by Roan Parrish
“Hey, can I see that cover design?” I asked. Will had been working overtime on the design for some book that his bosses were sure would be huge.
At the console next to the drafting table, Will nudged his mouse to bring the computer to life. He had some kind of black rubber pad where a keyboard would be and a set of black plastic tools lined up next to it. When the screen came to life, his desktop was a blank white background with only one small, unlabeled gray folder in the bottom right corner.
“What happened to your desktop image?”
“Nothing. I just don’t like clutter.”
“But you’re all… artsy. I would’ve thought you’d want….” I trailed off, realizing how dumb I sounded.
“Number one, don’t ever say artsy again unless you want to sound like you’re eighty-five. And it’s visual clutter. I don’t want anything competing for my focus on the screen.”
I looked around at Will’s apartment. I hadn’t paid any attention when I’d been here the other night, too nervous and too distracted by Will to notice much about the place. It was stark. All clean lines and well-balanced shapes. Nothing distinguished itself by design, but nothing was exactly plain either. Like the black leather couch, everything seemed very high quality, but nothing screamed money. The furniture didn’t seem to belong to any period—not that I’d have recognized such a thing if they were, but it didn’t have that aggressively modern, cement-and-steel look, or the bought-the-whole-showroom look, or the I’m-bohemian-and-artsy look. Er, wait, not artsy.
The walls were white, the furniture black or light wood, and the rugs a neutral oatmeal-y color. There were some large framed black-and-white photographs on the wall just inside the door, and I knew I’d seen some kind of art in the bathroom, but there wasn’t anything but blank wall near the work area, and the open floor plan left the kitchen no walls at all. The only real color came from the motley spines on the bookcase behind the couch, and a stack of coffee-table books on art and design on the side table. In fact, with the curtains drawn open, the main attraction was the view of the city through the large windows.
Will’s clothes were the same as his décor, I realized. Everything fit him perfectly—though that might have been mostly how well-proportioned he was—and they were always sharp, but never flashy. He wore mostly black, white, grays, and neutrals. Sometimes a light gray-blue the color of his eyes, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in anything else.
“That’s it.” Will’s voice brought me back to the screen between us. “The proofs are at work, but this is the digital version.” He leaned in and made a sound of disgust. “The damn—shoot.” He pointed. “That has a weird green cast on this screen but it’s actually gray.”
“Oh, it looks gray to me. Wow.”
“It’s the first in a trilogy, and when you line the three up, the color will fade down diagonally until it disappears at the bottom right corner of the third book.” Will traced a downward arc, finger hovering an inch from a screen totally devoid of fingermarks or dust particles. “Then, here—” He opened a smaller window with a picture of the spine. “See the way the image wraps around here and goes all ghosty? When the three books stand together on the shelves—the hardcovers, anyway—you’ll be able to see it’s actually part of a larger image.”
“It’s amazing!”
Will smiled. “The author won’t like it. He wanted something flashier. But that’s why we don’t let authors design their own covers, thank god. I think it’ll sell, though. Especially sitting on a shelf next to some of the schlocky garbage that’s just the title and the author’s name in Arial against a generic stock background.”
Then Will was off, talking excitedly about design and marketing, color and balance, pulling up different files on the computer to show me other covers he’d done and images of those he admired. He talked as if I understood what he was saying. As if my knowledge of cover design aesthetic weren’t limited to the distinction between, like, a Danielle Steel cover and a Stephen King cover.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. How his face lit up when he talked about this stuff. How every now and then he’d bump my shoulder with his for emphasis. The way he pushed his hair back absently when he bent closer to the monitor, eyebrows drawing together in concentration as he searched for the next file he wanted to show me. The way his forearm moved when he clicked the mouse, muscle and tendon contracting under pale skin limned with golden hairs.
“So, um, you kissed me. Again.” It just kind of popped out, and I felt my face heat in that way that I knew didn’t actually look like I was blushing, but made my heart beat fast and my ears buzz with nerves. “In the dressing room,” I added stupidly.
