Both Sides Now

by Peyton Thomas

  “Well, I have some good news,” she says cautiously. “If I share my good news, will I make you feel better or worse?”

  I look at her—the way she’s hesitating, chewing her lip against the words she can’t wait to spill. And I soften.

  “Better,” I say.

  She brightens. “So, you know how I’ve been booking interviews for my channel, right?”

  I’m not sure that I did know. She’d mentioned the one woman before, Linsay Ellfis, who’d gotten back to her. But interviews? Plural? I really had no idea she was this far along. Am I a bad friend?

  “Well, last night, I finally got an email back from the person I wanted to talk to most.” She’s speaking fast, each word tripping over the next. “And that person is . . .”

  She fans out her fingers: jazz hands, Bob Fosse style. Wait. Why do I know to call them jazz hands? Why do I even know Bob Fosse’s name? I regret every moment I’ve ever spent in the vicinity of Bailey Lundquist.

  “Alice Brady,” she says. “Future congresswoman.”

  “Lucy!” I forget, for an instant, everything bad, everything wrong in my life. “That’s incredible!” I pull her into a hug. “You’re incredible.”

  She tries to shrug, but I’m holding her too close. Those shoulders aren’t going anywhere. “I mean,” she says, all false modesty, “it’s a start.”

  “It’s a huge start! You’re doing an on-camera interview with a congressional candidate!”

  “Well, hoping to do more than that,” she says. “If it goes well, maybe she’ll want me to do some freelance video work for the campaign.” Her eyes are gleaming. “You know, like, a TV spot here, an online town hall there . . .”

  I can’t help it: My face falls. I’m happy for her—I am, I am—but it stings, too. Two days after I found out I’m not going to Nationals, Lucy gets the go-ahead to interview a congressional candidate. She might even work on this woman’s campaign, for God’s sake, while I . . . while I . . . what am I going to do after I graduate, anyway? Work retail? Scrounge up some money for surgery? Wish my parents could have afforded to send me to D.C.?

  “Oh! Almost forget.” She’s digging into her polka-dotted backpack, pulling out a brown paper bag. “I got you something. A gift for your trip to D.C. this weekend.”

  Oh, wow. She wasn’t kidding. She didn’t see a single word of those messages I sent last night. I take the bag, her gift. I upend it: a pen falls into my hand. Just a plain white plastic cylinder. I lift my head, look at her: What is this?

  “It writes in seven colors.” Plainly thrilled, she picks it up. “See? Just press on these tabs: red, green, blue, pink . . .”

  “Can’t be without pink ink at Nationals.”

  “You’ll never run out!” She grins, triumphant, and hands it back to me. “See? One less thing to worry about this weekend.”

  I can’t take it, the look on her face. She thinks I’m going to put this pen in my pocket and bring it with me to Washington, D.C., and use it to make magic. The rest of the world seems pretty agnostic when it comes to Finch Kelly. Not her. Never her.

  “Lucy, I . . .” My fingers close around the pen. It hurts to touch, almost. “I’m not going to Nationals this weekend.”

  “What are you talking about?” She sits back, confused. “Why the hell not?”

  “We can’t afford it.” Saying this out loud isn’t as awful as I thought it would be. It’s worse. “My parents had to return the plane ticket.”

  “Oh, Finch.” Her head falls on my shoulder. Her fingers stroke my hair. “Well, you’ll just have to save that pen for college in D.C. in the fall. Those lectures at Georgetown, you know?”

  “I’m not going to Georgetown, either.” The pen falls back into the bag; the brown paper rolls back into place.

  “Well, you never know,” she says, and sort of pets my hair. “You might get a scholarship.”

  I unzip my backpack, press the paper bag into what spare space I’ve got. “Yeah, like I might find a unicorn grazing in my front yard.”

  “God, you’re cranky today,” she says, and starts to reach into her backpack, rummage for our breakfast. “Let me do you a solid. Get some food in you.”

  Let me do you a solid. Above my head, a lightbulb goes off. There may be one real solid Lucy can do for me.

  “Lucy.” I reach for her, squeeze her shoulder. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.”

