Izzy + Tristan

by Shannon Dunlap

  Marcus has been battering his way into my thoughts all day. I imagine him in lots of different escalating scenarios, wondering where, if at all, a line would be drawn. Would he hurt me? Clearly, yes. Would he tell Tyrone or, God help me, Brianna’s brother to do whatever they wanted to me? Absolutely. Would he throttle me, stab me, gouge my eyes out? Would he run me over with a car? Would he slip a draught of poison in my drink, lance me with a medieval spear? If Izzy was right and he was buying a gun the night we saw him in the playground, would he ever press the muzzle to my temple?

  This is a team competition, at least, and since Pankaj and Anaïs and some sophomore whose name I forget are all playing well, we easily secure first place. I talk Anaïs and her dad into giving me a lift home so that I don’t have to endure dismal warnings or, worse, silent disapproval from Mr. K. Anaïs and I sit in the back seat like little kids on a playdate, the flowers her father brought her lying on the middle seat between us. She’s had a good day, won all three of her matches, chatters about them happily in the car, not even bringing up the clarinet. It’s only when we’re nearing my block that she turns her attention to my split lip and swollen nose.

  “So what happened to you, anyway?”

  “Long story,” I say, scanning the shadows outside the car window for any sign of Marcus. My heart is starting to race, and I think again of swords skewering flesh.

  “Boys will be boys, Anaïs,” her father chimes in from the front seat, as if he really has any clue what he’s talking about.

  “Well, see you at practice this week,” she sighs while I nervously flirt with the door handle, readying myself to make a frantic dash to the door. “You’re welcome. For the ride.”

  “Yeah, thanks, really nice of you guys.” I say the empty words, but my body is already in flight. I scurry, unprotected, a crab without a shell. I would almost welcome the relief of someone sliding obliquely forward to put me out of my misery. But no one does.

  Upstairs, the apartment is dark. Patrice has gone out again. I don’t even bother turning on the light. I lean against the inside of the door, slide down to the floor, waiting for my lungs to unclench. This isn’t a person I recognize, this victim of my own terror, but I can’t help that every time I close my eyes, Marcus is there, blood on his shirt, battle-ax in hand. Instead, I dig my phone out of my pocket.

  Come away with me, I text to Izzy.

  Where would we go? she responds a minute later.

  “Anywhere,” I say to the empty apartment. “Anywhere.”

  THE QUEEN

  THERE’S ALWAYS THE OPTION TO SAY NO TO THE WORLD. You can wear masks to hide from it, you can shut yourself away from it, you can put all your energy into trying to protect yourself from it. That was Hull’s choice, I think; he saw himself as a lone warrior, doing battle against everyone on the outside. But that’s not me. It’s never been me, and it certainly wasn’t me after I fell in love with Tristan, after a part of the outside found its way in, after it wended itself inside me and took root there. That’s the kind of thing that can only happen when you choose to say yes instead of no, and even now, I can’t bring myself to believe that it’s a bad thing.

  I was thinking about all of this when I got Tristan’s text message on Sunday night, and a few hours later, unable to sleep, I was standing outside Tristan’s apartment building, shivering and staring up at the small square of glass that was his bedroom window, still lit when almost all of the other windows in the building had gone dark. There was a narrow, weedy space between his building and the next, the same side as his window. Here are the things that occurred to me: 1) There was a fire escape, and even though Tristan’s window wasn’t directly accessible from it, I thought if I could lean out a little bit over the railing, I could reach far enough to knock on the window, and 2) Saying yes to the world should be proclaimed loudly, with a grand gesture, not with a quick text message.

  From the ground, I could barely touch the bottom of the fire escape ladder with my fingertips. I had to scramble, the toes of my sneakers scrabbling for purchase against the brick wall, and pull myself up until I managed to hook my legs through the bottom rung, and then I had to swing myself upright. It took a few tries, since I hadn’t done anything remotely like that since I was about seven years old on the monkey bars, but it felt exhilarating when I managed it. My arms already felt gelatinous and my palms were scraped up from the rough metal, but I thought, Say yes, and started climbing, trying to be as quiet as possible, lest someone on one of the lower floors hear me and spot me creeping past their windows.

