eli

‘ That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;

Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,

Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.

(…)

"Fool," said my Muse to me, ’

Astrophil and Stella 1 , Sir Philip Sidney

‘ I went out full and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: ’

Ruth 1 21 , The Holy Bible (King James Version)

He’s twelve, so it doesn’t matter.

He’s slumped in the corner jutting his bony thumbs into a Game Boy Color and his hair is falling into his eyes like strands of flax. And you’re the ornery sixteenyearold volunteering at an old age home pretending a few hours of begrudging community service will, by some cosmic happenstance, transmutate your lacklustre report card into something worth considering by a decent university.

Puppy shelter was taken. So was beach cleanup at the state park (foraging through the sand for discarded rings to pawn). So here you are.

Naomi Donaldson is not senile. She tells you as much while you’re heaving five or six comically weightful damask canvas suitcases into her ward.

“My bones,” she tells you, as she makes Mary Poppinseque work of unlading an entire ornate bedside table setup—Bible, timepiece, picture frames, letter opener, like, a dozen little candles and decorative cosmetic boxes—from her purse, “If I could stand right, I’d finish off in SaintTropez. That and my eyes. Swear to God, this one goes numb half the time. It’ll be a stroke He gets me with.”

So, puppy shelter was taken. But the kid in the corner—this total slip of a boy, more nose than anything to his face, swallowed by an ‘Urban Hymns’ tee, chewing at the collar—looks a little bit like a puppy. One of those tiny, grouchy ones. Like that bitey dirtyblonde Chihuahua your friend Elise adopted last Spring.

He sighs all angsty at this coarse reminder of mortality, and he groans, sort of whines, “Nana.”

“Not our timing, Artie,” Naomi says dismissively, spritzing the room with a powdery perfume and wafting it about with her sunspotted hand.

So the kid, Naomi’s grandson—Artie—spends his Summer slumped against the swingset in the back garden of the nursing home. Some of the residents planted snapdragons last month. Nurse Lisa has this program where she’s giving some sort of prize for tallest bloom come Autumn. Because that’s what really keeps the flesh spry. Competition. And, anyway, you’ve just heard too many fertiliser conversations in the week you’ve been here.

There’s lots of children sort of trickling in and out of random holes here during the day.

Your job, in large part, has been smiling and nodding at horticulture drivel, calling ceasefire on NERF gun conflicts between first graders who are meant to be spending time with their grandparents, and watching nurses deliver suppositories.

Most of the kids are younger, generally aged four to seven, because that’s that Goldilocks pocket of time where they’re young enough to a) have enough empathy to find joy in time spent with their elders, and b) have little enough agency to be thrown in a car and tossed to the nursing home on sporadic weekdays where their parents aren’t sure what else to do with them.

So, in that way, Artie’s sort of your only peer, despite him being four years your junior.

You drop into the swing beside him, dragging the toe of your shoe through the grass. You ask him why he’s always here. He tells you his neighbour’s family went to Nice on vacation, and his mom’s ‘kinda nutso’ and doesn’t let him go to the skatepark by himself.

You consider that. Your eyes flit to the helmet tossed a few feet away. You sigh internally.

“Can you do flips?” you ask.

You guys go to the pit together.

You listen to him complain about being sent to ‘tennis school’ after the Summer as he drags his skateboard lazily across the pavement.

“I mean, I’m grateful,” he tells you, like he’s worried you’ll mouth off to his grandma. “I like the game, and everything. I don’t know.”

You nod. You’re a little amused that he’s trying to express his anxiousness in being alone so far away, but refuses to say so in those words.

“Florida’s not so bad,” you shrug. Not that you’ve ever been there. And you can tell he doesn’t quite like this grownup tone you’re adopting. “Lots of alligators. They’re like dinosaurs.” You pause. Then you make a dino noise.

He looks at you. “How old do you think I am?”

“Eight?” you guess.

“I’m twelve,” he corrects.

Spending time with someone his age is great because you never had a little brother, and you get cool points by virtue of being older, and he never really acknowledges that the reason you’re hanging out with him is because you’re actually pretty lame in your own age bracket.

Puppy shelter was taken, but he always walks a little behind you and looks at you after he makes a joke and you’re basically kids and even if you throw words like ‘fuck’ at each other, you’re basically untouchable.

“He’s like his mother,” Naomi tells you, with that motherinlaw-typical disdain, as Artie—Art, he’s told you to call him (please, just say Art. Please. Like, I’m begging you. Seriously.)—sort of anxiously frets around her room. Fluffs her pillows, checks her pillbox, even though that’s all your job. “Blonde and neurotic.”

“Nana, I’m leaving,” Art huffs, giving her a hard look, his brows trembling a little, “Like, forever.”

“Eighteen weeks, Artie,” says Naomi, waving a dismissive hand the way she does, soughing as she sinks into the pillows Art had fluffed, and she beckons you over to readjust them in any case. “To Florida. Your father tried to join the army. I’ll cope.”

Art rolls his eyes. Slings his duffle over his bony shoulder. Looks at you. Shrugs. Says, “Well.”

And you laugh, because neither of you know if you should hug goodbye, or something.

“You can just ask for my number,” you tell him as you walk him through the hall.

He considers this, then stops and drops his bag, his new trainers chirping on the tile.

He’s writing on his little postit pad. This kid probably won’t be too popular in boarding school, you muse wordlessly, if he’s carrying around a fucking postit pad. It feels too late to warn him.

“What are you, Blues Clues?” you ask.

