Picture Us In The Light(46)

“They’re definitely—complex.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I take out my phone to text her congrats. “What are you going to do, then?” I say, not looking up from the keypad. “If she goes, you’ll be really far away from her.” And: me. The thought of having whole states between us next year feels like someone took a hole punch to my heart. “You think you guys will stay together in college?”

“Maybe.” He kind of laughs. “Or maybe she’ll want an upgrade when she gets there. Who knows. We’ve never really talked about it. She might not want to do long-distance.”

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I wonder whether she and Harry are sleeping together. Harry never says anything about it, which could mean they aren’t or could just mean talking about it isn’t his style. It feels like another lifetime that she told me how she was going to break up with him. I’ve never asked her about it since. For a while I kept waiting for it to happen, but it seems clear now it isn’t going to, and I should probably be glad. It would be a stain on anyone’s character to wish more loss on someone like Regina. The easiest thing to imagine is that after Sandra died she just couldn’t do it—she needed him too much, and she couldn’t endure another loss on top of everything else.

He reaches for a basketball shrouded by the edge of his blanket. “I’m scared I’m not going to get in anywhere.”

“That’s definitely not going to happen. But what about like University of Chicago or something?” I say. “I bet you’d like it there.”

“Yeah, maybe…” He’s too polite to say he would view that as complete and abject failure, but he would, obviously. It isn’t that I want him in Chicago, either, I just wish he didn’t see it as Princeton or bust. I guess what I wanted to say was You could do a lot worse than Brown.

“When you turned in your portfolio,” he says, “did it feel like, I don’t know, like you were ripping off your clothes so they could judge you naked? I don’t know what I’ll even do if I don’t get in anywhere good.”

“You’ll probably get in everywhere you applied.”

He hooks his leg over mine and then, without warning, rolls over so he’s pinning me against the ground. I can feel his heart beating against mine, which means, probably, that he felt it when mine picked up. He grins in my face.

“Get off me,” I say. My voice comes out kind of squeaky. I move feebly underneath him, not enough to actually shake him off.

“I’m trying to open up here and share my genuine fears and you’re just brushing me off. You’re probably going to get to RISD and find a new best friend, huh? Just replace me?”

I am hyperaware of every centimeter of him against me. And at the same time my mind is a raging mess of color and chaotic form, a Jackson Pollock painting splashed across the whole thing. I manage, “No.” Then he rolls off me.

I’m out of breath. What am I supposed to make of that?

He looks unruffled. Why did it feel like a lightning bolt to me, then? My whole body is still tingling.

Harry palms the basketball and tries to lift it. “I’m starving. You want to stay for dinner? My mom said the cook got crab.”

I do want to stay for dinner; I’d want to if the cook had gotten cardboard. I wait until I’m sure I won’t sound out of breath. “I’ll ask my parents.”

He lies down on his back, tries to twirl the basketball around on his finger without it falling and clocking him in the face. He keeps having these near misses, swerving his head out of the way. “You’re an idiot,” I say. Today the emptiness of life without him feels more real to me in ways it didn’t when I got the RISD acceptance. When my mom picks up, I say, “Hi, Ma, Harry asked if I could stay for dinner.”

“For dinner? No, Daniel, come back home. We have to eat all the leftovers.”

“I can have those tomorrow inst—”

“Don’t stay for dinner. They’ll think you don’t get to eat enough at home.”

“They won’t—”

“Baba is home. I’ll send him to get you.” She hangs up.

“No go?” Harry says.

“Nah, another time. Thanks, though.”

The ball thumps millimeters from his face again. He sits up, grinning, his arms stretched wide.

“What are you doing?” I say, my heartbeat not yet back to normal still. “Why do you look so smug? You’re terrible at that. You have nothing to be smug about.”

“It never got me, though, did it? I always got away.”



At home: tense silence, a cold—the heater’s turned off again—that slithers up against my nose and neck, my mom ensconced in her garden, tools arranged around her like armor. She’s out there another hour at least (an hour that, for the record, I could’ve stayed at Harry’s) and she comes back in wearing her sun visor and with her arms laden with some carrots and a bunch of greens. She fills the sink with water and plunges the vegetables under. The water swirls with dirt.

They’ve had all day to work things out together. I hope they did exactly that.

“Go get your father,” she says without looking up. “Tell him it’s time for dinner.”

He slides into his chair without looking at anyone, and his unhappiness spreads through the room like a fog. My mom shakes out her napkin and smooths it over her lap. For dinner she spooned mushrooms and pickled vegetables over rice, and the chicken from dinner last night is waiting on the middle of the table on a plate. There’s a tightness in my stomach.