Playing Pretend

There are five things I would tell you if I ever saw you again:

I.

I was disappointed the first time I met you. Word of mouth made me expect something else entirely. According to the giggling freshmen in the girls’ bathroom, you were supposed to be The Hottest Boy That They Had Ever Seen. I had been waiting on the curb of some anonymous street in Brooklyn with my two best friends, as we pretended to fit into the night lit with nebulous sepia lights and the soft clamoring voices of drunk college kids, like we belonged there, that we were inherently part of the misty night life. Isabelle had already called dibs, she reminded me in a quipping voice. After all, she was the reason that we were invited to your house at all. I didn’t even see you when you arrived. You’re one of those kids that you almost see through. I had to keep checking, bending my neck backwards, just to make sure you were actually there.

We walked to your house. The night was hazy and cool. It smelled like autumn. You were polite, and hung back with Isabelle. Jet black hair, dimples, pale skin, pursed pink lips, thin arms, calculated conversation. You didn’t seem to be The Hottest Boy Ever Seen material. Instead, you appeared to be flattered by any female attention at all.
You seemed more confident after a couple drinks. I had already entirely forgotten you by the time we got to your house. You were only sixteen but you were already living by yourself, illegally; your mother had kicked you out or something. You were somewhere behind the gaggle of rowdy teenage boys playing beer pong or maybe sitting on the old dirty beanie chairs with the potheads. The lighting was rusty and opaque and dim. The tinted air and cheap beer stung my throat. If I had cared to pay better attention, I would have seen you lingering at the back between amorphous impending shadows, your body already a few pitches more emphatic, with a tiny redhead. You were speaking in pretentiously hushed tones in her ear. But I was too busy making eyes at your best friend to really notice. You were just another face in the crowd.
You seemed effectively harmless. So I spoke to you.

II.

Your trick was to pretend to be as naive as me.
And I was naive, holding back chokes and gags when I took sips from your red plastic cup and talked about the music that only you liked. I thought I was never going to see you again after the first night I met you. I hadn’t been so lucky.
We spread the pink checkered quilt across the grass a few days later. We were flimsy and lightweight. I was mostly the only one talking, my incessant chatter bubbly and overflowing, breaking into high pitched laughter like marbles clattering and rolling, deluging in fits of giggles. My conversation was nonsensical but engaging; I couldn’t be taken seriously.
We hardly knew each other, but it was a fact that I’d already forgotten or deliberately overlooked. We stretched our young limbs across the grass, the sun bathing us through the knit leaves and branches above us, as we played cards and ate raspberries and drank wine out of a Ziplock bag. You had brought a friend, and I had brought Isabelle. Nothing was meant to make sense in between our blurred overlapping voices. Speaking for the sake of speaking, in riddles and in puns and in curves and twists, in different languages.
Adam and Isabelle started making out quietly and we were passé about it, like we hardly noticed. I began throwing blueberries and strawberries and pomegranate seeds at you, the smears of the sugary red carcass playfully defiling the white of your skin. We made the picnic our battle field, fighting with chopsticks and wrestling and smearing fruit in each other’s faces. I was always hysterical, you came to learn. Hysterically rash, hysterically playful, hysterically naive. Hysteria was my lifestyle. You complied to my infantile whims and became infantile in the process. Our friends made fun of us, but I insisted that we were so much cooler because of it. There was the tiny bleeding slit on your mouth where I had cut you with a chopstick. I couldn’t tell where the blood ended and where the pomegranate stains began. You were thin, as I climbed over you, and I could feel the indentations of the muscles in your chest, the crevices of where your ribs met your skin and the chiseled hip bones. You were gaunt, I realized, and I noticed the scars around your neck and face, fading into the pallor of your skin.
“This one I got because I nicked myself shaving.” You pointed at your slanted cheek bone.
“What about this one?” I asked. It was deep and thin, a slice on your shoulder blade.
“Oh, that? I thought it would be funny to skateboard down the ladder at my house.” Your voice was quiet but deliberate when you spoke.
“You must have been wasted,” I admonished, laughing.
“I was.”
“That’s never a good idea…” I murmured. “What about this one?” I lightly traced your jawline.
“That one…is from back in the Caribbean. I was born in Hell’s Kitchen, but I moved to the Caribbean for a while.” You mentioned something about getting picked on there. And left it at that.
That’s how it began. I pointed at a scar and there was another story behind it.
“…It was a fight with my older brother. My parents were separating–they weren’t really ever married, so they couldn’t get divorced–and he wanted to stick with my dad in Vermont and I wanted to live in New York…we got into an argument in the garage and he kicked me and I landed near the tool box…”
“I was doing community service in New Orleans, making ditches…manual labor mostly…Another worker accidentally hit me with his shovel…”
“I got that one during a fight at a rave in Serbia… I have family there. My mother is a volatile Serbian woman. She’s got that Balkan blood in her…”
Finally I pointed at your collar bone, half-hidden by your shirt. It was a crooked gash; it was the kind of cut that looked like it had teeth, the way it tore into your skin, chewing itself up. “You haven’t told me about that one.”
I was still lying against you, my legs on either side of you, and the grass was tickling my face.
“That one I got…” I sensed hesitancy. “It happened when…”
I offhandedly kissed you at the nape of your neck, and you stopped speaking abruptly.
You laughed. “I’m healed. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
I laughed and blushed and muttered something stupid and fast under my breath.
“You know,” you said, your voice holding that note of quiet irony. “I still have that cut on my lip. Are you gonna kiss that too?”
So I did, and I felt the taste of cheap wine and irony ebb in your mouth.
“Well, you’ve just been everywhere, and done everything, haven’t you?” I asked you after a while, my dewy voice clinging to the soporific breath of the trees. Your head was in my lap, and I was still sitting on the dewy grass. My skirt kept lifting and flowing in the air.
“Yeah,” you agreed, absentmindedly pulling my hair out of my face, “But it hasn’t done me any good.”

