Speak of Me As I Am

by Sonia Belasco

  Should it feel this good? Should it feel this good when they are gone?

  “Hey,” Damon whispers.

  “Hey,” I say, and he brings his hand up and brushes my hair out of my eyes.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  I swallow.

  “I miss her,” I whisper. “I really, really miss her.”

  I can feel him inhale, then exhale slowly.

  “I bet she misses you too,” Damon murmurs.

  “Do you think it ever . . .”

  “Goes away?” Damon says. “No. I don’t. I think when you love somebody, the grief’s forever.”

  I close my eyes and try to breathe. I feel Damon tracing my face with his fingertips, soft, slow.

  “You know you can tell me about her,” Damon says. “Whenever you want to, I’m here. I want to listen.”

  I exhale. Tears slip down my cheeks.

  I can be a mess. I am allowed to be a mess.

  Let yourself be seen.

  “My mom left me this letter,” I say.

  Damon’s eyes focus. I feel like the words are caught in my throat.

  “What did the letter say?” he says.

  Everything, I want to say.

  I wish I could write her back. I would say: You’re right, Mom. You were kind of a lot, always. Sometimes it felt like there was no way for me to be seen because all anyone could ever see was you.

  But even when I wanted that—when I wanted things to be different, when I wanted to be different—I never wanted it like this.

  I never wanted it without you.

  I say, “She said that I was beautiful and talented.”

  “True,” Damon interrupts, and gives me a dorky smile when I narrow my eyes. “Sorry. Please continue.”

  “She said that I should be myself and let people see me. She said—”

  I stop, because I can feel the tears coming faster.

  He says, “You don’t have to—”

  “No,” I say. “I do. I do have to.”

  I take in a deep breath.

  “She said,” I say, “that I’m not alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” he whispers. “You’re not, Melanie.”

  Damon wraps me up in his arms, holding me so close, it’s like he’s all around me.

  I like to think my mother exists somewhere between here and now and elsewhere, and in that place she sits back and watches the living screw everything up. Sometimes she laughs and sometimes she cries, but mostly she rests and hangs out and is comfortable and peaceful in a way she couldn’t be while she was alive because she always had something to do, somewhere to be, someone to satisfy.

  I don’t know how these things work, but I hope that wherever she is, there’s a lot of good music: the kind she can dance to, move her hips in little circles, swish swish, flick out her wrists and throw her head back and laugh. I have to believe Etta James is there too, singing her face off in heaven, because a heaven without Etta would be no heaven at all. Mom would like that, to be somewhere she could get her groove on all the time, with infinite dance partners and drinks for all and a beat that never stops.

  Maybe she can dance and paint too, fill the world with her colors, spread them everywhere, all across the sky, spill them on the ground, puff them out into the air. Maybe someday I will take all those crusty cans of paint out of the basement and bring them upstairs and find somewhere in my room to put them. I’ll draw and I’ll paint and somehow she’ll see what I make, wherever she is, however she’s able to see.

  I’ll keep her close. I’ll keep her close and I won’t forget and she’ll be here.

  She’ll stay.

  • • •

  I wake in the morning wrapped around Damon, head tucked under his chin, using his chest as a pillow. I stay still for a few moments, rising and falling with his measured breaths.

  “Damon,” I murmur. “I should go home.”

  “Mmm,” he snuffles, and shudders into waking. “I don’t wanna get up.”

  “You don’t have to get up,” I say, “but if I don’t go home, my dad’s going to call the police.”

  He blinks his eyes open. They’re blurry from sleep but still that same vivid shifting green, the color of trees, leaves, plants that grow.

  “I want to see you later,” he says.

  “I want to see you later too,” I say.

  “Like, later today,” Damon says. “You know, I want to take your picture. For real this time.”

  “Not creepy stalker-style?” I say, smiling, and Damon flushes.

  “More of a candid photo shoot,” Damon says.

  “Sad,” I say. “I sort of like the idea of having my very own paparazzi.”

  He smiles, a sleepy twitch of the lips, and I kiss him before he can say anything else.

  “Thank you,” I say, and I know he knows what I’m thanking him for.

  DAMON

  Carlos, man, if you’re watching . . .

  Watch me now.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I wake a second time on Sunday morning to the sound of my parents thumping around downstairs and the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen. I roll over in bed and burrow under the sheets, seeking lost warmth. Melanie is gone. I knew that she would be, but it still feels strange: My body keeps trying to fill the space she left behind.

  There are photographs everywhere, tucked between the sheets and inside my pillowcase and on the windowsill and all over the floor. I get out of bed and stumble around the room collecting them, shaking them out of fabric and tugging them from the cracks they’ve fallen into, and stack them together.

  I lift the camera from its place on the desk to check its battery power. Stuck to the base is another photograph. I peel it off and stare at it. It’s black and white, a photograph of only a silhouette, shadows on snow. The shape reminds me of a chalk outline, the contours etched into the sidewalk at a murder scene. I squint—it looks familiar. I remember:

  You never take pictures of yourself, man, I said as we tripped through the snow, white crunching beneath our dirty boots. No self-portraits?

