When Paige got back to Stanford on Monday, she made a decision. It would be May in a few days. Her classes would be ending in a few weeks and then she would have finals. She also had swimming to think about. Paige just didn't think she could handle doing all of that and trying to figure out what the hell her sexuality was. There was only so much one person could bear, she reasoned. So Paige decided to ignore herself and her thoughts and feelings until summer. It was definitely wasn't the best decision, and Paige had a feeling it would backfire on her somehow, but she made it anyway. In short, she slipped into the peaceful denial of an undetonated bomb.
As soon as she got back to her dorm room, she pulled the picture of Emily and her friends having a snowball fight off of her wall. She was just about to drop it in the trash, her hand hovering over the bin, when she thought better of it. Whatever happened in the end, Emily had shown her something about herself, had made her feel something no one had before. And that was worth remembering. Instead, Paige pulled out the wooden box from underneath her bed, wrote Emily on the back, and placed it, among the other items in the box, on the top of the coaster stained with her brother's blood. Then she closed the lid.
Usually, Emily would have been looking forward to the cast party. But since the incident at the frat party—that's what Emily was calling it, The Incident—she felt like she was getting over a bad case of the flu. She was unfocused and tired and she certainly didn't feel like socializing with a bunch of cheery thespians. She couldn't avoid the party though, because Eden had volunteered to have it at The Log. And the only thing worse than going to the party in her own house would be avoiding her own house for an entire night. A rock and a hard place, Emily thought as she, Charlie, and Jo tidied up the house while Eden was out buying food and alcohol with money she'd collected from the cast and crew.
"Em, it's been a week," Jo said, collecting dishes from around the living room. "Are you ever going to tell us what happened?"
"I told you. Paige and I were dancing. I thought she was into me, but it turns out she's just a handsy straight girl."
"I saw you two dancing," Charlie cut in while shoving an armful of shoes into the coat closet. "She wanted a piece, Em. I don't care what she said."
"I just thought maybe we could look into the whole 'crying Paige' thing. Don't you think that's weird? I mean, what did you say to her?" Jo went on.
"Why does it matter? It's not like I'm ever going to see her again. The whole thing was humiliating," Emily responded.
"No, but you're going to see her brother," Jo told her very matter-of-fact-ly.
Emily stopped dead. The cloth she was using to dust fell out of her hand.
"Oh my god…Tuck!" Emily said slapping her hand against her forehead.
"Don't tell me you forgot he was going to be here tonight," Charlie said seeing Emily's reaction.
Emily had forgotten. In all of the general party dreading she had been occupied with, she'd managed to completely forget that Tuck was one of the leads in the play and would definitely be attending the cast party.
"Oh my god," Emily said again. And then to no one in particular, "What am I going to do? He probably hates me. I emotionally wounded his sister." Emily covered her face with both of her hands and sat down on the coffee table.
"He could probably give you some tips on how to get into Paige's pants," Charlie said. "You know, show you where you went wrong."
"You're not helping, Charlotte!" Emily said in exasperation.
"Or you could just avoid him," Charlie offered, shrugging her shoulders. "Or, you could try to make out with him, too, make it like a family affair. They are twins."
"Charlotte!" Emily shouted.
Jo had collapsed onto the couch from laughter at this point.
"I hate you both," Emily huffed in mock anger and went to go take out the trash.
People started filtering into The Log around 10pm for the cast party. As per usual, it began with strictly those who had worked on the play in some way, but as the night wore on, those peoples' friends and boyfriends and girlfriends arrived.
Emily ambled around in the crowd talking to a few people. There was a beer pong table set up in the kitchen and she stopped to watch Liz, the stage manager, beat Eden at a game. She was avoiding the living room where she'd seen Tuck drinking and talking with some of his friends.
As she wandered around the party, though, her mind started to wander back to the previous weekend, to the way Paige's body felt against hers. Emily realized, with a heavy sigh, that she wanted to fix what happened, somehow, to get some sort of closure concerning the situation. And Tuck was the closest she was going to get to that. She rubbed her eyes wearily as she realized what she wanted to do was apologize.
Emily moved to the living room doorway and chatted with a girl from her poetry workshop until she saw Tuck's friends head off to get more drinks. She walked up to him very timidly, almost chickened out, but finally approached him and said, "Hey, Tuck. Shit. I mean Theo. Sorry. " Jesus, Emily though, I've fucked the whole thing up before I even started.
He just chuckled a little and replied, "Hey Emily. How are you?"
"Well, I didn't spend my evening walking through hell, so I'm better than you," Emily told him, referring to the play, and trying to break the ice with a cheesy joke. Surprisingly, it worked.
He laughed in earnest, but it sounded so similar to Paige's beautiful laugh that it felt more like a defeat than a victory in Emily's heart.
"Can we talk?" Emily asked him.
"We can, but do you really want to do it here?" Tuck asked, glancing around at the crowded room. He seemed to already know the conversation would be of a personal nature.
"Do you want to go on the roof?" she suggested.
"Really?" His eyes had lit up like a little kid's might at this prospect.
"Sure, we do it all the time."
The two headed up the stairs. The roof was accessible from both Eden and Charlie's bedrooms. However, it sounded like Charlie was entertaining a guest, so Emily led Tuck through Eden's room to the window. She opened it and hoisted herself out, then turned around to give Tuck a hand.
"This is so cool," Tuck gushed as they settled themselves on the slight slope of the roof.
It wasn't a great view, just the small town street with its brick sidewalks, an apartment building and its parking lot, and the gas station and convenience store in the distance. Tuck was delighted, though.
"Oh my god, you can see the Quickie from here!" He said excitedly about the convenience store.
