The sun was rising over the world once again as it did every day and every morning since the beginning of time. It illuminated the translucent dew that adorned the verdant grass of the field in front of him, giving color to the world like a painter with brush in hand. That shining painter, though passionate about his craft, was red hot with exasperation completely incensed by the fact that so little were admiring his landscape’s vibrancy. No one seemed to pay attention to this ceremony, the world being revitalized from its nightly torpor, and were much too busy with their lives to recognize its grandeur. I looked around to see the rest of the audience and only found students of varying shapes and sizes scurrying down pathways and across fields to escape the painter’s exhortations and find refuge inside.

I, however, lingered to watch the many scarlet fingers of the sun stretch out onto the world and caress everything with its light as time slowly crept on and the morning was realized. I of course was afforded this opportunity because of the fact that this morning marked April 30, deep into the second semester of my senior year.

The bell blared in the background as belated boys and girls rushed to make first period before the doors were shut, leaving them to grieve and gnash their teeth outside until a haughty but sympathetic instructor would allow them in, leading to their effusive and tender thanks. I had long before grown tired of the ritual and decided to stay out in sun’s gallery for a little longer, more as an act of quiet defiance than rapt appreciation.

“Hey, Michael!” I heard a familiar voice call.

The voice belonged to Anthony, my longtime friend, and neighbor, who I turned to see rushing towards me. Anthony was a lanky, slightly awkward young man of about my age who wasn’t necessarily helped by his rather pale skin. His eyes were shielded completely by thick-rimmed glasses that he had been prescribed two years earlier, around the time he found out about the Lost Generation and read himself half-blind under the dim lights in his home. He was, however, a handsome man who had grown into his looks of late, and if he decided to put down the Hemingway for a second and picked up a dumbbell he could make himself into an appealing man for the hedonistic romp that college (we were promised) would be.

“Anthony, how are you, man?”

“Pretty good, you coming to English today?” He said motioning towards the familiar edifice I was now facing.

“Yeah I will, I just needed a second out here before class started.”

“Oh, yeah I get that.”

‘Yeah, I get that’ had become a favorite phrase of everyone at the school lately. The expression feigned infinite resignation and worldly understanding but was simply verbal filler. In reality, we knew nothing, I doubt anyone does.

“Oh, so last night” Anthony continued, “I was reading The Old Man and The Sea-”

“Again?”

“Yes, last time I read it as allegory and this time I’m reading it as an epic.”

Anthony was a voracious reader and enjoyed the solemnity of a local bookstore or library over almost any other venue. I’d always admired him for this and he helped me love books and for that, I’m grateful to him, but, as evident, he can sometimes be a little too highbrow for his own good.

“Well, I’ll for sure check it out at some point,” I lied.

Truthfully I had already read the book but thought Anthony went through a lot of trouble just to see a man feed some sharks.

“Yeah I know you’re more of a Fitzgerald guy but I think you would like it.”

I nodded hopefully and we both looked out as the sun slowly crept up, straining to reach its apogee. The field and pathways were vacant now and, though the sun had gained an admirer in Anthony, it was increasingly infuriated and shined down with hotter anger at each passing moment.

“Do you want to go inside now?” Anthony asked his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Yeah that’s fine,” I said while beads of sweat began to congregate on his forehead, “the sun will do you some good though with that skin of your’s.”

“Yes, well I have to worry about sunburn a problem you don’t have to worry about.”

I was silent and feigned offense on my face when Anthony rushed to apologize,

“You know I didn’t-”

“Yes I know what you meant, we’ve been friends for years I know you’re not racist,” I laughed.

He joined the laugh and we both began to walk out of the sun into the building. My skin was a deep brown and defied the categories of both light and dark skinned lying somewhere in the middle. I had for a long time despised my skin color and race, as the world forces many, but had grown to love it as I’d grown older. Now in private school, it was a point of pride for me and an encouragement to always strive for perfection. Though, like the rest of my peers, I was beginning to slip away; perfection is tiring.

As we swung open the doors of the school the cold wind rushed up to us with a benevolent greeting. The English room was open revealing Ms.Jackson amicably chatting with some students while the others hung out nearer to the back of the room.

I respected Ms.Jackson, a plain woman who had crossed over the hill and was descending pleasantly into her golden years, for her teaching style and book preferences. She preferred a smart story over a sensational one and a truly well-written one above all else. Also, she selected intriguing writing styles over suspenseful plots, subtle stories over melodramas, and genuine realism over mere escapism. Because of these predilections, she despised the way fiction was headed and especially the wildly extravagant fantasy and science fiction novels that fill shelves today. It was this topic that she was speaking about as we walked in, catching her mid-list

“... every imaginary monster you can think of in a fantasy land, write a shaky plot with shaky prose, have some monsters fight some other monsters, and couple monsters fall in love with the attractive monster and you have yourself a bestseller.”

Ms. Jackson laughed and the group around her went along with her.

“You’re so right Ms. Jackson,” one said.

“Yes, exactly Ms. Jackson.”

“What an astute observation.”

“Apposite for sure.”

“Have I mentioned I love your class, Ms. Jackson?”

The other four clamored to profess their adulation for Ms. Jackson. The group that now surrounded Ms. Jackson, kindly christened ‘The Sniveling Sycophants’ by Anthony last year, had spent the whole of high school stepping on each other's toes to be seen as the star of every teacher’s eye. They were a diverse bunch, each touting a different ethnicity, which they surely all made use of on their college applications (even Susie, the white girl, who had Ms.Jackson review her essay on having a diverse friend group.) They are the chief reason I don’t believe in the catch-all terms “smart” or “intelligent” being defined by the number by someone’s name, that would make The Sycophants geniuses and by far the smartest kids in school. In reality, they were idiots.

“Let’s go over there and talk with Ms. Jackson,” Anthony said.

“Are you kidding?”

Needless to say, I try to avoid The Sycophants at all times.

“I know they-,” he said motioning to the group as Susie’s head rose like a doe hearing a twig snap, “-are over there but I really want to tell Ms. Jackson my college decision.

Anthony, along with Michael and some others from his high school, planned on going to North Central University, about 2 hours from the city. It was Ms. Jackson’s alma mater and she would be glad that Anthony was going there.

“Well you go do that, and let her now I’m going too, I’ll just hang out in the back.”

He nodded and I made my way over to an open seat in the back corner with another one open one next to it. The room was one of the largest classrooms at the school, a smaller version of the public college lecture hall. Filing out from a podium and desk in the front were chairs, that were once new and comfortable and now tattered and hard, organized into a semi-circle. I enjoyed the soft lighting of the room, a butter yellow that was never too harsh on the frigid winter mornings.

I liked the faceless pastiche of boys and girls and young men and women intermixed in the back considerably more than the bootlickers up front. Most heads were down intently examining their phones and the rest were conversing casually with each other. I dared not to examine any faces closely because of the risk of seeing her.

I finally made it to the seat, a particularly patchy blue seat, and rummaged through my bag for something to read. Grabbing one of the books I looked up to see two people in front of me, the guy was Zack, a conventionally attractive young man with sandy blonde hair, and the girl I was in love with. The sight was a surprise, I can’t decide whether for better or worse. My very soul was both brought to its apogee and its nadir at the same time pulling the corners of my mouth up in joy and the bottom of my lip down in anguish. The happy couple looked at me for a second in bewilderment for a few moments then Nathan asked me a question to try to break the spell I was under,

“How are you doing man?”

“Nothing.”

The bewildered looks continued as I contemplated my answer and tried again,

“Good, sorry about that.”

“It’s cool. So Mary and I were thinking of having our graduation parties together and we’d be really happy if you showed up it’s…”

Earlier in the year I had decided I was simply not going to look at Mary and my problems would be solved, and the plan for a while had seemed to work to perfection. But now, blankly nodding at unintelligible words, I had been ambushed and trapped in a reverie in the delicate autumn garden of her hazel eyes. I could spend eternity in those eyes, simply bathing in their warmth and, in a way, every time I looked into her eyes I did. The room around me, all the noise of the world, all the people, and even the rest of our bodies eased away and we were just two sets of eyes existing because of each other. Or maybe we were both maintained because of her.

“So do you think you could make it?” a voice said ripping me back into reality.

I hadn’t spent eternity in her eyes but I was damn close. I finally recognized the voice as Nathan’s and remembered Mary as not being single. The world was once again an evil place.

