I felt safe in his bedroom. Or at least I did at first. It wasn’t always the place I learned to fear more than any other.

Once it was a room I wished to be in as much as possible, and not just when Josh’s parents weren’t around, or when the door was closed, and not just because it was there I’d drawn ecstasy close so many times. Josh’s room was full of secrets, large and small. Mostly good secrets, the softest parts of him: his purple “Participant” ribbon from a swim meet in 1994; tattered Piers Anthony novels handed down from his older brother Teddy; a no-longer-needed, slightly-warped retainer in its blue plastic case. All proof to me that he was as human and puny and fallible at times as I was.

Under his bed, in black cardboard boxes reinforced with silvery clasps at the corners, proof of the two years he’d spent learning how to develop and print 35mm film. It wasn’t until we’d been together for three months, right before he left for Cape Cod, that I saw them for the first time. Five neat stacks of 5″ by 7″ black and white prints, held together with ribbons of different colors.

“Why do you hide these?” I was sitting cross-legged at his feet on the blue and white rag rug next to his bed while I sifted through the prints. He bounced a chewed up tennis ball against the far wall again and again, bounce-thwack-bounce-thwack. “You’ve really got an eye, you know.”

“Why do you think I’m hiding them?” Bounce-thwack. “And thank you.”

In the yellow grosgrain ribbon stack, studies of household objects I recognized from his home. The pair of chinoiserie vases stuffed with pussy willows that flanked the brick fireplace, a composition so perfectly symmetrical I now think of it as being proto-Wes Andersonian. One wall of his father’s study, shelves crammed with books on Greek and Roman history and mythology and biographies of Plutarch and Virgil, stuffed with The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and multiple copies of the Odyssey in Greek and English and French, and here and there a slim volume of Mad Libs jutting out from the classical mess.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied, retying the ribbon carefully into an even neater bow than the one he’d used to secure the photos. “If these were mine, my mom would probably have framed every one of them and hung them on the living room walls.”

Bounce-thwack. “My mom doesn’t know half as much about my life as yours does about yours.” Bounce-thwack. “Part of growing up is detaching. I guess I’m further down that road than you are, but then again, I’m a boy. We share less, just part of who we are.”

Red ribbon stack: portraits. His older brothers Max and Teddy, alone and together. One I particularly admired was a medium close-up of Teddy and Max facing one another, right profile facing left. The chiaroscuro was stark, light and dark playing hard against the young men’s faces. I could pick out every eyelash bordering Teddy’s closed lid, the chapping of Max’s thin lower lip and the puckery scar that slashed his eyebrow. “Can I say something?” I ventured.

Bounce-thwack. “Anything.”

“You’re better looking than either of your brothers.”

Bounce-thwack. Catch. “You’re funny, Melissa.” Josh reached down from the bed to caress my shoulder before sliding down the comforter to sit beside me. “Come on,” he teased, nudging me in the ribs with an elbow. “Tell me again.”

“Well, Max has got that scar, and your lips are much nicer. A better shape, not nicer. I don’t know if his lips are nice at all, I mean,” I stumbled. I knew Josh watched me carefully around other boys at school, monitored my body language and conversations for signs of… I wasn’t really sure, I just knew when I’d gotten it wrong. I’d learned by then not to speak of Sean in anything more than practical or critical terms. Mack got a free pass, however — it amuses me now to think that he was less insecure around a stereotypically masculine boy than one with a love for Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” and Julia Roberts movies.

“And Teddy?” Josh prodded.

Teddy was much closer in age to Josh, only two years older to Max’s eleven. While Max was Josh’s in-house idol — a Yalie who’d fled to Silicon Valley right before the internet exploded and was running a team at a (now defunct) search engine — Teddy was his domestic rival. Where Max and Josh were driven and occasionally awkward in their intensity, Teddy was the Jeffrey Lebowski of the Brookes family: The Ted abided. He’d bucked family tradition and was finishing his freshman year at Bennington, not Yale; he kept his dark hair long in a scrunchie and lived in Señor Frog t-shirts and cargo shorts. Teddy bussed tables at Mucho Mas instead of earning a generous allowance as a research assistant to his father; he addressed most people as “Dude.”

I resisted the temptation to needle Josh back a little by pointing out his own nose was a little more snubbed than Teddy’s. “He looks a lot like you, more than Max does, but his hair is too long. And I prefer your eyes.”

“You can’t even see his eyes there.” Josh was right, but I knew who Teddy was. Every girl in my freshman class knew who Teddy Brookes was. He’d been prom king his senior year, captain of the Ultimate Frisbee team, and a reliable source (for those who sought it) of decent weed. He’d done a star turn in Arsenic and Old Lace as Mortimer Brewster in the spring show — everyone said he should go to Hollywood with his good looks and natural comedic timing. One of Rachel’s Glam Squad, Talley Rand (I wish I was kidding) had gone on to marry Teddy years after graduation, and word is he has now achieved his true calling as one very chill stay-at-home dad to three kids.

Josh took the picture from my hand and pushed his glasses up, bringing the photo close. “You know Max has a different mom, right?”

I shook my head; another secret, or at least secret to me. “No.”

The glasses came down again with a long sigh. “Max’s mother walked out on my dad to go back to Germany. It was a long time ago.” Josh took the stack of portraits from me and shuffled the two-shot of his brothers in the middle.

I held out the red velvet ribbon for him. “Why?” From experience, I knew I had about a 50-50 shot at getting an answer to this question. Josh liked to tempt me with half-confessions of his life, suspended before me like a dazzling jewel on a golden strand, only to pull away when I came too close. Or really, when he felt like it. By controlling when the door to his inner life creaked open, he could tantalize me until I was nearly bursting with curiosity. Delaying the reveal only drew me closer when he finally let me have a look inside. And closer was where he wanted me.

