You first, p.10
You First, page 10
“Ohhh.” My mother rubs the wrinkle between her thick eyebrows and sighs. I think she’s sympathizing for a minute but then the bitter chuckle bobs up again and she says: “With everything going on…now I have to see you through a breakup, too?”
I clank my fork down hard. “We’re not—doing that.”
“What do you think is coming, then?”
“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”
She shakes her head, her fingertips pressed to her forehead. The parakeet flits back down and perches empathetically in her hair.
“You don’t want to hold him here. It’s not fair to him.” She reaches up and strokes the bird. “He’s been a star from the start, I could always tell, but now the world knows too. You know what happens when you try to keep a star in a beat-up old box?”
I fold my arms. “I’m the old box in this analogy?”
Her gaze shifts to the window and yeah, okay, I get it: My dad is the box. He is Beat-Up Old Box, Senior, and I inherited my essential boxiness from him, and it is the duty of my mother, the wise and regretful fallen star, to defend other stars from all threats to their ascendance. Even if the threat is her son.
“Well, for your information,” I say, “I was offered an interview too. At SuperCommand.”
“What?” A tiny smile tugs at her lips. “You’re kidding.”
“I am not.”
“A job interview?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“With what department?”
“Animal Authority. An Invasive Species Specialist position.”
“Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“Nothing.”
“No, say it.”
“Well.” She lifts her shoulders and lets them drop. “Are you qualified for a job like that?”
“That’s for them to decide.”
“This won’t end well.”
“How do you know?”
“I know you can’t handle that stuff. All that go-go-go. You’re like your father. You don’t believe in yourself.”
I’m pretty sure trauma and agoraphobia have zero to do with not believing in yourself, but we’ve had that conversation two dozen times, so I say nothing.
“Jay recommended you,” she says quietly. “Yes?”
“No,” I say, but I know she sees the lie.
“Come on, now. You want a pity interview? Is that where you are?”
I can’t look her in the eye, so I glare at the living parakeet fascinator on her head.
“You think you can drive off snakes?” she says. “Talk alligators out of resort lakes?”
“Maybe.”
“Pfft. You’re practically a non.”
“No I’m not. I fended off a rat invasion at work.”
“That was three rats, you told me.”
“They never came back, did they.”
She points her fork at me. “Listen to me, Levon Anthony. You are who you are. You have been since you were a little baby. And who you are is fine, you understand? There are certain things you’re never going to do, never going to be. I accepted that a long, long time ago. That you were my…quirky child. Don’t lie to yourself now—don’t tell yourself you are things you’re not. That you want things you don’t.” She stabs a half-moon of squash. “You’ll both end up trapped that way.”
“I would never trap him.”
“Not on purpose, no. He’d do it to himself, because he loves you. He’d say no to things that could make him bigger and bigger. He’d make himself small for you. Shrink himself down to fit your little box.” She sets her fork down, grasps my hand. The bird shifts on her head. “Now, I know what you think. You think your heart wouldn’t survive losing him—”
“Okay, can we not—”
“But hearts are tough, my love. They fix themselves. Especially when they break clean. So I’m telling you: if you see him making compromises, you be the one to step back. Do it before it gets dirty, before you hurt each other too much. Step back and let him fly.”
I have to look away because she’s so absurdly dramatic, with her parakeet hat and her chest-clutching rhetoric and her obvious metaphor that isn’t even a metaphor because my boyfriend can literally fly.
“Promise me you’ll do the right thing? For both of you?”
I fiddle with the fraying edge of my placemat. Anger simmers in my stomach, along with the casserole cheese.
“Yeah, Ma,” I say to my empty plate. “I promise.”
***
When I leave their house, Jay’s bocconotti wrapped in foil on the front seat, I don’t even drive a mile before I veer into a strip mall lot and park in front of a Dollar Tree. I pull up Marian Golden’s text and tap the URL she sent me. It takes me straight to the interview signup page for Animal Authority.
I tap the Junior Invasive Species Specialist link, read through the job description. Must be self-starter and work well with others. At least two years pest control experience required. Experience communicating with large reptiles, including snakes and alligators, strongly preferred.
A wave of nausea sweeps over me. I breathe through it, try to reason with myself. I do have informal pest control experience: cockroaches, rats, voles. Lynette and Mr. Heisey can vouch for my skills, even if they’re meager. And I haven’t tried talking to reptiles in ages—who knows, maybe my brain’s more attuned to their frequency now.
You’re practically a non, I hear Ma say.
In reply, before I can think too hard, I punch in Marian’s five-digit code and hit the SIGN UP NOW button.
Then I call Jay and tell him what I’ve done.
“Ahhhhhh! Oh my god!” It’s heartbreaking how excited he is. I hold the phone away from my ear while he rattles on about what a great adventure it’s going to be, he and I trundling down to Florida to spin the wheel of destiny and illuminate our future.
“Listen, we should splurge and fly down, okay?” he says. “Our car won’t make it and Marian said they’d give us a travel stipend.”
