Nosedive

Ian had been drinking more than usual, or at least that’s how he described it to himself. How many years before the exception became the rule? The truth was he had wine most nights at home, and he often finished the bottle. Then there were cocktails out with friends and coworkers. And headaches before bed. And a heavy feeling upon waking, too, he usually felt tired and sloshed. Not to mention his wine gut and thinning hair––he really needed to turn it around. But he compensated mostly by lifting heavy things at his dingy gym every once in a while and walking the length of St. Louis’s Tower Grove Park on Sundays, back and forth for hours.

He was coping with his job in digital advertising, managing media buys for regional tourism boards, helping them drive clicks, views, reservations. All around him, ads to stop working and start playing, take a trip. But he never drank during work hours––except when he worked at home a couple days a week, and only after four.

Sobriety was toughest at the office. Many of his coworkers had the same sunny disposition. If you cast a shadow over it, a crowd of faces turned toward you, in search of the danger to dispel. He was that danger once or twice, three times. The looming shadow.

Other times he engaged gleefully. A company party, for example, a celebration for hitting their sales goals––they’d recently booked Toronto and Spain––was a chance to get a little rowdy, start a pinball competition. Buy a drink for the VP, tell a few shy-of-off-color jokes. Show some pizazz.

It turned out the jokes weren’t shy enough, and apparently HR had received multiple complaints.

“Multiple, really?” he retorted, mortified but attempting defiance. How vague––multiple could be two or twenty, and those were very different scenarios. Either he pissed off a couple haters or he made a fool of himself in front of the entire department.

“Who’s to say it’s not both?” said Linda from HR. He’d been speaking his thoughts out loud, something he did more often than this company allowed.

He was let go. To be honest he’d predicted this would happen, he’d been testing the limits for months. His boss was always rolling her eyes at him. He saw the job posting for his replacement the very next day, as if it had been prepared for weeks. On a drunken lark, he applied for it. “Dear Linda, I believe I am uniquely qualified to replace myself.”

Ian had been unemployed before, but never at a time of such frequent drinking. He balanced it by smoking, waking and baking in a way he hadn’t since summers in college, when he worked at the university theater’s box office and took calls from blue-haired ladies looking for the best tickets to Bye Bye Birdie––fifteen minutes of Ian, stoned, describing the position of the seats vis-à-vis the stage, finding the rhythm in it: it's six from the front and three from the left; that's two from the back, five from the center, practically beatboxing.

Now there were fewer people to talk to on the telephone. Most of his friends worked. There was Hallie, though, on maternity leave and always itching to complain about her husband.

“He’s gone for nine days––have you ever heard of a business trip lasting nine days?” she said. She was bouncing the baby, her voice coming in and out like bad reception.

“I don’t think in days anymore,” Ian joked. “I’ve evolved.”

“You doing OK?” she asked. “Finding things to do?”

“You know I sabotaged that job,” he said.

“I know.”

“My body’s way of saying it was time to move on.”

“Mhm. What exactly did you say to those people?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“You mean you can’t remember,” she insisted. That was true. He’d tried, but had given up quickly, wincing at the possibilities.

“I’ve never been good with transitions.”

“How would you feel about helping babysit for nine days?”

“Oh––I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Too busy?”

“I’m going to my twentieth high school reunion,” he said, staring at the invitation on his computer, the goofy, colorful Class of 2005 graphic like a logo for a new Nicktoons show.

“Really?” she said, surprised. “Now you want to go back?”

He assumed she meant because he wasn’t at the top of his career game, things looking a bit grim. But he wasn’t worried about impressing people with his adult life. It was fine, he was good; he drank too much, so did everybody. And the memory of his adolescent life had faltered enough that this trip presented itself as a mission of excavation, which was a worthy cause. Especially excavation of events with only the faintest bearing on his current situation.

“There’s virtue in remembering, in reliving––isn’t there?” he asked his exhausted friend.

“I really wouldn't know,” she said, sounding distant.

He had money saved, part of the reason he’d felt emboldened to sabotage his job. Not enough to up and move to Spain or Toronto, but enough not to panic about a few months looking for work, and he could splurge on the best Airbnb in Evanston––a tub deeper and wider than his own, a large terrace in case he ended up hosting the after-after party.