His gaze shot to mine, his eyes burning, then slid down to my mouth, and I felt it like a caress. For a moment it seemed like he might respond. Like we might talk things through, instead of continuing this strange dance. But then he blinked and shot me a wink before turning back to the computer.
“You kissed me, kiddo.”
“SO, YOU have no experience working as a barista at all, you can only work on the weekends and when you’re not in class, and you’ve never heard of latte art. Why should I hire you when every third person in line to buy a cappuccino is probably more qualified?”
I’d ducked into Mug Shots on a whim when I saw the HIRING sign. I needed a job badly if I was going to have a prayer of being able to do anything in this city besides study, and, well, the state of my shoes was getting pretty dire.
The manager on duty was named Layne. Her dark jeans hung low and her white T-shirt and red-and-brown flannel were spattered with coffee and foam around the edges of a too-long apron. Her brown hair was cut short, her cheeks permanently flushed, and behind thick, nerdy-chic glasses her blue eyes were squinty and shrewd.
She was right. I was woefully unqualified for the job. And yet, it didn’t feel like she was shutting me down, exactly. More like she was asking it as a genuine question. And maybe was a little bit amused.
Anyway, she seemed so cheery, despite the chaos going on around her, and the stickers slapped onto her thermos said “Earth First!” and “Queer Rock Camp” and “NYQueer,” so I couldn’t bring myself to bullshit her.
“Oh gosh, you probably shouldn’t, if they’re way more qualified,” I said. “But—okay, things in favor of hiring me anyway?” I ticked them off on my fingers. “I’m super dependable. Maybe I can only work on specific days, but I’ll never call in and leave you searching for someone to take my place. And next semester I could schedule my classes so I’m more flexible. I’m pretty friendly and people usually like me, so I’d be good with, like, grumpy, pre-caffeinated people. What else? Oh, well, I’m smart, I promise. That sounds obnoxious, probably, but I mean that once you show me how to do stuff I’ll have it. You won’t have to tell me twice. And… well, I really need the money, honestly. So I won’t do anything to get me fired.”
I leaned in and lowered my voice. “Also, um, I’m gay, if, like, that helps?”
The look she gave me made it immediately clear that this was a miscalculation on my part. But just as she opened her mouth to respond, there was a crash, a splat, and a very inappropriate-for-the-workplace slew of swear words from the front of the line. The customer seemed to have somehow spilled the entire tray of coffee drinks he’d been handed, and half of them ended up on the counter and the girl ringing him up—hence the swearing. She was totally drenched in what smelled like a combination of coffee and hot chocolate, and the counter was swimming in sad islands of melting whipped cream.
Layne narrowed her eyes and sighed.
“What are you doing right now?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She nodded once, resigned, but I swear there was a damn sparkle in her eye like she was enjoying this. “Up for a trial by fire?”
“Um, what?”
Which is how I found myself hastily aproned and stationed behind the huge, gleaming machine that loomed like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey and
would determine my future. After about ten minutes, when it became painfully clear to the other guy stationed at the machine that I had absolutely no clue what the difference was between an Americano, a macchiato, and a latte, to say nothing of how to make them, I was switched to taking orders.
Three hectic hours later, Layne called me over.
“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “you definitely don’t know anything about coffee.”
“No,” I said.
“But you’re perky and polite, which shocks people in this industry.” She cocked her head, seeming to consider me.
“Look,” I said, “sorry about before when I said the thing about being gay. That was like maybe inappropriate? I dunno, I just meant—I was trying to say that—I didn’t mean to assume—I just thought you might like me more if—or be more likely to—um, but maybe that’s accusing you of some kind of, uh….”
“You’re not really helping yourself here.”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head. “Even if I did happen to be politically committed to providing jobs for queers, some pretty boy cis white dude wouldn’t be at the top of my list.”
