Man up. I would have found the rebuke funny for the double entendre if it hadn’t sliced in like a paper cut and kept stinging. What, I wasn’t allowed to stand up for my friend? Mama wasn’t allowed to be upset if someone took a sucker punch at his weight? There was something deeply screwed up about that attitude. There is no world where “you’re wrong” is an acceptable answer to “this hurts.”
Man up. What a cleverly disguised way to say shut up. Shut up, or fight back, or you deserved what you got.
Everything was growing clearer. So this was why the guys had such an issue backing down—why Mama fought for the last word in every argument, why Erik wanted revenge for every prank, why Isaac said sorry like it was brine on his tongue. I finally understood it. No, I felt it. Rage was mounting inside me; not at Graves, somehow, but at Connor fucking Caskey for setting me up for humiliation in front of a teacher. There was nowhere else to put the anger except back where it came from.
I stormed away from the music quad. Soon, I realized my feet were carrying me toward Wingate. Around to the side door. Up four flights of steps, which I powered up mechanically, relishing the burn in my thighs.
When I stopped at room 420 and knocked on Isaac’s door, Harry yanked it open.
“What now?” he snapped. Harry was obviously suffering a postfinals hangover. His hair stuck out from his scalp at an impressively vertical angle; Band-Aids wrapped his fingertips. He’d probably resorted to playing his cello with his toes.
“Where’s Isaac?” I said. I needed him to talk me down. I needed his endless tangents and distractions.
“Oh my God.” Harry shoved his glasses up violently, as if they’d done him an unforgivable wrong. “Some guy literally just came by to grab his guitar for his EP thing, so probably Arlington or Prince? I don’t friggin’ know.”
Harry made to shut the door, but I frowned, slamming a palm onto the wood. Isaac had told me he’d finished recording all his guitar parts over break. And . . . some guy? Who would Isaac ever trust to touch his guitar?
“What guy?” I said.
“I don’t know. Dark hair. Weirdly tall.”
My fists clenched. I felt a strange excitement. The sun of anger in me lashed out a flare. “When did he leave?”
“I mean, you knocked about ten seconds after I shut the door, so—”
I spun away, scanning the hall. He couldn’t have come up this stairwell. I would’ve passed him.
I stalked down the hall, hunting. Halfway down, I broke into a sprint. Half-open doors flew by, issuing snatches of soothing study playlists, hints of violin and flute. The sheets of paper pinned to the walls rustled and flailed as I rushed by.
Up ahead, the elevator dinged.
I flung myself around the corner to the elevator bay and through the closing doors, smacking into Connor Caskey.
“Shit,” he said. We fell apart, I thumbed my glasses back into place, and he caught himself against the back wall of the elevator. His right hand was fastened about the neck of Isaac’s guitar, that smooth rosewood. Strips of cloudy mother-of-pearl in the fret-board glittered behind his fingers. He gripped so hard that white bays pooled around his fingernails.
Caskey straightened up. We stood at an impasse as I fought for breath. The elevator doors drew shut behind us, but the car didn’t budge. I glanced at the panel—I’d knocked him away before he’d pressed a floor.
I had him cornered. Finally. “Give me the guitar,” I panted, “or else.”
“Or else?” Caskey said, and took a tube of acrylic paint out of his jeans. He flicked the cap open, held Isaac’s guitar out, and lifted the tube. “How about you move, or else.”
The fury that had simmered all afternoon reached boiling point. Something snapped, blanking my mind out like a flood of white paint.
I charged.
As I crashed into him, the guitar slipped from his grip and landed hard against the wall. A discordant complaint rang out from the strings. My hand found the acrylic paint, forced it out of Caskey’s fingers, and somehow I had the presence of mind to cap it before flinging it in a generally backward direction.
Then, out of nowhere, Caskey’s curled knuckles found my face. They slammed my jaw with enough force to make glass shatter somewhere deep in my head. My teeth clocked together. Lights burst in the corner of my eye, and my glasses slipped askew, then off my face altogether.
More in shock than pain, I clutched at the pulsing site of impact. All logic, all reason, all thoughts abandoned me. Energy surged from my core into my blood, and suddenly I was wildfire, needing to get the rage out. Man up, yelled a voice in my head, and I threw a fist. It found its target, smacking deliciously into Caskey’s temple.
