Page 8 of Fade into You
“Uh-huh.” He sounds so fucking excited, he might even crack a smile. Damn, if I’m lucky, he might even muster the whimsy to meet up this weekend and celebrate the last bits of freedom before senior year. I’d ask about seeing him at school on Monday, but we’ve mostly avoided each other since he started growing out of his tubby phase sophomore year and into his cool stage of trench coats and obscure film references, and I’ve remained the school’s resident queer and favorite pariah ever since Olivia Fucking Rubens outed me at thirteen. I keep my head down and my headphones on as much as possible. I can’t skate by with his crowd. They have a reliable tendency to make me cry, and I end up looking like more of an ass. So my best friend and I hang out at Six Roots, the best coffeehouse in town,or at music venues, or at his place watching movie marathons—dark places where if the wrong people show up, I can peel off.
“Okay…” I listen to the muted sounds of a video game counting up deaths, the worst kind of soundtrack. I hate watching him play. I want to play too, but I’m too embarrassed. I’m shit at all of it. The one time I did try, I head-shot Dade, who was on my team, and he called me deadeye for a month while laughing at me. It wasn’t my definition of fun, but some of the other guys who hung around him sure thought it was great, so it caught on at school for a while too. “Soooo I’m gonna hang up,” I murmur, wishing he was in a conversational mood. I feel needy tonight.
“Oh, wait,” he calls out, keeping me from flipping the phone closed. “Kayla wanted us to be there tomorrow at seven since her friend is doing a poetry reading or something.”
Of course he’d pause the game for anything Kayla-related. Ever since they met at some pretentious art show he attended to be bougie or something, he’s been obsessed with her and her skinny, bony self with that stringy blond hair. She was trying real hard to look like a skater kid, but I’d never seen her with any kind of board, just the JNCOs and baby tees and Skechers. Bitchy to me too, I think ’cause she’s probably hungry. Girl needs a cracker.
“Ughhhh, Dade,we hatethe poets…. Remember you said Dadaism died long before these wannabe beats bought their stupid berets…. Why are we going to watch this sideshow?”
“It means something to Kayla, so it means something to me,” he says, using perfectly complete sentences to discuss her, with polysyllabic words and nouns and verbs and subjects. Yet, for me, it’s just grunts and random sounds. I groan again; this meansinstead of a hangout talking over the latest games, movies, and if I’m lucky, music, he’s gonna be all over her tomorrow like some kind of horse on a salt lick. I especially loooove it when he sucks on her earlobes and she giggles and shrieks. It’s one of those perfectly annoying moments that makes me wanna go off just like Mack does. Dade getting a girlfriend over the summer has made him scarce and obnoxious, and while I know I’m not jealous of him dating (ew, penis), I am kinda jealous about all the time she steals from me—’cause he sure ain’t cutting into his video-game hours. Mostly I’m just worried she’s gonna derail our plans to graduate and go to the New School in New York, where he’ll become a director and I’ll be writing for a glossy music mag.
“Can you watch over her friend? Keep her from feeling like a third wheel or something? I dunno, talk some girl stuff to her or whatever.”
“You know I don’t talk girl stuff.” It’s like he hasn’t been hanging out with me every afternoon for the past two years.
“Then wow her with your expansive knowledge of the roots of punk rock. Or tell her about your new room. I don’t care, just make sure she doesn’t get abducted or end up hating me—they’re apparently super close.”
Like abduction and hating him are in the same category… I take a deep breath and try to school the anger out of my voice. Tomorrow will no longer be fun bestie time, but a shit babysitting job.
“Fuck, okay, but you owe me.”
“Actually, you owe me, for introducing you to the masterworks of Wes Anderson, or when I got Rubens away from youlast year.” I hear the game start up, almost back to the two-word responses.
