Rowie smiles at me in Precalculus today, lifting her nose in the direction of my phone. I rummage stealthily through my backpack, defying the Holyhill classroom cell moratorium.³⁵ I smile, twisting my hair around a finger as I feel her eyes on me, and hold my phone under the table.³⁶ She clicks furiously,³⁷ her boatneck collar dancing with the drop-off of her shoulder, and I feel myself waffling on my promise³⁸ to myself to catch up on homework, to catch up on sleep, to finish the new song I’ve been toying with. She goes back to taking notes. I watch her in silhouette, her serene glance, the alluring length of her neck. I stop looking; looking wears something on the outside that we’re still keeping under wraps.

35. Text from Rowie: Come over tonight?

36. Me to Rowie: Girl, i haven’t slept in days. it’s only wednesday. won’t your mom be home?

37. Rowie to me: If u come around 11 she’ll be out cold

38. Me to Rowie: You are persuasive, aren’t you?

I pull out the book I’m reading, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik. It’s another of Mom’s copies, a poet’s bildungsroman, and it’s chock-full of sex: sex with women; sex with men; graphic, endless sex. It’s weird to think about your mother reading a book with this much sex in it. I wonder if she ever would have told me anything about sex, if that’s something moms do. I see her a lot — my mom, that is. I mean, I don’t actually see her, but I think I do at least once a week and I write her letters.³⁹ I used to wake up in night sweats from dreams that she disappeared, or that I’d found her; I’d wake up and feel bereft, in that tender place between sleep and waking, feeling like I’d just lost her again, and then find her really gone, years-ago gone, and then it would harden, the anger, and I’d try to make myself stop wanting her back. It’s been too long without her to keep believing her itemized fragments will ever cohere into a mother, the way you see mothers on TV, like other people’s mothers.

39. SiN: 1. Johanna Page Rockett. Mom. 2. I will never send you these letters. You do not deserve them. 3. I had sex. With a girl named Rowie. What do you think of that? 4. Where are you? What the fuck are you doing? 5. Rowie’s mom always asks me how I am. 6. Pops is a better cook than you ever were. Even though I don’t remember if you ever actually cooked or not. Pops is a really good cook. 7. I don’t miss you.

“Ez?” Rowie pokes me with her mechanical pencil. I look up to see the rest of the class filing out; somehow I missed the sound of the bell.

“Yeah,” I say, shaking my head. “Yeah.”

“Gotta scoot, toots,” she says with a smile. “We got trouble to make.”

We scurry out and make our way toward the west exit, on our way across the track to the warming house. The October sunshine is orange, all glow and shadow, the air tonic with possibility. In a few months — weeks, really, by now — they’ll flood the track for hockey, hence the warming house.

“It feels so wicked delicious to bust out of school during the day,” Rowie says, rumbling down the hill, breaking into a run with arms outstretched. “‘I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable; I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world’!”

“Did you just make that up?” I ask.

“No, it’s Whitman,” she says. “My mom loves Walt Whitman. She made Mimi and me memorize him when we first got here.”

“Your mom kind of blows my mind. Hey, technically we’re leaving school grounds,” I say. I sprint across the track to the campus boundary, the bleachers on the far side of the track, straddling an imaginary border. “Come and kiss me. It’s legal here.”

“Stop,” she says, loitering, shuffling her feet in the brown dirt of the track.

“Come on,” I say. “There’s no one coming. We can just duck behind that tree real quick. I thought you were not a bit tamed.” I run back and grab her hand. She smiles bashfully and gives me a quick closed-mouth kiss, giggling. I grab her by the waist and plant a real one on her.

She takes a step back. It rankles me.

“You always go too far. Why do you have to shove us in everyone’s face?” she says forcefully. “I said I didn’t want to.”

“Whoa,” I say. “You didn’t say that, actually. And what the hell do you mean, shove us in everyone’s face? I haven’t even told Marcy about us.”

“I just mean — what was with announcing to the whole LocoMotive that we were, like, a queer hip-hop alliance or whatever? Don’t you think that’s going to make people ask questions?”

