Chapter thirteen
Josh is my boyfriend.
Josh is my boyfriend.
It’s a miracle that after only a single weekend, we are a real-life, not-just-in-my-dreams couple. Every morning, he arrives at my door before Kurt so that we can have a few minutes alone before breakfast. And then he joins us in the cafeteria. I think, maybe, he needed reassurance that he wouldn’t be sitting at an empty table. It’s strange to realize that Josh – detached Josh, composed Josh – worries about these things, too.
It might even explain the detachment.
We’re inseparable until our schedules split apart in fifth period. But we reunite after school, and I walk him to detention. If Kurt is the expert of roads less travelled, Josh is the expert of rooms long forgotten. All day long, he sneaks me into spaces that are cramped and hidden and neglected, and we kiss through the darkness until the warning bells ring.
I work on homework while he’s in detention, and when it ends, we all have dinner in the cafeteria. And then we re-separate from Kurt. We leave campus for the privacy that our dormitory no longer allows. It means that I usually visit the Treehouse twice – once with Kurt in the afternoon and once with Josh in the evening. We spend our nights in liplocks, sweet and earnest, while fumbling sublimely around things less innocent.
When Josh dated Rashmi, they were notorious for their public displays of affection. It was torturous. I was both envious and repulsed. With me, he’s quiet. He holds my hand and steals my kisses, but he saves most of his affection for when we’re alone. I think he understands that I don’t enjoy drawing attention myself. I also think, perhaps, he’s placed a higher value on his own privacy.
Even so, our relationship hasn’t escaped the notice of our classmates. But I’m happy. Despite my shyness, I still want to parade him in front of the entire school. I want to shout, Look! Look at this perfect boy who wants to hold my hand!
On Friday, Hattie startles us from behind in the hall. “So you’re the guy who busted my sister’s nose. Either you have the best aim or the worst. Which is it?”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Josh says.
“Whatever. Isla, I need forty-six euros.”
“Why?” I touch my nose self-consciously.
“Because I want to buy a weasel skull and put it on this one girl’s pillow.”
I try not to sigh. I’m not successful.
“She’s my friend,” Hattie says.
“No,” I say.
“Ugh, fine. Maman.”
We watch her stalk away. “Was she for real?” Josh asks.
“I’m never sure.”
He shakes his head, mystified. “Your older sister isn’t like that, is she? We had studio art together my freshman year. She always seemed cool—”
“She is.”
“Yeah. She always seemed like…she had things figured out. Like she had the motivation and confidence to do anything.”
I smile. “That’s Gen, all right. Last summer? She shaved her head and came out as bi. My parents really like her new girlfriend. But my mother is pissed about her hair.”
Josh laughs. When I drop him off at detention that afternoon, I run into another opinionated force. The head of school stops me. “I’d be concerned,” she says, “but Monsieur Wasserstein has been remarkably punctual, as of late. You must be the reason.”
I’m not sure how to respond.
The head looks down at me through her glasses, which are perched on the tip of her nose. “You’re a bright girl. Be careful there.” And then she strides away.
I don’t appreciate her tone. Or her presumption that hormones might be getting in the way of my intelligence. Is she afraid that Josh’s attitude will rub off on me? That I’ll stop caring about my education? Well, she can take her concern and shove it up her ass. But when I open my bedroom door a few hours later, Josh is also unusually cross.
“It backfired,” he says. “You know that whole detention-on-the-Sabbath idea? I asked the head about it, and she went straight to my parents.”
I wince.
“Yeah. And even though this time the excuse is – in theory – legitimate, my parents agreed that I’m being impudent, and now I have two additional weeks of detention.”
I’m shocked. “Two weeks? But that means—”
“Detention through the end of October.”
“That’s insane! What the hell is the head’s problem?”
He kicks off his shoes and flops onto my bed. “Welcome to the latest attempt at trying to get me to take this school more seriously.”
“I’m sorry. The Sabbath thing was my idea. My stupid, stupid—”
“Hey.” Josh sits up on his elbows. “Only because I didn’t think of it first.”
There’s a commotion in the hallway. “Look who’s on Izla’s bed,” Mike says. “Give us a show, girlie girl! Give us a sneak peek.”
Emily hoots. “Is Kurt jealous?”
Dave pushes his shaggy hair away from his eyes. “Nah. They’re getting ready for a threesome.”
