Izzy + Tristan

by Shannon Dunlap

  “I’m surprised you like this place,” I whispered as we walk-ran up the path, past the volleyball courts. “Doesn’t it make you sad somehow that they tore everything old down to put this stuff up?”

  “Everything changes, Izzy,” he said.

  “Well, yeah, but…” I trailed off, my parents’ complaints about the changes on the Lower East Side clanging in my memory.

  “You really think you would have moved onto my block if it wasn’t changing? If it looked like it did when my mom was a kid?”

  He had a point, I knew he did, and I was the last one who could say anything about it, so I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and hurried to keep up with him. But it made me a little sad, anyway.

  “Here,” he said, and pulled me into a playground area with all sorts of different swings. Baby swings and swings like seesaws and swings shaped like animals.

  “This is where we’re going?” I asked.

  He put one finger in the air like an intellectual begging to differ. “Reserve judgment,” he said. He walked into an area that had the standard sling-like, rubber-seated swings for older kids and pulled one under him. He nodded to the one next to him. “Go really high and then you’ll see.”

  I hadn’t done this since I was in elementary school, and I felt a little rusty, but when I saw how enthusiastically Tristan was pumping his legs, leaning forward on the backswing to gain more momentum, I followed suit. The drop, the weightlessness, the moment of suspension. Back and forth. It felt good, the widening arc of my body through space, my long skirt flapping against my legs, and I started laughing despite myself.

  And then I saw it. At the highest point of the swing, above the newish line of trees, an explosion of light that was the Manhattan skyline. In those tiny bursts of vision, it looked almost unreal, an alien landscape dusted with stars. No wonder everyone moves to Brooklyn, I thought. Even Manhattan looks better from here.

  “How did you find this place?” I asked, timing the question at the moment our swings flew past each other.

  “Marcus comes here a lot in the summer to watch the evening games on the courts over that way. And I wander around.” I looked behind me as the swing rushed back, and I could see the white smile of Tristan’s teeth, as he grinned like a little kid.

  Here are the things I was thinking right then: 1) We’ll be young forever. 2) We’re the only people on Earth. 3) My chest will burst with loving him so much.

  As I neared the end of this list, I noticed Tristan working against the momentum of his swing, legs out on the backswing, bent as he came forward. I thought that he was stopping, and there was a little pang in my heart that the surprise, which had turned out to be so lovely, was over. But then I realized that he was only trying to slow down enough to match his swing to mine, and he held out his hand and I grabbed it and we flew in perfect synchronicity. We giggled, giddy in the face of our own power; the world, the beautiful entirety of it, was spread out before us.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that, held in midair by physics and elation, before we saw a flashlight slicing through the darkness behind us. A police officer or a security guard. Someone who was already yelling muffled accusations at us. Before I could think of how to react, Tristan had let go of the swing and gone sailing through the air, grunting when he landed on his still-bruised ankle.

  “Jump!” he yelled.

  For a split second, I didn’t think I could make my body obey. I held the chains so tightly on the backswing that I could feel them tattooing my palms. But as the swing came forward again, something dropped away from me and I let go, and the feeling of floating freely in space was exquisite.

  I flubbed the landing, though, almost knocking Tristan over, and we got our feet tangled as we started to run. I could hear the staticky crackle of a walkie-talkie. The flashlight, bobbing up and down, was closer now, but not quite close enough, and we ducked back into the main expanse of the park, staying in the dark crevices where the orangey light from the halogen lamps didn’t fall. A few minutes later, we were crouched in a line of trees, sucking wind and gazing at the river spread out below us and the skyline looming above. A police helicopter circled over the harbor, and for a heart-stopping instant, I thought that it was searching for us. It wasn’t, obviously. Everything was quiet behind us, no hint of the security guard.

  “Brianna was right. This is a habit with you,” I said. “We should get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Tristan said. “Let me rest my ankle for a minute first, though.” We sat in the grass, straw-like and prickly from a long, hot summer.

