【by Chapman Jones】

Troy and I are at a party, and it’s the first week of summer. Troy is talking to Rachel and Immanuel, and they’re laughing at the things he’s saying. He’s putting his hand – the one not holding his drink – on their shoulders at certain points, slightly before this laughter. He’s punctuating things with gestures. He’s handsome, effortlessly, though he does put in a lot of effort. He looks all American even though his mother is French. He has dark hair. He has the bone structure of a model, wide jaw, full cheekbones, etc., but still extremely masculine. He’s my best friend, and Gigi, my girlfriend, comes up to me holding two drinks, and I think they slept together at school. I think Gigi is handing me a light beer.

Troy and I are sitting at his place, somewhere on the Upper East Side. It’s not the same address that he had in high school, or middle school – before his parents separated (or divorced, I’m not sure) – where we used to hang out. We’re playing a game where two characters fight each other. Both of them are Asian women. Both are yelling things, and mine has blue fire coming out of her hands. His has red fire. Actually, I think both of them are the same character model, but I think mine is blonde, and has blue fire. Troy looks bored. I also look bored, and we both furiously slap the buttons and triggers, and this is the thirtieth game we’ve played in a row. We both periodically take sips from Heinekens, the glasses sweating lightly in the sun that streams through the windows. It’s 3:45 PM.

When Troy and I were in middle school we used to smoke a joint on the way to St. Bernard’s, and we would sit in Doctor Kim’s second period Greek class, laughing at some of the words, giggling at Kim’s accent. One time he yelled at us, asked us what we thought was so funny, and we spent two hours in the office because of something one of us said back. Troy’s father picked us up after we got out of the office and took us to lunch at Orsay, and I had my first beer while I asked Troy if he’d heard Doctor Kim when he called us his worst students ever. Troy just smiled, took a sip of beer, and said “Youh arhh my worse stuhdents!” in an exaggerated accent. His father laughed, and so did I.

Troy posts on his Instagram, a picture of us at Helen’s last night. At Helen’s – the bar, not Helen Jones’s apartment – I kept thinking about a girl I used to know, getting distracted. Every time this happened Troy would stop the conversation to ask me a question or what I thought about something, try to force me back into the conversation with Jill and Gigi and James even though I don’t think they’d noticed I hadn’t been paying attention. I would try to listen to the lyrics of the songs coming over the speakers, or songs that came on after those songs, but I kept getting lost, getting confused, and then Troy would look at me again and I would turn away. He would smile whenever he looked over at me, but not in the way he would smile at the girls, because he was inviting me to share something, trying to show me things I wasn’t able to understand.

In the Instagram post you can see us all smiling, and, if you look closely, you can see how strange the expression on my face is, how afraid I look. We were surrounded by a birthday party, someone turning 28, which hadn’t seemed old before, but which did that night. They played 2010’s era Taylor Swift, and I had to swallow back waves of nausea. Troy never stopped smiling.

James and Valerie threw a party last week, and I ended up on a couch with both of them, and with Troy. Gigi wasn’t there. Someone had told me, when we first got there, that I looked different, and I told them it had only been two years since we graduated. They said they meant since middle school, but it turned out we had gone to different middle schools. On the couch, Troy and James were talking about the internships they had that summer, about how nice everyone was at Morgan Stanley, about how lax the dress code was. This meant I had to talk to Valerie, but we didn’t really say anything, just passed a joint back and forth, and I realized that I was spacing out, that I was somewhere outside the party. I tried to compose mental lists, pieces of information that might help things make sense, but I couldn’t decide what to make a list of, couldn’t figure out how to organize things.

We were in Valerie’s apartment, and everything was shades of grays and browns and blues. Everyone had gone to Dalton, or schools like it. Everyone was in college, but it was summer, and, for some reason, The Doors were playing on the bluetooth speakers that ran throughout the apartment. Someone was yelling something on the other side of the room that I couldn’t hear.

“Can I have that?” Valerie asked, pointing at the joint that was on the verge of dying between my fingers.

