Marcus Alistair Denny

Bryan Kessler's dorm room is too small for the both of you, and it's only ever been him.

You're sitting on his bed with his laptop open on his heavy thighs, and his hand — soft, unfinished, nineteen years of never having done a real day's work — keeps drifting to his stomach where the waistband of his sweatpants cuts in. You have worn him for less than a minute and already you know the whole shape of the problem: he is soft everywhere you don't want to be soft, and he is going to sit in this room being nineteen and average and unremarkable for the rest of a semester you have no interest in attending. You didn't spin the wheel for him. You never do. You spin it because the last one always goes stale the moment you've had a full minute to feel its edges, and Bryan's edges are dull. Heavy. A body built for sitting, not for anything.

You open the site on his laptop, his own fingers doing it before you've fully decided, because some appetites move faster than thought. The wheel sits there in its cheerful, idiot brightness. You pay with a card that isn't going to be Bryan's problem anymore. You spin.

—

The hold music loops back to its first bar, and your shoulder — a stranger's shoulder, narrower than you expected in the half-second before you have any sense of yourself at all — drops the phone into a hand that is already closing around it out of habit that isn't yours yet. The pen under your other hand stops on the second digit of a reference number and does not move again.

You are standing. You are tall in a way Bryan never let you be. There is sun coming in low and white through a window over a sink, and it is hitting you across the eyes at an angle that says morning, though something in the quality of your own tiredness says it shouldn't be. Kitchen. Counter. Envelope. A voice buried somewhere in the phone still talking about hold times to nobody.

You look down before you look at anything else, because that's the reflex now, eighty-seven times deep: hands first. Freckles across the backs of them, pale hair, a tattoo running up the inside of the near forearm where the sleeve of a green plaid shirt has been shoved up past the elbow. Script letters. A date under them.

—

The shirt gives it to you first, the way it always does — cloth against skin remembers longer than skin does. Flannel, soft from washing, a little too warm for the room. A memory of pulling it on this morning, one sleeve rolled and stuck, swearing under his breath at the second button which never sits right, the smell of fabric softener his girlfriend swears by and he pretends not to like getting used to. His girlfriend. That comes with a warmth low in the chest that isn't yours and arrives anyway — Danielle, her laugh caught between two doors, a specific Tuesday she wore his hoodie to breakfast and didn't give it back.

The envelope under your fingers is heavier. It is a name and a number and a company that keeps you on hold like this every month, and it comes with a whole afternoon of frustration threaded through with something duller and older — money, or the lack of it, a checking account that never quite clears the way it should, a life built on the gravel and glare outside this window, on secondhand furniture and a degree he is still three years and one gap semester away from finishing.

The tattoo on the forearm is the deepest one. Script. A name — Alistair — and a date that isn't a birthday, not really, not the good kind. It comes up in a rush that isn't words at first, just weight: a baby that didn't get to stay long enough to need a middle name of his own, a hospital room, his mother's hand on the back of his neck, a decision made at twenty that some things you carry on your skin because you can't carry them anywhere else. The recent ex who was there for that, whose name you don't get, only the shape of her leaving after, the two of you unable to hold each other's grief the same way twice.

The earring — small silver hoop, cold under your fingertip when you touch it without meaning to — brings back a barbershop and a bet with a roommate, something stupid and light against all the rest of it, and it feels good to have that in the pile too, proof he laughs.

Your leg is already bouncing. Has been the whole time, probably, some restlessness in this body that doesn't wait for permission, that ran when he was a kid too nervous to sit still through dinner, that runs now under a laptop on a campus lawn most days, papers due, money short, a mustache he grew because Danielle said she liked it and he decided, once, to believe someone easily. Your feet — his feet, sneakers, worn — remember the particular ache of standing too long at this counter arguing with an automated voice about a bill neither of you can currently afford. Your back remembers the same thirty seconds of the same hold music, over and over, like a joke only the phone company is in on.

None of it is much. None of it is nothing.

—

You turn the hand over. Palm up, palm down, the freckles crossing each knuckle like something scattered on purpose. The pen is still resting against the envelope where his hand left it, on the second digit, waiting for the rest of a number that used to matter to somebody.

The hold music loops again, tinny and small against your ear, and you lower the phone slowly, not hanging up on it yet, just done listening.

You look up, past the window, into the kind of white morning light that makes a kitchen feel like it could be anywhere, and you say, to no one, to whoever's on the other end of the line, to the lens of the world if it happens to be watching —

"Yeah — I'm still here."