DC Trip

by Sara Benincasa

  Rachel once remarked how interesting it was that Gertie, who was born in China, did a bunch of Italian Catholic stuff on Christmas Eve as per her mother’s traditions—the Feast of the Seven Fishes—whereas Sivan, who was Jewish, ate Chinese food every Christmas Day.

  “That’s actually not very interesting, Rachel,” Sivan had said. “You just think Jews are special because at church they told you we’re like magical elves or something.” Sivan loved to tease Rachel about her crazy church, where they offered “conversion therapy” for homosexuals.

  “I believe exactly zero percent of what they say in my church and you know it,” said Rachel.

  “I mean, real Chinese food isn’t even like the stuff we eat here,” Sivan said, rubbing the back of her short dark hair like she always did. Sivan had actually been to China. She had been all over the world with her parents. Even Rachel had traveled on mission trips to faraway places with her family.

  Gertie had nothing to add, because not only had she not been to China since she was an infant, she had not been anywhere interesting, really, unless you counted the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, which she did not. A social worker mom and a therapist dad didn’t exactly make enough for vacations to anywhere but the Jersey Shore and, once, Disney World. And it wasn’t like Gertie was going off and having adventures on her own.

  It wasn’t that Gertie was uptight. Sure, she didn’t do drugs, but that wasn’t a measure of how cool someone was. And okay, so she’d never actually kissed a boy, which objectively speaking was awful, but even that could probably wait till junior year or even senior year if absolutely necessary. It’s more that Gertie was average in many ways: average height, average weight, average attractiveness. Being born in another country was maybe the only interesting thing about Gertie. You wouldn’t notice her if you walked past her on the street.

  At least, that’s what she thought.

  Anyway, “Kids in America.” Gertie loved that song. It opened with a kind of controlled anticipatory tension before exploding into unbridled fun. Gertie herself spent a lot of time in controlled anticipatory tension and not a whole lot of time having unbridled fun.

  When Gertie was listening to “Kids in America,” she was going through Instagram, because if there was one thing Gertie really loved besides her best friends and ‘90s music, it was photography. Her father had always told her, “Never be a lawyer or an artist—the first is evil but you’ll eat well; the second is good but you’ll eat nothing.” Her parents didn’t make a whole lot of money, so Gertie was looking for a job that would help her sock away funds for a real camera. Jobs in town were few and far between, though.

  It wasn’t like her parents were so excited for her to get a camera, either. One time Gertie broached the subject that maybe she might like to take some fine arts courses in college. Her father frowned.

  “But it’s nothing you’d want to do for a career,” Gertie’s mom said, without even asking Gertie what she thought. Gertie’s mom and dad rarely, if ever, asked Gertie what she thought.

  “I don’t know,” Gertie said, feeling emboldened. “I love taking photos. People say I’m good at it. Maybe I could be a photographer.”

  “A photographer.” Her father snorted. “Come on, Gertie. Of what?”

  “I don’t know,” Gertie said again, because she really didn’t (although she loved photographing food, but she knew her parents would laugh at that). She fumbled for a response and seized on the first true thing that came to mind.

  “Beautiful things,” she said.

  “You want a career photographing … beautiful things?” her mother asked, looking over her reading glasses with some mixture of surprise and dismay.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Gertie’s father said, smiling kindly at her. He reached over and patted Gertie on the head, like he always did whenever she said something he deemed silly. “She wants to be a therapist or a social worker or a teacher … something that’s always needed. Something that doesn’t go in and out of fashion.”

  Gertie knew she didn’t want to be a social worker or a therapist. And as soon as she’d told her parents she wanted to be a photographer, she got a sudden feeling she’d never felt before. It was like a shock of recognition, but it wasn’t in her brain, it was in her stomach. Maybe that’s what people called a gut feeling.

  Whatever it was, it said, “Bingo!”

  The conversation with her parents was a couple weeks before the day Gertie listened to “Kids in America” and aimlessly scrolled through Instagram, but it was still in the back of her mind. Was she going to end up doing exactly what her parents wanted all the time, or would she figure something else out? Something different and fascinating and exciting?

