Then things got more complicated—less fact-based and more emotional. Then you stopped letting Lena visit. Now you meet somewhere off campus. Once she surprised you and you blamed all the evidence on Liam. You said, “Liam hasn’t moved out yet,” but in reality that’s not why there was a book of selected Keats poems on your desk. (Research.) You said the Van Halen CDs were Liam’s older cousin’s.
You’ve started dreaming about it at night. Lena’s face with Aubrey’s black hair. Aubrey twirling Lena’s silver boxing glove pendant over one red-painted index finger. Lena with ballet slippers, dancing to Tchaikovsky until her movements become jerkier and jerkier and she’s on puppet strings tugged by you, and then you switch and she and Aubrey are the ones tugging the strings and you’re the one doing the dance and they’re both laughing.
Your grades are slipping, not that it matters. They don’t flunk people out, especially not you. They need your family’s donations; everyone knows that. There’s a freaking building on campus named after your grandfather.
Sometimes you open the book and flip back, way back to the early days, when you first started it, after the move to Bangkok after middle school. It started as a list.
Bangkok Charlie Likes:
banana nut bread
hammocks
collecting rocks
jazz music
curse words (in any language)
Then a year or two later:
London Charlie Likes:
kangaroos
roller coasters
molten chocolate cake
comic books
Then there started to be differences. Conflicting information. You began to get confused.
Paris Charlie Hates:
music (all except soul)
marsupials
fucked-up shit
self-help books
It was no big deal. Your interests change all the time. That’s what happens when you travel—you see some stuff, you try a lot of stuff. That’s what happens to everyone. “We can’t keep your interests straight, Charlie,” your parents say on the rare occasions when you’re home from boarding school and your dad’s back for a holiday or whatever. But they laugh, like it’s some big joke or quirky personality trait.
Problem is, your interests change all the time. And Aubrey, she demands something different: she wants your interests to stay the same, when you’re with her. When you first met her, you shared strawberry milkshakes. You saw her again, and your interest in strawberry milkshakes had disappeared. They made you want to vomit. But you said it and her brow furrowed and her mouth turned down and you said, Just kidding. And you drank the goddamn strawberry milkshake. Everything had to stay the same. You’d hoped she was different, that she’d be amenable to change. She’s not.
Lena wasn’t either. Imagine having to pretend for three years with Lena. Just imagine what it would be like, trying to pretend you like basketball for two years running, or that you’re into sports at all anymore after a couple months’ fascination. Lena never got it. You hoped she’d accept you the way you are—the you that’s changing and interested in lots of different things—but she never did. So you had to be a consistent person, to please her.
That was why Aubrey was exciting at first. She was a change. You could be a different thing with her. Then she got stale too. It was easy when you were younger, always moving, always picking up people and later discarding them when you left, always able to slip on another cloak without anyone knowing the difference. Now it’s harder. And you’re angry.
But you love them, you really do.
Sometimes you love Aubrey so much you want to smother her. Really smother her. Wrap her all up in you until she can’t breathe anymore. Until she has to breathe your air, with your lungs. You love Lena so much, it’s like aliens take over your brain when you’re focused on her. Sometimes you’re thinking about it so much, missing her so much, that you forget to eat or drink anything for entire days. Your vision clouds and you get weak, and you remember.
You hate those cloaks you slip on for them, but they keep you strong. You read the book, you study, you impersonate. It’s what works. It keeps you feeling good. It’s these other times, these times away from them, when all of it sets in: the post-adrenaline crash, the exhaustion, the panic from the couple of times you almost slipped up. Then the rage boils up.
But you love them. That’s all you need.
Sometimes, though, it feels like a kind of death. Lambs to the slaughter. It’s a phrase that’s lodged itself in your mind. It’s ugly, that phrase. When you start thinking that way, you get shaky. It becomes hard to focus. What gives your brain relief? Pot. You only openly smoke pot around Lena. (Aubrey doesn’t like it.) And even then only occasionally. Here, in the privacy of your dorm room, it’s all the time. Focus. It helps you focus on how much you love them, your little lamb, the gentle one—and your loris, the one full of poison. And how angry you are that you’re making mistakes.
10
Lena