“What he’s put you through?” I throw my hands into the air. “No, forget it. I’m not going over this with you again. And he sent a courier because he had a plane to catch. To go to the White House. To have dinner with the president. Remember?”
“It’d still be the polite thing to do,” Dad says.
“Why? So you can harass him about school?”
“We do want to know what his plans are for the future, yes.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
Maman cuts back in. “We just want to meet this boy who is so important to you.”
“You’ll meet him next month.” And I storm the rest of the way upstairs.
“Will we?” Dad calls up. “Will we?”
In spite of everything, I’d been looking forward to coming home. Now I’m not so sure. My energy levels are at an all-time low. It’s taken everything I have to maintain my grades – Dartmouth – and, even though we’re okay, things still aren’t back to normal with Kurt. I’m in detention so much that we hardly see each other. Josh has sneaked in a few more calls, here and there, but it’s harder now because his mom is less distracted now that the election is over.
And Dad harassing me about Josh’s future is particularly stressful, because the last time we talked, Josh said his mom wants him to finish the year at a private school in DC. When I suggested he take the GED instead, he replied, “Why would I waste my time when they’re just gonna put me in another stupid school anyway?”
I changed the subject after that.
My bedroom smells uninhabited and clean, that vacant scent it carries whenever I come home from abroad. A large box is in the centre of my floor. I don’t recognize the return address, and there’s no name, but it’s unquestionably Josh’s exquisite handwriting. My pulse quickens. I slice through the tape with a pair of scissors, peel back the flaps, and cry out in a grateful sort of agony. This air smells like him.
On the top is a dark blue T-shirt, one of his favourites. He wore it on the first day of school this year. I press my nose against its cotton. Citrus, ink, him. My knees weaken. I hug it to my chest as I examine the contents below. The rest of my body weakens.
Boarding School Boy, bound in string.
There’s a note slipped underneath the manuscript’s binding. I LOVE YOU. I love that he starts with this even in his letter. I’M SORRY THAT I CAN’T BE WITH YOU IN PERSON, BUT I HOPE THAT YOU’LL ACCEPT THIS PATHETIC SUBSTITUTE. I’VE SPENT ALL WEEK SCANNING AND PRINTING THE PAGES. I’VE NEVER SHOWN THE WHOLE THING TO ANYONE BEFORE. I’M NOT DONE, BUT HERE’S WHAT I HAVE SO FAR. I HOPE YOU STILL LIKE ME AFTER YOU’VE SEEN THE UGLY PARTS. YOURS, J.
My eyes well with tears of happiness. I want to climb into bed with it this instant, but I have to wait. I want privacy. I don’t want to be interrupted mid-read. I place Josh’s shirt beside my pillow, but I push the box into my closet. My parents aren’t the snooping type, but anything left out in the open is considered fair game.
I spend the rest of the day with them. When they inquire about the box, I give them a vague “Oh, you know. It was a care package. A letter, a shirt.” But as soon as dinner is over, I claim jet lag and retire. I drag out the box to the side of my bed, switch on a lamp, and crawl beneath the covers. I’d wear the T-shirt, but I don’t want to lose his scent. I snuggle with it instead. And then I untie the string and remove the first page.
The book is divided, as it was in his dorm room, into four sections beginning with freshman. Josh has drawn himself as skinny and naive, slack-jawed, as he takes in his new surroundings. He finds Paris equal parts intimidating and awe inspiring, but little time passes before he falls into homesickness. It’s not that he misses his actual home – not the flights between cities, the endless campaigning, the neglectful parents. He misses the life that he glimpsed when he was younger. The cabin and the pine trees. A family in one place. He recognizes almost immediately that instead of trading in two lives for one, he now has three. And it’s too late.
A single-panel page: him in the corner, small and crouched, looking up at home, while the rest of the page – where home is supposed to be – is a blank space. He misses somewhere that doesn’t exist. And he knows that Paris will not fill the void.
He tries to fill it by throwing himself into his art. He befriends St. Clair in their studio art class. St. Clair is a year older, but he’s attracted to Josh’s natural talent while Josh is attracted to St. Clair’s natural charisma. At night, Josh lies awake in bed, rehashing things his new friend has said or done, hoping to learn from him. Emulate him. The pages are sad and sweet and full of humiliating truths.
St. Clair has a bushy-haired friend named Meredith, and Josh befriends her, too, and the three of them are uncannily reminiscent of Harry, Ron and Hermione. St. Clair is the leader, Josh is the clown, and Meredith is the brainiac. But in this version, Hermione is clearly in love with Harry.
The scenes with his friends are fun. They feel like characters, not like the real people that I used to see around school. Though they do trigger that accompanying, always-underlying twinge of hurt. I’ll never know this part of his life. But the scenes where Josh is alone, he becomes Josh again, and everything is heightened. I pour over these panels with an intensity that makes me feel uncomfortable, maybe guilty, but the harder the scenes are to read, the faster I turn the pages. Josh thinks about girls constantly. He sees a beautiful, too-tall French girl on the street, and I’m horrified to flip the page and find him masturbating back in his room to the thought of her. Over the summer, he gets his first kiss with an older girl who works at his favourite comics shop in Manhattan, but the next time he goes to see her, she brushes him off in embarrassment.
It took guts to draw these things. It’s a different kind of excruciating to read about them.
SOPHOMORE begins. St. Clair starts dating a girl named Ellie. She’s two years older than Josh, and he struggles with feeling cool enough to hang out with them. He and Meredith swap unkind words about Ellie – each out of a different type of jealousy – but his eventual coming to terms with Ellie means getting to know her best friend.
Rashmi Devi.
She’s pretty and smart and sarcastic. And I hate her. She flirts with Josh one day in their art class – of course she can draw, when I can’t – and he becomes consumed by thoughts of her. Page after page of Rashmi shining like a gorgeous Hindu goddess. They go on for ever. He woos her pathetically, desperately, until she agrees to go on a date with him. And then I’m forced to relive the painful moments of my past as they engage in on-the-page PDA.
It gets worse. Josh tells her that he loves her. She says it back. He touches her. She touches him back. And then they’re losing their virginity on the floor of her bedroom beside her pet rabbit, Isis.
A rabbit.
Josh literally lost his virginity in front of a metaphor for sex.
There’s another single-panel page, and this time Rashmi has been drawn na**d like the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, who – it turns out – is the goddess of fertility, and she’s holding her pet rabbit, and she’s surrounded by more rabbits, and enough with the stupid rabbits and fertility and sex already.