“Listen. I’ll rent a room somewhere else. They said there’re tons of sublets available in the summer; it won’t even cost that much. Okay? You won’t even have to see me.”
You were shaking your head.
“Come on. This is something good for you.” I got up and sat next to you on the sofa. “If you say no to this, you’re just being stubborn. It’s stupid. It’s just stubbornness.”
You turned on me. Your face had changed. “Why do you think you can have it both ways? You can’t do that, Kurl; that’s not how it works.” You’d stopped crying just like that. Angry replacing sad.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“It was you who said it was better this way,” you said.
“What way?”
“Alone. Apart.”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“You said it was easier. You said breaking up was for the best.”
“I did not,” I said. “You’re misquoting me.”
You narrowed your eyes. Sat back and folded your arms. “It was right in the last letter I sent to the Bridge to Education people. The last two letters, in fact. Word for word.”
“Then you’re taking them out of context!” Now I was getting angry too. The idea that you’d been refusing to see me, had kept vowing to stop writing—that all this time you’d thought it was me wanting to be apart? That I was the one behind all these wasted, heartsore, miserable days and weeks?
The anger stirred in my gut, shoved at my back, stung behind my eyes. And it—the anger—made me suddenly remember that I had said it to you—that we’d be better off apart. And I remembered why I’d written it, why I’d believed it. It was because of exactly this, this anger.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I leaned forward and put my head in my hands. “You’re right. I forgot I said it. No, no.”
You were quiet, and after a minute I turned to look at you. Your wide, raw eyes. The ridge of your collarbone and the soft hollow where it meets your neck. Jo.
I said, “It’s not, though. It’s not better apart. I was wrong.” I didn’t think of sliding closer to you on the sofa, of putting my mouth into the hollow at your neck, but I was there and my mouth was there.
You went rigid, gasping.
I pressed my mouth against your throat. I heaved a breath into your ear. I lay heavy against you, pinning your folded arms between us. My body felt like sand pouring out over your body.
You turned your head, and I felt your teeth scrape against my cheekbone, and I lifted my mouth to yours. Urge and urge and urge. It wasn’t kissing so much as looking for air.
You said, “No, no. Stop it.” Shoving me away, twisting.
“I don’t want to,” I said, though I sat back. “I don’t want to stop. I love you. You know I love you.”
You turned and climbed up over the cushions, kneeing me hard in the jaw on your way, and wedged yourself down behind the sofa.
I looked over the edge but your face was hidden. Your arm was curled up over your bent head as if to shield you from falling debris.
“Hey,” I said. “Come out.”
“I don’t want to live inside a beautiful fable,” you said, the words muffled.
“What do you mean?”
“What we had. Us. You said we invented a universe, remember? This whole delicate, fictional universe that only you and I knew about. And maybe the ghost of Walt Whitman was in there too.”
“Okay,” I said. From where I was sitting twisted around backward on the sofa, I could see the neighbors across the street unloading groceries from the trunk of their car. The mother handed grocery bags to the little boy, and the little boy switched each bag to his other hand, loading himself down and reaching for more, obviously trying to see how much he’d be able to carry at once.
“Well, look what happened to it,” you said. “It was shredded.” The word shredded broke on a sob. “I don’t want to live in a beautiful fable if it’s just going to get shredded like that.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But it’s not a fable anymore if other people live inside it too. Then it becomes real. Mark and Sylvan, Bron, Lyle”—I was about to list Shayna, but I thought better of it—“all the U of M people… I mean, hell, my mom and Uncle Vik may not like it but they know about us, at least; they know it’s real.”
The mother across the road slammed the trunk. She tried to take some of the grocery bags back from the little boy, but he staggered away from her and up the driveway, set on doing it all by himself.
“It’s not a fable anymore,” I told you. “We are two people in the real world. What does Walt call it? Dauntless.”
“I’m not dauntless though,” you said.
“You are.” I reached down and found your hand, threaded my fingers through yours. “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Remember?” I said. “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”
“I can’t.”
“Please, Jo.” I pulled your hand up to my lips, licked your palm and pressed it against my lips.
“No,” you said, and tried to pull away.
I held on. I needed to hear you make a sound other than No, so I bit into your palm.
A startled yelp, and then a muffled laugh. You tipped your head back, finally, and stared up at me. Blinking, your pupils constricting in the daylight, your lashes still glimmering with tears.
