“What? I think you mean either a wet blanket or a stick in the mud.”
“No, it’s a combination of both. You’re just this sad, muddy security blanket that some kid tossed out the car window when he finally decided to be cool.” Looking back, it seems like such a mean thing for you to say. But that’s just kind of how we communicated. We teased each other a lot.
But that night I was a little too tipsy to get clever and catty with you. I just smiled. “Lucky you found me, huh? ’Cause I turned out all cute and snuggly once you got me home and cleaned me up.”
I hope you know I always felt that way about you. Grateful. So fortunate. Even though it was my family that took you in when you had no place to go, I think it’s safe to say that me, Mom, and Mamochka all thought it was the other way around, that we’d been adopted by you.
You moved from your side of the booth and slid in next to me. Colorful half-finished drinks dotted the tabletop, and your lips were on my throat. “I’ll show you lucky. Let’s get out of here.”
We walked back to your cabin and fooled around a little bit, then you surprised me with a gift, for no reason at all. It was that big Sandman omnibus I’d been wanting. I squeed over it for a little bit, and you said, “You want to read it right now, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I shouldn’t have given it to you until the end of the night.”
“That’s what she said.”
You laughed and kissed me, then you asked if you could drive my car. You hadn’t had anything to drink, so I handed over my keys, and we went out to that cemetery you always liked. I remember we sat on the back bumper and kissed, but we didn’t linger there too long. We hardly ever kissed in public like that. That’s one thing I really regret. One thing I couldn’t find a way to change or control. I never figured out how to make us feel safe.
You took the long way home, gravel roads. I brought the Sandman book along and had it open on my lap. The moon was full, and occasionally there’d be a break in the trees, just enough light on the pages for me to catch a glimpse of Desire and Delirium. You plugged your phone in and played a song for me. “Tonight and the Rest of My Life.” I’ll never forget it because it’s the sort of song you only need to hear once. The lyrics just sink into your heart.
I rolled the window down. The air was so cold, and it ruffled the pages of my new book. When the song was over, you pulled onto some dark side road, and you had that little container of stuff to make glow-in-the-dark bubbles. We made a huge mess mixing the glow-stick stuff into the bubble solution. It was all over my pants and your hands. You smeared it on my cheeks like war paint. We got out of the car, some country road in the middle of the night, and blew radioactive bubbles in a tilled-up cotton field. It was fun. It was so fun. I think about that night a lot because it’s the last time I remember things between us being really, really good.
Seems like after that day, winter hit hard. The royalty checks from the Mixtape anthologies started coming, and you could hardly believe that you were out on your own and getting enough money to pay the bills by doing stuff you loved. It seemed like a dream come true until your parents cut you off their insurance and the public health care system decided you were rich enough to afford your own damn meds.
Two days before Thanksgiving, you cracked one of your wisdom teeth. On a cheese quesadilla of all things. The dentist convinced you to go ahead and have all four of them pulled. On the way home from your surgery, I dropped off the prescription the dentist had given you for pain meds. I took you home, tucked you in, then headed back to the pharmacy in case you were in pain when you woke up.
“It shouldn’t be so much. It’s only Vicodin,” I said when the pharmacy tech rang me up and an exorbitant amount of money flashed on the cash register screen.
The tech did some typing around and told me there was a second order, a monthly auto-fill. “It’s been ready since last week.”
“Uh, just the one from today. She’ll pick up the other later.” I didn’t have enough cash to pay for both. Painkillers were the only thing on my mind at the time.
When I got back to the cabin, you were awake. Messy hair, tired eyes. Wearing a little strappy top and those plaid pajama pants you stole from me. You’d probably hate to hear this, but you looked really pretty. I liked the no-makeup Vivian as much, if not more, than when you were all dolled up. I plopped down beside you on the bed and asked if you were in any pain. You said no, but took one of the pills just in case. We missed the part where you’re supposed to eat first, though, so it made you sick and dizzy. You put the rest of the bottle in the cupboard and said, “Never again.”
