I hurry to salvage my idea. “We don’t really need to unpack. I just need to show some evidence of progress with the boxes. I’m in charge of the boxes, and if I don’t open one or two today, I might get kicked out of the apartment.”
“Evicted, eh?” He grins. “That would be tragic.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s such a nice building. Good neighbors are hard to find, I hear.”
I start to back away.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he says, ducking back into his apartment. I wander back to 3B and wait for him at my door. He appears a few minutes later, locks his own apartment, and follows me into mine.
We stop in the middle of the living room. His eyes sweep the space.
“You’ve got a box infestation,” he says. “I’m afraid it’s serious.”
I laugh, heading for the kitchen to grab a knife. When I come back to the living room, Stephen pushes a box towards me.
“I’ve found it,” he says. “This is the box for us.”
“So be it.” I brandish the knife and begin cutting away the packing tape. We open the box together, slowly pulling away the sticky remnants of tape. The container is filled to the brim with objects wrapped in bubble wrap. I pull out one of the mystery shapes and pop a few of the bubbles, enjoying their snapping sound, before I tear away the plastic cocoon. Stephen rocks back on his heels, watching me as if a person wrestling with over-taped bubble wrap is the most fascinating pastime on earth. His attention makes me giddy.
“Pretty,” he says when I toss the protective shell away to reveal a carnival-glass candy dish that belonged to my grandmother.
“Then you can decide where it goes.” I hand the dish to him. He takes it carefully, which I appreciate. Its value is sentimental only, and I think it’s sweet that he’s cautious about handling the glass dish.
“So when you look at me, you think ‘interior decorator,’” he says, walking around the room as he searches for the candy dish’s new home.
“I think you’ve got what it takes,” I say, unwrapping a music box. I automatically wind it up, though I already know doing so will rob some of my happiness. Tinkling music flutters through the living room.
He pauses, listening. “‘Send in the Clowns’?”
I nod. “This is Laurie’s.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s had it since he was five,” I say.
“Kind of a heavy song for a five-year-old.” Stephen sets the candy dish on an end table. It looks lonely without jewel-toned candies filling it.
“My grandma.” I point to the empty glass bowl. “Candy-dish grandma gave it to him for Christmas because he loved music and clowns. I don’t think she realized that it was a sad song. I’d be shocked if she knew who Stephen Sondheim was.”
I stand up, cradling the music box in my palms.
“How is your brother adjusting?”
“Better than me.” I sigh.
He flinches a little and I chew my lip.
“I don’t mean . . . I feel good now,” I say. “When we’re together . . .”
My heart stutters. I don’t want to say too much and ruin things. “But Laurie has school and stuff to keep him busy. I’m stuck with unpacking duty.”
“Ah . . . the injustice.” He’s smiling again, and I relax.
“Right?” I say, putting the back of my hand to my forehead in mock suffering. “He did manage to snare someone else in the building already. A boy who lives upstairs . . . Five-C.”
“Sean,” Stephen says.
“Oh.” I tilt my head, taking in his thoughtful expression. “You know him?”
He balks. “A little. I think he prefers books to people.”
“I’m the last person who’d call that a character flaw,” I say. “But still, he’s not exactly a chatterbox, is he? I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but I’m pretty sure he’s Laurie’s new crush—God save us all.”
I watch his reaction, which is mostly a non-reaction. His face is open, pleasant. All he says is: “Sean strikes me as very shy. Hence the mumbling.”
I grip the music box a little too tightly. “Let’s take a break. I’ll put this in Laurie’s room.”
“A break already?” Stephen looks at the other piles of boxes around the room. “We only unpacked two things.”
“I said I only need evidence of progress.” I nod at the candy dish. “You have provided said evidence.”
He shrugs. “It’s your eviction.”
I lead him out of the living room into the hallway, pausing to set the music box on top of Laurie’s dresser. I grind my teeth, frustrated that I’m doing it again. Self-sabotage as a defense mechanism never ends well.
