We Are the Goldens (10 page)

“Shhhhhhh,” you said. Soothing or admonishing me?

We sat down on your bed. I kicked off my Uggs. You waited for me to say something. Our knees touched. I wanted to crawl under your comforter. I wanted everything else to go away. To tap my heels together three times and be back home again where life was simpler.

“So is it all true?” I asked finally.

You sighed. “Of course not.”

Before the relief could reach my stomach, you said, “It’s so much more complicated than that.”

HERE’S WHAT YOU SAID NEXT:

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth
.

You know I like quotes. I’ve memorized the good ones. I have shelves full of books I’ve desecrated with garish highlighters.

There are many arenas in which you outshine me, Layla, but when it comes to literature and loving the way words knock into each other, I have the upper hand. Are you the one who keeps a notebook in your bedside drawer where you write down all your favorite lines? I don’t think so.

Yet there you were, spouting Marcus Aurelius like you did that sort of thing all the time.

No, of course I’d never heard that before, but I recognized that those words were not your own. I looked it up
later on PretentiousQuotations.com or whatever, and there it was. But you were quoting someone else quoting someone else. Isn’t that right?

Well, then how come when I bust out with some of my favorite lines you roll your eyes like:
Nell. She’s such a nerd
. But when Mr. B. hit you with the Aurelius (let’s face it: there’s no way Schuyler or Liv knew that quote, and don’t even get me started on Chiara) you were probably like:
My hero
.

Okay. I get that this isn’t the point. I’d probably turn to mush too if someone I adored—someone like Sam, say—spouted off some Plato or even some John Lennon, so, yeah,
Judge not lest ye be judged
and all that. This sort of became my mantra.
Judge not
, especially when it’s your sister, and your lives are intertwined.

Anyway, back to the Aurelius. Let’s take it apart, shall we?

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact
.

Really? What about when Mr. Grandy, who is like the opposite of Mr. Barr because he’s old, and his clothes are hideous and he doesn’t know the first thing about contemporary music or anything after, like, the Second World War, what about when he says that the square root of 1,936 is 44. If I hear him say this, and I write it in my notebook, is it his opinion or is it fact?

It’s fact.

Maybe you could argue that numbers aren’t real, they’re just a construct to express a concept, that a number is nothing more than a superspecific adjective, etc., etc., but I don’t think that’s what you were trying to tell me with Marcus Aurelius. You were trying to say something about how
everyone has an opinion about everyone else but nobody knows what’s true other than the person or people about whom that opinion is expressed.

Gossip isn’t truth.

Duh.

You don’t need to drag in a two-thousand-year-old Roman emperor to prove that. And anyway, what did you think I was doing in your room? I came to ask you about the truth, not about gossip. I came to ask you, the source, the object of the gossip: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth
.

People saw you downtown with Mr. Barr. I saw Mr. Barr on your laptop screen before you snapped it shut.

What is truth? What is not merely perspective? What, if anything, is fact?

“Just tell me,” I said. “I can handle it. Tell me the truth.”

You took both of my hands in yours. We faced each other, knees touching, like we were at a séance, or a meeting of the secret society of sisterhood.

“It’s just like Madam Mai said. I’m in love. In real love.”

You squeezed my hands. Hard. Nearly cracking bones. Aside from sore hands, what did I feel in that moment?

So many emotions.

You yawned. I’d recently learned in Life Sciences that yawning isn’t so much about boredom or exhaustion—it helps cool the brain. I should have been the one yawning, because my head was on fire.

“I really do need that nap,” you said.

“Yeah. Okay.”

You leaned over and kissed my cheek.

“We’ll talk more later?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I love you tons,” you said.

“I know.”

“And, Nell?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You do?”

“Of course.”

“Promise?”

“Don’t insult me.”

I closed your door.

That’s how I vowed to keep your secret.

I’M NOT SURE WHAT
I can say about the miraculous friendship of Felix De La Cruz that I haven’t already said, but when I walked from your room back to mine, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

Meet me on 24th St.?

When?

NOW
.

Where?

U Know
.

I grabbed my fleece and went to tell Dad I was going out, but he’d left for a bike ride. Since he couldn’t do anything about losing his hair, Dad zeroed in on losing his belly flab.

“Did you have fun last night?” Sonia asked. If this were Mom, I’d know the subtext:
You better have had fun, because I spent an hour mopping whipped cream off the kitchen floor
. But this
was sweet and easygoing Sonia, who just wanted to know if I’d had a good time.

“It was great.”

“Is your homework all done?”

“Yep.” Another lie.

“Well, then say hi to Felix.”

He was waiting for me right where I knew he would be, in front of Happy Donuts. He handed me a maple glazed. Pitch-perfect Felix intuition.

“So?” he said.

I sat down on the bench clutching my donut. I wanted to devour it, the ultimate comfort food, but my stomach wasn’t ready.

“Did you miss me?”

“Since yesterday?”

“No, I mean at your girls’ party. Wasn’t there a Felix-sized hole in your heart?”

“You mean an itty-bitty little hole?”

