by Jandy Nelson
He says, “But if you’re someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time, aren’t you also someone who knows the best thing can happen at any time too?”
I think about this and instantly feel elated. “Yeah, that’s right,” I say. “Like right now with you, actually…” It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it, and I see the delight wash across his face.
“Are we drunk?” I ask.
He takes another swig. “Quite possibly.”
“Anyway, have you ever…”
“I’ve never experienced anything like what you’re going through.”
“No, I mean, have you ever been in love?” My stomach clenches. I want him to say no so badly, but I know he won’t, and he doesn’t.
“Yeah, I was. I guess.” He shakes his head. “I think so anyway.”
“What happened?”
A siren sounds in the distance. Joe sits up. “During the summers, I boarded at school. I walked in on her and my roommate, killed me. I mean really killed me. I never talked to her again, or him, threw myself into music in kind of an insane way, swore off girls, well, until now, I guess…” He smiles, but not like usual. There’s a vulnerability in it, a hesitancy; it’s all over his face, swimming around in his beautiful green eyes too. I shut my eyes to not have to see it, because all I can think about is how he almost walked in on Toby and me today.
Joe grabs the bottle of wine and drinks. “Moral of the story: violinists are insane. I think it’s that crazy-ass bow.” Genevieve, the gorgeous French violinist. Ugh.
“Yeah? What about clarinettists?”
He smiles. “The most soulful.” He trails his finger across my face, forehead to cheek to chin, then down my neck. “And so beautiful.” Oh my, I totally get why King Edward VIII abdicated his throne for love. If I had a throne, I’d abdicate it just to relive the last three seconds.
“And horn players?” I ask, intertwining my fingers with his.
He shakes his head. “Crazy hellions, steer clear. All-or-nothing types, no middle ground for the blowhards.” Uh-oh. “Never want to cross a horn player,” he adds flippantly, but I don’t hear it flippantly. I can’t believe I lied to him today. I have to stay away from Toby. Far away.
A pair of coyotes howl in the distance, sending a shiver up my spine. Nice timing, dogs.
“Didn’t know you horn guys were so scary,” I say, letting go of his hand and taking a swig off the bottle. “And guitarists?”
“You tell me.”
“Hmm, let me think…” I trail my finger over his face this time. “Homely and boring, and of course, talentless—” He cracks up. “I’m not done. But they make up for all that because they are so, so passionate—”
“Oh, God,” he whispers, reaching his hand behind my neck and bringing my lips to his. “Let’s let the whole fucking world explode this time.”
And we do.
I’m lying in bed, hearing voices.
“What do you think is wrong with her?”
“Not sure. Could be the orange walls getting to her.” A pause, then I hear: “Let’s think about it logically. Symptoms: still in bed at noon on a sunny Saturday, goofy grin on her face, stains on her lips likely from red wine, a beverage she’s not allowed to drink, which we will address later, and the giveaway, still in her clothes, a dress I might add, with flowers on it.”
“Well, my expert opinion, which I draw from vast experience and five glorious, albeit flawed marriages, is that Lennie Walker aka John Lennon is out of her mind in love.”
Big and Gram are smiling down at me. I feel like Dorothy waking in her bed, surrounded by her Kansans after having been over the rainbow.
“Do you think you’re ever going to get up again?” Gram is sitting on the bed now, patting my hand, which is in hers.
“I don’t know.” I roll over to face her. “I just want to lie here forever and think about him.” I haven’t decided which is better: experiencing last night, or the blissed-out replay in my mind where I can hit pause and turn ecstatic seconds into whole hours, where I can loop certain moments until the sweet grassy taste of Joe is again in my mouth, the clove scent of his skin is in the air, until I can feel his hands running through my hair, all over my dress, just one thin, thin layer between us, until the moment when he slipped his hands under the fabric and I felt his fingers on my skin like music – all of it sending me again and again right off the cliff that is my heart.