III.

I wonder what you had left when you weren’t pretending.
“Cool kids can’t die,” you once explained to me, murmuring it into my throat like it was a secret while I inhaled the scent of blue laundry detergent and fragmented vanity that pervaded your gait and your voice, and even your starched clothes–the ones you washed and ironed yourself–absorbed it. It was unmistakable, the smell of willful brokenness. You mended yourself back together with tape and band-aids and a tragic smile and a bottle of alcohol. I don’t remember if I accepted that you were only half a man and that you despised even yourself, or if I merely condoned it. I didn’t care as long as I felt your fingers slowly, cautiously entwine in mine in the back of the movie theaters and as long as I would receive messages from you at all hours of the night. Those were the conditions of our dynamic. I could forget that you were a shadow of who you pretended to be, as long as you promised to make the task easier. I was actually happy with you, but that was only because I didn’t know any better.
It’s funny what I remember, because none of it ever really mattered at all. It was a typical starless night when it happened. I was in a tempestuous daze. I was tugging at you, my hands pulling through the strands of your black hair, threading my small thin fingers in yours, pawing at you in quiet repressed agitation.
“Why do you look so scared if you have nothing to hide?” one of the cops demanded.
“I’m not scared,” you replied.
The cop shined a metallic light in my face. “She seems scared.”
We were with our friends–two of mine, two of yours–and we had been behaving innocently enough. We were at a park, on some benches. Someone might have had a couple bottles of a beer, which I barely drank. I laughed often and disinterestedly at the comments your friends made. It was a skill, when I laughed with intimate razor blade sincerity and tossed my long black hair back and jerked and curtsied, overcome by the disorder of my emotions. It was the kind of blind ecstatic laughter, the kind that pierced through the dark and frightened the doves. I could pretend no one else existed, or forget about them altogether.
We had hardly started when the cops came.
I blinked into the steely shaft of light, like a deer caught in the headlights. My small lips exploded when I said it, my hot mouth groping for the words, “Obviously I’m gonna be scared if a cop with a gu-”
“We know – we’re very sorry – we won’t do it again – we could leave,” you said, overlapping my voice hurriedly, squeezing my leg.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” one of the cops said sarcastically. They were all short men. They were of all kinds – first a Hispanic one, a Texan one, a Russian one – I lost track. I couldn’t see their faces in the dark. First there were only two of them, and then more came. They could sense my apprehension. The strain was visible in the fine lines of my face. My spine was arched, erect against the disintegrating wood of the bench, pricking the skin of my bare back, stinging and splintering the soft delicate tissue.
“Which of you kids were drinking?” one of them asked, examining us one by one in a straight line. “Were you drinking?” He pointed at me and you.
I waited a moment, waiting for someone to say something.
“No, it was just me,” you answered. You thought you were lying for me when you said it. You actually had no idea how little I truly drank. Your arms were like cobwebs draping around my shoulders and waist.
“Can I see your ID?” he demanded. You were at ease as you handed him your ID – with the birthdate scribbled over in wiry handwriting – and I knew you were going to be alright. You had that amiable irrelevance that appealed to grown-ups, the kind of flickering broken charm that adheres to miserable adolescent boys when they get themselves into mischief.
