Danny Lachance

The chat is still scrolling when you decide. Colter Vance's apartment smells like energy drink syrup and the particular staleness of blackout curtains that never open, and you have been him for one day and one hour, which is long enough to learn that his knees ache going up the two stairs to the kitchen, that his freckled forearms bruise if he leans on the desk edge too long, that three hundred people watching him eat gas station food at 3 a.m. is somehow a whole life. It was fun for about six hours. Then it was just his life, thin as a stage set, and you understood why he streamed instead of slept: there was nothing behind the curtains worth being awake for. You mute the mic, tell chat you're "grabbing water," and open the laptop instead. The wheel is already loaded in another tab, like you knew you'd come back. You always do.

The wheel spins and there's a half-second of nothing, no falling, no travel, just a hinge — and then you are sitting up straight on a couch you've never touched, and a remote is settling out of your hand onto the arm cushion like you set it down instead of dropped it. The television throws a bright flat light across a room that isn't Colter's — no monitors, no ring light, just a coffee table crowded with chip bags gone soft at the corners and a water bottle sweating a ring into a stack of mail. Your body is bigger than it was a breath ago, heavier through the shoulders, and your feet, bare, are hanging off the end of a couch that used to belong to somebody's parents. Something on screen is supposed to be funny. You don't laugh.

The shirt is what starts it — soft cotton gone thin at the collar, and it comes with the memory of a mirror, of pulling it over his head at five forty this morning, the fabric catching a second on the wet ends of his hair because he'd showered but hadn't dried it, because there wasn't time, because Ferris wanted the grave squared away before the family arrived at nine. That's Danny Lachance's morning arriving in Danny Lachance's shoulders: the ache already sitting there before the shift even started, old ache, the kind that lives in a twenty-year-old's back anyway because the ground doesn't care how young you are when you're four feet down in it with a spade. The jacket — canvas, stiff with old rain and grave clay, hanging somewhere by a door now instead of on him — gives you a colder flash: October, frost on the tarp they lay over the spoil pile, his breath fogging while Ferris talked about a Cleveland game Danny didn't watch because he doesn't care about football, never has, and how he'd nodded anyway because Ferris was good to him and it cost nothing.

The couch cushions know him better than the chair at the cemetery office ever did. He sank into this exact couch a hundred nights, controller or remote in hand, mother asleep down the hall — she works the early shift at the plant, in bed by eight, up by four, and he keeps the TV low and the lights off out of a courtesy so old it isn't even a decision anymore. The dark room isn't loneliness, or it wasn't supposed to be, except lately it has started to feel that way, since Bree. Her name comes up through the couch itself, through the specific dip in the middle cushion where two people used to sit close and now only one does. Four months of her, gone six weeks — she said long-distance-in-the-same-town doesn't work when one of you smells like a graveyard by five o'clock and doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't want to be at the bar with her friends on a Friday, wants to be exactly here, quiet, early, because there's a hole to finish by eight. He didn't fight her on it. He never fights anybody on anything. That's a thing about him that came through clean and whole: he lets things be decided around him and calls it patience, calls it the sutras, calls it whatever gets him through a Tuesday without feeling the size of the year he's had.

His hands remember the shovel better than they remember her hands. Two years of the cemetery — Ferris took him on out of high school because Danny's uncle vouched for him, because the work doesn't ask much except your back and your willingness to be alone in it — and his palms have gone hard in the exact places a grip demands, the pad below each thumb thick as a coin. He is strong in a way he never had to build on purpose; it built itself, shift by shift, into shoulders that fill out a jacket the way this one hangs off Colter's old apartment doorknob a hundred and some miles from here — no, not here, he corrects without meaning to, this is the only here now. When he isn't thinking about them his hands crack their own knuckles, a private percussion, one two three, and you feel the impulse rise in yours — his — unbidden, an old tic with no memory attached, just a body doing what it does.

There is a night that comes back sideways, from nothing you're touching, just close enough to the surface that the couch dislodges it: a burial he did alone at dusk for a man nobody came to see off, and Danny stood at the lip of it after, not because Ferris told him to, but because it felt wrong to just walk off, and he said something low into the hole that he never told anyone, in the register the temple in Dayton taught him for the dead. That's the whole of what he carries. He wouldn't bring it up. You have it anyway now, and it doesn't weigh what you expected.

You look down. The hands in your lap are broad, brown-knuckled, nicked along one thumb from a spade edge months healed, and they are cracking, on their own, one two three, before you tell them to stop. Colter's freckles are gone. Colter's whole thin, tired architecture is gone, and in its place is this — younger, heavier, quieter, a body that knows how to dig and how to be alone in a dark room and how to let a girl leave without saying the thing that might have kept her.

You turn your eyes up into the blue wash of the television, toward the black window behind it where, if anyone were awake to look, they'd see this face doing something it didn't do the first time the joke ran.

"Huh," you say, to no one, in his flat unhurried voice. "Okay."

Somewhere behind you, six spins deep, the wheel is still spinning in a mind that isn't his, and neither of you knows yet how long you'll let him keep the remote.