A Perfect, Pale Darkness
JOE BAUMANN
Peter Mercer and I were in the same homeroom and math class, andbecause my last name was Meyer, my assigned seat was right behind his. I was new, freshly-moved from Milwaukee because my father had suffered a midlife crisis and taken a new job. I spent a terrible, humid summer bored while he worked fourteen-hour days at his architecture firm and my mother brutalized herself with twelve-hour nursing shifts at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. I met no one until the first day of school, when I made the good choice of wearing a Mark McGwire jersey (he was still popular then, the steroid era revelations not yet arisen). Peter turned around in his seat after morning announcements, slouched his arms over his desk chair, and said, “Who are you and what’s your deal?”
I was at his house for the first time that Friday, after I’d helped him ace our first math quiz, which Mrs. Harwig surprised us with but I saw coming: she’d said something the day before about solving simple equations quickly, clicking her tongue, and I said to Peter at lunch (he had invited me to sit with him and his friends), “I bet she’ll give us a quiz tomorrow.” Peter wiped a streak of his black hair out of his eyes and asked how I came to that conclusion.
“By listening to her,” I said. I opened my textbook right there in the cafeteria and we started reviewing. Everyone else at the table laughed because it was the first week of school, but the next day, when she announced the quiz, he turned around and gawked at me. But he passed. So did I.
“You’re amazing,” he said, and I was filled with warmth that only intensified when he said, “What are you up to this weekend?”
My mother’s dreams filled our house with a glittering shine that floated to the ceilings, where fans dispersed it or light fixtures intensified its prismatic glow. I didn’t mention this to Peter, and he didn’t warn me about his own mother, who was the one to open the door when I arrived at his house. The Mercers lived two subdivisions down from me. My small cul-de-sac was home to tiny, bunched ranches, but Hunter’s Park, where the Mercers lived, was all sprawling two-stories with basketball hoops and bloated garages and lots of in-ground pools. I rode my bike over, which was a mistake, because I was sweaty and gruesome when I rang the doorbell thanks to the cudgeling Missouri humidity I still wasn’t used to. But Mrs. Mercer, who was tall and gangly like Peter with the same dark hair and crooked nose, didn’t seem to notice. She was wearing a floral apron and beckoned me to follow her through a large great room with chocolate hardwood floors and into the kitchen, where Peter was eating a sandwich at a huge marble island.
“The math whiz arrives,” he said.
“Your savior,” his mother said, smiling. The room smelled like pie dough. Mrs. Mercer removed a crust from the oven, then started humming as she worked on some kind of filling. Later, I wouldn’t be able to square this happy woman, chopping apples and sifting flour and offering for me to stay for dinner and dessert and wondering aloud my favorite flavor of ice cream (“Vanilla,” I said. “I’m boring.” Her response: “Oh, I very much doubt that, Sweetheart.”), with the gloom that thrust itself into every inch of the house when she slept.
Peter, finished with his sandwich, led me up a grand, slick staircase. Every wall in the Mercer house was painted an almost-fluorescent white, so perfect and glossy that it hurt to look at; the walls reminded me of the blasting spray of my mother’s dreams. Photographs were in abundance, of the Mercer parents as well as Peter and his two siblings: a younger brother who, if the photos were up-to-date, was trapped in the midst of early pimples and braces, and a mysterious older sister who did not appear to possess the ability to smile. The photographs lined the staircase and upstairs hallway, which was home to several hulking closed doors, the darkness of their wooden veneer bracing against the pulsing white. Peter didn’t explain what was behind any of them. He didn’t say anything until we had made it to his bedroom, which was spacious and tidy. The walls were cream-colored, a relief from the toothpaste commercial white of the halls, and decorated with posters of his favorite athletes: Griffey, Jordan, Zidane. The bedspread was deep-ocean blue. On a set of built-in shelves above a built-in desk, books practically popped out they were squeezed in so tight. I recognized Boxcar Children, Goosebumps, Hardy Boys, A Wrinkle in Time. Peter fell into a wheeled desk chair and asked what kind of video games I preferred.
“Is anyone else coming over?” I said, sitting on the end of his bed.
He shook his head. “Flying solo this evening.”
