Every Bright Thing

IT’S MONDAY MORNING AND even though today marks the first day of the rest of my life, it kicks off no different than any other day, choked with the same blend of glaring sun, boring school and lonely dirt roads as usual.

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First period Chemistry is about as confusing as last night’s dream. First off, none of the math makes sense. But the real problem is that I just don’t care. About chemistry, trig, any of it. Kinda feels like school is designed to force you into an unfamiliar shape, so even when I knuckle down and focus, the math scatters shy across the table like a flock of startled birds, the classroom rank with the beige smell of puberty — sour as wet hay left out in the rain.

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So instead, I stare out the window. I unzip the air. I peel the blue off the sky and stuff it in my mouth, chewing on it for a while. It tastes like the cloud-damp of melting frost. Fresh and clean and bright. It makes me want to cry.    

 

Dammit Daniel! Concentrate!

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Trouble is, it feels like I’m sittin’ at the bottom of a swimming pool. I guess that’s one way of explaining it. How far away I always feel. How cut loose I feel from everyone else. And I don’t know how to fix it. Or even if it can be fixed. Or even if I want to.

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“One minute, Daniel.”  

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The teacher’s warning jolts me back into the room. Grimy morning sunshine. Narrative echoes. A storm across my thoughts. Last night’s dreamscape unfolding into the world. Because my brain’s still poking at that dream, still workin’ it over like a piece of dry cornbread. For it was like I’d caught sight of something meant to stay hidden, something more real by far than the usual bang and glare of everyday life. And just like that, I’m lost again, staring at my workbook. Although the page is basically blank — white to match my face.

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And I wonder when that happened. When did I become a ghost?

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The bell shakes the fillings in my teeth. I flip the paper over. Write EAT SHIT CHEMISTRY on the back in black marker. Not my best work. But screw it, I couldn’t pull these answers out my ass if my life depended on it. And then I’m gone, bouncing out the door, payin’ no mind to runnin’ in the halls. I guess the axe has to fall eventually, I’ll just put it off for as long as possible, like one of them rabbits that dance with the fox till their hearts give out.

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It’s fine, I’ll make somethin’ up, I’m good at that.

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Still running. Tumbling past the lockers. Pounding up the stairs to the roof. Feet dangling over the edge. Wondering what it would be like — to fall, from all the way up here. No fear, palms raised to the sky, as if in prayer.   

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Little did I know those prayers were gonna be answered.

 

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COME SECOND PERIOD, the New Boy arrives without warning. No heads up, no announcement, he’s simply here when last period he wasn’t. ​​

 

I spot him before he spots me. Thrill at the sight of him. At the sight of somethin’ so unexpected. Though when he finally clocks me — hiding in the gloom at the back of the class — he stares me down for the longest time, fierce as a hawk studying a field mouse, and somewhere within that far-reaching moment, the whole room is ripped apart. Although it ain’t just shock that’s got my head spinning. Shame crawls up my neck too, hot as fresh laid tar. Shame for my thrifted jeans and oversized t-shirt. Shame for this one-horse school in this broke-down excuse for a town. And so my gut heaves wild, the bile rising mean in my throat, almost like my body remembers, even as my mind draws a blank. As if a once stubborn hollowness swells with unexpected feelings.

    

I can’t breathe.

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How is everybody else breathing?   