“Dad said she got a job offer she thought she couldn’t give up, and my dad thought it was a stupid move. Plus he thought West Berlin was a terrible place to raise a child. Much worse than Boston.” He looped the ribbon around and around the photos before tying a tight square knot. I thought to mention it might be hard to untie that later but held my tongue. I’m sure he has a reason.

“Wow, West Berlin?” Rachel remembers my parents sitting us down in front of the news to watch the fall of the Berlin Wall in the poky living room of our old apartment in North Hollywood, but no matter how hard I search for this memory, it remains out of reach.

Josh didn’t look up while he carefully replaced the photos back in their black box, fixing the lid with a brief tap. He didn’t need to say what I could hear him think: That’s enough of me for you right now. “Yes. At the Free University. Philosophy. Max was five or six and my dad was an associate professor at Boston College back then. Tenure track, if you know what that is.” (I did — my Aunt Jane had sweated it out herself, only to get sidelined on the mommy track.) “Frieda wanted to go, dad wanted to stay, so she left. Walked away from her husband and son like it was just something that’s normal. It’s not normal for a woman to do that, you know.”

We were lying side by side on the floor by now, my head tilted onto this shoulder, my ear pressed close. Close enough I could swear I heard the blood rushing through him, pulsing its whoosh of cells through his body. “Have you ever met her? Frieda?” I tested her name on my lips. Freeeda.

Next to me, Josh shifted onto his side to face me. “Yes. Quite a few times, actually.” He gently stroked the back of his hand along my jaw several times, a soft caress. I liked these quiet moments between us, so small and spare, with no performance for any friends or parents or teachers. As fragile and exquisite and bound to break on the slightest rap as fine sugar-glass.

I love you, Joshua Karl Brookes, I thought, but would not say. Instead: “What was she like?”

The hand on my face stilled as it reached behind my ear to cup my jaw and turn my face towards his. “German.”

I couldn’t help myself, as I often couldn’t help myself when he was unwittingly, oddly hilarious. “‘German‘?” I burst out giggling before covering my mouth.

“What?” Flashes of bewilderment and embarrassment and indignation flared and waned in those violet eyes before he returned a smile of his own, a slow unfurling I craved so much from him. Smiles meant I’d been clever or kind or well-behaved in a way that suited him, that suited me, I mean, in suiting him.

“Liiiiike, Brunhilda German?” I composed my face to look more serious, more mitteleuropäische, or what I thought that might look like. I certainly drew my brows together. “Or Leni Riefenstahl German?”

“What?”

“Orrrrrrrr, maybe Maria Theresa German? Or Heidi Klum German?” I kept my eyes on his to test the violet waters there — are they choppy, have I struck out too far? (Always checking, checking with Josh.)

“Now you’re just randomly naming every German woman you can think of.” Josh’s smile steadied, and he leaned forward to tap a kiss on my forehead.

I’ve pleased him, breathe now, Melissa. “Nuh-uh,” I countered, feeling out the corners of the space he gave me to entertain. “Not true.”

“Oh?” Another kiss, this time on the tip of my nose, so bare a brush it was like a memory more than contact. In the hallway, I could see his mother trying to keep out of line of sight, eavesdropping, but her pink-sandalled foot was still visible to me. My brilliant boy and his girl, I imagined her musing as she balanced the basket of clean clothes on her hip.

“I know a few more. Nico? Eva Braun? Frau Farbissina from Austin Powers?”

Josh’s lovely, serious face stilled in its smile before shattering the beat of silence between us with the truest, clearest, crystalline crack of laughter. He clutched me to his chest and the hiccuping, percussive beats of his laugh ran through my body as well. We were one, as I wanted us to be, as I wanted to dissolve into him and run through his veins and into the lub-dub of his heart and the crickety-creck of the electricity in that great brain that made all those crafty little sentences string together in seductive lines.

Eventually he stilled, the guffaws fading, though he kept me close, my head tucked beneath his chin. “You really are funny, Melissa. It’s like I dreamed and then you were there.” That last part was so quiet, like an echo of a thought he’d once had but let free into the world before giving it voice.

There are others like this, you know. Other memories, in that room and others, that are still precious to me, that remind me there were reasons why I stayed as long as I did. I’d spent nearly every day of my 16 years I could recall worrying I’d never been enough, never would be enough, that I was squandering any native brilliance on thinking too much about insipid things, dross. I worried that I was actively making myself more stupid by having strong opinions on boys with frosted tips, or whether Leonardo diCaprio really was more romantic in Titanic than Romeo + Juliet, or if I looked better in Mom’s green or blue top from J Crew. “More stupid,” of course, because I had no doubt I really was a dolt, no matter what my parents and teachers and friends and even Rachel told me (sometimes).

Josh called me singular, a one-off. After years believing I was a smudged carbon copy of Rachel, Josh wiped the glass clean. “You are your own self,” he told me, more than once. “And that self is more fantastic than you can see. But I see you, Melissa, and you can trust me. You just need a little more discipline.”

In me there was a ferocious and powerful goddess who needed to be tamed to be set free. A life as unbridled as mine, with no checks on the adolescent power within me, meant wasted talent, wasted passion, wasted energy. Josh knew this about me because he shared this frailty, and he’d cracked the code: chaos could be channelled into dominion by keeping the divine in check. By reminding her that power is nothing without control.

