Chapter 10
10
FIFTH GRADE
I MIGHT HAVE A NEW best friend. Mom might be out of her bedroom. But the Worries don’t leave. Not by a long shot.
I need evidence that I’m not actually a bad person. During class or at the dinner table or in moments of quiet, I root through my past. Look for lies and crimes and rules broken. Where one dead body is buried, there’s sure to be more.
As soon as I start digging, I find them everywhere. Everywhere. When I cheated off Hailey Richman’s spelling test in second grade. When I stole a Twix bar from the grocery checkout aisle. When I skipped soccer practice to eat Snickers bars in the rec center lobby until my stomach hurt. They’re all there, waiting to be found.
It’s hard to believe, actually. Hard to believe I spent ten years beneath the weight of these crimes and felt no guilt. None at all. What’s wrong with me? How did I live with myself? How did I wake every day and roll out of bed and brush my teeth and smile at myself in the mirror and think I wasn’t a monster?
In the end, it’s too much. I need relief. I need someone to absolve me of my guilt. So I do the only thing I can think to do: I confess.
“Dad,” I say during my first confession. We’re out on Lake Michigan in the boat we keep in Chicago. He’s teaching me to drive. But since I’m only ten, it’s mostly an excuse for him to buzz around in big circles for no reason. “I did something bad.”
“What?” he yells. The boat is a Boston Whaler. Its engines are thunderous, and it has no roof.
“I DID SOMETHING BAD.”
He eases back the throttle. The boat slows and its wake builds, thickening into long hills that lift the water we leave behind. When we come to a stop, the waves overtake us. The boat rolls about in the chop.
Speedy lifts me from his lap and places me on the spotter’s bench. He looks me squarely in the face. His eyes are withdrawn, as if expecting pain. “What are you talking about, Eliot?”
I swallow. Try not to look away. “Two years ago…um…” Admitting to past wrongdoing is humiliating, but for some reason, admitting to long -past wrongdoing, the likes of which you already got away with, is worse. “Two years ago, you dropped me off at soccer practice.”
He blinks. “Yes…which time? I did that three times a week.”
“I don’t remember. Just…one time. One time, you dropped me off at soccer practice, and then you picked me up afterward.”
“Okay…”
“And I acted like it was just any other day, like I’d gone out to the field and practiced and come back and met you in the parking lot. And then we went home and had dinner and I never said anything—to you or to Mom. When you asked me how practice was, I said good, or something. But that wasn’t the truth.” I’m speaking too much. Babbling, really. But they’re comforting, the extra words. Like a cushion for the coming fall. I stuff my sentences with as many as I can—a technique I’ll use thousands of times in the future. “The truth is that I never went to practice at all. I skipped. You know the lounge in the rec center, the one with the TV and the couches and the vending machines? Well, I sat in that lounge, and I bought myself a bunch of Snickers bars, and I ate Snickers bars and watched Johnny Bravo for two hours. Then I went out to the parking lot and got in your car and pretended I went to practice.”
I catch my breath. Dad stares at me, his mouth slightly agape.
I’ve never gotten in serious trouble with my parents. There were little things, of course. White lies and childish mistakes. But nothing close to the drop-everything-and-scream fights I’d witnessed between them and my other siblings. I saw it when Karma came home three hours past curfew. I saw it when Clarence drank too much at Thanksgiving and called Mom an ignorant child . Even Taz—perfect Taz—I saw it when he threw a baseball into the family portrait that hangs over the fireplace, sending it to the floor in a great spray of glass and metal. I saw all of it, and let me tell you—an angry Speedy is a terrifying Speedy. And I have officially thrown myself before the fire.
I look down. I wait. The flames, when they come, will be painful. I can only pray their heat will be strong enough to burn my guilt away.
Then, from the driver’s seat, my father starts to laugh.
—
SPEEDY BECOMES MY JUDGE AND jury. In the course of just a few weeks, I confess no less than twenty or thirty crimes to him. Each time, he ruffles my hair awkwardly and tells me not to worry. “You’re a good kid, Eliot. A good kid.”
A good kid? I want to scream. Haven’t you been listening?
—
AS HARD AS IT IS to believe, although I’ve gone to pieces on the inside, on the outside, life continues as normal. I eat eggs in the breakfast nook. I watch Hannah Montana on the Big Blue Couch. I puzzle out the nuances of algebra with Manuel, who has turned out to be almost embarrassingly brilliant. Every day, I crane my neck to catch a glimpse of his worksheets and find he’s five or six problems ahead of me.
“ Oye ,” I whisper. “How the hell do you do that?”
—
ONCE I EXHAUST THE LIST of past lies to apologize for, you’d think the Worries would go away. But they don’t. They just change shape.