When you were feeling better, I asked about the other prescription.
“It’s nothing,” you said. “Just a bottle of antiandrogens. I’ll be fine without them for a few more weeks.”
I took a moment to kiss your bare collarbones. Because they were there and I liked them. Because I forgot that you did not. They were a part of you that the hormones had yet to soften up. You tried to shake me off, but I just cuddled you a bit more. “You sure?”
“Yeah. It was them or Christmas presents—no, shhh! Don’t argue with me. It’s no big deal. Just don’t be alarmed when I”—you dropped your voice all low and manly—“develop a sudden interest in football and kung-fu movies.”
And I laughed a little because I could not have cared less if you butched up a bit. But it did kind of surprise me that you were okay with it.
It was only later that I started to notice that things with you weren’t totally okay. After you decided to come out as trans on Mixtape and we watched our readership shift from cis teen girls to a new crowd, mostly LGBT.
After that day I came home to find you crying, and you said, “Real girls don’t like me anymore.” And I didn’t think to correct you. You are a real girl.
After I found that overstuffed folder in your email marked Haters.
After the Christmas dinner where your parents didn’t show.
After the fight where I told you that you should “just give up” (on your parents, Vivian—I swear to Christ I meant give up on your unsupportive asshole parents).
After I found you blue in the face.
After the doctors said the odds weren’t looking so good.
That’s when I went to the pharmacy and picked up that bag of meds you’d decided to skip that month, citing financial reasons. (Despite having thousands and thousands of dollars secretly hidden away—what the hell???)
And I found out they weren’t antiandrogens or hormones.
You’d stopped taking your antidepressants.
Chapter Five
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
June 3 5:15 AM
According to the Internetz, skógur means “forest.” And I believe it. I’ve just spent the last two hours exploring the hotel. The rest of it is just as pretty and atmospheric as the roof, and there is a neat enchanted forest kind of theme. Each floor has a different sort of tree for its motif. There are pines on the first floor and some kind of ancient-looking trees with gnarly roots on the second. I like the top floor the best—the walls in the hallways are made from rows of birch trees. I ran my hand over them, feeling the bump bump bump as I wandered through.
I felt a little weird skulking around in the middle of the night, so I took a towel and a bag of toiletries with me, figuring that if anybody wanted to know what I was up to, I’d say I was looking for the spa, even though Man-Bun told me it was on the first floor. Anyway, Mamochka was telling me earlier that this place has, like, a movie theater, a library, and a little art gallery. The gallery was locked, and I never did find the library. The theater was open and running. It must be 24/7. I walked in to see some Icelandic lava documentary playing on the screen and a young couple going at it in the third row. Well, shit. No documentary for me. I booked it out of there while they tried to unfuck themselves. Ha.
Finally I did go to the spa. Swipe, and I was in. I had to feel around for the light switch in ea
ch room. Found the pool easily, but didn’t feel much like swimming. Since I had the whole place to myself, I—strictly for the hell of it, not because I have any gender issues—walked around in the women’s shower room. Nothing interesting, though. I kept wandering through and eventually ended up in the men’s showers. There were no individual stalls, just a big, open locker room kinda shower.
It’s funny how masturbation has become such an autonomous thing to me, like I’m just hitting puberty all over again. I was alone and naked. My dick was, like, Hey, while you’re scrubbing your balls, you might as well . . . and I was so busy mentally casting myself as “unnamed male fornicating in theater” that it took a minute to register the fact that I had started jerking it in a public shower where, theoretically, any employee possessing the right key card could have walked in on me.
My mind was flickering all over the place, thinking about you and people who aren’t you and what it’d be like if someone did walk in on me. I almost wanted it to happen, like I needed someone to burst in and say, Hey, you can’t be in here enjoying yourself. Your girlfriend is in a coma, for Chrissake!
Or, alternatively, Hey there, stud. Need a hand with that?
I don’t know which one I wanted more.
