Two Weeks in Omena

The hole in his paper is perfect. Completely flat and circular. Even on a blank page it looks empty.

Will slips in the tip of his mechanical pencil, until the base of the cone is too wide and stretches a curling, anxious lip of paper around the edge of the hole. The cylindrical body of the pencil barely fits through; when he pulls it back out, a tear forms from the hole to the bottom of the page.

In the top left corner, he starts drawing a Palladian window. He traces his thumbnail to make the central arch.

Gabe elbows him and makes a face. Gardner’s announced assigned project pairings. Gabe’s screwed with Rylee. Will’s with Zoe, which is fine. She’s nice enough and takes school seriously. It’s a much better shot at an A.

Will shrugs. Gabe rolls his eyes and mouths blah blah blah. Gabe thinks Zoe talks like a professor but Will likes listening to her talk. He can tell she curates her words, like her sentences are museum exhibits she needs people to experience in a particular order. He has to stop drawing whenever she talks, but not because he can’t hear her. It’s sort of like how he has to turn down the radio whenever he is driving somewhere unfamiliar.

Gardner drones on with the project guidelines. No PowerPoints, he’s saying. Be creative. Will is thinking about what Zoe said in class before winter break.

Their class met 7th period on Friday, the last obstacle between school and vacation. They made it through the Civil War with fifteen minutes to spare. Gardner asked them to answer a final question before they left for break.

“When I say ‘history,’ what do you think about?”

Will pictured pyramids, shifting like sands into temples, Gothic churches, clocktowers, Art Deco skyscrapers. Protrusions of solid rock from dust, evolving like something animate. When it was his turn, he said, “Things that don’t fall apart.” Gardner frowned thoughtfully.

Gabe said, “The past.” Gardner frowned disapprovingly.

Zoe went last. She said, “Dead languages.”

Gardner: “Care to elaborate?”

“When you lose a language you lose what happened to people but also how it was understood, how it was felt, how it was seen. History is all of that.”

Gardner tilted his head. Then he smiled. “See, now somebody’s thinking.”

Will had never thought about dead languages before. Maybe Latin, but some people still speak it in church, so does it count? He doesn’t get when a language counts as dead. Even now when he pictures a dead language he imagines the oversized alphabet posters from his elementary school classrooms in two-dimensional coffins.

He shades in a roof (Dutch, but maybe it should have been a Gable) above the thumbnail window, deciding that he disagrees with Zoe and Gardner. A dead language is the opposite of history. It’s not just gone, it was never even alive, never even real, never even there. He looks up from his drawing; people are already moving seats to be next to their partners. Zoe motions to the empty desk next to her. Before he gets up he adds a spire to the roof he’s drawn. It’s rushed and crooked.

Zoe asks him if they can meet Sunday morning. He reminds her that he has church. They decide on Saturday afternoon. He gives her his number and she texts him her address.

...

On their way into her house Zoe touches something on the door, then brings her fingers to her mouth.

“It’s a mezuzah,” she says, like he’s supposed to know what that means.

He didn’t think they would work in her bedroom. She leads him through her kitchen, where her parents are arguing over a New York Times article, something about a stolen museum artifact. He can’t remember the last time he saw a print newspaper.

They go up to the second floor, and he feels too big. Why are second floor ceilings always so low? His head knocks the ceiling above the stairs and immediately throbs.

He has never been inside a girl’s room before. Her bedroom walls are covered in posters for artists he either doesn’t know or doesn’t like. She is neat but not organized in the anal-retentive way he had pictured. He doesn’t remember thinking about how organized she would be. There is a bird feeder outside her window with six molting brown birds moving in stop-motion.

He sits on the floor in front of her bed – she doesn’t have any chairs in the room but sitting on the bed seems presumptuous. She crosses over and sits down next to him, leaving the door open.

“We can use my laptop,” she says, tapping the touch pad. She opens a Google Doc and titles it “History Project: Planning.”

