Chapter 20
20
FRESHMAN YEAR
THE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING, KARMA marries her girlfriend of eight years, Shelly, on the roof of their condo in Lincoln Park. Almost a hundred people show up for the ceremony, standing room only, friends and cousins and teachers packed together between four precariously low railings. Caleb officiates. Every single one of my siblings is a bridesmaid, men included. Manny sits up front with my parents, right next to the aisle. He pelts grains of rice at my face when I walk past.
After Shelly and Karma kiss—to thunderous applause and an unseasonal snowfall of rice—the reception begins. A metal staircase connects the rooftop and their top-floor condo. The party spreads itself between the two levels, with the roof acting as the dance floor and the inside as the lounge. Guests flow freely between the two. Manuel and I spend the whole night on the roof. We dance beneath dangling lights until our feet hurt, stopping only to steal sips of champagne from other guests’ abandoned flutes. At midnight, the new couple smashes cupcakes into each other’s faces.
Manuel and I don’t keep track of how much we steal from the other guests’ glasses, and eventually, the sips add up. By two a.m., we’re tipsy. I find, to my utter joy and fascination, that the more I drink, the less I worry. When I find one of the female guests attractive or remember some lie I told the month before, it’s a quiet kind of reminder. Not as relentless as before.
By the time the party ends, Manuel and I are wheeling about the roof like unleashed puppies. The guests clear out. Soon, only the core family remains. We stumble down the metal steps and into the condo to inhale what’s left of the buffet. Everyone fills plates and collapses onto the couches that were pushed up against the wall. Manuel and I grab three pieces of pizza each. I glance around at my family. They seem to be falling into a pit made of melted cheese and seat cushions. To Manny, I say, “Let’s go back outside.”
We carry our pizza back up. The roof, now littered with cups, napkins, and a light frost of rice hulls, is otherwise empty. We drain the last few abandoned champagne flutes, then climb up onto the wide brick-lined perimeter. Our legs dangle over the other side. The street twelve stories below contains nothing more than a few midnight drivers.
I take a bite of pizza. “I’m drunk,” I announce.
“I’m also drunk,” says Manuel.
We giggle.
We’re freshmen. The beginning of the end. But I can’t know that, of course. The night doesn’t feel like the beginning or end of anything. It’s just my best friend and me on the roof of a building filled with my entire family, the way it’s always been. There’s no future, no past. No graduation. No college. Just starlight and cold mozzarella. My bare feet—shoes came off immediately following the ceremony—bounce off the building’s brick exterior.
“How’s Leo on this good evening?”
“Beats me.” I throw a pinch of crust off the roof.
“You aren’t texting?”
“I mean”—I pick up a new slice of pizza—“he’s texting me a bit. But it’s my sister’s wedding. I’m trying to be present, you know?”
“Makes sense to me.”
I eye him over the cheese. “You don’t like him.”
“When did I say that?”
“You didn’t. But I can tell anyway.”
Manuel sighs, rubbing a hand through his short dark curls. “It’s not that I don’t like him, Beck. It’s just…”
“Just what?” I prompt.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Shakes his head. “Never mind.”
“Nuh-uh.” I wave my pizza slice at him. “No way. You don’t get to do that.”
“I just…” He sighs again, eyes on the buildings across the street. Then, all at once, he turns and looks directly at me. His face is serious, almost grave. “Are you happy with him?”
“What?” I ask. “Of course I am.”
“Your honest answer,” he says. “No stock bullshit.”
“That is my honest answer.”
“Is it, though?” He leans closer. “Is it?”
I shake my head, taken aback. “Where is this coming from, Manuel?”
“I just…Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but I just get this…bad feeling whenever the two of you are together.”
I bunch my eyebrows. “A bad feeling?”
“Yes. It’s…it’s something in my chest. This…tightness. Like the way I feel whenever you do something foolish and dangerous. When you jump off a cliff into Lake Huron or climb out onto the roof at your house. It’s like…like fear, almost.”
“Fear,” I repeat.
He shakes his head, frustrated. “Not quite that. But similar.”
“So, you’re…afraid when I’m with Leo? But of what?”
Manuel blinks at me once, long and slow. Then, he turns away. Looks back at the buildings. “Just forget it.”
“Manuel—”
“Drop it, okay? I don’t even know why I said anything in the first place.”
