Kaleidoscope
I want you to take a peek at this. It’s a little device, and in it are three little mirrors, each their own color. Looking in, at where these mirrors intersect, you might be able to see what the light is trying to tell you. The light is always trying to tell us something, you see, to show us something. It’s in a bit of a pickle, though, because the only way we can see the light is if it’s bouncing off something else. So, we have this: three mirrors, all working together to try and distill exactly how the light wants to be known. We’ll take it one at a time, and then, with all of them together, you can tell me what you see.
This one is eggshell white, like the hallway. He always liked looking at the ducks on it as he walked to and from his room. They were in flight, but frozen, captured on the wallpaper—moving, but going nowhere.
Janine brings another martini to her lips. Her last one had just fallen, its rim stained with a kiss of death, and its corpse had been placed amongst the others. It was Portia who insisted on never refreshing the same glass over and over again—“I like to get a clear visual of the kill count,” she’d say whenever a new visitor, like Janine two months ago, comes to one of her Wednesday chats—and all the other ladies quickly caught on. Portia has enough to spare, anyways. She buys her glassware in bulk, same as her hair products, liquor, and energy bars. There isn’t a more battle-hardened Costco card in all of Westchester County than the one Portia Hellum keeps in her wallet.
So here Janine Chamberlain sits, on a Wednesday evening, in a circle with four other women who are all presiding over the mass grave of Maybelline-wounded martini glasses. And to make matters worse, Lydia Solomon has just come back from the kitchen with a tray of new recruits, fresh from the draft. Janine eyeballs them, barely halfway through the first sip of her new glass. She feels the vodka flash freeze in her stomach, as if her body is starting to reject it, but she drinks on.
Portia snatches a martini from the tray and slides it into both hands, like a monk holding a candle during mass. “Thank you bunches, Lydia,” she says. “I’d do it myself, but my ankles still ache like hell after the wringer Emilio put me through this morning.”
That’s a different name than last week, Janine clocks, unsurprised. All the women in her circle know that Portia collects personal trainers like merit badges, all employed in a litany of different sports and activities. She spends her mornings swimming or cycling or fencing with some 6’4” eyeful in tight shorts—the same mornings that all the other women in the room spend cleaning bathrooms or bagging groceries at Shoprite or trying to sell dictionaries over the phone. It was in this way that they started to feel like merit badges, too. “You all make me feel so grounded,” Portia would say.
Lydia finds her seat, in between Marie and Everly. “Oh, it is absolutely no problem, Portia,” she says. “I only hope I can do yours justice.”
“I wouldn’t go that far!” Gabriella titters from across the circle. “I don’t think anyone could even come close to a Portia Hellum martini.”
Portia laughs. “I’m flattered. Please, though, give Lydia some credit. I don’t worry about the casing of the bullet that blasts through my heart, same way I don’t care about the drink I’m pouring down my gullet.” She raises her glass, leading her congregation. “As long as it gets me drunk!”
“Amen!” all the women shout, with Janine joining in a half-second late. She had been too busy thinking about Emilio. An Italian? she considers. Or a Spaniard? Latin, maybe? Or is that too much of a stereotype?
But now she’s conscious, fully present in the room, and trying to shake the image of Emilio with a rose clutched between his teeth out of her mind. Portia’s eyes make their way to Janine’s, and the smallest twitch of intention shimmers across her face. Much in the same way a hunter does when it is spotted by its prey—á la the consciousness Janine has just regained—Portia has a decision to make: let it run, or shoot.
“So, Janine?” Bang. “How is that son of yours?”
It’s not so dire, however—Portia doesn’t know it yet, but she’s misfired. She could’ve asked, “Read any good books lately?” and blown off an ear. “Any updates on that promotion?” and she would’ve shot Janine in the stomach. “How are you and the husband doing?” and she would’ve gotten her clean through the skull. But she chose this one. She was aiming for the heart, and she’s about to get it.
“Portia, don’t get me started, because then I’d never stop,” Janine says. She’s careful about her tone—she makes it sound like her child could be a troublemaker, a real brat.
“Oh, well, I’m sure we’d want to hear it,” Portia says. “To support you.”
Keeping the smile off her face is like trying to pin a tiger to the ground. So why not just let it go? “If you insist,” Janine purrs. “Because we’ve just got him to skip a grade.”
The women give a collective hum of intrigue. Gabriella nearly chokes on an olive.
