What do you keep under your bed? Just a bunch of shed hair and dust? I think you might be the kind of person to stash some contraband. Diaries or DVDs, or a box full of your old dolls. When I was a kid, I’d hide down there for hours and rehearse conversations. At that time, all the songs on the radio were about homecomings—Come Home this and Baby Come Back that— but it’s true, no one was really home. Everyone was off at work, or at war, or in outer space. Who was left? The children and the cicadas, so they both could do the singing. Ha-ha.
Conversations never go the way you rehearse them. You’re the only one who understands me.
Yours,
Henry
✉
I’ve run into him three times already—by the personal hygiene aisle, the grains, and once more by the foggy tank where the lobsters live and wait for their turn to one day be transformed into pot pie. Each time, he refuses to do the decent thing and look away, or even offer an acknowledging nod or smile. Instead, he stands there looking stupid as all hell.
He finally whispers, “Are you still alive in there?” Which at first I think is directed toward me. Then one of the lobsters starts to flourish an antenna, and I can see him smile through his smudged reflection. For a moment, I think about what we must look like through the glass walls of the tank, crouching beasts with swollen bellies and eyes that blink. I imagine reaching in and extracting one, my claw grasping for hers. I imagine swapping lives: me swimming in the tank, the lobster wearing my skirt.
“W-A-Y-L-A.”
When I say nothing, he turns his whole body toward me, which is the first time I notice his uniform, the chipped ink on his name tag. “What-Are-You-Looking-At?” he explains. As if it’s something I should have known.
I scurry away without a word.
✉
i got your email last night and didnt get the chance to send anything back until now because i was worried someone would walk in and see. i liked the thing you said about the cicadas and i thought about it all morning.
whenever i take the bus i’ll usually avoid anyone carrying a baby because their noises make my skin crawl. but today a lady and a bunch of her kids sat beside me and i noticed she was wearing a hearing aid. her son started laughing and i watched her turn the volume all the way up.
im thinking about getting a real job soon so maybe i wont be able to talk to you as much. the other day i did a freshman’s algebra homework and he bought me two sodas. i took the other one home because i had no one to give it to. maybe i could be a tutor. it was the first time anyone’s ever really thanked me for something. made me wish i could hear certain things a little bit louder.
my mattress is on the floor. i dont keep anything under my bed.
✉
This is in the part of town where nothing’s ever renovated. You could take a long walk and convince yourself you’ve entered Victorian times, only to step inside one of the fortresses and find yourself at an Aldi. Everything unreal and hollow and breakable, like one of those abandoned movie sets.
The store’s fake marble floors squeal beneath my feet the sound of a million dying mice.
I know him of course,have known him since we were children, though I’m not sure if he recognizes me from the nine years of schooling we’ve endured together. I know where he usually likes to sit, when he got his braces taken out, his friends, his name. It’s not until we both make a sharp left toward the produce section that I realize I’m not the one being followed. In fact, it’s the other way around. The air is still wet and thick from the hoses that mist the vegetables, so there’s the illusion of two ghosts sizing one another up from either side of the tomatoes. All I can think is, This guy needs to wipe that look from his face, and He’s lucky I’m not one of those kids in our class that’ll stick your finger in the pencil sharpener if you stare at them funny or those girls who snatch entire locks of your hair for no reason other than to prove that they can. If I were one of those girls, and he raised his eyebrows at me like that and kept pursing his lips the way he did, then he’d have no hair left. Middle left, last spring, no one, Matteo.
But then I realize I’m the one following him, and Matteo must be freaking out trying to place me in his mind. He must be thinking: not the one that plays the sax, not debate club—right, she’s the one who wears the same torn-up jacket every day. Same shoes, same shirt too sometimes. Free lunch.
I might be right because the first thing he says is: “You look different.”
Now I’m the one with a look on my face. So he keeps going. “You’re dressed like a mom. And you smell like a donut. You meeting a guy or something?”
I try to lift my shopping basket and hide as much of my blouse as I can. A mom! One thing my mother’s never going to do is wear a blouse. For two months now, she’s been cloistered in her bedroom wailing and whimpering over Diana and Dodi. Now and then I can get her to open the door—her nose flushed the color of a ripe cherry—to grab some pizza, restock her tissues.
