by Roan Parrish
Not that it’d go amiss for some people.
I’d spent a solid week sulking over Will’s rejection. Then I randomly woke up super early one day, as I sometimes had in Holiday, and walked out into the morning. I found myself in Washington Square Park, strolling along the sidewalks as the city woke. I sat on the edge of the fountain, watching as, in the middle of this sprawling city, the water spewed upward, caught the sunlight, and fell down again, recollecting itself only to do it all over again.
I watched, and I started laughing. At myself. Because I was here. Here. In New York City. Taking classes at NYU. Sitting smack-dab in the middle of Washington Square Fucking Park. And I was missing it. I was missing the whole damn thing because I was hung up on Will. It was, I told myself, basically the stupidest thing ever.
It felt so good to laugh. I hadn’t done much laughing over the last year, what with missing Daniel, feeling abandoned by Will, and any enthusiasm for my classes at Grayling being crushed within a week of the semester starting. And as I sat there, grinning like an idiot, people who walked past me smiled back. I thought about what Will had said about not smiling at babies and their parents getting so offended, and I smiled even bigger.
He’d been right. I’d tried it a few days after he had mentioned it in a twisted attempt to feel closer to him, though I’d broken at the last minute and smiled at the baby anyway. The baby’s mom had expected me to smile at her kid, and when I hadn’t, it was as if I’d broken some social law.
But, though Will was right, his point wasn’t mine. It felt amazing to smile at someone and have them smile back. And I could tell from the way people smiled back at me that morning that they thought so too. After all, things were shitty so much of the time. If you could connect with someone over something as small and easy as a smile, why wouldn’t you want to?
In that spirit, I’d texted Will.
It’s soooo beautiful here today, I wrote, with three grinning face emojis and a picture of the fountain.
His reply had been almost immediate, though it was barely 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning: Here too, and a picture of the view from out his living room window, sunlight falling gently on brick and, in the bottom corner, a man buying flowers at the corner bodega.
Since then, Will and I had fallen into the habit of texting each other random silliness. Well. I texted him random stuff that I hoped he’d think was funny, and he texted me back, basically making fun of me. But in a friendly way. A flirty way, I hoped. That was how I chose to take it, anyway.
Last night, for instance, I’d texted him a pic of mud splattered all over my skateboard and my shoes that said Another driver just tried to kill me. Should I be taking this personally???
He’d responded: He probably took your shoes personally and wanted to put them out of their misery. Srsly, they’re dead.
What I hear you saying is that you want to take me shopping! I’d written, though I totally did not have the cash for new anything right now.
He hadn’t responded for a while, then wrote, Well, I’d be doing the entire city a service, I suppose. Saturday afternoon.
I’d practically run my battery down looking at the text every ten minutes since it came. Every time I did, this warm, kind of squeeish happiness burbled up in me. It’d be the first time I’d seen Will since our awkward meeting at his apartment when I first got to town.
Milton bumped me with his shoulder and I nearly dropped my phone.
“What are you all slappy about?”
I hesitated to tell him because Milton has made it really clear that he thinks what he refers to as my obsession with Will is pathetic. Well, misguided, anyway.
“Oh,” he said, looking at my phone. “Will?”
“He’s taking me shopping on Saturday.”
I could see Milton physically stop himself from making whatever comment occurred to him, so to thank him for not harshing my vibe, I told him that he could pick the movies for tonight, even though I knew he’d pick this nine-million-hour-long documentary series about a staircase or something that he’d gotten from the library and had been trying to get me to watch for the last two weeks.
“AND THIS filmmaker was there practically from the very beginning, so you see the direct aftermath of the wife’s death, and then it takes you through his whole trial and everything, and each episode is about a different bit of evidence. Oh man, it’s so intense—like, in the middle, there’s this one—well, okay, no, I won’t give it away. But it’s so good. Don’t look him up online, though, or you’ll get totally spoilered.”
Milton’s movie night pick turned out to be amazing—though at nearly eight hours long we’d stayed up almost all night finishing it—and I’d started telling Will about it right away. Partly because it had been fascinating, and partly in order to keep myself from saying all the things I really wanted to say to him.
Like that the second I’d seen him loping toward me, I’d felt the same way I had when he would walk into a room in Holiday: as if the background receded and he was this pulsing star at the center of things. And how just like then, my face heated up and my stomach went all wobbly.
Nope, definitely didn’t need to be saying anything like that. So. Describing an epic documentary about murder it was!
Will said the neighborhood we were in was Chelsea. Brick buildings towered above us, and here and there you could see the ghost of where another building must have rested. The shops all had window displays that looked like art, or like they were trying to look abandoned. He kept pointing things out in displays and asking if I liked them. At first I thought he meant for me, but it quickly became clear he was just curious about what I thought was aesthetically pleasing, because I could never afford any of the stuff he was looking at.
When I told him so, Will ran a finger along the worn neck of my T-shirt and shook his head, making a tsking sound.
