“I used to be friends with him in middle school,” Matt says. “He ditched me and Burke freshman year, which is fine. I mean, not like I’m Einstein, but Dan never had more than about point-eight brain cells, so, not a huge loss.”
I can’t even get any vindictive satisfaction from the insult. “He’s not even unique,” I mumble. “He’s the same.”
“As what?”
I curl up around my Star Wars pillow. “I don’t know. The other guys I’ve hooked up with.” I sigh, sending a brush of static into the phone. “Sometimes it’s, like, what’s the point anymore? Why am I trying to fill this space with boys? It’s—”
“What space?” he asks.
“I—what?”
“You said, trying to fill the space. What space?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of . . .” I bite my lip, but I can’t keep it back. “Sometimes it feels like I’m not enough. For anyone to stay. You know?”
“Oh. I . . . yeah.” He lowers his voice. “I don’t think you’re right, but I get it.”
“It’s stupid, anyway.” I force a hard laugh. “Like guys could compensate for me feeling unwanted and whatever.” The second the sentence comes out, I want to yank it back. Why am I rambling about my insecurities with the boy I have a crush on, of all people?
Matt stays quiet for what feels like several months, prolonging my humiliation.
Finally, he says, “You are wanted.”
A shiver darts down my arms. His voice is low, but what’s underneath comes out loud and clear: I want you.
I don’t say anything. Can’t say anything. In the commanding quiet, we lay every basic function bare for each other: the stir of our breath, the pump of blood in our veins, the air mixing in our eardrums. The softest nothing sound either of us could make. And something deep in me calms, cocooned in a wellspring of evening silence.
I open my mouth, intending to say something hopelessly witty. Instead, after a second of strangled hesitation, what comes out is, “Tell me something.”
“What?” he says.
“Tell me something. Anything. I don’t—it doesn’t need to be a—really, anything.”
“Okay,” he says, clearly bewildered. “Uh, in seventh grade I broke my wrist, and this guy Adam something was like, using your right hand too much? And everyone called me ‘Matt Jackoff’ for, like, two years. With hand motions included. So that sucked ass.”
I can’t help but laugh. “God, middle school kids are even worse than high school kids.”
“I don’t know. High school kids are pretty bad.”
“Some of them are all right.” I let my usual teasing tone seep back into my voice. “Like, you’re all right.”
Another pause.
“You tell me something,” he says, but the words sound so careful, I get the sense he doesn’t mean just anything.
“Something?”
“Can I ask about your mom? Like, what happened?”
I pull back the covers, staring at my ceiling, allowing the absence of my mother to ache. Thoughts of her sit on the surface, pulsing like reopened wounds.
“Okay, so my family went to New York when I was fourteen,” I say. “End of eighth grade.” I still remember the sight of Mom on Fifth Avenue—it’s an image cut sharp and hard, a facet deep in a gem. Her smile is stamped against the twilit gloom of the city, her blond hair whitened by the glow of a neon sign. Her hands are in the pockets of her jeans, her scarf nestling her chin in loose-woven linen. In my mind’s eye, she looks so much like Kat. Sometimes I think there’s nothing of Mom’s face left in my mind, that Kat’s snuck in and replaced my memories of her, that I’ve fooled myself into thinking I remember the sight of her.
“We were there for one weekend,” I say, “staying at this hotel in Brooklyn. We were supposed to be flying out Monday morning, one of those stupid early flights that—we had to get up at four or something. We had two separate rooms, one for me and Kat, and one for my parents, so I woke up at four, and I heard their voices through the wall, right? They’d been fighting for years at this point, and now they were just screaming at each other in this hotel—probably woke up the whole floor. And Kat was sitting there with her arms around her knees looking terrified. So I got up, and I went out to knock on their door, but it, like, slammed open, and my mom sprinted out and ran down the hall. She was crying all the way down the stairs.”