***

“You see, it really doesn’t mean too much if you or I have all this innate genius if we don’t focus,” he explained to me in another room that summer, shortly after his return from Cape Cod. In recognition of Josh’s clamber to the top of the literary magazine masthead, Prof. Brookes had presented his son with a writing shed of his own, a cedar shack in the far corner of the Brookes’ backyard. The gift had one string: decoration and maintenance were down to Josh “and the ravishing Miss de Mornay.” (I’d tried not to feel creeped out when Prof. Brookes slashed a sloppy peck on my cheek. Even Josh gave him the side-eye for that one.)

We’d finished decorating it that wickedly brutal August afternoon, another cloudless summer day where it took barely five minutes of hanging laundry in the garden to work up a sopping sweat, and another two for the sweat to dry down to a fine salty tang if you gave your arm a lick.

“A real Valley special!” my dad had crowed in the car as he drove me over to the Brookeses in the same tan Mercedes biodiesel I’ve been borrowing during the COVID-19 lockdown. “Make sure to –“

“–drink plenty of water, I know, Dad.” It was one of the mantras I’d grown up with as a Valley Girl: drink plenty of water, reapply sunblock, seek shade, don’t overdo it, and no one needs to be on that stretch of Vanowen at 3 am (only said to Rachel). At my feet were the four sets of curtains my mom had agreed to donate, sorry, “lend” to the decoration effort. They’d come with us when we’d decamped from that two-bed courtyard apartment on Kittridge and were hideous (a blowsy floral print, pink and cream stargazer lilies on a navy ground) but had the distinct advantage of being free. I’d spent the afternoon before at the musty Salvation Army near the 99 Cent store on Lankersheim, where I’d scored two tablecloths (one for his desk, one for the table where I might work myself if my father let me, Josh said), a fluted stoneware vase and a wrought iron standing lamp for the corner. (The bus ride home with that was not particularly amusing, not least for the older woman sitting next to me who tried to disembark with the lamp.)

I was shattered from three hours of hanging curtains and blinds, rolling in the portable air conditioner that Teddy had somehow laid his hands on (Rachel later told me Teddy had swapped a pound of weed for a scratch-n-dent floor sample from B.J. Freeley’s dad’s appliance store — Teddy was the brother Josh never deserved), and filling the shelves with reference books. In one corner, by the bubble-shaped Sony boombox playing last year’s Bright Eyes album and the stack of Wilco and Uncle Tupelo CDs, was the castoff pinewood futon Mrs. Brookes had been itching to get out of Max’s old bedroom for years. “Mel needs somewhere comfy to sit,” she’d scolded Josh while tidying his stack of back issues of the Atlantic. “You can’t possibly expect her to sit on that old wooden chair.”

Josh had resisted at first, and I sort of didn’t blame him — the brown and gold swirls on the futon cover made it only slightly less grim than the curtains, and there were several stains of dubious provenance. No matter how I arranged the pad on the frame, some Rorsharch blot appeared to raise Josh’s hackles and add heat to his insistence that it just be trashed.

To Josh’s chagrin, it was Teddy to the rescue when he loped in the shed with a Bed Bath & Beyond bag the size of a small parachute under his arm. “Hey dudes,” he drawled with a brief wave to me before he pulled out a new burnt orange futon cover with a ta-da! of a flourish. “The Ted provides.”

The resemblance between the brothers was striking, near copies of each other — but for the eyes. Teddy’s were clear blue, the color of willow-pattern china, safe and easy. Kind and unchallenging. But where Josh’s posture was usually tense and taut, as if he were a panther about to pounce on prey unaware of his presence, Teddy was more a pampered housecat, unused to seeking his meals, lolling in a single sunray through the blinds. All was bueno in Teddy’s world, all the time.

Josh grunted a brief thanks to his brother before placing the cover into my arms. I didn’t refuse — to do so would embarrass Josh, and the hard work of that blistering day had stripped me of any fight at least an hour before. “I’m sure you’ve got more experience than I do in making beds, hon.” (He only called me “hon” in front of others, I’d come to realize — in private it was Melissa, and increasingly, “princess.”) “Going in the house for some water and the vacuum.”

Teddy cocked a jet black eyebrow at his younger brother, and folded his arms tanned from the Cape Cod sun across his chest. Not a Señor Frog tee this time — this one was plain grey, and I knew it to be Josh’s from the very small yellow highlighter stain on the hem. “Dude, you’re such a throwback from way back,” he yelled at his brother’s back as Josh strolled past him across the perfect green lawn and towards the house. “Just ’cause she’s a girl doesn’t mean she’s good at this shit.”

“I actually am,” I piped up, unfolding the cover and shaking out the creases with a bright snap! of the fabric.

Teddy caught the other end of the cover with one hand like he might have a frisbee back in high school, and set to unzipping the fabric. “Oh yeah?” He flashed me a smile that was probably only meant to be polite, but whirred the something in me that spoke of danger. No, I reminded myself. He looks like Josh but he is not.

“We have one in our spare room. A futon. I mean in my mom’s office. I mean, it’s her office but she really doesn’t use it too much and my dad I guess could use it more but mostly… I guess you could call it a spare room.” The words tumbled out of my mouth faster than I could keep them in, pouring out like rice to be washed in a sieve.

Teddy’s light laugh drifted in the air, a joyful feather, while I knelt on the floorboards, beginning to feed the pad into the cover. “Here, let me do that.” His hand swatted mine, enough time to feel the danger swell like a deceptively small wave beginning to crest on the ocean. “You just hold the cover. I got this.”

I was certain he could smell the mortification leaking from my pores (though it could also have been the sweat) but I held the cover open while he worked the mattress into its corners. Up close — and this was the very closest I’d ever been to Teddy Brookes — he was more than a laid-back Josh with long hair and a hacky sack in each pocket of his cargo shorts. Being near him was like being at the beach, or doing yoga, or getting a really good massage at Burke Williams. Like the toxic sludge of being on my best behavior had begun to ebb from my being.

