“Was that a bad question?” I said.
“No,” he said, quickly. “Of course not. There are no bad questions in the dog park, right?”
I’d told Mag and Daniel about how the dog park was my new Quaker burial ground, just blurted that out one morning, mid-conversation, which meant that I then had to explain about my old Quaker burial ground. But despite the topsy-turvy telling, they’d understood instantly.
“It’s like there’s truth serum in the air,” Mag had said. “If serum can actually be in air. Or even if it can’t.”
“It’s like The Breakfast Club,” Daniel had said. “Except we’re nicer to each other and no one has dandruff.”
Now, Daniel said, “I guess I just feel a little awkward because I don’t think I ever mentioned that I grew up around here. Sort of.”
“Oh,” I said, startled. “You did? Sort of? You sort of—did?”
He laughed. “Sort of.”
“How could I have missed you? Not to embarrass you, but tall? Handsome? Smart enough to become a vet? And you grew up here? Boy, my young self really fell down on the job with that one.”
Then, it was as if the invisible person colorizing the black-and-white photo of the morning painted two pink spots, one on each of Daniel’s cheeks.
“Well, thanks. But I don’t think I was actually any of those things back then.”
“You weren’t tall?”
“Okay, I was sort of tall. But not this tall. I grew in college.”
“Ah. A late bloomer.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. The truth is I was kind of a screwup in high school.”
“I can’t even imagine you being a screwup.”
“I started off okay. I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My parents met in college there and ended up staying. When I was fifteen, my dad got a new job up here, and we moved, so I spent the last three years of high school at Westville. It was rough, I guess.”
Westville was a high school just over the Pennsylvania line. It was big and public, but, probably due to some egregiously strategic school zoning, it drew mostly from an affluent part of the state.
“Rough?” I said. “The mean hallways of Westville?”
“The school wasn’t rough. But my transition into it was, so rough that it never fully happened. I hadn’t wanted to move. I was shy, and I went from knowing everyone to knowing no one. To get back at my parents, I fell in with some pretty wild kids. We drank too much. Did stupid things. Not terrible things. But stupid.”
He dropped his gaze to the frosty grass. “Senior year went completely off the rails. By the time I graduated, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“My senior year was like that, too,” I said, quietly.
“But look at us,” said Daniel, brightening. “Back and better than ever.”
He pulled off his gloves and got down on one knee to scratch Dobbsey, who was lying, stomach on ground, paws on chin, a position Avery and I called “Flat Dobbsey,” at Daniel’s feet.
“You’re better than ever,” I said. “I have a would-be philanderer for a husband, a newfound impatience with the directionlessness of my life, and no idea how to grieve for my mother.”
Daniel looked up at me, brows lowered, concern in his eyes.
“Do you think there’s a right way to do that?” he said. “Could it be that you are grieving for her, talking about her, telling stories about what it’s been like to be her kid?”
“But all my stories are about how we’ve never gotten along. Because that’s the only kind of stories I’ve got. The horrible truth is that I don’t even know if I miss her. I might not.”
Daniel stopped petting Dobbsey, and Dobbsey batted his hand with his paw until he started up again.
“What if—” He paused, and I could see him processing, calling up words. “What if grief isn’t only missing people and being sad? That’s how we usually think about it. But what if it’s just—reckoning with their being gone and with knowing they’re never coming back?”
Suddenly, I felt unsteady. All along, all week, I’d been so solid. Now, with what Daniel had just said hovering nearby, without really considering his words or understanding exactly what they meant, I felt my hinges loosening.
“I’ll think about that,” I said, nodding. “But look! We’re talking about me again. I need more info about Mary Nash.”
“You can meet her if you want,” he said. “She and my dad, Nathan, still live nearby.”
“In your old house?”
“Yep. Georgia and I live about a block away.”
“Wow,” I said. “You didn’t just come back, you came back to the same neighborhood.”
“Which should have been weird, except that, at the time, I think I just had too many other things to think about.”
Daniel stood, but then Dobbsey batted the toe of his sneaker, so Daniel bent down and scooped him up.
“Keep talking,” I said, snapping my fingers.
“Bossy,” said Daniel.
“Go ahead. Why did you come home?”
“After Libby died, Georgia and I tried going it alone for a while, and I wasn’t doing a terrible job. I made dinner, did laundry, got to most of the soccer games before they were over. And my parents would come for a week or so every couple of months to help out.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Really nice. But then, after one of their visits, I found Georgia crying. She cried a lot in that first year. So I figured it was that she missed her mom. But when I asked, she said no, that wasn’t the reason, not this time. And what she said was ‘I miss you.’ She said, ‘When Gram and Grandpop are here to help with stuff, you talk to me. But when they’re not, you don’t.’”
“Ouch,” I said.
“No kidding. She said, ‘It’s not your fault. I know it’s just because you’re so busy.’ I felt like a jerk.”
“So you moved home.”
“It feels more like home now than it did when I was in high school, that’s for sure.”
