22. Eli
TWENTY-TWO
ELI
“He’s selfish.” Oliver looks up. “Every choice he makes is about preserving the clean version he has of himself. He doesn’t intervene because intervention would make him visible.
He doesn’t judge out loud because that would commit him.
He goes home to the Midwest because if he stays he’ll have to admit he’s one of them.
Everything he does is to protect the version of Nick in his own head.
To be virtuous and above all others. He doesn’t do shit to stop anything bad from happening, he just watches on. ”
I nod. “And what’s the word for that?”
He frowns, shrugging.
“Enabler,” I say, watching their faces digest that. “A coward wants to act and can’t. An enabler doesn’t want to act, because acting would cost him something he’s decided to keep. He’s not paralyzed. He’s choosing to be quiet to save his status and comfort.”
Oliver nods slowly. “Like with Tom and Daisy. They use Nick, sure. They keep him around because he sees what they do and doesn’t say anything, and that’s worth more to them than a friend who’d push back. Nick enables them.”
I chuckle, nodding. “Exactly. Nick gets to keep thinking he’s the honest one. The enabling is the price he pays to keep his self-image. The fear isn’t gone. The fear is the engine. He’s so afraid of becoming them that he becomes useful to them instead, and he calls that virtue.”
The teen mom raises her hand. “That’s worse than being a coward.”
“Why?”
“Because the coward at least knows he failed. The enabler builds a whole story where he’s the hero of it.”
“I agree.” I hold up my battered paperback.
“The book is his alibi. The narration is unreliable because his truth is told through this lens of self-preservation. He wants you to believe the version of himself he’s spent two hundred pages constructing.
It’s the version that requires him to have done nothing. ”
The clock ticks. I’m aware of my own breathing.
“The coward fails despite himself. The enabler succeeds. That’s the horror of him.
Nick gets exactly what he wanted. He gets to leave New York intact.
He gets to be the only honest man he knows.
The cost of that purchase is Gatsby and Myrtle’s death, and Daisy’s indifferent callousness.
Nick paid for his clean conscience with their lives, and at the end of the book he doesn’t even acknowledge he made the trade. ”
I am, I realize, no longer talking about Nick Carraway.
I’m Nick.
“For next week,” I say, as if hearing myself from a long distance. “A thousand words. The case for Nick as enabler. Defend it from the text. Don’t be polite about it. If you want to argue back—coward, or honest narrator, or anything else—do so but justify it.”
The bell rings. They pack up slowly. The argument follows them out the door. I can hear two of the older students still going as they cross the threshold.
For almost five years I’ve told myself that what we do is justice. That hanging the Brocks of this world is the act, the verb, the thing that separates me from every man who knew and didn’t move.
But Nick thought he was the honest one, too.
The hangings let me sleep. That’s what they’re for.
They’re the receipt I keep so I never have to be the man who stands in the rubble of someone else’s life saying what a shame, if only the system were better.
And the price of that receipt is that I can’t let anyone close enough to see the math.
Because Micah’s already seen too much, and Sage walked in swinging, and if either of them gets a clear look they’ll find what Oliver just found in two hundred pages of beautiful narration.
Nothing underneath. A man who built a story where he’s the hero of it.
I went cold Monday because cold is cheaper. It doesn’t feel, doesn’t need, doesn’t lose anything when the people around it bleed.
I stare at the board, chalk dust on my hands, feeling like every cell in my body is vibrating at a different frequency. The whiplash of Micah’s mouth, the memory of Sage’s voice, the way my self-control keeps folding around the same two Molotov cocktails as if that’s ever gone well for anyone.
Oliver is the last one to leave. He shoulders his bag and stops at the door.
“Mr. Ward?”
“Oliver?”
“Which one do you think he is?”
I look at him. I think about lying. I give him the truth.
“Enabler,” I say.
He nods.
“You good?” I ask. It’s the thing I always ask him when he hovers at the door.
“I’m good.” He adjusts his bag. “Are you?”
“I’m good, Oliver. Have a nice night.”
He looks at me for half a second longer than he needs to, then he goes.
I drive home and for once, I don’t drive past Sage’s apartment.
I want to. I plan the route in my head before I’m out of the parking lot. Down Pacific. Past her building. Slow enough to see if her light is on, fast enough she’s unlikely to see me.
I drive home instead.
The house is the same as it was this morning. Quiet. Boring. Safe.
