Then her hands slide down onto my chest, and she pulls back. “We have to go back in there.”
“In where?”
“In the… other room. I left Brianna with Marcus, and he can’t know it’s her.” And then I see all of it, the whole mess of it, in a painful gulp. “No one can know about this,” she says, and I think, No shit, because Marcus will kill all three of us, but that’s not what I say.
“Everything will be okay,” I say. “We’ll talk later and figure everything out.”
“Yes,” she says, and kisses me a few more times, small, hasty kisses, still wonderful. We sneak back into the hallway, her hand gripped tightly in mine. As we duck back inside the Final Frontier, my eye catches on a dark shadow down the hall, and it makes me think that someone could be watching us, and anxiety twists in my gut. I’m not built for subterfuge. I tell myself that it is nothing.
We wait near the door, our arms twined around each other. It is too warm in here, and too dark. There are glow-in- the-dark star stickers but no other light, so I can’t see anyone, but I can hear whispers and giggles and heavy breathing coming from some corner of the room. The whole scene feels so sleazy that I don’t even want to kiss Izzy here, but I breathe in the scent of her skin and hold her tighter, and she squeezes back. It feels like an eternity that we wait there, when all I want to do is run far, far away with her.
There’s a movement in the dark and her body tenses, pulls away from mine. She and Brianna must have worked out some kind of signal, because I hear her softly whisper, “Brianna?” Then they are out the door, pulling me with them. In the hallway, we stand there blinking at each other for a beat. It’s hard to read their faces, and there’s no time to think about the right thing to say, because Marcus comes into the hallway, too. His expression is easier to discern: sleepy, satisfied, slightly smug.
“Izzy and I were just going to the bathroom,” Brianna says in a rush, and drags Izzy with her down the hall. There’s someone coming out of the bathroom at the moment they reach the door, and they dart into it, cutting in front of several people who were waiting in line.
“Oh, come on!” one person yells at them.
“Dykes!” yells another.
Downstairs, people are cheering for a song that’s shuffled up on the playlist, and Marcus starts to nod along, but I can’t feel it; my body is stuck in some quieter, more subtle rhythm, my heartbeat the bass line for the constantly replaying music video projected on the interior of my skull: what she looked like, what she felt like.
“It’s the strangest thing,” Marcus says.
“Huh?”
“When this whole thing started, I wanted to prove I could have her. You know that,” Marcus says. I can see the dimple on the left side of his face, the one thing that can still make him look like a little kid. “But now… I don’t know. She’s so nice and kind of dorky-sweet. And full of surprises, if you know what I mean. Maybe it’s fate that she moved to our block. I really like her, T. I might even love her.”
THE QUEEN
BRIANNA WAS FUMBLING WITH THE DOOR LOCK, UNLEASHING a stream of curse words at it, and when I reached past her to help, I saw that it was because her hands were shaky. I couldn’t immediately think why. The plan had been her idea and, miraculously, it had worked, sailed by almost without a hitch. Honestly, in advance, I had been most concerned with how Tristan would react, wondering if I had been imagining that kernel of something between us. My mind was still reeling with the knowledge that it was true. Truer than true. A big, rapturous starry sky of true.
“Can you believe this actually worked?” I asked her.
Brianna didn’t answer. She pulled a wad of toilet paper from the roll and wiped at her face, which was sweaty, and then tossed it in the toilet. She leaned against the counter, and her breathing sounded funny. The room was claustrophobic, suddenly, and I could still taste the sugary tang of the punch at the back of my throat.
“Are you… sick?” I asked.
She gave me a withering gaze, a don’t-be-so-fucking-stupid gaze. It does seem idiotic now, looking back on it, how much time I’d spent in the days leading up to the party contemplating the details of how to make the plan work and how little thought I’d given to what pulling it off would actually feel like. It didn’t matter, in the end, whose idea it had been. The consequences were everyone’s.