For some mysterious reason, I tell him the truth. “Yes.”
“Oh, for real?”
“Yes.”
If within the brick walls of our school I have been christened The One with the Tattered Clothing, then it goes without saying that Matteo is The Gay One. Which is fine by me. If Sweet Lady Di says it’s okay, then I do too, my mother once said.
I resist the urge to count the tiles, an anxious practice carried over from childhood. Then the world seems to unpause. A middle-aged man in a matching blue uniform claps Matteo on the shoulder and tells him he is needed at the bakery.
An announcement comes over the speakers: could a Mrs. Murphy come collect her child from the express line?
✉
Who needs a real job? Some people work eight, ten, twelve hours a day and come home with nothing to show for it. And wouldn’t you know it, I’m one of them. If it made people happy, they wouldn’t call it work.
It’s no soda, but I hope my last deposit cheered you up a bit. I’ll send even more than that if it keeps your emails coming.
What do you say we finally meet face to face? I can make a reservation at Chateau Alain, Saturday at 7. The steaks there are so beautifully cooked you’d think they were raw. If you do show up, wear some kind of bow. But I’d like to think I would recognize you in an instant.
Yours,
Henry
✉
The important thing to remember—to always remember no matter what—is that coincidences do exist. There are entire cultures that believe in their power and do everything they can to make them happen, contradictory as it sounds. Destiny and all that. Coincidences keep meteors from hitting the earth. So I’m not surprised that Matteo and I are on the same bus now that his shift is over—rather, I’m surprised to see him beckon me over with a jerk of his head, which makes him look like a marionette.
We walked the entire way to the bus stop together. Whether or not I was pleased with this was beside the point. Several times, I tried and failed to walk ahead of him, a task which his freakishly long legs made impossible. The tree-lined streets whizzed by faster than usual this way. This is not to say we walked in silence; in fact, Matteo played a lonely game of twenty questions while I cleaned my fingernails and ripped the supermarket tag from my blouse. Who I was meeting, where I was meeting him, if he was a boyfriend, boss, or fellow secret agent, was I still listening—he was desperate to know these things and more.
When I first met Matteo—that is, when we were both eight years old—I had the habit of falling madly in love with anyone who shared a desk with me. A boy would ask to borrow a sheet of notebook paper, and I’d immediately be transported to the fourth year of our domestic partnership, when we would have grown comfortable enough to snore and pass gas openly but still be able to laugh at our recycled jokes and memories of childhood. The first and only desk partner to put these delusions to the test was Matteo, who smelled like lunch and dripped with hair gel. He was the type of kid to bring a blanket to school, willing his teachers to bore him to sleep. At first, I would constantly cover for him, hoping he’d at least like me, think I was one of the good ones. He is completely and truly the same now. As for me, the jury’s still out.
Now, we sit with an empty seat between us and listen to disco hits through the jangling speakers of the six o’clock bus.
“I feel kinda bad about the mom thing,” he says. “From earlier. I’ve just never seen such a big bow on a shirt before.”
“Okay,” I say. Gay, I think.
“Oh shit… D-A-C! Quick!”
What?—Duck And Cover! Matteo deflates in his seat like one of those car dealership balloons. He takes cover behind both of his elbows, and I don’t doubt for a second that he is being completely serious. I crouch down beside him, the vibration of the bus rattling me to the bone.
For a moment, I wish he wasn’t covering his face. I wonder what expression is playing out behind his eyes.
We don’t sit back up until the traffic light turns green and the bus jolts forward.
“What was that?”
Now it’s my turn to do the interrogating. I ask him if he’s scared of birds, and he says nothing. I ask if he recognized someone through the window, and again, he says nothing, but this nothing feels more serious than the other nothing.
Minutes pass and the bus makes several stops before he says, “My dad.”
I’m at a loss for words, so I try to make listening noises—hm, mm, tsk, hum.
“What are you, beatboxing? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just move on.”
I consider moving on. “Is it because you’re gay?”
“Wait. What?”
“The awkwardness with your dad—is it because you’re gay?”
“Wait. Who told you that?”
I consider what a good idea it would have been to move on. “I thought everyone knew.”
