“Wait. You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Everybody calls me T,” he said, and then he was limping away from me, down the block, and I was left to stand there and wonder if any of it had really happened. I snapped the first-aid kit shut and walked back to the house.
Looking back, I can see that I was acting willfully naive about what had transpired. Someone more self-assured might have already begun to scheme about how to see him again, maybe even how to seduce him. But for better or for worse, I was, and perhaps still am, a person of reasonable expectations. I had always been a nerdy science girl with a chubby baby face, so casting myself as a romantic lead, even in my own daydreams, wasn’t something I was accustomed to doing.
Even so, I admit that after I retrieved the spare key from the geranium pot and let myself into the house, I spent some long minutes assessing my best and worst features (round eyes and wavy dark hair versus freckled nose and fat cheeks). Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I wondered when and if anyone else would ever study them so closely: a teenage girl’s preferred form of exquisite torture.
I was lying on my bed, pretending to read my novel but really bouncing between thoughts of the mysterious stranger with the injured ankle and visions of the nearly unimaginable moment when police put my brother in handcuffs, when I heard someone fiddling with the lock and raced to meet my family at the front door. The grim expressions on all three faces made me pull up short at the bottom of the stairs. Hull’s eyes looked red and swollen, but when I reached out to touch his arm, he brushed past me and went to his room. I looked at my parents disbelievingly, and my mother said, “Please, no questions tonight, Izzy. Okay?” Her voice sounded so small that I didn’t say anything as they, too, climbed the stairs and went into their own bedroom.
I spent a few minutes eavesdropping on the soft voices behind my parents’ door. “I can’t believe the lack of empathy,” I heard my mother say, but I couldn’t make out my father’s muttered reply. Nothing but silence from Hull’s room. I knocked softly on his door, then more loudly, but got no response.
I went downstairs and, since it seemed like everyone else had forgotten about dinner, ate some cheese and crackers while standing over the kitchen sink. Then I climbed into bed and went back to reading the same page of my book over and over. Typically I have a lot of thoughts spinning all at once or in quick succession: a mind like a Swiss Army knife, my dad calls it. But that night, lying in the unfamiliar house and ignored by everyone closest to me, I was consumed with thoughts of only one thing, and it wasn’t a contemplation of how to help my twin brother. It was the conversation in the playground, playing over in my head on repeat. He’s not thinking about you, Izzy, I told myself, so stop it. Stop it right now.
THE KNIGHT
I SURRENDER. THOSE ARE THE WORDS I CAN’T SHAKE this morning, the ones I can’t stop repeating to myself. You can surrender in chess; it’s called resigning. People will advise you never to do that, particularly when you’re first learning, because there might be some way out that you’re missing, some advantage that you can’t yet see. But this time, I know.
Maybe I knew when she first offered to help me, when her sweet voice flooded into me like a cool gulp of lemonade. Maybe I knew when I saw her beautiful face lit up by the setting sun, when I got lost in the sympathy of her gaze. Or maybe I knew when I realized she was Hull’s sister, when it dawned on me that it was just like fate to screw me over like this. Regardless, I’m certain by now: I’m powerless. My own fortune has checkmated me. I surrender.
It’s the last day before school starts, and I’m considering burrowing down into the covers and hiding from the world for the rest of the morning, but a few minutes after I open my eyes, there’s a sharp rap at the door. Aunt Patrice can sense when I’m awake; she can smell it, like a dragon.
“Tristan, I need to talk to you,” Patrice says, and her voice has a hot edge of irritation. “Come out to the kitchen, please.”
My brain was so capsized by meeting Izzy that I nearly forgot about the bigger picture: the chess match, the cops, leaving Marcus there to fend for himself. I hop out of bed and an arrow of pain shoots through my ankle. Still, upon further inspection, it looks remarkably better than it did yesterday. There is magic in her touch. I order my thoughts as best I can, trying to figure out a way to spin the previous day’s events to Aunt Patrice, readying myself to do battle with the dragon. She’s waiting for me, sitting on a kitchen stool, arms folded over her chest. I try not to limp.