“If I know Mary Nash and Nathan, they love having you two here.”
Daniel smiled. “Nathan’s idea of having fun with a twelve-year-old is to just do what he always does but with Georgia. They go birding. And golfing. And out for coffee on Saturday mornings with his buddies. And every Sunday, he brings over sticky buns from his favorite bakery, the New York Times crossword puzzle, and two pencils.”
“In case you don’t have pencils,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“I’ll bet she loves it.”
“She does.”
“What about my friend Mary Nash? What does she do with Georgia?”
“Well, right now, she’s teaching her how to paint.”
“Walls?”
“Paintings,” said Daniel. “Mary Nash is a painter.”
“Really? I used to want to be a painter,” I said. “And a writer. I was in love with the idea of making something out of nothing. What are her paintings like?”
“Mary Nash paints portraits of people for a living, mostly children, from life, not photographs. She loves the making something out of nothing, but she loves that part of it, too. The people part.”
Impulsively, I reached out and tugged on Daniel’s coat sleeve. “You know what you are? You’re one of those people who grew up with good parents.”
“True.”
“Lucky,” I said. “That’s what you are. Blessed.”
And then out of nowhere, I heard my mother saying, You went full tilt, didn’t you? Headlong into everything. You were something to see back then.
Mose and Walt had ceased adventuring in the gloom and were sitting in the grass nearby, their tails slowly wagging—Mose’s golden plume and Walt’s thumb-size stub—as if, even with nothing much happening, there was still cause for joy. I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Hey,” said Daniel, softly. “You’re crying.”
I took off my gloves and touched my cheeks with my fingertips and found that he was right.
I turned to look at him.
“What if she liked me all that time and I never knew it?” I whispered.
Daniel took a step toward me, handed me Dobbsey, and then he put his arms around us both.
Chapter Nine
November 3, 1997
I can’t breathe.
Or make my brain work.
I can’t write it down.
I can’t write it. I can’t write it.
I can’t.
Nothing is what I thought it was.
I feel like I got lied to by the entire universe.
I don’t even know who I am now.
Not Zinny.
Or even Ginny.
Not anyone.
I stayed home from school today because maybe I don’t have a fever or a sore throat, but if anyone was ever sick, I’m sick.
The day before yesterday, he called and said we needed to talk. That’s how everything bad begins, isn’t it? In movies or stupid TV shows. I should have known. Anyone else would’ve known that something terrible was about to happen. But us talking has always been good, a completely good thing. So I wasn’t ready. I am so stupid.
I trusted him. I believed every single word he has ever said to me.
He picked me up in his car. He didn’t kiss me. But I was so happy to see him that I didn’t even notice. I hate myself when I remember how happy. I was practically bouncing in my seat like a little kid.
I am so stupid.
I held his hand like I have a thousand times before, his wide, beautiful hand, and said, “Where should we go? The quarry?”
He shook his head, fast and twitchy, like he was shaking off a punch.
“Not there.”
That’s when I noticed his face. It looked just how it looked the night we’d had sex. Lost and scared and drained of color.
“Hey, baby,” I said, “what’s wrong?”
“Not now,” he said.
He drove and turned into the first really big parking lot we came to and parked in the most faraway spot with no other cars around.
It feels cruel now, that he picked that place. Maybe he didn’t want it to be in one of our special places, like the quarry. But there? In the parking lot of the most beat-down grocery store in town? With the dinged-up shopping carts lying around and the giant red ACME letters glaring down at us? The edge of the lot was littered with garbage that looked like it had been there for decades.
No one should have to be staring at fast-food bags snagged in bushes and empty forty-ounce bottles when her life comes crashing down around her.
He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
He tried to pull his hand away, but I just held on harder. Because that’s what you do when someone you love is sad or afraid. You hold on harder.
Then.
He said.
He said.
How could he?
He said, in this ripped and shredded voice, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. But I’m gay. I’m gay, Zinny.”
For a few long seconds, I literally did not comprehend what he’d said. I heard the sounds his mouth made, but I didn’t know what they meant.
And then his dark, scared eyes looked into mine and, like a thunderbolt, I understood.
I dropped his hand like it had caught fire and backed up against the car door so hard I banged my head and it hurt.
“You can’t mean that,” I said, barely getting the words out. “You’re lying.”
“I wish,” he said, dismally.
And then I was screaming at him.
“You say you love me, like, every single day! We talk about getting married all the time! How could you do this to me? What the hell is wrong with you?”
He didn’t say anything. Just stared out the windshield.
“Was that fun for you?” I screamed. “To lie to me over and over and over, every single day? You’re a liar!”
I couldn’t stop. I went on and on. Frenzied. Blind. Somewhere in there, I told him I hated him. He never spoke or looked at me. Only stared straight ahead with an empty face.
I got out of the car and just started running.
I can’t eat. I feel like throwing up all the time. I feel like little bits of me are dying. My mother thinks I have the flu.
I hate him.
