The Fascinators

by Andrew Eliopulos

  Denver responded to Sam’s text right away, saying he would be happy to take Sam to the auto shop.

  I’m right by the entrance of the lower parking lot.

  Better than Uber! Sam wrote.

  SO much better than Uber ;) Denver replied. Which, Sam supposed he had opened the door for that one.

  “How did you know Frosties are my favorite?” Denver said that afternoon.

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Ah, I see what you did there. But you didn’t have to do that. Buy me something, I mean. It’s not like I had anything else going on today.”

  “Gosh, when you put it that way, I feel so honored.”

  “No, I mean—I’m happy to help. I just—never mind.”

  “I’m only giving you a hard time,” Sam said.

  “Oh. Right.” Denver smiled. Whatever was in the water in Nashville that made a person’s smile look like that, with dimples for days, Sam wished more of it would make its way down here. “Actually, I was glad you texted, because I wanted to ask you if you might be free this Friday to go to a play in Atlanta.”

  “A play?”

  “Yeah. It’s at the Fox Theatre. It’s called Celestine. It’s supposed to have a lot of magic in it, and I happen to have an extra ticket.”

  “Oh yeah?” Sam said, gulping. “And why would you ‘happen’ to have an extra ticket?”

  “Honestly? Well, I bought two tickets because my boyfriend, Arjun, was supposed to be visiting me this weekend.”

  “Oh.”

  Oh!

  “But then Arjun went and broke up with me right before school started, because he said he couldn’t handle long distance. Which, ironically, is why I had this grand, romantic weekend planned, to convince him that long distance would work. Perfect timing, huh?”

  Sam’s brain was in hyperdrive.

  “So, wait. That was . . . two weeks ago? How long had you two been together?”

  “Well, we sort of started talking on the DL in eighth grade. On the DL because he wasn’t sure how his family would take him being gay, but then he came out to them last year and it went way better than either of us was expecting. We were officially boyfriends most of last year.”

  “Wow,” Sam said. “Three years, and it just ended?”

  “Pretty shitty, huh?”

  “Very shitty.”

  It was, in fact, shitty in a way that Sam was struggling to articulate. Yes, it was shitty for Denver, but this new revelation about what Denver was going through didn’t make Sam feel great about himself, either. It pointed to a reading of Denver’s recent interest in him that required words like “rebound,” “hookup,” “utter delusion.” Or maybe it had never been “interest” at all. Maybe Denver really was just looking for a friend—a fellow queer magicker in a town where either of those things was rare but both of them together was like a rainbow-spewing unicorn. Maybe Sam was the delusional one.

  And Sam knew he was experiencing a double standard here. That it wasn’t fair to resent any caveats to Denver’s feelings, when Sam’s own feelings came with a giant James-shaped caveat of their own. He also knew that there wasn’t some requirement that said people could only date one person at once—he’d heard plenty of people his age at Q-Atl meetings describe playing the field, limited though that field may be. But even before he realized he might want to be more than friends with James, Sam had never felt like he would be the type to act on feelings for multiple people at the same time. There was a tiny part of him that felt like he was cheating on James somehow, just being in this car, enjoying Denver’s company.

  Still, this news about Arjun hit him like a loss.

  It had been so nice to feel like a first choice for a change.

  “So, the play?” Denver said. “I know it’s last minute. You probably already have plans.”

  “I don’t have plans,” Sam said. “I’ll check with my parents, but I’m sure they’ll be cool with it.”

  “Cool,” Denver said, pulling into the parking lot of the auto shop. “If we leave right after school, maybe we can even go to the Varsity for dinner. Have you been? I read that it’s famous.”

  “Oh yeah, always happy to make a trip to the Varsity,” Sam said. “‘What’ll ya have, what’ll ya have.’ Definitely worth experiencing.” He paused. “Was that part of the plan too? With Arjun?”

  Denver raised an eyebrow, like he sensed there was a question underneath the question, but he wasn’t sure what it was exactly.

  “It was the part I was most excited about,” he said.

  “Well, then,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”

  Delia was delighted at lunch the next day.

  “I knew the Frosty trick would work.”

  “Trick? How was it a trick?”

  “So wait,” James cut in, “does that mean you two are for real going on a date?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Sam said. “We’re friends. We’re hanging out. Anyway, turns out Denver got out of a long-term relationship less than two weeks ago. He just didn’t want the ticket to go to waste.”

  “Right,” Delia said, rolling her eyes. “It’s not a date, and we’re going to win convention this year.”

  “I know you’re making a joke,” Sam said, “but you know, I really don’t see any reason why we couldn’t win convention this year, or at least place. I’ve been thinking about it this week, in fact, ever since . . . since we did the spell from the book. The Spell of Conveyance. We’re freaking talented, y’all. What do those Atlanta schools have that we don’t have?”

  “More time?” Delia said.

  “Full teams?” James added.

  “Okay, yeah, that makes it harder. But what if this year—now that we have four members—we really went for it? What if Denver and I each did two categories, and you two each did three? There’s nothing in the rules that says the same team member can’t do more than one category.”

