J-O-E-Y

They were going ninety until the cop car flashed its lights, then they were going a hundred. Half-shrouded in shadow, half-basking in the red-blue-red light slicing through the back window, Robbie leaned over the middle seat cup holders. “We gotta do something, dude. Like, now.”

Joey was eight years old, and even he knew better than to run from the police. But he also knew better than to speak on nights his mother’s car reeked of that perfume she kept stashed in the glove compartment—lemongrass and ginger, he would discover years later while struggling to breathe inside a Bath & Body Works. Rosary beads jittered beneath the rear-view mirror. Joey covertly examined her reflection: black-hole pupils, wreathed in veiny sclera, fixed on a destination only she could see. They were his mother’s eyes; they were not his mother’s eyes.

Robbie flicked Joey’s ear. The alternating hues revealed a thin mustache of sweat fringing his brother’s upper lip. “Start crying.”

Joey shook his head. He wanted only to be absent from what was to come. He had wanted this since he opened the car door thirty minutes ago. That pungent fragrance glazed the backseat, undulated beneath the overhead lamp. And yet, he could locate the damning scent instantly: like rotten eggs, like cat pee. It would be one of those nights.

Another flick. “Start. Crying.”

Their bodies lurched against locked seat belts. The cop car tailing them veered to the right, revealing another swirling light, another siren wailing. Their mother drifted left, blaring into the emergency shoulder. Surrendering, Joey thought, and relief flooded his veins. Then his entire body stiffened. He knew the next part well: burly officers barking unintelligible orders, guns drawn. They would smash her face into asphalt, shine a bright light into her eyes, and load her, hands cuffed, into the back of a police car, while he and Robbie watched, waiting to be returned to their dad’s house. After that, he wasn’t sure. He hated COPS and typically left the room before anyone went to jail.

Outside Robbie’s window, there were two red-blue flashes, and then the troopers were no longer behind them, they were forging ahead, their vibrance softening in the humidity, their glissandos becoming echoey and distant. They exited the highway and turned onto a residential road. In the passenger door mirror, a blue speck appeared, twinkling, intensifying, then elongating into a fleet of fire trucks and ambulances. Barreling down the frontage road, they turned right where the troopers had disappeared.

Joey sat back. He imagined burning buildings, parking lot shootouts, people screaming to their deaths. Real emergencies. In comparison, theirs was a predicament. A fabrication. They were a car on a highway, a mother and her sons.

“Pigs,” she muttered, jerking the gear shift back.

§

A P.E. teacher once told Joey that for muscles to strengthen, they must first tear.

Joey hated crying. He hated the quiet escalations and the quick, violent onsets; the way tears come from the throat, not the eyes; the shaky breaths and unintelligible sputtering; the red-hot humiliation; his brittle predisposition. He hated how, no matter the situation, tears were a likely outcome.

“There he goes,” Robbie would say the moment a line was crossed, declaring Joey’s hurt feelings, sometimes even before Joey himself had caught the insult.

It was a problem—one Joey desperately wanted to solve, the way Robbie and his father seemingly had. So, he developed a routine. On the night his mother went away, he stood in their shared bedroom before the double-pane window which reflected like a mirror when the ceiling bulb was lit, and he tore into the muscle in his chest with his nails, burrowing deep into the freshest gash until emotion oozed and clawed up his respiratory tract. When his face threatened to crumple, he clenched the elastic of his waistband, stared hard at his reflection, and demanded composure while impervious tears slithered down his cheeks like water through a cracked dam. Even though he was crying, he could feel a new muscle growing inside him. And so he did it the next night, too, and the night after that. He started to crave the post-cry throat ache. He would go to sleep drained and wake the next morning tasting the soreness of an athlete, his face streaked with salt which he pretended was from sweat.

