“Nothing. I just…”
“You’re not chickening out, are you?” She turns the bottle around so she can read the label. “It says it’s premium. This is the good stuff.”
I squint at the bottle. “Where’d you get that?”
“Someone left it at your welcome-back party. Totally unopened. Amazing, right?” She slips it back into her duffel, under her pajamas, and shoves the bag next to my bed. “Thanks for letting me come over. It feels good here. Cozy.”
“Mom and Saul missed having you here,” I say, linking my arm through hers as we head downstairs. Our bare feet press down on the squeaky hardwood floor as we walk in tandem.
“I missed this,” DeeDee says as we step into the kitchen.
The room is heady with basil leaves and olive oil and fresh dough, which means only one thing: DeeDee’s pilgrimage has warranted homemade pizza from Saul. He makes his own sauce, too, with tomatoes Mrs. Maldonado brings over by the bagful from her garden. The basil grows in a small plot of our own out back, across the yard from the tree house.
My whole family is hanging out in the kitchen: Mom carefully ladling sauce over a circle of rolled-out dough while Lionel and Saul line the top of the island with sausage and cheese and pepperoni and vegetables. We finish making the pizzas together, and DeeDee’s right—there is something nice about being with my family and her like this. These were the sorts of moments that made me ache with loneliness at Dinsmore: tripping over each other in a too-crowded, flour-dusted kitchen that smells like the very essence of good food.
After dinner, DeeDee insists on helping clean up, even after my parents protest more than once. Maybe she’s trying to solidify her spot on their good side, and I glance at her over the dual sinks as we rinse plates, wondering just how drunk she plans to get this evening.
Ten minutes later we’re up in the tree with the bottle of rum, transported through the house wrapped in a blanket.
“God, it’s weird being back up here.” DeeDee walks around the small room to inspect what’s changed and what’s stayed the same since she was last here many months ago. She opens the cabinet that Saul built into the far wall and looks at the stack of dusty board games hanging out above Lionel’s and my old sleeping bags. “Do you guys still come up all the time?”
“Not as much as we used to.” I settle onto the futon and place the blanket-wrapped bottle to the side. “It’s all kind of different since—”
Just then, I hear Lionel’s feet coming up the tree, and his flame-colored head pokes through the doorway a few seconds later. I asked DeeDee when we were washing dishes if she’d mind his company. I didn’t think she would, but I wanted to check, and she said, “Why are you even asking?” like the best friend that she is. And he decided to come up, which isn’t the choice I expected but the one I was hoping for. He’s comfortable with DeeDee, and maybe starting small is the best way to reintegrate into our group of friends.
Lionel’s eyes find the alcohol as soon as he’s in the room. The blanket has slipped away, revealing part of the label. “Looks like I showed up at just the right time.”
The first thing that comes to mind is his meds, but then I remember. And I know he’s not taking them again, because I check my tissue box every day, and they were still lodged in the bottom before DeeDee came over.
“We’re drinking because Alicia is being crazy,” she says, joining me on the futon.
I stiffen, waiting to see if Lion will be offended. Crazy is the word he always uses when he talks about how other people view him, and I know how much he hates that label.
But he doesn’t say anything or even flinch, and Dee tosses the blanket that we brought from inside over her legs. Los Angeles cools down after the sun has set, even in the summer. The two windows are sealed shut, but a chilly breeze winds through the cracks of the tree house. It’s nothing compared to the bone-chilling winters of Massachusetts, but it is enough to make me ask Lion to pass over a sleeping bag.
He retrieves them both and shakes the dust out in the doorway before he slides mine over. I unzip the musty cotton roll; it’s pink and purple and printed with sparkly-horned unicorns. Lion spreads his out, Transformers splashed against a navy-blue background, and sits on top of it, looking expectantly at the bottle.
DeeDee pops it open, taking a long swig before she passes it down to him. “Oh my God,” she says, breathless after she swallows. “That’s horrible. We need a chaser.”
