Hold Me by Courtney Milan
Now that I’m looking at her—really looking at her—I can see all the signs I missed. Her chest moves in a shallow rhythm. Her eyes are wide and dark. I step forward, expecting her to slide away from me like we’re two negatively charged particles.
She holds her ground.
“I know we don’t like each other,” I say. “But are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she bites off.
“Do you want me to find your friend? The housemate you mentioned? Or do you need a quieter place to sit where you won’t be disturbed? I can get you into the private areas of the house.”
She looks away. “You don’t have to be nice to me. I’m upset because I broke a nail. That’s all.”
It’s obvious she’s lying. It’s equally obvious she wants nothing to do with me. I can’t blame her.
She raises her chin and glares me down, and for one stupid second, I wish that I hadn’t fucked things up between us. That I’d let her talk when I saw her in September. That I’d given her a real apology before now. I wish Em had set me straight before I treated Maria like shit. Instead, we’re stuck in a rut of snapping at each other.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say. “I shouldn’t have said any of that just now. You were right last time. I’m trying not to…” I give my head a shake. “But you really get under my skin.”
She just continues to look at me. At first glance, I would have said her eyes were just dark brown. This close, I can see little gold flecks in them. It reminds me of a field trip to mining country I took when I was in high school. I stood in a creek and panned for gold in frigid waters. If I sloshed the water just right, little gold flakes rose to the top of the sand.
Looking into Maria’s eyes, I can’t help but think that there’s gold in them thar hills.
If I didn’t have logic, history, and economics to counsel me otherwise, I might throw everything away and go prospecting.
“I get under your skin.” She doesn’t move her eyes from mine. “Bullshit. You mean it pisses you off that I’m hot. You tell yourself I’m not real because that way, you can pretend this isn’t happening.”
Thank fuck for logic, history, and economics.
It’s the first week of December. I’m aware of the shit I carry around with me. Painfully aware. And yes, I’m aware that she’s hot.
“You remind me of someone.” I take a deep breath. I hate that she has me pegged so well. “You’re right. I’ve mucked this situation up from the beginning. I’m sor—”
She holds up a hand before I can finish. “Please don’t apologize. I can’t handle it. Hating you is kind of holding me together right now.”
I bite back my words. Maria is smart. And she’s resilient. She doesn’t take my shit. For the first time, I admit the truth: We could have been friends. Gabe obviously thought we’d get along, or he wouldn’t have shoved us together in the first place.
We could have been friends and instead, I hurt her. I have an image of the person I want to be, and this is not him.
Logic. History. Economics. I’m never going to be allowed to go prospecting for gold, no matter what untold riches her eyes promise.
“Fine,” I say softly. “Then I’ll just leave you to fall apart by yourself.”
12
MARIA
The little laundry room seems smaller and less safe after Jay leaves. I’m not sure how to take his being… Can I call it nice, after he accused me of fake bullshit?
No. But it was something approaching nice at a distance, and I didn’t like it.
I count to one hundred, giving him ample chance to go far, far away, before I leave the room. The hall spills out onto a vast open-concept living area. The fact that the space looks massive even filled with all these people tells me it’s gargantuan. Jay’s parents live here. Nowhere is safe.
I sidestep a polite inquiry from someone I’ve never met. I find my shoes on the patio just outside the backdoor and skirt my way around the crowds in the outside yard. I fall back on my old methods of calming myself. First, I imagine the crowd as a zombie horde, decomposing in the sunlight. I look for safe places, wandering to the side fence. No good. With this many people around, I’d be eaten in three minutes at best.
Second, I take out my phone.
Quick, I write to Actual Physicist. There’s an earthquake right now. What do you do?
Uh, comes his incredibly articulate response. Right now? Like *now* now?
Time, tide, and tectonics wait for no man.
I guess I get in a doorway?
Good answer. Doorways are safe. At least I hope they are wherever he is. I glance behind me. This house is probably okay. It looks like it was built recently enough to be seismically safe.
When I was in middle school and still living with my parents in Southern California, I used to imagine that the Big One—the fabled San Andreas fault quake that, to my great chagrin, still has not destroyed Orange County—would rip apart my classroom. It would make rubble of my parents’ house. The destruction of society would have been simpler to navigate than what I faced.
So…why? Actual Physicist asks.
I’ve stopped wishing that the earth would swallow all my problems. Some safety blankets don’t go away, though, and planning the disasters I don’t live through has always helped me face the ones I do.
You know, I start to write lightly, just your everyday average…
I hit send, looking at that ellipsis, trailing off into the promise of whatever lie I want to tell. A light breeze is cool against my face. I could let my emotions go, pretend that they’re washing away with the wind into the foothills. But I don’t want to lie to him.
…method of handling some minor anxiety, I finish.
You okay?
I check my internal status. I’m breathing properly. My stomach isn’t cramping. My pulse has steadied and slowed.
I’m okay, I type. Just took me off guard. It’s been a couple of years.
I see the appeal of the world ending, he says. Just promise that you’ll take me with you when it does.
