Who You Might Be by Leigh N. Gallagher

Author:Leigh N. Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

* * *

IT WAS SNOWING and it was going to snow.

Some line from an English-class poem he’d accidentally memorized, but it was unshakably right.

It was snowing, it had been snowing, it would continue to snow all night. Winter (he was beginning to understand what people meant when they groaned about its duration) had a way of compressing time, of packing a whole season into one monotonous span of waning daylight, dry skin, simulated warmth. Traffic crawled on 94, and his eyes itched and blurred. In the slow lane, he followed the taillights of a pickup truck’s dangling steel nuts, as hard and frustrated as his own. Already he was thinking he’d made the wrong decision. Could’ve been sitting in the dark eating Junior Mints, Kelsey’s hand down his pants. Instead, she smacked her gum in the passenger seat and sang along to the mix CD she’d made him—some whining Lisa Loeb bullshit he hoped desperately would be over by the time they picked up Tez. Caleb couldn’t tell if all girls were this annoying when you weren’t pressed up against them, or if this was only particular to the girls he’d been with. No sooner did physical space develop (it had been, what, an hour since they’d made out in her room, and then he’d driven irritably across town to pick up Miles?) than he felt the need to shut her up again, to pull Kelsey back into the silent occupation of bodies only.

She asked Miles questions that had never once crossed Caleb’s mind. Every few seconds she’d swivel around abruptly, as if something urgent had just occurred to her, and ask, “What’s your favorite food?” or “So where do you think you’ll apply to college?” or “So you write graffiti too, huh? What’s your word?” and Miles, clearly perplexed as to what Kelsey was doing here, would lift his headphones, ask her to repeat herself, then look to Caleb for guidance.

So the fuck what. Let him wonder why he’d brought her along. Say, This is what it looks like—to be not even a sliver gay. You keep girls around to watch. A girl watching makes a straight dude feel alive. Deep in the fibers of his dick, Caleb intuited that without a girl watching, nothing he did quite mattered—was quite real. Make Miles jealous, make him see what he was missing. And make Tez—because where, in the schema of Miles’s gluey-eyed crush, did Tez stand?—make Tez see clearly the brothers’ difference: wake him up to something, observe closely his reaction.

And yet when they picked up Tez, his Timberlands kicking fresh powder down the dark walk, the mood in the car suggested a division. Tez, who’d never ridden in the backseat, now sat next to Miles, and Kelsey, after a timid Hey, placed her hand on the back of Caleb’s neck. She stroked the shaved hairs there as he drove—a gesture he would’ve welcomed any other time, but which now felt wifely, ridiculously laying claim. He shivered and inched forward.

He could barely hear them behind him.

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