Crossing (19 page)

I lean against the door jamb, apprehensive about what her being here means. “How is your meet going?” I say for something to say. “Are you, um, winning or whatever?”

She snorts and shakes her head. “Nah, I didn’t place. I’m not very good.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” I wave the comment away.

“It is.” She shrugs. “If I was good, my mom would’ve come to the meet, but instead she stayed home. Her excuse is that Liam needs her, when in fact, I’m pretty sure I saw him Googling ‘ways to kill your overprotective mother without getting caught.’”

I laugh. “That bad, huh?”

“That bad for him. She could give two shits about me and that’s the way I want things to stay.”

I take a couple of mugs down from underneath the cupboard. “We have some fake creamer stuff if you want and Splenda—”

“Black is fine.” Liam has taught her well.

I pour our coffees and head into the living room. I set our mugs on the coffee table and sit down on the opposite end of the couch. It’s time for me to Woman up. “Brynn, I gotta level with you. You seem pretty cool and I get the feeling that you care about your brother, but your being here is scaring me. What do your parents know? What happened when you all took him home?”

She takes a deep breath. “You know about what happened last fall?”

“Liam never told me the full story.” I immediately feel like a fool for not asking, but I guess I assumed we’d have all the time in the world for him to tell me.

“I called Liam to give him a heads up because Ariana blabbed her big mouth to her baby cousin Nico, who is such a dumbass gossip, and everyone at school was asking me if he was, y’know, and I was sure it was going to get back to Mom and Dad.” She takes a sip of her coffee, blows on it and then takes another tentative sip. “I found his stash of girl clothes a long time ago, when I was still in middle school. I was snooping for weed and instead came up with a pair of patterned tights, a fuzzy purple sweater, and a skirt that was too big to fit me, Mom, or Ari.”

“And?”

She shrugs. “And whatever. I figured he was gay and I knew Mom would be a bitch about it, because she is obsessed with appearances, so I kept my mouth shut. Anyway, I think I’ve run interference and our parents haven’t heard the rumors after all, but then right before Thanksgiving I’m walking by Liam’s old room and Mom is ripping the drawers out of the dresser and all of the shit that was in his closet is flung all over the bed. She’s mumbling to herself, ‘Not again, not again.’”

“Not again? So, if she’d already known about him, why the ransacking? Everything incriminating was here.” I take a drink of my coffee and then get up and grab the four half-eaten boxes of Girl Scout cookies Rebecca’s daughter scammed me into buying. Twisted my arm, totally.

I drop the cookies on the table and Brynn goes for the Samoas while I unsheathe the Do-si-dos.

“Thanks, I freaking love these sonsofbitches.” She swallows and then tucks her feet underneath her. “So, I ask Mom the same thing. I say, ‘From the looks of it, you know about Liam.’ She breaks down crying and starts babbling about how she thought she’d nipped this in the bud, about how she’d gotten Ariana’s mom, who’s her frenemy, to talk Liam up to Ariana so that she’d want to date him.”

“Basically, they pimped their kids out?”

Brynn rolls her eyes. “Totally. Like it was a modern-day arranged marriage or what have you. So, when Liam comes home for Thanksgiving, I tell him this and he’s of course way pissed. He and Mom get in a huge fight and he tells her that her plan backfired, that Ariana is out of the picture, that he’s met this awesome woman who he loves more than he ever loved Ari.”

Pain radiates through my chest, hearing that. He loved me even then? I suppose I loved him already, too. I finish off my coffee and set the cup back on the table. “Where’s your dad in all of this?”

“My dad,” she says, sighing, “is nowhere. He’s checked out, been checked out forever. He’s never been able to live up to my mom’s expectations. But Liam and I…Liam made me promise that I would live my life the way I wanted. I asked him if he would make the same promise to me and he said that by the new year he hoped that he could.”

I nod. “He did. He was living the life he wanted. We both were.” Brynn and I munch on Girl Scout cookies in silence for a moment until I can’t stand it anymore. “Has he said anything about me?”

She scrunches up her mouth in thought. “He hasn’t been able to talk for that long, so he hasn’t said anything, but he did slip me a note asking if you’d tried to get in touch with him.”

