“I’m Rhiannon,” she says.
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“Thanks. I used to hate it, but I don’t so much anymore.”
“Why?”
“It’s just a pain to spell.” She looks at me closely. “Do you go to Octavian?”
“No. I’m just here for the weekend. Visiting my cousin.”
“Who’s your cousin?”
“Steve.”
This is a dangerous lie, since I have no idea which of the guys is Steve, and I have no way of accessing the information.
“Oh, that explains it.”
She is starting to drift away from me, just as I imagine she drifted away from the girls talking next to us.
“I hate my cousin,” I say.
This gets her attention.
“I hate the way he treats girls. I hate the way he thinks he can buy all his friends by throwing parties like this. I hate the way that he only talks to you when he needs something. I hate the way he doesn’t seem capable of love.”
I realize I’m now talking about Justin, not Steve.
“Then why are you here?” Rhiannon asks.
“Because I want to see it fall apart. Because when this party gets busted—and if it stays this loud, it will get busted—I want to be a witness. From a safe distance away, of course.”
“And you’re saying he’s incapable of loving Stephanie? They’ve been going out for over a year.”
With a silent apology to Stephanie and Steve, I say, “That doesn’t mean anything, does it? I mean, being with someone for over a year can mean that you love them … but it can also mean you’re trapped.”
At first I think I’ve gone too far. I can feel Rhiannon taking in my words, but I don’t know what she’s doing with them. The sound of words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.
Finally, she says, “Speaking from experience?”
It’s laughable to think that Nathan—who, from what I can tell, hasn’t gone on a date since eighth grade—would be speaking from experience. But she doesn’t know him, which means I can be more like me. Not that I’m speaking from experience, either. Just the experience of observing.
“There are many things that can keep you in a relationship,” I say. “Fear of being alone. Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life. A decision to settle for something that’s okay, because you don’t know if you can get any better. Or maybe there’s the irrational belief that it will get better, even if you know he won’t change.”
“ ‘He’?”
“Yeah.”
“I see.”
At first I don’t understand what she sees—clearly, I was talking about her. Then I get where the pronoun has led her.
“That cool?” I ask, figuring it will make Nathan even less threatening if he’s g*y.
“Completely.”
“How about you?” I ask. “Seeing anyone?”
“Yeah,” she says. Then, deadpan, “For over a year.”
“And why are you still together? Fear of being alone? A decision to settle? An irrational belief that he’ll change?”
“Yes. Yes. And yes.”
“So …”
“But he can also be incredibly sweet. And I know that, deep down, I mean the world to him.”
“Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn’t have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”
“Let’s switch the topic, okay? This isn’t a good party topic. I liked it more when you were singing to me.”
I’m about to make reference to another song we heard on our car ride—hoping that maybe it’ll bring her back in some way—when Justin’s voice comes from over my shoulder, asking, “So who’s this?” If he was relaxed when I saw him in the kitchen, now he’s annoyed.
“Don’t worry, Justin,” Rhiannon says. “He’s g*y.”
“Yeah, I can tell from the way he’s dressed. What are you doing here?”
“Nathan, this is Justin, my boyfriend. Justin, this is Nathan.”
I say hi. He doesn’t respond.
“You seen Stephanie?” he asks Rhiannon. “Steve’s looking for her. I think they’re at it again.”
“Maybe she went to the basement.”
“Nah. They’re dancing in the basement.”
Rhiannon likes this news, I can tell.
“Want to go down there and dance?” she asks Justin.
“Hell no! I didn’t come here to dance. I came here to drink.”
“Charming,” Rhiannon says, more (I think) for my benefit than his. “Do you mind if I go dance with Nathan?”
“You sure he’s g*y?”
“I’ll sing you show tunes if you want me to prove it,” I volunteer.
Justin slaps me on the back. “No, dude, don’t do that, okay? Go dance.”
So that’s how it comes to pass that Rhiannon is leading me to Steve Mason’s basement. As we hit the stairs, we can feel the bass under our feet. It’s a different soundtrack here—a tide of pulse and beat. Only a few red lights are on, so all we can see are the outlines of bodies as they meld together.
“Hey, Steve!” Rhiannon calls out. “I like your cousin!”
A guy who must be Steve looks at her and nods. Whether he can’t hear what she’s said or whether he’s trashed, I can’t tell.
