Chapter 14
14
SUMMER BEFORE SIXTH GRADE
THE QUESTION OF WHETHER OR not Manuel will join us at Cradle Island this year isn’t a question at all. When I ask, Wendy practically rolls her eyes.
She’s greedy for his love, my mother. Eager to absorb him into our family, to erase any hint of his unhappy past. He even appears on our Christmas card this year—and will every year hereafter—a fact she dubs “sheer coincidence.”
“Is it my fault that you bring him everywhere we go?” she asks, whistling as she stuffs envelopes. “We don’t have a single photo without him.”
In the grocery store, I even hear one of her friends ask if we’ve adopted a new son, an “adorable little Mexican.” I whip around when I hear her words, elbow knocking into a pyramid of cantaloupe. The falling melons drown out my mother’s response.
—
THIS SUMMER, WHEN WE PULL up to the boathouse—a perfect landing by Speedy, who had an accessible lift installed on the Silver Heron this spring to help him reach the flybridge; he is not going to lose the childish joy of driving a boat—my siblings mobilize, throwing suitcases over the gunwale and yelling about who’s staying where. Caleb and Clarence argue over beds in Tangled Blue. Taz quietly loads bags into the carts that we wheel down the boardwalk. I pay little attention to them. Instead, I focus on Manuel’s face. On his expression. I watch as he takes it all in.
I’ll never forget this moment. The roundness of his eyes. The parting of his lips. I’m immensely self-conscious, as if we’ve just crossed a barrier in our friendship from which there’s no returning. I look up, take it in myself. And I see, for the first time, that this is not just a vacation home.
It’s an island.
“You know,” Manuel says finally, “in Colombia, my family was considered rich.”
He doesn’t say anything after that. He doesn’t have to.
—
OUR FIRST NIGHT ON THE island, a massive thunderstorm rolls in. It’s a quintessential summertime display of whipping wind and crashing, crackling electricity. The entire family gathers on the porch of my parents’ cabin to watch. We spread blankets and sleeping bags along the cushioned benches, then hunker together beneath them. Under our wool blanket, Manuel grips my hand. His palm is sweaty. I wonder if they don’t have thunderstorms in Colombia.
In the morning, the storm leaves behind its usual destruction. I look over the cracked branches and fallen trees. It gives me an idea.
“Come on,” I say to Manuel, “I want to show you something.”
When I tell him we’re going into the woods, he looks unsure. He peers up at the sky, as if nervous that at any minute it will open up again.
“Trust me,” I say. “This will be worth it.”
All his fear disappears as soon as we enter the forest. The middle of Cradle Island, a jungle even on the driest of days, has come alive. Leftover raindrops drip from pine needles. Damp leaves stick to our shoes as we walk. I hop from rock to rock, careful to avoid thriving clusters of Moss People. Rock cress and wormwood blossom in tight clusters. Bristleleaf and wild rye wave in the breeze. Manuel reaches out and runs his fingers through it all.
I haven’t visited the Fort since before Henry’s death. I had no desire to sit in the middle of the forest alone last year. The idea depressed me. But something tells me the time has come.
I’m right.
Manuel falls in love with the Fort right away. It becomes our headquarters for the summer. Every morning, we shovel Lucky Charms down our throats and clear out of Sunny Sunday as quickly as possible. We nap in the Fort. Play cards in the Fort. Manuel reads. I write. When I finish a piece, Manuel reads it aloud so I can hear how it sounds. I stop him periodically to make notes. Sometimes, if I ask nicely, he translates the story into Spanish, painting an entirely new canvas of words onto the back of the page. I crawl up onto the top of the Fort and—stance wide, face tilted to the sky—perform a dramatic reading of the translation. I don’t know most of the words on the page, but I take my best guess. The higher my confidence, the louder my volume. The louder my volume, the worse my pronunciation. Manuel rolls around the clearing with laughter.
“You’re a regular Don Quixote,” he tells me, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. I have no idea what that means. I grin anyway.
“Where do you two go all day?” Mom asks one morning.
“To the office,” we say in unison.
Karma snorts. “They’re definitely sneaking off to make out in the woods.”
