Be Dazzled

by Ryan La Sala

  The truth of this layers over me like chilled, wet wool. It slows me down and I die in my video game. I become slow all over, except in my heart, which flutters like it’s got hiccups. Maybe I can’t start because I know this can’t end well. Maybe it’s hardest to begin the things we know will bring about ends.

  Luca texts me again.

  I’m kidding. I’m not dressing up as a deer. Not even for you, sicko. ;)

  I cast away my controller and swing my legs over the side of my bed. Then I’m standing and stretching, suddenly itching to make something.

  For a long time, I’ve been careful with Luca. Worried that the strange relationship we have would come apart in my hands. But Luca keeps outsmarting my fears. He keeps surprising me, like at the art show, like right now as he continues to send me ideas. I need to give him—and us—a chance, right? If this is just my anxiety derailing another good thing, I’ll never forgive myself.

  If Luca is ready, I can be ready, too. I won’t let my fear of the future define my behavior in the present. Luca has finally, finally entered my world, and I’m not going to make him leave it just because I’m afraid.

  The doorbell rings, barely audible over the music (presently Dolly Parton). It rings again a minute later, then a third time. I run to get the door and barely notice the several adults (Evie included) lying on the living room floor in a circle as they roll through some sort of chemical bliss. Blech. Old artists are so needy.

  Right as the bell rings again, I get to the door and find a delivery girl with no fewer than eight giant bags of food. I sign for them and gather the bags into my arms, annoyed on the delivery person’s behalf. I’m carrying the last bag into the living room when Evie sits up, her bob a bit askew, and says, “Raphael, what is this commotion?”

  “I’m guessing it’s your dinner?”

  “So it is,” she says pensively. She’s for sure high. Probably doesn’t remember ordering all this Indian food. I turn to go, but she’s up in a flash, tearing bags open.

  “Come, sit, eat with us, Raphael. You spend too much time in that room looking at screens. Come look at faces. Screens can’t smile or cry or ask questions.”

  That’s the point, I think.

  I glance at the other adults. They’re all in a state of delirium. Their faces are splotchy and surprised, then intrigued as the food fills the house with the aromas of naan and curry. One person picks up a plastic container and shakes it, listening to the contents splat about.

  “I’m going to get plates,” I say, but out of nowhere, several other guests float in from the kitchen, plates and utensils in their arms. Like Evie, they’re all swathed in a sort of space-like pajamas, like the night shift of the Starship Enterprise. I don’t know why. I don’t care why. If it’s not space pajamas, it’s some other weird thing. Some of them I know from past parties, and others are indescribably similar to the ones I’ve already met. Soon, they’re all arranged around the living room, trading stories in their unusual languid fashion.

  “And then they opened that Panera Bread,” one of them is saying as though delivering a eulogy. “And that’s when I knew it—that’s when I knew the town was dying. And so I thought: stay. Stay, Margaret, and paint the death. Face the death. Say ‘death’ and see how it tastes.”

  The two people Margaret is eulogizing to moan, “Deaaaathhh.”

  “Tastes like French onion soup,” Margaret concludes. “So I did a series on bread bowls. I called it Carb-e Diem. Seize the bread.”

  And so on like this for half an hour. I get through a plate of food without anyone noticing me, thank god. My mistake is trying to leave quietly right after.

  “Raphael, you’re what, fifteen now?”

  I sit back down, turning to the man who knows my name. He and my mom share a haircut. It’s distressing.

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Ah, nearly out of high school, right? What’s next?”

  “The wooooorld,” intones Evie, whom I hadn’t realized was paying attention. There’s a joke in the way she elongates the word. Sarcasm, I guess. Like I think I can handle it but can’t, and she knows it.

  “Your mother says you’ve got some nascent talent when it comes to a sewing machine. Have you thought about apprenticing?”

  “Nope,” Evie blurts. “I can’t get him to sit with anyone unless it’s in a class. He wants to do more school.”

