Maybe an hour before sunrise, I put the swans and boats and a roll of duct tape into a cardboard box and sneaked out my back door and drove to Gray’s house. When I got out of my car, I stood for a minute in the cold air, looking at the house and imagining Gray inside it, inside his room, inside his bed, and the thought of him—out of all the people in the world—tucked into his own personal space of sleep, that Gray-shaped alcove in the universe that was a secret from everyone but him, made me feel so protective, like I’d kill anyone who ever tried to hurt him.
Then, I went to the back of the house and found the big kitchen window that overlooks his backyard. I stood on the sill and taped the ribbon to the top of the window frame. When I jumped down and looked, even in the dark, the swans and snowflakes twirled and gleamed. I placed the boats, one by one, in the pond Gray’s dad had made in the backyard. They looked brave and quiet floating there. I didn’t see any, but I hoped there were fish flickering just under the surface, gazing up with their round eyes, wondering.
He will probably guess that I did it. Someday soon, I’ll probably tell him. I’m almost positive he’s going to love me back. But right now, sitting here at my window writing this, with the sky turning flamingo-colored over my yard, all that matters is that I gave him something beautiful.
Maybe he’s awake. Maybe he’s seeing it right now.
March 24, 1997
Today, I opened my locker, and there, riding atop the slick ocean of my AP Bio book, was one of the boats I’d made, a purple one, a little misshapen from getting wet in the pond and then drying out, but still looking basically like a boat. And inside were two cutout figures, like paper dolls, a boy one with crayoned dark brown hair and eyes and a girl one with light brown hair and eyes. They weren’t great works of art or anything, but it didn’t matter. They were us. They were holding hands.
April 21, 1997
We talk every night. The next morning, I remember sentences from the night before and play them over and over inside my head. I tell myself I will never forget them, and I haven’t yet, but if we are going to be together forever—which we are—I figure I should write them down for safekeeping. That way, when I get old, Gray and I can sit on a porch swing or something and read them and reach back and gather up the sound of our voices, soft in the dark. Gray’s voice is low and deep and dove-gray like his name and feathered around the edges. Catch that and hold on: the dark room, our voices the only thing in the entire universe.
Chapter Four
Clare
Almost before I knew it was Zach, I knew he was stressed. It was there in his bouncing half jog, the way he brandished a giant bouquet like a sword over his head; it flickered around him like an aura. And even though stressed was much too mild a word for what Zach was, for the state that could overtake him like a fever, it was the one we always used. As the child of a bipolar parent, even one as successfully medicated as my mother, I sometimes wondered whether Zach’s moodiness was something more than moodiness. The one time I’d tried to gently broach the subject, he’d snapped at me and then deflated to a blank sadness that lasted so long, I’d finally apologized—almost entirely sincerely—and taken back what I’d said—much less sincerely—and I never mentioned it again.
But the way he’d pull vivacity over the surface of his anxiety like a crazily colored tarp never quite stopped freaking me out. For instance, I knew that when he got near enough for me to see him in detail, his cheeks would be fuchsia, his eyes bright, his hands restless, his laugh full of blazing sunshine; he would possibly make an extravagant gesture, like dropping to one knee to present me with the flowers. He would almost definitely call me “gorgeous.” And I’d be torn, as always, between wanting to run far, far away and wanting to wrap him in my arms and keep him safe forever.
Zach didn’t drop to one knee. Instead, he caught me up in a hug that lifted me clean off the ground and spun me around, no easy feat, since at five foot nine, I’m a mere two inches shorter than he is. The spinning made me feel ridiculous, like an actress in a gum commercial, but, once I was back on the ground, to make up for not appreciating his romantic gesture, I nestled my face into his neck and kissed it.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said, pulling back a couple of inches and grinning so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. With one finger, I touched the twitching spot.
“Hello, you,” I said.
He handed me the bouquet. “I realize giving you flowers right now is like bringing coals to Newcastle, but I wanted you to have your favorite.”
Favorite. Before I even glanced down into the heavy, brown paper, ribbon-tied cone, I knew what I would find, and sure enough, there they were: twenty-four waxy blooms, splayed open like hands, freckled, edged in white, and as pink as the flush flooding Zach’s neck. Stargazer lilies.
Months ago, Zach had asked me what my favorite flower was. The question had been part of one of Zach’s I-want-to-know-everything-about-you-Clare sprees and had come sandwiched between “What was your field hockey number in high school?” and “What is your earliest memory?” I’d answered those two honestly (eleven and my mother singing to me while bathing my fingers in ice water after I’d grabbed a bee when I was three years old), but I’d lied about the flower. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that: coolly slid an arbitrary untruth into one of Zach’s mini-interrogation sessions. The exact circumstances of this particular lie were blurry in my mind, but I clearly recalled the surge of satisfaction telling it brought. Still, if I’d foreseen how that one tiny lie would blossom into bouquet after bouquet of stargazer lilies, God help me, I never would have told it. Not only am I, heart and soul, a white tulip girl from way back, I actually detest stargazers, which look fake to me even when they’re real, and the fragrance of which makes me instantly, overwhelmingly queasy.
Now, even in the open air, their cleaning-fluid smell was making my nasal passages want to scream. But when I looked up to see the nervous, hopeful expression in Zach’s eyes, I not only smiled in thanks but, as punishment for lying to him in the first place, lifted the bouquet to my face and took a long, hard inhale. He smiled back, and for a second or two, relaxed, but then, as if they had a mind of their own, his fingers began to flutter like a keyboardist’s against his thighs, and he said, “Remind me never to ride in a car for two hours with my brother again, okay?”
“Let me guess. Late Coltrane. No, wait. Ornette Coleman.” Like his father before him, Ian listened almost exclusively to jazz, the more beboppy and experimental the better. Zach avowed that, also like his father, Ian only did it to demonstrate his esoteric taste, not because he actually liked the music. “No evidence of pleasure whatsoever. Zero. No head nodding or toe tapping. It’s like he’s listening to white noise.” Whatever the effect on Ian, the wild, asymmetrical dissonance never failed to run like a razor blade over Zach’s nerves.
“Worse,” said Zach. “He snapped off the music. And lectured, declaimed. About marriage.”
“But Ian’s never been married.”
“Yeah, as if not knowing shit about a subject ever stopped him. Like the clone of my father he is.”