“It’s the most miraculous thing,” Janine continues. “He doesn’t even need to study. He comes home, sits down at his desk, and does all his homework for the day in half an hour. He’s never got anything below a 95 on anything. So me and Omar just figured, why not fast track him?”
“Wouldn’t that, um…” Everly smacks her lips. “Is that overwhelming for him?”
“Not in the slightest. It’s like nothing’s changed!” Janine exclaims. “He comes home, finishes his work, and spends the rest of the evening reading his own books, or doing whatever housework that’s lying around—which he always does as soon as he’s asked. He’s never a drain on us. We tell him he can eat whatever he likes, within our budget, but he just insists on sticking to the same chicken and rice every evening, the same bagel every morning, and the same sandwich in his lunchbox every school day. It’s like he knows what his distractions are, and just puts his energy exactly where it’s needed, every time.
“I am just… I’m in such awe of him. He breezes through everything. Omar and I talked about bumping him up again, see him be a Senior next fall—God knows his guidance counselor is all over it—but we don’t want to alienate him. One grade up is enough.”
Based on their faces, it’s as if Janine has just drawn and quartered Portia in front of them. She who keeps them around to feel grounded, and she who, for the sake of her ego, must repeatedly remind them that they are on the ground, has finally lost a duel of virtues. She can’t throw a pickleball trophy back in Janine’s face or the plane tickets to whatever island in the Caribbean her husband is taking her to next. She can’t even riposte with her own child, who, Janine knows, has just been cast into the ensemble of her school’s musical—not the lead, not a side character, but the ensemble. She has nothing.
But Janine has gotten cocky. Portia has the biggest firepower, the most sought-after weapons in her arsenal, and they have blinded Janine of her skill. Nothing beats pure technique, and Portia knows it.
Portia takes a sip from her martini, unfazed. “That is just fantastic, Janine! Where does your son go? For school?”
Janine continues to smile. “Ossining. He’s in this wonderful program of—”
“A public school, Janine? No wonder he’s breezing through it all! Those places basically give diplomas away for free.” Portia swivels to meet the eyes of the other ladies, pulling in their attention. “My brother’s son went to a public school up in Buffalo, and there was this kid who missed nearly a third of all the days he had to be in school. I believe his name was Luis. A third of the days, he missed! And the days he was there, he was skipping class to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom! How delinquent do you have to be to be a teenager in 2024 and still smoke cigarettes?
“He had no drive at all. No aspirations. But he was up there this past summer, graduation day, with tobacco on his breath and a big fat mustard stain on his robes. Didn’t hold him back a grade or anything.”
“Oh, my,” Marie says. “That’s just horrible.”
“It just is, isn’t it, Marie?” Portia meets Janine’s eyes again—ones that are beginning to narrow at the edges. “Your son sounds like a wonderful young man, Janine, but putting him in that place is like asking Michael Phelps to cross the kiddie pool. Of course he’s going to excel! The bar for accomplishment is so low they’re letting twerps like Luis Alvarez through!”
“The best thing to do for him—and this is just my opinion, but it has worked for my Gracie—is surround him with kids who are in the same league. Public school works for some, but if your son is the genius you think he is, then that situation is not going to do him any good in the long run. And it sounds like it hasn’t been.”
Everly scratches at the mole on her chin. “Where does Gracie go again, Portia?”
“Renner Academy,” Portia says, veiling her smug grin with another sip of her martini. Even in spite of her technique, she can’t help but flash her premium-grade firepower yet again.
“I’ve heard great things,” Lydia says. “How is Gracie doing there?”
“She’s found a home away from home—just a little problem with a drama teacher who seems to think she’s some two-bit talent, when I have heard her practicing her arias deep into the night and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been possessed by some spirit, some goddess of song. I have a meeting with some administration this coming Tuesday…”
And it fades into static. Janine is staring at the table in front of them, past the graveyard of glasses, deep into the wood grain. Her head is full of a lot of things—self-doubts, witty rebukes, rationalizations—but they all distill into one, unconscious thought.
Her merit badge has peeled off. She needs to fasten it tighter.
This one is a coal grey. #424549, to be exact. It’s the color of raw, unspent energy, waiting to be set alight and have its truest colors be witnessed. He always felt like it was a slate that he could put anything on. Anything was possible here—but none of it real.
The moonlight cast pale rays of blue, purple, and green through the great stained glass windows of the throne room of Castle Thornbellow. The four figures within were not as tranquil, however.
King Horace held a blade to Moira the Swift’s neck. Moira dared not take too deep a breath, lest her throat swell to meet the metal—the steel was coated in a sickly green, a poison, set in deep contrast to Moira’s purple skin. “One step further, and her blood stains my rug!” King Horace shouted, his spittle careening into the air.