“Well, I’ve never had it, so I want the full experience.” Lion sips, raises an eyebrow, and then takes a drink as long as DeeDee’s. He gasps a bit and squeezes his eyes shut, but overall he takes it like a champ and I’m impressed, considering he doesn’t have any practice. He moves his shoulders back and forth like he can shake the taste out of his mouth. “Fuck, that is horrible.”
“The worst is over,” I say, remembering what Iris told me when we drank together for the first time. I didn’t think she could possibly be right, as medicinally awful as the vodka had tasted. But each drink went down smoother after that first one, every single time, even if I never did grow to like the taste.
I grab the bottle, tip it back, and send the honey-colored fire tearing down my throat. This particular bottle of rum is so not fucking around. But I swallow it down; stick out my tongue and cough a bit as I hand it back to Dee.
“So, what’s the deal with Alicia?” I ask as she rests the bottle in her lap. And I’m so glad I’m with my best friend and brother, because none of us are trying to impress each other. Lionel appears just as relieved that we’re taking a break before round two. I’m already starting to feel fuzzy. “What did she do to earn your wrath?”
DeeDee traces her fingers around the edges of the label. “I want…” She pauses to glance at Lion but must quickly determine it’s okay for him to hear this, because she blurts, “I want to date other people and Alicia isn’t up for it.”
“Why don’t you just break up with her?” Lionel’s voice is clear but looser than normal.
“That’s the thing—I don’t want to break up with her. I want her to see other people, too.”
“Like an open relationship?” I say as the rum makes a slow, warm trip through my stomach and legs and arms, all the way to my fingertips and toes.
DeeDee’s cheeks are flushed when I look over. “Yeah, I guess… if that’s what you want to call it. I just don’t want to be tied down to one person. I’m not even seventeen yet.”
“What brought this on?” I raise my knees to my chest under the sleeping bag, pulling it tighter around me. “Do you like someone else?”
“I don’t know.” Dee shrugs. “I’m always looking at other girls, wondering what it would be like with them. And it doesn’t feel right to hold her back, so I wanted to see if we could just keep things chill for a while. She completely freaked out.”
“Doesn’t that kind of freak you out, though? The thought of her being with other people when she’s not with you?”
“Not really,” Dee says, and I believe her. “God, sometimes I wish I were bi. Like, I definitely don’t want to be with any dudes, no offense”—she looks at Lionel, who holds up his hands as if to say he gets it—“but it’d be so nice to just go back to a guy when you got tired of being with a girl. You’d never be bored.”
I stare at her, waiting for the laugh, the one that makes it clear she was joking. It never comes. “Um, Dee, you know that’s, like, one hundred percent not what being bi is.”
“So, it’s not about liking guys and girls?” She takes another drink of rum and Lion passes so now it’s my turn, but I’m already feeling so hot inside that I don’t know if another drink is a good idea.
She knows I’ve told Lionel, but I’m uncomfortable talking about this with him now. I still want to know if Rafaela would make me feel better than when I was with Iris, or if being with her wouldn’t feel as exciting as when I’m with Emil, or if she’d make me feel something new altogether. But he likes her. He called her two days after they met, and they have a date t
his weekend. I haven’t seen him so excited about anyone—anything, really—since he met Grayson, and I can’t take that away from him.
“That’s part of it, but… it’s not about getting to switch between guys and girls when I’m tired of one of them. It’s about being open to whatever happens with either one.”
“I know a few girls who said they were bi and then, like, six months later they only wanted to date guys,” she says. Her voice isn’t mean, but she’s challenging me, and I don’t like it. “What if you’re just experimenting?”
“What if I am, DeeDee?” I don’t mean to sound defensive, but I don’t appreciate the pressure, especially after she seemed so chill about it earlier. Maybe I’m bi, maybe I’m queer, maybe I’ll never like another girl besides Iris and Rafaela. I’m not totally clear on my identity yet, and maybe DeeDee wouldn’t be so skeptical if I told her about Rafaela. But I don’t need her telling me what I am and what that means, best friend or not.