I want to punch them all in the throat. But Josh is staring down Mike. “Her name is Eye-la. It must be difficult to remember when your brain is smaller than your penis. Which, rumour has it, isn’t that big in the first place.”
“Fuck you, Wasserstein.”
“Good one.”
The stairwell door clangs open, and Sanjita appears behind them. Her gaze is fixed on something ahead in the lobby. It’s an unnatural position that tells me she already knows this is my room. “Come on, Mike.” She tugs on his arm. “I’m hungry.”
He’s still puffed up like an angry baby owl. He points a finger at Josh. “I’ll get you.”
They swagger away, and Josh scowls at the doorway with supreme irritation. “Has there ever been an emptier threat?”
“What is with people today?”
“I don’t know. But I hate them. I hate everyone in the world but you.”
“And Kurt.”
“And Kurt,” he agrees. “Where is Kurt?”
“It’s sushi night. Remember?”
He sinks into my pillows. “Oh. Right.”
We discussed it earlier and decided that Kurt and I should keep Friday nights, and then Saturday nights will be ours. But I’m disappointed, too. The schedules, the rules, the people.
As soon as his Sabbath detention is over, he’s back at my door.
“I want to draw you again,” he says. “Before dinner. While there’s still light.”
My bloodstream courses with euphoria as he hurries me towards the Arènes de Lutèce, an amphitheatre long abandoned by the Romans. Once, it was immense and crowded and used for gladiatorial combat. Now, it’s smallish and empty and park-like. It’s only a few blocks away from our school, but it’s wholly concealed behind its surrounding apartments. No matter how many times I visit, I’m always still surprised to find an entire ancient arena hidden back here.
The park tends to stay quiet. Today, a father is teaching his young son how to dribble a football in its large and dusty centre. Josh and I climb the stairs to the original stone niches above the field. Each niche contains a modern bench, and we pick the one with the best view. Against his knees, Josh props up a sketch pad (one with thick, removable pages) and immediately commences drawing with his favourite brush pen (a capped pen with a brush tip). He works as he always does, with his thumb tucked underneath his index finger. I love watching his hand.
“What should I do?” I ask. “How should I sit?”
“Sit however you want. But try not to move too much,” he adds with a smile.
There’s nothing like being openly stared at by an attractive member of the opposite sex to make me feel as if all of my limbs were in the wrong place. I search for a distraction. “So…what’s the story behind your sticker?”
Josh flips over the pad, expecting something to have appeared.
“The one on your sketchbook. The American WELCOME one.”
“Oh.” He snorts. “There’s no story. My dad had a huge stack of them in his office, and I just took one. There were a lot of assholes on Capitol Hill ragging on Mexican immigration that week, so I drew the word I wished they were talking about instead. But it wasn’t an original idea. I saw an Australian sticker like it once.”
“You know what I like about you?” I ask, after a few minutes.
“My dynamite moves on the dance floor.”
“You’ve crafted this bored veneer, but you’re always giving yourself away in moments like that. In the moments that really matter.”
“I don’t care about anything,” he says. “But I care about you.”
“Nope. You have a mushy heart, Joshua Wasserstein. I can see it.”
He smiles to himself and keeps drawing. There’s a fragrant gust of wind, and the first leaves of the season rain down upon us. A nip pierces the air. I watch the tiny boy in the arena dart between his father’s legs and listen to the faint crunch of gravel as an elderly couple walks the footpath behind us. The sun grows lower on the horizon. There’s a new stillness, and I realize that Josh has stopped working.
He’s staring at me. Spellbound.
“What is it?” I’m afraid to move. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve never seen the sun shine directly through your hair before.”
“Oh.” I glance down at the glowing curtain. “It never looks the same, does it? Inside, it’s auburn. Outside, it’s more of a red.”
“No.” Josh reaches out. He softly touches one of the waves. “Red isn’t the right word. It’s not auburn or orange or copper or bronze. It’s fire. It’s like being mesmerized by the flames of a burning building. I can’t look away.”
I’ve blushed far less around him lately, but – at this – my cheeks warm.
“And that,” he says, as I look down at my lap. “That rosy blush. And your rose-scented perfume. God, it drives me mad.”
I lift my eyes in surprise. “You’ve noticed? I don’t wear much.”
“Trust me. You wear exactly the right amount.”
“You smell like tangerines.” I say it before I can take it back.
“Satsuma.” He pauses. “You have a good nose.”
“Yours is better. At least, the shape of it is.”
