The Most Dangerous Thing

by Leanne Lieberman

  When I get to English Bay, I get off my bike and sit in the sand against one of the massive logs, with my face up to the sun. A few wispy clouds float across the sky, reminding me of Paul. I almost text him, but I can’t think of what to say. I send him a picture of the sky instead. I’m looking up at the same sky as you, he writes back. Across the water I can see the sailing club and can almost make out Zeyda’s house. I email him, imagining him sitting on his balcony, looking out at the beach where I’m sitting, but he doesn’t respond.

  The sun sets, and I get back on my bike. The air cools, and I zip my jacket up to my chin. Lights come on as I head back through Yaletown and into Olympic Village, the path emptier now. I shiver as I take in the boats and the city, the night air. I should have dragged Abby with me, made her come out and see the sea and the sunset. She could have danced on the logs the way she used to when we were little. I could have told her I liked some of her monologues.

  Abby is not going to be happy until she’s onstage with her friends. She needs to find a new venue, some cool little café where they also have folk music or flamenco performances. I’m thinking about this as I start the uphill climb on Main Street. As I pass the Fox Cabaret, I slow down when I see the newly renovated black- and-red facade. Then I get off my bike to look at the list of upcoming events taped to the box-office window. Bands I’ve never heard of, a drag night, a performance-art show. Would putting on the play here be enough to motivate Abby?

  I’m about to get back on my bike when I see a guy going into the building. I hesitate a moment, imagining myself having to talk to a stranger. Then I remember what Dr. Spenser said about reaching out to other people, and I catch up to the guy before the door closes. “Excuse me,” I say, “can I ask you about performing here?”

  The guy is wearing jeans and a leather jacket and has a shaved head. He’s not as old as my parents, but he’s not young either. “What kind of performance do you do?” he asks.

  I grin, imagining myself performing. “It’s not me—it’s my sister’s play. Our school wouldn’t let her do it there.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Well…” I take a deep breath. “She wanted to do The Vagina Monologues, and the school freaked out about the word cunt.”

  The guy rubs his head, looks at me like I might be crazy and then bursts out laughing. “Well, c’mon in, and we’ll talk about your sister’s play.”

  An hour later I let myself into our back garden from the lane and find Abby sacked out in the hammock, listening to music on her phone as night falls. I pull up a lawn chair close to her and give her a gentle shove. Abby lifts up her head to look at me and pulls out one earbud. “What?” she asks, looking annoyed.

  “About your play,” I say.

  “The dead one?”

  “Yes, that one. I have a surprise for you.” I wiggle with excitement.

  Abby sighs and lets her head fall back. “Whatever.”

  “No, listen.”

  She rolls her eyes and turns to face me. “Fine. What?”

  “I went to the Fox Cabaret tonight.”

  “The where?”

  “You know, that place that used to be a porn theater.”

  “They let you in?”

  “Well, it’s not like I was there during a show or anything.”

  Abby’s sitting up now. “You went there?”

  “Let me finish. It’s a beautiful space with a stage and a great sound system now. Way nicer than any school auditorium.” Abby’s staring at me, but I keep talking. “I talked to Mike—”

  “Who?”

  “Mike—he’s the booking manager. Anyway, Mike says you can perform The Vagina Stories, or whatever you’re calling it, on April 17, which is a Thursday night, or on Saturday the nineteenth. Either day, it has to be at 7:00 PM, because they have a band coming on later. You might want to do it on the Thursday, even if it is a weekday, because this all-girl band called The Tits is playing afterward.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I continue, “Now I know you said it wouldn’t be good if it wasn’t at school, because kids wouldn’t see it, so I emailed Mr. Gupta to ask if we could advertise it at school, and I think he’ll say yes if the title doesn’t have the words cunt or vagina in it.”

  “You wrote cunt to Mr. Gupta?”

  “Well, no, I said the ad would have school-appropriate language.”

  “Wait, vagina isn’t school-appropriate language?”