I look down at my slice. Go quiet. I hate moments like this. When Manuel is angry, he doesn’t shout. I wish he would. I always prefer his words to his silence, even when those words carry the weight of fury.
For several minutes, I stay silent, too. Then: “Do you think,” I say, peeling off a pepperoni with two fingers, “that in life, you need true love to be happy?”
Manuel looks back at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…do you need romantic love?” I place the pepperoni inside my mouth. Salty pork tingles atop my tongue. “Or do you think you just need a Person?”
“A person? Like…a body?”
“No, no. A Person. A go-to. For example: You, Manuel, are my Person. For better or for worse. If I need advice, I go to you. If I’m sad, I call you and cry like a little baby. I tell you everything. You know all my secrets.”
His lips twitch. “Yeah. That’s definitely for worse.”
I elbow his arm, but not forcefully enough to tip him off-balance. “You know what I mean. You’re my Person. I could spend a thousand hours with you and never get bored. And I flatter myself to think I’m the same, that I’m your Person, too.”
“Eh.” Manuel tosses a crust off the building. It lands on the hood of Clarence’s car. “You’re a contender. But Wendy might be my Person, too. Depends on the day.”
I elbow him again. A bit harder this time. Too hard. He grabs the stone ledge to keep balance. “Jesus, Eliot!” He scoots away from me. “Be careful.”
“Sorry.” I look down. “I didn’t mean to push that hard.”
He grunts, then looks away, far away.
I did it again.
In these moments, I become suddenly, painfully aware of the gap between us. The mental one, not physical. I recognize the fact that I don’t know what he’ll do next. That it could be anything. Anything.
We often make the mistake of believing humans are predictable. That they live by patterns. Especially if it’s someone you trust. But when Manuel stops speaking, I’m reminded that I don’t know his brain, not really, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me to lose the only bridge I have to his mind. To feel deprived of his words, the ones he chooses so carefully—the ones that float to my ears like small vivid rings of smoke.
—
EVERY THANKSGIVING MORNING, THE FAMILY descends upon our home. Taz from his job in Connecticut, Karma from the construction site where her first bakery will go up, Clarence and Caleb from Real Middle-Aged Adult Life, unless they’re spending the holiday with their own mother. Our doors and hallways, normally deserted, fill to their usual state of chaos. I love that chaos. I lie in bed and listen to the sound of it, the laughter and slamming doors and socks on the spiral staircase.
My room sits right at the top of those stairs. All my life, I’ve listened to my family go up and down, around and around. Each carries their body with a unique rhythm—Caleb with purpose, Clarence two at a time, Taz near silent, Karma with such force you’d think the stairs had wronged her. I know them all.
Taz is working at Blue Sky Studios. When he comes home, he brings a suitcase full of cords and tablets and clunky laptops that whir when you plug them in. He sets up an editing studio in one of Dad’s old offices and spends most afternoons there, buried in Photoshop.
Occasionally, I poke my head in the door and watch him work. I see pixelated planets. Talking sheep. Pirates and robots. I watch them dance or run or just hold perfectly still as my brother edges them to perfection with a stylus.
One morning he catches me spying. I start to duck out the door, but he smiles and says, “Want to watch?”
I stand over his shoulder. He talks as he works, long sentences filled with words I only sort of understand, like skins and masks and layers and vectors and integration . As he speaks, I peek at his face. I’m struck for the first time by how old he looks; he’s only been working for two years now, but already his face is stubbled and sun wiped, as if the winds of Connecticut blow stronger than they do here. He doesn’t look like my brother anymore; he looks like a handsome man.
Ew. You think your brother is handsome?
Yes, I say back to the Worries. You’re allowed to find your brother handsome, right?
You can find him handsome, sure. But you can’t be attracted to him. Are you attracted to him?
No. Yuck. That’s impossible.
Is it, though?
Why don’t you check down there? Just to be sure. Just to make sure there’s no reaction.
Okay, fine. But you’re wasting your time. There’s no way I…
Oh.
There it is. There it is again. That pulse. That sign of arousal, right in the groin.
No, no, no, no, no…
Blind panic rises in my chest. I’m still there, still standing beside Taz, but I no longer hear a word he’s saying. All I can think about is that pulse, that throb.
I feel an immediate sense of loss. Of grief for every moment that led up to this one. Fifteen years spent free from the knowledge that I was attracted to my brother. Sixteen years. I watch that old life slip away. Oh, how lucky she was, Eliot of Thirty Seconds Ago. How good she had it. How simple her life. And she didn’t even know.
