by Laura Goode
“Stinker, where are you?” There’s no mistaking; it’s definitely Tess’s voice.
I throw up my hands. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she hisses. “Stay here.” She shoves on her shoes and shimmies down the ladder. I pull the floor door open a crack and lie belly-down by it to listen.
“Ro!” I hear Tess shout as she sees her.
“I’ve got his collar — don’t worry,” Rowie calls weakly.
“Thank goodness.” Tess jogs up to them, out of breath. “I left the door open while I was taking out the trash and he bolted before I could grab him. Stinker, you jerk.”
“Stinker, you jerk,” Rowie echoes.
“What were you doing out here in the cold?” Tess asks. “Oh, cheese and rice, Stinker, I didn’t bring a bag with me — stop pooping.”
“Oh,” Rowie says. “Well. I was — I had to grab something from the treehouse.”
Neither of them says anything for a tick. I suddenly become aware of the audio election coverage still droning from Rowie’s computer. I slam the computer shut.
“What was that?” I hear Tess ask. Fuck.
“What?” The crisis in Rowie’s voice is audible. “What was what?”
“It sounded like there was a radio or something on in your treehouse, and someone shut it off,” Tess says suspiciously. Shit.
“No, it didn’t.”
“Ro, why are you being so weird? Your hair looks like you just woke up.”
“Oh, I mean — I just like to go up there sometimes. To be — by myself.”
Stinker yips. “You go outside to sit in your treehouse alone in November?” Tess isn’t buying it, Rowie’s teetering on the edge of her rails, and I hear it all.
“Rowie, is someone up there?” The edge in Tess’s voice is gentle. “Who is it?”
“No,” Rowie’s voice catches. “There’s nobody up there.” It feels like a bowling ball slamming into my gut, hearing her call me nobody. I only hear muffled noises for a minute.
“Ro, why are you crying? I’m so confused,” Tess says. “What did I say?”
This is it; the jig’s up. I can’t sit here and hide while she cries and feel okay about myself in the morning. I take a deep breath and poke my head out through the floor door.
“Hey, Tessie.”
“Ez?” she says in disbelief. “What are you doing up there? Why are you guys hanging out in the treehouse at night when it’s so co —” She catches herself, coughing, clearing her throat, pausing. I pull a blanket around my shoulders and work my way down to the ground. The moon is out and shining on the tears streaming down Rowie’s face.
“Are you guys — uh, I mean, were you guys —?” Tess doesn’t finish her sentence again, but doesn’t really need to. All she has to do is look at us to know. She caught us and right now all I can feel, at least when I don’t look at Rowie, is relief.
“I’m sorry —” Tess says. “I didn’t mean to — I mean, I’m sorry I — fuck.”
“Wow,” I say as Rowie’s sobs escalate, “I can’t remember the last time you dropped a heavy F.”
“I’m sorry,” Rowie heaves.
“What are you sorry for?” Tess and I say in unison.
“I don’t know,” Rowie says, her shoulders slumped. She turns and dashes back up into the treehouse. Tess looks at me, shell-shocked.
“Is she okay? Are you okay? Are you guys, like, together? What the heck is going on right now?”
“Listen, Tessie, could we talk about this later?” I say. “I’ll explain later. I just want to make sure she’s all right, and I don’t want to wake up Raj.”
“Yeah —” Tess hovers. “Okay. I’ll take Stinker home. We can talk later.” She turns to go, then turns back in continuing disbelief. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
I look desperately at her. “Isn’t that kind of obvious?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Wow. I mean, go take care of her. I’ll talk to you later, I guess. Bye, Ez.” She withdraws bumblingly across the quiet lawns, Stinker in tow.
I climb back up to the treehouse. Rowie’s quivering like a bomb.
“What are we going to do?” she wails. “This is a disaster.”
“You know what, Rowie? This isn’t actually a disaster. You really think us being in love is the biggest problem in the whole world right now?”
There is another detonating pause as Rowie and I both digest the fact that the word love has entered the conversation, spoken out loud. She stares at the wall, receding. The silence is gravid.