He reeled sideways, spat a curse, and bulled forward. I tried to push back, but there was so much of him, six and a half feet of wiry limbs and cream-colored sweater. My spine hit the elevator doors, a dart of pain that scrabbled down my back. I flung out a hand. The flat of my palm found the side of Caskey’s neck, and I dug my nails in, driving my knee up toward his crotch. It missed the mark, hitting his thigh.
He staggered, face ugly with rage, and sunk his fist in the soft bowl of my stomach. The wind flew out of me. I hunched over and gasped for breath, a cold rush flooding up to my collarbones.
He grabbed me by the hair, angled my face up, and the second hit landed on my cheekbone. The impact reverberated through my skull, sending a red shadow over my vision. Caskey’s grip ripped hairs out of my scalp. Tears pricked my eyes. I lurched forward, righted myself, started to lift my fists—
His third punch careened in like a battering ram and smacked me square in the nose. I crumpled back. Blood trickled over my lips into my open mouth, warm and coppery. The stream felt like it was coming down from my eyes, or my brain, or from the center of my head, and I cupped the dark liquid in one hand as it dribbled off the tip of my chin.
I was bent double, chest heaving.
“Good talk,” Caskey’s voice said. “Know what? Keep the guitar.”
I straightened up. “Fuck you.”
He clapped me on the back, but for once, he looked dead serious. “Have fun singing tomorrow.” He reached for the Door Open button, but I lurched in front of it.
“Come on, Zhang,” he said, sounding tired. “Move.”
“No,” I said, spraying flecks of blood toward him. He recoiled.
I drew slow breaths through my mouth. “I want to know what your problem is.”
A mulish look settled on his face. “And I don’t want to still be here talking to you.”
“You know what people say about you?” I caught my breath and gave him my best sneer, as much as I could with blood seeping over my mouth. I wiped my upper lip with the back of my hand. “You’re just bitter you didn’t get into the Sharps. Kind of sad, isn’t it, holding a grudge over that for four years?”
“Shut up.” A purplish flush rose into his white cheeks. “It’s not—you don’t understand.”
“Fine. Then explain.”
Caskey’s lips scrunched up. It clearly took everything he had to keep quiet.
My eyes fell to the guitar. “What, do you think you’re better than Isaac?” I said. “Think you should’ve gotten it instead of him, when you guys were freshmen? ’Cause I hate to break it to you, but nobody’s better than Isaac, man. Not me, not you, n—”
He burst. “It’s not Nakahara, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yeah? Then what is it?”
“I’m a Sharps legacy, okay?”
My mouth drooped open. We stared at each other for a second.
I couldn’t help it. I burst into laughter. It made my head pound—I had to stop. Get ahold of myself. “Are you fucking serious?”
His face purpled even more. He looked like a ripe plum. “I knew you wouldn’t get it,” he said, obviously trying for scorn, but it didn’t sound right. There was a desperate edge to his voice. “My dad was a Sharps president. My grandfather was in it, class of ’65. It’s not some stupid thing to laugh at, okay? It’s our life. Like you could ever understand tradition. You can’t—you don’t get it!”
The outburst rang around the elevator. Embarrassment flashed across his expression. Then he straightened up, fixed his face into unconcern, and tucked his dark hair into place behind his ear.
As I studied him, the comedy of it curdled slowly, leaving something foreign to me. What did I know about tradition? When I looked back on my own history, I had to trace a jagged path full of leaps and shifts, starting with that first transpacific jump: my dad’s parents emigrating from Beijing in the eighties, leaving everything they knew behind to give my teenage father California. Then I had my mother, traveling alone from Hong Kong in 1995. What had I inherited from her, really? What had carried over from my parents to me? There was such a massive divide between us, so much difference that they hardly had the cultural currency to relate to what my life was like, born and raised American.
But Connor: Suddenly I imagined his life in Boston, in the mansion Nihal had told me about, raised in the same ancient rooms his family had occupied for a century and a half. I remembered how slight Connor had looked on the Arlington stage as he stood opposite his father and played the part: the arrogant Princeton aspirant who would never fall short, never fall behind, and never fall for a sarcastic boy from New Jersey. I could still hear Dr. Caskey waxing nostalgic, trying desperately, pathetically, to relive everything through his son, to mold him into just what he wanted.
