At first, the boys were one — a shapeless mass of shuffling gray-green, flickers of muscle here and there, like the life inside a lake. I squinted at the video on my phone. Slowly, individual bodies materialized. In the murky dark, the boys’ limbs had silver linings; there had to be a fluorescent bulb somewhere out of frame, I thought, the kind that casts more shadow than light.
Two boys stood facing one another with their left hands clasped. They looked as though they were about to clap each other on the back in greeting, thumbs interlocked the same way I’d seen them pose in photos, usually while squatting and faux-glaring at the camera. Only this time they were each taking turns smacking the back of the other’s hands as hard as they could, winding up by raising their right palm up by their ear like a baseball pitcher and bringing it down with a CRACK on the knuckles. The sound echoed like a car door slammed shut.
A new text bubbled up below the video: They’ve been doing this for twenty minutes, B wrote.
My heart gulped. It was the start to my final semester of college, and we had been dating for just a few weeks. It was enough to make me woozy with chosenness, the idea that he might have pressed “record” just for me, opening a door into a corridor of his life I’d never seen. All I had were names and a few character sketches, nebulous as the boys’ shapes in the dark. I knew they had all gone to the same handful of public high schools out in St. Louis County’s exurbs, in towns tangled together like a Celtic knot of highways and big-box stores and insular residential communities with single-file sidewalks. And I knew that while I had been doing the whole college thing — moving from California to St. Louis, fretting over what to major in, studying until my eyes throbbed with cranberry-red styes — the boys had been at work. Most of them, B included, were still saving up to move out of their parents’ houses. In their free time, they did pretty much exactly what they’d done back then, he told me; namely, what they were doing in the video: hanging out in their parents’ garages and drinking cheap beer, testing the give of the night, testing each other. Trying to make something new happen, even if it meant making something hurt.
The camera moved closer. I fought to make myself look. The hands receiving the blows were swollen taut and purple, each set of knuckles a smooth shelf of fluid. That B was the one filming felt important, symbolic. I sensed that he wanted me to recognize that, like me, he was watching at a distance, while suggesting that to turn away from this brute force would be to turn away from him. He seized my gaze and held it still, waiting for me to flinch. A warning, a challenge, or a plea: This is what you’re getting yourself into.
With each smack, the skin below the boys’ wrists juddered like bloated rubber gloves. I did not turn away. I felt dazed, like after a long walk in the cold. There was something bracing, even invigorating, in their dedication to this empty pursuit, this purposeless pain.
The next day, when I abandoned my homework to visit B on his smoke break at the coffee shop where he worked, he told me both of the boys in the video had broken their hands.
As a child, I tiptoed around my peers who played with pain, who wrung forearm skin with two hands like wet fabric and kicked quick and sharp beneath their desks. I was a staunchly conflict- and risk-averse kid; if an activity demanded submitting to the possibility of getting hurt, I only participated if I was sure I’d be good at it. From age three, dance became my sport — there were no moving parts that weren’t my own, and when I fell, it was from heights I made myself. Leading up to recital weeks, I ached all the time, but with art wedged in between motion and pain, the hurt felt far away.
I learned to fake laughter at the games we played at school, the red sting of palms against the taut skin between my shoulder blades. Whose hands would linger the longest? In the mirror, the ghost prints reminded me of the impressions I’d made in the wet cement of my driveway when I was five, my fingers splayed wide, laying claim.
There were other risks I failed to manage. My father had violence in him, a fuse so short you’d barely have time to hear the match snap alight. Entire weeks went by where he burned and burned. I was small for my age at every age, and he loomed over me, braying into my face. I find it hard to recall these episodes now; what’s left are images — his barrel chest, his filed front teeth, a lock of silver hair flopping lank over his forehead — and sounds, his voice so deep and resonant he had been denied admittance to his school choir when he was young. Once I was old enough to question my allegiance to him, around age ten, I began to stand my ground, even roaring right back. I would wake to myself minutes later, pinned to my closet floor by an alloy of frustration and terror. He never hit me, but I could tell he wanted to, and that was enough.