  “Abby, let’s not discuss this now. Mike wants to know if you’re in or not, because otherwise they’re going to book something else, maybe bingo.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  Abby swings her legs out of the hammock and starts pacing the yard. “I don’t get it. You’re doing this for me?”

  “Yes. Oh, I forgot one thing. Mike said that if you want, it can be a fundraiser, and you can take half the house and donate it to a women’s cause of your choice.”

  Abby stops and runs her hands through her hair. “But you hate my play.”

  “I don’t hate your play. I hate the tampon song, and I might insist you cut it if I help you.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Oh, and I kinda hate your monologue, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s good.”

  “Thanks, I think.” Abby shakes her head. “Why are you doing this for me?”

  I place my hands on my knees and look up at Abby. “Is it so hard to imagine that I might help you? Besides, women’s bodies are important.”

  Abby crinkles her brow. “Since when do you care?”

  I shrug. “Are you in?”

  Abby sighs. “I’ll have to ask the other girls. We really wanted it to be at school.”

  “I know you did,” I say, “and that would have been better. Truly, I think you blew it by including the cunt monologue. But think of this—you’re going to perform a version of The Vagina Monologues at a place that used to be a porn theater, and instead of it being about the exploitation of women, it’s going to be about educating women.”

  Abby’s eyes start to light up. “Ooh,” she says. “Take back the theater! I like it! I might have to write a new monologue.”

  “Shall I text Mike?”

  “Not yet. I need to talk to Sunita and the others.”

  Abby is already up and running into the house before I have time to give her Mike’s contact information. I hear her on the phone again and imagine she’ll have to write a new song or, worse, a dance. Still, I flop back into my chair, oddly satisfied.

  Eleven

  THE NEXT MORNING PAUL TEXTS ME. Mom back to China—want to come over?

  I close my eyes and roll over in bed, tucking my head under my pillow. Can I pretend I haven’t seen the text? If I go over and play pool or watch TV, that leather couch in the basement will still be there. Things have been better in the eye-contact part of my life. I’ve actually had real conversations with Paul about things other than math or investing. I told him some math jokes last week that had him groaning. It felt good, normal.

  I text Paul back, How about the trees?

  The trees?

  Remember the ones you sent me the picture of?

  Oh right. They won’t be in bloom anymore.

  That’s okay.

  Okay then. Let’s go see the trees.

  I put down my phone and let my head fall back onto my pillow. I’m not brave enough to go to Paul’s house, but it should be okay if we meet somewhere in public.

  I’m the only one awake, so I make myself some tea, grab a muffin from where Mom’s hidden them in the laundry room and take it downstairs. Abby’s cleaned up the tent, stacked her books and papers and pens, and taken her dirty dishes upstairs. She’s organized her monologues into a folder with a cover page. I scan the table of contents, flip through the pages and find myself reading Sunita’s monologue again. I am a living, breathing creature. I am a sexual being. I am in charge of my own body and all it wants. I live and I breathe and I feel, and I
crave too.

  What would that look like? Maybe I could kiss Paul. Maybe I could tell him what I want to do. Whatever that is. I haven’t even let my mind go there for the last couple of weeks—it’s been too dangerous. Dr. Spenser and I haven’t talked about visualizing much lately, but I could try it. I settle myself back on the cushions and close my eyes. Well, I’d like to play with the hair at the back of Paul’s neck. And I’d like to kiss him and maybe see what he feels like underneath his shirt. I’m curious about his skin, what it would feel like next to mine, how smooth it might be and what it would taste like under his ear. I spend a few more minutes thinking about Paul, not only his smile and the way he scratches his head with his pencil or twists his eyebrows together when he’s working on a math problem, but also the way he smiles at me and makes me want to smile back. Let me tell you what I want, Sunita wrote. I feel my pulse pick up. Usually I back away at this point. What if I didn’t? What if I let myself give in to those feelings? What if I followed Dr. Spenser’s suggestion and took a risk? I could have a new metaphor. What if instead of if you touch me I’ll break in two, it could be if I kiss you we’ll be a fire, but not the kind that burns down houses? I like this image. I take out my journal and start writing.

