About a Girl (2 page)

I am told Aurora was a great beauty. The only evidence I have of this fact is an old Polaroid of her and Aunt Beast when they were teenagers, taken in the garden of my grandmother’s old house in the city where they grew up, which has hung over our couch in a battered wooden frame for as long as I can remember. It’s summer; you can tell because of the backdrop of lapis sky and jumbled wildflowers. Aurora is laughing, her chin tilted up; her sharp cheekbones cut the light and send clear-edged panes of shadow across her face. Her skin is a few shades darker than mine and her hair, straight as my own, is bleached white where mine falls down my back in a waterfall of coal. She is indeed beautiful by any objective measure, not that it has done either of us any good. Aunt Beast is in her shadow, dressed in the same black clothes she still wears, her habitual sullenness battling a reluctant smile. You can’t quite make out the color of Aurora’s eyes but Aunt Beast says they were brown, in contrast to the blue of my own, which I have apparently inherited from my grandfather. My father is a mystery, not in the sense that he is mysterious, but in the sense that I have no idea who he is at all. From what I have heard of Aurora, it is not unlikely that she had no idea, either. Oh bother, excuse me—

Dear lord, you shouldn’t get that; I think books about children with cancer are invariably maudlin and that one is a wholly abysmal example of the genre—Yes, I know it’s popular, but why don’t you get a book with actual literary value—Yes, certainly, I’d be happy to recommend something, you might try
Titus Groan.
No, it’s not that long, and anyway it’s good, so that doesn’t matter—Oh, fine, as you like. Fifteen ninety-nine. It’s your funeral, ha ha ha ha. Yes, thank you, goodbye—

At any rate, I myself am not a great beauty, so it is lucky I am preternaturally clever, else I would have no assets whatsoever to recommend me. My person is overly bony; I have the ungainly locomotion of a giraffe; and while my face is not unattractive, it is certainly not the sort of symmetrical countenance that causes strangers to remark upon its loveliness. My nose is somewhat beaklike. My skin, at least, is quite smooth and a pleasing shade of brown, but not even a white person ever got cast as the lead of a romantic comedy because they had nice skin. Additionally, white people are not subject to the regular and exhausting lines of enquiry my skin and vaguely
ethnic
features occasion (“What are you? No, I mean where are you from? No, I mean where are you
really
from? No, I mean where are your
parents
from?”). These interviews have nothing to do, obviously, with my attractiveness, and everything to do with the troglodytic nature of my interrogators, but I find them inconvenient nonetheless. My eyes are striking, but they are not enough to distinguish me.

The apparatus of popular culture would have one believe that one’s success with the opposite sex is irreparably hampered by a disinterest in, and lack of, conventional attractiveness, but I can attest from experiential evidence that this is not always the case. I have thrice engaged in penetrative intercourse. The first instance was at the age of fifteen, at science camp, with one of the graduate-student counselors. It was not a memorable experience. The second was after some dreadful dance my junior year, with a paramour Aunt Beast had dug up for me somewhere (double date with Shane; awkward, beery-breathed post-dance groping on the couch of Shane’s date’s absent parents; actual moment of entry so hasty and uninspired I was uncertain for several moments as to whether I was having sex at all; the next day, my temporary beau sent me
flowers
at
school,
which I threw away immediately), and whom I elected not to contact subsequent to the occasion. I had thought, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, that I would repeat the experiment, in order to ascertain whether my own results would more closely match the ecstatic testimony of romantic poets and cinematic heroines upon a second trial, but I am sorry to report they did not. But the third time—the third—oh,
god
.

Which leads me to Shane. I don’t know if there is any point in telling you about him, since I don’t know if I will ever—oh, I am being melodramatic, and also getting ahead of myself. I have known Shane for so long that his name is as much a part of me as my own. As a small child, I’d opened the door to our apartment, alarmed by the thumping and cursing of a small army of movers carting furniture and various boxes down the hall, and caught a brief, tantalizing glimpse of a pigtailed urchin of about my age being towed along behind a set of parents in the movers’ wake.

