by Phoebe North
It was almost midnight when we made it to the party, and the tiny apartment was already packed full of people. Petyr took my coat from me, and I stood there in the middle of it, watching people dance in one corner, and play some kind of card game with intricate invented rules in another, and two boys kissing on one of those plastic blow-up chairs, and the TV on and no one watching. I drifted through the rooms like a ghost, observing the tableaux, and finally found myself in an overcrowded bathroom as people passed around a bong that was taller than a small child. I took a hit, passed it, coughed, and everyone erupted in laughter. One sound cut above it, though. Laughter like bells, like music, or maybe I was just imagining it, maybe it was just the pot, but I saw a girl sitting on the closed toilet seat, her elbows on her knees. She was brown skinned and short haired and wearing a worn-out T-shirt and suspenders and cropped pants with leather saddle shoes underneath like she didn’t even care about the weather and she was incredibly beautiful and I recognized her right away.
“I remember you,” I said, craggy-voiced. “From life drawing.”
Somebody whistled, but the girl just laughed. Time was slow, and I sensed the crowd parting like an ocean and then pushing us closer together like waves. I stood against the tile wall, close enough that her knees brushed mine.
“That means you’ve seen me naked. You have an unfair advantage.”
“Do I?” I asked. Her eyes twinkled, but she didn’t answer right away, so I added, “What got you into that line of work, anyway?”
Her smile went snaky, like she’d been waiting for that question. “It’s not about sex, if that’s what you’re asking. Actually, for me, it’s the opposite of sex. When I pose for a class, I’m using my body to make something more than what the world assumes about it. It’s like, have you ever met a guy in a band and thought, That asshole will probably write a terrible song about me later?”
I grinned at her. In a way, it reminded me of something Vidya might say. She was always complaining about asshole guys in bands who thought she was somehow inherently less than them.
“Not personally,” I told her, and it was true—asshole band guys had never paid any attention to me at all. “But yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Well, this is different. This isn’t having your story or your image stolen without your consent. This is about deciding the terms over your skin yourself. I get to say for once, Put me in your art, but make it good or it’s not worth a damned thing to either of us. Plus,” she added, “it pays better than a work study gig. Forty bucks an hour. Can’t beat that.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. She was different than I expected. Better. Hard and bright and clever. She asked me, “What’s your name, traveler?”
“Annie R. [Redacted].”
“Well, Annie R. [Redacted]. I’m Court.”
“Is that your real name?” I felt my mouth smiling at her and saw her mouth smiling at me back.
“It’s close enough.”
Our conversation faded for a moment, and I could have lost her, but then I saw the picture on her shirt. It was a reproduction of a faded book cover. A little boy, feather in his cap, standing cocky in a window, while Wendy, John, and Michael looked on.
Peter Pan.
“What do you think Peter did after the Lost Boys went off to live in London?” I asked.
I saw her pupils shrink back and then flood her dark eyes. She was surprised. She looked down at her shirt as though she might find an answer there.
“That’s an interesting question, Annie R. [Redacted].”
“You can just call me Annie.”
She rolled her eyes a little. Laughed a little. “I know.”
But I wasn’t ready to drop the Peter Pan thing. The pot had made me bold, or stupid. I wasn’t sure which. “But I mean, really. Hook was already dead. Did he and Tinker Bell just putz around Neverland for a few decades? Why didn’t he come home sooner?” And then I blushed, because I felt like I had revealed something.
But Court was only faintly smiling at me. “You’re a strange creature, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I arched an eyebrow, studying her saddle shoes, her cropped pants. “And you’re not?”
“I am,” she said, like she was pleased to hear it. “But it usually takes people longer to notice.”
“Not me,” I told her. “But maybe we strange creatures can smell each other.”
“For sure.” She held out her wrist out to me, right under my nose. “What do you smell?”
I let my lips almost grace her skin. She smelled a little like old musty paperback novels, and a little like powdery scented deodorant.
“Weirdness,” I said, and she giggled like a kid at that. I wasn’t used to flirting so obviously, but I remembered what she’d said about life drawing. This is about deciding the terms over your skin yourself.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked her, then added, in case it wasn’t clear, “Together?”
Her smile lit up the whole bathroom. She stood up, then offered her hand to me. She was taller than I was. Impossibly tall, a giantess.
“Come on,” she said in a low voice. She took me to a back bedroom, and in a nest of coats that smelled like winter’s chill, we kissed each other. And we didn’t stop until it was morning.
We woke half-naked in the gray morning light, tucked beneath the heavy winter blanket. The coats were gone. I had a dim memory of people streaming in and out all night, blushing, apologizing, pulling their jackets out from under our tangled bodies. But I didn’t feel embarrassed. Just spent, and maybe a little confused. There were books everywhere in this tiny back bedroom, shelves lining the walls and stacked in piles beneath them and spilled over every chair. And they weren’t the kind of pretentious, important books you’d find in most dorm rooms at Hampden. No Plato. No Robert Anton Wilson. No Žižek. Nothing like that.
They were all children’s books.