  A new photo popped up in Gertie’s feed.

  It was a picture of Danny Bryan …

  … at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

  And Gertie almost fell over.

  First things first: Gertie was not logged into her regular Instagram account, but her anonymous Instagram account. She had created the anonymous account the previous summer specifically so she could follow one person: Danny Bryan. For appearance’s sake, the anonymous account followed various other accounts—celebrities, randoms who took good photos, whatever. But the whole point was to keep track of the life and times of Danny Bryan.

  Danny was a fellow counselor at the sleepaway camp in the New Jersey Pine Barrens where Gertie had been going for a month every summer since she was nine. The only reason her parents could afford the luxury of camp was that the camp director was an old grad school friend of Gertie’s dad’s, and he always cut Gertie’s parents a nice deal. Danny Bryan was a certified lifeguard. He played lacrosse. He could sing and play guitar, and he had floppy brown hair that got in his eyes, and he was particularly beloved by the youngest campers, and he was perfect.

  Unfortunately, he did not go to Flemington High School. At the moment, Danny Bryan was a senior at Lindbergh High School, which was a half-hour drive and a world away. People at FHS didn’t mix with people at Lindbergh, and people at Lindbergh didn’t mix with people at FHS. They were major football rivals, lacrosse rivals, everything rivals. Even the mathletes at FHS hated the mathletes at Lindbergh. The two debate teams always ended up in the state finals, and people in Flemington who knew nothing about debate actually gave a shit about this simply because it meant “we can beat Lindbergh.” It all sounded stupid to Gertie. But she cared about it because Danny Bryan went to Lindbergh.

  Gertie had noticed Danny Bryan when she was nine and he was eleven. It was the summer after third grade, her first time at camp, and she was nervous about being away from her parents for an entire month.

  On the trip down to camp, Gertie’s mother waxed rhapsodic about archery lessons and color wars and canoeing and camping out under the stars—all the things she had loved at her own summer camp many years before. Her father was excited that Gertie, who was a little bit of an indoor kid, would spend time running around in the sun, “although of course you’ve got to be sure to wear SPF 30 or higher every single day, Gertie.”

  “And a hat,” her mother had chimed in.

  “Skin cancer is a serious concern,” her father had said.

  “Okay,” Gertie had said.

  When they got to camp, a group of older boys was assembled near the entrance. They were laughing and goofing around, knocking each other’s baseball caps off and giving each other wedgies. Gertie’s dad drove slowly through the entrance, being careful not to hit an errant camper, and Gertie stared at the boys in wonder. Then there came the sound of a strange clattering behind them.

  “HEY!” came a voice. “SIR! EXCUSE ME! SIR!”

  Gertie’s dad hit the brakes and peered at the young boy running up behind them. Gertie stared at him out the back windshield. The closer he got, the more beautiful he became. He finally reached the driver’s side window and held out a dusty tin rectangle.

  “Your license plate, sir,” he said. “It fell off back there.”
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  His eyes flickered to the backseat briefly, and he gave Gertie a friendly smile like any well-behaved kid would give the small daughter of a stranger.

  This was Danny Bryan.

  And that was it.

  Gertie was gone. Done for. Just like that, she’d met the boy she knew would be the love of her entire life. At nine years old, Gertie was hopelessly smitten.

  A few days later, in the mess hall, Gertie mustered up the courage to talk to Danny Bryan. She approached him near the salad bar, where he was piling leafy greens on his plate—the only kid at camp who did that of his own accord, probably.

  “Hi,” she said, staring up at him.

  “Hi,” he said, looking at her quizzically.

  She realized then he had no idea who she was. The feeling socked her in the gut like a closed fist.

  “Bye,” she said, and walked away.

