by Chris Lynch
I became aware of Gigi Boudakian taking my hand, because I could see it out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t feel it, though, though it was a feeling I would have held onto tight if I could.
“You want to come in and wait?” Grace said. “Like I said, Fran shouldn’t be more than an hour, so if you want to wait, you are more than welcome—”
“We’ll walk,” I said, and started walking just like that. “We’ll just go for a walk, Grace, thank you. We’ll kill time. It’s a nice night, so we’ll just do that. Thank you, Grace.”
Still floating, still not entirely there, I led Gigi down the hall, down the stairs, out the swinging glass front door. I was still unaware of the fine bones of Gigi’s slender hand in my hand. I must have been.
“Ow,” she squealed. “Keir, you’re hurting me.”
She pulled her hand away, and I stopped and stared. “I am so sorry, Gigi. I didn’t realize . . .”
“Well, no, I didn’t think you realized.” She relaxed enough to take my hand again, to take both of them in fact, as she faced me and talked to me. “What are you thinking, Keir?”
“I’m thinking that’s probably the worst question in the world. I’m thinking you should never ask anybody that question.”
She pulled her hands away from mine, and I was instantly sorry for whatever made her do that. I was quick to grab her hands back again.
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I really, really hate it when people I love let me down.”
WORDS
* * *
Why doesn’t she hear what I’m saying? Why don’t my words say what I am saying?
“I’m sorry. Gigi, I said I’m sorry, remember? I didn’t do it.”
“Let me out of this room, Keir.”
“Why don’t you hear me? I’m not keeping you here. I’m just trying to get you to listen to me, and you keep not listening to me.”
And she does, too, she keeps right on not listening to me. She keeps saying things that are not true and ignoring important things that are true. We kind of march around the room, circling after each other and away from each other, because I cannot let her near the window, because she is acting like she might do something demented, and I can’t let her near the door unless I’m there with her, because she can’t be going out there without me. Without the truth. We have to look at the truth and agree on it.
“Can I just try one more time? Huh, Gigi? Okay, there was sex, we had sex, all right?”
Instantly she covers her ears and spins to the floor like a corkscrew. She remains there, clinging to two fistfuls of hair on either side of her head.
“We had sex and okay, it wasn’t perfect, but I love you.”
It is like blood. Her beautiful liquid chocolate eyes are like spurting blood as she looks up at me now.
“Don’t do that,” I beg. “Please, Gigi, don’t do that to me.”
“It wasn’t perfect. But you love me,” she drones.
She is scaring me. With her tone, her eyes, her presence altogether, she is scaring me. Intimidating me.
“That’s right,” I say.
“You raped me,” she says, in that flat, quiet tone that is like an almighty scream.
I close my eyes and I step away from her because I don’t know what she is right now, but she is nothing I recognize. She is nothing she is supposed to be.
“Stop with that. That. . . word . . . is so wrong. That word does not belong here. It does not belong in the same room with us. It does not belong in the same world with me and you. That word, Gigi, belongs someplace else, with criminals and deviates and psychopaths, but not here, not with us, not with me loving you like you know I do. I did not. I could not, ever. You did not say that, Gigi, okay?”
“You raped me.”
“What are you saying? What are you doing, Gigi? This is me, here. This is me”
“That’s right, Keir. You.” She is shaking her head now herself, in disbelief, which is the right thing. Disbelief is the right thing. But she is applying it in the wrong way. When she whispers her next words, I die there on my feet.
“How could you do that to me, Keir? You? Me?”
I shake my head even harder in return, like a dog trying to tear the leg off something. “No, no, no, no. Do you know how far away that is from me? That did not happen. Why are you not listening? I could never make that happen. Especially not to you. Not to anyone, but especially not to you. You know that. You knew that. Just know it again. Please. Please? Know me again.”
“I said no.”
“You know what happened. You slept with me. Right here. Right there,” I rush up toward the bed and point right at it, to catch it before it gets away. “Slept, Gigi. You slept with me, which is even better than sex, which I would trade for the sex a hundred thousand times over.”
“I said no,” she says with the same dead flatness, the dead flatness that says she is not getting anywhere, not making any progress or even trying.
“I love you. That is what matters.”
“I said no. That is what matters.”
She stares at me as I talk, and for several seconds after. Her face is all pinched up in a confused rage, and it is breaking my heart for what that confused rage is doing to the fineness of Gigi Boudakian’s face, to the fineness of Gigi Boudakian. I am praying inside that this is not permanent, that she is not permanently ruined, and that we can fix this before it all gets out of hand.
How could it get so wrong? How could she not know that I would kill anyone who ever did that to Gigi Boudakian?
THE BEST IDEA EVER
* * *
After we left Grace, we walked all over the campus of Norfolk U. It was just the right thing to do, to cool down, to think through, to take stock, and it was just the time and place and company to do it with.
Gigi Boudakian was my best friend.
The sky was buckshot with stars, and the pale moonlight guided us wherever we wanted to go. It was almost summer warm, there was just enough of a breeze so you knew the air was there, and Gigi Boudakian held my hand the whole way.
