Fag to Hag, it says.
I swipe it open.
“What’s up, Tristan?”
There’s a short pause, followed by some heavy breathing, then Tristan’s voice, sounding too high and faint and far away.
“Melly? Mel?”
I shift the phone from one ear to the other.
“I’m here, hon, what’s up?”
“We got problems, Ellis. Big problems.”
“What’s going on? Where are you?”
“I’m somewhere round Tenley, but I’m heading your direction.”
I pause. My dad digs Tristan, but I’m not sure he’s ever quite understood our close friendship. This has led to a lot of awkward conversations about why we spend so much time together, and doesn’t Tristan have a girlfriend he wants to spend time with? In the past that’s when Mom would step in and change the subject, smile quirking her lips, eyes reading plain and clear: You owe me, daughter of mine.
“Can you tell me what’s up? I’m starting to feel a little Twilight Zone here.”
“I . . . Mel, it’s complicated. Bryan and I were at my house, on the couch, and I told him it was a mistake to be there, but it wasn’t . . . we weren’t even doing anything, just kissing, and then my father came home early and we had the music turned up and—”
The phone cuts out then, but I know how this story goes. I’ve known since the first time I saw Tristan kiss a boy at a party two years ago, cloaked in darkness and wedged into a corner where no one would be able to tell it wasn’t a typical drunken, horny ninth-grade couple hooking up on a Saturday night.
I won’t say I told you so but I did, I did tell him over and over again—tell your family the truth—and now I’m going to help him handle the fallout from not taking my excellent advice, because that’s what friends do.
Tristan looks a mess when he arrives on my doorstep, dark hair tousled and sticking up at odd angles, backpack hastily slung over his shoulder and half-unzipped, dark green polo shirt rumpled. His eyes are red and hazy and heavy with tiredness, and he’s got dried blood dotting his lip where it looks like he bit through it.
I let him in and wrap my arms around him in a tight hug, not letting go as his backpack slips off his shoulders and drops to the floor with a thump. Tristan’s so tense, I can feel his muscles moving under his skin. We breathe together for a few minutes, matching each other’s rhythm until he’s not shaking anymore.
“Hot chocolate?” I ask.
He nods. I lead him to the couch and he sits down, staring off into space. I disappear into the kitchen for a few minutes and return carrying two mugs of warm beverage. We sit for another minute sipping in silence before he says, “He’s not going to forgive me.”
I’m momentarily confused.
“Who? Bryan? Fuck him then.”
Tristan turns his sad blue eyes on me. “No. My dad. He’s not going to forgive me.”
I’m tempted to repeat myself, Fuck him then, to brush it off or make a joke, but I know that’s not what Tristan needs right now. This is Tristan’s family, his blood. He didn’t choose them, but he can’t just toss them away either.
“You really think—”
“Yes,” Tristan says. “I really do. You should have seen the look on his face, Melly, it was like—”
He stops, playing with a loose thread of his jeans.
“He hates me,” he says. “And my mom will hate me for being so inconvenient and different, and Jason and Danny will hate me eventually too, because it’s not cool in my family to have a brother who’s a fag.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
What else is there to say? Maybe his father won’t forgive him. Maybe he is that much of an ass. It’s hard to anticipate the extent of a parent’s love—or the persistence of their bigotry.
“I just—I always knew what my dad wanted for me, you know? To be the successful one who makes money and marries well and does all the older brother things. He wants me to be the one who shows Jason and Danny how to be men, whatever that means. And I can’t do that. Not in the way he wants me to.”
I want to tell Tristan that he is a man, that he’s more of a man than the many other boys I know—that his sensitivity is a strength, and that the way he loves is a part of what makes him beautiful. I want to tell Tristan’s dad that he should be grateful to have a son, grateful he’s still around. If he were to lose Tristan, none of this would matter anymore. All that would matter would be the space he left behind.
But this is my damage, not Tristan’s. This is who I am now.
“Maybe you can make him understand,” I murmur.
Tristan sighs, curling his legs underneath him on the couch. “Yeah. Right.”
We watch Bring It On and chase the hot chocolate with chocolate ice cream. I sprawl across the couch, head in Tristan’s lap, and he runs his hand through my hair idly, smoothing out the tangles. Then he braids sections of it into narrow plaits spliced with red dye like they’ve been stabbed.
We laugh at how stupid Kirsten Dunst is, and Tristan gets all irate about the injustice of the white girls stealing the black girls’ cheers, even though we’ve seen this movie about forty-seven times. The credits roll at the end of the movie, and Tristan nudges me to sit up. I do so with great reluctance.
“So tell me more about Damon, please,” Tristan says. “I want a progress report.”
“A progress report?” I repeat. “He’s not a target I’m trying to secure.”
Tristan raises an eyebrow.
I toss a pillow at him in disgust.
“You think your current angst has gotten you out of the doghouse for that crap you pulled with Mrs. McAvoy?” I say. “You’re so wrong.”
Tristan gives me a devilish smile. “Pretty sweet, right? I’m a smart kid.”
“You’re an asshole, is what you mean.”