“Oh shit. Good point. Um….”
She looked at me for a while, and I could almost see the questions she wanted to ask running through her head. “How do you feel about puns?” she asked, finally, smiling slightly and narrowing her eyes at me.
Crap! Did she like them and I was supposed to say I loved them? Or did they annoy her and if I said I thought they were cool I wouldn’t get hired?
“I-I—well….”
“You’re totally trying to figure out what I want to hear right now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, you’re hired on a trial basis. Be here tomorrow at three for training.”
IT TURNED out to be no coincidence that Milton had known how to get on the roof the night we met. He made it his business to always know an escape route, a side effect of going to a snobby private school, he said, where immediate egress was sometimes the only thing that had stood between him and losing his mind.
We were sitting on the fire escape on the north side of the building where we had Psych. Milton had pulled me out a fire door after lecture unexpectedly, talking loudly about nothing, and then hustled me up two flights before flopping down onto the chilly metal.
“What are you doing? Where are we? Jesus, is this even safe? This doesn’t feel safe.” The metal was an open grid, so if I looked down, I could see the dumpsters five stories below.
“Oh, just hold on to the railing, we’re fine.”
“Soooo….”
Milton rubbed his temples. He looked thrown.
“Umm, just this guy. He’s a senior and he’s like the best actor. Seriously, he was on some TV show or something after high school, and he took a few years off to do it and then came back to school because he wanted to learn more about his craft, isn’t that cool?”
Milton sounded uncharacteristically swoony.
“And why are we outside on this deathtrap because you have a crush on the next….” I couldn’t think of a really famous theater actor, and Milton laughed at me. Then he muttered something.
“What was that?”
“I just saw him coming down the hallway and I panicked is all.”
“Oh my gosh, this is great!”
“Not from where I’m sitting.”
“Oh, sorry, no, not great for you. Definitely not. For me! Because if you can get all freaked and flustered over a guy, then it means I’m not such a total mess. Jeez, I just thought you were cool all the time, but this is way better.”
“Gee, thank you so much, Leo.”
“Sorry, sorry, but I mean, obviously this guy will like you. You’re so awesome. And you’re hot. And a great kisser. I’ll testify to it if this guy wants.” We could say things like this to one another now, since we’d firmly established that we were not ever going to hook up again. It felt nice. Intimate, in a friends kind of way. “What’s his name, anyway?”
“Jason,” Milton said, the word practically a sigh.
After a few moments where I thought he’d say more and he stared down at the dumpsters, Milton seemed to shake it off, and he hauled me up by the arm and hustled me back to our dorm saying we were running out of time to eat before movie night.
“Direct all your criticisms to Milton,” I told Thomas and Gretchen. “I had absolutely nothing to do with this decision.”
When Milton announced that for movie night tonight we’d be starting to watch Felicity, I thought he was kidding, until he pulled out a disturbingly pastel box set.
“Are those DVDs?” Thomas asked, the way you might ask “Is that a cockroach?” Milton clutched the box set to his chest and glared.
Gretchen narrowed her eyes and looked between me and the box set. “Ah, I get it,” she said with what I could’ve sworn was pity.
“I am not Felicity!”
“Oh, boo,” Milton said, shaking his head. “You really haven’t ever seen the show, have you?”
MY CULTURAL Foundations paper was due in twenty hours, and Charles was deep into one of his conspiracy theory rants, this one, as far as I could tell, something about the Denver International Airport being secretly designed by the Freemasons.
“—an entire network of subterranean tunnels that they claim were an automated baggage delivery system, but it never worked even though its installation cost millions of dollars,” Charles was saying, and I was only half listening, nodding at what seemed to be key phrases, like “bunker” and “shadow government” and “New World Order.” Usually, if I just kind of nodded along, Charles would eventually run down his own motor.
