Poker Face
“Bullshit.”
Jesse grins over the pile of cards, rolling the toothpick across his bottom teeth. Bree’s smiles stretches slowly across her face, and she shakes her head. “Nope! Take ‘em!”
Their other friends laugh and jeer a little bit as he groans, ducking his head towards his chest before he goes to gather up the huge pile of cards and take a swig of his beer. He’s got half the deck in his hands now (meaning he screwed up — he thought he was better at reading Bree’s expressions during a card game).
They keep on playing like that for a while, and Jesse never gets over having half the pile handed to him, though he manages to get a couple people on account of the fact that he has most of the cards. They just laugh at his huge pile and take a drink, too (Drinking when you lied was their contribution to the rules of Bullshit, to make it more fun).
Then, Ashley says she’s bored.
She stands, stretches, and grabs her beer from the table. “I’m gonna go find the s’mores stuff.” The game quickly disintegrates after that, with Mark and Amir and Chris throwing in their cards as well to follow Ashley, who was always the leader, and Tanya quietly excusing herself after them. In a matter of minutes, everyone but Jesse and Bree are outside, stoking the fire back up to roast marshmallows and drink.
Jesse gestures with his head to the door. “You gonna go outside?” Bree shakes her head no.
Jesse could tell something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. It was niggling at the back of his mind the way a song does when you know the tune but can’t remember the lyrics. But, he knew with Bree, you didn’t want to push it.
Once, he’d caught her sobbing in her laundry basket as she’d separated her whites from her darks. It was nearing on 3 am, and he’d just finished an essay for a midterm and remembered that he had laundry in the washer. He had been hoping to god that no one had gone in and stolen his socks (it had happened earlier that week to a guy on his floor, no bullshit).
He’d stumbled into the laundry room, feeling mildly drunk he was so tired, and he saw her. They were friends at this point, after meeting each other weeks earlier in this same place doing laundry at 2 am because neither one of them had their lives together. But they weren’t cry-in-front-of-each-other friends (Jesse could count on one hand all the times he’s seen people cry in his whole life. Not emotional people, his family). He had stood frozen in the doorway for a long minute, contemplating leaving, but something pushed him forward. No one should cry alone at 3 AM.
He had approached her cautiously, like he was afraid she was going to yell at him to go away. Instead she looked at him, shocked to see another living soul at the point in the night when it feels like you’re all alone in the universe. He sat next to her, still so unsure, and she collapsed into him. He couldn’t do anything but hold her, and for what felt like a lifetime, they sat there on the laundry room floor.
She’s staring out the window, out at their friends dancing outside of Tanya’s family’s lake house. Jesse looks too, at the silhouetted figures dancing around the fire, laughing up at the stars, high on the feeling of finishing their first year and of being young and dumb and free. He watches Mark spin Ashley and Tanya around, singing so loudly to the radio tuned to the only station they can get out here (randomly, it’s an 80’s power ballad station). Amir and Chris light the sparklers, and they throw the glittering ashes at each other while they run around, looking like extras out of a Harry Potter movie.
Bree is smiling faintly, like she knows something they don’t. She’s still an enigma, even after a whole year of getting to know each other, even after they’ve become part of a group of best friends. He thought her barriers would come down, and he supposes parts of them have, but still.
Bree was so skittish; befriending her was like befriending a stray cat. Jesse never pushes his luck trying to get deeper with her, not the way he had with the others. Ashley practically told him her life story over a cup of coffee one day in November because he said hello and stopped for more than five minutes, but Bree was different.
After that episode in the laundry room it took a week for her to even talk to him again. He did it by cornering her in their floor’s common room and asking her to play poker with him. She laughed in her way, one he is now so familiar with but back then took him by surprise, the bright sharp single “ha!” that lit up the whole room. She never learned how to play poker. Doesn’t have much of a poker face, she said, with one of the best poker faces he’d ever seen.
So they played Go Fish instead, bonding over it way more than he ever expected to at 18. They played other games, like Bullshit when the whole gang was together, or War. They played Kings before they went to house parties and side-by-side games of Solitaire on Sunday mornings in the cafeteria, slightly hungover and desperate for silence.
Sometimes, when they would play Go Fish, if they didn’t have what the other person was looking for, they got to ask a question instead. “Tell me a secret,” she’d asked once, smiling her Mona Lisa smile, goading him into it. And then he’d asked the same thing. That’s how he knows her favorite color is periwinkle, and that she doesn’t like bacon but does like turkey bacon, and that she started drinking coffee because she thought it would make her look cool. But Jesse had never figured out the secret that he really wanted to know. For all the little bits of the picture that he had scrambled together to make up who Bree was in his mind, there was still so much he didn’t know.
And he’d never asked her what was up that night, but sometimes, when no one else was around and it was just them studying late at night he could hear her breath start to shudder. He would never look. He’d just reach out his hand to hold hers, and they’d keep that connection, that point of contact until her breath evened out. He couldn’t offer much; he didn’t know if he was doing this right, but that was all he had. He was never taught how to comfort any other way.
“Go Fish?” He asks, unsure of how to pull Bree out of her head, but wanting her to come back. He can feel how far away she is, despite the fact that the warmth of her radiates next to him on the wooden bench.
Bree smiles, a real one, and deals them both a hand.
“Got any sixes?” she says, and there is a note in her voice that sounds the way a poker face looks — ever so slightly too fake — and that’s when Jesse knows he has to ask.
He picks up his cards. “Tell me a secret?”
She freezes. He can feel himself getting shuttered out in a way that he hasn’t really felt in months, and he doesn’t like it. She tears her eyes away from his, and picks up a card from the deck. Jesse can take a hint, so he lets it go.
They continue like that for a minute or two, going back and forth, Bree resolutely just looking at her cards. The sounds of their friends outside trickle back into the house through the screen door, the darkness settling into the trees, the sky deepening into a periwinkle blue at the edge of the sunset across the lake.
“Bree.” Jesse looks at her, takes in the dark circles that are a permanent fixture under her eyes he didn’t remember from the beginning of the year and the wrinkle in between her brows that only got deeper as the year went on. She finally looks at him. Her eyes have tears in them. This is the first time he’s actually seen her cry since that night in the laundry room so many months ago.
And he has to know. He has to know what’s been going on with her all year that’s simultaneously allowed him to feel like she’s his closest friend and also that they’re barely acquaintances. He’s going to break the unspoken rule their friendship is built on because he can’t keep letting her keep him at arms’ length while he’s the only person who comforts her.
“Got any aces?” Her voice is a whisper he can barely hear over their friends laughing outside. The cards in his hand feel like bargaining chips.
So he puts them down, takes the cards out of Bree’s hands, and takes her hands in his. She looks down, and then back up. A tear tracks down the side of her face.
“Tell me a secret?” he asks.
Bree’s voice catches at first, when she starts. But it gets stronger as she goes, as she tells Jesse the secret that she’s been holding onto for so many years. Despite the burden she’s carrying, the weight of an illness that no one can see and that people don’t believe is real, for the first time since he’s known her, Jesse finally thinks he can see the whole of her.
