All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

“Yeah!”

The ‘y’all’, full of Southern home-town charm, feels impossibly glamorous in this beautiful Irish apartment. But every instance feels rehearsed, dropped just at the right time to create a family barbecue atmosphere.

“All right, all right, let me think.” Aaron places his thumbs and forefingers together to make a triangle in front of his face, like loose prayer hands. “All right. I’ve got it. Who knows Two Truths and a Lie?”

A slightly, uncertain worried hum comes from the circle.

“Relax, guys! It’s not as scary as it sounds. Basically, you say two true things about yourself, and one lie. We all have to guess which is the lie. They do this in drama school all the time and it’s a great way to get to know each other. Like, OK, I’ll go first.”

He does the triangle in front of his face again and pads around the circle, smiling to himself.

“OK, so… My name is Aaron. My parents are divorced. I really love Billy Joel.” He swings around and points at the very short girl. “Katie. Which one’s the lie?”

“You … love Billy Joel?” Katie says hopefully.

“Nope.” He smiles. “I really, really love Billy Joel. My parents are, however, still happily married. Twenty-two years.”

Katie goes beetroot-red and everyone titters again in appreciation.

“OK, now you guys go. Let’s start with a new face. Let’s start from … Rory.”

“Er, OK,” Roe says. “Um … I play the guitar. My birthday is in June. And my sister is a fish.”

Another laugh from the group. Aaron grants us a quick, dry smile.

“Nice first try,” he says. “I can’t wait to meet your sister. Enid.”

Enid is sitting to the right of Roe and Aaron is moving clockwise, so I won’t have to think of my two truths and a lie for absolutely ages. She is dark-haired and would be pretty if her forehead wasn’t in a perpetual furrow.

“OK,” Enid says. “I’m twenty-one next week. I’m double-jointed.”

Enid says this very quickly, as though she is psyching herself up for something major. You can feel the whole group leaning in, hungry to hear. Then, it all comes out, slick as an oil spill.

“And I’ve had unprotected sex with a man twice my age.”

Silence. I try to catch Roe’s eye, in a sort of “all that build-up, for that?” expression.

Aaron crouches down on the floor in front of Enid. He looks at her very closely, making the kind of intense eye contact that feels like it’s between two people that know each other very well.

He reaches out to her lap, where her hands lie dormant.

“Enid,” he says softly. “May I?”

She gives him her hand and he holds it, very tenderly, in front of everyone. I can feel the eyes of all the other girls goggling and realize that they have all wanted a moment like this. To hold Aaron’s hand. To feel the full wattage of his American attention on them. I am close enough to see that Enid’s hand is shaking, and her face has gone bright pink.

I turn away.

After a moment of silence, Aaron speaks again, softly massaging Enid’s palm with his thumb.

“Oh, Enid. You’re not double-jointed, are you?”

“No,” she says, her voice soft. She sounds like she is about to cry.

“That’s OK, sweetheart. That’s OK. It’s not what you wanted. It’s not your fault.”

I start to wonder if I’m missing something. Enid is twenty. Sure, having sex with a man twice your age isn’t great, but surely it’s not that big a deal, is it?

He puts an arm around her, cradling her, and she slowly begins to sob in his arms. Enid suddenly goes from being nervous and squirming to looking like a lamb suckling on a baby bottle. A golden calm settles over her. She is safe, cosy, warm, loved.

We all watch, our breaths held. Roe and I look at each other, dumbfounded. I don’t know what we were expecting, but it wasn’t this.

In a loud whisper, clearly intended for everyone to hear, Aaron tells Enid that he will check back in with her at the end of the meeting, and that they’ll talk about this properly. He disentangles himself and moves down to the next person in the circle.

“Cormac,” he says. It’s one of the silent boys who came in the door with us. “Two truths and a lie.”

“I … play GAA. My favourite superhero is Ant-Man. And … um…”

“Go on, Cormac. It’s fine.”

“Once, I, uh, I…”

“Come on, now.”

“I, uh, shaved my legs. Just to see what it would feel like.”

Roe’s eyes are like saucers. If tensions were high when Enid spoke, they’re at the ceiling now.

“Hey, man.” Aaron claps his hands together in delight. “Cormac! Is that all? Dude! What are you worried about? That’s nothing. That’s just curiosity. Look. You’re an athlete, right? Right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Swimmers shave their legs, did you know that? And, like, tons of other athletes. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean you’re gay. C’mon. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” says Cormac, his voice still uncertain.

“Man, you know as well as I do that there’s no such thing as being naturally gay. I mean, nature would just break down completely, if that were the case, right?” He starts looking at the group, his palms up, giving a “these are just the facts” tone to everything he’s saying.

“Animals wouldn’t reproduce. People wouldn’t reproduce. So if you’re having feelings like that, it’s because there’s a bogey in your radar, y’know what I mean? It’s because there’s all this weird, negative, confusing gunk on your windscreen, and you just need to clear that gunk off.”

He shrugs and smiles. “I mean, otherwise, how would you drive?”

Everyone laughs, and Cormac laughs hardest.

My muscles tense, my fingernails digging half-moon crescents into my palms. I remember talk like this from a few years ago, during the marriage equality referendum. But it always came from the mouths of old men. Never twenty-something Americans in hoodies and Converse.

Aaron keeps going around the room, and the revelations get more and more intense. When Enid first said her