Levi found me. I’m not sure how. How he found me, or how he knew.
It was at study hours, the library, some week deep in pledging, and I wasn’t studying. I was looking at the same paragraph about cell membranes and lipids and protein matching and not letting a word of it in. He just sat down across from me, and I glanced up. He still had the flannel, the overgrown hair, and he didn’t do the “you good?” I’d have bounced right off of. He looked at me, the way you’d look at a sky you were deciding whether to trust, and said, “You’ve got the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The Springs thing. The hundred-mile stare.” He almost smiled, but he kept it gentle, like he didn’t want to spook me. “Come on. My place is quiet, my roommate’s out being social so I don’t have to be. I’ve got a real coffee machine. It’s the one nice thing I own, and you look like somebody who could use a cup of coffee made by a machine that cost more than it should.”
I don’t know why I went. Okay, that’s not true, and a sin is a lie and I can’t believe I sinned, but it wasn’t against someone it was just against me. I do know why I went. I went because he was from home and he’d said the Springs thing like it was a diagnosis he knew about and carried, and I was so tired of carrying mine alone that the idea of sitting in a room with one other person who didn’t ask “you good?” would be like sitting down after standing for years.
Levi’s place was in the frat house, third floor. It was the first room I’d been in up here that looked like a person had decided, on purpose, to live in it. With their stuff, and not the crap we got for free during orientation week. A real coffee setup on a table, beans in a jar. Climbing gear on a hook, ropes and those little metal pieces that are supposedly stronger than they look, all coiled and cared for. And a plant on the windowsill, a living one, that somebody was clearly keeping alive with intention. I lived out of a milk crate. Here was a guy two years ahead of me who’d gotten far enough from the thing to keep something green alive, and from where I stood it looked like a country I might be allowed to move to one day, if I lived right, if I was good.
Except, being good was the whole problem, being good was what had me sleeping with a cross against my chest and omitting most of the truth to my mother.
He made the coffee and didn’t try to fill the silences. He just let it sit there and be a silence. We talked about home a little, both of us testing the ice while drinking hot liquid before we put weight on it. He knew my church, or knew of it, the big one off Academy with the worship band and the stage lights. He’d grown up two denominations over and four miles east, which in the Springs is close enough to be cousins. We did the map, the way people from the same place do, naming streets like passcodes. The reservoir. The Garden of the Gods parking lot where everybody’s youth group took the same photo. He’d had a Pastor Dale of his own: different name, the same man.
He asked, at some point, not like a test, whether I’d been homeschooled or done the Christian-school thing, and I said homeschool till ninth grade and then the school attached to the church, and he nodded like that explained any number of things about me, which it probably did. He’d done about the same. We compared notes: the purity pledges we’d signed at 13 without understanding what we were “promising” away, the trick of monitoring your own face in the mirror for anything that might give you up, the specific loneliness of being the kid everyone trusted because you’d gotten so good at performing the trustworthy one that even you half-believed him. The extra glances at the cards in the aisle at the grocery store; the fitness magazines that you couldn’t help but flit your eyes to, and that’s why you walked behind your mom in the store, at least down that aisle.
He laughed at one of my stories. I laughed at one of his. It was the first time in my life I’d ever laughed about any of it, and it didn’t feel like betraying anybody, which I’d have bet money it would.
And then, not making a thing of it, looking into his coffee instead of at me, he told me about the phone.
“Sophomore year. I didn’t pick up when my mom called. I wasn’t even dodging her, I was in some chemistry lab percolating or – no, that’s what a coffee machine does ... whatever, it doesn’t matter. My phone was in my bag. Three hours, maybe. I come out, I’d got like nine missed calls, and I call back, and she picks up and I can hear road noise. I go, ‘Where are you?’ And she goes.” He stopped. Rubbed the back of his neck, once. “She goes, ‘We’re past Castle Rock, honey.’ They were already in the car. A few missed calls and they were on I-25 coming to find me. Didn’t text first. Didn’t wait. Just got in the car, because me not answering meant something had gone wrong, and in their heads up here is where things go wrong. This is the place that takes their kid and ruins him. The only sane response to silence from me was 90 miles an hour up the interstate.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“I talked them around at a gas station in Lone Tree. Over the phone. Told them I was fine, I was studying, I was so sorry. I sent a selfie to prove I was alive and not at, I don’t know, an orgy or Satanic Temple meeting.” A small dry breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “They turned around. And I sat in my room after and shook for an hour. Not because I was in trouble. I wasn’t, they were sweet about it, they love me. That’s the entire problem.” He looked up then. “They love me in their own way, or what they think and have been told is love. It was enough to drive two hours on no information. And they’re never going to be able to actually know me, because the real me is the exact thing they’re driving up here to save me from.”