He hates that he has to hunch down and in to see her laptop screen. It’s exhausting, taking an unending inventory of his body. He tries to shift closer to her to type in his email, but it ends up being too close. He feels like a marionette with tangled strings, knees and elbows at wrong angles. He can see a tiny freckle on the shell of her ear and the top swell of her chest, visible above an electric blue sports bra.

“I think we should write an essay. I’m happy to write your parts if you’re busy with practice.” She makes the offer like it’s the opening statement in a debate.

From what little of Gardner’s instructions Will retained, he thinks the project is being graded on creativity. Writing an essay does not strike him as creative. He’s also a little offended at her willingness to remove him before he’s said or done anything.

“Well, it’s supposed to be creative ---”

“Writing is creative,” she says.

“Yeah, but. I think Gardner wanted something, more, I don’t know, outside ---”

“Outside the box, unconventional, sure. I know what you mean.” She sighs. “We can figure out the content, then pick a form.”

“Oh, okay. Wait, but---”

“You’re right, the form will inform the content. Or they’ll be related.” She thinks for a second. “We could do a faux news article? Like Yellow Journalism?”

“Sure,” he concedes. It’s not a bad idea. “I could do some illustrations. And the layout. If you want.”

She looks disgruntled, which is how she’s looked every time he’s opened his mouth. But she doesn’t object, vocally at least. Two vertical creases deepen between her eyebrows, which together remind him, abstractly, of a suspension bridge. He takes out his notebook to sketch newspaper layouts.

It’s difficult to explain what he’s thinking while he’s drawing; he can’t think in two different languages concurrently.

“Gilded Age, gilded, like ---” he starts.

“You’d use metallics, like the Cross of Gold, it would connect the writing and the color scheme—” she interrupts.

“If we, I mean, if the paper was, like faded somehow---”

“We could artificially age the paper, so it’s literally yellowed—”

She seems to know what he is trying to say before he does, cutting him off or finishing for him halfway through a sentence, impatient when he takes too many words to get to the point she knows is coming. She winces when she does it but also does not stop doing it; in fact, the longer they work, the more she intervenes in his sentences. Will wonders whether conversations just seem tedious to her, whether she is more offended by the waste of time or by the waste of language. He thinks he has said more words to her in an hour than he has to anyone, total, in the last month. This realization makes him want to – he isn’t sure. Close off? She’d have the perfect word for it. Taciturn, she’d say. But he can’t help it, he keeps talking.

It's humiliating. She’s pulling words out from him she doesn’t even want. He isn’t making a dent in her and she’s gotten inside him, lodged in his throat. He sees at least four different dictionaries in random places on her bookshelf and some of her posters are askew in a way that does not seem deliberate. And he’s still so close to her. Her head would fit under his chin.

They don’t get nearly as much work done as he can tell she wanted. Will knows it’s his fault. The longer they spend in her room the more he feels out of breath. Whenever he talks he feels both buried in his head and trapped outside of it. The wooden post of her bed digs into his spine but every minute adjustment he makes seems to echo. He keeps looking at her when she talks and looking away from her when he talks but he can’t stop looking back at her, like she is a constellation and if he looks away for too long he won’t be able to find her again.

He starts to pack up around 5. She’s looking at the back cover of his notebook, which has a design for a treehouse he sketched during math.

“You still want to be an architect.” It’s not a question or a judgment; all of the words are equally emphasized. This is why Gabe says she sounds weird, Will thinks. She never means more than the words she says.

“Yeah,” he says, zipping his backpack.

“You probably remember this. We had to design a school for art class, in fifth grade. You were allowed to use a steel T-square. No one else. Just you.”

He remembers the class she’s talking about in the artificial, hazy way he remembers stories his parents told him about how he acted as a baby.

“You sliced your finger on it, but you didn’t notice until the blood stained your paper. You were so distressed, and we all thought it was because of the blood, but then you said it was because you couldn’t finish the drawing.”

She is already typing again by the end of the sentence. She doesn’t elaborate.

“How do you remember that?” he asks.

“I had an eidetic memory when I was little,” she says. “It fades in adulthood.”