His parents no longer lived in the area, they recently divorced and moved to opposite coasts. Neither had liked the Chicago suburbs for a long time. From the airport he drove a rented truck (all they had left) to his childhood home first thing. He had a pair of binoculars that would have been perfect for this occasion, but he was conspicuous enough parked there in a GMC Sierra. This was part of the remembering. He took a picture of the little blue house with the four gabled dormers to send to Hallie––“My History,” he captioned it.

A young man emerged from the house. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, tall like he just went through his final growth spurt, hair all in his eyes, and carrying an instrument, looked like a saxophone. Just a regular day of after-school practice. He was walking straight toward the car. Ian wished he’d opted for the Sierra with tinted windows. The kid knocked right in his face. “Can I help you, creep?” he said through the glass.

Ian sped away. He’d never have had the guts to approach a strange car like that outside his house. Everything was all different now, kids had changed. Desensitized to fear and danger. Something to discuss with his fellow alumni––you can’t even stalk your old house anymore!

He drove to his high school, which looked surprisingly rusty, not imposing at all, the entrance archways only playing at grandeur. What memories he still harbored of this place mostly emerged in his dreams. He peeked inside as best he could and felt that he was spying on a dream world, always shrouded and receding out of view. The colors were familiar––cream tiles, navy and burgundy accents. Like an old, intricate puzzle. Ian pictured leaning against the outer brick wall and causing the whole thing to collapse. He’d be back.

At the Airbnb he spread out his things and took a bath. He had brought a candle and special soaps. He was going to smell fresh for his former frenemies.

He stared in the mirror for too long, his triangular shape a source of recent fascination and concern. He was becoming a new, soft sort of man, and he wondered how it affected the rest of him. He spoke, perhaps, in more of a mumble, held his hands on his belly like a nervous young prince, and stretched often, moaning and groaning like an old bear.

Bemoaning his belly, he grew hungry. He ventured out with a headache brewing; the initial, short pangs brought on by a harsh light or standing up too quickly would often linger and stick around all night. He got in the truck and let his instincts take hold, which brought him to the lakeside neighborhoods. It was early spring, and the evening air was tantalizing, hinting at warmer days to come. The houses he passed were mansions now, sprawling and surrounded by beautifully manicured grounds. The breezes off the lake made a whistling sound, he couldn't tell where it came from, and it began to get on his nerves. He drove on, the whistling worsening his headache incrementally, until he lost his way and ended up at a dead end. There was a long driveway that led to a tall, dark house that looked out of place in the neighborhood, but also felt familiar. If he got closer he might be able to remember why.

He pulled off to the side of the road and shut off the truck. In between the cool gusts he managed to light the remains of a joint he had stored in his jacket pocket. He hobbled somewhat unsteadily down the gravely driveway, taking little puffs as he went, leaving a trail of scent and smoke. After this I’ll find a bar in Evanston, he said to himself, wondering if other childless alumni had already started meeting up around town, lubricating themselves in anticipation of fanning old flames.

Not a light in sight. Ian climbed the porch steps and found his way around to the back. Unobstructed beach greeted him, and the sound of Lake Michigan lapping the shore. Somehow the angle of the view kept other houses out of sight. He’d seen this view, stood on this porch, turned around to look up at this second and third story, but it had been full of kids then, kids he wasn’t quite friends with, he felt inklings of embarrassment and fear about this place. There were small balconies off the bedrooms, perfect places for first kisses under romantic moonlight. Not Ian’s first kisses, but someone’s. Ian’s first kiss wasn’t romantic at all. It was with a thirty-five-year-old guy named Conner who he met on Craigslist when he was eighteen. One of the most disgusting apartments he’d ever seen.

Better it had been here. Ian could use this trip to reinvent his adolescent milestones, he’d create a fantasy map of his own history. Much preferred to a fading yearbook. He stored this idea for later, building up his toolbox of unemployed diversions.

A light came on in the house and Ian scattered. He felt eyes on him, something he often enjoyed, though not in moments of panic. He was rushing back down the stairs when the front door opened.

“Is that Ian Greenwald?”

He turned to find a girl he knew, Liz, someone from middle school, twenty-five years ago. Liz, whose last name he couldn’t remember. He wasn’t sure whether he would call after her if he saw her snooping around his old house. Granted, the saxophonist would get to her first.

“Well, yes––it is I.”

“What the fuck,” she said.

“I thought this place looked familiar.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Instant vulgarity was charming, intimate––put Ian at ease.

“I was lost,” he said. She stomped slowly down each step, eyeing him further.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

She was the vague sort of figure who looked exactly the same as her childhood self, enhancing the impression that she was just a figment.

