We Are Lost and Found

by Helene Dunbar

  I know, Connor honey, she says. I know. I know. Don’t cry.

  I retreat to my room, not wanting to intrude. Not sure, even now, how to merge the cocky version of my brother with the one who still needs to cry on the phone to his mother.

  Sunday night, I wake up to the smell of smoke curling through my window, which I’d opened so I could listen to the sounds of the rain merge with the drone of the city. I crawl over and stick my head out.

  Are you trying to drown your sorrows? I ask James.

  I think mine have flotation devices, he responds, and shakes water out of his long hair.

  I pull my head back, and he climbs in after me, shivering.

  So the weekend was that good? I ask.

  James helps himself to the towel from the back of my door and a sweatshirt from my dresser.

  My father was almost mauled by a bear, James says. He made the mistake of getting between it and its lunch.

  But he’s okay?

  James strips—I forget how thin he is under the shoulder pads and the scarfs and the jewelry—and shrugs into the Clash shirt that Connor put aside for me at the store. London Calling. Pretend you’re a rebel, he’d said, and I didn’t bother to figure out what he meant.

  James doesn’t speak until he’s lit another cigarette and opened the window again to blow the smoke out.

  We wait while a symphony of sirens plays and then streams away into the night.

  My father is fine. My father is always fine. Of course, he neglected to bring me the one photo I asked him for, but what else is new?

  What was the photo?

  Oh, he says, waving his free hand, naked without his rings. Something for the new show. But that isn’t really the point. Honestly, I think he’d be way more interested in me if I were a hyena or mountain lion. If I were something carefree and feral.

  After the rain stops and James warms up and leaves, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. At the tiny blue star I’ve glued in the corner.

  And I wonder, is everyone a mass of insecurity? Even James?

  Our career assessments come back, and Becky and I wait until we meet up with James after school to open the envelopes.

  According to this, I should either become a stewardess or join the military, Becky says. What the heck is that about?

  Did you say you love travel? I ask.

  Well, there wasn’t a box for “get me the hell out of here.”

  I stare at my report for a long time. Long enough that she grabs it out of my hands and starts laughing.

  Human services? What the hell is that?

  That, James says from behind the new edition of Backstage, means that Michael should consider a career in psychology. Or social work.

  The pages rustle.

  Or, he continues, just write a whole lot of songs that people conceive babies to.

  I grab the tabloid from him.

  Did you ever take one of these? I ask.

  James runs a hand through his hair and stretches his head backward like a cat in the sun.

  I want to change the world, he says, horrified. I want be true to myself. I have no wish to be in a box.

  Don’t worry about that, Becky smirks. There probably isn’t even a box big enough to hold your jewelry collection.

  It’s easy to coast during the day. Wake up. Go to school. Come home. Do homework. Go to sleep. Get up and do it again.

  At night, when I can’t sleep, and the sirens don’t want to quit, or when my dad is yelling and my mom is trying to calm him down without pissing him off more, I lie here like a bystander, watching anxieties parade through my head.

  First in line: Gabriel. Is this what Connor felt for Tony? This rush and hum that takes over my whole body when I even think of him? Is this why my brother did the loudest, the most public thing he could think of for a relationship he knew probably wasn’t going to last? Because he couldn’t hide the enormity of it anymore? Because it was so unfair that he’d even have to try?

  Next up is Becky and how she deserves to be happy, but never really gets there, with her mom being one more thing she needs to take care of, and Andy never being around for her. I hate that I don’t know how to help her.

  James says he wants to change the world and that’s fine because he probably will. When has James ever failed at anything? Except there’s something…off…with him these days. Some wall has surrounded him that I don’t know how to scale.

  And at the end, I’m left only with this: I don’t know what I want to do with my life.

  And that might be the most terrifying thing of all.

  My brother wants a loan.

  My father says he’d rather buy Connor a gun that he can use if he wants to keep shooting his mouth off.

  My mother says he doesn’t mean that.

  My father says is doesn’t matter whether he means it because they don’t have money to lend, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be loaning it to Connor.

  My mother reminds him that Connor is his flesh and blood.

  My father says something about the “fag part” not coming from his side of the family, and I stick my head out my bedroom window and replace the yelling with the sound of trucks and car horns and the music from the Italian place across the street. If this is all there is to being an adult: fighting and hating and working to pay the bills, I’m not sure I want any part of it.

  Part Two

  The music comes and the music goes.

  Sitting in American history class, I’m brimming with notes, overflowing with melody, spilling lyrics onto my textbook about the Civil War.

  At home, my guitar is silent. Talk to me, I beg. Talk to me.

  When I complain to James, he says, That’s how you know you’re an artist, Michael; the muse takes you as her fickle lover.

  He’s so serious. So intense. So driven.

  He’s some sort of prodigy. Some sort of genius. So hot.

  These are the things said by people who don’t know James well.

  But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

  There are bigger clubs than The Echo. Clubs that are more popular. Clubs that draw the rich kids with their rich clothes and their rich drugs. There are clubs that are wilder and dirtier; clubs where broken glass is swept off the floors more nights than not. There are clubs for girls, and clubs for boys, and clubs for those at every point in between.