Art laughs and hands the note to you. He’s got remarkably fuckedup handwriting, which shouldn’t surprise you by now. Art’s pretty smart, actually. He’s better than you at, like, math (which is no monumental feat, in all honesty). But he didn’t get into a fancy sports academy because of a stellar personal essay. Most of his vocabulary this Summer has been calling things gnarly and spewing cuss words like testing firearms.

“What’s this?” you ask, turning it over to the scrawls on the back.

“It’s my number.” He’s gone back to stammering a little, hauling his bag up again. “In case there’s something wrong. With Nana.”

“Mint,” you shrug. You survey Art for a minute. “I’d lose the notepad.”

They don’t get a lot of phone time at the academy. He texts you often. Uses his weekly call on the nursing home. Spends about two minutes reassuring Naomi he’s okay in lieu of asking if she’s okay. Then asks her to hand you the phone so he can spend the rest of the time telling you about middle school social politics. It’s generally the same as when you were in middle school, except that tennis is a social currency there.

You wait on a provisional acceptance from Ohio State. It doesn’t come. There’s a spot open at the puppy shelter next Summer. You sign up for the nursing home again instead.

You and Art sit on the lip of a eurogap together at the skatepark and play ‘who can slap each other’s hand first’. It was your idea.

“You’ve never done this? Oh my god, my brother used to kill me every time.”

"Yeah, my mistake for not having a brother."

You tell him to hold out his hands, palms up. He does as you say. You hold your hands on top of his, not touching. The objective is to slap you over your knuckles. But he also has to yank his hands before you get to slap him.

He’s not very good at it.

“Too slow!” you yelp each time you get a strike. 

“Ow, fuck,” he murmurs humorously.

“Are you enjoying this?”

He chuckles. “What, getting beaten by you? Every time.”

You can see the flush blooming his cheeks. He’s thirteen, so it doesn’t matter. He’s at that age where he’ll careen headfirst into that skatebowl if anyone looks at him too hard for too long.

You look down. You’re slow on purpose the next round. You let him slap your hand.

“You let me win that one,” he says, taking you by the wrist. His hands are cool, damp, and too thin, you think. He’s one of those little boys that’s still too skinny. Coltish, like a young mare.

“I like letting you win, now and then.”

And maybe you’re talking about pocketing his number. Maybe also the fact that he’s taller than you now.

“But you shouldn’t get used to it,” you say, tugging your hand away.

Incidentally, he does have something like a brother.

A friend, anyway.

Which is good, because you were worried about that, even though your own social life is by no means a paragon of fecundity.

His name is Patrick, and he and Artie share a room at school because most little boys deem proximity a far too valid impetus for a practically symbiotic friendship. But they’re both into contemporary Britpop, and Digimon, and tennis—obviously—and Naomi dislikes him explicitly, thinks he’s a bad influence, but he doesn’t really mind.

He’s sort of of the kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me school. He takes pleasure in subversion. He likes the way Artie’s ears go vermillion when he says something untoward. He sees it as a victory, when Art shoves him, really hard, and then shoves him harder still for laughing.

So, Patrick’s always sort of vying for a rise out of him, which makes it hard to tell if he cares. But then he’s here, in Ohio, for Spring Break, and mentions flippantly how his family’s skiing in St Moritz.

You’re a little alarmed that his wealthy parents care little enough for his presence to be unperturbed by his crashing in the Midwest in a twobedroom with his friend and his friend’s neurotic mom and Eeyore, their perennially ancient Bassethound. And you’re a little alarmed that he’s apparently allergic to dogs, and that’s why he keeps itching himself like he’s flearidden, and why they’re hanging at the skatepark instead of at Art’s place.

You’re also pretty alarmed that you have nothing better to do than to be here with them.

Mostly, though, you’re alarmed at the suspicion that Artie has developed a bit of a crush on you. Because his friend keeps doing these conspicuous, immature little mimicries of makeout sessions whenever he thinks you’re not looking. Wolfwhistling whenever Art says anything to you. Creating innuendo where there isn’t any. And doing that stupid, childish thing of telling you unsolicited embarrassing secrets about Art to varying degrees of truthfulness.

“Art’s, like, really into scat porn,” Patrick tells you blithely as you’re walking from the park to the stripmall and the Sun’s gone low and amber.

It’s one of those punchy, vulgar things teenage boys think they can just say to people with no consequence. It’s equal parts meant to tease his friend and make you uncomfortable and soothe his own ego from the bruises it gleaned when he ate shit trying to do a noslide.

Art thwacks him behind the knees with his skateboard. Patrick tumbles to the sidewalk. Scrapes his knees. Laughs very hard.

They’re fourteen, so it doesn’t matter.

The crush will wear off, and Art will be content never letting that cat out of the bag, but you’re a little worried Patrick will just out and say it and put the onus on you to let the kid down gently. He’s not secretive, the way Artie is. He’s not, as per his words, ‘a cagey little asshole who’s never kissed a girl’.

“Yeah, no, he was a little too into it,” he tells you of the time Art visited his place for the weekend and they were watching A Simple Life reruns with Patrick’s older sister (in their home theatre, which—come on). “We actually had a debate afterwards, about which of them is hotter. Well, I did, anyway.”

Art remembers that debate. It’s one of few vivid conversations he remembers from nights spent tugging themselves off beneath their comforters and pretending the other isn’t Right There. He tries to see those occurrences as brilliant exercises in spacing out.

You buy them a pack of Lucky Strikes. You’re a little surprised that Artie smokes, but, when you see the fluidity with which Patrick unsheathes a cigarette and lights it between his teeth, that much is explained.

Patrick sees Paris and Nicole on the cover of an US Weekly issue in the checkout line, and elbows Art and says, “Look, it’s your girlfriend.”

And you can’t tell which of them he’s pointing to, but you look nothing like either, so maybe you should be pleased either way.