My hands fly to my chest. “I did! I tried everything, but he never—”

She holds her hand up. “I told him I thought you had, and that I assumed Mom was keeping everything from him.”

“And he went ballistic and scribbled furiously on his pad of paper that he demanded to speak to me?” I ask, half joking, half wishing it were true.

Her eyes go sad. “He wrote, ‘Good, I’ve messed up Dani’s life enough. She should forget about me.’”

“Like that’s ever gonna happen,” I snort.

“So, you still love him?” she asks.

I look her directly in the eye. “Yes, of course I do. I will always—”

She juts her chin out at me. “Then how come you haven’t driven to Boise and kidnapped him?”

I sit back. How come I haven’t done that? “Because I was afraid that it had all been a cruel cosmic joke – someone like him with someone like me? Besides the getting the crap beat out of us part, being with your brother was a dream. I guess I thought if I went to him and found out that what I had felt wasn’t real then I wouldn’t even have the good times to remember.”

Brynn scrubs her face with her hands. “God, you two are such a couple of pussies, seriously. He loves you. You love him.”

I retrieve my backpack from the chair and pull out my two comp tickets to the One Night Only performance of
Crossing
and hand one to her. “Here. Tell him he didn’t ruin my life. Tell him I’m doing what I do best, thinking deep thoughts, writing them down, and then performing them in front of a hundred people.” She takes the ticket from me and crams it in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. “I need him to come to me, Brynn. Any version, I’ll accept them all, but I need him to come to me.”

“I don’t know why I told Brynn to tell Liam to come to me! What the fuck was I thinking?” I peek around the corner of the proscenium arch and scan the audience for Liam and then Lee just to be sure. He’s not here. Wah-wah. “I should be on my way to Boise right this minute instead of standing here nervous as fuck, about to spill my guts to a bunch of strangers.”

“They aren’t a bunch of strangers,” Rebecca says, pacing and rolling her neck. “You know at least sixty percent of the audience.” She grabs my arm, not unkindly. “And you better check your mad ideas about running away. You’ve got to live through one performance and then you can go wherever the hell you want. Tonight, your brilliant ass belongs to me.”

She pulls me into the hallway outside the costume shop. “Let’s warm up.”

I kabuki lion and squinchy lemon my face like I mean it.

X

I run off stage, ripping my shirt off over my head and throw it to one of the dressers. She catches it while the other dresser slips Elizabeth’s scrunched up magenta sequined halter down my raised arms. The show is going well, I’ve made it to the last scene and my heart is only moderately crushed, pulverized, whatever, that Liam didn’t show. I’m compartmentalizing the grief to deal with later, when I write my second one woman show about how I’m literally never loving another human being ever again. I choke down the Dixie cup of water that’s shoved in my face, and charge back onto the stage, a line of drag queens from RUMORS in formation behind me.

The lights come up and Liam, dressed as Liam, is standing there, facing me. His chest is rising and falling deeply, like he’s trying to control his breathing. The audience audibly gasps, but the drag queens don’t, which is assbackwards and tells me instantly they were in cahoots.

Liam’s got a red, raw scar along his jawline that my lips instantly want to kiss. I bring my hand to my chest to steady my heartbeat. No way am I gonna cry.

“Brynn told me about the note you put in my hand at the hospital.” Liam holds an uncapped tube of lipstick out to me.

I take it and step as close to him as I dare.

His mouth falls open into an “O” and I touch the Perfect Red to his lips, sliding the color over the top and then the bottom, entranced. He brings his hand up and takes the lipstick from me, making up my mouth.

There we are.

“I thought the finale was supposed to be a musical number,” some guy in the third row whispers to the lady next to him.

Liam smiles and turns to face the audience. “This isn’t the end.”

X

I lean in closer to the dresser mirror and tug down on my right eyelid with my left hand while sweeping the gel eyeliner across it with my right. I stand back and regard my handiwork, like what I see, and do the left eye.

Liam comes in wearing my leopard robe, really our leopard robe at this point, and hugs my waist from behind while I apply mascara. He kisses that spot on my neck and says, “You look beautiful.”

