Cupid Painted Blind

by Marcus Herzig

  When facing the wall, only the two people standing directly next to me can sneak a peek at my privates. On my right side it’s Chris, but he’s not looking. I’m trying not to feel offended, although I find his apparent lack of interest in my body somewhat disappointing. Then again, he’s not looking at anyone else’s junk either, which, if it’s a deliberate restraint on his part, might be his way of making sure naked peers who know he’s gay don’t feel uncomfortable in his presence. Because when straight dudes look at your dick and express their unsolicited opinion, they’re just guys being guys. If a gay guy does the same, he’s probably hitting on you. So much for equality.

  The guy standing on my left is obviously not gay, which might be why he doesn’t seem afraid to eyeball me up and down the entire time. As if that weren’t awkward enough, the person in question is no other than the Jackrabbit himself. And instead of facing the wall and turning his head to size me up, he’s giving me the full frontal view and rubbing his soapy crotch as he keeps glaring at me. I try to ignore him by staring at the wall in front of me, but it’s difficult to keep it up.

  Try to ignore a train wreck.

  Try not to think of a pink elephant.

  It’s nearly impossible, so I occasionally cast bashful glances to my left, and every time I look, I meet Jack’s eyes and his disturbing smirk as he keeps running his hands over his reasonably attractive body. He is obviously taunting me, trying to provoke a reaction, a visible physical reaction of my body that he can point out and laugh at and use as a reason to call me a faggot again. I’m not going to let that happen, so I turn my head, face the wall, and listen to the steady patter of water mixing with the boisterous, puerile chatter of naked adolescent athletes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I pull up a folding chair I brought up from the garage and usher Phil to sit. Sitting down next to him on my desk chair I say, “Shall we get on with it then?”

  “Yes?” he says.

  His answers always sound like questions, and I’m never quite sure if that’s because he’s unsure of his answer or if it’s his way of saying he thinks it’s a stupid question.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ve done some more research on our topic and I found this essay on Romeo and Juliet that might be useful. I suggest we read it and see if we can use any of it for our papers.”

  “Okay,” Phil says, pulling a pen and notepad from his handbag.

  There’s a knock on the door. It’s Mom, bringing a tray with two glasses of milk and a plate full of cookies.

  “Would you like some milk and cookies?” she asks.

  “Mom,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. “We’re not seven anymore.”

  Mom scoffs. “What’s that got to do with anything? One can enjoy milk and cookies at any age. Besides, I wasn’t even talking to you.”

  “If you weren’t talking to me, who’s the second glass for then?”

  “Oh shush!”

  Cumbersomely, she puts everything on my small desk between the computer, Phil’s notepad, and all the useless rubbish that litters my desk. “Chocolate chip cookies,” she says to Phil and smiles. “I hope you’ll like them.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mom has barely closed the door behind her when Phil puts the first cookie in his mouth and grabs a second one.

  “Hungry?” I ask.

  He nods, and without further ado he leans in to my computer screen and starts reading.

  The essay we have to read is only five pages, but it takes us forever. Philip is a slow reader. Every time I reach the end of a page I have to wait a minute or two for him to catch up before I can click through to the next page. Since I don’t know where else to look while I’m waiting, I watch Phil from the corner of my eye. The view of his profile isn’t even that unattractive, and from this perspective his deformity would hardly be noticeable if it weren’t for his cauliflower nose. With his cleft lip not hogging all the attention for once, I notice—for the first time—Phil’s other features. His thick, black Asian hair, his immaculate skin that has the color of very light coffee, his perfectly shaped ears. And then there’s his smell that is clean and fresh and pleasant. Most importantly, it’s natural, untainted by the artificial scent of shower gel or cologne. Just as I wonder if I can lean in closer without him noticing, he catches me staring at him.

  “Sorry,” I say sheepishly.

  He shrugs. “I’m used to getting stared at, believe it or not.”

  It’s a kind answer, kinder than I would have expected, and it prompts me to ask, “Does being used to it make it any less unpleasant?”

  He thinks about it for a moment, then he looks me straight in the eyes and says, “No?”

  There is no hint of anger or self-pity, which amazes me. I’ve probably witnessed only the tiniest fraction of abuse and rejection he must have experienced throughout his life, and I’m thinking if I were in his place I probably would have killed myself, or everyone else, or both, a long time ago.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “About what?” he asks.

  “You know …” I awkwardly point at my mouth.

  “About your mouth?” he asks with a deadpan face, making me chuckle.

  “No,” I say. “About yours.”

  “Sure.”

  “You were … born with this, right?”

  “This is not something you suddenly catch when you’re ten or something, you know?”

  “Right,” I say. “Sorry for being so ignorant. I’ve never … met someone with a cleft lip before.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Have you ever thought about … you know … I mean … can’t you get, like, surgery or something to fix this?”

  He nods. “I’ve had my fourteenth surgery this summer.”

  “Fourteen?!”

  I’m aghast. If he’s had fourteen surgeries and his face still looks like this, I hate to think how must it have looked when he was born. And one surgery for each year of his life? I have a million questions, but they’re all written right on my face, so Phil offers the answers without waiting for me to ask them.

