“Do we have to call him White Boy?” I ask, dragging the lurid spaghetti around in circles on my plate. “I mean, Frodo is white.” I’m agitating needlessly now, and I know it, but I’m in a contrary mood. Three whole periods since I’ve laid eyes on Izzy, and it’s eating at me.
“That’s different,” Frodo says, shoving my shoulder, making the fork fall from my hand. “I’m Cuban.”
I hold my hands up and shrug.
“You feeling bad for White Boy, T?” Marcus asks, his voice deadpan.
“It’s not that,” I say, crossing my arms. “But I guess I don’t get why you’re wasting your time on him.” I glance up at Marcus, and his jaw looks hard, like he’s grinding his teeth. “I mean, he looked like a mental patient because he probably is an actual mental patient. It’s like picking a fight with a moron.” This isn’t true; I don’t think Hull is crazy, knife or no knife, and he’s definitely not stupid, but the comment makes Marcus give a reluctant snort of laughter, and the other guys follow suit. Bomb diffused, I think. Now we can talk about the sneakers that Frodo is flipping on eBay or some other dumb topic of the day. But instead, Marcus looks hard at me, like he’s trying to read something on my skin.
“Hey, T, what about this guy’s sister? Didn’t you say you met her the other day?”
I shouldn’t have said the first thing about Izzy to Marcus, but what’s done is done. I take a big bite of garlic bread like it’s no big deal, even though it immediately becomes a gagging clump that I have to work to talk around. “Yeah, I ran into her on the block.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What is she like?”
“I don’t know. She seemed… nice. Not an arrogant ass like Hull, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t know if she even plays chess.”
“She in school today?” Tyrone asks. “Or did Marcus scare the whole family out of Brooklyn?”
I am steadfastly determined not to answer this question, so I concentrate on swallowing the bread, but the table is quiet, and when I look up, they’re all staring at me. “What?” I say. “How am I supposed to know?” At this, I think I see a muscle twitch in Marcus’s cheek.
“You know,” he says, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m going about this thing with Mr. Strategy all wrong. It’s all about the long game, right, Chessmaster T? I should have learned that by now from watching you play. So maybe I should be focusing my attention on his sister.”
Cold sweat, spaghetti bile rising up in my gut. “Aw, come on, man. She never did anything to you. You’re going to torment this girl because her brother’s a jerk?”
“Tormenting? Did I say anything about tormenting? Nah. But I don’t think Hull’s going to like it too well when I’m banging his sister.” Marcus studies me while he says this. It’s a test, I think, some kind of loyalty test.
“Aw, damn,” K-Dawg says. “That’s straight-up brilliant right there.”
“Do whatever you want, Marcus,” I say, putting on the same poker face that I use for tough matches. “I think you’re crazy for wasting your time on this shit. But do whatever you want.”
“What I want?” Marcus says, giving me that beautiful crocodile grin. “I think it should be what you want, too, seeing as how I kept you from getting arrested the other day. You’re going to help me with this girl.” He reaches across the table, and for a second I think he’s going to reach right inside my rib cage and tear out my telltale heart. But he’s only extending a fist for me to pound. And I do, weakly, because I don’t have a clue what to do instead.
THE QUEEN
BEING THE NEW KID DOES NOT EXACTLY PLAY TO MY strengths. I think that people who are truly great at the new-kid game are some combination of these things: 1) radiantly self-confident, 2) easily adaptable to shifting social situations, 3) a little dumb. You surely know someone who has all of those qualities, and you understand in your heart that that person would make a great new kid. I am none of those things.
I say that only to highlight my own surprise that the first week at the new school went mostly smoothly. The teachers seemed okay, a little less personable and generous with their time than the teachers at my old school, a little cagier, maybe, but not mean. And a lot of the kids were nice to me, nicer than I might have been if this was my longtime turf. I even made a friend on the first day, though it was cheating a little because I’d met her a few times before. The Brooklyn Central Library periodically offered free interpretive dance classes that my mother liked to drag me to, and Brianna had been one of the most enthusiastic participants. She recognized me immediately in Government class. It took me a second longer to place her, but then it came rushing back: Brianna in the basement community room, wearing a tank top and running pants, crawling like a turtle and leaping like a stag to the jangly live percussion provided by a jolly European named Vincent. What are the odds?
