Picture Us In The Light
Page 33
“Go see him,” your sister tells you every time she calls. She knows how you watch him. She doesn’t tell your parents. “Don’t see them if you don’t want, but at least go see him. You live basically on the edge of nowhere and I know from personal experience it’s the most boring place in the world, so what else are you going to do? Just go.”
You told no one this, not Mike from Animal Behavior who bought you a Slurpee and drove you back to campus, not Tish from your dorm who stayed up with you all that night and gave you a cool damp towel when you threw up, not the therapist who called 911 because she couldn’t be sure the panic attack you had in her office wasn’t something worse, not even Ruth. You got lost leaving your father’s campus. You were dizzy and stricken and the hallway loomed unnavigable in front of you, branching off to a maze of so many other hallways whose sum total was far too great for you to ever find yourself. You walked back and forth and finally unseeingly stumbled down a flight of stairs that delivered you into the unsparing glare of the sun. That was where you saw him again. He was crouched against the side of the building, weeping, wobbly, and trying to steady himself against the brick wall.
Still, you didn’t understand until your brother came, and then it was clear; his father had been trying to protect him. Your brother had the unmistakable air of one who’s been the very center of someone else’s universe all his life, one formed of all those hopes and dreams and fears and pains and longings and regrets. You know what that feels like, you and Ruth both.
It is no longer possible to hate them. You miss the hatred. After a while it can start to feel like a friend. Or maybe it’s just that the other things roiling underneath are unmasked now, and those things are harder things to feel. You are adrift. You cry a lot. You go drunk stargazing with Byron and Lance. Ruth sends you an Edible Arrangement and you eat the entire thing in one sitting. You go to see her and spend too much of your stipend taking her shopping and out to eat.
Like everything, it starts small. First you reread a post about his showing in December. Then you screenshot it, save it to your desktop. You let your eyes flick over your lab calendar and rest on the blank spots in between incubation and hatch.
You look up his campus on a map. You look up plane tickets to Rhode Island, just out of curiosity, just to see. You call a hotel with a forgiving cancellation policy. Finally you grow tired of pretending, and you book a flight.
You surrender yourself to momentum. On the plane you buy a miniature bottle of wine and let it blur away all the sharp corners of existence, and out the window you watch the landscape give way and give way, again and again, while you sail past it unscathed. You always feel most at home in the sky.
When the wheels touch down you feel the land returning to you, spreading like gangrene from that initial thud, and you have to take a Xanax. The mountains you flew over are all siphoned from the land, all come to press against your lungs in a rush of pressure, and in the terminal you hunch over on a grimy chair, gasping for breath, forcing a smile and a nod for the woman who stoops to ask worriedly if you’re all right. You want to grab her hand and beg her not to leave.
It takes you so long to find your way to campus and then to find the gallery space you’re worried you’ve missed it, but the room is full still. You see the other boy first. He’s leaning against the wall by the door watching, his eyes shining, and when you follow the direction of his small, private smile it leads you to your brother.
Your brother is standing by a painting talking to a woman you recognize from his posts as one of his professors. He’s engrossed in their conversation and it’s a few minutes before he looks up and sees you.
He’s across the room still; there are people between you, and you aren’t certain you won’t turn and walk out. You stay close to the door and recite the mantra your sister made you repeat (I am doing this for myself, I owe them nothing, I can always leave). But then he says something to his professor and comes toward you. All the air in the room goes hot.
There are so many ways this could have gone, so many ways this still could go. But in that instant, the one where you saw that flash of recognition strike him like lightning, you felt what you came here to see if you’d feel: the same strike at the same time, an atomic pull you can’t explain. You feel the distance between you as a physical entity, and you feel it compress with each of his steps.
And then he’s in front of you, startled and unsure.
“Hi,” he says. Something in his tone strikes you as brave. Maybe hope is always brave.
Ruth would hug him. You’re not sure you will ever be able to. But you’re there, and you can breathe still, and you say hi to him back.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
1-800-273-8255
Crisis Text Line:
www.crisistextline.org
Text HOME to 741741 from anywhere in the USA, anytime, about any type of crisis.
United We Dream:
www.unitedwedream.org
This book absolutely would not exist without the immense brilliance, patience, wisdom and talent of Laura Schreiber. Thank you eternally for shepherding it into being, for seeing and trusting and excavating the story lurking inside all the awful drafts, and for being an endless font of vision and clarity and support. Sometimes when the world feels heavy and dark, I think about people like you putting your whole selves into working to make real these books you believe in so that young people who might need them can find them, and that feels like a gift.
Thank you as always to Adriann Ranta, agent extraordinare, for believing in this book along its journey (and me, along mine) and for your unwavering confidence and insight. Thank you to Maria Elias for outfitting this story on its foray into the world and for all the care and creativity you bring to your work. Thank you to Adams Carvalho for the beautiful art. Thank you to Cassie McGinty for your endless enthusiasm and dedication. Thank you to Dina Sherman for all your magic in connecting books with the outside world. Thank you to Emily Meehan and the team at Hyperion for everything.
Thank you to Lee Kelly, Anna-Marie McLemore, Jen Brooks, and Charlotte Huang for your thoughtfulness and feedback on earlier versions of this story, and for encouraging me to believe there really was a story here. A million thanks to Mark O’Brien, Eric Smith, Ann Jacobus, Meredith Ireland, Tim Kim, and Sabaa Tahir for sharing your experience and expertise. And I am endlessly grateful and lucky to be a part of this writing community—thank you, thank you to all the incredible friends and colleagues I’ve made through it.
Thank you to all the librarians, educators, and booksellers for creating a literary universe for kids who so deeply need it right now, and for letting me be a part of it.
Thank you forever to all my friends and family, near and far, and to my church for the constant reminder and proof that there is beauty and hope in the world, and that it’s worth telling about. (Also, for the group texts that keep me sane.)
For my family—thank you for all the traditions and values and inside jokes that make up the stories of who we are and who we come from. To my grandmothers, Helen Loy and Marge Gilbert, thank you for creating and shaping our families, for a lifetime of stories and support, and for always telling everyone who will listen about my books. To my parents, Kirk and Teri, thank you for always believing in me and for all your care and generosity in helping me balance the work of family and writing.
To Zach and Audrey, thank you for being the brightest, most blazing spots of joy in all my days, for giving me hope in the world and the future, and for happily letting me share so many stories with you. And to Jesse—thank you for everything, for the laughter and support and encouragement and steady belief in me, for our beautiful kids (who, admittedly, do not make books happen any sooner but who are funny and cute enough to make up for it anyway). My favorite story is our own.
KELLY LOY GILBERT believes deeply in the power of stories to illuminate a shared humanity and give voice to complex, broken pe
ople. She is the author of Conviction, a William C. Morris Award finalist, and lives in the SF Bay Area. She would be thrilled to hear from you on Twitter @KellyLoyGilbert or at www.KellyLoyGilbert.com.