It’s Mile Day in gym class, a weekly event in which the entire fifth grade class is forced to run four times around cones spaced eight hundred meters in circumference. I’m behind Caroline Whittler, a girl I’ve known since kindergarten who once told me that a blow job is when a boy sticks his penis into an air duct. But I’m not thinking about that story as I follow her around the cones. I’m just spacing out, staring at her back. Staring at her butt. It’s a nice butt, I think. All bouncy and round.
Then I stop.
Not running—I stop my train of thought.
Oh my God , I realize. You just admired Caroline Whittler’s butt. Are you a lesbian?
No, I tell myself. I don’t think so…I mean—no. Of course not.
But are you sure?
No. Look. I’ll prove it. I’ll just check a few parts of my body to make sure I don’t feel any attraction to her. I’ll check my gut…feels a little tight, like it does when I have a crush, but it’s not the same kind of tight. It’s not all deep and fuzzy. Now I’ll check down there , the naughty place, the one that truly dictates to whom you are attracted, and surely I’ll find nothing, only emptiness, only calm…
But then…
Oh God.
What was that?
Was that a…pulse? An unbidden clench of the muscles, like the kind that happens inside me when I rub my pelvis against a pillow in just the right way for just the right amount of time?
Yes. Yes, it was. That was a pulse.
But is it the same kind of pulse, or is it something different? Is it… Shit. There’s another one.
No. Eliot. Stop. Stop thinking about that region.
But I can’t, because there’s another. And another. Why aren’t they stopping?
That’s it , my mind whispers. That pulse? That’s arousal. That’s all the proof you need.
But I’m not gay.
Are you sure about that?
Well…I’ve only ever had crushes on boys.
But how can you argue with your body?
Well…
Listen to that pulse. It’s telling you something.
It’s too late. I know it’s too late. The possibility of me being a lesbian has entered my mind, and once that happens, it’s over. I’ll never be able to unthink it. It’s just like remembering a past lie; I’ll return to this moment, this pulse, over and over. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never felt even remotely attracted to a woman before. It doesn’t matter that being gay is fine, that my sister is gay, that she would be thrilled if I came out, too. In truth, I have no problem with the idea of being gay. What bothers me—what I come back to over and over and over again—is that I know I’m not gay. I know that, one day, I want to marry a man. But that pulse—that one, insignificant yet somehow more significant than anything else in the world, pulse—it has planted a seed of doubt in my mind. And that seed will grow. It will grow lips and teeth and a jawline. It will argue with me. It will send me in circles. Awful, torturous circles. I will never know the truth. I will never know my own sexuality. What matters is that pulse. I can tell myself I’m straight, but my body says otherwise.
—
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, I ARGUE with myself over whether or not I’m a lesbian. Every time I see an attractive girl, I check for that pulse, for that sign of arousal. And every time, I find it.
—
AT THIS POINT, THE WORDS mental illness do not exist in my vocabulary. Illness is there, certainly, but only in the context of strep throat or the flu or the horrifying wrinkled paper bag of a woman they wheeled into the school auditorium to talk to our health class about cancer. To me, thoughts can’t be an illness. Illness implies that the change within you is not your fault. That it’s foreign. Invasive. That an army of cells broke in and started messing with your insides. That—and this is key, this is the most important part of all—with the right drugs, it will go away.
But this isn’t an illness. This can’t be cured with a few hugs and a capful of pink goo. This is me. Every thought, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disturbing—I create it. It comes from me. It’s made of me. Your thoughts are the mental manifestation of what you look like inside. Rotten thoughts? Rotten insides.
—
AT THIS POINT, I STOP confessing to Speedy. How can I? Dad, is it okay that I might be a lesbian, even though I don’t want to be, even though I don’t think I am, really, but still I might be because I felt this thing downstairs, and… No. Not happening. And the relief a confession brings is temporary, anyway. There will always be something new. I see that now. Better to just write it down in my journal. To confess to the nonjudgmental silence of an empty page.
Dad watches me from a distance for a long time, waiting to see whether I’ll approach him with a new confession. When I don’t, I can’t tell if he’s disappointed or relieved.
—
I MEET MANUEL’S PARENTS FOR the first time early one Sunday evening, a few weeks into our friendship. They aren’t home often, but that night is an exception.
Cena at the Valdecasases’ is nothing like dinner at the Becks’. Rather than laying everything out in a buffet and letting us serve ourselves, Manuel’s nanny, Valentina, arranges a feast right in the center of the table— bu?uelos and arepas and plantains and pitchers filled with fresh-squeezed juice, beautiful tangles of color I’ve never seen before—and then we sit down together, all of us, me and Manuel and Valentina and Se?or and Se?ora, but “Oh, no, Eliot, por favor , call me Che, and me Juli, sí sí, por favor , we insist.” Then we fold our hands and our heads, and Che says a prayer in Spanish, and even though I can’t understand his words, I understand that this, too, is different than the hollow demonstrations of Christianity my siblings and I giggle through after we’ve already finished eating. This is what faith sounds like. Real faith. Then the prayer is over, and the Valdecasas family returns to the realm of the living and passes me the first dish.
