All Adults Here(46)
It was also how Porter felt about herself and her brothers, that they were three parts of a whole that had somehow gotten untangled. She remembered being little and loving her brothers more than she loved anything else in the world, thinking (before their father died) that the three of them could run away and have adventures and that nothing bad could ever happen, because they had each other. Nicky and Elliot were so different from each other now, and they had always been, but the proximity of childhood had made the differences seem unimportant, just a part of their comedic timing, like rivals on a sitcom. Nicky was their wild little mascot, and Elliot their de facto leader, and Porter was the peanut butter, the glue. They both loved her more than they loved each other. When Nicky had been in the movie and people paid attention to him, out of nowhere, a bolt of blue, Porter and Elliot had swooped in like two bodyguards. He was the first to break away, and then when their dad died, it unhooked the rest, and Porter had spent her whole adult life trying to figure out how to put it back together. Jeremy had told her a thousand times that brothers didn’t matter—he didn’t speak to his brother more than once a year, and who cared—but Porter had never wanted to give up. She never called Elliot, and he never called her, and when they were together, Porter felt more irritated than anything else, but still. But still.
“Love you, Nicky.” He would have cried at the ultrasound, he would have held her hand. He would have said something about their dad that she’d forgotten. It wasn’t fair when people moved away—they took so much of you with them, without even meaning to.
“Love you, too, sis,” Nicky said. “Hug that girl for me, will you?”
“Of course,” Porter said, and she wrapped her arms around her own body too. Sometimes she wondered if she’d been too successful at convincing everyone in town that she was as tough as her mother, as tough as her brothers. She was so tough that no one ever checked on her, just to make sure she was doing okay, because she was always doing okay. That wasn’t true, of course, but no one ever bothered to find out. That was another thing Porter was going to do as a mom—she was going to ask her daughter how she was, and what she was feeling, at least once a week, if not once a day. She would wait for the answer.
Chapter 20
August Tells the Truth, Part One
The first way August made sense of it was thinking about the moment when cells began to come together and multiply, every human their own private science experiment. August’s parents explained it one day after school in the third grade. Making a baby was like baking a cake, August’s mother, Ruth, had said, with ingredients, and a specific order in which to do things, and then you had to wait and see if the recipe worked. So, August thought, maybe they got part of the recipe wrong, and put in too much of my mom and not enough of my dad. Maybe that’s where the feeling came from. Later, August would be embarrassed by this thought, which was wrong in a thousand ways, but kids were kids. August had been only eight.
Not wrong. Just different. The way two different people can follow the same recipe and make two different cakes, depending on how much vanilla you put in, what kind of butter you use, how long you mix things together. How patient you are. How many times you open the oven, just to check.
The clothing helped—the shop was always full of different possibilities. August’s parents thought of them as costumes but August knew better.
When August was ten, the family drove to summer camp for the first time. August had begged to go—already a good researcher, August had found the camp online. It was progressive, even for Clapham, even for the Northeast, even for people like Ruth and John who sold old clothes and composted with worms. The camp T-shirt read SUNSHINE VILLAGE CAMP IS NONCOMPETITIVE, NONRACIST, NONHOMOPHOBIC, NONTRANSPHOBIC, NONSEXIST, NOT FOR PROFIT. The word zinged in the middle and electrified August’s eyeballs every time it appeared. The camp was hidden in the woods of Massachusetts, only a few hours away, but when John turned the car down the private road that led to the camp, a collection of old barns and converted farm buildings, August felt nauseous—this summer was a test to see if anyone else noticed, to find out what happened if anyone knew the truth.
At camp, everyone was experimenting with something: macramé, bisexuality, slime, ultimate frisbee, French kissing, makeup, shaving their legs. August decided to start with a new name. August was one of twelve kids in a bunk called Evergreen, everyone equipped with two sets of sheets and a sleeping bag and a canteen and four pairs of shorts and eight Tshirts and two sweatshirts and as many pairs of underwear as they had. August’s bed was a bottom bunk, which was coveted, though August thought sleeping on top seemed like more fun, and so when August offered to swap with a kid named Danny, a curly-headed blond from Brooklyn, August was thrilled and hugged Danny, saying, “Dude! You rule!” When the bunk gathered for their first circle time, where everyone introduced themselves and said where they were from, August announced, as confidently as possible, as if it wasn’t the first time, that at home, no one actually used the name August, but Robin instead, and that they should too. And so they did. Easy as that. It felt like a tiny shaft of light piercing a pitch-black room.
Sometimes a lie wasn’t a lie when it got you closer to the truth. Sometimes a lie was more like a wish, or a prayer.
Robin Sullivan. The kind of name where you couldn’t tell. It was an in-between name, a practice name, maybe. The girls in the bunk next door were August’s closest friends, and when August ran over to their table in the dining room every morning, they sang out “Rockin’ Robin, tweet, tweedly twee” in unison, and August’s eyes rolled back from pleasure, like a dog getting its tummy rubbed. They weren’t like the girls in Clapham, who all wore capri leggings and let their long hair grow to the middle of their backs and rode pink bicycles with pink and purple streamers and bought the same color lipstick at CVS as soon as their parents said they were allowed. The girls at camp were different. One girl had a buzz cut, one girl had three holes in one of her ears. The women counselors were different too: Some wore baggy jean cutoffs and had nose rings, and some wore tiny flowery dresses and had Rapunzel hair. One, who everyone called Goose, bragged that she’d never cut her toenails. The black girls slept with their hair wrapped in silk scarves. All the girls farted noisily and then laughed. August hadn’t been sure before, because being a girl had always been so specific, so narrow, but the girls at camp weren’t all like the ones August knew at home, and they weren’t all the same. They all thought August was gay, and it seemed silly to correct them. There were lots of gay kids at camp, and some of the older ones paired up and held hands and kissed at the end of the weekly dances, or behind bunks, when they thought no one was looking, just like the straight couples. It was like once you passed through the gate, all the rules about how things were supposed to work got erased, and instead they could just work however they wanted, in whatever way felt best, and no one ever got teased. It felt like another planet.