who should be more like his older sister. Like me, he’s always been invisible. My grandparents, following my mother’s lead, eat health food. They collect art and modernist furniture. They believe their choices are superior to others’ and that they deserve only the best. But since my uncle’s arrival in Florida, he and his family adamantly eat Nathan’s hot dogs most every evening, and they make snide comments about my grandparents’ “weird” art. If his parents’ favoring of my mother hurts him, he refuses to show that. He proudly flaunts how different he is. Maybe I shouldn’t feel sorry for him after all. After the ceremony, Mom gives my grandmother a pendant for her birthday that is supposed to represent a woman’s vulva. Grandma shows it off to me when I come over.
“Gorgeous,” she says. “Like a cat’s eye.”
I smile. “It does look like a cat’s eye, but it’s actually supposed to represent a vagina.”
“Really,” she says, studying it. “Your mother’s something, isn’t she? Where does she come up with this stuff?”
“She’s a gynecologist,” I say, as though this explains anything. Later, I hear her telling guests who admire it, “Isn’t it lovely?
Kerry says it’s a vagina.”
Back in Tucson, I start to itch. My arms, my chest, and my back break out with a strange-looking rash. Leif starts to feel it too. I go to a clinic and leave with a prescription to treat scabies. After I rub on the lotion, I look up scabies on the Internet and learn that little bugs have been living and breeding beneath my skin. Horrified, I scroll down to see how I could have gotten them. Sure enough, they are passed by prolonged skin-to-skin contact or from sleeping in an infected person’s bed. I think of everything I’ve surely infected in the past few weeks. I borrowed a bra from my mother. I slept in my grandparents’ guest bed. And of course Leif. I’m repulsed, disgusted with myself. These bugs on me are fitting. I’m a filthy person, dirtying everyone who comes too close.
“So that’s what this rash is,” Zachary says when I call him.
“How could you not go to a doctor?” I ask. “You’ve had it longer than I have.”
“I figured it would go away.”
“Good thing you gave it to me. You would have had it for ages otherwise.” I laugh, but only to hide my rage. I haven’t forgotten what boys like, the easygoing girl, the girl who doesn’t demand too much. I don’t want to push him away with my anger, to make him stop wanting me.
He laughs too. “We better have sex soon, in case I have some kind of venereal disease.”
“Name the time and place,” I say, getting what I wanted.
“How about now?”
Something flutters at my throat. “I’d like that.”
“So would I.”
When I call Bevin to tell her I plan to say I got the scabies from her bed, she’s furious.
“You’re making me out to be dirty,” she says. “Leif’s going to think I’m a slut.”
I don’t say anything, aware of who’s really the dirty slut.
“Fine,” she says. “But you owe me big-time.”
“You’re the best friend ever,” I say.
“No,” she says, still upset, “I’m not.”
My acceptance to the University of Arizona’s writing program’s spring term arrives the following week. Leif hugs me.
“All right,” he says. “This is what you’ve wanted.”
I keep my eyes on the carpeted floor, unable to look at him.
“What?” he asks, his voice changed.
“I think I need to go up to Portland for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just until the end of the summer. Then I’ll start the writing program in the fall.” I peek at him and see the confusion in his face. My heart feels heavy, like a thick stone in my chest.
“Why?” he asks. Tears come into his eyes then. I want to throw something, scream. I don’t know what. Mostly, I wish I could cry too, but there’s nothing there. Just that thickness moving its way through my body.
“I’m not happy here,” I say. Hearing those words, hearing what he must be hearing, I quickly try to think of something else. “And I don’t want to start the program midway, when everyone already knows each other.”
“That’s not what you felt when we first got here. You would have killed to have gotten this acceptance.”
I look down again, deflated. The thickness has made its way to my throat, making it hard to speak. “I can’t,” I manage to say. The following evening, I pack up my car, and early the next morning, while Leif is still sleeping, I kiss his cheek and leave.
Zachary and I spend our first two weeks together in bed, and my condom rule from way back when goes right out the window. I force myself to call Leif, to act like nothing is happening, but our conversations are stilted. I’ve done irreparable damage. At the end of those weeks, I walk with Zachary through Safeway and we pass a beautiful girl. I see them look at each other.
“What was that?” I ask.
“What?”
“That look.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That look,” I say. “I saw you look at that girl.”
Zachary shrugs and makes a face, and I can tell immediately I’ve damaged us now as well.
Later he says, “Maybe you think this is something it isn’t.”
I look away, sick with myself. Sick of how I ruin everything in my life.
When Leif comes to visit a month later, I try to be enthusiastic. I drive him through the city, stopping at my favorite spots. I want him to see what I already love about Portland, the grassroots feel, the green spaces. But he says it’s just an old, industrial city. I touch him constantly, slip my arm through his as we walk, reach for his hand at a cafe table, wanting things to be the way they were. But he pulls away, or else he passively allows me to do what I want. After I drop him off at the airport, I curl up in bed and stay there the rest of the day. I’m such an idiot. I destroyed everything, pushing away one of the few men who’s ever loved me, and for what? For a fling with someone who couldn’t care less. A familiar frantic feeling courses through me, and I squeeze my hands into fists. I can’t lose him. I can’t lose him. When I call, though, my heart in my throat, he sounds distant, the full fifteen hundred miles away that he is. He tells me about the girl in his band who picked him up from the airport and surprised him with a plate of bagels at her house. And immediately, I know. The next time we talk, he confirms it. They’ve been sleeping together. Crying, I drive out to see Bevin at work. I don’t know what else to do. How else I will live. It is springtime, and flowering trees are at every turn. White and yellow dahlias and blue hydrangeas bloom in people’s yards. People walk down the street, laughing. None of it means anything to me. With Leif in my life, I could find other real sons to live. Without him, though, nothing I enjoyed before matters, not my writing, not a lovely summer day, not the stacks of uncracked books in the local bookstore. I grip my stomach, in physical pain from the grief I’ve caused myself. I’m a hollow shell. I’m nothing. Bevin, my amazing friend, uses the plane reservation I made months ago, before Leif and I broke up, to visit Tucson so she can gather up the rest of my stuff I left behind. While she is gone, I take early shifts at the juice bar where I work, just so I’ll be too tired to think. When I pick her up, I ask her not to tell me anything. She agrees, but when she says nothing I can’t stand it.
“Just tell me this,” I say. “Did he seem to miss me?”
Bevin doesn’t look at me. “He’s hurting,” she says. “I can tell you that.”
“Really?” This part I want to know. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I don’t understand how she could just write me off.’
Then he goes, ‘Get it? Write me off. She’s a writer.’ It was really sad.”
“But I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t write him off. He went off with that other girl. I still wanted to make it work.” I hear the whine in my voice. I miss him. I want him back. And I feel misunderstood, even though I know there are few other ways to interpret what I did, leaving him like I did. “Do you think I should call him?”
Bevin shakes her head. “I wouldn’t.” When she sees my face, she adds, “I’m sorry.”
A few years later she will explain he was already living with the new girlfriend. Even though he was still hurting, he had moved on. Before I know this, though, I lie in bed and think about what I did. It is still too close to