And—okay—you’re amused by their archness. The way Art points his finger at his friend and enunciates, ‘you’re such a fuckass’. Even as a babyfaced teenager he acts like he knows what he’s saying, and he still looks at you after he’s said it, because they’re little boys, and it doesn’t occur to them to exclude you, and your cool points still carry over and gain interest each year.

It’s Summer. The cicadas are screeching bloody murder, and the boys keep coughing as they smoke, and they look unkempt and honest. Patrick’s hair’s got some yellow eggshell in it. They tell you about a failed lemonjuice bleaching experiment.

“Because girls prefer blondes, right?” Patrick asks impishly, “I mean, don’t you?”

Art wrestles him to the ground again. Patrick scrapes his knees again.

They keep talking and laughing and they have to explain all their inside jokes after they’ve wiped their tears.

He doesn’t come home during the Summer of 04, but by then you two don’t talk that regularly, anyway, save for a short exchanging of heys whenever he calls his grandma, which he doesn’t do as often anymore either.

You get accepted this time. Kent State, Social Studies, and you do want to tell him, but you don’t know that he’d care.

It took him a week and a half to add you back on MySpace.

You just can’t really relate to the nerdy badboy thing he’s got going on right now. He wears headphones wherever he goes and always has a paperback copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being with him, which you tried reading so you’d have something to talk about, but ended up not liking.

The thing about his MySpace profile is that there’s a picture of him, all bleary and flashed, red beams in his pupils, with his arm slung around a girl with oilish black hair draping her shoulders, her eyes all big and sorrel and tired, and you think that they’re dating.

This is later confirmed when you scroll down and see a shadowy snap of him kissing her, with tongue. He is still wearing his headphones. There’s another of Art and the girl—Yosha, you’re a little ashamed to say you nosed out—and his friend and another girl.

It’s not like you’re hurt. It’s no business of yours who does what with whom. But it is Artie, and years ago you would be the first to know that he was seeing anyone at all. Art always asked your advice first before doing something, not even because you’re really close friends, but because he’s always needed your sage guidance.

You wonder if he’s maybe staging a coup.

But he’s sixteen, so even if he were, it wouldn’t matter, and—anyway—you have a student loan to take out, so whatever.

The Summer before you start at KSU, you go swimming in the creek with some friends from high school. And you use term friends in a movable sort of way. It’s just that some people stop being children and go places of note and do things of value.

Other people swim at the creek.

If you’re being honest, you’re mainly going for the sake of your highschool boyfriend. Not that he cares explicitly, whether you show up anywhere or not. And not that you see a future with him. In fact, you very particularly see the past in him, and that’s what appeals to you. He is familiar to the worst version of you, and he has no room to prod your bullshit when he’s spent the intermission between then and now slinging Cannabis nuggets beneath the cornerstone of the underpass.

He brings a few complimentary joints.

You’ve been texting on and off for the past few weeks, and you’re kind of hoping that something comes out of it today. You can’t drive, and he’s unemployed. You’re both total losers. You can make a moment out of it.

You undress in front of him. Maybe you’ve sort of outgrown this turquoise tankini, but you like it still.

Your highschool boyfriend smirks. “What are you, five?”

And you smile and roll your eyes in this placid, unhurt way, because it’s fine that he insults you. It’s called flirting.

You’re the first to wade into the water. Fearless, is what they keep telling girls to be.

You start splashing two girls of whom you remember very little, who only splash back a bit, because they're busy talking about another girl of whom you remember even less, but who apparently had a pregnancy scare back when you were freshmen. They pass the wet roach around.

You’re aware of your highschool boyfriend’s movements. Him swimming towards you.

You swim away. He follows you. You can’t remember why exactly you’d started dating him—there are many things you did at fourteen that you can’t exactly rationalise—but it’s sort of electrifying.

He catches you under the canopy of a wilting willow. A private curtain of something in the middle of the water.

Childishly, you stick out your tongue and try to swim away again.

He grabs your waist under the water. You feel a cold wave go under you.

“I’m tired of chasing you, baby. Are you afraid of me?”

You wriggle in his embrace. “You wish.”

“Prove you’re not afraid of me.”

“How?”

Childishly, you expect him to swoop down and kiss you—and was it him? The first person to kiss you? Probably. That makes it even better—so you lift your head, like someone who has never been kissed before.

His hand is on your belly. He slides it down between your legs. “So Kent, huh? Who’d have thought.”

It’s still fine that he insults you, even if that one is a little more withering and backhanded, but then his finger tries to tug the material to the side.  

It happens that fast.

In the span of a few panicked seconds, you consider your options.

Let your ex, your highschool exboyfriend—who, when you were fifteen, invited you over to his place and had you sit on his navyblue twin bed and listen to him gauchely strum through something vaguely resembling an Elliot Smith song before climbing over you and sticking his clammy, calloused fingers in this very same place, while his mom and dad argued Clinton’s impeachment downstairs—do this to you and learn to like it this time over, or reject him and confirm his statement that you are too afraid. Too afraid, and too young.

You’re shaken by this spark in your stomach, like static portending thunder, and you have the ludicrous sensation of this being one of those Important Teenage Moments. One of those rites of passage. You have to be brutalised a little, you have to enjoy it, and then you have to pass on the story.

But you’re no longer a teenager. Have you not already had your turn? Learned your lessons?

You’re still too proud to admit defeat. 

So you reach out with your own hand to ‘return the favour’. You’re not going to be alone in this. 

But when you reach for his trunks and grab his bulge—nails digging in a little too hard, you’ll admit—your highschool boyfriend, who is tragic with a guitar, loses his shit.

He yelps in terror and pushes himself away from you, eyes wide.