  “Oh, why be so practical? You’re so young,” asks a very tall lady named Rocky. Rocky is trans; she did a series of found object sculptures last year that chronicled her transition. She’s one of the few artists I actually like.

  I make a point of looking at Evie when I answer, “I want to learn as much as I can as I figure out my artistic perspective. I’m not sure what I want to do yet or what I want to say, so I’ll do everything until I know more.”

  “Oh, he’s smart, Evie,” Rocky says, but she says it as a scold, like Evie has told her otherwise, and recently.

  “What do you like to make right now?” Rocky asks.

  When I don’t answer right away, Evie says, “He’s very crafty. Tell them about your school project, Raphael.”

  And I know she knows it wasn’t just a school project, which makes the fact that she cut it up all the worse. Maybe because she’s high or maybe because she just feels like being cruel, she steeples her fingers and announces, “Raphael likes to play dress-up.”

  Rocky brightens. “Drag?”

  “No, no.” Evie hurries past the topic of drag, like she doesn’t want the noble art of drag to see our dirty little conversation. “Like cartoons. Little characters.”

  Somehow, I manage to say, “Cosplay.”

  “Yes, yes, my son, the cosplayer.”

  If the others know what cosplay is, they don’t admit it. If they don’t know, they’re not about to ask. Evie has her knives out, and anything that moves might get stabbed.

  Rocky is the bravest. “My nephew does that,” she says warmly, like she can sense I’m gonna bolt. “He likes to dress up like a fox.”

  “A fox?”

  “Yes, he has a fox suit. He tells me the community is quite active. Just all sorts of animals. They’re very accepting.”

  “That’s something else,” I say. “I design and build costumes from movies, comics, and video games.”

  “I’ve seen a fox in a movie,” says the man who thought I was fifteen. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Focus, Boris,” Evie says. “This is serious. It’s arts and crafts. Raphael is very crafty.”

  “Oh, have you been to Craft Club? My nephew loves that place,” Rocky says unhelpfully.

  “Have you, Raphael?” Evie says pointedly. “When Boris and I were setting up the loft, I found several Craft Club bags stuffed in the linen closet.”

  I give Rocky an anguished look, and she returns it with a stunned, apologetic horror. She’s trying to help me, but what I really need is to leave. Evie can make fun of Craft Club for hours.

  “Evie, you’re too elitist. Craft Club is very cute,” says Rocky.

  “Yes. Cute.” Evie sighs, long and powerfully disappointed.

  I have a lot to say. The words spool in my mouth, threads of fury coiling at the back of my teeth. I swallow them down, and they knot tighter in my gut. I’ve never seen my ambitions and my crafting as being in conflict, but Evie sees assured mutual destruction. Media that cannot be mixed. I know I could argue that they are one and the same to me, but it’s not worth it. Or it’s not possible.

  I don’t take the bait. The conversation moves on. I try to stay and listen to show that I haven’t just been flayed alive, but my mind has already escaped upstairs. It’s in my room, where my phone is on my charger, slowly filling with messages from the boy I’m falling for.

  Who wants to cosplay.

  With me.

  I guess we’re both pursuing dreams in spi
te of our realities. Between Luca and me, I wonder who is going to be forced to wake up first.

  * * *

  I’m still feeling dreadful about the way Evie talked to me, and it’s days later. I haven’t done any work at all. Well, I’ve done schoolwork, I guess. But nothing with my hands. It sucks.

  It’s also December. Which normally I love because it’s a great excuse to be inside all the time, but it’s been super mild. This is why, when I’m leaving school that Wednesday, I’m not surprised to get a text from Luca that reads:

  Come to the fields. Meet me under the bleachers.

  I have been living in Boston forever, but I never knew about any of the fields in the area until Luca. Now I know about most of them, and I know he means the ones near Magoun Square in Somerville. Even so, I have no clear idea of where the bleachers are, much less how to get under them. But as I pull up, I figure it out, wondering the whole time what Luca is up to. I shoot May a quick text letting her know to wait for me at Donut, Jonut! (a Rocky Horror–themed doughnut shop in Davis Square that we love).