“Yes. I remember talking to you outside a portable classroom, one of those trailer-like overflow rooms. You were a good listener.”

She took him in, embracing the dark silence, wrapping her sweater around herself. And then she took a deep breath, like she was moving on from whatever her instinct might have been. She thought better of it.

“Don’t you live in St. Louis?” she asked. “What’re you doing snooping around on my porch?”

“I got lost, I told you. There’s my car. And then the house called to me.”

“Sounds fishy.”

“It’s a little fishy, yeah.”

“Do you want to come in?” she asked unconvincingly. “I was just lying in the dark.”

“Also fishy,” he ventured.

“Don’t you ever do that? Let the sun go down on you?” She chuckled at herself, looking past him.

He did, actually. While his computer radiated his face. Society could be collapsing outside but as long as the internet didn’t go out he’d have attended to his assignments first. He was a diligent employee. But no more. Now he had time for this sort of improvised archeology, this digging through old, forgotten ground.

“I’d love to come in,” he said finally. She went up the steps just as heavily as she’d descended. She was small-framed and held her hands around her middle, keeping hold of both sides of her sweater, protecting herself from the cold or from the discomfort he had brought to her house.

“You still live here?” he asked. They passed through the central corridor into a large living room in the back, floor to ceiling windows revealing the back porch where he’d just stood, and the moon now rising over the lake.

“I’m staying for a while, yeah,” she said. The light she’d turned on was recessed and moody underneath a long bar on one side of the room. He saw a cut up lemon and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. No glass in view. She flopped down on a lumpy couch that seemed to absorb her, she became even smaller. They both stared out at the water.

“Are you going to the reunion?” he asked.

“What reunion?” she said, before adding––“Oh, that’s why…” and pointing at him. “No.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I can report back.”

She laughed at that, nodding dreamily from inside the couch cushions, playing along.

“Anyone in particular you want a scoop on?”
“Mmm,” she said. Her face brightened more and more with the moonlight. But she herself was fading, he knew that much. He felt a pang of envy followed swiftly by disgust––but no pity.

“Look for Michael Castillo,” she said.

The name was there, but no face to accompany it. He’d have to ask around. No bother––it was some direction, at least, a point of focus for his thus far open-ended mission.

“See if…he’s still the same arrogant prick,” she added. “With that thousand-pound watch around his wrist. You remember…”

A prick. A watch. A drunken comrade. How quickly he’d found purpose while lost at the end of this dark drive. He straightened up, took a bold swig from the bottle of bourbon, and gave her a subtle salute. She was curling herself around a plush throw pillow. “Moving out,” he said officially.

“It smelled like you had weed,” she said as he tried to depart. He turned on a dime and fished the joint from his jacket pocket. “Sure do.”

“Pay the toll,” she said, extending her hand from her curled position. He passed it over and then lit it for her. She was sort of pathetic lying there, her mouth pleading like a baby bird. When she was done with her little puffs she let it fall to the ground, ember and all, and he rushed to fetch and snuff it. He made his way back to the car, unsure if she would remember the encounter in the morning. He wouldn’t mind if she didn’t. But what, for god’s sake, was her last name? This would bother him for days. Liz Liz Liz. He came out to her early––eighth grade. He was nervous around her, but in a way that made him want to be good, hopeful, helpful. Not angry. She was friends with powerful people. Well, something like that. Powerful 13-year-olds with a boisterous ease in groups and families with money. So much money.

He wondered whether the majority of people he met tomorrow would elicit similar emotional rumblings––tenderness, namely. Thank god.

He slept terribly. The pillows were both firm and flimsy. He’d gone to a sparsely populated gay bar and found no other Lizzes. Just locals on a Thursday night, arguing about the neighborhood. Ian downed two shots while Barb the bouncer showed everyone her winning lottery ticket, thirty-five hundred dollars.

There had been no roving eyes for Ian. He searched the room. Perhaps he’d expired, his charm stale and rehearsed. You can smell that sort of desperate desire. But he’d looked at himself again in the mirror back at his rented abode and still, for a flicker, saw something worth loving, he thought, something cute and triangular, like a favorite block you always pick first to play with.

Sleepless now, bothered by light, fuzzier by the day, he felt far from that late-night bluster, the dream demons having reminded him of exes, doors he’d closed but would pry open with ten bloody fingers if he could––it took an hour or two to dispel them, to return to the living, to his mission to find the thousand-pound watch.

