Page 77 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
“Come on.” Manuel inches closer. When did he get so close? “You’ve really never thought about it?”
“I—” I try to process his words, but my mind can’t hold on to them.HaveI thought about sex? I must have, right? Somewhere along the way, I must have wanted to. But my mind has been so occupied for so long with sex-related Worries, withremember that time you didn’t mourn your brother, remember that time you flirted with a boy who already had a girlfriend, remember that you’re disgusting, you’re a pervert, and remember that the only way to atone for these perversions is to remind yourself of them, over and over and over, that I shut my sexuality off altogether.
And right now, they’re still there. I can still look for reasons to hate myself, the trails of thought I’ve walked so many times I could find them blindfolded. It’s not that they’re gone. I see them all, feel them, sink my foot into the groove in the dirt where their paths begin.
The difference is that I no longer care.
I swallow. It turns things off, doesn’t it? The alcohol. The drunk.
I see now, with surprising clarity, exactly how my father became an addict.
“Eliot?” Manuel knocks on the side of my head. “Are you in there?”
I blink several times. Come back to the present. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, of course, sorry.”
“Where’d you just go?”
“I just…” I trail off.
Manuel eyes me knowingly. “You’re worrying.”
“Nope.” I plaster a fake smile on my face and take a step back.Another. “Nothing to worry about here! Just booze and a good time and—”
I step back yet again, but there’s no floor, nothing, I’ve stepped right off the edge of the dock, and suddenly I’m falling, and what’s below must be cold, wet darkness into which my body will plunge, plummeting down three or five or uncountable feet, and the orange moonlight above will grow ever smaller, shrinking until it disappears altogether.
But that doesn’t happen—not this time, anyway—because Manuel catches my shoulders before I even hit the water. He pulls my face right up close to his, closer than I ever could have reached on just the tips of my toes, and whispers, “Do not”—his breath is warm in the cool night air—“lie to me about your OCD again.”
“I—”
“¿Me entiendes?”
I nod.
“Good.” He sets me down, but his hands linger on my shoulders, his eyes on my neck. The harvest moon casts a warm orange glow on his face, illuminating his short curls and high cheekbones from behind. He looks like a statue. Like Adonis carved in moonlight.
I swallow thickly.
What the hell is happening to me?I feel something strange in my pelvis—the same place I check every time my Worries tell me that I’m sexually attracted to a woman or a family member or a dog or any other being to whom I’m not supposed to be attracted. A place I’ve tried for years to freeze, to keep from feeling anything at all. It never listens. It isn’t listening now.
This feeling, though…it’s different. It isn’t tight and throbbing and painful, like it is when I worry. It’s warm. It’s a growing, glowing warmth, right at the base of my gut.
Manuel releases my shoulders, but I find that I don’t want him to.
I want him to hold on a little longer.
25
NOW
THE FRENCH FRIES WENT INfirst. Dad forced Taz to sit in the rocky throne next to the firepit, then nearly cried from laughter at how uncomfortable he looked. Glasses drained quickly. Once the fries started coming off the fire, they looked too good to resist. Karma was the first to sneak one from inside their nest of greasy paper towels. Its skin crackled between her teeth. She groaned. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Caleb dug in and took a handful. So did Taz. He arranged them on a small paper plate and passed them to Helene. Mom fed one to Speedy and giggled.
Clarence fried. He seemed to be having fun—real fun, I mean. Relaxed, effortless. Not the aggressive happiness he normally put on. When he finished all the potatoes, he switched to fish. His cheeks glowed pink in the firelight as he dunked fillet after fillet into a bowl of batter—once, twice, three times, a generous coating—then transferred them into the vat of bubbling oil. He moved from bowl to boil as quickly as he could, but batter still drizzled from the bottom, dripping first onto the ground and then into the hot oil, droplets crisping almost instantly into free-floating flakes that bubbled up and gathered to one side like a school of fish.
Karma fetched another bottle of champagne from the coolersand refilled everyone’s glasses. “Who wants to give the first toast?” she asked. “Clare?”
“Mine is too good,” Clarence said. “Nobody will be able to follow.”
