(no subject)
TWO
The specialist takes much longer with Dennis Tam than with me. Long after I am done with the cigarette that shoves me over into too many smokes today, I am still sitting in the coffeeshop, waiting for a sign of him. Dennis Tam never told me I'd be notified when he finished, so waiting for Dennis Tam makes no sense. I watch for a sign of him anyway.
A freckle floating in my coffee. A flush in the breath of the baristas that will warn me someone beautiful is coming. These would be signs. But he doesn't come. I light another, wrapping my lips around it as though I'm nervous it will reject me. Once it sits in my mouth, the filter warm and brown-tasting, the sign of Dennis Tam comes finally. It's my red book being opened with a flicker in the seat next to mine.
He came! Without a summons, without warning. For a moment, a moment made of web that stretches and binds us, I am a very dangerous thing: an irrational and vindicated adolescent.
"He's done with me," Dennis Tam whispers. "Go on up."
"You don't have to whisper," I puff out in a cloud.
"I want to," whispers Dennis Tam. "It's a way of showing there are two of us."
He's right. I glance around and see it. All over the coffeeshop they know there are two of us, two boys -- well, they see unnameable humans -- with all the same things wrong. too round, too swollen, too pixie-faced, with upside down cone rights instead of cylinders. The baristas are vibrating in our presence. The patrons are peripherally aware and say nothing, knowing they are polite in their abstinence from staring.
"I've had this before," I whisper to Dennis Tam. I think like a little boy again: some things are too precious not to be secrets. If they are not secrets, kept in a clubhouse with an arcane handshake, people will reach into the tree hollow or creaky floorboard or under-the-bed lair where you keep precious things, and they will steal them.
"Different with two of us," Dennis Tam whispers back.
I glance around again, and this time see the specialist in the periphery, eyeing Dennis Tam and me with urgent lines on his face. He sees the space between Dennis Tam's mouth and my ear, the vase shape two profiles make while speaking to each other when they look in the eye.
I am fourteen years old. It's a time when they haven't invented mercy. The lines on the specialist's face at our breach of confidentiality -- and minors too! -- make even my liver sparkle.
Only the two of us, Dennis Tam and I, for the duration of five whispers, and already they are afraid.
I go to the specialist's office with the shuddering knowledge that I am armed. I can frighten. He may not be the enemy, but the enemy is somewhere. I feel him loping, frog-like, in bathroom stalls, in the parent teacher conferences and the summer camp riflery programs. Sometimes I even smell him in the offices of specialists. Perhaps the enemy is an untouchable smell, or a way of looking at faces.
Dennis Tam still has my book. I do not want to face the specialist without it, but I do.
The specialist takes much longer with Dennis Tam than with me. Long after I am done with the cigarette that shoves me over into too many smokes today, I am still sitting in the coffeeshop, waiting for a sign of him. Dennis Tam never told me I'd be notified when he finished, so waiting for Dennis Tam makes no sense. I watch for a sign of him anyway.
A freckle floating in my coffee. A flush in the breath of the baristas that will warn me someone beautiful is coming. These would be signs. But he doesn't come. I light another, wrapping my lips around it as though I'm nervous it will reject me. Once it sits in my mouth, the filter warm and brown-tasting, the sign of Dennis Tam comes finally. It's my red book being opened with a flicker in the seat next to mine.
He came! Without a summons, without warning. For a moment, a moment made of web that stretches and binds us, I am a very dangerous thing: an irrational and vindicated adolescent.
"He's done with me," Dennis Tam whispers. "Go on up."
"You don't have to whisper," I puff out in a cloud.
"I want to," whispers Dennis Tam. "It's a way of showing there are two of us."
He's right. I glance around and see it. All over the coffeeshop they know there are two of us, two boys -- well, they see unnameable humans -- with all the same things wrong. too round, too swollen, too pixie-faced, with upside down cone rights instead of cylinders. The baristas are vibrating in our presence. The patrons are peripherally aware and say nothing, knowing they are polite in their abstinence from staring.
"I've had this before," I whisper to Dennis Tam. I think like a little boy again: some things are too precious not to be secrets. If they are not secrets, kept in a clubhouse with an arcane handshake, people will reach into the tree hollow or creaky floorboard or under-the-bed lair where you keep precious things, and they will steal them.
"Different with two of us," Dennis Tam whispers back.
I glance around again, and this time see the specialist in the periphery, eyeing Dennis Tam and me with urgent lines on his face. He sees the space between Dennis Tam's mouth and my ear, the vase shape two profiles make while speaking to each other when they look in the eye.
I am fourteen years old. It's a time when they haven't invented mercy. The lines on the specialist's face at our breach of confidentiality -- and minors too! -- make even my liver sparkle.
Only the two of us, Dennis Tam and I, for the duration of five whispers, and already they are afraid.
I go to the specialist's office with the shuddering knowledge that I am armed. I can frighten. He may not be the enemy, but the enemy is somewhere. I feel him loping, frog-like, in bathroom stalls, in the parent teacher conferences and the summer camp riflery programs. Sometimes I even smell him in the offices of specialists. Perhaps the enemy is an untouchable smell, or a way of looking at faces.
Dennis Tam still has my book. I do not want to face the specialist without it, but I do.