Page 80 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
AFTER DINNER, THE GROUP MIGRATEDto the couches in Sunny Sunday, telling misty-eyed stories over glasses of red wine. Rather than join in, Manuel turned to me and said, “Speedy told me we’re due for a meteor shower tonight.”
“Oh, I bet he did.” I snorted loudly. “How long did he spend describing the exact degree at which the rocks will be entering the atmosphere?”
“Not long. Just the better part of an hour.”
I laughed.
“Should we go check it out?”
The sun had set decisively, taking every cloud over Southern Ontario along with it. I peered up. The night sky shone bright and clear.
“Yeah, okay.”
Neither of us asked which direction we were headed. As kids, we always stargazed from the floating dock. It stuck straight out into the lake, affording the most sweeping view of the sky. We carried our champagne glasses out to the end and set them carefully on the slatted wood. Then we stretched out onto our backs.
The sky over Cradle Island is not the sky over Brooklyn. It’s not the sky over Chicago. It’s not even the sky over rural Illinois, far from the pollution of city lights. It’s something else. It’s a sky untouched by industry—no automobiles or cell towers or tractors or grids filled with a town’s worth of electricity.
“So,” Manuel asked, “are we finally going to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
He turned to face me. “You know what.”
I didn’t meet his eyes. I kept mine locked on the sky.
Unfortunately, there’s something about stargazing that loosens one’s tongue. I think it’s that talking to the stars is easier than talking to someone’s face. Flat on your back, sending words into that vast, empty blackness—it’s easy to feel that those words are of no consequence. They go nowhere. Sucked straight into the vacuum. So you speak freely, and always—always—you reveal more than you intended.
“Aren’t you…” I began, then stopped. Took a breath. “Aren’t you angry with me?”
“Angry with you? Why on Earth would I be angry with you? Just because you avoided every single one of my calls and text messages for the last three calendar years?”
“Yeah.”
“Nah.”
I turned to look at him. “What?”
He looked back up at the sky. “I mean, I was at first. At least, I think I was. I don’t know. It was right when freshman year started. I was completely overwhelmed.” He exhaled. Even though the night was hot and muggy, for some reason I expected Manuel’s breath to curl before him in a milky-white cloud. “Was I angry? I mean, I felt a lot of things. Maybe anger was one of them. I don’t know. But there was also this overwhelming excitement. Like…pure, bizarre, manic energy. Seriously. I mean, you know me. You know I’m not the most excitable person ever.”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
He smiled. “Right. But those first few months of college…I threw myself into it. All of it. I joined clubs. I went to dorm parties. I raised my hand in lecture, did every single one of my assigned readings—evenafterI learned no one actually does those. I thought I was having fun. I thought I was having more fun than I’d ever had in my life.”
I didn’t speak. Like a flag popping out of the ground, I thought, for the first time all evening,I need to check my email.
“But then, in October, Che and Juli came to Boston for Parents’ Weekend. They sat in on my classes and met my roommates and did all the shit I’d been doing for so long. The shit that made me ‘happy.’ But what’s the first thing they ask, before even asking how I like my classes or what concentration I’m considering?” He paused. “They ask about you. What you were up to, whether you liked U ofM. And I lied. I lied straight to their faces. Told them you were crushing it, that you got a job at the school paper, that we talked every day, that you had a roommate named Alexandra and a pet fish the two of you bought together and killed within a week.” He laughed and shook his head. “I made up a whole life for you. All because I couldn’t just tell my parents that you and I weren’t speaking.” He flicked unconsciously at a loose splinter on the dock.
My hand twitched, as if it itched to grab my phone. I knew that there would be nothing important in my inbox—Iknewit—but I had suddenly become overwhelmed by the sensation that there was something pressing I was supposed to be doing. Some meeting I needed to join, some slogan I needed to craft, some marketing campaign I forgot to create before I left.
“But obviously, none of it was true,” Manuel was saying. “I didn’t know anything about your life. The only reason I even knew you’d moved to New York instead of Michigan was because I texted Karma on her birthday and she said, ‘Thanks. X-O-X-O. Have you visited Boose in the Big Apple yet?’ or something like that. Imagine my shock to learn you’d skipped college without telling me.”
The splinter broke off, leaving nothing for him to pick at.
A beat of silence. Then he said, “I came to New York, you know.”
“You…” I exhaled. “What?”
“Yeah. Right after Parents’ Weekend.”
