Take Me With You When You Go
Page 5
It’s amazing what you can learn about yourself when you get away from the doubters. (And that includes Sloane, but maybe not Joe. Poor Joe, who will always feel the way other people tell him to feel and will never actually think or feel for himself.)
Here’s one last thing because I’ve already given you enough. As you can probably tell, I still don’t want to be found, so as soon as I finish writing this email I’ll go back over it a few dozen times and make sure I haven’t said too much.
But I owe you this.
So here it is.
In this new life, this one I’m chasing, I have a chance to be loved. Me. Unlovable, unlikable, terrible me. Belligerent Bea. Difficult Bea. Bad Seed Bea.
Imagine it.
Not the kind of love Mom gave us, which was barely love at all. And not the kind of love I had with Joe. I was with Joe because he was expected and he was sweet and he was boring and he was safe in a way I’d never known safe. And then he had the accident, and I was nice to him because how could I not be? You’re kind of forced to be nice after someone is in an accident. I couldn’t break up with him, not then, not after that. I didn’t have a choice. Unless I just stopped being there altogether.
I don’t feel bad about Mom but I do feel bad about Joe. Not bad enough to stay, obviously, but bad.
This person who shall remain nameless (for now) is a lot like me, but he’s also better than me in every way. And he makes me feel like I can do anything.
He almost silences the doubt. Almost.
He is funny and also serious.
And smart—smarter than me, maybe even smarter than you.
He’s weird too—weirder than me, maybe even weirder than you. Like he’s superstitious about black cats and 11:11 and not making left-hand turns. He will drive for miles out of his way just to get where he needs to go. And he never picks up pennies for luck because he leaves them for other people, and if he sees a penny tail-side up, he flips it over so it’s lucky. Which is lovely, and also weird.
But he knows that he’s weird and I’m weird and everyone is weird, deep down, even if they pretend they’re not, and that’s okay. He doesn’t want to change me.
He makes me feel possible.
Remember when Sloane and I were reading The Metamorphosis for old Mrs. Nadel’s class? That book Kafka wrote about the salesman who woke up one day as an insect? And he stays shut up in his room and becomes this huge burden to his family (because, hello, he’s a GIANT BUG!), and his little sister has to go to work to help support them, and they all just wish he was dead? And then he DOES die, and they’re all so thankful and relieved because WHO WANTS AN INSECT FOR A SON?
Well, that’s how I was feeling back home—like Gregor Samsa, the giant, monstrous bug that no one wanted. But now, out here, away from it all, it’s like I’ve transformed into the Me I’m meant to be.
A Me who apparently likes to write Ezra-length letters, but at least you know why I’ve run away. Only I like to think it’s not so much running away as running to, even though there is A LOT to run away from (and I don’t just mean Mom and Darren). I am running toward life and freedom and me.
What I wish for you, Ez, more than anything, is all those same things. Life and freedom and your own metamorphosis into you. You say you’re liberated now. But are you?
Write me back and let me know how school is. I promise to read it. I promise to respond. Because you are worth holding on to, and I may have quit everyone else, but I’m not quitting you. Even when I didn’t believe in myself, I believed in you. My only regret in leaving is not dragging you with me.
Love,
Your sister, Gregor Samsa
p.s. I guess I owe Joe a thank-you for taking in my baby brother. If you can’t be here or with Terrence, I’d much rather you be there than at home. Just do me a favor and be careful.
Subject: What? Who?
From: Ezra
To: Bea
Date: Thurs 11 Apr 13:48 EST
You know how you figure something is going to be surreal—maybe not Metamorphosis surreal, but real-life surreal—and then when you’re actually at the moment you’ve been dreading, it’s about a hundred times weirder than you imagined it would be?
Well, that’s today at school. I’m like a celebrity, but in that high school way that a kleptomaniac or a murder victim is a celebrity. Only I’m not a criminal and I’m still alive. For the past week, it’s felt like anyone who saw me was seeing me as your brother. Now they’re seeing me as me, or maybe as that insane-potential-movie-theater-shooter’s son.
And as all this is going on, do you know what I keep thinking about?
Your guy. Your mystery man.
Frankly?
What. The. Fuck?
I don’t understand anything. I mean, how can you be free if you’re following someone?
Shit. People are coming over.
Subject: Who? What?
From: Ezra
To: Bea
Date: Fri 12 Apr 01:34 EST
I think Joe is starting to suspect that I’m lying to him.
I’m in his backyard right now. I kept waiting for him to go to sleep, but he wouldn’t go to sleep. So finally I said I was going to step outside to chat with Terrence. And Joe was like, “Why can’t you chat with Terrence in here?” And all I could think to say was “It’s private,” which made me sound like a ten-year-old with a bogus secret, and also made me sound pretty ungrateful, because Joe’s stepped up for me even though there isn’t much reason for him to do so. There’s something I’ve noticed, though—whenever my phone lights up with a message, he looks at the screen. Wanting to see who it is. So I’ve tried to keep my phone in my pocket.