  “Yeah?” she says, not looking at me, still searching for our food. “What’s up?”

  “You should talk to Alice Brady about me.” My turn to talk a mile a minute, trip over my words. “Tell her that I’m looking for a job and I could be a big asset to her campaign, like, whatever she needs, whether it’s writing speeches or like, helping her with debate prep, or . . .”

  Lucy lifts her head, brow cocked. “You’re asking me to get you a job on the campaign?”

  “I mean, if you wanted to just talk to her, tell her I’m interested, give her my résumé . . .”

  “. . . I don’t know.” She gnaws on her lip. She looks away from me. “I mean, I keep inviting you to go door-knocking with me and you keep saying no.”

  “I’m not talking about door-knocking. I’m talking about helping her with speeches, and . . . and sending out press releases, and . . .”

  “She’s got people doing that stuff for her already,” Lucy says. “She needs boots on the ground. Voices on the phone. And you don’t need me to, like, refer you for that.”

  I can feel that dizziness again, that quickness in my blood. “So you . . . you don’t want to talk to her? About me?”

  “I just wouldn’t want to jeopardize, like . . .” She pauses, scratches at the side of her nose. “I mean, I might get to film some videos for the campaign, yeah? But not if I’m going around with my hands out, like, ‘Hey, you should hire my friend . . .’ ”

  “But I would be good for the campaign!” I insist. “I know how to write a speech, I know how to prep her for a debate, I could—”

  “Finch, I’m not going to ask her to give you a job,” Lucy cuts in, voice rising. “I’m sorry. It’s not going to happen.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. I don’t know if I’m even capable of saying anything to it. I only know that I can’t look at Lucy, can’t sit next to her even a second longer. And so I rise, clumsily, and shift my standing body past her seated one.

  “Finch! Come on. Don’t be so pissy. Sit down. Talk to me, at least? Eat your breakfast?”

  I do not turn around. I move out into the aisle, and I stand there, shaky, one hand on the high rail against the motion of the bus.

  “You know,” she says, “you can be a real fucking baby sometimes.”

  “I’m not being a baby!” I turn, face her, nearly fall as the bus lurches forward. “You’re joining this campaign and you’re not bringing me with you!”

  “Yeah! Because you didn’t give a shit about this campaign ’til five minutes ago!”

  She isn’t wrong. I didn’t care—and definitely didn’t have time to knock on doors—because I was so focused on Nationals, on D.C., on Georgetown. But all of that is gone now, and this—can’t she see?—is my last chance to break into politics, to do something, to be someone.

  There’s that feeling again, that tight heat behind my eyes. I screw them shut; deep breaths, Finch. There’s got to be another way. There has to be. But what is it? And how do I find it?

  * * *

  —

  “Finch! Just the man I’ve been looking for!”

  Adwoa is downright jolly when I walk into debate club after school. It’s the very opposite of my dark mood, still lingering after this morning’s bus ride. She leaps merrily down from her perch at the desk, braids swinging, as soon as she sees me. Me, I freeze. It’s a bad time to freeze, too, even by my own exceptionally awkward standards. I’m standing in the only entrance to the cla
ssroom. A small line’s forming. I don’t thaw ’til Adwoa’s hand lands on my shoulder, a touch that makes me flinch, hard.

  “Let’s take a walk.” Her voice softens like she’s soothing a spooked horse. No more exclamation points. “Okay?”

  I manage, just barely, to nod. “Okay.” Adwoa turns, waving to get Jonah’s attention.

  “We might be a while,” she says. “You good to run the meeting with Jasmyne?”

  “Sure. Of course.” Jonah gives me a glance. A look that says, Is everything all right?

  I shake my head at him. I don’t know what Adwoa wants from me right now, but if this unfolds like any of the other dozen difficult conversations I’ve had in the past week, it’s bound to be a nightmare.

  “Okay!” Jasmyne, behind a worried Jonah, claps her hands. “Today, we’re going to practice delivering a dynamite P.O.I. Let’s start with . . . okay, Ava? And Jesse? You two want to . . .”