—
I LOVE YOU, LEO TEXTS me while we’re in the middle of dinner.
“Oh,” I say out loud.
“What?” asks Manuel, who is with us for Thanksgiving as always.
Karma glances down the table.
I hide my phone.
“What is it?” Manuel leans over to look at my screen. “Oh. Yikes.”
The tiny screen glows in my hands. I try to type, but my thumbs won’t move.
“Well, do you?” he asks.
My fingers hover over the keyboard—planes above water, searching for a life raft.
—
I WANT TO LOVE LEO. Really, I do. I doodle his name at the top of my biology notes. Write love notes in return. Let no sentiment go unmirrored. I wonder why, as my pencil sprints over lined paper, as I echo back all the things Leo says, none of the words sound like they were written by me.
I even attempt to fantasize about him before bed. Halfway into the fantasy, unfortunately, I remember Thanksgiving, remember that I found Taz handsome, which meant I’m sexually attracted to my brother, which meant if I’m not careful, Taz’s face will appear in my fantasy instead of Leo’s, and then it does appear, because of course it does, because I told it not to, so now I’m no longer making out with Leo, I’m making out with my brother, and maybe it’s because I willed it into existence, but maybe it’s because I was never attracted to Leo in the first place, maybe it was all a cover, a socially acceptable outlet for my deeper, darker, truer impulses. And even if I wipe the image away as soon as it appears, that doesn’t change the fact that it was there. It entered my head. I pictured my brother while sexually aroused—and if I didn’t already have enough evidence to put myself away for life, that would be it.
So.
Better to avoid sexual fantasies altogether.
—
CHRISTMAS. WITH MY SISTER IN the throes of opening her first bakery and my half brothers long grown up, it’s our first meal together in a while. Karma tells us about blowing up a pot full of chocolate. Caleb does a spot-on impersonation of Speedy telling one of his long, rambling stories. Clarence rags on his coworkers at Beck Pharma, telling stories that make me laugh so hard I almost spit up my barbecued chicken.
And me—well, I never have much to say at family dinner. It’s because of Henry, I think. He was my life vest, the buoy that gave me the confidence to entertain our family with self-produced musicals and long, rambling monologues. But ever since he died, I’ve spent most of these meals in silence, legs folded beneath me, elbows on the table. I have stuff to say, too. But at a table full of the people I admire most—and with Manuel at his own house for Christmas—I forget what it is.
“Karma, did you have a good session with Dr.Scherman yesterday?” asks Mom.
“Mom.” The word comes out round and heavy, Karma’s humiliation obvious.
“You’re seeing Dr.Scherman?” asks Clarence.
She shrugs.
“Oh, don’t be embarrassed, Karma.” Clarence claps her on the shoulder. “A little mental illness ain’t nothin’ to be afraid of. Myself, I got the Big D.”
Karma’s eyes light up. “Depression? Really?”
“Full-on, kid.”
“No shit. Me too.”
I watch Karma’s face change. I watch it open, slowly, like a flower in the sun.
—
FROM THAT MOMENT ON, CLARENCE and Karma are inseparable. A bubble of cheerful nihilism, inaccessible to the rest of the family. Filled with inside jokes and antidepressants. I’m not invited to the mental illness party. Too young, I guess. Or maybe I have the wrong disease. Maybe they won’t invite what they can’t understand.
Between the two of them, Karma and Clarence are on every antidepressant on the shelf. “Wait,” I say to Speedy. “I thought we weren’t allowed to take drugs.”
Karma laughs. “Clarence and I are adults. We can take whatever we want.”
They compare notes on dosage, side effects. Swap stories about weight gain and vertigo. Their mental illnesses become a sort of game. Before breakfast, they toss pills into each other’s mouths like little grapes, cheering when they catch them, laughing when they don’t. More often than not, they miss, and the meds fly over their heads, falling to the ground somewhere they’ll never be found. Disguised by bugs and dust.
I come across the stray pills from time to time. Between cracks in the floorboard, nestled among couch cushions. Innocent and unsuspecting. Like loose change. I bend over. Pick them up. Study them. Wonder how they work. Wonder if it’s just like Advil, just one tiny circle to make the pain go away.
From: Memory [email protected]
To : Conscious Mind [email protected]
Subject : OCD Question it’s just your life.