My pulse starts up again—not in panic this time, but in anticipation.
I can’t promise. I type this very slowly. I don’t know where you live. Or what your name is.
Or what you look like, I don’t write. Whether you’d like me if you saw me. I don’t know what you’ll say when you find out I’m trans. But I know we get along, and I’m tired of holding out.
I stand in place, holding my phone, watching the sun reflect on the surface. Waiting to see him type. As the seconds stretch to minutes, I want to kick myself. Why did I say anything?
Em, he finally writes. I like you. I like you a lot. I like you so much that I think about meeting you all the time.
My heart gives a happy thump. Then another. My head knows better. It knows the next word he is going to type so well that it’s no surprise when it shows up on my screen.
But.
Of course there’s a but. I know there’s a but; it’s why I’ve never forced the issue before now.
I like you so much that I don’t want this to be serious. I don’t want you to text me when you need me, thinking I’ll be here. Because one day, I won’t be.
I don’t want to tell you about me. I don’t want to know about you. We can’t talk about this anymore, okay?
Shit. I swallow back hurt. Self-inflicted hurt, no less. It’s not like he ever lied to me about what he wanted.
Fine, I type.
Okay?
I’m just fine. I knew this was going to happen. I did it to myself. Maybe, even, I did it now because I needed the reminder. Anj will mess up; Actual Physicist will push me away. It’s never a good idea to expect anyone will care when I need them to. It never turns out.
I send him a thumbs-up and squish my stupid feelings back into the box where I was carrying them.
* * *
I’m still looking at my phone when Anj finds me. She comes to stand next to me by the fence, biting her lip.
She looks down. “I’m sorry, Maria. I’m so sorry. I slipped.”
It wasn’t just that. I exhale slowly. I try to imagine telling her the whole truth. You see, Anj, it bothers me that your shark is more important than I am…
“It’s fine,” I say instead. I’m saying that a lot these days. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Dammit, Maria. Don’t tell me things are fine if they aren’t. When you sit on shit, it turns into a blowup five months down the line, you moving out, and avoiding me for a year and a half.”
I put one hand on my stomach and don’t look at her. “I hate arguing. It never changes anything.”
She comes and leans against the fence next to me. “I know. I’ll shut up and let you talk. No arguing, okay? I promise.”
I don’t believe her. I look at her. She’s standing next to me, one arm propped against the wood of the fence. In the distance, the party goes on, an incessant rumble of merriment.
Yeah. I could tell her. She’d listen. But even if she didn’t argue aloud, she’d do it in her head. All love is conditional, and right now I don’t want to hear another but. I like you, but my shark is more important. I like you, but you just weren’t a priority in the moment.
It’s fine. I don’t need to push it.
“It’s not you, Anj,” I say, and in at least one way, this is true. “I told you. Sometimes I freak out. It just happens. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
Nobody’s but mine, for wanting stupid things.
Anj shifts uncomfortably next to me. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I saw this guy I know, okay?” It’s close to true. “He’s a friend of Gabe’s, and we don’t get along, and he tells me I’m fake, and…”
And I trail off, because it’s an effective lie. So effective, that Anj believes me.
“Oh.” Anj straightens. “That asshole. What’s his name, and where can we hide his body?”
Jay was a jerk. He also…almost, for a second wasn’t.
I shake my head wearily. “Don’t worry about it. He’s dead to me, and that’s good enough. Want to go find dessert?”
She looks at me a long time and sighs. “Okay.”
13
JAY
Even though my parents don’t drink, the morning after a party still feels like a hangover. The caterers cleared away the trash, but the house still feels subtly invaded—trampled paths, misplaced items on shelves. The silence seems to ring particularly loudly, as if the echo of a hundred conversations still lingers. Including the one I most want to forget—me telling Em I didn’t want to know anything about her. But we’re not revisiting that.
I’m in my parents’ house, and it doesn’t feel like home.
Not that this house ever felt like home to me. My parents had it built after my first year at university. I’ve only ever been a visitor to this space.
My dad pulls a pan from the oven, and the sweet smell of orange and cinnamon wafts over.
“Just a few minutes more,” he says. “If I ice them now, it won’t set.”
“Fuck the icing,” my mom responds. “I’m starving.”
People who hear my mom on the phone before they see her usually imagine her as tall and white, even though her legal name is Kerawak na Thalang. She can muster an impeccable English accent when she wants, one that she learned in a posh, century-old British secondary school in Hong Kong. She swears up and down that the King George V school is not Hogwarts, even though she was actually sorted into a house—Rowell, not Ravenclaw.
She’s tiny and brown, and today, she’s wearing a blue shirt—the color of her house. The smile she gives my dad as he bats her questing fingers away from the steaming cinnamon rolls doesn’t quite meet her eyes.
I don’t think he and Mom could be more different. And yet up until that day in December more than a decade ago, they were always there for each other. Their romance started the day my dad got lost looking for a writing seminar on the Stanford campus and ran into my mother swearing at a vending machine in Thai.
