Hold My Hand Page 16

  And most of all, he became conscious of Ethan, of his energy, of his physical presence, sitting next to him on the bed, the closeness of their bodies, the closeness of their lips, how long it had been since they’d …

  The one thing he knew for sure was that if he met Ethan now, the draw he felt, the tug, the chemistry between them would be as powerful as ever. Maybe even more.

  “You wanted me to listen to something?” Alek managed to get the words out without his voice breaking too much.

  “Yeah.” Ethan turned up the volume on his computer. “This is Brandy Clark. Country.”

  Alek made a face. “Country music? Isn’t that all hillbillies and ukuleles and coal miners?”

  Ethan laughed. “Just give it a chance, would you?” He clicked his mouse. “This is her first album, 12 Stories.”

  They sat in his room, listening to the music.

  Sometimes, their silence was interrupted by Alek’s laughter. “The songs are really funny!”

  “I know, right?”

  “Even when sometimes you think a song is funny, it’s not like laugh-out-loud funny. It’s like, ‘I intellectually recognize that as funny, but it doesn’t actually make you laugh.’ But ‘Crazy Women’ is hilarious. Like really, really funny.”

  Sometimes, Alek would ask Ethan to replay a tune. “I can’t believe she wrote an entire song about getting high.”

  “I know—that one is funny and sad, too.”

  “It’s just nice to hear someone writing about this stuff without that kind of after-school-special judgment, you know.” Alek dropped his voice into a deep, movie-of-the-week announcer. “‘His life was perfect. Until he tried one beer. And then he died.’”

  Ethan laughed, his eyes twinkling. Alek relished, as he never had before, the joy he received from making Ethan laugh.

  “And you know, she’s a lesbian,” Ethan added.

  “No way!” Alek exclaimed. “That’s so cool—I didn’t even know there were gay country music stars.”

  “The world is full of surprises—like gay marriage being legalized all over the world now.”

  Alek leaned forward. “Don’t get my mom started on that.”

  “Your mom isn’t for gay marriage?” Ethan asked incredulously.

  “Of course she is. But she says we need to be careful, especially now, otherwise the same thing that happened to abortion rights will happen to gay rights.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “The Supreme Court voted to make abortion legal in the early seventies, but since then individual states have been rolling back those rights, especially the red ones. She says there’s no reason that couldn’t happen to gay marriage, too.”

  “That’s what happens when you’re the descendants of the greatest unacknowledged genocide—you get paranoid about everything.”

  “Okay, but look at how black people are treated in this country—and that’s a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. And it still feels like every month there’s another video of a cop—I mean, a cop—doing something so horrible, you’re embarrassed to be American.”

  “I’m not embarrassed to be an American. I mean, yeah, horrible things happen, but do you think it’s better anywhere else?”

  Alek let the subject slide, but he couldn’t help feeling like even though they were talking about the country, they were talking about their relationship, too. “Ethan, was there something you wanted me to listen to specifically?”

  “Yeah.” Ethan clicked on his computer’s mouse. “Here we go.”

  They listened to it in silence, Alek painfully aware of how close his hand was to Ethan’s.

  Don’t let this moment linger. Now would be the time. To reach out with your fingers and get ’em tangled up with mine. Ethan half sang, half whispered whenever the chorus came. This’d be a real good time to hold my hand.

  “Why this one?” Alek asked after it had finished.

  “When we were at the restaurant, with Remi, I pulled my hand away from yours.”

  “I remember.”

  “I don’t know why I did it. But when I think about that night, when I think about how I could’ve done something so stupid, that’s what I always think about first. How you’ve always held my hand everywhere. In New York, where no one cares. In suburban malls, where we got funny looks. In private, where our hands felt like they were made to fit in each other’s. Somehow, I think, if I had just held your hand that day, none of it would’ve happened. That’s why I wanted to play this one for you. When I heard the lyric ‘This would be a real good time to hold my hand,’ I thought, Every time is a good time for me to be holding my boyfriend’s hand.”

