Stan is by the door, doing a poor job installing a Captain America gumball machine. He smiles at us. “You two done fighting?”
Collin is looking at me funny, sort of like that time I echoed the ending to his bad haircut story because he’d forgotten he told me already. I paid attention, made him feel worth it, and I promised I always would.
“We’re good,” he answers for us. He leads me to the graphic novel section.
“What was that about?”
“I came in here a few times without you, and Stan kept asking me where the Robin to my Batman was.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say. “I’m totally Batman.”
Collin snickers. “For a while I made excuses, said you were sick or working, but eventually I accepted we probably wouldn’t ever talk again. It sucked, but it made sense with how I ditched you.” He trails a finger across the spines of graphic novels and says, “I gotta ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“When you saw me here and were being extra nice and fake, were you doing it to impress that guy you were with? Was he your boyfriend?”
I completely forget that happened on account of having forgotten my relationship with Collin. Two worlds, ten feet from each other—and Collin was the only one who knew, the only one who was affected by it. “He was never my boyfriend and you were barely anyone to me. I went through the Leteo procedure and forgot my time with you.”
“Sure you did,” Collin says.
He doesn’t believe me. Why would he? But I told him.
We sit against a bookcase, our elbows touching. We’re both reading the same graphic novel about zombies invading a heavily guarded garbage dump, where they find their master’s decapitated head. Not really sure what the zombies plan on doing with the head if they manage to retrieve it, but we lose interest anyway.
“Remember our spot behind the fence?” he says out of nowhere.
It’s not a game of Remember That Time.
“It’s been a while,” I say.
“Want to go?”
I close the graphic novel. We tell Stan we’ll see him later and I wonder if he knows about Collin and me. As long as he’s not outing us, it doesn’t matter.
We head to our spot between the meat market and flower shop. I steer Collin toward the fence from behind, but he shrugs me off and I don’t give him any shit for it, even though there’s not a single gay-hating soul in sight. The smell of dead cow is way more pungent than the flowers this evening. There’s a sign that reads: community service gathering on friday, august 16th. Who the hell knows what that entails? But it’s pretty awesome to find our graffiti still on the wall.
We crawl through the open spot in the fence into the side where history is pulsating with memories of our first time, second time, third time . . . you get it. Collin scans the area for any wanderers or birds with cameras on their heads before coming back to undo my belt buckle. It’s so dark someone could murder us and get away with it, which we prefer—the darkness, not the murder part. I pull him into a rough kiss and I don’t doubt that whenever he’s kissing Nicole he’s pretending she’s some other guy—maybe even me—and as I kiss him now I pretend he’s someone else, and it’s just so fucking sad.
He hands me a condom and I rip open the wrapper with my teeth.
7
HEART-TO-HEARTS AND
HEARTBREAKS
It’s only been a day and I desperately need to see Collin to stay sane. I know he’s working two jobs—one as a busboy at an Italian restaurant, the other as a stock boy at a bodega—and doesn’t get a lot of sleep. But I need him as badly as I should be pushing him away. It’s too weird a mix of ugly and hopeful.
Collin has a few hours free before work, so at 2:00 he meets me at the track field where I watched trains speed by with Thomas. I look around for him lying on the grass or sitting on the bleachers, thinking about how he can be the architect of his life, but Thomas is not here. It’s okay, it’s okay: I have Collin, my first gateway to honest happiness. I tell Collin I chose this spot so we could run around and get him in shape for basketball tryouts, but when we race he’s so far behind, and it reminds me of Thomas losing too. But unlike Thomas, Collin doesn’t just quit, be it a job or a dream or a race. He charges on to the end and then throws himself onto the grass beside me.
“Can we talk about it?”
His question throws me off. “About . . . ?”
He looks around before tapping my scar. “Was it really that bad?”
“Yes.” I lie back and stare at the sun until it hurts. “Life felt like it was going to be too long. I wanted out.”