Page 25 of Rookie Mistake
Ava Mercer is twenty-five and in her second year of law school at Georgetown and she is the person in my life who hasnever required the grin. When I grin at Ava, she looks at me the way a teacher looks at a student who has submitted the wrong assignment: with patience and the expectation of a correction.
"I'm seeing someone," I say.
"A boy," Ava says. Not a question. A statement delivered with the flat certainty of a woman who has been waiting for this phone call since her brother was fifteen and who is not going to pretend the information is new.
"Yeah. A boy."
"Tell me everything."
"He's Russian. Thirty. A defenseman. He folds his T-shirts like it's a competitive sport and he cooks pasta at ten-thirty at night and he looks at me like I'm a structural weakness in his moral code."
"Is that a compliment?"
"I genuinely don't know. With him it might be."
"Name?"
"Nikolai Sokolov."
The pause that follows is Ava processing. Ava processes the way she argues in moot court: quickly, comprehensively, with the full awareness that every piece of information has a secondary implication.
"The shutdown defenseman," she says. "Two All-Star nods. Russian mother, American father. I googled him when you texted."
"Of course you did."
"He's hot in a terrifying way. Like a man who could end your career and then cook you dinner."
"That is the most accurate description of Nikolai I have ever heard."
"How long?"
"Three weeks. Since camp. He was my temporary housing and then he was my... not-temporary housing."
"Eli." Her voice shifts. The shift is from the sister-voice to the Ava-voice, the one that is careful without being cautious. "Have you told him you're bi?"
The question lands on the balcony with the weight of a thing I have been not-thinking about. The not-thinking is its own kind of thinking. The awareness that the word "bi" has not been spoken out loud in Nikolai's apartment. The word exists in my head. It existed in the search results I scrolled through at sixteen. It exists in the handful of conversations I've had with Ava over the years, conversations that were quiet and careful and conducted in the specific register of a brother telling his sister a truth that the rest of his life has not yet caught up to.
The word has not been spoken to Nikolai. Nikolai, who is gay. Nikolai, who is out to the team, out to his parents, out in the specific way that a man who controls everything can be out: on his terms, in his language, within the architecture he built.
Nikolai assumes I am gay. Nikolai has not asked because Nikolai does not ask questions when he believes the answer is already evident. The answer, to Nikolai, is evident: I am a man who is attracted to him, therefore I am gay. The logic is clean. The logic is wrong.
"Not yet," I say.
"Why?"
"Because I don't know how to bring it up without it sounding like a correction. Like I'm saying: actually, the thing you think I am is slightly different from what I actually am, and the difference matters to me even if it doesn't change anything about how I feel about you."
"The difference always matters. The word is yours, Eli. Don't let someone else's vocabulary define you."
The sentence is the Ava sentence. The one that cuts through the noise and arrives at the thing. The word is mine. Bisexual. It means I am attracted to more than one gender, and theattraction to Nikolai is not the whole of my sexuality, it is a part of it, and the part is real and the whole is also real and the two things are not in conflict.
"What if it changes things?" I say. The question is quiet. The question is the fear underneath the not-telling: the fear that the word will make me less, that the bi will be heard as confused or temporary or half-of-something rather than a whole thing that is its own thing.
"If it changes things, that's his problem. And if it's his problem, you need to know that now."
"You're ruthless."
"I'm a lawyer. Same thing, better suits."