He looked at me, like he wanted to study my face, and then decided against it.
“I get it,” he said. Quiet. Not the throwaway he’d tossed me at the party. This one had the whole weight set down on it. “Ours are like this too. I know you do the math at the gas stations on the drive home. I know you’ve got a seat somewhere with your name still on it.” He shrugged, then, “Or a picture from today with a gap they tell you is yours.”
I didn’t mean to, but my head jerked up from the mug at that. All he did was nod once. Not smile, nothing else, just nod once. “They did it to me, too. And that’s all. You’re not crazy. It isn’t you. It really is them. It’s a hard thing, and you’re not broken for finding it hard to deal with. You’re not broken. Period. And don’t ever let anyone tell you or make you think that you are.” He paused, and I was looking in his eyes, and they looked glassy. He didn’t look away; I would’ve in his place. “It’s taken me two years of therapy to be able to say that, and you’re the first person I’ve actually said it out loud to.”
Here’s what I have to try to explain, the part that doesn’t make sense even now.
I’d been touched by then. Kissed, and more. I knew what hands felt like, I’d done the stuff I’d been promised would damn me and walked home under the vault of heaven a dozen times. And none of it, not one minute of any of it, had taken the air out of me the way that did. A guy across a table, fully dressed, not reaching for me, saying it isn’t you and meaning it. I’d built my entire self around not being known, because being known was the thing that ended you, and here was somebody reaching past all of it. Gentle, with a coffee, saying I see the real one and the real one’s okay.
So I told him a true thing. I don’t know where it came from. I told him about the photo, the youth group on the steps, the saved seat, the text: “never forget whose you are.” I’d never said any of it out loud to a living person. It came out flat and fast and I stared at the table the whole time, and when I finished he didn’t flinch and didn’t fix it and didn’t tell me they meant well and it would all get better. He just nodded, like I’d confirmed something he already carried.
“Whose,” he said. “Yeah. Not who. They always say whose.”
I had to press the heels of my hands against my eyes for a second.
He didn’t reach for me. We sat just feet apart in a room with a plant in it, and he did not close quarters, and somehow the four feet between us left uncrossed were louder than anybody’s hands had ever been. I think he knew. I think he knew that if he’d touched me right then I’d have let him, and I’d have used it the way I used Marcus, to not feel the bigger thing, and I think he didn’t want to be something I used. I didn’t understand that yet. I just knew he didn’t reach, and that the not-reaching felt more like being held than being held ever had.
I left before I did something stupid like cry in front of him, even though I knew he would’ve let me and probably sat there just accepting it. He walked me to the door, easy, no big deal, “come by whenever, coffee’s always on,” and I went out into the cold and the pine, and the cold and the pine were different now. They had his name on them. They smelled like the inside of that apartment, the flannel. Like a room where a guy kept a plant alive on purpose.
I walked home not thinking about the sex I wasn’t having. Nothing had happened. Nobody had taken off so much as a jacket. Jasper was sleeping, snoring lightly. And I lay awake that night more turned-over, more unable to find the bottom of my own breathing, than I’d been after anything anybody had ever actually done to my body.
That scared me worse than Bid Day. Worse than the photo. Because for the body thing I had a whole filing system, built over years, and it mostly worked. For this I had nothing. No drawer. No verse. No little yellow thumb.
Just a guy from home who’d said “I get it,” and meant it, and hadn’t reached across the table, and a cold walk that smelled, for the first time in my life, like it might be safe to stop running.
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