Joey would recount these nightly rituals for the first time a decade later, naked, to a boy named Peter. He would struggle to speak through the embarrassment, pausing often to shake his head or cover his mouth, until he concluded the anecdote with an exaggerated sigh. “Childhood,” he said, and switched off the bedside lamp, never to speak of it again. In his chest, however, where his contentment with adulthood had inconspicuously rooted, disappointment now sprouted thornily. Why had his narration stripped the memory of its weight and replaced it with the humorous humiliation of wetting oneself at a sleepover? He vividly remembered the gashes, once raw and gleaming, now merely freckling his memory like scars, harmless and benign until he assumed their benignity. Then they screamed, like phantom pains. Like some unscratchable itch he’d at some point forgotten.

§

Pigs.

Her first word, first sound, of the night.

A start.

Thirty minutes had passed since her car trundled wordlessly up the ramp onto the highway, accelerating past all their usual dinner spots, the exit for their grandma’s house, the county marker. Thirty minutes since the question “Where are we going?” first patiently hovered over them, then floated through the headliner, unanswered, unacknowledged. Robbie asked it again, now, his voice breaking with what Joey believed to be optimism, for she had spoken. She could speak again.

Robbie called them episodes, and although Joey seldom questioned his brother, he was certain there existed a better name for them. Episodes were two eleven-minute blocks of SpongeBob SquarePants split by commercials that never seemed to end. Joey called them her ‘gloomies’ instead. He liked the wetness of the ‘gl’ sound found in words like glob and igloo. Gloomy was wet, but also hollow and round, like air escaping a lung at the bottom of an ocean.

Joey had coined the term the year prior, around the time their father informed them of the divorce. It was an inevitable conversation prompted by the seemingly innocent question that Joey felt guilty afterward for asking: “Where’s Mom?” She hadn’t come home the night before, which meant she picked up an overnight shift at the hotel, but now it was noon and her car still wasn’t in the driveway. Joey was getting worried. By that point, he would later learn, she’d been living with their grandma for two weeks, despite continuing to collect them from school, enter the house with her key, and prepare dinner as though nothing were amiss. She even planted kisses atop their father's blank expression when he trudged through the door, sweaty and stinking and simply too tired to deal with her. After dinner, he’d take her to the bedroom, where they remained until eight-thirty. Some evenings, they were silent. Others, the shouting shook the walls. One night, Joey heard a crash and emerged the next morning to find splinters of door frame strewn across the carpet. But no matter how loudly their dad yelled “Get out,” she wouldn’t leave, not without tucking Joey in and kissing him good night.

Eventually, their father changed the locks. A judge ordered her three hundred feet away from the house and the schools and restricted her visitation to a supervised facility in the neighboring town. Joey missed her terribly; Robbie thought the whole thing was bullshit.

Their mother respected the restraining order, and, eight weeks later, the court modified it to allow unsupervised visitation. She hosted them at their grandma’s house for the very first time. They would share the futon in the living room, they were told—not by their mother, but by their grandma, which ended the long, breathless silence that had swept the dinner table when the rail-thin man entered the house without knocking, and their mother, neglecting to excuse herself, staggered after him into her childhood bedroom and slammed the door. Joey and Robbie eyed their grandma, who stared into her fideo, the steam billowing over her inscrutable expression. Later, on the futon, Robbie admitted to Joey that for a second, he’d thought their grandma had died.

Joey didn’t like the man, whom he later learned was named Mateo. Although Joey had watched his mother introduce them by name, Mateo insisted on calling him ‘Boss-man.’ Once, in retaliation, Joey called him ‘Madea,’ which prompted a wheezy laughter to filter through his gap-toothed grin and fill the room with a stench Joey would only recognize years later when he removed the lid to an outdoor compost bin. Joey blamed Mateo for his mother’s gloomies because she was often gloomy when he was around. Until his grandma’s funeral six years later, he blamed Mateo alone. Huddled among uncles and aunts at the wake, Joey bowed his head, pretending to pray, and looked at her face for the very last time, remembering the thin straight line of her lips, the inert arch of each brow—that inscrutable expression which indicated another slammed door, another insult hurled, another dish flung in senseless frustration. It was never shock nor grief, but withdrawal that she embodied in those moments. She must have known, long before Mateo first walked through her door, what Joey would soon discover: to disengage was to protect oneself; to dissociate was to preserve one’s love.

§

When their mother didn’t answer, Robbie rephrased the question:

“Where are you taking us?”

“What are we doing?”

