Chapter 20
20
Eleanor
“Driving is fucking inane,” I say, gripping the steering wheel so tight the tendons that stretch over my knuckles are visible. We’re in the parking lot of a middle school. The very middle school Carson, Tatum, and their youngest sister, Laney, all attended, according to Carson.
“Don’t tell me you use big words like inane ,” they say. “It’s too sexy for me to handle while my blood pressure is this high.”
“You’re making fun of my vocabulary now? What’s next? My inability to execute a three-point turn?”
“Oh, sweetheart, I don’t think we’re getting to three-point turns today. You swear you got your license honestly? You didn’t pay off the person running the exam?”
“I failed it twice beforehand, but no, on the third time, I passed without incident.” We hop a tiny parking curb. “Sorry. I didn’t see that.”
“You didn’t see the curb that surrounds the only tree in this otherwise wide-open parking lot?”
“Do you want to drive?” I ask, throwing the car into park. When I look at their face, they’re smiling, head cocked to the side, beholding me as if I’m worthy of wonder. “Stop making that face. You make me want to be nicer.”
They fix their face into something serious. “Is this better? Because I love it when you’re feisty. Your ears start to turn purple.”
My hands reach for my ears, which are indeed warm.
“Don’t cover it up,” they continue. “I like seeing my effect on you.”
We are still beside the tree, sideways in front of the curb I hopped. The tree provides the perfect amount of shade, blocking the high-noon warmth from getting in through Carson’s sunroof.
“I don’t think I’m making any driving progress,” I say.
“You’re not,” they tell me, deadpan as ever.
I shove them. “Fuck you.”
“Sounds good to me,” they say. “But I think public indecency is a bigger crime than walking. Though I’m willing to risk it.”
“I’m not fucking you in your middle school parking lot.”
“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that…”
“You’d have one nickel,” I say.
“Exactly.”
We laugh.
“Was it a good school?” I ask, looking out past the tree to see a tall brick building, attempting to paste a young Carson in front of it.
Carson thinks for a while before offering up a very mild, “I guess so.”
“Wow,” I respond. “Don’t hold back or anything.”
This cracks them open, letting me in on the best version of their smile—the shy, slinky grin that slowly lights up their whole face. “It’s where I learned to love art, so I can’t hate that. And no one was ever that mean to me. Everyone was mean to everyone in seventh grade, but I think that’s kind of par for the course.”
“That was eighth grade for me,” I interject. “But go on.”
“High school was harder,” they say. “I knew I liked girls, but I didn’t know why knowing that wasn’t enough to make me feel complete. I thought figuring out my sexuality would, like, unlock this path to inner peace or something. But it didn’t. I got into a lot of trouble.” They start to tap a random beat atop the glove compartment. “While breaking countless hearts, of course.”
“I’ve seen the pictures of you,” I say, thinking again of the framed images that line the staircase in the cottage. “I would have had a crush on you. Add me to the list of the brokenhearted.”
“I’d have totally claimed your attention running cross-country at six thirty in the morning.”
“If you can believe it, I was in Ecology Club in high school,” I say. “So I’d have been out there collecting rainwater samples from the imprint of your running shoe in the mud.”
“It’s all coming together. Eleanor the walking enthusiast, examining the ecosystem.”
“And Carson the track star, running from the trouble they’ve caused.”
“It’s a funny exercise, wondering if we’d have liked each other,” Carson says.
“I already told you I’d have had a crush on you,” I remind them.
“Yeah, but that’s just something you’re saying because you think I’m irresistible now. Ecology Club Eleanor would not have been looking twice at the gangly swamp creature that was teenage me.”
“I think being a member of Ecology Club proves I would be very interested in a swamp creature.”
Studying their profile, I notice a gloss over their eyes. It surprises me to see how close I am to hitting a nerve when all I meant to do was make them laugh. They swallow and lean their head back, moving their gaze from the school to the roof of the car.
“This trouble you used to get into,” I start tentatively, wanting to explore this new, tender side of them the way I’ve explored every other. “What kind of trouble are we talking? Because I was also on the debate team my junior and senior year. I bet my well-considered arguments could’ve gotten you out of some tight spots.”
“I used to steal shit,” Carson tells me.
“Never mind,” I reply, coloring it with a light laugh, still figuring out what level of depth we’re excavating. “Couldn’t help you with that one.”
“No, I wasn’t easy to help in those days.”
“What did you steal?”
“I’d go to the grocery store and stuff my pockets with small things. Candy, gum, makeup. I didn’t even want it for myself. I’d give it to my friends as gifts. It was months before I got caught. The time they busted me, I had two packs of sour candy and a container of hair gel on me.”
“The usual supply,” I interject.