The answer deflates him. He realizes he actually wanted to ask “Why did you remember this?” and he wanted her answer to be something about him, an attention paid that he, specifically, had elicited. Or maybe, “Why did you bring this up?” and she’d have to say she noticed something about his drawing now that reminded her of his younger self, some continuity. With her memory she could tell him more about his childhood than he himself remembers.

He gets on his knees to take off his hoodie, but the drawstring gets caught in his chain. He manages to work the hoodie over his head but it traps his arms in a bundle on his chest.

“Jesus,” she says. “You look like you’re praying.”

“I don’t think most people actually pray on their knees,” Will says. One of his arms is now free.

“I don’t think most people actually pray, period,” Zoe says. “They probably just sit there and wish for things with God as their imaginary interlocutor. Like they need God to have coherent thoughts.”

The hoodie is now completely off.

“I do. Pray, I mean,” Will says. “And it’s not like that. For me, at least.”

“And you think someone is listening. And by someone I mean a resurrected Jesus who is also a ghost.”

“That’s really not the point,” Will says. He doesn’t know what else to say to that.

He tells her he has to leave, and they agree to meet again in two weeks. He goes to evening swim practice. During his laps he screws his eyes shut. All he sees is the freckle on her ear and the indented shadow above her bra. He lets chlorinated water slip into his goggles until his eyes burn and he sees lots of tiny suns.

….

Over text, they plan on meeting at her house again. Will’s house is significantly bigger but he tells her it would be a nightmare with his siblings. He doesn’t tell her that his dad doesn’t like having Jews at their house. His dad told him once that he could never be sure whether Jews would take things.

For the rest of the week he sees her every day in history but they do not talk. On Tuesday she makes eye contact with him from across the room, looks down at his paper very pointedly, and then looks back up at him. He is confused until she mimes lifting her paper. Then he holds up his paper so she can see what he’s been sketching: a design for a school. She smiles. The next day he waits impatiently for her to look at him. She does, about fifteen minutes into class. He brought a darker charcoal pencil so she could see his sketches in clearer definition. By Thursday he can’t wait for her to look over. He shows her his drawing – a map of Omena – before she motions. She smiles at him, the infuriating way she always smiles: like she knows something he would want to know. He is already planning his drawing for tomorrow and imagining her smile.

He sees her twice outside of history, once laughing with someone on the debate team, once on her walk home from school. She is not wearing a coat and looks cold. It reminds him of when she sat in front of the fan at the beginning of the school year, and he could see her nipples through her shirt. It made him uncomfortable then but he feels worse now that he’s a repeat voyeur, mapping the memory onto her again.

By the end of the week he has developed the habit of imagining her in lots of intricate scenarios. He has to set up mental rules for when he is and isn’t allowed to do this. Yes: walking, driving. No: cooking, swimming, showering. In these strange little fantasies, he never lets himself interact with her directly, but she is always close enough in the periphery to witness what he is doing.

He imagines her watching him win a swim meet, dance with Jessica at homecoming, even just drive Nick and Ava to school – he pictures her walking on the sidewalk next to his car, bare-armed and shivering. He has trouble sticking to a single image and flits between them, sometimes changing the endings in his head. He wants to stop but his mind sprints to fantasizing whenever he isn’t engaged with something else. Trying to stop exhausts him. He eventually has an upsetting dream in which she sits in the chair across from his bed, watching him touch himself. He wakes up hard and nauseous. He takes a shower and can only calm himself down by thinking through one of the simpler stories – her seeing him check out a book at the school library that she loves. He’s never checked out a book at the school library.

What he knows about her and what he’s imagined are getting blurred. Maybe he’ll fantasize less if he forces himself to stick to what he knows. On Wednesday he decides to list everything he knows about her, so that once he’s done he’ll be able to stop.

He knows that she is Jewish. (Don’t Jews also pray?) They were in the same second grade class, and during their traditions and customs unit her mom came in to talk about Hanukkah. She passed out candles, which were quickly confiscated. Somebody asked her mom why the Jews killed Jesus. He can’t remember who asked that. He does remember that Zoe threw scissors, and that her mom yelled at her and not the other kid, and Zoe cried and left school for the rest of the day.

