You Know Me Well(54)
“Okay,” she says. “Here it goes.”
We were swimming downstream, always.
We were all scales and fins,
all gleaming in the sun,
all carefree and careless.
We never had to try hard
or even try at all.
You and me,
me and you,
and the water,
and the sun.
Or, no.
What we really were,
were twins.
The kind that feel it
when the other is cold.
The kind that always hears
two heartbeats
instead of one.
Pinch me
and you’d say
ouch.
Or maybe
I imagined all of it:
the water,
the sun,
even our scales and fins.
Maybe it was just circumstance
and nothing profound
or anomalous
or even
unusual,
the way you’d eat a strawberry
and I’d say
yum.
Because all it took
was for you to step away
for me to hear
a single heartbeat.
It was always
just me.
It was always
just you.
We thought we were special,
but we were always
the subjects
of two separate
sentences.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s it.”
And I know things happened after that. The rise of applause, everyone’s teary eyes. Mark leaning over to me, saying, “Wow. So she is human.” Violet’s questioning look and whatever it is I must have told her. But everything that happened after, it was a blur, because all I remember is Lehna, blinking into the bright light, and the way it sank into me, burrowing, festering: Whatever this is that’s happening between us, it’s another part of the tower that I have to burn down.
19
MARK
I dare you.
Why do we think this is okay? Why do we always feel the need to push and push and push? Don’t we know that pushing is never a way to get a person to come closer?
And yet.
There is something powerful about the shedding of comfort. There is something intense about feeling that person push, knowing that the force behind it is the force of their caring, of their genuine belief that the push will get you to a better place.
I’m not ready.
As I’m walking up the stairs to Ryan’s room, I’m thinking the only real response to this statement could be:
Who is?
*
He’s still in his pajamas. Which isn’t fair, because in Ryan’s case pajamas means boxers and a ratty old Queen Amidala T-shirt that is much sexier than any late-nineties relic should ever be.
But that’s not what’s being drawn into my focus. What I’m seeing is a boy so lost in the world that he can’t get himself out of bed. The tiredness from lack of sleep, the tiredness of too many thoughts without hitting on the right one. He looks like a balloon that once touched the ceiling brightly but now, weeks later, stumbles along the floor.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. And the fact that he feels the need to thank me makes me sad. It should be understood that I would be here, that I will always be here.
“I know it’s ridiculous,” he goes on. “The timing, I mean. For fuck’s sake, there are only two days left in school. You would have thought I could’ve stayed in the closet for two more days. But no. That, apparently, was not the plan.”
“So this is it?” I ask. “Today’s the day?”
He pats a space next to him on the bed, then clutches a pillow to his chest. I sit down where he’s gestured me to sit, facing him.
“Today has been the day for a very long time,” he tells me. “Today has been something I’ve told myself often without ever really believing it. But this week—today actually became today. No more looking at a wall and pretending it was a mirror. No more shelving the fiction in the nonfiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it was Taylor who called my bluff. With you and me, the secrecy was part of the story—at least the way I was writing it. I know you would have written it differently. But with me and him—I had to leave the world I’d created. I had to walk into the world that really was. The feelings I’m feeling—they are not tomorrow feelings. They’re today feelings. With you and me—it’s just so…”
“Complicated?” I volunteer.
“Yeah. Complicated. Can I tell you another thing you don’t want to hear?”
“Sure.”
“If I hadn’t seen you up there on that bar—I never would have had the courage to talk to Taylor. To dance with him. To let all this happen. You gave me the inspiration I needed. Part of it was competition, I’m sure—you did that thing so I had to do something even riskier. But part of it was sheer admiration. So I flirted with him so openly—and doing that made me realize what open felt like. I got to that point. I’m at that point. Now I just have to figure out the other ninety-nine percent of it. And you know what? That other ninety-nine percent is fucking scary.”
I nod. It is.
I see how truly terrified he is. In a twisted way, I am glad that I am part of it. And in an equally twisted way, I am sad that I am only a part of it and not all of it.