He shoved me. “Shut up. I’m massive. Feel these guns.” He flexed his arm in front of me and I put my forehead down in the crook of his elbow.

“Uh-oh.” He stroked my hair. “Tell Uncle Felix what’s wrong.”

I wanted to. God, did I want to. I wanted to share what you’d told me, spread the weight of it around. But promises are promises. Even unspoken ones.

“Too much pizza, not enough sleep.”

“What about the nudity? Was there too much team nudity?”

“You’re gross.”

“In the immortal words of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth: ‘A man can dream.’ ”

“
Futurama
?”

“Season two, episode twenty. He’s talking about the Finglonger—a glove with an extra-long index finger.”

“Who doesn’t need one of those?”

“I can’t imagine.” We leaned back against the front glass window of Happy Donuts. He put an arm around me. “So there was no team nudity.”

“No, but there were some whipped-cream nipples.”

“You’re killing me, Nell.”

“Is this what it’s like?”

“What?”

“Being a boy. Do you just sit around all the time thinking about naked girls? Isn’t there more to it?”

“Of course there is. We care about things like your intellect and your sense of humor and your capacity for kindness, but we also really like how you all look naked.”

I sighed. “I’ll never understand your gender.”

“Is this about Sam?” he asked. “Do you still think he’s Sam-azing? Are you still feeling Sam-ourous toward him? Or am I sensing some Sam-bivalence?”

“How long have you been working up that routine?”

“Just the walk over here.”

“Cute.”

“Then how come you didn’t even crack a smile?”

“I don’t know. I’m just …” I shook my head.

“Wow. Nell Golden at a loss for words.”

“Maybe I just need to eat my donut.” I took a bite. It tasted like fryer grease.

Felix and I always went to Happy Donuts when things were dire, when nothing but 470 calories, 13 grams of fat, and 24 grams of carbohydrates could lift our spirits. And there was the matter of the little donut man on the bag with his white-gloved hands, baker’s cap, and smile. An anthropomorphized donut. How can that
not
cheer you up?

So how did Felix know? How did he know I needed the unmatched magic of Happy Donuts right at that very minute? Why had he texted me?

Meet me on 24th St.?

Even Felix, with all his intuitive powers, couldn’t have known that you’d just dropped a nuclear bomb on me. That was when it occurred to me that Felix must have needed Happy Donuts for himself.

Something was wrong in Felixville.

Why was I such a shitty friend? That was the real question.

“Hey.” I turned to face him. I wiped some chocolate from the corner of his mouth. “How are
you
?”

“Very well, thank you. And how are you this fine afternoon?”

“Seriously, Felix. Tell me. What’s wrong?”

He sighed. “I don’t even want to say it out loud.” He looked down into his lap and crumpled the donut bag in his fist. “You know how talking about something makes it real? And sometimes just pretending it’s not happening … you can fool yourself into believing it’s not?”

I knew exactly what he meant. Exactly.

I checked his profile. Was he being serious? Or was he about to bust out with something like:
I’m gay
, which for the record, I’d totally be fine with, but is so obviously not true.

Nope. I could see it in his body. In his half-eaten donut. This was no joke.

“It’s my dad, Nell.”

I knew exactly what he was going to say next. Exactly.

I’ve always had my suspicions about Angel De Le Cruz, figured there was no way he could live up to his name. I don’t mean to sound like a cynic, but you can’t put a man with Angel’s looks into a class of college girls year after year and not expect him to eventually fall under the spell of one of his students. And what about that whole romantic routine? The way Angel always calls Julia, Felix’s mom,
el amor de mi vida
? “The love of my life.” Or
mi corazón, mi alma
? “My heart, my soul.” How can that be for real?

I sat fuming. Men. Teachers. What’s wrong with the world?

“He’s sick,” Felix said.

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. That about sums it up.”

“How sick?”

“ ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good.’ ”

Hamlet
. Act 1 scene 2. No Fakespeare.

I took his hand. “Felix.”

“It’s in his adrenal cortex. I didn’t even know he had an adrenal cortex.”

He threw his donut into the trash bin and sat up straight,
filling his lungs with a big breath of air. “They say it’s just a spot. A few centimeters in diameter. And there are treatments. And Dad is strong. And we’re made of fight, we don’t give up easily, it’s a family trait, but I just feel like crawling into a hole and dying first.”

“You can’t. I wouldn’t let you.”

“I’m bigger than you. I’ll shove you out of the way.”

“It’s just a spot, Felix. A few centimeters.” This was lame, but I didn’t know what else to say. I just hugged him.

I adored Angel. And Julia. I envied Felix, whose mother and father were married to each other and loved each other. That’s probably why I’d told myself that Angel’s grand proclamations couldn’t be trusted. It was easier to believe that than the truth.

I took off my fleece. Too warm for November. The sky was thick and beige and I couldn’t tell if it was about to rain or if maybe miles below its surface the earth was about to shift, and the shaking would throw us both from this bench.

I looked up the block, half expecting to see the Creed brothers—it felt like that kind of weather, the kind of afternoon when maybe the dead could rise and saunter down the street.