This morning, for the first time, Bailey wasn’t my first thought on waking and it had made me feel guilty. But the guilt didn’t have much of a chance against the dawning realization that I was falling in love. I had stared out the window at the early-morning fog, wondering for a moment if she had sent Joe to me so I would know that in the same world where she could die, this could happen.
Big says, “Would you look at her. We’ve got to cut down those damn rosebushes.” His hair is particularly coiled and springy today, and his mustache is unwaxed, so it looks like a squirrel is running across his face. In any fairy tale, Big plays the king.
Gram chides him, “Hush now, you don’t even believe in that.” She doesn’t like anyone to perpetuate the rumor about the aphrodisiacal nature of her roses, because there was a time when desperate lovers would come and steal them to try to change the hearts of their beloveds. It made her crazy. There is not much Gram takes more seriously than proper pruning.
Big won’t let it go though. “I follow the proof-is-in-the-pudding scientific method: Please examine the empirical evidence in this bed. She’s worse than me.”
“No one is worse than you, you’re the town swain.” Gram rolls her eyes.
“You say swain, but imply swine,” Big retorts, twisting his squirrel for effect.
I sit up in bed, lean my back against the sill to better enjoy their verbal tennis match. I can feel the summery day through the window, deliciously warming my back. But when I look over at Bailey’s bed, I’m leveled. How can something this momentous be happening to me without her? And what about all the momentous things to come? How will I go through each and every one of them without her? I don’t care that she was keeping things from me – I want to tell her absolutely everything about last night, about everything that will ever happen to me! I’m crying before I even realize it, but I don’t want us all to tailspin, so I swallow and swallow it all down, and try to focus on last night, on falling in love. I spot my clarinet across the room, half covered with the paisley scarf of Bailey’s I recently started wearing.
“Joe didn’t come by this morning?” I ask, wanting to play again, wanting to blow all this everything I’m feeling out my clarinet.
Big replies, “No, bet a million dollars he’s exactly where you are, though he probably has his guitar with him. Have you asked him if he sleeps with it yet?”
“He’s a musical genius,” I say, feeling my earlier giddiness returning. Without a doubt, I’ve gone bipolar.
“Oh, jeez. C’mon Gram, she’s a lost cause.” Big winks at me, then heads for the door.
Gram stays seated next to me, ruffling my hair like I’m a little kid. She’s looking at me closely and a little too long. Oh no. I’ve been in such a trance, I forget that I haven’t really been talking to Gram lately, that we’ve hardly been alone like this in weeks.
“Len.” This is definitely her Gramouncement tone, but I don’t think it’s going to be about Bailey. About expressing my feelings. About packing up Bailey’s things. About going to the city for lunch. About resuming my lessons. About all the things I haven’t wanted to do.
“Yeah?”
“We talked about birth control, diseases and all that…” Phew. This one’s harmless.
“Yeah, like a million times.”
“Okay, just as long as you haven’t suddenly forgotten it all.”
“Nope.”
“Good.” She’s patting my hand again.
“Gram, there’s no need yet, okay?” I feel the requisite blush from revealing this, but better to not have her
freaking out about it and constantly questioning me.
“Even better, even better,” she says, the relief evident in her voice, and it makes me think. Things with Joe last night were intense, but they were paced to savor. Not so with Toby. I worry what might’ve happened if we weren’t interrupted. Would I have had the sense to stop us? Would he have? All I know is that everything was happening really quickly, I was totally out of control, and condoms were the furthest thing from my mind. God. How did that happen? How did Toby Shaw’s hands ever end up on my breasts? Toby’s! And only hours before Joe’s. I want to dive under the bed, make it my permanent residence. How did I go from bookworm and band geek to two-guys-in-the-same-day hussy?
Gram smiles, oblivious of the sudden bile rising in my throat, the twisting in my guts. She ruffles my hair again. “In the middle of all this tragedy, you’re growing up, sweet pea, and that is such a wonderful thing.”
Groan.