I felt deeply calm for the first time in months, which spooked me. As he reached the corner where I held the cover, our hands accidentally grasped each other briefly on either side of the fabric. I jumped back at his touch — not electric, like it would be with Alex in years to come, but the chill and temptation of the forbidden. I saw briefly a moment when it was Teddy stripping me to my blue cotton underwear, not Josh. Teddy would let me touch him, Teddy would let me straddle him in the backseat of his old Saab. Teddy wouldn’t need to worry about losing control, because there was nothing to control in the first place.

There’s something wrong with Josh, you know. (I knew.)

“I don’t bite, Mel,” he teased, catching my eye with an exaggerated wink as he tugged the zipper closed and sat back on his haunches to survey his efforts. “That’s more my brother’s bag.”

He wasn’t wrong. It had only been a few days since Josh had nipped at the tenderest flesh of my inner thigh when he’d gotten close, so aggravatingly close to putting his mouth where I wanted it most. I’d shrieked at the pain — almost metallic, a cold and piercing sting that lingered well after he’d moved up my body to cover my lips with his own to comfort me.

“Shhhhh, princess,” Josh had urged as he stroked my hair while I wept over his shoulder, hiccuping an apology for being too sensitive. “I just got… it was like I wanted to devour you.”

In his freckled arms I was a tiny jewel of a bon-bon, the prettiest macaron in the bakery display. A miniscule wonder, perfectly formed and sweetened, all to be devoured and to exist no more.

Teddy broke the spell of that memory as he struggled with the mattress. “I know you’re probably zonked, but help me get this on the frame?”

Once Teddy and I had flopped the mattress over the frame, Teddy offered to do some “fine tuning,” as he put it. “You know my brother, everything’s gotta be ‘just right’ or it’s an afternoon of him complaining about how incompetent everyone is but him.”

I snickered, but looked quickly to the door to check for Josh’s foot passing over the threshold.

With a last shove to the mattress and a kick to the base, Teddy placed his hands on his hips and gave his work a short nod of approval. “Not bad, kiddo. Not bad at all. Here, let’s try it out.”

Where he patted the futon, I complied dutifully, unthinkingly — he was a Brookes boy, after all — but as soon as I sat, the new familiar worries around boys gurgled in my consciousness: Am I leading him on? Should I be sitting on a bed with him? Be cool, but be kind, Melissa. “Yes, not bad at all,” I replied with what I hoped was a breezy note. Cheerful. Girls should be cheerful. “Great job.” And make their boys feel like men.

“Me?” Teddy scoffed as he stretched out legs as long as Josh’s. The same bony knees, the same hairy calves. “You did half of it.”

Girls should be polite, too. “Thanks. Shouldn’t Josh be back by now?” Every moment I spent next to Teddy Brookes, being cheerful and cool and kind and polite and making him feel like a man, was one that left me feeling like I was seeing a refracted image of Josh, distorted in some way I did not want to admit I preferred.

“Eh, Dad’s probably grabbed him to fix the broadband again. I fucked it up this morning and now I get a pass.” Teddy slinked another smile at me. “How long you been with the brat now?”

“Brat?” Josh was many things — imperious, cultured, affected, a lover at once tender and brutish, brilliant and beautiful — but I’d never thought of him once as a brat.

“Ahhhh,” Teddy exhaled. “Come on, like I don’t know your sister doesn’t call you that. Or worse.”

It slipped out of my mouth before I could catch it. “She mostly calls me ‘whore’ or ‘loser.'” As soon as I let it free into the world, I dipped my head towards my lap with an “oh fuck” of regret.

Teddy whooped. “See? It’s the condition, you know. Older sibling. We love you but you’re just… hey, how is Rach? She around this summer?”

“R-Rachel?” I stammered. I could feel Rachel’s green-eyed glare on me. Don’t fuck this up for me, slut. “She’s here. I mean, at home. Not all the time.” I gulped, trying to focus on helping Rachel reel in one of the sleek fish she’d never managed to land. “She’s working at Abercrombie. At the mall.”

“Sweet. Tell your sister I’ll stop by before I head back to Vermont. Where’s she going?”

“College? Nowhere,” I confessed. “She was supposed to be going to Northridge but she said she wanted to work on her screenplay. She says it’s like Heathers for the new millennium.”

I knew it wasn’t true, but in public I’d toe the line. Rachel had… an arrangement. And while my parents thought she was focused on a creative feat, I knew the truth. If I said the guy’s name now, you’d say wow! A blast from the past. But in 2001, his star was still on the rise, he was still young(ish) and he liked them younger. A lot younger. Rachel had met him at one of those Hollywood clubs you can get into if you’re pretty enough even though you’re underage (ask Kylie Jenner, or me, for that matter). He quickly realized he’d bitten off more than he could chew, but if you knew Rachel at 18, you could understand why he kept her around. She was sharp-tongued but sharp, an incisive wit masquerading as a bimbo party girl. She also liked fucking, which was probably in her favor.

“If you even breathe his name while you are alive, I will tell Mom and Dad exactly what I saw Josh doing to you,” she’d warned me. She’d caught us two nights before, on an evening our parents were at a LA County Bar Association gala and Rachel was supposed to be staying over at one of the Glams’ houses. “They think you two are sitting side by side, reading Shakespeare to each other, when in reality –“

I thought the reality was much more complicated than it actually was. What Josh and I were up to was still wholesome, or near enough, for two kids, even if I thought it was highly sophisticated. Groping, fondling, desire, denial, and wish for moreandmoreandmore but Josh threw up a hurdle at nearly every precipice. Now I realize my mom would have just reminded me that being on the pill doesn’t mean I can ignore using protection, and my dad would have lobbed a few zingers back at Rachel about her own dating history. Back then though, I thought Josh and I were dangerously in love, which made me desire him even more, when all it was was really kid stuff, if a little overwrought.