“Exactly. I got taken into the police station, and they made me spend the night in a holding cell. Turns out they’d been tracking my behavior at the store for weeks. They knew exactly how much I’d stolen. That’s where a lot of this ‘Carson is trouble’ mythology began.”
I want to brush a curl out of their eye, overwhelmed with the need to touch them, but I stop myself.
“I’ve talked a lot about it all in therapy,” they continue. “Probably too much, if I’m honest. I kind of feel like I’ve thought holes into all of it at this point, trying to figure out what I really wanted. I’ve pretty much landed on the fact that it felt like everything was out of my control. My parents were unhappy with each other but sticking together anyway. And it was confusing to learn what my dad did. He and I had always been really close. He liked teaching me things on his off days. Suddenly I felt like I didn’t know him at all, and nothing had even changed. I just learned something from his past that I didn’t think fit with the guy I knew in the present. It kind of blew my mind that people could walk around with earth-shattering secrets all the time, and they were still the same people. So I started racking up some secrets of my own, I guess.”
“That makes sense,” I tell them.
“Yeah. Add onto it that my body at the time didn’t feel right for the life everyone told me I was supposed to live inside it, and I didn’t have the understanding then of what I wanted it to be instead. And look, I know I fucked up a lot. I don’t mean to excuse what I did. But I think if I had a kid who started acting out the way I was, I’d have tried a little harder to figure out what was making them do all that instead of scaring them into stopping while ignoring all the reasons why it began. I just wanted someone to see me, I guess.”
A single tear rolls down the slope of their cheek, leaving behind a glistening river. This time I can’t help myself. I do reach out, resting my hand atop theirs and giving it a squeeze.
“If I learned anything from that time, it’s that all the rules we create for ourselves about how life needs to work, none of it is real,” they continue. “And yeah, maybe I could have taken a neater road to figuring that out, but it did help me understand that I didn’t have to play any part the world assigned to me. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to put that feeling into my work. Building, painting, drawing it into existence, how it feels to understand that everything is all made-up, but somehow, being alive is kind of a marvelous thing anyway.”
When I don’t respond right away, they force their usual grin, morphing before my eyes from someone vulnerable into someone careful, putting up the same shields I recognize from my own arsenal of defense.
“Sorry,” they say. “I shouldn’t be laying this heavy shit on you.”
“No apologies necessary.” I squeeze their hand tighter. “I understand more than I can even say. I’m somewhat allergic to the lighter fare myself. You know, child of dead parents and all. I’m sure if someone was around to care about me after they died, they’d have started calling me trouble then too.”
There it is. Another slip.
I’m planning all my rebuffs, ready to make a stunning case for my lack of support, workshopping how to mention the squirrel-psychic thing in a way that’s funnier than it is sad, when Carson leans over the seat.
“ Trouble ,” they murmur in my face.
“Hey now,” I say, playfully shoving them back to their side of the car. “I don’t qualify anymore. I’ve aged out of the bracket.”
“You qualify,” they say. “I’ve been over to the cottage more times in the last three days than I have in the last three years. That’s the work of a true menace to society.”
In the startling quiet that follows, a need possesses me. To show them more than I can put into words. I lean over the seat.
They give me that look, the permissive grin, and I know my instincts are right. With fragile pressure, I press my lips to theirs.
We’ve already kissed. We’ve done a lot more than that. Now the urgency between us holds the weight of our past. I know some of their vulnerabilities, and they know some of mine in return. To kiss them here is to accept them for it.
This kiss stands in for all I don’t know how to say. Be nearer to me , I tell them with my tongue, dancing with theirs as our hands untangle the knots of each other. Tell me all your secrets.
It’s only when I put my hand on the steering wheel to push up, needing to get even closer, and the car lets out a loud, disruptive honk, that we separate.
“Jesus,” I say, startled by the sound.
Carson laughs, falling back into their seat. “Fuck,” they whisper.
I’d meant to spend this day without them. When I’d rented a car this morning, I’d intended to get out of Trove Hills. But here I am, in the parking lot of Carson’s middle school, clutching the steering wheel as we’re parked under a tree, and I don’t know how I could ever be somewhere else.
“We should go somewhere,” I say.
“Where?” Carson asks.
“What about home?”
I don’t mean to say it like that. It’s not my home. But it’s the fastest way to communicate what should be next. We shouldn’t be in public. That’s all I know for sure. And it’s better than sitting here in the middle school parking lot, talking about who we used to be. That’s not getting me anywhere productive.
“Yeah,” Carson says with a smile. “Let’s go home, Trouble.”
···
The guest cottage gets fantastic light during the day. Even during summertime, there is a hazy, sun-drenched filter over everything that makes it feel as though you’ve stepped into your favorite memory. I could do nothing here and somehow, for once, be content with that.