“Your mom was so awesome!” she said. “She was so good at waving around those scarves!” And then she laughed at the face I made in response. Weirdly enough, there were quite a few similarities between Brianna and my mom. They both wore wild combinations of colors and long, funky skirts. They both had a habit of closing their eyes whenever they needed to think really hard. They both talked incessantly of moon signs and mysticism. Brianna was fairly certain she was a Wiccan, though she was “still thinking that through” and hadn’t yet mentioned it to her Catholic parents. She struggled with subjects like composition and history, but she was in the highest math and science classes, and I teased her that it was because she’d spent so much time working on complicated astrological charts. She nodded and said that was probably right. She was like a hippie love child with an undercurrent of Brooklyn tough girl mixed in. It made me sad sometimes to think about how much my mom would have loved having a daughter like her.
But mostly, I liked being around Brianna’s quirkiness, her enthusiasms and obsessions. She was so different from me, and particularly that first week, she was a good distraction from some other stuff in my life that wasn’t registering high on the sunshine scale.
For one: Hull. The day after I came home from camp, I’d been desperate to hear his side of the story, and by the time I woke up the next morning, I could already hear him arguing with my parents in the kitchen. Creeping down the stairs, I managed to catch a few snippets of the conversation:
“Don’t think that you’re going to magically get exactly what you want after the stunt you pulled yesterday. That’s not the way the world works, Hull.”
“Oh, so you don’t think I mean what I said?”
“That’s not what Dad is saying, Hull. Of course we’re going to get you help for as long as you need it. But I’m surprised at the lack of remorse you’ve shown. You don’t seem willing to—”
My mom stopped there because I accidentally stepped on a particularly creaky floorboard. I hadn’t yet learned the landscape of the new house’s sighs and groans.
“Izzy?” she called.
I waltzed into the kitchen casually, not at all like a person who had been eavesdropping on them. “Hey,” I said. Hull had a big bruise on his face, and he looked older than when I’d left for camp. I walked over and kissed him on the cheek. “I missed you while I was gone.” Sometimes siblings have to support each other in the face of the powers that be, especially, but not limited to, parents, so it didn’t matter at that point that I didn’t have all the details.
My father sighed. “I’m going to go get bagels,” he said, which was his typical code for I don’t want to be around any of you right now.
“I’m not hungry,” Hull said. “Can I go to my room?”
My father didn’t even bother responding. Finally, my mother said, “Go on,” and Hull went upstairs without looking at me or either of them. Dad made a noisy show of putting on his shoes and going out the front door. When they were both safely out of the room, I asked my mom to explain what was going on.
“Oh, Izzy,” she said, scrubbing the counter down with a dishrag. �
�It’s complicated.” She walked over and put her arms around me and rested her head against mine. My mom is a hugger, and I’m not, but I let her get away with it this time because she seemed so sad. “The police claim that your brother was threatening people with Grandpa’s hunting knife. And then he was saying some pretty strange things after we picked him up at the station last night. Stuff about wanting to hurt himself.”
“What?” I wriggled out of my mother’s grasp. “What exactly did he say?”
She was still holding the rag, and while she looked for the right words, she twisted it, hard, making her hands splotchy with white and pink.
“He said…” She hesitated, and I wondered if it was because the words were hard for her to say or if she was trying to choose the version that would provoke me the least. “He said something like, ‘It would be so convenient for you if I disappeared. So maybe I’ll eradicate myself and tidy up your lives for you.’”
“Are you serious?”
“And then something about getting that for us as an anniversary gift. You know how he can be.”