“It was love at first sight,” he used to tell anyone who would listen.
“No, it wasn’t,” my mother always corrected him. “It took me two weeks.”
My dad’s parents had been gently suggesting that he should find a wife on one of his summer trips back to Thailand.
“They wanted me to choose a nice, well-behaved Thai girl,” he would say, looking into my mother’s eyes.
“One point five out of four isn’t bad,” she’d answer. “I was a Thai citizen and I was a girl.”
He wrote books; she wrote code. He was from one of the oldest, wealthiest, proudest Thai families; she was ethnically Chinese and hadn’t lived in Thailand since she was a child. His parents were soft-spoken and polite; my mom swore up a storm and was far too Westernized for their tastes. Dad was an incurable romantic; Mom was blunt and questioning. He was a Buddhist; she was Muslim.
When I was five, I started kindergarten. After the usual introductions where we talked about what our parents did and where they were from, a red-headed kid at recess informed me solemnly that my parents were going to get divorced. Like his.
“Mom says that’s what happens when people are too different,” he told me.
It took two weeks of nightmares before my dad asked me what was wrong. He listened quietly when I told him, and patted my head.
“Your friend is wrong,” he said. “Your mother and I don’t argue; we disagree and we discuss. But if you look at us—really look at us—when we disagree you’ll see that it’s only our minds that are in dispute. Our hearts never change, no matter how different we are.”
My dad was right, I came to realize. Nothing could tear them apart. Not religious differences. Not a move to another country. Not my mother’s increasing work responsibilities nor her impossible schedule.
No matter how much they disagreed—and they did disagree—when they looked at each other, they always smiled. No matter how busy they were, they always had breakfast together. No matter how intense their schedule was, they somehow found a way to take a walk together at night. Even if my dad had to head down to the Cyclone campus near midnight to do it.
Nothing could get between them, I thought. Until I did.
They look okay now, if you don’t know what to look for.
My dad shakes a finger at my mom. “I will defend my rolls with my honor.”
“That’s a poor choice of weapon.” She pulls a butter knife out of the drawer. “Do you know how much military spending goes to the honor industry?”
“Mmm.”
“Approximately nothing—just a few metal doodads and whatnots. A knife, on the other hand—”
She makes a stabbing motion toward the cinnamon rolls, and he grabs her wrist. They start laughing.
The noise seems a little too loud, echoing in a silence that returns in full force when they are quiet again. Their laughter feels like a teacup that has broken into a thousand pieces and been painstakingly pieced together again. It’s laughter that recognizes the seams could burst at any time.
And when my parents put the teacup back together again, they didn’t use all the pieces. Their laughter doesn’t include me.
I don’t blame them.
Twelve years ago, my parents split apart. They filed for a divorce the year I left for university. Turns out, the paperwork never went through. They patched things up as best as anyone could. Now they have a new home, new decorations, and a new marriage. Some things can be reforged after they break.
They still broke.
“Stop it, Sai,” my dad says. “Are you twelve?”
“I lose a decade of emotional maturity for every ten minutes breakfast is delayed. You know this. But you had to show off with your yeast rolls and your fancy proofing.”
“You’ll wait and you’ll like them.”
“Oh, come on. What will a little pinch hurt?”
“Fine. Here. You can have a piece ea
I look away from their murmurs.
“Oh, look,” Dad says. “We’re embarrassing Jay. It’s been so long since we managed that.”
I turn back to them just in time to see them exchange a triumphant fistbump. I’m not embarrassed. I’m glad that I didn’t ruin everything. I’m glad they still argue over cinnamon rolls and other trivialities.
“You’re both twelve,” I say.
“Yes,” my father says, “maybe, but on the other hand, the rolls are cool enough to ice. Crisis averted.”
“It’s about time,” Mom says as Dad turns his attention to the pan. “My stomach is shrinking in on itself. I swear it’ll turn into a black hole if I don’t eat.”
I shake my head. “Fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, that’s what you two are. That’s not how black holes work.”
“How do you know I haven’t already produced one? If the event horizon is small enough—”
“Don’t encourage him,” my father says, putting plates on the table. “We were going to talk to him about his work habits, remember?”
It’s ridiculous. I’m twenty-eight. I’m an adult, and one who is responsible for other adults at that.
Still, I hold my breath, hoping that they’ll scold me.
“Oh, yes.” My mother snaps her fingers and moves her plate to the other side of me, so that I am bracketed by them.
“You guys are going to lecture me about my work habits?” I fold my arms. “You two can hardly talk.”
My mother glances down. Her eyes linger—briefly—on my forearms, on the geometric designs that crawl up past my elbow. The ink curls into the back of my hands. Twelve years out, the ink has faded from crisp black to a more muted brown.
Halfway through my final semester in high school, I drove myself to Vegas. Disappeared for three days. Got tattoos that were impossible for my parents to ignore, impossible to cover without long sleeves and gloves that would have been entirely impractical in California.
I came home, heart in my throat, positive that this, this would finally trigger their wrath.