So here’s a surprise: I kiss her back. Because . . . well, she’s so present. So alive. So magnanimous. And when she is kissing me, all the death of the last week disappears.
“Hi,” I say, and wipe my tingling lips.
“Oh, I like her.” Gerry pops Davey on the arm. “Your girl passes the test.”
I’d like to see what happens when she meets Janie Lee. If Janie Lee also “passes the test.”
Davey twists his smile sideways and arches an eyebrow. “One of these days you’re going to get socked.”
She doesn’t disagree. She checks me out, lingers on my boots, and then she says to Davey, “You said she was beautiful, but you didn’t say she was hot.”
Gerry’s words catch me woefully off guard. Beautiful? Hot? I’ve been called many things. Among them dyke and bulldagger (when my hair was very, very short), tomboy, and hoyden (that’s a favorite of the volleyball team). Someone once asked me if I was trying to be Angelina Jolie in her Billy Bob Thornton years. I still have no idea what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. Right now, I’m dressed as a dude. So there’s that.
“Thank you,” I manage.
“This fluid thing you have going is a thing of substance.” She smiles at me. Her mouth opens so wide I could stuff an entire state in there.
I don’t know her well enough to make a tombstone, but I do it anyway. The perks of having your tongue in a stranger’s mouth. Gerry. b. ?—d. probably never. Here Lies Gerry: People followed her to Mars. Tombstones aren’t about death. They’re about legacy. I shouldn’t care what people think, but it’s hard to avoid that someone else gets the last word. I try to live in such a way that I predetermine those words. I get the sneaky suspicion that Gerry does too.
“Also, your hair is longer, Davey,” she tells him as if he has not looked in a mirror since he moved.
“Like it?”
“Like it? I love it. It’s a very struck-by-lightning motif you’ve got going.”
Perhaps he wants to say more, but we all turn our attention to the characters gathering in the parking lot. Gerry and I help Davey into Guinevere, which makes him clank like cans behind a wedding car. (Guinevere had been one of my art disappointments until now.) Gerry applies makeup to Davey’s face while I adjust the suspenders holding Guinevere in place. For good sport, I let Gerry attack my face as well. The powder smell makes me gag, the additional eyeliner tickles my lids, but I like the way she clips my hair in the exact same way she has clipped Davey’s. Twinsies.
We’re not known characters, but we’re characters all the same.
Audi Thomas arrives on the scene. He’s dressed as a mash-up of Han Solo and Chewie. Our formal meeting goes something like this:
“You’re Billie.”
“You’re Audi Thomas?”
Fake scowl. “You burned down a church.”
“You should burn down that outfit.”
“Says the girl dressed like David.”
Gerry butts in. “I kissed her.”
“You kiss everyone.”
Audi Thomas and Gerry share a peck.
Audi Thomas offers to marry me. I ask for a rain check. Everyone laughs. We all go inside. Understated conclusion of the year: I am not in Otters Holt anymore.
We stroll into a coffee shop whose patrons are part Marvel Universe, part J. J. Abrams, part anime with a sprinkle of Disney. Even in costumes, some very elaborate, Thomas recognizes everyone. There are a few “normal” prep students in chinos and dress shirts. He knows them too. The barista is Johnny. Johnny lifts a large mug in the air and yells, “Americano, David? Thomas?”
Davey asks what I want. No clue. We don’t have coffee shops in Otters Holt, so I suggest that he rich-pick me something. He claims he’s not rich. I claim he has purchased enough five-dollar drinks that Johnny the Barista knows his order by heart. And then to make a point, I tap a large, square, expensive-looking ring on his finger. I win.
Davey lifts two digits in the air, and Johnny gives him a thumbs-up. Davey knows how to coffee shop, and I attempt to adopt his comfort. After twenty straight minutes of playing the meeting game, I ask, “How come you don’t know everyone?”
He sips his Americano, hiding behind the mug. “Thom’s branched out since I moved.”