How can I hate him?
I loved him so much.
He let me love him.
I wish I could get away from what happened in that car. Or away from every single day of the past seven months of my life.
I wish I could go to sleep for the rest of senior year.
Or forever.
Even now, I don’t mean that the way it might sound. But my heart hurts so much. I wish I didn’t even have one.
November 5, 1997
Kirsten came to see me today. She knows. CJ knows, too.
I wish I could tell you how it felt to see her face in my house, to see not just someone else who knows this secret that’s been weighing me down like rocks but specifically Kirsten, how just the sight of her broke me open and made me cry in a different way from how I’d been crying for days. But I can’t make pretty things out of language now. Pretty doesn’t have a place here anymore. And anyway, my brain is clumsy and slow and sad. I write this like a three-year-old building something out of blocks. And there’s no happiness in it, not a speck. I just need to write these hard things down. I don’t even know why.
I let her in the back door, and we went up to my room. The second the door closed behind us, she turned toward me, and her eyes searched my face, and I could see her worry at how bad I look (because I am pasty and stringy-haired and gaunt and a hundred years old), but she reached out, took a scraggly clump of my hair, gently tucked it behind my ear, and said (softly and without any sarcasm), “Leave it to you to still look gorgeous as a movie star even now.” And what I realized is that the only thing that had been holding me together for the past three days is that no one had been nice to me. Not my mother because she never is. Not Trevor because I’d been hunkered down in my room, claiming to be sick, and he never had the chance.
She did the hair looping and said that sweet if entirely untrue thing, and my chest started heaving and I burst into croaky sobs so harsh my throat and my whole chest were sore afterward.
Kirsten put her arms around me, and we sat down on my bed, and I cried for what felt like a week.
“I know,” she crooned over and over. “I know, Zin Zin.”
When I was all emptied of crying, I said, “We had this future all planned out. It was beautiful and exciting and now it’s gone. Trashed. Burned. Disappeared.”
“I know how much that must hurt,” Kirsten said.
“I feel just exactly like someone died.”
I heard Kirsten take a deep breath. Then, she said, “But Gray’s still alive.”
His name said out loud was like someone sticking a pin into me.
“And he’s still Gray,” she said.
I shook my head. “He’s not the Gray I knew.”
Kirsten put her hand on the side of my face and swiveled my head to face her. “No. He is,” she said, firmly.
“What?” I said. “Are you taking his side?”
“There aren’t sides, Zinny. This isn’t a war with good guys and bad guys.”
“So what is it? What is the name for this situation?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The thing is he’s still Gray. He’s still funny and smart and brave and nice. He’s our friend. He’s all the things he always was. Except now we know this one other thing about him. It doesn’t change the other stuff or cancel it out. It’s just an addition.”
I sat there, my hands pressed together, holding each other tight, like someone praying. But I wasn’t praying. I was wrestling with what Kirsten had just said. And I can’t tell which I was trying harder to do: understand what she’d said or push it away.
Before I could figure it out, Kirsten said something else: “He’s still Gray. And he’s scared and sad and hates himself for doing
this to you. And—listen to me. Are you listening?”
He’s still Gray.
My hands released each other, and I spread them open on my lap, palms down, and I nodded.
Kirsten said, “And he’s right on the edge of hating himself in general. Gray, the best guy in the world, who sticks up for everyone, hating who he is. Think about that.”
It was like there were automatic garage doors inside my head and as Kirsten said this, they all slid slowly open and light came in. Light and Gray. Grays. One Gray after the next. Laughing. And debating in class. And scraping the cheese off his pizza because he doesn’t like cheese but the rest of us do. Gray always laughing with—never at—CJ. And helping Kirsten with math. Gray giving other guys on the team the credit when people congratulate him on a game. Gray listening to me tell a story, giving me his full attention and never interrupting. His face going all thoughtful when he reads something I’ve written or looks at one of my watercolors. Gray’s voice on the phone at night with me, telling me the kind of person he wants to be when he grows up, noble and strong and interesting, telling me I will be extraordinary and brilliant because—just look at you, Zinny—I already am.
Gray Marsden had never hurt me on purpose. He never would.
I’d wanted to keep him forever. I’d wanted us to live in our house and share our secrets and raise our astonishing, beautiful children together. And now I can’t, ever, ever, and that terrible truth will never stop hurting me.
But what I said next to Kirsten was true, too: “No one is allowed to hate Gray. Especially not Gray. That can’t happen.”
She gave me a long hug. “My Zinny.”
“I wanted to be in love with him forever,” I said, so sadly.
Kirsten grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “I know.”
“And now I’ll have to be just his friend, and he’ll go off and be in love with someone else someday.”
“I know. But you will, too.”
“I can’t even imagine it,” I said. Tears burned in my eyes again, but I rubbed them away. “But I hope so. I hope it for both of us.”
Tonight, I’ll sneak out of my house and leave a note for Gray on his windshield, asking if I can come see him tomorrow night.
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