The first activity on the reunion agenda was a boozy brunch at a large, airy sports bar with a hundred and fifty televisions. It had two stories and a balcony overlooking the ground floor’s wide-open layout to ensure maximum exposure upon entering, a gut punch of eyeballs from all directions.

He beelined for the bar, taking whatever the sugary special drink was without reading. On either side of him were small groups of women sharing pictures on their phones, periodically clutching their hearts in displays of appreciation and disbelief. It was hard to believe how precious life had become. Ian didn’t recognize any of them, and felt a few suspicious glares in his direction as he stood there in the middle, leaning against the bar like a stranger to all and a friend to none, deciding whether to make himself smaller or bigger, invisible or engaged, deaf to the world or eavesdropping in preparation for his best improvised remarks.

Bits of the last party where he made similar calculations began to come back to him: his coworkers small talking about their weekend plans and their vacation aspirations and their streaming preferences and their children’s streaming preferences and skirting a few issues of concern with a world-weary “I can’t look at the news anymore.” Ian’s mind grew stormier, cloudy and dark the more he tried to zero in on the content of his own bluster that night or the specific recipients of his drunken outburst. Instead of the memory coming into focus, an image from a children’s movie appeared, a giant rhinoceros emerging from his mental stormcloud like a ferocious dirigible come to obscure all attempts at mental clarity or self-assessment.

Thankfully the stakes were lower here, the consequences of his blunt disregard for reading the room basically nonexistent; maybe the reason he’d come. Longing for a place in which to act out and call out––without getting fucking fired––his distaste for the accumulating mundanities and delusions involved in growing up, living a life, and presenting a respectable version of it to others. A reunion was an exaggeration of so much of what drove Ian to drink. So he drank, thinking of the rhinoceros until it burst out of his head like an aneurysm.

He had another pink cocktail or two while watching a basketball game that made him mildly nauseous with its pendulum pace of play. He wished he’d looked up whether there was some adjacent, gay congregating happening as an alternative to all this hetero-affirming, gender-conforming slop. He tugged at the bottom of his button-down to flatten his facade. It bounced back reliably, the wrinkles from having stuffed it into a small duffel bag determined to display their hard-earned creases. Looking around with his nose in the air, he guessed at demographic data points that would be impossible for him to verify, so who’s to say he wasn’t right:

Sixty percent with children under ten. Twenty percent divorced. Fifteen percent lawyers who’d never been to court. Seventy percent with receding gums (a generation of children improperly taught how to clean their own teeth). Twelve were already millionaires (even if they could barely eat anything cold). And four had recently been acquainted with a merciful but increasingly needy god.

Categorization was a soothing balm.

There was a clinking of metal on glass followed by shattering and a few clashing shrieks. Someone had attempted to gather the crowd’s attention, not knowing the strength of their own wrist. Once it was cleaned up and the self-appointed host got to talking, it was clear he couldn’t gauge where he stood on any number of scales as his remarks droned on and his laughter at his own jokes rose and fell like a poorly moderated sit-com track. Ian was relieved not to be him, the most pleasant feeling he’d had all day.

He snaked his way through the crowd and out onto the curb to have a smoke. The sun was bright and he could feel sweat starting to pool under his chest even though it was only sixty degrees. His body had excess heat it longed to get rid of, he was surprised steam didn’t escape from his ears. Though some did from his ass; he pinched the fabric below his butt and attempted to fan the back of his crotch.

After a couple hits he regained some of his curiosity about his fellow alumni, a desire to test out his hypotheses: check some gums, draw a few people out, pretend that he’d always been this nonchalant and indifferent to being liked by his peers. Time to change a few memories people had of him for the better––a motivation in direct contradiction to his imagined indifference, his mind a knot of beliefs that cancelled themselves out like a convoluted Möbius strip.

He turned to find that someone had followed him outside, a man with an unfortunate hairline and bright blue eyes, who slouched over his own thin, bony frame and looked, if Ian said so himself, about ten years older than this cohort.

“You couldn’t stand the sound of that guy’s voice again, either, huh?”

Ian squinted at him, trying to recall what this man might have looked like in a cramped hallway or squeezed into a tablet arm desk. His voice and presence had a staged quality to them, like he was used to making an entrance, and he stood at an angle, ready at any moment for his exit.

“Not particularly, no,” Ian said. “Who was that guy? Sounded like he was running for president.”

