Izzy + Tristan

by Shannon Dunlap

  I could tell you here about avoiding him after class, about slogging through French class, the last period of the day, but what’s the point really? My heart and my pride were scraped up, and I was too disappointed to conjugate verbs, and even if you don’t relate to anything else in this long, crazy story, I’d be willing to bet that you know what that feels like.

  So this was my new life. I was left to face the first week at Carl Sagan by myself, to try to make friends, to obsess over the one person whose attention I craved but who had apparently become an enemy of the family before I even met him. Even with Brianna in several of my classes, I felt lonely. I’d never gone to school without Hull before.

  Mom started driving him to therapy every day, and they’d come back in the evenings looking wrung out. My dad went to work as usual, since his new semester had started a couple weeks before, and he’d come home in the evenings looking preoccupied and vaguely angry. I sat through my classes, filling in the lines between Hull and Tristan, and I’d come home and not quite look my twin in the eye, thinking about who Hull had meant when he said cretins.

  My parents have always been those let’s-sit-down-and-have-dinner-as-a-family kind of parents, and never has that tendency been harder to swallow than it was that week. We were as strained and polite to one another as any unhappy family of Victorian Brits who made it onto Masterpiece Theatre. At first my dad tried to quiz Hull and my mom about what went down each day at the Columbia program, but Hull stonewalled him, and my mother would only say, “It’s a long process.” I made a brave sally or two into the fray, trying to tell amusing stories about something Brianna had said, but my parents looked distracted, smiling at me only as an afterthought.

  I believed in doctors. I believed in the ones who were trying to help Hull every day. But during that time, I wanted more than anything to be one of those people who can fix everything through the power of their charisma and optimism. Once, I looked at Hull across the table, and his face was such a scary blank, and I tried to will the happiness and compassion into him, to shoot it into him like a laser beam. But I wasn’t paying attention to where I put my arm while I was laser-beaming, and I knocked a spoon out of a bowl of tomato sauce, sending a messy red splatter across the tablecloth. Hull barely registered it. My father grimaced but said nothing. My mother said, “Oh, it’s all right, Izzy.” I’m still not sure what it was about the tomato sauce, but that was the closest I came to crying that whole long week.

  THE KNIGHT

  IN THE PARK ON THURSDAY NIGHT, I CONSIDER THROWING the game. I’ve played this kid before, and I could beat him with my hands tied behind my back, but I’m irritated with Marcus, with his posturing and his veiled threats and his running commentary about Izzy over the past couple days, and the only way I can think of striking back is by losing him a little cash that he’s been counting on. But in the end, I panic, and winning kicks in like a reflex, like a bad habit, and I pull a flashy ending that involves sacrificing the queen, and my opponent groans when he realizes it’s all over. Marcus crows in triumph and it’s all worse than if I’d played it straight and won quickly. I can’t do anything right.

  Something right would have been to tell Marcus how I feel about Izzy when I saw him looking her up and down in the hallway yesterday. I know it wasn’t much different from the way I look at her every opportunity I get. But it filled me with dread.

  “So that’s her, huh? She’s not half bad, T,” he said when he noticed me out of the corner of his eye, never breaking his gaze on Izzy. “Kinda plain, but a nice ass.”

  Why didn’t I say something? Cowardice, certainly, but something else, too: There is simply no chance that Izzy wants me as badly as I want her. In fact, Izzy now shows every indication of despising me. I could see it in her face that first day of school, like someone had completely remolded it in the time between Lit class and Physics class; the pit of my stomach knew it before my brain did. She’d figured out my involvement in that bad scene with Hull. Her twin brother! Of course she had, because her obvious intelligence is one of the things that makes me want to lie down in front of a speeding truck for her.

  “You got nasty up there at the end,” Marcus says on the walk home from the park. “I know you think I can’t follow what you’re doing, but I’ve been watching you play for, what? Two years now? I’d probably be pretty good at the game myself since I’ve spent so many hours studying the master.”

