Milan leaned into me, “That’syourman up there acting like this is a State of the Union.”
I shoved her. She laughed. Everyone was looking at me. Jay’s eyes were cloudy with feeling. Had he just proposed? No, he wouldn’t do that to me. The room was waiting for me to speak.
Jay waved me to the front, smiling. I stood awkwardly beside him, gripping the stem of my wineglass. “Hi, everyone. I’m Cat. I mean, you just watched them call my name at graduation so you probably know that.” I lifted my paper plate, bent with food. “The chicken’s good. If you haven’t gotten any you… oops, wait, looks like it’s all gone.”
My mom snapped a loud picture with her about-to-be-obsolete iPhone. “It’s okay, baby! Just start over!”
Jay pinched my side. We giggled. I started my speech, stumbling toward the end. “I’m just so thankful. Without Jay—”
My mind snagged on something sharp and unutterable. “Without Jay” was an incoherent statement, and so nothing coherent could follow. Pain, real or imagined, could simply climb out of our containers for language and run away. Jay placed a hand on my shoulder, picking up where I left off as though we planned it.
Milan said, “Bruh, your hand’s bleeding bad.”
Red bloomed on the shoulder of my dress under Jay’s hand. His dad came over, examining the cut. “We need to get you to the hospital.”
It turned out the glass had splintered inside his skin. The doctor had to pick out the pieces with baby tweezers. Jay got stitched and fed antibiotics while our families migrated to the hospital waiting room. High on pills, he petted his shiny “Get Well Soon” and “Congrats, Grad!” balloons.
“You love me!” he slurred, giddy, when I appeared at his bedside.
He looked so happy. I guessed this was why people did drugs.
“I do.” Taking his big, warm hand, I saw this was what it meant to love totally: To fear. To live inside the terror of losing with no way out but to lose.
Chapter 62
My emails with Anwar seemed to flit above everything else in my life, unstained by the self-conscious cast of dating but complicated by the fact that we were talking with no destination. There was also the strangeness of our growing attachment: If I didn’t hear from him, I’d get restless. If he didn’t hear from me, he’d send???like my silence was perplexing. I wish I could get his advice on Tristan and Jay, on this threesome, but he’d probably block me if I told him.
I googled his university, which I weirdly hadn’t thought to do before. On the school’s website, it said in big letters “OUR WILL IS UNBREAKABLE.” I stumbled on an article about Israeli soldiers shooting a student a couple years back. The incident was covered so differently by the Israeli newspapers and the Arab media.
from: [email protected]
Oh yeah that was my first year. It was a nightmare. This was right after 7 October you know. We did online learning for a while because of the escalation but to be honest this kind of thing isn’t unusual. Checkpoints though were an even bigger pain than before. But I’d never seen anything like the Gaza checkpoint. It’s impossible.
from: [email protected]
Really? I didn’t know you’d been to Gaza.
from: [email protected]
I haven’t been inside. Years ago we tried to go as a family, but let me tell you, do you think the checkpoints here are bad? This one to get into Gaza was a literal nightmare. We had to walk through these tunnels and get taken into rooms and stripped down and wait hours standing and in the end, they denied our permits! This after my father went through complete hell to get them. We went home. I never got to go. Now I’ll probably never go or if I do there will be nothing left to see.
from: [email protected]
All that’s so you don’t try to come back
from: [email protected]
Exactly. You’re lucky you get to move between states no problem, right?
