• • •
Sunday morning my cell phone rings while I’m chatting online with Tristan, having a serious and complex discussion about what pair of boots Tristan should ask for for his birthday. This is why I don’t look at my phone before I answer.
“Hey, Melanie, what’s up?”
My stomach does a skipping flip. “Oh—hi, Damon. How are—how are you?”
Great. I sound like I’ve just learned English.
“Pretty good, though things could be better,” he says. “You know how they could be better?”
hey, i asked you a question, my chat window beeps. where’d you go?
I minimize the window. Tristan will understand. You are always allowed to ditch me for a hot boy, Tristan told me once. Unless you’re stealing my boyfriend. Then we’ll have to have words.
“How could your Sunday be better?” I ask, recovering in an admirable fashion. “Do tell.”
“You could hang out with me later.”
“Later?”
“Around, oh, twenty minutes from now.”
“Twenty minutes? Are you serious?”
Oh, the presumption. But like I’m going to say no.
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“You want to go to a movie or something?” I ask. That would be okay. Low pressure. Not many opportunities for conversation.
“Meet me at the zoo, the north entrance on Connecticut.”
“But I—”
“Oh, and bring good shoes.”
“What are you—”
My phone’s already gone dead. I stare at it for a moment before slipping it into my pocket, then yanking on my sneakers.
Let them in, Melly—
But as I walk to the zoo, I find myself considering the possibilities that might await me there. Damon could be crazy! The National Zoo on a Sunday doesn’t strike me as a particularly auspicious place to carve someone up, though. Too many tourists and babies in strollers.
Maybe he has a weird giraffe fetish.
Maybe he’s like every other teenage boy on the face of the earth and thinks it’s hilarious to freak people out with the giant boa constrictor in the reptile house that only eats whole live mice and takes days to digest them, lying coiled up and enormous in its cage with a lump in the middle of its body.
I shudder. Now I’m officially freaked out, and I haven’t even gotten to the zoo yet. Awesome.
I want to seem cool and smart and witty with Damon, to act like hot boys invite me to the zoo all the time: Oh yeah, whatever, this is what I always do on Sunday afternoons. But I’m not the actor, Damon is. Mostly I’m petrified, because Damon is hot, and I’m clumsy and awkward and not nearly hot enough. I’m not my mom. I’m still that girl, the one trying to blend into corners. Don’t be fooled, Damon! I want to tell him. Just because my hair is streaked red doesn’t mean I’m hot.
All of these things make me want to turn on my heel and run, run all the way back home and climb into my bed under the covers and lie there for the rest of the day feeling like a loser.
But I refuse to be that lame, dammit. I may be a spaz, but I am not that much of a pussy.
Damon’s standing near the entranceway beneath the iron arch that proclaims National Zoo in large baroque letters. He’s got his hands stuffed into the pockets of a navy blue windbreaker and he’s looking at the ground, his dark hair messy. I tuck a thumb into my belt loop, tugging up my jeans—not even the cutest ones I own. I wish I was wearing something nicer, something tighter or more low-cut, but he only gave me twenty minutes and—
Then Damon looks up and sees me and his mouth tips into a lazy grin, and suddenly I don’t wish that at all.
“What’s goin’ on, girl?” he says as I approach.
“Not much, not much,” I say.
He watches me with his pretty eyes. He doesn’t look away when I look at him; he just stares, holding my gaze. Most people don’t like making eye contact, but Damon doesn’t seem to mind. People who look into your eyes are more likely to tell the truth, Tristan told me once. He’d been watching FBI documentaries, so Lord knows, but maybe. Maybe it’s true.
“So where are we going?” I ask. “I’ve been to the zoo before, you know. The pandas don’t hold quite the same mystique as they did when I was four years old.”
“Oh,” Damon says, “we’re not going to the zoo.”
What the fuck.
“C’mon,” Damon says, and tugs on my sleeve.
I don’t know why I follow without protest or objection, but I do. It’s like I’m in a daze. I follow him as he leads me past the tapirs, past the monkey house and the gift shop with the world’s largest supply of stuffed animals and books on the mating habits of lizards and the different patterns of leopard spots, past the food stands serving funnel cake and lemonade, past about a hundred thousand screaming, crying, shouting children. We stumble down a hill off the main path, and all of a sudden we’re in the woods behind the zoo, D.C.’s little section of preserved wilderness: Rock Creek Park.
My mom loved this park. She loved how green it was, how the light cut through the trees and made patterns on the forest floor.
Feeling the carpet of green mush under my feet and watching the tree branches sway in the wind reminds me of those times when I felt like I was one with my surroundings, like my arms were streaked with the veins of leaves, like I could photosynthesize light into energy by standing beneath the sun. Before the hospital became my second home, I would come here all the time when I needed to think, to process. I’d crouch on a mossy spot and draw, often trees because they were there right above me. The endlessly varied shapes of trees, no two the same. Every single one with a different story.
I didn’t worry about anything else then. Not when I was drawing.
So how do you stop caring, then?
I don’t know. You just do.
“I thought we could try this again,” Damon says. “With less tears and weirdness.”
