“I thought absurdists didn’t believe in God.”
Smiling, “I never said I was an absurdist.”
There were other people with whom spending the night in a vacant church wouldn’t have been such an awful betrayal. But there was also a different logic, one that accommodated this. At that moment I wanted to live inside that logic more than I wanted to be good, to punch a hole through reality and make a new one.
I moved closer to him. He studied my face like he was making a calculation. “You really don’t remember when we were in the woods?”
“I don’t remember meeting you at all.”
He smiled weakly. “That sucks.”
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“I just didn’t think you actually forgot that we almost kissed.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I thought you were just acting like you forgot.”
This revelation didn’t register the way it should have. Maybe because we’d kissed by then, more than kissed. A line had already been irrevocably crossed, and I was simply watching it recede. If anything, in some twisted way, I felt vindicated, like a part of me intuited our history all along.
“Who tried to kiss who first?” I asked.
“You tried to kiss me”—flashing a cocky grin—“obvi.”
I dropped my head in my hands, laughing, groaning. While my face was still hidden, Tristan buried a hand into my hair and drew me up to look at him.
“Clearly that night stayed with me.”
He kissed me hard, almost angry. It felt wholly plausible we were going to fuck in this church. I didn’t know how I was going to make it out of this situation in one piece. But maybe that’s what I wanted, to risk myself completely for this life everyone told me was impossible.
Chapter 42
Aunt Lisa blew in from New York the morning after a helicopter crashed into a passenger plane over the Potomac River. I watched the taped collision on my phone, a bright sun-like flare, disintegrated gray parts falling sideways. My city’s river, I thought. My river. We were two weeks into the new administration; my dad said you couldn’t ask for an omen clearer than that.
My mom, who’d taken off work to scrub the bathroom tiles to death, yelled at me to get the door when my aunt arrived. My mom was back in the office five days a week now and was in a bitter mood about it. Three people had already been fired for leaving their IDs in their computers to use the bathroom. There weren’t enough desks. Every day she had to sign up for one or else wander around the building, searching for somewhere to sit.
My aunt swept through the foyer with two big suitcases, a Japanese fan under her armpit. She shrugged her coat off in my hands and fanned herself. “… And you know I cannot stand people yapping on their phones. I was thisss close to slapping that thing out this woman’s hand, and tell me: How come it’s always Black people?”
I hung her fifty-pound coat in the closet. “Hi, Auntie Lisa.”
“Hi, sweetpea.” Looking me up and down, “Aren’tyougrown? I was a blonde in 1989, too, you know.” She stood at the bottom of the staircase and shouted, “Little sister! I like what you’ve done with the place. Is this a new paint color? It’s a little dingy but if it works for you, it works for me.”
The walls had been that pale green for over twenty years.
My dad heaved himself from his armchair and into the hallway. Anderson Cooper was on TV behind him looking like a serious elf. “Lisa,” he mumbled.
“Joel. You look good. You look old and tired. But good.” She wasn’t looking at him but fluffing her hair in the hallway mirror. “Someone should’ve picked me up from the train station, but I won’t say anything about it,” she said.
My mom came downstairs in yellow rubber cleaning gloves. My aunt looked like a bird when she spread her arms for a hug in her flowing caftan. They rocked from side to side, my dad defecting to the kitchen.
Aunt Lisa gently cradled my mom’s elbows. “Dori, baby, you look terrible.”
“Oh, shut up.”
My aunt laughed, leaning into me, breath smelling of hotel lobby peppermints. “Don’t get married or you’ll die before your death.” Then she followed my mom into the kitchen, the hem of her caftan sweeping around the corner.
I was exiled to the downstairs sofa while Aunt Lisa took my room. On my way to the bathroom, I caught her burning sage and moving my shit around. She had turned my bed sideways and was sitting on it. “Catherine, come here for a second.”
I came to sit beside her. She smiled at me, her hair stuffed inside a scarf. She’d removed her makeup, but her eyebrows were tattooed on and couldn’t be removed.
“What’s ‘rizz’ mean?”