Every time this happened, I was reminded that my anger made no difference to my father. He would always be angrier, louder, bigger. As I grew into a teenager, I grew into my certainty that the expression of anger and aggression — or at least my aggression — made no difference to anyone. I stuffed my wrath so deep down in my core that it seemed to dissolve.
By the time I got to college, whatever “fight” impulse I might have had was gone. Because my memory of my own fury was so faint, it was hard for me to believe I had felt it in the first place. I wasn’t even sure what it was — anger, fear, or a wild ache for relief? If my father had hurt me, he would have had to leave us, and then he would have been sorry. But he never did, and he never was.
My new friends laughed at me for the way I gasped at jump-scares in theaters and car horns on the road, the way I fought for air at sudden shifts in equilibrium. It wasn’t just the threat of experiencing pain; I avoided the pain of others, which I felt viscerally and even preemptively, every cell in my body screaming for me to bolt. Horror movies were a definite no, as were fail videos and even some adult cartoons. Watching others hurt made the nerve endings at the crown of my head tingle. It felt as though I was being sucked upwards into a tube, and I had to grip something to keep from dematerializing.
A similar sensation seized me whenever I looked at B. He was attractive in a gaunt, sharp way, limbs spindly as a candelabra; his eyes were like copper pennies left to rust, so chemically bright that I forgot my coffee order as he waited behind the register. I wrote in my journal that he was so beautiful it hurt to look at him, as if his beauty itself were a wound, like the cobweb of cracks in a broken windshield. I didn’t care how cliché it sounded because it was true, the perfect correspondence between language and experience that felt like proof of some long-held theory. But even more than the way he looked was the way he looked: how he saw straight to the heart of things. When we locked eyes, I could feel parts of myself leaving, rearranging. I became something more electric, more interesting, more worthy of being looked at like that.
I longed to make him glow, the way he did to me. I’d always felt most comfortable as the spotlight rather than in it, casting others in the warmth of my interest — or else as a kind of magic mirror, one that reflected back to others a version of themselves they admired. I was still figuring out what B’s mirror image would be, and I hoarded every shred of information he gave me: the Modest Mouse lyrics tattooed across his shins, the glamour shots of his Volkswagen on his Instagram feed. The tenderness in his voice when he spoke of his young stepsister, and the hurt in it when he mentioned her father. The loyalty in how he spoke of his friends, with alternating reticence and ferocity. It was an ambivalence I recognized: the mix of fear and hunger that lies behind the impulse to construct yourself inside your relationships with others, to define your being by a state of being with.
Once, at a party in a dark frat-house basement, a boy I knew started to bash his forehead into the concrete wall. He was out-of-his-mind drunk, his brown hair plastered to his forehead in stalactite spikes. He pressed his palms to the wall in front of him, reared back, and then — the sound was matte and solid. All his friends stood by laughing, so I shimmied in between him and the wall and placed my hands on his chest and shoved. He barreled away for a little while, but then he came careening back and did it again, and again, and eventually I gave up.
Events like this didn’t disturb me. Most of the boys I knew in college formed their camaraderie around pain and aggression, like fruit flesh around a pit. Some were friends of friends from back in high school, while some I’d met in our residence hall my first year. I tutored them in writing and picked chicken bones out of their piles of J. Crew button-downs and tucked them into bed while they slurred that they loved me. In exchange, they helped me with my stats homework and invited me to parties. After they joined fraternities, they told me being hazed brought them closer together. So did their show-and-tells about their sexual conquests, rumored to be held during chapter meetings, though these were supposed to be top secret. When I narrowed my eyes in accusation, they told me I just didn’t get it. Even the boys who weren’t like that were a little bit like that. My friends and I called them “normies,” though we kept nursing their hangovers and kissing them and occasionally letting them hurt our feelings.
The language of masculinity that B and his friends spoke was familiar enough for me to decipher, yet its signs were entirely different. They spoke a long-haired, painted-nails, concave-chest language, all vintage T-shirts and crop tops cut from said T-shirts. Faded Dickies with the sleeves and pant legs cuffed twice. Scuffed skate shoes with holes in the soles. Patched denim jackets spangled with pins. Knit beanies rolled an inch above the ear. Lots of black. Tattoos, at least one of which was usually ironic. All of it highly stylized, effortful, and torn. Theirs was a loud language, full of scream-singing to Panic! at the Disco and bands I hadn’t listened to since my brief emo phase years earlier. Silence came only when someone was taking a drag from a Camel Turkish Royal. It was a physical grammar that narrowed space or took it up entirely with flailing limbs and long drunken hugs. It was kinetic and coarsely affectionate. These boys said I love you to each other freely, and if they were even a little bit bored, they traded kisses on the lips in public. And they were always in public, even if their audience was just me.
