God, your mom, me, Muhammad, Cosmopolitan magazine—nobody’s rulebook is right for you. No one will have all the answers. Sooner or later you’re going to come up against something they can’t answer.
When you’re a kid, you follow the rules you’re given, but growing up means figuring things out on your own.
DAY: 22, CONTINUED . . .
Hudson has beautiful sunsets. Clouds crossing the Catskills, wind sweeping up the river and pollutants in the air all add up to some glorious spectacles in the sky around twilight. By the time we got to the Hudson boat launch, the place looked like a nineteenth-century landscape painting, except for the seagulls fighting over roadkill and the dudes on cheap boats drinking even cheaper beer.
“So what’s up?” Tariq asked.
Fear kept the question bottled up tight behind my lips. Fear that once I asked it, the bubble of this impossible, undeserved happiness would burst.
What happened the night my sister got hurt?
But the words would not come out. I wanted him to say them, wanted him to bring them up. Wanted him to explain why he’d spent so long sitting on a missing piece of the puzzle. I shut my eyes and tilted my face toward his. I thought the words as hard as I could. But he didn’t say a word.
A bottle broke on board one of the boats.
“I know my sister went to meet you,” I said, quick as I could before doubt could smother the words back into my mouth. “The night she ran away.”
Tariq flinched, turned away.
“I’m sorry, Matt. I should have told you.”
I didn’t say anything. Just waited.
“She asked me to pick her up, near your house.”
“Why you?”
“We were friends, and she needed a ride, and I had a vehicle. No big deal, she said. A concert your mom wouldn’t let her go to. So I said yes.”
“She had a crush on you. We both did.”
He laughed, abashed. “Yeah, well. As I was taking her where she wanted to go, she asked me out. And I don’t know why, but I said I couldn’t. Because I was in love with someone else. And she asked who. And even though I never breathed a word of this to anyone before, I told her it was you.”
I said nothing. I shut my eyes, listened to the tiniest of fluctuations in his voice, the slightest of shifts in his smell. But McDonald’s was making a mess of me. My abilities had evaporated.
My voice was barely audible. “What’d she say to that?”
He paused. “Actually, she kind of surprised me. I thought she’d be cool with it—it’s why I told her—but she actually kinda got mad. Or, maybe not mad, but . . .”
“Silent?”
“Yeah! Exactly.”
“Silence is how Maya handles pretty much any negative emotion. It’s her defense mechanism. But I don’t know why she would have been upset by what you said. She’s not homophobic. She helped me come out, basically.”
Unless her crush on Tariq was more serious than I thought. Unless she was really, truly, deeply in love with him.
Which would explain his response to my text to him from Maya’s number—I’m going to tell.
The secret Maya knew, the thing she could reveal to the world that would ruin his life, wasn’t some horrible harm he had caused her. The secret was that he was gay.
But it still didn’t add up. Rejection from a crush is not enough to make someone run away from home. Something was still missing from the story.
“It’s weird,” he said. “Girls have a sixth sense for that kind of thing. They know, somehow. A couple of the girls I’ve . . . dated.” His fingers drew air quotes. “They sensed something wasn’t right. I mean, they might not actually think Tariq is gay. But on some level, they know.”
One of the drunk white-trash dudes threw a beer bottle at the seagulls. They flew away, squawking, and the drunks laughed, and the two crowds sounded creepily similar. Of course the ugly birds were unharmed. Seagulls, like lots of disgusting things, are damn near invincible.
“Where was my sister going?” I asked. “It wasn’t a concert.”
“No,” he said. “Once we got out on the thruway, she had me take her to a rest stop, just south of Exit 20.”
“Why?”
“She told me to go home. Said she had a ride back, all lined up. And she made me promise not to tell anyone, anything ever. Especially you.” Tariq reached across, moved his fingers through my hair. “You gotta believe me when I say I really, really wanted to.”
“Okay . . . but?” He grasped my hand, and turned to look at me with enormous wet eyes. “There’s something else I need to tell you. About your sister.”
“Tell me,” I said, my voice on the edge of breaking.