“Julian?” he breathed. “What—what is—what?”
I stepped back, the world splintering in my head. Run, was my first, stupid, thought. Sprint down the steps and away, and never look back. Second instinct: whack Isaac on the head with the nearest heavy object. That always messed up short-term memory in movies, right? Third thought: If I have latent powers of invisibility, now would be an awesome time for them to show up.
He let out a tiny, incredulous sound, but I held one finger to my lips, giving my head a violent shake. This was no time for Isaac-babble. I grabbed his forearm, dragged him around the door, and yanked him up to the attic.
Once the attic door clicked shut, I hit the lights and faced him. His bleary eyes wouldn’t focus. “What is happening?” he jabbered. “Are you—is—”
“Shh. Hey. Calm down.” I glanced down at myself, at the towel I was still clutching. “Turn around, okay?”
Looking pretty much catatonic, Isaac rotated to face the round window.
I grabbed my T-shirt and sweatpants from the bed, pulled them on, and hung the towel from a hook on the door. “All right,” I said. “So.”
Isaac turned back around, looking like he’d figured it out. “So, um, you’re trans? Sorry I freaked out, it—”
“No.”
His bafflement reappeared. “Then—”
“I’m a girl. I’ve just been cross-dressing.” I scrambled for words. “Everything else I told you is true. I swear. Who I am, where I’m from.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “Except, um, my name’s Jordan, and I’m not a guy.”
He gave his head a hard shake, and then another, as if he were trying to dislodge a stubborn bit of water from his ear. “But why did you—why are you doing this?”
“I didn’t get cast in the musical, because my voice is. Well. My voice. And I’d heard about the competition, and I wanted—I don’t know.”
The incredulity faded from Isaac’s expression. A light frown creased his high forehead.
Was he angry?
I looked down, picking at the fuzzy specks that had accumulated on my sweatpants. “I mean, it was the competition, but then it turned into . . .” Being part of something. Finally, someone else at Kensington had known me again, like only Michael had.
“It’s stupid, I know,” I muttered. “Like I couldn’t have found some more normal way.”
My hope collapsed like a house of cards, fluttering down to nothing. It was over. I’d reached the end of the road I’d been paving all semester, throwing stones desperately at the ground and getting lucky as they stuck.
None of this felt real. I felt like I should want to cry, but nothing came, not a burn to the eyes or a tightening in my throat. Nothing. Some shield of self-preservation had come between me and myself.
A weight depressed the bed beside me. I looked over at Isaac, who inspected my jaw, my nose, my eyebrows. All my features, recontextualized. He looked wary.
“Um,” he said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe?”
“It’s like twenty-two degrees out.”
“It can be a short walk.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
By the time we crept out of the house, I’d regained some composure. I huddled inside Dad’s winter coat, my hands deep in the pockets. Isaac and I sidled through sheets of snow toward the riverbank. At the edge, in the frozen slate of mud and leaves, we stopped still, and the hush settled down in the glade around us.
Time spun out, loosely unspooling. The pair of us had never been quiet for this long. Every time I thought I had something to say, it slipped on my tongue and fell away. I waited for Isaac to unleash the fast-paced monologue—or, if not, to let some angry instinct take over, lash out with something that would hit hard. He said nothing at all.
We didn’t look at each other for a long time. When we did, it happened at the same second, and we looked away instantly, like children who’d been caught staring at something rude or dangerous. I examined the flat band of the river, lying lazy and glittering under the moon. On the opposite bank, the snow seized and spun the cold light like a long tray of quartz chips.
Isaac broke the silence, finally. “It’s, um,” he said. His voice was warm and neutral. “It’s kind of unbelievable you pulled this off for three months.”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you even . . . ?”
I waved vaguely at my face. “I wear a lot of makeup when I’m in girl mode.”
His eyes fixed on my hair. “And a wig or something, I’m guessing?”
“It’s from the costume shop. I’m going to return it, I swear. Just . . . for now.” I twisted my scarf tighter. “And the voice, um, I do a lot of shifting my voice register for my theater classes anyway, since they want me to sound more like a girl.”