We played A Link to the Past for a few hours, trading the controller every time one of us died, which was often me and almost never Peter. He played in silence, the nub of his tongue pressed out through the corner of his mouth, pink and glistening, his legs splayed long and insect-like across the floor. Peter was incredibly pale despite being on the soccer team and spending hours in the sun, though his calves were taut with growing muscle, and his shorts rode up high enough to hint at thighs that I could see would become meaty in college, strong and toned from endless squats and lunges and sprinting.
A few hours later, Peter looked up at a small clock above the television and somehow intuited dinner was ready: he paused the game with no call from the kitchen or any other indication that we were expected at the table. He told me to come downstairs and that he hoped I liked meatloaf.
Peter’s older sister, Vanessa, was already in her seat, while his younger brother, Mickey, was finishing setting the table. In a squeaky voice Mickey asked me what I wanted to drink. I told him water was fine.
“We also have milk, and OJ, and Coke, and—”
“He asked for water,” Peter said, rolling his eyes. “Jesus.”
“Peter,” his mother said, but her voice was singsong. She turned to me. “We do things sort of family style, so grab a plate and help yourself.” She gestured to the dishes arrayed on the island: potatoes slathered in butter, green beans and onions, meatloaf cut into neat slabs. There was a bowl of rolls, fluffy, looking crispy on the outside and warm and melty on the inside. Without a word, Peter and Mickey gathered their plates, heaping meat and vegetables in dripping, oily piles. We all sat and, without a word, everyone began eating. I didn’t ask where Mr. Mercer was.
The food was amazing. The meatloaf was spicy and sweet and somehow light and rich at once. The potatoes were smooth and thick with cream, the onions perfectly caramelized. When I offered her a compliment, Mrs. Mercer simply closed her eyes and smiled. Peter nor Mickey ever looked up once from their food, shoveling bite after bite, pausing only to sip from their drinks: a soda for Peter, milk for Mickey. I took my time, savoring each bite, and caught Vanessa’s eye. Her portions were much smaller, and she’d only eaten a tiny bit of each. When she saw me observing what was left, she smirked at me, then pushed away from the table and disappeared upstairs.
After dinner, Peter took me to the basement. Everything except the algae-green felt of the pool table was some shade of white: the shag carpet was unblemished like a fresh blanket of snow, which matched the glare of the walls that continued from the first and second floors and was joined by the brightness of the popcorn ceiling. The leather couch and its matching pair of recliners were also bleached white. Even the entertainment center was white, and the cathode tube and border of the humongous television were a glittery silver. Peter said something about me having to try the new Mario Kart game, then spent a few minutes opening cabinets on the entertainment center and plugging things in. He picked up a TV remote—white, except for the black buttons—and turned the thing on.
“My mom doesn’t like mess left behind,” he said, handing me a Nintendo 64 controller. I didn’t ask why this video game console was in the basement but he was allowed to keep another in his room. I didn’t ask why there were no clocks, or why we were down here without knowledge of the time, because that didn’t seem important then. It would later.
If Peter knew the darkness was coming, he gave no indication.
When I could no longer ignore the pinch in my bladder, I stood, groaning, and asked about a restroom. Peter pointed to a door I hadn’t noticed, inside of which was a half-bath, where, to my surprise, the walls were painted peach. A spray of days-old baby’s breath sat in a small vase atop the toilet tank.
I will never be able, no matter how many times I try, to explain how cold the darkness was when I first felt it. I’d gotten up to pee after sitting for what felt like an eternity, playing track after track in Mario Kart, Peter destroying me in every race until he started taking it easy, purposefully ramming obstacles and letting up on the gas, and I could tell he knew I knew. Maybe Peter was so absorbed in our play that it didn’t occur to him to wonder at the hour; there was no real way to tell what time it was except for the night seeping in through the window wells, a detail that would feel like a serious, puzzling oversight on Peter’s part after the fact.
I was washing my hands when I caught sight of it: the tiniest shadow leaking in from the corner. Because I’d seen my own mother’s dreams, sparkling as they were in contrast, I wasn’t confused or afraid. Instead, I watched the darkness seep in: I squatted next to the toilet and felt at the closest vaporous edge. I was briefly shocked by how frigid it was, the way all the heat in my fingers and palm seemed to vanish, like I’d tossed my hand into a vat of liquid nitrogen. But the feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
I found Peter standing between the couch and television, the screen blank. The darkness was obvious against the white of the room, purling in from all sides, a rising tide of opacity that would soon cover the entire floor. Peter looked stricken.
