THIRTEEN
I used to dream that I’d been switched at birth. For years I had a fantasy that I was the daughter of a Greek shipping magnate or the princess of a small but wealthy country. Maybe a young heiress—a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller—had me as a teen and I’d been left in the hospital and the woman I call my mother and the man I call my father didn’t realize I wasn’t theirs or maybe or maybe or maybe …
My grandfather was a jock. My mother was a jock. My sister was a jock. Football, tennis, volleyball. Long, lean muscles, eyes on the scoreboard, that’s them. Me? Soft and bendy, dreamy, eyes on the stars, head in the clouds.
I am the one who doesn’t fit.
There are no intellectuals in my family. No crazy aunts who live in Europe and paint. No father who once dabbled in jazz. Here, where I live, there are no ivory towers. Nobody using words like serendipity or existentialism. Nobody wears flowy scarves or reads Brecht or has a ring they bought in Barcelona. Nobody’s been in a band, in a play, in a pas de deux.
I ache—I mean literally ache—for the streets of New York City, Paris at night, Moscow in winter, like Lara and Dr. Zhivago. I long for cobblestones, mist curling around gaslit streetlamps, kissing in the rain. These are things I can’t find in Birch Grove and so I magic them into being, gathering everything that is Other around me, like a hen with her chicks. I listen to Mendelssohn’s Venetian gondola song in the dark, the only light a few candles. It makes me cry, this song. It makes me yearn for a time and place I know nothing about. I close my eyes and I am there. I read poetry, my eyes hungrily scanning the lines, heart beating in iambic pentameter: Now is the winter of our discontent.
When I feel trapped, afraid, lonely, I only have to look up at the sky and think: this is what people in Morocco look at when they see the sky. And India, Thailand, South Africa. Korea and Chile and Italy. The world, I remind myself, is mine, if only I have the courage to grasp it when the opportunity is given to me. I know there is that within me, I know not what it is, but that it is in me. Walt Whitman said that way back when because he’s the man and a prophet and he gets what it feels like to be me so hard.
This is my secret self. The part of me I hold as delicately as a violet plucked from a meadow. It is the me who lies awake in bed late at night and imagines what Verona is like, what it would be like to say, Be but sworn my love and I will no longer be a Capulet. It is the me who takes French, dreaming of trips to Paris: Je m’appelle Grace. J’ai dix-sept ans. Je veux le monde.
The first time you hurt me was when you took this secret self and squashed it between your thumb and index finger like a bug. You didn’t mean to, but that was how it felt.
We are sitting beside your pool, legs dangling in the water. It’s the middle of May: spring. New beginnings. The sun is setting, the warmth of the day an exhale. You are the sun to me, shining so bright I can only look at you sideways. I allow myself to think that maybe I am your moon—luminescent, enigmatic—until:
“You’re not very deep.” You say these cutting words thoughtfully, to yourself, almost as though you’re surprised. They hit me somewhere below my ribs.
Inside: I’m Broken Girl Blown to Smithereens: explosions, not the good kind—a blitz, unexpected, flattening anything in me that had dared to stand up around you. Just as I’d suspected, I’m not artistic enough to be on Gavin Davis’s arm.
Outside: I’m Dull-Witted Girlfriend, a shrug of a girl; heat screams up my cheeks and I look away, toward the shallow end of the pool. Shallow.
I think of the dictionary app on my phone that I have to use all the time when I’m reading stuff like The Master and Margarita or The Awakening. Or that one time when I missed sophomoric on a vocab quiz. And how I totally don’t get why girls love Jane Austen. You’re right: I’m not deep.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
The words hurt, but The Giant has been telling me the same thing for years, except he uses synonyms: thick, dumbass, use your fucking head, Grace.
And Mom: Ivy League? Honey, be realistic.
I didn’t know how to pronounce respite. I read it in a book, I can’t remember which one, and I confess I thought it was resPITE, not RES-pit. I knew it generally meant “a break from something that isn’t all that great and that you’d like to get away from in some way,” as in I’d like a respite from my entire fucking life, but I’d never heard the word out loud. My family doesn’t generally use SAT-level vocabulary, except when my mom tells me that the things I do are asinine or that I’m being obtuse. I didn’t know the difference between an epiphany and an epitome, not for a long time. I learn words when I read and so I do this nearly every day, pronouncing things wrong. When someone points it out, it makes me feel stupid. Like I’m wearing a dunce cap while everyone else is wearing fedoras and berets. Can you believe they used to make kids wear those? Hey, Stupid. Put this shit on your head while we laugh at how dumb you are.
That’s what’s happening right now. I feel naked. It was no trouble for you to blast through the armor I wear with everyone else, the shield I spent years building out of my hurt and confusion. You have the power to hurt me so bad, Gavin. Like in Spring Awakening: O, I’m gonna be wounded … O, you’re gonna be my bruise. Maybe the only way you really know you love someone is if they can break you with a single sentence.
You look down at the songs you’ve written in your ever-present black leather journal, the ones I didn’t understand when you read them to me a minute ago. This disappointed you—here you are, trying to share your heart, the essence of you, and your girlfriend—the one person who should understand—doesn’t. I don’t measure up. This disappoints me, too. I thought I’d be able to get the words that you’d dragged up from your soul. But I don’t know what they mean.
You sigh and try again:
Me, alone
You, twisting around bloody
roses
Eugenics
Euphoria
Eucharist
What’s eugenics? And a bloody rose—does that mean I’m, like, attacking you with thorns? What did I do wrong? Or is this about Summer?
This is me, then: not the brightest bulb. Not the sharpest knife.
You take my hands and look into my eyes. I’m trying really hard not to cry because I know guys hate it when girls cry, but the tears spill over.
“Fuck,” you say. “Baby, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean … like, you took it the wrong—”
You wrap your arms around me and pull me closer. “I just meant we’re different and that I like that,” you whisper. “I can’t tell you how good you are to me, for me.”
“How can I be good for you if I don’t understand your songs?” I mumble. I’m crying into the ROCKSTAR shirt I bought you and it smells faintly of baby powder. I close my eyes.