Don’t you wish you’d gone skiing? Duncan asked.
Don’t you wish you’d gone to Hawaii? Parker echoed.
They were suffering a bit of the stuck-at-home-with-nothing-to-do blues too.
Where did he go for break? Duncan asked.
I didn’t know. Maybe nowhere.
Why don’t you just give him a call? You know you want to.
I didn’t have his number.
Duh. It’s in the student handbook. So is his email. You can text him. There’s a whole world of communication opportunities open to you.
As we ran through Twin Peaks, even on the climb up, they never got short of breath. Running, like everything else they ever did, seemed effortless.
Parker turned around and started jogging backward. You know, you should probably talk to her. Find out what’s going on. You can’t keep acting like nothing is happening.
I grunted. The upward climb was doing a number on my lungs.
What are you afraid of?
I was afraid of everything.
Take control, Duncan said. Don’t be passive. Call Sam—you deserve to know what’s going to happen next. And talk to Layla about Mr. B. Start being a better sister.
In the end, I took 50 percent of the Creed brothers’ advice. I didn’t call Sam, but I did talk to you. Well, I took maybe 70 percent of their advice, because though I didn’t call Sam, I did send him a text.
An innocuous, safe text. Totally un-creeper-like.
How’s UR break? Hope UR somewhere fun.
I worked it over and over in my head on the last stretch of my run. With all that planning, I could have come up with something more clever. But I didn’t want clever. I wanted natural. I wanted off-the-cuff. I wanted you’re barely on my mind.
He didn’t text back.
Later, you suggested that maybe he’d gone to Europe. The Caribbean. Someplace where the roaming charges were so high he’d left his cell at home. That was kind of you, Layla, since you didn’t believe it. You were just trying to make me feel better. And for those two weeks it worked.
But first, we needed to warm up to each other. We needed to reach the place where I could admit I’d texted Sam and heard nothing back, and you could tell me about the perfect version of love you’d stumbled into, all of which meant I’d have to meet you where you were. Put aside my better judgment and just listen.
That first Wednesday of break I convinced you to leave the house and your laptop—the holy temple of messaging and video-chatting—so that I could introduce you to my favorite café.
We took the same bus we took to school, but it felt different, changed, like going back to visit a place you went when you were younger, or a theater when all the lights come back on. We walked by City Day. The gates were locked. A poster advertising Hamlet still hung in the glass case. I brushed off the memory of searching in vain for your face in the audience on closing night. The memory of Sam kissing me on the lips backstage, quickly, like an accident. There was something more exciting about that kiss than the kissing that happened later in his bedroom.
I turned, leading us up a different block from the one Felix and I usually take to the café. I wanted a fresh start. A vacation.
I ordered for us. Two mocha lattes, please. I smiled at the waiter who’d served me countless times and he smiled back, but I could see that he had absolutely no idea who I was.
“So,” I said to you.
“So.”
“What’s up?”
You laughed. Inane question, I know. But I was trying to show that I could be receptive to whatever you threw my way. I stared at you. Wanting you to know I meant it.
“I’m lonely,” you said.
That stung. Just a little. You were sitting with me. We were close enough so that my hand grazed yours when I reached for the sugar.
You sighed. “I just miss him so much. I didn’t know I could miss someone this way. I’m just … It’s just … I have this vast emptiness inside me. And I know that might sound crazy, because we haven’t even been together all that long, but now we are, and my life has changed, and I can’t even remember what anything was like before, and it’s as if I need him to breathe. He’s everything to me. And I’m everything to him. And don’t look at me that way, Nell. Seriously, don’t.”
I tried to neutralize my face. Slacken every muscle. “Like what?”
“Like that.” You pointed at me and squinted. “Like Mom morphed with an abused puppy.”
“Layla.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t judge me. And don’t make this about you. This is not about you. It’s about me.”
“Layla.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Just … give me a minute here. Okay?” I didn’t like hearing you sound desperate. Needy. Irrational. Was this what it meant to be in real love?
“You’ve got thirty seconds.”
I stirred my latte with my pinky. “Wow.”
“I know. It’s crazy. But it’s also a-mazing.”
“I’m happy for you, I guess.”
“Thanks, Nell.”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
You reached across the table and took me by the hand. “You don’t need to say anything else. It means a lot that you can be happy for me.”
I didn’t point out that I’d said I’m happy for you, I guess. But you looked ecstatic, actually. So how could I not be happy for you?
The waiter who didn’t recognize me circled back. “How are we doing over here, ladies? Got everything you need?”
“We’ve got it all,” you said. “We’re living the dream.”
He laughed. “Sure looks like it.”
That’s maybe the moment, more than any other, when I realized that though we’re close in age, though we share the same DNA, the world sees us differently. Especially the world of men.
You looked out the window and smiled. “Everyone thinks they know him, but they don’t. I know him. Truly. Do you want to know what he wrote in my book?”
“Sure.”
“He wrote: To YOU. Love ME. That’s who we are to each other. We are the you and the me. It’s simple. He’s just …” A sigh. “He’s not like anybody else.”
