Fans of the Impossible Life (13 page)

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Sebby pulled me into the bathroom with the excuse of giving me a makeover after he had finished washing the blue dye out of his new streaks. I sat on the toilet lid while he ran a handful of mousse through my hair.

“Hold still,” he said.

“I'm trying.” I closed my eyes, feeling his fingers on my scalp.

“You have good hair,” he said.

“I do?”

“You should do something more fun with it. You always have it brushed down like this.”

“I didn't know there was anything else to do.”

He held up a hand mirror for me to see when he was done.

“Fauxhawk,” he said. “I think it suits you.”

He had gelled my hair to a point in the middle of my head.

“I look ridiculous,” I said, studying myself in the mirror.

“Fashion is supposed to be ridiculous,” he said. “Just look at the stuff Mira wears.”

I smiled and handed him the mirror. He took it and examined his new blue streaks.

“We look good together,” Sebby said. “Very nouveau punk.”

The door to the bathroom was closed. We could hear the girls talking in the other room, and the fact of our aloneness suddenly felt significant. He turned back to me, touched the point of my hair with his finger. Then he leaned down and kissed me. I held very still, as if he were an animal that I didn't want to scare away. He stood back and looked down at me.

“That's okay, right?” he said.

I could feel my heart beating faster. I didn't know what to say.

“Yeah,” I said. “I want you. I mean, I want to.”

Nice, Jeremy. Smooth.

He sat down on the edge of the tub, his knees touching mine. He smiled.

“What are you going to do about it?” he said.

I laughed. He laughed too. I leaned toward him and then we were kissing again. The girls turned up the music, playing loud on the other side of the door.

           
All I want to get is

           
A little bit closer.

           
All I want to know is

           
Can you come a little closer?

His hands found the back of my head and something in me felt bold enough to reach for his waist, gather the fabric of his worn T-shirt in my hands. He felt real, there in Rose's bathroom. Our first kiss alone. It felt like something real.

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For the first time in the history of their family, Mira's mother had decided to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Her excuse was that she wanted to make sure that there were enough options for Mira to eat that fit her meal plan. Mira wanted to point out that it would have been easier to just bring some gluten-free bread with them to her aunt's house, but by that time her mother was already making multiple shopping lists.

Mira suspected that her mother's secret motivation was to put on a good show for the extended family. The past year had not been the best one for them, and maybe she thought that if she could craft the perfect holiday dinner, everyone would see that they were doing okay.

The kitchen was a disaster for the entire week before Thanksgiving. Mira didn't even understand how there could be so much to do, but every day when she got home from school, her mother looked a little more desperate.

Julie arrived the night before Thanksgiving to a hero's welcome.

“Thank goodness you're here,” their mom said, greeting her at the door. “Nothing's done.”

Of course Julie immediately took charge, rewriting the to-do lists so that they were color coded by family member.

“This is completely disorganized, Mom,” she said, tying on an apron.

Mira stayed up with them cutting vegetables and listening to Julie's incessant talk about Harvard.

Her sister hadn't changed much. She had cut her hair short when she first left for college, but now it was growing long again, and she looked even more like her old self. She and Mira had matching hair as children, unruly curls that Julie had tried to straighten for a while, finally giving in to the inevitability of nature. Sometimes Mira would just look at her sister's hair when she talked, trying to focus on what little proof she had that the two of them had come from the same place.

Around ten Mira got tired of chopping, and excused herself to go to bed. Their dad still wasn't home. He always had to work later around holidays to make up for missed time. Mira was walking to the upstairs bathroom when she heard her mom and Julie talking downstairs, heard them mention her name. She looked down the stairs. They were sitting in the dining room, aprons still on, each of them holding a glass of wine.

“She's much better, I think,” her mom was saying. “The new school seems to have helped a lot.”

Mira sat down at the top of the stairs where they couldn't see her.

“She hasn't been having any of her episodes?” Julie asked.

“No. This whole food-allergy thing seems to be working.”

“You have to be tough with her. You guys let her get away with too much.”

“I'm just trying to keep her on track, make sure she takes care of herself.”

