As Ryan stepped onto the bus, the air conditioning blasted him with dry cold and the faint smell of rubbing alcohol. Mill Valley didn’t believe in air conditioning, nor need it, usually, so this smell took Ryan to lesser places rarely visited: a McDonald’s in Orlando, his grandfather’s condo in Seal Beach. The bus driver creaked the springs in his seat. Nodded in Ryan’s direction, fixing his eyes on the road ahead. Ryan’s heart picked up its pace. It was happening. He’d never traveled alone before, and it was incredible how he could just do this, get on a bus and go somewhere, flash his iPhone with an email that said someone had paid for him, some adult somewhere was responsible for this, take a seat and let this dull-eyed old stranger drive him out of his life.
Ryan scanned the dim corridor of the bus and headed down the aisle. It was the middle of the day, a week before the start of school, and the bus was sparsely populated. There were a couple of white guys with dreads and headphones, and behind them an old man sleeping, head dropped on his chest. The old lady beside him wore a flowery T-shirt with fluttery sleeves, opened one eye to follow Ryan as he passed but kept quiet, with her hands crossed placidly over her belly. Next there was a woman about his mom’s age but nothing like his mom: this one was buttoned into a cheap-looking suit, hair clamped back with plastic jaws, blue smears over her eyes. He thought she’d say something, start asking questions, but instead she nodded at him, smiled, ducked her head.
He passed her. Next there were four Hispanic guys spread across one row, talking to each other in indecipherable Spanish. (Ryan had gotten a B+ in Spanish 5-6 last year, but his repartee was limited to “Hola!” and “Qué pasa?” and “Por favor, Se?ora O’Shannahan, puedo ir al ba?o?”) The men glanced at Ryan as he walked between them, but then went back to their conversation. They weren’t interested. Only then did it become real to him, only then did he understand:
No one was going to stop him.
He chose an empty row. Set down his backpack, scooted down in the seat and plugged his earbuds in his ears. It was Flint’s favorite: Tyler, the Creator. (He thought of Flint, trapped now, awaiting his fate.) The beat pounded Ryan’s eardrums. The voice shuddered his heart and tightened his throat—that slow, thick bass, saying whatever the fuck it wanted.
The bus coughed and rumbled to life. His seat quivered beneath him. He rested his head on the scratchy fabric and turned to watch out the window as they pulled away from the curb and headed south on Miller Avenue. They passed the baseball field. His teammates were white stick figures warming up. It was like watching himself on that field, a dozen copies of the boy he’d always been.
The bus traveled out of that little green valley that had been his whole life, that small town circumscribed by mountain and bay and fortresses of ancient trees, and wound toward the freeway, out of the gentle fog and into the hard blue sky, the open expanse of the land. He didn’t really know what he was going to, but he didn’t care. The main thing was that he was going. Was this how Tristan Bloch had felt, he wondered, while on his journey to the bridge?
Ryan’s life was opening all around him, whirling and spinning, whispering into his ear all the things it was going to be. And who he was going to be in it:
Anyone.
Anything.
—
He was a prisoner of the heat. Sweating little rivers in his palms and through the hair curled at his temples, in his pits beneath the borrowed robe and in the crease of his ass beneath his briefs. Cream makeup spackled and suffocated the pores of his face. Two fans limply spun as he waited on the teenage-bedroom set that looked weirdly like his own but not—it was some adult’s best guess, a twin bed with a blue plaid blanket, a desk with a cardboard box painted to resemble an ancient computer, a hair-band poster hanging cockeyed on the wall. A bored-looking girl in sandals and shorts reflected light into his face with a silver screen. The cameraman crouched behind his blank machine. The director yawned in his chair. Only Martin, hovering in the darkness beyond, watched Ryan’s every move with a fierce attention that felt like love.
Beyond the camera was a fluorescent hallway leading out. Ryan squinted to see, but the girl kept flicking silver light into his eyes and he knew now that Out There was nothing but hot smog and noise. He took off his robe. His little-boy briefs embarrassed him, but Martin’s voice carried out of the gloom to tell him they were perfect, he was perfect, he was beautiful, special, there was no one in the world like him. His costar, steroid-bulked and buzz-cut, marched on set yelling into a cell phone, guzzling a Coke. When he saw Ryan, he hung up, hawked into his can.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
As Ryan sat on the edge of the bed, the costar kissed him. Ryan had thought about this but he wasn’t used to it, he was used to girls, the sweet, waxy taste of their lip gloss and gum, the way their soft lips faltered and nipped. The costar led with his jaw, his lips chapped with sharp crusts of skin, and he pushed until their teeth clanged and then forced his tongue inside. Ryan’s heart was kicking, a small caught animal inside his chest. He was backing away, or being pushed, and he was getting hard like he didn’t know he could and didn’t want to but it was too good and too bad and too fast to stop. The costar released Ryan’s face and the sudden light stunned and dizzied him as the costar moved down, pulling at the waistband of Ryan’s briefs. Ryan let him. He closed his eyes until out of the shadows Martin said, “Don’t.” So he opened them, and stared into the dark, gleaming tunnel of the lens.