I'd Give Anything(23)

I expected it to be—I don’t know.

Splendid. Every nerve ending a sparkler.

Once, at the end of seventh grade, I took a school trip to Puerto Rico, and on the last night, we swam in a bioluminescent bay. I thought sex would be like that: all our movements splashing radiance, blue-green light pouring off our bodies, the bristling white stars overhead.

Desire, even the word has its roots in starlight. It really does. De + sidus. Of the stars. I looked it up, the way I do. Words are like people; the more you know about them the more interesting they are.

I expected us to have sex and change into something bigger and brighter and to rise up and be triumphant and jubilant forever.

It was over so fast. And, in the few minutes it was happening: oh, but Gray’s face, how it looked in the skim milk light coming through his bedroom window. Pale and scared and like he might cry.

Afterward, he was my Gray again. He buried his face in my hair and laughed his rumbling, car-driving-over-a-wooden-bridge laugh. He ran his finger down the length of my arm and kissed the inside of my elbow. He said, “My beautiful, beautiful Zinny.”

And I thought, “Thank you for trying so hard,” which was the wrong thing to think at such a moment. I know that.

But maybe my expectations were just too high. I was unrealistic. Overly romantic. Way too hopeful. Silly. Maybe the sky never cracks open the first time; maybe angels never sing. Maybe it was only disappointing because I was so sure it would be splendid. Maybe my mother is right that having faith that splendor and magnificence will come through for you is just stupid.

I’ll make it up to Gray. Even though he doesn’t know what I’ve been thinking, all these silent, traitorous thoughts, I’ll make it up to him. I’ll write him a sonnet, one with fifteen lines, so he knows that I love him too much for just fourteen.

Because I do.





September 15, 1997

My friends and I have always said we’d go to Hell and back for each other, and today, at the start of the second week of senior year, we did.

We call it Hell. Kirsten’s mother, who went to our school way back when, says they called it Hades and before that, she thinks it was the Underworld. All fine enough names for the basement of our school, which, when you’re in it, feels about a million miles straight down and as cut off from the regular, sunlit world as, well, Hell. I prefer the name Hell since it’s the most direct and least pretentious, although as you can see from the Tantalus bit in my last entry, I’m not above a mythical allusion. Plus, as CJ says, if you can’t show off what you know when you’re a kid and have basically just learned everything you know, when it’s all still shiny and new and you should be proud of it, there is something wrong with the world. Of course, CJ has a large personal investment in believing this is true, since showing off what he knows—and knowing more than everyone else—is arguably the foundation of CJ’s entire personality. But since it’s exactly this quality in CJ that led us to Hell, we can’t begrudge him it. Actually, we don’t anyway. CJ might be a know-it-all, but he’s our know-it-all.

Not everyone feels this way. In fact, apart from a few teachers, the ones especially comfortable with themselves and their own brains, most people give CJ a pretty hard time. He’s a flimsy little guy, almost translucently pale, with the kind of corn silk hair only toddlers and Finnish people usually have. Before he started hanging out with us in ninth grade, some of the meaner kids called him Al. When CJ found out that this was short for “albino,” he delivered a tutorial on the genetics and physical traits of albinism to any would-be bully within earshot, which, unshockingly, did not do him a bit of good.

Luckily for CJ, Lucretia Mott School isn’t exactly a bully stronghold, and even luckier for CJ, in September of ninth grade, he found himself assigned to a group history project with me, Kirsten, and Gray. At fourteen, Gray was already the starting varsity quarterback, something people claimed had not happened since the school was founded in 1870, which basically granted Gray a spot in the high school pantheon for all eternity.

Kirsten’s family is one of the wealthiest in town, and they’ve gone to Lucretia Mott for a bazillion generations, and she’s blond and tan and dimpled and was already curvy as a swimsuit model in ninth grade; in fact, she has all the makings of a queen bee except that she was somehow born not giving even the tiniest crap about stuff like that. Even so, people at LM who don’t openly worship her at least stay out of her way, maybe in case she decides to exercise her natural-born queen bee rights and sting them.

And then there’s me. I’m not sure how anyone else sees me, but I know how I see myself: fiery and funny Zinny, a rare bird, a wildflower, a comet. I love my friends the way I do everything: entirely.

Gray, Kirsten, and I—we are CJ’s circle of fire. We keep CJ safe.

The worst anyone does nowadays is steal his clothes, usually his gym clothes, but sometimes his regular ones. Not permanently. They always show up. Flapping on a flagpole or pinned to a bulletin board or stuck inside the school’s big front entrance display case with the trophies. Betsy, the big-hearted woman who has worked at the front desk of the school forever, keeps a set of CJ-size clothing in a filing cabinet drawer for when the thieves strike, which happens at least once a month.

Everyone knows the kids who are doing it: Tommy Fleming, Quincy Jarvis, Bryan Coe, a good-natured group who are just one slight remove from CJ-level nerdiness themselves. Coming from them, the clothes-stealing might even be a compliment, and it’s definitely turned CJ into kind of a celebrity. CJ, who has a seemingly bottomless capacity for worrying, doesn’t really even stress about it anymore.