“Yeah, but are you taking care of yourself, Mom?”

“I'm fine.”

“Don't you get bored being at home so much?”

“There's enough to do with helping your sister. I'll go back to work eventually.”

The front door opened and Mira heard her dad come in. Julie yelled, “Daddy!” as if she were a little kid, running into her father's arms. Mira got up and went to the bathroom.

At noon the next day, Mira's grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins arrived, fifteen people in all, and somehow Julie and their mom managed to actually pull together food for all of them.

Mira spent the meal trying not think about the “special plate” her mother insisted on preparing for her, which meant she was not permitted to serve herself from what had been put on the table, a luxury even her seven-year-old cousin was allowed. She tried not to focus on the fact that her aunt had hugged her
for too long and whispered in her ear, “I pray for you every day.” Or that her grandparents had not asked her one question about what was going on in her life, but beamed more happily every time Julie uttered the word
Harvard
.

Sebby showed up as her mom and Julie were preparing dessert. The younger kids had begun running in circles through the house, periodically screaming for effect. Mira had an urge to join them. Sebby let himself in the front door and she nearly knocked him over with joy when she saw him.

“I'm in hell,” she said.

She squeezed him too tightly and he laughed.

“Oh really?” he said. “I've just come from an epic Thanksgiving potluck in the basement of Tilly's church, where her priest informed me over Jell-O salad that by not attending church regularly I am spitting in the eye of the generous saint who has allowed me to live with her.”

“It's not fair. You always win,” Mira said, releasing him.

“Will your mom let you leave?” he asked.

She looked into the kitchen, where her mother was cursing over a half-burned pie, while Julie attempted to fan away the smoke.

“I think so,” she said.

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I got the text from Mira around five. Dave liked to make his epic seven-course meal last most of the day, and we were just about to sit down for dessert. People had been stopping by earlier in the afternoon, my aunt, some neighbors, a few of my dad's coworkers, but none of them had made it this far.

“Amateurs!” Dad liked to taunt people whenever they insisted that they had to leave before Dave forced another perfectly crafted entrée on them.

I was lying on the couch in the living room with Dolly Parton the Cat, attempting to will my stomach to make room for Dave's famous pies, when my phone vibrated.

can we come over????
the text read.
we are desperate you must rescue us from our lives.

I read it again. They wanted to come over? I had talked about Mira and Sebby to Dad and Dave, but they were still an abstract idea to them. Presenting two actual humans felt like a
big step. And then there was the fact that I hadn't had a friend over in years, especially not since last spring. But of course I was excited that they wanted to come, that I could be the one to rescue them.

“Hey, Dad?” I called into the kitchen where my dad was hand-whipping the bowl of cream that Dave had placed in front of him.

“Come in here,” he called back. “Don't yell through the house like an animal.”

“Do animals yell?” I said, coming into the kitchen.

“May I help you?”

“Sebby and Mira were wondering if they could come over.”

“Do they want pie?”

“I don't know.”

“They're probably going to want pie. Dave?” He called into the dining room where Dave was clearing the plates from the previous course. “Is there enough pie for Jeremy's friends?”

“Okay, now you're yelling, Dad.”

“Of course,” Dave said, bringing the plates into the kitchen. “The more the merrier.”

I texted Mira the address and they were at the front door in fifteen minutes. I made introductions and we sat and ate Dave's amazing pies and Dad asked Dad-type questions and I sat there nearly silent, not knowing how to participate. This was new territory. Dad and Dave and Sebby and Mira. And me.

After dessert we helped Dave clean up and then went upstairs to my room. Sebby closed the door behind us and stood
leaning against it as if someone might try to barge in, eyes wide in shock.

“What?” I said.

“So that's your dad . . .” he said.

“Yes.”

“And Dave is . . .”

“My other dad.”

“You have two dads?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yes.”

“Gay dads? Two gay dads?” he said.

“Yes. My dads are gay.”

Mira was shaking her head.

“What?” I said.

“How could you not tell us, Jeremy?” she said.

“This is literally the coolest thing I have ever heard,” Sebby said, still barricading the door.

