“I guess I don’t,” I say. “Not really. But we click, you know? There’s just something about her. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re both sober, or both photographers. Maybe it’s just her vibe. I can’t explain it. When we’re talking, it’s like the whole rest of the world falls away. And I like who I am around her. She makes me…funnier. Kinder. I feel like a more complete person, or at least like she sees something in me that I want to nurture. I want to be the person she thinks I am.”
Marcus gives me a considering look just in time for the waitress to return with our coffees. He takes a long sip, watching me over the rim of his cup. “And what is the worst possible outcome that could happen here? What are you most afraid of happening?”
“It goes badly,” I say immediately. “We don’t work out, and we risk both our careers, not to mention our sobriety.”
“I think you’re catastrophizing, bud. Plus it sounds like she’s the one who’s pushing for more involvement, not you.”
“I mean…yeah. With her project. She wants my help.”
“And you agreed to give it to her. You’re both grown-ups here.”
I shrug. “I guess I’m not sure which is worse: continuing some kind of professional relationship with her after what happened or punishing her by refusing to teach her when half of why she came to Parker was to study with me.”
And this is exactly why they say not to get into relationships with students. This exact kind of predicament. Because no matter what I choose, I’m choosing badly.
“Maybe there’s not a best choice,” Marcus says. “She’s only here for the summer program, right? It’s hard to imagine how you could mess up her career so badly in a single summer just by helping her out with an art project. And you said she’s been clean for four years. It’s not like she’s some newbie with a one-month chip hunting for validation. You know, some might argue that being with another person in recovery is the best move. You can build each other up, not tear each other down.”
It’s so different from what I thought he’d say that I blink twice in quick succession and sit back in my chair, turning his words over in my head. It’s also pretty much the opposite of the feedback I got from the other guys in NA, which I fully expected Marcus to echo tonight. Isn’t that what sponsors are supposed to do—tell you to get your baser impulses in order and control yourself?
“I guess….” I say.
“It sounds like you don’t believe me.”
“No,” I say quickly. “No, I do; I get what you’re saying. And maybe you’re right. It doesn’t have to go beyond that. But…yeah. Yeah.”
Wow, Wyatt. Great conversational skills. Really a pro there.
“If it did go beyond that, it’d be okay, you know. No one’s gonna smite you.”
I’m not 100 percent sure I believe that. But maybe that’s paranoia. Or fear of fucking up somehow, of turning into one of those assholes like my father, who used people and then threw them away. Who prioritized his own wants over everything and everyone else.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from that shit. I’ve built everything I am today from the ground up—from underground. I’ve come so far. I’ve got walls, and they’re fucking great walls.
I don’t want to risk anything that might compromise them.
“It’s such a cliché, isn’t it?” I mutter at last, after the silence has stretched on long enough for Marcus to take two more gulps of his coffee. “Guy with childhood trauma fears meaningful relationships because he’s afraid of turning out like villain dad. That’s pretty much me.”
Marcus has the grace to look sympathetic. “You talked to your brother lately?”
I snort. “You ask me that every time we hang out. Answer’s still no.”
“Be honest,” Marcus says. “You’re still stalking his social media.”
“Shut up.”
“I know you do.”
He’s not wrong, to my great humiliation. I’ve spent way too many nights scrolling through Liam’s page from my dummy account—the one with no name and no profile pic. Liam’s still in North Carolina. Different town, same state. Married now. He seems…happy.
Just looking at that makes me angry.
It’s not fair that Liam should get to go on and have a normal life—find himself a cute blond debutante, get married, white picket fence with two perfect kids, fucking…fucking seashell collecting on the beach with his gorgeous wife. The bitter core of me thinks he ought to have been cosmically punished somehow. I’m not sure why I think that. Liam never did anything to me. He didn’t bully me. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t even home the night my father lost his shit and kicked me out for good.
So why do I want him to suffer so damn badly?
Jealous, a voice murmurs in the back of my mind. I shove it down.
But isn’t it true? Liam’s living the life I might have lived if I’d been born a cis guy. Watching him is like watching a sneak peek at some alternate-universe version of my life. Where I never got hooked on dope. Where my family actually loved me and wanted me around.
Liam got it all. He won.
“You don’t always have to compare yourself to him,” Marcus says, more gently than I would have said it to myself.
“Yeah, right,” I mutter.
“It’s not a competition.”
But it is, of course. The competition started the day we were born, a screaming, red-faced supposed girl and a chubby monster of a baby boy. It continued every day after that, the pair of us dressed in our cute matching twin outfits: pink and blue, hair bow and bow tie. Ballet versus soccer. Etiquette lessons from my grandmother, but boys will be boys.
Yeah, it’s a competition. And my brother’s been winning from the start.
14
ELY
Sunday, I take my camera into Manhattan.
In the late afternoon the light is perfect, golden and filtering down between the buildings like molten amber. I walk through Greenwich Village, all the winding streets I used to explore in secret. Not because the Village was in any way forbidden to Chabad kids, but because I worried that if anyone saw me here, they might see the truth—that I belonged here, in front of Stonewall kissing a girl with glitter in her hair, far more than I had ever belonged in Crown Heights.
I trail my fingers along a wrought-iron fence and turn my face toward the sky, toward the silhouettes of the rooftops against blue. I take a photo of a man on a balcony leaning against the railing with a cigarette dangling from his fingertips. He’s in a white shirt, barefoot; another man behind him slides a hand up his spine and kisses the nape of his neck.