I wondered if you felt anything, when I was curled up like a cat, my body small, compact, neat, into your lap, when I was so restless and so close that you could probably hear the soft sound of my bones. Months later I would still remember the warm imprint of your hand on my back, a falsely reassuring fact that I surrendered to, while I seamlessly became expendable territory. You were full of empty gestures. Your design was all show and no substance, and I was the kind of girl whose back you could grow on. The premise and weight of your confidence relied on the first swollen heart that you could break.
“Is there anything that you’re afraid of?” I asked you later, lightly, the impudent honey flush of my cheeks and skin still not subsiding in between raw clandestine kisses. I was on my way home, and I didn’t dare ask you anything serious.
“What can I say? I’m a rebel.” The mock self-deprecation, the bouts of candid ease and confidence, it was like you practiced your lines. That was a typical response from you back then, when you had me all figured out. I was so easy to read, to coax, to beguile. I regarded every passing moment with a lovely drugged nostalgia, but my heart nearly broke when I saw you kept your gaze controlled.
“All sarcasm aside. You’re really not afraid of anything? Not spiders, the dark, failure – nothing?” We were walking down a ratty cobblestone road. The glow of the dingy streetlights set the misty roads in Brooklyn ablaze and my palm and thin wrist curved into yours. You were dropping me off at the train station.
“Being alone I guess,” you said it casually. “There being absolutely nobody. Just being alone.”
I was intrigued by my pity for you. You never had to tell me why your mother kicked you out. You once muttered something about there not being enough space in her apartment, some rehearsed lines that you had convinced yourself of but came out stumbling and dismissively. Over time the lies about your mother became more coherent, but your slips were irreversible. Your mother wanted her boyfriend to move in and you were in the way. “What does your dad do in Vermont again?”
“I told you. He’s a hit-man.” You were proud of it; it was obvious in your low glossy voice. I could never tell if you were lying with your father, though.
“Seriously? Be honest.”
“I am being honest.”
A beat. You were carrying the crimes and failures of your parents like scars on your skin. How long till your own crimes and your failures would appear too, I wondered. How long till people could read the liberating anguish off your face? How long till it stopped being liberating?
“I don’t think you have to worry about being alone,” I said, looking at you straight in the face, at the dusty opalescence of your serpentine arms. My voice danced and flirted in the dark.
“Why’s that?” you asked. I could tell by the look on your face what you expected me to say. I stopped and faced you. We were at the train station now.
“Because you’ll never be more alone then you are now. You’ve already faced your fear.” I have a funny quality, sometimes. This furious, tenacious innocence which obscures everything that comes out of my mouth. I could say the cruelest things with a huge smile on my face. But I hadn’t intended to be cruel, or even to be kind for that matter. I wasn’t like you, I didn’t need to rehearse my lines.
The next morning I woke up to receive an anticipated text message from you, “I am so hardcore. I live on the edge. Got in trouble with the cops again after you left. This time for pissing on public property. I’m like James Bond. Hahaha I told you I was badass.”

IV.

