I changed the subject after that.
My bedroom smells uninhabited and clean, that vacant scent it carries whenever I come home from abroad. A large box is in the centre of my floor. I don’t recognize the return address, and there’s no name, but it’s unquestionably Josh’s exquisite handwriting. My pulse quickens. I slice through the tape with a pair of scissors, peel back the flaps, and cry out in a grateful sort of agony. This air smells like him.
On the top is a dark blue T-shirt, one of his favourites. He wore it on the first day of school this year. I press my nose against its cotton. Citrus, ink, him. My knees weaken. I hug it to my chest as I examine the contents below. The rest of my body weakens.
Boarding School Boy, bound in string.
There’s a note slipped underneath the manuscript’s binding. I LOVE YOU. I love that he starts with this even in his letter. I’M SORRY THAT I CAN’T BE WITH YOU IN PERSON, BUT I HOPE THAT YOU’LL ACCEPT THIS PATHETIC SUBSTITUTE. I’VE SPENT ALL WEEK SCANNING AND PRINTING THE PAGES. I’VE NEVER SHOWN THE WHOLE THING TO ANYONE BEFORE. I’M NOT DONE, BUT HERE’S WHAT I HAVE SO FAR. I HOPE YOU STILL LIKE ME AFTER YOU’VE SEEN THE UGLY PARTS. YOURS, J.
My eyes well with tears of happiness. I want to climb into bed with it this instant, but I have to wait. I want privacy. I don’t want to be interrupted mid-read. I place Josh’s shirt beside my pillow, but I push the box into my closet. My parents aren’t the snooping type, but anything left out in the open is considered fair game.
I spend the rest of the day with them. When they inquire about the box, I give them a vague “Oh, you know. It was a care package. A letter, a shirt.” But as soon as dinner is over, I claim jet lag and retire. I drag out the box to the side of my bed, switch on a lamp, and crawl beneath the covers. I’d wear the T-shirt, but I don’t want to lose his scent. I snuggle with it instead. And then I untie the string and remove the first page.
The book is divided, as it was in his dorm room, into four sections beginning with freshman. Josh has drawn himself as skinny and naive, slack-jawed, as he takes in his new surroundings. He finds Paris equal parts intimidating and awe inspiring, but little time passes before he falls into homesickness. It’s not that he misses his actual home – not the flights between cities, the endless campaigning, the neglectful parents. He misses the life that he glimpsed when he was younger. The cabin and the pine trees. A family in one place. He recognizes almost immediately that instead of trading in two lives for one, he now has three. And it’s too late.
A single-panel page: him in the corner, small and crouched, looking up at home, while the rest of the page – where home is supposed to be – is a blank space. He misses somewhere that doesn’t exist. And he knows that Paris will not fill the void.
He tries to fill it by throwing himself into his art. He befriends St. Clair in their studio art class. St. Clair is a year older, but he’s attracted to Josh’s natural talent while Josh is attracted to St. Clair’s natural charisma. At night, Josh lies awake in bed, rehashing things his new friend has said or done, hoping to learn from him. Emulate him. The pages are sad and sweet and full of humiliating truths.
St. Clair has a bushy-haired friend named Meredith, and Josh befriends her, too, and the three of them are uncannily reminiscent of Harry, Ron and Hermione. St. Clair is the leader, Josh is the clown, and Meredith is the brainiac. But in this version, Hermione is clearly in love with Harry.
The scenes with his friends are fun. They feel like characters, not like the real people that I used to see around school. Though they do trigger that accompanying, always-underlying twinge of hurt. I’ll never know this part of his life. But the scenes where Josh is alone, he becomes Josh again, and everything is heightened. I pour over these panels with an intensity that makes me feel uncomfortable, maybe guilty, but the harder the scenes are to read, the faster I turn the pages. Josh thinks about girls constantly. He sees a beautiful, too-tall French girl on the street, and I’m horrified to flip the page and find him masturbating back in his room to the thought of her. Over the summer, he gets his first kiss with an older girl who works at his favourite comics shop in Manhattan, but the next time he goes to see her, she brushes him off in embarrassment.