It doesn’t help that Stephen is passing all my tests. It happened with him yesterday too. I’d kept my testing light—but it was still testing. When I mentioned Laurie and drag in the same sentence, Stephen didn’t so much as flinch. And bringing up Sean and Laurie together is a non-issue for Stephen too.
I couldn’t bear it if he was one of them. The ones who try to not make a face but inevitably do. The ones who shrug and say, “I don’t care what they do, but I don’t want to hear about it.” The ones who whisper behind your back, who make excuses when you mention they don’t spend time with you anymore.
My last boyfriend turned out to be one of them. Watching that relationship fizzle out wasn’t any sort of epic tragedy. It would have died on its own anyway. His reaction to my brother was just a catalyst, speeding its demise.
I rarely think about Robbie these days, but when I linger outside my bedroom door, I know why I am now, though I’d rather not admit it. Association bites. But I can’t deny that these skittering feelings, the creep of heat up my neck paired with fluttering in my stomach—all signs of a blossoming crush—last appeared when I crashed into Robbie while carrying an armload of supplies into the art room at our high school. I swore till I couldn’t breathe and he laughed. A week later we were dating. Two months later I was screaming at him in the school parking lot while our classmates watched, whispered, and snickered.
“This is my room,” I say. “Do you want to see it?” I worry I am being too pushy, that I should ask if he wants to watch a movie in the living room, but I want him to see me, and me is my room.
“If you’d like to show me,” he says.
I take a breath and go inside. Despite all my pre-planning of the unpacking-with-Stephen event, I didn’t work a bedroom cleanup into that scheme. The remnants of my restless night of non-creation are still scattered across my bed. My pajamas are hanging from the chair at my desk. A basket full of clean clothes waits to be folded.
“Oh,” I say, and go to clear the paper and charcoals from my bed. I shove everything into my art case and slide it back under the bed. “Sorry about the mess.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “At least it doesn’t smell.”
I sit on the bed, patting the rumpled blanket next to me.
He settles near me, not close enough to touch. Somehow a mallet has landed in my chest and is now pounding on my rib cage. I want to run my fingers along his forearm, from elbow to wrist, and then clasp his hand in my own. But there’s something I have to do first. I have to get past my own fear.
“I hate to do this,” I say. “But after yesterday—when I told you there’s something here, I meant it.”
“I know you did.” He rests his fingers lightly on mine.
I flip my hand over, curling my fingers around his. “But I have some baggage to deal with.”
“More unpacking?” He smiles slowly.
“Of a different sort.” I lean back on my elbows and I’m sorry when my hand slips from his, but I have to focus if I’m going to get through this. When he’s touching me, it’s hard to think about anything else.
He bends forward, resting his arms on his legs. His voice gets rough. “Do you have a boyfriend back in Minnesota?”
I’m startled and it makes me laugh nervously, especially because I’d just been thin
king about Robbie.
“Just a lame-ass ex-boyfriend. He claimed rebuilding motorcycles was his calling,” I say. “But I never saw him get near a bike, and I’m pretty sure if I set out a crescent wrench, a socket wrench, and a hammer, he wouldn’t be able to tell me which was which. Well, maybe the hammer.”
I’m relieved when he laughs. “But no strings attached?”
“I cut those strings in April,” I say.
“So where are the bags?” he asks.
I’m uneasy again, beginning to wish I hadn’t brought this up. “You asked why we left.”
“Heavy baggage?” he says.
I press my lips together, exhaling slowly through my nose. “Yes.”
“Then you should tell me. It’s more evidence of progress.” He says it so calmly that I almost curl into a ball, wanting to rest my head in his lap. Instead I twist my fingers in the blankets.
“We moved because of Laurie.”
He doesn’t respond, just leans in, listening.
“My brother is gay.”
Again, nothing. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, just listens. When I don’t speak again, he seems to decide I need something. He nods.