I meet his eyes in the mirror and then check out my reflection. My nose is more crooked than it was a year ago. I’m not any thinner. My hair is still brown, brown. There are days when I wish chin implants were an affordable option, but Liam’s right. I look beautiful. I turn around in his arms and hold the mascara wand up. “Want me to do you?” I ask and then kiss the scar along his jawline on the left side of his face – all part of our morning ritual.

“Nah, not today. I’m not feelin’ it.” He presses his lips to mine and I drop the mascara over my shoulder onto the dresser before sliding my arms around his neck.

Ever since he started working as a performer at RUMORS over the summer, he hasn’t felt like he needed to be Lee out in public or in the bedroom as often. I honestly don’t care either way, and I think him knowing that has made all the difference.

I untie the belt on the robe and slip my hands inside it, skimming my fingertips across his warm skin. He kisses me harder as my hands move lower.

“I can’t believe I’ve only known you for a year,” he says against my mouth.

I smile and trail kisses along his jaw to his ear. “Happy first day of school.”

“Mmm hmm,” he hums, pulling me back toward our bed.

“We’re going to be late,” I say, laughing, not really caring.

Liam grabs the edge of my shirt and pulls it off over my head, mindful not to completely ruin my updo. He slides my bra straps off my shoulders and brings his lips to the tops of my breasts. “I love you more than Archeology of Mesoamerica,” he says, unbuttoning my jeans.

I take a step back from him and push my pants and my underwear off. He scoots back onto the bed and rests on his elbows. I retrieve a condom from our dwindling supply in the bedside table and toss it to him. He only takes a second and then I’m climbing up his body, kissing his neck, his chin, his mouth. “I love you more than Exploratory Data Analysis.”

He grabs my hips and settles me on top of him, slipping into me. “Exploratory, huh?”

X

We run up the steps to Villard Hall, hand in hand. We missed our first classes, but there’s no way we’re missing Acting IV with Maren, especially since the theatre department has given us a pass for not completing several weeks of Acting II and III. We jam past a girl in the hall, going toward the Little Theatre.

“Uh, hey guys,” a familiar voice says from behind us.

I turn around and come face to face with a bald India. She brushes her knuckles over her head, ducking her chin.

For the first time ever, I don’t find her threatening. Maybe she hasn’t been all along? I chuck her on the arm. “Fuck you for looking even more beautiful without hair.”

She raises her eyes to mine and grins. “Thanks. I’ve always wanted it this way, but it’s a big change.”

“You’re taking Acting IV, right?” Liam asks.

India nods. She stands up straighter and puts that hand of hers on her hip. “Of course. You two ready to be upstaged?”

The three of us face the doors to the Little Theatre. Liam opens one side for us and India walks in first.

I raise my arms above my head to form a circle.

Liam sticks his tongue out at me. “You’re weird.”

I kiss his scar as I breeze past him. “And you’re pretty. Yay for us.”

The end.

Pure and simple, I wrote
Crossing
because I needed to. I’d had this strange, funny, personal story to tell for nearly eighteen years, but figured it would never see the light of day.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Martha Alderson’s
The Plot Whisperer
and Colleen Hoover’s
Hopeless
for giving me the nudge I needed to write my story down. I was reading those two books at the same time and dreaming bizarre dreams about the Universal Story and beautiful boys who help tragic girls find themselves, when I woke up one day with the entire plot of
Crossing
in my head. I texted the ideas to my e-mail while I cooked my daughter eggs, and by that evening, I had a detailed six page outline.

That was the beginning of March and I completed the final draft on April 22
^nd
.

When a lot of the stuff that happens in a novel actually happened to you, the writing is a whole hell of a lot easier. My heart had already broken and repaired over many of these things long ago – others still stung.

I found myself wanting the
Happily Ever After
For Now
for Dani that I didn’t get for myself. That was a hard day that turned into hard weeks that brought on a big change in my life. But the great part about writing this book was that I had more examples of times I had overcome bad situations than times I had given up.

Liam is based on my first real boyfriend, with added characteristics from all of the amazing guys I was lucky enough to act with at the U of O in the mid-Nineties. I was a little bit in love with all of them, so it only seemed right.

India is based on a woman that is currently a semi-famous actor on a popular TV show. I can’t bring myself to watch it, although everyone I know thinks it’s hilarious. Apparently, it’s Always Sunny where she is.