That night in the bathroom, though, I couldn’t see all of that so clearly. Mostly, I was trying to think of a delicate way of asking how far things had gone between them, and also trying to wrap my head around what, exactly, Marcus had wanted to do with me. In fact, what he thought he had done with me. Me! And he didn’t even know me.
“Are you all right?” I asked Brianna. She started to say something, then stopped, started again.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine. Let’s get out of here, though, okay?”
“Sure.” Oh, sure, it was all fine. Brianna was my one friend at Carl Sagan and I had already compromised that friendship in spectacular and innovative ways. I’ve never been one to stop grasping at straws, though, even when it was a little too late. “Brianna, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have thought this through more.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, sounding angrier by the second. “It’s not like I’m a baby who can’t think for myself. And besides, you have it all wrong. Making out with Marcus… I knew it was going to be great and it was great and I don’t regret it. It’s just… he didn’t know that was me, you know? And he never will know that it was me. It’s like I wasn’t even there.”
Comforting words melted on my tongue, never made it into the air. I couldn’t urge her, like a real friend, to tell Marcus everything. I felt the full weight of the secret, even though I was relying upon other people to hold it for me.
Another I’m sorry rose into my mouth, but I swallowed it down like a hunk of unchewed food. “You look so beautiful tonight,” I said instead.
The truth was, she looked so, so tired in that moment, and I could see what she was going to look like when she was fifty. But then she blew her nose on a piece of toilet paper and squared her shoulders like she was getting ready to step onto a stage. Someone was pounding on the door and yelling.
“Stop making out in there! I gotta pee!”
“Go fuck yourself!” Brianna shouted back, and then she turned to me and managed a thin smile. “Ready?” I nodded, and she looped her arm through mine, exactly as we had when we first came upstairs. It felt different now. “I’ll pretend to be too drunk, all right? And you use that as an excuse to get us out of here.”
We stumbled arm in arm out of the bathroom, where Brianna gave a drunken grin and the finger to the people waiting in line. I made some fast apologies to Marcus about needing to take Brianna home.
“Aw, Caballito’s all right,” Marcus said.
Brianna groaned pitiably, swayed on my arm like an unsecured sail. “I’m gonna throw uuuup.”
“You already did, sweetie.” I patted her shoulder, impressed with both of us.
Tristan said he’d walk us home. Marcus offered to leave, too, but I could tell he wanted to stay, and I vigorously urged him to do so. He grinned at me, and I tried not to read it as a leer.
“I’ll stop over to see you tomorrow, baby,” he said, and then, before I could think of a way of diverting it, he kissed me. If I needed any further evidence that what I had with Tristan was the real thing, then Marcus’s sloppy kiss sufficed. It was like flat soda, warm and sticky without any sparkle, and it took all my concentration not to make a face afterward. I couldn’t look at Tristan or Brianna.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Tristan and I looped our arms around Brianna’s back, and she pretended to be loose-limbed and unsteady as we lurched our way downstairs and through the heart of the party. She was a better actress than Roxanne could ever be. The music had swerved toward old-school, stuff that was popular before we were born, and everyone was yelling “Jump around!” and bo
uncing into us and off of us as we tried to make a break for the door. It was a relief to be out in open air, the concrete solid under our feet. We weren’t even a block away when Brianna straightened up and shook us off. I glanced at Tristan and his face was one big question mark, but there was no way to explain then, and maybe there’s still not.
Behind us, a police cruiser pulled up in front of R. J.’s house with lights circling and a few short bleats of siren to announce its arrival. Without discussing it, we picked up the pace, speedwalking until we put some distance between the party and us.
“What do you know, T?” Brianna said. “Running from the cops together again. It’s getting to be a habit.” And then she laughed, but it was a hard laugh.