  “It hurts?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “Not really. It feels a little weak, still, is all.”

  I put my hand gently on the edge of his jeans and slid the fabric away from his ankle. Then I leaned down and kissed it.

  I could hear the long release of his breath in the dark. “You’re a magician,” he said. He reached for one of my feet and slipped off my shoe.

  “No!” I said, mortified. “Don’t! It will smell awful! We just ran across the park.” I tried to pull away, but he had a firm grip on it, and then he drew his head close to my toes and I stopped struggling, afraid of kicking him in the face.

  “I love your smelly feet,” he said, planting a kiss on my sole. “I love every part of you.”

  And then, somehow, we were rolled up in each other, our lips pressed together, the roughness of the grass under my one bare foot and the rest of the world very far away.

  THE ROOK

  I KNEW, WHILE SCHEMING BEFORE THE PARTY, THAT Marcus wouldn’t technically know it was me, of course he wouldn’t, but I did think that it would somehow alter things, that some supernatural force would shrink the distance between us and he would be drawn to me without understanding why. It would realign the stars above our heads, change the navigational lines of our lives, set us on an inevitable collision course.

  When I see him a few days after the party, leaning against a locker, texting someone on his phone, I draw close to him and try to make eye contact, try to let the electricity, so potent in that dark room, flow between us again.

  “Marcus,” I say, catching his elbow. “Do you think we could talk?”

  He lets the phone drop out of his line of sight, but he doesn’t quite meet my eye. “That’s right,” he says. “You were gonna tell me my future.” Normally, I would be thrilled with him saying this, but it isn’t quite what I was hoping for this time around.

  “Sure,” I say. “It takes time to do it right, though. Come over sometime.”

  “I’m a busy man, Caballito,” he says, glancing at his phone again. I feel myself bristle, because come on, that sounds like something a sitcom dad might say to his annoying kids. But then he looks at me, really looks at me, and leans in so close that his forehead almost touches mine, and I can almost feel it again, that jolt of power between us. “Maybe you could read my palm or something right here. Give me a little taste.”

  And then his right hand is resting in the two of mine, wide and warm and strong, beautifully shaped, the lines crossing like a net that could lift me up and out of myself. I don’t know much about palmistry. It doesn’t matter.

  “What do you want to know?” I ask.

  “Where’s my love line?” he asks, so low it’s almost a whisper, and his eyes follow my fingertip as it traces across his skin.

  “It’s here. Deep, which is good, and unbroken.” I want to take his hand, entwine it in mine, lay my head against his chest where it belongs. If he would only kiss me one more time, here in the light of day, he would know, he would recognize the touch of my lips, he would be alive to the possibilities between us.

  “What’s it say about me and Izzy? She’s been acting weird ever since the party.”

  The first bell of the day rings; the walls of my heart cave in. Marcus promises to find me later, but I barely register his words. It doesn’t matter how much it feels like the universe has altered since the party, because when it comes to Marcus and
me, it’s all just more of the stupid same.

  Here is the real change: My spirit has a raw, raised edge, where before I was seamless. When I see the way Marcus’s face rearranges itself as he notices Izzy in the hallway, when I see the looks that she and Tristan exchange in Physics class—these things rasp against this edge in me, snag on it, tear it open again. Out of it pours a rage that I know is unfair, unwarranted, but I can’t help it: It’s a scar that points straight at the worst part of myself.

  For all of my previous plotting, the moment of my betrayal isn’t premeditated. I’m at the café after hours, dawdling and watching my brother play dominoes with Carlo, the one everybody calls Frodo because he looks like a hairy little troll. He’s been around a lot more than usual, Hector, that is, trying to get my parents off his ass, and I’ve been hanging with him more than usual, too, because he’s around, I guess, and because it would never really occur to him to ask what’s going on in my life, and it’s nice to not have to explain yourself all the time. Anyway, Frodo has started to show up more and more, and if Hector tells my parents that he’s hanging out downstairs, they leave him alone, even though the real reason Frodo comes by at all is because my brother is overgenerous, if you ask me, in rolling joints for them to share.