“Were you involved in this fight?” she snaps before I’ve fully entered the room.
“Not really,” I mumble. “And I swear to you that it wasn’t Marcus’s fault.”
“Sure it wasn’t,” Patrice says. “Trouble has a way of finding Marcus, but he never has anything to do with it. Go on. Tell me exactly what happened.”
So I give her a version of the events, omitting some selected details, like the fact that Marcus had money riding on the game, because she’ll disapprove, and the particulars of what the knife looked like, because she’ll get worried. “And when the cops showed up, Marcus kept yelling at me to run, run, run, and I guess I panicked, because I did. But I’m not lying: He didn’t start the fight.” And that was the truth, sort of, if you ignored the fact that Marcus started messing with Hull in the first place.
“So if no one was doing anything wrong, if everyone was perfectly on the up-and-up, why did you run from the police?” she asks me.
Why did I run? He had been looking at me in that forceful way that he has, screaming at me to get out of there, and I’d fallen into the habit of doing whatever Marcus told me to do.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Patrice shakes her head, her lips pursed so tight that they turn into a little lipstick-colored mark on her face. “Honestly, Tristan, I expected more from you when you came to live with me. ‘Tristan is special.’ That’s what I kept saying to all the people who kept calling me crazy for moving you up here. And now you’re hanging out with Marcus all hours of the day and night, sneaking around like a common criminal. You think I don’t know what marijuana smells like? And now the cops.” She blows her breath out in a long stream through those angry lips. Patrice knows everyone around here, even the cops, especially the cops, and she doesn’t like anyone giving our block a bad reputation. That goes double, maybe triple, for me. “These days, those same people are saying, ‘Oh, he’s being an ordinary teenager.’ But that’s exactly the opposite of what I thought you were.”
Her words carry a burn. But this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Patrice angry, and I can tell that a lot of what she’s saying is because she’s worked up. Once she calms down, she’ll see that it’s not such a big deal. No one is dead, no one is hurt. You can always count on Patrice to be practical.
“And that’s not even touching on the fact that you abandoned Marcus while he was getting arrested. If there was a problem, I should have heard about it from you.”
“Arrested?” Maybe it sounds stupid, because it’s not like the cops around here hold the most charitable view of kids like Marcus, but he has always seemed so untouchable that I thought he could wriggle his way unscathed out of the situation at the park. A thick lozenge of guilt lodges itself in my throat.
“I was playing cards at Ramona’s last night, and Cherry gets a call on her cell phone in the middle of the game.” Cherry is Marcus’s mom. You might think it’s weird that Patrice hangs out with her brother’s ex-wife, but they’ve both lived around here for so long that no one blinks an eye. “You should have seen her face when she learned she had to go get Marcus at the police station.” She makes a disapproving clucking sound with her teeth. “And I was so worried about you, because I knew there was no way you weren’t with him, and I come home, and lo and behold, there you are, already fast asleep.” That’s true; when I got home, I felt so wrung out from the pain in my ankle and the encounter with Izzy that I collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.
&nbs
p; “I should go see Marcus,” I say. When Patrice raises one questioning eyebrow, I quickly add, “I’m sorry that I worried you. I didn’t think Marcus was in trouble. Really, he shouldn’t have been, because he didn’t do anything bad.” Or nothing worse than every other day of his life, I think to myself.
“I think you’ve seen enough of Marcus this weekend,” Auntie Patrice says, finally uncrossing her arms. “I think you should stay here today and make sure you’re ready to start school tomorrow.” The way she says it, I can tell it’s not a suggestion.
“Did they charge him with anything?” I ask.
“I haven’t heard yet,” Patrice says, but she’s already standing up, doing dishes, making it clear that the conversation is over.
Back in my bedroom, I pull my phone out of my bag and call Marcus. It’s strange, but I hardly ever call him; I see him almost every day, so there’s no need. Just when I think he’s not going to pick up, he answers.
“What up, T?” he says, and I already feel a cascade of relief at hearing him say my name.
“Not much here,” I say. “Look, Patrice told me that the cops got all over your ass yesterday, and I’m sorry. I should have stuck around to make sure you were okay.”