"You seem like a cheap date," Emily said slipping into teasing tone with him. It seemed natural.
"Uh. Rude," he huffed, but laughed loudly while he did. "I totally am, though. It only takes like two drinks."
"Ooh, I'll have to remember that," Emily said in a seductive voice. And then, seeing her opening, went on, "Speaking of drunken disasters…"
Tuck looked over at her with warmth in his eyes. "You don't owe me an explanation, Emily."
"I appreciate you saying that, but I still feel horrible, especially about the way I left things," Emily was struggling to get her words out. She wanted to say this right. "Even though I was hurt and embarrassed, I shouldn't have walked away and left her in an unfamiliar place like that. And since I can't apologize to Paige face to face, I felt like I should at least apologize to you. I can tell how close you two are by the way she talks about you and watches you when you perform. So, I know it must have hurt you, too, to see Paige like that. So I'm sorry. I didn't treat your sister right. And I know that."
Emily maintained eye contact with Tuck the whole time she spoke. She wanted him to know how earnest her apology was. And now that she finished, he was staring at her like she was a new species or a UFO. He finally spoke after a long pause.
"Paige told me you were the most perceptive person she'd ever met. I can see now what she meant," Tuck told her. "I didn't realize I needed to hear…well, something from you about it until you started talking. So thank you for insisting. "
Emily nodded. She was glad she'd found the courage to apologize, too. She felt better already.
"I don't want you to think the whole thing was your fault, though, Emily," Tuck said.
"What do you mean?" she asked. Despite what her friends had told her, Emily was ready to accept full responsibility for what happened between her and Paige.
"God. Paige would kill me if she knew I was telling you this," Tuck started, "but you deserve to know. The thing is, what you have to understand about Paige…it's like her body is running about ten steps ahead of her brain. She feels things and can't stop herself from acting on them. She always has to learn things the hard way. Whatever it was that happened between you two, Paige hasn't even begun to process it."
Emily was listening intently, trying to understand what Tuck was getting at, but she was still confused.
"What I'm trying to say is, I think there was a reason she danced with you that night, but I don't think she's realized what that is yet," Tuck finished.
"I appreciate what you're trying to do," Emily told him, "but I don't want to get my hopes up that maybe I wasn't wrong about…her."
"I'm not trying to get your hopes up," Tuck said, beginning to realize that despite how brief their interactions had been, Emily had developed genuine feelings for Paige. "I truly believe Paige still has to figure out what she wants in life. I don't know if she's gay or not. That's not what I'm saying."
"Okay, then maybe I don't know what you're saying," Emily admitted.
"I've never told anyone outside of my family about this, because I knew they wouldn't understand and they'd just judge her. But I think it's important that you do understand this," he said, scooting closer to Emily and reaching up to the left side of his head. Emily wasn't sure what to expect, but she watched as he combed through his hair with his fingers and then spread the hair apart, revealing a long scar running vertically along his head, just behind his ear.
"Holy shit, is that a scar?" Emily asked leaning forward to get a better look in the dim light from the window behind them.
"It is," Tuck confirmed. "Paige gave it to me. She threw a marble coaster at me the day I came out to my family."
Emily looked horrified, but she kept quiet, sure that Tuck would explain.
"I really failed Paige that day," he said, shaking his head sadly. "I actually believed for about 12 hours that she hated me because I was gay. That wasn't true obviously. I should have known that. She felt like I had abandoned her by not telling her before I told our parents. We're so close, you know? I know now that she didn't mean to do it. But I think since that day, she's been almost scared of herself, of feeling something and losing control again, the way she did."
Emily wiped a tear off of her cheek. It sounded like a horrible way to live, suppressing all your feelings out of fear of what they might make you do.
"I think she couldn't help feeling something with you last weekend and it scared the shit out of her and when her brain finally caught up, she shut down again," Tuck finished his explanation.
"I wish I had known," Emily said, more to herself than to Tuck. "We're all so…human. But it's hard to remember we all are, somehow. That everyone is just as filled with the past as we are. It's hard to get outside of our own experiences, sometimes." Emily thought she sounded like one of her journal entries, completely indecipherable to anyone but herself.
But then Tuck spoke. "I think we keep ourselves so tightly wound we never see our spools. We saw them, clear as skeletons, that time. What's wrong? What's right? To know that you could take the heart and eat it raw."
Emily just stared at him.
"It's from a poem, one of my favorites," Tuck explained. "What you were saying reminded me of it."
"That was exactly what I was trying to say," Emily said in awe. She'd never met someone else who seemed to think in poetry the way she did. "On Sundays, in the morning, Eden usually makes pancakes. You should come tomorrow, Theo."
Tuck smiled at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling slightly.
"I would like that," he told her. "And Emily, you can call me Tuck."
The next morning, Tuck came over at 10 am for pancakes and he stayed all day with them at The Log. They decided to watch Moulin Rouge and Tuck was the duet partner Eden had always dreamed of. He and Jo had an in depth discussion about Tegan and Sara which turned into a discussion of Grey's Anatomy which, somehow, turned into a conversation about war reenactors. After he volunteered to make homemade pizza for dinner, Tuck taught Charlie how to tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue, which she insisted was the last piece of seduction she had yet to master. He even brought over the poetry book he had quoted from the night before for Emily to borrow without her having to ask.
That was the day Tuck began to become one of their best friends. Over the months he fell seamlessly into their group like a piece they hadn't known they'd been missing.
Note: The poem that Tuck quotes during this chapter is Beth Ann Fennelly's Madame L. Describes the Siege of Paris from the book Open House.