“Do you even know?”

Joey rested his head against the glass and watched the passing radiance of bustling strip malls, a cement plant metropolis, antennae piercing low clouds. He could feel his heart bleeding within him, the blood pooling in his gut and clotting into a fist-sized pit that hurt his back when he breathed. He closed his eyes. Plucked a soothing memory from the bouquet he preserved through frequent reminiscence, ignoring their over-nourished wilting.

It was Robbie’s last football game of the season, three months ago. The seventh-grade cheerleaders wore pointy hats and vampiric face paint. Joey and his mother shared jalapeño nachos in the bleachers and stomped and clapped to the cheerleaders’ commands. In the second quarter, Joey began to mimic their poses, their struts. He gallivanted down the row, elbows pointed, hips jutting. He didn’t care. At that age, flamboyance was normal. It was not yet singular to him, to boys like him. What mattered was that his mother laughed. And she was laughing. And when she laughed, her clavicles momentarily sank as her normally shriveled body inflated with life. The shadows around her eyes softened as sunlight restored their natural shimmer: two honey-dipped Whoppers—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen them. He kept strutting, kicking, rustling his imaginary pom-poms and raising them high. As the field cleared for halftime, he glanced over and found his mother descending the bleacher stairs. He lowered his pom-poms, watched her turn the corner and disappear underneath the stadium. Through a slit in the bleachers, he tracked her hunched frame as it wove through the concession line before exiting the stadium. He waited patiently, then anxiously, plucking hair and peeling back hangnails until the stadium synchronously erupted for the third quarter kick off. A body slumped beside him, stinking of lemongrass. He looked at his mother: puffy-eyed, continuously coughing, her pupils dilated to two black O’s. Like GLOOM written across her face in fat, permanent marker.

§

After two hours on the highway, Joey saw the horizon pale like the first sign of morning. Building by building, a skyline rose, vast and glistening. Joey had been to San Antonio once before, on a class trip to the Alamo. He recognized the building that looked like a nail.

The highway frayed, curving over rooftops and winding through knotted interchanges. Traffic thickened, thinned, thickened. They exited onto the frontage road, turned right, left, then right again. Behind them, the city blinked through the gaps of overarching trees. Streetlamps flickered orange over litter which spilled out from the corners of rodent-chewed liners slouching along the curb. Beyond the cracked sidewalks were unmanicured lawns, cars on cinder blocks, and weathered homes. Like Grandma’s house, he thought. But also, not like Grandma’s house. More like the houses surrounding Grandma’s house: sunbaked, peeling, swarming with strays, occasionally hardly standing. He imagined Mateo wandering out of one and into another without knocking.

They turned into the parking lot of a dimly lit corner store with two gas pumps, iron-bar windows, and a flickering fluorescent sign. Three men huddled outside the store’s entrance. Cigarettes dangled from their mouths and glowed between their fingers. Ten feet away, an old man was slumped on a parking stop, legs sprawled out into the unoccupied space. He sported a trench coat, baggy jeans, and sandals. He stared ahead, not blinking, his lips parted, as though trapped in a state of perpetual realization.

Their mother parked beside the gas pump and studied the men. Then she turned and surveyed the empty intersection through the back window. For the first time that evening, she looked at her children. “I’ve got to go pay for gas.”

“That’s why we’re here?” Robbie asked. “Gas?”

“That’s right,” she said, suddenly enthusiastic. “Gas is cheap here.”

Robbie squinted but said nothing. Their mother smirked before pushing the door open and stepping out. Joey couldn’t help but gawk at her blatant lie. Then, at the way her lips curved upwards in reaction to their inconsequential disbelief.

The men watched her approach. Robbie cranked his window open.

“Excuse me,” she called out, her pitch strained to suggest innocence, naïveté. “Do any of you happen to know…” Her voice softened; the men leaned in to listen.

“What is she doing?” Joey asked.

“Hell if I know,” Robbie said. He unfastened his seatbelt.

Outside, their mother clasped her hands together and offered a pleading look.

The men shared glances. The tallest one shook his head no.

“No, no,” she said. “I must not have been very clear.”

