January 1
Isaac was quiet in sleep, and still. For a moment I looked at him, his planes and valleys equalized, everything about his face flattened and hazed by the half-light of the opening morning. The glow snuck in through the airplane window.
“Hey,” I whispered, brushing the back of his hand.
Jon Cox had been assigned the boarding pass reading 27A, but when we’d filed down the aisle a few hours ago, he’d stood aside, waving me in beside Isaac. “All yours,” he mumbled, and sat in the seat I’d been assigned, in front of us, where Isaac put his knees up on the back of his chair for three hours just to piss him off. True gratitude.
Now the guys, like everyone else on the plane, were unconscious. We’d reached the fatigue section of the flight; we’d all given up on the ambitions we’d had sitting down. I had abandoned my plan to marathon three movies in a row after finishing the first, which was discouragingly terrible. Nihal’s sketchbook, meant to document the trip from top to bottom, was slipped into a seat back as he slept silently against the porthole window behind us.
Isaac stirred next to me. He pawed at one eye to wake up, a little clumsy. When he saw me he smiled. “What’s up?”
“I think we should talk before we get to the airport.” After we touched down in Newark, the eight of us would split, half to connecting flights, half done with the journey. For me, it was another six-hour leg to San Francisco.
“Yeah,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Okay.”
The drone of the plane engines hummed along. I took a deep breath. “So, I guess . . . do you want to keep this going when I’m home?”
He thought about it, and kept thinking. My thoughts began to fray, excitement into anxiety, hope into dejection. This was it. The moment he told me he didn’t care, or not in the right way, or not enough. Here, again, another moment of letting go.
“How are you feeling about it?” he asked. “Do you want to stay together?”
Obviously, I thought. This is a terrible sign, I thought.
“I mean,” I said, “I want to try.”
But then relief eased his expression. “All right.” He leaned forward, resting the side of his head on Jon Cox’s seat. He studied me. “Then let’s try.”
I let out a slow breath. My hand loosened on my wrist, which I had been squeezing, afraid. But it was all right. I wouldn’t have to look back on this as a hinging moment that swung the track from hope to hurt, yes to no. At least for now, we were still on the rails together.
“But you have to be honest,” I whispered, after a moment.
“About what?”
“Everything. I’m serious, everything.” I swallowed. “Don’t keep something from me because you think I can’t handle it. If something happens, or if you’re not feeling it anymore. If—if there’s someone else. Just tell me.”
Comprehension started to settle into his face. “Jordan.”
“Because I can get hurt. That’s fine. But I don’t want to feel stupid again. Ever.”
He reached for my hand and squeezed.
“Can you do that?” I said hoarsely. “All honesty, full disclosure?”
“Can you?” he said.
It took me aback for a moment. Then I tightened my hand on his. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna try. I’m gonna always try.”
The coolness of the San Francisco January still felt tropical compared to the weather of the last couple months. I stepped off the bus in the early afternoon—half my day having reappeared thanks to time zones—and it growled off. The brisk wind flicked my short hair. I needed to trim the back, which was approaching mullet status.
The few blocks I walked to get home were in the middle of a serious identity crisis. My building, similar to the ones flanking it, was a mildewing brick face painted the perfect mathematical average between gray and brown. The only color was a greenish awning, which stretched over the glass doors of a shuttered business, and the snatches of muted reds behind window screens, two by two, four stories up. But from where I stood in front of our building, I saw sleek new projects in chic pastels not even a block away, with crisply trimmed bay windows and Victorian flourishes. When I was in elementary school, there’d been cheap brick housing rising high from that corner.
Everything was how I remembered it. The percussion of the passing cars blending into the groan of the outside door. The echo and faint stink in the stairwell. The cheerful barking of the lapdog on the second floor, the amused Spanish chatting of the lady in 3C. The light that caught all the dust. My front door.
I pulled my suitcase in and wedged the door shut. A bright, narrow hall stretched ahead, with old family photographs and certificates of my achievements taped to the wall at my left. Our four rooms lined up to the right: bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen. My parents’ voices were bouncing around the space.
I kicked off my shoes and headed for the kitchen. The suitcase’s wheels down the hall sounded like the hollowness of the highway. I stopped in the threshold, feeling the exhausted relief of a homecoming.
My father sat at the table at the far side of the room, a can of beer in front of him, crosswords and papers scattered before our ancient computer. My mother stood up from the table, her thick hair escaping its neat left part. She rushed to me, her cheeks two bubbles of restrained smile. “Give me a hug,” she said, preempting this by binding me into a hug. I let my suitcase go and hugged her tightly. She’d gained weight; she threatened to spill out of my arms.