While waiting for the kettle to boil, I flick through my contact list. Sophie’s name is at the top. Her contact photo is from a hike last summer—sunburned, grinning, alive. I tap the call button.
It rings three times before diverting to voicemail. “Hey, you’ve reached Sophie, leave a message or text me, texting’s better.”
I hang up before the beep.
I stand in my kitchen, phone in hand, and think about how in five years, I haven’t made it through a phone call with my sister without lying to her at least once. Lies layered so thin and so practiced they don’t feel like lies anymore.
It feels like me.
Eli, the liar.
I want to tell her how I’m feeling. I want to reach out to someone—anyone—and have them understand. But if she picked up right now, I don’t even know what I’d say.
Soph, there’s a man I’d put my life in front of without thinking twice. I keep pushing him away because I don’t know how to hold him the way he holds me.
Soph, there’s a girl, and the only reason I met her is because I was hanging the man who was assaulting her.
Soph, the other day, I stopped by her house before school. I just wanted to see her, but then I stood in her bedroom and directed her and my best friend in one of the most erotic moments of my life. But when she reached for me, I left and acted like I was noble instead of selfish.
Soph, the things I do to keep you safe are the horrors that eat me alive. I don’t know how to dismantle one without destroying the other.
I put the phone down.
I make dinner. Eat. Don’t taste it.
I wash the plate.
At 10:30 p.m. I open my texts.
Milo has sent through a bunch of drawings—designs for our bowling uniforms that I know none of us will get a say in. I swipe out of the group chat without looking at them.
Micah’s name is third from the top.
I tap it.
The thread goes back six weeks. Mostly logistics.
Pickup at 11. Wear black. Don’t forget the gloves.
Occasional jokes—Micah has a way of dropping a one-liner into a thread about body disposal that makes me laugh out loud at inappropriate moments.
There’s a photo from August he sent me, no caption, of a cocktail he’d built.
It’s layered pink and gold. He was proud of it.
I’d written back “pretty,” and then I’d jacked off thinking about his mouth and hated myself for being too much of a coward to just ask him to come over.
Micah and I have always been a collision of heat and need. We don’t do gentle requests.
I scroll down to the empty space at the bottom and start typing:
I’m sorry for being an asshole Monday morning.
I look at the words, hesitating over the send button.
I’m not sorry I walked in. That’s the thing I’m sitting with. I’m sorry about the way I handled it. I’m not sorry I saw what I saw. I needed to see it. I needed to know that Micah and Sage had done that, were doing that, were going to keep doing that.
I needed to see it and not have it.
I try the message again:
I’m sorry about Monday morning. I handled it badly. You didn’t deserve that.
I look at the two sentences. They’re true but woefully insufficient.
The honest message would be . . .
Fuck. I don’t know what honest would look like. Maybe I’d say—Something happened to me the night under that jetty, and it’s been happening more every day since, and when I saw you in her bedroom it stopped being something I could put in a drawer.
That’s as close as I can get. The rest—what this feeling is, what I’d call it if I were a braver man, what I felt standing in that doorway watching the two of them together—I can’t even touch it. So I leave it where it is. Behind the wall. Where it’s safe.
Because I know how to keep us all alive.
But I don’t know how to want something and survive it.
I hit send on what I have.
Me:
I’m sorry about Monday morning. I handled it badly. You didn’t deserve that.
It clicks to “read” immediately. Then the dots start in response.
The dots disappear.
The dots reappear.
The dots disappear again.
I watch them for what feels like a long time. I imagine Micah behind the bar at Unholy Desires, phone tucked under the register, typing something and erasing it over and over. I know he’s doing what I’m doing. Trying to find the smallest possible thing he can say that doesn’t lock anything in.
I save him the trouble.
Me:
Goodnight, Micah.
I send it before I can think about it.
The dots stop.
After a beat, his reply comes through.
Micah
If you don’t reappear soon, I’ll track you down.
It’s an invitation and a backhand to the side of the head. It’s perfect. It’s Micah.
I look at it for a long time.
I don’t reply.
I put the phone face-down on the counter and I go to bed. I lie in the dark with my hands flat on the comforter and I think about how fucking tangled up I’ve become.
I need you, too. Okay? Always have.
I close my eyes.
I see Sage reaching for me.
Please.
With a sigh, I open my eyes.
I don’t sleep.