He knows she writes for the school newspaper. She doesn’t like chemistry but she’s taking honors chemistry anyway. He heard her complain about it to one of her friends in line at the cafeteria and almost opened his Notes app to type it in before he forgot. He thinks she is dating a guy on the newspaper staff.

At lunch she sits two tables down from him. He saw her eat an orange once: She dug in her fingernails and ripped it in half, spilling juice on her hand, down her wrist.

He also spends lots of time drawing the inside of her room. This is actually a problem. He needs to be working on a portfolio for his application to Carnegie Mellon’s architecture pre-college program. Instead he ends up picturing her room, replicating it on napkins and handouts. He tries to remember which plants she has on her windowsill, in what order, whether they were healthy or dying.

When he finishes drawing all of the parts of her room that he remembers, he starts making minor modifications, rearranging the books on her bookcase or reorienting the posters hanging on the wall above her bed. Somehow this feels more like an invasion of her privacy than anything.

He’s heard that for some people, drawing is like entering a flow state, where they can be on a kind of autopilot. It’s not like that for him; he feels minutely aware of every stroke he makes, how firmly he is pressing down the pencil, how long and straight his lines are, and he second guesses all of it. He used to wonder whether drawing was actually deeply unpleasurable for him and motivated by praise from other people. But what Zoe said about his drawing in elementary school reminded him that he started well before other people thought he was good, and that he’s always craved the experience, even if it’s painful.

…

He has church on Sunday with his family. He talked to Pastor Clarke a while ago about how drawing makes him feel closer to God, so he is allowed a sketchbook during the services. He sketches images based on what the service is about; sometimes Pastor Clarke likes them so much he puts them on the bulletin board with upcoming events.

He hasn’t seen his youth group friends since winter break. He sees Jessica and is reminded of how pretty she is. His mom would comment on it in elementary school, when he and Jessica were solidly friends, and not this uncomfortable in-between thing they are now. He can’t remember what they used to do together, besides four square and monkey bars.

Jessica is still nice, though. In his experience pretty girls aren’t nice, to him or to one another. The last time he saw Jessica was at the church’s Christmas food drive, when she slipped her hand into his.

Seeing Jessica makes him think of Zoe again. He’s not sure if he would describe Zoe as pretty. Her face is pale and reminds him of the smooth, curved backside of a spoon. He wants to draw her, but it feels impossible to hold her whole face in his mind at once. He thinks he might try drawing pieces of her.

Jessica motions for him to sit down. She’s wearing the same dress she wore to the food drive, which he remembers because she posted a photo of it, and him, on her Instagram. Will’s arm is around her shoulders in the picture, his knuckles resting awkwardly on her bicep. One of his eyes looks significantly narrower than the other and his Adam's apple is pronounced. He hates seeing photos of himself but not because of how bad he thinks he looks, although he does feel that he looks bad, certainly worse than Jessica. Seeing photos of himself reminds him that there were versions of him that used to exist, an infinite string of copies like a flipbook, leading to him now. All those forgotten Wills make him sad.

The picture was liked and commented on by people he doesn’t know. He wishes Jessica had asked him before posting, although he can’t imagine he would have told her not to. He doesn’t know if she expected him to post a photo as well.

Jessica smiles at him and carefully crosses her legs to make room in the pew. Soon after he sits next to her she places her hand, upturned, in the space between them, and he rests his on top of it. Neither of them clasps their fingers, so their palms just touch for the service.

...

Will is never hungry after church, which is odd because he is always hungry. His dad drives him home; his mom takes Nick and Ava out to lunch. He knows his dad gets along better with Nick and his mom gets along better with Ava, and that Ava and Nick like each other more than they like him. Sometimes he thinks about what it would be like to have a twin, but he knows he’s just picturing an inversion of himself, a photo negative.

He and his dad are not close but he isn’t sure when that happened. His dad doesn’t like to talk about architecture with him, but when Will won a scholastic key in middle school his dad bragged about it in every conversation. And his dad comes to watch every single weekend swim meet, even when Will isn’t competing.