“Getting so thin again,” she said. “They must not feed you anything.”
She let go and looked up at me—“Your beautiful hair, ai yah,”—and with a single tsk of her tongue, turned away to fuss with my suitcase, rolling it back down the hall. I approached my dad, who wheeled his chair my way and reached out an arm. I leaned down to tuck my head over his shoulder as we hugged. “Welcome back,” he said gruffly.
As we separated, I glanced over his crossword. “This one’s Monaco, I think,” I said, pointing. “Kelly Monaco.”
Dad filled it in. “Can’t ever finish them,” he said. “There’s always something or other. Actors, baseball players . . . I don’t know how they expect me to know who these people are. Look at this—I can’t get half the questions. Useless.” He dropped the pen and leaned back with a sigh. I found myself smiling. I’d somehow managed to miss my father’s constant dissatisfaction. Between him and my mother, I was the least perfectionist member of the family, which was a pretty pathetic state of affairs.
My attention shifted from the crossword to the papers scattered around it. I frowned, my eyes catching on the Kensington-Blaine logo.
I picked the top sheet up. The transfer application was only half filled in. “Mom,” I called, turning around, “shouldn’t you guys have mailed this in by now?”
She reappeared in the threshold of the kitchen, exchanging a long glance with my dad. It held volumes. Something in that glance, or in the air, told me there’d been a sea change between them. Maybe this wasn’t just a peaceful period. Maybe it was really and truly peacetime again.
“Mom?” I repeated, after a moment.
She sighed. “We’ve been talking with a woman from your school. Reese Garrison, who sent us the form. She told us to wait until the New Year, so. We waited.”
“And?” I said.
“And—” My mom waved her hands, a dismissive flourish. “I thought with the plays, if they didn’t cast you, they didn’t care. But this woman’s really pushing.”
Dad spoke up. “She called a couple days ago and told us about a School Board meeting they had this break. She said every year there’s a motion to change the financial aid, so she brought in a petition about what you did this semester, had a list of faculty sign it, and it—” He waved at the papers. “You can read it. She sent us a copy.”
I rifled through the papers and found a page-long letter with Reese’s signature. I scanned it, my heart beating faster and faster. By the conclusion, I was lightheaded: “. . . this social disguise project embodies the aggressive, real-life approach to artistic and, more specifically, theatrical applications we seek to engender in our student body. It shows a keen interest in both character study and improvisation, and from the length of the commitment, a dedication to the Kensington ideal: art through perseverance. Unfortunately, Ms. Sun’s financial experience with the academy demonstrates a fundamental weakness of Kensington’s current policy. She is one example of the losses we incur annually—not of funds but of exceptional academic and creative talent. We fail current students and applicants alike by using an outdated, limiting financial aid system. Luckily, the Board has the capacity to create change, and to work toward a more comprehensive, realistic network of support for low-income, often first-generation students.”
I lowered it. God, Reese had made cutting off all my hair and cross-dressing sound like a dissertation.
“So what happened?” I asked hoarsely. “What’d she say?”
“Well, I guess they passed it,” Dad said, one finger tracing the crossword absentmindedly. It occurred to me how contented he looked. “Six votes to five,” he said, “starting this semester. They credited us for your flight back already.”
The paper was crumpling in my hand. “And can I get on that flight?” I asked, and I knew the answer, had known it from the second my mother admitted she might have been wrong. I was going back. I could already imagine myself there. I found myself submerged in the future, again, as always. Everything flowed smoothly forward from this frozen instant: first, the rumble of hitting the runway in the Watertown airport. Then, the slow drive up to Arthur’s Arch and through, that distinct sensation of slipping into a new world, as if through the wardrobe, while the Kensington winter closes me in. No longer barricaded in my room, no longer torn in two, I’m myself this time around. This time I track the Sharps down across campus just to see their faces. I am not afraid. Night falls and I walk up stone steps to a red door, laughter glowing behind it like treasure, with my hand in the grip of someone who respects me. I am honest; I am honest again. A new semester’s classes break in, and I scan the collection of students arranged around the table, familiar and unfamiliar, old stirred in with new, and I feel eager and spoiled, and I think I am never going to do arm’s-length again, I want everyone close. The gas-jet fire flickers in the Burgess Lounge as we scribble in silence, extracting all the scrambling thoughts from our heads, learning to line them up in order. We walk into the next audition heads up and fearless, because no matter how many times we’ve heard no, we still imagine the answer will be yes, yes, yes.
fin