The State of Us Read online

  Following Tamal’s circuitous explanation took a bit of effort. “I’m going to be here for homecoming.”

  “But what about after?” he asked. “I know it’s not your fault, but I have to start taking care of myself, you know? I won’t ask her if you don’t want me to, though. We can hit homecoming together, you and me one last time. You might be abandoning me, but you’re still my best friend.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. My mother hadn’t won the election, but Tamal was already making plans like I wasn’t going to be in his life. And he was right to do so. Until Election Day, my life was on hold. I couldn’t commit to anything too far in the future, and my friends couldn’t rely on me. It was one more reason to resent my mother for running, but it was difficult to resent her for doing something she believed in, even if it did complicate my life.

  Sometimes we had to make sacrifices for the people we loved. “I think you should ask Astrid to homecoming,” I said. “And I think you should do it now.”

  Tamal was looking at me with big bug eyes. “Like, right now?”

  “You have to give the girl time to find a dress.”

  I watched as Tamal paused the treadmill, got his phone, and called Astrid. He talked to her nearly every day, and yet he kept fumbling over his words now like she was a total stranger.

  “She said yes!” Tamal practically squealed, which was endearing. As he started jogging again, a couple of guys nearby threw him a look and shook their heads, but they wisely kept their thoughts to themselves.

  “Was there ever any doubt?”

  Tamal looked happier than I’d seen him since lunch. He really liked lunch. And dinner. Meals in general.

  “Let me hook you up with someone,” he said. “Then we can still go together. A double date. You could drive, and we could take the girls to that fancy French place, Chaleur.”

  I had to put the brakes on Tamal before he planned out the entire night. “I’ve got to do the whole royal court thing, which will keep me busy, and you know I’m not much of a dancer.”

  “Unlike me.”

  “Tamal,” I said. “You are my best friend, my brother, my personal computer genius, and you bake a heck of a cake, but you are not a good dancer.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says everyone.” I ignored Tamal when he rolled his eyes like he couldn’t be bothered with the truth about his dancing. “But we can still go as a group. I’ll drive and pick you up.”

  “Like my own private chauffer?”

  “No.”

  “I feel bad you flying solo.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  Tamal’s eye caught something on one of the TVs mounted in front of the treadmills. It was me. Well, it was me and my mother and father, and the Rosarios. One of the photos from the debate. We all looked suitably composed and were smiling as if we might have been close friends under different circumstances. Maybe we still could be. Stranger things had happened. Like the unlikely friendship between George W. Bush and Michelle Obama.

  “You met the Rosario kid, right?”

  “I did.”

  “And? What’s he like?”

  Trying to find a way to describe Dre was like trying to describe the feeling of finally scratching an itch in the center of your back that’s been bothering you for hours. Amazing, but also weird because scraping at your skin with your nails or a wooden spoon or whatever you can find that will reach the spot shouldn’t feel so good. “He was all right,” I said. “Excitable and odd, but generally nice.”

  “Seems like the kind of kid who’d cause a lot of trouble living in the White House.”

  A smile crept up on me. “He does, doesn’t he?”

  “What’d you guys talk about while you were holed up in the greenroom?” It had been impossible to hide that there had been a security scare before the debate, especially since it had caused the broadcast to start later than planned, and I’d already told Tamal about it.

  “Not much, really. We mostly just talked to keep from worrying about what was going on. We didn’t know if there was a bomb or if someone had been shot. I’ve been through scares like that before—not that it’s ever easy—but it was Dre’s first time. He held it together surprisingly well. Better than I did my first time.”

  “Cool,” Tamal said. “Hey, you wanna come with me to get a suit? I need something for the dance.”

  As Tamal started listing his requirements for a suit, none of which I was certain Astrid was going to approve, my phone vibrated. I grabbed it out of the treadmill’s cupholder, expecting a text from my mother, or from Nora relaying a question from my mother, but it was a notification from the Promethean app. A message had arrived from DreOfTheDead. I checked to make sure Tamal wasn’t paying attention and took a peek.