And the food—well. There’s no way to describe eating homemade Colombian food for the very first time. Especially after a decade of Wendy Beck’s home cooking. How do you describe the first time you get drunk? The first time you fall in love? And I am in love. I’m in love with the newness of it all. I’ve never eaten a tostada or drank coffee after dinner or called adults by their first name. It’s all so new, so wonderful.
So wonderful, in fact, that it quiets the endless spiral, the ever- present flap of moths’ wings wreaking havoc inside my mind. Just for a moment, but I’ll take every moment I can get.
Che and Juli dominate the conversation. They’re best friends, a fact that becomes clear almost instantly. This, too, is new to me. I’m a child with parents who rarely display affection, who tell their children they love them but never seem to tell each other. I never found that fact strange. Not until I met Che and Juli.
Conversation runs at a dead sprint. Che and Juli tell all the stories, and they tell them together. Complete each other’s sentences rather than interrupt them. Never run out of things to say. They speak mostly in Spanish. I don’t ask them to switch. I don’t want to. The words—they’re mesmerizing. All long r ’s and short d ’s. Ten thousand b ’s in the span of twenty seconds. S ’s that disappear. Rapid-fire syllables that tumble from their mouths like rolling pebbles. The stories are intended for the whole table, but the couple seems to speak only to each other.
Manuel whispers translations into my ear from the side, but I tell him not to worry, I can keep up. A blatant lie—which he knows. I don’t care. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, even if I understand almost none of it. I let the rocks roll past, all of them, clicking and clacking and creating a soundtrack of countless stories whose plots I can only imagine. I listen to it, all of it, and I think, This is a language.
This is the moment I fall in love with words.
I look over at Manuel, hoping to share my joy with someone else. He isn’t looking at me. He’s watching his parents. And while he smiles at all the right moments and nods along with details he remembers, there’s something else behind his eyes. Something distant, like a friend excluded or the smallest boy on the baseball field. Standing before the chain-link fence, fists clenched. Waiting. Knowing he will always be chosen last.
—
WHEN MOM ASKS ME ABOUT dinner at the Valdecasas house, I don’t say, It was good , and go to my room as I might have done in the past. I can’t. Not anymore.
She’s been better lately, my mom. Gets in bed at night and out in the morning, rather than staying all day. But if there’s one thing the last few months have taught me, it’s that nothing is permanent. Nothing. Not moods or legs or minds or lives. And I want to do whatever I can to keep Mom’s mood on the right side of her bedroom door. To keep her from disappearing again.
I describe the entire evening. I talk about the food and the house and the Spanish and the café con leche we drank after the meal. I talk about Che and Juli, their mysterious and fascinating careers in diplomacy. I talk about Valentina. I talk and talk, just the way I did to Manuel that first month of school. I figure it will make her happy, all these details, this evidence that her daughter does, in fact, have a real friend.
Instead of reacting with excitement, Mom is horrified.
I’ve just explained the way Valentina hides candy throughout the pockets of Manuel’s backpack on the days his parents are away. Mom puts down the wet rag in her hand. She says, very slowly, “You mean to tell me that this boy is being raised by a housekeeper?”
“No, no,” I say. “Not a housekeeper. She’s more like a second mom. And it’s only for, like, half of each month. Just while Che and Juli are in Colombia.”
Mom stares at me. Then she turns around and walks across the kitchen to the cordless phone, muttering something along the lines of “…and an only child, no less.” She picks up the phone and calls the Valdecasases and thanks them for hosting me and asks to speak to Valentina.
I start to sweat. I have no idea what she’s going to say.
“Valentina?” she asks. “Yes, hi, this is Eliot’s mom…Nice to meet you, too. Listen, next time Julie and Jay”—I cringe at her pronunciation—“go out of town, I’d love to host Manuel for dinner. Return the favor, you know?…Absolutely. One night, two nights, every night until they’re back…No, no, it would be no trouble at all. Whatever Manuel prefers. And while we’re at it, he’d be welcome to sleep over. Of course.”
She hangs up. “That’s all sorted, then.”
Then she ruffles my hair and walks away.
I stare after her. What just happened? Family dinner? Sleepovers? On school nights? It’s unprecedented. Wendy has always been an open-door mother—the kind who volunteers to host every swim banquet and cast party and graduation brunch from September to June—but she draws a hard line when it comes to weeknight dinner. “This is our time,” she always says. “Our time together as a family.” But not anymore, I guess. Something changed her mind. Something about Manuel.