  As Adwoa leads me out of the classroom, down the hallway, Jasmyne’s voice fades away. All I hear for a while are footfalls as she steers us forward.

  “I thought we’d grab some hot chocolate from the cafeteria,” she says, still in that spooked-horse voice. “Sit and talk, yeah?”

  I nod. I would wonder, normally, what this was about, but I’m so worn down these days. Nothing would surprise me. She could sit me down in the cafeteria and say, “Finch, I’ve discovered evidence linking you to the death of Princess Diana,” and what could I do but roll with it? I have no way of proving my whereabouts on the night of August 31, 1997.

  Besides that I wasn’t born yet.

  Adwoa buys two hot chocolates: one for me, with whip, and one for herself, without. We sip them in the center of the room, all but empty in these after-school hours. A few stragglers are sitting, studying, waiting for parents or for volleyball practice, but we’ve got a fairly wide berth.

  “So,” she says, and takes a sip, “I got your messages.”

  “You . . . you got my . . .” Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

  “Yes.” She puts me out of my stammering misery. “I have to assume I wasn’t the intended recipient, but . . .”

  But she received them. All two dozen or however many puddles of digital word-puke. The fight with my parents, and, oh, Christ, most mortifying of all, the blow-by-blow of my evening at Jonah’s.

  “I am so, so sorry,” I leap in, before she can say another word. “It was the middle of the night, and the screen was so bright I couldn’t see, and I was trying to message someone else, and if I clicked on your name, it was definitely an accident, and, just, please don’t tell Jonah that I . . .”

  “Hey. No.” She lifts a hand. “I’m glad I got those messages. I’ll keep everything between the two of us.” I take this as a pledge that she’ll refrain from telling Jonah about my . . . crush? Is it a crush? “I wish you’d talked to me sooner,” she goes on. “You should never be embarrassed to ask for help.”

  I’m embarrassed to wake up in the morning most days. I’m definitely embarrassed that Adwoa was the unintended recipient of a middle-of-the-night diatribe that ended with me typing “I love you.” This is calling your teacher “Mom” times a hundred, supercharged, on anabolic steroids.

  “I just feel bad,” I say, “because my parents never talked to me about refunding that ticket, and now Nationals is ruined, and—”

  “Stop. Please. You have to stop.”

  Up ’til now, Adwoa’s been operating in the gentle mode of a guidance counselor. Now, though, there’s a hard edge to her voice, the one I hear whenever she goes on a tear about corporate tax evasion or ICE or the cancellation of her favorite show on Netflix after only one season.

  “You are a brilliant kid,” she says, in this voice, the no human is illegal voice, the #RenewTheGetDown voice. “But as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been swimming upstream, and every time the currents get stronger, you blame yourself. And you can’t make it in this life on willpower alone, Finch. You’ve got people around you who love you, who want good things for you. Try asking one of them for help sometime.” She leans back, spreads out her palms. “Go on. Ask me for help.”

  Confused, I ask, “What kind of help?”

  “The kind you need,” she says. “And right now, that’s a new plane ticket. Isn’t that right?”

  Before I can answer, she reaches into her pocket: a white envelope. She places it on the table, daring me, without words, to open it.

  So I do.

  AMERICAN AIRLINES, I read. Thank you for your reservation, Ms. Douna. And then Passenger Name, and then, in confident bold: Mr. Finch Kelly.

  A near-minute passes in silence, stunned, before Adwoa says, “You’re welcome.”

  “Adwoa, I can’t accept this.” I press the paper back into its envelope. “This is so much money. And you . . .” You have debt from college, I think, but don’t say. And even more debt from law school. And you’re interviewing for the job of your dreams, aren’t you? The one that will take you to the middle of nowhere, to earn nothing.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “I didn’t take that job in Alabama.” She sighs; I hear regret in every syllable. “I’m staying here. Well, near here, anyway. Redmond. Going in-house at Microsoft. I accepted the job last week.”