  That was the last conversation she had with him. There were four hundred campers, divided into groups by age, and for the next four summers, Gertie watched longingly from afar as Danny Bryan grew into exactly the kind of gorgeous being who drives pre-adolescent girls to distraction—and adolescent girls to wild fits of moaning and writhing. Gertie preferred to silently moan and softly writhe while she thought about Danny Bryan, particularly when she was masturbating and thinking about him, something she had started doing when she was ten and learned about masturbation from some 1970s book called The Young Womyn’s Guide To Growing Up. She found it in the attic while looking for her mother’s Free to Be You and Me record. The book had illustrations of different kinds of breasts and vaginas and bellies and butts and it said that female bodies were a beautiful wonderland that should be cherished and celebrated. It didn’t have instructions for masturbation, exactly, but it explained what it was, and since Gertie hadn’t previously known it was even a thing, she felt the need to explore on her own. It soon became her favorite private activity, though she never discussed it with Rachel and Sivan or, ew, her parents.

  Once, Rachel brightly brought up masturbation in ninth grade health class when they were discussing healthy alternatives to sex. Everyone laughed, but Rachel didn’t seem fazed in the least. Gertie blushed and pretended to focus on the cover of her notebook, where she was doodling Danny Bryan’s name in purple felt-tip marker.

  “That is an alternative to sexual intercourse, Rachel,” their health and gym teacher, Ms. Bump, said encouragingly. “But it’s not something we discuss in our curriculum.”

  “I just think every girl in the world should get a vibrator as soon as she turns fourteen,” Rachel said in that same sweet, weirdly innocent voice. Across the room, Sivan sighed loudly and stared at the ceiling.

  “Well, that’s definitely not something we’ll discuss in class,” Ms. Bump said. “That’s a … family conversation.”

  “Not my family,” Rachel said. She grinned and winked at Gertie, and Gertie turned redder. Rachel could really push the envelope sometimes, but she always got away with it because she was so pretty and so sweet.

  Then later in the cafeteria lunch line, like some kind of psychic with no emotional boundaries, Rachel turned around and smiled conspiratorially at Gertie.

  “You know what I meant today in class,” she said.

  “About what?” Gertie said, playing dumb.

  “Oh, come on,” Rachel said, giggling. “I bet he’s great, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Danny Bryan. In your fantasies. While you totally masturbate.” She said it loudly enough that other people could hear.

  Sivan, who was vegan and only got in the lunch line to accompany her friends, poked Rachel in the arm.

  “You’re embarrassing Gertie,” she whispered.

  “I am liberating Gertie,” Rachel said. “I’m freeing her from the shackles of a society that doesn’t understand a woman’s sexuality.”

  “Have you been reading that feminist website again?” Sivan groaned.

  “What, like you’re not a feminist?”

  “Of course I’m a feminist,” Sivan said. “I’m a queer intersectional feminist, duh. I just don’t feel like talking about vibrators in health class is appropriate.”

  “Whatever,” Rachel sang. “I’m a sex-positive feminist.”

  “You don’t even know what that means,” Sivan said.

  “I mostly do,” Rachel said. “It means you think sex is cool.”

  “You’ve never even had sex,” Sivan said.

  “Of course I haven’t!” Rachel said indignantly. “I’m waiting till I’m sixteen, duh.” (In fact, she DID go on to wait until she was sixteen. Rachel was good at sticking to promises.)

  Gertie got out of the lunch line and hid in the girls’ bathroom for the rest of the period. She did not masturbate. There was nothing as unsexy as a public school bathroom.

  Anyway, there is no way to overestimate the incredible, momentous importance of the instant Gertie realized that Danny Bryan was in Washington, D.C., the day before she was scheduled to go to Washington, D.C. She looked at the photo again, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. The time stamp said it had been taken an hour ago. This time, she read the caption.

  “Saw my uncle’s name on the wall. Amazing. Never thought a class trip could be like this. Hopefully next few days in D.C. are just as incredible.”

  Next.

  Few.

  Days.

  Next few days!

  HOLY SHIT.

  Danny Bryan was going to be in Washington, D.C. for the next few fucking days!

