Izzy + Tristan

by Shannon Dunlap

  “You’re sure?” he asked, glancing again at my parents.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “We’re still studying together on Tuesday night, right?”

  He assured me that we were and kissed me hard, in front of everyone. Then there were some hurried introductions of the people I hadn’t met before. He pointed to Miss Tutu and said, “Izzy, this is Dorie.” I stuck my hand out like a robot.

  “Isadora, actually,” she said. “Isn’t that funny? Almost the same as yours.” And then she started doing a strange series of lunges and hops, ignoring my offered hand. I backed away, tried to turn it into an awkward wave to the whole group as I departed.

  “Everything okay?” my mom asked, putting her arm around me.

  “Yeah, totally. I didn’t want to drag him away from the people he came with. You know.” I did want to drag him away, especially from Isadora, with her stupid gloves, but I didn’t, and soon afterward we started to march up Fifth Avenue and the crowd swallowed them completely.

  I did see Tristan that Tuesday. He didn’t say anything about the march or about Dorie, so I didn’t, either. If I didn’t mention her, maybe she would cease to exist.

  THE KNIGHT

  IZZY IS ONLY A BOROUGH AWAY, A MERE RIVER BETWEEN us, but without a car or endless money for cab fare, it can feel almost like a long-distance relationship. We still get to see each other, but it’s in these tiny scheduled increments, and those long, beautiful nights seem like a distant memory. This evening we have a single stolen hour to study together at the coffee shop down the block from my dorm, even though it will take Izzy almost twice that long to get here and back on the train. She never complains about it; we take what we can get. But when I arrive, her pretty face looks worried, and I ask her what’s up.

  “A shooting down the street last night,” Izzy says. “Probably drug-related, and the guy is in bad shape. There are police all over the place today. My parents are both really freaked out. They barely let me leave the house to come meet you.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  “No.”

  “Hull’s helping the situation, I bet?”

  She allows herself a small smile. “All sanctimonious raised eyebrows,” she says, and does an impression that makes me laugh, but then the corners of her mouth turn down again.

  “It’s not so bad, Izzy. There are always going to be shady characters, but they mess with each other, not with anybody else. You know that. Your parents probably know that, too. They’ll calm down.”

  “It’s not that,” she says. Her eyes look wet. “I can’t explain it. I worry that I’ve made mistakes that I can’t fix. And I worry about you all the time.”

  None of this makes sense to me, but I rub her hand, bend down to kiss her knuckles. “Come on. You’re the one who lives in the bad neighborhood,” I joke. “I’m up here in my ivory tower. Safest I’ve ever been.”

  “Tristan, don’t you think it’s time to talk to Marcus?”

  “What’s he got to do with this?” My heart picks up speed. Izzy has told me time and time again that she was wrong about the gun, but I can’t un-know the fear I felt the last time I saw him.

  “Nothing. I swear—nothing. But he’s been on my mind. You might feel better if you talked to him, don’t you think?”

  I doubt that. My feelings about Marcus are so twisted up that there’s no hope of unknotting them anytime soon. But to Izzy, I say, “I’ll think about it.”

  “There’s an astronomy club fund-raiser tomorrow, and I think R. J. talked Marcus into coming. You could come, too. An easy way to see him without having to talk very much.”

  “Why does it mean so much to you?”

  “It would be nice to put it behind us. That’s all.”

  “Look, I said I’d think about it, okay? Mark me down as a maybe.”

  It’s not enough to soothe her, I can tell, but we decide to start studying, since time is slipping away. I’m supposed to be writing a paper about the French Revolution, but my mind keeps skipping around. I study Izzy’s face, the little line between her eyebrows. I used to think I knew everything that was going through her head.

  When it’s time to go, we stand outside the coffee shop for a few minutes, neither of us wanting to be the one who turns away first. She weaves her arms inside my coat, under my arms and around my back, and rests her head on my shoulder. Even though I know we’re almost exactly the same height, she feels small tonight. I bend my head down to kiss her, but she stops me.