  There are the clubs that Connor goes to: pills on tongues, sex in balconies with boys whose names you never need to know, the strange freedom that comes from anonymity and loss of control. Clubs I’m intrigued by, but can’t work up the courage to even walk into.

  And it’s okay because I feel like myself in The Echo. I feel like I’m home.

  I lean against the speaker. Bauhaus is droning out “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and I can feel the scream of the bats in the treble, the dripping of fangs in the bass.

  The notes are loud enough to make my teeth ache, concentrated enough to make me feel drunk. I close my eyes and the room spins and my head spins and I give in and let it, and then I wonder if this is what hard drugs feel like and if Nancy Reagan will tell us to “Just Say No” to music because nothing this good could possibly be legal.

  Gabriel’s arms, sudden around my waist.

  Gabriel’s breath in my ear.

  He fakes biting my neck as the singer repeats “Undead” over and over. I turn my head, bare my skin. Open myself up. Finally understand why people write love songs. Lust songs. Whatever.

  Run away with me, he whispers in my ear.

  My stomach leaps. I know he can’t mean it. We’ve only seen each other at the club. Haven’t exchanged phone numbers or addresses. Had we gone to school together, I’d have known him for only a week instead of seeing him a few times stretched over a couple of months.

  But a part of me is already
packed and out the door.

  Instead of running away, we dance.

  Whatever else we have or don’t have…

  Whatever else we do when we aren’t here…

  Whatever else we dream about or want to escape from…

  …this rhythm has infected us.

  When the room is too crowded, too sticky, too smoky, when the music turns to bubblegum pop and the floor fills with girls in leg warmers and boys in Chinos, we maneuver to the wall. Sweaty, spent, and, for a minute, satisfied.

  Gabriel shakes his damp hair and smiles at me. Time stops.

  Becky made me memorize a list of things she thinks I need to find out about Gabriel before I let myself fall too hard for him. His favorite color. His favorite band. What he does when he isn’t at the club. Whether he’s actually looking for a boyfriend. Whether he wants to be monogamous.

  But her questions aren’t my questions, and all I need to know is this: When he smiles at me as if he recognizes something within me that I’ve never said out loud; when my vision narrows so that the only thing I can see is him; when he makes me laugh and then my laughing makes him laugh…it’s too late for the rest to matter.

  How do you write a song? he asks me. How do you come up with the ideas?

  I consider the hours I spend moving my fingers over the frets, listening for a tune somewhere inside me.

  The time it takes to run to Manny’s Music and buy new strings.

  The balls of paper stacked in the garbage can when I’m trying to write a lyric.

  And I shrug.

  Gabriel tells me he likes to hang out in Washington Square Park on Sundays and watch the boys playing chess. He doesn’t ask me to meet him, but also doesn’t tell me not to.

  When I ask their advice later, James says to go, that Gabriel wouldn’t have shared the information unless he was testing to see if I’d show up.

  Becky says to stay away. That sometimes wanting is better than having—whatever that means—and I’m starting to wonder if what works for her and Andy is really what will work for me.

  And no way am I asking Connor.

  I take the subway to West 4th and then get off and grab the uptown train, heading home without even leaving the station.

  Not good to be too overeager, but I spend a whole week second-guessing myself, anyhow.

  James says to ask Gabriel for his phone number. James says to give him mine.

  James says that I’m driving him up the wall by looking at the clock and pacing through the days. I ask him what I’m going to do if Gabriel calls and my dad is the one to pick up the phone.

  James chews his lip. What did Connor do? he asks.

  I glare at him and say, Well, yeah, look how that turned out.

  Becky is working her way through a pack of clove cigarettes. When I tell her she might think about cutting back, she says, I don’t really smoke them. Sometimes I just light them like incense, and sometimes I just kind of suck on them for the flavor. I used to smoke them, but they made my gums bleed, and my mom was getting mad at me, so I stopped.

  Now that Mom’s using again, I don’t really care what she thinks, she says. But I still don’t really smoke them.

  I never ask Connor about his phone call with my mother, and I don’t ask why he’d need a loan because my brother is, I guess, entitled to some privacy. Instead, I catch him midbite at our Wednesday dinner and ask, Did you ever think about just sitting down and telling Mom and Dad you were gay instead of being such a drama queen about it and pulling that stunt at graduation?

  Are you high? he sputters.

  I wish, but no.

  Connor puts his burger back on his plate and takes a deep breath. Okay, he says. Just for shits and grins, let’s walk through this. I could have called a family meeting, but Mom would have cried and Dad would have dragged me to my room and pulled out my suitcase and shoved all sorts of useless crap in it while telling me I was a waste of plasma. Then he would have thrown both me and the suitcase out the door and told me not to come back.

  Isn’t that what happened, anyhow? I ask.

  Yeah, he says and shrugs. But at least this way, I had witnesses.

  I met someone, I tell Connor, to see how the words feel in my mouth, to make it real.

