Chapter 71 #2
The four of us shoved desks and chairs against a row of doors that led to the faculty parking lot.
The ground floor was aesthetically nothing like the grand hall: pewter and damp, reeking of mothballs, a cozy ugliness like a suburban basement in 1980 Nowhere, America.
It was also boiling. Tristan kept lifting the hem of his hoodie to wipe the sweat from his forehead, flashing his hard stomach.
I was ignoring him with the same intensity with which he was ignoring me, but this made it difficult.
As we checked the sturdiness of our barricade, the flirtatious murmurs between Ryen and the actress agitated me.
Ryen assumed, I guessed, that if I hadn’t said anything to Milan yet I probably wouldn’t.
It made me sick: how he played with the actress’s hair, talking in her ear.
I texted Milan, asking if she knew Ryen was here, knowing she’d be up watching Temptation Island or something equally terrible.
Meanwhile Tristan was acting like we were competing on some televised challenge show called Barricade That! carrying three chairs on his arm.
Eventually, Ryen and the actress disappeared, leaving me alone with Tristan. Tristan popped on blue latex gloves, headed toward the stairwell. He tossed me a pair. “Put these on.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all night.
A thrill surged in me when we approached the front entrance on the main floor, the one Edgar and I came through a few hours ago, and heard protestors singing outside.
The moment opened like a mouth. When I entered it, I was watching us from the future, hearing the newscast version of the night on the radio, sitting around a kitchen table, telling the kids I wasn’t going to have, “Mommy was there.” I hadn’t thought about what we were doing as an act of creation until then.
Tristan had paused to listen to the singing but then handed me one of the hammers. “We’re smashing the glass squares so we can lock the door from the outside.”
“Wait, what?”
He brought his hammer’s nose down on the frosted window.
It shattered with an icy shriek that reminded me of hail falling on concrete.
I’d never destroyed property before. Absurdly, it seemed a step too far even though I knew this was a small act to confront a much greater, sinister one.
I hesitated, the hammer heavy in my hand.
Tristan said, “I’ll do it.” I ignored him and drove the hammer through the window, crashing the metal head against the glass.
It was beautiful, the transparent shards raining at our feet.
I surprised myself by kicking the door with my boot, imagining every fuck-ass authority figure who failed us, who forced every generation back to this place where we had to become animals to win the right to be human.
I was so angry at that damn door, I was going to chop it down like a rotting tree.
Tristan grabbed me with a startled look, the most emotion he’d offer me all night. “Hey, chill, okay. It’s broken.”
I’d splintered part of the door, a piece of wood hanging from it. I breathed in, out. I hadn’t breathed, it felt, in days. My body slackened. I was dizzy, high and overcaffeinated. It took me a moment to understand I was experiencing euphoria.
“Are you calm now?” he asked.
“Yes,” I lied.
Reaching an arm through the holes we made, Tristan efficiently looped a metal bike lock around the door handles.
A few people standing nearby cheered us on, chanting “We will win!” Tristan threw up a Surf’s Up!
sign. It was a gesture that felt totally out of place, that reminded me we were all just kids who didn’t really know what we were doing.
After boarding the windows that flanked the door, we walked silently down the hallway. Above us, other barricaders dragged chairs, desks up the steps. It was a grating sound. Someone dropped a heavy piece of furniture and cursed.
Tristan swaggered slightly ahead of me. His gait was anxious and angry, how I felt. The hammer dangling from his hand didn’t help his image. I didn’t know what we were doing next.
When we reached the stairwell on our way upstairs, I stopped on the landing. “Is this about what I texted you the other day?”
He paused but didn’t turn around. “Is what about that?”
“Your weirdness.”
He angled slightly, showing only his profile. “You know what’s weird? Dumping someone over text.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. You said you’d made peace with things ending.”
“Yeah, well, I fucking lied, also”—hearing footsteps, lowering his voice—“also, what was I supposed to say? Be all like”—in a dumb, mocking tone—“ ‘cAn wE tAlk’ while we’re taking over a building?”
“You’re the one who wanted me to tell Jay I’d be monogamous, remember?”
He paused. “I didn’t want that. I just wanted him to be happy.”
He started walking up the stairs. Instinctively, I grabbed his wrist. For a moment, he just stared ahead, like he was deciding what to do.
“You were right to end things though.” He laughed bitterly. “We lied to everyone and for what? For sex?”
He untangled himself from my grasp.
Was that the story he’d told himself? Where was the part where we fell in love?
Where was the part where Nia offered me to him like a ribboned box, setting me aside once I’d been unwrapped?
Where was the part where she and I might’ve fallen in love?
The part where everyone thought I was something to be disciplined?
To be had? Where I resisted and, yes, wronged people, yes, unnecessarily, selfishly wronged people, in my piss-poor reach for something other? Where was the rest of the story?
I was looking at him, but he was staring at his shoes. My phone went off, a loud, clipped sound. I took it out of my pocket. Somewhere I had applied for a job wanted to know if I was available for an interview at 9:30 a.m. I said yes because, still out of work, what choice did I have?
When I looked up, Tristan’s tight expression had come undone. He looked sad and tired.
Moonlight skimmed the steps through the window behind me, slicing his face in half between light and dark. He and I weren’t on the same page, would never be. But all that made me want to do was rip the page up. All I wanted was to touch him.
A tiny black hair stuck to his cheekbone. “You have a lash on your face.”
He looked confused. I took my thumb and pressed it to his cold cheek. He closed his eyes almost mechanically like he was falling asleep. My mind cycled through ways to tuck the lash in my pocket without him noticing.
Someone cleared their throat. I jerked around. Tristan’s lash was lost to the ground.
Ryen stood at the base of the stairwell, the actress’s singsongy voice not far behind.
“Did I interrupt something?” He was flicking a blue flyer on the back of the door with his index finger, almost bored.
Tristan stumbled up the stairs, head bowed. I listened to the door shut behind him.
“Does Milan know you’re here with another girl?” I hadn’t even meant to say it, but I was angry.
Climbing the steps, Ryen stood on the landing with me. His eyes were glassy. He was drunk on something dark. I could smell it. “What, are you gonna tell her?”
“You don’t deserve her.” I felt like a middle schooler defending their friend, grasping at authority in my squeaky voice.
I tried to walk up the steps, but he moved into my path. My pulse picked up. In my syrupy service voice, I said, “Excuse me.”
He pushed a big clammy hand up my shirt and grabbed my breast. I was so shocked, I stopped breathing. “Get the fuck off me.” The command came out strangled.
He laughed. I thought of screaming, but somehow screaming was worse than being groped in the stairwell.
“What about the girl with you?”
He said in my ear, “I know you’re into threesomes.”
I could almost hear my heart split.
The actress emerged in the doorway, slurring, “There you are.” Ryen calmly released me, like I was a balled-up piece of trash he was dropping in a bin.
Flitting up the stairs, the actress found his arm with a manicured hand. She gave me a look of mild disgust before they left me in the stairwell.