  “No,” she says. “Keep it until next time. Keep it until tomorrow, when you come home to Brooklyn. Then it will taste sweeter.”

  It’s a strange, flowery thing to say, especially from Izzy, and I think about it the entire walk back to the dorm, puzzling over whether Brooklyn is my home and what that word means. I’m still thinking about it when I unlock my door, turn on the light, and find, lying on my bed, Dorie.

  “Jesus,” I say, once I’ve managed to swallow my heart back down to where it belongs. “What are you doing here? In the dark?”

  “Patrick let me in,” she says, as though that explains everything. She makes wiggly ghost fingers around her face, drawing attention to those gloves. “Did I scaaaare you?”

  “Um, yeah, you kind of did,” I say, trying to laugh, but it comes out in a little huff, making me sound irritated. Which I am. Or tired, at least, and eager to be alone. It’s definitely against the rules for her to be on this floor at this hour, especially in my room with the door closed, and I don’t need trouble with the school administrators added to my problems. I like Dorie, I do, but she takes credit for convincing me to come here, and sometimes she behaves as though I owe her something.

  “Don’t be mad,” she says, and pats the spot on the bed next to her. I sit. “I was lying here pretending to be you. You know, imagining what it’s like inside your skin.” She makes her hand into a little animal that looks around, sniffs the wind, capers across the bedspread and onto my knee. I grab the wrist. It turns back into a hand, and I return it to the space between us.

  “Oh, don’t be such a worrywart,” she says. She rolls off the bed, lies spread out on Patrick’s hypoallergenic rug. “I know you have a girlfriend.” She stretches out the word girlfriend like it’s an experiment her tongue is running. “Besides, it would never work between us. Opposites attract, and you and I, we’re too much alike.”

  “We’re nothing alike.” It comes out sounding more severe than I mean it to. She turns on her side, props her head in her hand, looks up at me.

  “Well, you said it, not me,” she says with a smile that has too much in it to unpack. Then she does a kind of backward roll and hops up onto her feet. With her, it’s always like having a conversation with a court jester. “You’re coming tomorrow, right? Everyone else bailed on me. But I know you’ll come.”

  It takes me a moment to remember that I’m supposed to go to a demonstration against police brutality with her. I’d forgotten when Izzy invited me to the astronomy thing. I have way too much to do; really, I should back out of both, stay home and study. Before I can come up with the words, though, Dorie has slipped out of the room, leaving me alone.

  THE QUEEN

  HERE IS WHAT I REMEMBER FROM THAT DAY, THE DAY of the full moon: three encounters.

  1) On a whim, I stopped to say hello to Mr. K after school. I quit going to chess club after Tristan left; it felt too sad to be there, particularly because the entire team was depressed that Tristan was no longer leading them to easy victories. But that day, I was walking past the room where they met, so I stuck my head inside the door to wave to Mr. K and assure him that Tristan was doing okay and that they would surely run into each other soon at a tournament somewhere. Mr. K had thawed toward me after he came to believe that Marcus, not I, had been the one to interfere with Tristan’s concentration at the beginning of the school year. His impressive eyebrows twitched in a way that may have signaled pleasure when he noticed me in the doorway.

  “And you are well, Iseult?”
he asked me after I gave him my dutiful report. Until that moment, I hadn’t been sure that Mr. K even knew my name. He pronounced it like someone who could speak French, and it made me think how little I knew of him and his life. So many people in the world, and you’ll really only know a handful, and that’s if you’re lucky.

  “I’m good,” I said. “No complaints.”

  He sighed and turned to write on the chalkboard the topic for that day’s meeting, a list of possible openings. “Beginnings, they are always wanting more beginnings,” he muttered. “But so we go. Some say that in the opening, there is already written the endgame.” In his shaky script, he added “Queen’s Gambit” to the list. I didn’t know who he meant by they or some, and I didn’t bother to ask before I said goodbye.

  You might see this as a missed sign, but the truth is that Mr. K was always saying stuff like that.