“Heathers? Huh.” Teddy fussed with the purple canvas wristband of his Timex. “Gotta run, meeting Zeller and Benitez to shoot some hoops. Tell the brat I said you passed the test.”

When Josh returned a few minutes later, wrestling a vintage, pepto-pink Electrolux into the shed, I passed on Teddy’s parting words. Josh scowled, his upper lip reflexively drawing into a sneer. “God, I don’t know how I’m related to that cretin. Futon looks good, though I bet that was you.” With a sigh of resignation, he sank next to me where I perched on the futon’s edge. “Come here, you,” he growled as he tugged me onto his lap. “This is our room,” he whispered in my ear, a buzz of a promise as he tugged my hair out of its tidy ponytail. “We can do whatever we want here.”

My gaze dropped to the floor, to the small faux-Persian rug at my feet, and I drifted into the prickling thrum of desire. The steady hum of the AC whirred while he dappled my face with soft-lipped kisses; the damp of his sweat slicked from his cheek to mine. Beneath my thighs his erection grew, and I knew I was meant to feel it.

“Whatever we want,” I echoed back, tilting my head up to return his kiss. He still smelled of the paint thinner we’d used to clean the banged up filing cabinets we’d rolled in earlier on wonky dollies, but I didn’t really care. Josh was my reward for being such a very, very good girl, and I would take him whatever way he gave himself to me: tender, attentive, sulky, proud. Violet-eyed, summer-tanned or winter-pale.

From the corner of the room, the CD kept playing: Haligh haligh a lie haligh / the plans were never finalized

My face in his hands, Josh’s brow touched my own. Another moment in a room, mounted and preserved under a bell jar to regard through a keyhole in the years that would follow. Another premonition of liminality — this scene bursting with the reeling of the delicately picked guitar and the singer’s quavering voice, the dull musk of Josh’s body, the bitter orange glow of the sun just beginning to cloak itself behind the line of his garage, about to bleed pink and purple.

All change all change

“You know what I want,” he murmured. “I’m going to make it perfect for you. Would you like that here, princess?” His voice was so low and warm and comforting, like slipping between fresh flannel sheets on a bristly-cold New England night. No scolding, no scowl, just a gentle crackle of a smouldering file in the grate.

Two rooms of his, indoors and out. Two rooms where I’d be worshipped and petted, where I’d learn about Dostoevsky and the Pixies and Foucault and Monty Python and how Josh could make my body thrash with the golden pulse of my orgasm, where I’d bring him his own release within the layers of control he required. Where I’d learn to trust Josh to know best. Until I didn’t anymore.

***

It was in a room I’d never seen, never see, that I severed the cords he’d secured around me and tied tighter than that red ribbon knot. Down the line from Burbank to New Haven my voice shook and strained and finally burst from my body in the great NO! I’d stopped myself from saying so many times. Maybe it was the distance that gave me the courage, maybe it was the hit from the bong Rachel had packed and shared with me before I picked up the phone. There would be no college romance for us, no schlepping back and forth on janky Peter Pan buses and overheated, overcrowded Amtrak cars between New Haven and Providence. No post-collegiate wedding, not in the dress he’d sketched for me on the back of a Peets receipt while I helped him craft his essay for Yale, not in any dress.

You can’t do this to me, Melissa. We are better together. You can’t do this without me. You are nothing without me. How can you be trusted to control yourself? I spent so much time grooming you for what comes next, aren’t you always asking me what’s next? This isn’t what’s next. I know what’s next. You know you can trust me because I love you I love you I love you and this is what you do? To me? You can’t trust yourself. You’re undisciplined alone. Who is it? Who is making you do this? Have you let some other boy touch you? You can’t do that. You’re mine. You’re mine. You say you don’t want this anymore? Who will want you now? You’ll always be mine. No other boy will ever want you, no other boy will ever deserve you. I’ll always have part of you. I was your first. I’ll always be your first. Don’t leave me.

It was the last time I heard his voice in a room, speaking directly to me. The last time I’d ever hear him say, “Hello, Melissa” in that way that made my body squirm as it recalled how tender his touch could be upon me, tenderness cut through with rancid shame.

And then it wasn’t the last time any longer. Rachel thought it was a good idea, something to get me out of my “stupid fucking coronafunk,” as she dubbed it. “Mom’s worried about you, again, because unlike me, you don’t reply to her texts with anything more than a heart emoji.”

“Hey!” (It was true though.)

“Uggggggghhhhhh, Mel, why do you have to make my life more difficult? You at least get to be locked down with someone who isn’t stuffing his face with fucking Papa John’s. Papa John’s!” Rachel yelled the last bit loud enough over speakerphone that Alex, working in the other room yelled back, “Papa John’s sounds good, Rach. Tell Matt I agree.”

My mother, Patricia Sullivan de Mornay, MD, in her unexpected semi-retirement (telemedicine isn’t the doddle she thought it might be) has taken up several new hobbies. Finally reading all of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. (“Don’t be precious, baby, I’m reading it in English.”) Redecorating her study, finally replacing the futon after 20 years with a rather glam (I’ve seen pictures, many pictures) 1940s pink velveteen fainting couch. (“You must start checking out online estate sales now — you have no business going into any of those stores on Melrose for at least a year, and there are the most amazing deals to be had. Didn’t you need a new end table? I distinctly remember an end table, so I found you some I like. Click the links I sent you and thank me later.”) And joining Facebook groups. A lot of Facebook groups.