“This spring, six assholes at my school jumped him.” My voice starts to shake. I can’t remember the last time I talked about what happened. “Baseball team hazing, they said. Hate crime is more like it.”
I’m starting to feel dizzy. My stomach twists and I sit up.
“How badly was he hurt?”
“Broken jaw, broken collarbone, broken ribs, broken arm.” I clutch the edge of the bed. “They had bats.”
I hear him draw a sharp breath.
“He was in the hospital for weeks,” I say.
“That must have been horrible,” he says.
“It was. But considering Laurie was the one with all the broken bones, he took it better than the rest of us. He’s always been our family cheerleader. But my mom and dad fell apart. Dad didn’t take it well when Laurie first came out, but . . . what Dad did next none of us saw coming. He blamed Laurie for the assault, talked nonstop about how Laurie must have provoked them, said that they were ‘good boys’ and we shouldn’t press charges. Mom went ballistic.”
“I assumed your parents were divorced,” Stephen says. “Since you moved here with just your mom.”
“They will be when all the paperwork goes through,” I tell him. “My dad’s family is conservative, but he always claimed to be the liberal of the bunch. We didn’t spend much time with that side of the family. But I guess his liberalism only stretched so far before it broke.”
Stephen’s shaking his head. “I’m so sorry.”
“It wasn’t just my dad,” I say. “People didn’t know how to handle it. My friends got weird—even the ones who really did care. I’m sure it was my fault too, but I was so angry. I couldn’t trust anyone.” I look up at him. “And sometimes I think I still don’t know how.”
“That makes sense.”
“What I’m trying to say is that I spent the last four months learning to be alone, avoiding the world, hating pretty much anyone who so much as blinked at me,” I say. “But when I’m with you, I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
The anchor of pain that I’ve been dragging around Manhattan with me snaps free, sinking into the past, where I hope it will rest undisturbed. He knows. He knows and he’s still here. I want to laugh and cry. But I want something else even more. I edge closer to him on the bed. He doesn’t move. I’m looking at his lips, tracing their shape with my eyes.
I close my eyelids and quickly lean forward. I feel the cool whisper of his breath on my face, but then I’m no longer leaning. I’m falling. I make a full face-plant against my bed, and the familiar scent of our fabric softener hits my nose. Spluttering through cotton, I roll over. Stephen is bending over me, his eyes wide. I stare at him. My stomach wants to climb out my throat. He obviously jumped out of the way when I tried to kiss him.
My cheeks are on fire, but humiliation makes my blood cold.
I’m such a moron. This is too soon.
I’m blinking as fast as I can so I won’t cry, but tears are biting at the corners of my eyes. I want to cry because it feels so good to finally have talked to someone kind about Laurie. I want to cry because the boy I like didn’t want to kiss me. I want to cry because I’m in a new city and I’m lonely.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I can’t shake my head or nod. I’m afraid to move at all. Paralysis is the only thing between me and a total meltdown.
“I’m so sorry, Elizabeth, but I have to go.” He’s still hovering above me, his hands pressing into the bed on each side of me. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He fixes me with a gaze that makes my breath stop. Without closing his eyes, he leans down. Then his lips are brushing against mine, feather soft.
His kiss lingers, electric on my mouth, but he’s walking out of my room.
I’m still lying there when I hear the apartment door open and close as he leaves. I’m still lying there when I realize I have no idea what he meant.
Chapter 7
I AM FINDING IT HARDER and harder to concentrate on myself when I am around her. If I am too caught up in her—in caring about her, in wondering about her—I forget about my body. I disappear in my thoughts of her.
This is not a problem I’ve had before. To escape my own story long enough to be a part of someone else’s—this has never been a temptation. With my parents, there was always the knowledge of what was going on. Every interaction they had with me was tethered to the fact of what I was. All of our conversations were, in some way, about me. But with Elizabeth, I lose that tether. My thoughts are free to think only of her. But if my thoughts go too far, then my body, left to its own devices, loses its ability to touch, to hold, to stay.
