All Adults Here(63)

“Are you okay?” August asked.

Cecelia looked up at him. “Yeah, why?”

“Because you’ve been painting the same Popsicle stick over and over again. I think that one’s good.” He pointed with his paintbrush. Sure enough, the piece of wood that Cecelia had been painting was permanently shellacked to the newspaper underneath it.

The first time that Jesse and Katherine were supposed to meet up, Cecelia went too. Katherine—admitting some form of weakness, or maybe just because she’d watched Dateline—asked her to go along, and to just stand in the background, so that if Jesse was watching, he would think that she was alone, as they’d agreed. They were supposed to meet at Grand Army Plaza, on the stone benches right in front of the entrance to Prospect Park, where the farmers’ market was on Saturday mornings. On Saturday nights, it was empty, with a few smushed tomatoes on the ground. People everywhere. That was the idea.

Katherine had stood there for almost an hour before she gave up and skulked back to the bench that Cecelia was sitting on. She should have told her parents then. He must have come, Cecelia thought, and seen more than one girl. There were cops around, too, just hanging out next to their squad car. If Jesse was really a teenager, he would have sloped up to them like Katherine’s older brother would have, with a dumb look on his face and eyes full of fear. That was when Cecelia should have told. The next time anyone told her anything, she was going to shout it from the rooftops. She was going to be clear and direct. It was the only way.



* * *



—

August and Cecelia walked together to the bus stop after school. They’d stayed late to help Ms. Skolnick put away things after they dried, and to help prep the next round of things that needed to be painted, which meant cutting out tiny doors and windows for the float, and August was going to come over for dinner. The sun was hanging above the trees, turning the sky purple and pink, and they both cupped their hands around their eyes to stop the glare.

“Can I ask you something?” she said to August, who was rearranging things in his backpack.

“Mm-hmm,” August said, without looking up.

“Are you gay?” Cecelia felt her heart beating fast. She was nervous. What a crazy thing to ask someone, just flat out, outside, in the middle of all this light and air.

August looked up. It didn’t seem to be the question he was expecting. “Did someone tell you that?”

“A girl asked me, in Parade Crew. The seventh grader with all the freckles. I said I didn’t know.” Cecelia closed her eyes, her resolve gone at the first clip. “I’m sorry, that was a crazy way to ask that. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

August zipped his bag back up and slung it over his shoulder. A lock of hair got caught under the strap, and he tugged it out gently. “People have been asking me that for a long time. For a while, I thought I was. But I’m not.”

At the other end of the driveway, a kid drove their car too fast and screeched to a stop at the light. It was a miracle anyone survived childhood, really.

“I have a friend at camp who’s trans, do you know what that is?” August was speaking quietly. He stood up straight and took a step closer, so that she could hear him.

Cecelia nodded. She’d known a few kids, back in Brooklyn, people who had asked the teachers to say She instead of He, but none of them had ever really been her friends, just figures of interest at school. She stared ahead, to the wall of trees, to the purple sky, to the neat lines of birds sitting on the telephone wires. This was important—Don’t fuck this up, she told herself. Whatever you did before, don’t do that now. Don’t lose your only friend. React perfectly. Whatever that is, just do that, and nothing else.

“Trans is when you’re born into a body that doesn’t match what’s in your brain. My friend was born looking like a boy, so everyone treated her like a boy, but inside, she always knew she was a girl. Like, always. From preschool. She always knew she was a girl.” August shifted from side to side. He was nervous, too, Cecelia could tell. Some kids pushed through the main school doors, some fifty feet away, and were laughing loudly. Their voices echoed into the trees.

“Okay,” Cecelia said. “She.”

“She,” August said. “Yeah. But it’s hard to tell everyone, so she hasn’t yet. Just at camp, and when she’s alone with her parents, for now.”

Cecelia shifted her body so that they were standing next to each other instead of opposite each other and pressed the side of her body into the side of his body, and together they stared out, as if to designate that they were united in this space, that they were a human oasis from the Sidney Fogelmans of the world. The tip of Cecelia’s elbow touched August’s, two points in the dark. “This sounds like a close friend.”

“Really close,” August’s voice was small, just above a whisper.

“Like how close?” Cecelia asked, whispering. “Like your best friend? Emily?”

“Like, closer than Emily. Like, inside my body close,” August said, now almost inaudible.

“Does she have a name? Like, a different name?”

People said that the past and the future didn’t exist, but they did. Just not at the same time. The past was right there, if you wanted to look at it. The only trick was knowing that your past was never the same twice, and the past was never the same for two people. Everyone looked at things through their own eyes, and also through every single thing that had happened before that moment. Even the present was iffy.