Page 66 of Past Present Future

When I get a good look at the letter, I realize it’s not addressed to my specific room—just Neil McNair, and NYU’s address. My room number is handwritten, as though it was sorted by someone at the residence hall. So he doesn’t know exactly where I live, but the universe was more than happy to intervene and help him out.

Breathe. Just keep breathing, I urge myself, because suddenly I’m unsure whether it’s something I’ve ever been able to do naturally.

I don’t read it until I’m outside, until I can gulp in lungfuls of midwinter air while unassuming New Yorkers stream by me.

Dear Neil,

I’ve been working on my penmanship. Can you see a difference? It made me think of you, how you loved those expensive pens and all that calligraphy stuff. I remember seeing you bent over the kitchen table, spending all that time making each letter look perfect. Seemed like a waste of time back then—when would you use something like that in real life? But maybe I’m starting to see the value.

Haven’t heard from you, so school must have you pretty busy. But that was always the case, wasn’t it? Guess I really thought you might surprise me at Christmas.

What I’m trying to say is… it’s been lonely in here.

Miss you, buddy.

Dad

If his goal was emotional manipulation, then congratulations to him, because I’m feeling manipulated as fuck.

I hate that it hurts for a moment, the idea of him being lonely. I hate that split second of sympathy immediately followed by the crushing feeling that I don’t know what to do about this.

I have always had the answers. Always had a plan. But there is no set of rules for this, no formula I can follow that generates a perfect answer. He hasn’t listened to my mom. If I wrote back, telling him to stop? I’d be on edge every time I opened that mailbox. The simple presence of an envelope would make me break out in a cold sweat.

All this time, I’ve wanted to deal with it without dealing with it. Ignore it, and it would go away.

Well, it isn’t going away.

Because even if those letters stopped, he’d still be in my head, taking up far too much space and pressing on old bruises. No son of mine is taking a dance class, he spat at my mom one night so many years ago. I’d been in bed, but sound carried easily through the thin walls. You’ve spent his whole life babying him—what’s he going to be like when he’s older? He’ll barely be able to take care of himself.

I’m not babying him, she responded. This is what he wants.

And who put that idea in his head in the first place?

Then a loud noise. A muffled, foreign sound.

Hair straightener was too hot, my mom said the next morning, when I pointed to the red mark on her wrist, her voice shaking. Clumsy me.

The weight of it nearly knocks me over—I have to dodge a cyclist at the last minute. A memory warped by time and by force.

I’d somehow convinced myself—self-preservation?—that he’d never become physical with us. Suddenly I’m no longer sure what truly happened, what my mind conjured to protect me.

The way I snapped at Skyler when he asked about Adhira. How many times did my dad snap at us like that?

How many times did he leave a mark?

Now it feels overwhelming that the whole city is the campus, this intangible thing for an intangible feeling. Too many sidewalks, too many people. But it’s slightly better than the claustrophobia of that room, with a roommate who might know my darkest secret.

I should love it here. I should be grateful for every minute. I’m in college in one of the greatest cities in the world, and I would dare to not have fun? What a fucking asshole.

Yet all I feel is a bone-deep weariness mixed with unease, as though I’ve been put in a blender along with every uncomfortable thought I’ve tried to keep from coming to the surface. Pureed and panicked.

I go all the way across the country, and he’s still here in my head. He’s next to me in the dining hall at breakfast and in my classes and on the subway platform. His voice, as clear as it was when I was sixteen, when I was eleven. Mocking me.

Miss you, buddy.

Buddy.

As though the two of us have a relationship where that word makes any kind of sense. There were times I doubted whether he loved me at all—I was certainly never his buddy. Because it didn’t seem right, that he could love me while telling me in a hundred different ways that I was too soft. Too weak.

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