All at once I could see the crippling sameness of those generations. Connor turned transparent for a moment, and under his skin, I saw a patchwork of his father, his grandfather, and his grandfather’s father, Massachusetts men with only the smallest variations, pieced together from such a strict and immediate tradition that there was nothing left of him.
“You’re right,” I said. I felt distant from myself and from what we’d just done. “I don’t get it.”
I stepped aside from the panel of buttons. He looked at me a long time. A bruise was clouding into life on his proud forehead, where I’d gotten revenge. I regretted it, but it felt inevitable for him to wind up blue with bruises and hard with scar tissue. His father had been so proud of getting hurt. Growing up meant inheriting all your parents’ injuries.
He punched a button, the door slid open, and he disappeared.
A long time after Caskey’s footsteps faded, I leaned over and jabbed the first floor button with a thumb. It left a red smear on the clear plastic that came off with a swipe of my sweater sleeve.
I sagged against the paneled elevator wall. Everything felt swollen: my lips, my stomach, and my brain, which pressed against the confining walls of my skull as if trying to squeeze its way out into the open air. I slid a hand clumsily over my aching lips. Red kept running between my fingers. My vision was narrower than usual, bright and uneven around the edges.
The mirrored elevator doors slid shut and showed me myself. The bruise on my cheek was already darkening, and the lower half of my face was a bloody mess. For a moment it occurred to me that I’d never looked more like a man.
Then I couldn’t look at myself anymore. I’d done it. I’d gotten there. I’d trampled out every last vestige of who I used to be. Rest in Peace to my former self. It had taken this for me to miss anything of what I’d had before, when I’d been unsure and awkward—but God, at least back then I’d been able to recognize myself in a fucking mirror.
And then tears rushed hot to the inside corners of my eyes, and I began to cry. Some gasping spot of relief uncurled in the center of my chest, cathartic, freed. I held myself against the wall, my shoulder slipped down the paneling, and I crouched right there and sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. My mouth stretched wide, and the blurry world jerked and sharpened as the tears unfastened themselves from my eyes, molten down my cheeks. I felt stupid and small, caught up in the pursuit of something I had no business chasing down. Victory, or honor, or selfish vindication. All this bullshit that guys were taught to care about.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of it, or that it was too much for me to carry. It was that it didn’t matter, did it? Did it really matter at all?
I drifted over a stamped-down track of snow connecting Wingate’s back entrance and the music quad. The thoughts in my head moved like treacle. Ice, went one. I scooped up a handful of wet, heavy snow and pressed it to the bridge of my nose. Nest, went the next. Home. I sniffled a bit, and tight pain shot up from my nose, dispersing over my forehead.
Blood droplets hit the snow, marring the shadows with school-spirit carnelian. I left a trail in my wake. The cold numbed my face and froze my fingers around Isaac’s guitar. By the time I reached Prince, the bleeding had slowed, almost stopped. The punches I’d taken to the side and stomach had roared into prominence on the way over, making every step feel like one of Hercules’s labors.
My glasses steamed up when I walked in. Stern silence wallpapered Prince Library, punctured by the clicking of keys and scratching of pens. Music kids occupied every chair, filled every sofa. Others huddled in groups on the oaken floor, clustered around outlets with laptop screens illuminating their faces, like survivalists after an apocalypse gathered around their campfires.
I steadied my stride and breathed quietly through my mouth, keeping my face aimed down. Nobody even glanced at me. Final papers were due at 7:00 p.m. In the last academic sprint of the semester, everything else turned transparent.
In the stifling air, sweat beaded on the back of my neck. They’d turned the heat up in every building, overcompensating for the ten-degree weather. I climbed staircase after staircase. In the antechamber that led up to the Nest, I had to stop halfway up the stone steps. I thought I might throw up, my stomach hurt so badly.
At last, I turned the knob and all but collapsed into the Nest. It was blessedly temperate, the only warmth issuing from the space heater beneath a window.
The only other person there sat at the piano, his back to me, scribbling a paragraph on a pad of college-ruled paper. Looking at him, navy sweater stretched over his narrow shoulders, his horrible posture and the way his head was always tilted a fraction to the left, I thought I might cry, and I wasn’t sure why.
Isaac clicked his pen and turned around. His eyes fixed on my nose, my mouth. The blood coating the ridges of my upper lip. His mouth drifted open.