You want to laugh it off. You want to say, how is this fair? I didn’t scream.

But he’s red in the face. Humiliated. He doesn’t want to look at you anymore. He laughs and shakes his head like you’ve missed some crucial touchstone between then and now, like you’re too young.

You hear him whisper ‘freak’ as he quickly swims away.

You pretend not to care. To be too young to care. You’d think that’s when they matter, words. You’d think that when you’re young nothing can spurn you harder than meanness. But then you get older and you could lose so many things in so many other ways, there are harder things with which to hurt you. And then it’s the words that are those quiet woundings.

You’ve spent enough time with people content to die to know the sorts of pains that still reach you, even then.

You stay in the water longer than anyone else.

Eventually, they have to go.

You tell them you’re waiting for the high to wear off. Tell them you’ll grab a ride with a friend.

Your highschool boyfriend doesn’t even say goodbye.

Childishly, you punch the water with your fists.

You won’t cry, even when you’re alone. You don’t feel like you deserve to. You just wish people weren’t so stupid and disappointing. You wish you weren’t so stupid and disappointing.

Art did come home this Summer.

He actually can drive, among many other things he has learned to do before you. That subversion of youth. What is he too young for?

You call him to pick you up.

But you’re still angry, and when your tooyoung whiteknight shows up at the creek, you want to start a fight.

You’re standing in the middle of the water, hands on your hips.

“Come in with me,” you tell him, impatience clearly etched on your face.

Art looks at the ground.

“No thanks. You come out. It’s almost sundown.”

“No, you come in. You drove all this way. The water’s great.”

“You’re shivering.”

“That’s because I’m standing up.” You dive into the water. “Come on. I’ll race you.”

You don’t quite like that grownup tone he’s adopting. “Listen, unlike you, I have a life and this is a fortyfiveminute drive.”

You cock your head to the side. “When did you get so boring?”

When he says your name, it is as a small warning.

You sigh. “I guess you’re afraid. Maybe you’re afraid of me.” You realise you’re echoing your weed-dealing, middling-guitarist highschool exboyfriend’s words, but you can’t stop. “Are you afraid of me, Artie?”

The boy rolls his eyes. “I’m mostly annoyed.”

“Liar. I’m too big and scary for you.” And you laugh, because you’re afraid and tired and disappointed. You’re too young.

“You don’t want me to do this,” he says, taking off his shoes and pants. He balls up his socks. 

You wriggle your toes underwater. The wave under you is warm, suddenly. You feel like the day just started.

The thing in your stomach is now the same as when he’d nearly twist his ankle at the skatepark. Not quite static. More like the air snapping after the thunder.

“Do what?”

You eye his bare legs, welldefined and almost feminine, but still foreign and male in a way that makes you a little queasy at the passage of time. He marches into the water in his Tshirt.

“I’m giving you one more chance to get out on your own.”

You shake your head, so amused as to be almost mesmerised. You should predict what's coming, but you’re just thinking about him taking a girl his age—Yosha, maybe, but he’s deleted all their pictures now—by the waist, like your highschool boyfriend just did.

And then he does. But it’s not exactly what you thought of.

Art yanks you nonetoonicely out of the water, grabs the back of your thighs, and throws you over his shoulder.

Art Donaldson has not been smaller than you since the year 2000, to your misfortune.

“Wait—what the fuck—put me down, you weirdo!” you flail, helpless with shock.

“Nope.”

“I said put me down!”

In fact, he tightens his hold on your thighs because his hands keep slipping.

He walks like this all the way to his car. You’re quiet by the time he deposits you clumsily in the front seat.

He goes back for your bag and his pants and shoes.

You’re stunned. You can’t put it into words. The imprint of his hands still lingers somewhere between the sticky seat and your wet skin. You glare at your own pruned toes. You don’t look at him as he climbs behind the wheel. You’re afraid of looking.

Art doesn’t look at you either. He drives very carefully all the way to your house, never going over the speed limit. The fortyfiveminute drive takes over an hour. You could’ve walked faster. You’re quiet all the way through. His hands are relaxed on the wheel, but the rest of him is stiff. You both smell of lichen and smoke. You’re still wearing just your tankini. His discomfort is a perfect mirror of your own.

He parks in front of the house from which your parents cannot extricate you.

He sighs deeply as you both sit very still in the car.

“Sorry. I— I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

You cannot even conceivably take pleasure in his attempt to reassert your dominance.

You sadly shake a few drops of water from your hair. “I guess not.”

He swallows. “Not gonna give me hell for it?”

You look at him sardonically. “You just threw me over your shoulder like I’m a sack of potatoes. I’m not in a position to fight you, Artie.”

He smiles at that. “Sorry, I just— you sometimes make me go a little crazy.”

You hide a smile. “I know. I make myself go crazy too.”

“Why were you alone? You should’ve left with your friends. It's not safe out there,” he says, still trying to excuse himself.

You shrug. “I didn’t feel like going with them.”

“Why not? Did something happen?”

You bite your lip. “I had a small falling out with a boy.”

Art ducks his head. “I’m sure it’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”

Why do young people say that, you wonder, when some things clearly can’t be?

You weren’t encouraged to befriend the residents. No one is encouraged to befriend anyone, really.

What you were helping provide was the atmosphere of friendliness.

You had to make them feel welcome, but it can’t be too personal. You have to depersonalise this intimate work of care. You have to make it seem as neutral as a protracted stay in a hotel. Which isn’t neutral either. Someone’s presence in your room that isn’t even yours.

People don’t realise how strange hospitality is.

Putting their comfort in your hands, trusting you with that final most fragile part of their life.