“Have you seen Stephanie?” he yells.
“No!” Rhiannon yells back.
Then we’re in with the dancers. The sad truth is that I have about as much experience on a dance floor as Nathan does. I try to lose myself in the music, but that doesn’t work. Instead, I need to lose myself in Rhiannon. I have to give myself over entirely to her—I must be her shadow, her complement, the other half of this conversation of bodies. As she moves, I move with her. I touch her back, her waist. She comes in closer.
By losing myself to her, I gain her. The conversation is working. We have found our rhythm and we are riding it. I find myself singing along, singing to her, and she loves it. She transforms once again into someone carefree, and I transform into someone whose only care is her.
“You’re not bad!” she shouts over the music.
“You’re amazing!” I shout back.
I know that Justin is not coming down here. She is safe with Steve Mason’s g*y cousin, and I am safe knowing that nobody else will interfere with this moment. The songs collide into one long song—as if one singer is taking over when the previous one stops, all of them taking turns to give us this. The sound waves push us into each other, wrap around us like colors. We are paying attention to each other and we are paying attention to the enormity. The room has no ceiling; the room has no walls. There is only the open field of our excitement, and we run across it in small movements, sometimes without our feet leaving the ground. We go for what feels like hours and also feels like no time at all. We go until the music stops, until someone turns on the lights and says the party is ending, that the neighbors have complained and the police are probably coming.
Rhiannon looks as disappointed as I feel.
“I have to find Justin,” she says. “Are you going to be okay?”
No, I want to tell her. I won’t be okay until you can come with me to wherever it is that I’m going next.
I ask her for her email address, and when she raises an eyebrow, I tell her again not to worry, that I’m still g*y.
“That’s too bad,” she says. I want her to say more, but then she’s giving me her email address, and in response I’m giving her a fake email address that I’ll have to set up as soon as I get home.
People are starting to run from the house. Sirens can be heard in the distance, probably waking up as many people as the party has. Rhiannon leaves me to find Justin, promising me that she’ll be the one to drive. I don’t see them as I run to my car. I know it’s late, but I don’t know how late it is until I turn on the car and look at the clock.
11:15.
There’s no way I’ll get there in time.
Seventy miles an hour.
Eighty miles an hour.
Eighty-five.
I drive as fast as I can, but it’s not fast enough.
At 11:50, I pull over to the side of the road. If I close my eyes, I should be able to fall asleep before midnight. That is the blessing of what I have to go through—I am able to fall asleep in minutes.
Poor Nathan Daldry. He is going to wake up on the side of an interstate, an hour away from his home. I can only imagine how terrified he’ll be.
I am a monster for doing this to him.
But I have my reason.
Day 6000
It’s time for Roger Wilson to go to church.
I quickly dress myself in his Sunday best, which either he or his mother conveniently left out the night before. Then I go downstairs and have breakfast with his mother and his three sisters. There’s no father in sight. It doesn’t take much accessing to know he left just after the youngest daughter was born, and it’s been a struggle for their mom ever since.
There’s only one computer in the house, and I have to wait until Roger’s mother is getting the girls ready to go before I can quickly boot it up and create the email address I gave Rhiannon last night. I can only hope that she hasn’t tried to get in touch with me already.
Roger’s name is being called—it’s church time. I sign off, clear the history, and join my sisters in the car. It takes me a few minutes to get their names straight—Pam is eleven, Lacey is ten, and Jenny is eight. Only Jenny seems excited about going to church.
When we get there, the girls head off to Sunday school while I join Roger’s mother in the main congregation. I prepare myself for a Baptist service, and try to remember what makes it different from the other church services I’ve been to.
I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it’s just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity.
It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion—whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.
The only way I can navigate through my life is because of the 98 percent that every life has in common.
I think of this as I go through the rituals of a Sunday morning at church. I keep looking at Roger’s mother, who is so tired, so taxed. I feel as much belief in her as I do in God—I find faith in human perseverance, even as the universe throws challenge after challenge our way. This might be one of the things I saw in Rhiannon, too—her desire to persevere.
After church, we head to Roger’s grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. There’s no computer, and even if it weren’t a three-hour drive away, there wouldn’t be any way for me to get to Rhiannon. So I take it as a day of rest. I play games with my sisters and make a ring of hands with the rest of my family when it’s time to say grace.