When Will was younger, he would ask his dad big questions during these Sunday drives, usually stuff from church that didn’t make sense. He isn’t sure how his dad answered those questions, or if his answers would be different if Will asked them now. He doesn’t. They just talk about swimming and the Lions and today, girls.

“So you, and Jess, that’s…?” His dad gestures with the hand not holding the wheel, as if to unroll the rest of the sentence.

Will shrugs. His dad doesn’t press it. When they get back to the house, he’s exhausted, even though it’s barely one.

His mom wants him to do laundry, sort through his closet for things to give to the church’s clothing drive, and clean the living room table where he sometimes does homework. He knows these are all perfectly reasonable tasks, but the thought of doing them makes him feel ill. There isn’t a good way to explain this feeling to his mom; she’d probably just tell him to stop being lazy. She’d probably be right.

He gets onto his bed but not under the covers. With his pillow over his face and his body horizontal he can pretend everything below his neck doesn’t exist. Sometimes he feels that way when he is upright, suddenly unsure that he is connected to a body, or rather that his body and the thing realizing he has a body are the same entity. He pictures his torso turning to limestone and crumbling.

In this position he can’t breathe very well and he can’t tell whether his eyes are open or not. He sees nothing and then neon pixels, in patterns he can only identify after they dissipate. The dampness on his face could be sweat or just his exhaled breath.

He always stays lying down longer than he intends to; it isn’t hard to imagine staying endlessly. In swim practice, after everyone leaves, he will occasionally try to stay underwater for as long as he can.

Eventually he remembers he has to take Nick to soccer. When he moves the pillow off his face, the room is blue and spotted.

…

He has swim practice every day after school because they have a meet on Friday. The week goes better: He still shows Zoe his sketches in history but he stops drawing her room so much. In his head he keeps adding to his list of what he knows about her, but he has a firm rule against writing any of it down.

Swimming helps. He likes racing, the heavy emptiness of his lungs, the slick glide and weightlessness of moving in water, the feeling of dissolution and solidity. He is happy to be good at something other people like to watch. Nobody likes to watch him draw; his drawings could exist without him.

He and Gabe leave history early on Friday for the meet. (Zoe does not watch him leave.) Will drags the pool safety ropes from the locker room while Gabe complains about his history project.

“Rylee and I haven’t even started. We’re so fucked. I went to talk to Gardner about changing partners and he just laughed at me.”

“Can you give me a hand with these?” Will says.

“Are you even listening? And no, you brought this duty on yourself by becoming The Hulk during off-season.”

Will had outlifted both Gabe and Elijah at their first team lift of the season, which Gabe won’t shut up about. It’s hard for Will to tell if Gabe is genuinely insecure about this; Gabe is so openly emotive that his feelings are opaque. Either way Will is bothered by the incessant reminders that changes in his body, which to him seemed gradual and personal --- the tightening of shirts around his armpits, the incessant hunger --- are experienced more dramatically by other people.

By the time they have the lanes set up, the stands have started to fill. Zoe is here, sitting with the boy Will thinks she is dating, the sports editor of the newspaper. Jack something? Jack has his arm around her, and they are both looking at something on her phone. For a second Will imagines Jack joining the race; Will can see himself reaching for the wall first, feel the thrumming in his chest accelerate.

Will anchors the relay and they win. It’s not close. The 200m fly is tighter but he wins that one too. The race itself is a total blackout. As soon as he leaves the pool, whatever he remembers – mostly breathing and darkness—evaporates.

When he leaves the throng of his teammates, he allows himself one look at the bleachers. It’s just to gauge crowd size, but he’s disappointed when he doesn’t see her.

He goes to the hallway to fill his water bottle. She’s by the water fountain, alone, wiping her mouth. She looks to him but her gaze falls somewhere short of eye level. He looks down and they both watch a water droplet move down his chest and stomach. He feels an urge to stretch, to roll his shoulders and pull his hands above his head. He does.

He realizes he doesn’t have his necklace – he never wears it while swimming because it creates drag – and abruptly he feels naked and shiny. He still manages to nod at her. She congratulates him. He ducks his head and smiles, walking with her back to the pool without filling his water bottle.