I’m always kind of amazed how ultra-specific Facebook groups can be and still attract a decent membership. It was in the “Moms of Burbank High School Alums 2001-2005” group that my mom first heard about the Zoom. Addy Fujima and Carole Lodge, Jen and Jenn’s mothers, had added her to the group on the same day in March; Joanie Mackenzie joined shortly afterwards. It was there that Addy and Joanie bragged jointly of the imminent arrival of Baby Fujima-Mackenzie, due in October. (Did I mention this? Jen finally saw two lines on one of the First Response pregnancy tests she clearly prefers to actual birth control. Neither Addy nor Carole mentioned the messy details about Mack’s not-completely-dissolved marriage to Kayla.) And there that Billie Katz (mother of Lee, the boy who’d taught a fourteen-year-old Rachel how to give a handy while on a field trip to Mission Santa Barbara) hatched her plan: a “Rezoomion for the kids!” (OK, Boomers, it’s not that clever.)

Since I wasn’t engaging with my mom as much as she wanted (clearly she’s now taking tips from Cora on how to muscle in more to her daughter’s life now that they’re working together on their children’s dream wedding for next year), I’d missed the gushing email she’d sent to Rachel and me with the details. Actually, I’d seen it and deleted it immediately, mistaking it for yet another article my mom was forwarding from the Facebook group along the lines of “Top Tips for Looking Professional on Zoom.” When I’d reminded her a month ago that I didn’t need to look professional on Zoom or anywhere these days, she’d simply replied with a link to a Dear Prudence question about a letter writer who thought she’d turned off her cam getting caught on Zoom squeezing a zit.

Rachel promised me that it wasn’t that much of a sacrifice to make. “Think about it — you can drink as much as you want, you don’t have to say anything, and you can mute yourself if you want to talk shit about anyone in there to Al. And I remember the losers in your class, plenty to talk shit about in there. What was the name of that girl who was wearing white jeans when Aunt Flo came to town in the lunchroom? Classic.”

“Caitlin,” I gritted out. “You know her. She was a bridesmaid in my wedding. Just like you.”

“Oh yeah, the one with the fat rolls on her back. Good thing the dresses had corset backs or –” She made a sharp whistle. “Didn’t Mom catch her eating a whole box of Totinos out of the deep freeze one time?”

“RACHEL! Cait is one of my best friends. Shut up.” (It was completely true about the pizza rolls.)

“Whatever,” Rachel breezed. “Anyway, I told Mom I’m going to keep her happy and go, and Cherise said she’d show up too for moral support. We’re going to pregame in another Zoom and do our makeup together. You should join us. God knows you still need me to help you with that. Your moron friends can drink and doll with us, too. Except Jen.”

“Why not? It’s not like you didn’t fuck other people’s husbands,” I bristled. “So don’t throw stones.”

“Such melodrama. No, Jen can’t come because we’re going to get drunk, and if she’s preggers I bet she’s not going to want to be around people drinking Ina Garten-sized cosmos.”

I was briefly stunned by Rachel’s consideration for someone I thought barely registered as a woman-shaped blip on her consciousness at holiday parties. (Rachel will show up anywhere with an open bar, even Sean’s parents’ annual Labor Day Tiki-rama.) “I… well, that makes sense. But can I ask her anyway?”

“Sure, whore. Oh, and Talley Brookes is doing the pre-Zoom, but she has to host some shitty socially distanced family barbecue at 6, yawn. That means you-know-who isn’t Zooming, thought you might like to know.” I didn’t need to see Rachel to hear the hair flip. “So no chance of you seeing Shitheel McAsshat on camera. I wouldn’t even ask you if I thought that asshole was going to show up.”

“For real?” I scratched out. Rachel’s occasional bouts of sympathy and protectiveness still stun me, even if they are often bookended by the words “slut” and “loser.”

“Pfffffft, come on, Mel. Who was the one who convinced you to ditch that piece of shit? I mean, I still think you should have kicked him in the dick that time you saw him walking through our backyard in the middle of the night but whatever, you and the blah blah blah there’s been enough hurt. You’re too boring but it works for you, I guess.”

“I’d completely forgotten about that,” I mused. It had been a few nights before Christmas, senior year. I’d gotten back late from a holiday party at the Swensons’ with my parents and couldn’t sleep — Sean and I had popped some Adderall with Derek Montez and his cousin Cass in the backyard, and I’d ended up kissing Sean before I left the party. It had been a fluke — we’d been playing Never Have I Ever while fannying about with an old croquet set. Instead of taking a drink, we’d get to hit a ball with one of the chipped mallets. (I didn’t say it made a lot of sense, and we were all nerds, which explains the Adderall and the croquet.)

“Never have I ever kissed my best friend,” Cass trilled, balancing her red-tipped mallet in her hands. Sean sighed and clicked his yellow ball a few feet across the lawn; I wasn’t far behind with a sharp clip to my green one.

Derek snorted and took a swig from his Solo cup of the decidedly non-alcoholic eggnog available to the “children.” “You two are pathetic. Get it over with!” He jabbed an index finger at Sean’s chest with his free hand. “Kiss her, dude!”

Sean’s lips — lightly chapped, chilly from a night cold enough we were able to see our breath in small puffs when we spoke — pressed on mine. I squeezed my eyes closed firmly enough to see a psychedelic whirl of black and puke green and TV static spots of magenta, reaching for feeling something, anything, anything like what Josh had stirred in me, even in our worst days.

But there was nothing. It was a close girl cousin’s kiss, or one you might get from your dad when you were seven. We laughed it off, Sean said something like, well, scratch that one off the bucket list, and we soldiered on for a while, whacking at the lawn and reciting lines from Holy Grail. As I said, nerds.

