Chapter 21
Isaiah was my first love, but he didn’t love me back. I was just his corny friend. His shadow.
He was athletic, with a sinewy, strong build. At pull-ups, he was perfect. When we ran track, he was perfect. I always fell
behind as soon as the guns fired and we started to run. Many people were spurred on by the bystanders who were cheering from
the stadium, but my father was never there, so what was the point?
Everyone else was bigger than me, backs more bricked up, legs longer. My competitors charged over the hurdles, brows clenched,
mouths relaxed, red clouds kicking up when they landed. They took this very seriously.
But one day Isaiah tripped, and he and his hurdle skidded across the track. I was already behind, so I stopped for him as
the rest of the runners ran.
“You losing the race,” he said as I knelt by his side.
But I wasn’t losing anything. I was helping my friend.
“Nick, this is stupid of you,” he said. “I’m fine. Go.”
If I could, I would stop all over again. The race could not ride bikes with me and shoot bottle rockets over the drugstore
and lie in the meadow and talk about dreams—only Isaiah could. But once he realized I had that losing sprit, he tried to toughen
me up.
The day after the race, he took me to the gym to do push-ups and then we went out behind the gym to cool off. Girls sat on
benches, skirts riding above their knees for the summer, their brown legs gleaming under white sun, sun hats shielding their
eyes, so that lips were all that showed.
They looked up when Isaiah walked by. He waved, and they giggled, turning away. He had his eyes on Pam Harris, who sat with
her legs crossed, elbows back on the table as he passed. Those two understood the confidence thing before the rest of us.
Isaiah took a fighting stance across from me. “Throw a punch,” he said, glancing over to Pam.
And I refused. We both knew he could make origami of my bones—no point in pretending I stood a chance. But when he swung at
me, I was quick enough to duck and stumble like a deer from the encounter. He gripped my neck as I tried to escape and swiped
my leg from under me.
He caught my shirt, before I fell, holding me dangling off the ground, like I was a puppet. He laughed at my resignation.
“You not gonna fight me back at all?”
“Nope,” I said. “Not at all.” I had no shame. I didn’t need to prove how strong I was. And most importantly—I didn’t like
to fight.
A cloud came to block the sun, and Isaiah looked up to the sky. I climbed his arm and regained balance.
Behind us, the girls got up from the bench and bunched under an umbrella together.
The first raindrops splashed our faces, and we ran to retrieve our bikes from their racks. Isaiah threw his leg over his seat
and then noticed my teeth chattering. He took off his coat and offered it to me.
I slid into the padded coating beneath the wool, its protection like a blanket. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” he said, rubbing his hands together before strapping them to the bars.
We pedaled down the winding roads, which were quickly turning muddy from the rain. We had to go fast so we wouldn’t drown.
Once we reached my house, we were soaking wet. We left our bikes leaning out front and covered ourselves under the porch roof.
Isaiah was still pushing me around, saying, “Fight me.”
Unrelentingly, I said, “I’m not in the mood.”
And the wood creaked under our feet.
I was sopping wet, and was I ever in the mood, in grade nine, for anything but to stare at nature, or to stare at the wall?
Isaiah jiggled my skinny arm. “You gotta put some meat on these bones,” he said. “So you can wake ’em up if you need to.”
“I think they’re already awake,” I said. “They don’t need me to wake up.”
Oh, I felt so powerless in those years.
I reached for the door to my house, but Isaiah stopped my movement, with a hand around my wrist. And he wrestled me down to
the wood of the porch. And then he had me lying underneath him, with one leg on either side of my torso, and he was dripping
rainwater off the side of his jaw onto my forehead, his shirt clinging to his body.
He pulled me up fast, when he was done, and I crashed into him, feeling a rush, a buzz from the universe as it moved me, called
me to touch his face and lean in to a kiss. It felt natural. It relieved me of all violence, all tension.
But it did not do the same for him. Isaiah pushed me away, eyebrows furrowing like I had caused him great discomfort. “Nick,
no.” He was very serious as he took his jacket off me like I was a coatrack and not a person. “I don’t do that.”
There was no room to call it an accident. Isaiah knew already, somewhere deep down. It took so long for him to come around
after I did that. He went on his track, making the connections that would get him a job at the Vanderbilt estate. I floundered
desperately, looking for one business that would take me, ending up in the back of Mr. Wallace’s shop.