  Ethan leaned in, and Alek stopped fighting the impulse, the instinct, the programming that had been wired into his body for the last six months. He kissed Ethan.

  Kissing Ethan.

  Kissing Ethan rocked.

  “I’m so happy you’re here.” Ethan ran his fingers through Alek’s hair, familiarly, happily, joyously. “Being with you is even better than … being in the city.”

  “Now that’s a compliment.” Alek’s hands found Ethan’s face, his chin, his neck.

  “After you left me at the diner a few days ago, the only thing I could do was run away to the 212. It’s the only place I wasn’t going to feel suicidal.”

  “And what’d you do?” Alek asked a few moments later.

  “When?”

  “Then. When you went into the city?”

  “Hit some party,” Ethan shot off nonchalantly.

  Too nonchalantly, Alek thought.

  “Where?”

  “Who cares where?”

  Like Spiderman’s spidey-sense, an inexplicable, intuitive instinct told Alek to pursue the line of questioning. “If who cares, then why don’t you tell me?”

  “It was in Bed-Stuy, okay?” Ethan adjusted.

  “Who do you know in Bed-Stuy?”

  “Some guys I met in Greenpoint,” Ethan said.

  “That same night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.” Alek pulled away.

  “What ‘oh’? No ‘oh’! We were just making out. It was awesome. Let’s do that more!”

  Alek and Ethan kissed for a few more minutes. But the demon of distraction was already ripping down that magical bubble.

  “So … how was the party?” Alek asked.

  “Which party?”

  “The one in Bed-Stuy.”

  “It was lame. I’d rather have been with you.”

  And then Alek asked the question he hadn’t realized he was holding back until it came tumbling out of his mouth. “Was Remi there?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry—was I unintentionally speaking Latin or some other language you don’t understand? I said, ‘Was Remi there?’”

  “No.” Ethan paused. “I mean, not really…”

  Alek’s spidey-sense wasn’t just tingling anymore. It was screaming, like a siren. He pulled away. “What do you mean, ‘not really’? Either he was there or he wasn’t. It’s not a trick question, Ethan.”

  “He wasn’t there when I got there. And the music was pretty cool, and so were the peeps.”

  “And…”

  “And then he showed up.”

  “So he was there.”

  “I guess, technically, yes. Remi and I were both at the same party for the five minutes it took me to get my shit and go.” Ethan adjusted again, doing his best to make eye contact.

  “What ‘technically’? He was there. He was physically there. I don’t understand why this required such a complicated exchange.” Alek got up and walked out of Ethan’s room. “Thanks for the song. And tunes. And dinner.”

  Ethan scrambled to follow. “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “But why?”

  Alek yanked on his winter clothes, taking his frustration at not being able to make a clean getaway out on them. “Gosh, Ethan, it is hard to think of something more fun than being
lied to by you. Again. Let me see—maybe I can work really hard and force myself to come up with something.” He tugged on his boots unceremoniously. “Okay: here’s a list of things.” He reached the front door. “Root canal, chores, self-amputation, stigmata in my eyes, another four years of 45.”

  Ethan ran his fingers through his sandy hair. “Come on, man—I just went to a party. I didn’t know he’d be there, and I left the second he got there. It’s not like anything happened, you know?” When Alek didn’t say anything, Ethan continued. “Alek, it’s New Year’s Eve. We were getting along so well. Come back. Let’s talk about this. Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit?”

  “Let me get this straight.” Alek spoke slowly, methodically, with the kind of emphasis reserved for escape plans in action movies. “You go to a party that you were invited to by some people you met with the guy you cheated on me with, then when I ask you if he was there you lie to me, and I’m the one who’s overreacting?”

  “I didn’t lie to you.”

  He wrapped his scarf around his neck. “Yes, you did. You said he wasn’t there. And he was. If that’s not a lie, I don’t know what is.”