It took guts to draw these things. It’s a different kind of excruciating to read about them.
SOPHOMORE begins. St. Clair starts dating a girl named Ellie. She’s two years older than Josh, and he struggles with feeling cool enough to hang out with them. He and Meredith swap unkind words about Ellie – each out of a different type of jealousy – but his eventual coming to terms with Ellie means getting to know her best friend.
Rashmi Devi.
She’s pretty and smart and sarcastic. And I hate her. She flirts with Josh one day in their art class – of course she can draw, when I can’t – and he becomes consumed by thoughts of her. Page after page of Rashmi shining like a gorgeous Hindu goddess. They go on for ever. He woos her pathetically, desperately, until she agrees to go on a date with him. And then I’m forced to relive the painful moments of my past as they engage in on-the-page PDA.
It gets worse. Josh tells her that he loves her. She says it back. He touches her. She touches him back. And then they’re losing their virginity on the floor of her bedroom beside her pet rabbit, Isis.
A rabbit.
Josh literally lost his virginity in front of a metaphor for sex.
There’s another single-panel page, and this time Rashmi has been drawn naked like the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, who – it turns out – is the goddess of fertility, and she’s holding her pet rabbit, and she’s surrounded by more rabbits, and enough with the stupid rabbits and fertility and sex already.
Ohmygod. I hate rabbits.
And I feel ill and furious, but there’s no way I’m stopping now. It’s masochism. There’s a weird, out-of-place flashback to Josh getting his tattoo. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s probably because he was so eager to draw more naked pictures of his girlfriend that he figured the story of his own body modification could wait. Or whatever. I grab the next stack of pages from the box and realize, at some point, that I’ve pushed his T-shirt onto my floor. I don’t pick it up.
Finally, Josh and Rashmi are fighting. And it’s nasty. She’s pissed because he’s skipping school, and he lashes back at her in full force. I relish his anger. And I feel vindicated because I never yelled at him for skipping class to work on this book. Though maybe I would’ve if I’d known what was in here. But then the school year ends, and he flies out to join her family at their vacation home in Delhi.
He once told me that he’d spent “some time” with her family one summer, but…an entire month? In India? No wonder he knew so much about Sanjita. Somehow, the idea of Josh spending an entire month with the Devi family hurts almost as much as the rabbit.
JUNIOR begins without any mention of Josh’s time in New York. His parents were everywhere in the beginning, but they’ve almost entirely disappeared. It’s a strange omission.
School kicks off, and St. Clair moons over Ellie’s absence, even though she’s attending a college nearby. Anna shows up. I remember watching her in the cafeteria that first week of school, seething with jealousy because she made the leap to their table so effortlessly. I wanted her luck. I wanted her confidence.
And then, suddenly, Josh is alone.
St. Clair gets a crush on Anna. He’s torn between her and Ellie, and he spends so much time running between them that he hardly has time left for Josh. And the more time that Josh spends alone, the more he realizes how alone he actually is. All of his friends will be gone the next year. Josh grows increasingly antagonistic towards school, which makes Rashmi increasingly antagonistic towards him, which makes him increasingly antagonistic towards her. And she’s upset because Ellie dropped her as a friend, and Meredith is upset because now St. Clair likes two girls who aren’t her, and Anna is upset because St. Clair is leading her on, and then St. Clair’s mom gets cancer.
It’s a freaking soap opera.
As the drama between his friends grows, Josh pulls away and into himself. His illustrations become darker. The slack-jawed freshman is long gone, the oversexed sophomore has disappeared, and now he’s a sullen junior. His parents briefly, randomly, appear to hassle him about the election. He wants to break up with Rashmi, but he’s too depressed to find the energy. He stops drawing and skips class to sleep. The head of school – having called him into her office for the hundredth time – tells him, “I think you’re passively trying to get me to kick you out. So I’m not going to.”
I’ve never thought about their actual interactions. I’m shocked as the head pulls out his records and informs him that he had the highest pre-acceptance test scores that she’d seen in years. He’s the brightest student in our class.