Her voice lowered again. She began to gesture wildly, her innocence deflating into desperation through sharp hisses of whisper. She motioned to the car. Joey caught the eye of one of the men, who quickly dropped his gaze and took a drag from his cigarette.

“Please,” Joey heard his mother say. “To get me through the weekend.”

The tall man crossed his arms. His acne-spotted skin and patchy scruff indicated mid- to late-twenties, but there was something paternal about the way he glowered at her. Like a disappointed father, relenting against his better judgment. He lifted his chin past their mother, then dropped his cigarette butt and stomped it. The others dropped theirs too, marring the concrete with black tobacco. They crossed before the storefront and disappeared behind the building’s left wall, leaving their mother to awkwardly idle by the entrance for a beat before going inside. The door chimed then shut languidly behind her.

Robbie’s door opened with a squeal. He stepped out and pressed the door closed.

Joey scooted seats and watched through the open window as his brother pushed his pelvis forward, then to the side.

“What are you doing?”

“Stretching my legs.” As Robbie raised a knee and hugged it, Joey tracked his eyes’ fervent scan of the parking lot, the empty intersection.

“Please, don’t go.”

“Who said I was going?”

The door chimed again. Robbie ducked behind the gas pump. Out walked their mother, carrying a single Coke. She twisted off the lid and sent it back, wiping dribble from her chin as she sauntered down the length of the storefront. When she reached the left corner, she glanced over her shoulder, then continued on.

“Where is she going?” Joey asked.

When Robbie didn’t respond, Joey looked back at the gas pump. Robbie wasn’t there.

“Robbie?”

The quiet air returned only the intermittent hum of fluorescence and the scent of forthcoming rain. Joey pushed open the door and scuttled to the gas pump, each movement an impulse, a surprise. To defy his mother’s implicit instruction to remain in the car was certain to upset her, worsening their predicament when they were inevitably found. And yet dealing with her alone was a nauseating alternative.

Behind the left wall, an engine revved. Joey peeked out from the gas pump, saw crimson light spilling out over the pavement like blood and illuminating a chain-link fence that wrapped the back of the store. It intersected a wooden fence lining the right of the building, forming a slim alleyway occupied by fire logs, an air condenser, a dumpster, and Robbie, who stared back at him, his finger pressed to his lips. He pointed to the car, mouthed, Go back.

Joey shook his head.

Robbie rolled his eyes, peered down the storefront, then stuck out three fingers. Three, two, one.

Joey sprinted across the parking lot. In his periphery, the old man on the parking stop tracked him, like eyes in a painting. Like the Jesus painting their grandma kept in the dining room which scolded Joey’s every bite, even when he’d remembered to pray. Part of him wanted to stop and ask the man who he was and why he was sitting there, filling the parking space with his outstretched legs. He wanted to know if he was blind, or deaf, or homeless, or drunk, or high. Or holy.

Behind him, a car door slammed.

“She’s coming!” Joey lurched for Robbie’s arm. “We have to go back! We have to–”

“Shh!” Robbie pulled him down and clamped a palm over his mouth. They listened for footsteps, voices, a chime. Joey’s heart walloped in his temples. After a minute, Robbie released him, then flicked him on the forehead. “Nobody’s coming,” he whispered. “You just forgot to close the door.”

Joey rubbed his forehead as Robbie switched from squatting to sitting.

“What are we doing?” Joey asked.

“Waiting,” Robbie answered. He picked up a pebble and dragged it across the pavement.

“Why aren’t we waiting in the car?”

“Because it’s suffocating in there.”

Joey thought the dumpster was pretty suffocating but didn’t object. “Sorry for not crying earlier,” he said.

“Probably wouldn’t have done anything.” Robbie threw the pebble over the wooden fence. “I just wanted her to snap out of it, ya know? I thought, maybe, if you cried, then her mom sense, or whatever, might…” He stared at the ground, momentarily taken by a thought, before shaking his head. “Cheap gas,” he muttered.

Joey shook his head, too, mimicking his brother’s disapproval, but secretly thrilled by the mutual respect displayed via his candor. He felt like one of Robbie’s friends, not his brother, but one of his bros. Or like a parent discussing a problem child with the only other person in the world who could understand.