We—Thomas, Gerry, Davey, and I—have been a comfortable, revolving foursome. I’m not saying we would dog pile now, but I think we might dog pile before the night is over. Here, Davey’s a watercolor with smeared edges and paint running down the page. Loose. At home, he’s a pencil drawing. I like this Davey better.
“What’s with all the formality?” I ask, after Thomas calls him David for the third time tonight.
“Davey’s a Vilmer family thing,” he explains.
Thomas kicks his head back, grins wickedly, eyes gleaming with something more than laughter. “His old man wouldn’t let us call him Davey.”
“Not in a million years,” Davey agrees.
The two of them sound drunk on caffeine. I can’t blame them. The Americano spiked my pulse too. That doesn’t stop them from wanting round two. Thomas and Davey steal away to the coffee bar for Johnny’s miracle brew, which leaves me with Gerry, who is readjusting the hoop in her nose. She’s older than I am. Maybe nineteen or twenty. From all her stories, she is a vagabond wrapped in a mystery inside a costume. There are unasked questions hanging off her lips.
I beat her to the punch. “Do you really kiss everyone you meet?”
“Will you sell me those boots?” she asks in return.
I’m on one barstool. My boots are propped high on another. I swivel and place one foot on each of her thighs so she can see what she’s missing in the boot department. “I would sell you my beating heart before I’d sell these boots. Now, the kissing. Explain.”
Gerry chews the nail of her pinkie—eats some of the scant black polish. “I don’t kiss everyone. I kiss the people who have the little pieces of my soul I’ve been looking for.”
Gerry’s explanation makes a degree of sense. My soul has always felt like a big game of Where’s Waldo? Most days I go about life and see no signs of a red-and-white cap. But sometimes, there among the ordinary, I discover misplaced pieces of self. She’s saying she’s one of them. Honestly, it’s a relief to know that pieces exist beyond the Hexagon. Without safe people, I would climb a tree and never come down.
I’d tell Gerry that she’s my people, but if I had to say it aloud, she wouldn’t be.
“Please say you’re coming back for LaserCon?”
“Should I?” I ask, without having a clue what LaserCon is.
“In my opinion, everyone should. But I’m guessing David could use your company. His granddad’s death hit him pretty hard.”
It’s difficult to hear about Davey’s emotional health from someone who exists outside of Otters Holt. All those outgoing text messages. This means Davey is hiding in old sanctuaries rather than leaning into the Hexagon. I glance over my shoulder at him. He’s demonstrating a leprechaun-looking toe-tap for Johnny and Audi Thomas. All of the recent tension in his shoulders has relaxed, and he’s clanking like a proper aluminum Guinevere should. He’s electric.
Then it hits me: Davey Winters is in love.
He’s got Audi Thomas graffitied all over his face. Thom may very well be with Gerry, but long before there was Gerry, there was something with Davey.
No wonder he’s been so tentative with the Hexagon. His mom didn’t move him from Nashville to Otters Holt; she moved him from love to absence.
The timing of this realization coincides with the band taking the stage. Everywhere in Nashville is a live music venue. The Ryman plus the Grand Ole Opry plus a rinky-dink coffee shop filled with rich high school kids. The drummer pounds her sticks—“One, two, three”—and the leader, a punk girl Davey says goes to their sister school, puts a lung into the mic.
We are invited to set down our coffees and power up our feet.
As soon as Davey shucks Guinevere, he tugs me by the index finger to
the middle of the dance floor, Gerry and Audi Thomas on our heels. Those two lean and lean and lean until their foreheads touch. Gerry collects another piece of her soul from Audi Thomas’s mouth. We watch them for a moment, waiting for a dance style to emerge. Just after the stillness, they jump.
We all jump.
Just like that, my heartbeat is a kick drum. My hands punch the air. Davey and I leap like we’re on a trampoline. Spring. Sproing. Spring. With total abandon. From our neck movements to our toes striking the polished concrete, we’re timed perfectly. My god, his eyelashes are long. We land on each other’s feet. We hurl ourselves toward the ceiling.
