Track 12 Delilah
Delilah
[words written on the back of a receipt in Delilah’s backpack]
synonyms for gray—
smoke
charcoal
dove
ash
silver
iron
steel
stone
shadow
They set out for Chicago in the morning, after a breakfast spread of eggs and pancakes and tempeh bacon and three kinds of fruit salad at Joyce and Megan’s that puts the instant oatmeal Delilah had picked up a few days ago to so much shame Delilah doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to look at the packets again.
Emmett had been gone by the time Delilah woke up, the crumpled blanket barrier in the center of the bed and the depression on the other pillow the only signs that they’d been there at all.
Delilah hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect from them when she’d slid open the door and climbed out of the van, but she was relieved to see them sitting at the picnic table with a sketchbook, last night’s alarming pallor gone.
Emmett had given her a tentative smile, Delilah had returned it, and then Joyce had hollered over to them from her site with an offer of breakfast, and that had been the end of that.
Derek, Ames, Libby, and Willa come staggering out of their camper in a bedraggled line as Delilah and Emmett are finishing breakfast, and Delilah has to bite her lip to hide a smile at the way Emmett goes abruptly pink at the sight of them.
Derek’s neck is spotted with marks and there’s a decided hitch to his step, Ames looks like a cat who caught the canary and then treated itself to a large bowl of cream for dessert, and Libby and Willa radiate a mix of smugness and affection as they settle down at the table.
They insist on exchanging contact information, and Delilah’s phone immediately lights up with a string of alerts as she gets confirmation text messages.
She’s just tucking her phone away again when Libby says, “Oh my God, that’s where I knew you from. ”
She’s perched on the table next to Delilah, staring at her phone, eyes wide. Delilah can just make out the grid of her own private Instagram account on the screen, and immediately braces herself.
“I didn’t recognize you without a guitar,” Libby continues, grinning.
“I love your music. I’ve been listening for years.
” She pauses, and Delilah abruptly remembers all the ranting she’d done yesterday when they’d been sharing stories and talking about how they came to be cross-country road-tripping.
Libby narrows her eyes. “So wait, when you said your ex, that—”
“Please don’t say anything,” Delilah says. “My manager’s been trying to keep it quiet. At least until we figure out what’s happening next.”
“I wouldn’t,” Libby assures her, but she’s still scowling. “Ugh. My image of Sam Knight is ruined forever. And I always thought she seemed so nice.”
“Sam’s good at seeming,” Delilah says, then hesitates. “You really won’t say anything?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Like you were ever any kind of scout,” Willa says, leaning over. Her micro-braids are twisted up into a knot on top of her head in a silk scarf, the long ends draped gracefully over her shoulder. “What are we saying?” Libby tilts her phone to show Willa the screen.
Willa looks puzzled, and then she glances at Delilah and her eyes widen in dawning comprehension. “Oh,” she says.
“Oh,” Libby agrees.
“Hey,” Derek calls from the end of the table, breaking the tension. “Can I get some backup here? Emmett isn’t on any social media. Like, any of them.”
“I don’t need them,” Emmett protests.
“Baby, how are we supposed to keep up with your crazy adventures if you’re not posting them?” Willa slides down the bench. “Gimme your phone, we’re making you a profile.”
By the time they get on the road, fed and caffeinated and Emmett newly online, Delilah almost wishes they didn’t have to leave.
“They were nice,” Emmett says, turning their phone over and over in their hands, like they’re not quite sure what to do with it.
“Understatement,” Delilah says, steering them onto the highway.
She’d intentionally mapped out a less direct route so that they’d spend as much time as possible on the more scenic roads around Lake Michigan.
When they’re comfortably cruising along the Blue Star Highway, she says, “You don’t have to keep the profile they made you if you’re not comfortable with it. ”
“I’m not uncomfortable.” Emmett rubs their thumb over the side of their phone, then slips it into their pocket. “I just don’t know what to do with it.”
“Because of the no-friends thing?”
“Because of the no-friends thing,” they agree. “And other than this trip, I don’t really do anything interesting. I don’t know why anyone would want to hear about it. Or see anything about it.”
Delilah shrugs. “Some people use it as a journal.”
She’d done that, before it was part of her job.
Now she has a public account that’s mostly Alex’s domain, filled with promotions and carefully edited photos and captions that have gone through a PR review, and a personal account that she mostly uses to be as ridiculous as possible, since it’s only open to people she knows and enjoys and is willing to let her guard down in front of.
She rarely gives out the personal account these days.
Libby and the others had clearly been touched when she shared it, and the look of delighted surprise on Emmett’s face when she used it to follow their brand-new account and then took their phone to follow her back had made her want to hug them.