…

There’s a party the night of the meet; there always is and it’s always the same. Gabe hosts in his family’s barn and finagles his older brother into supplying the cheapest possible alcohol. Most of the grade turns out. Even Zoe’s friends are in the corner on the couch.

After a few cups of what tastes like Sharpies, Will is on the couch next to Zoe, with little idea how he got there. Like a ball rolling down a hill, he thinks, deposited here.

Gabe, sitting across from them, is saying his name.

“Will tries, and he’s cool.”

“What?”

“We’re talking about whether it’s cool to try at things,” Gabe says. “Zoe thinks – fuck, what did you say?”

“Effort is gauche,” she says. “If you’re trying, that means you can fail, and that you’ll care if you do.”

“Will is cool though, and he always looks like he’s trying really hard,” Gabe argues.

Will isn’t sure how he feels about the visibility of his apparent efforts.

“You’re just saying that because he swam better than you,” Zoe says. “Obviously Will’s the best on the team, which makes him cool. Trying and winning is better than not trying and losing, like you.”

Gabe is looking away, distracted. “Hold on, I think Elijah’s here.” He hands Will his drink and stumbles up, towards the door.

His departure leaves Will and Zoe alone on the couch, both facing forward. The edges of Will’s vision are blurred. He glances to his side, at Zoe’s face in profile. Nose to eyebrow, one continuous arch. Tunnel of her neck. He looks down at the proximity of their legs, the slight spread of her thigh against the sofa cushion. Her entire body could probably fit inside of him.

Will’s the best, she had said. Has anyone said that to him before? Already he forgets the cadence of her voice, how she said it. He wants to pull a string on her back and hear it again, again.

The red solo cup in her hand is cracked down one side from the pressure of her thumb. He thinks of her tearing open that orange, juice dribbling on her palms.

“I feel like I’m on a roll, offending the swim team.” Zoe swirls her cup. “First you, with Jesus, now Gabe…”

It’s not an apology, he thinks. Really it’s a test – saying Jesus in front of him so flippantly.

“Gabe doesn’t care. Or if he does he won’t remember.”

She turns to face him on the couch, propping her chin on her hand. The fullness of her attention falls on him like a shadow.

“But you care?”

“About God? Yeah, I care.” He swallows.

“You care about God, or how people talk about God? Or is that the same thing?”

“I care about both. And they’re different.”

“How so?”

“Caring about God isn’t just talk. It’s about things that are good and real. Loving people, and helping them, stuff that matters. That you can see. It’s – material.”

“Material,” she repeats. “Like a building? When you picture God, is that what you picture?”

She’s smiling, like she always does, like she’s laughing at him. He can feel his neck flush. Zoe’s foot presses down on his toe. It is gentle enough for him to think, stupidly, that it is not deliberate. Everything she does is deliberate. Her eyes are black like ink. He tries to retract his foot and she pushes down more firmly. This time the message comes through. He keeps his foot under hers.

Before he can answer, Gabe comes back.

“What’d I miss? Are we still figuring out how Will is cool?”

“No, I think we settled that pretty decisively,” Zoe says. She doesn’t move her foot. “It’s because he’s the best.” Like she knew he needed to hear it again.

Gabe laughs. “Second best, maybe. Come to our next meet and watch me reclaim my dominance.” Is Gabe flirting with her?

“For sure,” Zoe says. “I love seeing cocky boys fail at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at it.”

Gabe doesn’t say anything. He just laughs once, loud and brittle. Then he downs his cup and walks away.

Will isn’t sure when Zoe leaves the party. When he doesn’t see her for about fifteen minutes, he feels listless, like there’s no more reason for him to be there. He leaves before midnight.

…

Swim practice on Monday is canceled, a break Coach gives when they do particularly well at a meet. Will texts Zoe on Sunday after church.

Hey I don’t have practice tomorrow

Do you wanna work on the project?

A few seconds later he adds: All good if not

He sends it soon enough after the original messages that there isn’t a big separation between the text bubbles. He considered saying “No worries if you’re busy” but “All good if not” left room for her to say no for other reasons and felt less formal.