Around us, everyone I’ve met, from Captain America to Princess Jasmine, lets go of something they’ve been holding on to.
For me, it’s the fire. Up. Down. It’s Janie Lee’s confession. Up. Down. It’s my fucking inability to finish the projects in my garage. Up. Down. It’s my father. Up. Down. It’s expectations. Up. Down. It’s self-acceptance. Up. Down.
I pray a hard-rock, punk, dancing, live-journal prayer.
Here I am. Free me.
There he is. Free Davey.
There they all are. Free everyone.
We’re jumping to the words “I can’t be contained.”
In the middle of everyone else leaping and screaming, I stand completely still and fully embrace the eye of the cosplay hurricane. The power of so many people doing the same thing rushes through my veins like blood. From the costumes to the dancing, we’re caught up in the same palm of an invisible hand.
I am dressed as a boy, I have kissed a girl, I have met people outside my usual web. No one cares. I am hidden. I am perfectly transparent.
This is it. This is living.
Davey lands. His feet plant. Sweat drips down the sides of his face, making lines in his makeup that look like a cracked desert floor. “You’re smiling so loudly I heard it over the music,” he says.
I think of kissing him the way Gerry kissed me. But Thomas . . . But Woods.
Instead, we jump like fools until Johnny tells us it’s closing time.
4
We’re homeward bound, discussing my Dance Dance Revelation, when I eyeball the clock: 10:45. “Can you speed up?” I ask, and monkey over the console to change clothes in the backseat.
Dammit. I didn’t bring makeup remover. Not only am I cutting it close on curfew, I’m arriving with sideburns. As it turns out, freedom is a temporary thing found only in coffee shops in other cities.
“What’s the problem there?” Davey asks at my sudden disappearance.
I wiggle out of slashed jeans and into sweatpants. “His name is Brother Scott McCaffrey.”
“Oh, right.” Having been in Otters Holt for three months, Davey is not an expert on his youth minister. But that oh rings of understanding. “What’s your take on things?”
I scrub at my face with the discarded T-shirt. “You mean God?”
“No. I’m good with God. I only mean . . . church people seem awfully hard on you for you to keep loving them.”
Church people. Trite. I level a glare at him in the rearview. Davey cracks open a window. Then cracks the one beside me. The glue in my hair holds. I won’t be able to fix it before I see Dad.
Davey speaks. “You seemed pretty happy, pretty uninhibited tonight. And don’t get me wrong, you’re usually happy enough, but I always think something is holding you back. Like you’re obligated to be a certain way for your dad. And he feels like he should be a certain way for the church.” He uses air quotes around the church. “And the church feels like they should be a certain way for God. It’s just . . . isn’t God all open arms and welcome home?”
“God, yes. People—well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. People are the hard part of being human.”
“But that’s my point. Why do all that for them when they judge you?”
“Do all what?” I demand.
“Change clothes. Best face forward. Smile on Sundays. Take their bullshit judgment. You know, pretend to be something you’re not.”
He has evidently been around long enough to assemble an accurate picture of how people perceive me. I zip my bag, all the Davey-inspired clothes inside, and climb into the front seat. “I don’t know. I guess I’m scared.”
“Of?”
“What everyone is scared of—that if I’m me, I’m not enough.”
He’s silent for a few miles, thinking. Maybe he wonders why. Maybe I do too. The harder he thinks, the slower we go. I put a stop to that. “Can you please solve the problems of the world and use the speedometer simultaneously?”
He more than makes up for the loss of speed. I barely have time to consider how tonight has changed something fundamental in the way I see Davey before we pass Molly the Corn Dolly and then we are in my driveway. What has changed us? Conversations? Meeting his friends? Getting out of town? Me kissing a girl? Those solutions seem too simple, too on the nose.
Guinevere and I are home at five minutes to twelve.
We’re idling in the driveway—that lingering moment when the night is supposed to be over but it’s not. I should go. Dad’s waiting. Davey stares into my garage, because I am evidently the only one capable of lowering the door. All my art is on display for Otters Holt.
