Ryan’s mom intruded on his life at every opportunity: logged into his Home Access account to check his homework and grades, typed his papers, emailed his teachers and tutors, made his excuses, selected his college (Pepperdine, where both she and her father before her had gone), colluded with his coaches, gossiped with the mothers of his friends and hookups, made his lunches and monitored his dinners, asked about his exercise, glimpsed him from the hallway as he slept. And the older he got, the more invasive her actions became, as if she could sense his shifting away from her and grew ever more desperate to pull him back. And yet, for all these efforts, she knew nothing. Knew nothing of the whirrings of his brain, the anger in his heart, the desire for he knew not what, or the knot at the floor of his stomach that had been there for as long as he could remember, telling him that something was not right.
At school, he folded up inside himself. He wailed on freshmen. Fucked with girls who worshipped him. Spit words at teachers. His boys, Nick and Flint, had known him so long they didn’t expect him to be any other way. “Man, don’t take it personal, that’s just Ryan,” they’d explain. They said this to show their loyalty and love, they didn’t know it felt like a life sentence.
Ryan’s mom didn’t speak, just watched him, and there was a shimmer in her eyes that made him wonder if she saw it now, could understand and possibly accept, not who he actually was but how little she actually knew. She seemed about to ask him something. But then Ryan’s little sister, Nell, ran into the room, snot-nosed and shrieking, and grabbed his mom around the waist. Ryan didn’t try to listen to her whines. She was hungry, she was hurt, she wanted, she did not have. The same old Nell routine.
As she was dragged off toward the kitchen, Ryan’s mother called over her shoulder, “One of these days, kid, we’re going to talk about that attitude of yours.”
—
He went back to the webcam. He just didn’t think about it. Whether it was weird or not. Whether he liked it and what it meant if he did.
At night he would open his laptop, peer into the webcam’s tiny eye. His body in the bedroom filled the small square in the corner of the screen. Amazing how his world could be compressed in this way—how small it was, how insignificant. Grinning, he tilted the screen until it cut off his head. Above the elastic line of the little-boy briefs his mom insisted on buying him, his torso, slim and tan from an early-summer surge at Stinson Beach, looked alien. It was like watching a stranger strut around a room that once was his.
His body fascinated. Martin’s greedy face filled the screen. His jaw and the broad banks of his smile. Although he’d said he was close to Ryan’s age, his eyes revealed him—he was in his thirties at least. Ryan didn’t care. If Martin was older, it was probably better. It meant he’d have more to give.
Ryan posed. Messing around at first and then working his body in earnest, stealing glances at the corner of the screen in order to see what the man was seeing, sweating slightly in his armpits and along the furred small of his back as he sought out the ideal angle of his beauty. His mother’s anxious presence pressed toward him through his locked bedroom door, but he knew she knew nothing of what was going on inside. No one did.
He did like it. He liked turning the lock on his mother, liked watching himself in the corner of the screen, liked the little presents Martin sent in unmarked envelopes. He even liked sneaking out to intercept the mailman at the curb, beating his mother to it, just in case.
Martin Cruz returned to watch him again and again. The truth was that he asked for hardly anything. He said he wanted to know what Ryan would be doing if he were all alone. That was the phrase he used, “all alone,” like he was talking to a child.
Then, one night:
“Have you ever been to the city?” Martin asked. “Are you ready to see what life’s like for a star?”
Los Angeles was six hours south. When Ryan’s family had driven to Disneyland three summers ago, he’d crowded into the backseat with his snoring sister and pressed his temple to the window as the I-5 landscape paled and dried, the sky’s precious Northern California blue gritting and bruising purple in a way that felt portentous and magic. As they descended into the city, he thrilled to its chaos and its ugliness, its dirty laces of streets, fast-food neon, power lines slashing the sunset like scars.
Ryan knew what Martin meant, what kinds of movies they made in the grim stucco cloister of Martin’s real hometown, Van Nuys (which he’d seen on Google Earth, his cursor tracing the bleached streets). The idea intrigued him. The cut would be swift and total. In this way, he would free himself from the perfect shackles of his life.
—
The strange, hot June ceded to a foggy July and a temperate August.
With his backpack hanging from one shoulder, Ryan walked to the Miller Avenue stop and boarded the bus to San Francisco. Planning the trip was easier than he’d expected: it turned out buses traveled the California spine each day, San Francisco to L.A.