  Gertie couldn’t handle it. Her heart was pounding. Her hands were sweating. She did not know what to do with herself. So she did the only thing that seemed do able in that moment: she punched Rachel in the shoulder.

  “Ow!” Rachel yelped, thankfully not loud enough for the teachers to hear her. She pulled out her earbuds and stared at Gertie. “Gertie, what the fuck?”

  Wordlessly, Gertie handed her the phone and pointed.

  “Oh, shit,” Rachel said, immediately grasping the importance of the situation. “Are you fucking kidding me? He’s in D.C. too?” She poked Sivan and showed her the phone.

  “Good old Danny Bryan,” Sivan said. For the past seven years, they’d been hearing about Danny Bryan and seeing photos of Danny Bryan and scheming how Gertie could talk to Danny Bryan. Sivan was very familiar with the boy’s visage, and while she didn’t personally find him attractive, she could understand why Gertie was into him.

  Gertie refreshed Danny Bryan’s Instagram feed, and a new photo popped up from just a few seconds ago! It was a photograph of the outside of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The caption read: “Feeling overwhelmed as we get ready to go in here.”

  “Fuck!” Gertie snapped, just loud enough for kids in the surrounding rows to take notice and stare at her.

  “You scared me,” Sivan said.

  “Be patient with her,” Rachel said. “She is in love.”

  “She is not in love,” Sivan said. “She is infatuated.”

  “Well, how would you know what being in love is like?” Rachel asked. “I know I haven’t been in love. And I know you’ve never been in love, except maybe with Angelina Jolie in that one movie.”

  “Gia,” Sivan said automatically. “It was her breakthrough performance.”

  “You just like it because she totally does it with a girl,” Rachel said.

  “The acting is excellent,” Sivan said primly.

  Gertie couldn’t take their back-and-forth. Not right now.

  “Can we focus, please?” Gertie demanded. “Look!” She showed the Instagram to Sivan and Rachel.

  “Oh, now he’s at the Holocaust Museum,” Sivan said. “Well, I’m glad it’s affecting him deeply. It should. It’s a living memorial to the greatest evil the world has ever seen. Although of course we can’t discount the atrocities taking place even today …”

  Gertie looked at Rachel.

  “Sivan,” Rachel said. “He’s at the Holocaust Museum right now. That’s w
here we’re headed.”

  “Maybe we’ll see him there,” Sivan said, shrugging. Sivan had been to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum more times than she could count. Her grandfather had been on the planning committee. It was a very special place and a very sad place and she didn’t exactly relish going there, but she regarded it as an important experience for everyone and she really hoped their less sensitive classmates would be respectful.

  “No, we won’t see him there,” Gertie said. “So we’ve got, what, two and a half hours left on this drive?”

  “About that, yeah,” Sivan said.

  “Meaning we will probably just miss him,” Gertie said with enormous disappointment. “We could’ve seen him. We could’ve been at the museum at the exact same time as him and we could’ve seen him.”

  “You could’ve talked to him,” Rachel said sympathetically. “I totally get it.”

  “Um, what exactly would you have said at the Holocaust Museum?” Sivan asked, trying hard not to actually yell at them. She loved them, but they could be super-dense sometimes about anything social or political or historical or, well, important.

  “I don’t know,” Gertie said glumly. “I probably wouldn’t have said anything. I get so shy around him.”

  “You’re kind of shy around everybody,” Sivan pointed out.

  “Sivan!” Rachel said. “Encourage her!”

  “To what? Hit on some bro at the Holocaust Museum?” Sivan was indignant. “That’s so gross.”

  “Have you seen The Fault in Our Stars?” Rachel asked. “They made out at the Anne Frank House and it was totally inspiring.”

  “The Fault in Our Stars was ridiculous,” Sivan said, her voice rising. “It was the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen!” At this, a hush fell over the girls seated nearby. From a few rows away, Peighton, Brooklynn, and Kaylee turned around and glared, as did most of the girls nearby.