But, anyway, yeah . . . I did, ahem, enjoy myself. In a public shower. Pretty gross, right? Well, at least now I can say I’ve achieved orgasm on two continents.
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
June 3 1:30 PM
I wouldn’t exactly say I’m extroverted. Not like you were. I don’t have a lot of friends, and it doesn’t bother me. You were my whole world for a while. I feel kinda shitty for ditching Brian all the time when you and me first started dating. Anyway . . . where was I going with this?
Loneliness? Yeah. I was lonely this morning, but in a different way. Not a lonely-without-Vivian sort of way, but this big, overarching strange-man-in-a-strange-land sort of way. I woke up in time for breakfast and found out that hotel patrons don’t just get a muffin and orange juice here. They get a free breakfast buffet. And you know how much I love breakfast foods! I was more excited than that rat in Charlotte’s Web when he gets to munch on all that carnival food. What was his name? Templeton? I loaded up my plate with this random assortment of stuff that I wanted to try—beans on toast, little baby potatoes, soft-boiled eggs, lemon curd. Skyr, the famous Icelandic yogurt. Earl Grey tea. Stuff I haven’t really had before. And that was when I got a little lonely because I didn’t have anyone to share the experience with.
And then Man-Bun showed up. “I have some things for you. May I sit?”
He’s very proper. His back is very straight. His hair is whitish-blond, and his eyes are very blue. We make each other nervous, because we’re both extremely awkward people in extremely different ways. We need someone like you as a buffer. If you were there, you’d have grabbed his arm and said something weird and funny, probably your standard line about how black people don’t bite—as if your skin color were the reason strangers were curious about you. Anyway, you weren’t there, so I was stuck dealing with the prim little Icelandic man all by myself. I say “man,” though he is probably close to my age. But he exudes grownupness in a way I never will. I bet he was born in a suit.
He asked me how I slept in that generic way that customer service people do. You know they don’t really care about the answer. I sure as shit don’t whenever I politely ask mom’s patients about their day. So I was just, like, “Fine.” He gave me a key card for my new room—304. Top floor. The birch floor, yes! He also gave me a city bus pass and a stack of brochures to look over.
And then he took out a little notebook and pen and went, “What is the purpose of your trip?”
And I was, like, “Sorry, dude, I didn’t know I had to explain myself to a bellhop.” Okay, no, I didn’t say it like that. But I didn’t really have an answer for him.
What is my purpose, Vivian?
He wrote something in Icelandic in his notebook, then went on to explain that he was my personal concierge and that it was his job to see to it I had a pleasant trip. He said he could do things like book sightseeing tours for me, or recommend restaurants, or whatever. I asked if he was doing this because I had to sleep on the roof, because I was fine with sleeping on the roof even if the temperature got down to sixteen FAHRENHEIT, and I didn’t need any special treatment. And he said his services came with the hotel stay.
Oh, so that’s why Mamochka picked this particular hotel. She wanted to make sure I was “having fun.” She thought I needed a babysitter. Then it dawned on me.
“You talked to my mother, didn’t you? Did she call here?”
“I don’t think so. No.” And oh my God, I need to take poker-face lessons from this guy.
“Talks like zhis,” I said, putting on the Russian accent. “Probably called me her ‘little baby boy.’ Any of this ringing a bell?”
“No bells,” he said. I thought for a moment his facade was going to crack, but he straightened up even more and repeated himself. “My services are included in your stay.”
“All right, man. I’ll look these over,” I said, waving the stack of brochures, “and let you know if I feel the urge to swim with the orcas or go snorkeling with puffins or whatever.”
“Thank you.” He got up and pushed in his chair, giving me a little bow. And then—I shit you not—he stole a piece of toast right off my plate and ate it on his way out the door.
