Page 28 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
Manuel turned and walked away, an upright ship sailing slowly into the night.
I stumbled up onto the boardwalk. Rounded the oak tree and started down the other side of the hill. By then, we’d been in Sunny Sunday for hours, leaving the boardwalk wide open and available for spiders to build their webs.
This island is covered in spiders. They swing from tree trunks, dangle below branches, perch in wait on webs as thick as wool. Orb weavers. Sheet weavers. Wolf spiders. Cellar spiders. Long bellied, star bellied. Hammock, garden, grass, hacklemesh, and—of course—the ever-present daddy longlegs. They build cobwebs and hide little yellow sacs filled with thousands of unhatched babies in places you don’t expect to find them—inside wakeboard gloves or between the folds of a wet towel. They coat this island, every inch of it. There’s no nook into which they cannot creep.
The winding path of the boardwalk, which zigs between boulders and zags around bushy trees, is the perfect place for spiders to build cobwebs. While the island sleeps, the spiders weave—just a strand at a time, thin as fishing line, pulled tight across the boardwalk. Sticky, silky, invisible to the naked eye. A thousand trip wires waiting for the unlucky first to rise.
They truly outdid themselves, that night. Didn’t settle for a few isolated embellishments. They decorated the whole damn thing. Door-to-door security. I kept running—down the narrow boardwalk, through the tunnels of trees, around the edge of the lake, gathering cobwebs the whole way.
Was Manuel right? Was keeping a secret impossible when you were keeping it from a person who knows you better than you know yourself? Was it all going to come spilling out, dragged by the sheergravity of closeness, despite my best efforts, despite the fact that telling him would almost certainly sever him from my life forever? Would earn me nothing but his disgust, his revulsion. Would perhaps even end with him reporting me to the police.
That was why I did what I did. Why I cut myself off from my family and best friend. Because seeing them brought me back to my old life, to the self-torture and self-loathing I worked so hard to eliminate. To the person I finallystoppedbeing when I moved to New York.
Work was my saving grace. Goals and schedules and assignments turned in far too early—those were the branches to which I clung, white-knuckled, until at last they dragged me free of the river in which I had for so long been drowning.
I knew what I had to do this week: I had to plaster a smile on my face, to show my family just howA-okayI really was. Not only to prove that adulthood was goingjust swellfor me—that I’d earned my spot with the grown-ups—but to protect myself, too. To shield me from my Worries. Because they might have been silent for now, but their memory remained; they lingered at the edges of my consciousness, like the little flare-up of obsession over a piece of spit at dinner, a silent reminder of the power they once held over me. A voice that could, at any moment, come roaring back to life.
And I was afraid that if it did, this time it would be for good. That if my family discovered just how broken I was, there would be no putting me back together.
Henry always told me not to keep secrets. “You can hide it from everyone else,” he’d said, “but not me. We’re practically twins, remember? We’re connected. Anything that passes through your mind passes through mine, too.”
But wait, I realized. That quote—thatcouldn’thave been Henry. An eleven-year-old would never say something like that. Even abrilliant eleven-year-old. Or would he? Was he truly that exceptional? Or did Manuel say that to me much later on?
No.No, no, no.It was happening again. The confusion. That infuriating, torturous defect of mind. The one that only happened with Manuel and Henry.
It had been a problem as long as I could remember, but in the past three years, it had gotten worse. Sometimes, my memory replaced one boy with the other. Sometimes they appeared together, one being, a messed-up mixture of body parts, blended until I couldn’t tell if the boy in my memory was my best friend or a ghost of the brother who once was the same. I shook my head, a dog trying to dry its fur of rain.
My cabin for the week was Little Lies. (If you can’t tell, Speedy is a big folk music fan. All the cabins are named after songs by his favorites—“Sunny Sunday” by Joni Mitchell, “Little Lies” by Fleetwood Mac, “Tangled up in Blue” by Bob Dylan, etc. The soundtrack to his drug-fueled past life.) With just one bedroom, one bathroom, and a small screened-in porch facing out toward the water, it’s the smallest cabin on the island.
Outside Little Lies, I stopped and bent to gather my breath. It was only then, stooped over my body, staring at nothing, that I heard the paradox in what I’d said to Manuel.
Stop trusting me. Trust me.
I sighed.
When I straightened up, I spread my arms to the trees. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “I give you: the Copywriter.”
10
FIFTH GRADE
I MIGHT HAVE A NEWbest friend. Mom might be out of her bedroom. But the Worries don’t leave. Not by a long shot.
Ineedevidence that I’m not actually a bad person. During class or at the dinner table or in moments of quiet, I root through my past. Look for lies and crimes and rules broken. Where one dead body is buried, there’s sure to be more.
As soon as I start digging, I find them everywhere.Everywhere.When I cheated off Hailey Richman’s spelling test in second grade. When I stole a Twix bar from the grocery checkout aisle. When I skipped soccer practice to eat Snickers bars in the rec center lobby until my stomach hurt. They’re all there, waiting to be found.
It’s hard to believe, actually. Hard to believe I spent ten years beneath the weight of these crimes and felt no guilt. None at all. What’s wrong with me? How did I live with myself? How did I wake every day and roll out of bed and brush my teeth and smile at myself in the mirror and think I wasn’t a monster?
In the end, it’s too much. I need relief. I need someone to absolve me of my guilt. So I do the only thing I can think to do: I confess.
“Dad,” I say during my first confession. We’re out on Lake Michigan in the boat we keep in Chicago. He’s teaching me to drive. Butsince I’m only ten, it’s mostly an excuse for him to buzz around in big circles for no reason. “I did something bad.”
“What?” he yells. The boat is a Boston Whaler. Its engines are thunderous, and it has no roof.
“I DID SOMETHING BAD.”
He eases back the throttle. The boat slows and its wake builds, thickening into long hills that lift the water we leave behind. When we come to a stop, the waves overtake us. The boat rolls about in the chop.
