Nathan Kowalski

The rooftop smelled like tar and rain that hadn't fallen yet. He'd come up here the way he always did after a bad week, tilting his head back like the sky owed him something, and when the light streaked white across the dark he moved his mouth around a wish before he could stop himself. *I wish I could be someone else. Anyone but me, for a while.*

You were already falling before he finished it. You'd been waiting on that same stretch of sky for longer than he could imagine, watching him from wherever you watch from, hating him with the specific, curdled patience of someone who has lost to him before and expects to lose again. You didn't choose him because you liked him. You chose him because you knew him, and knowing is its own kind of hunger.

He brings his head down slow. Looks at his hands in the dark like they've been swapped out for someone else's — which, in the way that matters, they have.

You know these hands. Thin wrists, a tattoo on the right arm he got at twenty-two and has regretted since twenty-three, some sleeve of overlapping shapes that don't add up to anything, that he covers with long sleeves in the summer when he can get away with it. You know the cleft in his chin because you used to stand across from him in vet school anatomy lab and stare at it while he outdiagnosed you, quietly, without gloating, which was almost worse than gloating.

You know his name. Nathan Kowalski. Top of your cohort, or close enough to it that the half-inch gap between you might as well have been a canyon. He got the residency you wanted. He got the recommendation letter you wanted. He did not, as far as you know, get the woman — she left before either of you could have her — but you've never been sure that isn't just something you tell yourself to make the losing hurt less.

You stand up in his body on the gravel roof and flex his narrow shoulders and feel how little muscle there is to move. He's thin in a way that isn't healthy-thin, just underfed, missed-meals thin, clothes-hang-off-him thin, and you catalogue it with something between contempt and a strange tenderness you didn't invite. *This is what winning cost you,* you think, uncharitably, and take the stairs down into his apartment because a week is not long and you intend to spend every hour of it being him better than he is.

Monday the exam room has that particular fluorescent hush, the table between you and the door, a beagle on it shaking so hard its collar tags ring like a bell. You know the motions. You did four years of the same motions, minus the diploma, minus the letters after your name. Your hands — his hands — go to the stethoscope like they've done this ten thousand times, because they have, and for one ugly second you resent him getting to keep the muscle memory of doing something well.

You talk to the owner in his voice, low, steady, a voice that has never once had to fake caring about a shaking dog. You feel, distantly, why he's good at this. It isn't the grades. It's this — the stillness he brings to a frightened animal, some patience he apparently could never bring to himself.

Tuesday you go through his phone and find her name still saved under a nickname three years old. You don't call. You look at the thread instead, the last message unanswered on his side for eleven months, and you feel something in his narrow chest that you tell yourself is only curiosity.

Wednesday you catch his reflection in the dim break-room window — the cleft chin, the green eyes, the black hair a little too long at the front — and for a second you forget which one of you is supposed to be losing.

Thursday, Friday, the days go soft and strange, filled with rabies boosters and one bad prognosis you have to deliver to a crying college kid, and you find yourself doing it kindly, in his voice, with his hands folded the way his hands fold, and it costs you something to admit that if this had been a fair fight all along, it might never have been a fight you were going to win.

By the last night you're back on a different roof, his roof, looking up out of habit though there's no ceremony required to leave — you just will, the way you arrived, unannounced, ungrateful. Before you go you flex his thin arms one more time, look at the badly-drawn lines on his skin he's regretted for two years, and think, with something that surprises you by not being triumph: *I hope she comes back. I hope the residency isn't the thing that ruins him. I hope, God help me, that he beats me again.*

The wish unwinds. The light, wherever it went, is long gone.

He wakes on the gravel with his neck stiff and no memory of sitting down, tilts his head forward, and looks at his own hands like he's checking they're still his — and they are, cleft chin and crooked tattoo and all — while somewhere above him, already forgotten, the sky closes back up over what it gave away.