“Yeah, that sounds great.”

“Great, we’d be so happy,” Mary said.

Her voice, for a split-second, lifted me up into paradise just to crush me down back into the inferno, the hot pangs of jealousy and darkness of longing tormenting me.

“Yeah, that’d be fun.”

The happy couple smiled at me and walked languorously back to their seats, enjoying every second of each other. Once they left I put down the book, pulled out my phone, and opened Tinder.

They’re many lies that I was told when I was growing up, but the most egregious of those is that everyone would love me just the way I was. That isn’t to say that anything was necessarily stopping me from portraying myself exactly as I was at all times but to truly do that would have extreme social consequences. This is why, like most humans, I’ve gone around trying to constantly promote my best self without trying to reveal my true self, like a salesman trying to sell a cheap novelty to an unsuspecting family before it falls apart. This is the basic premise that Tinder and the other thousands of dating sites run off of, that with 4 or 5 pictures and a 150 character autobiography we could make a decision of whether or not we wanted to be with a person. This was to be done by looking at a certain person, flipping through their pictures, and swiping left or right on them. Swiping right to signify an interest that waited with a pregnant hoped to be reciprocated and Left to banish that person onto a towering heap in oblivion. Needless to say, first impressions are everything.

This fact combined with my physical appearance made Tinder a self-deprecating machine bent on destroying my self-worth. With every right-swipe that went by unanswered -and there were many- I could feel myself falling deeper and deeper into my inner hole of ridicule and loneliness. So the app wasn’t any real good to me or modern society as a whole but I stayed for the reason every man stays, for the romantic chimera lurking just behind every right-swipe. That idealistic vision kept me crawling back to the app when I was low and in some sad part of my soul, I was certain that today would be the day I found her, the mystical woman to pull me out of my hole.

I checked my message box to find no new matches and scrolled absentmindedly through the older connections. Most were born out of the quiet heartaches of late nights when I would stare up at the ceiling and contemplate my situation. This was the time I was at my most dangerous when every moment felt like a defining one and the only thing stopping me from happiness was indecisiveness. So in those moments, I tried to vanquish my demons with activity and this warpath usually started with swiping right on every girl I saw on Tinder. “Saw” is probably the wrong word, I would more catch a general image of their face in the interval between thumb swipes. With that sheer number of swipes I would eventually match with some girls, talk to them without being truly interested, and the conversation would fizzle out in the morning. The rest of my connections were more hopeful, swiped when I wasn’t drunk on sorrow by a much more discerning eye. However, like most hope, it was eventually dashed, either on Tinder or another communication medium. One of the particularly memorable matches was with a girl named Raven. She was a very attractive girl with jet black hair and dark but inviting brown eyes. I scrolled down to the conversation and opened it, “Hey beautiful.” (This was my routine, hackneyed greeting for most of my matches.)

“Hi.” (Already a sense of detachment.)

“What’s up?” (I ask cheerfully.)

“Nothing.” (Disinterest is clear.)

“Oh cool, same.” (She surely must’ve forgotten to ask me what I was doing, surely)

Silence ensues. 5 minutes later,

“Well, I think you’re really attractive and you seem cool, do you think you’d want to hang out sometime?” (I’ve gathered so much about her from our delightful repartee.)

“No.”

“Oh, so you’re in a relationship?” (Presumptuous.)

“No.”

“Oh, so you’re just looking for friends? That’s fine with me.” (My mind was already composing a beautiful love story: we would become friends, she would open up to me and I to her, it turned out she was badly hurt in a previous relationship, I slowly nurse the wound to health (never crossing any lines mind you), I take her out to the river one day, and at last she tells me that she’s ready and our lips meet under the stars. Easy enough.)

“No.”

“Then why did you swipe right?” (Anger, indignation, fury, rage all put pumped into 6 words.)

“I thought you looked funny.”

The switched off of the messages and to the game itself, a 19-year-old girl named Shane welcoming me back. The first thing I noticed about her was her nose ring and then pulled perspective back to see her whole face. She was wearing a staged and somewhat frightened face and her lips pouted like that of a well-behaved child trying to beg for a toy silently. I fell for the gambit though and decided that she was pretty. I flipped through the rest of her profile and she seemed fair and decent so I swiped right with some hope.

The next girl, Jamie, 19, was sporting a black cat filter on her opening picture. I decided to check the profile,

“I love anime, and music. Let me enlighten you. It’s really all fun and games until I find me an Asian man xD.”

Naturally, I swiped left; anime girls didn’t like me.

Next was Maureen, 18. Her picture showed a contemplative woman sitting down on a cracked stone step looking into my soul while her hand cradled her head overlaid by a black and white filter. Her winged eyes and softly closed mouth gave off a worldly look as if she knew her future but was bound to play it out against her will. Those sad and knowing eyes made her an immediate right without the need to see anything else.

Right and left the pendulum swung as I ran through a few more before Anthony approached, pulling me out of the game.

The bell rung while most were already out of the door. This blare set off the most coveted period of the day, lunch, the only time where we went from running out the clock to existing in the moment. For a couple minutes the whole school was in the hallway, all partaking in some form of conversation creating a low din that rose like heat from the first floor to the fourth. I walked out of Statistics to find Anthony,

“Outside, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered, “just gotta grab my lunch.”

He nodded and strolled to the doors while I walked up the stairs to the second floor. Snippets of conversation passed by me furiously as most made a mad dash to secure their place outside,

“Yeah, she’s so hot…”

“How’d the test go for you?”

“I’m ready to be out of here.”

And so on and so forth. I finally arrived at my locker, grabbed lunch, and made my back downstairs. The noise had quieted mostly and the only remaining people in the halls were small groups of four or five circling close together on the floor cheerfully conversing over ham sandwiches and chicken over rice.

I hit the doors to find the sun exulting in the joy of reaching its apex and burning brightly out of exuberance. Since the school didn’t have a conventional cafeteria, most students were driven outside into one of the three courtyards on campus, the one farthest away from the building held freshman, sophomores and juniors were lumped in the middle, and the most accessible and pristine spaces were reserved for seniors. The guerilla warfare of popularity struggle had finally ended with cliques and hierarchies regimented long ago which had led to a general system of notoriety working itself out from the middle of the courtyard.

I spotted Anthony on the outskirts and joined my group amidst a conversation.

“Obviously I wouldn’t.”

That negation belonged to Donald, a well-built if not stocky mixed guy who joined our cabal last year. To the outside observer, it would seem as if someone with Donald’s qualifications, football captain, and lacrosse state champion, was deigning upon our group of budding intellectuals and brooding creative-types. However, underneath his pectorals and six-pack (highlighted by a perpetually tight shirt) lay a casual poetry reader and guitar player.

“Well I definitely would,” Anthony chimed in.

“What was the question?” I asked putting my lunch down on the round table next to Anthony.

“John asked whether or not everyone would want to fuck Samantha,” Camila, Donald’s girlfriend, responded sharply.

Camila is a truly beautiful girl who’d move to the school from Spain in tenth grade. She was tall for a girl and stood right at about six foot, slightly shorter than Donald. She was also a track star, long jump and hurdles, which made the two something of a power couple. She obviously didn’t particularly like hanging out with us but could tolerate all of us most of the time, except John.

“Oh come on man, lunch just started and we’re already on this.”

“Well I didn’t phrase it like that,” John pleaded.

“O.K. then how’d you phrase it?” Camila said eyes narrowing at him.

“I asked,” John’s voice was dignified and sciolistic, “whether everyone would know Sally, in like a biblical sense.”

“Jesus Christ John I don’t know which is worse.”

John, a wiry kid with skin slightly tanner than Anthony, wasn’t truly liked by everyone but tolerated since he really didn’t have anywhere else to go. He was funny at times, but all of his humor was based on pushing the line of what was acceptable, and many times he transgressed.

“O.K. so you’re saying that you wouldn’t? Obviously, Donald can’t say he would but no one in their right mind wouldn’t,” John said orienting himself away from Camila and towards me.

I looked over to Samantha who sat at the epicenter of the courtyard laughing at some imperceptible joke. That table, filled with only the crème de la crème of high school peakers, always looked like they were having so much fun. Samantha couldn’t be described in any other way than the ambiguous umbrella term “hot”. Her blonde hair flowed out down her back freely, her face was always painted with unbelievable precision, her shirts toed the wonderful line between vulgar and acceptable, and the rest of her body was athletic and inviting. She sat facing me from about ten yards away, lips parted in a smile to show off her flawless teeth.