“You don’t have the guts,” Isri spat. Her fingers danced in the air, fire trailing behind them, as she readied a spell from her tome. “The only thing under that crown is a coward!”
“So bold, young Isri. So full of words.” Horace quickly gestured to the man at her side. “Do you have so little to say to me, Drykand? Do you insist on letting this amateur sorcerer speak for you?”
Drykand’s rapier thrummed with impatience. The swordsman wanted nothing more than to draw it and drive it right into the heart of King Horace, but reason trumped his hatred. He knew the plan. He knew that Moira was not as helpless as she seemed to Horace—only as helpless as she wanted to seem.
He took a step forward. King Horace took a step back, dragging Moira with him. “You confuse my silence for idleness, Father, when the good work has already been done,” Drykand said. “It’s happening as we speak.”
“What?” Confusion twisted Horace’s features. “What are you talking about, boy?”
“Your people, Father. That crown means nothing now. Your barracks are burning at their hands, right at this moment, led by Rennara Goldshimmer in the name of her god.”
“No. No, that can’t be true,” Horace murmured.
Isri’s spell now sat in her hand, ready to be cast. “You bet it is, fucko! And you’re gonna burn with them!”
The King’s brow tightened. “I will not accept this! Not from a bastard son!”
Drykand’s anger flared again, like adding straw to a burning pyre. But he kept it in place, as he spotted something—a glint. “There is no stopping it,” he continued. “Revolution is upon you. They have likely already made it into your banks, and are pilfering your gold as we speak.” He let a smile grace his lips. “Just as Moira’s dagger has already made it into her palm.”
The purple horned rogue flashed with motion, slashing King Horace’s leg. He screamed out and stumbled away, as Moira the Swift immediately found herself back at her friends’ sides. “Let’s get him,” she said.
Dyrkand drew his rapier. Half a dozen of Horace’s crownsguard dashed into the room. Isri’s hands erupted with flame, shooting towards the King. Moira drew her shortsword to meet her dagger.
“Roll initiative!” Elliot shouts.
The call erupts into screams, a blend of excitement and worry. Leslie squeals and spins in her chair—her room is only illuminated by the pulsing light of her computer screen as the green rings that signal her friends’ cries jump up and down.
“Half a dozen guards?” Evi exclaims. Leslie can hear their dice clacking from over their microphone. “And King Whore-Ass? Elliot, there’s three of us!”
“You’ll be fine,” Elliot says. “Let me just go get the battle map stuff ready.”
Leslie scoffs and scoops up a die of her own from her desk. “We will be fine. Just to spite you.”
Their laughter is bounced off the satellites, bridging the physical distance between them—not insurmountable distance, but with the thought of asking their parents to drive that far every Friday to play Dungeons & Dragons, there might as well be oceans between them. In their estimation, what they have is more than good enough.
Kiera’s green ring blips. “Leslie, can we talk about how cool you are? Like, those lines?”
“Oh, my god, yeah!” Evi chimes in. “That was so rad. I got a fifteen, Elliot, by the way.”
Leslie sputters. “It isn’t that— I guess— It’s good, but it isn’t, like, a big deal. And I got an eleven.”
“Drykand is, like, the coolest motherfucker on the planet, though,” Evi says. “God, I hope he sticks his rapier right through his dad’s fucking brain.”
“I got a nine,” Kiera adds. “You should, like, act, Leslie. Or write a book. This is some Shakespeare stuff.”
Her friends can’t see her, so Leslie doesn’t have to put on a smile. In fact, many of the things she has just said as Drykand have been written down in her notebook for months. Months of planning, in and out of character, to help Drykand and his fellow adventurers destroy the kingdom that had taken so much from all of them—Isri’s guild, Moira’s honor, Rennara’s temple, and Drykand’s mother—and months of writing and erasing, trying to figure out exactly what Leslie wants Drykand to say once he finally gets his wretched father at the end of his plus-two rapier.
But her friends’ praise doesn’t register. Something is missing. Someone. As Kiera and Evi strategize, Leslie’s eyes find the scarlet pennant for Ossining High School hanging above her desk.
A new image blips onto the screen. Elliot has turned his camera on, and after a brief glimpse of his forehead, he moves the frame to capture the battlemap. He has laid out a dry erase sheet onto his twin bed, etched with a grid of one inch squares, and designed it to look like the throne room of Castle Thornbellow. Six grey blobs of plastic flank a miniature with a golden crown—Horace and his crownsguard—and three other miniatures, sculpted and painted into the forms of Isri, Moira, and Drykand, stand to face their foes.