An hour later she responds. Seeing the messages on his screen, with her name, gives him a thrill even before he reads them.

yeah for sure.

give me a ride home?

All lowercase, but with punctuation. He reads her question the way she would speak it: softly, a command. The visual of her in the passenger seat of his car is close to one of his recent fantasies, which now feels like a premonition. He feels an unknown pressure release – the anxiety that he would not be able to really talk to her for another week.

He texts back: Sg

She leaves the message on read. It makes sense; his message was the natural end to the conversation. Still he keeps opening their text exchange to see if she had texted him again and he just missed it.

Gabe texts him Sunday night.

Mcd’s tm?

I bet Elijah I’d eat more big macs than him

Nah can’t

You’re both gonna get sick lmao

Yeah but I’ll puke AFTER elijah

Why not

Already ditching us for Jessica damn

I’m j doing project stuff with Zoe

She really wants that A

Are you sure she doesn’t want THAT D bro

Fucjking nerd

Fine

Does “fucjking nerd” refer to him or Zoe? Did Gabe make that D joke because he picked up on some vibe at the party? Part of Will is relieved that even if his confused feelings about Zoe are unidirectional, Gabe saw the opposite. But also Will insinuated that Zoe initiated the project meeting, which she didn’t. And there was that flicker of something with Gabe, inviting her to another meet, and the resentment that followed.

Will’s definitely thinking about this too much –- Gabe’s an idiot; he makes that kind of joke all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. Will doesn’t reply.

At 11pm he texts Zoe again.

Would you want to get food before we do work?

I’m always hungry during swim season

She texts back at 11:03.

Yes.

always happy to feed the troops.

…

“You’re a good driver,” Zoe says as Will pulls into the Burger King parking lot. The building is squat and gray.

“Thanks.” He parks in front – an immaculate parking job, the best he’s ever done. Maybe she’s so convincing in presenting her opinion as fact that reality conforms to it.

“I wonder if you have better spatial awareness because you’re a good artist. Or if it’s more related to sports, having reflexes and muscle memory.” She glances at him. “But now I’m just listing things you’re good at.”

“You’re being very nice to me,” he says, after they get out of the car. He tries to discreetly dry his palms on his pants. “I thought you were on a mission to piss off the swim team.”

He holds open the door for her; there’s no line. She orders mozzarella sticks. He orders a double Whopper. They pay separately (not a date then?) and sit before she speaks again.

“I wasn’t trying to be mean on Saturday,” she says, finally. “To you, at least. To Gabe, maybe. But he doesn’t like me.”

Will can’t tell if she wants him to push back on this assessment. He doesn’t; it would just sound fake. He almost says “I like you.” He starts eating his burger.

“I know I can seem pushy about religion,” she continues. “I’m sorry if you felt like I was judging you, last week. Obviously it should be your prerogative to believe what you want.”

There’s a rehearsed, almost sing-song quality to how she says this, like something she’s recited enough times to believe in the way he believes the pledge of allegiance. As an apology it’s hostile and stilted. He’s sure she’s biting back an “even though you’re wrong.”

She’s pulling pieces from the mozzarella sticks and popping them in her mouth.

“The thing you said. About me picturing God as a building?” He pauses; she nods, either to confirm she remembers saying that, or to encourage him to go on regardless. “I guess I do? Like when I was little, before Nick and Ava, my family went to New York City. And the buildings there, the Chrysler Building especially – they were so big and untouchable. Bigger and older than anything I’d ever seen. I couldn’t imagine people building them, or designing them. I actually found it hard to breathe around them. I remember thinking: ‘God did that.’”

He pauses again, surprised she hasn’t interrupted yet. “But at the same time, when I picture God – it’s like a being, a presence. But also this nothingness. I don’t know if I’m making sense.”

Zoe has stopped eating. “No, you are. Not to compare myself to God or anything but I feel that way too sometimes. That I’m both present and absent.”

“What do you mean?”

