Your face softened and you smiled. Relief. You thought I hadn’t seen. That I was clueless. The little sister, N. Golden, Monkey Number Two.
“Go ahead,” you said. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute, soccer star.”
Earlier that day that moniker almost brought me to tears. Now I heard the condescension.
You were playing me for a fool.
“I’ll save your seat.” I backed out of the room.
You came out about five minutes later. This movie that I loved so much played out slowly and torturously. I didn’t even crack a smile at the end when they all sing and dance to that “Hot Hot Hot” song.
Chiara slept over and everyone else left. This wasn’t the plan, but you begged her, you offered her spare pajamas and a toothbrush from the collection of fresh ones Sonia keeps in the linen closet.
Chiara wasn’t one of your besties, and she’d certainly never spent the night, but I guess you were desperate to have someone act as a buffer between us. I couldn’t exactly barge in and ask why you were video chatting with Mr. B. while Chiara stretched out on your floor in your old Giants T-shirt and flannel bottoms.
I went to bed and I tossed and turned for hours, trying to ignore the Creed brothers.
Nell. You up?
Nell. You saw what you saw.
Nell. Nell? There’s no arguing with what you saw.
Nell. Hey, Nell.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight. You had no problem leaving me alone. Why couldn’t they?
Sleep changed things a bit. I still knew what I knew and I knew it for sure, but the night had erased some of the urgency. I wanted to be thoughtful. Careful. I didn’t want to come off as the outraged and bewildered younger sister, I wanted to come to you like a friend with no stake in what was happening.
But you had no stake in any of it—I know that’s what you’re thinking. Now I’d like to try and tell you why this isn’t so. Here goes:
Our lives are intertwined.
I don’t know how to make this any clearer. From my surprise birth to my mistaken name, Nellayla, to all the nights we slept in the same room to all the days we’ve been each other’s only constant—it could be Mom’s day or Dad’s, but we were almost always together—to my arrival at City Day, where I joined your soccer team, I could go on and on.
Our lives are intertwined.
This is another way of saying that I love you, Layla. I love you, and what you do matters to me, but more than that, it matters for me.
Think of the Creeds. I know they meant more to me than they meant to you, and I’m sure you think my fascination with them is strange or morbid, but one thing we know is that Duncan couldn’t live without Parker. If such unspeakable tragedy can have a lesson, then that’s what their lives and deaths taught us. Duncan had a stake in Parker’s choices.
I’m obviously not talking about killing myself. I’m not trying to be overly dramatic. I’m just saying that we’re close like that. We are the Goldens. And who knows; maybe to someone else out there, we are the perfect, beautiful sisters who have it all. Wouldn’t that be nice? To be seen that way? But of course, another thing the Creeds have taught us is that things are more complicated when you take a closer look.
We are the Goldens, but we aren’t perfect. We’re going to have some hard times, and I wanted to calmly and wisely say some version of this to you: I am your sister, I’m here to help, we’re close, our lives are intertwined, you can trust me.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
Chiara left around noon and you said you were going back to sleep because the two of you had stayed up all night talking.
Talking about what? Did you tell her? Did she know? How could you tell Chiara something you hid from me?
I followed you into your room.
“Nell, I need a nap. I’m seriously wiped.”
“I know. I just wanted to talk.”
“You always want to talk.” You did a little motion with your hand. Blah, blah, blah. “Can’t it wait a few hours?”
The calm I’d been cultivating all morning was seeping out of me.
“I saw you,” I said.
“You saw me what?”
“I saw you on your computer. Last night. When I came to find you during the movie. I saw what you were doing.”
“What was I doing, Nell? Enlighten me.”
“Video chatting with Mr. Barr.”
“And?”
“And that’s what I saw.”
“So?”
“So, he’s a teacher. You’re a student.”
You smiled at me. I’d rather you’d called me a name or told me to get the hell out of your room. There was something so aggravating about that smile.
“Like I said, I’m super tired.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Taking a nap? Let me spell this out for you. I am t-i-r-e-d.”
“No, Layla. Why are you acting like this? Why are you treating me this way? Why are you staying up all night talking to Chiara, but you won’t talk to me?”
“God. You’re such a baby.”
I know why you said this. You know it’s what stings the most. It’s one of the few things that ever sent me crying to Mom or Dad.
And guess what? I’m not a baby. In fact, standing in your doorway, I felt like I’d aged years. I could see the mistakes you were making like I was looking in a rearview mirror. Why couldn’t you see things the same way?
I took a deep breath.
“Layla. I love you.” I tried to stay cool, but my eyes filled with tears. My voice cracked.
All your hard edges disappeared. You grabbed my wrist, pulled me into your room, and closed the door.
“Shhhhhhh,” you said. Soothing or admonishing me?
We sat down on your bed. I kicked off my Uggs. You waited for me to say something. Our knees touched. I wanted to crawl under your comforter. I wanted everything else to go away. To tap my heels together three times and be back home again where life was simpler.
“So is it all true?” I asked finally.
You sighed. “Of course not.”