“Well yeah, of course, I would but could we not talk about this here for the whole world to hear?”

“Look at you Michael, forsaking your morals to be with the girl, how Nietzschean of you,” Donald laughed.

““to be with” is a little much, she’s hot but she’s a terrible person. I’m just making an objective statement of my actions if she were to come onto me nothing more.”

“Who said she’s coming onto you?” Anthony asked.

“Isn’t that the situation? She like slips me a note with her intentions and I fulfill the request, right?”

“I never said anything about that,” John clarified.

“And why would she use a note?” Donald asked with a smile.

“Then how is this situation supposed to play itself out?”

“I don’t know you would probably make the first move and wait.”

“Hell no I’m not making the first move, we all know what happens when she rejects people, remember Ravi?”

Ravi was a poor, poor soul that had tried to ask Samantha on a date on the day school let out for winter break Freshman year. She laughed in his face, called all of her friends over, had them all laugh him to death, and then told the story for the world to see over Snapchat.

“R.I.P Ravi,” Donald said kissing a finger then raising it to the sky.

Ravi never returned and was forced to transfer in disgrace.

“C’mon man, in this hypothetical you have a 100% guarantee that she’ll want to do it, you just have to approach her,” John coaxed.

“No, I have to reject out of principle. I’m surprised Anthony hasn’t changed his mind.”

“Yeah I know she’s the devil, the landfill trash of society, but I think I could forget all of that for 2-5 minutes.”

“You’re all pigs,” Beatrix, the last member of our group, said from under her hood.

Beatrix was the brooding, tortured artist of the group, a painter to be exact, and sat silently with her coal-black hoodie on at all times. Easily the most talented out of all of us, I have no real idea why she hangs out with us at all for any other reason than to sporadically throw out clever one-liners.

“She speaks!” John exalted throwing his hands in the sky.

Beatrix took a quick look around then gave John two middle fingers causing the whole table to erupt in laughter and John’s face to turn beat red in anger.

Lunch continued on like so many before it, conversations turning from easily from one topic to another as we ran out those forty-five minutes in the middle of the day. We all tried to nestle up into that time together, to share it and make it last forever, our laughs carrying delicately on the late spring breeze. But like every day the bell eventually rang forcing all of the living mass to reluctantly walk back inside to endure the rest of the day, dreaming of the golden paradise just outside the glass window panes.

The words on the page had stopped making sense a few minutes ago and I finally closed the book to look around the room. The walls were an almost muted white and everyone had taken its cue, sitting silently and flipping through phones or falling into reveries. In most situations, this would be the ideal time to read but my mind kept wandering elsewhere, specifically to the desk a row over and one seat ahead of mine where Mary sat with the countenance of a goddess gazing out in front of her. Her head lay gently on her fist and was cocked slightly to the side while my imagination furiously tried to piece together how her face must’ve looked at the moment. In the meantime, I mused upon her hair, brown curls that stretched down to about her shoulder blades. It bounced almost imperceptibly as she moved her head or stretched and then slowly moved back to a quiet stillness waiting to shake once again. Inspecting closer I could see a couple individual hairs standing out and rebelling against the monolith and fraying out to the sides. Those strands made her more beautiful, they were humanizing, creating a being with the perfection of a deity and the minute imperfections of a mortal; making her simultaneously divine and tangible. Waves of conflicting emotion passed over me, racking my body with a roaring fire of poignant desire and the icy pain of an unreachable dream. Is this what love is, a beautifully tragic blend of passion and pain? For at that moment that’s what I felt, watching for the movements of a girl’s hair as my soul racked against itself, unfinished thoughts and plots of derring-do racing through my mind. My body writhed; it was the same feeling I got when I threw my hands near a fire after they froze outside in the cold, a numb pain that made me wonder whether I had hands at all. Now, the pain was diffused from the soles of my feet to the top of my head, a pervasive yet more distant pain that made me wonder whether I was there at all. My eyes searched wildly around the room trying to find something to rip my attention away but was pulled back immediately to her amber tresses.

‘Mary! Mary!’ I screamed in my mind.

I wanted to scream to the world, to release these feelings that threatened to tear me apart and to finally let her know how I feel. However, I know this was a fantasy that only ended with Mary accepting my love and neglecting her own and even in a fantasy that scenario made me uneasy. So I continued to call out to her in my head, until, like picking up on some signal, she turned around and smiled at me. I forgot all the pain for a moment and smiled back.

“Hey, do you know what time it is?” She asked.

I fumbled my phone out of my pocket and quickly woke it up,

“2:20.”

“Oh, so five minutes until this class gets out?”

“Yeah.”

“Great, five more minutes to kill,” she said turning back around her hair flinging back into place.

My heart was racing the whole time and was only just starting to return to normal. Mary and I’d been friends for a long time, and we were to a certain extent still friends, but obviously, things changed when she started dating Zack. In fact, she used to be a big part of our group but has since ascended to her rightful place higher up the food chain. Now at lunch, she sat alone with Zack away from the company of round tables yet completely occupied by the companionship of true love, or at least that what it looked like. I looked once again at her, hoping she could understand telepathically what I felt, but that was asking for too much considering I didn’t know myself what it was.

“Hey, Mike why the long face my man?” A pestering voice asked.

I turned to John, sitting on my left,

“Nothing just thinking about some stuff.”

“Oh cool. Have you checked out that new fidget spinner app? I cracked the high score in the region yesterday, it was a crazy spin like a hundred something revolutions. O.K. exactly 160 revolutions but hey who's counting? I mean I guess the rest of the region but whatever. I’m not getting a big head or anything but it’s like objectively an amazing accomplishment you know like this is a job application level achievement right here.”

He tilted the phone over towards me showing a heavily embroidered and decorated three-pronged spinner with red and purple flames running down the prongs.

“No, I don’t have it.”

“Oh. Well, you really should it's like the third highest grossing fidget spinner game in the app store.”

“Grossing? That app wasn’t free?”

“Oh yeah, it was totally free. But they give you some bland ass spinner so obviously, I put down some paper to get a spinner of this quality, here let me spin it for you.”

I watched John tap the center of the spinner and it started to spin around rapidly, a tracker at the top counting the revolutions as red and purple flames dizzyingly made their way around and around. My eyes rose up to John’s as he watched the spinner go around with a content gaze, like a father watching his little girl teetering on her infant legs.

“Oh cool.”

He watched intently as the spinner finally rounded out to 135,

“$17.50 well-spent man. I’m not saying you’re going to be world spinner material off the bat but I’m sure you’ll get there one day.”

“Yeah, maybe I will.”

He pressed the spinner again as I slumped back in my seat and reopened my book to pass the last minutes of class.

By the time the bell had rung for the last time that day I was outside, thankfully beating the crowd that was descending like locust on the hallways, all fighting furiously to escape. Donald and Camila were with me walking out to the Senior parking lot. They truly were both beautiful people walking, hands interlocked, with the self-assuredness of people who had figured something out that others chase after forever. Besides the sporadic surges of loneliness, I felt, hanging out with them was pleasant. They were both intelligent, and had all the unpleasant knowledge of the world that comes with that, but remained at least somewhat positive despite it all.

“So are you going to play football at State?”

“I’m not really sure yet, the coach wants me but I might just focus on what I want to do after college I’m not sure yet.”

“Oh O.K. that’s cool.”

“But this girl here,” he paused and looked tenderly into Camila’s eyes, “she’s going to be a track star.”

Camila laughed a little while continuing to look into his eyes,

“Yeah, I’ll be doing hurdles. It’ll be really fun.”

Their look lasted for a second longer and then they both looked to the ground then forward, cheeks slightly flushing like a couple that's just found each other. I could see understanding through that gaze, so close that I could almost touch it and not having that hurt faintly.

“I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun at North Central,” Camila continued with her fading Spanish accent.

“Yeah, I’ll know some people at least.”

“Yeah, Anthony, John, Beatrix, Tommy, Rachel, Mary, Zack-”

“Mary and Zack?”

“Oh yeah I was talking to Zack about it and they said they made the decision today,” Donald interjected, “said that they both came to the decision individually.”

“That’s good.”