“It started when I realized I was losing the eidetic memory, and suddenly there was this void between who I am now and who I was before. If I don’t remember what happens, did it even happen? Was I even there? Like the tree in the forest, you know? But my body was there the whole time, and I don’t know how to think about that.”

She looks surprised. “I’ve actually never talked about this with anyone.”

“I never had an eidetic memory,” Will says. “But what you’re saying? I feel that way all the time.”

…

He tries to notice less about her room, the second time he’s in it. They sit the same way, backs against her bed, a laptop balanced on her lap and a notebook open in his. They are much closer than before; if she uncrossed her legs then her right thigh would press against his left.

She starts showing him the columns she’s written, tiny text in an unrecognizable, archaic-looking font. He is so grateful for an excuse to put his head near hers. Every time she breathes her shoulders rise, bringing her even closer to him. She asks him if he’s thought about drawings and outlines, and it’s like he’s under water.

She gestures at his notebook and he rips out a page to pass to her. It slices open the tip of his index finger; a dot of red beads. He stares as it trickles down to his knuckle. The pulse of pain comes just as he remembers to anticipate it. She grabs his wrist and kisses the tip of his finger.

For a second he cannot understand anything he sees; he recognizes that his eyes are open and seeing light and images, but none of them generate any kind of thought. He leans over, into her mouth. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He can taste the faint tang of copper, his own blood. Her mouth is so open. Danger that she could swallow him. Her nails on his scalp are the most acute sensation. He pulls away, breathing hard.

Once, years ago, he went fishing with his dad. He hated the one time he caught a fish. It was a glistening spotted bass, mouth swollen, pulsating where the hook had dug into its flesh, writhing and resplendent. He feels like that fish.

He thinks of when his mom taught him to scramble eggs: how when he first tapped the egg on the lip of the bowl, he was too gentle, and made only a hairline crack; how his mom said “Do it like a man!” and he smashed it on the table counter, the yolk trickling down his wrist.

He leans in and kisses Zoe harder, feeling the dry cracks of her mouth. She turns away, and that’s his answer. The dying plants on her windowsill are golden-red in the evening light. When he can bear to look at her again she’s shrugging out of her sweatshirt. Her collarbones shine with sweat.

As she moves to sit on the bed above him he turns on his knees to look up at her, like he’s praying the way she imagined prayer. He cups her hand and kisses her fingers, because she kissed his, because she kissed her own on the doorstep. Something slides down her wrist, towards him – a red bracelet with a little open palm on it.

“I haven’t seen you wear that before,” he says, then wants to die at how much attention to her that observation reveals. His embarrassment at this feels silly, given what just happened. He looks down; the palm has an open eye at its center.

“My hamsa,” Zoe says. “I’ve had it for years.” She lets it slide across her right hand to his: a trinity of palms. Then she tugs him up and onto the bed. “But you’re right, I only started wearing it recently. I was inspired by your necklace, actually.”

“Is Hamsa Hebrew?” he asks.

“Yes. Or Sanskrit. Maybe Phoenician, actually.” He puts his left arm under her head; she wraps her right arm around him. “It slipped into a lot of languages before they died.”

When Will leaves her house, he sees her illuminated in her window, watering her plants.

…

On Tuesday, history is first period. Will came early from morning swim; none of the desks by the windows are occupied. Even Gardner isn’t here yet. Will decides to draw the classroom.

When was the last time he drew a building from within? His art teacher in middle school used to take them outside whenever they did perspective exercises. Drawing horizon lines, everything radiating out of some interminable point in the distance. The history classroom must be on the east side of the building, Will reasons, because morning sunlight is slanting in. He renders the outline of the light – two parallel lines, a clean angle. But light hits the dust and the beams become swirling particles and suddenly it’s full, too full of motion and substance and collision, for him to get down. Like the patterns behind his eyelids, like water at the bottom of the pool, like Zoe’s face.

She comes in next, taking out her earbuds, then putting away her phone. She sits in her usual seat, across from him, in the sunlight. She hasn’t looked at him yet. Still he smiles, involuntary but not unpleasant, letting it stretch across his face. He knows she’ll ask for a drawing, and she won’t be in the drawing, but she’ll have watched him make it.