“Isn’t that what we are? And aren’t we trying to make people ask questions about the language hip-hop uses to describe women and gay people?”

“Yeah, but”— she looks exasperatedly away —“it’s just getting kind of complicated to answer why we’re so interested in it.”

I pause. “No kidding?” I examine her, not sure what to make of that.

“Whatever. Let’s go inside.” She slinks into the warming house without looking at me.

I follow her inside, where Marcy is tinkering with electronics with a boy whose back I don’t immediately recognize. When they turn to greet us, I see it’s Yusuf Njaka, Jane’s brother.

“’Sup,” I say, fist-pounding them both. “What you got going here?”

“Check this shit out,” Marcy says. “Yusuf brought us these old turntables. They’re pretty broke-ass, but if we combine them with some new parts, we can rewire them any way we want, which is pretty dope. We were talking about how to make them portable.”

“Sick,” Rowie says.

Yusuf flashes a blindingly white, toothy grin. “I remembered she was the drumline girl everyone’s always telling crazy stories about, and it made me wonder if we could load turntables onto one of those over-the-shoulder harnesses they use for drums in marching band.”

“Word.” I nod. I can’t help but notice that Marcy hasn’t had too many sneak-arounds with athletes lately.⁴⁰

40. Text to Marcy: Yo, are you gonna get with Yusuf or what?? He’s like your match made in technological musical heaven.

“I have no idea who’s gonna show up to this thing. I talked to some people and passed out a few flyers.” She rustles in her backpack and hands me a crumpled photocopied flyer that reads: 4H: Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos. Think Holyhill is wack? Talk it out. Monday, first lunch, in the old warming house. Above the handwritten text is a stick-figure couple of two dudes who appear to be some sort of homo thugs, wearing bandannas and spiked collars and holding hands.

“What the eff is this?” I hold up the flyer, cracking up. “And did you get Bob and Luke to model for it? This sort of looks like them after their Fourth of July golf game.” Our dads always play golf on the Fourth of July, even if it’s raining. Really they just ride around on the cart pounding beers and then come home and pretend not to be tipsy again. At this point, I wish they’d drop the charade and let us give them a ride home, but I guess it’s weird to make your teenage daughter be your DD, even if it’s only once a year.

“Listen, homes, you should be grateful for my initiative.” She snatches the flyer back.

“I am. Seriously, homeslice, I’m super grateful for you.” The confession hovers like an awkward kite between us for a minute, Marcy searching my face with a panicked look in her eyes that feelings may have entered the conversation, and then we both sputter, laughing at the thought of actually being grateful out loud for each other. Some secrets are less painful than others.⁴¹

41. Marcy to me: Maybe.

“You guys are weirdos,” Rowie says.

“Is this the gay-straight hip-hop meeting?” Emma Fazzio pouts her maroon lips as she enters with another theater girl whose name I forget.

“Um, yeah, I guess this is the gay-straight hip-hop meeting,” I say. “Welcome.”

Jane Njaka and Tess bust in behind her, pumping the magic pink iPod speakers. “What up, my sisters!” Tess hollers, breaking it down.

“Is anyone else coming?” I ask Marcy.

“Hoooooo!” Just then, a dude swaggers in and man-hugs Yusuf.

“This is my boy Angelo,” Yusuf introduces his friend, a tall, good-looking kid. “I told him he should roll through here. A-nez, you know these fools?”

“I think I’ve seen you around.” I extend a fist. “I’m Esme, and these are my girls Marcy, Rowie, and Tess.”

“Enchanté, ladies,” Angelo says, eyeing us. I know Tess is batting her eyelashes without having to look at her. He seems more interested in Rowie. I could probably take him.

“Angelo Martinez.” Yusuf grins. “The only living Blaxican in Holyhill.”

“Wow,” Rowie says. “Better recognize.”