“Tell you what,” I explode, too tired to hold it back anymore. “I don’t give a fuck anymore. I love you. I am in love with you. I can’t help it, and I don’t want to. And I’m sick and fucking tired of sneaking around and acting like I’m ashamed of something I refuse to be ashamed of. I would — we could tell people together. It couldn’t possibly be as bad as you think. I love you and I want people to know.” Everything is spinning.
Rowie looks like she’s about to throw up. “Can you please keep your voice down?” Her voice is feeble but trembling with intensity; the moonlight throws a twinkle into the tiny jewel in her nose. She doesn’t say anything else.
“Look, Rowie, we’ve been slinking around for nearly two months pretending this is something we can keep close forever.” Fuck. Please don’t let me cry. “I can’t lie about it anymore. It’s — it’s too much to ask. Please tell me I don’t have to.” Please don’t let me cry.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice is the size of a bird’s heart.
“Sorry for what? Sorry you don’t love me?”
“I didn’t — Esme, I didn’t say that. God, it’s so cold out here. I can’t think straight.” She shivers.
“Look, Rowie, every time this comes up, this issue of us being out as a couple, you give me some lame excuse about your parents, and frankly, I’m not sure if I believe it anymore. I don’t believe your mom would freak out. Maybe your dad would, but you know what? At the end of the day, with something like this, you either decide it’s worth the trouble or it isn’t, and it’s your decision. I get that you don’t want to disrespect your parents, and I get that being Bengali is a big part of who you are, and I get that I just don’t get it.”
“Did you ever think that maybe it isn’t my job to help you understand what it means to be Indian, or a person of color, or whatever?” Rowie snaps. “I can’t purge your white guilt for you, snowflake. You’re right. You just don’t get it. You never will. And I’ve started to wish you’d stop trying.”
I recoil, as wounded by that as by anything she’s ever said to me. “Stop trying?! But Ro — I love who you are. Maybe I can’t understand, but — why am I here, Rowie? Tell me why you’re so ashamed of this, what it is that happens between us that’s so disgusting you can’t even tell your family or your best friends. Tell me why I let you in on me if you were this full of shit all along.”
She says something I can’t hear. I reach out and lift her chin.
“What did you say?”
“I said I never asked you to.” Her eyes are twin shimmering wells of grief.
“Are you fucking serious?” I can’t stop pushing. How can she say this to me?
She throws up her hands.
“I’m not ashamed.” Her voice is still faint but her eyes flash. “I’m not ashamed. But I can’t give you the kind of love you need.”
“You mean the kind that other people know about?” I ask bitterly.
She turns to me slowly.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she murmurs. “I’ve never been like this with anyone else. But I just can’t do it — out loud. I just — I’m not sure enough that this is what I want to fuck it all and be with you. You know who you are, Esme. What you are. What you want. I’m not so certain.”
We lay there doing nothing for a minute as the cold sets in. I feel like wishbones are snapping inside me as I feel her abating, one after another coming up short-ended. I break the silence in a final flight of des
peration.
“Look, Rowie, or Rohini, whoever you are,” I implore her. “Hear me out for one more minute. Imagine what this could be like if we could go on an actual date. Imagine just going out and eating dinner somewhere and going a movie together, and making out in the back row of the theater like couples do. I don’t want our whole relationship to exist in a treehouse. I want to take you to school dances and have you sleep over at my house sometimes and hold hands in front of our friends and not have you make weird faces every time I try to touch you. I just want to not have to hide this beautiful thing we made together. All I want is for you to be my girlfriend, for real. It’s that simple.” I suck in some air.
Her hair muffles something else I can’t hear.
“Girl, raise up your head!” I sputter, exasperated.
“I SAID I NEVER ASKED YOU TO COME HERE,” she bursts, hissing in fierce red tones that liquefy into tearful blues. “You are so focused on getting what you want that you’re not listening to me. I’m saying I love you and I can’t do this. I do love you and it can’t stop me from failing you, or you from failing me. I can’t be your girlfriend. I’m sorry.” She takes a heaving breath. “I think you should leave now.”
