Chapter 24
24
FRESHMAN YEAR
IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, THE END of our freshman year. Manuel’s parents are out, as usual. We take two Razor scooters and push ourselves to Jewel-Osco through the springtime slush, where we buy Red Vines and Busch Light with IDs made in China. The sky outside glows pink and grey. We stuff the beer cans into Manuel’s backpack and scooter home.
Waiting just down the block are Leo and Lisa, Manuel’s current fling. When Leo spots us scootering together, his face twists into a sour expression. I smile as wide as I can.
We usher them in the side door and down the steps to the basement. Once inside, I turn on just one lamp, as if the half darkness can protect us from being found out by Valentina. We make a loose circle on the ground. The nylon inhales our legs in a way that only basement carpets can.
Someone hands out the beer. We each crack one open.
One beer is enough for Manuel to stop worrying about Valentina’s presence upstairs.
“Lisa and I are going to my bedroom,” he announces. “Don’t wait up.” Then he sticks his tongue out and closes the door. I laugh louder than intended, an attempt to cover up the crack that widens in my heart every time I see him leave with another girl.
Without Manuel, the room feels too quiet.
There’s a beat of silence. Then Leo says, “It’s him, isn’t it?”
I look up. “What’s him?”
“The reason you won’t sleep with me.” He nods at the door. “It’s Manuel.”
“What?” I try to laugh.
Leo shakes his head. Slowly, at first, then with increasing intensity. “I knew it. I fucking knew it.” He stands up and throws his empty can in the garbage. “All my friends told me this would happen. ‘Never date a chick whose best friend is a dude.’ They all said it.”
“Leo, what are…?”
“No, Eliot. Just…no.”
“Leo.” I stand. I’ve only had one beer, but on an empty stomach, one is enough. The room tilts. “Leo, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if I’ve done something wrong, I—”
“You haven’t done anything wrong. Not yet.” He shakes his head. “But I know how this ends.”
I try to collect my spinning head. Is this really happening? “Leo, you don’t—”
“I see the way you look at him.”
My jaw snaps shut. I see the way you look at him. I grasp for words. For excuses and explanations. But in the space where I normally find them, the soothing sentences that coax my boyfriend back from the ledge, there’s nothing. Just a whisper I’m not quite ready to hear.
Leo collects his backpack. “This is done. Okay? We’re done.” Then he turns and walks out the way we snuck him in.
—
WHEN MANUEL AND LISA RETURN, hanging on to each other and giggling quietly, I’m seated in exactly the same place I was when Leo left, staring at exactly the same doorway.
“Where’s the Almighty Lion Man?” asks Manuel. Lisa giggles again.
“He left.”
“Like…for the night?”
“No.” I fondle a loose thread of carpet. “Like forever.”
“Oh.” Manuel and I make eye contact. He seems, for the first time, to absorb my deflation. I see him start to move away from Lisa, as if to comfort me, then pause. Second-guess himself. A hazy confusion clouds his face.
Then he straightens up, moving farther from Lisa as he does so. “Well, to hell with him. It’s not like you really loved him.”
—
YOU’D THINK MY WORRIES WOULD end once my relationship did. That without someone to cheat on, spit droplets would become irrelevant.
You would be wrong.
Every ounce of guilt dedicated to the possibility of cheating transfers, almost instantaneously, to guilt over my possible sexual deviancies. When (I imagine that) a drop of spit from someone’s mouth lands on my hand, I no longer feel compelled to wipe it away because I think I’m cheating on my boyfriend; I feel compelled to wipe it away because I think that to leave it on my hand is akin to admitting that I am, in fact, a lesbian. Or sexually attracted to one of my family members.
In fact, the Worry expands. It grows to encompass almost all bodily fluids: spit, period blood, pee, anything. If I don’t wipe away every last drop after using the bathroom, the pee will be on my pants, and if I sit down on a chair in class, the pee will now be there, and then someone else will eventually sit in that chair, and it will get on them . And it came from my vulva, and my vulva is the source of my sexuality, and only someone to whom you’re attracted is supposed to go near that. And if I just let that happen, if I just leave the pee there without wiping it away completely, does that mean I wanted that to happen? That I wanted someone else to touch my pee?