“Best graduating class in a generation!” the man said, mimicking the speechifier, and he gave a theatrical salute, making like he was going to march away but promptly coming right back. “You don’t remember him? Michael Castillo, always a bloviator. You know he ran for governor? Insane.”

It was too easy. The fish all arranged in their barrel.

“We’re too young to run for governor,” Ian said.

“Hear, hear!” the man yelped, and he reached for Ian’s joint. “May I?”

“Sure!”

“You’re Ian, right? We had a couple math classes together.”

“I must have smoked too much of this stuff,” Ian said. “Remind me your name?”

“It’s Taylor. And that’s okay, I was practically pre-verbal back then, I only learned to speak for college.” His blue eyes twinkled in the chilly sun.

“Judge a man not by his words,” Ian said.

“But his…debilitating phobias?” Taylor tried.

“Sounds right. Hey––do you remember a girl named Liz?”

“Liz who?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re funny,” said Taylor, smiling and maintaining eye contact. Ian felt some movement in his crotch, though he was not attracted to this slouching man, he didn’t think. But the blue eyes did cause movement. It was a very long look.

“And you’re not so debilitatingly afraid,” Ian finally replied.

Taylor was comfortable with the joint, swaying with it. He smiled and thought to himself. When he passed it back to Ian, he deliberately intersected their fingers more than necessary. Forward for a man who took so long to be verbal.

“Have any friends here?” Taylor asked, exhaling smoke in Ian’s face. Ian liked it. He was on the verge of being drunk, but needed another one to fully indulge in this flirtation.

“If I do you might need to point them out to me.”

“Oh come on, everyone looks the same. You haven’t aged, for instance.”

“What if we go back in there,” Ian said, “and introduce ourselves as each other. How many people do you think would notice?”

“You’re Taylor?”

“At your service.” Ian gave a little bow, a little flourish.

“Sure, let’s do it,” Taylor said. He turned on a dime and this time really did march off.

Ian was kidding, playing with hypotheticals, basically his whole personality. He felt freshly baked by the sun, even saw some evasive stars moving quickly across his eyes.

As he made his way back inside, he noticed a woman with an ostentatious bow around her waist rubbing a small, unnoticeable spill on her dress. He related subconsciously and checked himself for stains. He considered himself clumsy, a mess, and bloated, too, out of proportion. His stomach strained against his shirt. Michael Castillo was still talking. Two guys rolled their eyes at each other––they were both incredibly fit. Ian imagined walking right up to them and asking what steroids they used, if he could feel their biceps. One of them caught his eye and looked surprised or confused––his shirt was so tight Ian could see his pec twitch. “Male culture,” he almost said out loud.

Taylor was in a corner of the room by the end of the bar, talking quietly with a very short woman, hunching over like his spine was a pool noodle, talking with his hands in a way that could have been a lame imitation of Ian. A waiter nearby was clearly annoyed that his easy access to the drink station was blocked, reaching around Taylor with exaggerated gestures, pursing his pretty lips.

There was a clear consensus of discomfort in the air, awkward reluctance to shut this guy Michael up.

“Life’s not about avoiding the fall––it’s about learning how to hit the ground with style.”

Jesus. Liz would appreciate this, Ian thought. Liz Klein. Liz Simon. Liz Mantel. Nope, he struck out.

The atmosphere was inscrutable. Ian felt like he was in a room full of strangers, but he kept making the most meaningful eye contact. He stood still and looked around the room of maybe two hundred people and caught eyes that lingered and body language that was unlike most ordinary encounters. More searching, more surreptitious––all of a sudden he liked it––it was like everyone was expecting something from him. With a little weed—what a thrill.

The room broke out in scattered applause, hoots and hollers. Michael was finally finished, and people took the chance to mill about, change positions, escape from dead-end conversations. Ian felt rooted to the spot, shoulders brushing against his while he flexed his buried abdominal muscles as much as he possibly could, like a solitary non-dominant male in a new herd. Someone tapped him on the back––he turned to find two women, they looked like sisters, smirking at him. Mel and Priya, thing one and two, good and constant classroom friends his senior year who fell off almost immediately after graduation, they had not communicated since that day, he was sure of it. Friends of convenience, of context.

They hugged deeply, though, allowing Ian to soften his flexing with relief that he remembered something, for god’s sake, the time the three of them wondered aloud about the sexuality of their comparative religion teacher, only to realize she was a few paces behind them, and then their pathetic attempts to quickly change the subject, dissembling and bumbling nonsensically until they devolved into giggles. They were still giggly and gossipy, so Ian felt it was only natural to ask about Michael and Liz, as furtively as he could.