Yes, that was where I belonged. For years, I knocked on my friend’s door, and no one was home. He ignored me in school. I
left him letters and got nothing back. I lost my friend.
Three years passed and Isaiah started to reach out again.
It was as if the changing of seasons had wiped the memory of my mistake from his mind.
We’d just gotten started again when the mob brought hellfire to Greenwood—otherwise his house would’ve been the first place I went when that was happening.
Where are you, Isaiah? Are you alive? Did you make it? I was wrong to think that if I did nothing wrong, no one would want to hurt me. People want to hurt people for no reason
at all. So, all that fighting he taught me was worth it.
Now I know to hold fast to the friends I have because there is the risk I could lose them. I vow to hold them even when I
have no arms around me and remember them when I’m held in someone’s arms.
Everyone who’s held me is still holding me, and I’m still holding them too.
Are you alive? I had a mental connection with him too, but only sometimes. I have some stuff to do in New York, but I’ll come back with enough money to surprise you. And leave you jewels, and money,
and concert tickets to the Apollo if when I knock, you open the door. I’m so sorry, Isaiah. I’m sorry.
Dreams of Isaiah still ran through my head when I heard the sound of Jay’s door creaking. In the morning light, I saw his
father walk into the room and stop mid-journey on his way to the bed when he saw us. He stood over us, clothes in his hand,
and stared, stunned at the sight.
I couldn’t move as I opened my eyes fully and looked at Mr. Gatsby. His expression didn’t change. And then, he turned and
hurried out, as if he’d forgotten something in the other room.
I got out of bed and threw on my pants and socks. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
Jay was hiding under the pillow, still half asleep. What he mumbled in response was muffled. I prodded him with my arm, and he came up for air, squinting at the light from outside.
“Your father just saw us,” I said.
“What?”
“He saw us.” My heart was jumping out of my chest. What would Gatsby do now that he knew I was sleeping in the same bed as
his son?
I couldn’t trust a white man from a crocodile on the hunt. I imagined him returning with a golf club and swinging at my head,
screaming, “Darky!” until I turned black and blue. Instead of defending myself, I’d say, I love your son, sir, I love your son, and let the damage be done.
“I don’t care what he saw,” Jay whispered, reaching out to me, his fingers like crane clamps.
I spun a circle about the room, feeling like a princess in a beam of twirling dust, the silk robe he draped me in falling
off my shoulders. “Jay, it’s morning.”
I could smell tobacco. His father was in his room, puffing his pipe. Was he cooling off from his reaction? Would we have to
fight?
I didn’t want to fight him. I’d be sad to hurt the man who helped create Jay.
Pinwheels rolled around in my stomach as I checked the room for my jewelry. I was wearing a filigree ring with a green gemstone,
and it was so pretty but so tiny and easy to lose.
Jay leaned up in bed, wiped his eyes, and yawned. “He knows already.”
“Knows what?”
“That I like boys,” Jay said. “He’s asked me about it.”
“Oh.” Something about even that small reveal was satisfying.
Jay’s eyes opened wider, and I almost gave him a kiss, but I could feel Mr. Gatsby watching this too, as if he had a ghost
eye in the room. The moment broke and part of me curled inward as I sat back on the bed. It was sickening to think that I’d found no way, in
all eighteen years, to do away with the impulse to be with a man.
So I just left. Jay called, “Nick?” but I kept going into the hallway, into the splash of front-of-house window sunshine over
the upstairs balcony. On the wall above the side table was a giant mosaic portrait of Alexander Hamilton made of glittering
diamond. Why?
What will Mr. Gatsby do with the knowledge of us?
I wandered aimlessly through the morning, letting the city guide me, its streets offering a subdued entry into the day: shopkeepers
sweeping, delivery trucks rolling in and out. I stopped by the park and watched children kick a ball while an older man played
a mournful tune on his trumpet. His melody pressed on my heartbeat, which was skipping through an endless rhythm of survival
and the hope for triumph ahead. But more so lately, survival.
Down the busier avenues, life bustled with urgency that made my turmoil seem invisible. The day stretched into afternoon,
my feet carrying me deeper past the brownstones and businesses and toward the places I felt most at home, but I still felt
Gatsby’s eyes following me.
I almost went down those streets darkened by alleyways, with the bootblacks and gamblers and gangsters, the drunks who emptied their pockets in the juice joints, to escape.
Instead, I chose to take another path.