The two nodded as we reached the lot.

“Alright see you tomorrow Michael,” Donald said stepping in.

Camila waved and I waved back at the two as I traveled deeper into the lot to find my car. The prospect of having the two of them at North Central didn’t bother me as much as the fact that she didn’t tell me, but it did bother me nonetheless. North Central was large enough for me to distance myself from them, but since it was Mary and I’m myself I knew I would want to remain in touch, and I despised myself for that. I’d expected to brave out these last few weeks in silent pain and then get on with my life, occasionally reminiscing on Mary as a girl from my past. That dream was over.

I finally reached my car, a dark gray 2002 Ford Escape, and slid in, laying back against the seat for a moment. I pulled out my phone, opened my messages, and scrolled down to Mary. We hadn’t spoken in about two weeks and the last time we did it was about nothing. I began to type a message but decided against it and started the car.

Before I went back home I decided to stop by Taco Bell for a slushie, as was my custom of Wednesdays. The drive was about five minutes from the school and I threw on my usual car mix to pass the time and started on my way.

I wanted to obsess about this new development but decided against it and tried to focus on something else. My day as a whole had been relatively normal, the languor of spring semester becoming more prevalent by the day. School was increasingly becoming just a place I got up early to go to and then wasted the day inside. As students, we no longer had the mutual hatred of school or the occasional intriguing lesson, but only apathy for the present and longing for the future.

‘Maybe that’s the real world,’ I thought turning a corner, but I quickly pushed the thought out of my mind, knowing beyond a doubt that I was bound for great things or at least not bound for the mundane. I stopped at a stop sign and turned my attention to the short story idea I’d thought of in last period.

I’d been inspired by The Trial and the feeling of complete hopelessness that was expressed through the story. Instead of having that fear and hopelessness being directed against the social system, I had the idea of writing those feelings against the backdrop of the meaningless day-to-day work of life, probably having a young housewife paralyzed by dread and simply unable to do the menial work that fills her days. As she considered further, she would find that much of her life is this work and realize all the anxiety that comes with that realization.

I tried to write something, a short story, a poem, a journal entry, something every day. I’ve had the dream of becoming a writer for as long as I could remember, and even if it doesn’t work out I’ll always enjoy it. My more practical future occupation is becoming a civil servant, so I guess I’m like Goethe in that way.

A loan office and a Jack in The Box stood near the Taco Bell, the three creating a beautiful cross-section of America, which I admired as I turned into the parking lot. The sun was now weary and slowly losing fire as it quietly fell to its daily rest. The road, however, was anything but as cars packed the streets rushing to beat one another to their destinations. I cursed myself silently for not beating the rush hour traffic but knew my qualm would be appeased once I had a cold drink in hand. I pulled the door open and a high-pitched ding declared my entrance. I took a second to breathe in the air, a neutral smell desperately fighting back a diverse army of odors led by the overpowering scent of refried beans. The restroom, located to the immediate right of the door, opened rapidly and released a bulky middle age white male who pushed past me on the way to his seat. The back of his jean jacket read, “It’s my right!” in embroidered letters surrounding a gun with angel’s wings. His fragrance joined the army of the refried beans on the front lines.

“Hey what can I get for you today?” A cheerful man asked from behind the counter when I finally reached the front.

“I’ll have a regular Baja Blast Freeze.”

“O-K,” he said making a few swift punches on the register, “anything else for you today?”

I took a ceremonious look back up at the menu to communicate that I’d weighed all my options. The cashier looked on expectantly, fingers ready to make more swift and decisive punches.

“No, I think that’ll be all.”

“Allll-,” he punched in the last of the punches, “-right, that’ll be one dollar and eight cents.”

I handed him my card absentmindedly and peered into the back where about six people worked diligently grabbing readymade food and sliding it into packets.

The cashier handed me back my card,

“There you go sir, your drink will be out in a second.”

I nodded to him and he receded to the back to join the six, leaving the register unattended in a near empty eatery. Besides the workers and I, only the winged pistol and another older man were inside. The other man sat at the back and took periodic bites of a quesadilla. His skin was a dark, almost coffee brown and he stared with a direct gaze straight ahead as if he was focused on some problem and was trying to will it away. His clothes symbolized him, no-nonsense and gritty but underscored with integrity. His blue jumpsuit, clearly weathered but useful, had his identification sewn into it and I tried to decipher his name but was thrown out of focus by another ding at the door.

Tristian, one of two male members of the Sniveling Sycophants, walked in. His finely tailored jeans and crisp shirt coupled with his slicked backed black hair gave him an air of dignity, but the clothes mixed harshly with his face, with somehow childish features but meticulously threaded eyebrows, giving him the look of a thoroughly professional adolescent like his mother had spent hours making sure her little boy looked perfect for school every day. He surely wasn’t an unattractive person but he’d groomed himself past any appealing look.

Tristian waved at me when his narrow gaze had finally landed on me and I nodded my head in his direction. He ordered then made his way towards me, holding a large grin on his face as he approached. I suddenly wondered what was taking my freeze so long.

“Hello, Michael!” Tristian chirped.

“Hey, Tristian.”

“Do I have some good news for you?!”

He talked in the way all the Sycophants talked, excessively and superfluously, carrying their SAT words on their tongues like badges from war.

“Oh, what is it?”

“We, on the board of the Trinity High School Literary Society Board, have decided to use your story, The Pleonast, for our Spring Edition!”

“Oh wow that’s great,” I said plainly.

The Pleonast was a story about a writer who’d locked himself in his room until he could write a whole novel on the singular action of waking up. He did this because he thought that by keying in on one universal human action, he could understand all there was to know about that action and translate it to others truthfully if not clearly. Against all odds, the book becomes a commercial success with critics praising it for a variety of things, but no one seemed to understand exactly how the author felt about waking up. The story ends with the author setting out on his story again with plans to make it three times as long to get his meaning across.

“Yes everyone absolutely loved every second of reading it,” he said the grin on his face growing larger, “we didn’t even mind the lack of plot and the absence of a twist ending that was outlined in the prompt. But no matter! We simply thought it was much too good not to be published so well done Michael Cooper!”

“Thank you, Tristian Torres,” I mocked through gritted teeth.

“Oh thank you so much for using my full name some find it too wordy to say it all but I do love when people do say it,” Tristian went on, my slight unnoticed, “and to that, I always say ‘it’s consonance doesn’t it just flow off the tongue!’ But thank you for saying it most people aren’t so kind.”

I nodded and for a quick, beautiful moment silence was resumed. Then he continued,

“It’s Filipino you know? I simply love the name ‘Tristian Torres’ it just flows off the tongue so-”

“Baja Blast Freeze,” The cashier finally said holding up my cup in triumph.

“Oh, that’s mine. I’ll see you later,” I said curtly, mercifully grabbing the cup.

“Oh Ok, see you later Michael Cooper!” Tristian called after me as I escaped.

The door closed behind me and I made haste to get back into my car and shut myself off from the world. The traffic had increased in my absence and the occasional horn was honked at a domineering truck trying to switch lanes or a phone-obsessed teen unaware of the newly green light. I sighed, turned the ignition, and resigned myself to a long ride into the dipping spring sun.

And she stared at the machine watching the clothes rise and crash over each other, the water cleansing them of all their uncleanness and stench. She stopped it momentarily and tried to climb in herself, to be cleaned and begin again. She stuck her head in and waited, for new life, for swift death, for anything but was unchanged, and as she lay, head first into a washing machine, she realized nothing was going to change.

“Well, someone has to do the laundry,” she said closing the machine.

I laid back in my desk chair staring back at the short story. I’d been working on it since arriving home and now after finishing the story and a long day of nothing, I was much too tired to revise. School always had a way of wearing me out whether, in the early days, I was tired after a long day’s work or, in the later times, when I was finished after a day of inanity.

I picked up my phone, laying by my computer on the desk, and found a few new notifications. Most were throwaways, emails, and news updates, but I could see a couple notifications from the various communication mediums that I had. I started off with checking Snapchat, the white, faceless ghost on a yellow backdrop welcoming once again. I’d received two snaps from two girls, Rachel and Mary. My heart raced for a second when I saw Mary’s name but slowed again when I remembered we were trying to keep a streak.

