It is, it’s really dumb, Russ said.
So they sat. Neither turned on the radio. July—trees danced in a casual breeze. Russ’s uniform pits were damp, so he rolled down the passenger’s-side window. Night had folded itself over the world, a blanket.
Lee shifted in the driver’s seat, rested his right hand on the middle console where they kept cigarettes and condoms and cinnamon gum. Russ’s hand, also on the console, had been fidgeting with a Styrofoam cup. Digging half-moons with his nails into the white. When the cup dropped to the floor by Russ’s dirty work boots, his hand stayed.
Russ and Lee had had ten years’ worth of conversations sitting in these two nylon seats. Now, frenzied July wind streamed in, the same mountain air dipping from Russ’s mouth and into Lee’s. Vice versa. He and Lee had had hundreds, thousands of conversations in the car, but perhaps none as important as this.
Whatever Russ had known about himself before this night—it shifted inside him, rearranged itself, rose up to choke him. He could have rolled up the window, he could have turned on the radio, he could have used the hand on the console to take a sip of cold coffee. He did none of these things.
Instead, Russ left his hand. As it was—bare inches from Lee’s hand on the middle console. They both stared through the glass windshield at the rolling dawn landscape, so conscious of their traitor heartbeats, their own Judas fingers.
He can’t remember who was at fault. Who leaped those two inches of space.
Butterfly: skin. Lee’s thin pinky finger curled over Russ’s pinky finger. Smallest digit on smallest digit. And that unfamiliar desire, blazing and determined, the desire to curl more than pinkies—whole selves—to curl bodies around bodies. The desire to eat someone whole. Smell, taste, swallow. Fill. It was paralyzing and perfect, crippling in its singularity. Here is what I have been alive for all this time, Russ thought. This touch.
They sat this way, rigid in squeaky seats, pretending to count smeared insect carcasses on the windshield while instead counting seconds as they passed. Pinkies on pinkies, children making a promise they would never keep.
Minutes. Twelve, thirteen. All shaking insides.
Then, the call: a Toyota pickup speeding down I-25. Twenty over the limit. Lee tore his hand away, Russ revved up the engine, and they drove away from that unremarkable spot. When the shift was over, the sun rose over the mountains, bleeding an inky orange across the sky. Neither man could look at the other.
And the next night, Hilary Jameson. Four broken ribs in a ditch on the side of the highway.
Russ knows nothing of love. The lethal grip of it: a stillborn blue.
Jade
The Arnauds have repainted their house. It’s a pastel yellow now. They also redid the garden in front—a stone path leads up to the porch, where two hand-carved rocking chairs sit next to a rustic wooden table. I bet Mrs. Arnaud spent hours poring over the Pottery Barn catalogue at their sunny kitchen counter. Cette couleur? she probably asked Mr. Arnaud, and he probably kissed her forehead, slow like he used to. I bet the Arnauds speak in quiet French before bed, Mrs. Arnaud in a clean silk nightgown, hair falling natural in her face.
Chunks of half-melted snow litter everything. I take the new path up to the door, but I hesitate before ringing the bell. Nostalgia stops me.
Nostalgia is my favorite emotion. It’s like, you think you know how to deal with the passage of time, but nostalgia will prove you wrong. You’ll press your face into an old sweat shirt, or you’ll look at a familiar shade of paint on a front door, and you’ll be reminded of all the time that got away from you. If you could live it all again, you’d take a long moment to look around, to examine knees against knees. Nostalgia puts you in this dangerous re-creation of something you can never have again. It’s ruthless, and for the most part, inaccurate.
I feel very small, standing on Zap’s stoop in my white dress and my army coat. This isn’t a bad thing.
When I ring, Mrs. Arnaud answers immediately, still wearing her tailored black ensemble.
“Hi, honey,” she says. “Please, come in.”
WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK
A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns
INT. BEDROOM—DAY (LATER)
Celly watches from the doorway as Boy sits on the edge of his bed, pressing his thumbs deep into his temples. He looks up.
CELLY
Hi.
BOY
What are you doing here?
CELLY
I came by to make sure you’re okay.
BOY
Thanks. I appreciate that.
The two stare at each other in silence.
CELLY
(gesturing to the bed)
Can I . . . ?
Boy shrugs. Celly scoffs, hiding her hurt.
CELLY (CONT’D)
I know there’s a part of you that wishes we were young again, that we hadn’t lost our way or whatever.
Boy watches the lines in his palms. Tracing. Avoiding.
CELLY (CONT’D)
I want you to remember how we got here, okay? The love that drove us to become the people we are. It meant something.
(pause)
Right?
Boy finally lifts his head. He looks at Celly, earnest now.
BOY
It meant everything.
Zap used to be messy. When we were little, he’d throw school papers in piles on his desk. His soccer cleats would leave mud cakes at the bottom of his closet, and his jeans were always splayed across the floor, like he’d stepped out of them and they were waiting there, patient, for his legs to fill them again.
I consider doing our secret knock—two sets of quick raps, a horse’s patter—but we are old now. Instead, I knock twice, firmly.
“Come in,” he says.
Zap sits on the edge of his bed. His arms are crossed and his elbows rest on his knees; his body makes a perfect box. His shoulders form an angular T, and his head is bowed and limp in the center, thumbs pointed up toward his face.
“Hey,” I say. Voice too high. “It’s me.”
His bedroom is spotless. He’s painted the walls—one is red, the other three white. On the red wall, he’s hung a bulletin board, which he’s covered in pictures of him and various friends. The boys’ soccer team, crowded around a campfire. Leaning out of jeeps. They’re all very tan from a summer of lazy drinking on docks and joyriding dirt bikes through the mountains.
He got a new bedspread. It’s black, and looks scratchy. The sheets and the comforter are both tucked in at the corners.
“My parents called you, didn’t they?” he says, without looking up.
“They’re worried.”
I’m still standing in the doorway. I take a tentative step forward, hoping he’ll invite me in. He doesn’t. The seconds pass, miserably slow, honey slinking to the bottom of a jar.
“I don’t know what they want from me,” he says, gaze still fixed on his hands.
“I don’t know, either,” I say.