Before the relief could reach my stomach, you said, “It’s so much more complicated than that.”
HERE’S WHAT YOU SAID NEXT:
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
You know I like quotes. I’ve memorized the good ones. I have shelves full of books I’ve desecrated with garish highlighters.
There are many arenas in which you outshine me, Layla, but when it comes to literature and loving the way words knock into each other, I have the upper hand. Are you the one who keeps a notebook in your bedside drawer where you write down all your favorite lines? I don’t think so.
Yet there you were, spouting Marcus Aurelius like you did that sort of thing all the time.
No, of course I’d never heard that before, but I recognized that those words were not your own. I looked it up later on PretentiousQuotations.com or whatever, and there it was. But you were quoting someone else quoting someone else. Isn’t that right?
Well, then how come when I bust out with some of my favorite lines you roll your eyes like: Nell. She’s such a nerd. But when Mr. B. hit you with the Aurelius (let’s face it: there’s no way Schuyler or Liv knew that quote, and don’t even get me started on Chiara) you were probably like: My hero.
Okay. I get that this isn’t the point. I’d probably turn to mush too if someone I adored—someone like Sam, say—spouted off some Plato or even some John Lennon, so, yeah, Judge not lest ye be judged and all that. This sort of became my mantra. Judge not, especially when it’s your sister, and your lives are intertwined.
Anyway, back to the Aurelius. Let’s take it apart, shall we?
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Really? What about when Mr. Grandy, who is like the opposite of Mr. Barr because he’s old, and his clothes are hideous and he doesn’t know the first thing about contemporar
y music or anything after, like, the Second World War, what about when he says that the square root of 1,936 is 44. If I hear him say this, and I write it in my notebook, is it his opinion or is it fact?
It’s fact.
Maybe you could argue that numbers aren’t real, they’re just a construct to express a concept, that a number is nothing more than a superspecific adjective, etc., etc., but I don’t think that’s what you were trying to tell me with Marcus Aurelius. You were trying to say something about how everyone has an opinion about everyone else but nobody knows what’s true other than the person or people about whom that opinion is expressed.
Gossip isn’t truth.
Duh.
You don’t need to drag in a two-thousand-year-old Roman emperor to prove that. And anyway, what did you think I was doing in your room? I came to ask you about the truth, not about gossip. I came to ask you, the source, the object of the gossip: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
People saw you downtown with Mr. Barr. I saw Mr. Barr on your laptop screen before you snapped it shut.
What is truth? What is not merely perspective? What, if anything, is fact?
“Just tell me,” I said. “I can handle it. Tell me the truth.”
You took both of my hands in yours. We faced each other, knees touching, like we were at a séance, or a meeting of the secret society of sisterhood.
“It’s just like Madam Mai said. I’m in love. In real love.”
You squeezed my hands. Hard. Nearly cracking bones. Aside from sore hands, what did I feel in that moment?
So many emotions.
You yawned. I’d recently learned in Life Sciences that yawning isn’t so much about boredom or exhaustion—it helps cool the brain. I should have been the one yawning, because my head was on fire.
“I really do need that nap,” you said.
“Yeah. Okay.”
You leaned over and kissed my cheek.
“We’ll talk more later?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I love you tons,” you said.
“I know.”
“And, Nell?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do?”
“Of course.”
“Promise?”
“Don’t insult me.”
I closed your door.
That’s how I vowed to keep your secret.
I’M NOT SURE WHAT I can say about the miraculous friendship of Felix De La Cruz that I haven’t already said, but when I walked from your room back to mine, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
Meet me on 24th St.?
When?
NOW.
Where?
U Know.
I grabbed my fleece and went to tell Dad I was going out, but he’d left for a bike ride. Since he couldn’t do anything about losing his hair, Dad zeroed in on losing his belly flab.
“Did you have fun last night?” Sonia asked. If this were Mom, I’d know the subtext: You better have had fun, because I spent an hour mopping whipped cream off the kitchen floor. But this was sweet and easygoing Sonia, who just wanted to know if I’d had a good time.
“It was great.”
“Is your homework all done?”
“Yep.” Another lie.
“Well, then say hi to Felix.”
He was waiting for me right where I knew he would be, in front of Happy Donuts. He handed me a maple glazed. Pitch-perfect Felix intuition.
“So?” he said.
I sat down on the bench clutching my donut. I wanted to devour it, the ultimate comfort food, but my stomach wasn’t ready.
“Did you miss me?”
“Since yesterday?”
“No, I mean at your girls’ party. Wasn’t there a Felix-sized hole in your heart?”
“You mean an itty-bitty little hole?”
He shoved me. “Shut up. I’m massive. Feel these guns.” He flexed his arm in front of me and I put my forehead down in the crook of his elbow.
“Uh-oh.” He stroked my hair. “Tell Uncle Felix what’s wrong.”
I wanted to. God, did I want to. I wanted to share what you’d told me, spread the weight of it around. But promises are promises. Even unspoken ones.
“Too much pizza, not enough sleep.”