Josh is the brightest student. Not me.
I’m ashamed to admit that this hurts. It definitely hurts. And yet…I’ve always known it to be true. I’ve always known that he’s been putting on an act. That he can see through the bullshit, and he’s not willing to participate in it. It’s one of the reasons I was attracted to him in the first place.
“For a certain type of person, high school will always be brutal,” the head says. “The best advice that I can give you is to figure out what comes next, and work towards that.”
The following scene shows him in detention. My skin flushes when I see him hunched over in the back corner of the classroom beside the window overlooking the courtyard with the pigeons.
I have been sitting at his desk. I knew it. Somehow, I knew it.
Josh throws himself back into his work. He wants to lose himself in it…and maybe find himself in return. But when St. Clair breaks up with Ellie, St. Clair’s new-found joy with Anna only further cements Josh in solitary misery. And by the time Josh and Rashmi break up, they both know it’s coming, and they’re both ready. They’re exhausted. Too tired to keep fighting. He begins travelling to other countries every weekend – in secret and alone – separating himself from his friends before they can do it to him.
And then it’s summer. Our summer.
My heart is hammering as I grab the last stack from the box. On the first page, he’s alone inside Kismet. And then I’m on the second, shouting his name and startling him out of a waking slumber. There’s a dreamlike tone here. It mirrors both how I acted and how he reacted. I cringe at everything I say, but the way he draws me is like a beacon of light.
There’s a flashback to our freshman year, and his brushstrokes become softer. He sees me reading Joann Sfar. He tries to talk to me, but he’s a bumbling idiot. And then I’m the one who gives him a crazy look.
The story returns to Kismet. Josh realizes that I’m flirting with him, which he finds puzzling and hilarious. But also pleasing. He walks me to my door and then hurries home to draw me again – the garden-rose-halo illustration – before falling asleep. The next night, he returns to the café and discovers me with Kurt. He curses, drags himself home, and then he’s back in DC, where he spends a miserable summer dreading his senior year.
The last few pages are loose, rough sketches of his first day of school. Hard to follow. His interactions with me are flattering, but the messy panels make it feel less concrete. Like the ideas inside of them are still subject to change.
And then…I’m out of pages. The box is empty.
Chapter twenty-three
I’m filled with too many strong emotions at once. Jealousy. Sadness. Anger. There’s certainly an acknowledgement, though it’s unreasonably begrudging, of the fearlessness it took for him to create this, but the negative thoughts keep shoving their way to the top. They sour the positive. I thought I knew my boyfriend, but it turns out that I had only an out-of-focus snapshot. Now I have the full picture.
Josh had…this entire life before me.
How can something so obvious be so shocking?
And Rashmi. I knew she’d be in there, but how could I know all of her would be in there? I didn’t want to see her. With Josh. Like that. It’s not fair that I’ve seen it, because I’ll never be able to un-see it.
I kick at my sheets. I’m thinking about rabbits. I’m thinking about too-tall French girls. I’m thinking about Josh thumbing his nose at an education that I’ve chosen to take seriously. It’s never bothered me before. Why is it bothering me now? I toss and turn for hours until I’m jolted awake – out of a restless sleep I didn’t even know I’d succumbed to – by a flying leap. An oddly fuzzy sister is bouncing up and down on my bed.
“Wake up!” Gen bounces the bed harder. “Hattie and I are already dressed and coffee’d. Those balloons won’t make fun of themselves.”
Great. Because this is exactly what today needs. A parade.
Our house is on the wrong side of Broadway to see or hear the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it only takes a few minutes to walk someplace where we can witness the grotesque spectacle first-hand. My sisters and I have a tradition of poking around the parade’s outskirts in the early hours of daylight.
My head is throbbing from crying all night long. “I don’t feel well.”
“You have to get up so Maman will stop bugging me about my hair.”
Her orange-red fuzz is about two inches long. It sticks out in a thick sphere around her head. “You look like a corgi,” I say. “Are you growing it back out?” But Gen is rifling through the papers on my bed. I lunge between her and the manuscript.
