“Why aren’t you waiting for your buds, Lenny?” he asked.
Lennox jerked her arm away. Her coffee went flying onto the ground below, the lid separating from the cup. I didn’t know what to do and found myself frozen, watching the milk stained coffee spread into a puddle on the ground.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” I heard her say before the other one, a chunky, shorter boy with a full beard and flannel shirt, reached out and ruffled her hair.
“Why are you being such a dick, man? Aren’t you glad to see us?”
I didn’t know exactly what was happening; it was like watching a boxing match where the two opponents circle and each know that the escalation is inevitable, but no one knows exactly how it will begin. Like there’s something about throwing the first punch that makes you more vulnerable, not stronger. I willed myself to move, to stand between her and them, to help her, but I was frozen, watching. Her face had fallen the minute her pleas for them to stop had been ignored, but their eyes never broke from her face. Her cheeks were getting red and as her eyes started to tear up, the escalation happened, but it happened from me. I didn’t even feel myself move as my arm jerked out and I threw my coffee across the chest of the chunky one who had touched her hair.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he yelled, pulling his shirt away from his chest.
In my head, there were a million answers: you were harassing my friend, keep your grubby, stubby little fingers to yourself, a wealth of comments. Instead of saying any of them, I shook my head back and forth like I was trying to wake myself from what was quickly becoming a nightmare.
A hand gripped my shoulder and I jumped, not expecting the sudden touch from behind. I turned to see a security guard was the culprit.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, spreading his legs apart and crossing his arms in the classic alpha male pose.
“This crazy bitch threw coffee on me!” chunky shouted, his shirt now rolled up to expose a pale white belly.
“Because they were following us and they grabbed my friend,” I responded. “The one that got the coffee thrown on him actually grabbed at her hair.”
With an audible sigh, the guard looked back and forth between the two boys and Lennox and myself. I wished I could see the situation the way he saw it: was he the kind of middle aged guy who would take in Lennox’s softly feminine face, see the contrast with her style, and be a jerk, or was he the kind of guy who just looked at us all as a handful of punk kids?
“Is it true that you grabbed this young lady?” he asked the two boys.
They paused and a glance was exchanged between them, one I couldn’t quite read. Ultimately the skinny one nodded. He probably realized there was little they could say that would reasonably explain how else they ended up in this situation. Or maybe they just didn’t care, I don’t know.
With a slight nod of his head, the guard again surveyed the situation. Neither boy was hurt; it was obvious from the lack of blotches or otherwise red patches on the one’s exposed flesh that my coffee had cooled significantly before it made contact. Other than being slightly sticky for the rest of his zoo trip, there wasn’t any damage. Lennox, too, looked mostly unharmed; her face was a little blotchy and red and you could see the storm that had settled across her face, but physically she was unscathed.
“If these two boys promise to go about their business and leave you young ladies alone, are you okay with me letting them go?” The guard asked us.
Lennox’s jaw tightened and I could see that she wanted to say no. I could kind of see why; our whole day was ruined because these two punks had chosen to harass us and follow us and they deserved more than a stroll through the kangaroo habitat. Finally, she nodded. The security guard shifted his attention to the boys and without further conversation, waved them away with a flick of his hands. I guess he’d decided the threat of dealing with him again was enough because he didn’t even ask for that promise we were supposed to hear.
When it was just the two of us again, I wrapped my arm around Lennox’s frail shoulders, but she quickly shrugged me off.
“Ready to head to the train?” she asked and walked away without waiting for an answer.
I followed behind her, finding it difficult to keep up with her suddenly brisk gait. As we stood in line to buy our tickets, she was silent and stone-faced. Something told me not to ask if she was alright, so instead I tugged the edges of my scarf tightly around my frame and felt myself shrink as it wrapped around my body. For a minute I thought about how I had loved to play with my scarves as a kid; I would wrap them around my head, around my eyes, around my mouth. I would imagine that I was an actress in an old-fashioned movie with a headscarf wrapped around my head to keep my hair from being blown free in a handsome bachelor’s convertible. I was a robber; I was a hostage. I was so lost in my own scarf thoughts that I didn’t notice for a second that Lennox had bought her ticket and wordlessly left me next in queue. I paid and trailed behind.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked when I joined her in line, surprised that she would walk off without even a “hey” to get my attention.
She looked ahead and didn’t answer. Again she followed along with the line as though I wasn’t there. We boarded the train on a middle row, one she had selected without asking me for any input. When I slid in next to her, she jerked her hand away from my body like I had tried to touch it.
“Okay, seriously,” I said with as much force as I could muster. “Knock off your shit and talk to me.”
A woman in front of me with two small, grimy children sitting on either side of her whipped her head around and glared. I apologized, feeling heat web across my cheeks. Suddenly I just wanted to get off the creaky wooden bench seating of the train and leave the zoo. The whole trip felt ridiculously wholesome in the midst of all this harassment and anger.