  Self-portraits are boring, Carlos scoffed. Nothing to see here.

  But a few minutes later he’d stopped and brought the camera up and snapped a single shot. I thought he was just taking a photo of the snow, but now I know I was wrong.

  Nothing to see here. I lower the photograph to the desk. That was it, wasn’t it? Carlos saw so much around him, so much pain, so much beauty. But he couldn't see his real self. All he saw were shadows in the snow, borders and outlines and darkness and nothing inside.

  When he turned the camera on himself, he was afraid of what he saw.

  I can’t put these back in that box. Melanie’s right, I can’t keep hiding them.

  I can’t keep your secrets, man.

  Let them breathe, D. Let them go.

  I shiver. I turn in a slow circle, but the room is empty.

  My mind conjures up an image of the scenery from the play, those high castle walls, and outside them that lonely tree: Melanie’s one-man forest. On that stage, I feel like that tree, isolated and afraid. But I don’t have to.

  Carlos didn’t have to feel—

  I drop the photos onto my desk and grab my phone. When I text Melanie I get an almost instant response.

  i like the way you think. come by the restaurant later.

  • • •

  Melanie’s working the dinner shift. The restaurant smells like lime juice and grease. I nearly run into Macho while coming back from the bathroom. He is currently throwing a very pronounced hissy fit.

  “How is anyone supposed to work around here with all this nonsense going on?” he asks, flailing his arms. “Crazy busy, crazy people . . .”

  I duck, and he careens into the kitchen. Through the open kitchen door I se
e Melanie nearly collide with him, deftly avoiding getting smacked in the face at the last moment with a quick swerve. She dumps some dishes into a vat of dirty dishwater and exits the kitchen with haste. I take a seat at the table with Tristan, who’s studying the script in his lap and idly carding his fingers through his hair.

  “Hey, waitress!” I call out when Melanie walks by. She sticks out her tongue and keeps going, but returns a couple minutes later bearing food.

  “I know you’re going to want fries, so here’s your fries, dumbass,” she says, sliding the plate piled high with steaming potatoes over to me, then drops another plate onto the table next to Tristan. “And your burger, idiot.”

  “Do you always talk to the customers this way?” I ask. “I’m shocked and appalled.”

  “The service in this place used to be so excellent too,” Tristan complains.

  “Oh ho ho, Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dumber,” Melanie snorts. “Talk to me some other time when you’re not eating for free.”

  I grin up at her.

  “We love you, Melanie,” I say. “We kid because we love.”

  “I don’t know, I just wanted a burger,” Tristan inserts. “Running lines makes a man hungry.”

  “Hell Week,” I lament. “Aptly named.”

  “As if he’s even stressed,” Tristan says with a roll of the eyes. “He’s had the lines memorized since the second day of rehearsal.”

  “I like the play,” I say, affronted.

  “Hey, as enchanting as this conversation is, I gotta go, y’know, like, work and stuff?” Melanie gestures to the busy restaurant. “So you boys enjoy your meal, okay?”

  She turns to go, but I grasp her wrist.

  “Later, right?” I ask. “You promised.”

  She nods, eyes suddenly dark. “Yeah. Yeah, I promised.”

  • • •

  A couple hours later we’re shivering outside the door of the Hamilton gym, Melanie making a big show of blowing on her hands and then rubbing them together to keep warm. Melanie is still wearing her work clothes, and she smells sweet and a little sweaty. I want to lean in and lick her.

  “I have to say I’m a little alarmed at how bad the security is at this school,” Melanie says. “Where are the beefy guards? My history textbook is in there. What if it got stolen? That would be tragic. It’s only ten years out of date! It might be a collector’s item.”

  “You might never know who really shot JFK,” I say.

  “Please don’t ever get Tristan started on that subject,” Melanie says, twisting the bobby pin until the lock clicks open. “If you pretend you’re listening, he stops eventually, but it takes a while. Pro tip.”

  “I will keep this in mind,” I say.

  “So what’s the plan here?” Melanie asks as we cross the gym and walk down the hallway, shoes squeaking on recently mopped linoleum. We push through the theater doors, walk down the aisle, and shove our way past the curtains backstage.

  The set is all there, painted to look like castle walls, surrounded by trees.

  I hold out the cardboard box.

  “I thought we’d put them up over the gray space,” I say. “Just kind of—fill it in.”

  “Make the castle a little less lonely?” Melanie says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I just . . . I want them near me when I’m up there.”

  I want him near me.

  When I look into Melanie’s eyes, I know I don’t have to say it.

  “I think this is going to be awesome,” Melanie says.

  “I hope so,” I say.

  “Also, as a bonus,” Melanie says, “Calvin is going to lose his mind.”

  “Oh man,” I say. “That is such a bonus.”

  I open the box of photographs, shaking it until every last one is scattered across the floor. “Okay,” I say. “Here goes.”

  Melanie places her hand on my wrist—gentle, there—and squeezes.

  We work at it for a few minutes, pasting the photos into corners and around set pieces.

  We’re so involved in what we’re doing that we don’t hear the footsteps.