A streak, a feature specific to Snapchat that tracks the number of days of sustained contact between two snappers, was a simple way to keep in constant, if not minimal, contact with someone. Though I originally looked upon the idea of streak- I thought that the obligatory daily picture would make interactions brief and vacuous- it did have its advantages. With the streak, I could make sure that the avenue to a conversation with Mary could be opened every day, and even if it didn’t sprout into the long conversation I coveted, it would at least have the potential to do so. I opened her snap, a particularly beautiful smile spread across Mary’s face that was captioned, “streaks!” I noticed immediately that the picture was a mass snap and tried to think of a way to spark a discussion. As I thought I absentmindedly opened Rachel’s snap.

Rachel Cameron was a casual friend of mine, a friendship that was born out of having many classes together over the years and not totally despising each other. We liked each other's post but never commented, kept a streak but never kept a dialogue, greeted each other but never saying goodbye, the perfect distant friendship. Viewing the snap, one could tell she was an excellent picture-taker. Her blonde hair seemed to flow forever behind her back, her blue eyes were open wide and popping, and she wore a slight, knowing smile like she could observe you looking and enjoying the picture. Her picture was captioned similarly but was given spice by the wink emoji she placed at the end. I decided to reply to both with a casual picture of myself captioned with the general conversation starter, “what’s up?”

I switched off Snapchat to view a new message I’d gotten to find it was from Beatrix,

“Hey, you finished up the project?”

“Yeah, it’ll be ready for Friday,” I typed back.

I switched off of that and, with some suppressed intrigue, over to Tinder where I was said to have a new match. Her name was Violet and she was eighteen. I vaguely remembered swiping right on her and was glad to know I was in full control of my faculties when I decided. Her black hair lay in bangs falling gracefully over her eyebrows. Her skin was a rich caramel brown and her face was mostly normal and pretty. The only really noticeable feature on her face, in fact, was her nose which was slightly larger than it should’ve been, the bridge protruding just a fraction too far like an assembly worker had been distracted for a millisecond in crafting her face. It wasn’t necessarily a flaw and I saw it as an idiosyncrasy that separated her from others. I wanted to make the long nose my long nose.

I decided to deviate from my basic Tinder greeting and try to start the conversation with a unique question.

“So Chipotle or Freebirds?”

I then took the phone over with me to go lay down on my bed. The springs initially protested my arrival but quieted down after a moment. I closed my eyes and the idea of sleep suddenly seemed like a favorable one. My phone vibrated though and I picked it up and hastily unlocked it to find myself back in the Tinder conversation.

“Freebirds.”

 The lights had gone off some time ago, but I was awakened by another buzz of the phone. The glare was overpowering as it always was at night and I peered cautiously at it when my eyes adjusted. The time was 11:20 and the vibration was caused by a text from Anthony reading,

“Hey what’s up man?”

The only reason any guy would text another that late was to ask for urgent help on work or to discuss a personal matter, I was expecting the latter. I sat up in bed, propped up by my elbow as I replied,

“Nothing much, what about you?”

I could see the three gray dots immediately pop up where his new text would soon appear indicating that he was typing out his reply. I took a look around the room I’d come to know as my own which mostly still shrouded in darkness despite the harsh light of my phone screen. I thought about playing some music to pass the time but elected against it until I knew what topic Anthony and I were going to discuss. Another vibration shook the phone in my hand and I glanced down.

“Same here man. I’ve just been really lonely recently.”

I decided to play some music and my phone picked up where it left off, softly playing Street Lights in the background.

“Yeah, I get that. What sparked it for you?” I sent.

The three dots appeared again but this time I backed out of the message thread, expecting the next text to be a long one. I clicked onto Tinder and viewed the conversation I had going with Violet which had been pleasantly surprising. We’d basically gotten to know each other, which meant learning each other’s basic information, a few hopes and dreams, and a slew of each other's likes and dislikes. In one of the highlights of the conversation, she’d asked me why I was on Tinder and I’d answered, “I don’t know just looking to meet new people really.” The truth actually would’ve ran like, “I’m looking for a girl to fill the hole left inside me by another girl, but obviously nothing too serious because she might become available at any time (a man can dream right) and either way I’m leaving for school in a few months.” However, I think the deception went unnoticed and I actually posed the question to her and she replied, “Same, same, just looking to meet new people :)” and I’d wondered if I was potentially filling a hole for her as well.

Anthony’s message arrived,

“I guess it’s not really one thing, in particular, it just hits me when I’m alone sometimes. Like I’ll be reading about love or see it and it’s just like I want that, why can’t I have that you know? And I mean I kind of had that with Brittany, but we were just too different.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

He replied quickly,

“It’s weird because we didn’t date that long and I know it wouldn’t have worked long term, but I still feel really hurt by what she did do you have any explanation for that?”

“Well I think it’s because we want to understand the people we love but we can’t truly know anyone and even worse no one truly knows you. Like I think that’s why people begin to dislike their parents because they’re supposed to always be there for you and to understand what you’re going through because they literally created you but you change naturally and then they’re in the dark. And you look to your friends but around them you want to be the best version of yourself and you shield parts of your true nature from them and you still feel alone, so many turn to a significant other, which in an ideal sense is your best friend and knows you more intimately than anyone else and who you can be safe to be vulnerable and true around. But then you change or they change or you find out who they really are or vice versa and then they’re no longer there for you and it fades away. I know how you feel because I feel it too, it’s like bleeding out in front of millions of people and not being able to get anyone to help.”

I sent the message and laid down for a second staring up at nothing. The song had changed to Marvin’s Room which was somewhat appropriate, and my thoughts drifted off towards Mary. The funny thing is that even though I knew what I texted was true and that no love was perfect all the time and that perhaps even the institution was a fantasy perpetuated by sensational romance novels and Disney movies, I still wanted her more than anything. My heart still bounced at the sight of her and nothing else mattered when I was in her presence. I could give the advice, that solitude was eternal and love should be undertaken without illusions, but I still hold to the hope against hope of the romantic, impossible love close to my chest like a miser grasping at his last gold coin, ready to annihilate anyone who even thought about taking it away from him.

“Yeah man, well said. It’s just hard sometimes not having someone there to even try to help out with the loneliness, even though they can’t be there all the time.”

I sighed and everything ached faintly as I thought about Mary, beautiful unattainable Mary. I flipped over to Snapchat and saw that she’d opened my snap but hadn’t replied. I sighed again,

“Yeah. It really does.”

I expected that to be the end of the conversation so I placed my phone beside me and lay on my side waiting for sleep to fall on me. The music had ended and I closed my eyes and tried not to think of anything. The phone vibrated again and the light forced my eyes open again.

“Since you kind of deal with the same thing, do you have any ideas on how to work through it?”

My fingers typed out an answer as soon as I’d read it,

“Writing about it helps sometimes, but sometimes it makes it worse. I’m also on Tinder and that almost always makes it worse but there’s always a chance it could immediately be better.”

The music had changed again and my phone selected Flugdank, the melodic bass comforting me slightly.

“That sounds good. I’ll probably try both.”

“That’s good.”

“Between you and me though,” I continued, “what did you see in Brittany anyway? Like I didn’t even know you guys really talked until after it was over.”

Once the message was sent, I suddenly recognized my error and hoped that the question didn’t pull Anthony deeper down into his misery. A lightning strike of a thought, Anthony asking me about Mary for revenge, flashed across my mind and frightened me. However, Anthony took my question in good stride,

“Yeah, I didn’t really understand it either. One night last summer she literally just texted me and asked whether I’d want to go out sometime and I basically just accepted because I was scared of her at the time. She was actually sweet though as you get to know her. But then at that party, she got wild and I thought it was best to get out of there. We’re still amicable though I mean as amicable as two people can be after that.”

“Wow, really? You guys are still friends?”

“Yeah, I mean she apologized for it and even asked me and wanted to go out again but we’re just too different.”

Brittany was a tall, attractive, and powerful girl that championed every girl’s sports team fathomable. She held a pretty high reputation at school and her brief relationship with Anthony had been an engaging development all of last summer. The relationship though ended tragically at the back-to-school party filled with Trinity high nobility. According to the legend,- I wasn’t invited to the party -Anthony had entered the party late to find Brittany intoxicated, which seriously bothered him because his older brother died from alcohol poisoning. Apparently, he told Brittany that drinking wasn’t something that he was all right with and to see her like that hurt him. He explained later that it wasn’t even that blow that sunk the ship, but, when he saw that everyone else was in an even worse state than her and that some were even pressuring him to join their debauchery, he left the party and walked five miles back to his house. Afterward, he admitted he might have overreacted, but both of them knew the other probably wasn’t a good fit.