“We’d better go,” he said, which, I realized when he led the way upstairs and directly to the front door, pulling it open and saying, “Thanks for coming,” actually meant that I needed to leave. I made no argument, brooked no resistance. My bike was leaning beside the front door where Peter had promised it would be safe. The darkness outside wasn’t nearly as absolute as that seeping into the house from his mother’s dreaming. Peter nodded at me, glanced back over his shoulder, and shut the door.
Word of my first time at Peter Mercer’s house spread quickly, and somehow the knowledge that I’d encountered his mother’s dreams was the thing that made other people approach me.
Arch Miller, the best writer in school, as I would discover (as early as fifth grade he was writing essays and stories that made the teachers laugh, and sometimes cry, and he joined the newspaper staff freshman year, writing articles that made the front page and were famous for their complexity and smart analogies), wanted to talk to me about Peter’s mother’s dream-darkness. He had also been in the basement bathroom the first time he’d seen it, when he was eleven years old, caught off-guard and unaware, also more fascinated than afraid because he liked books and weirdness. He, too, had gasped at the icicle feeling that it sent shocking up his radius and ulna, tingling his entire left forearm into a sensation of nothingness, of vanishing, a sensation that only went away when he yanked his arm away from the black and held it to his chest like a fragile kitten.
I kept seeing Vanessa in the hallways, our paths crossing between classes two or three times a day. Every time she glared at me, her eyes narrowed to sharp needles, and she’d give me the tiniest shake of her head. I had no idea what my violation was, and Peter said nothing of it. When he invited me back to his house a few weeks later, relief shattered through me. I said yes immediately.
He leaned back in his seat—we were in math—and let out a deep breath.
“Did you think I’d say no?” I said.
He shook his head. “Come over early again, yeah?”
I biked over again and was met at the door by Peter. This time we bypassed the kitchen; Peter already had a plate of crackers and a few apples up in his room. I didn’t say anything about this, but I considered telling him his mom’s dreams were no problem. I’d heard the whispers; the words of concern, the way that her darkness creeped everyone out, had reached my ears.
Peter seemed to know all of this. Where he’d been slumpy and free with me the first time I came over, he was rigid and aware, tense the entire time. He watched me eat, glancing into the corners as if his mother might pass out and her dream-darkness come crashing into the room at any moment. He could hardly relax into Final Fantasy VI. Eventually he didn’t ask for the controller back when a powerful boss party-wiped me and it should have been his turn to play; he was focused on the clock.
As the sky darkened, he only looked more afraid.
“Are you okay?” I finally said.
“Huh?”
“You look uncomfortable.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”
I wanted to tell him how, although his mother’s darkness was cold, yes, it didn’t bother me. I was used to cold. I was used to alone. In the last two weeks, I’d had dinner with both of my parents exactly twice. The previous weekend, I’d spent the entire time in an empty house except for when they blustered in and out for work. I could hardly blame them; my mother’s sleep cycle was blasted by her grueling hours at the hospital, and my father was ragged from being at the bottom of the totem pole at his firm. I tried not to take their absence personally, but it surrounded me like a tight fist.
I looked at Peter as I rambled through a castle on-screen and was drawn into a random enemy encounter. He looked tired. His skin was still milky even though I knew that, at least four afternoons a week, he was on the soccer field. Our school didn’t have its own pitch, so the players drove to a public park with several fields. I passed them on my way home, and I could see the boys stripped to the waist, bodies glimmering with sweat, torsos twisty with muscle, calves twinging under their shin guards. Sometimes I would slow down and look their way, careful not to veer off the sidewalk and into one of their cars parked along the street. I’d never played team sports; I was a runner of a kind, though by that I mean that I ran in the afternoon because I liked the way my lungs burned and my body ached. I paired this with sets of push-ups and crunches and squats in my bedroom, not because I was obsessive about how I might look with my clothes off but because there was something delicious about the way muscular failure felt, that tight, seizing sensation in my body. And then there was waking up sore, my torn-apart muscles feeling like they were full of tiny stones, the sharp pleasure-pain that burst through them if I squeezed them, a rough shock of nervy energy that made my mouth water and the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I said none of this to Peter as I killed a boss, its body vibrating and crumbling to dust as my party members pumped their arms in synchronized celebration. Neither of us said anything as we watched the subsequent cutscene during which the world came to an end: despite my victory over the bad guy, the world descended into chaotic darkness, splitting apart. The screen was littered with pixelated explosions, land mawing to pieces, people falling to their deaths or being burnt alive. I had never played the game before, but Peter had clearly seen this several times. I held out the controller and he took it loosely in his hands, eyes still clockward.