“Wait.” She was still working that dishrag over, and I suppressed an urge to snatch it out of her hands. “So Hull is threatening to off himself, and Dad’s wandering around the neighborhood buying bagels? Aren’t you guys going to do something about this?”
Mom kind of puddled onto a kitchen stool and rubbed at her temples. She was doing that noisy diaphragm breathing she does when she wants to stay calm. “And what would you suggest we do right now, Izzy?”
“Um, I don’t know. Take him to a hospital?”
“We’ve already looked into a couple of treatment options, but Labor Day isn’t really the best day to get someone into one of them. I’m driving him up to Columbia tomorrow to see if we can get him into a special youth-counseling day program.”
“Terrific.” I’m not entirely sure why I was so flooded with rage in that moment. It wasn’t fair, and it’s not as if I had a better plan than she did. But I still believed at that point that my parents’ love was so boundless that it could protect us from anything: the world, ourselves. It largely had up to that point. The illusion would be shattered soon enough, but as with so many fractures, the first fissures hurt the most.
My mother sat up straight and looked at me sharply. Even she had her limits. “You haven’t been home dealing with this every day, Izzy. Your brother has been… very difficult lately.”
This is completely mental, I thought as I stomped up the stairs to Hull’s room. I pounded on his door, put my ear against it, couldn’t hear anything inside, and promptly started to panic.
“I will kick this door down if you don’t open it right now!” I shouted, with eighty-four times the bravado that I actually felt. “I’ve been leading nature hikes for the past month! My legs are strong.”
A heavy pause the length of a breath. Two breaths. Three. I heard the latch turn on the other side of the door, then his footsteps as he retreated. I let myself in. The room was still a wreck, virtually unchanged since the day I left for camp, except now there were more books and clothes strewn everywhere. Hull was sitting on the floor, knees up in front of him. He looked skinny.
“What’s going on, Hull?” I demanded. “This is crazy.”
He looked at me, cocked one eyebrow. “No, I’m the one who’s crazy.”
“Did you really get in a fight yesterday?”
“Yep.”
“With?”
“Just… cretins. Just the dregs of this illustrious borough.”
“And you’re totally cool with Mom and Dad shipping you off to the loony bin tomorrow? Instead of going to school?”
“I am not going to that school tomorrow,” Hull said slowly, deliberately. “That much is certain.”
I paced, frustrated. “What about your grades? What about everything you worked for?”
He shrugged. I couldn’t quite fathom what was happening here. Either my brother was mentally ill or playing some kind of game. As angry as it had made me to hear about my father’s reaction, it wasn’t totally out of the realm of possibility that Hull was manipulating my parents. But I wasn’t certain either way; it was like I couldn’t recognize him with that bruise around his eye.
You could be forgiven, I guess, if you’re not finding Hull to be very likable. In this story that I’m telling you, he’s the troublemaker. You’ll have to take my word for it, then, that in the story of my life, he was more than that. He was a fun-maker when we would hold daylong tournaments, involving board games and feats of strength and constantly shifting rules, every time school was canceled during a snowstorm. He was a loyalty-maker when I would disagree with my parents and he would think of the perfect point to back me up. He was a comfort-maker when I would sit in his room in the evening and feel completely myself and tug on that waning but still palpable thread of twin-ness that stretched between us and feel someone on the other end of it. Even now, writing this, I can whisper our twin word and feel the physical presence of him, something I’ve never had with anyone else.
“Bork,” I said to him that night, but he wouldn’t answer me. He curled onto his side on the floor and went to sleep. I picked up a book I found lying on top of one of the piles, White House Years by Henry Kissinger, and spent the rest of the last day of summer vacation sitting on the floor of his bedroom, keeping a silent and stubborn watch.
If Hull had been my only problem during that week, it would have been bad enough, but there was something else, or rather someone else, constantly staking a claim on my thoughts. I had told myself, of course, the night we met that I shouldn’t think about him, shouldn’t entertain the possibility that something could happen between the two of us. And I know what I said earlier about love at first sight. Even so, I was still a sixteen-year-old with a hopeless crush.
