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“Well, thank you. Also, thank you for how completely awesome you were with my parents.” I pause for a second, more than a little embarrassed. “How’d you know they were coming?”
“My girlfriend Kali. She tell me. She tell me everything, because we be besties.” He narrows his eyes. “See? Wasn’t no need to hide Miss Dee from the folks. I clean up real nice.”
“Oh, right. I’m sorry about that.”
Dee stares at me, waiting for more.
“Really. It’s just my parents. There’s a lot . . . well, it’s complicated.”
“Ain’t so complicated. I gets it just fine. Okay to slum with Dee but not to bring out the good silver.”
“No! You’ve got it wrong!” I exclaim. “I’m not slumming. I really like you.”
He crosses his arms and stares at me. “How was your field trip?” he asks acidly.
I want to explain, I do. But how? How do I do that without giving myself away? Because I’m trying. I’m trying to be a new person here, a different person, a tabula rasa. But if I explain about my parents, about Melanie, about Willem, if I show who I really am, then aren’t I just stuck back where I started?
“I’m sorry I lied. But I swear, it’s not about you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you did.”
“Ain’t no thang.”
“No, I really mean it. You were great. My parents loved you. And you were so smooth, about everything. They didn’t suspect a thing.”
He whips the lip gloss out of his pocket and, with painstaking precision, applies it first to his top lip, then his bottom. Then he smacks them together, noisily like some kind of rebuke. “What’s to suspect? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nobody. I just be the help.”
I want to make it right. For him to know that I care about him. That I’m not ashamed of him. That he is safe with me. “You know,” I begin, “you don’t have to do that with me. The voices. You can just be yourself.”
I mean it as a compliment, so he’ll know that I like him as is. But he doesn’t take it that way. He purses his lips and shakes his head. “This is myself, baby. All of my selves. I own each and every one of them. I know who I’m pretending to be and who I am.” The look he gives me is withering. “Do you?”
I purposely tried to keep all of that from him, but Dee—smart, sharp Dee—he got it. All of it. He knows what a big fat fake I am. I’m so ashamed I don’t even know what to say. After a while, he slips Twelfth Night into my computer. We watch the entire thing in silence, no voices, no commentary, no laughing, just four eyeballs staring at a screen. And that’s how I know I’ve blown it with Dee.
I’m so miserable about this that I forget to be upset about Willem.
Twenty-two
MARCH
College
The winter drags on, no matter what the groundhog says. Dee stops coming over in the afternoons, ostensibly because we’re not reading Twelfth Night aloud, but I know that’s not really it. The cookies from my grandmother pile up. I get a bad cold, which I can’t seem to shake, though it does have the side benefit of getting me out of reading any of Twelfth Night in front of the class. Professor Glenny, who is stuffy himself, gives me a packet of something called Lemsips and tells me to get in shape so I can pull a double shift as Rosalind in As You Like It, one of his favorite plays.
We finish Twelfth Night. I thought I’d feel relieved, as if I’d dodged a bullet. But I don’t. With Dee out of my life, I feel like I took the bullet, even without reading the play. Tabula rasa was the right move. Taking this class was the wrong move. Now I just have to buckle through. I’m getting used to that.
We move on to As You Like It. In his introductory spiel, Professor Glenny goes on about how this is one of Shakespeare’s most romantic plays, his sexiest, and this gets all the Glenny groupies up front swooning. I take vacant notes as he outlines the plot: A deposed duke’s daughter named Rosalind and a gentleman named Orlando meet and fall in love at first sight. But then Rosalind’s uncle kicks her out of his house, and she flees with her cousin Celia to the Forest of Arden. There, Rosalind takes on the identity of a boy named Ganymede. Orlando, who has also fled to Arden, meets Ganymede, and the two strike up a friendship. Rosalind as Ganymede uses her disguise and their friendship to test Orlando’s proclaimed love for Rosalind. Meanwhile, all sorts of people take on different identities and fall in love. As always, Professor Glenny tells us to pay attention to specific themes and passages, specifically how emboldened Rosalind becomes when she is Ganymede and how that alters both her and the courtship with Orlando. It kind of all sounds like a sitcom, and I have to work hard to keep it straight.
Dee and I start reading together again, but now we’re back in the Student Union, and he packs up as soon as we finish our assignment. He’s stopped doing all the crazy voices, which makes me realize just how helpful they were in “interpreting” the plays because now, with both of us reading in monotones, the words sort of drift over me like a foreign language. We may as well be reading it to ourselves for how boring it has become. The only time Dee uses his voices now is when he has to speak to me. I get a different voice, or two, or three, every day. The message is clear: I’ve been demoted.
I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don’t seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.
“Today we will read one of my favorite scenes in As You Like It, the beginning of act four,” Professor Glenny says, one bone-chillingly cold March day that makes it seem like we’re heading into winter, not out of it. “Orlando and Ganymede/Rosalind are meeting again in the Forest of Arden, and the chemistry between them reaches its boiling point. Which is kind of confusing and amusing, given that Orlando believes himself to be speaking to Ganymede, who is male. But it’s equally confusing for Rosalind, who is in a kind of delicious torment, torn between two identities, the male and the female, and two desires: a desire to protect herself and remain Orlando’s equal, and the exquisite desire to simply submit.” Up in the front of the classroom, the groupies seem to emit a little joint sigh. If Dee and I were still friends, it would be the kind of thing that would make us look at each other and roll our eyes. But we’re not, so I don’t even look at him.
“So, Orlando comes to Ganymede in the forest, and the two perform a sort of Kabuki theater together, and in doing so, they fall deeper in love, even as they don’t entirely know whom they’re falling in love with,” Professor Glenny continues. “The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides. Which I think is a rather handy metaphor for falling in love. So, it’s a good day to read. Who’s up?” He scans the class. People are actually raising their hands. “Drew, why don’t you read Orlando.” There’s a smattering of applause as Drew walks up the front of the room. He’s one of the best readers in the class. Normally, Professor Glenny pairs him with Nell or Kaitlin, two of the best girls. But not today. “Allyson, I believe you owe me a Rosalind.”
I shuffle up to the front of the room, along with the other readers he’s chosen. I’ve never loved this part of the class, but at least before, I could feel Dee cheering me on. Once we’re assembled, Professor Glenny turns into a director, which apparently is what he used to do before becoming an academic. He offers us notes: “Drew, in these scenes, Orlando is ardent and steadfast, completely in love. Allyson, your Ganymede is torn: smitten, but also toying with Orlando, like a cat with a mouse. What makes this scene so fascinating to me is that as Ganymede questions Orlando, challenges him to prove his love, you can feel the wall between Rosalind and Ganymede drop. I love that moment in Shakespeare’s plays. When the identities and false identities become a morass of emotion. Both characters feel it here. It gets very charged. Let’s see how you two do.”
The scene opens with Rosalind/Ganymede/me asking Orlando/Drew where he’s been, why he’s taken so long to come see me—I’m “pretending” to be Rosalind. That’s the gimmick. Rosalind has been pretending to be Ganymede, who must now pretend to be Rosalind. And she tries to talk Orlando out of loving Rosalind, even though she really is Rosalind and even though she really does love him back. Trying to keep track of all the pretending makes my head spin.