We look at each other and make identical gagging faces. Then we fill two Ziploc bags with Oreos and race out the back door.
—
MY DAYS ON CRADLE WITH Manuel are the closest I come to real contentment. We read dystopian thrillers on lounge chairs while our bodies bake under the sun. We beg Clarence to take us tubing because he drives the fastest. We chug cans of root beer while the adults sip wine. After dinner, Taz appears with kindling and matchsticks and volunteers to fire up the sauna. In half an hour the tiny wooden hut is hot enough to burn itself down. We strip to swimsuits and pile in, all of us, eight half-naked bodies packed into one eight-by-eight room. Pale, perspiring sardines. We lock ourselves inside as long as possible. Toss cup after cup of water onto the blazing-hot rocks. Grit our teeth when it hisses back into the air as clouds of steam—the most delicious form of torture. Then, just when the steam becomes so thick it feels like you’re drowning in a pot of boiling water, someone throws open the door and we all rush into the night and sprint down the dock and dive into the moon-bright lake.
Then we run back to the sauna and do it all over again.
And again.
And again.
By the end of the night, we’re exhausted. When we fall into bed, we pass out in seconds.
—
EVEN WITH MANUEL, THE PERSON who makes me happiest, in the place that makes me happiest, the Worries don’t leave. At every moment, I live half in this world and half in another. One world is physical, the other invisible. I’m perfectly capable of remaining engaged in the physical one—the “real” world, the one with action and dialogue and the ever-present passage of time—while silently running through my standard list of Worries, one leading right into the next, like the endless all-caps ticker that sprints across the bottom of a newscast.
The ticker contextualizes the physical world. Provides the set of rules by which I must live. The Worries might have nothing to do with what’s actually happening at the moment—in fact, most often they don’t; most often they’re leftovers, past wrongdoings or passing thoughts onto which I graft meaning. And although I might look happy on the outside—I might smile with my teeth and laugh with my belly and dance with my feet—at every moment, inside my mind, the ticker runs on.
—
OUR LAST MORNING ON THE island, Manuel and I wake before sunrise. We gather everything we need for the day into one backpack, and as soon as the first glimpse of sunlight peeks over the horizon, we’re out the door. The air is cool and brisk, the first sign of fall.
One year has passed since I first lost my mind.
When we reach the Fort, we drop our bags at the edge of the clearing and remove books, papers, pens. We take only what we need, nothing more. Manuel lifts the tarp and crawls inside. Before following, I pause to admire our little home. For the last four weeks, we’ve spent almost every waking hour inside this place. I miss it already.
Manuel pokes his head out of the tarp. “Coming?”
And there they are. Those eyes. The ones that pull words from my mouth.
One year.
One year of internal chaos. Of false beliefs and self-loathing and intrusive thoughts, though I don’t yet have the words to name them as such.
In the end, I don’t do it on purpose. It isn’t some sweeping act of courage, some terrifying admission toward which I built all summer long. I don’t wake up and think, Today is the day I reveal my biggest secret. I stare into those eyes, those unblinking almonds that pull words from my mouth I never intend to share, and it just happens.
“I have to tell you something,” I say.
He tilts his head. “Yes?”
“I’m…” Suddenly his eyes are too much. I can’t talk to them. I look down at my feet. “I’m…there’s something wrong with me.”
“What do you mean?”
I kneel down. The juniper buds in the soil are tiny, still soft. Too young for thorns.
“I have these…thoughts. Thoughts I don’t think are true, but I also can’t convince myself are not true.”
“I don’t understand. What kind of thoughts?”
“Um. They’re like…like worries.”
Dry grass crunches as Manuel crawls all the way out of the Fort. “Everyone worries, Eliot. That’s nothing to worry about.” He pauses, realizes the contradiction in his words. “I mean, uh…you know what I mean.”
“These aren’t regular worries.” Still I don’t look up. “These are worse. They’re like…it’s like…” I have no idea how to explain them. “Lemme just give you an example.”
I glance up. Manuel nods.