But something about the alchemy of selfregulation and 8 AM lectures didn’t take for you.

You drop out of KSU.

You try retail for two weeks, and it’s a lot like the nursing home, because people are spontaneously irate without personal regard, and proceed to forget about the interaction with dementiagrade immediacy. But it doesn’t feel significant.

Not, of course, that beggars can be choosers.

And you get lucky, getting hired again at the nursing home, hired for real this time. As in; meagre salary, hourmeasured workweek. You stop trying to be too young, even if the feeling lingers. What a stupid, disappointing thing to be too young. There’s nothing significant about that, you decide.

You can’t be a nurse, obviously. You have no certification—authoritatively speaking or otherwise—to direct or administrate or pathologise much of anything.

You could cook or clean, maybe. But Pamela, in the admin room, smiling encouragingly at your modest CV, like you’re still that teenager, does you the favour of not making you say it, that you want significance.

They employ you as a Care Worker. You get a set of floral scrubs.

When you breeze back into Naomi’s room, giving a demonstrative spin and dangling your lanyard, she says, “Oh, there you are,” as if you’ve only just popped out for lunch. She beckons you over to readjust her pillows.

He’s eighteen, so it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters when you’re eighteen. You try to tell him as much. It’s just a game, dude. No one was even watching, half the residents fell asleep. I lose shit all the time. I lost my debit card last week.

“It’s not just a game, and it’s not about the game.” He stumbles over a kickflip and scowls and kicks his board across the pavement.

There’s no way to explain the phone number thing without sounding stupid. You try to tell him as much.

“You sound stupid.”

“You don’t get it.”

You shrug. “Maybe,” you concede. “Hey, when I was eighteen, two guys asked me to prom, and the one I chose slept with someone else that night. And I haven’t seen or spoken to either since.”

“That’s different, she’ll be at Stanford with me.”

And that—that gives you pause. You’re not jealous right away, because bitterness isn’t an instant thing. It’s, by nature, an aftertaste, it’s retrospective. Anger, that can be immediate. But even then, you’re not angry. You just didn’t know. “You’re going to Stanford?”

He blinks at you for a moment, assessing. “Yeah.”

“In August.”

“Mhm,” he nods.

And it’s not like you expected him to stick around, swim in the creek. Art’s a clever, talented kid, and he has that sense of certainty that fills the gap between a decent person and a successful one, because one doesn’t beget the other, but you won’t feel jealous until later.

You two spend a moment just looking at one another.

And when you do speak, it’s only a noise. A little, “Huh.”

It’s not totally the same as when he was leaving for Florida at twelveyearsold, but he sees value in quality time all the same.

Art starts coming over again, like he used to. He prays over Naomi’s breakfast at her behest, like he used to. He swaps comics with you, like he used to. He plays video games with you, like he used to.

But now that he’s older, you don’t have the power that comes with being the only one who knows anything.

You have to let him choose the game sometimes. It drives you a little mad. He wants to play intricate puzzle games. Thinkers, he calls them. You like ‘thinkers’, you’re pretty good at them, actually, but sometimes you just want to shoot stuff.

“You just want to shoot stuff?” he asks, eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, it’s a way to let off steam,” you say, savagely decapitating a goblin assassin on screen. “There are so many people I want to punch in real life, but violence is bad, or at least that’s what everyone else says, so I only have this left.”

You’re talking like a child. You know that, once upon a time, he thought you were sagacious, and mature. You used to cherish that. But now he’s Stanfordbound come August, and you’re flunking community college, and he keeps leaving and coming back to find you in the very same place, and—anyway—he’s eighteen, so none of this matters.

You’re in the communal rec room. It’s late and vacant and smells like scrambled eggs and potpourri. The only light is coming from the window—the strange indigo shimmer of summer rain.

He asks, “Who do you want to punch so badly?”

You stick your tongue between your teeth. “Let me see. My eighth grade P.E. teacher. The admin associate for the Social Science division at LCCC. Every politician. And James Frey.”

Art laughs. “James Frey?”

“Someone has to protect the sanctity of Oprah’s Book Club.”

“Okay, I guess that’s fair.”

You glance over at him obliquely. “So, what’s your list of people you want to punch?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

You roll your eyes. “Well, start thinking about it,” you order tonelessly, like explaining the rain and the heat.

Art smiles when you’re not looking. Without his grandma around, your energy has always been like a hot knife in butter. 

You’re in the kitchen. You’re taking out a cake from the fridge. One of the residents is turning ninety today. The nurses like to do something special whenever someone doesn’t have family to celebrate with them.

Art pads barefoot to the counter.

“That’s a really ugly cake,” he says quietly.

“You think?”

He comes over to your side to stare at the sloppy doodle of a plane—that looks more like an impressionist interpretation of something regrettably phallic—in greenblue icing.

“I decorated it myself,” you tell him proudly.

“It looks like a penis.”

You frown a bit. “Eli used to be a pilot.”

He’s about to reach out with his forefinger to scoop some icing, but you catch his wrist. Your fingers can’t quite go all the way around anymore.

“Hey now, no licking. You practicing for college?” You pause. “Is Patrick going to Stanford with you?”

He makes a face. “You don’t have to make it weird.”

Naomi gets you to give scripture the old college try.

You’re resistant at first. All twentysomethings are when presented with the inherent indictment of Abrahamic religious canon. But any new racket callouses on Art’s cool, damp, pony hands will be bright, Stanfordgrade Cardinal red and gleaned in the Californian Sun, and he left his Bible at home, but probably not his heart.

“I just have my grievances with the Church as an institution,” you try to explain as you slowly crutch and guide Naomi from the bathroom back to her bed.