“Nobody is like anybody else.”
“You’re like me.”
I knew what you were doing, but still, I liked hearing it. Yes, you are like me. I am like you.
“Go on.…”
“He’s, like, open and unafraid to articulate his feelings. He treats me better than anybody ever has. Do you know any boys who can tell you how they feel, really tell you how they feel?”
“Felix.”
“That’s different. Felix is your friend. I mean, look around you.” I looked around. You slapped my wrist. “Not literally. Like, think of the boys at school. Do you notice how they are with their girlfriends, if they even have girlfriends? Love is pretty much dead in high school.”
I thought of Hugh Feldman giving Ava Price the play’s sole standing ovation. I even thought of Sam telling me the view looked better with me in his window. You were being ridiculous.
But I clung to Duncan’s words. Start being a better sister.
We ordered a second round of lattes and you talked. And talked and talked and talked. At first you thought you just had a crush. A crush like so many girls before you. But then you felt the connection. The way he looked at you when you spoke. He saw through your art, understood you in ways you didn’t yet understand yourself. Two people are strangers to each other and then, suddenly, they are not. All at once you knew him. And he knew you. And you felt as if your whole life had been leading up to knowing this person.
Did I understand? Could I understand?
We took our conversation outside, found ourselves in Golden Gate Park at Children’s Playground. We sat on a bench and you talked. And talked and talked and talked. And as you talked I felt some part of myself recharging. Like the way certain specie
s of animal can regenerate a piece of themselves they’ve lost—a fin, a tail, a skin. I started to feel like me again, and damn, Layla, if it didn’t feel great being your trusted ally. Your confidante. Closer than close, only seventeen months apart. Nellayla.
A surprise December sun warmed the tops of our heads. We watched as a line of kids dragged flattened cardboard boxes up to the top of the rock slide and flew down at dangerous speeds. I was always afraid of that slide.
You nudged me and said, “I think it’s time.”
I reached into the pocket of my jacket to check the clock on my phone (and, yes, to see if Sam had returned my text).
“Mrs. Literal.” You took the phone from my hands. “I mean grab some cardboard. It’s time you go for it.”
“No thanks.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know … maybe the risk of permanent brain damage?”
“Come on. Let’s breathe some life into this vacation. If we can’t go away, let’s go back and do all the things we used to do, that we don’t do anymore because we think we’re too old.”
“But I never went down that slide.”
“True.” You pushed me until I rose from the bench. “Now’s your chance to rewrite history.”
I stood around watching until a boy with strawberry hair took pity on me and offered me his produce box from Andronico’s.
I know all this sounds as if it’s building up to something, some metaphor about facing fears, taking risk, sliding toward the unknown, but honestly, it was just kind of awkward. I hit that sand and laughed like a kid.
This was the first stop on our Tour of the Places We Used to Go.
We chose a destination a day. Ghirardelli’s. The Musée Méchanique. Alcatraz. The carousel at Yerba Buena. The ice rink in Union Square.
We were kids with nothing to do but revisit a childhood that had receded far less than I’d realized. We didn’t need anybody else. But more than that, we were better without anybody else.
We traversed the city by day. At night you stayed in your room, on your computer, connected to him by satellites and signals that allowed you to talk face to face. To stare into each other’s eyes. To remind yourselves of the risks you were taking to be together. At least, that was what you told me each morning. That he said he missed you. He loved you. Your eyes, he’d say. God, I love your eyes.
As my text to Sam sat somewhere in technology purgatory, I decided you were right. Love is dead in high school. It was dead for me. Forget a face-to-face connection; Sam couldn’t even be bothered to text back a K or a thx or even a .
The more you told me about the things Mr. B. said to you (he quoted poetry!), the more the few kind things Sam said to me began to fade, and all I could remember was that lime-in-the-teeth high five. The way he called later. Would there be a later for Sam and me? It didn’t feel like it.
You tried your best to share your optimistic outlook on love. To rub some of it off onto me and my hopeless situation. There was the comment you made about how Sam probably left his phone home to avoid the roaming charges, but also you told me to be patient.
I remember we were standing out at the tip of the Wave Organ, surrounded by water. I’ve always loved the Wave Organ, the way that collection of rock and pipe responds to the changing tide in the bay. Sometimes the sounds are subtle, sometimes cacophonous. That day the water lapped gently and the music it created was almost like what you hear in a creepy movie when someone is lurking right around the corner.
“High school boys don’t know how to handle real emotion or connection,” you said. “Just because he hasn’t contacted you doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking about you. He probably doesn’t even know what he’s feeling yet. Just wait.”
That was my favorite day. My favorite stop on our tour. Despite the ominous music of the Wave Organ, despite that warning, I saw a happy ending.
Do you remember that day? How it felt to stand out at that rocky tip with me? Us, in isolation. Us, together. We had a good time that day, didn’t we?
I hope, Layla. I pray, even though you know how I feel about religion, that this wasn’t our last good time.