Evi yelps. “Oh my lord. I am shaking right now, Elliot.”
“Would it ease you,” Elliot says, “to learn that King Horace and his Flamewrapped Greatsword of Wounding will be going first?”
Evi and Kiera half-fake a few sobs. “This is going to be horrible,” Kiera bawls.
“Ughhhh!” Evi’s mic picks up a sharp snap—Leslie thinks it might be their pencil breaking. “Dude, I wish we had our fucking cleric right now!” they shout.
“He’s here in spirit,” Elliot says. He holds up something to his camera. As the focus shifts, Leslie sees that it’s the miniature of Rennara Goldshimmer, their party’s healer and champion of the God of Light. She and Drykand had once spent a night talking by the campfire, and Rennara held him as his stoic façade crumbled away and he wept for the father he wished he had. Leslie had actually cried that night, as she embodied Drykand’s woes, and then again after hanging up from the call, embodying her own.
Elliot pulls Rennara’s miniature out of view. “I hope we’ll get to use it again soon.”
Kiera sends a GIF of a cat running around in panic in the text channel. “How is he doing, by the way, Leslie?” she asks.
“I think he’s doing okay.” And now, it is only him that is in her mind—Drykand and Horace are like some distant port on the horizon, as Leslie sails in the other direction. “It just sounded like… like, he’s really busy. The new school he’s in just has a lot, and he has to, like, help out at home a lot more, too.”
“That sucks,” Kiera says. “Are you texting him and stuff? I sent him something yesterday and he hasn’t responded yet.”
“Not… not really.” Leslie turns on her phone and sees the text she sent before the session started: wish you were here!!!! Her iMessage says it’s still on “Delivered,” not “Read.”
“Well, I hope we can get Rennara back,” Evi says. “Do you know when that might be, Leslie? I miss her. And him, obviously.”
“I don’t know.” Never, is the first thing that flashes across Leslie’s mind. She feels herself sailing ever onward, always on the lookout, until pitching right off the edge of the world. “Maybe in a couple weeks. I’ll ask.” And the answer will be “I can’t,” or no answer at all, she thinks. She then realizes she is mad at him, and guilt swells through her veins.
“Well,” Elliot starts, “King Horace is going to begin his turn by—”
“Wait! My spell!” Evi shouts. “I said I casted a spell before combat started, you dick. I roll to hit first.”
Elliot sighs. “Well, Evi, he wasn’t really surprised on his turn—”
“Oh, come on, Elliot—”
“I’m just saying, it’s the rules—”
“Let me cast my spell!”
And it fades into static. Leslie is transfixed on the pennant. He isn’t here to play Rennara—that’s not something she realized would even be a possibility. Every vision of the future of this game held him in it. Every vision of the future had him in it, period. Leslie opens her Notes app and looks down at the paragraphs held within. I’ve been feeling… I’ve been thinking… I want to talk about…
She will ask her dad to drop her off at his house tomorrow. She will make that future.
This one is a pinkish-orange, exactly the color of his pale hand wrapped around the lightbulb of his desk lamp, the yellow light filtering through the flesh. He would do it just to see that color again, that muted glow, and then return to the task at hand.
It smells of sweat and weed in Jarek’s room, and Simon has partaken in both. Now, Simon watches Jarek walk naked to the window. “This thing sticks in the summer,” Jarek grunts. His fingers struggle against the metal lifts at the base of the window frame.
Simon lets his eyes wander. “No worries,” he says. Every time he’s found himself in this spot, legs twisted in Jarek’s bedsheets, he finds something new to look at. The walls are a frenetic collage of the last forty years of counterculture—Liz Phair screams into a mic beside a poster for Mulholland Drive, and Keith Haring dancers are pasted around a blown-up picture of Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show—and this time, he spots a Phish poster buried beneath a collage of Doordash receipts, as well as a polaroid of Jarek with his arm around Taylor Mac.
The window opens with a snap, and Jarek turns. The light in here is socialized into a dozen different sources, through Christmas lights, artisanal candles, and salt lamps, and they turn Jarek’s pale skin into a mosaic of warm colors. His paunch bustles with an arrow of hair, leading a happy trail up his torso—with the belly button in the middle, Simon smiles. Like a horseshoe crab with a lobotomy, he thinks. Through the window, August in Williamsburg hums like a heart monitor, with a drone one tends to tune out jabbed with darts of sound that remind you it’s alive. Right now, a Hasidic man shouts at a van that has stopped in the middle of a crosswalk.
