How They Met, and Other Stories

I waited for him to finish the sentence. What couldn’t he imagine? Doing it himself, or having someone do it for him? I waited, but he left it open, closed.

I looked at him, studied the thoughts right underneath his expression. Most dancers find their confidence in dancing. Right is mere millimeters away from wrong. Failure is always louder than success. But there is an accumulation of all the things you don’t do wrong, and that becomes your confidence. You can even get to the point where that confidence lasts longer than the dance. Seconds at first. Then minutes. Then maybe it’ll be there when you’re walking into a party, or meeting people after a show. You know you have something desirable, and you know you can move. But for Miles, the confidence wasn’t there. Instead, there was something even more marvelous—the trying.

Suddenly, it occurred to me. I was looking at Miles twisting the coffee stirrer around his paper cup. I was thinking of him, of me, of Jeremy.

“You could be my boyfriend,” I told him.

“I could?” The coffee stirrer fell to the table, still looped.

“For the Bar Mitzvah. You could be my boyfriend. Would you?”

“Be your boyfriend?”

“For the Bar Mitzvah.”

Miles looked at me strangely. “That’s one hell of a proposal,” he said.

“C’mon…it’ll be fun.”

“Now, you know that’s a lie.”

“Are you free?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Please,” I said.

“You want me to pose as your boyfriend—the boyfriend you’ve never had—in order to make sure your brother—God bless him—didn’t take a stand for nothing.”

“Pretty please,” I said.

“You’re so stupid. You know I’m going to do it.”

For the first time that awful day, I felt something approximating happiness. “I will owe you,” I told Miles. “Anything your big heart desires.”

“Anything?”

He seemed happy despite himself.

And so it came to pass that on the morning of my brother’s Bar Mitzvah, I was introducing Miles to my parents as Graham, but telling them to call him Miles, since that was what all his friends did.

He looked amazing, in a blue suit, white shirt, and purple tie. He’d taken a train, a bus, a subway, and a cab to get to the synagogue, and he’d made it exactly on time. My parents, overwhelmed by all the greetings coming their way, were polite without really registering. Jeremy pulled away from the rabbi to shake Miles’s hand, to tell him he was glad he’d come. He turned to me and said Miles was exactly what he’d pictured. I didn’t know what to say.

Miles was going to sit in the back, but I wanted him beside me. So we sat in the front row. When his keepa kept falling off his head, I reached up and pulled out one of the bobby pins keeping my keepa in place. Instead of handing it over, I leaned into him and touched his hair, securing the keepa. Maybe nobody was looking, but it felt like everyone was. I didn’t turn to see what was true. I just looked at him and his nervous smile.

The service began, and all focus turned to Jeremy. It was so strange to sit there and watch him for two hours. I don’t think I’d ever considered him—really watched him—before. It wasn’t that I hadn’t realized he was growing up—I was always waiting for the next stage, the first hint of body hair, the voice’s awkward, jagged plunge. But I was always mapping him out against my own progression—as if he was somehow having the same life just because he had all the same teachers. Now I wasn’t seeing him in terms of age, or in terms of me. I was just seeing him. Five years behind me, but somehow with his shit together. He’d tied his tie himself and it was perfectly knotted. He chanted over the Torah portion as if it was something he was born to do. And he made eye contact. I swear, as he spoke it was like he looked each of us in the eye. Bringing us together.

I should have felt proud, but instead I felt awful. That I had let him down so many times, that I had been a horrible brother. That he loved me anyway. That maybe he knew more about life than I did, even if I’d had more experience. Because knowing about life is really about knowing how it should be, not just how it is.

It hadn’t occurred to me that this would be Miles’s first Bar Mitzvah; it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be more nervous than I was. During the rabbi’s sermon, his leg started to shake. I rested my hand on it for a second, giving him as much of my calm as I could. He accepted it without a word. I used the open prayer book as a phrase book to tell him things, pointing to words, rearranging the scripture to spell out our own verse. GOOD. IS. PLENTIFUL. YOU. ARE. ALL. WISDOM. SHINING ON A HILL.

When the service was over, when we were all getting up to shuffle to the reception, he straightened my tie and moved some of the hair from my eyes. My mirror. I fixed the back of his collar. His mirror.

Jeremy had sneaked into the reception hall before the service, banishing one of our cousins to a kids’ table so Miles could sit with our family. I wondered what we all looked like to Miles, as we said our prayers and lit our candles and danced a whirlwind hora. I tried to put myself in his place, and realized we looked exactly like what we were: a family. These strangely tied together individuals trying desperately to keep both ourselves and one another happy. Succeeding, and failing, and succeeding. When Jeremy called me up to light one of the thirteen candles on the cake, he said the kindest things, and I knew he meant each and every one. He talked about me teaching him how to ride a bike, how to swim, how to kick an arcade game in just the right place to get a free play. He was remembering the best of me. The way he spoke, I almost recognized who he was talking about.

I stayed up for the final candle, for my parents at their proudest. The love I felt for them then—I knew I meant that, too. It wasn’t something I had to think about. It was there, unexpectedly deep. I hadn’t been running away from that, or even from them. I had been so focused on my destination that I’d forgotten all the rest.