I gave her the tour, the same tour they gave me when I came for my recruiting visit months before. I showed her the neighborhood of clustered dorm buildings, I showed her the stately administration buildings and senior faculty residences that looked more like colonial mansions than school property. I showed her the athletics building where I would be spending so much of my next four years working out on the best equipment with the best physical trainers.
“They have a pool, a beautiful Olympic-size swimming pool, right in there,” I said. “You can swim in it with me when you come to visit.”
She laughed like she did the other times when I showed her things, and she pulled a couple of my fingers apart.
“Ouch,” I said. I was deliriously happy. Couldn’t she see that?
“I think if Carl came to a place like this, things would be better,” Gigi said, spoiling the moonlight. “I mean, it’s closer, it’s nicer. In the military . . . he’s become more rigid, more . . . macho. Less sweet.”
“I’m sweet,” I said.
“You are, yes. But I don’t think the air force has done Carl a lot of good, in terms of us. In terms of men and women and stuff.”
“Oh,” I said, trying like hell to think of a suitable, supportive-but-not thing to say. “Oh,” I said.
“Maybe he’ll change. Maybe after tonight, after I’m AWOL for a while and he has to think, maybe—”
“Maybe,” I said, suddenly catching a whiff of honeysuckle from somewhere near, somewhere probably within the deep forest of the wildly landscaped science center grounds. I stopped to breathe it. I lifted my nose like a dog on the scent of something he just had to get. Gigi lifted her little fawn nose as well.
“See, it wasn’t all bad that your sisters weren’t here,” Gigi said. Why’d she have to say that? The reminder pulled a few petals off the honeysuckle, pulled my nose down out of the air. “I mean,” she went on, “we wouldn’t be out he
re now, and I don’t know about you, but this has been the best part of my day.”
I sighed. “Ya, mine too.”
And it was. This had become our place, this rolling green moonsplashed campus. There was little sign of life outside, and likely not much inside, either. All the sports had finished for the year, and most of the exams. There was enough peace here now to shave off some of the anger and disappointment I was feeling, and enough wide-open imaginative space for me to picture myself here a few months away. Picture myself here and big and happy, a football player in his prime in a prime location. To picture the best of the best possibilities.
“Maybe you could enroll here,” I said to Gigi. “I’m going to be a big football player, so I could pull some strings.”
I was walking in the opposite direction from the dorms. And I would have happily continued walking, to the edge of the campus, past the edge, out into the broad open fields beyond, and out into whatever was beyond that, clutching Gigi Boudakian’s hand the whole way.
But she tugged me now, back toward the dorms. “Thanks, but I already have a college, Keir. And your sister is probably back now, so we should see her.”
Half of me changed right there. A full half of me went dark and cold at the change of direction, at the reality of what was back there as opposed to the far better world that was surely out in the direction of the fields.
“Hnn,” I grunted, following along passively.
* * *
She was standing in the open doorway when we got there.
“Hi,” I said coldly.
“Hi,” she said warily. “And you must be—”
“Gigi, yes. Hi.”
Gigi shook Fran’s hand. Nobody shook my hand.
We all went in and sat down on the chunky university furniture that filled Fran’s living room area, which was two feet away from the kitchen area. There were three doors that must have led to the bedrooms, all lined up together. The whole place was smaller than the kitchen back home, and it felt monstrously claustrophobic to me. The smell of antiseptic and stale bread hung in the air. I couldn’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want to get out of there and go home as often as possible. I would.
“So how was graduation?” Fran asked.
“It was lovely,” Gigi said. “The sun was shining, the day couldn’t have been more perfect.”
“Are you not offering drinks?” I asked.
“I don’t have any. And judging by the smell of you, I don’t think you need any more.”
“You don’t have any? Since when are you—”
“It’s okay,” Gigi cut in. “Fran’s right, we’ve had enough.”
I didn’t like that at all. I didn’t like Fran for saying it, I didn’t like Fran for not having drinks, and mostly I didn’t like the way Gigi had to step in there.
I was thinking about saying so when there was a beeping at the window. The first notes of “Start Me Up.”
Fran got up and looked. “Oh, god, what is he doing here?”
“He’s my ride,” I said. Had it been that long already? No, couldn’t be. “Hold on.” I asked Gigi to wait, and I went down to Rollo.
“You’re early,” I said when I got to his window.
“No, I’m not,” he said, tapping his watch. “I am right on time.”
“Well, you’re early for me. I’m not ready yet.”
“Well, you need to be ready yet. Listen, Keir, I’ve been a sport about this, but now it’s time. I have to get back to town.”
I stepped back from the car, hands on my hips. I looked up at the stars and around at the still niceness of the quiet campus.
“Okay, go,” I said.
“Go?” he said.
“Ya. We’re going to stay.”
“You are? Really?”
“Ya, why not? We got no classes. We’re free. And then Fran can bring us home tomorrow, borrow a car from her friend. That way she can come for a visit, make Ray happy. Sure, there’s a plan. You are released.”
He looked at me screwy-like. “You serious?”
“I am totally serious. Thanks, Rollo. Thanks for the whole thing. I had a great time.”
