Chapter 12
12
FIFTH GRADE
THE NEXT TIME CHE AND Juli travel, my new friend arrives on our front step with a small roller suitcase. I throw open the front door with a grin wider than my face. For any self-respecting ten-year-old, to have your best friend move in for two straight weeks—essentially an eternity—is nothing short of a fantasy on par with climbing into an alternate reality via a wardrobe or building a time machine.
His parents are at a two-week-long conference in Argentina. The business of diplomáticos . Something secretive and important and, most likely, uninteresting. We’ve spent enough hours rifling through the papers in Che and Juli’s locked file cabinets—opened with a stolen key—to know.
“Sleepover!” I yell, bouncing about the doorframe.
Manuel rolls his eyes. “Calm down, loser.”
I’ve long since accepted that my best friend doesn’t express emotions the way most human beings do. He buzzes at a low frequency. It’s all there—sadness, joy, excitement, frustration—but you won’t find it on his face. It’s in the air. Seriously. I don’t believe in auras or energies or any of that hippie stuff, but I swear to God, the kid emits something. To sit next to him is to pick up on it. Sometimes I think that’s why I was drawn to him in the first place—his frequency. It’s never fast, never chaotic. When he’s happy, it hums. When he’s angry, it flattens out or disappears altogether. And I’m left alone with my own frequency, the swarm of moths inside my mind—an incessant beating of wings so loud, so terrifying, that at every moment I’m afraid someone will hear.
—
AFTER MY PARENTS GO TO sleep, I slide out of bed and pad silently down the hall. When I reach Taz’s door, I crack it open, slip inside, and dive-bomb the bed, whisper yelling, “Cannonball!”
“Hey!” Manuel wiggles out of the covers. “What are you doing?”
“Follow me.”
We unhook the latch from the bedroom window and shimmy out onto the roof. The shingles rattle as we flip onto our backs. We stay up late, talking into the dark, counting the number of satellites drifting across the sky. I walk him through the complex political dynamics of the American middle school and he teaches me curse words specific to Colombia. The rough asphalt leaves imprints on the backs of our legs. We do this every night. Amazingly, my parents never figure it out. Not when we laugh so loudly the whole block can hear. Not when we start nodding off over our eggs in the morning. Not even when we break a cluster of shingles off the roof. “Damn pigeons,” says Speedy, rolling about the garden and glaring at the treetops.
Two weeks is a long time. You might think we’d start to hate each other. And, listen—it’s not like we don’t fight. We do. Some nights our giggles devolve into angry whispers, which end with both parties flipped onto their sides, faces pointed toward opposite ends of the roof. But the next morning I tumble into his bedroom and wake him by blowing a raspberry into his ear, and the friendship moves on. We fight like siblings: cruelly, carelessly, operating under the principle that the person on the other end of your anger will have to forgive you.
I start to understand Clarence and Caleb a little better.
Even at the deepest point of a fight—lying plank-straight on my side, steaming with rage at whatever great wrong my best friend committed against me—I don’t kick him off the roof. And if he tries to crawl back into the window, I say, “Don’t gooooo , Valde. There are scary monsters in the woods!”
And he rolls his eyes. “Eliot Beck, the Permanent Baby.”
If only he knew how accurate that is. How my heart seizes at the thought of walking back to my empty bedroom. How silence pulls thoughts from my mind that I work hard, so hard, to keep down. To shove beneath the floorboard of my mind. How a warm, familiar body is the only thing that keeps them there.
We watch the stars together and drive to school together and eat lunch together and come home together and suffer through Wendy’s cooking together. “What is this?” he asks on his first night at our house, in reference to the hamburger casserole on the buffet.
“That,” I say, “is the You-nited States of America.”
At night we climb out onto the roof with a grainy map of constellations we printed earlier that day in the library. We struggle to connect the hazy pixels on the page to the twinkling lights in space. Quickly we lose steam. Stare up at the bright Midwestern sky. My head nods to the side, drifting onto his shoulder. By the time I find sleep, Worry has become nothing but a distant memory.
“This is bullshit,” says Karma one morning. Manuel is upstairs, in the shower. From the kitchen, I can hear the pipes running. “Eliot’s little boyfriend getting to sleep over for weeks on end? None of us ever got to do that.”
“Catherine.” Mom doesn’t even look up from her crossword. “Watch your language.”
“No. This is just another instance of Eliot getting away with whatever the hell she wants, all because she’s the youngest. You never let Jack sleep over, and I don’t even want to fuck dudes.”
Mom flinches. My sister only recently came out, and although my mother’s words profess that Love is Love, that she supports Karma no matter what, her face sometimes says otherwise.