  I pause as I near the fields. Luca is out there with some of his friends, passing a ball back and forth. He sees me but doesn’t stop, which is normal. Some of Luca’s friends know about him, but most don’t, and we do what we can to keep it that way. I keep my gaze on the middle distance and walk past the game. Any onlooker watching would see nothing between us, no tension, no connection at all.

  Then I’m under the bleachers. I’m not waiting long before Luca swoops in next to me, pulling me into a sweaty hug.

  “You’re so damp.”

  “Now you are, too! Wanna play?”

  “Like you’d ever let me play.”

  Luca scrunches up his eyebrows. “Like you’d ever want to.”

  I shrug under my backpack straps. “What’s up? Is something wrong?”

  Luca drops to the grass, cross-legged, indicating I should join him. I kneel, because I don’t want to get dirt on my jeans. He has his backpack, too, and from it he grabs a notebook that reads PHYSICS on the front. He flips through pages of notes until the dense numbers disappear, and suddenly I’m looking at full-page drawings.

  “I’ve been thinking about what we’re gonna do, and I figured it out: Phobos and Deimos from Pantheon Oblivia.”

  It takes me a second to realize that he’s talking about a potential cosplay, and then another second to swallow back the panic.

  But to Luca, there’s nothing potential about this. After the hundreds of ideas he has sent me, most of which I haven’t had time to respond to before the next idea showed up, he has decided on this one. I can see it in the way his whole body is focused on showing me he’s serious.

  I think again about that awful realization I had, and the details of that realization smudge into a blurry bruise that I won’t let myself consider now. So I don’t react. I just keep us moving forward, saying, “The twin crow gods?”

  “Yeah, with the wings. I envision these huge wings that open and close. And they’ve got crazy-cool armor. Not huge or bulky, but super detailed. And—”

  “Luca, wait—why them?”

  I know why, but I want him to say it. And he says, “They’re perfect, Raff. I swear to god. I’ve thought through it, and they’re gonna kick ass as a double look. They’ve got cool coordinated armor, and they look like us. Deimos has that pleated mage tunic you’d look so cute in, and Phobos has, like…”

  “He’s nearly naked,” I provide.

  “Well, yeah, except for the chest plate and the…I think it’s called a codpiece?”

  “So you want to be a sexy crow god, and I get to be the pudgy wizard pigeon sidekick?”

  “They’re supposed to be equals, Raffy.”

  “Luca, we’re not…”

  Do I want to say equals? We’re so different, it’s hard to see where we even align. I expect Luca to look down at my body, which is certainly not his body, but he doesn’t. Just looks at me and shrugs. “I don’t see the issue.”

  Which is the issue, I think. Artistically, at least. There’s a second, bigger issue, though: This is a very, very gay costume. Maybe it’s Evie’s spooky intervention, or maybe I’m just a grumpy person when I’m not working, but the urge to blurt this out to Luca lurches in my throat, threatening to break me open.

  I press it down. The boy next to me is full of light and wind and electricity, a static storm building around a fantasy. And to ask him if he knows what he’s doing would be to ask him to turn it all off, to never let it start because of how it’ll all end.

  I shrug. “I’m in. Show me what you’ve got.”

  He thrusts the drawing at me and starts to explain it. “I think we can use plumbing equipment to attach the wings to our backs, but I don’t know how we’re going to drill through cloth. Do drills work on cloth?”

  I lean in, looking at his work. The drawings are blocky, but I immediately see what he has in mind, and my own brain starts working through the problem he’s getting at.

  “Look at this part here,” I say, tapping the back of the costume. “If we cross these two straps, we can put a support band between the top and bottom, and then fasten a board to the whole thing.”

  “What? How? Show me.” Luca hands me a pen. I cannot imagine ever asking anyone to tamper with my sketches, but he doesn’t care. I quickly outline what I mean.

  “I get it, but where are we going to get these parts?” he asks.

  “My house?” I say.

  “I should have known. Can we go now?”

  “What about soccer?”