FELIX CALLED ME ON HIS way back from the airport.
“I know school starts tomorrow, and I know how you need your beauty rest, but wanna sneak out for a donut?”
“The one thing I don’t need is a donut.” Not after all the sweets on our Tour of the Places We Used to Go. “Just come over. I’m at my mom’s.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Great.”
“I’m just warning you, I look hot. Seriously hot. My homeland agrees with me.”
“I’m bracing myself.”
I didn’t want school to start again, but I was happy to have Felix back. And happy to see Mom. I missed her, and the part of me that lived with her. Not only the way we were together, but my room there, the kitchen, the streets, that particular patch of city. It was like I’d been favoring one leg over the other—and it was nice to get my balance back.
I’d convinced myself that things would be different when we went back to school. That you could live equally in the Mr. B. world and the regular world. I believed you were happy. That you weren’t ruining your life or making an unspeakably bad mistake. That your secret was one I should keep. Those two timeless winter weeks had cast a spell on me.
Felix did look great. Sun-kissed with shaggier hair and even the slightest hint of man stubble. He smelled like coconut.
He hugged me for a very long time.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I was the one who owed the apology. I’d been a brat. Boy-crazy and a little bitchy.
“Please,” I told Felix. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“But I—”
I kissed his cheek, feeling the soft prickle of his first beard. “I’m sorry, Felix. Really sorry.”
We went out to the square of yard behind Mom’s house. We took blankets and sat in the reclining chairs she’d bought for sunbathing—an opportunity that presents itself once every two years. The sky was dark and fogless.
“How’s Angel?”
“The surgery’s next Monday.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
Mom broke the silence that followed when she leaned out the window above. “Hot cocoa, anyone?”
“I’ll take a whiskey,” Felix answered.
“Cocoa it is, then.”
She came down carrying a tray with a teapot and two cups. She shot me the evil eye when she saw the blankets I’d taken outside. There were indoor blankets and outdoor blankets. But she didn’t want to scold me in front of Felix. She’s got such a Mom crush on him.
“So,” Felix said. “Tell me everything.”
“I missed you.” This was both true and false at the same time.
“And Sam?”
“What about Sam?”
“Did you miss him too or did you spend your whole break with his tongue down your throat?”
“Jesus, Felix.”
“It’s Hey-soos. Don’t go forgetting your Spanish.”
“Sam was away.”
“Where’d he go?”
I couldn’t admit that I didn’t know.
“It doesn’t matter.”
There were so many things I wanted to say to Felix that night, but instead I stretched out on the sun chair in the dark and listened as he tried to talk himself out of being afraid of Angel’s operation. I stroked his arm. I refilled his cup with lukewarm cocoa. I tried not to think about the next morning, walking down the hall and into Sam. It would no longer be just you and me, better without anybody else.
Eventually Felix got up to leave, though I wished he never would. I thought of him that first day of school, standing on the sidewalk with his ridiculous flat-brimmed baseball cap and eager grin.
“Will you wait for me? Out front?”
He cocked his head. “Of course.”
“Thanks, Felix.”
“De nada.”
; I imagined many different ways my reunion with Sam might go, from a high five to a quick hug to a grand embrace where he held me, dipped me back, and kissed me long and deep. Patience, I thought. He’s sorting out his feelings. What I didn’t imagine was a barely perceptible nod. And when I say barely perceptible, I mean that I may have made it up.
I tried to construct an alternate narrative:
Maybe he didn’t see me and that wasn’t a nod in my direction but at someone else behind me.
Maybe he was waiting for me to give him a high five or quick hug and when I kept walking I hurt his feelings.
Maybe he saw me but he didn’t say anything because there was a note waiting for me in my locker, about how he missed me and wanted to kiss me again.
The verdict was in by the end of the day, delivered by Felix: “Sam Fitzpayne is a total dick.”
“What?”
“Sam Fitzpayne is a total dick. A cock. A prick. A wiener. Do I need to make it more clear?”
“That’ll do.” I felt nauseous. I didn’t want to hear what Felix had to say next, although, on some level, I already knew. Sam had walked by me in the hall. He didn’t cross the cafeteria at lunch to say hello. And there were the glances from random people all day long. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but I know when people are staring at me.
And you. Before all that happened, before that night in his room and your words of encouragement that followed, you’d warned me. You’d told me there was something about Sam you didn’t trust. A cruelness, you’d said. I hated that you understood more about everything than me.
Felix waited for me on a bench across the street from school, working up his list of names for Sam. He waved me over and I took my time crossing at the light.
School had let out. With no soccer or play rehearsal I didn’t feel free, just lost. I’d wanted to find you. Maybe walk the miles home instead of braving the bus. I’d even checked the art room, but the lights were out and the door was locked.
“Should we go get a coffee so I can expound?” He looked up at me, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Tell you all the ways he is so very penislike?”
I thought about the afternoon we’d spent at the café drinking lattes, and the waiter with the smile he reserved just for you. I didn’t want to go back there. Maybe ever.
We Are the Goldens Page 11