Lennie! Lennie! Lennnnnnnnnnie! God, I’ve missed you!” I pull the cell phone away from my ear. Sarah hadn’t texted me back, so I assumed she was really pissed. I cut in to say so, and she responds, “I am furious! And I’m not speaking to you!” then she launches into all the summer gossip I’ve missed. I soak it up but can tell there was some true vitriol in her words. I’m lying on my bed, wiped after practicing Cavallini’s Adagio and Tarantella for two straight hours – it was incredible, like turning the air into colors. It made me think of the Charlie Parker quote Mr James liked to repeat: If you don’t live it, it can’t come out of your horn. It also made me think I might go to summer band practice after all.
Sarah and I make a plan to meet at Flying Man’s. I’m dying to tell her about Joe. Not about Toby. I’m thinking if I don’t talk about it, I can just pretend it didn’t happen.
She’s lying on a rock in the sun reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – in preparation, I’m sure, for her very promising guy-poaching expedition to State’s Women’s Studies Department feminism symposium. She springs to her feet when she sees me, and hugs me like crazy despite the fact that she’s completely naked. We have our own secret pool and mini-falls behind Flying Man’s that we’ve been coming to for years. We’ve declared it clothing optional and we opt not. “God, it’s been forever,” she says.
“I’m so sorry, Sarah,” I say, hugging her back.
“It’s okay, really,” she says. “I know I need to give you a free pass right now. So that’s…” She pulls away for a second, studies my face. “Wait a minute? What’s wrong with you? You look weird. I mean really weird.”
I can’t stop smiling. I must look like a Fontaine.
“What, Lennie? What happened?”
“I think I’m falling in love.” The moment the words are out of my mouth, I feel my face go hot with shame. I’m supposed to be grieving, not falling in love. Not to mention everything else I’ve been doing.
“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat! That is so unfreakingfreakingfreakingfreakingbelieveable! Cows on the moon, Len! Cows. On. The. Moon!” Well, so much for my shame. Sarah is in full on cheerleader mode, arms flailing, hopping up and down. Then she stops abruptly. “Wait, with whom? NOT Toby, I hope.”
“No, no, of course not,” I say as a speeding eighteen-wheeler of guilt flattens me.
“Whew,” Sarah, says, sweeping her hand off her brow dramatically. “Who then? Who could you be in love with? You haven’t gone anywhere, at least that I know of, and this town is beyond Loserville, so where’d you find him?”
“Sarah, it’s Joe.”
“It’s not.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“No!”
“Yup.”
“Not true.”
“Is true.”
“Nah-uh, nah-uh, nah-uh.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Etc.
Her previous display of enthusiasm was nothing compared to the one that is going on now. She’s doing circles around me, saying, “Oh my God. I am soooooooooooooo jealous. Every girl in Clover is after one Fontaine or another. No wonder you’ve been a shut-in. I would be too, if I could shut in with one of them. God, let me live vicariously through you. Tell me every freaking detail. That beautiful, beautiful boy, those eyes, those eyelashes, that unfreakingbelievable smile, that trumpet playing, wow, Lennnnnnnnnie.” She’s pacing now, has lit another cigarette, is chain smoking in glee – a naked smokestack maniac. I’m so happy to be hanging out with the marvel that is my best friend Sarah. And I’m so happy to be happy about it.
I tell her every detail. How he came over every morning with croissants, how we played music together, how he made Gram and Big so happy just by being in the house, how we drank wine last night and kissed until I was sure I had walked right into the sky. I told her how I think I can hear his heart beating even when he’s not there, how I feel like flowers – Gramgantuan ones – are blooming in my chest, how I’m sure I feel just the way Heathcliff did for Cathy before—
“Okay, stop for a second.” She’s still smiling but she looks a bit worried and surprised too. “Lennie, you’re not in love, you’re demented. I’ve never heard anyone talk about a guy like this.”
I shrug. “Then I’m demented.”
“Wow, I want to be demented too.” She sits down next to me on the rock. “It’s like you’ve hardly kissed three guys in your whole life and now this. Guess you were saving it up or something…”
I tell her my Rip Van Lennie theory of having slept my whole life until recently.
“I don’t know, Len. You always seemed awake to me.”