“You do sound like a girl,” Isaac said. “I mean, now you do. Mostly. This voice.” Realization filled his words. “After the dance, too, you sounded . . .” He trailed off. The sentence rerouted. “Wait. Didn’t you make out with Victoria Taylor?”
“Yeah. I’m bi, as far as I can tell, so.”
He chuckled. “As far as you can tell.”
“No, I’m serious. I was in this relationship that I’m only now kind of over, and it was impossible for me to figure it out, with that in the way. He took up all my attention, all the time, so . . . yeah, distracting.”
“Huh,” he said. “It just seems like that would be a thing you couldn’t not know.”
“Well, yeah, there were signs, but I don’t know. I thought they were something else, I guess, or I wasn’t focusing on myself hard enough to see what was there. It just got confusing when I did.” I curled my hands in my pockets. “I don’t like not knowing things.”
“I know,” he said, with a touch of amusement.
More silence. We went back to observing the river. I imagined I heard it rushing under that thick coat of ice, rolling dark and quick over its bed.
My voice came out in a feeble little mumble. “Do you think the guys are going to be mad?”
He didn’t answer right away. Obviously, whispered the unspoken response. How could they be anything but livid?
“I mean,” Isaac said carefully, “do you want to tell them?”
My heartbeat became a thudding drum in my ears. “You’d cover for me?”
“Sure.”
“Why?” I asked.
He was still examining the river. “I mean, it’s obvious, right? You didn’t give me away, either.”
The words made my heart slow.
I let myself look at him for the first time, really look. I never looked at the Sharps more than necessary. Whenever we made eye contact, I felt sure they’d read the truth right out of my eyes somehow. So I avoided it. But it was 3:55 a.m., and I had no more energy for avoidance.
Isaac’s thick hair was down for once, hanging in rumpled layers. Moonlight washed his profile. His lips looked chapped and bitten, and acne scars pitted his cheekbones. His thick eyebrows tapered above his narrow eyes, making him look perpetually serious or frustrated.
His calmness was giving me dangerous courage, making me want to say, Forget it. Tell the guys, and if they hate me, that’s that. Get everything out in the open. Finally, I’d be able to talk to the Sharps as myself, without filters, without constantly thinking, What would a boy say? How would a boy act? Is this the way a boy should be? As if there were a right way to be a guy.
I’d never been a one-of-the-guys type of girl. Jenna and Maria and I went way back to the first grade playground, and we’d adopted Shanice in seventh grade, when she’d transferred to our school. We, the Fearsome Foursome of Buchanan Middle School, had never needed boys—they’d been irritants or decorations, hovering around the fringes of our lives. Back then, we’d gotten a lot of the same from guys—panicked teasing in middle school, desperate teasing, the type that screamed notice me! or like me! or concede to me!
Now, when I came back for summers, we hung out with Jenna’s wide collection of guy friends—about half of whom had mustered up the bullheadedness to ask her out, even though they knew she was lesbian—and they smirked and pushed each other around and talked shit, talked loud, talked over each other. For the first time, now, I wondered what they’d tamped down beneath that. What were they hiding under the rusty, outdated suits of armor they climbed into before talking to girls? Were they frustrated romantics, like Jon Cox? Know-it-alls, like Mama? Still figuring out how to treat the world, like Erik?
Or maybe they were like the boy in front of me. So impulsive that he got thoughtless, saying anything, doing anything, forgetting himself. For once, there he was in silence, in stillness, all tangled up in knots, this kid standing next to me on the bank.
“Thanks,” I murmured, my throat tight.
“No problem.”
“Listen. Isaac.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask about your dad?”
He met my eyes. I couldn’t read his. “What about him?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Like, about the surgery?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, um. He got in this wreck and fractured his femur, so they put a titanium rod in his bone to hold it together. It got infected, so they had to take him out of physical therapy rehab and put him back in the hospital. He’s in rehab again now. My mom looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.” He paused. “It was kind of weird. He’s a comedian, I might’ve told you that? He writes for late-night shows and SNL and stuff. Does some stand-up. I swear to God I’ve never seen him go so long without cracking a joke about something. He was so, just . . . I don’t know. He looked like eighty years old. Or like someone made a wax copy of him and made it a little too small.”