“Yeah, I guess it’s like that sometimes,” I texted throwing a platitude out to try to express the inexpressible. Anthony appreciated the effort,

“Yeah, it is.”

He waited for a second and then added another text,

“Hey man thanks for talking with me about this, it means a lot to have a friend like you.”

I smiled down at the text and sighed again, a sigh of contentment rather than longing or disappointment.

“Yeah man, you’re welcome. I’m glad to help anytime and I know I can count on you for the same.”

“Yeah for sure.”

Then in the following text,

“Well, goodnight see you tomorrow.”

“See you later.”

I locked my phone and paused the music along with it. Slumber now felt closer than ever and I was glad to go back to sleep but also glad to have helped a friend.

The late afternoon sun beamed out from the distance, struggling to work through two large white clouds. I arrived at the cafe a few minutes early, and the pleasant smell of coffee grounds reached me even from outside of the shop. Two pigeons squawked a couple tables in front of me, quarreling over crumbs on the ground. The air was light and a slight wind breezed softly through the air which made sitting outside manageable. I was beginning to regret showing up early though, a ball of anxiousness and doubt snowballed slowly in my stomach forcing me to check my phone incessantly for an update or just to look at the time. I hadn’t been on a date, apart from sporadic hookups, in a long time, and a distant fear kept my eyes locked to the distance, half hoping for Violet never to arrive so that everything could simply stay the same.

I pulled out my phone again and unlocked it. 4:30. We said we’d meet up here at 4:30 and I checked back through our message thread to confirm this. Our conversation had moved from Tinder Thursday night and we’d been exchanging messages through simple text since. I found there was a lot more to her than her slightly long nose, specifically that we share similar literary and musical taste and that she was going to Brown in the fall. I grew to like her and scenes of a rose-colored future, a beautiful summer spent with an understanding companion, started to fly into my mind as scenes of a lavish meal comes to the famished. The scenes gave me momentary bliss then dispirited me, not because we could only be together for the summer, but because with the daydreams of the future came the longing of the present and, with that longing, another small hole was sure to appear in me. I felt crazy for worrying about a future that wasn’t even solidified and tried to think of the amazing person I would (hopefully) soon be with, but the anxiety hung over me like a dark cloud on an otherwise bright day.

I opened Instagram and scrolled through photos absentmindedly, trying to put my mind on something else. I scrolled through a myriad of superficial smiles of ostensibly happy teens and eventually stopped on someone I knew. It was Donald and Camila, who must’ve spent their Friday night alone together, were standing in front of some fountain in the city. There was a casual happiness in their eyes which made the picture feel natural. I closed my phone after that to find Violet walking towards me and, spotting my eyes, waved at me with a conciliatory smile. I waved back and I could feel my face open up and a smile pulling harder and harder at the corners of my mouth as she approached.

“Hey, Violet,” I called once she was in earshot.

“Hey, Michael,” she replied.

We exchanged a quick hug, and it felt good to have someone to hold even for a moment.

“Do you want anything to drink?”

“Oh,” she paused and looked inside to find that there were only a few people in line, “yeah that sounds good.”

We walked into the coffee shop and as she perused the menu I looked on at her. She looked very similar to how she looked online and, in fact, even more, attractive in person. Some light in the room hit her eyes perfectly and they looked almost chestnut instead of the dull brown we were both cursed with. Her face was rounded which made her look inviting and caring and her skin as a whole seemed incredibly soft. I could feel myself slowly falling for the girl staring at the menu and the feeling was new and exciting and I didn’t feel the biting undercurrent of anxiety that came with what that meant. Violet turned to me suddenly and I was caught red-handed,

“What are you looking at?”

My mouth worked faster than my mind and was opened waiting for words to filter through it. When those words didn’t come, I was left with a gaping mouth dumbly staring at Violet. She giggled quietly and I closed my mouth into a soft smile while the knot of anxiety within me began to loosen. She ordered a caramel macchiato and we took it outside to talk more. We sat down back at the table I was at and her back was to the sun, the rays gently catching in her hair.

“So how was your week?” she asked after a sip of her drink.

I thought back on it, and couldn’t really think of anything. The week had been filled with large periods of ennui, a hearty amount of self-hatred, desperate yearning for someone I’ll never have, a thousand dreams of successful futures, a million cynical observations, and a pervasive feeling of general dissatisfaction with fatuous school work sprinkled in intermittently. A thoroughly regular week.

“Pretty good,” I replied, “how about your’s?”

“Great actually.”

“That’s good.”

There was a pause and we simply stared at each other for a moment and I saw myself happy within her eyes, and I wondered vaguely what she saw in mine. We both gently let the moment go by, marking the change with a quick laugh and continued the routine small talk. Talking with her was very pleasant, there was some poetry in her voice which made all of her words flow easily like water from a pitcher. I asked her questions that she had to think about and then provide long answers to just to hear her voice sweetly muse on some topic or another; it was a voice to be experienced not simply heard.

“So how long was your last relationship?”

“Oh that’s a story,” she began taking a sip from her thick, brown drink, “My last relationship started before high school, when I was in 7th grade in fact, and because of that there was a mystical almost magical aspect surrounding it, because then I was a kid and I believed that he was undoubtedly the “one”. By the time we both got to high school we were two completely different people and I think we just held to the relationship so ardently because we viewed the other as the idealistic, rose-colored portraits that we’d painted and giving up on that relationship meant giving up on that version of ourselves.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“But when we were Sophomores I think we both finally accepted the fact that we changed and we broke it off then. So about four or five years I guess, we’re still amicable we’re just not together like that anymore.”

“That’s really interesting. I mean it takes a lot to accept that you’ve changed and move on.”

She nodded and we shared a moment of silence again, but this time her gaze was vacant as if she was looking forward, past me. The moment passed before I could ruminate over why this was and my mind was already focused on her question,

“What about you? How long was your last relationship?”

Though I expected the question to be posed to me and expected where my mind would go, I still thought painfully over Mary, foolishly poking at a wound like a child over a scraped knee. Thankfully I was able to move past her quickly,

“It lasted a couple months. My last relationship was in 8th grade actually, nothing too serious, I mean obviously its 8th grade, but it was fun while it lasted.”

I hadn’t really considered how peculiar that statement was and thought briefly about how inexperienced I was in terms of real relationships, a missing piece to my high school experience. Then again I was probably missing many pieces.

“Oh, ok. Why did you and your middle school sweetheart part ways?” Violet asked half-sincerely, half-sarcastically.

I answered with a short laugh,

“She moved off to boarding school actually.”

She opened her mouth to reply but I continued, lost in the thought,

“You know it's crazy how important things feel while you’re inside of the moment. Like when I found out she was leaving that killed me inside and now I don’t even think about her. The whole relationship was such a big deal and now it's not only over, but, because I don’t think about it, it's not even real, like it's a thing that happened, but if I don’t even remember it does it matter if it happened?”

“Yeah.”

I was looking off now and I was also off somewhere. For a second I wondered why I hadn’t been in a relationship in high school. I knew I wasn’t a drop-dead gorgeous guy, but I wasn’t the other extreme other. I’m funny at times, I can hold a conversation, I have friends that are women, and I can talk to the other sex easily all qualities that should’ve guaranteed me something in my four-year term. I looked into Violet’s brown eyes again, still holding that illuminated quality from inside, and looked down to the soft smile she held comfortably. I could see in her eyes that there was something here. If not the bloomed sunflower of infatuation then the budding seed of intrigue, and the look made my question even more poignant: if there was something in me that could get a girl I’d known less than a week interested in me, why have I been so alone?

“What are you thinking about?”

“Oh? Me? Nothing, sorry.”