“So, it’s Mile Day in gym class, and we’re all running around those stupid orange cones, and I’m right behind Caroline Whittler. You know her, right? The one who looks like she’s drowning in her own hair?”
Manuel snorts.
“Yeah. Anyway. So we’re going around the cones, and I’m spacing out, like I always do when I run, you know. Thinking about the math test or what to have for lunch or how much time I can spend on Club Penguin after school before Mom notices.”
I’m doing it again—stuffing my confession with as many irrelevant details as I can. Padding the cushion I hope will soften the fall when I finally jump.
“So, yeah. I’m spacing out, thinking about whatever, and then I sort of come back to the present, and when I do, I realize that, the whole time, the whole time I was spacing out, I was staring at Caroline Whittler’s butt.”
I pause. Manuel says nothing.
“And I think to myself, ‘Wow, she has a great butt.’ And then, immediately after, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you’re staring at Caroline Whittler’s butt. You’re a lesbian.’?”
I glance up again. Manuel grins, then covers his mouth when he sees I’m not laughing.
“And I know it’s crazy, ’cause I tell you about my crushes all the time and they’re all boys and whatever, but like…once I thought the thought, I couldn’t unthink it, you know?” Now I’m really off, really talking. Now that the confession has started, I can’t stop. “It’s out of my control. No matter how many times I tell myself I’m not a lesbian, I always go back to that one instance, to the time I stared at Caroline Whittler’s butt. Because that’s evidence, and you can’t just erase evidence, you know?”
“Eliot.”
I stop. I look up at Manuel.
His face is serious now. “You’re not a lesbian.”
I nod.
“You’re not a lesbian. You know that.”
I nod.
“You spent a month analyzing the fourteen words Robbie Siegler said to you on Field Day. You made me draw a Venn diagram.”
I nod a third time.
“And even if you were, who cares? It’s not 1908. There’s nothing wrong with being gay.”
“I know. I know, I know. Obviously I know. That’s not the point.”
“What is the point, then?”
“Maybe this is a bad example. There’s other stuff. Worse stuff. But it’s not really about that. It’s…it’s…it’s these thoughts. They won’t leave me alone. No matter how many times I tell them to. And they feel, like, weirdly separate from me, you know? Like…they don’t sound like me. Or, at least, they didn’t when they first started. Now…Now, I…I can’t really tell the difference.”
The confession is over. I fall silent.
I wait for the rush of relief. The fake, fleeting relief that sticks around for an hour or two whenever I confess a crime to my father. I wait for Manuel to forgive me, the same way Dad did. Here I am. I am giving you this bizarre part of myself, these thoughts that dog me, that won’t leave me alone. Take them. Drain me of them. Wring me of their poison and tell me what to do with it. Purify me. Please.
I hear nothing. I look up. And this time, when I do, I find a familiar sight: Manuel, eyes squinted, lips parted, wrinkle in the middle of his brow. His face of incomprehension, the one he wore for a month after we first met.
I begin to sweat. I’m naked and raw before the eyes of my best friend. I wish I could take it back, all of it. I’ve done something disastrous. Something irreversible. I see that now. On the day we met, I drew a clear line between Worries and Non-Worries. Only the latter could be shared. No matter how heavily they weighed upon me, no matter how much mental space they occupied, the Worries were still confined to the four inches between my left and right eardrums. The inside of my head might not feel safe, but at least the rest of the world did. Why did I let all those words, that whole psychotic monologue, leak out of my mouth as casually as any other collection of noises? Now the thoughts are out there. They’re free. By speaking my fears aloud, I thrust them out into the cool, bright light of day.
I can’t bear to watch his face any longer. I look down again. I want to run away. I bet he does, too. I wonder if it’s more polite to let him go first.
Then my vision blacks. My face smushes into a blindfold of dark fleece. I inhale in surprise. Take in a familiar scent. One that calls me not just to a certain place but to a specific time of day, too. Linen and cedar and the mysterious, distinctive scent of boy. The first thing I smell every day. Manuel in the morning.
“It’s okay, Eliot.” The words sound out of place in his voice. They’re adult words, and we’re still just kids. “You’re going to be okay.”