  I shrug, still angry that I can never keep myself from doing exactly what Marcus wants me to do. “Maybe you should play the games yourself, then. Skip the middleman.”

  Marcus throws me a glance, and I inwardly flinch, worrying that maybe I overstepped, and hating myself for worrying about it, but he only laughs. “I wouldn’t go that far, T.”

  We sidestep around a running club that is barreling toward us on the sidewalk like a pack of determined sled dogs. Marcus pauses to lean against a concrete pyramid that’s been poured to support the base of a massive tree in danger of toppling over. Someone has painted a cheery pastoral scene on it: windmills and houses, nothing of Brooklyn in it. I could use something to take the edge off, but Marcus lights up one of those fruit-flavored cigarillos, the ones I can’t stand. I snort like a horse, trying to force the blueberry smoke out of my nose. Candy that will kill you, he’s called them in the past. It’s a world full of things that will kill you.

  “You think I’m not smart enough for this girl,” he says.

  It takes me half a second to understand that he’s talking about Izzy. “Course you are,” I say flatly.

  “I know you think it’s only about sticking it to White Boy,” Marcus says, “and that gets to you somehow. But here’s the thing, T. Maybe I’m not the dummy that everyone assumes I am.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re a dummy, Marcus.” The headache is starting, hastened by the smoke, and it kicks at the space between my eyes.

  Marcus blows a perfect smoke ring, and we both watch it rise and disappear. “Maybe I want this girl because I deserve her.”

  Marcus slaps my shoulder, tells me again that it was a good game, and then his phone buzzes, and he ducks into a subway station without bothering to tell me where he’s going. Normally, I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to walk home alone, to unwind by myself. But today it’s hard to turn off my brain. I’m not sure I believe Marcus that this has nothing to do with Hull. But telling him now that I’ve fallen for Izzy would imply that I’m the one who deserves the smart girl, not him.

  The thing is, Marcus is smart. Not in the calm, deep way that Izzy is, but in a fast-thinking, quick-witted way. But he’s also the most emotionally charged person I know, definitely not beyond doing some stupid, careless things. I’ve seen him shake people down for money they owe him, not because he needs the money but because their lack of respect offends him. There was also a night last summer when he came home with blood on his shirt. I was sitting on the stoop of his building, teaching his baby sister, Chantal, to play tic-tac-toe, and he told us to get inside, to stay there for the rest of the evening. Marcus, too, stayed in his apartment for the following few days, a rare occurrence, but then he’d reemerged and acted like none of it had happened. So he had either dabbled in some serious shit, or it was nothing and he got superstitious for a couple days, which would also be totally like Marcus. Now the difference between those two possibilities eats at me.

  Walking home, I pass the Dominican restaurant with the yellow door. That girl from the park, Brianna, is clearing dishes from the outdoor tables, but she doesn’t notice me. I’ve seen her around school a few times this week talking to Izzy, so I guess they’re friends. After I’ve passed the place, I turn around and watch her, like a creeper, from the shadows of a doorway for a minute or two. Brianna’s smart and pretty; why can’t Marcus fall for her instead of Izzy? Why can’t he fall for anyone instead of Izzy? Brianna goes back inside the restaurant, and I kick at the bricks of the nearest building, but they don’t move, not even an inch.

  Saturday will be our f
irst scholastic chess meet of the year, a scrimmage with a tony boarding school in Manhattan, so I haul myself out of bed early on Friday for a chess club meeting.

  Mr. Karapovsky, the coach of the high school chess club, is one of those ancient guys whose face seems to be shrinking under the weight of its own hair. Salt and pepper tangles sprout from each ear and each nostril, and with every passing month, it seems that his intense eyebrows come closer and closer to completely blocking his vision. He’s old, really old, probably the oldest person still working at the school. In fact, he gave up his job teaching freshman Biology a few years ago, and now gets paid only a small stipend to run the chess club. He was close to quitting that, too, but then I came along.