“Yeah, I don’t know either. It was a wine-induced theory.” Sarah picks up a stone, tosses it into the water with a little too much force. “What?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer right away, picks up another stone and hurls it too. “I am mad at you, but I’m not allowed to be, you know?”
It’s exactly how I feel toward Bailey sometimes lately.
“You’ve just been keeping so much from me, Lennie. I thought … I don’t know.”
It’s as if she were speaking my lines in a play.
“I’m sorry,” I say again feebly. I want to say more, give her an explanation, but the truth is I don’t know why I’ve felt so closed off to her since Bailey died.
“It’s okay,” she says again quietly.
“It’ll be different now,” I say, hoping it’s true. “Promise.”
I look out at the sun courting the river’s surface, the green leaves, the wet rocks behind the falls. “Want to go swimming?”
“Not yet,” she says. “I have news too. Not breaking news, but still.” It’s a clear dig and I deserve it. I didn’t even ask how she was.
She’s smirking at me, quite dementedly, actually. “I hooked up with Luke Jacobus last night.”
“Luke?” I’m surprised. Besides for his recent lapse in judgment, which resulted in his band-kill status, he’s been devotedly, unrequitedly in love with Sarah since second grade. King of the Nerdiverse, she used to call him. “Didn’t you make out with him in seventh grade and then drop him when that idiot surfer glistened at you?”
“Yeah, it’s probably dumb,” she says. “I agreed to do lyrics for this incredible music he wrote, and we were hanging out, and it just happened.”
“What about the Jean-Paul Sartre rule?”
“Sense of humor trumps literacy, I’ve decided – and jumping giraffes, Len – growth geyser! The guy’s like the Hulk these days.”
“He is funny,” I agree. “And green.”
She laughs, just as my phone signals a text. I rifle through my bag and take it out hoping for a message from Joe.
Sarah’s singing, “Lennie got a love note from a Fontaine,” as she tries to read over my shoulder. “C’mon let me see it.” She grabs the phone from me. I pull it out of her hands, but it’s too late. It says: I need to talk to you. T.
“As in Toby?” she asks. “But I thought … I mean, you just said … Lennie, what’re you doing?”
“
Nothing,” I tell her, shoving the phone back in my bag, already breaking my promise. “Really. Nothing.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” she says, shaking her head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Don’t,” I say, swallowing my own atrocious feeling.
“Really. I’m demented, remember?” I touch her arm. “Let’s go swimming.”
We float on our backs in the pool for over an hour. I make her tell me everything about her night with Luke so I don’t have to think about Toby’s text, what might be so urgent. Then we climb up to the falls and get under them, screaming over and over into the roar like we’ve done since we were little.
I scream bloody murder.
There were once two sisters
who were not afraid of the dark
because the dark was full of the other's voice
across the room,
because even when the night was thick
and starless
they walked home together from the river
seeing who could last the longest
without turning on her flashlight,
not afraid
because sometimes in the pitch of night
they'd lie on their backs
in the middle of the path
and look up until the stars came back
and when they did,
they'd reach their arms up to touch them
and did.
(Found on an envelope stuck under the tire of a car on Main Street)
By the time I walk home from the river through the woods, I’ve decided Toby, like me, feels terrible about what happened, hence the urgency of the text. He probably just wants to make sure it will never happen again. Well, agreed. No argument from demented ol’ moi.
Clouds have gathered and the air feels thick with the possibility of a rare summer rain. I see a takeaway cup on the ground, so I sit down, write a few lines on it, and then bury it under a mound of pine needles. Then I lie down on my back on the spongy forest floor. I love doing this – giving it all up to the enormity of the sky, or to the ceiling if the need arises while I’m indoors. As I reach my hands out and press my fingers into the loamy soil, I start wondering what I’d be doing right now, what I’d be feeling right this minute if Bailey were still alive. I realize something that scares me: I’d be happy, but in a mild kind of way, nothing demented about it. I’d be turtling along, like I always turtled, huddled in my shell, safe and sound.