“It’s such a cliché, isn’t it?” I mutter at last, after the silence has stretched on long enough for Marcus to take two more gulps of his coffee. “Guy with childhood trauma fears meaningful relationships because he’s afraid of turning out like villain dad. That’s pretty much me.”
Marcus has the grace to look sympathetic. “You talked to your brother lately?”
I snort. “You ask me that every time we hang out. Answer’s stillno.”
“Be honest,” Marcus says. “You’re still stalking his social media.”
“Shut up.”
“I know you do.”
He’s not wrong, to my great humiliation. I’ve spent way too many nights scrolling through Liam’s page from my dummy account—the one with no name and no profile pic. Liam’s still in North Carolina. Different town, same state. Married now. He seems…happy.
Just looking at that makes me angry.
It’s not fair that Liam should get to go on and have a normal life—find himself a cute blond debutante, get married, whitepicket fence with two perfect kids, fucking…fucking seashell collecting on the beach with his gorgeous wife. The bitter core of me thinks he ought to have been cosmically punished somehow. I’m not sure why I think that. Liam never did anything to me. He didn’t bully me. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t even home the night my father lost his shit and kicked me out for good.
So why do I want him to suffer so damn badly?
Jealous,a voice murmurs in the back of my mind. I shove it down.
But isn’t it true? Liam’s living the life I might have lived if I’d been born a cis guy. Watching him is like watching a sneak peek at some alternate-universe version of my life. Where I never got hooked on dope. Where my family actually loved me and wanted me around.
Liam got it all. He won.
“You don’t always have to compare yourself to him,” Marcus says, more gently than I would have said it to myself.
“Yeah, right,” I mutter.
“It’s not a competition.”
But it is, of course. The competition started the day we were born, a screaming, red-faced supposed girl and a chubby monster of a baby boy. It continued every day after that, the pair of us dressed in our cute matching twin outfits: pink and blue, hair bow and bow tie. Ballet versus soccer. Etiquette lessons from my grandmother, butboys will be boys.
Yeah, it’s a competition. And my brother’s been winning from the start.
14
ELY
Sunday, I take my camera into Manhattan.
In the late afternoon the light is perfect, golden and filtering down between the buildings like molten amber. I walk through Greenwich Village, all the winding streets I used to explore in secret. Not because the Village was in any way forbidden to Chabad kids, but because I worried that if anyone saw me here, they might see the truth—that I belonged here, in front of Stonewall kissing a girl with glitter in her hair, far more than I had ever belonged in Crown Heights.
I trail my fingers along a wrought-iron fence and turn my face toward the sky, toward the silhouettes of the rooftops against blue. I take a photo of a man on a balcony leaning against the railing with a cigarette dangling from his fingertips. He’s in a white shirt, barefoot; another man behind him slides a hand up his spine and kisses the nape of his neck.
I capture that moment, just as I capture the girl in the bubble-gum-colored dress smiling at her phone as she nearly walks into traffic; the children coloring with chalk on the corner, tracingrainbows into concrete; the tattooed old woman on a café patio scowling at the newspaper and tearing her croissant to pieces.
This is the kind of day I used to dream about back when I was a teen. Nowhere to be, no one expecting me home. Just me and my camera and the city opening up before me like a map.
I’ll see Wyatt tomorrow. But this space stretching out between yesterday and then feels infinite. I wish I had just texted him and asked him to meet me today too. Then again, that probably wouldn’t be fair considering he lives all the way out in Bushwick.
But it’d be nice to stroll by his side, his warm hand finding mine and his low voice narrating the architecture around us—because in this fantasy world, of course Wyatt knows about architecture. Knowing about architecture is hot.
I wander out of the West Village and head east, meandering past NYU and Parker—apparently I can never stay that far away, as if the school has its own magnetic pull—with no particular destination in mind. At least, not consciously. But when I find myself on Broadway staring up at the red flag of the Strand Book Store, I know exactly why I’m here.
My mother and I had this tradition. We used to come here together every Sunday afternoon, after I got out of my Bnos Menachem weekend classes. She’d give me a crisp twenty-dollar bill and tell me I could buy whatever I liked. Naturally, I tended to treat the Strand more like a library than a store—I’d spend hours curled up in a corner reading until my mother would finally come get me, her own books in one of those plastic baskets slung over her arm, and make me pay for the book instead of devouring it for free.
It didn’t occur to me as a child, but it occurs to me now how impressive my mother was. How much love she had—how even with all those children she would still carve out time to spend with each of us. Me and the bookstore, Dvora and her obsessionwithgeology. My mother had whole universes she built with each of us, castles that belonged to Ima and me alone.