“Oh you mean Liz Cassidy?”

“That’s a sad story.”

“You remember her twin brother, Tim.”

“Always smoking cigarettes, got that big snake tattoo in like tenth grade.”

They took turns rapidly, it was very nostalgic.

Tim had disappeared, and not recently. It sounded vaguely familiar to Ian, a rumor mid-college about a boy his year who went missing, off somewhere in the Canadian wilderness and never came back––no body, no trace. It was almost twenty years ago at this point.

“The whole family never really recovered,” Priya said before downing the remains of her Bloody Mary.

Ian shook his head in memory of Tim Cassidy, imagining him like Leonardo DiCaprio, hiding for warmth in the skin of a bear.

“And she dated that blowhard, right?” he said, searching around to point in the right direction, only to land very easily on his subject standing directly to his left.

He was right back in that hallway with the girls, unable to master the art of effortless slander.

“Ian, isn’t it?” said the fully grown man; he was easily six inches taller than Ian, broad shouldered with the two top buttons of his shirt undone, showing off some well-manicured chest hair in a not-unsexy way. Ian was ashamed of his constant attraction to assholes. His sleeves were rolled up, his arms glistened with tanner, his Rolex shimmied with abandon.

“I’m Taylor, actually,” Ian deadpanned.

Michael scoffed and walked off, huffy and lumbering and causing some people to shuffle out of the way. Taylor appeared again and was drunker than when he had left Ian ten minutes ago.

“You really don’t remember me?” he said, slamming his hand down on Ian’s shoulder. This was one conflict too many for Priya and Mel, who tiptoed away in search of firmer ground.

“Woah buddy,” was all he could think of, extracting Taylor’s surprisingly strong grip from his scapula.

“We studied together all the time. Or a few times. A couple.”

Everyone was regressing, and Ian was high as fuck. Now Taylor was moving his hand slowly down Ian’s back, inching towards the small. Ian enjoyed the attention just enough to let it happen.

“It’s the ones you don’t want to remember you who do,” Taylor said, speaking for everyone.

The crowd was thinning. The next place to convene was the school itself; one of the vice principals had agreed to give a tour to the alumni of the expansions and improvements they’d made in the past twenty years, flaunt the property tax influx that made it all possible, encourage folks to move back to the area as their kids neared adolescence. A brilliant idea––a bunch of near-40s brunch-buzzed and backsliding, wandering around a maze of hallways that brought them back to their loud-mouthed, horny days of reckless self-sabotage.

Ian was along for the ride, and Taylor trailed him. Like a talkative parrot, he hopped into the passenger seat and squawked about how no one changes, “they just busy themselves with consumption and responsibilities that make them conform and complain.” Ian didn’t mind his rambling, it quieted his own, and his handsiness made Ian feel desired for the first time in months, his erection rearing its head from hibernation tentatively, unsure of the legitimacy of this arousal, but still curious.

“Liz Cassidy,” Ian eventually said when they arrived at the school. “That’s the Liz I was trying to remember.”

They stood by the car for a few minutes, finishing the joint. “Did you hear that story about her brother Tim?”

Taylor had not only heard it, he knew everything there was to know. They huddled close together as they made their way through the school, Taylor filling in more details with whispered hearsay, recounted with an intimacy unbefitting of their nonexistent friendship. There had been accusations that Michael was abusive––he may have been pushing Liz around, rattling her. And then there was a miscarriage. And some people said there was something going on between brother and sister. “In the end, Michael Castillo came out clean, and Tim Cassidy is dead.”

“Well, not confirmed, right? He could be living inside a bear somewhere in the Canadian wilderness,” Ian said.

A woman dressed in a floral maternity dress––a very pregnant milkmaid in spring––turned around to shush them sternly, like they were the troublesome duo on a field trip that would soon be split up.

“Our motto is to stay one step ahead of the curve,” said the vice principal, gesturing to a lab full of state-of-the-art microscopes and a demonstration setup for CRISPR gene-editing technology. Ian was not keen on the idea of giving chromosomal editing powers to a bunch of idiot sixteen-year-olds, imagining Liz and Michael taking matters into their own hands.