  DreOfTheDead: whats a pirates favorite letter

  Dre had sent me a joke. And not even a good joke. A bad, bad joke. The kind my father probably would have tried to tell me when I was six. But I didn’t want to be a snob, so I responded.

  PrezMamasBoy: R?

  DreOfTheDead: aye you’d think so but ’tis the C

  A sharp laugh busted out of me and I dropped my phone. It smacked the tread and went flying into the wall behind me. I hit the emergency stop and straddled the tread until it slowed enough for me to hop off. My phone’s screen was shattered, and I couldn’t read anything on it.

  “You okay?” Tamal asked. He’d stopped his machine too and was staring at me.

  “I am,” I said. “My phone is decidedly not.”

  “What were you laughing about?”

  I considered telling Tamal about Dre—I usually told Tamal everything—but something made me want to keep this to myself. “Just something I read.”

  “It must’ve been pretty funny.”

  I smiled impulsively. “Yeah, it was.”

  Dre

  I ROLLED THE twenty-sided die, adding a twist as I threw, and then held my breath as I watched the gold-painted numbers on the emerald-green icosahedron tumble and spin. “Come on, twenty! Come on, twenty!”

  The die came to a stop. I blew out the breath and said, “Three. Plus my modifier, which is—”

  “Still not good enough,” Mel said, wearing an excited grin.

  Around the table, the members of my adventuring party groaned.

  “You don’t have to look so happy about it, Mel,” I said.

  Mel—Emelda Vincente-Perez—cleared her throat from behind the enormous screen that hid her secret machinations from the rest of us. She rolled her dice. There was nothing more nerve-racking than Mel wearing a shit-eating grin and rolling a whole bunch of dice.

  “How many hit points you got, Dre?”

  I checked my tablet where I kept my character sheet. “Lady Poppy Needles has seventeen hit points left.”

  “Not anymore,” Mel snapped back. “While attempting to pick the lock, the door bursts open. Your delicate fingers slip and you trigger the trap. The chandelier hanging overhead falls and hits you, doing thirteen points of damage. You’re dazed. You’ve got blood streaming down your face and you can’t move. But when you look up, you see—”

  “The Count of Crows?” I asked hopefully.

  Mel’s smile grew deeper and more wicked. “The Blood Mistress, flanked by her entourage of impossible children.”

  More groans from around the table. Adam said, “We are so not making it out of this alive.”

  “I’ll heal Poppy,” said Dhonielle. “But it’ll cost you. Let me see if you’ve got anything I want.” Her cleric, Father Aurum, was devoted to the god of greed, so she couldn’t cast any healing spells without getting paid first.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I touched it through my shorts. We were still coming out of one of the hottest Augusts on record—thanks, climate change!—and while it might’ve been chilly at night, it was still balls-stuck-to-my-leg hot during the day. I had to sneak a peek at my phone under the table because Mel would’ve smote Lady
Poppy Needles on the spot if she’d caught me. It was a notification from the Promethean app.

  PrezMamasBoy: Hi, Dre. It’s Dean. What are you up to?

  Every time. Every time this boy sent me a message, he introduced himself like I didn’t know it was him by his screen name. It was like he was writing from the 1950s sometimes, but it was also a little adorable.

  DreOfTheDead: playing d&d

  PrezMamasBoy: The role-playing game?

  DreOfTheDead: no, the drinking game

  PrezMamasBoy: I don’t drink. I did once, at my cousin’s wedding. I snuck some champagne. It didn’t agree with all the wedding cake I’d eaten prior to that.

  DreOfTheDead: no drinking here either . . . unless you count coffee

  PrezMamasBoy: Do you have a vendetta against proper capitalization and punctuation?

  DreOfTheDead: nah

  DreOfTheDead: just faster without them

  PrezMamasBoy: Autocorrect is an option.

  DreOfTheDead: turned it off

  DreOfTheDead: kept changing my fucks into ducks

  PrezMamasBoy: That sounds ducking awful.

