Jonathan Kwan Lee

You have been Declan Farrow for one minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is easy. His knees don't ache. His green eyes take the light in off the water and ask nothing of it. Twenty, athletic, a gap year, a whole body that has never been told no. You stand on a pastel balcony with the ocean haze coming up, the neon from last night still drying on the wet tile below, and you feel how little there is to push against. You wanted weight. You wanted something that costs. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin.

The hold music loops back to its first bar.

His shoulder drops the phone into your hand mid-loop. The pen stops on the second digit and does not start again. You are standing at a kitchen counter in the middle of the morning, hip against the cabinet edge, the envelope under your left hand, the pen in your right, and the tinny little melody going round in your palm. Your breath is already in the middle of something. Your jaw is clenched. You didn't clench it. It was clenched when you got here.

Then the shirt gives you the first thing. Cotton, washed soft, a faded green with a whale on it and the print cracked at the edges. The collar has gone slack against your collarbones. Sleeve by sleeve it comes: this morning, the dark room, the drawer that sticks, the shirt picked off the chair because it was the one nearest. Not the good one. He had a good one for the interview that did not call back. His arm went through the left sleeve first, because it always does, and he stood there in the gray undershirt that hangs below the hem, thinking, as he thinks every morning, about the number. The number is large. It has more digits than he has years. He pulled on the black jeans, stiff at the knees, and did not let himself do the arithmetic before coffee.

The counter's edge is cool under your forearm, and the laminate holds a memory in it. A woman laughing with her back against this exact corner, flour on her wrist, her hair in a clip. She is the one who got away. He didn't hold on, and he can't say why, and that is the feeling underneath all the others, a plain ache with no argument in it. It sits in your chest like a swallowed stone.

The pen is warm from his grip. A flash: the registrar's office, the plastic chair, a clerk saying "the balance" the way people say a diagnosis. The tuition. The loan on the loan. He nodded and said thank you, which he regrets more than the debt.

Your feet are bare on the tile. It is cold and gritty with a little sugar, a little sand. Your body is long and thin, all wrist and shin. The shoulder that held the phone is stiff, and the hair falls into your eyes in two black curtains. When you rub your cheek against your shoulder, the beard catches in patches, wispy, with bare gaps he is quietly ashamed of. He has been waiting for it to fill in since he was seventeen. Your stomach is empty. The room smells of toast and the paper smell of envelopes, and under it the faint sweetness of last night's beer, one of his two big nights a month, spent with friends who didn't ask how he was.

Hold music. First bar again.

You lift your right hand off the envelope and turn it over. Long fingers. Ink on the side of the thumb. They are not yours, and you hold them in the window light like something you've been lent.

Then you lift your eyes and say, to nobody, to the kitchen, "Still on hold."

It is a joke, and it isn't one. Somewhere the wanting is already stirring, small and patient, and you don't know whether you will be him by lunch.