“You know,” I told him, “Einstein said ‘Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.’”
Will snorted. “Yeah? Well, when you’re inventing theories of relativity I won’t say a word about how you dress like you passed out in a skate park in 1997 and just woke up. Until then, I’m happy both accepting that the universe is matter expanding into nothing and also that the combination of too many design elements in that universe looks like shit.”
I elbowed him playfully.
“So, was the guy found guilty?” Will asked.
I gaped at him. “Dude, that’s the entire point of the documentary. I’m not going to ruin it. You’re supposed to watch and, like, form your own opinion based on the evidence.”
“I don’t care about spoilers, man—a story’s either interesting or it isn’t. Besides, I assure you, I don’t have any problem forming my own opinion, even in a sea of conflicting ones.” He winked at me.
I certainly believed that.
“I can’t tell you. No way. If you wanna know, you can google it, but I’m not going to tell you the end. I am firmly in the no spoilers camp. It’s a lifestyle.”
The look Will gave me was one I liked to think he saved just for me. Like I didn’t say what he expected, but he was glad that I didn’t, and also irritated with himself for being glad. Will was really not the surprised type. He was more the absolutely-nothing-shocks-me type. In fact, it seemed vital to him that he’d thought of every possible eventuality. So the moments when I did something that bypassed whatever formulas he’d cooked up about how people acted or how the world worked were total wins. Granted, I still couldn’t predict what was going to strike him that way. At all. But it was a start.
The thing about walking with Will, I was realizing, was that everybody stared at him. Some people straight up checked him out, but others just… looked at him, like they had every right to. Like he was art, publicly displayed to be publicly appreciated.
At first I thought he was getting a kick out of it. But Will wore his beauty with a kind of scorn that made it even more
potent, the way some people in New York seemed to wear expensive clothes with the air that they couldn’t care less if they ruined them. Like, yeah, splatter duck fat on this gazillion-dollar silk shirt, sure. Or, what’s that? Sit on the dirt in this designer dress and drink champagne? Let’s do it.
After the eight billionth person’s head turned to look at him, though, he started to tighten up. It probably just read as good posture to the casual observer, but to me it looked like he was trying to pull into himself. As if by making himself stiller he could escape notice, a gazelle on the plains freezing to elude the chase.
When he shoved his fisted hands into his pockets, though, I pulled him into a little café, seated him facing the wall, and bought him a coffee. And I watched him slowly relax.
He looked tired and still wasn’t very talkative, but he seemed happy to listen, so to distract him, I told him about Milton and Charles, and about Gretchen, this awesome girl on my hall, who was the calmest person I’d ever known. Seriously, just being around her made me relax. I’d met Gretchen because we were in a tour group for people who hadn’t already visited campus the previous spring. Our tour guide was a sophomore who seemed so jaded that he could hardly raise his voice loud enough to be heard, but clearly took a great deal of pleasure in making us nervous.
When we’d gotten to the lobby in the library, he pointed a languid thumb behind his shoulder and told us that from the fifth or sixth floor looking down, the mosaic tile was laid out to look like spikes rising out of the ground in an attempt to deter students from throwing themselves over. Because before the administration added the cage around the opening, they did that, he told us. A lot. He made eye contact with each of us in turn, as if he were making a toast. I let out a nervous laugh.
The girl next to me, tall, with curly hair so blonde it was nearly white and strangely colorless eyes, cocked her head at the mosaic and said, “That’s so odd. If people wanted to commit suicide, the promise of spikes would hardly be a deterrent would it?”
“Oh gosh,” I said. “You’re totally right.”
And that, I had quickly learned, was really all it took to make new friends the first week of college.
I told him about classes. How my favorite was this physics class that was blowing my mind. Especially the parts about astrophysics. Physics was like a cheat sheet to the universe. Things that once just were suddenly had explanations, a logic all their own—except not all their own because they resonated with other things and forces throughout the universe. I might have gotten pretty excited talking about Newton’s second law.
And as long as I was talking and Will was paying attention to me I felt like I could do anything. Like he was a magnifying glass refracting the light of the whole universe onto me in a beam so intense and so warm that every molecule of my being was illuminated and seen. The threat of being burned alive was always in play, but the risk felt totally worth it.
Two girls at the counter lingered over doctoring their coffees, sneaking glances at Will and giggling. Will let out an exasperated breath.
“They stare at you because you’re so beautiful,” I told him, nudging his coffee with mine.
“Ugh, who fucking cares,” he said, flopping backward in his seat and closing his eyes, like if he wasn’t able to see people, then they couldn’t see him.
I snorted. “Easy to say when you are. I bet everyone wishes they were. Or, most people, anyway,” I corrected myself. It drove Daniel batshit when people made generalizations and whenever I did it in front of him I’d get an earful.
“You shouldn’t wish for that. You’re fine as you are.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, but secretly I was a little thrilled even at the faint praise. Will hardly ever gave compliments.
“Whatever, you’re fucking adorable. Don’t fish.”