  “Except we’d be running around from one end of the convention center to the other,” James said. “And each event we do would probably suffer as a result.”

  But Delia looked intrigued, Sam could tell.

  “We do always end up placing in our individual events . . . ,” she said.

  “Exactly. And I bet it would really impress Pinnacle if you placed in not one but three individual events. Plus, I just think . . . I think we need this. I think if we don’t do it, we’ll always wonder what we might have been capable of, if—if we’d had more opportunities.”

  What Sam wasn’t saying—what he didn’t have to say—was what he meant by “more opportunities.” For the past three years, the bougie Atlanta schools at convention had been the stand-in for everything they didn’t have in Friedman, but always in such a way that it remained a point of pride for them, how well they were doing without those same privileges. In Delia’s case, they were also the fuel to her fire—the reminder that their nice clothes and nice cars, their vast circles of magicker friends, were only theirs because of a happy accident of location, and they could all be Delia’s, when she finally got out of here.

  That had changed this past week, since they’d done the spell from the book. Their fixed point of comparison had faltered. Their guiding light had flickered in the sky. There was powerful magic right here, almost within their reach.

  All three of them could feel it.

  It had been four days since they’d returned the book, and so far, no one had even attempted to schedule another practice.

  The gap had widened between what they had and what they could have, just a little bit. Or at least their awareness of that gap.

  Maybe, Sam thought, if they spent more time practicing between now and November, it would get their minds back on track. Close the gap. Bring things back to normal.

  (Because sidebar: the lack of practices had also meant a lack of opportunities for Sam to talk to James, and the longer they went without talking about what had happened at the bowling alley, the harder it was getting to imagine broach
ing the subject, period. Sam needed things to be easy and fun between them again, or the conversation would land like a lead balloon, if it happened at all.)

  “I guess, as club president, I could get behind this idea,” Delia said agreeably. “Operation Win Convention. Win-convention mode.”

  “I guess, as vice president, I am compelled to get in line,” James said. “But if we’re going to take on all these extra categories on such short notice, we’re going to need way more practice time. More weekend study sessions, less hanging out at the Fox Theatre.”

  “Wow. Jealous much?” Delia said, only half under her breath.

  But Sam just blushed. He was seriously wondering the same thing.

  Celestine, it turned out, was not a play, but a musical. It did, as Denver promised, have a lot of magic in it.

  “You hate it,” Denver said at intermission, when the lights had come up and people were standing in the aisles or making their way to the restrooms.

  “What? Not at all. I’m really enjoying it.”

  “You’ve had a scowl on your face for the last twenty minutes. It’s the singing—admit it. You’re not a musical guy.”

  “No, no, it’s not that. I love musicals. Okay, I do think it’s borderline homophobic that the prince seems like he is going to save the princess from this evil witch who absolutely also has a crush on the princess, but I’m willing to be surprised in act two. What about you? You can’t be watching the play too closely if you’re noticing my facial expression.”

  “Honestly, I’m not really a musical guy. But it’s fun. This theater is gorgeous.”

  It was true, the inside of the Fox Theatre was a place to behold. Their seats were close enough that they were under the starry-night ceiling right in front of the stage, but they hadn’t gotten a great look at everything on the way in because they’d been running late, and the lights had already been down. It had taken longer to get through traffic than they’d anticipated, and then, after an extra-rushed dinner at the Varsity, all the closest parking lots to the theater had been full. They’d ended up having to shell out thirty dollars to park a few blocks away, and that meant Denver had sheepishly been forced to accept a twenty from Sam. But Sam had been glad for the chance to make this feel that much less like a date. Even if Sam were to go on a date—because honestly, it’s not like he’d gone on many . . . okay, any . . . real dates before this (those chaperoned hangouts with Eliot really didn’t count)—he’d still want to pay for half of everything himself. Lord, why did his mind keep going to hypothetical dates and whether or not this, hypothetically, was one?

  “Everything okay?” Denver said.

  “What? Oh, yeah.”

  Sam had been momentarily distracted, looking up at the balcony, by the face of another boy looking down at him. It wasn’t anyone Sam knew—at least, Sam didn’t think he knew this guy—but the guy was definitely staring right at him, not even bothering to look away when Sam’s gaze stopped on him and they locked eyes. Finally, Sam broke contact, a little unnerved, and as Denver started to turn to see what Sam had been looking at, Sam said, “No, don’t. Give it a second. There’s a guy staring right at us.”

  “I don’t see him,” Denver said, because of course he’d charged ahead with gawking before Sam could stop him.

  “Right at our one o’clock,” Sam said, but as Denver continued to scan the crowd, Sam looked up and realized that the guy wasn’t there anymore after all. “Never mind. That was weird.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Our age? Maybe a little older? Buzz cut? Looked like a football player.”

  “Did you give him my number?”

  “Har har,” Sam said. But the joke broke the tension enough that he was able to shake the unease in his brain.

