by Daryl Banner
“You scratched that into the wall when you learned your ABCs in school,” my mom tells me. “You were only four or five.”
“You’re going to be late for work,” I warn her.
“Sam. Look at the letters. Read them.”
I stare at the wall again. “A … B … C … D … E … F … G.” I shrug. “And?”
“Musical notes, sweetie.” My mother smiles. “You stopped at G.”
My eyes flinch at her words, and then I look at the wall one more time. My lips part as I think about what she’s saying. Then suddenly I think about something my father told me a long time ago. It was in this garage he said the words, pointing at the same markings I made as a child on this wall. His words bounce around in my head like a snare drum tap, tap, tapping …
“You were always a musician,” my mom tells me. “And your dad—”
“Dad showed me this, too.” I bite my lip, staring at the wall some more. I picture my little child self meticulously carving these letters into the plaster. “A, B, C … D …”
“He used to tease you,” my mom recalls. “He’d say you couldn’t get beyond G because you knew you wouldn’t need any more letters. You had all the musical notes in front of you right then, all the letters you’d ever need. You are a musician, Sam. Always were.” She comes up to me and cradles my face, then gives me a meaningful kiss on the cheek, her lips lingering for a second. “And your father may have left me, but he never left you. Not truly,” she whispers. “You’ll always have the music in you.”
With that, my mother gives my shoulders a squeeze, then dismisses herself from the garage. I stand there as the morning sun pours more and more light into the stark, lifeless garage. Soon, I hear the rumble of a car, and then my mom is gone to work.
And those letters on that scratched up, hole-pocked wall sing to me. A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
Then a smile finds my face, and I know what I must do.
Senior Year
Chapter 21
Dmitri
It’s the first week of my final year at Klangburg University, and I’m convinced that I’m going to spend it alone in this damned apartment.
Brant stays over at Nell’s loft in the city more often than he does here, especially since he’s no longer a student at Klangburg, having officially dropped out. I suspect they have their hands all over an art project together, clay and glue and paint caking their fingers. (Yes, that’s a euphemism for about twenty other things they’re actually doing.) After seeing how they were with each other at that graduation party, which I didn’t stay at for very long, I wouldn’t be surprised if an unplanned son or daughter is in their immediate future.
They couldn’t even keep their hands off one another at Dessie’s surprise party at the Throng at which she (finally) proposed to Clayton, who was in tears because he had no idea. As we’ve come to learn, if there’s anything our group of friends is good at, it’s keeping secrets.
And there are plenty of secrets to keep.
Secret number one: Eric and Kirk are a thing now, but he doesn’t want anyone to know for fear of breaking Bailey’s little heart, who still pines after him and, even months later, calls me randomly asking what Eric’s up to and if I can tell him he called. Even just last week when I was helping my sister move into her dorm (yes, little Devin’s all grown up and officially enrolled as a Klangburg freshman, and she’s majoring in economics, of all things), he called and begged to know where Eric was. My automatic answer is always that Eric is busy with some show at a community theater in town, since he’s graduated while Bailey still has two years to go. I feel so sorry for the guy, I’m tempted to put him out of his misery and tell him all the words Eric’s too chicken shit to tell himself, even if that’ll cause a rift between Eric and I. Really, I’ve weathered worse, and Bailey deserves closure.
Secret number two: Riley is, in fact, not a virgin. I know I should have concluded this long ago when she first started flirting with me, but the truth is, she lied. It was something about her not wanting to taint the image of perfection she thinks I have of her, despite my insisting that I don’t see anyone as perfect; it’s practically my job as a writer not to. But when she finally came clean, something beautiful and freeing seemed to open up between us that allowed for a much richer, more honest line of communication to exist. We started to feel like we could share all of our secrets with each other.
Except for secret number three:
Sam.
Which I will more adequately explain after a story about Riley, a girl I thought I could love, and a boy, Dmitri, myself, who I thought I knew.
This story, despite its seeming pleasantness, does not end well.
Last semester on Valentine’s Day, Riley and I finally had sex. It was a gorgeous day pulled straight out of a Shakespeare sonnet—one of the less tragic ones, that is. I took her to her favorite restaurant. We drank wine, then strolled down the street hand-in-hand to a ritzy hotel I booked us for this special night. We ordered room service with no mind at all to the (ridiculous) cost and feasted on chocolate-kissed strawberries while lounging on beds covered by thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Rose petals made a trail to the marble bathtub, in which we bathed, kissed, and began our adventure in true intimacy together at long last. The water was perfectly hot, and the sex we had after was hotter. For that night, I was king and she was queen.
Please induce your self-assisted vomiting now.
And somewhere else on the other side of the city, Sam was enjoying a concert filled with breathtaking video game music and dreaming of the epic game soundtracks she might someday compose. And she was doing it all with Tomas at her side, someone I hoped was making her as happy as I was with Riley.
After that Valentine’s, the gates between Riley and I opened and all the sexually-charged horses stampeded into the yard. We started to have sex all the time—and everywhere. She wanted it before class. She wanted it after. Then she wanted it the moment after we just did it.