“I don’t get it, though. You like it sometimes, I know. The power it gives you over people. I mean, you use it to, like… meet people, right, so you can’t tell me you don’t like being so hot—”
“Yeah, at a bar or a club—when I’m trying to pick someone up. Not at work or buying a fucking newspaper, or”—he nodded to our surroundings—“drinking a damn coffee. Not when I can’t control it. You think it’s great to look like this? To walk down the street and have everyone stare at you so you can’t even trip on the damn sidewalk without an audience. To constantly have people talking to you and smiling and acting all nervous or insecure or like you’re better than them?”
He cut himself off with a quick look around, suddenly realizing he’d started ranting.
“Whoa. I guess… I didn’t think about that part of it.”
“Yeah, nobody ever does.”
He took another sip of his coffee and made a face. “Ugh. Overextracted.” He was quiet for a while, pushing a finger through the light spill of sugar to leave a trail. “I just…,” he said quietly, then shook his head.
“What?”
When Will had things to say, he said them. When he had nothing to say, he didn’t make an effort to fill the silence. At first this had made me uncomfortable. It was weird to hang out with someone who might be silent for an hour and then, when something occurred to him, monologue about it. But now it was one of my favorite things about hanging out with Will. Realizing that when he said things they mattered to him.
“I don’t want to be responsible for other people’s feelings, you know? I don’t want to know that someone is nervous because they’re hot for me and feel like it’s my responsibility to be nicer to them to put them at ease or some shit. It’s nothing to do with me even. They don’t like me, they don’t care about me. Hell, they just want to stare at me and have me shut up and smile at them. Like I’m a fucking prop in some fantasy.”
His expression was grim, bitter.
“And then, if I don’t play along—if I don’t smile the way they want, or flirt back, or say thank you to their compliments—it’s like I’ve somehow committed a social foul. I’ve offended them so they have to get revenge somehow. Like by asserting that I’m an actual fucking person I’ve invited retribution.”
I started to respond, but Will’s jaw was tight and he clearly wasn’t done.
“And if they aren’t turning me into a prop or a fuck toy in their heads, then they just let me do whatever I want because beauty is basically an all-access pass to the world.”
“People don’t really think that, do they?” But even as I said it, I thought of my own initial reactions to Will’s beauty.
Will hit me with a heavy, pitying look.
“Leo, you would not believe the shit I can get away with by looking like this. Seriously. It’s sick.”
“Like what?”
He sighed, like there were too many to even list.
“The things that I can say to someone and not get called on it…. Like, I was on a date over the summer with this guy and we had nothing in common. He started talking some stupid shit about how stop-and-frisk is the best thing to ever happen to the city. He kept flirting with me and I kept telling him off. Like, he’d say ‘Tell me about yourself,’ and I’d just dead-eye him and say, ‘If you think stop-and-frisk is a good policy, you are a racist.’ And he just let me talk all this shit and kind of laughed like I was kidding and never called me on it.”
“Well, maybe he was just being polite because you guys were on a date and he was trying to make the best of it since you didn’t have anything in common.”
“Dude, I called him a racist to his face and he just looked embarrassed and said nothing. Whatever—he’s just one example of shit that’s happened hundreds of times. I’ve tried it the other way around too. I’ve said ignorant, bigoted shit just to see if people will call me on it and they don’t. People don’t call me on being rude or selfish or ignorant even when the person next to me will get called out for doing the exact same thing. It’s like a social experiment at this point. A… screening process for assholes.”
The idea of Will wandering through the city feeling like everyone h
e interacted with was failing him, instead of actually connecting with them, made me incredibly sad.
“They give me credit for something that has nothing to do with me. It’s… it’s bullshit,” Will continued.
“Um, well, I guess it means you get what you want, though?” I was trying to put a positive spin on it, but as someone who had never really felt like I had the license to be rude or selfish or inconsiderate, it didn’t seem like the absolute worst thing.
“Yeah, great.” Will slumped. Clearly that was the wrong thing to say. “Never knowing if you get something because you deserve it or because someone just likes the way you look is awesome.”
“Shit, sorry, I didn’t think about it like that.”
He threw back the rest of his coffee like a shot and stood abruptly.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The second we were outside again, Will straightened his spine and set his shoulders. Even his gait changed. The mask slid back into place, like he could filter what went out and what got in. Will was pretty good at that whole making a bubble around yourself thing.
After a few blocks, he pulled me into a store where every single article of clothing was white. Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of rule about white after… some day? I was going to ask Will, but he was distracted, pinching the pressed pleat of a pant leg here, running a fingertip over the crisp collar of shirt there, and caressing the cable of a sweater with the back of his hand as he walked through the store.
“Here, try this on.”
Will held up a pair of pants that tied at the waist with a strip of fabric and had built-in suspenders, like in those old Charlie Chaplin films. He handed them to me along with a sleeveless shirt that looked like an undershirt but probably wasn’t. It was baby blue and cut low enough that the few chest hairs I had would be on full display.