Picture Us In The Light(18)

My dad found me in my room, furiously drawing ugly-looking caricatures of Harry. He watched me for a little while, then patted his stomach. “Want to go get donuts, Daniel?”

“No.”

He watched me draw. “Who is that?”

“Just a guy at school.”

“You don’t like him?”

“No.” He waited for me to elaborate. Finally I said, “He had this party today and everyone was acting like it was this huge important thing. I don’t know. It’s stupid. He’s kind of full of himself.”

I immediately regretted telling him—my dad can be so advice-y, and I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, though, he said, “Let’s go on a hike.”

“I don’t feel like hiking.”

“Fresh air will be good for you. Put on some shoes. It’ll be fun.”

So we drove up into the hills and went hiking at Fremont Older. You drive up Prospect where it winds into the hills and is barely big enough for two cars to fit, park under the oak trees next to the country club, the branches gathering you away from the sunlight, and you hug the side of the hill and pass some shut-off wooden homes and then the trail spills you onto a wide dirt path in a clearing. The dusty path leads up bare grassy hills until you get to Hunter’s Point and you can see the whole Bay Area sprawled out below, all gray-green and red-roofed, from so high up blurred in a way that always makes me think of an artist I like named Dashiell Manley, who makes these explosive, haunting oil-on-linen paintings, textured dabs of color that make your eyes feel thirsty and inadequate. I hadn’t wanted to come, but my dad was right—it was nice being up here, kind of like being in another world. Literally above it all. My dad was making an obvious effort to be in a good mood, and we saw hawks and a few deer and I watched the way people looked hiking, the lines their bodies made from their tiredness and determination. Any other day it would’ve been fine; it wouldn’t have felt like a consolation prize.

We were headed back to the parking lot, coming around a narrow switchback with a steep drop-off, when he hit a root and stumbled. My mind flashed forward. I could see the accident before it happened—him tumbling down the ravine, the search parties I’d try to flag down, the guilt I’d feel for all the times and all the ways I’d holed up in my room quarantined from his obvious sadness, what it would do to my mom to lose a daughter and then a husband, too. But I was wrong about it—he flailed his arms and grabbed at a shrub, and steadied himself. When he pulled his hand away his palm was bleeding, but he was laughing.

“That was close,” he said. “Hey, it’s not so bad, right? You aren’t at your party, but we’re not lying at the bottom of a ravine.”

My heart was pounding. I was embarrassed by my own fear. “If you say so.”

“Say it’s better or I’ll throw you down this hill. Now I know the way down.”

It made me laugh in spite of myself. Afterward, we went to go get donuts at Donut Wheel. My dad ate two. My dad, who deserved a party and a celebration and happiness and instead all that went to Harry, who’d done nothing to earn any of it.



Monday was Harry’s actual birthday, a fact I learned when I showed up for school that morning and it was like a balloon store threw up all over campus and Harry’s face was plastered all over the halls. People decorated like this for their friends’ birthdays, but I’d never seen anyone take it this seriously. There were flyers with his face taped to pretty much every bank of lockers, including my own. When I went to get my books, there was his extraordinarily satisfied face, staring right at me.

I thought: NOPE. I pulled my Sharpie from my pocket, glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and drew over the flyer. I edited his features—I made his eyes more leering, more pleased with themselves, and then I zoomed in on his mouth, trying to shape it to make it look self-congratulatory and smug as all hell.

“You didn’t like the original?”

I knew before I turned around. I turned around anyway. Harry was watching me, his arms folded across his chest.

“What is this?” he said. “Is this supposed to be me?”

Of course it was. There was no use denying it, either. It looked like him. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

He let his arms drop and then reached in front of me and tore the paper off the lockers. The expression on his face—at the time I thought it was disgust. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Uh—” I tried to grab for the paper, but he held it out of my reach. “It’s nothing. I was just screwing around.”

“Why?”

What are you supposed to say to that? Finally I said, again, “I was just messing around.”

He stared at me a long time. It occurred to me to wonder if maybe he was going to hit me. He didn’t, though. He said, “Can I keep this?”

It caught me off guard—it was the last thing I expected—and I nodded before I could stop myself. Anyway, it’s not like I could’ve asked for it back.

He didn’t crumple it up, either. He folded it carefully in half, then swung his backpack around and unzipped it and slipped the drawing into his binder. Then he walked away, taking the drawing with him: tangible proof he could fold up and keep of what a petty, vindictive person I was, something that would leave me always on the hook.