Adam (22 page)

IT WAS LATE
Friday afternoon. Tonight Adam was going to meet Gillian at her apartment at 7:00
P.M.
, and then they were going out to dinner with some of her friends. Gillian had texted:
Is it too soon for that?
Followed quickly by:
I just want to see you and I forgot about these dinner plans and it would be cool to bring you
. Adam had texted it was fine,
great
, even though it made him feel as if his throat were puffing up and his hands had started stinging and gone numb. More people to lie to.

Meanwhile, the hallway refrigerator had been swiftly removed after Ethan's lawyer-threatening phone call, and someone was supposedly coming today to fix the clogged bathtub.

“I have a plan,” said June. She turned down the TV and faced Adam and Casey, slumped in their usual positions on the futon. June's eyes were wild and shiny, and Adam wondered if she was gaining weight. She was wearing a tank top, and her stomach spilled out over the top of her jeans—her bellybutton stretched into a winking gash.

“A plan for what?” said Casey, not lifting her eyes from her book. She had finished
A Cyborg Manifesto
and moved on to
Neuromancer
—another one of Hazel's recommendations.

“A plan for the Jews of course!” said June. For a moment, Adam thought June had a plan to kill them. Or at least trip them on their way into the apartment with a shoelace nailed to the door frame.

“Uh-huh?” said Casey, still not looking up. Adam knew she wasn't listening. It was a surprise Casey heard June at all. When Casey was reading, nothing got through to her. She became dead to everything outside the book. It was an attribute their mom liked to brag about all the time.

“We put out all the Jewish items we can—that menorah you bought, whatever old Jewish holiday cards any of us can find. Adam”—June jerked her head toward Adam, suddenly needing him—“what Jewish stuff do you have?”

“I don't have anything Jewish,” said Adam.

“Well,
look
,” said June. “We'll put out all the Jewish stuff, they'll realize we're serious Jews, and then they'll love us and we'll never have to worry about them fucking us over again!”

“But we're not serious Jews,” said Adam.

Casey, head down, turned the page of her book.

“Speak for yourself!” said June, flouncing around. “I can say the Hanukkah prayer.
Baruch atah Adonai
. . .” and she continued reciting it as she went into her room to look for “Jewish stuff.”

June had had to take on a second job. The comic shop barely paid anything, and she'd already had to borrow money from Ethan to pay last month's rent. So now she was a medical research subject. A “guinea pig,” she called it. Adam wasn't sure what the medical research she was loaning her body to was, but it entailed her leaving a giant jug of her urine in the bathroom and keeping a “mood chart,” for which she was always asking everyone to help her rate her mood on a scale of one to ten.

“Only you know what your mood is,” Casey had said. “We only know how you
act.
” And June had looked crestfallen, like Casey knowing her mood had been the one slight glimmer of intimacy she was hoping they could share.

Adam listened to June reciting the Hanukkah prayer over and over in her room as she rooted around. He was pretty sure she was pathetically trying to impress Casey with it. Casey, who, if you clapped in front of her face right now, wouldn't notice. The apartment felt heavy with loneliness.

Casey looked at her watch. “Shit!” she said. “It's four-thirty! I'm meeting Hazel at seven! Fuck!”

“But you have, like, over two hours,” said Adam.
I'm meeting Gillian at seven
, he thought.

“Uh,
yeah
, and I'm totally not ready,” said Casey. She looked forlornly back at her book. “God, and I really wanted to finish this so I could talk to Hazel about it. She's so fast. She reads, like, a book a day. I'm so dumb and slow.”

If Casey was dumb, Adam was brain-dead.

“She sent me the itinerary for our date on iCal,” continued Casey. “Wanna hear it?” and before Adam could respond, she said, “First we're meeting at South Fourth and Bedford and having a romantic sunset walk over the Williamsburg Bridge. Then I'm going with her to get her tattoo worked on—the one in binary code on her wrist. I'm not allowed to tell anyone what it means. Then we're getting dinner in Chinatown at a special place where she knows the waiters. Then we're getting strawberry gelato at this other special place on the Lower East Side.”