Alex will probably kill her for sharing it now, with everything going on.
It’s not like there’s anything really scandalous there, but it’s not public, and the last thing they need is for someone to leak something Delilah had already chosen not to share with the world.
But Libby and Willa and Derek and Ames had just been so nice, and half of Delilah’s friends are Sam’s friends too, and if she’s going to have to find her own people again, she has to start somewhere.
The drive to Chicago is just over two hours, and they spend it in companionable silence, Iris’s lilting voice talking about the subversive sensuality of 1970s queer porn blending with the hum of the road under Roscoe’s tires and the buzzing of the wind against the windows.
They’re into the third season now, Delilah’s own voice disappearing from the episodes after she’d reluctantly bowed out and Iris had kept it going as a solo show.
Without Delilah, Iris had started picking up more guests and digging more deeply into her topics, somehow threading the needle of meticulous research with vibrant threads of stories stretching back decades, sometimes even centuries, and Delilah loves listening to these even more than the ones where she was still part of the show.
Iris weaves in bits of poetry and music and audio snippets from movies and television and talk shows so smoothly it feels like they were always part of the greater whole she’s putting together.
Delilah has a sudden mental image of Iris hunched over her laptop, not just from the early days, when the project was their shared baby, but from later too, when Delilah would visit and they’d fall back into their old rhythms, for all that Delilah had become a guest star on something that had once been hers to share.
She thinks about those nights—the pages and pages of notes, the takeout containers of cold Chinese food, the rush of creative energy—and tells herself that that’s the energy she’s channeling for the rest of this trip.
She told Alex that she’ll write a banger of an album, and she is going to write a banger of an album if it kills her.
Maybe she’ll even get lucky, and it will.
Delilah and Emmett do the Legacy Walk when they get to Chicago, braving the wind to get a chance to stretch their legs after so much time in the van.
Delilah digs an extra cardigan out of her suitcase for Emmett, who hadn’t packed for so much time outdoors.
It’s too large in the shoulders, too short in the arms, and clearly not at all their usual style, but they’re a good sport about it, tugging their own jacket over it.
Delilah squishes a beanie over her hair and slides her sunglasses on.
“How do I look? Incognito?”
Emmett, once again wearing Delilah’s spare sunglasses, cocks their head to one side. “You look like yourself,” they say. “Is that such a bad thing?”
“Ha,” Delilah says, linking her arm through theirs. “We don’t have time to even begin unpacking all of that.”
If Delilah had booked a proper tour, the walk would take about four hours, but she and Emmett do it in just under two, meandering from plaque to plaque.
They take turns reading the little bronze memorials, and Delilah adds commentary or trivia whenever she can, just to watch more of those bright sparks light up Emmett’s face.
She quotes Audre Lorde’s poetry and tells them about Oscar Wilde’s trial, explains the Kinsey scale, recites half of Leaves of Grass from memory, and tells them about the Harlem Renaissance and the Stonewall riots.
At some point, the arm she had looped through Emmett’s migrates, their fingers tangling together.
Delilah tells herself they’re holding hands to make sure they won’t get separated in the milling crowds, and she almost believes it.
Emmett stops when they get to the plaque for the pink triangles and lifts a hand to trace the engraving, fingertips brushing over the colored triangles, bright and stark against the dark bronze. Before Delilah can start reading the plaque, Emmett says, very quietly, “I know about these.”
Delilah squeezes their hand in silent comfort, scanning the words on the memorial.
“ ‘At the recommendation of British and American lawyers, the men who had been arrested under Germany’s anti-homosexual “Paragraph 175” statute—identified by the pink triangles many were forced to wear—were to be re-imprisoned,’ ” she reads aloud.
“ ‘The enforcement of anti-homosexuality laws across the US and Europe meant that many gay survivors of Nazism faced continued persecution, arrest, and detention long after Hitler was defeated’—Jesus Christ.” She shakes her head in disgust. “Society was a mistake.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Emmett looks almost tenderly at the men engraved on the pillar, gaunt-cheeked and hollow-eyed even in bronze. “The mistake would be forgetting them.”
“People tried,” Delilah points out.
“But didn’t succeed,” Emmett says. They trace one finger over the jaw of the man at the front of the carving, gentle as a lover, and then let their hand fall, turning to Delilah. “That’s what really matters.”
Delilah makes a living by being good at words, but they all leave her now. She swallows twice, tries and fails to think of something profound to say, something to match Emmett’s tenderness and the fragility of this moment.
She settles, for once in her life, on silence.