  “What are you doing? Who is that?”

  Mrs. McAvoy emerges from the darkness of the theater.

  Shit.

  It’s possible we didn’t really think this through.

  “Damon, Melanie?” she says. She trips up the steps to the stage and looks at us, bewildered. “What—”

  “I can explain,” Melanie and I say in unison.

  She raises her eyebrows. “Well, one of you better.”

  “It was my idea,” I say. “I just—I thought it needed some filling in.”

  This is such BS, and I can tell Mrs. McAvoy isn’t buying it. The woman is not an idiot. She leans in, adjusting her glasses, and examines the photographs.

  “These are beautiful,” she says.

  I feel proud hearing that. Proud of Carlos. And so sad he’s not here to hear it.

  “It’s very striking, what you and Melanie have done,” Mrs. McAvoy says slowly. “But I would have appreciated if you’d asked me first before you added your photographs like this. You know that wasn’t part of the original set design, and it’s very late to make changes—”

  “The photos aren’t mine,” I correct her. “They were taken by a friend. Carlos.”

  Mrs. McAvoy tilts her head to one side. “Does he go to Hamilton?”

  “He’s not—no, he doesn’t,” I say. “Carlos is dead.”

  Her face pales in that way people’s often do when confronted with death during an otherwise polite conversation. It’s helplessness, writ large.

  “Oh,” she says, her voice soft.

  I can see her scrambling. It always feels unfair to put people in this position, because there is no right thing to say. No magic words.

  She lifts her eyes to mine.

  “Damon,” she says, “does this have anything to do with why it’s been so hard for you to rehearse the death scenes in the play?”

  My throat tightens. I can feel Melanie watching me.

  I breathe.

  If you ever need to talk, Mrs. McAvoy had said, you let me know.

  I keep thinking that nobody sees, but they do.

  They do.

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, it has something to do with that.”

  She nods, and her face softens. She doesn’t ask anything else. She doesn’t push.

  “I understand why you want to put these up,” she says, “but I think maybe they don’t belong behind you like this. It’s hard for others to truly see them when they’re part of the set, and I think people should get to see them. What would you think about us displaying them in the hallway instead? Make it sort of an exhibit to honor him? I think that display of photographs of sports teams has been up there quite a while.”

  “It has,” Melanie says. “I’m pretty sure it’s been up there since the beginning of time.”

  Mrs. McAvoy smiles. “I can talk to some people about moving it at the very least, then.”

  My heartbeat speeds up. I can do this. I can make Carlos’s mark. I can leave the kinds of marks Carlos left all over me: marks, lines, or brushstrokes, permanent and real, but not scars.

  “Mrs. McAvoy?” I hear Melanie say.

  “Yes, Melanie?”

  “It’s just, I think if we’re going to have an exhibit—I mean, not that Carlos’s photos aren’t amazing and great, but . . . maybe we should let other people contribute too.” Melanie’s eyes flick down to the floor. “To honor the other people we’ve lost.”

  Mrs. McAvoy looks overwhelmed, but not upset. “Do you think there are other people who would want to contribute?”

  “Yes,” Melanie says. “Me.”

  • • •

  Melanie and I walk home together. She holds my hand and it feels good
to have her so close. We don’t talk, and by the time we get to her house I feel full to the brim with things I don’t know how to say.

  “Does it bother you?” Melanie says suddenly. “I mean, would you rather that it just be Carlos’s stuff in the exhibit?”

  “Of course not,” I say, squeezing her hand. “Melanie—God, no. The more the—well, not the merrier, maybe, but—”

  “The less alone,” Melanie says.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  I kiss her. It’s soft and light, and when I pull away, she’s smiling.

  • • •

  I wake up the morning of opening night and spend some quality time staring at the ceiling, letting the lines scroll before my eyes like ticker tape. It’s never been the lines that have been the problem, though. Memorizing is easy. Forgetting is harder.

  My phone buzzes on my nightstand. I reach out and flip it open.

  don’t stress out, Melanie’s message says. you're going to be fantastic.

  I smile. I’m about to text her again when my phone vibrates.

  etta said it best: trust in me in all you do/have the faith i have in you.

  I text her back: you ready for the show?

  I don’t mean the play, and this Melanie knows.

  It takes a few minutes before she texts me back.

  i don’t know, she says. maybe.

  it’s ok to feel whatever you feel, I text her back. someone rly smart told me that.

  I’m getting dressed when I get her reply.

  flattery will get you everywhere, mr. lewis, she says, and then, a moment later: at least at the end of the night, we’ll be together.

  • • •

  I get to school a couple hours before the play is scheduled to start and find much of the cast and crew already there.

  They’re not gathered backstage, though. They’re in the hallway in front of the theater, where we put up Carlos’s photos.

  I didn’t put them all up. I chose the ones that felt the most like his, the most like him. Some of my family, of me, of places in the city I know he loved. The ones he took in Anacostia. His shadow on the snow, Carlos and his visual echo.

  Carlos, unedited. Even the parts that are hard for me to look at. Even the parts that took me a long time to see.