I think I had been in love with her at some point, in high school. I don’t think I am anymore but it’s hard to tell because it doesn’t feel any different. She was blonde, tall, thin, and someone had once compared her to a character in a movie, showing me a picture that was supposed to make me agree, but I told them that I didn’t. Five minutes later they realized we’d been thinking of different people, that he didn’t even know Valerie, that he’d been talking about someone else.

At some point James and Valerie got up, left to say hi to someone or maybe to get a drink, and Troy looked over at me a minute later, told me how bored he was.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I might leave soon,” he shrugged.

“It’s not that bad,” I yawned. “I mean, don’t you wanna talk to the people here? Like, catch up?”

“I don’t think I’d really notice if most of the people here never talked to me again. I don’t think I care what happens to them,” he said, looking at his phone briefly.

“But aren’t these people, like, our friends?” I asked, confused. “Aren’t we supposed to hang out with them and stuff?”
“What’s your point?”

“Isn’t that, like, a good thing?”

“I don’t think there’s a lot I can do with that. I don’t think that really means I owe them anything,” he said.

“I’m not saying that, though,” I told him. “I’m just talking about being friendly.”

“What’s your point?” he asked. “Why do you want me to care so much?”

He laughed, waiting a second and then realized I wasn’t going to say anything.

“I mean, you don’t, either.”

He said this into his glass, the drink he was holding, and then, turning to me. “But I guess that’s not really something you like to talk about.”

Once, I was staying with Troy in his house in East Hampton, and I passed by his room in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom, and there was a girl beneath him on his bed (they were both naked, and he was covered in beads of sweat, glistening, actually), and, even though the room was dark, I saw her face and it wasn’t anyone I recognized. Then I saw his face, eyes totally black, his teeth glistening against the whiteness of a night light that was there for some reason, and I just stared in at them on his bed. He, and maybe she, kept humping, and she was screaming, or maybe moaning, in a muffled way – I was never sure if there was something, a pillowcase maybe, over her face (it was so dark) – while I thought about how I would go back to my house in South Hampton the next morning and see my parents, and they would ask me how it was, and then I would remember how I just stared for five, maybe ten minutes, and then closed the door. When I came down the next morning, or maybe early afternoon, she was gone, and Troy later told me that it was a girl from Sag Harbor who he’d gone to camp with, who’d come over after I’d gone to bed, but I never learned her name. He’d said she’d Uber’d home at 4 AM, and when I told him I came in well after five, he just laughed and told me I must have been drunker than he’d thought.

Tonight I’m at a bar with Gigi, who’s asking me when we can leave. Troy returns with drinks, says something to Gigi that I can’t hear, and she laughs. Gigi is blonde, and thin, whatever. Troy is going out with some girl named Amy tonight, but I haven’t seen her for twenty minutes so she may have left. It’s a dive bar, and we all got stoned before we came. At some point I get up from the booth, go downstairs to the bathroom, and, as I close the door, someone yells fuck. There’s a crunching sound, I realize. The door, I realize, has fingers sticking out of it.

“What?” I say, thinking that this might help for some reason, not sure how it would.

“Cameron?” someone says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Cameron?”

It’s Gigi’s voice.

“Gigi,” I say.

“Open the door,” she says, pained.

I open the door, and she immediately grabs at her fingers, which look red and swollen.

“So, uh,” I say, glancing over at a reflection that looks nothing like me because of how stained the mirror is, like it’s covered in Vaseline.

“Cameron?” she says, unsure.

“Yeah,” I say.

“You closed the door on my hand?” she says.

“Oh.”

“I was going to… I was coming down here.”

“To use the bathroom?” I ask, confused since there’s another one right next to the one I’m in.

“No. I was going to… I don’t know. I think I was trying to hook up with you or something…” she says confused, maybe bitter, still clutching her hand.

Maybe bitter isn’t the right word, I don’t know.

“I…” she says, faltering, looking into the bathroom.

There’s a flickering light, and paper towels are scattered over a floor that has a thin, filthy residue, some sort of grime. I’m looking at it, too.

“Well, I was going to, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea…” she looks at the bathroom again, “…anymore.”

“Okay,” I say. “And, now you’re… not?”

She just stares at me, and then leaves. I’m left with several possibilities.