Just as suddenly as she shut down, she turned to me, her face stormy and her jaw clenched. I looked down and noticed that she was gripping the side of the bench so tightly her knuckles were bright white. It was like all the aggression and frustration she had inside her was being channeled into the side of the train car.
A crackly announcement came over the speakers that were positioned overhead and, though I saw her mouth moving, I missed what she was saying. For half a second I considered pretending I had heard because her expression told me that I wasn’t in store for a happy conversation. I could have kicked myself for being in such a hurry to convince her to talk to me. Mustering my courage, I asked her to repeat herself and she did, eyes rolled up at the red steel roof.
“This is why I can’t be gay,” she said. “Don’t you think I would like to just live my life like you, walking around school with my arm threaded through some girl’s arm as we saunter around in this fantasy bubble you think we live in where homophobia is our history instead of the present?”
My eyes welled up with tears and my cheeks stung so much that it felt as if the emotional slap I’d just been given was a real one. Fantasy bubble? Is that how she saw me, as some sheltered lesbian who didn’t know there was hate in the world? I knew there was hate in the world. I watched the news and knew about Kim Davis, and how an hour drive away from my front door she had disobeyed the Supreme Court and refused to grant marriage licenses to gay couples. I knew about the denial of wedding cakes, the comments people made in public places, the looks given through slit eyes. I knew about the death threats, the bullying, the suicides, and even the murders. I knew what we, as a community faced—I just hadn’t experienced it firsthand. With the back of my hand stiff, I wiped the tears away in a gesture so violent I accidentally elbowed Lennox in the chest. I didn’t even apologize as the anger welled up inside of me.
“Don’t tell me you can’t be gay because the world is too ugly, Lennox,” I hissed through clinched teeth. The woman from before turned around in her seat as if on cue, her eyes shooting daggers at my face.
“Will you two please change your conversation? I have children here who don’t need t
o hear ‘gay this’ and ‘gay that,” she muttered, and I could tell she was trying not to draw attention to herself as she scolded us.
In my mind, I cursed her with every expletive I could conjure. In terms of potential harassment, this petite, harried looking mom with bags under her eyes and a stained, oversized sweatshirt was a pretty mild threat, but the timing of the whole thing couldn’t possibly be worse. If it wasn’t for the context of her comments, I wouldn’t have batted an eye before shutting down her hate speech with an exercise of my own first amendment rights, but as it was, this was turning out to be the opposite of the day with Lennox I had envisioned. We were two for zero and going downwards fast.
Then suddenly it happened. As quickly as the dark cloud had settled upon us, God smiled at us and the clouds lifted. An elderly lady, the only other person sharing our row, leaned over to join the discussion.
“It’s not contagious, you know, your kids won’t catch gay from hearing these two girls exchange the word.”
With a sputter that vibrated her two narrow lips, the mom shook her head at us. “That’s hardly the point. They’re just kids, they don’t know what that means.”
The look that crossed the older lady’s face in that moment was priceless. I wish I could really describe it, but the best I could do would be to say it was kind of like that dog meme where the dog is all wrinkly, but you can tell he’s very no-nonsense. She looked like that, with her brows furrowed and her mouth pulled down in a frown.
“If you don’t want to explain simple things like word definitions to your kids, maybe you should just keep them home,” she said firmly. With a flip of her hand, she ended the conversation in a shooing manner that expressed that she wouldn’t be too happy to hear another response. With a hand over my mouth, I bit the inside of my cheek to suppress the shit eating grin that was fighting me to get out.
Red faced and shamed, the woman whipped her head back around with another audible huff. I was left trying to digest what had easily been the most awkward two minutes of my life and the only thing out of the whole interaction that I was sure of was that I had never in my life wanted to hug anyone as much as I wanted to hug the old woman sitting to my right on that zoo train. Instead, I simply turned and thanked her. She smiled at me before reaching over and giving my hand a squeeze, her cracked, age skin softer than it looked against my own.
“Don’t you worry, baby. Don’t you worry about their hate. That makes them something evil, not you.” She gave my hand one last firm squeeze before releasing it. “It doesn’t change anything about you.”
I didn’t want to look at Lennox and see her inevitably blank face staring ahead, but I couldn’t help a quick peek at her. To my shock, a small tear was leaking from the corner of her eye and she wasn’t making any moves to wipe it away. Still, she didn’t speak. She made no gestures, no moves to acknowledge that what had just taken place between me, the mom, and the elderly woman had involved her in any way. I didn’t know how to talk to someone with that capacity to just shut herself off, so I said nothing. We ended our zoo trip early and headed towards the parking lot.
Right before we passed the gates, I froze. There was a sudden fullness in my chest and I felt panicky, like if we didn’t resolve something before this trip was over, that would be it. There would never be any mending our friendship and this connection I felt to her, this sudden, fierce bond that I so needed in my life, would just be gone.
I grabbed the sleeve of her hoodie. “I’m so sorry for the way today went.”
She flinched away from me. “Not your fault,” she responded, but the low grumble in her voice told me that she didn’t mean even one of those three words. She started to walk away, but I called her back and she slowly turned around to face me. The edges of her eyes were lined in red and I wondered if she had cried again without me noticing as I’d struggled to meet her pace back towards the entrance of the park.