“Hey,” I managed.
“Holy shit.” Isaac snatched the tissue box off the top of the piano and crossed the room in five long strides. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“Careful,” I said. “Your guitar.” My voice came out thick. It made the top of my nose buzz.
In one impatient motion, he took the guitar from my hand and chucked it onto the sofa. “Who did this?” he said, his eyes darting from my cheekbone to my nose to my mouth.
I glanced back to the door and twisted the lock. It took time. My clumsy fingers wouldn’t respond; it was like trying to control someone else’s hands. I wiped my mouth with the flat of my palm, feeling like a child.
“I caught Connor trying to ruin your guitar,” I said, unzipping my coat. “In Wingate. We—I don’t know. Fought.” I gestured at my face, and a twinge of discomfort flashed across my torso. I swayed and sat down on my armchair’s arm, sliding my glasses off.
“Caskey did this?” Isaac said. A murderous look twisted across his face. “When I see him, I’m going to—”
“No,” I said heavily. My eyes closed. “Don’t. No more fighting, no more anything. Please.” I took a few deep breaths. “He’s just confused. He’s just trying to figure his shit out. Let’s just let each other get better for a second.”
When I cracked my eyes back open, Isaac was giving me a strange look, curious and fierce. He turned away the second I saw. “Okay,” he said. “Right.”
Isaac unlatched the nearest window and scooped up a handful of snow from the sill outside. I maneuvered my way out of my backpack, moving gingerly, and Isaac moved back to my side, stretching out a cloud of damp tissues. I reached up, but he was already pressing them against my chin.
I closed my eyes and tried to ignore my stabbing headache, my throbbing bruises. The tissues passed over my mouth, against the creases of my nose, so gently I felt no pressure, just the cold sapping the heat from my skin. I took breaths past my aching teeth.
“Is it still bleeding?” I asked. A nasal hum edged my voice.
“Doesn’t look like it,” he said.
The tissues skirted my lower eyelids, pressing away the tear tracks that had crusted up as I walked. When he slid the tissues over my cheekbone, pain burst open on the spot like a bitter flavor. I flinched back.
“Shit. Sorry.” His voice was close. I opened my eyes. My face prickled with cold evaporation. A chill blustered through the open window, at odds with the sunset that smoldered like coal in the clear sky.
“What happened to the talking thing?” he said, flicking the tissues into the trash. “Beating each other up is kind of eye-for-an-eye.”
“It’s the Greek tragedy coming out again,” I said feebly. “Retribution, you know? I thought about sacrificing him to Zeus, but it would’ve been messy.”
He didn’t smile. “Hilarious,” he said. Then two of his fingers were hovering over the swollen curve of my cheekbone. I might have imagined the ghost of their warmth. “But this isn’t actually funny, Julian. I mean, Jordan.”
My heart took an unsteady swerve. I kept my voice level. “Taste of your own medicine, Mr. Walk-on-Thin-Ice.”
“That’s not the same. I, unlike some people here, don’t get hurt for real.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, quiet and hoarse. “I kind of make it a habit.”
His fingers landed against my cheek, two points of light contact. Second by second, my focus gathered around his touch. Ignore it, I told myself. Glancing down, I studied the dots of snow that salted the flagstone floor, the tight knots of Isaac’s black sneakers, the white corners worn into his jeans pocket where he tucked his phone, and the cable knit of his sweater. But then my gaze slid up too far, brushed his, and stuck. My composure slipped out of my strangling grip. His eyes were the warm black of velvet.
His touch on my cheek became a conduit for everything I couldn’t say: the admissions I couldn’t make; the wants I couldn’t let myself want; and the fears that came from trusting someone more than he’d deserved. I kept quiet. Isaac would take his hand away, step back, and leave this weird silence where it hung in the air, to extinguish safely. And I would look down at the bloodstains on my dad’s old coat, and it would still be December 12th, two days before I left this place for good. Silence was the right answer here.
But he didn’t back up. He slid his hand forward, his callused fingers brushing over my ear into my hair. The stiff heel of his hand rested against my jaw.
I pressed the tiniest bit against his touch, a breath slipping between my lips. His expression was written in uncertainty and signed in curiosity.
