Be normal, I told myself, willing the tears to come. Just now, just for him.
“Why am I here, Matt?” I said.
Dry eyed.
“You didn’t want to see me?” he said.
“It’s not that.” It wasn’t a lie. I both did and didn’t want to see him—wanted to, because this was one of the last times I would get to, and didn’t want to, because … well, because of what I had done to him. Because it hurt too much and I’d never been any good at feeling pain.
“I’m not so sure.” He tilted his head. “I want to tell you a story, that’s all. And you’ll bear with me, because you know this is all the time I get.”
“Matt …” But there was no point in arguing with him. He was right—this was probably all the time he would get.
“Come on. This isn’t where the story starts.” He reached for my hand, and the scene changed.
I knew Matt’s car by the smell: old crackers and a stale “new-car smell” air freshener, which was dangling from the rearview mirror. My feet crunched receipts and spilled potato chips in the foot well. Unlike new cars, powered by electricity, this one was an old hybrid, so it made a sound somewhere between a whistle and a hum.
The dashboard lit his face blue from beneath, making the whites of his eyes glow. He had driven the others home—all the people from the party who lived in this general area—and saved me for last, because I was closest. He and I had never really spoken before that night, when we had stumbled across each other in a game of strip poker. I had lost a sweater and two socks. He had been on the verge of losing his boxers when he declared that he was about to miss his curfew. How convenient.
Even inside the memory, I blushed, thinking of his bare skin at the poker table. He’d had the kind of body someone got right after a growth spurt, long and lanky and a little hunched, like he was uncomfortable with how tall he’d gotten.
I picked up one of the receipts from the foot well and pressed it flat against my knee.
“You know Chase Wolcott?” I said. The receipt was for their new album.
“Do I know them,” he said, glancing at me. “I bought it the day it came out.”
“Yeah, well, I preordered it three months in advance.”
“But did you buy it on CD?”
“No,” I admitted. “That’s retro hip of you. Should I bow before the One True Fan?”
He laughed. He had a nice laugh, half an octave higher than his deep speaking voice. There was an ease to it that made me comfortable, though I wasn’t usually comfortable sitting in cars alone with people I barely knew.
“I will take homage in curtsies only,” he said.
He pressed a few buttons on the dashboard and the album came on. The first track, “Traditional Panic,” was faster than the rest, a strange blend of handbells and electric guitar. The singer was a woman, a true contralto who sometimes sounded like a man. I had dressed up as her for the last two Halloweens, and no one had ever guessed my costume right.
“What do you think of it? The album, I mean.”
“Not my favorite. It’s so much more upbeat than their other stuff, it’s a little … I don’t know, like they went too mainstream with it, or something.”
“I read this article about the lead guitarist, the one who writes the songs—apparently he’s been struggling with depression all his life, and when he wrote this album he was coming out of a really low period. Now he’s like … really into his wife, and expecting a kid. So now when I listen to it, all I can hear is that he feels better, you know?”
“I’ve always had trouble connecting to the happy stuff.” I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. I was wearing all my rings—one made of rubber bands, one an old mood ring, one made of resin with an ant preserved inside it, and one with spikes across the top. “It just doesn’t make me feel as much.”
He quirked his eyebrows. “Sadness and anger aren’t the only feelings that count as feelings.”
“That’s not what you said,” I said, pulling us out of the memory and back into the visitation. “You just went quiet for a while until you got to my driveway, and then you asked me if I wanted to go to a show with you.”
“I just thought you might want to know what I was thinking at that particular moment.” He shrugged, his hands resting on the wheel.
“I still don’t agree with you about that album.”
“Well, how long has it been since you even listened to it?”
I didn’t answer at first. I had stopped listening to music altogether a couple months ago, when it started to pierce me right in the chest like a needle. Talk radio, though, I kept going all day, letting the soothing voices yammer in my ears even when I wasn’t listening to what they were saying.
“A while,” I said.
“Listen to it now, then.”
I did, staring out the window at our neighborhood. I lived on the good side and he lived on the bad side, going by the usual definitions. But Matthew’s house—small as it was—was always warm, packed full of kitschy objects from his parents’ pasts. They had all the clay pots he had made in a childhood pottery class lined up on one of the windowsills, even though they were glazed in garish colors and deeply, deeply lopsided. On the wall above them were his mom’s needlepoints, stitched with rhymes about home and blessings and family.
My house—coming up on our right—was stately, spotlights illuminating its white sides, pillars out front like someone was trying to create a miniature Monticello. I remembered, somewhere buried inside the memory, that feeling of dread I had felt as we pulled in the driveway. I hadn’t wanted to go in. I didn’t want to go in now.
For a while I sat and listened to the second track—“Inertia”—which was one of the only love songs on the album, about inertia carrying the guitarist toward his wife. The first time I’d heard it, I’d thought about how unromantic a sentiment that was—like he had only found her and married her because some outside force hurled him at her and he couldn’t stop it. But now I heard in it this sense of propulsion toward a particular goal, like everything in life had buoyed him there. Like even his mistakes, even his darkness, had been taking him toward her.
I blinked tears from my eyes, despite myself.
“What are you trying to do, Matt?” I said.
He lifted a shoulder. “I just want to relive the good times with my best friend.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then take us to your favorite time.”
“You first.”
“Fine,” I said again. “This is your party, after all.”
“And I’ll cry if I want to,” he crooned, as the car and its cracker smell disappeared.
I had known his name, the way you sometimes knew people’s names when they went to school with you, even if you hadn’t spoken to them. We had had a class or two together, but never sat next to each other, never had a conversation.
In the space between our memories, I thought of my first sight of him, in the hallway at school, bag slung over one shoulder, hair tickling the corner of his eye. His hair was floppy then, and curling around the ears. His eyes were hazel, stark against his brown skin—they came from his mother,