  “Oh, the boys will understand.” Luca waves them away. “Are you free, though?”

  “I’m supposed to meet up with May and Inaya for doughnuts.”

  Luca whistles. “Is Donut, Jonut! a ticketed event now?”

  I glance around, and then inch closer. I’ve still got my fears, but I choose to live in these past few minutes.

  “Stick with me,” I say. “I know the bouncer.”

  If anyone were watching us walk along the fields, they’d see two boys, hardly a gap of air between their bumping shoulders yet an entire world between them all the same.

  * * *

  The bliss lasts until we actually need to get to work.

  Luca is wide-eyed as we stroll into Craft Club on a Saturday afternoon. I’m still a brittle, brooding ball of pins after what Evie said to me about Craft Club being cute, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s golden with wonder right now. It coats him, sweet and glowing, trailing from his fingertips as he rushes to touch every texture Craft Club has to offer.

  I try to feel that wonder, too, but the truth is that I’m feeling a bit frantic as I approach both a brand-new build and the Herculean task of guiding Luca through the process. If it were just me here right now, I’d be in and out. But with Luca, we’re not shopping for materials. We’re shopping for ideas. I get inspired by supplies, too, but Luca takes it to a whole new level, entirely new cosplay concepts cascading from him as we walk through the aisles.

  “This place is freaking awesome,” Luca says as he slow dances with a giant Santa Claus. “I barely got a chance to look around last time, before you caught me in the aisle with all those gems and…those sparkle-dot things.”

  “Sequins.”

  “Sequence?”

  “See-quins.”

  “See Quinn’s what?”

  “Luca, I swear to god.”

  “Relax, Raff, I know what sequins are. I’m just messing with you.” Luca moves on to the knitting aisle, immediately locating the extra-large yarn. Someone has unraveled a bit of it from its bundle, and Luca makes me close my eyes as he does something with it.

  “Okay, open.”

  When I open my eyes, Luca is fully sprawled on the Craft Club floor, one arm crushed beneath him, the other clutching the stomach of his shirt, which bulges
terribly. Out from under the pushed-up hem explodes a mess of yarn, like spilled guts.

  And I laugh. It surprises me. I forget I’m supposed to be brooding and snap a photo while he rolls around and makes pitiful dying noises. He keeps the joke going for a few seconds too long, and a family stops at the end of the aisle, sees him, and decides not to shop for yarn today.

  “Raffy,” he whispers. “I’m weak. Come closer. It’s so dark.”

  If it were anyone else, I’d walk away. No, run. But it’s Luca, who I am convinced was designed in a secret lab to teach me how to go with the flow. So maybe this process won’t be perfectly efficient, but does it have to be if we get to do it together? I relent, taking a knee beside him. His shaking hands find mine as though it won’t be long now.

  “Raffy,” he says through pitiful coughs. “Take my yarn intestines. I want you to have them.”

  “And do what?”

  “Knit a sweater. For my mother.”

  “Oh my god, Luca.”

  “She looks great in salmon.”

  “Luca, this is gross.”

  He looks right into my eyes, his grip fierce now. “Tell her she looks great in salmon. Not pink. Not peach. Salmon! Promise me!”

  I wait a beat. “Are you done?”

  Luca cracks a smile. Then he shoves the yarn back into the bin as best he can with one hand, because he’s still holding my hand. I pull him up and away.

  “You’re never making the Avengers,” he says.

  After hours at Craft Club and hours more working with Luca in the studio, I’m finally by myself again. All the guests are gone, too, so I’m changing out the linens and towels in the loft. I will undoubtedly resume sleeping here, maybe in the next few minutes, even. I’m exhausted. Working on a build is one thing, but working with Luca is like its own separate project. His focus comes undone at the slightest provocation; his resolve to be serious is bound with the least tacky glue. Even after I finally got him out of Craft Club, getting him to actually sit down and start working with me this afternoon was nearly impossible. He wouldn’t stop draping armfuls of fabric over his head, imitating flowing hair, and asking me if he should get bangs.