  “I just didn’t see what the big deal was.”

  “There was no big deal.” One glove. “Until you lied to me.” The other glove.

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Stop saying what? That you’re a liar? That Ethan Novick is a liar? Why would I stop when it’s the truth? I mean, maybe there’s more you’re not telling me. Maybe you guys didn’t just overlap for five minutes. Maybe you hung out the whole night. Maybe you even slept together. Again. Who knows? I certainly don’t.”

  “Stop it, Alek! Please, stop it!”

  “I know you won’t understand this, Ethan, but when you’re not a liar, you actually take great pride in telling the truth. And the truth is, you’re a liar.”

  “I didn’t mean—I never meant to lie to you. I just didn’t want to get into a fight about it. And especially because things were so nice.”

  “I’ll see you later, liar. And just so that I don’t have to deal with Becky asking me about this, and just so there’s no confusion: you and me—we’re done. This is what it feels like to be dumped. Happy New Year.” Alek grabbed the nearest thing to him and hurled it at Ethan, full force.

  Señor Huevo went flying through the air, missing Ethan but hitting the wall next to him. He splattered into chunks of hard-boiled egg and shell, some of them ending up in Ethan’s clothes, his hair, on his face.

  17

  The windows rattled in their frames when Alek slammed the door behind him, like children quivering as their parents fought in the next room. It was a satisfying slam. It was a slam that said goodbye forever.

  Alek stomped away from Ethan’s, indignation coursing through his veins, fueled by the internal furnace of righteousness. He unbuttoned his winter coat. Even though it was New Year’s Eve and every exhale puffed in front of him, he was hot. He was angry. He needed something to do or somewhere to go. If there had been a town to hit, he would’ve hit it.

  This was the point, Alek felt, where he’d earned one of those montages that involved numerous bars and dancing and meeting strangers and maybe even alcohol consumption—the kinds of things he was sure that Remi did all the time, especially in the city on New Year’s Eve. The kinds of things he was sure he would do as soon as he was old enough to move to New York.

  And yet still part of him wanted to run back, to apologize, to beg Ethan to forget the last ten minutes had ever happened. But the Hulk wrestled Bruce Banner into submission. If Ethan had chased after him right now and begged forgiveness, maybe he would’ve granted it. But no hand placed itself on his shoulder the way it had in New York in Washington Square Park. Besides, this was what he should’ve done that night, on their six-month anniversary, when he’d first found out about Ethan and Remi, before time and fear and friends had talked him out of it.

  If only he had somewhere to go right now. Or something to do.

  But alas, the options were as limited as Ethan’s understanding of integrity. And none of them would make for a good montage or even celebrate that for the first time in months, he was single. That Alek and Ethan were no more.

  Going home was out, since his parents would probably still be up, celebrating New Year’s alone like they always did. Even if he had somewhere to go, it would be months before the weather changed, liberating his hybrid from the shed where it was hibernating, and still years before he’d get his driver’s license (New Jersey, to prove its disdain for young people, made them wait until seventeen, not sixteen, to drive). There was always the diner, of course. But the idea of sitting there by himself on New Year’s Eve seemed even more depressing than going home. So really, Becky’s house was inevitable.

  “Oh, Alek…”

  “… this is a pleasant surprise.”

  Alek intercepted Mr. and Mrs. Boyce on their front stoop, returning from wherever they’d been celebrating. Once inside, Mrs. Boyce immediately slipped off her heels and removed her earrings, two loops of tiny diamonds surrounding a translucent pearl.

  “Is Becky expecting you?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Boyce had really dressed up for the occasion, Alek saw when they removed their coats: him in a jacket and tie and her in a maroon, floor-length gown. Alek knew that he should ask them about their evening, their resolutions, their holidays. But right now, he just couldn’t be bothered.

  “Not really.” Alek tried to play it cool, as if dropping by unannounced at your best friend’s house just before midnight on New Year’s Eve was totally normal.