Alice. Narnia. Ann M. Martin and Louise Fitzhugh. E. Nesbit. E. B. White and Cynthia Voigt and dozens of Oz books and Beverly Cleary, too.
“Must be some kid’s room . . .” I murmured. Buried beneath the blankets, Court giggled. When she poked her head out, I saw her brown eyes gleaming.
“They’re yours?”
“I keep thinking of what you said last night about Peter Pan,” she said as she stretched her arms luxuriously overhead. Her shirt was lost somewhere in the tangle of blankets. She only wore a soft, worn-out sports bra. I was wearing nothing but my undershorts.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Do you know about the real Peter Pan?”
I shook my head.
“He was an orphan. J. M. Barrie was a family friend who adopted him. But it wasn’t like the movies, I don’t think. He threw himself in front of a train eventually. One of his brothers got shot in the head during the war. Another drowned.”
I winced.
“Then there was Christopher Robin Milne. You know, from Winnie-the-Pooh? He hated being a character in a book. He eventually gave his toys away. Said he didn’t care about them. I don’t think any children’s book character just putzed around after the book ended. Not even Alice . . .”
I watched the light slip over her collarbones. “What about Alice?”
“She made it out okay, I guess. But Lewis Carroll had all those naked pictures of her. He wanted to marry her. Some people think he was a total pedo.”
I stared at her. My heart was beating in my ears, too loudly. She turned to me, cupped my face in her hands, took in my trembling lips and chin.
“What? What did I say?”
44
Court and Petyr were best friends. Seniors, both of them, who had met the first week of school freshman year and been inseparable ever since. Now they were finishing up their capstone projects. Petyr’s was a series of paintings of men in traditional pin-up poses. They were wry and winking and playful, had a sense of joy that my own paintings never had. Court, meanwhile, was working on a giant paper on the lives
of the children behind the books. She said she didn’t always want to moonlight as a life drawing model. She really wanted to be a children’s librarian someday. It had been her only dream, from the time she was in diapers. I wondered what it was like to know yourself so well. When I showed her parts of myself, I had the feeling of being halfway unraveled.
When the three of us—a sort of trio now, a band, a team—would go to the diner together after life drawing, we drank too much black coffee and ordered off the children’s menu, where the dishes were all named after ancient cartoon characters. I did my best to share what I could of myself. I couldn’t tell them about Jamie, so I told them about Sophie, about Miranda, about my parents’ separation and recent reunion. I told them about my high school, and the kids who drank in the woods, and how I’d pretty much never been invited. Petyr snorted at that, digging into his Donald Duck.
“I went to parties like those,” he said. “Back when I was in high school and still pretending to be straight. Trust me. You weren’t missing anything. A whole bunch of football players flirting with each other, mostly.”
“And you never joined in?” Court asked, waggling her eyebrows.
“I can’t deny that there were a few surreptitious underbrush hand jobs,” Petyr said. Court grinned wickedly. I smiled, too, trying to hide how I was blushing a little. I wasn’t used to being around people who spoke like this, and so openly. Other queer people. Who wore their queerness without hesitation or shame, like it was any other ordinary part of them.
Court had been born into this kind of openness. She’d been raised by a single dad who eventually started dating other men—and then married one. Her mother had made a reappearance in her midteens, and tried to take custody of her, making it clear that she thought Court’s family life was “inappropriate.” But Court had stood before a judge to make an impassioned defense of her two fathers. When I told her she was brave, she said she wasn’t; she was just doing the sort of thing they would always do for her.
Her fathers were perfect. They were loving, supportive—they sent her lumpy care packages with T-shirts from the cruises they went on together now that they were empty nesters. I wondered what it was like to have home be a sanctuary, and not a thorny tangle. I’d wondered that before, with Vidya, but had never found an answer. Then my strange family had only ever been a liability. I wondered if that were true now, too.
That night, after we gorged ourselves on waffle fries, Court walked me back to the dorms, her freezing fingers tucked inside mine.
“You’re holding back on me,” she said out of the blue as we passed under a burning streetlamp that made the snowy path look bright white. “I know there are things you haven’t told me about yourself.”
I stopped in the path, turned to face her. Could feel how the frown had made a crease between my eyebrows. I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t know how to tell her about my brother, and so there was a huge chunk of my life that I was always talking around. It hadn’t mattered with Vidya. She’d known all about Jamie. But it seemed like the sort of thing that might make this new, fragile romance heavier than it needed to be.
“Look,” she said, “I just hope you didn’t leave behind some stupid high school boyfriend—”
“Oh G-d no!” I couldn’t hold back the look of horror on my face. “Do you really think I seem like the type to have a boyfriend?”
Court laughed, then sheepishly looked down at the toes of her shoes. She was wearing Converse sneakers, and I wondered if her feet were cold. I decided then that when we got back to my room, I’d help her take her shoes off and rub her feet until they were warm again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “People reinvent themselves. I really don’t know you at all, Annie.”