“My nose is huge.” He laughs, and it makes his throat bob. “Yours is like a bunny rabbit’s. What the hell are you talking about?”
I laugh, too. “It’s not huge. But it is interesting.”
“Interesting.” He raises a teasing eyebrow.
I smile. “Yes.”
Josh smiles back. His ink-stained fingers thread through my hair, and he leans in towards my lips. But then he pauses to smell my neck. A shiver runs through me. He kisses my neck softly and slowly, and my eyes close.
I want him to kiss me there for ever. But he pulls back, languid, letting his fingers fall back out gently through my hair. He smiles at me again. “Roses,” he says.
My head and heart are in full swoon. “Thank you. And thanks for saying such nice things about my hair,” I add. “Not everyone is that nice.”
“Who wouldn’t say nice things about it?”
“Ha-ha,” I say.
But he appears to be genuinely confused.
“Really?” I take a deep breath. “Well, okay. When I was little? Every grandmother would stop me on the street to tell me how much I looked like one of her grandchildren. ‘She has hair just like yours,’ they’d always say. ‘Except hers is more orange’ or ‘hers is more auburn’. It was so uncomfortable, especially for someone as shy as me. Hattie’s the only one who ever talked back. ‘Then it’s not just like mine, is it?’ she’d say.”
Josh laughs.
“And when a redhead hits puberty? You become this magnet for gross men. A month doesn’t pass without one telling me that I must be good in bed because all redheads are sex fiends, or I must be a bitch because all redheads have fiery tempers. Or they’ll tell me that they only date redheads, or that they never date redheads, because we’re all ugly.”
Josh is stunned. “They say those things to you? Strangers?”
“At least a dozen men have asked if ‘my carpet matches my drapes’. And now there’s the ginger insult – thank you, England – and some cultures think we’re unlucky, and ohmygod, you know what the French say about redheads, right? They think we smell.”
“Like roses?”
“Then there’s the crap that comes with it naturally. The sunburn, the freckles—”
“I love the freckles.” Josh taps his sketch pad with an index finger. “I have plans to hang these on my walls, you know.”
He does?
He does. The next day, my face appears in all of his prime-viewing locations – above his desk, beside his bed, on his fridge. Drawings with leaves in my hair and my eyes closed in rapture. Drawings with delicately exposed collarbones and neatly tucked legs. Drawings with a stare as direct as it is vulnerable.
I feel like his muse. Maybe I am.
“It’s still so surreal,” I tell Kurt, one afternoon in the Treehouse, “to be the object upon which his eyes are focused.”
“Object,” Kurt says.
“I don’t mean object object.”
“It’s wrong to objectify people.”
“You’re right. I used the wrong word.” It’s easier to agree than to explain the perplexing and disconcerting truth. When it’s Josh looking at me…I don’t mind.
Kurt is petting Jacque. He scratches underneath his chin, Jacque’s favourite place, and the grey tabby purrs accordingly. “Where’d you find that?” He inclines his head towards a heart-shaped stone.
“Oh. Um, near the Arènes de Lutèce?”
“So your boyfriend found it.”
“We found it together.”
“And you brought it here together?”
I pause. And then I nod.
Jacque jumps onto his lap, but Kurt pushes him off. “I have to work.” He yanks out his chemistry textbook, and someone else’s ballpoint-pen-drawn map of underground Paris flies out of his bag and hits my arm.
I hand it back to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We come here sometimes at night.”
“Mm,” Kurt mumbles. We work until dinnertime, but the next day, when I ask if he wants to study at the Treehouse, he declines.
The following Sunday at the Treehouse, Josh surprises me with three brushes and a large plastic jar of cheap dark-green tempera paint. “The brushes are my own, but the paint was found. And free.”
“Where’d you find it?”
His expression turns devilish. “The art room.”
“Cheater.” But I return his smile. “What are you gonna paint?”
“I like that. Not what do you want to paint, but what are you going to paint.”
“I trust you, if that’s what you mean.” I tug out the plaid blanket from its trunk. “Not that I should. Art thief.”
“Paint thief, thankyouverymuch. The art will be my own.” He helps me arrange the blanket, folding it over an additional time so there’s more space than usual around the rooftop’s perimeter. “I’ll need the space to work.”
I shrug happily. It’s sunny, probably one of the last warm days of the year, so I’m already slathered in SPF. I slip out of my wedge sandals and wiggle my toes in the air.