“Yeah. So. Welcome to Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos.” Marcy parks on a bench and clears her throat to introduce our cockamamie idea for a student group. “I guess we should start with a little background. At the beginning of this year, Holyhill’s administration issued this statement and made us all sign it.” She looks at me; I pull out my notebook and the copy of the policy I have in there. “Holyhill High School cannot condone violence in any form, nor can it condone any material known to incite violence. In this interest, loud, violent, heavily rhythmic music such as ‘rap’ will be prohibited on campus or at school events. Additionally, any apparel or other materials associated with a violence-inducing culture, such as pants sagging below the underwear line, gang apparel, or promotional artist material, will also be prohibited and punishable by suspension.”

I pick up the thread. “We refused to sign the policy because we didn’t like what it implied. We don’t want to go to a school that doesn’t recognize the importance of hip-hop music and culture. In protest, we decided to form a student discussion group to talk about hip-hop as a cultural movement. Also, because we’re interested in the idea of sex-positive hip-hop, and because we thought Holyhill needed a gay-straight alliance, we combined the two beliefs into one group: Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos. Code name: 4H.” I throw down the semi-secret 4H sign Marcy and I have devised: four fingers horizontal on the left hand, crossed by one finger on the right, pressed to the breast.

“Fuck, man,” Angelo says. “That asshole Nordling told all the kids in my program that we couldn’t stay in it unless we signed.”

“He messed around with us, too,” Tess says. “That’s why we’re meeting out here and not in an actual classroom.”

“Yo, so are we gonna listen to some hip-hop, or what?” Rowie asks. “Maybe we should play rap-and-tell. Does anyone have music they want to talk about?”

Jane and Yusuf’s hands shoot up simultaneously.

“Seriously guys, don’t raise your hands.” Marcy shakes her head.

“K’naan!” Jane gushes. “I’m way up in K’naan’s shit. I’m like getting with K’naan. With my mind.” She plugs her iPod into the speakers and puts on The Dusty Foot Philosopher.

“Hell, yes,” Marcy says.

“K’naan’s a total poet,” I say. “He loves Dylan. Did you guys hear his mixtapes with J. Period?”

“So you guys are, like, from Somalia?” Michelle interrupts. That’s her name. Michelle.

Jane’s tone is polite but not too warm. “We’re originally from Somalia, but we were living in a camp in Kenya for a year until my father could bring us all over here.”

“Why’d he pick Minnesota?” Michelle asks.

“Haven’t you ever noticed there are tons of Somalis in Minneapolis? It’s because of all the Lutheran missionary groups,” Rowie replies. “Same with the Hmong.”

“There was also a war in Somalia,” Yusuf points out.

“Right,” Rowie says. “And in Vietnam and Laos.”

Michelle shifts in her seat. “What do you mean, a camp in Kenya? Like summer camp?” Emma thrusts an elbow into her ribs, hissing. “Ow, what?”

Jane looks disbelievingly at her. “Like a refugee camp.”

“Oh. Heavy.” The room goes silent as we all wonder why Michelle decided to come today.

“Sorry I’m late.” The door bursts open to reveal Mary Ashley. “It took me a while to figure out where the heck this was. Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos, is it?”

“Who told psycho?” Rowie leans over and mutters to me.

“Mary Ashley, what are you doing here?” Tess sounds annoyed.

“Well, I was just a little curious,” Mary Ashley replies sweetly, “about Holyhill’s first all-gay hip-hop student group.”

“Being here doesn’t make you gay, moron,” Marcy snarls at her. “It’s not, like, contagious.”

“That’s cute.” Mary Ashley sits down. “Because I look around, and all I see is ABS losers and weird lesbos.”

“Who does this girl think she is?” Angelo says.

“We’re not in the ABS program,” Yusuf says. “We’ve gone to school here since fifth grade.”

“And so what if we were?” Jane pipes in.

“What’s wrong with you, Mary Ashley?” Tess asks.

“Come on, Tessie, you’re not like them,” Mary Ashley says, staring at me. “Freak, what’s in that notebook you’re always scribbling in?” She makes a lunge for it before I can pull away, and when she opens it, I feel a feverish panic, like I’m about to pee and I can’t stop it.