By bedtime, I’ve collected so many hot spots—tiny circles of skin upon which a droplet might have landed, a constellation of wrongdoing—that my body feels like it has an invisible case of chicken pox. An illness that only I can see. So I wash it away. All of it. I develop a highly specific end-of-day shower routine. I start at the top, always the top, and work my way down. Hair, neck, shoulders, chest, torso, legs. Don’t start with your pelvis. Don’t break the routine. Ensure every last drop funnels down the drain.
—
ON MONDAY, LEO DOESN’T SHOW up at the Trevian. Not on Wednesday, either, or the next week or the following. On the fourth, the editor in chief tells us Leo resigned. All eyes glance at me.
I wait for the sadness. For grief over our back corner, his hand around mine.
Instead, all I feel is relief.
—
FOR THE REST OF THE year, the Worries stay steady. Awful but steady. By the time summer rolls around, I need Cradle like a man in the desert needs water.
“Any regrets?” Manuel asks on our first afternoon out on the lake. We’re lying on a paddleboard, floating off the empty western side of the island.
Today, the lake is glass. We’ve arranged ourselves in a comfortable yin and yang: face up, heads next to each other in the center, torsos pointed in opposite directions. Legs dangling into the water off either side of the board. On our bellies, we balance two cans of Labatt Blue.
“Regrets about what?”
“I dunno. Freshman year. Things you wish you did.”
“You mean, like…care about homework?”
Manuel snorts. “No, no. You were doomed in that regard from the start—except maybe in English.” He traces a circle in the water. “I mean serious stuff.”
“Such as…”
He takes a sip of Labatt. “Well, what about Leo?”
“What about him?”
“Were you upset? About the breakup?”
“Not really.”
Another circle. “What happened, at the end?”
“Diverging interests.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means”—I flick my Labatt can, leaving small dents in the side—“he wanted things that I wasn’t willing to give him.”
“Wait.” Manuel rolls his head over on the board to face me. “Are you telling me…after all that time…”
I shrug.
He laughs. “Why the hell not? Are you secretly a God-fearing Christian and I didn’t know?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then what?”
I sigh. “It’s like you said.”
“What?”
“It’s not like I loved him.”
—
OUR LAST FULL DAY ON the island, Manuel and I wake up earlier than we usually do. Earlier than anyone wakes up, except maybe the loons. We slip out of bed and scamper up to Sunny Sunday. We turn the cabin over. Mom drinks only beer and wine, and Dad hasn’t touched booze in almost thirty years, so finding hard alcohol isn’t easy. But finally, in the back of a cabinet otherwise filled with canned beans and maraschino cherries, we locate a yellowing bottle of brandy. A milky crust leaks out from under the cap, nearly sealing the bottle shut. If anyone ever cared about this bottle, that time has long passed.
“Jackpot.” I wiggle my tongue at Manuel.
We secret the bottle back to our room and slip it under the bed.
That night, after the sun sets and the dishes are done and the old adults head for bed and the young adults settle in for wine and card games, we fetch the bottle and sit with it on the end of my bed. I claw at the cap, trying to pry it from its thick crust.
As I do, Manuel asks, “Have you ever been drunk before?”
“You know the answer to that question.”
“No, I mean like… drunk drunk. Not buzzed, like at Karma’s wedding.”
The cap breaks free. “Oh. Well, in that case—yeah, all the time. Speedy and I split a six-pack before bed every night.”
“I’m serious.”
I put the bottle right to my mouth and take a big gulp. “Jesus.” I shove it into his hands and gasp for air. “People drink this shit for fun?”
We pass the handle back and forth. One shot. Two shots. Three shots, all straight to the face. When I hand over the bottle, I do it gingerly, like a new mother afraid to drop her firstborn. Before the fourth, I hesitate. Do I feel anything yet? I don’t think so. One more, then, just for good measure.
“All right,” says Manuel after the brandy burns a fourth hole in my esophagus. “I think that’s enough.”
“Eughhh.” I rake my fingernails down my tongue. “Does every hard alcohol taste like this?”