  DreOfTheDead: was that a joke???

  PrezMamasBoy: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  DreOfTheDead: i’m onto you arnault

  DreOfTheDead: anyway . . . what’re you doing

  PrezMamasBoy: I’m at a debate tournament.

  DreOfTheDead: hopefully you’re doing better than your mom did

  PrezMamasBoy: My opponent started crying during cross-examination. I think I won, but I don’t feel particularly good about it.

  DreOfTheDead: what the hell kind of questions were you asking?!

  PrezMamasBoy: Good ones, or so I thought.

  PrezMamasBoy: The judge is back. I have to go. I will talk to you later. ~Dean

  “Dre?” Mel was looking at me like she was waiting for the answer to a question I hadn’t heard. “What’re you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re trapped under a chandelier, the Blood Mistress is trying to kill you, your party is in danger, and you’re doing nothing?”

  I laughed. “Oh. Right. In the game. I guess it’s time to show the Blood Mistress how I earned the surname Needles.”

  Mel, Adam, Dhonielle, Caleb, Julian, Phil, and I made up the sassiest Dungeons & Dragons group that had ever crawled through a dungeon. We were kind of an offshoot of my school’s QFA group—that’s Queer Friends & Allies—because that’s where we all met. Mel, who was a friend and ally, had been the one to suggest we pop by and had forced me to go with her. Dhonielle had heard me and Mel talking about wanting to start a gaming group, and she dragged her BFF, Phil, in. Adam, Caleb, and Julian all followed after. We tried to get together at least twice a month to play on Sundays, but it was tough to work around everyone’s schedules. Especially mine.

  “Seriously, Dre?”

  The others had gone home, and I was helping Mel clean up the dining room. Her house was smaller than mine, but it was homier, and there were never photographers hiding in the bushes, so we usually played there.

  “What?”

  “It’s been two months since we’ve been able to get you to the table, and you spent half the adventure staring at your phone with that stupid grin devouring your whole face.”

  “What grin?” I asked, but the second I started thinking about Dean, my lips went and betrayed me.

  Mel pointed. “That one!”

  I grabbed a slice of cold, congealed pizza from the box on the counter and took a bite. “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Sometimes I thought Mel had secret mind-reading powers. Like her mom had dropped her on her head when she was a tiny baby and it’d rattled her brain just enough to shake loose a little bit of mental telepathy. It was that or I was super transparent. Yeah, it was probably the second thing.

  “Are you seeing someone? Is there a boy? A secret boy? Do you have a secret boyfriend? Why didn’t you tell me about your secret boyfriend?! I thought we were best friends, but clearly we’re not if you have a secret boyfriend and you didn’t tell me. Who is it? Is it Hiro? No, he chews with his mouth open and I know how much you hate that. Oh God, please tell me it’s not Caleb. I mean, I know you two flirted with the idea last year, but—”

  “It’s not Caleb,” I said. “It’s no one. I don’t have a boyfriend, secret or otherwise. I’m starting to think maybe I never will.”

  Once Mel got going, it could be difficult to reel her back in, but I guess the look on my face reassured her that I wasn’t hiding a secret boyfriend from her. The only secret I was keeping was Dean, and I didn’t know if we were even secret friends.

  “But there is someone?” Mel asked. See? Mind reader.

  “No? Maybe. I don’t know.” I sat down on one of the stools at the counter and threw my half-eaten slice back in the box.

  Mel sat on the edge of the table, her feet dangling over the sides. Mel described herself as chubby, I described her as curvy, and the boys in school had been describing her as “Damn, girl!” since she was thirteen. She had a mess of curly hair that always looked like it was on the verge of coming to life, and a scar that cut through her left eyebrow that she’d gotten when she was little and had tripped and hit a coffee table.

  “You’re obviously talking to someone, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me he’s not like fifty or offering to pay you for sex or to send you nudes or anything.”

  My shoulders dropped and I cocked my head to the side, giving her a look like “How gullible do you think I am?”

