Part 60: Charlie

Charlie loved his cousin. Of course he did. You had to; it was a rule. Just like you had to hug them on Christmas and say things like, “Hey, if you’re ever in New York, let me know and we'll get together” or “Make sure you send me that recipe for those stuffed mushrooms, they were amazing.” And just like when one of them called you crying at 1 AM, pleading with you to come pick them up because they really needed to get out of that house and felt unsafe and didn’t know who else to turn to, you had to actually suck it up and drive the four hours out there.

And when it turned out that they had exaggerated a bit and their mom was not holding a knife to their throat or locking them up in the basement, just passed out on the couch after a short rant about how inconsiderate they were, well - you'd already driven four hours, and it might as well not be for nothing, so you had to bring them back to New York and tell them “Hey, don’t worry about it, you can crash here as long as you need to.”

But on the other side of things, when your cousin dropped everything to pick you up and said you could stay as long as you needed to, you really ought to leave after a day or two. But apparently Hannah didn’t know that.

And she did have quite a few annoying habits. Charlie had started making a list - to entertain himself, to cope. The way she started looking for the next song she would listen to (on his computer) as soon as the first one started, like she wasn't even enjoying it. The way she had started saying “Bed-Stuy” so casually, so immediately, as if she had lived there her whole life and it wasn’t something you had to earn. The way she left the orange juice out on the counter after she had used it instead of putting it back in the fridge.

But more than anything, it was just the way she was always there. And would continue to be there, because the alternative would be to enroll her in school - which is what she kept asking, practically begging for, but that would mean committing himself to keeping her until mid-June, and he missed his carefully-cultivated, particular life. (Plus he had his doubts that she was really a sophomore; wasn't she only, like, twelve?) That was the whole reason he had come to New York: to get away from his family and their judgment.

Not that Hannah was the part of the family he had been fleeing. Indeed, he had always considered her to be on his team, proof that the genes that had created him in all of his flamboyancy had not been a complete fluke. But now he was finding that excessive admiration could be just as bad as scorn. He certainly couldn’t bring a guy home, for instance, because of how excited she would be to meet a real Gay Person; he couldn’t even have his friends over, because each of them was some kind of novelty - the Black Woman, the Professional Artist, the Cuban Immigrant - at the very least, a New York Person. Imagining his friends through her eyes cheapened them, reduced them to their most obvious characteristics, and Charlie didn’t like thinking of them like that. It reminded him that, to his family, including Hannah, he was simply and perpetually the Gay Cousin.

He knew his aunt wasn’t the easiest person to cohabitate with - but then, neither was Hannah. If only she hadn’t left her phone behind - he suspected intentionally - then surely Aunt Tracy would have called by now and said whatever it was parents said in these situations to reassert their authority and get their kids to come back home. Reawaken them to the real world; shake them out of their fantasies. He couldn’t do it. He was part of the fantasy.

All Aunt Tracy had said the night of, awoken by the sound of his car in the driveway, was "Good. You deal with her for a while."

What Hannah needed was an encounter with someone Back Home to show her that New York was a vacation - not her new home, not her destiny. This was his life. If she wanted to escape from her stifling suburbs and domestic difficulties, she would have to find her own way of doing it, not just copy his. Follow in my footsteps, like as long as you need to, was one of those phrases that wasn’t meant to be taken literally.