While I would never say so, Karma is right: Mom does treat Manuel differently. Yes, she’s always been an open-door mother, but never like this. Eventually, there will be birthdays and road trips, spring breaks and winter vacations, long summers in Canada. I will ask, and Mom will never say no. In fact, she’ll invite him herself, throwing open her door and her heart to a boy she barely knows. Almost as if he’s her best friend, not mine. Almost as if she needs him as badly as I do.
—
ON THE LAST NIGHT OF our two-week-long sleepover, Manuel and I change into pajamas in our separate rooms—we wear almost the same thing, boxers and a T-shirt—and, as usual, crawl out onto the roof. We’re quiet for a moment. Then, I ask, “Are you excited to see your parents?”
Silence.
“No?”
Grunt.
“Haven’t you missed them at all?”
He turns away. “Just drop it, okay?”
—
THE FIRST TIME I TELL Manuel I love him, it’s an accident.
It’s the next morning. We’re waiting outside for him to get picked up by his parents’ driver. After a few minutes, a shiny black car with tinted windows that look like they could take multiple rounds of bullets before breaking turns the corner and starts up our block. As soon as I spot its headlights, I tackle Manuel, pulling him into a bone-crunching hug. I don’t let go until I hear the tires pull into the driveway.
“Bye!” I say as I release him. “Love you!”
It’s an accident. A reflex. An instinct built by ten years of tacking those two words onto the end of every phone call with my parents, every holiday, every goodbye after a long summer on Cradle Island. Love slips out just as naturally as adding how are you to the end of hello .
The surprise on Manuel’s face is obvious. His eyebrows climb higher than I’ve ever seen them go before.
“Oh. Uh.” I realize what I’ve done almost immediately. I keep my face completely neutral, watching him without expectation or acknowledgment, as if love is something we toss around on a daily basis. Don’t panic , I think loudly, hoping the words will reach him. Please don’t panic.
“I…love you…too!” He turns and runs down the stairs. The car door opens and shuts. I can’t be sure, but from behind the windshield, I think I see a smile.
—
AT THE END OF THOSE two weeks together, I feel the best I’ve felt in months. The Worries? Gone. Silent.
That’s it , I think as I watch the black car drive away. That’s my cure. He’s my cure.
I close my eyes. I imagine a grey shower plug at the base of my skull, the same kind I have in my bathtub. I imagine reaching around my head and pulling the plug. A gaping hole opens at the bottom of my skull. I watch as all the Worries—the noise and pollution and terror that have clogged my brain for the last several months—drain out. All of them. Every last drop. They drain away. They drain away and my head is empty, and I’ve never been so happy to be empty-headed in my life.
I exhale.
But then again…
The exhale stops.
But then again, there was that first night, when Manuel asked you about Henry.
No. Shut up. You’re supposed to be gone.
Manuel saw Henry’s empty bedroom and all the pictures and flowers. He asked you about Henry, and you lied.
I didn’t lie. I told him what happened. Go away.
Right. You told Manuel your brother was hit by a car. But you left out a few key details, didn’t you?
Did I?
You left out what happened after the funeral. You left out how easy it’s been for you, how you’ve barely cried, how for a long time you thought you weren’t even sad. You left out all the parts that make you look bad. And if you only tell the parts of the story that make you look good, isn’t that just as bad as lying?
Is it?
Doesn’t Ms.Collins say that “lies of omission” are just as bad as regular lies?
I guess so.
Leaving things out is just another kind of lie. You have to tell Manuel. If you don’t, that makes you a liar.
But if I tell him, he’ll think I’m a bad person. He’ll think I’m crazy. He won’t want to be my friend anymore.
But if you don’t tell him, you’ll feel guilty about lying.
I turn around and open the front door. I run through the hallway, up the stairs, into my bedroom. Slam the door.
Guilt stays with you. Forever. Next time you see your best friend, you’ll know you lied. You’ll carry that guilt everywhere you go. Homeroom. Sleepovers. Lunch tables. Laps around the field. If you stay friends forever, you’ll still carry that guilt with you. You’ll be ninety years old and laughing with your best friend at the nursing home and trying to be happy, but at the back of your mind, you’ll always remember that you lied to him, that you’re a liar, that you don’t deserve his friendship.
Shut up, I say to the now familiar voice in my head, the one that isn’t me but is inside me and so must be me—who else could it be?
How are you supposed to live with yourself now, hmm? How?
That’s when I understand, I think. Lying on the floor of my bedroom, hands pressed to my ears. That’s when I get it. This voice, these thoughts. These Worries. They aren’t temporary. This is my new reality.