  “You get a brilliant student maybe once, maybe twice in this lifetime, Trees-tahn,” he’s said to me more than once while clapping me on the back and breathing his garlicky pickle breath on me. “For you, I stay.” That’s kind of a lot of pressure, since I get the feeling that if I don’t make it to grandmaster level before Mr. K dies, it’s going to be one of the major disappointments of his life, which is really saying something since I’m pretty sure he hates his wife and lives in a terrible apartment and eats sardines for lunch every day. Reaching those higher echelons seemed like an inevitability near the end of last year. Our team took a surprise second place at the state tournament, and we only declined the invitation for nationals because we were saving travel funds for this year, when our best players would all return and be even better. But while I’ve been soaring in the park, in the world of on-the-books tournament chess, I’ve been hovering somewhere under a 2300 rating for a while now, unable to haul myself off that plateau, and I know that it makes Mr. K anxious.

  Here’s the way chess club usually works: We come in and have a little introductory puzzle with Mr. K and he explains the theme of the day, like working on our openings or using our knights to create forks or whatever, and then we’ll break up into groups to work on that theme. Chess is pretty popular at Carl Sagan, and there are usually around thirty people in the room for the meetings, and the small groups correspond to three different skill levels. At least, there are technically three groups, but in actuality, there are four groups: Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced, and then me and Anaïs and Pankaj, who are so freakishly good that we basically exist outside the usual categories.

  I’m not bragging here. It’s just a fact. And besides, freakish could easily apply to us, the trio of misfit nerds, the same way it applies to our level of chess skill, so it’s not like we have to shoulder a heavy burden of envy on a daily basis. Pankaj has one of those faint, wispy mustaches that he never shaves, and even after years of crushing it at chess tournaments, he still gets so nervous that he often has to run to the restroom in the middle of a match with the timer running. Anaïs is an overweight, short-tempered blond girl who makes it clear that she’d rather be practicing her clarinet, and who exercises her natural talent at chess only to please her vaguely creepy dad, who shows up to the tournaments with flowers for her every single time. Anyway, I know I’m not exactly the king of cool myself, so I’m not trying to hate on poor Pankaj and Anaïs, who are very good chess players, good enough to be ranked at the state level for two years in a row, but I think it’s safe to say that we’re all pretty tired of one another’s company at this point. Mr. K doesn’t make us stick to the theme of the day if we don’t feel like it, and he usually spends most of the hour going over famous games between grandmasters with us and pretty much ignoring whatever else goes on in the room.

  On Friday, everyone is sleepy-eyed and cranky at having to come to an early morning meeting instead of our typical afternoon ones. Everyone, that is, except for Mr. K, who is nearly giddy with the idea of beating the boarding school, Westcroft, for the first time in years. They irk him, these expensive private schools with endless resources to pour into their chess teams. Mr. K loves an underdog, and since Anaïs and Pankaj and I are not the uniform-wearing preppies of Westcroft, we fit the bill well enough.

  He sets everyone up with some work on how to bounce back from a material disadvantage and then comes over to strategize with us about the coming match. Instead of grandmasters, we talk about the strongest players on the Westcroft team: Dan Arshevsky, Ronald Santos, Isadora Desmains, Eamon Kennedy. The names sound familiar from last year, and I should be concentrating, trying to remember previous matches I’ve played against them. Instead, the only thing my mind will hold is the image of Izzy’s face. When the first class bell rings and I’m called back to myself, Pankaj looks worried.

  “You going to be this spacey tomorrow?” he says after we bid farewell to Mr. K, promising to get plenty of sleep before the meet.

  “Pankaj, you could beat those fools while you’re half in a coma,” I say, and he gives me a wan smile. It’s true, too. Winning at chess is easy; it’s winning at love that I’m worried about. I square my shoulders and walk toward first period.