“Tell me!” she pleaded with a smile. The beauty of her voice was amplified with the request and my mind opened as I thought aloud spilling a monolog into the air while barely understanding my words until they were out,

“I don’t know, I was just thinking that not being in a relationship is so strange to say out loud for me because honestly I’m a pretty outgoing person and I don’t think anything’s wrong with me. Obviously, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with not being in one, but it's something that I feel I want. And like to my point earlier it's so strange that you don’t remember some big things and then remember some small moments like they’re even closer than yesterday like there always happening in your head and you’re always living inside of them…”

My mind threw me back into the first time I was ever at Trinity. I was so hopeful and everything was so new. I finished many teen T.V. high school dramas and was convinced that life was about to be exactly as those were portrayed; each day an amazing adventure where I would grow and change and run and sit and talk and, most especially, love. Opportunity seemed to be knocking around every corner and all of those could be mine, all of those would be mine if I simply asked for it. Every person that passed me had a wonderfully rich backstory and would, in some way, aid me along my journey to becoming widely liked and praised. I found myself sitting on a bench fidgeting with excitement to start what would easily be the greatest four years of my life.

Not many of those things were true and high school was mostly a thing to be endured like it was for everyone else, but in one way my story was dramatic. Many people passed me while I was sitting on that bench who were now faceless and amorphous in my mind, but one I will always remember. I saw Mary approach, laughing brilliantly while flocked on the sides by two friends, and there was everything. I didn’t even know her name but I knew in that moment that I would spend all of my days chasing to the very ends of the Earth just to walk next to her. She didn’t notice me as she approached but she glanced back at me as she passed and my fate was sealed. Even now, some part of me, if not all of me, will be running after the girl who glanced back, no matter what those eyes become.

“Oh yeah? And what moments do you live inside, Michael?”

No time had really passed, but it felt like an eternity. For a moment Violet’s eyes turned into Mary’s eyes, the green orbs teasing me playfully then switching back again.

“Oh, nothing just stupid things we used to do.”

“Oh ok,” she laughed quickly, “and what was her name, Romeo?”

“Mary,” I said dreamily.

“Mary? That’s a pretty name.”

“Yeah.”

Another silence, I still wasn’t completely back to reality.

“What boarding school did Mary go to?”

I realized my mistake and looked at Violet for a second with bewilderment then straightened myself out and answered cooly,

“Rosemond Academy. It’s out in Virginia actually.”

The rest of our time together went naturally without any other patches of silence, and we asked and answered questions with my breezy temperament and her sing-song voice. The setting sun falling behind Violet made her lovelier and lovelier still until it was directly behind her head transfiguring her into an angel. She was truly a beautiful girl. Finally, though, she had to leave and I walked her out to her car, a white newer-looking Sedan, to wish her goodbye. Standing at the car I held her close to me by her waist,

“Hey, it was really great being with you today.”

“Yeah, I really enjoyed it too.”

Her voice fluttered a bit when she said “too” and my heart took its cue.

“We should really do this again,” I said pulling her slightly closer to me and wrapping my other arm nonchalantly around her waist.

“Yeah we really should,” she echoed looking into my eyes.

“Well,” I said my eyes following her gaze as her eyes slowly made their way down to my lips, “I guess this is goodbye for now.”

We both leaned in until our lips were millimeters away from each other.

“Goodbye for now,” she whispered back into my lips.

We embraced, both our bodies slowly rising up with sudden energy and then falling back down in fulfillment and satisfaction. We kissed once, twice, and on further, our lips dancing around each other backing away in hope that the last one wasn’t the end and then again into each other with renewed passion and poignancy. Kissing, usually a weapon used by men of the casual hookup (as I was) to move activities forward, was an art form that usually was overlooked en route to more intimate activity, but in this moment I cherished the act and nestled inside that moment with eyes closed and heart open.

When we did finally pull away, I tried suppressing my natural joy, but the corners of my mouth were pulled with acute strength and I was smiling like a fool. Violet saw this and laughed, carrying the smile into the car with her. I stepped back as she revved the engine and pulled out. She waved at me once as she began to drive away and I waved until she was out of the lot.

I pulled out my phone and began to walk to my car which wasn’t far away. It was now 6:07, and I marveled at how fast time went by. Absentmindedly, I checked Instagram as I came upon my car and instantly knew it was a mistake. Mary’s green eyes taunted me as she and Zack stood in each other's arms posing in front of some light display. I wanted more than anything to believe that the smile on her face was strictly superficial, but anyone could tell that it was genuine and natural. I saw that love lying behind her eyes and happiness lying in her countenance and I hated that so much and then hated myself for despising her happiness. The past hour and a half vanished instantly as I slammed my car door and sulked in my seat. The answer to my question was simple, my solitude was not produced by internal defects nor was it something I was subjected to, it was a voluntary isolation. I am simply a loyal dog, waiting patiently behind, but ultimately in vain, for recognition.

“Hey that project went really well,” Donald said taking a bite of his pizza.

“Thanks, man,” I said looking over to Beatrix and nodding.

“Oh, what project?” Camila asked.

“In English for our final, we just had to write a short play and perform it for the class. I was just O.K., Beatrix was amazing,” I answered.

I could see Beatrix smile slightly under the hood then subdue it under a blank expression.

The play had been about two people who run into each other after witnessing a calamitous event. However, though they both speak English, they use different words and phrases to describe the phenomenon which the other perceives as an entirely different event. The play ends with the two heading in different directions, not completely sure of the scale or even the nature of the disaster. It ran mostly as a comedy but did bring up some larger questions about life, and Beatrix was truly remarkable in her role. We ate in silence for a while until another question was posed

“So Michael, how was the date this weekend?”

Scraps of lettuce fell off my face back into the paper wrapper as my attention went from the sandwich to Anthony, his eyes waiting expectantly for my answer. I put the food down and slowly chewed the bit I had in my mouth taking a quick look around to find that all eyes were patiently waiting for my reply. Squarely at the center of attention, I methodically chewed the last of my food, carefully swallowed it, and cleared my mouth, the lighthearted suspense building with every passing second.

“It went well,” I finally said in reply, “we went to that new coffee shop on Broadway. It was cool, she was a really fun to be around.”

“‘Was?’” Camila asked.

For a second my mind flitted back to Violet’s voice, which carried like a rocking chair on a forgetful summer afternoon.

“Yeah, ‘was’. We haven’t really talked since.”

There was a collective eyebrow raise of acknowledgment like when a distant acquaintance is found to have a minor injury. A moment of silence followed it, blessing the passing memory of Violet, as the sun hid behind a large cloud. I looked over to the right to see a couple sitting by each other on the ground, the girl affectionately guiding a cookie into the boy’s mouth. They laughed quietly after he had taken the bite and, even with eyes narrowed, maintained eye contact with the other. I turned back to the group,

“But it’s fine, there’s always more fish in the sea though right?”

The group nodded again with a couple scattered agreements ringing around the table. I sat back to take another bite of my sandwich, the bland ham hid under the mustard spread generously over the sandwich. Ham and mustard, the combo had brought me through the year and I was growing increasingly tired of it. My eyes worked independently to pick out Mary, for a second she was alone (Zack had recently gone inside), and she stared off into the distance vacantly. I sighed, I was increasingly growing tired of everything.

“It's probably best that you don’t start anything long-term now anyway since we’ll be out of here soon,” John said stuffing a handful of chips into his mouth.

The rest of the table looked at him with reproach, like when a child irreverently mentions a stranger’s disability, but I understood that he didn’t perceive the potential harm that the question could uncover.

“Yeah it’s probably a good idea to keep things light going forward,” I said cautiously keeping any hint of pain out of my voice.

A solemn nod rode like a wave in the circle and, though I appreciated that they were trying to look out for me, I wanted to show them I didn’t need to be coddled.

“Guys, I’m fine, really. I’m good,” I said.

“Yeah, we know man,” Anthony said sympathetically.

I know I hadn’t convinced my friends because I hadn’t convinced myself. My eyes drifted again towards Mary, who still sat alone, and I formulated a half-baked scheme to approach her and win her heart and then scolded myself for the idea. John was right, I needed to wake up from the fantasy that in these final days of high school I would meet the one person to complete me and understand me. I tried to comfort myself with the hope of finding her in college or even beyond, but the thought gave me no solace.

“So what did you guys do over the weekend?” I posed to the table trying desperately to change the subject.

“Camila and I went to that new park on Friday,” Donald said after a quick pause, “and I learned how to play Without A Face yesterday. Pretty great weekend.”

“That’s impressive,” Anthony said nodding.

“Yeah for sure,” I added, “what about you John?”

“Terrible weekend for me honestly,” John said hanging his head while sinking his shoulders, almost as if he was melting into ground, “I lost my spot on the spinner leaderboards and my mom wouldn’t loan me the money to make my spinner better so I was stuck at home doing nothing all weekend.”