And when she said, “I love you,” one night after she came so hard that she screamed my full name—Oh, Dmitri Joseph Katz!—her words caught me so much by surprise that I fell off of the bed.
Seriously. I fell off of the fucking bed.
“Are you alright??” she called down to me, alarm in her eyes.
“I think I broke something,” I groaned.
Yeah, her heart. I didn’t say the words back. I think she noticed, because she never said them again since.
When summer came, I missed my chance to say goodbye to Clayton before he took off to New York for good. I had so many sappy things I wanted to tell him about what our friendship meant to me over the years. But Riley was having an emergency involving her scheduling for the fall, and she required my input on every professor and class choice. It wasn’t exactly her fault because I don’t think she knew Clayton was leaving that day. If I’m being honest, time completely slipped away from me and my phone was nowhere nearby, buzzing in some other room with the missed texts and phone calls from everyone—even Eric.
But something inside me still blamed her.
I turned dark and, despite the smiles I gave her on the outside, I felt a bitter stab of resentment within that I couldn’t shake off.
It was Sam who called me that same night asking where I was, since she’d shown up to say goodbye to Dessie and didn’t see me there. “I came down with something,” I lied to her. “I feel awful that I missed his send-off today. I hope Clayton wasn’t pissed.”
But Sam knew me better. “Something came up with Riley?” she asked, cutting straight to the heart of it. Sam always has a talent for doing just that when it comes to me.
“Yeah,” I admitted with a sigh, thankful for Sam’s intuition. “I’m … trying not to be mad about it. She really didn’t know what day it is.”
“Mmm, yeah.” Sam joined me in a second sigh, then said, “I’m sure she feels awful about you missing Clayton’s send-off, too. I mean, she did get to know some of the gang. Sort o
f. Kind of. Well, not really. But still. She cares about you.”
Truth is, Riley made very little effort to meet my friends. (Read: none at all.) In fact, whenever I tried to introduce her to them, something always came up in which she was suddenly very occupied with family stuff, or her brother coming home from the oil rig, or her father having another random trip to the doctor. I probably should have taken the hint from the very first time I invited her to watch my friend Dessie sing at the Throng and she had some sudden cousin-related family emergency and dashed out of town. After a lot of arm-twisting, I got her to attend Brant’s art opening last fall as well as Dessie’s proposal at the Throng, but she spent most of the time staring at my friends instead of talking to them. She smiled so much that I doubt anyone noticed her lack of interest toward them.
And so I tried the opposite tack. I asked if I could come out to her house sometime over the summer and meet her folks. That whole day after I asked the question, she got stressed and suddenly everything was annoying her. I finally rescinded my own invitation and instantly she was better, then said something about timing and that she couldn’t wait to get me out to the farm someday—just not this day.
It seemed to me that Riley was making a (very) active effort to hide me from her family.
Thoroughly. And shamefully. The way you hide a porn magazine under the mattress. Or clear your questionable browser history before your roommate hops on your computer. Or cover up a humiliating zit on prom night before your date sees it.
I am that humiliating zit.
And thus began the great fight of the summer, just one month ago from today on an unassuming Wednesday night in late July. “Are you embarrassed of me or something?” I asked her plainly while we were having sex.
“I’m close, don’t stop,” she moaned, her eyes closed.
I stopped. “Do your parents even know I exist?”
Her eyes flipped open and she stared at me. “Really? Right now? You want to talk about my parents—right now—when I’m seriously just about to come?”
I took that for my answer. “They … don’t even know about me.”
“Of course they do.” She slapped my ass. “Fuck me.”
I didn’t. “I’m, like, your scandalous, dark little secret you stash away on campus.”
“I said fuck me!”
“They think you’re being daddy’s good little girl. Single. No boys. Just you and your studies all day long. I don’t exist.”
She huffed in my face, then pushed me away, my dick popping out of her. She was dressed in an instant and heading for the door.
I followed her, my hard cock dancing against either of my thighs in my heated pursuit. “Say it isn’t true, then. Look me in the eye, Riley, and tell me they know you have a boyfriend at all, and that in just a months’ time—”
“You’re naked. Put on some clothes,” she demanded, folding her arms and standing by the counter where her white Coach purse sat.
“And that in just a months’ time … we will have been together for a year,” I said. “One whole year.”
Riley’s face was set and her eyes were flaring with indignance, but she said nothing more. She knew I was right. The problem was, she just didn’t want to have this conversation right now. Riley wasn’t ready.
But in my eyes, an explanation was long overdue. “Just tell me,” I begged, naked, my latex-wrapped cock hanging between my legs and, oddly, staying stiff as steel throughout all of this. “Tell me why. Just a little clarity … a little something so I can stop losing my mind over it.”
Something calmed in Riley’s expression. I imagined it was due in part to my having brought my own voice down. I didn’t want to yell, and I wasn’t going to get anywhere with anger.
In a voice as small as a grain of rice, she murmured, “I … never knew we would become what we are. I didn’t expect this to … get serious.”
“So I was just a fling at first?”