I acted as though this easy intimacy had no effect on me, but I thrilled at it inside. The normies would never, I thought. Most men — including the boys’ aloof midwestern fathers — would never. B and his friends sneered at more traditional performances of masculinity, especially any mention of the college kids. Looking back, though, I see more similarities than differences: the work-hard-play-harder ethos that structured their time, their almost-uniform whiteness, their shared lexicon and emblems and tastes, within what my anthropology professor would call their respective social fields. I recognize their casual brutality, the kind I saw in the boy who tried to sledgehammer the wall with his forehead. I recognize, too, how I felt about it — intoxicated, excited the way a neuron is excited. How often had I wished for the kind of strong personality that others had to make way for? And if all these boys were anything, they were made way for. B and his friends took me to punk shows in bars and backyards and townhouse basements, but they acted the same no matter where they were. They stood outside smoking and talking; they stood inside drinking and talking, and in between, when their friends came on stage, they hurled themselves into one another in torrents of bone and skin and denim. I watched, mostly. Until B, my playlists were largely populated with teenage girls crooning softly over acoustic guitars. I loved going to shows, but I hadn’t even skirted a mosh pit since the ninth grade, when my best friend and her mom brought me along to see the Dropkick Murphys, where we’d been the only ones not wearing leather. Most of the music B’s friends played had no discernible beat or pattern; listening to it made me feel pure and vacant, made me want to melt into the noise. But my ballet training still lived in an iron column of muscle along my spine, and I tensed up instinctively in mosh pits, rooting into the floor as the crowd around me sloshed like surface waves. They all seemed to know when to go limp and then rigid again — never soft, but fluid like chain mail, then like chain mail suddenly pulled taut.
B sometimes glanced at me apologetically. I would grin and shake my head in reassurance — I liked seeing him lose control around them, dissolving the self-consciousness that often kept him watchful and anxious. I liked seeing the lines between affection and aggression blur as the crowd heaved. In public, B was restrained in his physical tenderness toward me, as if he were afraid that, exposed to open air, our intimacy would oxidize. But when he and the boys were together, when I was together with them, his inhibitions fell away.
Still, I couldn’t ignore the scarcity of girls in their inner circle — really, the scarcity of anyone who wasn’t a cis man. The girls B knew had hair bleached the color of Smarties, like stained teeth. The boys called them rude things behind their backs, though they’d all dated each other, broken up, and dated again. A small constellation of girls always emerged when the group ventured out in public, but the boys rarely addressed them directly, except if the girl was Jamie, who also liked to kiss girls and play bass and skate and make music that we distributed on hand-burned CDs with perky, round butts drawn on the covers. The boys kissed her on the lips sometimes, and when I joked that I was jealous, she offered up her lips to me, and I leaned in.
When the other girls got bored, they went outside to smoke. I heard defiance in the snap of their fresh cigarette packs against their palms, a confidence that didn’t reach their eyes. I was wary of their bitterness, but I felt a small, insistent warmth when they grasped my hands and tugged me to the bathroom. As we retouched our makeup, they filled me in on who was being an asshole and who wasn’t. “You’re so lucky,” one of them told me once. “He actually loves you.”
I thought of the night B first brought me around, when, smoking Camel after Camel in the garage the boys called The Bakery, I had made them laugh. I was “keeping up,” and I’d flushed when B whispered to me how rare it was for his friends to actually like someone he was dating. It seemed to make him want me more, and I materialized beneath the wanting like a bruise. When we left The Bakery after two in the morning, we tumbled into the back seat of his car; he couldn’t wait, he said. The steam from our breath frosted the windows of his snow-kissed VW, and I pressed my hand flat against the glass on purpose, leaving behind a perfect print.