  The three of them stood awkwardly in the Boyces’ foyer, waiting for something to happen. Becky’s mom broke the silence.

  “Well, she’s probably back from the band party…”

  “… and in the basement.”

  Surely Alek was imagining the nervous glances he saw the Boyces exchanging.

  “You all have fun tonight, and…”

  “… happy New Year’s!” Mr. Boyce opened the door to their basement and yelled down, “Becky, dear…”

  “… Alek is here!” his wife finished for him, a little louder than perhaps was necessary.

  Alek clomped downstairs in all his winter layers, feeling like the abominable snowman. Every familiar detail was a balm: the zigzag carpeting on the steps, the creaking banister, the tiny landscape windows at ground level—even the inexplicably unfinished concrete floors and exposed drywall.

  He was crashing now, spent, turning back to human form, emerging from the shock of having done the unimaginable: actually breaking up with Ethan. His racing heart, exhausted, slowed down, decelerating to its normal beats per minute.

  The more the numbness faded, the more he hurt, like novocaine wearing off mid-drill. Telling Becky what had happened was the only thing that would make the surfacing pain go away. He just needed to get to Becky. Who was sitting in her usual place on the mammoth brown couch.

  Right next to Dustin.

  “Oh my God, what happened?” Becky jumped up, adjusting her tights, her cream blouse with ruffles, and her skirt with an asymmetrical hem.

  “I dumped Ethan.” All of Alek’s emotions came bubbling out of him, like a mad scientist’s experiment gone wrong.

  Dustin let out a long exhale. “Damn, man. That is rough.” The top few buttons of his slate-gray button-down were suspiciously undone, Alek noted, and he made no move to redo them.

  “OMG, Alek, I can’t believe it!” Becky got up and met him at the foot of the staircase. “What’re you doing tomorrow? You wanna come over and tell me all about it?”

  “Tomorrow?” Alek kicked his boots off. “What’s wrong with now?”

  “It’s just that we were”—Becky fake-cough-coughed—“in the middle of things.”

  “No, look, I get it from the smudge of lipstick on Dustin’s face and the way you keep fidgeting with your tights.” Neither one of them had the decency to blush, Alek noted. “But I really need you,
Becky. Like, desperately.”

  “Becks, I’ll catch you later.” Dustin stood up. “And Alek, happy New Year, buddy. Sorry it’s starting so whack.” He snatched his stupid green skateboard that he apparently insisted on carrying around with him everywhere even though it was way too cold to actually use it since it was THE MIDDLE OF WINTER.

  “Dustin.” A low rumble that Alek didn’t recognize erupted from Becky’s mouth, full of reverberating bass. “Sit!” Slowly, sheepishly, Dustin sat back down. She turned to Alek. “I’m sorry you and Ethan broke up. Seriously, I am. But you’re not kicking my boyfriend out because you chose to break up with your boyfriend tonight, not any more than you ever would have kicked Ethan out for me or anyone or anything!”

  “You don’t even know—” Alek began to protest.

  But Becky cut him off. “Yes, I do. And I’m pretty sure I can tell you exactly how it happened, too. You showed up there, things were going nicely, then Ethan did something to piss you off and you lost your temper and dumped him and stormed out.” Alek’s silence was all the confirmation Becky needed. “That’s what I thought. So you have to ask yourself, Aleksander Khederian, why are you choosing to end this year by being such an asshole?”

  “Me? An asshole?”

  “You heard me.”

  “If I were half the asshole you think I am, I’d tell you that no one understands what you’re possibly doing with Dustin.” Alek referenced Becky’s boyfriend as if he weren’t in the room. “You’re amazing—funny and smart and wicked. You’re like a chocolate cheesecake. And he’s so tapioca. You could do so much better.”

  “Get out.” Becky was physically quaking with anger, and her voice trembled with the attempt to constrain it. “Get out of my damn house.”

  “Are you serious?” Alek asked.