  If I kiss you we’ll create a fire,

  not one that burns down houses

  but that lights up a city

  or makes northern lights flare across the sky

  If I kiss you we’ll be a raging storm,

  not one that ruins farmers’ fields

  but one that makes rivers flow in dried-up beds

  or creeks gurgle with rainbow-fleshed fish

  If I kiss you we’ll make a small quiet space,

  not one with broken pieces and fear

  but one that glows with a private light

  where we speak a language only we understand

  I look at the words on the page, reread them and make a few small changes. I’m not trying to work language down to the smallest bits I can find. Instead I’m building something, creating something bigger than me, maybe bigger than Paul and me. I think I might have written something I like. I sit still, listening to the beat of my heart, feeling the exhilaration of not wanting to rip the pages out of my book. Part of me wants to spin around the room, but I don’t want to break the spell of having written a poem that captures how I feel. And what if there’s more in me?

  I flip through my journal, looking for lines I like, copying them on a fresh page of my journal in my neatest printing. Most of what I’ve written is awful, but I find a few lines I like. I pause when I come to the “I Fear” free-write. I haven’t looked at it since I wrote it. I could never bring myself to actually throw it out—it felt like it contained everything that was important to me, everything that mattered. I was the sum of my fears.

  Now I take a deep breath and write each fear at the top of a separate page, I fear tsunamis, I fear Zeyda going crazy, I fear crashing on my bike, and then, on the last page, I fear not being able to get up in the morning. I do a free-write on each of these, my writing becoming tiny and illegible at the bottom of the pages and sneaking around the sides, even leaking around to the back. I have to cross out some of the titles and rewrite them. My writing gets slanted and fills with indecipherable loops and weird shorthand I didn’t know I knew. I fear Zeyda’s house filling with water, the wave splashing high into his living room, and then leaking down through the rest of the house, Chinese vases and carved tables floating and bobbing out broken windows into the cold sea. Zeyda and Crystal float on a raft made from the lid of the grand piano my mother played as a child. By the time I get to the last fear, about not being able to get out of bed in the morning, my pen moves so quickly I’m jotting down half ideas, words bleeding into each other to get them all down. I fear not being able to get up in the morning but it already happened, and it was awful, Abby’s sad face, forgetting to worry about everyone else, and heaviness, but a way out, a way out, although it’s not totally gone, what if the meds don’t work, what if, what if, what if? It will happen again and there will be people to help me, right? ’Cause I’m not alone. My mother, not her, but her, she will pry me out. Lock the closet if she has to. My mother, and Fenny savior Penny and Paul, waiting for me, Paul waiting for me.

  I’ve been ignoring my phone for so long that when Paul calls it wrenches me from where I’ve been—lost in words, somewhere deep inside my head. I jump and clutch at the phone, my hello sounding shell-shocked.

  “Hey,” he says, “you okay?”

  I swallow, gripping my journal to stabilize myself. “Yes.”

  “Did you forget about hanging out today?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” I say. “I was concentrating.” I want to put the phone down and go back to my journal. “Can I call you later?” I know I sound impatient.

  “Okay,” Paul says, sounding uncertain. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, fine. I’m in the middle of something. I’ll call you in an hour.” I hang up as Paul is saying goodbye and go back to my writing. Each of my fears slowly becomes a poem, the catalog of my worries and anxieties, like exhaling a long breath, like getting the worry out of my head and onto my paper. I write a few more pages, each one with a topic for a poem scrawled at the top: Dr. Spenser, Abby’s play, Fen. Finally I come to Paul. I struggle to write what I want, about being on the leather couch, the feelings sliding up my legs, what Sunita wrote in her monologue. I want to be with Paul, and I want to let myself experience all the feelings that I usually squash down.