He studies the concrete wall. “Where will we go when the weather turns?”
“I tough it out through mid-November. And some winter days aren’t so bad, you know? But Kurt and I usually hole up in the dorm, sometimes the library.”
Josh glances at me. It’s so sexy that my heart misses a beat. “But where will we go?”
“Everywhere,” I reply. “We’ll go everywhere together.”
“I want to show you my favourite portraits. The Van Gogh self-portrait at the d’Orsay. And there’s this Van Dyck that I’ve always loved at the Louvre. Le Roi à la chasse. I don’t even know why I love it so much. Maybe you could tell me.”
I close my eyes to feel the sunshine against my lids. “I’d like to take you to the restaurant inside the mosque. We’ll have mint tea and honeyed desserts.”
“We’ll ride the Ferris wheel at the Place de la Concorde.”
“And then we’ll walk through the Tuileries and drink vin chaud to stay warm.”
“The flea market in Montmartre,” he says. “We’ll shop for rusted bicycles and broken mirrors.”
“We’ll ride the métro to its furthest stops, just to see what’s at the end of each line.”
“Those,” Josh says to the wall, “are perfect days.” I open my eyes. He dips a small brush into the paint and pauses mid-air.
And then…he comes alive.
His plan unfolds quickly. He’s painting a mural on the inside of the rooftop’s wall. He begins with a sketch, an outline, and moves around the interior in a complete circle. It’s already clear what this mural will be.
I smile and let him work in silence.
Josh switches to a larger brush and bolder strokes. Fat green leaves and thick green branches appear across the wall’s peeling white paint. I lose myself in a book about the search for an ancient lost city in the Amazon, glancing up occasionally to watch the tree grow. But when he circles around again, unexpected shapes appear between the leaves. He’s creating a mock-up of the surrounding skyline. It’s precise but with his usual touch of whimsy – certain buildings rounder, others more square.
Jacque visits. He purrs against Josh’s leg.
When Josh doesn’t notice – which is a first, Josh adores Jacque – he scowls and saunters towards me. I feed him scraps of duck gizzard from the salad I had for lunch, and he allows me to pet him for a few minutes before disappearing back over the rooftops.
The sun beats down. Josh takes off his shirt. He’s so deep into his work that he’s forgotten I’m here. He’s a work of art himself. The lines of his back and arms are strong, more so than his slender body would suggest. He has a small mole on his right shoulder blade and a faded scar on his lower back. The skull-and-crossbones on his arm looks even more him against this backdrop of similar brushstrokes.
And…his hips. They jut out skeletally from the top of his jeans, and I find my eyes returning to this area again and again. This right-above-the-pants area.
Christ.
Josh removes a second jar of paint from his shoulder bag. As he circles a fourth time, yet another unexpected layer appears behind Paris. Towering skyscrapers. Suspension bridges. Statues of lions. He paints a Flemish building with climbing garden roses and a tiled roof, and then a brownstone with ivy window boxes and an American flag. What surely must be his house.
I was wrong. Josh didn’t just turn my rooftop into an actual tree house. He turned it into a tree house with a view of the world. Our world. Paris and New York.
He circles around one last time, sprinkling in a few birds among the tree branches. Some look almost real. Others are so fantastical that they must exist exclusively in his imagination. The complete mural takes less than six hours.
When Josh emerges from his trance, he is dazed and art-drunk. He blinks at me. Inexplicably, I burst into tears. He continues to stare at me without expression, and I continue to sob – embarrassingly fat tears. He tilts his head. Another blink. And then he drops to the blanket. His eyes are wild with fear.
“It’s…it’s beautiful,” I say.
Every muscle in his body relaxes. He laughs so hard that he collapses backwards. His paint-covered hands clutch the blanket, and his body shakes with uncontrollable laughter.
“It’s not funny.” I dab at my face with the blanket.
He doubles up even harder.
“I’ll have to wash this blanket now anyway.” I gesture towards his paint smears.
Josh slowly stops laughing. He smiles up at me – a beatific, godlike smile – and holds out his long arms. I nestle into them, green paint and all. He hugs me tightly. My ear is pressed against his naked chest, and his heart is beating a thousand times a minute. I run my hands down his body. He closes his eyes. I kiss his skin and the paint and his sweat. He lifts my face towards his and kisses away my tears. “Thank you,” he says. “That was the best reaction that anyone has ever given me. For anything.”