We Are the Goldens

by Dana Reinhardt

  How could our parents not see?

  I lied to Felix like I lied to them. She’s a junior. School is stressful. Blah, blah, blah.

  Layla, you know I’d happily lie for you to save your life, or to fix your life, but it’s a different story entirely to lie about something that I believe is ruining your life.

  Mr. B.

  George.

  I probably wouldn’t ever have figured out what brought him back to you if it weren’t for the Creeds. Sometimes they point me in the direction I didn’t realize I needed to go.

  It was another sleepless night. Sleeplessness had become my new normal. On this night I relived that morning you left school with him. Your seat in US History: empty. His classroom: dark, locked. Why? Why would he take such a risk?

  Why don’t you check her phone? Parker whispered.

  There are things a sister just doesn’t do.

  She’s a sound sleeper. Go for it.

  I kicked off my covers. I was hot and cold at the same time. My heart raced. I stood alone in the darkness of my room. I was proud that I’d never violated your trust. I hadn’t even told Felix. But reading your texts? How could I justify that?

  I’m telling you about your phone when I don’t even have to. I didn’t find anything because you were smart enough to delete any communication with him. I couldn’t even find him in your contacts. You slept, your face unsuspecting as I stood by your bedside scrolling through your history.

  What’s up?

  Where u been?

  When can we hang?

  R U mad at me?

  Your messages were mostly from Schuyler and Liv, trying to make sense of your disappearing act.

  I put your phone back by your bedside. And then I grabbed your backpack. Heavy. That goddamn Rothko book—you took it everywhere. I lugged your bag into my room, put it in the middle of my floor, and stared at it.

  It’s not going to open itself.

  C’mon. Get it over with.

  Books. Papers. Homework. Pencils. Gum. Calculator. Lipstick. I pulled out your wallet. You kept it in the outside zippered pocket. I’d told you more than once that you should keep your wallet inside your bag where someone riding the bus with you wouldn’t be able to take advantage as you texted or read, but you laughed and said, “Geez, Nell. You always imagine the worst in people.”

  I pulled out a picture of us, from a photo booth at Pier 39. For a second I felt profoundly happy, and then I was struck by a sickening sadness. You couldn’t carry a photo of the person you loved. You couldn’t keep his number in your contacts. You had to erase all signs of him. If an anthropologist stumbled upon your possessions and tried to form a narrative of your life, he’d never conclude that there was somebody essential to you. Someone you believed you could not live without.

  I finally got why you took that Rothko book everywhere.

  See, Layla? It’s not that I don’t understand you. I get how hard it must have been, how sad really, to have something so enormous be your secret. I could feel it as I put my hands on your things, the power of that burden.

  In your wallet, a stack of receipts. I flipped through them, not really thinking that something so insubstantial could hold the answer I was after.

  The connector.

  What made him decide that he couldn’t break things off. What made him leave school with you instead of leaving you alone with a shattered heart.

  You weren’t totally lying to Mom that day. I guess that explains why your story unfurled so naturally. You did go to Walgreens. You did buy Advil.

  You also bought a First Response Gold Early Digital Pregnancy Test for $15.98.

  I LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT. The sun lightened the walls and then the ceiling of my room and still, no clarity. I don’t know what today will bring. What I’ll do. I suppose this describes most days. There are always things we can’t predict, the plot twists we don’t see coming.

  Layla, you are not pregnant. I believe you are not pregnant. But what really kills me is this: I know you wish you were. That’s why you walked away from school that day, isn’t it? You walked toward Walgreens hoping, praying for something drastic to bring him back. Something bigger than you.

  Did the test come out negative? And when it did, did you cry? And then, did you alter it? Draw a little pink line where there wasn’t one? Or maybe you just threw it away and then told him, with that tear-streaked face: It’s positive.

  You can lie to him, Layla, but you cannot lie to me.

  We live together and we share a bathroom and we share so many other things, including our cycle, and to put it crudely, I needed a tampon last week and you’d snagged the last one.

  If this is your strategy, Layla, to fool him into staying, then you’ve acted without thinking. Failed to see the future. Forsaken that good head on your shoulders. What will happen when he finds out you’re not telling him the truth?