“Well, that’s just great,” he says.
It reaches me secondhand: I’m shocked that he’s shocked. Matteo, to me, is gay the same way grass is green, or summers are warm.
The bus howls to a stop.
“It’s okay if he doesn’t get you,” I say. “Conversations never go the way you rehearse them.”
“What does that even mean?”
No idea, I tell him.
Just then, the seat between us is seized by an old woman with cheeks the size and color of apples. She opens a newspaper so comically large it reminds me of those blueprints from heist movies. At this angle, her body eclipses my view of Matteo, so I have no choice but to look glumly out the window. Outside, everything is lit by the color of beetroot, and the clouds sag with the rain to come. I poke at the glass. I entertain a passing thought about the lobsters.
✉
do you know where thirst comes from?
there are receptors in your brain that tell you when you’re low on fluids. when you get older those receptors start to wear out and you’re less likely to know when you need water. for example my mother opens the door once a week so that might be when her receptors go off. when i was little i went on a camping trip for school and we had to watch all sorts of educational movies about how to not die in the woods in case you run into a wild animal or an old man (no offense). so anyway one of the movies was about how to stay hydrated. it was pretty dumb because everyone knows you just need to drink water to stay hydrated but i guess the question is what happens if you run out. which is what our teacher asked us. something along the lines of is it better to ration out the water or just quench your thirst all at once. i was the only one who voted for the first option because i thought it would be smart to do everything in moderation.
i guess that was a silly thing to think. right after that we watched a video about how there have been tons of hikers found dead from dehydration even though they still had water left in their canteens. i think about it all the time now. moral of the story is just don’t go hiking i guess.
okay. chateau alain tomorrow at seven. i’ll be the one with legs and teeth and hair. joking. i’ll wear a bow.
✉
Of course we get off at the same stop. I have to take painfully large strides in order to keep up with Matteo, but for the most part, we walk side by side and let the crickets do the talking.
Then he says, “Something good is going to happen to us soon.”
The trees are dripping with water. A few blocks away is the side of town where people walk dogs the size of cockroaches. That’s one way to tell a place is changing: the animals get eating disorders. It’s getting dark enough that the street lamps automatically flicker on. When I look at Matteo, his skin and hair are glowing orange.
“And how the hell would you know that?”
“Jupiter is about to go into retrograde, duh,” he pauses. “I saw it in that lady’s newspaper.”
I can’t help it. For the first time all day, I laugh.
Matteo’s guts rumble loud enough for both of us to hear it. “Mind if I join you guys for dinner?”
“I wish.”
“Ha!” He clutches at his chest. “You wish?”
“No, I just,” I start. “It would be nice to have someone else there. Don’t have a heart attack.”
“Don’t worry about me having a heart attack.”
We kitty-corner through a patch of wet grass.
“God, you’re just too funny,” I say. I make up a tune and hum it to myself.
Matteo is still laughing. “You said you wish.”
I start again. “If you were lost in the woods, and you only had one bottle full of water, would you try to save it or drink it all at once?”
We pause at a traffic light and watch a chain of children hold hands to cross the street.
“You must’ve lost your mind.”
“Just, which one would you do?”
“Knowing me,” he says, “I would drink the whole damn thing.”
The bow on my blouse seems to have grown to the size of a water buffalo. I can tell we’re about to part ways because Matteo turns to face me and we stand three feet apart like prom. I can tell he can tell I’m thinking about the bow. Like a mom, but really this time, I watch his body shrink as he walks home, until he’s smaller than a fingernail. I wonder if he and his father will be arriving at the same time, and what they will talk about, if they will talk about anything at all. I wonder what conversations really can be rehearsed. In the dress rehearsals of my mind, maybe Matteo would have said farewell instead of S-Y-L.
He turns around right then, when he’s even smaller than a grain of rice, and shouts something to me. I can’t make out his exact words. From this distance, he looks like a child.
I nearly crush a snail with my shoe, and when I squat to inspect it, I see it’s carrying a small piece of a leaf. I let it go on its way, perhaps back to its colony inside of a hollow tree. It’s nice to be going somewhere. It’s good to be needed. I step over the snail and try to think of something sad to say about it but can only come up with jokes.