After a second, he said, “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. I just thought, if you haven’t talked about it with anyone, you might want to.”
“I guess.” Isaac looked down. He was stretching the edge of his thick sweater over his thumb. “I mean, thanks. But I don’t know. There’s some stuff that it kind of doesn’t feel right to talk about. You know?”
“Like how?”
“I mean, if it makes you get all weird. I don’t feel like me, talking about some stuff. Like, who’s this boring sad boy who’s probably going to go home and listen to depressing indie rock until he stops feeling shitty? Who wants to talk if it’s just going to get you upset? What good’s that going to do?”
I folded my hands under my arms, warding off the piercing cold. I knew exactly what he meant. I’d thought about bringing up my dad’s hospital stay, to commiserate or relate, but that episode was wound so tightly into the way my family had lived for the past year—hell, the way we’d lived for most of my life—that it felt too huge even to touch. I didn’t know who I would be if I let myself talk about it.
But I knew how it would go if I did muster up the courage to broach the topic. I would start to talk and for a minute I would hate it. The next minute, I would feel exposed and jumpy and paranoid, but as if I were pushing at a door that needed to be opened. The next minute, I wouldn’t be able to stop talking. And then—after a long time—
“You keep going until it feels better again,” I said quietly. “Catharsis.”
“Right.”
“In theater, that’s the whole thing with Greek tragedy. You take the audience through the—like, the realest shit, the tearing out the eyes or the worst possible thing, and then on the other side it’s like coming out of boiling water and you’re clean.”
“Life’s not a Greek tragedy.”
After a long second, I shrugged. “I mean, if you didn’t sleep with your mom by mistake, that’s fine, but don’t go around acting all superior to the rest of us.”
Isaac gave me an amused look. The corner of his mouth lifted a fraction, and then a broad smile cut his face, a slash of white teeth. “All right, you win,” he said. He spread his hands and took a few steps back. “You go ahead and handle the tragedy stuff. I’ll just be over here.” He edged up on the river and placed one foot on the ice.
My hand flew out. “Wait—”
“I tried it earlier. It’s fine.” Isaac gave a demonstrative stamp. Not even a groan from the ice—just a heavy thunk, like oak hitting oak. He walked out onto the river.
“Isaac, wait!”
His steps slowed. He halted by an arm of driftwood thrust out from the ice plane, a dark spar like a ship’s mast. He glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“It gets thinner in the center. There are currents under there. You want this trip to have a body count?”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s got to be a foot of ice out here.” He had that look in his eye. The feverish delight of acting out. The adrenaline of it. He didn’t move away from the driftwood. “Stop looking at my feet.”
“What if it breaks?”
He shrugged. “It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I know.”
I shook my head. “Why don’t you take care of yourself, huh?”
Isaac’s head tilted. He looked uncomprehending. A bit of lostness around the angle of his brow.
The wind had picked up again. Loose snow was eddying around his feet. I pictured the ice rupturing, a dark gash of river opening wide.
“Come on,” I said. My voice was quiet, but he could hear just fine. We were locked in a snow globe together. “We can go inside,” I said. “It’s cold.”
He took a halting step my way. Then another. The ice creaked as he approached. The wind picked up as he crossed the lip of the river, mounting the bank. He stopped in front of me.
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t think it . . . I don’t know.”
You’re a runner, I wanted to say. I’m a runner too. Rather sprint for the hills than hold on to something you can’t figure out.
I said, “It’s all right,” and we headed back for Jon’s house, the oasis of light shimmering in the blue-dark snow.