“Well … yeah. Kind of.” She chuckled dryly. “I’m trying to be honest. I just thought you were some cute guy I could have fun with. And then we did. And then we had some more. And … some more. And … I was always afraid to take you home with me and show you to my parents when in the back of my mind, I was … just waiting for this to end. Because all the best things in my life just … end. Maybe I’m afraid that you’ll leave me suddenly. If I took you to meet my family, then I’d have to know that this really is a serious thing.”
This is a serious thing, I was about to say to her, but instead, I held my tongue and waited for her to finish.
“And we’d have to … tell each other everything,” she said. “My exes. Your exes. Things about me that maybe I haven’t been forthcoming about. And … things about you.” Riley’s posture stiffened. “I need to know you’re the real deal.”
“Ask me anything,” I blurted out, determined to be done with this.
She pursed her lips and studied me. Her eyes drifted down to my cock, but there was oddly nothing sexual about her gaze. She was just thinking of what she wanted to ask.
This is how comfortable we’d gotten around each other’s bodies; I didn’t even seem to affect her anymore.
“Alright. Dessie. Your deaf friend’s singer gal. You slept with her?”
I choked on my own tongue. “Uh, no. We never fucked. Definitely not. Just a friend, always was.”
“What about that Chloe girl you’re close with?” Riley continued to interrogate me. I let her. “The one with the black hair and the black … everything? She just about seems to share your wardrobe, minus the fingerless gloves and fishnet stockings. Did you two ever date?”
“Nope. She dated Brant for a bit a couple years ago, but not me.”
“She seems awfully friendly around you.”
“She’s like a sister. I was never—”
“And what about Sam?”
My mouth opened, ready to explain precisely what Sam means to me, but suddenly there was cotton in my mouth and a sea of ice before my eyes.
What if I told her the truth and she decided she didn’t want me talking to Sam anymore? What if Riley suddenly grew suspicious every time I texted Sam, or called her up, or hung out and got some totally platonic, innocent, friendly lunch with her?
All of my insides froze up. I realized in that moment that I didn’t know Riley as well as I thought I did, and perhaps that’s what inspired me to keep a few cards close to my chest.
“Just friends,” I answered lamely. “Always was.”
Secret number three.
Riley sighed, called herself stupid for worrying, and rushed into my arms, determined for us to never fight again. I held her, naked as my birthday, and in the cold silence of my apartment, I stared at nothing and wondered what the fuck I was doing.
What the fuck was I doing?
A month after that fight: what the fuck am I doing?
Now, I’m standing in this same cold, empty apartment, right where I was hugging her after that moment. A month later, and it feels like we had that fight just yesterday.
But that was summer. Now it’s fall, and school is in session, and when this year is over, I’ll have a degree in my hand and a big, bright future staring me in the face.
But will Riley still be by my side?
I take a peek at my quiet phone on the counter only to find no new notifications. I’m waiting for my sister Devin to message me that she’s ready for lunch. She should be finished with her first class by now, but I don’t want to be the annoying, pushy older brother who’s wrecking her freshman style. For all I know, she’s already making tons of friends and doesn’t need my companionship at all.
Maybe it’s me who needs some companionship. Maybe it’s me who needs Sam most of all because without her, I have no real friends I can trust who truly know me. I’d like to think I bring the same comfort to her with regard to being the one safe person she can vent to when it comes to bassoonist issues (yeah, that’s what we call them) or some dumb, stress-inducing assignment t
he Music school puts on her.
The moment is broken by the sound of keys at my front door.
Eric comes in. Loudly. Riley is with him, and she’s cackling at some joke he obviously just told her. When they see me, their laughter dies out right away, Eric saunters into his room after a tiny wave, and Riley approaches me with that all-familiar hunger in her eyes.
“You and me,” she states. “Like, right now.”
“Oh? My gay roommate got you all worked up, so you need to sit on my dick for some relief?” I tease her.
The next moment, I’m stumbling over my feet as Riley drags me into my bedroom. The door is kicked shut with a vengeance, and then she has all my clothes off in seconds. It’s sex time before we even have a chance to chat about our mornings. And I have so much on my mind that I wanted to talk to her about, but Riley’s having none of it until she gets some of her own.
Only five minutes of passion ensue before she orders me around.
“Lower.”
I shift my weight a bit.
“Mmph. Lower.”
I adjust even more, grunting slightly in the effort.
“Lower.”
I suppress a shriek of pain as my calf decides to cramp up.
“Lower, Dmitri. Lower.”
“Seriously,” I mumble under my breath, “if I go any lower, I’m going to be fucking your knees.”
“What was that?”
“Is this fine?” I ask, louder.
Riley grunts in frustration. “It’s just that you’re breathing on my face,” she explains.
I stop fucking her. “Would you rather I not breathe?”
“Don’t stop!” she protests.
I resume, despite the cramp. I think I’m acquiring a throb in my head to match the one in my calf. “You want me to go down on you?”
“Ugh. Don’t ask. Just do it.”
“Alright.” I drag my mouth down her body, then recoil when I reach her pussy. “Um …”