I realize: This is where we met.
I turn in a circle, watching the light filter through the branches in the canopy above, coming down in sparkling sheets.
“It’s so alive, you know?” Damon says. “Everything around here is alive.”
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
“I used to come here with Carlos a lot,” Damon says. “It felt like an escape, being here. Like we were—I don’t know. Explorers. That probably sounds mad stupid.”
“No,” I say. “It is like a whole other world. It feels like you’re not even in the city anymore.”
“Yeah,” Damon says. He looks distant.
“It’s a good place to take pictures too,” I say, hoping to bring him back. “You always have that camera.”
He’s got the camera with him right now, slung over his shoulder.
Damon looks startled, but then he recovers.
“It is,” he says. “I think—I take pictures ’cause it makes you look close.”
Look close. Maybe that’s what Damon’s trying to do when he watches me so carefully, trying to frame me, break me down to my parts. I like watching people too, sometimes, in the restaurant or on the bus or in Dupont or at school, taking them apart and putting them back together piece by piece. Observing the way a man twists his wrist or stretches his arm, the way a child’s legs scissor when they run, the way a woman bites her nails or adjusts her shoe strap or flips her hair.
My mother used to tell me that. Look close.
Damon sits down on a rock and gestures for me to do the same. When I’m situated, he says, “So your dad owns the restaurant, but where’s your mom?”
Gone to a better place?
No. Just gone.
“She’s dead,” I say. “She died this summer. Cancer.”
Damon sucks in a breath. “Oh.”
“Yeah. It’s
kind of a conversation stopper.”
“So when I saw you before—when you were crying—”
I nod and scratch the toe of my shoe in the dirt, saying nothing.
“I never know what to say except that I’m—I’m sorry. That must be rough. I can’t even really imagine how rough that is.”
The silence hangs over us for a full minute, and in the background I can hear the swish of the wind through the trees and the muted rumble of traffic from the parkway, a reminder of the city that’s never far away. I think I understand what’s meant by a “pregnant pause” now. The moment feels like it’s swollen with something that’s waiting to come out, that from this moment, something should be born.
“You okay?” Damon asks, and his hand falls on my back, landing between my shoulder blades.
He’s touching me. He asked me a question. Shit. What question did he ask?
“I don’t know,” I say.
That may be the first time I’ve answered that question honestly since my mom died.
“You seem pretty together,” he says. “I mean, considering you lost your mother only this summer.”
“Yeah, well,” I start to say, then realize I don’t know what I want to say.
What was I supposed to do? Fall apart? That never seemed like an option, somehow. People do fall apart. I know that. The grief book certainly knows that. But I never saw it that way, never thought: I can be a mess. I’m allowed to be a mess. I know Mom wouldn’t have wanted that. If there was one thing my mother taught me and taught me well, it was how to hold myself together even when I feel broken and messy and awful, like a carton of eggs turned over on the kitchen floor, leaking sticky yolk into the grout between the tile.
“I don’t know if I can be okay right now,” I say. “You know?”
Damon looks at me, his eyes the green of fresh-cut grass.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
“Carlos,” I say. “You said he was—you said ‘was.’”
Damon looks up. His eyes have that faraway look they had at the restaurant when he slid the photograph across the table, the same look he had the first time we met.
The look he has as Othello, up on that stage.
“Yeah,” Damon says. “He was my best friend, but he’s gone now.”
There is a story there, I know it, and it’s a story I want him to tell. I want to ask him: How? How is he gone?
She loved me for the dangers I had passed.
I have so many questions, but I bite them back. Damon is staring at the ground like he wants to be under it.
Maybe words are overrated, and this is what we’re supposed to be doing right now, this and nothing else. I reach across the space between us and take Damon’s hand, feel his palm smooth against my own, and hold on.
DAMON
That show at the 9:30 Club, the first show we ever went to together . . . what was it, man? I don’t even remember what we went to see. I know it was all ages and we were thirteen and my mom dropped us off outside and she was freaked out, like, Don’t do anything stupid, don’t get mugged, don’t talk to anybody, don’t, don’t, don’t. And yeah, that neighborhood is not the best, but we laughed so hard after, you gasping out, Shit, dude, what if I want some water at the bar, can I ask the bartender or do I have to pull my glock?
I do remember. It was a hip-hop show, all bass and beats, and we got so close to the stage, our whole bodies vibrated with it. You kept your hand on my shoulder and mouthed all the words and afterward our T-shirts were sweated through from all the close bodies, the jumping up and down and dancing and screaming.
We have to do that again, you said, your voice hoarse, and we waited outside for my mom to pick us up, leaning against the wall. We watched people stream by all high off music, the sky above us dark and shimmering, raised voices disappearing into the night.
CHAPTER FIVE
I walk Melanie home. We don’t talk much. Mostly we look—not at each other, but around us at trees weeping leaves, shoppers getting in and out of cars with straining plastic grocery bags, people walking dogs on taut leashes, yelling at their kids. Sometimes we catch each other looking at the same things, and our eyes meet, and we smile.
