Jamal Everson

---

You are standing in a locker room that isn't going to be yours much longer, and that's the whole problem.

Bryce Talamantes's body is warm from a shower you didn't need, hazel eyes in the mirror, blond hair still damp, and the trainers keep calling it a great sign that swelling's down this fast. Nine days and change in him and the knee still doesn't trust itself on the cut, and you know — the way you know things now, secondhand, through his own dumb hopeful flinching — that this one was never going to be more than a body that runs out of use before it runs out of years. Good face. Good money in the bank that isn't yours to keep touching. But there's a particular boredom in wearing a man whose whole talent is a joint that clicks funny going up stairs. You've had twenty-three of these. You know the itch by now. It isn't hate, it isn't even disappointment — it's just Tuesday, early evening, end of a day that had nothing else in it, and the site is one tab over, patient as it always is.

You open vessel.cards. The wheel is already spinning by the time you've stopped deciding to spin it.

—

The hold music finishes its loop and starts over, tinny out of a phone that is suddenly, entirely, yours to be holding. Your shoulder — a shoulder that isn't Bryce's, thinner, lower, a stranger's architecture — drops the phone straight down into a waiting hand like it's done this ten thousand times before you ever arrived to do it. A pen stops moving. It was circling a two on an envelope and it just — stops there, ink pooled slightly at the loop of the digit. Afternoon light, low and flat and butter-colored, coming through blinds onto a counter that smells like dish soap and old coffee grounds. You are barefoot on cold linoleum. Somewhere behind you a refrigerator hums.

The flannel shirt is what gets you first — worn soft at the elbows, a little too big, sleeves rolled twice each and already coming unrolled on the right. It smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, like him: sweat and Suave and something chemical, floor-stripper maybe, ground so deep into the fibers it doesn't wash out anymore. And with the smell comes the morning — his morning, hours behind the one you're standing in, because this kitchen is running on Chicago time and somewhere far east of it the man you were is still toweling off in a locker room that hasn't happened yet in this light. He'd pulled this shirt off a hook by the door only three, four hours ago by his clock, humming something with no words to it, thinking about the school being empty by six and how much he liked it that way — the long buffed hallways, nobody's footsteps but his own, lights going off classroom by classroom like he was the one closing up the whole day.

The jeans carry the shift itself, all of it: hours of pushing a cart with a bad wheel down a corridor that smelled like pencil shavings and radiator dust, the particular ache low in his back from leaning into a mop, the callus along his palm that the mop handle put there without him ever deciding to earn it. His hands know it before you do — how to wring without looking, how to flick a rag just right so it lands flat instead of balled up. Skinny arms, more wire than muscle, but they don't tire the way you'd think; whatever's under this skin has been doing this work since he was nineteen and it does it without complaint.

The earlobes carry the studs, small and cool, and with them a flash of a mirror in a gas station bathroom, sixteen years old, a friend's shaking hands with the piercing gun. The tattoos on the arms come up out of the shirt cuff like they're rising to meet your attention — a skull, faded green and red, a rose gone the soft brown-pink of old ink, and each one drags a night behind it: a shop on Milwaukee Ave, a birthday, a bet lost to a cousin, cheap beer and worse decisions and none of it regretted even once, not really.

Then the envelope. Your fingers — his fingers — are still resting on it, and it gives you the rest in one long unbroken pull: a car that needs a part it can't afford, a claims number he's been reciting to three different people for two weeks now, a woman's voice on the other end of that hold music who keeps putting him back on hold like it's a personality trait. Frustration, low-grade and familiar, the kind you carry in your jaw and don't notice until someone points it out. Nobody's pointed it out. Nobody's around to. He lives alone under the train, and he likes it, mostly, except for afternoons exactly like this one, phone against his ear, no one to hand it to.

There's a good year in there too, if you want it, and you take it because there's no reason not to: a woman named Priya who worked the desk at a hotel he used to clean, three months of something easy and warm that ended without a fight, just a slow drift, the way things end when nobody's really trying to keep them. He still thinks about her sometimes when the vape runs out of charge, which makes no sense, and he's never tried to make sense of it.

And under everything — quieter than the rest, more like weather than memory — there's the eye. The way it drifts when he's tired, the way people's gazes catch on it half a second too long before they catch themselves. He noticed a long time ago that it makes people look at him like they're deciding something. He stopped explaining it around fourteen. It just is, now, the way the stubble is, the way the part in his hair is — his, without apology.

You are twenty-two in this body. Skinny in a way that has never once been about vanity. Tired in the specific, permanent way of someone who's on his feet from three to eleven and calls that normal.

You look down at your hand — his hand, the pen still loose in the fingers, cuticle already picked raw at the thumb without either of you quite noticing when that started.

You look up, into the low window light, and you say, out loud, to no one on the line:

"Yeah — yeah, I'm still here."