Joey held out two clenched fists, the forefingers extended. “Wanna play Chopsticks?”

Robbie smiled. They took turns transferring points with taps, halving their totals between two hands with bumped fists and mouth-made explosion sounds.

“G-Gs,” Robbie said whenever he won.

Good game, even when it wasn’t. Joey felt mocked by the sportsmanship but vastly preferred the pain of losing to the dread metastasizing within him, as the likelihood of their disappearance being discovered increased with each passing turn.

During their seventh game, they heard footsteps cross the parking lot, toe-first and staggering. Panic spiked in Joey’s abdomen. He launched to his feet. Robbie yanked him back down, flattened him against the wall with his outstretched arm, and clamped his mouth before he could protest. Joey writhed and spat, then went limp, as the arrhythmic scuffs culminated in the squeal of a car door.

A breathless silence. Then, a ricocheting slam.

“Excuse me?” their mother called, her mustered innocence now hoarse with fury. “Did you see two boys?”

Fluorescent lights hummed, hummed, hummed. She recrossed the lot and snapped three times. “Sir? Can you hear me?” Joey imagined the old man staring back at her. Through her. Oblivious to her.

“Robbie?” she called. “Joey?”

Joey’s lips were numb beneath Robbie’s bony palm. He tasted warm metal. The store entrance chimed, and her voice muted behind the shutting door. As soon as Robbie removed his hand, Joey yanked his sleeve so hard it crackled. “We have to go back!” he cried, lips buzzing. “Please, we have to–”

Robbie seized his brother’s wrist, looked him dead in the eyes. “Chill. Out.”

The door chimed again, their mother’s voice spilling out. “I went to pay for gas, and when I came back–”

“No gas,” a man’s voice said sharply. “Coke.”

“The fuck does it matter?”

“Twenty minutes ago. Why you only worry now?”

“I… I was looking for them!”

“You look for him already? Around the building? Up and down the street?”

“Yes!”

“I call police for you.”

“No! Just wait a second, please. I need to think.”

“Ma’am. You lose your child.”

“Children. There’s two.”

“Twenty minutes is too long for lost children. I call police. You keep looking.”

The chime faded, replaced by their mother’s grumbling. “Where did they go? Where the fuck did they go?Oh my godohmygod where did they go? Jesus where did they go?” The quiet lot amplified her swelling desperation like an auditorium.

“Let her worry,” Robbie whispered.

As her footsteps crescendoed towards the alleyway, Joey’s heart sank to his bowels. Robbie’s fingers constricted around his wrist, his nails indenting along a vein. Just before she reached the corner, another chime rang out.

“Ma’am, police want to talk to you.”

“Fuck,” she muttered. Her footsteps retreated down the storefront.

Without warning, Robbie stood and marched out of the alleyway. Linked at the wrist, Joey stumbled out behind him, scraping the pavement and colliding into Robbie at the storefront’s edge. The clerk gasped and lowered the outstretched flip phone. Their mother barely looked at them before dropping her gaze to the cement. She touched the crease between her eyebrows and, in a low, throaty monotone, began to giggle.

Robbie stepped in front of Joey.

“Oh, you think you’re a man now?” their mother asked. “Think you’re your dad? Don’t need me, don’t love me.”

“Mom, stop–”

“You think I don’t know you’ll go right to him? Make me look bad, then use it against me. My own son, a sabotaging little pig. But where’s your proof? You recording me?”

“We’re not sabotaging you–”

“Don’t lie, you little shit. I know you’ve got a mic. Where is it? Under that shirt?” She lurched towards Robbie and pulled the hem of his T-shirt over his head.

“I don’t have a microphone!”

“In your pockets, then? Or stuffed in your drawers?”

“Stop it!” Joey cried. Their mother glared at him over Robbie’s shoulder, slowly removing her hands from his pockets.

Robbie pulled his shirt down over his stomach and wrapped himself with his arms.

“Joey,” she grumbled, stepping past Robbie. She bent at the waist and, for many excruciating seconds, did nothing except occupy Joey’s entire field of view. With a gentle tone, she asked, “You really think mommy doesn’t know?”