  Tonight Frodo is determined to talk about Marcus, even though it’s a subject that Hector doesn’t like to discuss after that close call with the police. He’s not mad at Marcus, but he’s keeping his distance until things blow over. Whatever: It would surprise me if Frodo has ever taken a hint in his entire life.

  “He’s, like, totally psycho over this girl, man. You really got to see it to believe it. I never knew that Marcus had a taste for weird chocha, man.”

  “Weird how?”

  “White, for one. And not like hot supermodel white, neither. I asked him the other day if her cuca was paved with diamonds or some shit.…”

  “Come on, man, my sister’s standing right there.”

  “And he was like, ‘I don’t kiss and tell.’ Do you believe that shit? Like he’s some kind of Boy Scout or something? I don’t know, man. It’s crazy.”

  “Strange,” my brother says, but I can tell he’s totally checked out of the conversation.

  “Whatever she’s got, T wants a piece, too,” I say. That’s all it takes. Frodo literally jerks to attention, like he is a dog that has caught sight of a squirrel.

  “What do you mean?” he asks, talking directly to me for the first time tonight or maybe ever. Boys will treat you like wallpaper whenever they can.

  “Exactly what I said. I mean, Izzy’s nice, but both of them?” Saying these words is like picking a scab, and I feel a tiny bit better for a few seconds before it starts bleeding.

  “You think T’s creeping with this girl?” Frodo says. “Because Marcus is definitely under the impression that he and this girl, this Izzy, are, like, together.”

  I shrug.

  “Huh,” Frodo says, and he narrows his little troll eyes, and then Hector changes the course of the conversation, complaining about the Jets coaching staff. The whole thing takes less than a minute, maybe, and if I was better at forgetting things, I might toss it out of my memory immediately, one little sentence about something that people were bound to notice sooner or later anyway.

  I’m not so good at forgetting, though. When I read the cards tonight, I can tell that something bad is on its way. Reversed sword cards popping up like I’m stacking the deck. It’s coming, the cards say to me. And when it does, I’ll know who to blame.

  THE KNIGHT

  LIFE IS NO LONGER LIVED IN THE BRIGHT TRANSPARENCY of the day. It’s lived in times and places owned by shadow, in the dark spaces where skin can press against skin. At night, we dive beneath ground, trace the train lines like water droplets in the city’s root system, resurface to bask in the sodium glow of the streetlights. We prowl the nighttime versions of Williamsburg, SoHo, Astoria, the Upper West Side. The dark is full of strange visions: the woman in an evening gown playing the accordion on the empty F train platform; the panhandler with elaborate swirling tattoos covering his face and a pet goldfish in a bowl; the man sitting on a park bench under a streetlamp, smoothing a surgical drape over his lap before eating a lox bagel with rubber-gloved hands.

  One night we walk past the blanket cocoons of the homeless men in Tompkins Square Park and sit on the front steps of Izzy’s old building. We make out urgently there, both of us, I think, catching a trace of all the past what-ifs, all the possible scenarios in which we never would have met. But then, as always, we migrate back toward home, dreading the inevitable rise of the sun and the struggle through the daylight hours.

  She comes to chess club religiously now, so there’s at least one part of the day to look forward to, but because I’m still grounded and because Marcus is still in the dark about us, it becomes a different kind of torture, strolling politely home from practice with empty air between us. Sometimes, as we walk, she tells me all the ways she would like to be kissing or touching me right then, all the things she will do to me the next time we manage to creep out of our houses in the middle of the night. She means it playfully, of course, a lighthearted flirt, but it verges on cruel. The endless longing for her is too much like pain.