Adam noticed June, cast in dark shadow, standing completely still in her bedroom door frame, clutching the heavy gold menorah.

“And then,” continued Casey, “there's a surprise! She won't tell me what it is. I have to get ready!” And she bolted up.

Casey was making Adam nervous. He should be getting ready, too. He went into his room and started rifling through his clothes. Ugh, he hated everything he owned. A few weeks ago when he'd bought his Ethan Diesel jeans, he'd tried to buy some shirts that seemed Ethanesque too, but now that he'd worn a
real
Ethan shirt, they all seemed horrible and like they were from Kmart. Adam went and knocked on Ethan's door.

“What's up?” Ethan was still in his pajamas.

“Hey, um, I'm going out with Gillian tonight, and, um, I was wondering if I could borrow that shirt again?”

“What?!” said Ethan.

“Oh, uh, I don't—”

“You can
not
wear the same shirt to your second date,” continued Ethan. “Get in here—let's try on some other ones.”

Adam walked into Ethan's room. The Rachel movie was still on his computer screen. Didn't he ever just get
sick
of it? Adam was sick of it, and he hadn't even seen the whole thing. Ethan took a shirt off a hanger in his closet and held it up to Adam. It was the special gray-with-thin-white-lines button-down he'd bought for his date with the Film Forum girl.

“This is Patrik Ervell for Opening Ceremony,” said Ethan.

“It's what?” said Adam.

“A designer,” said Ethan. “It's better without an undershirt. Try it on.”

Adam felt shy taking his shirt off in front of Ethan. He didn't know why. He and Brad were shirtless together all the time. He lifted his T-shirt over his head, and Ethan turned his back to Adam to do something on the computer. Adam felt his nipples get hard. He quickly buttoned up the shirt.

“Sweet,” said Ethan, turning around. “That's the one.”

Back in the front room, Casey was putting on a fashion show for June as June cut out Stars of David from yellow construction paper and pasted them on the wall.

“Yeah, that's what Roxanne said Schuyler said,” said June. “Whatever.”

“Auh!”
said Casey. “I am
not
a tranny chaser!” She seemed extremely pleased that this had been said about her.

“I think Schuyler's just in love with Boy Casey,” said June.

“Hold on, let me try another shirt,” said Casey, and she darted into her room.

Tranny chaser?
This seemed like something Adam should be aware of.

“What are you guys talking about?” he asked June, casual. June slapped another glue stick–smeared Star of David on the wall.

“You know, 'cause Casey dated Boy Casey and now she's dating Hazel, two trans people in a row.”

“What? Hazel is trans?” said Adam. Was
everybody
fucking trans?

“Yeah,” said June.

Casey walked back into the room wearing a sheer tank top and probably a push-up bra.

“Hazel is trans?” Adam asked her.

Casey rolled her eyes. “Yes. What do you think of this shirt, June?”

“So how come you guys always call her ‘her'?” said Adam. “I thought you were supposed to call trans people ‘him.'”

“Not if they're trans
women
,” said Casey.

Adam was completely confused. He'd thought Hazel was just a butch lesbian—butch like Sam was butch, with short hair and cargo pants and . . .

“But I thought—”

“She was born a boy, transitioned to being a girl, is attracted to girls, so she's a trans dyke,” said Casey, fast and exasperated, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“I think I liked the other shirt better,” said June.

“Really?” said Casey. “Is this one too slutty? Hazel told me she likes slutty. She calls me her slutty teenage college girl.”

“I liked the other one,” said June.

“I'm gonna wear this one,” said Casey. “But I think I'm gonna wear a skirt, too.” Casey turned around, went back in her bedroom, and shut the door.

The buzzer rang.

“It's them!” said June. “It's them! I'm not even ready! How does everything look?”

June ran to the bookshelf, adjusted the menorah, and then ran to open the door, almost slipping on a Star of David on the way. As she opened the front door, Adam saw her smile fall.

“You have clogged bathtub?” A short Hispanic guy in grubby clothes carrying some sort of suction machine walked into the room.