  I write until I am so wrung out I can only lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Paul is texting me and I’m hungry for lunch and I don’t want to move, not because of the fog, but because I’ve kicked some of the thoughts out of my head and onto paper, and some of it is good. Some of it might be good enough to send to Paul, to read to Sofia, to hand in for my assignment. It makes me want to dance through the house, spinning. I’ve captured the thoughts buzzing in my restless mind, and now they’re like butterflies soaring with their wings spread wide. The words are beautiful, and they’re mine.

  When I meet Paul to bike to VanDusen Garden, I’m so excited I almost forget to be nervous. The easy, graceful way he rides his bicycle, all relaxed limbs and a casual wave when he sees me, makes me even happier. It’s a beautiful, warm day, breezy, with the smell of lilacs drifting by us as we bike toward Oak Street. We lock our bikes at the park entrance, pay the entrance fee and stroll down a gravel path past a vegetable garden and some bushes carved into animal shapes. Paul leads us along a path lined with flowers and then by a pond with ducks. I let him hold my hand even though it makes me feel a little queasy.

  “Your mom left for China?” I say.

  Paul swings my hand. “Yep. But she’s going to come back for the whole summer.”

  Paul looks happy, so I say, “That’s good. How was your visit?”

  “Mostly okay. We went to the outlet mall near Seattle. She cooked a lot. We talked about school too.” Paul sighs. “She’s going to ask my dad about me doing a double major—biology and economics.”

  “She’s okay with that?”

  “Not really, but she doesn’t want me to be miserable either.”

  “What about your dad?”

  Paul grins. “Oh, he’s probably okay with me being miserable. You’re lucky your parents are so normal.”

  I shrug. “I think they just want me to be okay.”

  Paul stops walking and looks at me. “And are you okay?”

  I take a deep breath. I didn’t feel the fog when I woke up this morning. Maybe it’s because of biking yesterday, or maybe the meds are starting to work. “I think I’m starting to feel better.”

  “That’s cool.” Paul’s grinning now and tugging gently on my hand. “Look.” He points across a lawn. “There are the trees.” Farther down the path a small grove of cherry trees shimmers in the light, each one with a canopy of green leaves. We walk toward
them and look up at the branches. “You could take pictures of them in different seasons,” I say. “Like a series.”

  “Maybe.” Paul walks around the grove and holds up his phone to take a picture. “There’s a mycology group that meets here monthly to look at mushrooms. I’m thinking of joining, except I think it might be only old people.”

  “Maybe some young cute girls are also interested in mushrooms,” I say.

  “Maybe. I don’t think I’m interested in other girls.” He looks like he’s going to walk over and kiss me, and I start to feel my usual panic rise. I think about Sunita’s monologue.

  “Do you want to sit under the trees?” I blurt out.

  “Sure.” Paul sits down in the grass, his arms around his knees, and looks up at me as if to say, Are you coming? “I want to take a picture of you,” I say to buy myself time. Paul smiles at me, and I pull out my phone and snap a photo of him under the green boughs, and then another and another, until I feel ridiculous. I slowly kneel beside him. He leans back and looks up at the branches, up at me. He squeezes my foot and leans toward me. I can tell he’s going to kiss me, so before he does, I kiss him quickly on the cheek. “Don’t move,” I whisper. “Okay?”

  Paul nods. When I don’t do anything for a moment, he looks at me expectantly. I take a deep breath and lean over and sniff his skin. I close my eyes and lean my face on his shoulder. Then I let my lips brush against his neck. He sits very still, letting me lean into him. I rest my hands on his shoulders, feeling the muscles underneath. Paul has a quizzical look on his face, as if he’s not sure what’s going to happen next, but there’s a hint of a smile on his lips too.

  “You look relaxed,” I say.

  Paul closes his eyes. “I’m always relaxed with you.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. It feels right.”

  This makes me smile, makes me feel brave. “I’m going to kiss you,” I say into his ear.