“Oh, did you ever get to check out that book of Neruda poems I gave you?” Donald asked hopefully.

“Oh yeah man,” he said hopefully, “I used all of the love poems I could.”

“Used?”

“Yeah,” John asked noticeably puzzled, “I went through all of my female Instagram followers, picked out the single ones, and direct messaged them with the best quotes in the book.”

John laid out his plan with such frankness we all had no choice but to laugh. Sometimes he was an idiot, but watching his mind work was hilarious. He wore a face that made it clear that he took the scheme seriously which only made the situation funnier. In a way, it was the prototypical move of our day, overwrought and undeniably ingenious yet without the integrity or emotional fervor of days gone by. We are a generation of readers, not writers; critics, not thinkers.

“Did any girls write you back?” Anthony asked after we’d settled down.

“Yeah one girl asked me if I’d made it up myself and I was like “yeah, I like to write or whatever.” and she totally went for the tortured artist vibe I was giving off.”

“Typical John building a relationship out of lies,” Camila said matter-of-factly.

“That’s where you’re wrong my sweet,” John said with a smirk, “I intend to build a hook-up out of lies, which are the very lifeblood of a hook-up.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

John straightened, relishing the opportunity to speak on what he knew for certain,

“Really it's quite simple. Both parties lie to each other and themselves, imagining a future for themselves or trying to convince themselves that they’re not “that type of person”, but by the time the actual hooking up begins both have long since discovered that this is a one-time thing but, out of common decency, refuses to tell the other in the moment and opts for a slow decline to eventual cessation of communication afterwards to get the point across. Sometimes even before meeting each other in person, the two know the relationship won’t progress further than one or two passionate connections, and in that situation, deception plays an even bigger role, a constant denial of what will become obvious as soon as the potential meeting becomes reality.”

“That can’t be right,” Camila said shaking her head.

“No, he’s actually has a point,” I said, unconscious emotions transfiguring into words in my throat as I continued, “Maybe the whole thing is a deception. Every time I go onto Tinder I trick myself into believing that the perfect girl is always right around the corner. Maybe all I’ll ever get is the occasional match with someone I have to make myself believe is right for me, settle for about a third of those matches actually turning into hook-ups, and ignore the nagging feeling that they’re never right for me, and then go back and do the whole thing over again”

The table sat in silence for a moment with the solemn nods beginning to reappear when Beatrix broke her silence and said,

“Well, maybe you should stop opening Tinder.”

I began to laugh and I felt the table join me in relief. I knew she was right but as I looked around at the couples sprinkled around the courtyard I also knew I would still use the app. However, as I looked around at my friend’s smiling faces I also knew that I would have someone to talk to when I did.

Cold tears from the cloudy Tuesday sky beat on my windows as I drove down the road. I made an effort to rush out of the building and make my way to the car as quickly as possible to beat the impatient multitude soon to pack the streets. The rain was falling in huge droplets, crashing on the front window and exploding on impact creating a landscape of small liquid craters every few seconds. I flipped my wipers on and they creaked slowly to life then began to move normally, clearing my view on the way down to find more water to clear on its way up. I was on the highway I traveled down every day on my way back from school, indifferently speeding a few miles over the limit and weaving listlessly in-and-out of traffic. The road was familiar and I took my right hand off the wheel as my mind drifted.

I’d driven down this road hundreds of times on the way back from school or from somewhere else and I’d passed millions of people, each of us confined to our metal boxes and doomed to, at best, being a passing car in another’s memory and more often not even making an impression. The thought made me want to roll down the windows in the rain and yell at cars going by, but I knew they would never turn to look. Some cars tried to fight this obscurity by riding past with their music blaring out at full volume, the bass making the very mirrors shake vigorously with every hit. I’d tried that method but again the music that was so clear to me fell silent on the ears of those I passed. So I resolved to simply stare at the passers-by, momentarily turning my head left or right and silently hoping my gaze would reach them before being pulled back to the road. While this plan was mostly unsuccessful, every once in awhile someone would look over and our eyes would meet. On the road, all wore the same expression, a muted annoyance coupled with an obvious impatience, which materialized itself as a mostly blank face with the lips slightly downturned and a vacant stare. It was if, in that moment when our eyes met, that we were simply a part of the environment; that when we were behind the wheel we’d given up our humanity and melded into machinery with a singular purpose of getting to our destination. Then both pairs of eyes would turn back to the road and forget both the person they’d just seen and the fact that they’d turned in the first place. Honestly, I don’t know what is worse: having my existence be ignored or instantly forgotten.

My mind moved on through to the events of the day Everyone was issued a copy of the literary magazine before lunch and some had congratulated me on my story, with Mary being the most notable of these. She spotted me in the hall before last period and waved at me from across the hall. I waved back and she walked over holding the magazine tightly to her chest. Along with the typical feelings of severe wistfulness and heartbreak that usually accompany seeing Mary, a strange mixture of anger and resignation splattered haphazardly on the canvas. I felt it lying in wait ever since the lunch conversation on Monday and maybe even since the date with Violet. I figured it appeared because I finally put a face to my suffering, a beautiful, smiling face to be the scapegoat for my ills. For some reason though this revelation gave me no solace, maybe because the true scapegoat I sought was only a mirror away.

“Hey, Michael!”

“Hey Mary,” I said cloaking the concoction of emotion under a casual facade.

“I read your story and I really enjoyed it! It’s just so well-written and the whole theme of the untranslatability of the human experience is really unique which made it an even better read,” She said her eyes lighting up.

I marveled at this friend turned near-stranger who understood me so well and I laughed softly out of joy and pain,

“Thank you so much,” I paused for a second while foolishly staring into her eyes, “that means so much coming from you.”

She maintained her smile but it lost some aspect, moving almost imperceptibly from admiration to pity and I hated myself for doing that to her. I tried to move the conversation to something different,

“Can’t believe we’re graduating Friday.”

Mary snatched at the chance to move on,

“Yeah, it’s crazy! It’s so surreal like I’ve seen so many people go through it and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s my turn now.”

I nodded with a smile and she mirrored me. I tried to think of more things to say just to keep her in front of me but my mind was blank and apparently, Mary’s was as well. We stayed there for another moment, smiles slowly fading when she saw someone behind me and walked over to speak to them, leaving with a quick goodbye. I watched her walk a few steps then sighed and headed to class.

I flipped my windshield wipers down a level as the rain slowed. I wasn’t very far from home now as my exit off of the highway became visible. For a moment I was conscious of the music that was playing, Alex Turner’s smooth voice carrying quiet emotions like the wind picking up and carrying beaten rock particles,

“An ache in your soul/ Is everybody’s goal…”

The song brought me back to Mary and back to a memory, sitting up in bed with the covers at my legs while rain pelted the windows in my room.

“So what do you think I should do?”

I locked the phone for a moment and hugged my knees to my chest staring off into the darkness. There was a dull pain inside me and I was a child standing inside awaiting the inevitable. Inside, my life was normal and everything was as it should be. Inside, my fantasy was, though improbable, still possible and the dream could still work out on some theoretical day in the future. However when I opened the door (and I had to open the door), my whole world would change and the fantasy would die stillborn in my mind, the corpse lying quietly as evidence of my failure. I laid back on the bed hoping sleep would delay the inevitable but another vibration from my phone ended that possibility.

“Please Michael, I trust your judgment just tell me what you think?”

My being screamed out into the void, the silence in the room filled with a million cries of anguish. I tried to console myself: “this won’t matter in five years” and “this isn’t really that important” and “you’re just dramatizing an inconsequential event” but these gave me nothing, in fact, they made things worse because I knew the words were true. I knew that this moment actually meant nothing and that I shouldn’t let this image of this high school girl have such a hold on me, but she did in spite of all of it. Staring back at that screen, imagining Mary staring anxiously at her own screen, I was surer of my love for her than at any time before, but also in that moment, I knew with certainty that she didn’t love me. I was at a crossroads, and though I knew I could’ve gone down the selfish road and clutch at the wispy dream of my love for her finally being reflected back to me, I knew that there was only one answer to her question.

“You should follow your heart,” the keyboard becoming obscured in the misty eyes that looked down on them, “that’s all anyone should ever do.”

The next day she was dating Zack.