I blinked in surprise, but I supposed it was true. How could she know anything about me if she didn’t know about Jamie? He was only someone I’d mentioned once or twice, in passing, dismissive. My older brother, who worked in a supermarket. It was the kind of thing that made the wealthy kids at Hampden uncomfortable to hear, so they never asked anything more about him. Now I winced to remember it. It was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. There were reasons that Jamie’s life looked the way it did, and I’d been stepping around them.
How could I even begin to say it, though? Something bad happened years ago. Not to me, but to someone I loved. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part was that I thought magic was real. And sometimes I wonder if it still is, but not in the way I thought. . . .
“I don’t know how to tell you about the things I’m not telling you,” I admitted, letting my shoulders rise and fall. I’d tried already. Failed. It was too big. Too strange.
Court squinted up at the streetlight like it might hold the answer. “Maybe you can write it down,” she said. “Maybe you can use a metaphor.”
“A metaphor?”
“Yeah,” she said, “You know, like Neverland wasn’t just a magical land. It was also a place where J. M. Barrie could visit his brother who died as a kid.”
The Lost Boy Returns, I thought. My frown deepened. “I’m not a writer,” I told her.
She rolled her eyes at me. “What’s a writer, anyway?” she said.
By the time Court’s birthday came in late February, I’d taken what she said to heart. I thought I might give her the story as a gift. Sitting down at my laptop, I began to write a story about an old woman looking back on the brother she’d lost—even though he’d never died. It wasn’t right, though. The words felt wrong. Plus, I wondered, in a way, if this were my story to tell at all.
I took long breaks from my story. I paced. I quit pacing and lay back in my bed, closing my eyes, and tried to imagine Jamie. I could almost see those long days at the grocery store, and fighting with Shelley over takeout, storming off on his motorcycle and riding into the silvery dark night. Forgetting his gloves again, and his hands getting so cold he worried about frostbite.
But that wasn’t all of him. Something was missing, some luminescent heart. A question. A gap. And so my words felt flat and joyless, empty. My brother had told me that I loved Gumlea once, and he wasn’t wrong. But I didn’t know how to find my way back to that love now. Not when there was still so much I didn’t understand.
Finally, I gave up. I asked Petyr for a ride to the used bookstore instead, and we browsed the stacks in silence together, the spines of books staring out at me until I found the perfect one. It was an Edward Eager book, one I remembered stealing off Jamie’s shelf when I was a kid. Magic or Not? it was called. On the flyleaf, I inscribed it for her, wondering if I was being too naked with my feelings, pressing forward anyway.
Not sure if you’ve read this one. It meant a lot to me once. Sometimes it feels like a question I’m still asking: Is there magic or not? Meeting you makes me think the answer is more likely yes than no.
Yours,
A
When she opened it and read the words I’d jotted on the front page, Court glowed.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “I’ve read Half Magic but never any of his other ones.”
“This one is different,” I told her. “This one is more like real life. The author is a character in it.”
“Droste effect,” she said, grinning. Later, I looked up the phrase, but in the moment, I only vaguely understood. Still, at least she was pleased. Maybe more than pleased. “I love it.”
Court kissed the book like it was a Torah. Then she put it down on my dorm room bed and climbed over to me, kissing me, too.
“But you’re the best birthday present,” she told me, leaving kisses down my jaw, my throat. I had to admit that I felt the same about her. And it wasn’t even my birthday.
That night, with Court tucked in against my shoulder, my phone buzzed. I groped around my nightstand for it, then found it, knowing somehow who it was even before I picked up my phone and looked.
Jamie.
“Hello?” I whispered. We never called each other, and we definitely never called each othe
r at 2:17 a.m.
“Hey,” he said. He sounded rushed, breathless. His voice was very low, like he was afraid of being heard. “You’re awake.”
“I wasn’t,” I hissed.
On the other end, my brother laughed. It sounded ragged. “I hope I didn’t wake your girlfriend up,” he told me, and that’s when I sat up and pried myself out from under Court’s sweaty, sweet body. Then I went to the bathroom I shared with my suitemate, turned on the light, and closed the door. I stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were the same as always, and so were my freckles, but I noticed how I looked older now, a little less round around the jaw.
“How did you know about Court? Did Mom tell you I was dating someone?” I asked.
There was a long pause, a crackle. Finally, Jamie said, “Yeah.”
“Cool,” I said. I rolled my eyes. “Would have liked to have told you myself.”
“You never tell me anything,” he said, hurt in his voice, and I couldn’t even argue against it because it was true.
“Why are you calling?” I said at last.
“Me and Shelley had a fight. She thinks—” There was a pause, an awful sniffle. I imagined my brother crying, like he had once cried as a little boy. Red-faced and raw, every feeling obvious on his boyish features. Of course, he was a man now. How many times had I seen our father cry, even after Jamie disappeared? Once? Maybe twice?
“Jamie,” I said. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay.”
Another long pause. Finally, I heard him exhale, crackly-voiced. “Okay,” he said. “But I wanted to ask you how you—how you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Damn it. I—I mean, you’re always yourself, Annie. You were never afraid to be yourself.”