Something bad

O’Malley didn’t have a first name until you were eight, the one year you were on the same soccer team and you read it on the roster they sent out before practice started, but even then it looked like a placeholder on the flimsy sheet. He had one name and it was his last, his family name technically, though it was hard to imagine that he had ever held hands around a table or been tucked in or coddled in any way.

O’Malley was practically a nomad, except for the staying in one place bit that was the universal nightmare of childhood. He didn’t seem to own shoes, or have parents that spoke or moved or cooked or went to back-to-school nights to sit in those teensy blue plastic chairs, or did anything other than pull into the driveway across the street behind tinted windows a few hours after you and your sister had already eaten dinner. He was the kid growing up who seemed to own nothing except what everyone else, including you, wanted to own—himself. One thing for sure, to deconstruct the myth a bit, is that he had health insurance, because he never seemed too panicked the handful of times that a neighborhood mom or older brother drove him to the emergency room, once with a nail poking through the top of his foot, and another time with the bare metal handlebar of his trick bike stuck into his leg. You remember being so proud sitting in the back keeping the bike steady or staring, numb, at the dull and rusted point of the nail, while he bit his lip and stuck his head out the window, even on the freeway when the wind got so loud it hurt your ears.

The biggest secret you ever had was that your whole life you called him your best friend, in the spiral notebook you kept under your bed and college admission essays and stories that you told in bars to get girls to sleep with you, all of those endeavors successful not because of your sexual prowess but because of O’Malley’s—you were never selling yourself whole but as an extension of him. That’s why you never felt real, because of that one summer that he left town with rumors of military school and came back with a shaved head and soft shadows in the middle of his cheeks and, when school started again, only came outside to take out the trash. You’ll be that age forever, you told yourself (and only yourself, not your girlfriend and definitely not your therapist) because you knew that is sounded ridiculous and creepy that he had such a hold on you.

You went into his room only once, that Summer, by telling his mom that he had your skateboard, though if she had really known him she would know that O’Malley didn’t know how to skateboard, refused to learn, because, he told you, “I know myself; anything goes wrong I’ll close my eyes and stick my arms out.”

Of course, his mom was hot. In your head you rolled your eyes when she opened the door, not before pissing yourself just a little bit when it swung open because you were just that shocked and heartbroken and worried that nobody would answer. You knew that you would never see him again, not like he was before, and you had resigned yourself to that fact but you were petrified that, if the door didn’t open, it would mean he had never existed at all. He did, in fact, and when you went into his room on the second floor his mom didn’t even follow you, so you set a timer to make sure that you snooped for an appropriate amount of time, using the watch you begged your dad for because O’Malley didn’t believe in time and therefore was always asking you for it when you two were a few miles into the woods behind your houses and it started to get cold or windy or gray.

Looking around the space, a perfect square, you were astounded and delighted and all the rest when you saw that he had Beastie Boys posters and fitted sheets and hangers in his closet. He had a drawer full of condoms that made you jealous of all parties involved (another fact reserved for the spiral notebook), and a plastic baggie of dusty, shriveled mushrooms that you pocketed and threw away at school a week later because you were never as brave as O’Malley, who were you kidding.

You opened the drawer with his underwear in it and stared for a while, partly because it was so well kept, everything pressed and folded. You knew if you disrupted anything in the draweryou’d be on the other side of that gap you were always scared to jump over, just because you didn’t know what was on the other side. O’Malley would’ve taken a pair, you thought, but then, you asked yourself, would he even be curious about those kind of things at all and then you were just staring into the drawer for who knows how long when the tiny mechanical beeping of your watch went off and you reset it for another three minutes and moved on to other nooks of the room because this was one of those moments where you knew it was now or never and you would never be in this room again. He had a book of poetry on a shelf that you thought was interesting—not the poetry, but the fact of it sitting in the room—and you flipped through it and grazed the imprints of his written notes with your fingers, and indulged the fantasy that you were blind and could pick up importance just from the feel of something. For some reason you got a strong urge to lick your fingertips, but then you jumped because his mom shouted “any luck?” from downstairs and it was time to go because you would never come back down with the thing you said you were there for, the skateboard, or anything else.

You bounded down the stairs, playing the gangly, boyish thing that O’Malley’s mother would expect and said thank you, but no, no luck this time. Standing on the little rug in the entry way you could just barely glance into the kitchen and see a pair of dress shoes and pressed pants peeking from behind the counter, but a cabinet door at eye level hadn’t been shut so you never saw O’Malley Senior’s face. The view stopped right at his chest, which was decorated with two strong arms, at the end of which were hairy hands holding a beer. You couldn’t believe how casual everyone was being; didn’t it matter to them that their son was gone? When you were halfway across the street back to your own house your watch went off again, the second timer that you hadn’t let run out, and that was the end of that and you made a note to cry later that night, once you were in bed, but you forgot before falling asleep and every night after that too.

***

It is hard to explain all of that the night before the trip to Kristen, who is smart and kind and a teacher and vaguely religious and who hates her name because it is so plain, even though you made it a point to say how much you love it, though you don’t tell her why, which is because of how plain it is.

“How do you know this guy?”

“He’s my best friend.”

She looks hurt so you quickly say “Was.” Is.

Kristen lets you be little spoon when you first crawl into bed each night so that you can stare ahead and make purple and green shapes out of the thin darkness between you and the apartment wall. Tonight you feel like soup, or maybe the steam that comes off of soup. You’re whatever shape and size the container is and tonight that’s this small square room with Kristen on your back and it’s really just that space you have to work with because no air is coming in or out since she has central AC plus a cat who likes to scratch at window screens. It’s hard not to feel trapped, but then, you think, at least every part of you is all in one place. Tonight, you couldn’t go anywhere even if you wanted to, which you’re beyond grateful for, because you’ve never been sure of what you want anyway.