Despite his vigilance, darkness started creeping in. I saw it first, glomming in the corners of the room. It seeped up between the baseboards and the carpet, smoky dribbles squirming toward us. Peter barked out a strangled noise and leapt to his feet, sending his desk chair smashing against the wall behind him. He looked wild, rabid almost, sweat having bloomed across his forehead. Peter dropped the controller, the cord another snake of black slithering across his carpet.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking around the room as if in desperate need of escape. “I guess you need to go.”
“Why?”
He opened and closed his mouth, teeth flashing, lips slick with spit. Peter resembled a struggling fish, one that knew it was both suffocating and on the verge of being gutted.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
Peter looked at the darkness, which was growing, blobs the size of basketballs. I understood how mother-dreams worked: their growth was like cell division in that it took time to get going but then the multiplicity, the expansion, was speedy and immense. Soon enough, if we didn’t get out of Peter’s room, we would be blanketed by it. I was used to this with my own mother’s dreams, the warm, scintillating glitter that puffed out of the edges of our house.
When I didn’t move as the darkness grew, Peter sat down on the bed next to me. It occurred to me that he must have found himself immersed in his mother’s darkness many times, and perhaps that explained, somehow, the perpetual paleness of his skin: something had settled inside him that wouldn’t allow him to glow. I liked Peter’s lanky body, the moonlight texture of his skin. He was sitting close to me, his knees vibrating with a slight tremor as he looked around his room.
I set a hand on his knee and he went stone-still. He looked down, and then looked at me. Peter’s eyes were wide. His mouth was wet, slippery, the red like something out of a gory movie. Desire churned up through my gut like a powerful spell, and so I let it guide me. I squeezed his kneecap and he let out a little sound, and as the darkness of his mother’s dreams surrounded us, I kissed him.
Peter tasted like salt. His lips were tight at first, unforgiving, his body stiff, and for a second a cold worry ran through me, but then he relaxed and let his weight fall against mine, his hand covering my fingers. We stayed that way for a second, as if frozen in time, but then his mother’s darkness fell upon both of us. The cold zapped me briefly, but it settled, like the feel of an ice pack pressed against a throbbing, swollen wound, or the rush of a popsicle after a long afternoon in the sun. But it made Peter spasm uncomfortably and he broke away from me, sprung toward the door. He looked at me expectantly, so I trudged after him, letting his mother’s darkness grab at me. I imagined the cloud as the lascivious hands of adoring fans, I their pop star idol, loving them back as much as I could.
The hallway was just as dense with darkness, so thick and encompassing, dripping from the ceiling like veins, wriggling up the walls, that I could barely see Peter. Every one of my limbs was covered in that chill, the void that the darkness carried. I heard Peter give a little gasp, and I imagined it must be a bit of theatricality for me: he surely must be used to this by now.
We made our way down the stairs. Peter threw open the front door and stumbled outside like we were escaping a house fire. He nearly toppled my bike where I’d stood it on the front porch. I expected him to be coughing or raging, but he gathered himself and stared back at the house. I wondered what his brother and sister had done. I wondered where his father was. I realized how much I didn’t know.
I could still taste his spit on my lips, briny like the sea. His breath, laced with the slightest bit of sweet apple, lingered in my nostrils. Though I wanted very much to kiss Peter again, I could tell that now was not the time. I wanted to say something, but I knew there was nothing to say. So instead I plucked up my bike, walked it down to the street, and pedaled away into the dark. I glanced back as I turned a nearby corner, but Peter was already gone, either back inside the house or too fully swallowed by the night for me to see him.
Peter didn’t speak to me for several days, keeping his gaze straight forward and his back to me in math and homeroom. At lunch, he kept people between us. I wondered if I’d hear whispers or giggling about kissing him, if I would be shunned, but nothing came up. No rumors or gossip wended their reptilian way to my ears. Of course, I had no one else to talk to, really: Peter was—had been—the only real friend I’d made. His sister continued to glare at me just as brutally as before, so I had no way of knowing if he’d said something to her.