When Joey didn’t answer, she clicked her tongue and stepped backward. She cupped her hips and jutted her elbows sharply outward. “You think I don’t know why you like to perform for all the mommies and the daddies in the bleachers?” She began to march in place, her hips swinging with devastating accuracy. “You think I don’t notice the stadium cameras?” Joey bit down hard on his cheek and watched his imitation look to the sky, to a bleacher full of onlookers. “I’m Joey!” she shouted, her tone exaggeratedly effeminate. “J-O-E-Y Joey! Everybody watch me humiliate my mom until she loses it! Daddy says if she’s in the looney bin by Christmas, I’ll get an Xbox!”

“Crazy bitch,” the clerk muttered.

Her head whipped around so fast she lost her balance. “I am not crazy,” she declared, holding up a finger and wagging it. “Not crazy. Not crazy. Not crazy.”

The clerk laughed in her face. He extended the flip phone and shook it. “Police still on the line.”

Her last “crazy” tapered like the dribble from a choked hose. For a long moment, she stared at him, before spinning on her heel and facing her children. “Let’s go.” When neither of them budged, she knelt in front of them and grabbed each of their shoulders, her gaze suddenly pleading, switching rapidly between them. “Listen to me. I’m sorry. All right? I didn’t mean any of it. So please. We need to go now.”

“To Grandma’s?” Robbie asked.

“Yes. Grandma’s. Anywhere. Right now.”

Robbie shook her hand from his shoulder and trudged towards the car. Joey tried to follow, but his feet were glued to the pavement. He looked down at them, past his nose and quivering top lip. He lifted one foot, then the other, and watched neither leave the ground.

“Oh, baby,” he heard her say. “You know I didn’t mean it.”

Of course he knew. The logical half of his brain understood it all too well. Her gloomies divorced her from her sense, emotional command, and, therefore, accountability. Yes, his mom had laughed that day on the bleachers. But was she laughing because she was happy? Or was she laughing at him? He leaned toward the car and prayed his legs would catch him.

In the corner of his eye, he saw the old man slowly turn his head away.

As the car trembled down the creviced neighborhood road, Joey stared out the window at the city, blinking through the trees, then sinking in the side mirror; at the headlights, blurring like comet tails across the median; at the plains, expanding indefinitely towards the invisible seam of earth and space. He tried to ignore his reflection in the glass. He never understood why windows reflected when he got close to them. It was as if, inside every pane, there was also a mirror whose sole purpose was to spoil his view with the knowledge of his gazing. When he closed his eyes, he faced an even uglier reflection: his mother’s imitation. So he settled for a world double-exposed with the image of himself on the brink, lips trembling, eyes full, his heart clawing up his throat.

He felt a flick. He scooted away, compressed himself against the car door.

Another flick. Another. Another.

A poke.

A palm rested flat against his back. The fingers curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling. When Joey finally turned, Robbie withdrew his hand fast, before clenching it into a tight fist. He clenched the other, then offered the pair with forefingers extended.

The hours passed like lanes stretched interminably before them. As the familiar landmarks reappeared in reverse order—cement plant; billboards; strip mall, no longer bustling—the softest sound broke through the highway’s drone. A hiccup, Joey thought, until their mother’s shoulders began to bob, her composure crumbling into gasps and sobs. He didn’t quite know how to feel about his mother’s crying. Robbie was probably glad for it. But Joey couldn’t resist another feeling taking hold, not relief or pity, but curiosity. He wondered about her sadness, wondered if it was in him the way half of her already was, and if there was a cure for it, and if that cure would destroy him too.

When they arrived in their grandma’s driveway, their mother kept her seat belt fastened. “Y’all go on in. I’m going to pick us up something to eat. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

Joey and Robbie looked at one another. Nodded.

“How does Chick-fil-A sound? Or maybe Panda Express?

“Everywhere’s closed,” Robbie said.

“Oh,” she said, drumming her fingertips atop the steering wheel. She sniffled.

“Well, maybe Dominos is still open,” Robbie said.

