When I am sixteen, the boy I like is named Luke. He is twenty-two and lives in a Colorado suburb that, in the photographs he sends me, is lined with split-level ranch houses and pockmarked with churches. Across the Internet, in the AOL chat rooms that I have joined because I am still not going to school regularly, he writes to me that he loves his ex-girlfriend, Crystal, but that she wants nothing to do with him and that he needs to move on. He appears to be moving on with me. He is taking classes at a community college, trying to finish his degree. On my father’s shelves I have found Robert Heinlein books that spin out utopian, sci-fi worlds, and he knows those books and likes them, too. He wants to know me, he says. He wants me to know him. He sends me packets of photographs taken every few hours, each photograph numbered in pencil on the back, so that I will see the sequence of his days. The parking lot of the McDonald’s he manages, gray and boring in the afternoon sun. His grin as he holds the camera out in front of him. On his head perches a paper hat that reminds me of origami boats I made as a child.
The next photo is his college parking lot—his Colorado, I am starting to understand, has a lot of asphalt. Then the ugly paisley couch in his parents’ living room. The black terrier mutt he grew up with, its mouth open, with a small pink tongue hanging out. There is a picture of Crystal. This I study. She is petite, with thin straight hair angled down her face in a mall haircut, a tiny gold cross at her neck. I permit myself the realization that she looks ordinary, and not much older than I am. Then, that night, pictures of his bedroom, of his stereo, of the Pink Floyd posters on his wall. He must be living with his parents, I realize, and though he is six years older this makes him seem not so different from me. I have finally told my parents about my eating disorder, and they’ve found me a therapy program where I spend part of my days. I’m too uneasy in the program to make friends there, and I haven’t been in touch with anyone from school. Luke and I talk on the phone long-distance for eight-, nine-, ten-hour stretches, all night and into the day. Sometimes I fall asleep with the phone on the pillow next to me, listening to him breathe. His voice is low and dusky, and because it is all I know of him it seems to expand to encompass him, as though he is as steady and kind as his voice.
The phone bills are monstrous, $700 one month. My father yells, but he pays them.
Luke flies out to meet me. My parents have agreed that he will sleep at a friend’s house, but the first night he stays in my bedroom, and then that’s where he stays for the rest of the week. I don’t know if they’re just not paying attention or if they figure it’s too late to protect me, as I sometimes do. In person, Luke is shorter than I, with a spray of acne across his chin. To cover for this, perhaps, he says, “You’re lucky I don’t mind how tall you are. Some guys would mind, but not me.” When he says this we are standing under a streetlight at the center of my town. The ploy, the insecurity he is trying to cover, is so obvious that even at sixteen I can see it highlighted in the yellow from the lamp, and yet I also can’t object. I want him to love me. I want it like a prize and because it is what I am supposed to want and because it will save me. In the parking lot of the town duck pond he gives me my first kiss, and when his lips hit mine I can’t breathe. It’s not my first kiss at all. Before him, wet in my mouth, is the taste of my grandfather.
When I am seventeen, the boy I like is named William. He’s in college in the Bronx on a football scholarship, flunking his classes now that he’s discovered Bob Marley and pot. He’s big and mellow, with a blond round Charlie Brown head—but sometimes the mornings after our dates I have bruises on my arms where he’s held me too tightly and sometimes when I see him my breath catches with a fear I can’t name. It’s as though I’m swimming through something I can’t see; I can’t even remember the hours when I’m living them.
The boys’ attention frees me to feel loved. The boys are a threat. I don’t know how to recognize when love and hurt are mingled. It’s all I’ve known them to be. I can’t tell who’s safe and who’s not, can’t tell what safety even is. I only know I need someone to be.
*
Then, when I am eighteen, I find someone who really is safe. Dima is a cellist from the Ukraine. His family moved to New York from Kiev so he could apply to Juilliard. But when the time came, he bombed the audition. Now, at twenty-three, he’s a student at a community college in the city. His hands are pockmarked with angry red splotches where I know he’s put out cigarettes, his pale forearms snaked with carved white scars, but with me he’s nothing but gentle. At night, when we lie on his bed and kiss, he puts his hand low on my belly and before I understand what is happening he is not Dima anymore and I am panicked, gulping at his touch, I am breathless and shaking, the tears run out of me until my chest heaves and my eyes burn. I go beneath the crust of silence then, somewhere down beneath where I spend my days. I dissolve.
He keeps his hand perfectly still on my body. He waits. His hand is warm, and below it I feel my body slowly settle. “Breathe,” he says then, and I do, and as I breathe my body comes back to me. Night by night, we move his hand lower on my body. Night by night, I tunnel my way up through the layers of memory, until I emerge and he is there. We sleep at the small apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he lives with his parents and younger brother. His bedroom walls are lined with cassette holders tacked up like wallpaper, the work of every musician he loves alphabetized. In the living room, there’s a big glass tank with carved mahogany braces that holds a single carp his father smuggled out of the Ukraine in a plastic bag full of water, hiding the fish through Romania, through Italy, across oceans and into the States. For the fish, and for Dima, his father has that kind of love. While Dima and I hide in his bedroom, and he plays me Alpha all the way to Yes, and all the time his hand goes lower and I gulp and breathe and am finally calm again, the carp swims lazy circles in its grand tank. I take Dima’s story as proof, blazing bright as a bonfire: He failed at what his family wanted, but they love him anyway.
The week of our high school graduation, my parents throw my brother and me a party on the back deck they’re building. The pilings are only half-constructed, the beams still unsecured and uneven, and this gives the night a slanted feel.
It’s an epic party, strung with white lights and loud music and a dance floor set up in the backyard. My brother is rangy-thin but healthy. While I’ve been trying to hide on the sidelines he’s found a home in the high school theater department and takes the center of any crowd he walks into, with his big gestures and his stage-lit laugh. He’s buzzed tonight and his friends are, too.
So Dima and I hide away in the kitchen, talking our way around things. He’s got something he can’t say to me: that he wants me to stay close to home, to stay with him, to go to college in New York. I’ve got something I can’t say to him: that the reason I am smiling tonight, the reason the world seems to have lightened for me, is that I am alive with the knowledge that I finally, truly, get to leave.
“Come here,” I tell him, and back myself up against the refrigerator.