Tristan didn’t respond. From then on, it was a quiet walk, the only disturbance the music and chatter from a few bars that we passed. The moon wasn’t quite full, but it had that curious orange hue of autumn; that night, the color looked almost fake, a garish splash of paint. I tried to remember why that happened, the scientific explanation for it, but I couldn’t come up with anything, and I even considered putting the question to Brianna and Tristan, but it was as if a spell had fallen over them, all marching feet and downward gazes.
Brianna lived closer to the party than I had realized; she’d gone out of her way to meet up with us on our corner. Already, the walk to the party had receded in my mind; it belonged to an earlier era.
“Well,” she said, in front of a shuttered café, “this is me. See you Monday.” Brianna was usually a hugger, a fan of the big goodbye after every class, but that night she walked to the door without ceremony and started to let herself in.
“Brianna,” I said, before considering that I had no way to follow it up. I settled for “thanks.” She gave me a small smile, I think, though it was hard to tell in the dark, and then she disappeared into the building.
I took a breath, and it was only from its rattle that I noticed I was shivering. Tristan and I looked at each other, two castaways washed up on the other side of a storm. Ship of fools. The phrase came unbidden into my mind and anchored there, repeating in those long seconds. I thought that he was about to open his mouth and tell me that it would never work, that we should go home and pretend that the night, the party, the kiss had never happened. And if he had said that, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to disagree.
Instead, he said this: “I think I’m in love with you. I know it, actually. It’s the only thing I’ve known for sure since I met you in the playground.”
And then the distance between us had vanished, and we were kissing each other hard, urgently, as though we were trying to save something, and the effervescent feeling in my stomach was back, its reappearance so sudden it was almost painful, as if I had chugged a can of ice-cold soda in one long swallow. We stood there, melting together, for a couple of minutes, until I got a full-body shiver. I’m not sure if I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a movement in the second-story apartment window, or if it was the mere possibility that Brianna might be watching us, but at any rate, I whispered into his ear, “We should go somewhere.”
It was hardly a moment of great eloquence on my part, but Tristan seemed to understand, and he nodded, his smooth cheek rubbing against mine, and so we started walking.
I thought, briefly, that he was going to say that I had to hop the fence, and I wouldn’t have hesitated to try, though it was easily eight feet tall and scaling it would have been a noisy and possibly doomed endeavor. But to my surprise, Tristan fished his keys out of his pocket and selected one that fit the padlock on the gate.
“My aunt helps run it,” he whispered in explanation. “She gave me a key so I could water it on my way to my summer job in the morning.” We were standing outside of a Green Thumb garden, a series of small garden plots set up in an empty lot between two brownstones. We were very close to our own block. If I squinted through the dark to the next corner, I could see the playground where I first set eyes on him, and if I had crossed the street to get the right angle, I probably could have seen my own house. But home was the last thing I wanted to think about right now. Tristan slowly, soundlessly swung the gate open and I followed him inside.
A streetlight from the other side of the street provided enough light to see where we were walking. A few of the plots were already cleaned out, the soil turned over in preparation for winter, but most of the garden was still in bloom, tomato plants and zucchini vines starting to turn brown and withered but still bending with the weight of big fruits. One ambitious person had taken up most of his plot with a single misshapen pumpkin. Fruit trees and geraniums in big pots flourished near the back of the lot, and some benches were set among them. Behind the benches, some kids had painted the brick wall with rainbows and fat birds, and as we sat down, I traced one edge of a bluebird’s wing with my index finger. It was darker back here under the trees, beyond the reach of the streetlights, and the rest of the garden looked illuminated, enchanted.
“I didn’t know you were a gardener,” I said.
“I’m not. I just follow Aunt Patrice’s instructions and try not to kill her plants.” He picked up my hand and started to trace the lines in my palm.
“Izzy, the day that I hurt my ankle, the day I ran from the park…”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I know, but let me say it.” He moved as though to push up his glasses, even though he was wearing his contacts that night, and then he reached for my hands again. “I wish I could take it back,” he said. “I wish I’d never played that game against Hull. Marcus can get some strange ideas in his head sometimes.…” He trailed off.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. I have to get tougher about standing up to Marcus. We’ll find a way to tell him about us. I’ll find a way to tell him about us. But you should know that I’m sorry about what happened.”
