by Daryl Banner
I cut through the crowd, squeezing between people on my way across the lobby to the bathrooms. Halfway there, it occurs to me that Clayton might even be running lights for the show. He and Eric have gotten pretty friendly over the last year, especially with how chummy Dessie and Eric have gotten. Eric’s like, her gay BFF now, which I guess would be cool if it didn’t feel like Clayton and I have become strangers overnight.
I’m sorta jealous of Dessie.
Imagine that. Me, jealous of a girl getting more attention from a guy than me.
The bathroom proves fruitless. The rest of the lobby is just full of Theatre people I don’t know. I don’t see Clayton anywhere. I expected that I’d sorta never get to hang with him. Every time I try, our plans get delayed or put off or are riddled with distracting texts, just like the dinner he and I had at our usual place earlier this week. Dessie has a crisis thing, he kept saying. It’s always all about her.
I wonder if that’ll be me someday. Oh, Nell has a thing. Sorry, bud.
The thought wrings my stomach up like a rag. I see the sad look in Nell’s eyes and relive the sickening spin I felt just before leaving her loft. That, coupled with having my camera stolen—the camera that had the beautiful candid photo I took of Nell in the car on the way to the restaurant—has left me feeling so unsettled.
I hate leaving things unsettled.
Clayton is my go-to guy. He’s always been. I’d text him and tell him when I’m having issues with a girl, or when things aren’t right in my life, or when I just want a friend. His absence is doing something to me. It’s changing me.
It’s forcing me to stand up on my own feet.
As if to exaggerate this very point I’m making, when I get back to the front of the lobby, I find Dmitri hanging out with Dessie and Chloe and their friends. There’s no way I’m joining them, not after what I endured at lunch today.
Great. I’m officially on my own.
“Girlfriend, you got some serious nerve.”
I turn and lift an eyebrow at the unfamiliar, deep voice. A very tall, very built and sculpted black god (or goddess?) with long platinum hair and drawn-on eyebrows stares down at me. He’s clad in a skintight black sleeveless shirt and pants that I imagine can’t be put on without some form of lubricant.
“Uh, sorry?”
“You, showing up here,” he says, smirking, “like there isn’t anything wrong, like nothing’s amiss, like you can just swallow up the canary and crawl back here, you little sexy pussy cat you.” His eyes run down my body, then come back up to meet my face, his lips pursing.
I seriously can’t tell if I’m being checked out or scolded right now. “Do I know you, bro?”
“I’m Avery. And you’re Brant, if I’m recognizing your pretty face from the pic on Candy’s phone. Not the dick pic. You can stop your gaping; I know I’m the sexiest thing you’ve seen all day. Shut up. Candy told me everything.”
He talks fast. “Candy? Oh, Candace. Right. Dancer. And … you’re a dancer,” I conclude, putting the relationship together. “You got some sick arms there, Avery. You … You look like you could lift a dude in the air and do twenty pirouettes without breaking a sweat.”
“Mmm-hmm. Ooh, I’d lift you, that’s for sure. Damn …” he sings, giving me another onceover. “No wonder she got all stupid over you.”
“She’s a great girl. I did her wrong.”
His eyes meet mine. Then, unexpectedly, he leans forward and his voice goes low and quiet. “Y’know, if you’re not doing anything after the show …”
I lift my eyebrows. “Huh?”
“C’mon, bubble boy, don’t be shy.” His quiet voice is like night and day to his colorful scolding one a second ago. “I can totally keep a secret … you lean, mean, tight n’ humpy machine, you.”
“I’m not following.”
His lips pinch again, an eyebrow lifting quizzically. “Pretty boy like you? Living in an apartment with two other mo-mos? Girl, everyone knows. C’mon, you can tell Mama Avery. Just tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Fill my spank bank. Mama’s lonely. C’mon.”
“Seriously, I—”
“Candy told everyone in jazz today. I just need to hear it from the horse’s pretty mouth so that all my straight-boy-gone-gay fantasies can come true.”
I’m starting to piece together a puzzle. Call me slow, or call me distracted by a big black muscle guy in makeup and a wig, but I think the implication he’s making is clear. “You think I’m gay now?”
