Just One Day

“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 Gle

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 Gle

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 begi

“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 Gle