Still, the experience wriggled around in me like the larva in a jumping bean left in the sun. Was I supposed to feel more? Did I want to feel more? Am I bad because I felt nothing? echoed through me in the backseat of my dad’s Mercedes on the way home, as we banged down Kenneth, past the all the perfectly parallel streets to our home on Orange Grove. Walnut and Fairmount and Grinnell and Harvard, Cypress and San Jose and Magnolia and Palm, tranquil in the late hour, every other house sprinkled and twinkling with Christmas lights.

Surely I wasn’t meant to feel nothing, a thought that trailed me all the way into the hallway bathroom, where I washed off the dusting of Orgasm blush I’d worn that night. (Without Josh around, I’d no one reminding me but my sister to make an effort in the beauty sweepstakes — both were concerned that my tendency towards slatternly habits reflected poorly on their own precise grooming.) The amphetamine rush of the Adderall made sleep a far-off fantasy, and the hyperfocus that lingered brought the funk of self-doubt that had been sprawling in me since I’d ended it with Josh to a crystalline point.

I don’t know if I can feel anything ever again, thrummed through me, a cardiac thump of defeat as I reached forward in the windowseat to pick up the Georgette Heyer novel I’d started the night before. Aunt Jane, visiting from New Hampshire, thought I might like her dog-eared copy, and though I found it disappointingly devoid of the sex scenes that I relied on for a furtive orgasm or two, I was determined to finish it. It was precisely the sort of trash I could read at the breakfast table without fear that my dad might swipe it from my hand to read in a terrible English accent lines like, “Septimus’ long, olive fingers raked through Kathleen’s damp nether curls, bringing her closer to a longed-for release she had no word for.” (Everyone completely lost their appetite after that, and I blushed a deep salmon that stuck around in splotches for the rest of the morning.)

Before I clicked on the reading lamp, the slow amble of an animal through our backyard flicked in the corner of my peripheral vision and I stilled my hand upon the switch to get a better look. No, that was not an animal picking its way across the lawn, drawing its hand through the pool, taking off its shoes and rolling up its corduroy trousers to dip its legs in the surely frigid water.

Mom mustn’t have noticed when we came home that Rachel had left the lights in the pool on, so it didn’t take much effort to make the creature out with clarity, but I knew his features almost as well as my own. I didn’t need to see his violet eyes to know he wanted me beneath his gaze again. From the floral-sprigged cushion, I watched Josh as he rose from the pool, swiping his socks and shoes as he trudged wet-legged and barefooted out of the backyard. It was only when I watched him close the gate that I realized two things: he still had a key, and I was hyperventilating. Rachel found out he’d visited by pure chance. She was sneaking in via the same gate at five in the morning and noticed something Josh had left behind by the side of the pool, my marked-up copy of Jane Eyre he’d always treasured for the odd notes and aides-memoires and strange exhortations to myself. “It’s like getting to see in your head, which is something I’d very much like to do,” he’d said, and though that creeped me out, I’d let him keep it.

So here I was on a late Saturday afternoon, prodded by my sister into an online makeup lesson with Rachel and Cherise, my second favorite of the Glams (Talley was first, my sister fourth of six), who had a definite opinion on my still insisting on using NARS Orgasm in 2020. (“Yawn yawn,” Cherise drawled, swiping a brush she’d dipped in a Patrick Ta blush.) When Jen and Jenn both proved to be disappointments to their mothers by declining — multiple times — to take part in any BHS-related nostalgia, I was left with only Caitlin representing the Class of 2003 at the Drink and Doll, and she came only for the drinking element. Talley made a brief cameo — hats off to a woman who can entertain a four-year-old with a feather boa and some lipstick while complaining passionately about her boorish septuagenarian father-in-law and sucking back three strawberrytinis (they were on the small side, but still).

And soon enough: “All right, bitches,” Rachel boomed. “Showtime. Cherise, toggle the smoothing filter back on, I can see you haven’t had Botox since January. Mel, for fuck’s sake, stop doing that cheek-biting thing you do when you’re looking at yourself on camera. Caitlin, you’re kinda drunk, but it suits you, nice natural flush.”

Caitlin smothered a belch with one hand while she lifted her third bottle of Fat Tire in salute.

Rachel flicked a blonder-than-two-weeks-ago lock of hair in front of her shoulder — she’d posted a pic of herself two days before on Instagram with her hair in foils, toasting the camera with a glass of champagne and a red sequin face mask, with the caption, “Kudos to @gavinnewsom for keeping a California Girl as blonde as she needs to be!” (I immediately bought an identical mask for myself, but I am unsure I can quite carry it off.) “See you in there, whores. Do me proud.”

Cherise straightened her shoulders and I think I saw Cait dab at her eyes before I darted out of one Zoom room into another, much larger one — twelve heads in boxes, fifteen, twenty, pop pop pop. More and more, faces I recognized (oh! Sindy Chan’s eyebrows grew back! Brad Whitaker, hello, you turned out hot! Anna Falcone, get someone who actually knows how to do lip fillers next time, k?) and many more I didn’t. Pop pop pop, enough now that had I wanted, I could have scrolled to another page to see everyone in attendance. Guess that Facebook group has more pull on their offspring than I’d guessed.

At 6:05, Brad’s mom unmuted herself and, after a brief yet maudlin address about the passage of time which was probably better suited for her Facebook group than a bunch of people in their mid-30s, she laid out the rules. With a group this large, she’d be spinning us out into groups of eight or nine randomly to chat for ten minutes before reconvening in the general room. “And then we’ll repeat the process another four times. It’s just like being a cocktail party where you know one or two people in the room, but you’ll get to meet some new friends. Hope everyone has a drink and a smile ready! Now, go! have! fun!”