Jarek moves towards the record player next to the door. “Music?” Simon wagers.
That makes Jarek smile. “Undoubtedly,” he says, and Simon finds himself staring. Jarek has a face that turns a nine a.m. shave into a stubble by noon, and a smile that only shows the top row of his teeth. Simon loves those things about him—he hasn’t quite spoken that word into being yet, but he has committed himself to it in his mind. He loves Jarek’s arms. He loves the hair on his stomach. He loves how he is not ashamed to let his breath shudder when Simon’s hand breaches his waistband. He also loves the way he is now carefully extracting an Anita Baker vinyl from its sleeve, making sure not to let the oils of his skin touch the record’s grooves.
Soon, The Songstress is quietly playing, and Jarek lays beside Simon again. The Hasidic man has been replaced by a passing karaoke pedicab.
“I have an inquiry,” Jarek starts.
Simon shifts to turn his body fully towards Jarek. “Do inquire.”
Jarek smiles again. “It’s a sort of ritual.”
“Oh, no. Is that what the candles are about? Am I an offering?”
“Oh, well, that’s a bad word to use,” Jarek says through a scoff. “It’s like a tradition. For new people.”
Simon’s grin dips the smallest amount. His eyes flicker across Jarek’s face. “Am I… you feel like I’m new?”
“Well, yes. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I want to try and defeat that newness a bit. Wrestle it away.”
Simon smacks his lips and looks around the room. Kurt Cobain catches his eye. “Okay. I understand. You’re just… I don’t know, worrying me with the preamble.”
“I’m complicating things. I’ll just ask.” Jarek clears his throat. “This is the third time we’ve, you know, been together, and I feel like that’s always the point where I start to be able to turn my brain off during it. I start to know what you want without asking. Asking is great, obviously, but I start to be cognizant of what you want from me without having to put the words in the air. So, whenever I hit that ‘three’ checkpoint with a person, I want to find out how he found out what he wants.”
Simon stalls. “Whenever,” he said. “A person.” How often is he giving this talk? He smacks his lips. “What does that mean?”
“I know it’s sappy and faux-deep and woo-woo,” Jarek continues, fluttering his fingers around his head to try and capture the ethereality of his words, “but I think getting to the point where we can really be truly vulnerable like this with, you know, another man… that’s a really, really powerful thing. So, I want to know what your first step was. When you started to find your want in the world.”
Simon shifts in the bed. He sits up and rests his arm on his knees. “Jarek, are you just… you want to know how I lost my virginity with another guy? That’s what you’re asking?”
“I guess so, yeah. But I think that term’s a little, I don’t know, invariable. It doesn’t work all the time, especially when it comes to us.”
Then why didn’t you just fucking ask that in the first place? “Okay. Sure. It was in high school. We were study buddies and we gave each other blowjobs. That was the first anything.”
Jarek takes a pause, and Simon feels him trying to stare into him. Like he thinks he can solve a problem by peering into my brain through my eye sockets. God, I hate it when he does that.
Jarek sits up too now, cross legged. “I feel like you got a little cold there.”
“Because you’re speaking in fucking riddles! I don’t come here to fuck a Sphinx!”
“Is… what…” Jarek’s brow furrows and he looks up at the ceiling. “Is that the only thing you come here for?”
“Jesus, no, but, like—”
“I’m just trying to understand you more, Simon.”
“What, are you unsatisfied with my answer, then?” Simon finds himself laughing. “Was it not getting to the essence of the matter, Jarek? Did you require some more extrapolation on the… nature of my sexual zeitgeist?”
Jarek starts to stand up. “You are plenty happy to talk about yourself, your family, school, your art, but as soon as I actually ask you a question about any of it, you give me a half-assed answer. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“I don’t have to make sense to you.”
Jarek is looking out the window now. Past him, Simon sees a drunk couple stumble along the sidewalk. They laugh, one of them a cackle and the other a sort of squeal, and a new Anita Baker song starts—“You’re the Best Thing Yet,” it goes.
Jarek’s shoulders slowly rise and fall with his breathing. Simon can hear his heartbeat in his ears.
Finally, Jarek turns. He speaks slowly. “I am interested in you, Simon. I’m sorry that I expressed that in a weird way.”
Simon sighs. His eyes trace the edges of Jarek’s jaw, the constellations of stubble, and then find his eyes. Brown. Fuck. “It was in a very weird way.”