He shifted the car into gear, shaking his head. “I’m not so sure you did, but okay, kid. Take care.”
And he drove off. As I turned away and headed back to the dorms, I looked up and saw both Fran and Gigi looking down at me. I got a jolt. I got shaky. I had to tell Gigi what I did, or anyway, some version of what I did.
I waved and smiled and went back up.
“I told him we needed more time,” I said calmly, taking my spot again on the grungy couch next to the girl who made it look warm and inviting. “I told him to give us some more time, so he’ll be back again, a little later.”
Gigi looked a little uneasy about that, but she didn’t object. I gave her my most grateful smile—I was more grateful than she could even know—and turned my attention to my sister.
“Baltimore, Fran?”
Fran let out such a sigh, it was like the central heating wheezing into action. “She has a right to do whatever she wants, Keir. Mary’s exams are over, okay? I’m sorry.”
“And your exams? Are your exams over too?”
“No, they’re not. I have one more, tomorrow afternoon.”
I didn’t really even have to go to the trouble of objecting to that. We all heard it. I objected anyway.
“Afternoon? You couldn’t come to my graduation because you had a test first thing, remember? And you were studying all tonight, remember? And so now you are out with a Mormon, and Mary is messing around down in Baltimore, and nobody cares enough to come home to my graduation?”
Fran, who had been leaning forward in her chair, slumped backward. “Remember?” she said. “Do I remember?” She stared at me still, but now with her hands folded in front of her face she was praying. When she spoke, her tone was both hushed and intense. “I cannot believe you are here.”
“I just bet you can’t. I can’t believe Mary isn’t here. I bet you both never figured I’d check on your lies.”
“I cannot believe that you came all the way out here for this. I cannot believe I am looking at you right now. What, because we didn’t make it back for graduation? How about if you remember. Remember how you walked out of both of our graduations?”
“It was really hot. At least I was there.”
“You were there when it became a blowout party. You were there to embarrass us by getting publicly sick both times.”
A huge hot flush came to my face as I turned to Gigi, who shouldn’t have been hearing this.
She smiled. She patted my hand.
She was my best friend.
“I was just a kid.”
“You are still just a kid,” Fran said. “But that’s all right. Sort of. That is who you are. But you have to stop being such a kid at least some of the time, and this is one of those times. I don’t want to hurt you, Keir, but . . . okay, the truth is we were not there because we did not want to be there.”
“What is wrong with you two?” I barked. “What happened to you?” I turned to Gigi. “We were great. You should have seen us, honest to god. We were the best. You would have wanted to join our family, we were so great together—so close, the best.”
I was very sad, listening to myself. Listening to myself talk as if I were talking about a wonderful person who was dead. My stomach climbed up into my chest, and my heart squeezed itself into a tight hard ball, as I listened to myself.
And I watched Gigi Boudakian’s smart, kind face go all watery with pity for me, and for this dead person I was talking about.
But even that wasn’t the worst. No, the worst was when I turned back to catch Fran, Fran my hero, my strong and great sister Fran, sitting there getting all busted up and flushed as she looked at me with something like the same pity, and something like fury, too.
“The way you make things look is not the way they really are, Keir,” Fran said, leaning forward to try and put a hand on my knee.
I pushed her hand away. “You make things up to be what you want them to be. And Ray lets you.”
“Shut up, Fran. Don’t you say anything bad about Ray.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Keir. I love you, and I love Ray, too. But I have to love Ray from a distance. He’s not healthy for me. He’s not healthy for you.”
My mind shot to Ray, to Ray alone, to Ray in the house, to Ray at the Risk table all by himself. I felt my own eyes welling up at the thought of me and my dad playing our yearlong game together, our innocent, ongoing Risk game that wasn’t any trouble to anybody. I should have stayed there, I thought. Should never have gotten up from that table across from Ray.
I couldn’t speak.
“Ray is not a strong man, Keir,” she went on mercilessly. “And we needed him to be, especially you. You need to look at yourself, Keir, and look at life and reality a little more clearly, and Ray has never made you do that. You need to take responsibility for yourself, for the things you do, and not make excuses for yourself. I heard, Keir, about all the stuff this year, all the frat boy antics and destroying statues and everything else and instead of getting excited about having you come up here, I started dreading it. You have grown progressively more spoiled and irresponsible, and I am not purely happy you are coming here. Do you hear me? Do you get the magnitude..
Whether I heard it or got it or whatever, I was never going to be able to tell her. Because I was choking near to death with what was inside. And I was holding back what was already feeling like a full-blown, full-force monsoon of fear and hate and disgust and self-pity.
And then I didn’t have to tell her at all.
“That’s enough, I think,” said Gigi Boudakian. She pulled me by my weak and pathetic hand, right up out of that rank college sofa. “I don’t actually know you, Fran, or Mary, but I can tell you that Keir talks about you all the time. And he talks about you like you are angels. And I can tell you that whatever flaws he has—and nobody’s going to argue that he hasn’t got them—he is a sweet and soft-hearted guy at core. And if he says that your family was once an amazing and beautiful thing and his heart is broken now because it isn’t what it was, then I am inclined to believe him.