“They have a girl in there,” I announced to Henri, “help me get her,” and so Henri baked cookies and sent me out to bear them to our new neighbors. Shane answered the door and we ate all the cookies on the spot, and Shane and I have been best friends ever since. I stood next to him when he told his mom he was a boy (“Well,” she wept, clutching him in a moist embrace while he gazed stoically at a point over her shoulder, “it’s not like you ever wore dresses anyway, and you know your father and I will always love you, but can’t you at least still come to
church
with us?”); I was there when Shane grew boobs, and assisted him in assessing the most efficient and low-cost mechanism for concealing them (both of us cursing the cruelty of genetics, which had bestowed upon me the spindly and uniformly flat physique of a teenage boy whilst endowing him with lush feminine curves I, vain though I am not, would happily have sported in his stead); in unison we suffered the depredations of middle-school socials; as an ensemble we pilfered Shane’s parents’ liquor cabinet for the first time, supplementing the significantly depleted bottles with water from the tap so that his parents would not notice our theft (I was sick afterward for
days,
and have not touched spirits since; Shane, on the other hand, immediately embraced a path of dissolution with a singular enthusiasm)—in short, every first step into the adult world has been one we have taken as a united front (him stoned, me bossy and admittedly overly loquacious). I was there the first day of our freshman year, when Aaron Liechty, senior, hulking sociopath, prom king, and national fencing star (this is New York; only the automotive high school, last refuge of miscreants, has a football team), cornered him in the hallway and sneered, “I don’t know what to call you, a little faggot or a little bitch,” and Shane said, cool as you please, “You can call me sir,” and punched Aaron Liechty square in his freckle-smattered nose. Blood geysered forth, redder even than the flaming crown of Aaron Liechty’s hair, Aaron reeled away moaning, and from that point onward, Shane was a legend and folk hero amongst our peers. Only I knew the truth: that Shane had never hit anyone before in his life, that breaking Aaron Liechty’s nose was a stroke of sheer luck, and that afterward he had dragged me into the girls’ bathroom, where we’d locked ourselves in a stall and he’d cried into my shirt for ten minutes. Hold on a moment—

Yes, it’s cool in here, thank you—Yes, awfully hot for this time of year—No, I only read the first one and thought it was sort of badly done—Yes, children seem excited about them—No, I don’t have a problem with
wizards,
I just prefer
science
fiction, and I think the rules of magic in her world-building are so arbitrary, it’s clear she’s just making things up as she goes along—why is it always a
boy
wizard, anyway, it’s clear the girl wizard is significantly more intelligent; it’s always the case, don’t you think, that less-talented young men take credit for all the work done by women who are much cleverer than they—Fine then, go find a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, I’m sure no one will argue with you there—

As I was saying, Shane and I did not excel in high school so much as endure it; he, like me, is a genius, but his gifts lean in the direction of being able to play guitar riffs back perfectly after hearing them only once, unknotting the tangle of chords and distortion and tying the resultant bits back together again in flawless replicas of whatever he just listened to. And, of course, he writes his own songs, a skill that seems as elusive and astonishing to me as the ability to, say, walk cross-country on stilts. I have always been considerably more intelligent than people around me are comfortable with, and unskilled at concealing it, and I had in addition an unfortunate habit of reading science-fiction novels in public long after such a deeply isolating quirk was forgivable. Other students were disinterested in the finer points of celestial mechanics, and I, once I thought about it at any length, was disinterested in other students. I was not lonely (how could anyone be lonely, with the heavens overhead? All the motion of the stars, and the planets turning, and beyond our own humble solar system the majesty of the cosmos), but I was grateful to have my family, who were boundless in their affection for me, and of course I was grateful beyond measure for Shane. Only he—and thank god I had him, boon companion, coconspirator, confidant, and literally my only friend—would let me ramble on ad nauseam about Messier objects and telescope apertures. Only he never made me feel odd or untoward for my outsize and grandiose ambitions, my unwavering passion for Robert Silverberg, and my penchant for quoting particle physicists in moments of great strife or transcendent happiness. I had the sense sometimes that even my teachers were frightened of me, or at the least had no idea what to do with me. It was only Shane’s friendship that insulated me from any greater miseries than being the person no one wanted to sit next to in AP calculus. People were afraid of me, but they all liked Shane, and I suppose they imagined that even such an easily ostracized specimen of humanity as myself must have had some redeeming qualities if he was willing to put up with my company. Shane, a stoner Caramon to my bitchy and superior Raistlin, acted as a generous and often oblivious buffer between me and the outside world. People gave me a wide berth, but they left me alone.

