For me, it’s the fire. Up. Down. It’s Janie Lee’s confession. Up. Down. It’s my fucking inability to finish the projects in my garage. Up. Down. It’s my father. Up. Down. It’s expectations. Up. Down. It’s self-acceptance. Up. Down.
I pray a hard-rock, punk, dancing, live-journal prayer.
Here I am. Free me.
There he is. Free Davey.
There they all are. Free everyone.
We’re jumping to the words “I can’t be contained.”
In the middle of everyone else leaping and screaming, I stand completely still and fully embrace the eye of the cosplay hurricane. The power of so many people doing the same thing rushes through my veins like blood. From the costumes to the dancing, we’re caught up in the same palm of an invisible hand.
I am dressed as a boy, I have kissed a girl, I have met people outside my usual web. No one cares. I am hidden. I am perfectly transparent.
This is it. This is living.
Davey lands. His feet plant. Sweat drips down the sides of his face, making lines in his makeup that look like a cracked desert floor. “You’re smiling so loudly I heard it over the music,” he says.
I think of kissing him the way Gerry kissed me. But Thomas . . . But Woods.
Instead, we jump like fools until Johnny tells us it’s closing time.
4
We’re homeward bound, discussing my Dance Dance Revelation, when I eyeball the clock: 10:45. “Can you speed up?” I ask, and monkey over the console to change clothes in the backseat.
Dammit. I didn’t bring makeup remover. Not only am I cutting it close on curfew, I’m arriving with sideburns. As it turns out, freedom is a temporary thing found only in coffee shops in other cities.
“What’s the problem there?” Davey asks at my sudden disappearance.
I wiggle out of slashed jeans and into sweatpants. “His name is Brother Scott McCaffrey.”
“Oh, right.” Having been in Otters Holt for three months, Davey is not an expert on his youth minister. But that oh rings of understanding. “What’s your take on things?”
I scrub at my face with the discarded T-shirt. “You mean God?”
“No. I’m good with God. I only mean . . . church people seem awfully hard on you for you to keep loving them.”
Church people. Trite. I level a glare at him in the rearview. Davey cracks open a window. Then cracks the one beside me. The glue in my hair holds. I won’t be able to fix it before I see Dad.
Davey speaks. “You seemed pretty happy, pretty uninhibited tonight. And don’t get me wrong, you’re usually happy enough, but I always think something is holding you back. Like you’re obligated to be a certain way for your dad. And he feels like he should be a certain way for the church.” He uses air quotes around the church. “And the church feels like they should be a certain way for God. It’s just . . . isn’t God all open arms and welcome home?”
“God, yes. People—well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. People are the hard part of being human.”
“But that’s my point. Why do all that for them when they judge you?”
“Do all what?” I demand.
“Change clothes. Best face forward. Smile on Sundays. Take their bullshit judgment. You know, pretend to be something you’re not.”
He has evidently been around long enough to assemble an accurate picture of how people perceive me. I zip my bag, all the Davey-inspired clothes inside, and climb into the front seat. “I don’t know. I guess I’m scared.”
“Of?”
“What everyone is scared of—that if I’m me, I’m not enough.”
He’s silent for a few miles, thinking. Maybe he wonders why. Maybe I do too. The harder he thinks, the slower we go. I put a stop to that. “Can you please solve the problems of the world and use the speedometer simultaneously?”
He more than makes up for the loss of speed. I barely have time to consider how tonight has changed something fundamental in the way I see Davey before we pass Molly the Corn Dolly and then we are in my driveway. What has changed us? Conversations? Meeting his friends? Getting out of town? Me kissing a girl? Those solutions seem too simple, too on the nose.
Guinevere and I are home at five minutes to twelve.
We’re idling in the driveway—that lingering moment when the night is supposed to be over but it’s not. I should go. Dad’s waiting. Davey stares into my garage, because I am evidently the only one capable of lowering the door. All my art is on display for Otters Holt.
“You’re enough,” he says.
I say, “You too,” and find that I’m pleased Davey is my friend now rather than just Mash’s cousin.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: She collected the best people.
Davey carts Guinevere to the corner of the garage for me; she fared well considering it was her first time in public. Before he climbs into the Camaro, he twists out of his sweater and tie and tosses them into the trunk. He’s standing half-naked in my driveway, looking ridiculously handsome. Davey has a very nice chest. It’s considerably nicer than Woods’s, because Woods lifts dry-erase markers and peppermint tea, and Davey lifts . . . I don’t know . . . Thomas.
Thomas. Thomas. Thomas.
I pick up his band shirt from the Daily Sit. “You’re forgetting something,” I say, and throw it into his palm like a quarterback.
“Well, I’m off,” he says. Up-nod.
“You’re off,” I say. Up-nod.
That departure felt very two steps forward, three steps back.
Inside, I tiptoe toward the crack of light under Mom and Dad’s door, checking my reflection in a hall mirror. Not good. Ear against the wood, I don’t hear anything. I knock, praying for low lights and shadows.
“Enter,” Dad says.
I am in full explanation mode before I move from hardwood to carpet, a room more his than hers. I had a good time. We aren’t in a ditch. I’ve already been here for five minutes.
Mom lowers her sketchpad, pulls the covers closer to her chin, and checks with my dad before using a very calm but firm tone. “When we gave you permission to go with Davey, we thought he’d be returning you well before midnight.”
Dad’s working out my appearance. He is particularly interested in my hair until he lights on my chin. Or is it my lips? Does he somehow know I kissed Gerry? He asks, “What’s wrong with your neck?”
The Adam’s apple. I cup my hand over the makeup. “Just a joke,” I say, and then move on to Mom. “I was with Davey.”
They don’t seem nearly as impressed by Davey as they were earlier today. Their eyes flick from the digital clock on the nightstand to my neck. Dad removes his Bible-reading bifocals, gestures to me, and says to Mom, “I’m sure that’ll make the morning paper.”