“Cool. Yeah.” I detest airplanes but I’m not going to argue, not now.
“We can go down a day early. Go to the Dali Museum. The Sunken Gardens.”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
“I’m so so sorry. I should’ve talked to you about it right away. I shouldn’t have let her ambush you.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry. Sorry I was shitty.” It feels so bad to be mad at each other that we both forgive fast just to put it behind us.
“And baby, listen. I mean it. I refuse to drag you anywhere. They hire both of us, or neither of us. I don’t jump without you.”
I close my eyes, feel myself teetering on the edge of a small decayed dock, my heart in my throat and my arms wrapped around him from behind.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you too,” he says. “Come home.”
We disconnect. I gaze into the glinting windows of the empty storefront next to the Dollar Tree. I’m flying again. I’m flying twenty feet above sunlit water, my chest on his back, the weight of me trying to defeat his skill and strength, sagging us down while all around the hidden birds and frogs keep watch, taking their secret chirping bets on whether we’re going to make it.
then
“I promise you’ll be safe,” Jay whispered in my ear. “Just lock your arms around me.”
We stood barefoot at the edge of the creaking dock, gazing across the murky expanse of Goosebill Pond. The late-summer air was thick with honeysuckle and dread. We’d left our picked-over picnic, wandered far away from Steve and Arlie and their boyfriends and their pitiless game of Never Have I Ever, and we’d capered to satisfying ends on a carpet of pine needles.
Now he wanted us to fly.
“I’m better now,” he insisted. “I don’t smack into trees.”
“What, are you practicing?”
“Casually. On weekends.”
“Would you get on a plane with a casual weekend pilot?”
“Oh c’mon, scaredy.” He rolled his eyes, shoved me playfully. “We’ll be like Superman and Lois.”
We’ll be like a pigeon with a ham steak strapped to its back, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I studied my hairy toes and played everyone’s favorite new-relationship game show, Should I Be Pissed at You? He was pushing me out of my comfort zone, but my comfort zone was so ridiculously narrow that maybe I deserved a shove.
“We’ll be fine. I flew Jenna across a football field. It was easy.”
“I’m way heavier than your sister, though. And you.”
“Doesn’t matter. Weight barely applies when you’re up there. It’s like being underwater, almost.” He swept a hand at the pond, stippled with rosy-gold afternoon light. “And even if you fell, it’d be fun. Refreshing.”
I felt the blood slowly drain from my face.
“What’s wrong?”
I closed my eyes. I’d hoped to keep this particular humiliation quiet for longer.
“I can’t…you know. Swim. Technically.”
“You can’t? At all?”
“Unless flailing counts.”
“That’s okay, baby.” He reddened a little. We’d just started trying out baby and it still sounded goofy, like we were saying it in quotation marks. “I won’t let you go.”
He slipped in front of me, his back to my chest, and took my cold hands in his warm ones. Then he pulled my arms around him and held them there, his thumbs stroking my wrists.
“Trust me. Okay?”
My insides churned with terror and arousal and Arlie’s sriracha tofu balls.
“I want to do this with you,” he murmured. “Say yes. Please.”
I slipped out of my flip-flops. Jay’s head was tilted back and his body was already humming with energy or whatever he used to manipulate his field of gravity—asking him to describe it had felt too personal, like reading his high-school journal. Whatever he was doing, it was making him hot, temperature-wise and otherwise. A warm breeze swirled around us. I held him close and pressed my lips to the rim of his ear.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“We jump together,” he said. “Straight up. On the count of three.”
I took off my glasses, shoved them deep in the pocket of my shorts. Jay didn’t need to. He’d just gotten contacts, ones that made his eyes seem a touch bluer.
He counted up. One. Two.
We jumped.
I wish I could say it was a beautiful and cinematic moment: the two of us soaring over the pond’s hammered-gold radiance, light and graceful as a crane in mid-flight. But as soon as my feet whooshed away from the earth, I panicked and made every tactical error in the first-time flyer handbook. I clutched and re-clutched his torso too tight. I left my mouth open and got bugs in my teeth. I shouted OH FUCK NO in his ear when a flying duck nearly clipped us and we dipped down with a sickening swoop, nearly grazing the pond. We never recovered from that. We tried to climb higher in the sky but I dragged him down too much, and we spent the last fifty yards of the flight swerving all over like a four-year-old in a bumper car until finally we hit land again and skidded to a stop in a cluster of pine trees.
“WOOHOO! YEAHHH!!”
I sat up in a daze, my entire person peppered with pine needles. Our friends stood on the opposite bank, hooting and hollering at us. Jay had come out to them as a flyer a few months back, but this was the first time they’d really seen him in action.
He laughed and waved back, blowing goofy kisses. Then he threw his leg over my legs and sat on my knees, which were pretty banged up because we hadn’t yet mastered the fine art of landing.
“See?” he said. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“It was pretty bad.”
“You did great!”
“I think I peed myself a little.”
“I’m proud of you, though. You took a risk!”
