Picture Us In The Light(22)

“Don’t cry,” I whispered to my mom, and patted her hand. I tried to smile. “It’s just eighth grade.”

At the graduation dance that night (butcher-paper palm trees taped to all the walls and the lights turned low, bottles of sparkling cider and those Costco three-flavor packs of cookies), when we were tired of dancing, a bunch of us sat on the bleachers and Harry slung his arm over my shoulders. He’s always been a kind of handsy person. He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the music and said, “How come your mom was crying so much today?”

I held still so he didn’t think I was moving to get him off me. “Long story.”

“What’s the story?”

Back then I never really liked talking about my family with most people—it was complicated, I was worried about fitting in, school was where I got to not think about it, etc., etc. But that night—maybe it was how hard it had hit me seeing my mom crying like that, or how before the dance we’d gone to dinner and my dad had given me a framed signed Dashiell Manley print. He’d watched my reaction eagerly, like he wanted to save it, and when he saw how pleased I was he was proud in a way that made him feel more like himself. Or maybe it was the way it felt to sit there on the bleachers with Harry and for him to have made that space for the two of us that way in that whole big sea of people.

So I told him what it had been like. My voice cracked a couple of times; luckily it was loud in there. I was nervous. I guess I’ve always believed that’s what a relationship is, this space you keep between you where you hold each other’s secrets. Or that it’s how you build something together, layering the things you’ve never told anyone else like bricks.

After I finished he was quiet for a long time. Ahmed came over to talk to us and I could see Harry snap into motion, grinning back and laughing, and I wanted to take back everything I’d told him. But then Ahmed went off to ask Sandra to dance and Harry’s grin slid off his face and he turned back to me. He put his hand on my knee.

“It’ll get better,” he said. Harry is an unrepentant optimist, and so I might’ve been willing to write off what he was saying as a cheap platitude, except for the hand on my knee and also for what came next. “It always does. They’ll figure things out and everything will get back to normal. Okay? And in the meantime, I mean—we’ll get you through it.” And there it was again—that same we.

That was when it all made sense to me—why I’d disliked him so ardently at first. It was because something in me recognized how much he would matter to me, all along. I’d just been wrong about the particular way.

I’m not going to try to pass the night off as in any way epic. It was hot in there and everyone was sweaty and you could feel a thousand middle schoolers’ worth of hormones everywhere, and everyone had braces and all the girls were teetering around in their heels and the teachers were skulking around in the corners trying to make sure no one was grinding on each other or otherwise getting too gross.

But still. The dance was also a retreat from the fear I’d been living in at that point. My worst fear about my family was that maybe I would never be enough to make up for what they’d lost, that I wasn’t supposed to be the one who’d lived, and that they’d wind up broken in a way I couldn’t put back together. Maybe they’d break apart from each other entirely. I felt that possibility heavy on my chest every morning when I woke up. By then I could see a future where my family never stopped being a grayer, paler, more trembling version of ourselves, and by then I couldn’t shake the possibility that maybe my fate, all our fates, had been sealed before I was even born when my sister died. It wasn’t hard to see how our future could get swallowed by the past.

And so it was the way he’d said we that felt significant to me—that same we from Yosemite I’d been holding on to all these months, the same one I’d been hoping I hadn’t just imagined. It’s both the best thing that can happen to you and the most dangerous, because what do you have except the people you belong to and who belong to you? But then you can also lose yourself to it; you can do things in service of those wes that end up haunting you.



Harry was, surprisingly, right: things did get better. Something rekindled in my dad—whether that was purpose or hope or something else, I’m not sure, but he felt like himself again. He’d go to social events again and hum in the shower or while making coffee in the morning and joke around with me. And my mom seemed relieved in her quiet, nervous way—that sort of holding her breath, that sense she gives off that she doesn’t quite trust the ground beneath her feet.

I’ve never told Harry how I feel, and daily, probably, I go back and forth about whether he knows. It’s what makes me wonder, too—maybe he’s more open than I am and I already know everything there is.

Or maybe not. Maybe he keeps some of that locked up, like I do.

Anyway, though, since Yosemite we’ve been basically inseparable, but there are ways I don’t let my guard down around him. Someday, maybe—I tell myself that all the time. We’ll see. Sometimes, actually, he’ll say something to me that feels so generous it throws me, but for the most part it’s not like we ever said that kind of thing to each other aloud. We always bickered a lot and also, I mean, the things that always bugged me about him didn’t necessarily stop bugging me once we got close; I just learned to contextualize them differently. They slid off to the side and allowed room for the rest of it in.