  When the curtain went up and the play resumed, Sam was even able to focus on the story again, scooting forward to the edge of his seat and balling his hands into fists as the subtext became more anti-queer instead of less, with the evil witch masquerading as a prince to try to fend off the competition, only for the princess to see right through the disguise. Hard pass.

  At one point, Denver took Sam’s fist in both of his hands, and when Sam flinched just a little bit—mostly out of surprise—he managed to play it off as a funny attempt to make Sam realize how worked up he was getting. Sam spent the rest of the performance looking for a natural moment to return the gesture—to show Denver that the flinch was an accident, and he was as funny and flirty as Denver was, ha ha look, we’re holding hands. But the problem was, it didn’t really feel like either of them was kidding; he sincerely wanted to hold Denver’s hand. And that was very inconvenient indeed, since what Sam was really still looking for was the most natural moment to break the ice with James.

  “Well, the magic was cool, at least,” Denver said as they made their way out of the theater at the end.

  “That’s true. I really want to know the spell that the witch used to make herself look like a tree at the end. I read in the program that the actress was a Keeper. The tree looked so real. I wonder if it was.”

  They walked out the doors into the night air, pressed into the throng of fellow audience members. As limited as his line of sight was, Sam didn’t notice until it was too late that he was walking right into a person who seemed to be going in the opposite direction, or else had just been standing there.

  “Excuse me, I’m sorry,” he said, looking up and realizing with a jolt that it was the boy from the balcony.

  The boy didn’t respond. Only stared at Sam with his intense, football player glower.

  Sam broke away and rejoined Denver in the flow of the crowd, already looking over his shoulder to confirm that the boy wasn’t following them.

  “That was the boy from before. Who was staring at me,” he whispered to Denver.

  Once again, Denver turned immediately. This time, at least, he saw the guy, confirming Sam hadn’t lost his mind.

  “Oh, he is cute,” Denver said, frowning. “Should we go back and talk to him?”

  “No,” Sam said immediately.

  “Sorry, sorry. Kidding. I didn’t realize he upset you that much.”

  “Let’s just get to the car,” Sam said, hurrying them along the blocks back to the parking lot, looking over his shoulder every few feet. A couple times he could swear that he saw the boy again, never actually moving—always standing stock-still.

  Back in Denver’s car, Sam didn’t waste a second before locking the doors.

  He only fully exhaled when they were back on I-20, headed east toward Friedman.

  “You want to talk about it?” Denver said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe? Maybe that would help? I just . . . between everything with that book, and my windshield, and the vision last week. I don’t know. It all has me pretty shook.”

  “Understandable,” Denver said.

  “Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad you can understand. Because I’ve been feeling a little mental lately.”

  “No, Sam, seriously. I get it. Being with Arjun for two years before he was out, every time we were in a public place was this, like, constant game of peekaboo from hell. Okay, you can laugh, but seriously, that was at the time the best way I could think of to describe it. One second I was looking at the real Arjun, the next second, he would see someone from school or someone who looked like a homophobe, and suddenly it was like he was hiding behind his own face. At first, I’d get kind of impatient with him about it, cause it felt like he was ashamed to be with me. But then we had some friends of ours get gaybashed at a Vanderbilt party. Vanderbilt! Which is super liberal! And then honestly, I started getting as self-conscious as Arjun was. I even made us learn some pretty high-level self-defense spells, just in case. The fear never really goes away.”

  “You know,” Sam said, “I think that truly is part of it. Peekaboo from hell. I mean, this guy had this look about him. Like there was something about me he hated, even though he didn’t even know me.” Sam shivered. “Lor
d, it was creepy.”

  “Well, my mom’s working another nightshift, if you’re worried about having nightmares . . .”

  “Oh, I don’t have nightmares. Or dreams.” This seemed like a safer avenue than responding to the part where Denver had invited him over to his place. As close as he’d come to grabbing Denver’s hand in the theater, he really didn’t trust himself to be alone with him in his room. Denver’s reaction to his confession went exactly as he’d have guessed.

  “Wait, what? What do you mean, you don’t have dreams?”

  “Exactly that. I mean, I’ve been told that I probably have dreams, but I’ve never remembered one, so it’s hard to say.”

  “Never ever?”

  “Never ever.”

  “Damn. That must make it harder to do magic.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I think of dreams as being the same kind of associations I have to do when I’m casting a spell. But then again, it’s not like I use my dreams in any active way. I just imagine the two processes as coming from the same part of my brain. The part of my brain that makes something imaginary real. If that makes sense.”

  “Well, James always says I’m good at associations, but I figured that’s his way of keeping my spirits up, like handing out a trophy for ‘most improved.’”

  Denver laughed, but when Sam didn’t, he tried to act like he’d been clearing his throat.

  “So, um, sorry about before. I mean, I was kidding about you coming over, mostly. Your mom made it pretty clear she would vaporize me if I didn’t bring you straight home.”

  “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sam. Of course it’s okay. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said it at all. I have this bad habit of saying the exact wrong thing when I get nervous. I guess talking about that guy had me more freaked out than I realized.”

  “I do the same thing—joke when I get scared. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Phew. Okay. Thought I’d made things weird for a second there.”