I flinched at the word. My father always said risk-takers were either fools, narcissists, or Pollyannas, and for twenty-one years I’d done everything in my power to be none of the above. But that wasn’t an acceptable way to live, not if I wanted to keep someone like my boyfriend around.
My boyfriend. It still seemed improbable. Ridiculous. Glorious.
“We’ll get better,” he said, picking pine needles off my t-shirt. “Next time I’ll fly you over Lake Wallingdare.”
“Next time?”
“And in like two years, look out. I’ll be whizzing you all over Summerhill.”
That made me smile. I kissed him, relief loosening all my muscles. He was planning ahead. He loved my town as much as I did, and we wanted the same kind of life: cozy and small and unassailably ours. As long as I had those comforts, I could compromise sometimes. I could do brave things now and then. I could do them for him, and seem normal and fun and free.
As long as I was holding on to Jay.
now
I let go of his hand, which is no small feat when he’s fallen asleep holding it. Sometimes I think he has super strength, too. It would be just like Jay to hide a third superpower, one he only lets play in the safety of dreams.
I slip out of bed and cross the creaky floorboards to the sewing desk—a scuffed-up hand-me-down from Lynette—where we keep our ancient laptop and African violets. We’d had extremely acceptable fence-mending sex but I’d woken up worried about the logistics of the Florida interviews, the kind of boring details Jay never likes to think about until way too late for my comfort. Hunting down bargain plane tickets. Asking Lynette to water our plants. Finding a cheapo motel that lacks bloodstains on the carpet and the philosophical chatterings of unfamiliar roaches.
I pull up the SuperCommand Employment page, thinking maybe they’ll have help. Trip tips, a checklist. A digital Magic 8-Ball that tells you exactly how big a mistake you’re making.
I stumble upon three terrible things, one right after the other.
For reasons I can only interpret as sadistic, you can view the qualifications of your competitors for any given job (names redacted, of course, to protect the more-qualified-than-you).
Contrary to Jay’s assertion that “tons of other supers” would be jockeying for his job, there are only two other applicants, and neither one is a flyer or a Medal of Honor recipient.
Contrary to Marian Golden’s assertion that I “had a decent shot,” fourteen other supers are applying for the Junior Invasive Species Specialist spot, and more than half of them have advanced degrees and/or previous alligator experience.
I shake the Magic 8-Ball in my brain. OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD. Golden wants to coax Jay down there, get him interviewed and offered, entice him with wads of cash and the cushy office where he’ll plan lifesaving maneuvers. Is she betting he’ll find it too hard to say no, even if I get turned down?
SIGNS POINT TO YES.
I don’t jump without you.
There are certain things you’re never going to do. Never going to be.
I shut the laptop and think. I have one month. One month to catch up, learn new tricks, groom myself into a competitive candidate. I might not be able to level up before the interview, but I can hone the skills I have, maybe add a few more animals to my repertoire.
I can do this. I have to.
I wrench open the top drawer of the sewing desk, where I’ve stashed my three-day sample of Harry Horton’s power-boosting powder under a crinkled legal pad. Before I can talk myself out of it, I unscrew the half-full bottle of sparkling water Jay pinched from the wine-bar reception and left on the desk. I tear open one of the orange packets and pour the powder into the bottle. My nose wrinkles instantly. It smells like a malevolent spirit has breezed through the room, passing judgment and gas.
I’m staring at the bottle, pondering the sinister effervescence within, when Jay glides up behind me.
“Whatcha up to?” He kisses my neck, slides his arms around my chest.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He makes a sniff-sniff sound.
“I didn’t fart,” I explain.
“Didn’t smell like yours.” He reaches out, tilts the bottle. “Whaaaaat is this.”
“Some new stomach stuff,” I fib, but then he sees the empty packet.
“Nuh-uh,” he says. “Not Horton powder.”
“It was a free sample.”
“This stuff is evil.”
“It doesn’t smell benevolent,” I admit.
“I’m serious. Julia’s ex tried it on a camping trip. Had the shits for three days and he’s still a low C.”
“Did he pair it with Horton’s vigorous exercise regimen?”
“It’s a scam. Seriously.” His hands knead into my tight achy shoulders. “What’s this about? You stressing already?”
“Moderately.”
“Why?”
“I have some catching up to do. To say the least.”
“Ughhh. Did you look at those resumes?”
“Maybe for a minute.”
“Don’t get intimidated. Okay? You’ll be great.” He swings around and half-sits on the desk. “Who a person is on paper tells you nothing.”
Which is easy for him to say, because even on paper he’s a star.
“I need to work on myself,” I tell him. I look away because there’s shame in it, how much time I’ve wasted, how little effort I’ve expended on myself thus far. And resentment, too, because until a few months ago I thought we were in the gentle business of wasting ourselves together.
“Let me help you,” he says.
I pick at a loose flake of paint on the desk. “I should do this myself.”
“That’s silly. I know things. And you need quick fixes. You don’t have much time.”
“That’s true, but—”
“Plus,” he says, holding up the bottle. “You almost poisoned your delicate insides with scam powder. Which is concerning.”