Sometimes I don’t ever feel alive, except when I’m drunk, when I’ve had six or twelve or… well, sometimes I’m drunk, and I’ve had half or a full pack of Marlboro Lights (Golds. I’ve heard that they’re a women’s cigarette, but they taste really good). Sometimes I chain smoke them, just walking a few yards behind my friends, and sometimes Troy is there. I fucking love Golds. Sometimes I don’t even smoke. We’re always on a sidewalk, and I’m always walking behind other people, walking back from a bar or a club, walking towards someone’s apartment, or to another bar.

During late July we’re sitting out by the pool at Troy’s house in East Hampton. James and Reece are there, too, and a joint is being passed around. Troy is wearing a Rangers shirt. I have on boxer shorts and flip flops. I think Reece is wearing Saint Laurent sunglasses. I think they might be women’s sunglasses. We’re drinking Coronas that we bought from a CVS, and everyone is mildly buzzed. Someone’s Juul just died. The horizon looks like it’s melting, the sky barely there as the sun sets, and somewhere, miles away, you can hear traffic. I’ve been here for hours, for days, for what feels like years. We may never leave the lounge chairs by the pool, we may stay here forever, and this doesn’t bother me.

Jill Hearst came over at some point earlier in the afternoon with Rachel, both girls we knew from Dalton. Rachel came out to the pool with us and bummed Reece’s Pall Malls, talked with Reece and James and me about how boring college (maybe Colgate) was. I was surprised when Rachel asked for a Pall Mall, and then for a second one, since I’ve always thought they were more of a men’s cigarette, but maybe that’s not true.

“It’s just like high school, but in the middle of nowhere,” Rachel said, punctuating the sentence randomly, taking long drags.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Reece said, noncommittal. 

“It’s fine, though. I actually kind of like it.”

“Yeah,” James said, stoned. “What do you like about it?”

“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.

“Like, what about it? The people? Or… the campus, or something?” He said, stumbling over the words, absentmindedly putting a hand down his shorts and rearranging his dick.

“I don’t know? What kind of question is that?”

“Like…” James said, and for a second I wasn’t sure if he was lucid enough to remember the question. “Like, what about it?”

“I guess… the people?” Rachel said. “Yeah, the people. I like the people there.”

She repeated this several more times.

“What about them?” James finally said, and I could see Reece silently cringing.

Rachel finished her cigarette and started puffing on a Juul, which Reece asked if he could hit. “I don’t know,” she said after a long time.

“You don’t know?” James laughed. “Wild.”

At some point, maybe an hour later, Troy and Jill came out from the house, which they had disappeared into almost immediately after the girls had arrived. Troy was wearing a different t-shirt, one with a Rangers logo. Jill was smiling beneath sunglasses, holding a Corona, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing bike shorts, or maybe a tennis skirt. She said hi, and then told us about a party that was happening tonight, but we had all been there too long, and it was decided we couldn’t leave. Going somewhere wasn’t an option anymore.

A week after that we go to the Surf Lodge, then to Jill’s house, and I think Reece went back to the city and James might be in the hospital or just going out with Valerie tonight. It’s the final weeks of summer, the end of something that’s going to begin again, and again. It’s just Troy and Jill and me sitting by Jill’s pool drinking Coronas, and I’m hitting my Juul while Jill smokes cigarettes. The pool is lit up, the only light in the backyard besides the glow from the house, and, for some reason, I keep thinking that I’ll fall into it, that I could drown and no one would notice until the next morning. I can imagine my body, face down in the water, just a hundred feet away from where Troy and Jill would be sleeping. For some reason I can’t decide if it would make a difference. More concerning than that is the fact that my Juul is dying and, when Jill offers to run up to her room to grab a charger, Troy asks me something.

“What?” I ask, pretending I didn’t hear him.

“Do you like Jill?”

“I mean, she’s nice?”

I sit there for a second, confused.

“Are you guys going out or something?” I ask.

“Maybe,” he says. “Not really.”

“Oh, that’s cool, she does seem nice.”

He looks at me for a second, and then turns away, pausing.

“How would you know?”
“What?” I ask, unsure if I heard him right.