  Four stories feels a lot more significant when you’re not inside a building but rather perched on the outside of it on a flimsy Erector Set of rust. The lights were on in his aunt’s kitchen, and for a second my breath froze in my chest at the sight of the same table I’d sat at little more than twenty-four hours before. But no one was there.

  The bedroom window was farther from the fire escape than it had appeared from the ground, and I would have to sling at least one leg over the railing in order to reach it. Also, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t only my fear that made the railing seem wobbly and ready to fall off. I took one last look down at the ground, but it was too dark to see much of anything. I gripped the loose railing in my hands, afraid to think about the physics of it for too long, and heaved my right leg over it.

  I wasn’t brave enough to pull my left leg over as well and lean out over open space, so I could only reach far enough to give a feeble knock on the window frame. His face appeared immediately anyway. He fumbled to put on his glasses, and his lower lip dropped, forming a fishlike gape. Maybe it was the goofiness of his expression or maybe it was the sudden realization that there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to pull myself over to and through the window anyway, but I started laughing with more than a tinge of hysteria. Tristan was now sticking his head over the sill.

  “Have you completely lost your mind?” he hissed. “Get back onto the fire escape. I’ll come around to the kitchen.” I was still laughing as I swung my leg back over and waited for him, and my muscles were shaky and weak both from strain and my giggling fit. Tristan wasn’t laughing, though, as he struggled to heft open the stubborn kitchen window enough for me to crawl through.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed? Resorting to unusual methods to make our situation worse?” he whispered.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I was saying yes.”

  “Yes to…?”

  “To running away with you.”

  And so we did.

  THE ROOK

  I GO BY IZZY’S HOUSE EARLY ON MONDAY MORNING, because ever since I left them on Saturday night, I’ve felt an ugly tremor in the cosmos, a hideous foreboding. I called her multiple times yesterday, in the few seconds when I managed to slip away from bussing tables at Sunday brunch service, but by the time the dinner shift ended, she still hadn’t called me back. Maybe it was guilt that made me mix up an anti–love potion late last night—a rush job, to be sure, but the best I could do on short notice—but it felt like more than that. It felt like a last-ditch effort to push the future back up onto its fulcrum, to keep it from crushing us all.

  And so I tuck it in my bag, the bottle of murky amber liquid, and I pedal in a fever to her massive house, ring the bell even though it’s barely past seven. It’s her dad who opens the door, his hair still sticking up in the back like a child waking up from a nap. Is there suspicion in his face when he looks me over? There’s certainly confusion; he has no idea who I am, though we’ve been introduced once or twice.

  “Um, hi. Sorry to bother you so early, but Izzy and I had plans to go to practice for the, um, for the chess team this morning, so…”

  He’s already nodding, acting like he knows about this fictional practice. “Oh, sure, sure, hold on a minute.” He turns back into the house and calls “Izzy!” up the stairs, and then his rich-person politeness kicks in and he motions for me to come inside. “Do you need juice or coffee or anything?”

/>   “I’m fine.”

  “Izzeeee! Your friend’s here!”

  There’s motion at the top of the stairs, but it’s not Izzy. It’s her brother.

  “She’s not in her room,” he says.

  “Well, where is she?” her dad asks. “Did she leave for school already?”

  Hull shrugs. I can’t tell if it’s a trick of the light, but his face looks like it holds complicated secrets, and my heart plummets. He disappears into the shadows of the second story.

  Her dad is turning back to me, offering apologies, saying that she probably forgot, that I probably missed her by a hair. But somehow or other I already know that I’m too late.