When I finally fell asleep the night after meeting Tristan, I had a scorchingly embarrassing erotic dream: a sunlit clearing in a forest, the warmth of the sun on our bare skin, the soft, almost trampoline-like quality of the grass as we tumbled to the ground. The whole nine yards, basically. I woke up hot-faced, cringing on two levels: 1) that I was so quick to obsess over someone who showed me the tiniest bit of attention, and 2) that my sleeping brain couldn’t come up with anything better than a romantic cliché. Nevertheless, I spent a long time lying awake in the tangled sheets, trying to breathe around a newfound knot of desire that rested right below my ribs, drawn so tight that it was almost painful.
And then the first day of school, when I saw him in our homeroom class, he smiled at me, and his face was so open and joyful, and my blood thundered through my love-addled head the entire class period. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, and when he raised his hand and made a comment in AP Lit, my heart did a tap dance. He wasn’t just a pretty face; now I had evidence that he was smart, and the knot pulled tighter.
He waited for me outside the classroom. I know he did. He could have left, but he was waiting there, and he pointed out another class we had together, and he smelled like peppermint soap, and I almost reached out and squeezed his hand because it felt that right. And I guess I let myself hope for… what exactly? Something easy, I guess, like you could put on a love affair in the same way you’d slip on a clean shirt.
Stupid. Because it was the very same day that Brianna, unwittingly, brought these daydreams to an abrupt halt. It started in Trigonometry, not even four full class periods since she and I had figured out that we knew each other. We were supposed to be doing a review problem set with a partner, and between the two of us, it was so easy that we finished it with plenty of time to spare and sat there whisper-chatting. Brianna told me about her brother, about how she both detested him and worried about him constantly. “I mean, he got arrested two days ago, and I did something really big to help him and it’s like he didn’t even recognize the risk that—”
“Girls!” Mr. Mashariki said from his desk at the front of the class. “Less talk, more math.”
I flushed. I probabl
y would have been embarrassed at being chastised by a teacher on the first day of school (not my style), but I was too distracted by a coincidence so big that it didn’t really seem like a coincidence. The bell rang.
Brianna and I had already determined that we had the next class together, too, and we swam through the crowds, rowdier now toward the end of the day, in the direction of our Physics classroom. Brianna dragged me along in her wake. I wanted to know more about her brother, and particularly about this arrest, but before I could form an intelligent question, I saw Tristan approaching the door from the opposite direction. Our eyes met again, but instead of birdsong and butterflies, it was a nervous frizzle. He half smiled at me and then put his head down and slunk inside the classroom. Not a word spoken. I felt sucker-punched.
How much did Brianna read from this scene? Impossible to know. She said only, “You know T?”
“I met him a couple days ago. He seemed, I don’t know, nicer.”
“Nice. Yeah, I guess. Kind of a weirdo, though.” The crowd was starting to thin. She grabbed my elbow, leaned in conspiratorially. “He’s like this super chess genius, right? And he beat this kid so bad on Sunday that the kid went psycho and pulled a knife and then everything blew up. And that’s how my brother ended up in jail.” Brianna shook her head and shrugged. “And it all comes back to quiet, nerdy little T. You wouldn’t guess from looking at him, would you?”
I folded myself into a desk near the back of the classroom. The teacher, Mr. Hawkins, was goofy and fun, and he should have been my favorite teacher all day, but I was barely on the same plane of existence. I may have been missing some pieces, but the big ones were there. A chess-playing kid who pulled a knife and caused a scene? It wasn’t hard to figure out who that was, sharing DNA with him the way I did. And Tristan was involved. And Brianna’s brother. Tristan was sitting a few rows ahead of me, and I spent most of the period studying the back of his head, wondering how on earth the literal boy of my dreams had decided to have some kind of chess duel to the death with my twin brother.
Izzy + Tristan Page 6