“It's not a big deal,” I said.

“It's a huge deal and we're furious with you,” Mira said.

“Why didn't you tell us?” Sebby asked.

I didn't say, “Because I need to protect them, and protect us, even from you.”

I didn't say that every day when I left the house I imagined words spray painted across our garage instead of my locker. That Dad and Dave lived in a carefully crafted world, one designed to keep us safe, to keep things normal, and that I had already done enough damage.

“Start at the beginning,” Sebby said, leaving the doorway
to come sit between us on the bed. “I need to know absolutely everything about this situation.”

“My mom and my dad got divorced right after I was born,” I said. “She moved away and left me with my dad. Dave moved in when I was two. He's been my second dad ever since. They got married last spring.”

Last spring before the incident. There had been a picture of them in the local paper along with a wedding announcement. The two of them smiling side by side, Dad's head tilted a little in Dave's direction. “Announcing the marriage of David Martinez and James Worth.” They had wanted me to be in the picture with them. I didn't want to do it. But the announcement mentioned me: “The couple have a son, Jeremy Worth, who is a freshman at St. Francis Preparatory School.”

Mira looked at Sebby, both of them shaking their heads.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“They're just dads. They're not cool or anything,” I said. “Dave is obsessed with Martha Stewart.”

“When your gay dads do anything, it's cool,” Sebby said.

I shook my head.

“Believe me. It's really not.”

Dave's Martha Stewart obsession was a running joke in our house. He had a special shelf where he saved her magazines in pristine condition. He would photocopy pages at work rather than tear them out for recipes or instructions on how to make the perfect handwoven rattan Christmas wreath. Dave's job was running the administrative end of the county's sanitation
department. Dad was a court clerk, and they had met when someone had tried to sue Dave's department. Dad always said he had never seen a neater-looking garbage man.

So because Dave thought about garbage all day he made sure that at the end of it he got to return to a spotless, perfect fantasy of a home.

“You certainly are a nester,” my dad would tease him whenever another elaborate holiday centerpiece was revealed.

Before the incident at school, my biological dad had always been the one trying to push me out of the nest, to convince me to go out into the world. But when I would come home early from another school event that my father forced me to attend, it was always Dave who was ready with freshly baked cookies in the kitchen, who would sit up with me as we made our way through the batch, dunking them in tall glasses of cold milk.

“I hated high school too,” he would say.

It was only after the incident that my dad stopped pushing me. As if he had started to understand that my high school experience might be different from his. And that if my life was going to be difficult he might not be the one who would be able to fix it.

And now, sitting on my bed with two very real, tangible friends, I could only imagine the conversation that Dad and Dave were currently having downstairs. I wondered if they had suspected that I'd made Mira and Sebby up.

The three of us sprawled out on my twin bed and watched
Miracle on 34th Street
on my little TV. By the time it was over we
were ready for more pie.

The full story of what had happened the previous spring was not something that anyone would ever know except for me and Peter. And even Peter didn't know just how wrong it all went.

It was early May. Peter had assigned
The Great Gatsby
as the final book of the year in his freshman English class. After all of my worrying, my first year of high school hadn't actually been so bad. I didn't have many friends, but it hadn't been the epic move into adulthood that had so terrified me back when I was at St. F Middle School. Eighth grade had seemed so final back then. The end of a childhood that I wasn't sure I was so ready to leave. But the move to high school had just been a changing of buildings. The same kids I had known forever were still there. And, new haircuts aside, we were still the same people that we always had been.

There was a reckless feeling in the air in Peter's class on the day we were supposed to discuss
Gatsby
. It was a Friday and he had opened the windows wide to the spring air. It took a while for him to get the class to even focus on the book, and then the conversation was mostly about the idea of the unreliable narrator.

“Doesn't he end up in a mental institution or something?” was Sarah's contribution.

“Just in the movie,” Peter said. “We did all read the book and not just watch the movie, right?”

The conversation eventually turned to the mysterious end of Chapter Two, after Nick Carraway ends up in a drunken apartment party in New York with Tom Buchanan and his mistress and the neighbors.