We wound up back in the attic. Isaac wanted to see the wig. I hadn’t taken it along. Instead, I unlocked my phone and showed him the shot of the Greek Monologue class for our upcoming showcase, where I stood at the end of the row, bright-pink lipstick and long hair. It was 4:15 a.m., and everything had turned vivid with sleepless delirium, everything tenser and funnier and more electric than it should have been. We wound up stretched on the bed, side by side, staring at the ceiling, talking music and home and nothing at all. His guitar was a gift from his mother, so expensive he’d wanted her to return it. My mom’s most valuable present had always been her time.
In the slanted attic ceiling, a set of narrow skylights displayed slices of the outside world. Pine branches shivered overhead. A hollow moan of wind passed by, distant, a ghostly lullaby. I had thawed from the trip outside, my muscles tired and empty.
A glittering spray of snow toppled from the branches and scattered across one of the skylights. Time slowed. There was nothing pressing at the edges of the night anymore, not the dawn, not the day. The sun would never come up. The flakes of snow in the yellowing moonlight would keep shifting and dancing for years, graceful in the dark.
“I’m kind of glad you found out,” I murmured. It came out vanishingly quiet.
Isaac hesitated. The mattress warped as he edged back. In my peripheral vision he moved into a slender cut of moonlight, his hands folded behind his head. When he spoke, his voice had softened a fraction. “Weight off your chest?”
“Yeah.” Something like that. Relief always came after guilt, one way or another. “Have you ever lied for three months?”
“I don’t think I could.”
I half-smiled. “Must be weird having morals or whatever.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I definitely lie all the time. Dumb little things. People will be like, what’d you do this afternoon? And I’ll be like, oh, I was studying, when actually I watched Netflix for a few hours and ate about four metric ass-tons of cheese puffs.” He yawned. “But it’s never anything somebody’s going to hold me accountable for.”
“Except the past couple weeks.”
“Right. And it was the worst. I can’t imagine three months of that. Honestly, I don’t think I have the patience.”
I was still and quiet, wanting to tell him that the patience couldn’t hold a candle to the isolation. How could I explain the ever-present tightness in my chest? The sense that between me and the rest of the school, I’d built an indestructible wall? The sense that I would never belong again, with Kensington, with my friends at home, with the Sharps—maybe even with myself, inside my own head?
“Sometimes I’m trying to go to bed,” I said, finally. “And I just think about the people who know me.”
After a second, he said, “The actual you, you mean.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to sound pathetic. But it felt good to let it out. “You guys are kind of my only friends here, and it’s not even real.”
“No offense, but how’d you go freshman and sophomore year without making friends?”
I gave a humorless laugh. “Because my ex was my whole life, and then he—” I cut myself off. Don’t get into it. “He, um. Graduated. And we don’t talk.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes. Tiny confetti shapes danced behind my eyelids, cartwheeling down over the darkness. My brain felt wrung out.
“It’s kind of funny,” Isaac said.
“What is?”
“It . . .” He paused. “I mean, we’re so comically, laughably tiny. You know? The universe is expanding forever, and there are nebulas a hundred billion miles away, like, spectacularly shitting out stars, and suns collapsing every twenty seconds, and essentially what I’m trying to say is that we’re the tiniest speck of dust on an infinite space plain and our lives are these insignificant little minuscule pinpricks on the timeline.”
His spiel petered out into quiet. Outside, the wind was back. That low, gentle whistle.
“And?” I said.
“And what?”
“You said it’s funny. What’s the punch line?”
“I guess I was going to say, like . . . all this, and human beings act like it’s such a big deal if you talk a little deeper than usual and wear baggier clothes. That was going to be the punch line, I don’t know, if there was one. I’m not the comedian, ask my dad.”
An exhausted chuckle fell out of my mouth.
Isaac’s voice had turned scratchy and slow with sleep. “But now I kind of want to say, with all that going on, I guess it’s no surprise the world feels totally unmanageable sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. I felt like I might melt into the covers and the mattress and the carved bed frame. It all cradled me like gentle hands. I kept thinking of home, for some reason, but in a quieter, sweeter way than usual. No worry. Just my mother humming me to sleep, and my father content in bed. “But it keeps turning,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So at least there’s that.”
“Yeah.”