“Pretty much.”
“How the hell am I supposed to make it through college?” I glance out the window; a bright orange harvest moon peeks through the treetops. “You know what? Let’s go run around.”
Outside, the moon casts a hazy orange glow over the rippling waves of the lake. Manuel and I weave carelessly about the boardwalk. We stick close to the harbor, away from the trees. I come to a halt at a place that feels like standing atop water. I hear waves. The sky is wide and open. The Earth sways. I look down and see that we’re standing on the floating dock. How did we get here?
A voice says, “Tell me the real reason you broke up.”
I startle. I turn to the left and there’s Manuel, standing right next to me atop the swaying earth, peering down into my eyes.
“Hi,” I say.
He smiles. “ Oye, gringa. ”
God, he’s tall. Has he always been this tall? “I already told you,” I say. “Diverging interests.”
“But were you really not interested in that?” Manuel asks. “Or were you just not interested in it with him ?”
The waves are gentle. They rock the floor beneath us; I wonder if this is what it would feel like to live inside an actual cradle. My eyelids are heavy, but I’m not tired. In fact, I feel better than I have in a long time. What is this feeling? What’s happening to my body? Hazy, slippery thoughts. Numb skin and a racing heart. Desire to do absolutely everything, all at once. Realization—brand-new and wonderful—that I can. That I can do anything I want, because nothing matters—not now, not ever.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
“Come on.” Manuel inches closer. When did he get so close? “You’ve really never thought about it?”
“I—” I try to process his words, but my mind can’t hold on to them. Have I thought about sex? I must have, right? Somewhere along the way, I must have wanted to. But my mind has been so occupied for so long with sex-related Worries, with remember that time you didn’t mourn your brother, remember that time you flirted with a boy who already had a girlfriend, remember that you’re disgusting, you’re a pervert, and remember that the only way to atone for these perversions is to remind yourself of them, over and over and over , that I shut my sexuality off altogether.
And right now, they’re still there. I can still look for reasons to hate myself, the trails of thought I’ve walked so many times I could find them blindfolded. It’s not that they’re gone. I see them all, feel them, sink my foot into the groove in the dirt where their paths begin.
The difference is that I no longer care.
I swallow. It turns things off, doesn’t it? The alcohol. The drunk.
I see now, with surprising clarity, exactly how my father became an addict.
“Eliot?” Manuel knocks on the side of my head. “Are you in there?”
I blink several times. Come back to the present. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, of course, sorry.”
“Where’d you just go?”
“I just…” I trail off.
Manuel eyes me knowingly. “You’re worrying.”
“Nope.” I plaster a fake smile on my face and take a step back. Another. “Nothing to worry about here! Just booze and a good time and—”
I step back yet again, but there’s no floor, nothing, I’ve stepped right off the edge of the dock, and suddenly I’m falling, and what’s below must be cold, wet darkness into which my body will plunge, plummeting down three or five or uncountable feet, and the orange moonlight above will grow ever smaller, shrinking until it disappears altogether.
But that doesn’t happen—not this time, anyway—because Manuel catches my shoulders before I even hit the water. He pulls my face right up close to his, closer than I ever could have reached on just the tips of my toes, and whispers, “Do not”—his breath is warm in the cool night air—“lie to me about your OCD again.”
“I—”
“?Me entiendes?”
I nod.
“Good.” He sets me down, but his hands linger on my shoulders, his eyes on my neck. The harvest moon casts a warm orange glow on his face, illuminating his short curls and high cheekbones from behind. He looks like a statue. Like Adonis carved in moonlight.
I swallow thickly.
What the hell is happening to me? I feel something strange in my pelvis—the same place I check every time my Worries tell me that I’m sexually attracted to a woman or a family member or a dog or any other being to whom I’m not supposed to be attracted. A place I’ve tried for years to freeze, to keep from feeling anything at all. It never listens. It isn’t listening now.
This feeling, though…it’s different. It isn’t tight and throbbing and painful, like it is when I worry. It’s warm. It’s a growing, glowing warmth, right at the base of my gut.
Manuel releases my shoulders, but I find that I don’t want him to.
I want him to hold on a little longer.