  “It’s not just the lip, it’s also my palate and my nose. When I was born I had a gaping hole smack in the middle of my face. They had to close the gap in my palate, fix my gums and my teeth, and to do that they had to break my nose multiple times. That’s why it looks the way it does. Anyway, it’s complicated to fix something like that, and you can’t do it in just one or two surgeries, so I’m having surgery every year. Usually during the summer holidays so I don’t miss school. But this summer we moved here from Texas and we couldn’t schedule my surgery any earlier, that’s why I started school a week late.”

  A piece of the puzzle suddenly snaps into place.

  “It’s why you suddenly fell silent that weekend before you started school,” I say. “You were using the Internet at the hospital when you first started writing to me. Then you went home and didn’t have Internet access until you started using the computer at the library.”

  “Yes.”

  I look at him. “So what’s it like? I mean, having to spend so much time in hospital?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make much of a difference if I sit in hospital with nobody visiting or I sit at home with nobody visiting. It’s the surgeries that are difficult to deal with. Every time you get general anesthesia, there’s a chance you won’t wake up again. And getting surgery also increases the risk of getting a blood clot later that might kill you. It’s a small chance, but it’s there, and the more surgeries you get, the bigger the chance.”

  “So how many more surgeries do you think you will need?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “But I’ll try to get as many as I can until I’m eighteen.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Why until you’re eighteen?”

  “Because as long as I’m a minor, our health insurance will cover most of the costs. Once I’m an adult I’ll have to pay for it all by myself. Surgery is very expensive, so I try to get as
much done as I can before I’m eighteen and hope that after that I’ll need just one or two more.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Anywhere between five and ten thousand dollars.”

  “For one surgery?” I say. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I know.”

  “And no offense, but …” I pause because I don’t know how to say it without sounding like an upper-middle-class asshole.

  “… I don’t look like I have that kind of money,” he completes my sentence.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s true, I don’t. We don’t. My family is poor. When we were still in Laos, my family owned land and we were doing all right. Laos is a poor country, so by Laotian standards we were almost rich.”

  As his words slowly sink in and I’m thinking about my own sheltered life and my carefree, privileged childhood, I’m beginning to feel a strange sense of guilt over how I let my own petty problems make me feel miserable when I’ve never really experienced true misery. I’m humbled as he keeps telling me about his surgeries, how he never went on vacation because they can’t afford it and because he spends most of his summer holidays in hospital, year in, year out. Life has been hard on him but it didn’t break him, it only made him harder and more thick skinned, and I’m beginning to understand why he sometimes seems cold and detached. He tells me a few stories of people who have been mean to him in his previous school, and he does so without any hatred or anger. I wonder how a person can be so forgiving, so I ask him that.

  “I don’t know that I’m forgiving, “ he says. “But I’m not an angry or bitter person by nature, and I won’t let other people turn me into such a person because that’s not how I want to be. I had no control over the way I was born. I have no control over the things people say to me. But if I didn’t have control over the way I deal with things, then I’d have no control over anything, and that would be terrifying, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Let other people be angry if they choose to be angry. I choose not to be.”

  I look at him for a long time, bewildered, confused, and in awe. He holds my stare until he finally says, “What?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head. “I just wonder how you do it, that’s all. I mean, cope with it all.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. I try to channel it into something positive.”

  “Something positive? Like what?”

  “Art?”

  “Art?” I say, pretending I’ve never noticed him sitting in the schoolyard or the cafeteria, or even in class, his head bent over his sketchbook and the pencil in his hand flying over the paper. “That’s cool.”

  He shrugs again. “I guess.”

  “So are you any good?”

  He pulls a face, which is no mean feat given his condition, and says, “I don’t think that’s for me to say.”

  “Show me some of your work then.”

  Now he’s the one staring at me for a while, then he shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” I insist and poke my finger in his ribs. He winces and raises his arms in defense.

  “Don’t do that,” he says.

  I poke him again. “Come on, show me.”

  “All right, all right! But stop poking me already!” He picks up his bag and pulls out his sketchbook. As he hands it to me he says, “Don’t expect anything special.”

  I’m not expecting anything, but when I open the book and turn the first page I immediately know that Phil was hiding his light under a bushel. The first sketch shows the semi-profile face of a teenage boy, a little older than us, maybe seventeen or eighteen. It’s crude, just a quick sketch, but it’s good. It’s really good.

  When I raise the sketchbook to get a closer look at Phil’s delicate pencil strokes, a photograph slips out from between the pages and falls to the floor. We both stoop to pick it up, but I beat him to it. From the corner of my eye I notice Phil’s discomfort, but he doesn’t make any attempts to tear the photo out of my hand, so I take a look at it. It shows a young Caucasian woman wearing khaki cargo pants and a plain white T-shirt. She’s got shoulder-length, dark brown, wavy hair, green eyes and an attractive smile. On her arm she’s holding a baby. It’s Phil, obviously, and it’s a pitiful, almost revolting sight, because of that gaping hole in the middle of his face. He may still not look great today, but it’s a vast improvement on how he used to look as a baby, because that baby looks almost … non-human.