“My house is this way,” she tells me, and leads me down a leafy, shaded block of modest homes. Her house is a bungalow, smaller than my family’s house, painted blue and white with a neatly groomed front lawn. It looks comfortable, plenty large enough for two people. Even, I suppose, for three.
“I like that place,” Melanie says.
I want to like it. I want to like it the way I used to like it, before—
“Thank you for today,” Melanie says, and takes my hand again. Her palm is cool against mine, her skin soft.
“Thank you,” I say.
Melanie tips her head to one side, looks at me with bright eyes, and smiles.
• • •
At play rehearsal the next day, I prepare in my usual way: Etta on my iPod, camera in my hands. I snap some photos of the partially constructed set, admiring the way it’s already coming together, pieces and fragments joining to create a complete picture.
Othello, however, remains in shards in my mind. I should have known that doing this play would make me angry. Othello is a play filled with anger, after all, a play about a man undone by his own anger and his inability to control or direct it. I’ve never thought of myself as an angry person, but now with each day that Mrs. McAvoy blocks out the play, I get more furious at the people who deceive Othello. The anger seeps into my performance and Mrs. McAvoy loves it, eats it up and eggs me on, tells me to “keep digging, keep pushing, honey!”
The cast seems to love it too. There’s nothing more surreal than Lacey Andrews hanging off my arm bubbling over with enthusiasm, telling me, “God, Damon, you’re so hot up there.”
People think you’re all sexy when you’re angry, Carlos told me once when we were washing his car, a beat-up truck he’d bought off his uncle for $500. What the hell is that about? Like anger is passion. Like anger is . . . sex.
Like anger is primitive, I replied. That’s why there’s all that crazy shit about how slaves were more sexually potent or whatever. More like animals.
Makes sense, kinda, Carlos said, flipping a dirty towel over his shoulder. I mean, the sex and anger part. Both things make us more conscious of how we’re like animals. Our base instincts and shit.
I wonder, now, what Carlos knew about his own instincts, about his own anger.
God. I wonder so many things.
When my thoughts twist into a mess at rehearsal, I find Melanie. On break we sit together backstage and chat about anything and nothing and everything in between.
“Peanut butter,” Melanie says.
“What?”
“If I had to live on one substance forever. Peanut butter.”
“Not chocolate? Wouldn’t you get all sticky from peanut butter?”
“What would you eat then, genius?”
“Macaroni and cheese.”
Melanie laughs. “That is not a single food.”
“It is the way my mom makes it.”
“I don’t know if I should be impressed or scared.”
“You should come by sometime,” I say. “Try it out.”
Oh, man. I think I just invited her over to my house.
“Well, you made it sound so appetizing . . .” Melanie jokes, and I bump her shoulder with mine.
“What’s going down back here, kids?” Tristan pokes his head around the curtain.
“Damon’s invading my personal space,” Melanie says.
“She likes it,” I say.
“Lies,” Melanie mutters.
“This makes me want to go to Venice,” Tristan says, tilting his head to one side to examine the scenery.
“You just like Italian boys,” Melanie retorts.<
br />
“That too,” Tristan says, smirking. “Italy is very aesthetically pleasing.”
“Venice stretches across a hundred eighteen small islands in the Venetian Lagoon,” I inform them. “That’s along the Adriatic Sea.”
Melanie looks at me with raised eyebrows. “You’re kind of a geek, aren’t you? Secretly, inside?”
“Take away the secretly and inside part, then yes,” I say, and Melanie laughs.
“There’s this exhibit at the National Gallery on Venetian art from the 1500s,” Tristan says thoughtfully. “My art teacher was talking about it. We should check it out.”
I imagine Othello, walking around the palace in Venice, gazing at the art on the walls, the paintings as foreign to him as he was to the Venetians.
“That could be cool,” I say.
“Let’s go to the museum on Sunday,” Melanie says. “It’ll be like school, but on a weekend.”
“Totally wild and crazy,” Tristan adds.
“Sounds excellent,” I say, and I mean it.
• • •
The National Gallery towers over us, a giant neoclassical monolith of a building. The place has always looked like a temple to me, a venue to worship art in its many forms. We wander inside, and I take some photos of the cream-colored walls and hardwood and marble. Enormous black columns rise up before us, white lines slithering over their smooth surfaces. We climb the winding marble staircases to find the open space in the center, always filled with plants, a huge ivory-encased greenhouse.
We’re scheduled to meet up with the infamous Bryan here. Melanie and Tristan wander off to marvel at an enormous spider plant, while I thumb through the postcards in the exhibit gift shop.
“Damon,” Bryan says, and we bump fists.
Bryan looks different without Tristan’s hand down his pants: less ruffled, more smug.
“Bryan,” I say. “Nice to actually meet you.”
Bryan flushes. “Same to you.”
“You a fan of Venetian art?” I ask.
Bryan’s staring over my shoulder, and I follow his gaze to see Tristan, who’s standing with Melanie by the table of gift books and laughing. Tristan’s smile is contagious. He smiles with his whole face, eyes bright and cheeks stretched wide.
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