Both Sides Now

by Peyton Thomas

  “It’s honestly no big deal,” says Jonah, with an odd heaviness that tells me, yes, this is an absolutely tremendous deal. “There’s a big role in the musical for a Chinese man. And since I’m the most experienced Asian guy in the club, that’s probably where they would’ve put me. Bailey really wanted me to do it.”

  “So what’s the problem?” says Adwoa. “I mean, I’m glad debate’s got your undivided attention right now. But this musical sounds made for you.”

  “Yeah, but it’s like . . .” Jonah sighs heavily, slumping chin-to-palm. “This show isn’t the most woke?”

  His shoulders are all tense, hunched up around his ears, the way they get when we’re about to walk into a big round on ten minutes of prep time. Wow. He really doesn’t want to talk about this. I’ll just change the subject. Easy.

  “Shouldn’t we start prepping?” I say, setting down my lemonade.

  “Nuh-uh,” hums Adwoa. She leans closer to Jonah. She’s very interested. “What’s wrong with the musical, Jonah? Spill the tea.”

  “Fine.” Jonah forces out a breath. “So, basically, the main character moves into a hotel run by this Chinese lady.” He pauses; another frustrated huff. “But she’s actually a white lady in disguise, so . . .”

  “So, yellowface,” Adwoa says, flatly. “Okay. We’re talking yellowface.”

  Jonah looks down, sighs, addresses the tabletop in a low mumble: “She does an accent, and she squints, and she wears this, like, white pancake makeup.” He lifts his head, sighs again, and says, “But, I mean, she’s the villain, so it’s not, like, condoning . . .”

  “Oh, no.” Adwoa’s eyes are almost popping out of her head. I don’t have a mirror handy, but I bet I look just as shocked. “I think it’s condoning plenty.”

  Jonah doesn’t answer. His eyes, again, are on the tabletop. I reach out, lay a hand on his arm.

  “I can see why you wouldn’t want to be part of something so . . . so . . .” I look for the right words; I don’t find them. “. . . Something like that.”

  “There’s more.” Jonah takes his longest, weariest breath yet. “There are these Chinese henchmen—like, actual Chinese guys, not white people in disguise. And they kidnap girls from the hotel. White girls. And uh . . .” He pauses, cringing. “They sell the girls. Into, uh . . . sex work. In Hong Kong.”

  There’s a long, stunned silence. Adwoa’s mouth actually falls open, just a little. When I finally manage to open my own mouth, all I can say is “. . . Wow.”

  “Yeah,” says Jonah, glumly—and this, I guess, is the thing that sends Adwoa careening once again into lawyer mode, because she brings her flat palm down on the table and says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Kids are doing this? For a school play?”

  “Yeah. All over the country. It was a smash on Broadway back in 2002. Won a bunch of Tonys. So there must be something appealing about it. I don’t know. Some of the songs are all right.”

  I’ve never seen shame on his face before, and seeing it now—the soft, low arc of his bottom lip, the gleam in his eyes gone dull—it’s enough to make my stomach ache. How much does it hurt, I wonder, to defend something that hurts you?

  “Have you talked to Bailey?” I ask him, quietly. “Does he know you’ve got issues with the musical?”

  Jonah’s quiet for a long moment, stirring his drink. Fat pink petals sink through the pale cream at the top.

  “The show is a really big deal for Bailey,” Jonah says. “I mean, playing this iconic role? As a boy? Making it into a gay love story? I wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.” There’s some real optimism sneaking into his voice now. “I’m probably just overreacting. I mean, I’ve definitely done stuff that would make Bailey mad, so . . .”

  What is he talking about? What could Jonah possibly have done that would . . . Oh. Oh. College. Jonah still hasn’t told his boyfriend about UDub. Bailey still fully believes Jonah’s following him to Manhattan in the fall. Is that why Jonah’s keeping quiet about the musical? Is he just steeling himself for another, bigger fight?

  I can’t ask Jonah about any of this. Not just now. Adwoa’s already got him on the stand. “Overreacting?” she’s saying. “You’re ‘probably just overreacting’?”

  “Well, maybe,” Jonah says. “I don’t know.”