“You’re enough,” he says.
I say, “You too,” and find that I’m pleased Davey is my friend now rather than just Mash’s cousin.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: She collected the best people.
Davey carts Guinevere to the corner of the garage for me; she fared well considering it was her first time in public. Before he climbs into the Camaro, he twists out of his sweater and tie and tosses them into the trunk. He’s standing half-naked in my driveway, looking ridiculously handsome. Davey has a very nice chest. It’s considerably nicer than Woods’s, because Woods lifts dry-erase markers and peppermint tea, and Davey lifts . . . I don’t know . . . Thomas.
Thomas. Thomas. Thomas.
I pick up his band shirt from the Daily Sit. “You’re forgetting something,” I say, and throw it into his palm like a quarterback.
“Well, I’m off,” he says. Up-nod.
“You’re off,” I say. Up-nod.
That departure felt very two steps forward, three steps back.
Inside, I tiptoe toward the crack of light under Mom and Dad’s door, checking my reflection in a hall mirror. Not good. Ear against the wood, I don’t hear anything. I knock, praying for low lights and shadows.
“Enter,” Dad says.
I am in full explanation mode before I move from hardwood to carpet, a room more his than hers. I had a good time. We aren’t in a ditch. I’ve already been here for five minutes.
Mom lowers her sketchpad, pulls the covers closer to her chin, and checks with my dad before using a very calm but firm tone. “When we gave you permission to go with Davey, we thought he’d be returning you well before midnight.”
Dad’s working out my appearance. He is particularly interested in my hair until he lights on my chin. Or is it my lips? Does he somehow know I kissed Gerry? He asks, “What’s wrong with your neck?”
The Adam’s apple. I cup my hand over the makeup. “Just a joke,” I say, and then move on to Mom. “I was with Davey.”
They don’t seem nearly as impressed by Davey as they were earlier today. Their eyes flick from the digital clock on the nightstand to my neck. Dad removes his Bible-reading bifocals, gestures to me, and says to Mom, “I’m sure that’ll make the morning paper.”
“Oh, Scott. Stop it.” Mom swats his arm as if this is the follow-up to an earlier conversation. She turns off their light and shoos me to bed with her eyes. When I’m halfway down the hall, her voice follows. “Don’t forget the garage door.”
That night, I dream I’m flying an Audi. Gerry’s riding shotgun. Davey’s wearing ten ties in the backseat and Audi Thomas has installed an espresso machine in the trunk. He’s pouring glasses. Gerry rips out the front seat, tosses it out the
window. It doesn’t drop. It flies away like a bird. The rest of the seats go the same way. Suddenly, the Audi is large enough to hold a dance party of four. We jump. We kiss. The horn sings, “I cannot be contained.” Gerry laughingly says, “We are more ambitious than a love triangle. We’re a love square.”
I wake up drenched in a fresh wave of worry over all the love squares in my life.
My best friend is in love with my other best friend. I’m going to have to deal with that at some point.
5
Davey’s Part
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
He called me before I called him. Thom Cahill had a knack for three things: stealing my girlfriends, stealing my girlfriends in such a way that I ended up thinking they were better off with him than they were with me, and calling before I needed him.
Two hours before we’d left summer football workout together, and everything on my emotional monitor registered as level and fine. “How’s it hanging, Winters?” he greeted me over the phone.
“At my feet,” I told him.
“Meet at Bonjo?” he asked.
“Meet at Bonjo,” I replied.
Fifteen minutes later, Thom and I were among the hipsters and writers who populated our favorite caffeinated haunt. Our barista had the day off, but even the second-string made us two Americanos before we asked for them. Impressed, I dropped an extra ten in the jar. A middle-aged lady with a baby abandoned our favorite table as if Thom had sent a text ahead asking her to vacate. The stage was set. Serious conversation to follow.
Thom twisted the square Waylan Academy ring he always wore on his pinkie because it was too small for his ring finger. The platinum gleamed against his skin. He’d had it polished again.
Dress Codes for Small Towns Page 4