You.
I’m sweating.
I’m going to cry.
I’m going to throw up.
I’m going to crap my pants.
I need to bolt now with the three shards of pride I have left.
I will leave this treehouse immediately. Forever.
“Okay —” I say, starting to get up. “Look, I’m gonna—”
She starts to cry again and grabs my arm, pulling me down without saying anything. I bury my face in her hair, toppling back over in the mess of blankets as we sob, quiet sirens crying like the lostest of the lost, lonesome together in the severing hour.
“Don’t do this, Rowie,” I mewl. “You did ask me to come here, the first night we kissed. Please — can’t you see it? It could be real.”
She’s shaking her head no, no, no. I feel vague, robbed of victory.
“I can’t,” she says, two syllables. “You’re strong. You can handle it. I can’t. Will you please leave?”
You.
There is a buzzing in my ears, a dim din of anger and a deeper disappointment than I’ve felt since I was five, a hum like the phantom ring you hear the moment after a phone stops ringing. I can’t believe she’s chickening out, and at the same time, I can.
“Fuck you, Rowie,” I manage without dignity. It’s a frayed blur as I split, struggling with my jacket, both of us crying, my hair sticking to her face, swallowing. She lets out a strange yelp as I retreat. Her arm is outstretched as though I were a boat pulling away in the night, like longing from a dark dock. I close the floor door to her. I climb dumbly down the tree trunk, stopping my ears to the celebratory racket from the Baumgarten house leaking into the night, and barely prevent myself from screaming as I hurdle toward home.
Marcy and I are testing the ice sheet on the creek with our feet. It’s Wednesday afternoon; I hear church bells tossing hollow echoes across the plains.
“Who goes to church on Wednesday?” I ask.
“Catholics, duh,” she says.
“Huh,” I say.
“Wanna go steal some signs?”
“Eh.” I shrug listlessly. “Maybe later.”
The wind bites and the winter light clouds over the patchwork of white frost and dead brown earth. Brittle Creek runs through her backyard; it was a source of endless fascination when we were younger, swimming in the summer and boot hockey in the winter. As we probe the half-frozen sheet, daring it to crack under our leaning, I feel an awareness of seasons, of the ache that comes when seasons change.
“Hey, dirtbag. What’s with you? Where were you today?” she asks.
“Just wasn’t really feeling school. I had some things to do.”
“Like building a secret annex and hiding in it? You showed up to like one class all day.”
I squirm. “Okay. I have to tell you something and I don’t know how to put it.”
“Put what? Just put it.”
“It’s about Rowie.”
“What about Rowie? She’s been totally AWOL, too.”
“Yeah. Um.”
Marcy throws a stray rock into the river in frustration. “Spit it the fuck out, Ez.”
“We could ice-fish through that hole,” I say, misdirecting, pointing at where the rock went through.
“Esme.”
Marcy very rarely uses my whole name. We’re always just Ez and Marce.
“Mary Marcella, I really don’t know what to say. Remember the night we ripped off that joint of Rooster’s and smoked it in the treehouse, and you left early?”
“Yeah.”
“Well. After you left, Rowie and I were talking and realized that neither of us had ever kissed a girl.”
“Why would Rowie have kissed a girl?”
“Um,” I say.
Marcy searches my face. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Um, I guess — fuck. I don’t know how to — I mean, I haven’t ever really told — oh, fuck all. Rowie and I made out that night in the treehouse, and we’ve been hooking up on the DL ever since, until last night Tess caught us and Rowie freaked out and I realized that she would never be able to handle being my girlfriend.” I start getting choked up and try to wipe the tears off before she notices.
“Holy shit, Ez,” she says, looking at me incredulously for a full ten seconds. “Are you serious?”
I nod.
“Is that why you’ve looked like a zombie for, like, two months?”
I nod.
“Shit,” she breathes, understanding dawning across her face. She shifts from standing on the bank with one leg arched onto a rock like a pirate to a flabbergasted sprawl in the snow, her heels resting on the ice.
“Say something,” I insist with what little insistence I have left in me.