  2) I had to be at the school that night to help with the fund-raiser, but because I had forgotten to bring a book I needed for the next day’s AP Lit homework, I decided to dash home for a couple hours, work on the essay, and then go back. We had finally moved past the colonial era and arrived at Nathaniel Hawthorne, the adultery and shit that Alex had yearned for long before, on the day that Tristan and I had gotten in that stupid argument. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, trying to dream up something interesting to say about The House of the Seven Gables, when Hull got home. He opened up the refrigerator and removed a plastic bag of baby carrots, started crunching them noisily as I sat there and stared at him. There was nothing strange about it, and yet there was everything strange about it, since the old Hull had gravitated more toward beef jerky and had always rolled his eyes at Mom and Dad’s Meatless Monday dinners, their raw nut trail mixes, their homemade kombucha. He was looking much more muscled than he once had.

  “Have you been working out?” I asked, incredulous that such a question would come from my lips, and even more so that it would be directed at my twin.

  “Actually, yes,” he said. “For weeks now, thanks for noticing.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “No problem. A strong body begets a strong mind.”

  “Huh.” I pretended to go back to my homework, but I couldn’t concentrate over his crunching. “You know, I’m helping with this event at school tonight, a fund-raiser that I helped organize. I could get you in for free if you wanted to come.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, which I understood meant no way. “What are you writing?”

  “A paper on The House of the Seven Gables. Escaping from the past and all that. Are you guys reading it?”

  “Nah, The Mill on the Floss. Dysfunctional siblings. And all that.”

  “Ah.”

  “Well, I need to go meditate now.”

  I should have let it end there, but instead I asked, “Do you think it helps? The meditation stuff?” Hull stopped midstride and looked at me with an expression I recognized from his old self: snobbish pity.

  “It makes of me a modern warrior,” he said.

  The old Hull would have been embarrassed to say something like that. He would have made fun of someone who said that. There were still times when I missed the old Hull.

  It took a beat for me to realize that I must have uttered these thoughts aloud.

  “I thought you knew that the old Hull is dead, Izzy,” the new Hull said. And then he was gone, forgetting to put the carrots back in the fridge.

  I suppose I might have taken this as a sign, too, but the truth is that the new Hull was always saying stuff like that.

  3) The bleachers had been pushed back in the school gymnasium, and a big white disco ball hung from one of the basketball hoops. We were calling it a Full Moon Party, and it was a joint fund-raiser for a few different student groups, including the astronomy club and the Wiccan club (whose membership, as far as I could tell, consisted of Brianna and a group of freshman girls who wore a lot of eye makeup). A makeshift dance floor had been set up, and along the perimeter were some booths and tables where people could trade in the tickets they’d purchased at the door. Brianna was reading palms, though she didn’t look too happy about it, and directly across from her, I was working at the concession stand, selling MoonPies and sugar cookies in the shape of stars and planets. Someone had put together a lame playlist of songs about the moon, so people were mostly standing around in clusters in the half dark, talking and laughing instead of dancing.

  Attendance was modest, but I’d seen Marcus walk in with Tyrone, and my eyes kept straying to the door, expecting Tristan to arrive. I figured that if he and Marcus were in the same room, some remembered way of being together would kick in and they could work out their problems. Or Marcus would punch Tristan in the face again. One of the two.

  “Moon… river,” Audrey Hepburn warbled as I watched Marcus wait in line at Brianna’s booth. He offered her his palm, and they stood whispering to each other. Something had altered between them, I could tell, but it didn’t look like the blossoming love that Brianna had once hoped for. Then they both turned to look at me, so I understood exactly whom they were discussing. I could feel my face turn red, and I fumbled a plate of cookies, sending a couple sliding to the floor. By the time I’d retrieved the broken pieces, Marcus was standing right in front of me.

  “Hey,” I said, flustered. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” The words were tumbling out much too fast, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Yeah?” He plucked a corner of cookie out of the hand I was stupidly holding out in front of me and put it in his mouth. “About what?”