“‘1. Johanna Page Rockett. Mom,’” she reads aloud. “‘2. I will never send you these letters.’”

“God, what is your problem?” Marcy yells at her.

Without thinking, I emit an inhuman yawp and make a dive for her and the notebook, catching her around the middle. I tackle Mary Ashley Baumgarten to the ground, snatch back the notebook, and open-handed slap her hard across the face.

“I think you should leave,” I say, getting up. “Now.”

“You crazy bitch,” she sputters. “I’m totally reporting you.”

“And everyone here will corroborate that Esme did nothing more than politely ask you to leave,” Tess says calmly. My breath heaves in the silence.

“Traitor,” Mary Ashley seethes. “The baby Jesus totally hates you for this, you know.”

“You are totally effing losing it, Mary Ashley. Just leave.” Out of words, Mary Ashley turns on Tess and flounces out just as we hear the bell ending first lunch in the distance.

“Yo, who the fuck put pinecones in her oatmeal?” Jane asks as we all begin to pack up. Rowie’s face is purpling with disproportionate passion; I want to touch her, but I know that would make it worse. It feels awful.

“Damn, girl, you bitch-slapped that bitch right,” Angelo says, cackling and biting his fist. “I wouldn’t’ve thought you had it in you.”

“I would.” Marcy raises her hand.

“I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t even want to think about her. What’s the topic for the next meeting?” I ask.

“Female MCs,” Marcy says. “Everyone bring in songs by their favorite chicks on the stick.”

“Done,” Yusuf says. Everyone else agrees, and I prepare to go back indoors, feeling sharply the lack of safety in space. If she’d had time to read one more line of my notebook — I don’t want to think about that, either.

Rowie is feral when I climb up to the treehouse later that night, hungry. She’s on me without speaking before I pull the floor door closed, clawing at my back.

“Whoa, whoa, hey.” I laugh a little, covering her arms around my stomach with my own.

“Let’s not talk,” she muffles into my back.

I oblige, letting her pull me under the blankets, as if under a tide. She kisses me hard, like she’s been waiting for it. We make out in this way like I never have any idea how much time is passing. It could be minutes, could be hours, could be days — hardly matters. I bury my hands in her hair and kiss the curvature of her ears.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper to her.

She pulls off my shirt and brushes her lips across my bare shoulders, sending a thrill down my spine. I unbutton her dress, discovering her small breasts again, welcoming their return. Sometimes I think about Rowie’s breasts and nothing else for, like, hours. I reach around to unhook her bra.

“Hold on,” she says, pulling back. “I — I don’t know. I just — I wish we could be alone together all the time.” She puts her face in her hands and sits back on her knees with the covers fully enveloping her; I sit the same way, propping up an impromptu tent with our heads, protected in our confidence. It’s getting colder too fast; we’re bundled under a sleeping bag and two blankets now. Rowie smuggled out an ancient space heater, but we can’t leave it on too long without risking a fiery treehouse death.

“What’s eating you, kitten?” I ask tentatively, unable to see her face. My eyes begin to adjust to the dark, but the scent of her fear is thick, distracting.

“Today just freaked me out. Did you have anything about us in your notebook? Did she see it?”

I take a breath. “Calm down. She didn’t see anything. But it scared me, too.”

“It’s like, I started thinking about what would happen if my parents ever found out about us. If all of Holyhill found out.”

“I mean, I can see where you’re coming from in terms of your dad,” I say. “But would your mom really bug out that hard if you were — with a girl? She seems so feisty and smart to me.”

“She is, but all my parents want is for me to get into a good school and eventually to end up with a nice Bengali boy,” Rowie insists. “They’re always talking about a son of some family they know who’s going to Princeton next year. Fuck it.”

I choose my words carefully. “What do you say?”

“I say I have to go do homework, which is probably what they want to hear anyway.”

“And then?”

“That’s it. They’re never long conversations. We don’t really have those.”

“I wonder what that would be like, that kind of family conversation,” I speculate. “Pops and I just beat the emotional shit out of everything until we’re too tired to talk anymore.”