Your eyes had such hurt in them though. And fear—I could see that you were afraid. “I can’t do it, Kurl,” you whispered. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
So I let go of your hand.
I stood up and took the poem out of my pocket, the one Uncle Viktor confiscated when he kicked me out of the house. I’d remembered some parts of it, and I’d composed the rest from scratch. I dropped it down for you behind the sofa.
And I said goodbye.
Sincerely,
AK
GREEN
by Adam Kurlansky
(for Jo)
From the start you saw the truth of me,
Grown slowly up out of the dark,
A pale green thing reaching for the sun.
Like a mirror you showed me to myself,
All bluster and scars.
I was uneasy with the reflection
And moved away but you pulled me back
And back again.
Before you I never noticed daybreak,
Crimson then yellow then white.
I never saw how the clouds rush the sky.
I never knew how soft the skin is behind a knee,
How skin can smell like milk, like grass, like the sea.
I never noticed how an ant will climb to the tip
Of a blade of grass for no reason,
How many things happen for no reason,
And how no reason can mean joy.
Now I notice it all:
I notice all this heaviness,
How blood moves unevenly through a body,
Flames in some places, freezes in others,
And how a heart can hurt inside a chest.
Thursday, June 30
Dear Kurl,
I called Mark this morning to find you, and he said you were somewhere you called your Outer Sanctum. “What is that,” he joked, “some kind of gay-football-player-slash-poet hangout?”
“It’s down by the train tracks,” I told him.
I apologize if it was meant to be a secret, Kurl. I reasoned that, first, Mark is the person with whom you used to explore all those wild places of the city, so he’d be intrigued to know you still return to them, and second, someone should know where you are when you go off-road like that. We all need someone watching out for us, Kurl. Even you.
I rode Nelly down the new section of the bike path you mentioned. My ribs were only a tiny bit sore going uphill, and riding over the parts where the tree roots had already pushed the asphalt out of shape. I found the spot with the spray-painted word BREATHE, just like you said.
You were lying on a blanket in the sunshine. “
Sit down,” you said.
Right away you took off your flannel shirt for me to wear against the mosquitoes. “It’s fine,” you said, draping it over my shoulders, doing up the top button, adjusting and tucking in the edges of my green silk scarf to seal the gaps. “They don’t like the way I taste.”
Kurl, the reason I’d sought you out was that I wanted to talk. I wanted to explain how utterly breakable I’ve been feeling since my sister left, since I found out about my mom. How I have felt brittle and porous as an old clay pot, leaky with tears.
And I wanted to tell you that Abigail Cuttler phoned me the other day, and that we talked for ages. And for some reason, instead of the expected things, I started to talk to her about Prince, about Prince dying like that right at the height of his career. Abigail was attempting to ask me how things were going at home and whether I was sleeping okay, and all I did for the half hour on the phone was sit there on my bed weeping about Prince, and blabbering about the time Lyle and I arranged “Little Red Corvette” for mando and banjo and performed it with Shayna at Rich and Trudie’s anniversary party.
I was sure Abigail would tell me that I was trying to deflect from the real issues by focusing on Prince, that I was in denial or I was repressing my true emotions.
But it turned out she wasn’t fazed in the slightest by all the Prince talk. “You’re grieving,” she said, “plain and simple.”
It turns out Abigail’s mother is a psychotherapist, and so Abigail has learned all kinds of different theories about grief. Grief doesn’t attach very well to “proper” objects, she said. If someone close to you dies, for instance, you might find yourself grieving not that person but someone who died ages ago, or not a dead person at all but an ex-spouse or estranged friend. “Or all of the above,” Abigail said. “You might be grieving everybody.”
I told her how I tend to cry at inappropriate times. She said, “Maybe part of you has always been grieving, in a low-grade way. Maybe it’s been happening in the background, all along.” We didn’t have time to get into it, but I strongly suspect she was talking about Raphael Vogel. About my mom. I’ve been writing to her quite a bit about Raphael, recently.
Anyhow. I was planning on telling you all this, Kurl, in an attempt to give you some context for why I hid from you when you came over, why I flat-out refused your offer to rent an apartment off-campus so I could attend the Summer Poetry Seminar without you.
It was the idea of you leaving, Kurl. I hadn’t spoken to you face-to-face in weeks, yet somehow, without being aware of it, I’d managed to convince myself that you weren’t going anywhere. And then there you were in my living room, talking to me, touching me—and telling me you were going away to college, not in the fall but for the summer, too. For more than the summer. For good.
