Colton Ferriday

You have been Cody Michalak for nine minutes and it is already the worst body you've worn in twenty spins. Not the worst-made — hazel eyes, cleft chin, that gym-built patrol-officer thickness through the shoulders — but the worst *fit*. Something in the desk drawer he sat down at. A citation book, half filled out in a hand that isn't yours and never will be, for a kid who ran a stop sign near the reservation line. You feel the itch of a report Cody hasn't finished, a wife who calls this landline and not the cell, a scheduled dentist appointment written on a sticky note in a handwriting you didn't make and now have to answer for. Nine minutes of borrowed obligation is enough. You are sitting in his kitchen, in his life, at the end of his shift, and none of it belongs to you, and all of it is waiting to be lived through if you stay. So you don't stay. You open the laptop already glowing on his counter, the tab already open like Cody himself used it recently — vessel.cards, the wheel spinning lazy behind a login he apparently kept. You didn't even choose that part. You pay. You spin.

The fork is halfway to your mouth and then it is not your mouth, not your fork, not your hand anymore in any way you remember owning. There is a half-second where two full lives try to occupy the same swallow and lose to a smaller, stranger, red-headed second. You feel the fork's cheap plastic give under fingers that are thinner than the ones you had a breath ago, and you feel — before you feel anything else — the actual physical *smallness* of him after Cody's linebacker frame: five-eight, a boy's remaining softness at eighteen laid thin over a body that has been carrying boxes since he was old enough to lift one. The fork stops in the air. It comes back down onto the lip of the styrofoam container with a click that sounds enormous in a kitchen this quiet. You shrug the coat off his shoulders because his shoulders, newly yours, are hot in it and the room is not.

You sit. The chair takes weight differently than Cody's did — no bulk to settle, just bone and a body's ordinary tiredness — and you eat the rest of what's in the container in even, unhurried mouthfuls, staring at nothing in a window gone black with a Sunday night on the other side of it. The dark glass gives you nothing back but a smear of orange hair and a face you don't own yet.

But the shirt does. It's still on him, damp under the arms from twelve hours in a van with a busted AC, and it starts talking to you the way they always do, through touch and not through will: a Tuesday in March, sleeves rolled to the elbow because the collar chafed after the fifth stop of the day; a woman on Bienville Street who tips in cash and calls him "baby" like she's known him longer than four deliveries; the particular ache low in his back that isn't injury, just eighteen years old asked to move like he's thirty. You feel the calluses on the pad of his right thumb where the scanner trigger sits, worn smooth in a shape no other thumb in the world has made. You feel how his feet know the two steps up into the van bed without looking, how his knees have learned the exact give of the concrete dock at the depot before his mind ever catches up.

The cargo shorts remember getting put on this morning — not this morning, a different morning, but the shirt gives it up anyway as if today were any day, because to him they were all one day worn many times: the brown uniform shirt off its hanger by the stove, cool against his back before the kitchen woke it up with the day's heat; the shorts already sweat-soft at the pockets from wear nobody launders out. He does this every morning without thinking, and now you're thinking it for him, sleeve after sleeve, a stranger doing a boy's ordinary ritual by feel.

Other things come loose the longer your hand rests on the counter's chipped edge — this exact counter, this exact house one room wide with steam still ghosting off the street outside from an afternoon storm. A girl named Priya who texts him good morning even when she's annoyed at him, who he's dating now, easy and undramatic, the kind of good thing he doesn't examine too hard in case it stops being good. And under that, quieter, an old ache with a name he doesn't let himself think much: Marisol, two years gone to Houston with somebody's ring, the one who still surfaces at 2 a.m. some nights uninvited, the one he half-drives past her old apartment for no reason he'd admit. None of it dramatic. All of it his.

You feel his body's actual small furniture, too — the way his throat catches sometimes at night, breath stalling and restarting without him ever fully waking for it, apnea he doesn't yet think is worth a doctor. You feel that his hands, though young, already know a job's economy of motion: how to carry two boxes stacked wrong so they don't slip, how to knock so a delivery reads as done without waiting for an answer. Eighteen years old and already fluent in exactly one kind of competence.

You lift your — his — hand off the counter's edge and look at it under the bare bulb: the calluses, the raw pink where the shorts strap of the scanner holster has rubbed his hip through fabric for years he doesn't count as years yet. Fingers too narrow for what you were wearing nine minutes ago. You turn the hand over once, like checking it's real, and something in the boy underneath, wherever what's left of him has gone, doesn't answer.

You look up into the black window instead of out it, and say, to no one in the empty shotgun kitchen: "Wonder how long I get to be young."