“You throwing me over for Drew?” Drew is the second best Shakespeare reader in the class.
“No. Of course not,” I reply, my voice all pinched and panicked. “It’s just I have one of those trips with my ceramics class Friday.” This isn’t entirely untrue. My ceramics class does go on field trips occasionally. We’re experimenting with glazes, using different kinds of organic materials in the kiln, and sometimes even firing our pottery outside in earthen furnaces we build. I do have field trips, just not in the next couple of days.
“And I’ll probably work on a paper this weekend.” Another lie; the only class I have papers for is Shakespeare. It’s amazing how good at lying I’ve become. “I’ll see you Wednesday, okay? I’ll bring the cookies.”
“Tell your grandma to send some more of those twisty ones with the poppy seeds.”
“Rugelach.”
“I can’t say it. I just eat it.”
“I’ll tell her.”
The weekend with my parents goes decently enough. We go to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Science. We go ice skating (I can’t keep my blades straight). We go to the movies. We take tons of pictures. There’s an awkward moment or two when Mom pulls out next year’s course catalog and starts going over class schedules with me and then asks me about my summer plans, but I just listen to her suggestions like I always have and don’t say anything. By the end of the weekend, I feel drained in the same way that I do after a marathon session of reading Shakespeare aloud and trying to be all those different people.
On Sunday afternoon, we’re back at my dorm before dinner when Dee pops by. And though I haven’t told him one single thing about my family, not even that they were coming, let alone what they believe about me, what they expect of me, he still shows up in a pair of plain jeans and a sweater, something I’ve never seen him wear before. His hair is pulled back into a cap and he’s not wearing lip gloss. I almost don’t recognize him.
“So, how do you two know each other?” Mom asks after I nervously introduce them.
I freeze, in a panic.
“We’re biology lab partners,” Dee says, not missing a beat. “We’re raising the Drosophila together.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him pronounce it correctly. He picks up the tube. “Breeding all kinds of genetic abnormalities here.”
My dad laughs. “They had us do the same experiment when I went here too.” He looks at Dee. “Are you pre-med also?”
Dee’s eyebrows flicker up, the slightest ripple of surprise. “I’m still undeclared.”
“Well, there’s no rush,” Mom says. Which almost makes me laugh out loud.
Dad turns to puts the tube back next to a cylinder of pottery I forgot to hide away. “What’s this?”
“Oh, I made that,” Dee says, picking up the piece. And then he starts explaining how he’s taking a pottery class, and this year’s class is experimenting with different kinds of glazes and firing methods, and for these pieces, they fired everything in an earthen kiln fueled by cow patties.
“Cow patties?” Mom asks. “As in . . . feces?”
Dee nods. “Yes, we went to local farms and asked if we could collect their cow manure. They actually don’t smell that bad. They’re grass-fed cows.”
And it hits me then that Dee is using another voice, but this time, the person he’s playing is me. I had told him all about the cow patties, the earthy smell, collecting them from the farms . . . though when I’d done it, he’d laughed his head off at the thought of all us rich kids at our forty-thousand-dollar-a-year school paying for a class in which we went to farms and picked up after cows. I’ve told Dee more about myself than I guess I realized. And he listened. He paid attention, absorbed a bit of me. And now he’s saving my ass with it.
“Cow feces. How fascinating,” my mother tells him.
The next day, my parents leave, and on Wednesday, our Shakespeare class starts on Twelfth Night. Dee has checked out two different versions from the media center for us to watch. He feels that as penance for not doing our homework, we should at least watch several. He hands me the stage version as I fire up my laptop.
“Thank you for getting these,” I say. “I would have done it.”
“I was at the media center anyway.”
“Well, thank you. Also, thank you for how completely awesome you were with my parents.” I pause for a second, more than a little embarrassed. “How’d you know they were coming?”
“My girlfriend Kali. She tell me. She tell me everything, because we be besties.” He narrows his eyes. “See? Wasn’t no need to hide Miss Dee from the folks. I clean up real nice.”
“Oh, right. I’m sorry about that.”
Dee stares at me, waiting for more.
“Really. It’s just my parents. There’s a lot . . . well, it’s complicated.”
“Ain’t so complicated. I gets it just fine. Okay to slum with Dee but not to bring out the good silver.”
“No! You’ve got it wrong!” I exclaim. “I’m not slumming. I really like you.”
He crosses his arms and stares at me. “How was your field trip?” he asks acidly.
I want to explain, I do. But how? How do I do that without giving myself away? Because I’m trying. I’m trying to be a new person here, a different person, a tabula rasa. But if I explain about my parents, about Melanie, about Willem, if I show who I really am, then aren’t I just stuck back where I started?
“I’m sorry I lied. But I swear, it’s not about you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you did.”
“Ain’t no thang.”
“No, I really mean it. You were great. My parents loved you. And you were so smooth, about everything. They didn’t suspect a thing.”