Anyway, he’s upstairs now, thinking who knows what. I’m worried he’ll ask Terrence about it tomorrow—Why did you have to chat with Ezra so late? What couldn’t wait six hours until you saw him in school? Terrence will cover for me, but he’ll also call me on it. I have no idea what I’ll tell him.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but how do you manage to lie to so many people at once? How can you do that without starting to feel like all you are is a lie?
I still need to tell you about school. You know who was coming up to me at lunch? Jessica Wei. Remember Jessica? She and I were friends in elementary school. And we’ve been friendly-but-not-really-friends ever since. She headed over to me with those girls who follow her everywhere, Serena and Taz, and she came right out and asked me what happened last night. And it was weird, because I could tell she wasn’t doing it to be gossipy, like your favorite, Lisa Palmer. But it wasn’t like she was concerned either. Like, she wasn’t asking me if I was okay. She was asking the question because she wanted to know the answer…and I was the only person around who could give it to her.
I felt all the usual rules trying to block out the answer. No, not rules. Commandments. If anything goes wrong at home, you can’t tell anyone outside of home. Pity is worse than pain, embarrassment is worse than help. If people treat you like shit, you still have to stay loyal to them. You still have to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe you are, in fact, shit and deserve to be treated the way they treat you.
You know what I mean.
We might not have been turned into bugs, but we were always made aware of how easily we could be stepped on.
But not anymore. That’s what I decided then, as the commandments started to blare. Not. Anymore.
So I told Jessica, “My stepfather is an asshole and he found a way to register this fact with the entire world.”
I looked at Serena and said, “The only surprise was that usually when he wants to vent his rage, he thinks he’s enough of a weapon himself that he doesn’t need a gun.”
I turned to Taz and wrapped it up with, “In fai
rness to him, I had just tried to burn his house down. But in fairness to me, he deserved worse.”
I thought they’d run away. I thought they’d laugh. I thought they’d pull out their phones and ask me to say it again so they could send it to their friends.
I didn’t care.
But you know what came next? Before I knew what was happening, Jessica was hugging me. Not saying a word. Just holding me tight, as Serena and Taz, who I barely know, looked on approvingly. Then, when she pulled back, Jessica said, “It’s going to be okay.” Which isn’t true, but is something people say when they want it to be okay.
Do you think she already knew about the fucked-up state of our family? Do you think other people know? I thought we faked it so well. Mom talked to the ladies at the supermarket like her life was endless coupons and free desserts. Darren came to my soccer games and cheered. The other dads liked him. What did Jessica Wei see?
We thought there was a wall around our story. But what if there were windows?
What could I say to Jessica, at the moment she actually cared? I said I was okay. I said I’d found somewhere else to stay.
She told me they were heading to lunch. She asked if I wanted to sit with them.
I nearly lost it. Bea, this is so weird. I don’t know how to be this kind of visible.
I said thanks, but I’d already had lunch. (Lie.) It felt monumental enough to tell them something. I wasn’t ready to have a conversation.
They left. I could have written you more, but instead I tracked down Terrence. I told him I had to talk to him, I had to tell him things…and then, after school, we went to the woods and I said I needed to go to the house and see if Mom and Darren were there, and if they weren’t there, I needed to get some things. I told him I couldn’t do it alone.
You know how I feel about Terrence. You know how sweet he is, to a degree that’s sometimes annoying and sometimes deeply intimidating. You know I didn’t think we’d last two weeks, and now we’ve lasted seven months. He’s been there for me—but this is something different. He’s been there for me, but I’ve never asked for him to be there. I’ve never admitted—except on a superficial, social level—that I’ve needed him there.
He agreed to go with me. Of course he agreed to go with me. And along the way, I told him what happened last night. I did a Q&A with myself, because I knew he wouldn’t ask me questions with the same ferocity that I would. I spun them backwards, and the answers got harder the closer we got to the source.
What happened at the movie theater? I asked.
I told him.
How did you get there?
I told him.
Why were you running from your house?
I told him.
Why did you set the paper towels on fire?
Why did you run to the kitchen?
Why did your mother hit you?
Why did you say that to your mother?
I told him.
Why doesn’t your mother love you?
This is when it got weird, because I didn’t know why I asked myself that, and I didn’t know what my answer would be until I said it.
“She does love me. She just doesn’t love me enough.”
Is that why Bea left?
“No. It’s probably part of it. But no, I don’t think so.”
We were a few houses away from our house. The whole time I was talking in reverse, I was following my footsteps in reverse. I didn’t even realize until I was there.
“I’ll go check,” Terrence said.
I nodded.