“Seriously, I just got dealt, like, the biggest cockblock of my life. The least you can do is let me live through you.”
“Nothing’s really happened,” I say, even though my brain counters my spoken words with liar, liar, you lie like a rug.
“Well, get on that,” Tristan says, nudging me with his shoulder. “You fail as my model of heterosexual behavior if you’re not—you know.”
“If I’m not behaving heterosexually?”
“If you’re not behaving sexually, yes.” Tristan nods. “So go, go, Gadget, go.”
“What would I do without you?” I sigh.
“Probably die,” Tristan says, very seriously.
I elbow him in the ribs, and he pretends he's been mortally injured.
“What does Bryan think about all this?” I ask.
Tristan shrugs.
“I don’t know, he basically ran when my dad showed up and freaked.”
“Are you going to talk to him?” I say.
Tristan’s eyes lose their blue luster.
“Yeah,” Tristan says. “If he wants to talk about it.”
“He’s as much a part of this as you are—”
“I know, Mel. I know,” Tristan says. “I’m sorry about all this. Showing up, being a drama queen. I didn’t mean to—”
“Tristan, it’s okay,” I say. “I’m your BFF, remember? This is what I do.”
He sighs, shoulders slumping. Tristan’s not a big guy, and he looks even smaller right now, deflated like a beach ball that’s been left out in the backyard too long.
“You remember back in third grade, when we broke your mother’s favorite vase because we were reenacting scenes from Star Wars?” I ask. “And you were wigging out, and I said you had to tell her because she was going to find out anyway, and you told her and she yelled at you but afterward she was okay with it?”
Tristan looks at me with tired eyes.
“Melanie, this is not a vase I broke.”
“I know, but—” I stop.
Tristan is hugging his knees. His brow wrinkles in concentration.
“What does your dad want you to do?” I ask.
“Be less gay?” he postulates. “I don’t know, Mel. He’s a dick, and my mother’s not much better. I thought she might at least take my side, but she’s so afraid of him that she just sits by and lets him get away with saying all this shit, and Danny and Jason are so confused, and I feel like—”
He stops, shaking his head. He’s run out of words.
I sigh, letting my hand fall to cup the back of Tristan’s neck. His skin is soft under my palm, slightly moist with sweat.
“They’re going to let you stay, right?” I ask. “They’re not kicking you out or anything.”
Tristan shakes his head.
“They’ll let me stay. Not that I want to stay, but yeah. They’re not totally awful.”
I wish I could tell Tristan, Stay with me, I will let you stay for as long as you want, but I know if I do I’ll just be letting Tristan’s parents win, letting them get rid of him and his complications.
“You’ll be okay,” I whisper, pressing my thumb into the nape of his neck.
I think about my mom, and my dad, and Tristan and Bryan and Tristan’s parents. I think about Damon and the way his eyes go dark whenever he talks about Carlos, like someone inside him flicked off the light.
I think of that sketchbook under my bed.
I think about secrets, and keeping them, and how long a person can do that before it starts to eat them up inside. How long before they start wishing they could shout it from the rooftops or carve it into someone’s skin.
I curl my hand into a fist, nails prickling my palm.
• • •
Over the next week, my days become a blur of school, play rehearsal, working, sleeping and eating. School is boring and work is boring, but play rehearsal? Play rehearsal has its perks.
The actual painting of sets is pretty tedious, though there is a Zen element to it that I dig. It’s very repetitive and physical, slicking the paint over wood or sanding things with that back-and-forth friction motion, but at the end of the rehearsal I can look at what I’ve done and see it in front of me, this product I’ve created. It’s weirdly gratifying in an oh wow, I made that sort of way, similar to the satisfaction I got as a kid when I made ugly paintings out of macaroni or built leaning houses from Popsicle sticks.
There’s Max too, short for Maxine, who joined the set-building crew a week or so after me. Max is cool. She wants to be a comic book artist when she’s older, and she’s got fabric patches with drawings of superheroes stitched all over her backpack. Some are just your standard superheroes, Batman and Spider-Man and the Hulk, but some are superheroes she created, like this one called the Haberdasher, who dresses in a pinstripe suit and wears really sweet hats.
“His hats are made of this ultra-sharp material that can cut through skin,” Max explains. “So he throws them at people and slices them in half.”
“Like that guy in the Bond movies,” I say. “Oddjob.”
“Yeah, like him, but awesomer,” Max says.
“How would it be awesomer?” Calvin asks, sounding pained. “It’s exactly the same.”
“It just would be,” Max replies, and there’s really nothing Calvin can say to that.
I’m crouched down, painting the castle walls onto canvas, gray and looming against a dark night sky.
Max nods, appreciative.
“Nice work, Melanie.”
“Thanks,” I say, smiling. I bite back the desire to say something self-deprecating. I want to ask Max how it’s so easy for her, to draw and paint and not worry about what people think.
But I don’t.
Damon wanders backstage while I’m painting and stands around watching for a few minutes before I say, “It’s a pretty bitchin’ castle, isn’t it?”
I can feel Damon smile behind me. “It is. Those turrets are hot.”