“It just trails off at the end,” Anna said. “They have this big party in Myrtle's apartment and then Nick and Mr. McKee end up downstairs, like, in his bedroom and then he doesn't say what happens. It's like, dot dot dot.”

“An ellipses,” Talia said. “It's called an ellipses.”

“Then it just goes to Nick alone in the train station.”

“Yeah, that part was weird,” Sarah said.

“Well, okay,” Peter said, smiling, always smiling, “what do you guys think that's about?”

He looked around the room and no one responded. Not even Talia. Talia, who always knew everything. She looked down at the book in front of her, flipped to the page that we were talking about.

“I mean, I think it's kind of obvious,” I said. Because it was. It was obvious to me, and why was no one going to say it?

“Great,” Peter said. “Tell us what you think, Jeremy.”

“I mean, uh . . .” I doubted myself for a moment, thought better of it, but then thought no. Peter was asking me. There was no reason not to respond.

“Well, there's that part about, ‘keep your hands off the lever' that seems like a kind of euphemism,” I said.

“For what?” Sarah asked.

“For, you know, hooking up. They're drunk and maybe Nick
doesn't remember so then he can't narrate it, or maybe Fitzgerald didn't want to spell it out like that, or maybe he couldn't. I mean, you couldn't really say stuff like that then. So he just kind of fast-forwards to after.”

I looked around the room. No one said anything. Talia's head was still in her book.

“Hook up?” Anna finally said. “Nick and Mr. McKee?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, they're alone in Mr. McKee's bedroom, and Mr. McKee's in bed in his underwear. It seems pretty obvious.”

There was what felt like a full minute of silence before Sarah just started laughing.

“Okay, thank you, Jeremy,” Peter said, but it was too late to save this moment from the direction in which it was now headed.

Sarah was laughing hysterically. “Yeah, obviously there's a gay sex scene in
The Great Gatsby
. Are you crazy?”

The boy who always sat next to Sarah, a jock named Tommy, had his head in his hands.

“That's just Jeremy's wishful thinking, that everything would be gay,” he said, as if this were the most predictable thing in the world.

“And you think ‘the lever' is a penis?” Anna sounded horrified.

“I'm not the first person to have this idea,” I said. “If you look online . . .”

“So you're just going online and searching ‘
Great Gatsby
gay
stuff'?” Sarah said. “Maybe you've been reading some kind of fan fiction or something.”

Tommy leaned over to Sarah and I thought I heard him say, “something something dads,” and Sarah laughed, and Peter started to say something but it was the bell finally that ended it, everyone rushing for the door even as Peter tried to say, “This is not the end of this conversation!”

But of course it was the end, because it was Friday, and then it was the weekend. And there was plenty of time for anyone who had not been in that room to hear about what I had said. And plenty of time for anyone in school for sports practice over the weekend to sneak over to the unsupervised locker aisles with a can of spray paint. Plenty of time for me to think that this had just been an embarrassing moment in English class and that was it. That my only lesson would be to think twice about speaking up next time.

Monday morning I got to school early. Before the buses had arrived. So I was the first person to see it, my locker tucked away in a back corner of one of the aisles, not visible to anyone passing by in the main hallway. And Talia was the second.

Jeremy
s 2 suk dix.

The heart was actually kind of sweet, round and girlish, a few drips of paint hanging down from the bottom. Bleeding heart.

“Oh my god,” Talia said, the two of us standing in that aisle that we had shared all year.

And then the noise of the buses arriving, the students
streaming in through the front doors. Talia grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the dean's office before they descended.

The dean called my dad and they had me wait for him in the teacher's lounge so that I wouldn't have to see anyone, except for Talia, who waited with me. We sat in silence at a table as the noise of the hallway streamed by outside. I tried not to hear what anyone was saying.

When Dad got there he talked to the dean alone for an hour. Then he came and got me from the teacher's lounge. He looked pale and angry. He put his arm around my shoulder and walked me to the car. I could feel the school watching us go.

Dave was there when we got home. We sat at the dining-room table and let Dad rage around the house, pacing through rooms, threatening to sue the school, to put the entire county court on the case.