  Boy or girl, he asks, his face shoved into the menu as if he hasn’t been reading it since he was thirteen.

  His name is Gabriel, I say.

  Connor explodes in a laugh. Like the angel? he asks. Like the one that blows…

  Stop, I cut him off before he takes the joke to where I know he’s going, because I don’t think “trumpet” is what he has in mind, and Connor never did learn to keep his voice down in public.

  Besides, I say, getting in my own jab, who are you to talk, dating someone named Destiny?

  I’m thinking of taking driver’s ed next semester, I tell my father.

  My father says no before I even get the whole sentence out. Then he says, What? You wanna be a cab driver or something? Forget it, I’m not buying you a car.

  I wasn’t asking you to buy me a car, I protest.

  Then why waste your time and my money by taking driving lessons?

  Because I’d like to get a car someday.

  Then someday you can learn to drive it.

  I haven’t visited the fear room in a while, and when I do, the paper has been changed. I’m never sure if the librarians throw it out or the school counselors lurk around until they see someone writing something truly awful and then drag the student into their offices.

  I’m disappointed not to see anything from the person I was talking to before, so I decide to start the conversation this time.

  I met someone, I write. Someone I really like and…

  I leave it hanging on an ellipsis because I don’t know what the “and” is.

  …and I feel more alive when I’m with him than I ever have before?

  …and I don’t want to end up out on my own like my brother?

  …and I’m afraid?

  Look what I got? Becky dangles a key in front of me the next day while we’re sitting in Mr. Solomon’s class waiting for the sub to figure out how to work the overhead projector.

  What is it? I ask.

  It’s for the bomb shelter.

  Bomb shelter?

  She explains that when our school was built in the fifties, a bomb shelter was put in and stocked with canned goods and supplies in the event of nuclear war.

  So…do you know something I don’t know? Are the Russians attacking?

  Becky smiles. No, I’m writing about the shelter for the Spirit. But the key also opens the door to the roof.

  Oh?

  Oh.

  We hang out in the school newspaper office and wait until after the last bell. Then we walk through the theater and climb up a ladder onto the catwalk where Becky uses her key to open a door in the ceiling.

  We stand on the tarred roof. From here, you can see Central Park. The Hudson. Lincoln Center.

  Becks, this is…

  Yeah.

  We dangle our feet off the edge. Lie back and stare at the clouds.

  My mom hasn’t been home in two days, she says.

  Oh, Becks…

  The worst part is I’m not sure I care. I mean, of course I do, but I don’t think I can save her. And I have to focus on school or I’m going to end up trapped like she is.

  I reach for her hand and ask, Is there anything I can do?

  Take care of James, she says. He seems off these days.

  James?

  I’m worried about him. Andy’s mom was telling me stories about the patients coming into St. Vincent’s and… Oh, Michael. I’m worried about him and worried about this plague and his theater friends, and I’m worried he’s going to meet someone who doesn’t even know they’re sick and… I wish
the two of you were together.

  I take a deep breath. Then another. I get that she’s worried about James, but her flood of words feels bigger than that somehow.

  Is Andy’s mom okay? I ask. Is she…scared?

  Becky sits up and says, Of course she’s scared, but she’s volunteering to work in those wards; some of the nurses won’t even go into them. I don’t know what she’s saying to Andy, but she keeps telling me not to assume that being a girl is going to keep me safe.

  We’re quiet for a long time after that until Becky shades her eyes and stares down at me. She says, I lit a candle for James in church last night.

  Becks, about this whole church thing, I start as I sit up.

  She grabs my hand again. You have your music, she says. Your dancing. Even your brother. Andy is always busy these days, I spend more time talking to his mom than to him. My mom is falling apart. I’m not sure how much I have. At least let me have God.

  I squeeze her hand and stay silent. Even I’m not stupid enough to argue with God.

  On Friday, I’m back at the club. Dancing with Gabriel. Losing myself in his eyes.

  From the DJ booth Danni plays The Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed.” I’d forgotten how sad the lyrics of this song were. Lost love and misplaced lust. But it’s still damn good to dance to.

  I love the song enough to try to ignore the implications. Ignore the heat, and the need, and the invitation that’s sitting on my lips.

  Because we can’t just go to bed, or anyplace else, really. My bed is in my parents’ house. A fortress of hate.

  But there’s a pressure that’s building, building, building. And Gabriel dances in front of me, white shirt pulling tight over his biceps, 501s hugging his ass, sweat curling his hair right above his collar.

  Next is Berlin’s “Sex (I’m A…)” and it’s too much. I cough an apology to Gabriel and head back to the DJ booth. Danni pretends I’m not there.

  Can you dial it back? I yell over Terri Nunn’s percussive orgasmic notes.

  Danni takes off his headphones. Don’t know what you mean, Michael. I’m just playing what’s making them dance.

  I give up and get a Coke. Watch Gabriel watching me while I try to ignore the music, which is impossible when it’s blasting loud enough to shake the walls. When it’s making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. When it’s echoing this hunger inside of me.