“Humph,” she harrumphs. “White people are so into talking about their feelings.”

“Oh, sure,” I tease her. “Make it racial.” I stroke her hair. “MashBaum really got to you today, didn’t she?”

She cracks a grin. “I think you really got to MashBaum today.”

I grin back. “Bitch had my heart in her hands. I didn’t stop to think.”

“Whatever,” she says dismissively. “I really don’t want to talk about it. I just want — to feel something else.” She buries herself in my shoulder, and I wrap my arms around her, and we hunker down into the blankets to make a stay against the encroaching cold.

Next thing I know, I look at the clock and it says 5:38 a.m.

“I gotta get, pretty.” I trace a map on her back, over the perfect fins of her shoulder blades.

She nods, snuggling down in the covers. Dawn is just breaking, bleak and freezing, drizzling weak light over the frosted grass.

I will myself to leave, yanking on my jeans and sneakers and jacket. “I’ll see you at school. Don’t forget to go back inside soon.”

“Mmm,” she grunts in response, already half-asleep. Some nights I come home and she’s still trapped in my nose, gardenia and almond and that third fragrance that is, I know now, cardamom.

“Ro?”

“Mmm.”

“I think I could fall in love with you.”

There is a pause in which I wonder if she’s already slipped into a REM cycle.

“Rowie,” I whisper. “Don’t fall back asleep. You have to get back inside.”

As I gingerly lift the door and toe the ladder, I hear her small voice.

“Not a bit tamed,” she murmurs.

The morning frost hits me like a cold mackerel in the face; I let out a soft string of expletives as I dig through the damp, dirty leaves, grasping for my bike. My legs are limp as I try to shake enough sleep out of my head to ride. The faint light breaks into morning, accelerating my pace as I race to beat Pops’s alarm clock. I swing around Iroquois Circle and offer a silent salute to Tess’s waking house, the lights in the upstairs bathrooms just flickering on. As I ride past the high school, a few teachers are starting to arrive in cars far less expensive than their students’. I can’t believe I have to show up there in a few hours and stuff my lunch in my locker and hobble through class and pretend the electricity in my gut isn’t there and Rowie and me aren’t really Rowie and me, the manic sample of us in my head looping no one knows, no one knows, no one knows. I walk around with it inside me every day, all the days after the nights we spend in her treehouse, and I wonder if people are starting to wonder why we look so underslept.

Our garage door is old and wicked janky — it’s one of those relics that you have to hoist open manually. I sleepily pull it up halfway and duck under it, ditching Priscilla, my bike, in the corner. The door into the kitchen is unlocked. Shit.

Pops is sitting at the kitchen table, whittling a wing as I slink in. Not seeing the point of trying to avoid him, I drop my backpack on the floor and flop into a chair.

“Have you been up all night?” I ask.

He nods slowly, not looking up. “Mmm-hmm. You?”

“Pretty much.”

He sets the knife and fairy down. “Where you been, parakeet?”

I shrug and look down, pigeon-toeing. “Out.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna need more information than that.” He looks up. “You been drinking? Getting high?”

I shake my head and stare at my feet, trying to undo the laces to my Pumas without using my hands.

“Look, Ez, you know I don’t want to put a curfew on you. There’s nothing you can do after eleven p.m. that you can’t do before. But six a.m. on a school night? Three, four times a week? I gotta know what’s going on here. I’m worried.”

My head snaps up. He knows I’ve been sneaking out and hasn’t said anything?

“You don’t have to be worried.”

“Yeah, parakeet, but the thing is, I love you and I don’t know if you’re out turning tricks on the streets while I’m trying not to invade your privacy. I’m worried. I just need to know where you’ve been and if you’re okay.”

“I was over at a friend’s,” I concede. “And I’m not turning tricks, for Christ’s sake. Do you really think I’m, like, standing outside the Holyhill Community Center hitching my skirt at passing midlife-crisis-mobiles?”

