They never discussed the incident, at least not directly; they weren’t that kind of family. But Donna had seen what she’d seen, and it had frightened her.
“She had a code word,” Margo explained. “She called it my nonsense. Whenever my parents left me home alone—and believe me, they didn’t do it very much—my mother would say, You better not get up to any of your nonsense! If she ever caught me looking sad, she’d say, Is this about that nonsense? And when I finally got engaged to be married, she said, I hope this means you’re done with all that nonsense.” Margo shook her head, amazed by her mother’s stubbornness. “Even on her deathbed, after I’d transitioned and was living as a woman, she looked at me and said, Are you ever gonna stop with this nonsense?”
Eve knew it was rude to text in the middle of a presentation, but she couldn’t stop herself. She pulled out her phone and sent a quick message to Brendan.
I miss you.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Margo told the photograph. “I can’t stop my nonsense. I’m your daughter and I love you very much.”
*
I couldn’t wait for Thanksgiving. I just wanted to go home, sleep in my own bed, eat some decent food, sneak onto the golf course with Troy and Wade, polish off a couple of blunts and a bottle of shit vodka, just like the old days. We’d get completely annihilated on Wednesday night and then drag ourselves to the homecoming game on Thursday morning, where we could brag about our hangovers to people we hadn’t seen in three months, though it felt way longer than that. Becca would be cheering on the sidelines—the last football game of her career—and I was hoping maybe I could catch her in a sentimental mood and convince her to give me another chance. I loved the way she looked in that stretchy little dress they all wore, red with a big white H on the front.
H is for hot, I used to tell her.
H is for ho, I used to tell my friends.
The only thing I dreaded about going home was having to talk about my college experience, pretending it was the greatest thing ever, parties on top of hookups mixed in with challenging classes and inspiring professors and lots of cool new friends, when the truth was, it had pretty much all turned to shit in the past couple of weeks. I was on the road to failing Econ and Math, Amber wasn’t responding to my texts, and Zack was hardly ever around. He was spending all his time with Lexa, sleeping in her room, pushing her wheelchair all over campus, like he was her fucking caretaker instead of her boyfriend. One day I bumped into him at the Student Center Chick-fil-A and asked him point-blank if he was pissed at me, but he said he wasn’t. I told him it didn’t feel like that, and asked why he’d never said a word to me about Lexa.
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” he said, though he didn’t sound all that happy about it. “But honestly? The way we talk about girls? The shit we say? I didn’t want to do that to her. She deserves better.”
“What are you talking about? I would never make fun of a disabled person.”
“It’s not you, bro. It’s me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He took a while to answer. I could see him thinking it over, trying to get it right.
“No offense, dude, but the person I am when we’re together? I just don’t want to be that guy anymore.”
All right. So he was in love or whatever. Good for him, I guess. It didn’t really bother me, except that I hated being alone in our double, especially at night, when I had work to do, and I always had work to do, not that I ever did any. When Zack was around, we would procrastinate for hours, trash-talking and playing video games, and it would feel great, exactly like college was meant to be. But on my own it just seemed kinda pathetic, like I was a loser with no friends who was failing half his classes. I started keeping the door wide open, in case somebody I knew walked by and felt like saving me from my solitary confinement.
That’s what I was doing that boring-as-shit Wednesday night, sitting on the ratty couch Zack and I had found on Baxter Avenue, playing Smash on auto pilot—I was Captain Falcon—just killing time, waiting for something to happen that would give me an excuse to get off my ass and out of that depressing room. I remember how my heart jumped when the phone buzzed—I was thinking, hoping, Amber, Becca, Zack, Wade, in that order—and how disappointed I was when I paused the game and realized it was just a text from my mother.
I miss you.
I mean, it was sweet, don’t get me wrong. I was glad she missed me. But it didn’t really help with my situation.
Miss you too, I texted back.
And then I looked up and saw Sanjay standing in my doorway, staring at me with his big sad eyes. Somehow, just from that look on his face, before he even said a word, I could tell that bad news was coming.
*
Somewhere in the middle of the slide show, Margo felt the audience slipping away from her. No one laughed at her jokes; a handful of spectators were behaving badly, disrupting her talk with loud whispers and possibly derisive comments, some of which drew appreciative snickers from their neighbors. The applause at the end of the main presentation barely rose to the level of basic politeness.
But it wasn’t until the lights came back on for the Q&A that she realized the extent of her flop. She could see it in the faces staring back at her—some blank, some icy, many others disgusted or confused.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Ask me anything. There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
The silence that followed took on an embarrassing density. Then, mercifully, she noticed a hand inching upward in the center of the crowd. It belonged to the woman in the lavender turtleneck, her imaginary ally, whose face no longer seemed quite so sweet or supportive.
“Some of us ladies were wondering,” she said in a frail voice. “Which rest room do you use?”
Really? Margo thought. It wasn’t just the question that depressed her, it was the loud murmur of approval that followed it. After everything I just told you, that’s what you want to know?
“I use the women’s room,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “I think I’d cause quite a stir if I wandered into the men’s room.”
The seniors took a moment to discuss the matter among themselves. Margo noticed another hand jabbing into the air, offering her a lifeline.
“Next question. Over there.”
The words were already out by the time she realized that she’d called on Julian Spitzer’s neighbor, the loudmouth who’d made such a ruckus during the slide show. He rose with some difficulty and gazed at her for a long time with a weirdly expectant expression, his arms spread wide, as if he himself were the question.
“Mark,” the man finally said. “Don’t you recognize me?”
Margo winced, but maintained her calm. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t go by that name anymore. Please call me Margo.”
“You really don’t know who I am?” He removed his baseball cap, giving her a better look at his face, but it didn’t help. Margo had spent so much time trying to forget so many things that huge swaths of the past were lost to her. And that was okay.