“What about the nudity? Was there too much team nudity?”
“You’re gross.”
“In the immortal words of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth: ‘A man can dream.’ ”
“Futurama?”
“Season two, episode twenty. He’s talking about the Finglonger—a glove with an extra-long index finger.”
“Who doesn’t need one of those?”
“I can’t imagine.” We leaned back against the front glass window of Happy Donuts. He put an arm around me. “So there was no team nudity.”
“No, but there were some whipped-cream nipples.”
“You’re killing me, Nell.”
“Is this what it’s like?”
“What?”
“Being a boy. Do you just sit around all the time thinking about naked girls? Isn’t there more to it?”
“Of course there is. We care about things like your intellect and your sense of humor and your capacity for kindness, but we also really like how you all look naked.”
I sighed. “I’ll never understand your gender.”
“Is this about Sam?” he asked. “Do you still think he’s Sam-azing? Are you still feeling Sam-ourous toward him? Or am I sensing some Sam-bivalence?”
“How long have you been working up that routine?”
“Just the walk over here.”
“Cute.”
“Then how come you didn’t even crack a smile?”
“I don’t know. I’m just …” I shook my head.
“Wow. Nell Golden at a loss for words.”
“Maybe I just need to eat my donut.” I took a bite. It tasted like fryer grease.
Felix and I always went to Happy Donuts when things were dire, when nothing but 470 calories, 13 grams of fat, and 24 grams of carbohydrates could lift our spirits. And there was the matter of the little donut man on the bag with his white-gloved hands, baker’s cap, and smile. An anthropomorphized donut. How can that not cheer you up?
So how did Felix know? How did he know I needed the unmatched magic of Happy Donuts right at that very minute? Why had he texted me?
Meet me on 24th St.?
Even Felix, with all his intuitive powers, couldn’t have known that you’d just dropped a nuclear bomb on me. That was when it occurred to me that Felix must have needed Happy Donuts for himself.
Something was wrong in Felixville.
Why was I such a shitty friend? That was the real question.
“Hey.” I turned to face him. I wiped some chocolate from the corner of his mouth. “How are you?”
“Very well, thank you. And how are you this fine afternoon?”
“Seriously, Felix. Tell me. What’s wrong?”
He sighed. “I don’t even want to say it out loud.” He looked down into his lap and crumpled the donut bag in his fist. “You know how talking about something makes it real? And sometimes just pretending it’s not happening … you can fool yourself into believing it’s not?”
I knew exactly what he meant. Exactly.
I checked his profile. Was he being serious? Or was he about to bust out with something like: I’m gay, which for the record, I’d totally be fine with, but is so obviously not true.
Nope. I could see it in his body. In his half-eaten donut. This was no joke.
“It’s my dad, Nell.”
I knew exactly what he was going to say next. Exactly.
I’ve always had my suspicions about Angel De Le Cruz, figured there was no way he could live up to his name. I don’t mean to sound like a cynic, but you can’t put a man with Angel’s looks into a class of college girls year after year and not expect him to eventually fall under the spell of one of his students.
And what about that whole romantic routine? The way Angel always calls Julia, Felix’s mom, el amor de mi vida? “The love of my life.” Or mi corazón, mi alma? “My heart, my soul.” How can that be for real?
I sat fuming. Men. Teachers. What’s wrong with the world?
“He’s sick,” Felix said.
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. That about sums it up.”
“How sick?”
“ ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good.’ ”
Hamlet. Act 1 scene 2. No Fakespeare.
I took his hand. “Felix.”
“It’s in his adrenal cortex. I didn’t even know he had an adrenal cortex.”
He threw his donut into the trash bin and sat up straight, filling his lungs with a big breath of air. “They say it’s just a spot. A few centimeters in diameter. And there are treatments. And Dad is strong. And we’re made of fight, we don’t give up easily, it’s a family trait, but I just feel like crawling into a hole and dying first.”
“You can’t. I wouldn’t let you.”
“I’m bigger than you. I’ll shove you out of the way.”
“It’s just a spot, Felix. A few centimeters.” This was lame, but I didn’t know what else to say. I just hugged him.
I adored Angel. And Julia. I envied Felix, whose mother and father were married to each other and loved each other. That’s probably why I’d told myself that Angel’s grand proclamations couldn’t be trusted. It was easier to believe that than the truth.
I took off my fleece. Too warm for November. The sky was thick and beige and I couldn’t tell if it was about to rain or if maybe miles below its surface the earth was about to shift, and the shaking would throw us both from this bench.
I looked up the block, half expecting to see the Creed brothers—it felt like that kind of weather, the kind of afternoon when maybe the dead could rise and saunter down the street.
IT WAS ALL TOO MUCH for one day. But I came back from 24th Street and we packed our things and returned to Mom’s and got our homework in order and chose our outfits for school and hit up Mom for lunch money. We had soccer finals coming up and I had play rehearsals and there were quizzes to study for, because life wants to be lived. You can’t just sit on a bench all day outside a donut shop, wishing everything were different.
We Are the Goldens Page 7