  I’d rehearsed this part. “I told myself I wasn’t lying to you, but I was. And I assumed a lot of stuff about you that wasn’t true. And I’m really, really sorry that it messed things up between you and Tristan. Believe me, I never meant for that to happen.” He looked at me for so long that I added, “That’s all.”

  “Huh,” he said. He looked up at the white disco-ball moon, stared at it as he said the next part. “I get so mad that I do some stupid shit sometimes.”

  It was the closest I was going to get to an apology or the acceptance of an apology from Marcus. I lifted my hand again, an offering this time, and we both stood there chewing the cookies I’d picked up off the gym floor.

  “He might come tonight,” I said.

  “Nah,” he said. “He’s not going to show.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re supposed to be the one who knows him so well,” he said. There was a sharp edge to the smile he gave me, but it softened after only a second. “Look, Izzy, you want to fix everything, but sometimes that’s not how it is.”

  That was, actually, a fairly accurate summation of me and my relation to the world, so I didn’t reply, just let it hang in the air between us.

  “I still love him, though,” Marcus said, so low that I thought I might have misheard, and then he turned and melted into the growing crowd, and before I could blink, another person had taken his place, impatiently demanding a MoonPie.

  If I was going to recognize something as a sign, it would have been this, because Marcus never said stuff like that, not before, not after. But by then, signs were no use to us anyway.

  THE KNIGHT

  THIRD PERIOD, WHAT WOULD BE A STUDY HALL, IS AN independent study chess intensive for me at Westcroft. It’s mostly an extra one-on-one practice session with our coach, Mr. Ippolito, and a few papers on the history of chess thrown in to persuade the administration of its validity as a class. Mr. Ippolito is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met: young and quick, with the darting energy of a flying squirrel. I still miss Mr. K sometimes, though, and today I look at Mr. Ippolito’s face and hear Mr. K’s voice inside my brain saying, sadly, “He has not suffered enough to understand the game.”

  Nevertheless, Mr. Ippolito is a good coach, and he’s been giving me crushingly difficult chess problems to solve. Today, I surprise even myself in coming up with the right answer to one presented yesterday; all
of a sudden, the solution is alive in front of me, like the teeth of invisible cogs have meshed together, making the whole machine whir and hum. The pawn gets promoted to a knight instead of a queen, and then it’s mate in three.

  “That’s it,” Mr. Ippolito says before downing the last of what is surely his seventh coffee of the day. “This one took me much longer than it took you. How’d you do it?”

  “The answer came to me in a dream.” I don’t know why I say this. It isn’t true, not in the slightest, but it makes Mr. Ippolito laugh.

  “You’re the most mystical chess warrior I’ve ever met,” he says, and I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not.

  “I need to leave practice early today,” I tell him. “Only twenty minutes or so. Something important to a friend.”

  He sighs. “Just this once. And only because you solved that puzzle.”

  I don’t know when I cut out of chess practice alongside Dorie and Dan whether I’m doing it to go to the demonstration with them or to the fund-raiser with Izzy and Marcus. I walk my way into the answer, and as I arrive at it, it surprises me a little. Dan and Dorie expect me to follow them onto the subway going uptown, not the one headed to Brooklyn, and that’s what I do.

  When the subway car gets loud and crowded, Dorie simply gets louder herself. “The thing is, it makes me roll my eyes when people ask how Gamergate could have happened. Misogyny in strategy gaming is as old as chess. Older, probably. Maybe I’ll make a feminist chessboard, one that gives all women a subtle advantage.” Dorie has been talking about the same magazine profile of a female e-sports star for at least thirty minutes now, attacking it from various angles, and I’ve lost the thread of her argument. Dan leaps in to relate StarCraft II to some Trotsky principle, so I’m saved this time, though I can tell that what Dorie really wants is for me to argue with her. She delicately nibbles the edge of one of her white gloves while she swings around the subway pole with the other arm. People glance at her over the edges of their phones or reading material, annoyed.