He lifts his eyebrows expectantly.
“Candace is telling people that?” I ask him bluntly. “Because I live with a pair of gay guys? First off, that’s homophobic, to insinuate that a straight dude like me can’t coexist amicably with a pair of gay dudes. Fuck everyone for thinking that. And second off,” I merrily push on, keeping my cool despite my height literally coming up only to this Avery person’s chest, “Dmitri is bi, not gay, and I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m a firm and devout worshipper of the pussy god of lady luck. Dick’s not my thing.”
Avery frowns. “Well, well. Crush all a lady’s dreams, why don’t you.”
“Dream crusher by day, pussy destroyer by night.”
“Hmm.” He squints at me, a smile playing into his lips. “I think I like you anyway, Branty-boy.”
“I really didn’t mean to hurt Candace.”
“I can tell.” He gives me a shrug, then does half a pirouette and says, “Well, well. Carry on with your being sexy and all that. Just know, I got my eye on you.”
“Noted.” I give him a tentative nod.
“Such a shame,” I hear him mumble as he sashays into the crowd, disappearing as fast as he’d come.
I’m not sure how I feel about Candace spreading that rumor. On one hand, it doesn’t bother me because regardless of whether girls think I’m gay or not, it obviously doesn’t stop them from hitting on me. On the other hand, she’s probably just saving face, telling people I’m gay to spare her friends from knowing the truth: that she got bossed-and-tossed by the infamous man-whore Brant.
Maybe Candace isn’t even spreading the rumor. Maybe others are. Maybe no one is. Maybe it’s just Avery’s wishful thinking.
I kinda wish I was gay. Eric makes it seem so fun.
The lights dim a few times, signaling the start of the show. I start to move toward the black box theater, a ball of confusion swimming in my head. Clayton’s whereabouts remain a total mystery as I find a seat all by myself. I belatedly spot Dmitri sitting with Dessie and Chloe on the other side of the seating area, which both annoys and comforts me. Dmitri makes eye contact and flags me over, patting an empty seat next to him. I cross my arms and pretend not to notice, turning towards the stage with a sigh.
I guess I really am just here for Eric. Wherever the hell he is.
Before the show starts, I yank out my phone and text good ol’ Clay-Boy, asking if he’s running the lights or if he stayed home. Then I fold my arms and slouch in my creaky chair, waiting for the play to start as the gentle murmur of the audience swallows me up.
The lights go down at last. Whether or not that’s a product of Clayton’s doing, I still don’t know.
I hear shuffling in the dark as the actors take their place. When the lights come up, they reveal a man and a woman at a table. The woman stirs a mug of something very demonstratively—y’know, to show us she’s acting really, really hard—and the man is scrolling through something on his prop phone, squinting at it.
Already, I’m annoyed at their positioning on the stage. They’re too center. The whole set is irritatingly symmetrical. Then, as they start to argue—as, I guess, most people end up doing in plays anyway—I get annoyed with the whole scene in general. If I were to direct this play, I’d throw off the balance visually. Maybe the table should be more to the left or something, just to give the stage more appeal to the eye, more asymmetry, more discord. That’d add to the tension, I think.
Most of the play is spent just
like that: me, kicking back and acting like I know the first thing about directing or set design or lighting or anything at all. Really, that’s Dessie and Clayton’s world, and I’ve never had a part in it.
Still, the symmetry bothers me from the beginning to the very end. So much so that I only seem to pay attention to the dialogue at one key moment when the woman slaps the phone out of the man’s hand and says, “If ya’d quit livin’ in ya world, take a step back, and actually look at it, maybe ya’d see what the hell ya got right in front a’ ya!”
Her accent is terrible, true, but the words resonate. I lean forward at that point in the play, my elbows propped up on my knees and my chin balanced on my knuckles as I squint at the stage, scrutinizing every dumb little moment … and those words she just uttered.
Maybe I need to step back from my world, stop living in it, and actually look at it.
Look at it …
I really, really wanna wreck that annoyingly balanced stage.