***

Adam took the G train from the Broadway stop to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop to get to Gillian's apartment in Fort Greene. As the subway sped along, he glanced around at the other passengers, replayed making out with Gillian in the pizza shop alley, and managed for moments at a time to forget the lie. But whether he was thinking about it or not, it was always there. Like a ringing in your head you don't realize is so loud until you plug your ears.

Adam exited the station. Gillian was at 488 Atlantic Avenue, apartment #2. He glanced around and saw Atlantic Avenue about a block away. He checked his reflection on the back of his phone. Then the time: 6:22. As usual, he had been terrified of being late and somehow calculated it would take an hour to travel seven subway stops. Actually, it was more a precaution. There could have been an emergency and they would have had to stop, and Adam would have been trapped underground with no cell phone signal, no way of contacting Gillian, who would just be waiting, waiting and realizing that she didn't even really like Adam all that much, now that she was annoyed with him for being late and had time to think things over. Definitely better to be obscenely early and kill forty minutes. He started in the direction of Atlantic Avenue but then thought better of it. Gillian, getting dressed for the date, peers out the window and sees Adam, pacing up and down the street below.

Adam walked down Livingston. He wondered what Kelsey Winslow was doing right now. Waiting in her bedroom for Matt to climb up that tree like a fool.
“My dad says I'm killing the tree.”
Adam imagined Matt at the top of the branches, swaying slightly in the breeze, about to clamber through the window when—
snap!
The branch breaks and Matt comes crashing down, cracking his skull open on the concrete in a bloody sprawl. East Bay Prep would build a memorial water fountain for him like they did for that girl Amy Kirkland, who had died of Graves' disease, RIP 1992. Adam didn't like drinking from that fountain. It always made him feel like he was catching Graves' disease. Whatever that was.

It was only 6:27.
Jesus.
Adam started to worry he was going to show up at Gillian's with giant pit stains if he kept walking. He ducked into an air-conditioned Duane Reade and headed toward the back. Stared at the magazines, picked up a
GQ
, opened it, stared at an article—“How to Have Sex in the Car”—but couldn't concentrate enough to read. Maybe Kelsey and Matt were fucking right now. Just slippery slamming, ramming into each other on her bed.
“Oh, Matt, you feel so good! Harder!”
Why did he keep thinking about Kelsey? He had walked around the block before her house 500,000 years ago. He had barely even thought about her since he got to New York; she meant nothing to him. But now she felt eerily close. Like she was breathing on him. They all were. They knew who he really was, and it was inevitable that soon Gillian would too.

“Oh, yeah, I—I'm not trans. I'm actually seventeen—”

“You're
what
?? Oh my god. Get away from me!”

The most amazing, wonderful thing that had ever happened in his life, and probably ever would, had revealed itself to be a sick, convoluted prank that he had masochistically constructed to humiliate himself.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Everyone at EBP exploded in laughter. Brad was coming to New York in two weeks.
God.
He needed to fucking fix this before Brad got here. Get rid of Gillian. Pretend it never happened. Just let Brad see his lame, boring life at the apartment and say,
“Yeah, my life sucks, so what?”
He needed to go home. He needed to leave this Duane Reade, get on the subway, go to the airport, get on a plane, and go the fuck home. Real home. Piedmont home. And then quietly kill himself.

But as soon as Adam thought this, as soon as he acknowledged that committing suicide was indeed a real-life possibility he had at his disposal, he felt better. Euphoric almost, with a recharged desire to live. He slammed the magazine shut and felt a shock of that wild, unhinged video-game feeling he'd had the first night in New York.
“Prepare to meet your greatest challenge ever”
ran through his mind like a booming TV Xbox commercial. He loved Gillian.
I LOVE GILLIAN!
he screamed to himself. And he whipped around and marched out of the Duane Reade.
He was going in.

***

Adam rang Gillian's bell.

“Just a second!” came through the intercom. Then a buzzing noise and he pushed the front door open.

Gillian's face was flushed. She was wearing a really low-cut V-neck T-shirt, and a silver necklace of a little bird hung across her exposed skin. Her lips were wet with fresh lipstick. God, she looked sexy.