  “You are not overreacting,” she insists—one hand a tight fist. “Look at me. Listen. Everyone else with a hand in this racist circus is under-reacting.” She loosens that fist, loops a finger around the fury on her face. “This is the appropriate reaction.”

  “I’m not condoning it, Adwoa,” Jonah answers. “I just don’t want to wreck this thing that Bailey’s, like, living for.”

  “Okay. Listen.” Adwoa lays a hand on the table, right in front of Jonah. She’s quieter now, her voice more level. “As someone who also dates white boys from time to time?” She presses her hand to her heart, levels a dead-serious gaze at Jonah: “I have let plenty slide over the years. And I can’t tell you how bad I wish I could go back to every time I was like, ‘Just be cool, don’t rock the boat, it’s no big deal.’ If I could do it all over, I would’ve said no to so much racist nonsense.” She sighs, drops her hand to the table. “I just want better for you, Jonah. It’s what you deserve.”

  “I’m not saying the musical isn’t racist. Like, it is. It really, really is. But I don’t think Bailey’s a monster, either. And I don’t think this is a big enough deal for me to, like, pick a huge fight over.” He stops here—probably sees Adwoa reeling up for a rebuttal—and begins to plead: “Sorry. Can we just move on?” He turns, appeals to me: “Finch? We should probably start prepping, yeah?”

  Should we move on? Can we move on? I feel betrayed, and Bailey’s not even my boyfriend.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell Jonah. “I’m really, really sorry you have to deal with this.”

  “It’s all good,” he lies brightly, and opens his laptop. “Anyway! Less than three weeks ’til Nationals!”

  I want to say more—so, I can tell, does Adwoa—but Jonah is moving on. What can we do but follow him?

  chapter six

  The next day is a rare one: After school, I’m free. No debate club meetings. No Green Bean prep sessions. My only job is to ferry Roo home on the bus—and make sure she at least attempts to start her homework before descending into a video game fugue state.

  I find her in the library—earbuds in, laptop open, screen a maelstrom of war and ruin. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t say hello. In the world of her screen, everything is copacetic. There are fights, sure, but they’re fights Roo can win. She’s retreating into a landscape she can control.

  “Hey, Roo.” I pull up a chair, speak to her gently: “You’re playing, right? How’s it going?”

  “Bad,” she says, scowling.

  “Oh, no. What’s going on?” I lean closer, peering at the screen. Mom and Dad give her a lot of shit for gaming; I try to show a little interest, every now and then. “Is some despot giving you a hard time?”

  “So Gandhi”—she spits his name like she’s swearing—“finished the Manhattan Project before I did, and now I’m paying off the city-states to score a diplomatic victory. But he is not having it. One of my spies slipped me the intel that he’s plotting to bomb my capital.” She stops, double-clicks on a patch of tundra. “So I’m gonna stockpile giant death robots next to the Kremlin I built in Sparta and hope for the best.”

  I blink. It’s a lot to process. The Kremlin stockpiling giant death robots? Sure. I’ll buy that. But in Ancient Greece? And to fend off a nuclear strike from Gandhi?

  “Isn’t he a pretty peaceful guy, Gandhi? Would he really go for nukes, you think?”

  She snorts. “You don’t know shit about Gandhi.”

  “Evidently.” I nod. “Care to teach me?”

  “He’s a menace,” Roo glowers. “Him and his little round glasses and the—oh, n
o!” Her voice leaps up an octave: “No, no, no!”

  My eyes dart to the screen just in time to see it: a mushroom cloud billowing over the emerald isles of Roo’s queendom.

  “Dammit!” Roo shouts. “I thought I had two more turns to . . .” Another bomb falls, dousing Athens in smoke. “Fuck!”

  “That’s it, Ruby Kelly! Three strikes!”

  I whirl around: Mrs. Rubin, the librarian, is marching at us. Roo yanks her earbuds out of her ears.

  “I’m so sorry,” she pleads. “Gandhi just dropped a nuke on my capital, and—”

  “I don’t give two shakes of a little lamb’s tail what Gandhi is up to,” she says—and it’s shocking, really, how menacing little lamb sounds coming out of her mouth. “You will not use that language in my library.”