  I stare at her, wide-eyed, horrified. “But, Adwoa,” I begin, “you . . . you said Alabama was your dream job.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not just about me.” She props her chin in her palm. “I’ve got a mama who’s getting older. Who’s gonna need home care sooner rather than later. I’ve got loans to pay off.” Her long, glittering fingernails dance across the table and tap on the envelope. “And I’ve got students who need plane tickets.”

  “But everything you said about . . . about doing good in the world, and . . .”

  “That’s not good in the world?” She nods at the envelope. “That plane ticket’s not making you feel good?”

  I don’t know how to answer her. I think this may be the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me. And it’s not without blood, this gift. Not without sacrifice.

  I lift my eyes to Adwoa’s. “I honestly don’t know . . . I mean, how do I even begin to thank you for this?”

  “Thank me,” she says, “by winning Nationals.”

  * * *

  —

  We rise from our seats not long after that. I pocket the envelope, and she tosses our empty cocoa cups into the recycling bin. It’s a short walk back to debate club, and just when I think we’ll spend it in a comfortable, stressless silence, Adwoa turns to me.

  “Now, that other thing,” she says, as we push through a pair of double doors. “That boy thing.”

  “No!” I pull on her sleeve, try to bring her back to me. We’re nowhere near Jonah—not yet, anyway—but, still, better silent than sorry. “You said you’d keep everything between us!”

  “And I will!” she says, and laughs. “But you boys have a big weekend coming up. And I know you both got a lot going on right now. So: Extra distractions?” She stops here, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks hard, insistent, into my eyes: “You don’t need ’em.”

  I’d love to melt into the floor, but her grip won’t let me. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” I tell her. “I’m sure he was just sad the other night, and I was just . . .” I swallow, search for words: “Confused, I guess. I was confused.”

  “Well, we don’t need confused right now,” she says. “We need focused. Focused on winning. You hear me?”

  “I do. I hear you.”

  She lets go of me. I’m ready to let the issue die. I’m also ready to die of embarrassment. But our next stop, of course, is debate club. And Jonah looks up when I step into the room. He sees my skin, rosy with humiliation, and lifts his brows in silent concern. I settle into the seat next to him, trying to focus on the freshmen arguing against one another.
It’s something about the British museum, about drawings of Buddha, Burmese diamonds. I watch, but I don’t quite listen.

  Instead, I worry. I worry about the future, rolling on whether any of us likes it or not. Where will Jasmyne and Tyler be in twenty years? Where will I be? And where, crucially, will I be at the end of this weekend? When all the rounds are through, when all the votes are being tallied up?

  This is where my mind is wandering when Jonah lifts his hand. He brings his thumb to my forehead and smooths the frantic ridges. They vanish under his touch.

  “There you go,” he says, as he runs his thumb over the last worried lines between my brows. “All good?”

  “Yeah.” I’m having trouble breathing, suddenly—not from anxiety, but from its lack. The way he managed to rake all my worries away with a single touch. “All good.”

  “Good,” he repeats.

  He slings an arm around me then, and directs another two freshmen up to the front of the classroom. He gives them a topic. Something about Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism. I don’t completely hear it. My left ear’s sort of buried in his side, dampening the sounds. It occurs to me that I’m exactly the right height for him—like this space, right here, under his arm, was designed with me in mind.

  I shouldn’t think too hard about what that means, should I?

  chapter eleven

  I wake up groggy and disoriented before our hideously early flight to D.C. on Friday morning. It doesn’t help that I was up ’til the wee hours, packing and prepping. Mom passed by my door sometime around half past one and laughed at me, up late, ironing the navy-blue jacket I got at Gap Kids for this august occasion.

  “I swear,” she said, “you are the only seventeen-year-old boy in the world who knows how to work an iron.”

  Most of the kids at Nationals hail from top-flight private schools. All of them wear their uniforms to tournaments. There are crisp blazers in navy blue, maroon, and forest green. Starchy dress shirts, too, snow white. You’ll see plaid skirts in hundreds of different colors, and wool trousers in just the one. Whatever the uniform looks like, though, and however they wear it—formally, or with a sort of campaign-stop-in-Iowa tilt, sleeves to the elbows and the top button popped loose—they look, in these clothes, like they belong in any room they walk into.