Page 35 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
I’ve long since accepted that my best friend doesn’t express emotions the way most human beings do. He buzzes at a low frequency. It’s all there—sadness, joy, excitement, frustration—but you won’t find it on his face. It’s in the air. Seriously. I don’t believe in auras or energies or any of that hippie stuff, but I swear to God, the kid emits something. To sit next to him is to pick up on it. Sometimes I thinkthat’s why I was drawn to him in the first place—his frequency. It’s never fast, never chaotic. When he’s happy, it hums. When he’s angry, it flattens out or disappears altogether. And I’m left alone with my own frequency, the swarm of moths inside my mind—an incessant beating of wings so loud, so terrifying, that at every moment I’m afraid someone will hear.
—
AFTER MY PARENTS GO TOsleep, I slide out of bed and pad silently down the hall. When I reach Taz’s door, I crack it open, slip inside, and dive-bomb the bed, whisper yelling, “Cannonball!”
“Hey!” Manuel wiggles out of the covers. “What are you doing?”
“Follow me.”
We unhook the latch from the bedroom window and shimmy out onto the roof. The shingles rattle as we flip onto our backs. We stay up late, talking into the dark, counting the number of satellites drifting across the sky. I walk him through the complex political dynamics of the American middle school and he teaches me curse words specific to Colombia. The rough asphalt leaves imprints on the backs of our legs. We do this every night. Amazingly, my parents never figure it out. Not when we laugh so loudly the whole block can hear. Not when we start nodding off over our eggs in the morning. Not even when we break a cluster of shingles off the roof. “Damn pigeons,” says Speedy, rolling about the garden and glaring at the treetops.
Two weeks is a long time. You might think we’d start to hate each other. And, listen—it’s not like we don’t fight. We do. Some nights our giggles devolve into angry whispers, which end with both parties flipped onto their sides, faces pointed toward opposite ends of the roof. But the next morning I tumble into his bedroom and wake him by blowing a raspberry into his ear, and the friendship moves on. We fight like siblings: cruelly, carelessly, operatingunder the principle that the person on the other end of your anger will have to forgive you.
I start to understand Clarence and Caleb a little better.
Even at the deepest point of a fight—lying plank-straight on my side, steaming with rage at whatever great wrong my best friend committed against me—I don’t kick him off the roof. And if he tries to crawl back into the window, I say, “Don’tgooooo, Valde. There are scary monsters in the woods!”
And he rolls his eyes. “Eliot Beck, the Permanent Baby.”
If only he knew how accurate that is. How my heart seizes at the thought of walking back to my empty bedroom. How silence pulls thoughts from my mind that I work hard, so hard, to keep down. To shove beneath the floorboard of my mind. How a warm, familiar body is the only thing that keeps them there.
We watch the stars together and drive to school together and eat lunch together and come home together and suffer through Wendy’s cooking together. “What is this?” he asks on his first night at our house, in reference to the hamburger casserole on the buffet.
“That,” I say, “is the You-nited States of America.”
At night we climb out onto the roof with a grainy map of constellations we printed earlier that day in the library. We struggle to connect the hazy pixels on the page to the twinkling lights in space. Quickly we lose steam. Stare up at the bright Midwestern sky. My head nods to the side, drifting onto his shoulder. By the time I find sleep, Worry has become nothing but a distant memory.
“This is bullshit,” says Karma one morning. Manuel is upstairs, in the shower. From the kitchen, I can hear the pipes running. “Eliot’s little boyfriend getting to sleep over for weeks on end? None of us ever got to do that.”
“Catherine.” Mom doesn’t even look up from her crossword. “Watch your language.”
“No. This is just another instance of Eliot getting away withwhatever the hell she wants, all because she’s the youngest. You never let Jack sleep over, and I don’t evenwantto fuck dudes.”
Mom flinches. My sister only recently came out, and although my mother’s words profess that Love is Love, that she supports Karma no matter what, her face sometimes says otherwise.
While I would never say so, Karma is right: Momdoestreat Manuel differently. Yes, she’s always been an open-door mother, but never like this. Eventually, there will be birthdays and road trips, spring breaks and winter vacations, long summers in Canada. I will ask, and Mom will never say no. In fact, she’ll invite him herself, throwing open her door and her heart to a boy she barely knows. Almost as if he’s her best friend, not mine. Almost as if she needs him as badly as I do.
—
ON THE LAST NIGHT OFour two-week-long sleepover, Manuel and I change into pajamas in our separate rooms—we wear almost the same thing, boxers and a T-shirt—and, as usual, crawl out onto the roof. We’re quiet for a moment. Then, I ask, “Are you excited to see your parents?”
Silence.
“No?”
Grunt.
“Haven’t you missed them at all?”
He turns away. “Just drop it, okay?”
—
THE FIRST TIME I TELLManuel I love him, it’s an accident.
It’s the next morning. We’re waiting outside for him to get picked up by his parents’ driver. After a few minutes, a shiny black car with tinted windows that look like they could take multiple rounds ofbullets before breaking turns the corner and starts up our block. As soon as I spot its headlights, I tackle Manuel, pulling him into a bone-crunching hug. I don’t let go until I hear the tires pull into the driveway.
“Bye!” I say as I release him. “Love you!”