I dreamt, over and over, of kissing Peter. The dreams were intense, vivid, sensational. I woke tingling, erections throbbing between my legs. Peter’s body was visceral and hot, on sharp display, stripped down and bare, his skin perfect and glowing. He groped at me in my dreams, fingers weaving through my hair, tongue pressing against my teeth, kneecaps splitting my thighs. He was heavy as concrete. When I woke, I expected to find some remainder, some atmosphere gathering above my head, but only mothers could produce such cumulus, such build-up.
When Peter finally spoke to me again, it was at my front door. I’d ridden home from school, forcing myself not to look at the soccer players practicing, legs chopping through the hot air, moisture gathering at the small of their backs, staining their shorts, soaking their socks and scalps. I imagined Peter darting across midfield, limbs tangled with a teammate as they scrimmaged. The house was empty, and the looming hours alone made my teeth ache. I was standing in the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk, looking around and wondering how our house stayed so clean—neither of my parents had the time, and I didn’t make much effort beyond periodically picking up my dirty clothes so I could actually see my bedroom floor—when someone pounded on the front door. When I saw through the sidelight that it was Peter, I felt warmth slash through my body. I opened the door. His hair was matted with sweat, and he was gulping huge breaths.
“Did you run here?”
He nodded.
“You have a car, right?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You apologize a lot.” When he said nothing, I stepped to the side and said, “Do you want to come inside? Air conditioning.”
He nodded and came in. I tried to see the house through Peter’s eyes: a single-story ranch with closed rooms, almost maze-like, the living room separated from the dining room by a small archway, through which one tunneled to the kitchen. The rooms had bad crown molding and dust gathered in the corners. Our living room furniture was worn with use and didn’t match, the sofa a dark brown microfiber, where the pair of recliners were a lighter gray fabric. The walls were crowded with my mother’s kitschy décor, impressionist prints and family portraits unevenly spaced above the television. I could imagine Peter hating the house, clucking at its closeness, the many corners in which dreams could gather.
I led the way into the kitchen, where I picked up my half-drunk glass of milk and asked Peter if he wanted anything. Despite looking dehydrated, he shook his head. We stood on opposite sides of the small island, at the center of which was a basket of apples. I picked one up and nodded down toward it. This time he obliged, picking one up and immediately biting into it with a wet crunch. I watched juice foam up at the edges of his mouth. We chewed in silence. Peter kept looking around, as if he was a spy surveilling his surroundings, ready to jump out of the way of traps at any moment. He wouldn’t quite look at me. I kept watching him, drinking my milk in tiny sips until it was all gone. I thumped the glass down on the island and he startled at the sound.
“Sorry I’ve disappeared a little,” he said. He held the apple core in his hand as if unsure what to do with it. Peter let out a little huff of air that was maybe meant to be a laugh. “I’m just not sure what I’m doing.”
“Are any of us?” I held out my hand. “I can throw that away.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
The apple was wet with his saliva. I remembered, with a burning heat, kissing him. I hoped he was thinking about it, too. As if reading my mind, he raised a hand to his mouth, fingers dancing on his lower lip. When I opened a low cabinet beneath the sink and dumped the apple core into the trash bin, it bashed with a loud noise. Peter winced as though he’d heard a gunshot.
“So,” I said.
Peter looked around me again, as if fascinated by the pots and pans dangling from their hanging rack or intrigued by the view of our backyard from the window above the sink. Or maybe he was mesmerized by the dishes sitting in a heap in their rack, long-dry. I tried to follow his eyes but they evaded me, dancing around like the rest of his body as he fluttered around the soccer field, elusively avoiding the opposition.
“Peter.”
He finally looked at me. “I’m just not sure what to say. Or how.”
“Is there a reason you need to say anything?”
“Probably. Yes. Right?”
I shrugged and told him to follow me. I wended my way back through the dining room and living room toward the other side of the house, where our bedrooms were. I passed my parents’ room, the hall bath, the empty third room that was supposed to be a study but was still home to dozens of unopened boxes. Peter paused and peered in.
“We’re slow,” I said. “At getting things like that sorted.”
He looked at me with an eyebrow raised but said nothing. We moved on to my room, the smallest space in the house and the gloomiest, with its single tiny window, barely a fingernail. I had done no decorating: I had no posters, no trophies. My books were still in their boxes, a little row butted up against the end of my bed.
“Cozy,” Peter said.
I sat down on the bed but he remained in the doorway. We looked at one another for a long time.