  We are careful. Usually. In Physics class one day, there is a lab about the diffusion of light, an experiment in which our entire lab group, me, Izzy, and two others, must squeeze into the dark supply closet to collect data. I try to concentrate on the task at hand, on the pencil marks we are supposed to be making on the wall to be measured later, charting the path of a tiny pinprick of light. I try to focus on the equation that Tricia and Deshawn are talking about. It’s the dark that gets to me, even more than the sweetly familiar sound of Izzy’s breathing. The bliss of finding ourselves in our natural habitat in the middle of the long day. I find her shoulder, slide my hand over it, bite it gently. And then my fingers dip below the neckline of her dress, into the warm shelter of her bra, and I hold the perfect weight of her breast. Deshawn is sitting maybe a foot to my left, so close that I can hear when he shoves his eyeglasses higher up on the bridge of his nose. I try not to let there be any change in my breathing when Izzy reaches into my lap, feels me through my jeans.

  “I don’t get it,” Tricia is saying, and I can hear the sound of her pencil against the wall again. “The numbers aren’t going to come out right.”

  “It’s because you’re not accounting for dust particles in the air,” I say, but my voice is unnaturally high and strained, almost as if I’ve taken a hit of helium, and Izzy laughs. I clear my throat.

  Tricia pauses. “I’m going to turn the lights on,” she says, and my hands, Izzy’s hands, instantaneously retract, creatures scurrying back inside their shells. How ruffled do we look when the lights flicker on? It’s hard to say, but Deshawn is grinning, amused. Tricia is red-faced, eyes down, scribbling in her notebook. She mutters something that might be “Jesus, you guys,” or might be something about physics. I can’t look at Izzy.

  It’s no big deal, of course. We’re nothing but faces in the crowd to Deshawn and Tricia, and to them it’s only a slightly funny or annoying blip in their existence. I can’t help but worry, though, about what will happen when Marcus learns to see in the dark.

  On our walk home from chess club, Izzy lets me know that she’d rather illuminate Marcus immediately. I know she’s right. But every time I ready myself to do so, the anticipation of conflict stops me short. It’s not only fear of his anger, though that’s part of it. It will also hurt him when he realizes that he’s lost her, when he realizes that she was never his at all. For maybe the first time in my life, I wouldn’t want to switch places with Marcus.

  “But we have to tell him sometime, right? Plus, he invited me to a haunted house thing this weekend and swore he wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Izzy says glumly, shifting her heavy backpack higher on her shoulders. I’d like to carry it for her, but even this seems like too public of an act when we’re so close to ho
me.

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” I say. “He loves that stuff.”

  Halloween is Marcus’s favorite holiday, and every year, he finds new ways of embracing it with a manic glee. Not many high school students still get dressed up for Halloween; they’re too afraid it will make them look like dweeby trick-or-treaters. But Marcus always wears a costume and, of course, because it’s Marcus, it never seems anything but cool. Every year I’ve been in Brooklyn, he has dragged me and a few others to one of those expensive haunted houses in Manhattan, practically knocking down the door as soon as the place opens for the season, bribing some manager dude he knows to get us all in for free. He hasn’t mentioned it to me this year, though. In fact, Marcus hasn’t said a lot of anything to me over the past couple weeks. Last weekend passed without a single chess match. Entire lunch periods have slipped past listening to K-Dawg drone on about obscure hip-hop, playing tracks no one else cares about on his phone, with barely a word exchanged between me and Marcus. I wonder if he’s pining for Izzy or if it’s merely my guilty paranoia at work.

  “I hate Halloween,” Izzy says, the closest to whining I’ve heard from her. “Aren’t there enough real-world horrors without creating more? And I don’t want Marcus groping me in some haunted house.”

  “You’ll think of a way to shut him down. You’re brilliant at thinking of excuses.”

  She laughs, but there’s an edge of annoyance in it. “People are good at all sorts of things. It doesn’t mean they necessarily want to do them.”

  “I know. It isn’t fair. We’ll think of some way to tell him about us. But… you know. Delicately.”