She smiles patiently. “I don’t think you’ll believe too much of it, no. Don’t read it that way, like instruction. Just read. You like to read, don’t you? You’ll find it’s actually very wise. It’ll help you figure yourself out.”

You pick up Artie’s old pocketsized KJV a few months later during a lonesome, windy February. He isn’t here because winter break was over a long time ago and spring break is so far away.

You find the Book of Ruth somewhere amidst the cyclical pattern of sin, suffering, supplication, and salvation in Judges.

You don’t quite like Naomi’s namesake.

In the Bible, Naomi loses everything. Her husband and home. Her sons and livelihood. She wails in her grief. But Ruth clave unto her, the verse reads.

Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

And you know that Art’s mom and his grandma, for all their disunity, were tandem in his parenting after his dad’s passing. You’re humoured by the parallel. But you’re struck by that sentiment. Ruth clave unto her. You wonder if that’s what you’re doing. Cleaving on. If you’re supposed to be Ruth.

You’re not estranged, not really out of contact, not myopic Old Friends. He’ll still call, sometimes, and the conversation will be fluid and hysterical, although maybe not exactly natural.

It’s just that somewhere along the way he decided to meander through life and you didn’t follow him.

He had the tennis, and his friend, he got older, he grew up, slept around a little, went to a good school, he even got a little cool. The kind of attractive guy cool.

You used to joke how he’s definitely gonna be the one to get famous and successful and then dump you, and you just have to cope with working at the nursing home until you need to be admitted there.

He told you to shut up, told you you’re one of his best friends, but all the while you’re thinking, could I call him up right now and ask if I can watch him do flips? Nah, it wouldn’t have the same poetry.

You’ll never be as in sync as you were playing slapsies at the skatepark. As you were that first Summer in 2000. You’ll never breathe the same Summer air, you’ll never both be losers again.

You don’t even touch anymore, not really. Because you’re no longer children. You used to pinch each other’s flesh, right under the armpit. You used to spit in each other’s icecreams for fun. You used to do screaming contests at the public pool. You sometimes jumped on him in the water and started singing the bridge of TLC’s, ‘No Scrubs’, loudly in his ear until he crylaughed. You used to.

It doesn’t even occur to you to let him know you’ll be in Santa Clara County meeting a friend. Not until you see his friend, in a supermarket, in the snackfood aisle, and you have to do a tripletake to be sure.

“Oh my God, scat porn,” you say too loudly.

Patrick freezes for about two split moments before grinning wildly.

Like he’s old enough to know that that was a stupid thing to say at the time, but not old enough not to still find it funny.

“Nicole fuckin’ Richie,” he chuckles slowly, like you’ve done something really brilliant just by being here, and oh. Oh, okay. It doesn’t matter, and you’re not gonna ask what exactly makes you Nicole instead of Paris, but oh, okay. “You here to see Art?”

“Yeah.”

He grins wider. “No shit—“

“I mean no,” you sort of shortcircuit, “Sorry, no. I’m visiting a friend. Another friend. I— you are though, right? Here to see Art, I mean.”

He’s quiet for a bit, assessing you. Then, “Yeah,” he nods, copping a bag of Doritos from the sill without looking away from you, like you’re liable to vanish. “Yeah, I am. Right now, actually. You busy?”

“Uh. Right now?” you echo. Though you’ve done far more spontaneous things with far less preamble.

He shrugs. “Yeah. We’re getting dinner at this, fucking, uh… dinertype place Tashi’s into? You should come. Right now.”

You blink, mouthing around unspoken words for a bit. “Tashi?”

You’d texted him earlier that month, actually. You’d told him how you’re keeping his old Bible warm. He’d taken five minutes to respond and said it was because he was laughing too hard to type.

How is that funny?? you’d texted.

Its not, he’d told you, Its great im happy 4 u

Its pretty hXc, you’d sent then.

U think so?? Was rly boring for me

You must’ve missed the fun parts. Like that bit about the zombies??? o_0 amazing

There was another little delay, and you’d figured he was laughing again.

Technically not zombies, Art replied eventually, but yeah, in the gospel of matthew it says Jesus wasn’t the only one who was resurrected on the third day. So all these people suddenly came out of their tombs. Imagine everyone in jerusalem totally spazzing out watching people they buried just walk around xD

And, okay, now you were laughing, too. Thriller was probably playing in the background LOL

Yeah it should’ve been the Gospel of michael

It’d been stupid and corny and it wasn’t even funny. But that’s what you guys like. It’s what you guys are like, when left to your own devices.

We R huge nerds, you’d sent.

You think you’ve been in more humiliating circumstances, but none come to mind right away.

Why you said yes to dinner with three nineteenyearolds is beyond you, but then you couldn’t exactly say no.

Tashi is the girl with the number from the game on the TV last year. Oh, okay.

Art, when he sees you, is all wide-eyed like that Tom Lea painting, and so Patrick was definitely lying when he said he’d text Art to tell him you’re coming. And he gives you this sidelong hug that’s a little too tight to mean he isn’t a little glad that you’re here, but also too unfastened to mean he wasn’t lying when he told you he was over Tashi.

And this is Tashi. The leggy brunette with the empyrean eyes. So, yeah.

“Is that…?” you’d murmured in his ear, and the flush on his face said enough.

Oh, okay to that as well.

Patrick observes this all like a marine biologist charting sea urchin behaviour.

You sit down in a squeaky red booth. You order burgers, milkshakes, fries, because to order a salad right now would be A Statement.

They inform you that Patrick is obligated to pay in an effort to redistribute wealth.