That rang a bell, something about genes and adolescence and this unborn baby in front of him––he felt squeamish, like he’d said or was on the verge of saying something wrong, interrupting the adults with some sordid, offensive comment. He got a flash of unpleasant memory, a drunken remark in front of a group of shocked coworkers about an overpaid, ineffective colleague taking her second maternity leave, he heard it in his own voice: “Another six-month break raking in a hundred thousand more than the rest of us worker bees!” Jesus. There may have been some snark about frozen eggs, too—the overengineering of the "baby-making industrial complex." And then the echo of his lonely laughter. A deep, sharp pain stung him between the eyes and then moved around to his temples. It was better, less painful, to forget.

He was temporarily relieved when instead of continuing with their hushed disturbances, Taylor pulled him into an open classroom and went in for a kiss. It was a slow-motion sort of approach with closed eyes, tilted head, and mouth ever so slightly open in preparation. Ian was still there in that moment of pre-kissing, even while Taylor rolled his tongue around in his mouth, he saw that incoming face like a haunting, so zoned out and zombie-like.

But there was something desperate and searching in the way he used his hands that turned Ian on, and the setting was once-in-a-lifetime––he hoped to never be back in this place, once was enough to remember how much money was wasted on the rich––but to leave a stain on it with this grasping, glitchy string bean pumped him full of adrenaline and desire, however misplaced. Taylor started crawling his fingers downward, tugging his pants off, then sniffing around, pushing his face against Ian’s penis with his eyes closed, and again the zombie kiss-face came back to him. He didn’t want to lose his boner so he thrust himself at Taylor to dispel the image, thrust right in the man’s eye, then his cheek, finally his wide-open mouth, hitting the back of his throat.

Ian gripped the back of Taylor’s head and guided him more gently after this aggressive introduction, trying to enjoy the lip and tongue maneuvers but feeling it slipping away, soon he would be flaccid in this poor guy’s mouth. To avoid that humiliation for both of them, he brought Taylor to eye level and they kissed some more, both of them exposed, two shameless amateurs. Everything felt out of order and misplaced, to be hanging loose like this, he was a sex offender the second someone peeked through the narrow window in the classroom door. He thought he saw an eye or two when he glanced in that direction and quickly turned away, grabbing his belt and putting himself back together, whispering “thank you, thank you, you’re good at that” to Taylor, who steadied himself against a nearby desk.

“I remember what you like,” he said, which made Ian’s stomach drop. He checked the window again but the eyes were gone, whoever spied them had gone, free to do with that information what they wished. He was at the mercy of those who witnessed his transgressions––what would they tolerate? Where would they draw the line?

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I don’t remember.”

“That’s insane,” Taylor replied, “how many people gave you blow jobs in high school?”

“Are you totally sure it was me?”

Taylor stared at him, blue eyes on fire, clearly deciding whether Ian was worth it. Apparently not: he zipped himself up and left the room, shaking his head and mumbling under his breath.

Ian didn’t remember any sexual encounters from high school except that Craigslist date the summer before he went to college. He really did think Taylor was mixed up. There was no way his first brush with sex would escape him, no matter how drunk he’d been. Some party where Taylor got him confused with someone else, created this whole false narrative. A memory triggered upon seeing Ian that existed only in his head. “I remember what you like.” Well, at least someone did!

He attempted to accept this fiction as part of a reinvented past, imagined it happened on one of those moonlit balconies at Liz Cassidy’s place, their bodies moving in and out of shadow, his orgasm respectably timed and dutifully announced, his thoughts quiet in the face of such undoubted arousal. He stayed in the dark classroom for five minutes, indulging the fantasy to completion, and replacing Taylor with Michael Castillo, naked but for the Rolex.

When he emerged, the hallway was barren, they’d all moved on without him. He wandered around, attempting to follow the mocking exit signs, caught off guard by phantom sounds and the faintest echoes. By the time he made it outside, a storm had blown in and fat raindrops were falling, covering the ground––and him––in heavy splotches.

As he drove it picked up, heavier and heavier until he could hardly see through the windshield, his wipers overwhelmed by water. He drove slowly, fifteen miles an hour, guessing which way led to the lake, attempting to get lost in the same way as the night before. He wanted to find Liz on her back porch, drenching herself in the rain, so he could lead her inside to safety like a surrogate brother, or huddle with her on a covered balcony, two drunks drying out in a storm. Instead he ended up parked by a public beach, watching two lovers chasing each other wildly, stripping off their clothing as they went, creating a memory that surely neither would ever forget.