As the party warmed up and watermelon started getting passed around, Nicholas kept an eye on James, or to be more accurate, he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Finally, when the opportunity presented itself, he extracted himself from his crowd of adoring aunts and uncles saying he had to use the bathroom, and dragged James into his childhood bedroom, shutting the door behind himself and leaning on it to block any attempted escape, still half worried James would somehow disappear from right in front of him.
James raised an eyebrow. “It’s certainly been a while since we’ve met like this.”
“Very funny,” Nicolas snapped. “What are you doing here?”
For a second James looked hurt, and Nicholas felt a stab of guilt, but he quickly resumed his poker face. “As your friend, I was invited to your birthday party, but if you want me to go, then I can go.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Nicolas said, frustrated. “Of course, you’re welcome to stay.”
“Then what did you mean?” James said.
“I meant that you disappeared one night, then just ignored me for over a year, so why did you show up now?”
James looked away and kicked his shoe against one of the bedposts. “I went to rehab.”
Nicolas wanted to believe him. “So you’re sober now?”
“Yep, four months as of last Monday.”
Nicolas frowned. Math had never been his strong suit, but that didn’t quite add up. James must have seen it in his face because he added, “I relapsed, but I’m fine now. It’s a normal part of the recovery process.”
“Couldn’t you have at least called me?”
“They didn’t allow phones.”
“Written a letter?” Nicolas asked, trying really hard not to sound as desperate as he felt.
“Alright fine,” James said, throwing up his hands. “I was avoiding you a little. Happy now?”
“No,” Nicolas said. “I was worried you were dead.”
“Well,” James said, “you can’t stay mad forever.”
“Hey,” Nicolas said, cracking a smile, “that’s my line.”
They smiled at each other over the bed that was now the guest bed, surrounded by the craft supplies his parents had put in the room after he left for college. Nicolas wanted so badly to reach out and grab James to make sure he was real, to feel his heartbeat not racing and skipping out of control because of a bunch of junk in his veins, to hold him and make sure he knew he was loved, to make sure this wasn’t all just another dream after which he would wake up to another day of no silence and worry.
“We should probably go back,” James said. “People will wonder where we are.”
“Right,” Nicolas said, not moving, not wanting the moment to end.
“I met your girlfriend,” James said as he crossed the room to the door. “She seems nice. Not what I expected, but nice. And smart.”
That comment snapped Nicolas back from the past where he could spend hours in his bedroom out of time just talking with James, to the present when two parts of his life he had tried for so long to keep separate were colliding. He turned to respond, but James had already gone back to the party, and instead, Clarissa was the one standing in the hallway just outside the bathroom looking guilty.
“I was just using the bathroom,” she said, her face frozen, the way it always did when she lied, “and I happened to overhear a bit. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
Nicolas felt a flash of anger before he reminded himself that none of this was her fault. And besides, if he wanted to heal, to move on, he needed to let go of his anger.
“It’s alright,” he said. This was a lie, but it was a lie he would have to tell. If he wanted Clarissa to get along with his old friends, he would have to actually open up and tell her about them. Maybe she would understand. “How much did you ‘overhear’.”
“Um, well,” she blushed. “I heard him talking about rehab.”
And it was the way she said rehab like it was a dirty word and the way she looked at the doorway James had left through suspiciously out of the corner of her eye that let Nicolas know he couldn’t actually tell her everything.
It was often clear to Nicolas by the way Clarissa talked about California as though it were one big beach and the way she spent money as if she had never really worried about it, that she was largely unaware of how different their backgrounds were. Clarissa had grown up in the largely irrelevant state of Missouri, but she had grown up, from what Nicolas could tell, in a predominantly white upper-middle-class suburb just outside of a St. Louis where families lived in houses with fresh green lawns and sent their kids to college. When she had stared at pictures of sunny Los Angeles beaches and fog swelling past the Golden Gate Bridge, she had probably never imagined a part of California like the area Nicolas had grown up in.
The California Nicolas knew was medium-sized towns an hour away from the nearest big city where wealth inequality was the monster that loomed over everyone’s head for most of the year until the summers when hundred-degree heat waves rolled in with smoke-filled air and the fear that this year’s wildfires would come close enough to hurt you mostly drove away other worries. He knew kids whose parents owned car dealerships sitting next to kids whose migrant worker parents would never get citizenship in elementary school classrooms, and English Second Language classes being full to capacity.
“Yes,” he told Clarissa, “James was in rehab. We’ve been out of contact for a while, but we’re fine now.” And then he walked away because he didn’t trust himself to say more than that.
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