After the show, the lobby becomes such a turmoil of noise and bodies that I don’t even bother looking for Dmitri. Besides, I’ve got somewhere else to be, according to the time and the flyer I saw hanging outside my digital media class this morning. Trouble is, without Dmitri, I don’t have his car to drive me.
Not that he’d allow me in it again, after the condition in which it was left the last time I borrowed it.
I push through the glass doors and dump into the courtyard, then pull out my phone, curious if Clayton might be, in fact, home. I didn’t get an answer from him during the whole duration of the fifty-minute play. I text him again, frustrated, then stare at my phone and await his response. I flip through Facebook while I have it open, scrolling past pics of kitties and big-boobed ladies in swimwear.
I hear the doors open behind me and a group of laughing people escape it. Behind them, the foot-taller-than-anyone-in-the-lobby Avery emerges, pulls a purse over his enormous, muscled shoulder, then saunters down the road.
An idea hits me. “Hey, Avery.”
He stops and turns, his eyes hunting for the person who said his name. They find mine and a look of curiosity takes his face.
I approach him, shove my phone away, then thrust my hands in my pockets. “You got plans?”
His face melts. “Ooh, Branty-boy. You’re gonna make all my dreams come true, hmm?”
I shrug. “Maybe. Do your dreams involve a big ol’ flashy art exhibit? I’m not walkin’ these streets alone at night, that’s for damn sure.”
He lifts a pencil eyebrow. “And you think a big girl like me’s gonna keep you safer?”
I appraise him for a moment. “Quite frankly, yes.”
A grin crosses his face that is both frightful and charismatic. “I got better things to do than gamble my heart on a straight boy. Been there, done that.”
With that, he strolls off down the road, disappearing around the corner of the building.
I turn my face into a breeze that races by, then glance up into the night sky, which is obstructed by the greedy trees in the courtyard that want to keep the view all to themselves. I glance back at the wide glass windows, maybe searching for the minute possibility of Dmitri coming out and telling me he’s ready to leave, maybe searching for Clayton to magically emerge from the crowd, maybe just staring back at them with no purpose at all.
I straighten my posture and decide against waiting on any one of my friends—whether Dmitri or Clayton or even Eric at this point—and I push into the darkness down the road that edges around the campus toward the side of town I always avoid.
You can do this, I coach myself.
The campus is full of a lot of nobody at this time of night on a Wednesday. With the exception of a computer lab near the psychology building dumping a modest group of loudly bantering students who walk in the opposite direction as me, there isn’t a soul in sight. I don’t even hear crickets, as if even the insects have more sense than to be out on this side of campus at night.
It’s at the crosswalk that officially takes me off school grounds and into the sparsely-lit streets that I question my manhood. Like, really, I could easily piss my pants if even a cat leaps out from an alley and catches me by surprise. Big Bad Brant has been reduced to a quivering-in-his-shoes sort of guy at the moment, especially since I have no one with me to witness my complete and utter lack of bravery right now.
I don’t need Clayton with me, laughing at my jokes. I don’t need Dmitri chatting to me about his latest story. I don’t need Eric at my side, complaining about his latest date-gone-totally-awry. I just need my own feet and a purpose in my brain.
I cross the street and it doesn’t feel unlike floating over a cloud.
Shadows pass me on both sides, shadows that turn out to be gently rustling bushes in the yard of a rundown house with just one window lit, shadows that are trashcans, shadows that loom over me from a power line or a tree or a narrow building across the street that seems to watch me from all of its darkened windows, which seem more like suspicious eyes.
The second I turn the corner and the brightly-lit face of the gallery hits me like a lighthouse after being lost at sea, the shoulders I didn’t realize I was tensing relax at last. I cross the street and reach the front glass doors, my hand resting on its handle, waiting.
I tell myself a bunch of reassuring things, like how Nell may not even be here, like how I’m here for my own curiosities regarding art and what a career in it can possibly lead to, like how I could learn from the work of an established alumni. Maybe beyond these doors, I can find an answer to a few questions that have haunted my mind ever since I foolishly signed up for the photography program.
And, fuck it, if I’m lucky maybe I’ll find Nell in there too.