  THE QUEEN

  IT WAS FRIDAY BEFORE I TALKED TO TRISTAN AGAIN, and only because we were divided into randomly assigned discussion groups in AP Lit to talk about a Jonathan Edwards sermon. My heart plummeted as Mr. Berger read our names, one right after the other. We sank into adjacent desks, still not really making eye contact, along with an incredibly quiet girl named Mireille, and Alex, a tall kid with a dopey half smile, whose presence in an AP class seemed optimistic on somebody’s part. I hate group discussions during the best of times, and this definitely wasn’t the best of times. I kept my eyes on my notebook, like the secrets of the universe were written there. Alex stretched, arranged his gangly limbs.

  “This early stuff is so boring,” he said while surreptitiously playing a racing game on his phone. “The summer reading was at least a little bit hot. Why can’t we skip ahead to the whale hunters and adultery and shit?”

  “Language, Mr. Robinson,” Mr. Berger said from his desk a few yards away, without even bothering to look up from the paper he was grading. “And stop with the texting before I confiscate that thing.”

  “Sorry,” Alex mumbled. Then he lowered his voice and said, “This Edwards guy sounds like a real prick.” Mireille tittered at this.

  “I don’t think he was trying to be harsh with all of that dangling-over-the-fires-of-hell stuff,” Tristan said. “He sees it as being helpful. He’s keeping everyone from making terrible mistakes.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the usual patriarchal bullshit,” I said, feeling my face start to burn. “He’s so sure he has a monopoly on the truth, and he bullies everyone instead of letting people make their own decisions.”

  “Well, yeah, but you’re taking it out of context,” Tristan said. “The people who heard this all went to his church, so they agreed with his version of the truth.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well…”

  “I mean, we don’t know what they were thinking while they were sitting in the church listening to this.”

  “Ooh, she got you there, T,” Alex said.

  “Maybe they’re just scared,” I said. “They’re scared because they’re in this new land, trying to make a go of it, and they don’t understand everything that’s around them, but every day they’re trying to do the best they can. And then this really powerful guy comes, wanting to reinforce his superiority, and just… he just…” My face was burning; I felt like I was fumbling forward into a fire myself.

  “Acts like a dickhead,” Mireille supplied.

  “Thank you, Mireille,” I said. “He acts like a dickhead.”

  “Language!” Mr. Berger interjected, giving me the stink eye over the rims of his glasses. I leaned back in my chair so that I was partially hidden behind Alex.

  “You know only a man would say crap like this,” Mireille said. “The world would be so much better if women ran it.” I hadn’t pegged Mireille for a feminist, but I was relieved that someone was backing me up.

  “I mean, I guess we can sit here and talk about how unfair it is that white men have pret
ty much held the winning hand for all of modern history,” Tristan said. “But is it really Edwards’s fault that he lived in the time and place that he did?”

  “What about Anne Bradstreet, then?” I asked, finally looking him squarely in the face. I was suddenly, senselessly enraged, and I wanted to punch him, wanted to shake that inscrutable expression right off his face. I wanted to kick him in his bad ankle until it hurt as badly as it had in that first moment I saw him, and in doing so, erase all those embarrassing dreams I was still having about him.

  “Well, what about her?’ He sounded so calm, but he kept licking his lips like his mouth was dry.

  “She was religious. She was a product of the same age. But you don’t see her threatening people with hellfire. You don’t see her being a prick. She focused on her personal experience, and people loved her for it.”

  “Ooooh, snap,” Alex said. “Who’s Anne Bradstreet?”

  “I think you’re missing the point,” Tristan said.

  “And I think you and Jonathan Edwards are assholes who deserve each other.” Alex and Mireille were laughing, giving each other a look like, This girl is totally nuts. Tristan’s mouth hung open a little as he stared at me.

  “What’s gotten into you guys today?” Mr. Berger sighed as the bell rang. “All right, remember to read the section on John Smith in preparation for Monday.”

  Tristan was gone, like a shot, out the door before the bell stopped ringing. He wasn’t even in Physics class that afternoon. He had disappeared. I spent the whole period replaying the conversation. It might have still carried with it a hint of the original indignation, but the overarching theme was embarrassment.