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But as you know by now, I have issues with other people. Boys especially. They are the ass-burn of my life, worse than chigger welts in high summer. And that goes double for strangers. That’s why I always start with the watching. You watch someone long enough, you see who they really are. And so I study him, suspicious-like, squinting at him like my chemistry homework. I track how he shifts in his chair, shoulders drooping low like he just lost a battle. I study how he scowls at the floor, his ratty-ass backpack slung across his shoulders like a broken wing. Even his eyes are careful. Always checking the exits, the windows. Like the ghost of a much younger child. It’s the kinda look a boy gets when he’s spent way too much time waiting on somethin’ bad to happen, and I briefly wonder how many different colors of paint I’d have to use to catch the feeling of this boy on canvas. Because he’s also got a strange way of holding himself. A very still surface. And I wonder at that stillness, because I know that look — it’s a way of protecting yourself. Like a box turtle drawing in tight at the first sign of trouble. But that won’t save him round here. These halls ain’t seen no fresh meat in so long he might as well be a mythical creature. Pale stalk of a boy, eyes bright like a lone coyote. And yet despite lookin’ tougher than the back end of a shootin’ gallery, there’s a softness to his voice that seems at odds with the way he presents himself—all black clothes and dark hair falling into his eyes, his body whittled down to nothin’ but bone and sinew. It’s a very in-your-face skinny, a what’s-wrong-with-your-home-life skinny.

 

Like a pack of wild dogs raised him up from under a porch somewhere.   

   

And besides, new kids usually talk all the time. But not this one. He don’t talk to no one. And when he ain’t in class, his nose is always in a book, eyes nailed to the ground, shrinking into himself. And I been fightin’ it all morning, this need for him to look at me, but also never look at me again, both things at the same time, goosefleshing my arms. And now inside my head we’re all panting breaths and bodies slick with sweat, our mouths locking together, like I’m as good as half-way in love with him already. I actually have to hold myself back when this wave of calm moves through me, like a warmth in my chest — a sense of belonging — almost like I have a body unmarked by pain, by loneliness.

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Reckon I’ve been waiting on that feelin’ for a real long time.

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But then I remember that it’s only 10 AM and I should not be staring so early in the morning.

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Thankfully, he don’t notice.

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In fact, he don’t seem to notice much of anything at all.

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Guess I oughta say here that I’ve always been drawn to what don’t fit right in this world. And this boy don’t fit right. I can smell the rot inside him. Mothballs and alcohol. Switchblades and roadkill. It hurts my crotch just to look at him. So when his eyes meet mine for a second time (his eye to face ratio is really quite extraordinary), I feel such a vast sickening lurch happening all down the front of my insides that I panic and almost run out the room. 

   

Okay, so I may have lied about him not noticing other people.

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I actually lie quite a lot. You’ll get used to it.

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So now I’m gut-feeling this boy in a place I never knew I had, a deep place, a place where the humming in my teeth never stops, a place where I’m stunned by the crave of him, and as I blink back to now — in a weird replay of this morning’s déjà vu — it’s like the whole world’s been painted a darker color.

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It ain’t a bad sensation exactly, it’s just wildly unexpected.  

 

He never even makes a sound when Bryce the Inbred Lizard snaps all his pencils, one by one. He just stares, with those huge black eyes, until Bryce (in a moment of gormless bewilderment), shrugs and leaves him alone. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years, and it triggers a hot spark of want inside me. 

  

And so I do my thing, watching him — snapshot glances out the corner of my eye, furtive and slippery, a manic flush of heat flooding my cheeks with warmth, the feeling washing over me, prickling my skin and softening my edges, the way it wraps around me, the way it makes me feel bigger than myself — I don’t know how else to say it, or what to name it, because it’s surprising, the way somethin’ that powerful should’ve made me feel gone and yet it don’t.

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But when I trace the shape of him in one of my notebooks (ripped yellow fingernails, skate shoes all beat to hell, ring of grime round his neck like a slave collar), a vibration passes over me, a ripple of motion, almost like vertigo, because suddenly, there it is, like my pencils have revealed it — his hurt, shining with a rare-jewel glimmer, shot through with unspeakable violence. I can’t put it into words, but it’s there all the same. Someone did things to this boy. Bad things. Christ. The little did I know. Sitting at my desk, tryin’ not to freak out. ‘Cause now I’m lookin’ through my pencils, I can see how he flinches at the sound of the bell, or when someone moves too quick in his direction. I see the tremors in his hands, and the bone-deep tired in his eyes, almost like he ain’t slept in a safe place for years. I see an undoing of the natural order of things, like somethin’ is broken inside. Not just bent or cracked, but broken in a way that changes the shape of your world.