I have to learn to be conscious of her and conscious of myself at the same time.
I am so new at this thing, which I deeply suspect is what other people call love.
* * *
I return to her apartment an hour later, after I’ve managed to rehearse my focus, practice my concentration.
Mercifully, she lets me back in. Mercifully, her brother and mother are still gone.
She has been taking out her anger and confusion on the boxes. There’s a sheen of sweat on her skin, and her room is an astonishment of piles and scatter.
“What was that?” she says.
“I want us to go fast,” I tell her. “But I need us to go slow.”
She scrutinizes me. “Why?”
If I cannot tell her the truth, I can tell her a truth.
“Because I’ve never done this before.”
“Never.”
“No. Never.”
“No evil exes?”
“No exes mark my spot. Evil or otherwise.”
“Why?”
I shake my head. “It just hasn’t happened.”
I can’t tell her she’s the first person I’ve ever had feelings for—she’s not. But at the same time, I can’t tell her she’s the first person I’ve ever had feelings for who actually knows I exist. Because she is. And that would no doubt scare her.
“You can’t just leave,” she tells me. “If a moment goes wrong or if something isn’t right—you can’t just say you’re sorry and walk out the door. The next time you do that, the door’s going to be locked and bolted behind you. Do you understand? I like you, okay? But I also need to like the way you make me feel. And just now? I didn’t like that at all.”
I tell her I know.
“Okay, then.” She looks around the room. “So who’s my box bitch?”
I smile. “I’m your box bitch.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t hear you.”
“I’M YOUR BOX BITCH!”
Now she smiles. “Much better. Let’s get to work.”
* * *
I focus. As I rip off the packing tape, I focus. As I fold th
e empty boxes into their flattest state, I focus. When she’s showing me books, asking me if I like certain authors—I focus. And then when those books sentry around us in stacks, and she beckons me to hear her favorite Margaret Atwood poems, I focus. It’s called “Variations on the Word Sleep” and at the very end the poet says she would like to be “the air that inhabits you for a moment”—hearing this, my own breathing intensifies, like breathing itself is a sense.
Time doesn’t stop, but we stop. We cannot ask time to stop, but we can stop ourselves.
She turns to me, and I focus. On her breathing. Her eyes. Her lips. She leans into me, and I focus. Her heat. Her skin. Her hands.
We touch, and I focus. We kiss, and I focus.
We are the time. We are the breathing.
We are the air.
* * *
What follows is an almost perfect week.
The weather turns nasty outside, storm after storm after storm, which proves to be a perfect excuse to stay indoors. With her brother off at summer school and her mother starting work, we have the days to ourselves. Our apartments and the hallway between them become the only territory we need, the Profoundly Sovereign Nation of Us, and we alternate between the newness of her place and the long history of mine.
She discovers my parents’ old board games in our hallway closet, and soon we are playing them all, sometimes two at once. Risk and Monopoly and Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. It’s been a long time since I’ve played them, and it makes me a little maudlin at first.
Elizabeth senses this and asks, “Do you miss your parents?”
I stop, game piece in hand. How does she know? And then I realize she believes my story, that my parents are off on some research trip for the summer. She believes I miss them in the way you miss something you know will someday return.
“A little,” I say. Then, “It’s your turn.”
Over the board games, she tells me a lot about Minnesota, and Robbie, and Laurie, and her parents. I tell her about people in the park, residents in the building, other things I’ve overheard or witnessed over the past few years. It’s the difference between autobiography and biography, and if she notices, she doesn’t mention it. A few times, she asks me about my school, and I make things up. Or she asks me about my parents, and I give her an altered version. The mother I tell her about is still a recognizable version of my mother—the same quirks, the same laughs, the same missing family history. Only she isn’t dead. And she doesn’t have an invisible son.
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