We only had one thing in common, you and I. One sole thing. We both wanted to be young forever.
So we sucked on the night, sucked on the quiet, filling our lungs with the crisp coolness and we pretended there was no tomorrow. Youth was tumultuous serenity, I decided. It was the angst of having everything ahead of you and not knowing what to do with it. It was having a clumsy power, and the inability to use it, so it came out in spurts of emphatic passionate fallacies. Youth was being able to revel in your ecstatic fallacies. We were empty slates. You and I, we wanted to be empty forever.
Our intention wasn’t to live forever. We didn’t seek immortality. It wouldn’t be fun, if we couldn’t die. Losing was all the more precious. We felt weak and futile and vulnerable, like rag dolls lost in waves, and we loved it. You made me realize that love laughs at faith.
But you were racing against life. You wanted to see how much you can take. How much till youth broke you. How much till you broke it. I wanted to preserve it, keep it safe, hold and lock it inside me. If I took care of it, would it last longer? That’s where our problems began.
I was a wreck the fleeting time I knew you. You kept me on a constant edge. I agonized for hours each time before I met you, over every double-meaning, over every phrase that could have meant something else, I analyzed and over-analyzed text messages, emails, phone calls, taunted by your unpredictability, the fluctuation in your temperament, while I aimlessly attempted to portend your next move. It was like a perpetual break-up for me, but you were none the wiser.
We were sitting on a bench near my house by the river, my legs draped across your lap.
“What time do you have to get home?” you asked for the third time, as I walked towards the creaky black swings, toying with a wavy black strand of my hair.
“Before midnight.” I sat in the rubbery swing, waving to and fro, and the park was mostly empty except for us. It was always a little windy by the river, and across the river I could see the flickering lights of New Jersey, reflecting against the inky water, illuminating its blackness with metallic stains of wavy gold. The tree branches above us were interlacing into coils of braids. The leaves rustled, staggering the silence. “You never have to worry about what time you get home,” I said, only half-complaining.
“That’s the only good thing about living on your own,” you said. You were leaning with the long of your spine against a pole, observing me as the swing launched up and then retreated from the sky. You were mostly composed of shoulder blades, arched eyebrows, and high cheek bones.
“So your mom doesn’t care what you do?” My swing was gaining speed, and my breathless voice weaved into the breeze, vacillating along with it, whipping around us.
“What Mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” you replied airily.
“It won’t hurt her, but it could hurt you,” I objected. Your blood was infested with cocaine and worms, and I wanted to keep reminding you of it. I needed the upper hand, to show you I was still whole, that I was still untainted. I flaunted my innocence in your face just so I could see you cringe. I punished you for being able to do without me.
“My mom knows I could take care of myself-”
“But you shouldn’t have to,” I interrupted.
There was a pause, as you ignored me and gazed straight across the river, not facing me.”I do alright.”
I inhaled a gulp of cold air, and aimed my swing towards the black gilded waves. I wanted to collide with the stars.
“Would you burn your dreams down for me?” you asked, your slender fingers entwining around the chains of my swing, the sallowness of your skin interrupting the roughness in the steel. The rhythm of my swinging broke, and I was trapped.You said it innocuously, with a clipped smile, but it’s always been hard for you to hide the fact that you enjoyed my emotional carnage.
I was startled, but I just laughed. That was my response to most of your sly antics. “Don’t be ridiculous. What does that even mean?”
“It’s just a question. Would you or wouldn’t you?” you pressed.
“Yeah, I guess I would.” I like to think that I was lying while I said it.
We will always be bad actors with bad habits, Adrian.

V.

I was disappointed the last time I met you.
We were sitting on the front porch of my building. My legs were dangling beneath my seat, and I held my back against the chipping black streetlamp. Upstairs, my family was waiting.
“So will I ever see you again?” you asked.
“Depends. Are you going to suddenly disappear again?”
“I said I was sorry about that. I don’t know what happened.” You offered me promises of wispy delusions and self-deception. That was all you had to give.
“It’s okay. I just figured you died or something.” It was almost midnight. I distinctively remember the taste of my pride. Like metal. Like rubber burning. Like inhaling ashes.
“But if I don’t call you this time,” you insisted, “It’s because I’ve died.” I wonder if we knew we were lying as we said it.
If I ever see you again, there would be nothing left to say.