Just One Day(54)

“So, how do you two know each other?” Mom asks after I nervously introduce them.
I freeze, in a panic.
“We’re biology lab partners,” Dee says, not missing a beat. “We’re raising the Drosophila together.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him pronounce it correctly. He picks up the tube. “Breeding all kinds of genetic abnormalities here.”
My dad laughs. “They had us do the same experiment when I went here too.” He looks at Dee. “Are you pre-med also?”
Dee’s eyebrows flicker up, the slightest ripple of surprise. “I’m still undeclared.”
“Well, there’s no rush,” Mom says. Which almost makes me laugh out loud.
Dad turns to puts the tube back next to a cylinder of pottery I forgot to hide away. “What’s this?”
“Oh, I made that,” Dee says, picking up the piece. And then he starts explaining how he’s taking a pottery class, and this year’s class is experimenting with different kinds of glazes and firing methods, and for these pieces, they fired everything in an earthen kiln fueled by cow patties.
“Cow patties?” Mom asks. “As in . . . feces?”
Dee nods. “Yes, we went to local farms and asked if we could collect their cow manure. They actually don’t smell that bad. They’re grass-fed cows.”
And it hits me then that Dee is using another voice, but this time, the person he’s playing is me. I had told him all about the cow patties, the earthy smell, collecting them from the farms . . . though when I’d done it, he’d laughed his head off at the thought of all us rich kids at our forty-thousand-dollar-a-year school paying for a class in which we went to farms and picked up after cows. I’ve told Dee more about myself than I guess I realized. And he listened. He paid attention, absorbed a bit of me. And now he’s saving my ass with it.
“Cow feces. How fascinating,” my mother tells him.
_ _ _
The next day, my parents leave, and on Wednesday, our Shakespeare class starts on Twelfth Night. Dee has checked out two different versions from the media center for us to watch. He feels that as penance for not doing our homework, we should at least watch several. He hands me the stage version as I fire up my laptop.
“Thank you for getting these,” I say. “I would have done it.”
“I was at the media center anyway.”
“Well, thank you. Also, thank you for how completely awesome you were with my parents.” I pause for a second, more than a little embarrassed. “How’d you know they were coming?”
“My girlfriend Kali. She tell me. She tell me everything, because we be besties.” He narrows his eyes. “See? Wasn’t no need to hide Miss Dee from the folks. I clean up real nice.”
“Oh, right. I’m sorry about that.”
Dee stares at me, waiting for more.
“Really. It’s just my parents. There’s a lot . . . well, it’s complicated.”
“Ain’t so complicated. I gets it just fine. Okay to slum with Dee but not to bring out the good silver.”
“No! You’ve got it wrong!” I exclaim. “I’m not slumming. I really like you.”
He crosses his arms and stares at me. “How was your field trip?” he asks acidly.
I want to explain, I do. But how? How do I do that without giving myself away? Because I’m trying. I’m trying to be a new person here, a different person, a tabula rasa. But if I explain about my parents, about Melanie, about Willem, if I show who I really am, then aren’t I just stuck back where I started?
“I’m sorry I lied. But I swear, it’s not about you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you did.”
“Ain’t no thang.”
“No, I really mean it. You were great. My parents loved you. And you were so smooth, about everything. They didn’t suspect a thing.”
He whips the lip gloss out of his pocket and, with painstaking precision, applies it first to his top lip, then his bottom. Then he smacks them together, noisily like some kind of rebuke. “What’s to suspect? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nobody. I just be the help.”
I want to make it right. For him to know that I care about him. That I’m not ashamed of him. That he is safe with me. “You know,” I begin, “you don’t have to do that with me. The voices. You can just be yourself.”
I mean it as a compliment, so he’ll know that I like him as is. But he doesn’t take it that way. He purses his lips and shakes his head. “This is myself, baby. All of my selves. I own each and every one of them. I know who I’m pretending to be and who I am.” The look he gives me is withering. “Do you?”
I purposely tried to keep all of that from him, but Dee—smart, sharp Dee—he got it. All of it. He knows what a big fat fake I am. I’m so ashamed I don’t even know what to say. After a while, he slips Twelfth Night into my computer. We watch the entire thing in silence, no voices, no commentary, no laughing, just four eyeballs staring at a screen. And that’s how I know I’ve blown it with Dee.
I’m so miserable about this that I forget to be upset about Willem.

Twenty-two
MARCH
College
The winter drags on, no matter what the groundhog says. Dee stops coming over in the afternoons, ostensibly because we’re not reading Twelfth Night aloud, but I know that’s not really it. The cookies from my grandmother pile up. I get a bad cold, which I can’t seem to shake, though it does have the side benefit of getting me out of reading any of Twelfth Night in front of the class. Professor Glenny, who is stuffy himself, gives me a packet of something called Lemsips and tells me to get in shape so I can pull a double shift as Rosalind in As You Like It, one of his favorite plays.