Picture Us In The Light(81)

“You know it’s not like that. It’s—it’s kind of a long story.”

I say it quietly, and something in him deflates. “Okay, look,” he says, closing his eyes a moment, “I got kind of—it was a pretty bad night.”

“You want some tea or something? I can make you some.”

“No, I don’t want tea, I want—” He composes himself. “No, thank you.”

“You want to come in and sit down?”

“All right.”

I hold the door open. He comes inside, slipping his shoes off and shoving his hands into his pockets and looking around. I close the door behind us.

I can read the shock on his expression; it’s his first time inside. Failure always makes him uncomfortable; he always tries to gloss over it in anyone else and stamp it out in himself. But this apartment is unequivocally failure. I see it again through his eyes, the grimy carpet and ’70s appliances and boxes and bags stuffed with our things crammed into all the corners, rising up the walls. I see him start when he sees my mom, too, sprawled out on the pullout bed.

I lead him into my bedroom, which at least has the distinction of being reasonably neat and unpacked. His eyes flicker sharply over the bare walls. He plops down on my bed. Even furious there’s an almost aggressive perfection to the way he holds himself—impeccable clothes, hair artfully arranged, a chiseled profile that’s highlighted, somehow, by his anger. For the hundredth time, I think fleetingly how nice it must be to be him.

Even in the dim lighting, though, his cheeks look flushed. I say, “Are you drunk?”

“A little.”

“What the hell, Harry? You drove here drunk?” I’ll kill him.

“Of course I didn’t. My parents would’ve heard the garage open anyway. I took Uber. Don’t tell Regina.”

“Ah.” Regina thinks Uber is evil. “She’s okay, right? I should’ve called her, but…”

He lets me trail off. There’s nowhere for me to really go after that but. I should’ve called her, full stop. Finally he says, “Yes,” his tone clipped.

“That’s good. I was worried.”

“Were you.”

“I mean—yes.”

“Cool. It’s great you called her, then. It’s great you didn’t just go dark on her overnight. It’s great you answered your phone all the times I tried to call.”

“I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

He raises his eyebrows at the wall. “I didn’t mean to yell at you earlier.” His voice is stiff. “I didn’t—actually, you know what, screw it, I did mean to yell at you. Why the hell didn’t you answer any of my messages? I wouldn’t have done that to you.”

I want to tell him the truth—about the accident, about everything. But I picture him getting up in horror and disgust and leaving, never coming back, and my heart curdles. There are some things you can’t bring yourself to risk.

“I wasn’t trying to piss you off,” I say. I sit down next to him, my back against the wall. We’re close enough that our knees brush against each other. It feels like the Pop Rocks candy Ethan and I used to hoard sometimes when we could talk our dads into buying it for us, those small explosions I can feel all over. I wait to see if he’ll shift away. He doesn’t.

I tell him about crashing (I don’t say how) and how my mom got hurt, and I tell him everything my dad told me after. I didn’t realize it until just now but I kind of subconsciously assumed, when we moved, that I’d never bring anyone I knew into this room. And him solid and angry next to me—it sets him in sharp focus and blurs the rest of the room around me like he uses up all my vision, all my atoms rushing to align themselves toward him in a way that leaves behind so many billions of lacerations. I’m still exhausted enough, and everything I’m telling him is still surreal enough, that the room has the filmy, detached quality of a dream.

He’s stunned. When I’m done he’s silent a long time. Finally he says, “Illegal is a messed up way to put it. You’re supposed to say—”

“Dammit, Harry, you think I care right this second? Does it look like I care?”

He swivels to face me. His hand hovers over my knee, and I think he’s going to rest it there. I want him to so badly I can’t breathe. But then he drops it to the comforter instead. “What are you going to do?”

“I guess what they always do. I mean, what is there to do?” He opens his mouth and I recognize the look on his face, that one where he believes he can architect the right outcome in any situation if he just tries hard enough, and I say, quickly, “No, trust me, they’ve already thought of everything. This isn’t something you can fix.”

He looks panicked in a way I’ve never seen him look. “You aren’t, are you? You were born here?”

“I was born in Austin.”

“So no matter what you’re good, right? You get to stay here?”

This is why illegal is a shitty thing to call people, because it shifts the goalposts on you—suddenly the things about yourself that you want to matter don’t anymore; nothing matters. I imagine trying to defend them to Mr. X. This is why I had to stop reading the comments sections to everything a long time ago, because I couldn’t stop thinking about the real people lurking behind them harboring all that ugliness, sitting beside me in class, waving me on at a stop sign, in line next to me at the store.