  THE KNIGHT

  IZZY WANTS TO GO STRAIGHT TO PORT AUTHORITY, buy bus tickets to Atlanta, and deal with the consequences later. I can see that she is absolutely serious about this plan, and it scares me a little, the degree to which she is committed. Maybe she’s right; I can’t tell anymore if a southbound Greyhound is what I meant when I sent her that text message. Still, I imagine my father’s surprised and not-exactly-pleased face when I show up in Atlanta, imagine Izzy’s impotent rage when they force her, a minor, to return to her parents in New York without me. I need to think. I need time to think.

  We creep beneath the city like rodents seeking shelter in a familiar burrow, and we ride the trains endlessly, talking about what Marcus would or wouldn’t do. We are capable of convincing ourselves of all sorts of things that probably aren’t true but might be, and eventually we become sick of it and stop talking and fall asleep against each other, her mittened hands clutching mine, my chin hooked over the top of her head.

  I wake up with a gasp of breath, as though someone who was choking me in my sleep has suddenly released me. It’s rush hour, and the car is a crush of neckties and school uniforms heading downtown. People in business suits are shooting us little poisoned glances, irritated that in the sprawl of sleep we’ve taken up too much space. We’re on the B train somehow, even though I don’t remember transferring to it. I shake Izzy awake.

  “This is Ninety-Sixth Street,” the recorded subway voice announces, and without discussion, we pull on our backpacks and scramble onto the platform.

  Ascending into the open air, it becomes easier to breathe. Even during the morning rush, it’s relatively quiet up here, in the borderlands of Central Park. I can sense Izzy’s displeasure at our lack of direction, though, like an insistent thrum barely under the audible range.

  “Let’s walk in the park for a while,” I say. “We can figure this out.” I don’t say that this is a chess strategy more than a life strategy: Sometimes you have to play for a while and buy yourself time before the endgame becomes clear to you. But she nods and adds that we should eat something, so we walk over to a deli on Columbus Avenue to buy egg and cheese on rolls, New York’s greasy and blessedly cheap solution to breakfast. It’s not until we’re about to enter the park, paper bags in hands, that a cop steps in front of us.

  “A little young not to be in school right now.”

  He’s smiling, but not in a particularly friendly way. His radio crackles, and I can see the butt of his gun out of the corner of my eye, daring me to look at it directly.

  “We’re students at Juilliard,” Izzy says smoothly. “No classes this morning.”

  “Huh,” the cop says. “College kids? You some kind of baby geniuses or something?” He laughs, a phlegmy heh-heh-heh, like it’s the funniest thing he’s heard for a while.

  “It’s hard being this smart,” I say, attempting a polite smile. It pulls at the scabby seam of my split lip.

  The cop stops laughing. “Must be a burden,” he says. His badge says DEATS, a stupid name. If he asks us for ID, this adventure is over. “Whatcha studying over there? Acting, I bet.” He smirks.

  “Nope,” Izzy says, a cool arch in her voice. “The actors are morons. I play piano, and he’s a cellist.”

  “Real shiner you got there,” he says, ignoring Izzy. His eyes crawl over my face. “How’d you come by that?”

  “Just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess.” My voice sounds tight, unnatural. I can’t help it.

  “I’d say.” Officer Deats studies me for another uncomfortable beat, then flicks his bulgy little eyes in Izzy’s direction. “And you’re all right, miss?”

  She nods, slips her hand into mine.

  “All right,” he says, stepping aside a few inches. “Get out of here, then.” We have to step off the dirt path to avoid brushing the hard dome of his belly. We’re only a few steps away when he says, “Hey,” and as I turn back to face him, a wave of irrational fear crests inside me. We look at each other, Officer Deats and I, and every stupid little infraction of the law that I’ve ever committed goes pinwheeling through my brain.

  “Don’t do anything to make me regret letting you go,” he says. “You understand?”

  I nod, because yes, I do understand.

  “What bullshit,” Izzy says when we’re barely out of earshot. “It’s a crime now for me to walk into the park with a black guy?” I hear anger and defiance in Izzy’s voice, but none of the panic that’s still thundering through my chest.

