Read Online The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang - Free Book Online Page B

have told the residents he was there on the sly. Sitting in the common room, he wouldn’t have said, “This is just between us here, okay?”
    â€œYou should ask him,” Nora had said in he car. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though, he wishes he’d replied. That’d hardly be appropriate. Or: You ask him, if you think it’s so easy.
    Leo drifts to a corner table with soda bottles. The plastic cups are cherry red and lined with bright white, the kind they used for beer pong back in the day. How happy the frat house had felt, always full, bustling with life. Leo used to make the guys laugh by collecting the cups after a party and drinking their contents.
    He pours himself a Coke and takes a sip. Talk: as if that would mend matters. The carbonation offers its sharp bite.
    â€œIt’s better, I think, that we not say anything,” his dad had declared that morning as Leo stretched. His dad was the true runner, with muscular calves that bifurcated like the halves of a heart. Leo used to try to build his up when he was in high school, doing calf exercises on the stairs, until it occurred to him that—as with so much else in life—he hadn’t inherited his father’s genes. No amount of work could give him what nature had withheld. “Sure, Dad,” Leo had replied. His dad nodded, knowing he could trust his son.
    There is valor in letting things slide. This is what Leo has learned from his father. It is why his mom gets her way with the remodels and shopping sprees, why she gets to have the party tonight. We look the other way in love.
    Leo glances at Stephen and Nora across the room. Leo believed her when she said she hadn’t known about Stephen’s visits, but she also didn’t seemed surprised. “Aren’t you offended?” he wanted to ask her. “Don’t you think it’s strange? He’s supposed to be your best friend!”
    But some part of him thinks that Nora is sympathetic to secrets.
    She first told him about the pulling a few weeks after her mom’s funeral, leading him into the bathroom. “Look,” she said tearfully, parting her hair in the mirror. He knew, before he turned, to brace himself—that whatever this was, it wouldn’t be good. He kept his face still as the shock ran through him.
    The bare spot was the size of a quarter, white scalp visible through fine tendrils. It wasn’t like a bald spot on a man, but horribly unnatural looking, like a face without a nose. He kept his breathing steady, the lightbulbs over the vanity gaping. Then, meeting her eyes in the mirror, he took her into his arms.
    There was a name for it. Trich-something. Whenever he types the first few letters into the search engine, the computer supplies the rest. A trick, he always thinks. It fooled you, duped you. You lived with it every day without knowing it was there.
    Nora’s pulling is like an addiction, a dark secret they gloss over. What bothers him is not the strangeness of her desire to pluck herself clean (did it have something to do with her mom’s chemo? He’d hoped one of the shrinks would ask) but that because of it, he has to tiptoe around her. He isn’t supposed to ask about it because there’s always the fear of making it worse. “You pulling?” is the most he ever says. Two words. “You tired?” “You hungry?” “You pulling?” He utters them casually, not really thinking it helps—surely she does it in private, at night—but because it helps him. Those two words were like a release valve letting out steam.
    Nora was horrified when he told his family about it. It didn’t matter that the websites specifically recommended family support. “My parents are sophisticated about this stuff,” he assured her. He refrained from voicing his surprise that Stephen hadn’t already known. Because shouldn’t best friends confide in each other?
    Apparently