cradled his head in his hands. “Don’t remind me.”
“Sorry.” I wasn’t.
He smiled wryly. “You know, I saw her again.”
“You mean when the middle school band played for May Day? I saw her too. I thought of you.”
“No,” he said. “Later. The summer before senior year. I ran into her at the grocery store.”
“Oh.”
“At first, I did a one-eighty. I was too embarrassed to face her. But she stood right behind me in the checkout line. ‘Is that who I think it is?’ she said. ‘Can it be?’ This was during my punk phase, mind you. I think I only had about seventy percent of my hair.”
“I remember.” I’d been the one to shave it off, cross-eyed on stolen Xanax.
“And you know what she did? She reached out and touched it. ‘All the teachers have bets on how their kids will turn out,’ she told me. ‘I think I just lost.’ She was smiling when she said it, and I could see that she was wearing a plastic retainer. God, I was dizzy. ‘How did you think I’d turn out?’ I managed to ask. She started laughing. ‘I thought you’d be a veterinarian.’ And we both started laughing, and she patted my wrist and told me, ‘Take care.’”
“That’s actually rather romantic.”
“I know, right? And she was just as beautiful as I remembered. You always expect to be disappointed, you know, like once you grow up and look back on the shit you used to worship. But even though she was definitely older, I could still see it.” He waved his hands in the air. “And I remember exactly what she was buying too: disposable razors, frozen macaroni and cheese, a bar of Dove soap, and one clementine. The kind that come in the orange mesh bag. She was buying just one.” He shook his head.
“I’m jealous,” I said. And I was: All my childhood crushes had ended not in heartbreak but in something more like acid reflux. The obsessions that I found so poetical (with Heather, with Jackie) invariably fizzled into ickiness, into: Is there something in my teeth? That Leif kid is staring again. A sunflower seed? Ugh, he gives me the creeps. Like so many, I never got the chance to atone for my awkwardness; even years later, I carried it inside me, like the muscle memory of a major injury, all those jerks and spurts and moments when I clapped my hands to my ears and shouted, OH FUCK ME, for how badly I wanted to say the right thing.
I staged them in my mind. Miss Lee, the landlocked geography priestess. Tay, the disciple, who finally, finally, grew into the lust that he wore plain as jeans. In a way, they had less in common now than when he was a little boy, for he alone was no longer confused by his body. She wore drawstring pants and ChapStick with a tint. He was tall, dark, and clearly debauched. They made eye contact over the magazine rack. A year’s worth of candy bars melted.
In real time, Tay grinned. “Well, listen, if it’s release that you’re after, I know just the girl. She’ll be there tonight. She studied holistic healing at a coven in Helsinki. She’s now a masseuse for the terminally ill. Goes by Pumpkin.”
“Sounds like you’ve got me pegged.”
“If you’re lucky. So you’ll come?”
I threw up my hands. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”
“That’s probably what Miss Lee said.” He rose and I followed suit.
I walked him to his tube stop. We stood at the entrance and embraced. He squeezed my well-padded biceps and gave me a questioning look.
“It’s the shirts,” I mumbled, gesturing helplessly.
He smirked and didn’t look away. “It’s so good to see you, Leif.” He had lowered his voice, and I had trouble discerning his words over the tube’s subterranean rumble. “You’ll always be funny to me, man.”
“Is that an insult?”
“Up to you,” he said. He held my earlobe between thumb and pointer finger. “Fuck, you’re cold. I will see you later, won’t I? Don’t pull a Leif on me.”
“I won’t.” I let my gaze drift to his lip; the scar tissue was like frost on a windshield. If I tried, I could still see the troubled boy that I’d touched dicks with. This had, by no means, been the peak of our relationship, but it came to me then, in a semisweet gust. One more instance of our loose-limbed youth, a foray in the cornfields. I’m kidding. It was in his room, My Bloody Valentine playing. I think his dog watched us from under the bed. Later, we laughed it off, chalked it up to the drugs; we were simple. Sometimes we’d swap T-shirts, Black Flag for Bad Brains, and sleep amid the other’s stink. It was one of our many inexplicable gags that only gained significance after the fact, when folding laundry on a rainy day. I’d pressed the crumpled T-shirt to my nose and yes, it was still musky.
“Excellent.” He released me and hurried down the stairs. I lingered at the entrance for a moment or so, siphoning the body heat of the crowd that hustled past me.
THAT’S HOW I ENDED UP in his East London flat, gripping a drink and wishing for death. I’d only been there for fifteen minutes and already a girl had me pinned to the wall. She was explaining, with some difficulty, the benefits and freedoms of the fruitarian lifestyle.
“There’s no limit!” she panted. “Other diets have you counting calories. Since going raw, I’ve chucked restrictions out the window. It’s heaven.” She waved her glass for emphasis and I was tempted to ask if it was a mimosa. “For breakfast today I ate thirteen peaches.” She grinned and I noticed the stains on her teeth. “For lunch I had watermelon. Three, to be exact. I have to eat out of mixing bowls. After that, I was still a bit hungry, so I snacked on five dates.”
I noticed her fingers were shaking. “What about protein?”
“I get all the protein I need from fruit!” she shrieked. I could see this was a question she got quite a lot. “The most important thing is to stay carbed up. And people say carbs make you fat!” Her laugh was shrill; her knobby shoulders convulsed. “You wouldn’t believe how much sugar is packed into one date. It’s like a little bomb! A tiny sugar bomb!”
In truth, her babbling was a blessing, for it vindicated my people-watching and protected me from a more involved conversation. I dreaded having to pretend to give a single shit. I metaphorically rested my chin on the top of her head and surveyed the crowd while she rhapsodized over spotty bananas (“Brown! They have to be brown!”). My eyes fell on Tay, holding court in a corner. He wore a black sweater, a headband (oh, he was sleek), and a gigantic homemade clockface around his neck, which he, every few minutes, consulted with a fierce concentration.
“Get ready!” he screamed. “Ten-minute warning!”
The theme of the party was Last New Year’s Eve Ever (despite it being February). Tay had hidden every clock in the flat and confiscated watches at the door. If he caught someone sneaking a peek at their phone, he stormed over and demanded that they not only hand him the offending device but their drink as well. He was a mad king, stalking around the apartment, declaring every hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every time he saw a pretty face, to be midnight. Someone made the mistake of handing him a saucepan and a spoon, which he clanged mightily when, according to his private logic, the time came.
“Countdown, people!” he bellowed, hopping from couch to couch like a little boy convinced that the carpet was lava. “Couple up! It’s the end, the end of time, and this is the last chance you get! To get fucked!” He stopped to consult his fake clockface, with one leg up on the back of the sofa, posing like a New World explorer. “Ready? Three … two … one … HAPPY BOOB YEAR!” And he sprang off the sofa onto the suddenly stable ground and sprinted around the flat with his spoon in the air, holding the backs of people’s heads as they kissed to make sure that it counted.
Even for a party of trim twenty-somethings, the atmosphere was unusually abuzz. Tay’s was a hyperbolic universe of cheek-kisses galore. The effect of the theme