Allison Weissman
Before Hurricane Sandy ripped through New Jersey, before the cracked trees and down power lines—before the week without heat—my best friend Maggie had a treehouse. It loomed over her backyard, slate-blue and tan, like a mountain rising from mist. We were ten, and I wanted to see every inch.
At school, Maggie wore rainbow tutus and teal tights. She used a spell checker and put duct tape on her plantar warts. In the bathroom, she sang songs while she peed, and even now, at 23, I can still hear her tinny voice, her urine, echoing off the tiled walls.
Maggie’s hand shot down through the treehouse trapdoor like a snail poking from its shell. “Are you coming or what?” she said.
The ladder laced up into the floor, straight and rigid like train tracks. Under my sweatshirt, I wore a back brace made of plastic and foam. My scoliosis was severe—my spine, spiraled like the staircase in Maggie’s house. As I climbed, I could feel the brace chafing against my hips, reactivating the pink tender rash beneath.
I spilled flat onto the treehouse floor and turned, unbending, like a stinkbug in the sun. Maggie was already out on the balcony, slipping wet oak leaves between her fingers. It was autumn—two years before the hurricane would come and destroy all this. Over Maggie’s head, the leaves gleamed golden and rust-colored, like rays of light.
“You can really feel them up here!” she called. “That’s how close we are.”
The left side of the balcony didn’t have a railing, and I walked over to that ledge as if it were calling to me. Below, the muddied stones we scraped our sneakers on had nearly dried, and the earth seemed to stretch and fall away, as I imagined what it’d feel like to jump.
Maggie was my first friend who knew, with full confidence, she was bisexual. She’d tell me years later, leaping on a trampoline, hurtling towards the sky, it had always been both. But by the time I let myself admit it—that I was queer, too, and Maggie was the only person in my life who understood me—she was already gone, up and moved to boarding school before the hurricane came. Never even saw the storm.
“Maggie,” My voice dropped off, fell down to the mud stones below. “What’s this ledge?”
“Oh, that’s just for my neighbor, Steven,” Maggie said. “So he has somewhere to go.”
“To go?”
“To pee,” Maggie explained. She took my hand then and guided me back into the treehouse.
“Here,” she said. “I even made one for us!” The floors were dusty. Around the lip of the room, a small shelf was lined with rocks and seashells, and there, in the corner, tucked beneath a plastic patio chair: a terracotta flowerpot, whorled with dark drip stains.
Maggie picked up the pot, gingerly, and placed it on the chair. “See,” she said. “Now you don’t have to go inside! I even have things to wipe with.” She pointed to a crumpled wad of tissues on the shelf. “And a bag for when you’re done.”
I think I laughed. Thought Maggie was kidding.
“Turn around,” she grinned.
And I know I did because I never quite forgot that trickle. The unmistakable sound of piss pouring down—I can hear it still. Maggie singing, “If you sprinkle while you tinkle, please be neat and wipe the seat!”
When she was done, she dumped the piss over the side and came back into the treehouse, electrified. Her pin-straight bob had gone up in static, and she held the flowerpot out to me, beaming. “Your turn!” she said.
Even now, when I think of her—the way she blared her trumpet in band class, spun hula hoops on her slackline, crunched sugar snap peas on the bus—I want to go back and ask her how she did it, how she was always rushing toward herself, becoming.
Because it wasn’t that the pee pot was gross or that the tissues were mysteriously wet or even that my back brace made it hard to squat. I didn’t care about any of this. For years, I’d been building this shell around myself, like an exoskeleton, and I couldn’t bear the thought of letting anyone in, of Maggie turning around while I was peeing and figuring it all out—I was terrified of being known.
It left me alone, in the end. After Maggie moved to boarding school, this other family moved into the house. They had little kids. All these trikes and toy cars out in the drive. I used to wonder if they went up into the treehouse and found Maggie’s flowerpot—if they got it out before the hurricane came and that evergreen smashed the wood to pieces. As a teenager, I told myself they did. That the yellow chrysanthemums in the terracotta flowerpot on their front porch had Maggie growing through them, and when my mother drove me past her house, I got to see her out the window in quick flashes of amber.
But this, too, I know, was nothing more than a failed attempt to will her back into my life, to get the chance to say, I’m here. I’m ready now.
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Allison Weissman (they/them) is a queer writer from New Jersey. They are pursuing a dual-genre MFA in fiction and creative nonfiction at Virginia Commonwealth University. From fall 2023 to spring 2024, they were the senior nonfiction editor at Blackbird, and currently, they serve as assistant art editor at Split Lip Magazine. They are a 2024 Lambda Literary Fellow.