I slipped forward on the armchair and rose back to my unsteady feet, nearly his height. His hand stayed in place, palm fitting warm against my cheek, and his eyes stayed searching mine, as if I were hiding answers inside instead of a rippling well of confusion. The wind mumbled past the window. The space heater emitted its determined hum. A whisper of breath from him drowned it all out. He was so close.
Isaac swallowed. My gaze darted down to his neck, the bobbing movement of the sharp curve in his throat. My thoughts fragmented as I thought of the voice in him, always going, never tired. The whisper that had brushed my forehead in November in the cinema. The scraping words in Jon Cox’s attic as the dawn snuck up. The raw edges of his solos that tore at me every time he sang, and tore at the crowd during concerts, leaving us all dumbstruck afterward. This boy put so much of himself into his voice and spent all his time giving it away.
His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth, and then his other hand found my hip, and I realized I wanted him. With the strength of a thousand gravities, I wanted this. What would he feel like against me? Would he be uncertain, or reckless, or something else entirely, showing some facet I hadn’t seen? I wanted his quick, string-callused hands on me.
Where was his impulse now? Where had that gone?
I placed a hand uncertainly on his chest. One of the questions in his eyes resolved. He tilted his head, and we moved together. Then my eyes were shut, and my mouth was landing softly against his. The aching, for a second, melted away.
The moment froze. A moment of feeling, just for a second, what it was like—him and me, lip to lip, tense and hesitant.
He pressed forward. His lips were rough and bitten, scraping mine like salt. The tip of his nose dug into my cheek, and as I drew a breath, the smell and taste of him rushed in, bittersweet and biting.
I reached up and slipped my fingers into his dark hair. It felt how I’d imagined, thick and rough, tangled as if he’d walked out of a hurricane. I hadn’t known I’d been imagining it at all.
He pressed too hard and too far, mouth clumsy and immobile, all movements of the head and neck. My nose bumped his, and pain darted up between my eyes. I drew back too fast, remembering myself: my bruises, my swellings, the penciled shading in my eyebrows, and my shapelessness under layers of disguises. I was a collage of cover-ups and bad decisions.
But Isaac didn’t seem to have remembered any of that. He was looking at me as if he couldn’t breathe from self-doubt. I read it right out of his eyes: Did I fuck it up? Is this okay? Am I okay? And I knew, somehow, that if I didn’t reassure him, he’d cut and run. I’d lose him, this time, across the river.
I knew Isaac longed to be the mask he wore every day: all instinct, no caution. But I looked at him now and saw a boy made out of contingency plans.
He didn’t need one. Not with me.
I leaned up and kissed him again. He pulled me in until we were flush together. Heat snarled up beneath my heart. The quick ache in my chest had turned huge and yearning.
My perpetual doubt clamored up. Is this right, Jordan? it nagged. Is this stupid? Is this plummeting feeling something you want to escape, or something you want to let spin down to your core? And if you give yourself over—if you close your eyes and let gravity have its way—what’s it going to feel like when you hit the ground?
What if it hurts?
What if it hurts, all over again?
When he leaves you too, what if it’s as bad as it used to be?
Shut up, I thought. Shut up and let yourself be happy for a second.
For once, my brain obliged, going blissfully silent, but it wasn’t happiness that bloomed up to fill the silent aftermath. It was closer to shock, the instant of shock that follows an accidental glance into the sun, painful and immense and consuming. Closeness felt like that after being untouched for a while.
The world was quiet. Isaac’s hand was rough on the back of my neck, his thumb drawing designs over my skin.
As we kissed, tentative turned to urgent, before fading back to gentle, and finally—when we pulled back—he rested his forehead against mine. I didn’t find any guarantees in his eyes. For a moment, I wished I could see certainty there, the cocky arrogance of absolute surety. For a second, I imagined him saying, This is going to be everything, the words Michael had whispered at the start of our relationship with burning eyes—with authority.
I knew better, though. Isaac was panic over whether to call and the murmured admission that the world was too big and too furious and too much to make sense. He wasn’t about to patch my doubts and make me whole; he wasn’t going to be my cornerstone; he wasn’t the blanket stretched taut to catch me when I fell. He was this nervous kid, playing with matches and dancing around gasoline, and I was this nervous kid, shying back from the firelight, and we were here nervous together, acting like we had it figured out—as if we hadn’t already learned what it looked like to see each other pretending.