“Did Josh draw this?”
I snatch at the paper that’s still in her hands. “Give it!”
“Jeez, calm down. I just wanna see.” She extends her arm, holding it as far away from me as she can. “Wow. What is all of this?”
“Please.” I’m on the verge of tears.
Gen looks at me, startled. She hands it back slowly. “Sorry.”
“It’s just…it’s private. Don’t tell Hattie, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Seriously. You know how she is.”
“Yes, darling. I seriously won’t tell her about your seriously weird reaction to something I seriously don’t understand.”
I clutch my pillow against my chest. She stares at me for a long time. Finally, she stands and heads for my door. “Five minutes.”
“I’m not going. I don’t feel good.”
“It’s not optional.”
When Gen wants something, it’s impossible to stop her. I know better than to try. I place the manuscript back into the box. I’m careful not to crease the pages – any more than they’re already creased – but I don’t bother putting them in order. I shove the box back into my closet, throw on some clothes, and meet my sisters at the door.
Hattie frowns. “What’s up with you?”
“Leave her alone,” Gen says.
“Your hat clashes with your gloves,” Hattie says to me. “And they look even worse with that coat. Won’t you, like, die or something if you don’t look perfect?”
I pull down the woollen hat further over my eyes. Gen links her arm through mine and marches me outside before I can change my mind. Or my outfit. Hattie trudges behind us.
The feeling in New York in the autumn is what you’d expect elsewhere in the spring. Renewal. Locals are happy to be outside again. The subways have cooled, the humid stench of summer has passed. Celebrations and festivals are everywhere. The air is crisp, and its accompanying scarves and boots are a comforting return. I try to appreciate my surroundings. I search for yellow or orange or golden leaves, my own favourite aspect of the season, but the branches are already bare. I’m too late. Everything is dead.
Gen chatters away about her life in Massachusetts while Hattie interjects with colourful commentary. I don’t really pay attention. We cross Columbus, and the streets grow crowded with families and dancers and cheerleaders and police officers. Several marching bands are warming up – there’s a hum of brass, staccato drills on snare drums, and airy scales on woodwinds. The enormous Horton the Elephant balloon peeks out from behind a building, a street ahead,
and its trunk is holding a bright pink flower.
“Cheer up,” Gen says to me. “I’ve signed you up to walk the route with them this year.” She points at a group of dancers in blue cowboy chaps and goofy fringed vests.
At least a dozen horrifying clowns in tattered rainbow jumpsuits pop into the drugstore beside us. “Over there,” I say. “They’re looking for you, Gen. They need you.”
“Have you seen those tap-dancing Christmas trees? They asked if you’d swing back around and have a second go with them. You won’t be too tired, right? I mean, I already paid for your tinsel pants.”
“I’m glad you guys didn’t sign me up for anything,” Hattie says. “Because it’s really awesome doing nothing.”
I shoot her an annoyed look. When Gen sees that I’m still not willing to fulfil my usual role as peacekeeper, she steps in. I sink back into myself. Back into the manuscript. I can’t erase this image from my mind: Rashmi, covered in rabbits. The Kermit balloon floats out from behind another building, and I think about rabbits. We get cold and walk home, and I think about rabbits. Maman calls us into the kitchen, and I help her make crescent rolls. Rabbits. I help her set the table. Rabbits. The turkey is carved, the drinks are poured, the toast is made. Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits. The plates are cleared, the mashed potato and gravy remains are scraped into the trash can. My boyfriend loses his virginity, and, oh, who’s that looking on?
It’s a rabbit.
My family parks around the television for a feel-good movie. I’m still thinking about rabbits an hour later, when I hear the faint sound of my phone ringing inside my bedroom. My heart catapults into my throat. I sprint upstairs and barely catch it in time.
“I love you,” Josh says. “Hold on.” There’s laughter and loud voices, and then the sucking sound of a sliding door being shut. “Okay, I’m on a patio. Or a private balcony. Or something. Actually, I don’t know where the hell I am.”