  Or … maybe you were pregnant? Maybe that little pink line showed up all on its own and he took you to have an abortion.

  Or … maybe you are pregnant? I could be wrong about whether someone who is pregnant might need a tampon. I don’t know everything, Layla. There are still so many things I don’t understand. So there. I’ve said it: you know more than me.

  I’m feeling a little crazed as I spin and respin scenarios, everything distorted by sleeplessness. As the morning light continued its climb across my ceiling, I wished for a real earthquake, not a metaphoric one. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure it, the stillness just before everything changes. The ground trembling and then a roar. Everything turned upside down. Maybe then, in its aftermath, I’d find the courage to do something. I’d know what to do.

  Is that prayer? I’m not sure. If it is, it seems to be going unanswered, because the earth is quiet and Mom is outside with the car running, waiting to drive us to school.

  You sit up front, backpack on your lap. Why do you always get the front seat? I stare at that backpack. Black with zebra-striped straps. I returned it to your room last night. You took a quick breath, flipped over to face the wall, and settled down into sleep again.

  That bag in your lap with an outside zippered pocket that contains your wallet, inside of which lives a stack of receipts—that bag is the end. The living, breathing end of what I am capable of doing for you. What secrets I can keep. That backpack is the creature on my shoulder—devil or angel, I don’t know—that tells me the time has come.

  “Mom,” I croak from my seat in the back. She doesn’t hear me over the sound of the radio. “Mom.”

  She reaches out and adjusts the knob. Silence. “Yes, my love?”

  You turn around and look at me, searching.

  In this moment, Layla, on this morning after a night of no sleep, after praying for a natural disaster, it is you and me and Mom together, safe inside her car, just the three of us, and … I can’t tell her. I don’t know how to tell her. I can’t pry the words out. I can’t bear to see what they will do to your searching face. I can’t even figure which words they’d be—Layla is pretending she’s pregnant? Or Layla was pregnant and had an abortion? Or Layla is pregnant and she needs help?

  She needs help. Those are the words.

  “Nothing,” I say. Maybe you’re right. I should stay out of your life. Let you make your own mistakes. Maybe it’s time to start untwining us.

  Even if I could tell her, I know you’d deflect, deny, derail. You’d dismiss my list of top reasons why it should be obvious to anyone paying attention and make it all my fault, my crazy fantasy. Nell, always envious. Now she’s turning what stupid kids at school say into some big drama. Why’d she even have to come to City Day? Why’d she have to follow me here? Why does she follow me everywhere? She’s lying. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She can’t prove anything.

  But I can prove it.

  I have that receipt in my pocket.

  As Mom pulls the car into the drop-off lane, I think: maybe I should just go to him, tell him that he must leave you alone be
cause he is making you do crazy, stupid things, but I know I won’t. He is a teacher and I am a student. There are things I cannot do.

  I can’t tell Mom, and I can’t confront Mr. Barr, and Dad is buried in work and we won’t see him until Friday night, and this can’t wait until Friday night, and anyway, any talk with Dad about sex and his daughters is inconceivable.

  I go and I stand outside Ms. Bellweather’s office. She’s talking on the phone and drinking coffee. To her it’s probably just another day. With lists of things to do. Schedules to juggle. Students to wrangle.

  What if I walked in and reported him?

  City Day has rules, standards, and they need to know that their teacher is violating everything sacred. They need to take a closer look at the one whose class the girls fight tooth and nail to get into. Wink. Wink.

  She’d look up at me and in her slight Southern drawl say, “Can I help you?”

  And then … what?

  I’m standing in the hallway of this place I’ve come to love, and I am totally lost.

  That’s when I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “Nell?”

  I can’t speak.

  “What’s wrong?” Felix turns me to face him. “What’s the matter?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Nell, I told you, we don’t need to do this. Can’t we just forget everything? I was drunk, okay? I was an idiot. Please don’t overanalyze this. Just forget about it, okay?”

  “No, it’s not that,” I say, though I don’t much like Felix blaming his confession of love on being drunk. This isn’t how I see it. He’s not an idiot. I don’t want to forget. I want to overanalyze and then think about it some more. About him. About us.