“You ever want to live in a castle? Like as a kid?” I ask, and Damon kneels down, resting his hand on my shoulder and keeping it there. I can feel the heat through my shirt.
“Not really,” Damon says. “Castles seem like they’d be cold. And damp. And hard to keep clean.”
I laugh. “I guess so. But you could have, like, drawbridges and shit. That’d be kind of sweet.”
“Mmm,” Damon murmurs.
He reaches out and holds his hand over the painting, not touching it, just hovering. When I look at him, questioning, he says, “Carlos used to do this sometimes when we’d go on field trips to art museums. He said he could feel vibes or something. Like he could feel what the artist was feeling when they were painting it.”
I stare at Damon. He’s not looking at me, his eyes trained on the set piece, brow furrowed.
“That’s pretty freaky.”
“Yeah,” Damon says softly.
“You feel anything?”
“I feel that the person who made this is really talented,” Damon says. “And has no idea how talented she is.”
I flush. “You’re so full of—”
“No,” Damon says, and he’s looking at me with that straight-on green gaze. “I’m not, Melanie.”
I don’t say anything, and he finally looks away.
I can hear the murmur of the cast rehearsing nearby, but somehow it feels like Damon and I are the only two people here.
“I think they’d be lonely,” Damon says.
I blink. “What?”
“Castles,” Damon says. “I think they’d be lonely. Big and dark and empty and lonely.”
“Even if you had courtiers and maidens and knights?” I say.
“Yeah,” Damon says. “Even then.”
• • •
The grief book is staring at me when I walk into my bedroom that night. I flip it open, thinking: Tell me how to feel her close to me.
Are you enjoying your life? This is a question you should be asking yourself, and often. If the answer is yes, this is good. You should not feel bad for enjoying yourself. Living with grief means precisely that: living. You do no service to yourself or the person you are grieving for by acting like you are dead too.
I flip to another page and read.
You need, at some point, to learn to love your grief, to make friends with it, because it will be with you a long time. It is a part of you now.
Enjoy your life. Love your grief. This book makes it sound like it’s just a big old party when someone dies.
I put on my flannel pajamas with ice-skating penguins all over them and climb under the covers and pull the sheets up to my chin. I lie back on my bed and spread out my arms so my fingertips come to the edge of my mattress. The ceiling is a powdery white, seemingly pristine, but I think I see a tiny crack in one corner. It makes me smile to see that even the almost-perfect ceiling is flawed. Everything is a little fucked up, and that’s okay.
I flick off my bedroom lamp, but every time I close my eyes I see empty castle hallways, dark and dank and filled with shadows.
“You’re there, aren’t you?” I say softly. “You’re there, and you think I’m being stupid.”
I sigh.
“The grief book says you have to love your grief,” I say. “But that’s some bullshit, right? How can you love your grief? That’s dumb.”
I grasp a corner of the sheet between my thumb and forefinger, rubbing it against my skin. The sheets are soft, worn thin by many washes. I remember the day my mom taught me how to do laundry. Whites separate from colors, she told me, tossing a pair of underwear into one pile, a pair of jeans into another. Whites get warm water. Colors get cold. If you put colors in warm water they might run.
Run where? I joked, and Mom made a face at me.
“How do you know who you should let into your life?”
I ask. “Do you just decide? Like, should I trust Damon because he’s nice to me, and he seems like he’s honest?”
What I don’t say: What if I let him in? What if I let him in and I care about him and then I lose him?
What if I lose him like I lost you?
I flip over on my bed, nestling my head in the pillow.
“I think you’d tell me to wait and see. Wait and see what Damon does, and if he’s a good guy then . . . then I’ll know. That’s what you’d say.”
I take in a deep breath, then exhale, slowly, feeling the air fill and leave my lungs.
“Am I stupid, Mom? Can you just tell me that?”
No answer.
I tug on my pajama sleeve, sighing. I lift my hand to my cheek. It’s wet. When did I start crying? I turn to one side, blotting my cheek on the pillow. What the hell am I crying for?
You lost your mother, the voice inside my head reminds me. That’s not supposed to happen. It’s not supposed to happen to anyone, ever, but it does, and it sucks, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I flop over on my back, curling my hands into fists.
“He likes me,” I say. “I think he really likes me, Mom.”
• • •
Sunday night about mid-shift, Macho hands me a plate holding a cheeseburger and fries for table five and gives me a big wink. I shoot him a confused look and he says, “We gotta talk, girl,” in a tone that fills me with foreboding.
The slightly rumpled older gentleman at table three gives me a filthy smile that makes me shudder. The day I do not have to wait tables ever again will be a glorious one indeed.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” I say to Macho when I return to the kitchen with an armful of dirty dishes.
“I heard you got a boyfriend,” he says in a singsong voice. “How come you don’t tell me these things, Mel? I thought we were buds.”
I roll my eyes, dumping the plates into a bucket of milky-colored dishwater.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
This is mostly true. It hasn’t been that long since we went on that date, even if it feels like—
My lips burn a little, and I unconsciously lift my hand, stopping myself before I actually touch my mouth.
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