I was sorry, too. I was sorry that Hull was so brash and intractable, sorry for whatever he’d done to attract Marcus’s anger in the first place, sorry that our first kiss had to be akin to an act of espionage. But to say aloud that I was sorry would sound like I was apologizing for Hull’s very existence, and that was something I wasn’t ready to do.
Instead I said this: “You know what my grandma’s last words to me were? She said, ‘It’s all water under the bridge, honey.’ I think my dad took it badly, like she’d given up hope, but I still find it comforting, actually. There aren’t all that many things that matter in the end, are there?” If you had asked me in that moment, there would only have been one item on the list. “So don’t talk about Hull, not right now. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Let’s talk about how you kissed me at the party.”
I laughed. “I’m pretty sure you kissed me, actually.”
“Are you sure?” He was leaning close to me now, and the tip of his nose was brushing mine, and I could feel the warmth of his breath. “Like this?” He was still tracing the patterns in my palm, and I wondered if he could read the future there, the way Brianna believed was possible.
Our kisses this time were deeper, more searching, as if we could divine everything about the other by the way our bodies met. Brianna was the one who knew about alchemy, and I was the one stuck on scientific explanations, but that night, it seemed plausible that a magical change in our basic makeup had occurred. A mingling of our particles, maybe. Or transubstantiation. I kissed his neck, the outer edge of his ear, and tried to sink deeper.
In a mental flash, though, I saw Brianna in the bathroom, the age in the lines of her face, and I couldn’t relax.
“I’m not sure,” I said, my voice teetering on the edge of the sentence, uncertain about how to finish it. “I’m not sure I want to do anything more than this tonight.”
Tristan put his arms around me, looked me in the eye. “You think I care? We could do just this for the rest of the night. We could do just this forever.” And in one version of the story, the one I use to make myse
lf fall asleep these days, that’s exactly what happened.
PART 2
THE KNIGHT
IF IZZY IS THE BEST DRUG I’VE EVER TAKEN, AUNTIE Patrice is one terrible comedown. She doesn’t even wait for me to fumble my way to the kitchen this time, instead barging into the room, her vocal cords already warmed up for yelling before I’m fully conscious. Izzy and I stayed in the garden until the wee hours of the morning, kissing and talking. I thought I had managed to slip back into the apartment undetected, though judging by the decibel level of Patrice’s first sentence, now I’m not so sure.
“Twice in one month!” she’s saying. “And before you tell me that you know absolutely nothing about this again, Cherry already told me you were at this same party, so I suggest you start explaining what happened.”
I struggle to free my arms from the sheets, prop myself up on my elbows. I have a pounding headache from the punch I drank early in the evening, and maybe from the wallop of adrenaline that came after it. “What is twice in one month?”
Patrice exhales hard out of her nostrils, hands on her hips, before she answers me. “Your cousin getting arrested, that’s what.”
“What?” That wakes me up. I remember the cop cars pulling up, of course, but I’d been certain about Marcus’s ability to slip out of something as banal as the cops breaking up a party. “Yeah, we were at a party, but I left early to walk home with a friend who was sick. And Marcus was doing what everybody else at the party was doing. He was when I left, at least.”
“Which was what, exactly? Playing bridge?” Auntie Patrice lifts her arms in a gesture of disbelief. “Do I have to spell it out for you, Mr. Honor Roll, that underage drinking is against the law?”
She’s right, of course, so I decide not to respond by saying that she must not remember high school very well if she thinks that no one drinks at parties. Plus, my only reasonable guess about what happened is that the cops arrested Marcus before all of the other people in that house because they recognized him from the fight in the park or possibly from something else Marcus has been up to, but I don’t think Patrice is going to like that explanation very well, so I don’t say anything at all.
Izzy + Tristan Page 11