It had become my approach ever since the day he’d tried to explain the theories of the second gunman in the JFK assassination, complete with schematics of the grassy knoll, reedited versions of the Zapruder film, and heavily redacted scanned documents from the Warren Commission.
Charles did eventually lose steam, trailing off back into his research. I was exhausted from my first real day of work at Mug Shots, despite my proximity to the espresso machine meaning I could caffeinate at will. Even though I’d taken a shower when I got home, everything still smelled like coffee, to the point where I was convinced that maybe coffee particles were stuck in my nose hairs or something, like bits of pollen on a bee’s legs, so that every breath I took was being filtered through coffee. Hell, maybe that’s why it was so addictive? I’d have to see if Charles had ever heard of a conspiracy theory about that.
The caffeine had clearly worn off, though, because I was staring at the screen where I’d written some notes for my paper and my brain felt like mush. I wrote a thesis statement and immediately deleted it because it was self-evident. I wrote another that I deleted because I knew I couldn’t support it, and another that I deleted because it would be too much work to explain. Ugh.
I closed my laptop and went to see if there was any tea in the hall kitchen. I found a mangled box of jasmine tea that it didn’t look like anyone would miss it and put water on to boil, slumping against the counter in the hope that somehow a paper idea would magically fall into my head.
“You gonna get that?”
I jerked up to Gretchen’s voice and the sound of the kettle screaming.
“Oh my god, I actually just fell asleep standing up.”
“You okay?”
“I have a paper on Jane Eyre due tomorrow and everything I think of is idiotic and I’m so tired.”
There was something about Gretchen that made me accidentally tell her all my problems.
“Come to yoga with me,” she said.
“Oh, no, I don’t have time,” I said. I thought only hippies and health nuts did yoga.
“Well, you’re not getting anything done in the state you’re in, are you? Also, you just majorly over-steeped that.”
I didn’t know you could over-steep tea. I took a sip. It smelled floral and sweet but was intensely bitter. I winced and Gretc
hen nodded in commiseration.
“Ugh!” I dumped the tea down the drain and slumped. “I can’t even make tea, what’s wrong with me?”
Apparently she decided this was a rhetorical question because she just nodded and said, “It’ll be good, I promise.” Then she took me by the elbow and pulled me after her.
The first twenty minutes were ridiculous, the next twenty minutes were torture, and the last twenty minutes were amazing. I was clumsy and not strong and had no idea that I apparently breathe incorrectly. But the instructor was amazing, telling us ways to adjust our bodies to do the poses more safely, more effectively, more beneficially, and every time I followed her instructions, I could feel my muscles engage differently, feel my breath deepen, feel myself calm down and my mind clear.
With all my attention focused on breathing in and out through my nose, turning my right hip forward and my left hip back, pulling my navel in, squeezing my shoulder blades together on my back, retracting my chin back so my head was in line with my spine, pulling my feet energetically toward each other, and pushing into the inner edges of my feet, along with a dozen other things I couldn’t do, I had no time to feel tired or stressed. I didn’t give a single thought to my paper, or to Mug Shots and all the ways I’d managed to humiliate myself in front of my coworkers, mess up people’s drinks, or spill things on myself.
I didn’t even think of Will. And an activity that managed to take my mind away from him and the fact that he’d kind of blown off my last few invitations to do anything, citing being busy at work? Well, that was worth something.
As we walked back to the dorms, I was alert and energetic, but not bouncing off the walls the way I often felt. I was calm. And how much did I love Gretchen for not asking me how I liked it and saying she told me so.
“I go three times a week” was all she said when we went our separate ways. “Come whenever you want. Good luck with your paper.”
THE NEXT month went by in a rush of total chaos, punctuated by the most fun I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s because of how busy and stressful everything was that the moments with my friends felt so intoxicating. Or maybe it was because I’d never really had friends like these before—the kind who knew about my daily life, who I was excited to run into at the library, or slump next to at a table in the dining hall with plates of pizza that managed to be simultaneously dry and greasy.