Dade helps me with two major things…. He teaches me more about movies, which he finds very important. I find it fun-ish. Mainly I like the soundtracks, because it seems whoever makes critically acclaimed films also picks pretty decent song selections. His other service as my best friend is to redirect some of the more vigorous bullying at school and public places. Dade and I don’t hang out at school, but if someone’s being nasty—like Olivia Fucking Rubens, tossing food at me for the better part of last year in the caf, he’ll intervene and flirt a bit so I can make my escape to my lunch spot behind E building. I’d have a lot more lunchroom casserole in my hair without him, so I guess some kind of debt is owed.
“Fine, I’ll watch her friend.”
“Cool, cool.” I hear gunshots and grumbles; he’s tuning back out. “Her name is some kinda animal… Cat, Raven, Robin…”
“Egret? Turtle? Hymenoptera?”
“Pretty sure it had nothing to do with a hymen.”
“Shut up, they’re bugs like wasps and bees and those giant mosquito-looking things that eat other mosquitoes.”
He doesn’t give me a response, and the sound of him playing stretches out. I’m about to tell him I’m hanging up again when he pipes up, “Bird, her name’s Bird.”
“Her parents named herBird?”
“It’s a nickname, ass. Want me to start calling you Delphine?”
I cringe at the sound of my first name. I am not a Delphine. I’m Jessa, after my second name, Jessamine. My parents lovedgiving us a plethora of names. Delphine Jessamine Thalia Papadopoulos. It’s ridonculous and tiresome as fuck when I end each school year filling in endless bubbles on my EOG Scantrons. Especially since our Greek heritage is dubious at best… likely a mix-up at Ellis Island, ’cause we definitely have smoosh noses versus that classic aquiline look.
“Fine, I’ll babysit her Bird.”
“Sweet,” he says, and ends the call. I snap my phone closed hard, as if he could actually hear it.
BIRD
Sitting on my bed, Iopen the cover of my notebook. The picture of the three of us in Kat’s dorm room stares back at me—it’s the only picture I have of them. Me in the middle, Silas on the right, Kat on the left. The tiny orange numbers in the bottom right corner glow7 16 ’99, as if that day wasn’t already digitally date-stamped into my heart.
One kiss. That was all it took to change everything. It happened only a couple of hours after we took that picture. We’d all gone back to our rooms for the night; I was almost asleep when I heard someone knocking lightly on my door. More like atap-tapwhisper I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed. One minute the three of us were just friends who flirted and cuddled and laughed and held hands and smoked cloves and pretended that it was all just platonic adoration. The next minute it was all big feelings and expectations, and I suddenly felt like I had to choose between them—not that either of them asked me to. But more than that, it felt like I was trying to choose between two different lives, two entirely different identities. It still feels that way.
Part of me wishes we could’ve just kept pretending.
I’d planned on showing Kayla the picture. But as the day passed and we went to the mall and she bought Victoria’s Secret bras and thongs, but did not eat anything except two bites of a McDonald’s parfait thatIbought her, and did not drink anything except water, and gave herself mean looks in every reflective surface we passed, I couldn’t do it. Somehow, this new her wouldn’tgetthem. She wouldn’t get Silas’s stories or Coke-bottle glasses and ponytail, or Kat’s humor or buzz cut and makeup-free face full of freckles. I couldn’t stand by while she judged them, while she judged me for liking them so much. So I kept the picture hidden in my notebook, stowed safely away in my bag.
I fan the pages over; I need to stop thinking about them. Aboutmewith them, about all my stupid regrets. I find my poem for tonight. Reading it through one more time, crossing out lines, swapping words around, it’s still a mess. “?‘Wh-wh-what I Did This Summer,’?” I stutter through the title. “Fuck!” Too wordy—too many words to stumble over. I scribble out the title so hard I tear the paper with my pen. Above it, I writeProvidenceinstead. The place where it all happened, the word itself aptly describing it. The divine order of meeting them when I did. What was meant to be and maybe not meant to be. “Providence,” I say out loud, the syllables gliding together easily.
