Page 45 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
Throughout that morning, it felt like every time I looked over at Manuel, he was goofing off with a member of my immediate family—teasing my mother, bumping fists with Taz, making Karma laugh so hard she spit her gum out. He even appeared to be the resident favorite of Pam and Tim, who peppered him with so many questions about Colombia and Harvard that I feared he might run out of responses. But he never did. He took them in stride, all of them—just as he always had.
It takes a certain kind of fearlessness to let yourself be absorbed into a family as massive and chaotic as my own. Luckily, Manuel was nothing if not fearless. He moved to the US at ten years old—that awful age, when most children go from innocent to something short of evil—and even though he talked about missing parts of his life in Colombia, I never saw him cry. Not once. He embraced his bizarre new American family. He embraced all of us, from Taz’s long silences to Clarence and Karma’s aggressive hijinks. At the time, it was perfect. To have your best friend so seamlessly absorbed into every aspect of your life? It’s every child’s dream.
But as I watched him laugh and plot and generally take centerstage among the family whose acceptance I had so desperately craved as a child, the same family who clearly hadn’t forgiven me for my yearslong absence, I felt this creeping dread, this pit in my stomach that felt like recognition: Had I been so easily replaced?
Speedy, who was in charge of kicking off Greased Pig, was positioned up on the porch in his Feather Chair. The Pig—a watermelon covered in a thick layer of slippery Vaseline—sat in his lap. On Wendy’s whistle, he tossed the Pig into the lake. It was a fall of over fifteen feet. It hit the water and rocketed halfway to the bottom before it boomeranged back upward. By the time it broke the surface and leapt into the air, sending up two great flourishes of water, the other players had already dived after it. Caleb snatched the watermelon first. The game was off.
My siblings had no problem playing dirty; that much became clear within the first few seconds of the game. Karma attacked Caleb from behind, pushing his shoulders down until his head submerged and grabbing the Pig. Clarence splashed water in Karma’s face. Momentarily blinded, she let the Pig slip through her fingers and into Clarence’s arms. Clarence kicked as hard as he could, drawing near the other team’s inner tube. Taz was waiting, playing goalkeeper. He dove for Clarence, but at the last minute, my half brother passed the ball to Manuel, who slam-dunked it into the tube.
Clarence let out a victorious whoop, rubbing Manuel’s hair affectionately. “That’s our guy.”
One point to our team.
We could do this. We could win. I wasn’t just going to sit back and watch; I was going to swoop right in and bring us to victory.
Once again, Speedy tossed the Pig off the balcony, and the second round began. Karma snagged it right away, kicking water into Clarence’s face as he advanced on her. Thankfully, her attention wasall on my half brother; she wasn’t even looking at me. Probably didn’t even consider me a threat—youngest child and all. I capitalized on her negligence and pounced.
What resulted was a kicking and scratching match between Karma and me. It was like we were little girls again, fighting over a favorite toy. We kept our kicks light, not wanting to actually injure each other, but our faces were screwed up into twin expressions of gritted teeth and wild eyes, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the greased watermelon.
“A-ha!” hollered Karma, ripping the Pig from my hands and tossing it into the air. Taz was waiting behind her. He snatched it, then tossed it to Helene, who floated closer to our goal. Helene shot, and the Pig went into the tube.
It went on like this, back and forth between the teams, them scoring once, us scoring twice, them scoring three times. I did my best to participate, but it quickly became clear that I wasn’t built for this sport. I was built for long runs along the Hudson and even longer days sitting at my desk.
Yet again, I was the weakest one of the group. Yet again, I wasn’t enough.
Eventually, I decided I needed a break. I paddled away from the game, over to the rock we used to climb out of the water—an enormous box of a thing with a perfectly smooth top, like a swim raft. When the water is low, the rock sticks a full foot out of the water. I wriggled up, not bothering to push with my arms, just flapping my legs until enough of my torso slid up and over the rock’s flat top. I rolled over onto my back. Then I went limp. My legs dangled into the water. A cloud shaped like a light bulb drifted past. Hungry smallmouth bass could have nibbled at my toes.
Somewhere in the distance, Karma yelled, “Eat grease, asshole!”
As I lay on that rock, I couldn’t help but come back to a questionI had pondered a thousand times in my life: Howdoyou form meaningful relationships with a family you didn’t grow up with?
The answer, I had come to see at last, was this: you can’t. You might think that as you grow up, it gets easier. To make friends with your siblings, I mean. You age. You mature. You harden from that adorable, irritating little bag they have to carry around into something resembling a human adult. When that happens, you get to take your seat at that proverbial table. Right?
Wrong.
That gap might shrink, but it will never close altogether.
You’re left with one option: Build your own family. Choose your own identity.
But here’s the problem: the older kids get to the rest of the world first—to the parents, the teachers, the local law enforcement—which means they define what it means to be a Beck. And they’re human, right? They have no idea how to grow up properly. They make mistakes. They fight. They self-destruct. Sometimes, they self-destruct ratherpublicly. In that way they stumble into adulthood, drunken explorers weaving through the jungle of life and hacking shit down as they go. By the time you, the youngest, come along, you stand at the jungle’s entrance with a machete in your hand and envision carving your own path, but shortly after you start, you realize it’s impossible. The damage is done. The jungle is razed flat. If your oldest brother was a goat fucker, it doesn’t matter if you commit your entire life to saving the planet. It doesn’t matter if you’re hotter than a supermodel or faster than Usain Bolt or ordained by God as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. You’ll always just be the sister of a goat fucker.
But the craziest part, the most baffling, ridiculous part of all, is that these people—the ones who cut the paths you must follow, who standardize familial traditions, who leak personality traits andisms that you absorb without meaning to, an accidental human sponge—you don’t know them. Not really. You’re so young that by the time you’re old enough to make your own decisions, they’re gone. Off to college, to jobs, to that slow process of disentangling who they are from who they were raised to be. They’re well out of the jungle, but you’re lost in the thick of it, no map, no guide, clutching at your side what you thought was a machete but you see now is nothing more than a pen.
—
THE FIFTH EVENT—THE FINALround before lunch—was the Sauna-Off.
All morning, the Nurses had been stoking the fire, juicing the sauna up to skin-melting temperatures. The rules for the contest were simple: Whoever stayed in the longest won the most points. Five points for first place, three for second, and one for third.
“This will be a walk in the park for us both,” Manuel said as we followed the group into the small wooden hut. “We grew up spending almost every summer night in here.”
“As did the rest of us,” Karma said over her shoulder. She leapt up onto the lower wooden bench—one of two that lined the walls of the sauna, interrupted only by the vintage metal chimney and hot rocks in the corner—and sat down, crossing her freckled legs. “I wouldn’t get too cocky, Valde.”
I stiffened. A bizarrely possessive feeling rushed through me at the sound of someone else using my nickname for Manuel.
How ridiculous, I thought.It’s just a shortened version of his last name. Of course other people are going to call him that. In fact, I bet his entire club—what did he call it, the Spree?—knows him as Valde.
It happened all at once, like a boat filling with water so fast it was sure to sink: I was furious. Not at Manuel. Not even at the Spree.No, I was furious at myself. For not knowing the name of the place he spends the most time. For not knowing the names of any of his friends that are in that club with him. For not knowinganything—not one significant thing—about the life my former best friend led in Cambridge.