“It was.”
“But I…” I love that brown. “I shouldn’t have made it a thing. I’m sorry.”
Jarek smiles, squeezing the corners of his eyes, and he quickly lies back down in the bed. An arm goes around Simon and pulls him closer.
Simon’s fingers caress the hair on Jarek’s stomach, petting the horseshoe crab around its wound. “Do you want to hear, like, the real version?”
Simon only hears the sound of Jarek’s head moving against the pillowcase—a nod.
“Well, I had a crush on him for a while. I think I was smart enough to know that that was what it was. I had seen porn, too, and he kept coming to mind whenever I watched it. But we were both quiet. We both didn’t have a lot of friends. So, I just sort of stewed on it. I would watch the porn and sort of imagine, like, teaching him what to do—which was dumb, since I didn’t even know what I was doing, but that was what I was thinking of. I wanted to be the one to show him how good this sort of thing could feel.
“Then, my mom came home one day and said she had run into a Mrs. Chamberlain, whose son went to my school, and it came up that I wasn’t doing too good in my math class. That school was really tough—my mom only put me in there because we had the money, not because I was particularly, like, gifted at anything. Mrs. Chamberlain had apparently volunteered her son to tutor me, some “super whiz” my mom called him. They had already set a date. And I recognized that last name.
“Four days later, I was in his bedroom. We were sitting on the bed, feet away from each other. I could cross the distance like that and realize everything I had been jerking off to for a month. But I didn’t, which was probably the rational thing to do. We just did our work, and went home, and our moms had already scheduled the next study session. It took five of them for him to say something that wasn’t about precalc.”
Jarek shifts. “What was it?”
“He asked if I had ever friend-zoned someone before,” Simon airs. He chuckles. “I obviously had not. He started talking about some situation he was in, if he made some right decision, but I didn’t hear all of it. I only heard that he had said no to being in a relationship with a girl. That was the inch I needed. So, I kissed him. And he kissed me back.”
“We did that for a bit, and then I pulled away and started to unbutton his pants. Where that confidence came from, I don’t know, but he started to help me get his pants off, no words between us, and soon I was blowing him. And it was horrible. I couldn’t figure out how to get my teeth out of the way, and he was uncircumcised, which I had never seen in any of the videos I’d watched. I had no idea what I was doing. Then, I heard him say really softly, ‘You can stop.’ I nearly started crying. I moved away, but then he moved towards me. ‘Let me try,’ he said. And we started unbuttoning my pants, and soon his mouth was on me. He wasn’t amazing at it either, but I came so quickly it was embarrassing. And then we were done.”
Anita Baker is playing “Feel the Need” now, but Simon feels like he’s there again, walking down the stairs from his study buddy’s room.
“Thank you for telling me that, Simon,” Jarek says. “Where… where did it go from there?”
“His dad drove me home.”
“But, did you share that with him again?”
“No.”
“Hm. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I never even looked at him again. I couldn’t.
“What was his name?”
Simon tells him. Jarek reaches over to grab his phone and starts typing into Google. “Oh, my,” he says after a moment. “He’s in pre-med. And he only has an Instagram. He’s one of those people who only ever post pictures of sunsets and trees, and those posts are scarce anyways…”
And it fades into static. Simon finds himself staring at the Polaroid he spotted earlier, and he realizes he will never be able to tell Jarek “I love you” and mean it, if they ever even get that far. He is less than the sum of his parts, Simon thinks.
He will do nothing about it. He is stuck in the car, looking up at the tall man’s eyes, his study buddy’s father. He feels them penetrate him, unearth him. “I’d like to show you something,” he had said. “If you’re comfortable with it.” And he wishes he had said yes. He wishes he had let the tall man pull into the corner of a parking lot, instead of insisting on his curfew. He wishes he had been taught, so he could have met his study buddy’s gaze in the hallway, pulled him away, and showed him what he had learned.
I wonder if you feel like you know the light now. The truth is, I don’t. I could look at a million more mirrors—forest greens, sky blues, sanitized whites—and I still don’t think I would. But maybe I should try. Maybe it’s the trying that matters.
Thank you for trying.
Nathaniel Kenny is a junior at SUNY New Paltz, where he’s pursuing a dual degree in English and Philosophy with a minor in Creative Writing. He’s been published before in Tych Lit, as well as in his school’s literary journal, the Stonesthrow Review. He loves spending his time with his girlfriend, with new weird books and movies, and trying to write in styles he’s not used to.
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