Tashi tells you she’s jealous that you get to work with the elderly. You want to tell her that you don’t work with the elderly anymore—you quit last month, you’re trying for college again, because you hate yourself or something—and that she shouldn’t be jealous, the bowel movements are irredeemable and last week a mutual friend set you up on a date with a guy who taught Phys Ed at a public school and he had to pay. But then she starts telling a story about going to the corner store with her granddad when she was a kid and the boys are both looking at her like she is quite literally effervescent, and it doesn’t feel like the time.

That they keep trying to include you in the conversation feels even worse.

Tashi, bless her, is very endeared by this embryonic thing of yours and Art’s friendship being engendered in this place of old age.

So you guys didn’t go to school together or anything, she asks. And you say well, yeah, there was only one local school, but you two were in different years. How old are you again, Patrick asks.

Art, before he can stop himself (and you can tell, because he’s florid enough to match the diner seats), starts recounting a time he once saw you in the hall and tried to follow you without your knowledge.

“But she, like, smelled me. She was like,” he sniffs dramatically, “Art is here.”

Afterwards? you two stand in the parking lot, waving off Patrick and Tashi. Patrick slinks his arm around the passenger seat and pulls out onto the road fast and gracelessly. You and Art watch the car recede until it rounds a corner.

“I can smell you?”

He runs a hand over his face. “That’s the part you focused on?”

“Okay, now I gotta think. How did you smell when you were twelve? I should grab my gym bag for reference.”

“You don’t go to the gym.”

“Well, if I did.”

There’s a moment of awkward silence because you’re still thinking about his potential pubescent aroma. And he’s thinking about you thinking about it.

He remembers that shortlived stint as a lifeguard when he was seventeen. He remembers smelling of chlorine and cocoa butter for days; somehow the two smells are related. He remembers twenty-yearold you on Summer break from your brief stint at Kent State. How you came to see him at the pool with your then boyfriend.

Not the one from the creek. Art can’t remember his name, regardless.

The cocoa butter was you, now that he really thinks about it. When you hugged him tight and your tankini top unraveled and you turned around and swept your hair aside and asked him to tie the wet LYCRA strings back together at your nape while the crew whistled and your boyfriend jokingly gave him the stinkeye before pulling you back towards himself and smacking your bikiniclad ass.

Yeah, that. That smell.

But he’s—what?—nineteen, now? So.

Well, actually—

“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.”

A petty part of you—well, the petty part of you—wants to snapshot this moment if only to make the point to your highschool boyfriend that you can give a decent handjob, if given the opportunity, but this isn’t about that right now.

This isn’t even about being young.

It certainly could be, of course. It’s pretty quintessentially sixteen, your hand down a boy’s pants in a starless parking lot.

You can tell Art’s a little embarrassed about this whole situation, but he moves recklessly, his hips spasming with effort, fucking up into your fingers, the leather of the car seat whining beneath his writhing body. He wants to prove to you that he can hold out, that he is not too young. He’s leaning over the centre console, saying things to you, licking them into the skin between your jaw and earlobe where he can taste the nervous sweat.

The soft little razorbumps on his pale groin nudge your palm. In many ways, being able to hold this hot, pink part of him in your hand reminds you of that sexless euphoria of the walk to the skatepark. You’re caressing the underside of his cock with your thumb almost nostalgically.

His breath thins and stutters.

He reaches over with trembling fingers, fumbling with the button on your jeans. You smack his hand away, your own still keeping pace on him. “No, quit it.”

“Fuck, sorry,” he whispers. He comes hot and fast on the halfmoon of your palm, and the rest spills on the firm blush of his belly and he moans after the fact, as if it took everything from him. “Fuck, sorry.”

You nearly laugh when you feel the fluid seep between your fingers.

He kisses your mouth so hard he breaks your lip. You squeeze your thighs rhythmically, pressing the seam of denim against yourself, quieting your pleasure, even as he whimpers. Adulthood is all about quieted pleasure.

His face is warm with shame. Bright, Cardinal, dinerbooth red. This has never happened to him, he would say, if he could speak. But you both know a lie from the other when you hear it.

When he does speak, he tells you his Nana told him you don’t work at the nursing home anymore. He has the nerve to pout at you.

You tell him you don’t think bedpan cleaning is your calling.

He asks you why you volunteered there in the first place.

You roll your eyes. “Puppy shelter was taken.”

He lets his tongue fall out of his mouth and makes little panting noises, and you give him a laugh as a favour. But it’s not really funny, the puppy pastiche, when he was just panting for real only moments ago, and it sounded very similar. But, anyway, maybe that’s the point.

You stick your fingers in his mouth and make him lap himself away from you.

You pull them out before he wants you to.

He barks lowly, snapping his teeth at your fingertips and grinning, still flushed in the dark.

“Down, boy,” you murmur wryly.

Ruth and Boaz are called to respond to God’s divine and chronic grace in faithful obedience. It’s glorifying, the obedience, and that’s why it matters.

This familial intimacy, this easy devotion, because Ruth is loyal to Naomi and Boaz is loyal to his kinsman, Naomi’s departed husband, and loyal, too, to loyalty itself. He sees Ruth, this loyal, loyal girl, how she cleaves, what that means and how it matters, and the love, or that Biblical something that’s very much like it, happens easy.

Naomi tells Ruth to go for it. To anoint herself before the man. To seek rest. And Ruth, faultless, faithful, would have followed Naomi to where limbs leave. So, of course. All that thou sayest unto me I will do.

In the verse, she lay at his feet until the morning. In the verse, she rose up before one could know another. And he said, Let it not be known that a woman came into the floor.

There’s something in that. Something like shame. He marries her anyway, in the end, and so why should she not have laid there, at his feet? But it’s there, that shame. You’d thought so anyway, reading that.