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
June 3 2:15 PM
I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to flush an Icelandic toilet. Ugh! I swear, I was this close to phoning the front desk and asking Man-Bun how to dispose of my piss. He probably gets asked that a lot. I can imagine him all straight-faced, like, Place your palm against the large white button and push. There are no handles or knob or anything—that’s what I kept looking for. Seriously, it turned out to be a HUGE button. So huge that I overlooked it completely. I thought that thing was like a tissue dispenser or something. Push—flush—crisis averted. Of course I didn’t have this problem last night because the toilets in the spa were auto-flush.
I’m in my room now. I went back to the roof after breakfast and grabbed my stuff. It had started to rain again, so I was kind of glad to settle into someplace with an actual ceiling. And this room is super pretty. You’d love it. There’s this big mural on the wall behind my bed, a birch tree forest with beams of sunlight shining down.
I figured since I’m going to be here awhile, I might as well unpack. Put away my toiletries in the bathroom, clothes in the dresser. That’s when I stopped to piss and got stumped by the toilet. Hopefully that’s my last hurdle of the day.
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
June 3 2:47 PM
Nooooo. No. No. No. No. No. Vivian. You won’t believe what just happened to me. I went to log on to Netflix, and the screen said We’re sorry, Netflix is not available in your country. Is this hell?! Am I in hell?!
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
June 3 3:57 PM
I was just at the hotel’s art gallery. Nothing too interesting. It’s a small room, and a lot of the work in there was chess-themed because apparently Bobby Fischer won that really big tournament here. But, anyway, off the side of the gallery, you can head out into this enclosed garden, and that was the part that was pretty cool. There are these small, gnarly trees, and some street artists had wrapped their trunks in bright Icelandic wool. So everything looks kind of like a weird-ass cross between a Dr. Seuss book and something Tim Burton-y.
In the center, there’s a koi pond with a little bridge that goes across. And on the bridge there are a zillion multicolored padlocks. It’s a lover’s bridge, like that famous one in Paris, where couples are supposed to put the lock on together and throw the key into the water below. At the gift shop in the hotel lobby I bought a purple lock and key.
Lock on the bridge. Snap.
Key in the water. Plop.
Oh, and what’s that other noise? Just my
heart cracking in half.
Hey, do you remember the first time we said I love you? Because I sure as hell don’t. Seems like that’s probably a big moment for most couples. I guess that’s one of the downfalls of becoming romantically involved with a person who’s practically been a family member for so long. The I-Love-You-Like-a-Siblings bleed into I-Love-You-You’re-My-Soulmate, and you almost feel cheated a little bit.
Nah, I don’t really mean that. I don’t feel cheated. We had a pretty awesome relationship. And, yeah, you weren’t there today to put that lock on the bridge, but hey, there’s still that overpass where you spray-painted our names.
That’s another day I think about a lot. I was just having one of those lazy-in-bed-in-my-underwear kind of Saturdays, and you showed up and made me get dressed so we could go for a walk. Walking down the street, I felt like I always did whenever I was beside you: a little taller and more sure of myself. You had a magic I hadn’t seen in anyone else before or since, and it rubbed off on everything you touched. Could that be what happened? You gave and gave and gave to everyone else until there wasn’t any more of that sparkle left for you.
It was springtime, cold and cloudy that day because Missouri only has two seasons: arctic and armpit. We hadn’t hit the sweaty balls season yet. Anyway, you dragged me up over the viaduct into the park. There was a birthday party going on, little kids running around in pointy paper hats.
I played on the swings for the first time in a while and discovered that after all those years away from the playground, when you jump out of a swing, that long second of weightlessness still exists.
You just hit a liiiittle harder coming down now.
“I wanna show you something,” you said, while I tried to dust the grass stains off my knees. You hadn’t swung with me because you didn’t want to rough up your dress. You were particular about your clothes, carefully curating each item from thrift shops and vintage sellers online. I never saw you buy anything new or expensive, but you treated every dress like it was spun from gold. I think that day you were wearing that short dress with the lacy overlay we’d dyed yellow in the kitchen sink one day with turmeric and Rit. Black fishnets and ballet flats.
Miles Away from You Page 4