  Roo doesn’t even bother to save her game. She snaps her laptop shut, shoves it into her bag, and flings it over her shoulder. Mrs. Rubin is at our backs all the while, bellowing about that language in her library. We escape to the foyer with our lives, but only just.

  “So, are you coming home tonight?” Roo says as we cut through the after-school crowd. “Or do you live with Lucy now?” She sounds snide, and sad, and hurt—hurt by me, I realize, and rush to catch up with her.

  “Wait. Are you mad at me, Roo? Because I went over to Lucy’s the other night?”

  “Could’ve used some time in the blanket fort after Mom’s shocker.” We reach the door and she kicks it open. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I’m sorry, Roo. I just wanted to be with my best friend.” We spill onto the stairs of the school. The cool air smells like rain; I am, once more, umbrella-less. “I felt really overwhelmed after Mom told us, and—”

  “Join the club.” Her messenger bag swings as she descends the stairs, smacking some poor kid in the back of the head. “I had to lie awake all night, by myself, dealing with this bomb Mom just dropped.”

  “I don’t know how much help I would’ve been,” I tell her honestly. “I’m dealing with a lot right now.”

  “Right, like your college apps.” Roo is still a few steps ahead, striding up the sidewalk. “And how you’d rather glug toilet water than stay in Olympia ’cause you don’t give a shit about me.”

  “Roo, what?” The bitterness, the hard-bitten swearing—where is this coming from? I catch up to her, finally, and take her gently by the shoulders, spinning her ’til she’s facing me. “What are you talking about? Why do you think I don’t care?”

  She shakes her shoulders to rid herself of my hands. Other kids cry when they get emotional; not Roo. She is seething. I can hear her grinding her teeth in her closed mouth, one row scraping against the other.

  “You’re always dealing with a lot,” she spits. “You only ever think about yourself.”

  People are staring. I’d rather they didn’t. “Hey, come on,” I say, in a voice as gentle as I can make it. “Let’s find a quieter spot.”

  She hesitates, but she does follow me—off the sidewalk, through a narrow line of withered brown trees, and into a poured-concrete courtyard. There is a bench here, made of a stiff ridged metal and bolted to the ground. We sit down. Roo brings her knees up to her chest. She stares ahead in profile, her black hair fluttering freely in the wind.

  “I love you, Roo,” I say to one acne-pebbled cheek.

  “But like. Next year. When you’re away at college . . .” She sighs; her hands retreat into the sleeves of her hoodie until only her fingertips poke out, like turtles’ heads. “I mean, I’m gonna miss you. But I don’t know if you’re gonna miss me the same way.”

  The words land like a fist to the gut.

  “Roo, no,” I manage, finally. “Of course I’m going to miss you. Next year, when I’m in my dorm, and I can’t sleep, and you’re not around to help me build a blanket fort . . . I mean, what am I going to do?”

  She lifts her sleeves to her face. She’s quiet for a long time. When her hands finally fall into her lap, I can see tiny patches on her sleeves, darker than the rest of the fabric—places where she caught the tears before they could fall. How did I miss this? How long has she felt this way? Like I’ve got one foot out the door, like I can’t wait to get rid of her.

  “But you’ll have a whole new city,” she says, and sniffs, “and friends, and school, and I’ll just have . . .” She sweeps her arms across the damp concrete nothing that surrounds us. “This. Minus you.”

  “You will still have me,” I tell her, emphatic as I can. “You can pick up the phone any time, any hour of the day—or the night—and I’ll be there.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “You’ll be there.”

  She sits with her knees to her chest, silent, like she’s waiting for me to prove her wrong. I don’t know what to tell her, don’t know how to make this hurt less. There are so many things pushing me out of this town, pulling me toward D.C. She isn’t one of them. She makes me wish I wanted to stay.

  “I’m here now, though,” I tell her. “And I love you. And I’m not going anywhere. Not yet.”

  She’s not all the way satisfied with this answer—opening her mouth, then hesitating. She plays with her damp sleeves, one thumb rolling over the other in her lap.

  “Could we do something together?” she says, after a brief quiet. “Like, right now. Go somewhere?”

  “Yes.” I can’t say it fast enough. “Absolutely. Anything you want. GameStop?”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” she says, and lifts her head, giving me a hard-won smile. “But I was actually thinking more like . . . ice cream?”