I do not blame Aunt Beast or Raoul for failing to educate me in the delicate task of disguising myself enough to make other people understand how to talk to me. Aunt Beast barely graduated high school herself, and although I have never asked Raoul about it I do not imagine growing up a poet and gentleman homosexual is a thrilling experience for teens of any era or clime. I am an only child—so far as I know, anyway—and never had friends my own age, save Shane. Even as a small child, I spent my evenings in the company of Aunt Beast, Raoul, and Henri’s witty, funny, brilliant friends, who treated me as though I were a person in my own right with opinions of interest—which, obviously, I was. Aunt Beast and Raoul raised me to have a kind of fearless self-possession that is not considered seemly in a girl, and I cannot help being smarter than the vast majority of the persons who surround me. The prospect of college was the only thing aside from Shane that got me through the sheer unending drudgery of adolescence.

Shane has no plans to go to college, preferring to eschew the hallowed halls of higher education for the chance to make a career as a rock musician, and if anyone I know is capable of this feat it is indeed he. He is forever trying to get me to listen to better music. He was, anyway, before—oh,
god.
I am not accustomed to this sort of—anyway. I
have
ruined everything—but I can’t—oh,
god
. He has an insatiable and catholic palate, his tastes ranging from obscure Nigerian jazz to obsessively collected seven-inches from long-forgotten eighties punk bands. He likes a lot of the same old stuff—goths weeping into synthesizers—that Aunt Beast and Raoul listen to; he likes hip-hop; he likes, although he would never admit to it in public, hair metal, a clandestine affection he shares with Raoul, to the extent that they sometimes swap records with as much furtiveness and stealth as if they were dealing narcotics. His record collection takes up an entire wall of his room and is sorted alphabetically and by genre, and if you let him he will discourse extensively about stereo equipment with the obsessive focus of—well, of an astronomer citing observational data. I am prone to frequent bouts of insomnia, and sometimes I will call him late at night and ask him about different kinds of speakers, and drift off to sleep at last with the murmur of his voice in my ear.

I used to do that, anyway. I have not for—well.

The problem, of course, is feelings. Of all the banal and pedestrian impediments! The florid indignity! Shane and I had marched along for years, platonically intertwined, inseparable as glass-jarred conjoined twins bobbing in a formaldehyde bath, until one day without warning I looked over at Shane as he played video games with the fixed intensity of the very stoned, and felt a sudden and astonishing ache in my loins. I was quite sure I had gotten a cramp, and went home and took several ibuprofen—and then I thought of the delicate beadwork of sweat along his upper lip, the burnished glow of his skin under his nearly worn-through white undershirt, his perfect mouth slightly opened in concentration—and the ache blazed forth into a fire, and I understood (belatedly, to be sure, but the landscape of the heart is a country I have with determination left untrespassed) that something awful had befallen me, and our friendship—our blissful, majestic, symbiotic bond—was under the most dreadful threat it had ever faced.

Matters only worsened from there. Where last summer I would have thought nothing of lounging about in my underwear, dozing in his bed in the hazy June heat and watching him play Super Mario Brothers on his old Nintendo, or practice the guitar, brows knitted together in concentration, thick dark hair falling over his high forehead, now the elegant line of his neck and the soft slope of his shoulders, his rounded back (his mother is forever trying to get him to sit up straight), summoned forth in me an all-pervasive nervousness that sent me pacing around his room until he snapped that I should calm down or leave. I could no longer look at the curve of his mouth without imagining it on my own, no longer punch him on the shoulder without wishing he would retaliate in turn by pinning me to the ground and ravishing me, no longer grab carelessly at his hand without willing the electricity I now felt at his touch to spark an answering flare of light.