Mateo Whitefeather

Mateo Whitefeather is the name you will find out later, from the inside of a wallet. For now you are still Mitchell, and Mitchell is at the bottom of a service corridor with a wrench in his fist, nineteen minutes old and already finished.

He is five-four and he is wrong for you. You have spent nineteen minutes reaching for shelves that are a head too high and looking up at men who weren't looking down. The pipe under the sink is sweating onto your wrist. You know its fault now, a seized coupling, and you could fix it and you would be good at it, and you don't want to. Whatever you wanted when you paid, this isn't it. The wheel sits behind your eyes, round and patient. You pay, you spin, and the corridor goes out like a lamp.

The wrench is gone. There is grass under you, cold through denim, and a laptop warm on your thighs. Your fingers are mid-word on a keyboard, and the word is wrong. You feel it in the tendons: the left ring finger lands a key late, and the sentence goes crooked. The body has done this ten thousand times without looking. You back up and do it again slowly, and it comes out right. Then the next one, and you check that too, and the next, each one slow and careful, as if the body suspected a stranger had its hands.

Air comes in through a beard you can feel against your throat, and it smells of leaves going soft and wet stone. Your shoulders are wide and heavy, and nothing in you has to reach up for anything.

The hoodie is the first thing that talks. The cuffs are rolled twice, and you push one with your thumb and it gives you a morning: a dark apartment, a girlfriend's laugh through a bathroom door, this sweatshirt pulled off the back of a chair because it was the one that smelled like her. He wasn't thinking about the laundry. He was thinking about a test, and about money, an ugly number that sat in him like a swallowed stone. Underwater, he called it. You feel the weight of it in his chest.

Your thumb finds the strap of the backpack against your hip. Canvas, worn soft. Under it comes a staircase, public steps between backyards, concrete slick with leaves, his sneakers slipping, his hand catching a rail. Late light. A girl at the bottom of the steps, laughing at him, the one who got away. It aches with something older than you. He still checks his phone for her sometimes, and doesn't tell the one at home.

The tattoo is on the inside of your forearm, and when your sleeve slides back you look. A cross, praying hands. Your pulse knocks against the ink. A kitchen, a grandmother's voice in Spanish, a rosary in a drawer. A needle, and his own stubborn pride, nineteen and sure. It feels like prayer more than decoration. In his chest the old words sit there unasked: Hail Mary, full of grace.

Your jaw is tight and a little sore. His vape is in the hoodie pocket, a small hard weight, and the want for it comes up in him without a thought. Your knees are young and don't complain. Your back is strong. Your stomach is empty and he doesn't mind.

You lift your right hand off the keys. It's broad, steady, a stranger's. You turn it over. The palm is warm, the knuckles are scuffed, and the tendons move like something good you've been lent.

You look up. The lawn is gold and enormous, students crossing it, none of them looking at you.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than yours ever was. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."