  “What, then?”

  “We need to go somewhere.”

  He looks down the hallway at the students rushing to their classes.

  He sighs. “Okay.”

  I wish we could go to the Bison Paddock. Sit and watch those steadfast buffalo with lives so dull the very idea that they harbor secrets makes us laugh. Look at that one, I’d say to Felix. She’s having an affair with her teacher, and when he tried breaking things off with her, she told him that she’s pregnant. Look at that one. She was pregnant but she had an abortion and didn’t tell her sister. Look at that one.…

  Layla, you’re desperate enough to do anything to hold on to him, but I don’t believe that any of this is your fault.

  It’s his.

  He’s done this to you.

  We don’t go to the buffalo. I don’t want to leave school because I promised Mom I wouldn’t. We go to the drama section of the library, the most secluded spot on campus, and we sit on the floor. Our knees touch.

  “I have to tell you something,” I whisper.

  “Right. But I have to warn you, I’m sort of done in. It’s been really hard at home. Dad is barely eating. He’s so weak. I don’t like being the strongest man in the house.”

  I think of the Einstein poster again. The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Clearly Einstein wasn’t as smart as people make him out to be.

  “Felix.” I take his hand and squeeze it. I want him to see that I can hold both his pain and my own at the same time. And while holding our pain I can also feel the way his skin warms mine. And as I feel his warmth I think, yes, if I didn’t have a lot of time left, if I only had one chance, I would want it to be with him. And it occurs to me that all of this might be what it means to be in love. Real love.

  “You are the only person I can trust to tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do. Oh God. I don’t know what to do.” I am shaking.

  “Nell,” he says. “I’m here. Take your time. And say whatever it is you need to say.”

  I take a deep breath.

  SO, LAYLA, THERE’S SOMETHING I need to tell you.

  Don’t be mad.

  Please. Please don’t be mad. I hate it when you’re mad at me.

  I am only doing this because I love you. Because our lives are intertwined.

  I’ve called a family meeting. Tonight. Just you and me and Mom and Dad. The original Goldens. The last time the four of us sat down together was the Christmas of my kindergarten year for that talk. We thought there’d be more meetings, about issues big and small. That’s what Mom and Dad said, that things wouldn’t change, but of course they did, because change comes even for those who don’t want it.

  “You have to tell them,” Felix said. “They’re your parents.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.” He looked at me with such intensity, I wondered if he maybe would lean over and press his lips against mine. “I know you think you have to be perfect for them, but you don’t. You aren’t perfect. Layla isn’t perfect.”

  “But …”

  “But nothing, Nell.”

  “But Mr. B.”

  “He’s a Cretan.”

  “I thought you loved him.”

  He looked at me. It was a stupid thing to say. “I love you, Nell.”

  He’s said this more times than I can count. Nonchalantly. Just like this. But today it means something more, or something different, and it’s familiar, yet totally and completely new.

  “Tell them,” he says. “You have to.”

  Felix is right. At the end of the day, despite anything and everything else, all the changes and reincarnations, they’re our parents. We’re their children. They’ll know how to handle it. They’ll protect you. They’ll help you through. That’s what parents do.

  They watch out for us. You can’t hide your troubles from the people who watch out for you. You can’t pretend your life is perfect when it’s not. Just look at what happened to the Creed brothers. It’s my job, Layla, to watch out for you. To help you when you need it, even if you don’t know you need the help.

  So I’ve called a family meeting.

  We’ll sit together, the four of us, Mom and Dad in separate chairs, we’ll sit on the sofa, though I don’t expect you’ll drape your arm around me or tap-tap-tap my shoulder. I won’t look at you, because that can’t come to good. So I’ll look ahead, at Mom, at Dad.

  “What is it, honey?” they’ll ask.

  “What is this all about?”

  And I’ll say, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dana Reinhardt lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two daughters. She is the author of the young adult novels A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, Harmless, How to Build a House, The Things a Brother Knows, The Summer I Learned to Fly, and, for middle-grade readers, Odessa Again. Her books have been singled out for many awards and best of the year lists; reviewers have praised her work as “exceptional” and “funny and unforgettable.” Visit her at danareinhardt.net.