“I don’t know, Esme,” Pops says, throwing up his hands. “You never tell me anything anymore. Whose house were you at? Is it someone I know?”

Pause. “Yeah.”

“Well, that’s fine if you were sleeping over at Marcy’s, but why didn’t you tell me?”

“I, um, wasn’t at Marcy’s.”

All of a sudden, new understanding breaks across his face. “Esme, are you — seeing somebody?”

I squirm uncontrollably, literally writhing in my chair.

“You could say that.”

Dad looks like he’s just been given a free pass out of hell. His face dissolves through relief into a big smile.

“You know, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before, but it’s so nice not to be afraid you’ll get pregnant.”

“Dad. Ew.”

“I mean, it is, a — you know, right?”

“Is girl the word you’re looking for? Yes. It is a girl. Have you ever thought about how ironic it is that I’m the gay one? I mean, you build fairy houses, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t turn your little poison darts of wit on me, missy. I’m impervious.”

“Christ on a bike. I was just saying it’s funny.”

“To avoid talking about your love life.”

“I have to go to bed. For like, an hour.”

“I’m grounding you only if you won’t tell me who it is.”

“You are the weirdest parent ever.”

“Spill it, kidlet.”

I take an extremely deep breath. “It’s — it’s, um. It’s Rowie.”

Pops makes a little sound, and his face gets all warm and soft and gooey. I begin to pray fiercely that he won’t cry.

“Dad. Compose yourself. This really doesn’t have to be a moment.”

He gets it together, cupping a hand to my cheek. “Rowie is wonderful. Smart and beautiful. Just like you.”

“Whatever.”

“Uff-da, I just didn’t know I had to be ready for this yet. I do miss your mother in these moments,” he says. “I wish you had a woman around to help you with stuff like this.”

“Because she always dealt with things so well?” I say acidly.

“She did the best she could, kidlet.”

“You let her off the hook too easy.”

“It’s not that,” he sighs. “I’ve just — made my peace with it, and I’d like to see you do the same. She’s gone, and we miss her, and we can’t change that.”

“Sometimes I don’t know — like, how to miss her,” I say. “I don’t feel like I ever knew her very well, or well enough to miss her. And I don’t know how to forgive her for leaving.”

“Yeah, that’s a tough one.” Pops rests his chin on folded hands. “Tell you what, though. In Jewish law, it’s customary for the children of departed parents to atone for those parents, but not vice versa. So maybe in finding your forgiveness of her, it might be helpful to understand that forgiveness as a Jewish one: it’s your sacred responsibility, in a sense, to find forgiveness for her.”

“That’s a bum deal,” I say.

“How?”

“That I have this Jewish responsibility to atone for her when I wouldn’t have been Jewish without her in the first place. It’s basically all her fault.”

“Well, your first responsibility is to figure out the kind of woman you want to be without her help, and I’m sorry for that lack.” Pops looks pained. “And you’re entitled to your anger at her, but it would be a far better thing, in the long run, to find forgiveness. And love.” He gives me a crinkly smile. “So. You and Rowie. Are you happy?”

“I think so.”

“Why do you sound so unsure?”

I put my head down on the table. “Shit’s complicated.” He raises his eyebrows. “She doesn’t want anyone to know.”

He folds his arms across his chest in thought. “Hmm. That’s tricky.”

“Yeah. I guess I’m just hoping she’ll get past it.”

“Well, promise me you’ll quit with the sneaking out from here. I want both of us to get a lot more sleep than this. Bring Rowie over sometime, anytime. I’ll stay out of your hair.”

“We’ll see.” I haul myself to my feet with great strain, stretching. “Pops?”

“Hmm.” He’s inspecting the wing again; I guess he’s decided it’s too late to sleep.

“If you know it won’t last, is it still worth it? I mean, losing Mom — was it worth it?”

He looks up.

“That’s a complicated question — you know that.” He pauses. “Of course Johanna was worth it for me because she gave me you. But you need to find your own love, to give yourself away. Now — you’ll only be able to be this uninhibited once. Don’t let it pass you by.”