His calmness was giving me dangerous courage, making me want to say, Forget it. Tell the guys, and if they hate me, that’s that. Get everything out in the open. Finally, I’d be able to talk to the Sharps as myself, without filters, without constantly thinking, What would a boy say? How would a boy act? Is this the way a boy should be? As if there were a right way to be a guy.
I’d never been a one-of-the-guys type of girl. Jenna and Maria and I went way back to the first grade playground, and we’d adopted Shanice in seventh grade, when she’d transferred to our school. We, the Fearsome Foursome of Buchanan Middle School, had never needed boys—they’d been irritants or decorations, hovering around the fringes of our lives. Back then, we’d gotten a lot of the same from guys—panicked teasing in middle school, desperate teasing, the type that screamed notice me! or like me! or concede to me!
Now, when I came back for summers, we hung out with Jenna’s wide collection of guy friends—about half of whom had mustered up the bullheadedness to ask her out, even though they knew she was lesbian—and they smirked and pushed each other around and talked shit, talked loud, talked over each other. For the first time, now, I wondered what they’d tamped down beneath that. What were they hiding under the rusty, outdated suits of armor they climbed into before talking to girls? Were they frustrated romantics, like Jon Cox? Know-it-alls, like Mama? Still figuring out how to treat the world, like Erik?
Or maybe they were like the boy in front of me. So impulsive that he got thoughtless, saying anything, doing anything, forgetting himself. For once, there he was in silence, in stillness, all tangled up in knots, this kid standing next to me on the bank.
“Thanks,” I murmured, my throat tight.
“No problem.”
“Listen. Isaac.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask about your dad?”
He met my eyes. I couldn’t read his. “What about him?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Like, about the surgery?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, um. He got in this wreck and fractured his femur, so they put a titanium rod in his bone to hold it together. It got infected, so they had to take him out of physical therapy rehab and put him back in the hospital. He’s in rehab again now. My mom looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.” He paused. “It was kind of weird. He’s a comedian, I might’ve told you that? He writes for late-night shows and SNL and stuff. Does some stand-up. I swear to God I’ve never seen him go so long without cracking a joke about something. He was so, just . . . I don’t know. He looked like eighty years old. Or like someone made a wax copy of him and made it a little too small.”
After a second, he said, “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. I just thought, if you haven’t talked about it with anyone, you might want to.”
“I guess.” Isaac looked down. He was stretching the edge of his thick sweater over his thumb. “I mean, thanks. But I don’t know. There’s some stuff that it kind of doesn’t feel right to talk about. You know?”
“Like how?”
“I mean, if it makes you get all weird. I don’t feel like me, talking about some stuff. Like, who’s this boring sad boy who’s probably going to go home and listen to depressing indie rock until he stops feeling shitty? Who wants to talk if it’s just going to get you upset? What good’s that going to do?”
I folded my hands under my arms, warding off the piercing cold. I knew exactly what he meant. I’d thought about bringing up my dad’s hospital stay, to commiserate or relate, but that episode was wound so tightly into the way my family had lived for the past year—hell, the way we’d lived for most of my life—that it felt too huge even to touch. I didn’t know who I would be if I let myself talk about it.
But I knew how it would go if I did muster up the courage to broach the topic. I would start to talk and for a minute I would hate it. The next minute, I would feel exposed and jumpy and paranoid, but as if I were pushing at a door that needed to be opened. The next minute, I wouldn’t be able to stop talking. And then—after a long time—
“You keep going until it feels better again,” I said quietly. “Catharsis.”
“Right.”
“In theater, that’s the whole thing with Greek tragedy. You take the audience through the—like, the realest shit, the tearing out the eyes or the worst possible thing, and then on the other side it’s like coming out of boiling water and you’re clean.”
“Life’s not a Greek tragedy.”
After a long second, I shrugged. “I mean, if you didn’t sleep with your mom by mistake, that’s fine, but don’t go around acting all superior to the rest of us.”
Isaac gave me an amused look. The corner of his mouth lifted a fraction, and then a broad smile cut his face, a slash of white teeth. “All right, you win,” he said. He spread his hands and took a few steps back. “You go ahead and handle the tragedy stuff. I’ll just be over here.” He edged up on the river and placed one foot on the ice.
My hand flew out. “Wait—”
“I tried it earlier. It’s fine.” Isaac gave a demonstrative stamp. Not even a groan from the ice—just a heavy thunk, like oak hitting oak. He walked out onto the river.
“Isaac, wait!”
His steps slowed. He halted by an arm of driftwood thrust out from the ice plane, a dark spar like a ship’s mast. He glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“It gets thinner in the center. There are currents under there. You want this trip to have a body count?”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s got to be a foot of ice out here.” He had that look in his eye. The feverish delight of acting out. The adrenaline of it. He didn’t move away from the driftwood. “Stop looking at my feet.”
“What if it breaks?”
He shrugged. “It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I know.”
I shook my head. “Why don’t you take care of yourself, huh?”
Isaac’s head tilted. He looked uncomprehending. A bit of lostness around the angle of his brow.
The wind had picked up again. Loose snow was eddying around his feet. I pictured the ice rupturing, a dark gash of river opening wide.
“Come on,” I said. My voice was quiet, but he could hear just fine. We were locked in a snow globe together. “We can go inside,” I said. “It’s cold.”
He took a halting step my way. Then another. The ice creaked as he approached. The wind picked up as he crossed the lip of the river, mounting the bank. He stopped in front of me.
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t think it . . . I don’t know.”
You’re a runner, I wanted to say. I’m a runner too. Rather sprint for the hills than hold on to something you can’t figure out.
I said, “It’s all right,” and we headed back for Jon’s house, the oasis of light shimmering in the blue-dark snow.