“Were you and your siblings ever in a fight over who got to live here?” I ask as Carson follows me through the front door.
“Not at all.” They plop onto the couch with a practiced familiarity. “No one used the cottage until Tatum moved in.”
“You’re kidding,” I say, taking off my shoes and settling beside them. “Why not? It’s perfect.”
Carson explains to me the origins of this cottage. How it got constructed when the affair came to light, which was years after the affair had actually occurred. I listen with my head drifting toward their shoulder, magnetized by the idea of being able to feel their beating heart as they speak.
By the end, I am nuzzled into them, looking out the very window they tumbled through a few days ago. It offers a perfect view of the main house, a back door leading out to a wooden patio, and a long garden path that connects the two buildings.
“Tatum has to like living here, though,” I insist. “It’s charming.”
“She likes that it doesn’t make this place a family joke anymore,” Carson explains. “Everyone had a different reaction to the affair. Tatum wanted to undo it, I think. And the fact that our mom won’t step foot in here unless she’s forced to made it really hard for Tatum to scrub the affair from the family conscience. If anything, Dad building this cottage made a lot of things worse. I don’t think Tatum has any real love for it beyond the fact that now no one can call it Dad’s Bad Apology Building anymore.”
“If the vibes are that bad, why doesn’t your family move to a new house?” I ask.
“There was a time when they discussed it, but my parents have lived in the main house for almost forty years. They’ve accumulated so much stuff that they don’t want to go through yet, so the hassle of moving everything out isn’t worth it to anyone. But Tatum should absolutely go, yeah. I’ve been telling her that since she moved back after college. Her friends have too. We all want it for her. She just can’t bring herself to do it.”
“I’m always team leave home,” I say. “I moved out when I was eighteen. Practically ran out the door.” There’s a catch in my throat, something beyond me nudging out a deeper truth. “I can’t say I regret it, because no one could have changed my mind then. But losing my parents so young did make me wish I’d spent more time with them before I left.”
I never press these emotional bruises, knowing the tenderness of the touch is not worth exploring. Why speak to the pain in myself that can’t ever be healed? But something about Carson makes me willing to acknowledge it. Being away from the life I know makes it safe enough for me to open up.
“Do you have a favorite memory of them?” Carson asks.
“It’s funny,” I say. “I’ve spent so long missing them that I forget to remember what happened when they were still here.”
“How long has it been?”
“Fourteen years in November,” I tell them. “My mom wasn’t very good at expressing herself, and my dad never had a lot of patience for anyone trying to find themselves in the world.”
“That sure sounds like a recipe for a young Eleanor,” Carson says, stroking my arm.
“Oh yes. It was very important to me that they saw me as an expert at existing,” I say. “I spent a lot of my childhood searching for ways to impress them. That was the fastest way to get my mom to say she was proud of me and to make sure my dad didn’t get frustrated. If I was bad at something, I’d quit before there was any kind of recital or game, so I didn’t have to sit in the car and hear about how I could be better at it.” My filter has been so far removed that it’s only after I’m done speaking that I realize what I’ve said. “That’s not an answer to your question at all. There were a lot of good things. I don’t know what made me tell you that. We went to Disney World every summer. That was fun.”
Carson laughs, not in a pitying way. “Disney World is fun. But so is being bad at things.” They pick up a strand of my hair, running it through their fingers. “If I’m allowed to brag, I’m pretty good at being bad at stuff. If you ever want someone to show you.”
I sit up straighter, leaning back to look them in the eye. “Please tell me one single thing you are bad at. You managed to use the sugar packets at Rita’s to make a Mona Lisa of me.”
“That was easy though,” Carson says. “Who wouldn’t want to draw you?”
My body tenses, unpracticed in accepting this brand of fondness.
“I frequently misjudge the severity of things, for one,” Carson continues. “I think I know what’s serious and what’s for fun, but I’m usually wrong.”
We’ve just shared what we think are our fatal flaws—my inability to fail and their inability to assess something. Our worst flaw might be that neither of us wants to be incorrect about what’s going on between us. Which makes it easy for me to go for the physical. The part that doesn’t have to be explained. We’ve understood it from the very beginning, before Carson even knew my name. It’s the first rule we established in this strange little game we’ve been playing, and it’s the only thing I’m sure I understand.
I can kiss Carson like I planned to on the entire drive over. They can put their hand under my leg and tug me on top of them. We can get lost in each other’s bodies until the sun starts to move across the window, shining golden-hour light through dust-covered panes.
There’s an expiration date to all of this. That’s what I need to keep in mind. The more we speak, the less I’m able to keep track of what this is supposed to be.
So we won’t speak anymore. Not about anything real.
We can hold each other instead.