DeeDee looks at me. “What do you mean? Like, the breakup? Breakups are hard. Honestly, they should be outlawed. They’re practically inhumane.”
I forgot how much Dee talks when she’s been drinking, how her soft voice gets raspy with overuse.
“We didn’t break up,” I say. “Technically.”
Because technically, Iris and I were never a couple. Not in the traditional sense. We were locked doors and long, slow kisses that tasted of raspberry vodka and promises to keep whatever happened in our dorm between us.
Dee and Lion are staring at me and I feel sick to my stomach. I haven’t had that much to drink. But it’s not the rum. It’s the fact that I’ve never mentioned this aloud to anyone since I left Dinsmore, and talking about it makes it real again. Harder to forget.
“I didn’t stick up for her… for us,” I say, not meeting their eyes.
“What do you mean?” DeeDee says again. From the corner of my eye, I see her head tilt.
“They wrote on our door. The word dykes,” I say, grabbing the bottle from the center of our triangle. I take a long swig and it burns my tongue but it doesn’t hurt so much going down this time. My body takes well to the liquor—to its warmth and the silent but steadfast promise that whatever I say out loud next won’t hurt as much as it did at the time. “In black marker. They could’ve written it on our dry-erase board, but I guess they didn’t want us to forget.”
And then I tell them the whole story. DeeDee interrupts a few times to express disgust, saying she hoped we knocked those bitches out for what they did. But Lionel listens silently the whole time, until I’m finished.
“How’d you leave things with her?” he asks as he takes another turn with the bottle.
I am completely fuzzy now, and when I move my head to look at him, that part of the room takes a few extra seconds to align.
“She slept in the common room until we left,” I say, remembering the first time it happened, when I woke in the middle of the night to find her gone and stumbled down the hall until I saw the faint glow of the television and Iris curled up under her yellow quilt on the couch. “And I let myself be off the hook.”
“I can’t believe you went to such a homophobic school,” DeeDee says, shaking her head.
“It wasn’t, though. Lots of people were out and there’s a gay-straight alliance and… it wasn’t even everyone on our floor. But the bigots made sure we all knew how they felt. Iris and I were new to Dinsmore and they’d been there a whole year before us and… it sounds stupid now, but it was easier not to stand up to them.”
“Well, I still can’t believe they treated you like that.”
“I can’t believe I treated Iris like that.” I work my fingers around the edge of a faded unicorn hoof on the sleeping bag. “She was always nice to me. Always.”
And patient and sweet. She was good to me, and a good person in general, and I didn’t return the favor.
“She’ll get over it. I feel like it sort of comes with the territory—dating a closeted person. You can’t take it personally.”
“But you’ve never dated anyone who was closeted.”
“I might someday.” She shrugs. “I mean, yeah, it wasn’t ideal, or all that nice, but she gave you her blessing. Sometimes you can’t think too hard about it when someone hands you a gift like that. Get out unscathed while you can, you know?”
It might be easier not to think about it, to just let it go because Iris did. She never mentioned it again, and when we parted ways, she was kind. She told me to have a good summer, that she hoped everything worked out okay with my brother.
But then I remember how much I hated not being open about my Judaism. We may be on the more liberal side of the religion, but it’s a part of me and, especially, my connection to Saul, and I’m proud of that. Going back to Dinsmore and continuing to hide this other part of myself might actually kill my soul.
“It was a shitty thing to do,” I say. “Iris shouldn’t have to go through that. Not with me.”
“Sometimes, when I’m getting all down on myself…” Lionel pauses to shove his hair out of his eyes, a task that suddenly requires absolute concentration. He begins again: “Sometimes Dr. Tarrasch makes me repeat this thing. She makes me say, I’m doing the best I can. I thought it was corny, but I don’t know. It kind of works. Nobody’s ever trying to do their worst, I guess.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to do the right thing.
then.
Each year, our family goes to a Dodgers game to kick off the summer. None of us is a huge baseball fan, but it’s fun to go as a family, and even I start to get into it once we’re there, with the Dodger Dogs and the songs and all the fans dressed in bright blue and white.
Lionel seems particularly excited this year. He keeps talking about it to our friends, though none of them care because I’m pretty sure most people in that group have never attended a professional sporting event in their lives. He even bought us matching Dodgers shirts, the jersey kind that button up the front.
“Little. Little! Oh, good, you’re wearing it,” he said—or practically shouted—as he entered my room without knocking, something he’s been doing more and more often. I’m trying not to let it bother me, because it means he’s out of bed and talking to people and not looking at me with lifeless eyes. It means he’s finally over Grayson, and we can get the old Lionel back.
The shirt is a nice gesture, but I can’t see myself wearing it again after today. When I ask Lionel how much it cost, worried that he’s spent too much on something I don’t even want, he waves me off, insisting, “We can’t just show up looking like casual fans!”
We always have before, and I don’t know what’s different this year, but before I can ask, he’s running through the Dodgers’ entire season of stats with fervor, occasionally interrupting himself with a non sequitur or to exclaim about a completely average fact that doesn’t deserve the excitement. I try to stop him a couple of times, to ask if he’s okay, but he’s too far down the Dodgers rabbit hole. He’s pacing my room as he talks, picking things up and walking around with them and putting them back in the wrong spot.
I’m relieved when Mom calls up to us from the middle floor. It feels claustrophobic in my room, like I’m being pushed out by Lion and his increasingly intense thoughts. He goes ahead of me down the stairs and I wonder, for a moment, if he’s taken something—a pill, maybe, or even coke, though he once told me he has no intention of putting anything up his nose. But when I look at his hands, at the skin torn ragged around his thumbs—so badly in some places that I can tell they’ve been bleeding—I wonder if it means something.
“Guys, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Saul had a work emergency that’s going to take up most of the afternoon,” Mom says. Apparently Lionel has convinced her to dress for the occasion, too: A vibrant blue baseball cap with the Dodgers logo sits on top of her close-cropped hair.