“I’m being annoying. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he said. I felt unsatisfied. The best answer you could hope for after an apology was you don’t have to be sorry. Still, it was funny. These days it was so much less instinctive, the feeling of being sorry, the unstable drive to say I was.
The elevator doors slid open. We entered. Isaac’s finger hovered over the second floor for a second. Then he pressed the fourth floor button, saying, “Let me grab you a coat, while you’re here.” The doors shut.
“Thanks.” I leaned against the wall, facing Isaac. Two thick locks of hair hung down from his forehead, framing his face. He had a long, thin nose. Everything was quiet. The car jolted upward and my spine compressed. I thought of the elevator in Ewing Hall across the street, identical, my back to the wall and Michael’s hand tangled in my long hair and his lips against my neck and the shudder of the elevator downward that had made me feel, for a second, weightless.
“You remind me of someone sometimes,” I said. The words were slippery and came out dreamy.
He’d already said, “Who?” when I realized I shouldn’t have said anything. He didn’t look like Michael. He didn’t act like Michael. He was just tall, and a boy, and good-looking enough for me to notice it. And he smelled like cobalt and rum.
I looked at Isaac and remembered my panic in the dark against him, and I wondered if it hadn’t been because of my memories of closeness after all. Maybe I had felt the need to run from him like I’d run from Victoria. Terrified of being within reach. Terrified of the exhilaration or my own inevitable inadequacy. What did it mean that I’d wanted her? Was it making me want him, want everything, suddenly, all at once?
Last time I’d felt the heat of attraction, I’d been Michael’s girl. Now I was my own again. I was my own. It took being your own to want somebody else. Now I could, and it was drowning me, and Victoria was mint and Isaac was a smile and every person I knew was such a work of art. Beauty was beauty and want was want and a beating heart was a beating heart. I was drunk and my synapses were firing in sluggish delirium and everything was absolutely stupid and utterly profound.
What came out of my mouth was, “You smell good.”
“What?” he said.
“Um.”
He looked hard at me for a second. Then the light of slow realization dawned on his face, which I realized, somewhere, was a very bad thing.
His mouth opened a fraction.
I began to feel ill. The door slid open. I exited the elevator. Something had gone wrong. I had to get away from it. The hall blurred. My eyelids were falling. Then Isaac’s dorm room door shut behind me. We’d gotten in somehow. Walked down a whole hallway, and I’d already forgotten every step. Getting a coat. Right.
I saw a bed. That bed was mine. I headed for it, shrugging my blazer to the floor. Isaac said something, but I had already become horizontal, breathing in that bittersweet smell that hung on his navy pillowcase. It was soft against my cheek. My eyes were closed, and I was gone.
I jerked awake at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, blinking stickiness out of my eyes. Why was it so dark? Why was glossy paper plastered all over my walls?
Because they’re not my walls. It flooded back—the drinks. The performance. The kiss, the gravity that had kept me clinging to Victoria, the way she’d tasted, the roughness of her lips beneath the gloss. What I’d said to Isaac.
I jerked up in bed, whispering a stream of detailed and elaborate curses that would’ve made your typical Kensington mother clutch her pearls. Isaac lay on a mattress pad on the ground, breathing deeply in his sleep. His roommate snored in the other bed, invisible under the covers. As Isaac’s covers fell from me, I realized I wasn’t wearing my blazer. Why? What possible reason? Had I lost all sense of self-preservation?
As I looked in the window, the reflection offered a glimpse of my left eyebrow, a glaringly obvious brown-black smear pointing toward my cheekbone. The moment in the elevator came back to me, then. The way Isaac had frowned, scanning my face, and gone completely blank.
Horror paralyzed me. My hands went still on Isaac’s dark sheets. I couldn’t do anything but let the alarm bells in my head ring on, on, and on.
Isaac had figured it out, because regular eyebrows did not migrate down people’s faces, and Isaac wasn’t an idiot. He’d tell the others, and they’d shun me and tell the rest of the school, and I would be humiliated beyond belief.
That had been the biggest flaw in my plan, hadn’t it? Of course I had no backup plan for failure, because at the start, I hadn’t cared about failing. I’d had nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
Now I had something, fields at night and songs in the dark and wind in the afternoons and the eight of us together and home. The idea of losing it felt catastrophic.
I slid out of bed. Isaac shifted in his sleep, but I moved faster, grabbing my blazer from the end of the bed and dashing for the door, head splitting. Go. Go. Go—
By the time I burst out of Wingate into the freezing early morning, I was in a full spiral of panic.
Evening approached. I felt pinned and helpless.
None of the guys had texted me all day. The group text had been unnaturally quiet, too—and Isaac hadn’t said a word.
They must have started another group text, just the seven of them, to talk about it. Maybe they were meeting in person to figure out what to do. Even with the Sharps’ eighty-year history, I somehow doubted they’d had this particular issue come up.
It was a weird day if figuring out you were bisexual made up the least of your mental turmoil. I considered calling Jenna, but I felt too sick with nerves to talk about it. Instead, I buried myself in memorizing lines for The Greek Monologue all afternoon. I had to deliver a monologue from Antigone on Tuesday. “Last of all shall I pass thither, and far most miserably of all, before the term of my life is spent!” The anguish of it all didn’t help.
Sitting in my room as eight o’clock approached, I figured there was nothing for it. I slid my wig off and brushed my bangs into place. Black jeans belted, gray shirt buttoned, winter jacket on, I stepped into the skin of a perfectly average boy, and with it came the sting of self-assurance, still a little fresh every single day. I braced myself and slipped out the window one last time.
At the top of the stone steps to the Nest, I hesitated. I ran a hand over the red-painted door and took a deep breath, breathing in the dust and oldness of the stairwell. The faint tang of fresh paint still hung in the air from when Nihal and I had put a new coat on the door.
I blinked hard, looking up at the ceiling. Breathe. It’ll be over soon.
My watch read 7:59 p.m., closer than I’d ever cut it with rehearsal. No more delaying.