  “A black guy who looks like he gets into fights. I’m guessing that, in his mind, you’re not the one who’s committing the crime, Izzy.”

  She looks, for a moment, like she has more that she wants to add, but instead, she clamps her mouth shut. We haven’t said much about race to each other, and that’s fine with me; most of the time, it makes me feel like the love between us trumps everything else. But it throws me off-balance, how surprised Izzy is by the cop’s words, how indignant. Didn’t she ever consider that this would be part of dating me? Her face goes impassive, takes on a blank glassiness, something I’ve only seen happen on the occasions when talk of her brother starts to get too emotional, so I drop the subject, even though part of my brain snags on Officer Deats and trails like a thread behind me.

  We find a bench and sit to eat our sandwiches. The ground is lower in this section of the park, like we’re down at the bottom of a bowl, and the buildings rise around the rim on all sides, watchful. Two middle-aged men on the tennis courts swat at a ball, but they keep hitting it out of bounds, and their feet drag, joyless, along the pavement as they walk to the fence to retrieve it. The sound of an ambulance spirals up out of the unseen Upper West Side, rising in tone like a bomb siren. The bites of roll stick in my throat. I don’t want to be sitting here.

  “Come on,” I say. “It’s cold. Let’s eat while we walk.” It’s true; it’s unseasonably cold today, and we both should have chosen warmer clothes. But, really, it’s not the chill I want to walk away from; it’s the strange loneliness that has set in. Izzy’s still far away, lost in thoughts that she’s not sharing, but she follows.

  The cold air nips at us as we circle the reservoir. In the distance, the reservoir’s fountain shoots into the air, the powerful gush of it shattering on the wind as it falls. It’s early enough that there are still dogged runners doing their laps around the water, and I get the abrupt urge to join them. I swallow my last bit of sandwich and take Izzy’s elbow, pull her into a trot with me. She’s reluctant at first, dragging me back to a walk, but I smile at her, coaxing without words, and she relents. We break into a slow jog. We go on like this, for a minute maybe, our backpacks thumping against our hips, our breath coming harder. The fountain shifts shape as we round the curve of the reservoir. It is a feather, a mountain, an icy staircase, an arched doorway. Then Izzy speeds up, and then I speed up, and we run faster and faster, until we are passing people and our panting turns into laughter and everything but her face is a blur. We are leaving the world behind us. It is the two of us again, alone, and it is beautiful.

  “What if we told the school about what Marcus did to you? Would they expel him?” she asks. We’re heading south, pretending we have a destination.

  “Maybe,” I say. I don’t want to add fuel to the fire that is Marcus. I want him to leave me alo
ne, alone with Izzy, and getting him expelled isn’t the way to achieve that. But Izzy and I promised, after we reached the southern end of the reservoir and slowed to a walk and caught our breath and leaned into each other, that we would discuss any option we could think of, so I don’t tell her that getting the school officials involved is a terrible idea.

  “I still think we should tell your dad what’s going on. What if he can come up with some other relative you can stay with, even if it’s only temporary?”

  “There’s a reason I live with Patrice, Izzy. She’s the only viable option.”

  “What if I agree to be Marcus’s girlfriend for a while? So he can see that I’m not that much of a prize.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Izzy sighs, exasperated. “Of course I’m kidding. But we’re both supposed to be coming up with ideas.”

  I do have an idea, one that looms larger and larger as the only real choice, but I’m not ready to say it aloud yet. I need to sit with it.

  “I get my best ideas when I’m asleep,” I say. “Do you think we could find a place to rest for a while?”

  Izzy thinks the Shakespeare Garden might work, so we walk past the theater and search for a comfortable bench. I don’t see what’s very Shakespearean about this place, aside from some little plaques with quotes. There’s a massive holly bush, more like a tree, with some words from As You Like It at its base. MOST FRIENDSHIP IS FEIGNING, MOST LOVING MERE FOLLY. Neither of us says the words, but I can see Izzy’s eyes scan over the line, take in the meaning.

  “Maybe the Ramble instead,” she says.