At the table, my mother asked Miles how long he’d been dancing. They talked Nutcrackers while my father watched, taking it in. After the hora, the dancing grew more scattered, the sincere thirteen-year-old girls and the jesting thirteen-year-old boys doing their sways and muddles as my older aunts and uncles kicked up (or off) their heels and used the same moves they’d learned for their weddings decades ago.

Miles and I watched from the sidelines, and I gave him the anecdotal tour of my family’s cast of characters. At one point Jeremy came over and asked, “So, are you guys going to dance or what?” But I wasn’t sure Miles wanted to, so I put it off. Miles was doing me enough of a favor. Dragging him onto such a dance floor would be cruel.

I tried to imagine Graham there in his place, but I couldn’t. It was laughable. Impossible. Stupid.

Finally, after two or three songs of sitting in the folded-chair gallery, picking at the mixed salad with blueberry balsamic vinaigrette, Miles turned to me and said mischievously, “So…are we going to dance or what?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s.”

Miles smiled. “It’s about time.”

Just because two people can dance well on a stage to prearranged choreography doesn’t guarantee that they will be good partners in a simple slow dance. When Miles took my hand in his, there was no guarantee that our arms would fit right. When he put his other arm around my back, there was no guarantee that it would feel anything but awkward, unrehearsed. When his feet started to move, there was no guarantee that my steps would match his.

But they did.

As if we had rehearsed. As if our bodies were meant to be this. As if we were meant to be this. Together.

He closed his eyes. He was with me, he was elsewhere, he was with me. I looked over his shoulder. My mother smiled at me and I nearly cried. My aunt and uncle smiled. Jeremy watched, as a girl tugged on his sleeve, telling him to hurry.

I closed my eyes, too.

The sound of a dance. This dance. The ballad of family conversations, clinking glasses, plates being cleared. One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. The song you hear, and all the things beside it that you dance to.

When it was over, Miles pressed my back lightly and I squeezed his hand. Then we separated for a fast song. Instead of jumping off the dance floor, we jumped into the fray. We joined Jeremy and his friends, the aunts and the uncles. We electric slid. We celebrated good times (come on). We cried Mony, Mony. As a crowd, part of the crowd, together.

It was fun.

When the next slow song came on, there was no question. I reached for him, and he let me.

“May I?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he replied.

But just as we were about to start, there was a tap on my shoulder. I looked to my side and saw it was Jeremy.

“May I have this dance?” he asked.

I let go of Miles and turned fully to my brother, raising my hand to his.

“Uh…sure,” I said.

Jeremy looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Not with you,” he said. “With Miles.”

My brother wanted to dance with my not-quite-but-maybe-so boyfriend. I could imagine all his friends watching—his eighth-grade friends watching. Talking. Our family. Our parents.

“Why?” I asked.

He winked at me. I swear to God, he winked at me. And then he said, “I want to make Tom insanely jealous.”

“Let’s go, then,” Miles said, laughing. And with that, they left me. Stunned. They took the dance floor, laughing and awkward and wonderful. I felt such love for both of them. Such love.

I looked over to Jeremy’s friends, who were all watching. I wondered which of the boys was Tom. If Jeremy was serious. Then I looked over at my father, at everyone else who was watching, confused and excited. Something was happening. I knew my father would blame me. I knew he would say all of this was my fault. And I would take it. I couldn’t take any of the credit for my astonishing brother, but I would happily take all of the blame. If it could be in some way my fault, then I would know I’d done something right.

I would stay to find out. And stay, and stay, and stay.

It is never, I hope, too late to be a good brother.

BREAKING AND ENTERING

People never change the place they hide their keys.

It was right after midnight. Back when it was summer, back when I had some reason to hope. Cody’s parents were out of town for the weekend and Cody’s keys were locked in his car, seven blocks away. He took me around back and we walked quietly through the night foliage, listening like thieves for the neighbors who would notice, the ones who might tell. I wasn’t supposed to be there, wasn’t supposed to be the boy Cody loved, wasn’t supposed to see when he moved the flower pot and revealed the spare key underneath. He didn’t say anything, didn’t swear me to secrecy. He just held his breath a little as he squeezed past me to the door, ran inside so the alarm wouldn’t sound. When I walked in, I had to call out for him. He reached me before I got to the light switch. We found ourselves in the dark.

Now it’s afternoon, four months later. Cody is gone, but the key is still in its hiding place. I don’t know what I’m doing here, only that I have to be here, doing this. Breaking and entering. The breaking has already happened, is always happening. So I reach for the key. I fit it into the lock. I enter.

I should be in school. I should be enjoying the first breaths of the last gasp of my senior year. I should be living my days like they are the best days.

Cody is in a place I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met. Somehow I allowed him to step into the future without me.

From a schedule I saw back when all such things were hypothetical, I know he is sitting in an English class right now. I can picture him there. I can see him slumped back and doodling. I can see him after class, walking over the green. Or asleep in his dorm room, eyelids closed. The pattern of his breathing. I can see it clearly, and none of it is true. It is only my version, which is imagination.