“How would you know?” he repeats, toneless. “What’s nice about her?”

I take this in, think for a second, realize that I don’t understand the question. “I mean, we did just talk to her,” I say, trying to work my way around the contours of the non-opinion I’m constructing. “I don’t know, I guess. She just looks nice.”

“She looks nice,” Troy mimics.

“Yeah,” I say, waiting for his reaction, but there isn’t one.

He just sits there for a long time, looks like he’s trying to figure something out. I consider asking him what he’s trying to say, but he says something before I get the chance.

“Did I ever tell you about this thing… from a couple years ago, on the Fourth of July?” he asks, a semi-seriousness that surprises me.

I try to remember if he did, tell him that he didn’t. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but his tone announces something, informs me that a pivot is being made. A decision is unfolding.

“Did you know we were on a beach once, Jill and me, and there was this- this seagull…” he pauses, stares into the darkness of the backyard, at these huge pockets of shadow that line its edges. “Jill and I were on the beach a few years ago… at this thing, this Fourth of July thing… and we started walking on the beach, really far out onto the beach…”

“Yeah.”

“We left the party we were at, and… on the beach we saw this seagull, and it was really fucked up…” he says slowly, emphasises this with his hands, gestures vaguely, “and it was already dying, these cuts, all over its body, and there was blood everywhere. I think its wings were broken. It kept making noises, trying to make these… sounds… …and do you know what she asked?”

“What?” I ask, automatically.

“She asked me to put it out of its misery. I mean, don’t get it twisted, she asked me to stomp on its fucking head, basically,” he says, and I think this is supposed to turn me off, to upset me, but he’s smiling while he says it.

“So… you didn’t?”

“No, I did,” he says. “But she asked me to do it. And she watched, too, but only half.”

“Why? Was she, like, freaked out?”

“She was looking for her phone in her purse,” he laughs quietly, the sound muffled as he takes a sip from the Corona.

There’s a long pause.

“I don’t really know what that means, dude,” I say finally.

“It means whatever you want it to mean,” he says, sipping his beer, staring out into the yard again, into nothing.

“Sure,” I say. “But why would you tell me that? I mean, do you think she’s not nice, or something?”

“Maybe,” he shrugs, “I don’t know. Maybe I think you remind me of her.”

“Because…” I start, not sure what to say, trying to figure out how to steer this conversation somewhere else. “Because I’d stomp on a bird’s head?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think you would. But you’d watch.”

I’m silent, and, somewhere, miles above us, a plane passes overhead and my hands are shaking, but only a little.

“But you wouldn’t stop somebody else from doing it,” Troy says after a pause. “You act really bored and stuff, spacey.”

 And this last word is said in a way that’s too coy, too cute. “But…” he trails off.

“But…?”

My throat is dry, and I have to take several gulps of the beer to keep from gagging.

The only lights, the body of the pool and the house, aren’t enough to illuminate his face, and all that’s visible are the edges of his features, the outline of an expression. I can vaguely make out that he’s smiling. For some reason I wonder if my face is shadowed, too, if Troy is as afraid of me as I am of him. But I know this isn’t true. His face is hidden, gone.

“But I don’t think things bother you, things that,” he pauses, “bother other people.”

“What things?” I ask.

“I don’t think they bother you,” he continues, ignoring me. “Not really. Maybe you can pretend it’s different. But I know you. I know you like to watch.”

“Like Jill?” I ask.

“Like a lot of people we know.”

He turns away from me when he says this, and I realize that he’s not laughing, not joking, and for some reason his eyes are illuminated now, and they just stare into the yard, and we sit like this for minutes until Jill returns. At some point I think he mutters something. I think he says that they were on the beach for twenty minutes, that he stomped on the gull’s head for twenty minutes, but I don’t hear him.

Most mornings when I wake up that summer I can’t remember where I am for the first thirty seconds, and sometimes it takes hours to realize, to put the pieces together beyond basic biographical information. Sometimes I can’t do it all, and I have to go through the day pretending I can. Someone, I think a girl I went out with, once told me that I was barely a person, barely half of one. I asked her if that mattered, since she couldn’t tell the difference until it was already too late.

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