“Sorry.” Her voice is unmistakably contrite, and I feel bad about snapping at her, especially in front of Lionel. “I’m just mad about Alicia. And this rum is really strong. And I thought—well, after you told me what happened with Emil…”
Lionel is holding back a smile, because when I returned to his car after delivering the soup to Emil, he took one look at me and said, “You were totally making out.” I tried to protest, my hands fumbling with the takeout containers as I slipped into the passenger seat, but he knew he was right. Emil had walked me to the foot of the stairs and Catherine, grinning at us both, had said in a knowing voice that she was happy to see how much better he was feeling.
“I don’t want to talk about Emil.”
Not because I would take back what happened between us—I’ve thought about that afternoon so often since it happened, I’m embarrassed—but because I don’t know what to do about my feelings. We hang out this summer, and then what? We have only a couple more months before school starts up again. I’m due back at Dinsmore in the fall, but of course I’ve thought about what will happen if I don’t go back.
With my job and Lionel’s therapy and the meds they think he’s taking, Mom and Saul have no reason to think I’m missing out on my life or making his problems my own. They’ve already admitted they didn’t handle things so well last year; I probably wouldn’t have to fight so hard to stay. But then I might never see Iris again. And I don’t want that, either. Because a voice I keep trying to squash deep down in me is wondering if I could ever be truly happy with Emil or Rafaela or anyone else if I never make things right with Iris.
“Little, seriously, what’s your deal with him? You like him. Own it.” Lionel’s words slur just a little. He’s had only a couple of swigs, but the alcohol is hitting him harder because he’s new to it.
And he’s chewing at the skin around his thumbs. I watch for a few moments before I swat his hand away from his face, and my stomach twitches as I wonder if this is the sign I’ve been waiting for. If that little tic, a common bad habit, was the switch that officially flipped him from Medicated to Nonmedicated Lionel. He frowns and swats back at my own wrist but he stops chewing his thumb.
“It’s not Emil. I like him. It’s…” I swallow hard. I’m with two of my favorite people in the world, but sometimes that makes saying uncomfortable things harder. I worry that they’ll judge me, yell at me, tell me I’m a bad person. It’s hard enough for me not to believe it myself sometimes. “I was a real shit to Iris before we left Massachusetts.”
DeeDee looks at me. “What do you mean? Like, the breakup? Breakups are hard. Honestly, they should be outlawed. They’re practically inhumane.”
I forgot how much Dee talks when she’s been drinking, how her soft voice gets raspy with overuse.
“We didn’t break up,” I say. “Technically.”
Because technically, Iris and I were never a couple. Not in the traditional sense. We were locked doors and long, slow kisses that tasted of raspberry vodka and promises to keep whatever happened in our dorm between us.
Dee and Lion are staring at me and I feel sick to my stomach. I haven’t had that much to drink. But it’s not the rum. It’s the fact that I’ve never mentioned this aloud to anyone since I left Dinsmore, and talking about it makes it real again. Harder to forget.
“I didn’t stick up for her… for us,” I say, not meeting their eyes.
“What do you mean?” DeeDee says again. From the corner of my eye, I see her head tilt.
“They wrote on our door. The word dykes,” I say, grabbing the bottle from the center of our triangle. I take a long swig and it burns my tongue but it doesn’t hurt so much going down this time. My body takes well to the liquor—to its warmth and the silent but steadfast promise that whatever I say out loud next won’t hurt as much as it did at the time. “In black marker. They could’ve written it on our dry-erase board, but I guess they didn’t want us to forget.”
And then I tell them the whole story. DeeDee interrupts a few times to express disgust, saying she hoped we knocked those bitches out for what they did. But Lionel listens silently the whole time, until I’m finished.
“How’d you leave things with her?” he asks as he takes another turn with the bottle.
I am completely fuzzy now, and when I move my head to look at him, that part of the room takes a few extra seconds to align.
“She slept in the common room until we left,” I say, remembering the first time it happened, when I woke in the middle of the night to find her gone and stumbled down the hall until I saw the faint glow of the television and Iris curled up under her yellow quilt on the couch. “And I let myself be off the hook.”