I was planning on explaining all this to you, how the realization that you were actually leaving had shattered me and saddened me too much to bear. It was too much for me even to get out from behind the sofa.
I didn’t end up explaining anything, though. Instead I just kept my eyes down, sitting beside you, and picked at the new shoots of grass at the blanket’s edge. Despite the polite inches between us, it felt as though your body next to mine was throwing off a charge, as though you’d been absorbing solar energy and were now radiating it to me. I tried to gather my words, but they kept getting scattered into the vibrating air.
And then you wrapped a heavy, casual arm around my shoulders. Your other hand gathered the ends of my scarf together and tugged, scooping me toward you, turning me in so that my ear was pressed against your throat. I felt your pulse beating at my temple, heard you sigh from deep in your belly.
Held in that gentle lasso, that warm half hug, what was I supposed to say? Suddenly none of the explaining felt very urgent or crucial. You weren’t asking me for anything, and I didn’t need anything from you either, beyond that solid contact. There was suddenly nothing that needed to be said.
I realized that it was the first time since Bron’s party that my mind had gone still. I could feel my blood moving around inside my body, my muscles resting, my skin warming against yours through our clothes. Now, now, now, said your heartbeat.
And then I saw it.
“Is that a Red Eft?” I said.
“Ha,” you said.
“Look,” I said. “Look, slowly. Look!”
You released me in slow motion and swiveled your torso to look in the grass where I was looking.
“No,” you said.
“It is, right?”
“No. No way.”
“It’s red,” I pointed out. “Is there another kind of red salamander?”
“They don’t live this far south,” you said. You moved your weight onto your hands, slid your knees around, and came up to all fours. You eased forward six inches, maybe twelve—and the little creature ducked its head under the thatch and was gone.
We were silent a moment. I didn’t want to interrupt whatever you were thinking.
Finally you turned back to me with wide, spooked eyes. “You’re a miracle,” you said.
I laughed. “What did I have to do with it?”
“You conjured it,” you said, “obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Then you took my face between your hands and kissed me.
“Kurl,” I said, after a minute or two, “I don’t want to live in your dorm room by myself. I want you to do the Poetry Seminar with me, if I’m going to do it at all.”
You sat back on your heels. “Okay.”
“You must have signed an acceptance form for U of M’s offer, right?”
“I guess so,” you said. Your face was perfectly still, and I realized you were poised between happiness and fear of what I was going to say next.
“On paper,” I said. “You had to sign something on actual paper, and mail it in.”
“Yeah,” you said. “I mean, they wanted my signature.”
“I want your signature,” I said.
“On what?” you asked. “What for?”
“Everyone has left me”—I heard the sad little quaver come into my voice and felt my face heating up—“or lied to me.”
You lifted your hand to my jaw, the pad of your thumb on my lips. “I’ll sign anything you want. Ask me anything, Jo; you know the answer is yes.”
So I unzipped my backpack and took out my taped-together Leaves of Grass. I slipped out the contract that I’d written and tucked into the back of the book. I unfolded the paper on the blanket.
“I signed my part already.” I showed you.
You read it over slowly, out loud. My heart was beating so hard in my chest I could barely hear the words.
“I have amendments,” you said, when you’d finished.
I handed you a pen and watched as you scratched out some parts and wrote something new. Then, carefully, you signed your name.
Yours,
Jo
I, hereby agree to register for and attend the Summer Poetry Seminar at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I further agree to share my allotted on-campus accommodations with . Together we commit ourselves to the pursuit of truth and happiness as exemplified in the work of poet Walt Whitman and summarized as follows:
Let us be poets of the body and the soul!
Let us loaf together on the grass!
Let us press together our bare-stript hearts!
Let us sound triumphal drums for our dead!
Let us listen to the beat and urge of the world!
Let us unscrew the locks from the doors!
Let us unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Let us be together ever dauntless!
Signed,
Looking for the latest news on your favorite YA authors?
Want early access to new books and the chance to win advance copies?
Bring the (book) party to your in-box with the NOVL e-newsletter:
theNOVL.com/enewsletter
Join the NOVL community:
theNOVL
.com
Twitter.com/TheNovl
Instagram.com/TheNovl
Facebook.com/TheNovl
We Contain Multitudes Page 27