At a point or another that’s all the same thing, right? Shame and love and faith.

When Art would call from boarding school, his grandma would hand the phone to you and flit you that conspiratorial wink old people do to embarrass children for interacting with one another.

She never said anything, save for suggestive smiles and shoulder shimmies.

You’re not good at obeying things, and it’s probably why a lot of your life looks the way it does. But maybe if she had. If she’d said something. If she told you to go for it.

Maybe.

You aren’t there when it happens. He’s mad at you for that, like he even has the right to be. Which he doesn’t, because he wasn’t there either, because when was the last time he came home at all?

It is, ultimately, a stroke by which the Almighty deals bitterly with Naomi Donaldson. Cerebrovascular failure. She passes away in her sleep.

You want to use the harsher language. You want to say it, that she’s dead, so your irate tearshed feels validated.

But saying she died doesn’t make it sound like it was a voluntary choice, and you think it sort of was.

You don’t know anything about passing away, about why people do it.

As you sit on the swingset in the nursing home garden, blinking back the tears every other moment, you recognise this is a lie. You’re trying to act like this sort of action would never involve you.

But it does.

Because you can easily see why people would have hope in an afterlife. You can even see how they’d do it.

You've thought about it.

You’ve thought about it a lot, since reading what you did of the Bible. But she’d been right, of course. You don’t believe too much of it.

You aren’t encouraged to befriend the residents. But you think you and Naomi had become friends.

Even though, maybe no one should ever be friends.

Art comes home. He looks older to you than he ever has. He’s experimenting with depression for a short while.

The swingset chains bleat softly. You two are at once too big and too young for them.

You reach over the grass between the swings and pet his hair, his baby dog hair, the tufts so soft, the tousled sunny curls against the wind. You like it that way, you tell him.

“It’s stupid,” he scoffs ruefully—not of his hair, no—shaking his head and studying his palms. He looks at you, and his eyes are wet and narrow, like it’s paining him physically not to sob. He never really cries. He was a sensitive kid, he got upset easy. But he never cried. Now, though, when he speaks, his voice is thick and damp. “I just didn’t think it would happen yet, for some reason.”

“Not our timing, Artie,” you say softly. We can just pretend to believe it, you mean to say. Because the sky’s a certain shade of pink, and it feels like all the signs are there.

He laughs at the idea, happy that you’d try that for him. He sways a little closer and nuzzles his nose against your palm.

He scoffs again, glancing up at the clouds. “You don’t really think…”

“I mean it’d be nice,” you shrug.

“Maybe.”

He’s looking at his hands again. His knee starts shivering jerkily as he weighs something over interiorly.

“I think I’m gonna propose,” he tells you then. “To Tashi. I think I’m gonna use Nana’s ring.”

You don’t actually know the full story.

You know that he loved that kid, his friend, Patrick. Patrick, who taught him how to love, how to actually love like it matters. He’d fallen in love with Patrick and his bottled effervescence.

But you don’t know how it happens, that something like that should end.

You imagine Art lobbing a left hook and leaving his friend no longer vertical.

You think about the list of people you wanted to punch, the way you used to joke about it when you were younger. 

You don’t find it so funny now. 

You curl your fingers in his hair and give a little tug of affection. “That’s great, Artie. Congrats, man, seriously.”

“Okay, it’s four AM. I have to be at practice at eight. This better be good,” he mumbles over the phone. You hear the cloudy grumble of a woman—his fiancée, and, Jesus Christ, should you be getting on one of those apps? Is that what this stage of your life is meant to be?—from somewhere beyond the receiver.

“I’m holding your birth certificate in my hands,” you say distinctly, like you haven’t slept a wink. Like you’re a fucking psychopath.

Art groans. “Good for you?”

“Your name’s not Art.”

“... yeah, okay. I’m Aristotle Stagiritis.”

And, in part, you’re still marginally aggrieved that he went to The Right School—whatever that means, because you’re realising it means all of everything and none of anything—and did a BA, of all things, where he took the kind of courses that mean he now knows the first and last names of every seminal philosopher.

You choose, to your credit, not to get pissed right at this moment.

“It’s not even Arthur. Your parents wrote you down as Stuart.”

There’s a long, disoriented pause.

“Did you just say squirrel?”

“No. I said Stuart.”

“What’s that?”

“Your name, on the certificate.”

“Bullshit.”

“Taking a photo and sending it to you.”

Art is too tired to suffer an identity crisis, even when he sees you’re goddamn right. The most he can do is waffle.

“Holy shit.”

“Imagine living your whole life not knowing you’re actually a Stuart,” you taunt. “I mean, say it with me, Stuart Donaldson. They definitely wanted you to be an accountant. Or Mormon.”

Art makes strained, nasally sort of noise, like a whine, and you picture him pinching the weird bridge of his nose. “You’re too fucking pleased with yourself.”

You laugh. “I am, aren’t I?”

“I can’t believe it. What are you doing with my birth certificate anyway?”

“We’re clearing out Naomi’s stuff for storage. I was going through your family albums.”

“Why?”

“Do I need a reason?”

“Uhh, yes?”

You pause and scratch your head in this silly, Winnie the Pooh kind of way, and you feel too young again. “I guess I miss you.”

“I can come and see you, you weirdo.”

“Stuart. Shit,” you say, not really acknowledging his invitation.

“Yeah. Shit. That’s me,” he drawls. “It’s not uncommon, at least.”

You suck in a breath. “Okay. Go back to bed.”

You both hang up with a sense of something left unfinished.

Neither of you falls asleep.

He contemplates his new name.

You think about how you always knew he was two people in one, one of them was your kid friend, and the other one belonged to everyone else.

And somehow, you feel like you lost both.