  My turn to smile. “You got it.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s after our trip to Baskin-Robbins, kicking off our rain boots in the mudroom, that I notice something odd: Our house smells utterly unlike our house. It smells . . . dare I say . . . good? That mysterious wet-dog odor is gone. In its place, there’s a kind of Olive Garden bouquet, all rosemary and garlic and olive oil. A tiny bead of drool slides from my open mouth and lands, a wet dot, on my chest—that’s how hungry I am, even post ice cream.

  “Gross!” Roo giggles, just as Mom steps into the entryway, her apron flecked with red sauce and redder wine.

  “Welcome home, kiddos,” she says—and then, more stern: “Roo? Is that chocolate ice cream I see on your cheek?”

  “It is,” says Roo, then licks the back of her hand, and rubs at the sticky residue with it, the same way a cat uses a paw. “Sorry.”

  Mom lifts a hand, brushes some rain-damp hair out of my eyes. “You guys went out for some sugar therapy, huh?”

  “I hope that’s okay.” I’m a bit suspicious. When was the last time I came home to dinner on the stove? Hell, when have I ever come home to anything but a fight? “It’s just been . . . you know, a rough week.”

  “Sure has been.” Mom sighs, weary. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. Come on in. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  Her hand on my back, she steers me into the kitchen, where Dad is rolling up meatballs and dropping them, one by one, into a sizzling pan on the stove.

  “There’s my man!” Dad gives me half a hug, his hands covered in raw pink beef. “How you doing, champ?”

  I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t understand what I’m seeing. We are not, ever, a spaghetti-and-meatballs family. We are a Wonder Bread family. A Campbell’s Ready-to-Serve family. Even, occasionally, a cereal-for-dinner family. Did someone get some good news today? Did Dad get a job? Did Mom, by some miracle, get hers back?

  But when we sit down at the table, hold hands, say grace—blue-moon events, all three—I know that there’s no good news coming. Mom prays for guidance as she “embarks” on a “new chapter” in her life. Dad prays, more directly, for a job interview. And then he doles out the pasta, and Mom doles out the sauce, and I’m dispatched to the kitchen to retrieve garlic bread from the oven and dole tha
t out, too. We pass around pepper, salt, paprika. Nobody speaks ’til the plates are half-empty—or, well, half-full, but I’ve never been much of an optimist.

  “So.” Mom lifts her head, clears her throat. “Yesterday was my last day at the Mountain. The last day of the paper, too.”

  Dad cuts in: “And we’ve got a lot to talk about as a family.”

  Mom takes a deep breath. She doesn’t snap at Dad for the interruption. Not yet, anyway. “The good news,” she says, “is that we all have ’til the end of the month on my health insurance.”

  “Wait.” The fork falls out of my hand, hits the plate, hard; kertwang. “The end of the month? But . . . this summer . . . my surgery . . .”

  “I know, Finch.” Mom reaches out, squeezes my hand. “It’s going to be a hard few months. Maybe longer. We’re all going to have to sacrifice some.”

  Everything I’ve just eaten threatens to come back up. “But I need surgery. It’s not something I can . . . can just . . . sacrifice.”

  “Kid, listen.” Dad sets down his own fork. “This operation you want? We’re talking thousands of dollars. You know we don’t have it like that.”

  “But it’s not . . . I’m not asking for . . .” I stammer, struggling for the right words: “I need this. Or else I’ll go to college this fall and . . . and I . . . I still won’t be able to go out when it’s hot, or . . . or run, or go swimming, or . . .”

  Mom’s hand in my own, heavy, presses harder. “I know, honey,” she says. “And I’m so sorry. But there’s nothing we can do. You’re just gonna have to stick it out a little longer.”

  “Yeah, and like,” Roo says, mouth full, “you don’t really do much running or swimming anyway.”

  “Because I can’t!” I bring a fist to my chest, my heart, feel the sleek constricting fabric under my shirt. “With this thing on? I’d be risking my life!”

  “ ‘Risking my life.’ Jesus.” Dad snorts. He wipes his mouth, tosses the napkin down, stains blooming all over it. And then he turns to me, points a finger: “Listen. You? You’re not in danger. This house is in danger. Our mortgage. Your tuition. That’s in danger.”