He whips the lip gloss out of his pocket and, with painstaking precision, applies it first to his top lip, then his bottom. Then he smacks them together, noisily like some kind of rebuke. “What’s to suspect? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nobody. I just be the help.”
I want to make it right. For him to know that I care about him. That I’m not ashamed of him. That he is safe with me. “You know,” I begin, “you don’t have to do that with me. The voices. You can just be yourself.”
I mean it as a compliment, so he’ll know that I like him as is. But he doesn’t take it that way. He purses his lips and shakes his head. “This is myself, baby. All of my selves. I own each and every one of them. I know who I’m pretending to be and who I am.” The look he gives me is withering. “Do you?”
I purposely tried to keep all of that from him, but Dee—smart, sharp Dee—he got it. All of it. He knows what a big fat fake I am. I’m so ashamed I don’t even know what to say. After a while, he slips Twelfth Night into my computer. We watch the entire thing in silence, no voices, no commentary, no laughing, just four eyeballs staring at a screen. And that’s how I know I’ve blown it with Dee.
I’m so miserable about this that I forget to be upset about Willem.
Twenty-two
MARCH
College
The winter drags on, no matter what the groundhog says. Dee stops coming over in the afternoons, ostensibly because we’re not reading Twelfth Night aloud, but I know that’s not really it. The cookies from my grandmother pile up. I get a bad cold, which I can’t seem to shake, though it does have the side benefit of getting me out of reading any of Twelfth Night in front of the class. Professor Glenny, who is stuffy himself, gives me a packet of something called Lemsips and tells me to get in shape so I can pull a double shift as Rosalind in As You Like It, one of his favorite plays.
We finish Twelfth Night. I thought I’d feel relieved, as if I’d dodged a bullet. But I don’t. With Dee out of my life, I feel like I took the bullet, even without reading the play. Tabula rasa was the right move. Taking this class was the wrong move. Now I just have to buckle through. I’m getting used to that.
We move on to As You Like It. In his introductory spiel, Professor Glenny goes on about how this is one of Shakespeare’s most romantic plays, his sexiest, and this gets all the Glenny groupies up front swooning. I take vacant notes as he outlines the plot: A deposed duke’s daughter named Rosalind and a gentleman named Orlando meet and fall in love at first sight. But then Rosalind’s uncle kicks her out of his house, and she flees with her cousin Celia to the Forest of Arden. There, Rosalind takes on the identity of a boy named Ganymede. Orlando, who has also fled to Arden, meets Ganymede, and the two strike up a friendship. Rosalind as Ganymede uses her disguise and their friendship to test Orlando’s proclaimed love for Rosalind. Meanwhile, all sorts of people take on different identities and fall in love. As always, Professor Glenny tells us to pay attention to specific themes and passages, specifically how emboldened Rosalind becomes when she is Ganymede and how that alters both her and the courtship with Orlando. It kind of all sounds like a sitcom, and I have to work hard to keep it straight.
Dee and I start reading together again, but now we’re back in the Student Union, and he packs up as soon as we finish our assignment. He’s stopped doing all the crazy voices, which makes me realize just how helpful they were in “interpreting” the plays because now, with both of us reading in monotones, the words sort of drift over me like a foreign language. We may as well be reading it to ourselves for how boring it has become. The only time Dee uses his voices now is when he has to speak to me. I get a different voice, or two, or three, every day. The message is clear: I’ve been demoted.
I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don’t seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.
“Today we will read one of my favorite scenes in As You Like It, the beginning of act four,” Professor Glenny says, one bone-chillingly cold March day that makes it seem like we’re heading into winter, not out of it. “Orlando and Ganymede/Rosalind are meeting again in the Forest of Arden, and the chemistry between them reaches its boiling point. Which is kind of confusing and amusing, given that Orlando believes himself to be speaking to Ganymede, who is male. But it’s equally confusing for Rosalind, who is in a kind of delicious torment, torn between two identities, the male and the female, and two desires: a desire to protect herself and remain Orlando’s equal, and the exquisite desire to simply submit.” Up in the front of the classroom, the groupies seem to emit a little joint sigh. If Dee and I were still friends, it would be the kind of thing that would make us look at each other and roll our eyes. But we’re not, so I don’t even look at him.
“So, Orlando comes to Ganymede in the forest, and the two perform a sort of Kabuki theater together, and in doing so, they fall deeper in love, even as they don’t entirely know whom they’re falling in love with,” Professor Glenny continues. “The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides. Which I think is a rather handy metaphor for falling in love. So, it’s a good day to read. Who’s up?” He scans the class. People are actually raising their hands. “Drew, why don’t you read Orlando.” There’s a smattering of applause as Drew walks up the front of the room. He’s one of the best readers in the class. Normally, Professor Glenny pairs him with Nell or Kaitlin, two of the best girls. But not today. “Allyson, I believe you owe me a Rosalind.”