“I can’t believe you went to such a homophobic school,” DeeDee says, shaking her head.
“It wasn’t, though. Lots of people were out and there’s a gay-straight alliance and… it wasn’t even everyone on our floor. But the bigots made sure we all knew how they felt. Iris and I were new to Dinsmore and they’d been there a whole year before us and… it sounds stupid now, but it was easier not to stand up to them.”
“Well, I still can’t believe they treated you like that.”
“I can’t believe I treated Iris like that.” I work my fingers around the edge of a faded unicorn hoof on the sleeping bag. “She was always nice to me. Always.”
And patient and sweet. She was good to me, and a good person in general, and I didn’t return the favor.
“She’ll get over it. I feel like it sort of comes with the territory—dating a closeted person. You can’t take it personally.”
“But you’ve never dated anyone who was closeted.”
“I might someday.” She shrugs. “I mean, yeah, it wasn’t ideal, or all that nice, but she gave you her blessing. Sometimes you can’t think too hard about it when someone hands you a gift like that. Get out unscathed while you can, you know?”
It might be easier not to think about it, to just let it go because Iris did. She never mentioned it again, and when we parted ways, she was kind. She told me to have a good summer, that she hoped everything worked out okay with my brother.
But then I remember how much I hated not being open about my Judaism. We may be on the more liberal side of the religion, but it’s a part of me and, especially, my connection to Saul, and I’m proud of that. Going back to Dinsmore and continuing to hide this other part of myself might actually kill my soul.
“It was a shitty thing to do,” I say. “Iris shouldn’t have to go through that. Not with me.”
“Sometimes, when I’m getting all down on myself…” Lionel pauses to shove his hair out of his eyes, a task that suddenly requires absolute concentration. He begins again: “Sometimes Dr. Tarrasch makes me repeat this thing. She makes me say, I’m doing the best I can. I thought it was corny, but I don’t know. It kind of works. Nobody’s ever trying to do their worst, I guess.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to do the right thing.
then.
Each year, our famil
y goes to a Dodgers game to kick off the summer. None of us is a huge baseball fan, but it’s fun to go as a family, and even I start to get into it once we’re there, with the Dodger Dogs and the songs and all the fans dressed in bright blue and white.
Lionel seems particularly excited this year. He keeps talking about it to our friends, though none of them care because I’m pretty sure most people in that group have never attended a professional sporting event in their lives. He even bought us matching Dodgers shirts, the jersey kind that button up the front.
“Little. Little! Oh, good, you’re wearing it,” he said—or practically shouted—as he entered my room without knocking, something he’s been doing more and more often. I’m trying not to let it bother me, because it means he’s out of bed and talking to people and not looking at me with lifeless eyes. It means he’s finally over Grayson, and we can get the old Lionel back.
The shirt is a nice gesture, but I can’t see myself wearing it again after today. When I ask Lionel how much it cost, worried that he’s spent too much on something I don’t even want, he waves me off, insisting, “We can’t just show up looking like casual fans!”
We always have before, and I don’t know what’s different this year, but before I can ask, he’s running through the Dodgers’ entire season of stats with fervor, occasionally interrupting himself with a non sequitur or to exclaim about a completely average fact that doesn’t deserve the excitement. I try to stop him a couple of times, to ask if he’s okay, but he’s too far down the Dodgers rabbit hole. He’s pacing my room as he talks, picking things up and walking around with them and putting them back in the wrong spot.
I’m relieved when Mom calls up to us from the middle floor. It feels claustrophobic in my room, like I’m being pushed out by Lion and his increasingly intense thoughts. He goes ahead of me down the stairs and I wonder, for a moment, if he’s taken something—a pill, maybe, or even coke, though he once told me he has no intention of putting anything up his nose. But when I look at his hands, at the skin torn ragged around his thumbs—so badly in some places that I can tell they’ve been bleeding—I wonder if it means something.
Little & Lion Page 12