  “So not some old dude?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ve met in person. But it’s not like that. There’s nothing between us, and I don’t even know if I’d call us friends. We don’t have much in common, though he’s definitely more interesting than I expected him to be. But honestly, we’re not even from the same planet. He’s the opposite of the kind of guy I imagined being with.”

  “Is he like Chris Grossman?”

  “Worse.”

  “Evan Smith? Please tell me he’s not as bad as Evan Smith.”

  “Worse.” I’d been telling Mel everything about everything since the day we met. Our brains had synched up and we’d been inseparable from then on. I’d never kept a secret from her, so it was natural for the truth to slip out. “It’s Dean Arnault.”

  Mel stared at me for a moment, and she had me wishing that mind-reading thing went both ways because I really wanted to know what she was thinking. Then she smiled and started laughing so hard her face turned red and she nearly fell off the table, which would’ve served her right.

  “Good one, Dre. Oh God, could you even imagine? I mean, he’s basically the spawn of the devil himself, and his mother’s even worse! I bet he takes girls on dates to his mother’s campaign rallies, and when he kisses them, thousands of tentacles slide out of his mouth and implant a new alien parasite in the poor girl that replaces her with a clone of his mommy, because of course whatever girl he marries is going to be just like Mommy Dearest.”

  “He isn’t that bad.”

  “Uh, yes he is,” Mel said. “Do you want me to list all of the horrifying things his mother supports?” Before I could stop her, she was ticking them off on her fingers. “For-profit prisons, overturning gay marriage, guns, the continued criminalization of marijuana, tax breaks for big corporations—”

  “I get it,” I said. “They’re awful. And I was kidding, anyway, remember?” It was easier to let her think I’d been joking. Mel could be relentless, and there was no one she hated more at the moment than Janice Arnault, except possibly Jackson McMann, but that asshat had, like, zero chance of being president.

  “So who is it really?” Mel asked. “Is it that cutie from the Apple store? I saw the way he was making eyes at you. No! It’s the new guy—what’s his name?”

  “Malik,” I said. “It’s not him either. Just, don’t worry about it. It’s no one and not even worth talking
about because nothing is happening.”

  Mel slid off the table and came around and rested her head on my shoulder. “It’ll happen, Dre. You’re gonna find someone.”

  “When?” I asked. “I’m seventeen and I’ve never even kissed a boy.”

  “I promise it’ll happen. And when it does, it won’t be with a gun-loving, sweater vest–wearing hypocrite like Dean Arnault.” She shivered and grimaced. “Now come on. Let’s go work on our costumes for the con this weekend.”

  Maybe Mel was right. What was I doing even talking to Dean? We had nothing in common; we didn’t live in the same state, so it’s not like we could go on dates or do anything normal people did; and his mother was basically evil incarnate. Still, there was something about talking to him that made me feel seen in a way I’d never felt while talking to anyone before, and I didn’t want to stop, no matter who his mother was.

  Dean

  I STOOD IN front of the mirror and took a picture of myself with my phone, which I’d paid too much to have the busted screen replaced on. Then I deleted it. I took another and deleted that one too.

  “Put your tongue behind your teeth when you smile, Dean. Like I taught you.” My mother was standing in my doorway. I dropped my phone when I saw her.

  “You have got to be more careful with your phone.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m so clumsy lately.” Casually, I bent to scoop my phone back up and slid it into my pocket. “I thought you were supposed to be in Wisconsin now.”

  “Minnesota,” she said. “I was. I’m just home long enough to shower and see your father before heading to South Carolina.” She sounded exhausted. She looked exhausted. Most people probably didn’t see it because my mother was keenly aware of how important it was not to show weakness. As the first Republican woman to gain the party’s nomination for president, she had to walk a fine line. She could be strong but not too strong, feminine but not too feminine, funny but not too funny. She could never complain because that would be seen as a weakness. She couldn’t be emotional, but she also couldn’t be emotionless. And this wasn’t new. It had been true going all the way back to her days in the military.