Gavin
spent the next morning at the kitchen table, eating microwave popcorn and
making pro/con lists.
NEW YORK—PRO
Interesting.
Freedom.
It’s not Kansas.
He
shoved a handful of greasy corn into his mouth and stared down at the
paper. It was one of those yellow
notepads they always gave you at academic conferences, as though every single
person there wasn’t carrying at least two computers in their bag.
What else? It didn’t make sense to
move to a place if you couldn’t list more than three good things about it.
He
listened to the punk music blasting out of Sinder’s room, tried to make sense
of the lyrics—something about oy oy oy
you’re bloody trash. Or I’m bloody
trashed? In the spaces between
songs, there was shuffling, crashing, banging. Sinder was packing for his move, already, just
like that. Rona asks you to go to New
York—fine, let’s go.
Sinder, Gavin wrote at the
bottom of the pro list. And then, Rona. He felt presumptuous writing her
name down, like she belonged to him, but it seemed like it had to be
there.
Cons
were easier. Rash decision. Throwing away my career.
Letting everybody down. Parents
will be pissed. On and on, reason
after reason why he shouldn’t just drop everything he’d been working on for his
entire adult life. He ended up with
twelve of them. But still, when he looked
at the measly five reasons in favor of New York, he liked them better.
He
went to Sinder’s room for a break, stood in the doorway watching him drop stacks
of philosophy books into brown grocery bags.
There were four of them overflowing already, and that was only half of
the first bookshelf.
Gavin
had to yell over the music. “How are you going to take those on the
train?”
Sinder
turned down the volume on the little desk speakers that plugged into his laptop.
He was wearing serious work clothes:
khaki pants, a t-shirt that was more holes than fabric, an actual bandanna knotted
around his hairline.
“On
the what?” he said.
“The
train.”
“I’m
not.”
Sinder had cleared all the clothes out of his
closet, all the posters off his walls.
The bed was covered with overfilled garbage bags, looking ready to
burst. A whole life gathered stripped
and stuffed away, all in a matter of a couple hours. This was the most industrious Gavin had ever
seen him.
“You’re
gonna ship them or something?”
“I’m
giving them away. Can you give me a ride
to Goodwill later?”
Giving them away? Gavin looked at the empty shelves, breaks in the
dust marking out where the books used to be. Okay, drop out of school, move to
New York, fine. But your books.
Gavin couldn’t imagine it. It
took years of coursework and exams and research papers to amass a collection
like that. You’d never recreate it,
never remember the fucking names of
all those books you bought for some course on fascist aesthetics or autobiography
as self-creation, much less be able to find them again.
“All
of them?”
Sinder
nodded and dropped another stack into the bag, like he was clearing dead leaves
from his backyard. “Let me know if there’s anything you want.”
Gavin
pointed at the giant dictionary of philosophy on Sinder’s desk, next to the
laptop.
“You’re
taking that one, right.”
“Nope.”
He reached over, grabbed it, tossed it to Gavin in the doorway. “It’s yours.”
Gavin
raised his hands, but not quite fast enough, so it hit him hard in the chest
right as he caught it. He looked down at
the cover, creased and coffee-stained, spine weakened from being propped open
so often. It kind of hurt to hold it, to think that it wasn’t Sinder’s anymore,
that it was his now. He took it into his
room, put it on his own bookshelf next to the Dictionary of Terms for Literary Criticism. Someday Sinder would
want it back, would want to reclaim this lost part of his life. Gavin would keep it safe for him.
He
went back to the living room, ate a couple pieces of cold popcorn and stared at
his lists. The pro side looked pathetic next to all those cons. Add something. Something
good about moving to New York. Like
what? He had gone to conferences there a couple times, just quick trips where
he had mostly stayed in the conference hotel, not much to draw on. And one trip with his parents, the summer
after tenth grade. What had they done?
Museums, plays, he wrote. Shopping. What else? Um, Statue
of Liberty. Did that count as a pro?
Of
course, those things all cost money.
Would he have a job? Maybe
teaching. He added that to the cons list: high
school.
Sinder
came in, all sweaty, holding his laptop.
His hair was covered with dust where it stuck up from the bandana. Gavin flipped the notepad to an empty page and
pretended to be writing on it.
Sinder
set the laptop down on the table. “You got any food?”
Gavin
shook the bag of popcorn. It rattled
lightly, like maybe there were eight kernels left.
Sinder
wrinkled his nose and went over to the freezer.
“I meant real food.” He reached his arm in, rearranged some things, and
came out with a box of pizza bites. He
got them set up on a plate in the microwave and then sat down next to Gavin.
“Okay,
check this out.”
It
was a video on the laptop. A girl returns to her teacher’s office, busts in
without knocking, catches him jerking off at his computer. Nothing too remarkable, but Gavin remembered
it right away. It was the first porn
they’d ever watched together, the one that had sent them on their epic journey
into the darkest recesses of the internet.
They
had been sitting on the couch, new roommates then, and they didn’t know each
other super well, so to break the ice they were making jokes about fucking
their students. Sinder did a quick
internet search: “student-teacher porn.”
This was the first video that came up.
It was about this nerdy-looking college girl who was secretly a porn
star. When she walks in on the teacher,
he’s sitting at his desk with his dick in his hand, watching a video on his
computer.
There
was this really funny moment where he looks at the screen, looks at her, looks
back at the screen and back at her, all wide-eyed and open-mouthed to show he
was shocked. Because she was so nerdy and plain, he never
would have given her a second look, and suddenly she’s this hot girl he’s just
been beating off to. And it was kind of funny, kind of awesome really to think that any girl in your class, even the most normal, un-sexy girl, could be
secretly so fuckable.
And
then of course, she was all like, Please
don’t tell! That pretty much sealed the deal.
“We
need to collect all of these,” Sinder
had said.
Gavin
nodded, like, Yeah, totally, but he didn’t
think it was a serious actual plan. That
showed how he didn’t really know Sinder back then. If he had, it would have been obvious: of course there would be an exhaustive collection,
a classification process, a database.
Sinder didn’t joke about shit like that.
The
porn lasted fourteen minutes and fifty-two seconds. They ate all the pizza
bites, burned their tongues on boiling cheese, split the one beer in the fridge. It was sweet, watching it
together, the girl bouncing on her teacher, her own video still playing behind
them, this foundational text of Gavin and Sinder’s relationship. Their first porn, and now, whatever happened,
probably their last.
“Any
decisions?” Sinder asked. Gavin could
see the dust in his eyebrows, his arms glistening with sweaty grime. Through all that dirt, his dark skin looked polished, healthy, like the dust was actually some kind of fancy spa-mud. He looked how pregnant women looked when
people said they were glowing.
“Not
sure yet,” Gavin said.
It
was tempting, all that determination and aliveness, like really tempting. Go, be
free, do what the main character in a movie would do. Make Sinder happy. And Rona. Do
what Rona would want him to do. What she had flat-out asked him to do.
“I
mean, I really want to go with you guys," he said. "It’s just.”
What? He could feel it, but he couldn’t say
it. It was something scary, something
that you’d fall off the edge of, and there would be no bottom. You would just fall forever, down, down,
down, an eternity of that falling-feeling in your stomach, the tingling in your
feet, falling with nothing to catch you, with no hope, never stopping.
The abyss.
“It’s
cool,” Sinder said. He pulled the
bandana off, re-twisted it, tied it back around his dusty head. “At least you know you have a choice. That’s what scared me most. When I didn’t think there was a choice.”
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