Chapter 13
Nell
Coffee.
It’s a sculpture of a giant hypodermic needle labeled “Ego” with a weird, lava-lamp-like fluid slowly squirming within it.
And the piece is called Coffee.
If my eyes roll any more than they already have, they’ll be halfway home by now.
I keep slowly walking around, killing time until Renée Brigand makes her entrance and starts to interact with us. That is, if she even bothers to grace us with her delicate, celebrity, too-important-for-us-basic-and-boring-student-artists demeanor she has since adopted. I couldn’t hide the way I feel about her work if I was wearing a stone mask with a happy face carved into the front of it.
I approach one of the smaller rooms that showcase one of Brigand’s “experiences”. On the wall next to the entrance is a little tired-looking keypad with a bullet hole in its face, and as I walk past it, the thing beeps feebly, the word “INTRUDER” flashing dimly on its screen. Inside the room, there is an array of differently-sized walls like a labyrinth, each containing a door that’s been busted open in some manner or another. Some of them have locks that hang off their doorknobs, bent or broken. Some have a hole busted through the door as if they were assaulted by a cannon. Some walls don’t have doors, but rather windows that have been wedged open, shattered, or don’t have glass at all—just square holes in the wall with nothing but the frame to show for itself.
From a white, simple plaque on the wall, I get the name of this exhibit: Security.
The faux walls and broken doors divide the room into little vignettes, sort of like the staged showrooms you’d find in a furniture store, except they’re odd and off-putting. In one of them, there’s a desk with no drawers under which rests a big safe. Upon watching someone else play with it, it’s discovered that literally any combination will unlock the safe. Okay, I get your point Brigand, I’d say if I had anyone to share my opinion with. Please, keep knocking me over the head with your message. Nothing is secure. Nothing is safe. Blah, blah, fucking blah.
When I pass into another vignette, I find a pair of giggling bushy-haired guys trying to take a selfie together next to a grandfather clock. Its hands, I find upon closer inspection, spin slowly in opposite directions, and the numbers are a
ll out of order, and instead of a 3 there’s a B, and instead of an 11, there’s an R. Gosh, I feel so insecure. All my means of security are so unreliable and broken, even time itself.
And Iris accuses my work of being obvious?
After passing through a room filled with obnoxious, unhidden cameras that rotate quickly to track everyone passing through—with screens posted in an adjacent room broadcasting everything they see—I happen on a vignette that is downright empty compared to the other busier rooms. In its center is a single pedestal about waist high, and resting upon it is an enormous heart-shaped locket.
I smirk upon seeing the locket. Curiosity gets the better of me, so I cover the three paces it takes to bring myself to the side of the pedestal and I grip the little knob on the locket’s face and pull it.
And it doesn’t open.
I frown, thinking I might be trying to open it wrong. I look for a latch or hook, but there is none. I examine the backside, confused, then try opening it again, wanting to know what’s inside. The cursed thing still doesn’t open.
I scowl at it now, purely annoyed.
Deciding to alter my tack, I use both hands to try and get the damn thing to reveal its contents to me—one hand holding down the body, the other pulling on the dumb knob. Even after a solid minute of grunting and tugging, still the damn thing won’t open, its contents safe from my eyes and utterly unknown.
Then … “Oh,” I mutter to myself, realizing the point.
I sigh, letting go of the thing at last. I almost feel stupid, falling for it. Of course the enormous locket would be heart-shaped. All of the things in our lives that we rely on for keeping us secure and protected, they ultimately fail us, letting in the robbers and thieves and prying eyes and uninvited friends into our most private, precious spaces. And yet the heart …
The heart is just a cold, metal locket that won’t open even if you want it to—the most secure thing of all.
Footsteps shuffle slowly into the space from behind. I turn towards the sound.
Brant stands there with his hands in the pockets of his low-hanging crinkled jeans, his biceps bulging beautifully in the effort and hugged by the sleeves of the green t-shirt he wears, and his bright blue eyes lock onto mine with his forehead wrinkled up cutely. His sexy lips purse, sucking in his cheeks as he watches me.