“Pizza,” she said, sounding a bit too enthusiastic. “Pizza sounds good. I’ll be right back.”

§

A month later, they visited her at Pioneer Rehabilitation Center. Her face was rounder, her clothes tighter around the gut, which she blamed on antidepressants. They ate wedges of cantaloupe and honeydew and discussed Robbie’s dictator of a Social Studies teacher, the upcoming Hulk reboot, the dreaded Valentine’s Day dance. She talked about daily prayers, flimsy mattresses, the continuous reruns of old westerns in the TV room. How she’d never read a book before coming to Pioneer, not that she could recall, but that she’d finished her third that week. Joey gifted her the heart-shaped dish he’d sculpted in art class, which had cracked in the kiln and had dried glue oozing along the seam. She caressed the hardened rivulets with her thumb and told him it was beautiful. Joey thanked her, watching her other hand closely.

Nobody mentioned the night at the gas station. It was as though everyone had forgotten. Even Robbie. Not avoiding the topic. Omitting it. Joey tried to omit it, too. He practiced times tables alongside his classmates, bowed his head before every meal, drifted to sleep, bathed, played, laughed, and blew out all nine candles, all while pretending the imitation didn’t permanently exist inside him, occupying his mind on constant repeat. Over time, the pretending habitualized, and around it Joey grew, until one day, when asked why he walked with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, elbows pressed into his hips like a stint, he said he didn’t know, and he was telling the truth.

When he turned sixteen, he fingered a girl in the back of his truck. He squeezed her breast and whispered “Fuck” like it was the best thing he’d ever touched. She offered to fuck him. To blow him. A hand job. He respectfully declined, blaming it on his Christianity.

She offered to smoke him out. Again, he declined.

He took a creative writing course during his first semester of college. When prompted to write about a time he was sad, he eulogized a dead pet that never existed. The thought of wringing a memory dry only to reassemble it, embellish it with perfectly placed adjectives, clauses, and line breaks, seemed counterproductive. It would be a betrayal to even consider putting that night to page, especially since his sadness was only a byproduct of a greater sadness. He remembered the troopers, ambulances, and firetrucks, all racing to an emergency more urgent. The older he grew, the more certain he was that his mother was the victim of that story.

At a party, a boy held out a plastic cup half-filled with a murky brown liquid. Joey declined the drink and, unknowingly, the boy. But the boy was persistent, sticking out his hand and introducing himself: “Peter.”

Joey resented him. Not for the gesture, but for his flagrance. That distinctive pitch. The way he carried himself, like he was his own personal cheerleader. The way his mother’s imitation simultaneously suited him and didn’t ruin him. Joey simmered, then surprised himself by accepting an invitation to a movie at Peter’s apartment. They watched Toy Story 3 between bouts of shaky-breathed lovemaking, of Joey overcompensating due to his inexperience with pleasure.

At the movie’s bittersweet ending, Peter apologized for crying. Then he asked, “What’s wrong with you?” which Joey interpreted as “Why aren’t you crying, too?”

He tried to explain himself. Blathered on about a long-ago practice that supposedly cured him of his sadness. But it wasn't that he wasn’t sad, he forgot to say. Sadness resided within him, preserved in a dark, forgotten room, like an aging wine. That a corked bottle doesn’t spill does not prove that it is empty, he should have explained. So why did he feel empty, then? Like some indistinguishable part of him had all been for nothing? Worth only Peter’s slanted expression before switching off the lamp?

Joey shivered. Peter stretched the blanket over him, cuddled him. When Joey heard snoring, he made a gap between their bodies. He laced his arms across his chest and, clenching the skin over his ribcage, squeezed himself into an even tighter hug, tensing every muscle until he was no longer shivering. Then he relaxed, his fingers uncurling. He closed his eyes. Curled his fingers, uncurled them. Curled, uncurled.

---

RYAN PEED is a fiction writer from Kyle, Texas. He is a recipient of the Inprint Brown Foundation Fellowship and holds a degree in Exercise and Sports Science from Texas State University. An MFA candidate at the University of Houston, his other fiction appears in MoonPark Review, Jet Fuel Review, and Cutleaf Journal.

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