How They Met, and Other Stories(37)
Author: David Levithan

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.