“It’s safe,” I said. “You can come in.”
He bit at his lip. I wondered: those fingers, that gnawing. Was he remembering what I tasted like? What did I taste like? What was it like to remember me? Did Peter dream of me, too?
“I won’t bite,” I said. “Or kiss you again.”
“It’s weird, is all,” he said.
“Not that weird.”
Peter lurched toward me and practically fell onto the bed next to me, the mattress creaking and lumping beneath his weight. He rubbed at his eyes. “My family is weird.”
I laughed. “Aren’t they all?”
“I’m including myself.” When I said nothing, he said, “My brother still wets the bed. It drives my mom crazy. My dad won’t talk about it. They’ve tried taking him to a therapist. He wants to do ECT.”
“Where they zap you?”
Peter nodded. “And my sister, she cuts herself.”
I sucked a breath through my teeth.
“She’s careful. No one really knows, I don’t think. I do. I caught her once, when she forgot to lock the bathroom door. She does it on her upper thighs. They’re tiny. She’s careful.”
“Still,” I said.
He nodded. “Still.” Peter crossed his legs. The floor in my room was covered in dark brown carpet, ugly, and his pale skin glowed in contrast. “It scares me.” He looked down at his lap. “And then you’ve got me.”
“You?”
“I’m a terrible soccer player.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s all I ever wanted to be good at,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me, as if I wasn’t even there, or if I was, I was vapor, just another cloud, another impeding mist waiting to creep in from all sides. “I guess I’m not terrible. I’m okay. I’m not fast enough, though. My crosses aren’t good enough for a midfielder. I’ll never play in college.”
“I’m sure you’re better than you think.”
“And my dad is definitely going to file for divorce.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. My own parents already seemed separated. My mother was picking up overtime shifts to help sock away more cash for when both she and my father had time for a vacation. She dangled the prospect of Disney World at me like a meaty carrot, seeming to have forgotten how old I was, and that the Magic Kingdom wasn’t necessarily divine inspiration for me anymore. And my father: I couldn’t remember the last time he’d made it home for a timely dinner or was still around when I woke up in the morning. I half-expected him to keel over from a stress-related cardiac event.
“He’s never around. You noticed, I’m sure,” Peter said. He seemed to have gotten very small: he was leaning over, spine curled practically into a half-circle, his hands tucked between his hips and his stomach. He was staring down at his knees, chin nearly pressed against them.
“Mine isn’t either,” I said, and then I told him all about my own family, how I was always by myself in this stupid house. And then I was onto my mother’s dreams, how when she was around, she was tired and thus slept at weird hours and her dream-glitter practically blinded me no matter where I went. “So I could use some darkness.”
Peter scoffed and shook his head. “And I could use some light.”
With deliberate care, as if his skin was an oven coil that might still be hot, I laid my hand on his cantilevered back. His T-shirt was glommed with sweat, the fabric more like another thin layer of epidermis than cotton. Peter gave no indication of having felt my hand there, so I pressed my fingertips against his muscles, which were prominent and pulsing, warm and tight beneath my touch. He let out a slow breath, as if I was a doctor prying at him with a stethoscope.
“What if we could switch?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Lives.”
I pulled in a breath and removed my hand. Peter looked at me. His face was glimmery with perspiration. In combination with his pale skin, he looked vaporous, almost ghostly. I realized then that Peter was far away from me, inaccessible. His loneliness, his darkness, was too powerful to dispel my own isolated sorrow. What he wanted from me wasn’t love. It wasn’t even friendship. I didn’t have a word for it, but I knew that it wasn’t what I could give, and that he had nothing else to offer.
As if realizing the same, he left soon after, just got up and walked out of my bedroom. I followed him, not sure why he’d come in the first place. Obviously, Peter didn’t want to rehash our kiss. Obviously, he didn’t want to talk about it. I said nothing as he opened my front door. I watched him walk down the street. The air was hot, so breathlessly wet and rotten.
That night, I had trouble sleeping. I stared up at my ceiling, which was lit up from my mother’s shimmering, glittering dreams. I threw a pillow over my face, wishing I was at Peter’s house, able to sink myself into his mother’s cold darkness. But no doing. I was trapped in a bright night, surrounded by a light that was the opposite of what I so desperately wanted.
JOE BAUMANN is the author of six collections of short fiction, most recently A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone, from University of Wisconsin Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction and currently directs the MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