“What do you need to say so badly that it can’t wait until we are in the car?” she asked, yanking up her hood.
I bit my lip, unsure how to answer. There wasn’t any one thing I needed to say; it was something I needed to do. I needed to find a way to stop the gap that cracked between us from turning into a chasm. I needed to fix things, but it was pretty clear she wasn’t receptive to mending our friendship right then, so even though it made my legs feel heavy and my heart sick to do it, I shook my head and resumed the trudging walk back to the car.
“Nothing,” I said.
We didn’t talk on the ride home. I tried to recreate the mood of the drive up by blasting Ariana Grande and belting out the lyrics, but with her eyes fixed on my face, Lennox reached over and flipped the dial to turn the stereo off. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say something, wanted to will her not to hold me responsible for the behavior of some cavemen in boat shoes who’d acted like animals at the zoo. The words just didn’t come, so instead I help my hands firmly at ten and two and tried not to cry.
Three hours later, we pulled up to her house. The sky was full of stars and the air smelled heavy of burning wood. It smelled like snow. Again, I felt the desire to do something, say something that would close this gap that had formed between us, but it had opened too suddenly and widened too deep.
“I hope you got what you wanted, Han. That was definitely an experience.”
I watched wordlessly as she unbuckled her seatbelt, left my car and walked into her house. She didn’t even walk, she trudged, slumped over like an elderly woman. It was like her trip with me had taken everything out of her and left her barely enough energy to make it into her own home.
Chapter Ten
Lennox
Under my skin, I could feel the rushing movement of each molecule that made up my body. My breath, previously caught in my lungs and resisting every effort to make it move, was now flowing in wide, rapid gulps that seemed to be coming faster than I could process them. It wasn’t my first panic attack, but it was the worst I had ever felt.
I lowered myself to the edge of my bed, my hands shaking as I gripped at my comforter for support. What had I been thinking agreeing to accompany Hannah on a trip back to Columbus? Why had I risked seeing people I knew? Why were those assholes at the zoo in the middle of the week without their parents?
The thought nagged at me that somehow they knew I’d be there, so they showed up just for another chance to torment me. Since we were kids, they’d been everywhere, every time I turned around, waiting to make my life Hell. On the street when I tried to ride my bike, in the halls at school, in the sanctuary at church. What a laugh that had been; the idea that anywhere could ever be called a sanctuary if I was there. There was no sanctuary for me.
The worst part was that I could remember when we’d been friends. We’d been neighbors our whole lives and our families went to the same church. Somewhere, in one of my mom’s falling apart, cracked seam photo albums, there were pictures of us splashing each other in the kiddie pool on some long past summer day. They might not have been my best friends, but they were constant, as present in my memories as my own parents.
In Kindergarten, they had broken the two brothers up, so only Dalton was in my class. I think it was probably the first time he and Nick had ever been apart. He had tried to act like Mr. Tough Guy at first, with his scrawny five-year-old chest puffed out, but as the day went on, it (and he) seemed to deflate. By snack time, he was pushing pretzel sticks around his plate without speaking and by naptime, he had started to whimper.
“Dalton,” I whispered from my cot, not caring if the teacher caught me. “Dalton, it’s okay. I’m here.”
He had looked over at me with his wide, bovine brown eyes and blinked rapidly. The tears started to fade, and he smiled a tight-lipped smile in my direction. “It’s just, Lenny, I have never fallen asleep without my brother.”
And I laid there, across the room on my tiny cot, trying to picture a time when I had ever seen them not in a pair. When I had ever spoken to Dalton or Nick instead of Dalton and N
ick. Even when one went to the bathroom, the other had always trailed behind like a tiny, ineffective bodyguard ready to offer protection at a moment’s notice. I was jealous then of the idea that they’d been born a team when I’d always been so very alone.
When Hannah and I saw them that day at the zoo, it wasn’t freckle faced, crying Dalton I thought of, or the two little boys who loved nothing more than to sneak out of their house when it was raining so that they could catch raindrops on their tongues. It was the two boys from the alley who had outnumbered me so easily. Less team than small gang, waiting in the dark to prove something to me and themselves.
The sweet neighbor boys had disappeared not long after my dad had put his foot down about my tomboy ways. I guess it was natural; at a certain age boys and girls break into gender segregated groups. One has cooties while the other feels familiar. It’s the way it has always been. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that it was so sudden and so all at once.
I knocked on their door. The sky was the hazy oceanic blue of late summer, the air so thick it felt like you were drowning in it. After a couple of minutes, I started to pop my weight back and forth between my legs, skipping a little each time. I rang the doorbell again. Still no answer.
My shoulders sagged. There weren’t any other neighborhood kids close to my age; most of the other families in our subdivision had babies and toddlers. The idea of such a perfect lazy, hazy summer day passing me by without anyone to enjoy it with gnawed at me, but as I turned to go back to my house, I saw them at the other end of the block.
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