Then I tried to hide, just in case Mom or Darren drove by. (For all I know, Darren is still in jail. But that’s not something I could count on.) I felt like a burglar in my own neighborhood. Terrence came back in a few minutes and told me Mom’s car was there. He thought he’d seen her in the kitchen window.
I abandoned the plan. I don’t want to see her. Even if that bastard’s still in jail.
Terrence didn’t argue. We went back to his house. His parents weren’t home—his dad still at work, his mom off at a Black Women’s Action Group meeting. Normally an empty house would be an invitation for some quality cuddling. But when we curled up together in his room, it felt different. When we cuddled before, it was the cuddling of certainty, of knowing we were meant to be together, and proving it as much as we could. But this? It was the cuddling of uncertainty. My uncertainty. He asked me some things—how long am I going to stay at Joe’s? Do I want him to talk to his parents about staying with him? And I answered. But mostly we drifted off into our own thoughts, largely unshareable.
I ate dinner there, after his parents got home. They didn’t say anything about Darren, leading me to believe that they are either spectacularly polite or completely oblivious to what goes on in our town. (Of course, Terrence’s father still thinks of me as Terrence’s “special friend,” so obliviousness isn’t that shocking.)
Then I came back to Joe’s. We played some video games. We didn’t talk. He just looked at my phone every time I got a message, and didn’t think I saw him do it.
Now I’m here in the backyard. It’s long past midnight on a school night—think I’ll get grounded?
I know I should go to bed. But there’s one question I have to answer before I do that.
You asked if we ever believed in ourselves. And, Bea…I think the answer’s yes. But the weird thing? I think we believed in ourselves most when we were pretending to be other people. Iron Man and Black Widow. Han Solo and Chewbacca. We were great pretenders—defenders of the backyard, guardians of the rec-room peace. When we stepped out of our own story and into others, we would be these laughing, excited, fearless kids. Maybe I saw it this way because I was the younger one. Maybe you were humoring me. I don’t know if this counts, and I don’t know if it’s real. But when you and I were pretending to save the world, I actually believed we were capable of saving the world.
We had that. We didn’t have much else, except each other. But we had that.
Write more soon,
Ezra
Subject: The Great Pretenders
From: Bea
To: Ezra
Date: Sat 13 Apr 18:52 CST
Dear Ez,
So how does it feel to be popular?
Or should I say notorious?
Either way, I’m glad people are behaving themselves for now.
Do you remember when Jessica Wei missed school for like an entire month a couple of years ago? It’s because her brother broke her jaw. (I think she blamed it on gymnastics, but it wasn’t gymnastics. He. Broke. Her. Jaw.) They had to put him in a home somewhere because they were scared of him. That’s the rumor at least. So she has that special X-ray vision that allows her to spot another person who’s been pushed around, no matter how they’re trying to hide it. (And we were good at hiding it. We had to be.)
Joe is a nosy one. I know he’s concerned and he misses me, and blah blah blah. I don’t mean that to sound heartless, but he was always nosy, even when I was right there. He couldn’t just let you be. He had to know everything. And he was everywhere. He wanted to do everything together, and maybe that’s nice at the start, but after a while I couldn’t breathe. It was like this really warm, comfy blanket that felt good at first, but then the blanket wants to wrap itself tighter and tighter around your body, and not just your body, but your neck and your head and your whole fucking face, and that blanket just clamps right onto you and holds on like it’s trying to be a second skin, and before you know it you feel like you’re going to just drop dead from all that holding and not being able to breathe. That’s the kind of nosy he is.
Terrence, on the other hand, is a good egg. I know he bugs you sometimes, but honestly, he’s good, decent people, and we both know that’s hard to find. Let him in a little. You can tell him you
’ve heard from me, that you still hear from me, but that’s it, nothing more. Then make him swear on his life that he won’t say a word to anyone.
How do you lie to so many people at once? You do it because you don’t have a choice and because it’s all you know and because all you’ve done is lie your whole entire life. We became liars the minute Darren arrived. Actually before that. We became liars when Dad left, although I was too young to remember it and you weren’t even born. The second he disappeared, Mom started telling us he didn’t want us anymore. And the only thing we could do was believe her, and later on we told everyone he was killed in a fire (ironically enough), trying to save a family of five. Why a fire? I don’t know. Why a family of five? Because we thought that sounded nice. A mom, a dad, three kids. Everything normal and easy, except for the fictitious fire. They sounded so happy, we had to give them something bad, even though our dad—at least, that version of him—died saving them. So they had a happy ending after all, even if we didn’t.
Mom was the liar first. We learned it from her.
But I’m not lying anymore. Not even to myself, although that’s the tricky one.
I have to go, but I’ll be back, and then we’ll talk about me.
Love,
Bea
p.s. Yes, we were great pretenders. We saved the world over and over because we had to.
Subject: A Day in the Life of Bea
From: Bea