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  Visibly uncomfortable, Phil says, “Me?”

  “Really?” I say with a wry look. “You used to be a Caucasian woman before all your surgeries?”

  Showing no sense of humor, he says, “No. That’s my godmother. Her name is Phyllis. She’s American.”

  “She’s also very pretty.”

  “Yes.”

  I look at the photo a few more moments until Phil takes it out of my hand and puts it the pocket of his shirt. I have a million questions, but it doesn’t look like Phil wants to talk about it, so I don’t pry and turn my attention back to his sketchbook. On the next page we have a young man in his early twenties. He’s wearing a pair of jeans. No shirt, no socks or shoes. Like the boy in the previous sketch, he’s staring into the distance, a melancholy expression on his face. I turn the page again. The same guy, this time fully nude, his private parts concealed by a towel he’s holding in his right hand. As I keep turning the pages, I see more variations on the same theme. Boys and young men in varying stages of undress, always sensual, always pretty, and occasionally very sexy, but always alone. About halfway through the sketchbook I come across a drawing that breaks the pattern. Two boys kissing, both their faces obscured by one another. I look at Phil. He looks back at me and says, “What?”

  “Who are they?”

  He shrugs. “Nobody?”

  “One of them looks like you.”

  “No he doesn’t.”

  “He does too. I recognize the hair and the ears. Well, one ear.”

  “We should get back to work,” he says, grabbing the sketchbook and putting it back in his bag.

  As he leans forward and continues reading the essay on my computer, I pull my chair a little closer and pretend I’m still reading along while I take slow, deep breaths and inhale Phil’s subtle but intriguing scent.

  * * *

  “So what happened to 2-b-pretty?” I ask, slumping on my bed. With my back leaning against the wall and my feet dangling over the edge of the bed I look at Phil. He’s still sitting in his folding chair by my desk, his back straight and rigid, his hands in his lap as if he’s waiting to be called into a doctor’s office. I try to make my question sound casual and innocent, as if it’s something that just crossed my mind. The truth is, I’ve been dying to ask that question ever since he stopped leaving comments on my Wattpad despite the new installments that I post daily.

  “Nothing?” he says.

  “Are you still reading along then?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m just asking because you haven’t been leaving any comments recently.”

  “I know.”

  I give him a few seconds to elaborate on his answer, and when no enlightening details are forthcoming, I ask, “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Things have changed?”

  “How have things changed?” I ask with a high-pitched voice, almost sounding agitated. “I mean, I know things have changed in that I no longer think you’re some random girl from Indonesia. Or Sandy. But you knew I was me all along, so how has me knowing you are you changed anything for you?”

  He shrugs. Again. When you talk to Phil he always shrugs so much, it’s a miracle he hasn’t developed rotator cuff syndrome yet.

  “I’m not good at leaving comments. They take me forever to write up, and no matter how much time I take writing them and rewriting them and polishing them, they never feel adequate.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I
say, looking at my fingers fiddling with the seam of the small heart-shaped pillow I keep on my bed, “I always enjoyed your comments, your analysis, and your suggestions, so …” I let the sentence trail off because I don’t know what more to say.

  “Thank you. But now that you know who I am there’s no need for me to take an hour to write a five-line comment when I can just tell you what I think in person, is there?”

  “I guess. Except you’re not doing that either.”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  I frown at him. “I never asked you to leave comments on Wattpad either. You still did it anyway.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Oh for crying out loud!” I say, throwing my hands up in the air. “Will you stop apologizing for everything? What is wrong with you?”

  “Sorry,” he says again, and before I even know what I’m doing, I grab the heart-shaped pillow and hurl it at his face. Come to think of it, it’s actually kind of embarrassing that I even have a heart-shaped pillow openly lying around like a twelve-year-old girl, but it was a Christmas gift from Zoey two or three years back, and I actually kind of like it, so it wouldn’t be nice to store it in the junk box under the bed.

  The pillow hits Phil in the face before he catches it, and for a split second he musters a shy grin. The grin goes as fast as it came, and he puts the pillow back on my bed, but I sense a tiny little hole in the wall he seems to have built around himself, so I put my hand in before it closes again.

  “Okay, I’m asking you now. What do you make of it?”

  “Of what?” he asks.

  “Of the whole situation. With Chris. And everything. You know.”

  He thinks for a moment, his expression calm and pensive. Then he looks at me. “Do you love him?”

  I’m stumped by the question, at first by its simplicity, and then, after a brief contemplation, by its complexity.

  Love?

  What does that even mean?

  I’m a twenty-first-century teen and—as the work on our term paper keeps painfully reminding me—clearly not as knowledgeable about matters of the heart as Shakespeare’s precocious sixteenth-century Romeo, nor am I nearly as eloquent in expressing my emotional turmoils. How is one to recognize love if one has never experienced it before? Where does affection end, and where does love begin? And isn’t it, in the end, all just hormones?