“Nah,” Marcus says, chuckling. “You’re my golden boy. Can’t let them mess with you.”
“Did they charge you?”
“Nope. Except maybe Hector, since he’s nineteen. You can bet that they don’t want to mess around charging Mr. Strategy with anything. You should have seen his parents in the police station yesterday, panicking and wringing their hands.” I realize he’s talking about Izzy’s parents, the nice sand-art lady from the block party, and nausea tiptoes through my stomach. “Anyway, best believe I’m not going to let that little weirdo forget that he brought trouble down on me. And shit, he still owes me a hundred bucks.”
“Look, I can play him again if he disputes the win.…” I would throw the game in an instant if I thought it would keep the peace.
“Not necessary, T.”
“Okay,” I say. And then, like a sudden case of Tourette’s has come over me, I blurt out, “He has a sister. Hull does.” Why on earth would I say something like this? But she’s been there, fighting to the center of my mind, the entire time I’ve been talking to Patrice and now Marcus. And some part of me wants Marcus to know that everything—north, south, gigantic tectonic plates—has shifted for me.
“Huh,” Marcus says, and there’s a calculating note in his voice that makes me wish I’d never brought it up. “What’s she look like? She hot?”
“She’s okay,” I say. There’s some noise in the background, and I’m eager to change the subject anyway, so I say, “Where are you right now?”
“Down at the TipTop. You want to come meet me here?” Of course Marcus isn’t under house arrest like I am. It isn’t his style.
“I don’t think I can. Patrice is on the warpath today.”
“K. I’ll catch you later, then, T.” And he hangs up before I have a chance to say goodbye.
Whenever Aunt Patrice is angry at me, I have the vague and probably irrational fear that she’ll ship me straight back to Atlanta at the first opportunity, so instead of pushing my luck and lurking outside of Izzy’s house, panting beside her door like a lovesick dog, I cool my heels in my bedroom all afternoon. That doesn’t, however, keep me from pulling out my laptop, the one my dad sent for Christmas last year, and trying to find out more about her. There’s not much online, except for some science awards listed on the website of her old school. Be still my nerd-loving heart. I try to find her profile on Facebook or Insta or Snapchat, all the usual social media sinkholes, but I can’t turn up anything at first. Hull is much easier to trace (he has his own YouTube channel about political science, though he hasn’t posted to it in a while) and finally, by poring over his Facebook page, I figure out that she’s listed under her full name, Iseult. I close the computer and repeat it to myself a few times. Iseult, Iseult, Iseult, like the petals of a rose unfurling.
It doesn’t matter how well you do in school, how easy it is for you; getting ready to go the first day each fall feels like dressing for a funeral. The death of summer, with her lazy evenings and icy drinks. May she rest in peace.
The period of mourning starts to drop away as I feel again the rhythms of the morning hallway rush, as I remember that this isn’t such a bad place. People really dog the New York City schools, and lots of them, like Carl Sagan High, are big, a lot bigger than the suburban middle school I went to in Georgia. You could get swallowed in a place so big, but also, if you’re lucky, you can find a niche and hold on tight. A lot of my classes are AP classes, and the same faces tend to repeat themselves in my schedule. It’s not like I hadn’t considered the possibility that Izzy might now be one of those faces, but even so, my heart does a stutter step when I see her sitting in my first-period AP Literature class. She’s trying to lean back casually in the metal desk, but I can tell she’s nervous, not knowing anyone here, and she’s wearing a gray dress that’s hard to imagine anyone else at this school wearing, sort of old-fashioned, verging on Amish-looking. I don’t care about her clothes. I want to run to her, drink in the sight of her here, revel in the miracle that we’re in the same room. All the seats next to hers are taken, though, so I drop into a seat near the door right as the bell rings. She glances over and we make eye contact, and there’s a flicker of joy that lights up her face before she gives me a more composed smile. So I haven’t been making it up; it’s real.