Jesus, I thought. Maybe it’s true that it’s the moms who are on Adderall these days, not the kids.

As my screen went into a holding pattern while I waited to enter “Cocktail Room #2,” I checked my teeth in my compact. Showtime! wasn’t going to be accompanied with a piece of Chex Mix lingering in my gumline.

And then — we were nine, tiled like the Brady Bunch. I was where Jan would have been, and Cherise was next to me in the center, looking infinitely more glamorous than Alice ever could have hoped to have looked, even if she’d been able to achieve an immaculate smokey eye like Cherise had. I’d tried to follow the tutorial but given up, wiping it all off with micellar water and reverting to the cat-eye liner I’d been favoring since last summer’s Truth Team debacle in Pasadena when we found out the truth behind Jen’s power aerobics.

The few I recognized were hardly more than names, or half-slips of memory — the cheerleader who’d cut me from tryouts freshman year, the boy who smelled of the tuna sandwiches he ate every day in the lunchroom, the head of the Mathletes, the girl who’d dressed like a sister wife even though I knew she was an atheist.

And look! Where Greg Brady had once flashed his shy and safe grin, there was Joshua K. Brookes, all violet eyes and straight dark hair and heavy-framed glasses, beaming into the camera, his face splitting with the grin of recognition.

It’s him it’s him it’s him leave leave leave

“Holy hell, Melissa!” he blurted. As he touched his hand to his mouth, I caught the glint of his wedding band. “I… wow!”

Julian’s voice rang in my head — not the words I wanted to hear, that he’d never let Josh touch me, that Julian would happily crack his head open like a soft-boiled egg given half the chance, but the reminder that even in the most difficult social settings, “it’s simply not done to give an unkind word — people talk, Mel, and they’ll be unkind about you.”

But my own voice had fled, my throat parched and sandy like I’d been hiking Runyon Canyon and run out of water halfway. I managed what I hoped was a smile, not a rictus grin. What was he even doing here? A quick glance at his tile revealed what looked to be a child’s bedroom behind him: a map of the world, a poster of a horse mid-gallop, a wrought iron single headboard against which an army of plushies were arranged by what must have been a tween girl’s careful hand.

Incoming message from Cherise: u dated him right? i read a couple of his books, pretty good!

But it wasn’t her message I dwelled on, it was the one that darted in 20 seconds later, as Tuna Boy told us about his job as an engineer for JPL, his newborn son Harley, and the 23 hours his wife spent in labor to bring Harley Tuna into the world.

Hey. I know it’s been a long time, it read. Just words on a screen, I reminded myself. He can’t touch you unless you let him. He can’t approach you unless you give him permission.

In spite of every hour I’d spent in Berkeley and Santa Monica dwelling on what I should do in a moment like this, I typed back: Yes. A very long time.

Without a pause: This is going to come out all wrong, but whatever it was that I did to you, I’m sorry. I don’t think a day has passed in the past 18 years I haven’t thought about you and wished you well. It should have been different.

I sat with my fingers on the keyboard, prepared to be… what? Kind, as I’d been told by Julian, by Josh? Be firm, as my therapists had urged, and tell him to stay away? Or let loose the brew of fear and enmity and desire (yes that) that still gurgled and banged and fizzed within me? I wrote nothing, for once, had no reply. I stared at his little box on my screen, watching him wait for me to respond, seeing consternation build on his beautiful face as it always had when I’d disappointed him — not the red mist descending as with Al, or Julian’s gelid fury unrolling like a grand sheet of shimmering ice, but stone upon stone, a fearsome wall of frustration he’d build just to knock it down upon me.

But this time, I was not there for the wall to fall on me. I was safesafesafe. In the next, real-world room, Alex was grinding levels on some iteration of World of Warcraft (every so often, I could hear the phrase “BASK IN MY RADIANCE!” so I guess it was Cataclysm). In another Zoom room, my forever-protector Rachel was likely not-humble-but-straight-up-bragging about her dazzling Hollywood career. And in this one, me. I could only let him hurt me now if I gave him permission, not like before, when I was only a child, and didn’t know I could stop him, only that I mustn’t talk about it. But now I could, as I could then. The power was in me all along.

Fuck you, I typed, then immediately deleted as Cherise bubbled away in the center tile. (“Being a fashion buyer for Saks is a lot harder work than anyone thinks. It’s not all Escada gowns and Jimmy Choos, you know.”)

That’s nice, I slowly tapped out, but I never said you could speak to me — so don’t.

I pressed send on the keyboard with a flourish of my fingers. The “fuck you” hung in the air, hovering somewhere between Santa Monica and Teddy and Talley’s five-bed ranch in Ojai, where he looked to be hiding out in one of his nieces’ bedrooms.

His plush lips drew down in disbelief, a small “o” of shock; his nearly-black brows bent up while his stone wall of frustration crumbled in the corner of my laptop screen where he lurked like an exquisite but venomous dark spider. When Sister Wife (Allie, or so it said beneath her window) asked what I was up to these days, I let my voice — mine! — ring out its truth.

“Me? Well, hi. I’m Melissa de Mornay. I just moved back down from Berkeley to live in Santa Monica with my fiance and right now…” I paused, and looked up to Josh’s tile where his darkest blue eyes bore into me, seeking what was inside of me, as they always had. I’d say my truth in front of him. “Right now, I’m waiting to resume my career as a bookdealer, but more than anything else, I am loved and safe and happy, which is just about as much as any of us can hope for these days. “

The truth really does have a way of shimmying out and shooting into the sky like a dazzling firework plume, heedless of whom it might strike on its descent after streaking high above. My truth is beautiful, and it is, at last, mine.