She drags her heels over the ice, tracing a snow-angel arc on the creek.
“Something, Ezbo,” she says.
“Don’t call me that.” I kick the ice and it cracks like crème brûlée under a spoon. My toe breaks through, dipping into the searing freezing water, and I stumble back onto the frozen bank. “I think I hear my dad calling.”
“Bitch, please.” Marcy grabs my sleeve, pulling her feet under her. “You can’t pull this shit on me. I’m a shitbag with emotions too, but quit with the cactus act and fucking come in for some hot chocolate.”
“Okay,” I sniff.
Marcy drags me across her backyard and into the kitchen, where we stomp off our shoes and leave our wet jackets in a pile on the floor.
“Is Bob here?” I ask.
She shakes her head as she takes a swig from the milk carton. “Practice.” She exhales, wiping a renegade drip from her chin. She dumps the milk into a saucepan to heat up. My phone beeps.57
57. Text from Tess: How are you doing, babe?
“I’m, um — I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” I say. “Rowie, like, couldn’t really deal with people knowing about us.” I take a breath, still unsure how to talk about Rowie and me to anyone other than Rowie or me.
“Don’t trip,” she says. “I mean, I understand, or whatever. At least now I know why you never sleep over anymore.”
It dawns on me how displaced Marcy must have felt while Rowie and me were — whatever we were. I’ve spent so much cumulative time at the Crowthers’ over the years that I actually have my own set of dishes here. Me and Marcy were really picky about what we ate and what we ate it on when we were little, so Bob and Luke had to team up and provide full sets of diningware for both girls at both houses to appease us. She hands me my #1 Grandpa mug and I pinch a marshmallow out of the cocoa. Marcy’s drinking out of her 1991 Twins World Series Champions mug.
“Are you, like, okay?” she asks abruptly.
“I don’t really know,” I say. “I guess I just needed to say it out loud more than any
thing. It was really hard not to tell you while it was happening.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It was hard not to know why you looked so sad.”
“Marce?” I ask.
“Yeah?”
“I know we don’t usually talk about stuff like this, but — do you believe in God?”
She takes a long pause. “I do my best to remember that I am loved. The source is less important.” For a long moment, I am washed over by a wave of intense love for Marcy, the longest-running female lead in the sitcom of my life. I take her for granted the way I take my ability to read for granted. Not for nothing, we’re the only sisters we’ve got.
“I love you, Marce,” I blurt out. “I know we don’t really say that, but I don’t know. I guess I need us to say it sometimes.”
She returns my long look. “I love you too, Ez,” she says. “I can deal with us saying that sometimes.”
“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” I say, grinning.
“Deal.” She grins back.
“I gotta jet,” I say, rising.
“To do what?” Marcy scoffs. “I know you’re not going to do homework.”
I crack a grin. “If I did my homework now, what would I do during the first five minutes of every class?”
“Dude — I don’t want to push you or whatever, but when there’s no talking happening, there’s no sweet beats and fat rhymes happening either. . . .” She trails off meaningfully.
Nope. Not yet.
“Nope. Not yet.”
“I’m just saying, we got some good momentum going after the LocoMotive, and your on-camera interview about Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos, and you had that new song you showed us on your birthday, and we were talking about having a concert. . . . Come on, Ez. Don’t let all this drama get in the way of our dream.”
“Give me a little time.” I tip my hat on my way out. “Later, homes.”
“Minnesota-do-or-die, soldier.”
Marcy lives on the eastern border of Holyhill’s west side, near the highway and the big Lutheran church and the old Soo Line train tracks, a ways away from the big houses in the old-money part of town. I plug myself into my iPod and start walking, Black Star trickling into my ears. It’s barely four o’clock, but the sun is indistinct, as if afraid of wearing out his welcome. I begin to climb the spiral-ramped bike path up to the bridge over the highway, and a twinge of hunger reminds me I haven’t eaten in a while. I look down at the highway: the traffic is thickening as the giant arched streetlights begin their neon flicker into the evening. This was Marcy’s and my favorite place to hide growing up, a perch in plain sight that no one can really get a good look at.