Mr. Berger takes attendance, and I notice that even though Hull is on the class list, he isn’t in the room. Then Berger stumbles over Izzy’s full name badly, and she blushes, says that Izzy will be easier, and glances over at me again. My heart is pounding so hard for the next fifty minutes that it’s hard to concentrate on Mr. Berger discussing the wonders of American literature. Melville and Hawthorne, Steinbeck and Hemingway, all of these long-dead guys running together in a slurry.
We meet up outside the classroom door.
“Tristan,” she says. My blood prickles cold for a second, because I realize she’s picked up on my real name, maybe when Mr. Berger said it, maybe when she was doing some online snooping of her own. I don’t know, can’t even begin to guess, really, what Hull might have told her yesterday. But then she says it again: “Tristan. I like that better than T.” And there’s such warmth in her voice that it’s like I’ve never heard my name before, not the way it’s really supposed to sound. “How’s your ankle?”
My ankle seems like the least important thing that has happened to me in the past few days. Even so, it’s healing much faster than I thought was possible. Like I said before: magic. Everything right with the world and a current of that rightness drawing us closer and closer together—who could care about a stupid ankle? But trying to sound less like the head case I am, I say only, “You were right. It’s only a bad bruise. It’ll be fine.” She has very faint freckles high on her cheeks, and a dimple on the left side. Eyelashes for days. “You have Trigonometry next period?” I ask, because everything is going so well that it seems impossible that we won’t spend the entire day gazing at each other.
“Ah, no,” she says, pulling her schedule out of her bag. She fusses with her hair while she reads it, the only tell that she’s the scared new kid, and it makes me want to protect her. Nerd turned chivalrous guardian. “Rathscott for Government, I think.”
“She’s nice,” I say, giving her schedule a quick scan. No overlap until the afternoon. Not even the same lunch period. Eons without her, the suck of time a swirling black hole. “I’ll see you in AP Physics, though.”
“Right. I look forward to it. Physics, I mean.” And even though I’ve barely noticed my ankle all morning, I feel it throb now, the dull pulse of it matching her departing footsteps as she drifts away with the crowd.
The rest of the morning is, predictably, interminable. I notice during the requisite first day roll calls that I’m scheduled to spend far more ti
me each day with Hull than with Izzy, but each time it’s spoken, his name is met with a span of silence, a scratch of the teacher’s pen. Hull Steinbach is nowhere to be found today.
Lunch is the only period that I share with Marcus, and when I enter the cafeteria with my tray of overcooked spaghetti, he’s already holding court in one corner, his lackeys gathered around him. They are not the cool kids, or rather, they are cool only because of their association with Marcus. Tyrone, Frodo, K-Dawg: They’ve been his best friends since elementary school, and I’ve never been totally clear whether it’s because he’s loyal to a fault or because their presence makes him shine more brightly in comparison. He raises a finger to acknowledge my presence but he’s too busy relating the story of what happened at the police station to say hello, so I squeeze into a seat between Tyrone and Frodo and listen.
“The cops are so worried that we’re going to eat White Boy alive that, check this out, they put him in his own holding cell until Mommy and Daddy can come rescue him. You can bet Hector and I didn’t get our own cells. We got shoved in a pen with every smelly junkie who’d been caught shitting on the sidewalk that night.”
The peanut gallery chuckles at this, even me, a little, except for K-Dawg, who keeps repeating, “It ain’t right, man. It ain’t right.” He’s on his second bag of Cheetos, eyes glazed over as usual.
“But the cell is right next to ours, and we can see right in through the wire mesh. So Hector keeps messing with him, growling at him like a dog, telling him he’s going to find out where he lives—the kinda trash talk we been ignoring since kindergarten. But White Boy is huddled in the corner with his arms wrapped around his head, rocking back and forth like a mental patient. Hilarious.”
“Yo, I heard from Roxanne that White Boy didn’t even have the balls to show up to school,” Tyrone says. Roxanne is Tyrone’s long-suffering, on-again, off-again girlfriend. She once broke up with him because he said that American Indians arrived on this continent after enslaved Africans did, but then she felt bad for him and took him back. She’s a smart girl with a Tyrone-shaped stupid spot on her brain. “She says that he’s not in any of his classes.”
Izzy + Tristan Page 5
