White lace drapes failed to keep out the day—it tore through them, heedless. The shower curtain had a girlish striped pattern, and the toilet-seat cover was made of fuzzy pink yarn. Two toothbrushes with white film crusted down their necks leaned against the rim of a plastic cup, and the voices downstairs came up through the floor, muffled, a distant murmur.
In the mirror, Cameron looked hollow. The three naked bulbs that lined the ceiling made his face pale white, with thick, sagging shadows, like a sick person from a movie. His hair stuck up in a thousand funny places, and a leaf clung to the collar of his button-down shirt. Maple. He plucked it off and dropped it in the sink, where it sat, morose with all its veins.
Cameron snaked his belt out of its loops and dropped it on the bath mat. He unbuttoned his shirt—bits of skin revealed themselves like secrets. Someday his chest would have hair like Dad’s, but now it was white and smooth and bare, nipples interrupting like unexpected punctuation.
His shirt puddled on the floor. Cameron slid out of his dress pants, bunching each pant leg around his ankles, then wriggling clumsily out of them.
He examined himself: Cameron was a boy in a pair of plain white boxers from the drugstore, the kind that came three pairs in a bag. He was a human body. Just that. What went on inside was irrelevant. He didn’t hate himself. He only investigated a body with all its anatomical parts, all the related bits and pieces, a body that knew what felt good and what felt bad.
Lucinda’s green velvet dress had a zipper in the back and a tag across the seam. Eighty percent cotton. XS. Machine washable.
She had worn the dress to last year’s Halloween party. Cameron hadn’t been invited, but he knew from the photos plastered to Beth’s locker that Lucinda and her friends had dressed up as the seven deadly sins. Seven girls with heart-shaped faces smiled into the camera, crouching, a line of paper dolls with stick-straight hair and vodka eyes. Lucinda had gone as envy.
Cameron eased his feet in first. He reveled in the parting velvet, how it let him inside. Surrounded him. Slippery. His shoulders were broader than Lucinda’s—when he pulled the dress up past his chest, a rip tore down the side. The dress wouldn’t fit over his arms. The sleeves were too tight and the shoulders bunched, then settled around his elbows.
The dress was a green horizon line across Cameron’s chest.
Shooting heat. A plunge. The same heat as when he looked at Rayna Rae’s centerfold, or when Nicole Hartley sat so close to him in science class that her silky brown hair stroked the back of his hand as they wrote in lab notebooks. Cameron was set ablaze. Set to explode.
He gripped the edge of the sink so tight the rim left ruler marks in his palms. His reflection in the mirror pulsed in and out. In. Out. He was so dizzy. He sat on the knitted toilet-seat cover and pressed his nose into his forearm—he smelled like Lucinda’s musty vanilla closet.
Cameron was very worried he would vomit. He peeled the dress off and kicked it into a puddle on the floor, stumbling panicked into his own pants, belt, shirt. The ballerina figurine sat poised on the counter, witness to the whole scene.
He needed to leave.
Shoving the ballerina in his pocket, Cameron considered the dress, lying crumpled and torn on the tile—it felt wrong to put it back in Lucinda’s closet, so he stuffed it under the bathroom sink, folding it morbidly over a damp, rusty pipe.
The angles in the Hayeses’ house were all wrong. The stairs were too steep. The upstairs was drenched in that oppressive emptiness, the downstairs bustling with the show that went along with it.
He yearned for sunlight, for a space that did not belong to his desolate love.
Cameron’s Collection of Statue Nights had documented a lot of afternoons, evenings, and nights, but he only saw Lucinda touch herself once.
Cameron knew this night was different from the others in his Collection of Statue Nights when Lucinda pressed an ear to her bedroom door. She murmured into the phone. She wore a baggy gray T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts with small blue flowers embroidered across the seams, like the tiny blossoms that sprouted between sidewalk cracks.
Lucinda climbed onto her bed. She lay on her back and bent her knees, tapping bare feet against the comforter, laughing and shaking her head no to the person on the line. After four minutes and twelve seconds, Lucinda reached her hand into the seam of her pajama shorts.
She pulled the shorts halfway down; Cameron could see the V of her hips, where they melted into the hill of her pelvic bone. He couldn’t tell which underwear she wore, but the insides were lacy black. A small patch of shocking dark hair sprouted from beneath her stretching palm.
Cameron tried to look at something else, anything else, as Lucinda started to explore, slowly at first, hand twisting in tender circles. But in the entirety of the neighborhood, Lucinda was the only light and the only motion.
Lucinda’s hand moved in circles. Her back arched. She was starting a fire somewhere he could not see, a flicker of blue heat that rumbled up. Her long, thin toes were flexed, her legs spread butterfly against the bed. Cameron wondered, at what point do two people stop being two people—when do you become one entity, one conjoined thing that pulses together? When do you become one motion, building to reach, furthering, furthering? He didn’t know the answer, but he wanted to be that with Lucinda as she bent toward the warmth of her own fingers, her lungs expanding and contracting, the back of her head pressing hard into the pillow, dainty neck so stripped and vulnerable. If Cameron could have asked Lucinda anything in the world right then, it would not be who she was talking to, or why she did this for the voice on the other end of the line.
He would ask: Where does that bring you, my girl—can I hold you by the neck, be a part of this creature thing?
In his entire life, Cameron had done only one landscape painting, and that was Pine Ridge Point.
Everything above looked bigger from Pine Ridge Point, and everything below looked smaller, and Cameron thought this was how the world should have been shaped all along. Good things always came from above. For this reason, he could not imagine a better place to go when it was time for things to end. There was a place like this in Hum, he was sure, and he’d spend all his evenings there, watching the sun bow and retreat. Lucinda would sit next to him in her favorite purple skirt, blooming full.
Look, Cameron would say. Don’t you see how weightless we are?
Jade
“How’d it go?” Ma says as I kick off my boots at the front door. “You look terrible.”
In my bedroom, I move aside a mountain of dirty clothes and flop into the ball of blanket stuffed between the mattress and the wall. I lie like this. Time hovers over me, unsure of itself.