Years would pass before I began to read about “subordinate,” “hybrid,” and “deviant” masculinities, about the elaborate galaxy of dominance that can feed on girls’ own internalized misogyny, contempt, and “desire to be desired.” While traditional masculinities demand a muscled, macho swagger, a deviant masculinity might encourage sensitivity, affection, even earnestness. Some such masculinities are relegated to the margins by strict social norms and real, material persecution; others are acted out by appropriating — or, depending on how generous you’re feeling, “selectively incorporating” — styles and expressions from othered, marginalized communities. Punk or emo masculinities can swim in the Venn diagram sliver between these two states. According to scholar Michael Messner, who frames hybrid masculinities as “more style than substance,” performing punk masculinity can allow men to express their very real social alienation and frustration with existing class structures without actually defying the status quo. In a 2012 autoethnography of her local punk and DIY scene, Naomi Griffin observed that punk “aims to reject oppressive and exclusive aspects of mainstream society” and can encourage the “renegotiation” of masculinity, but she also admits this negotiation might be so male-centric that it demotes others to the “supporting cast” of fans and girlfriends (which harbors its own hierarchies). Similarly, in 2018, Maria Sherman resolved to “unpack” the culture surrounding the emo music she’d grown up on, noting pervasive sexist and essentialist language and “unbalanced power structures that fostered abuse.” “Basically,” she wrote in Jezebel, “their whole musical world is fucked.”
Back then, though, I wasn’t interested in trying on labels and seeing which fit us best. I wasn’t interested in dissecting any of it. All I thought about was having fun, being fun. About whether I should bring Miller Lite or Stag to the pregame. About B’s hands, callused and sure. About how to keep earning the boys’ esteem, to keep being not like other girls. To be a friend as well as a girlfriend, to stay funny yet sexy, and definitely to stay Jewish, which all of them had a Catholic fascination with. Miles, B’s best friend, was the hardest nut to crack: he was small and wiry, and he moved with purpose, like a projectile, his eyes black and wary and arresting. I knew he liked me when he started including me in his grousing. When he got annoyed with one of us, he windmilled his fists like the Marx Brothers in the slapstick comedies I watched with my dad as a child, his keychain jangling at the waistband of his skinny jeans as he muttered, “I’ll swing. I swear, I’ll swing.”
Over time, I let my grip on docility and likability loosen. My bite sharpened; my tongue quickened. I let myself believe that we felt the same defiance, the same degree of angry and powerless and omnipotent and free, all of which could be true at the same time for different reasons having to do with class and gender and big constructs that none of us thought about but all of us felt smothered by. Together, we sprinted down the street at night, the soles of our Vans skidding on a sheen of black ice, racing for no other reason than to see how fast we could go.
The first almost-fight happened on the rooftop bar of the hotel up the block from my apartment. All the usual suspects were there — Miles, B, Jonah, Jamie, along with a few satellite friends from the local coffee and bar scene — and we swarmed around a low table, laughing and singing and grabbing the back of Jonah’s shirt when he jokingly swung a leg over the railing. The lights on the theater marquee below made the night feel timeless and full of potential. Above our heads, a papier-mâché moon swiveled on a spit. A man with a receding buzz cut and a tight black T-shirt orbited the edges of our group; I watched him size B up, approach, strike up a conversation. I turned my back and sipped my drink. I turned back around. In that time, something had snapped. “Nice arms, dude,” B joked. “How long did you stare at yourself in the mirror this morning?”
“At least I don’t look like I’m fucking starving,” the guy said.
I grabbed B’s elbow and gave it a light tug.
“Look, look at you both,” the man jeered. “You look like twins.”
“Go fuck yourself,” B said.
“I don’t have to tell you to do that,” the man replied. “You already are.”
I watched the signal travel through the rest of the boys. Before it could spark, I stepped between them with a confidence that belied the quaking jelly of me. I took B’s chin in my hand and whispered, “Hey, hey, kiss me,” until he did, and I felt his anger drain away, down my throat.
When we were alone, B sometimes asked me to hit him as hard as I could. “It’s good practice,” he told me. “I would die to see you get in a fight.” I joked that I was going to do something about Tina, the bartender who liked to flirt with B while I was right there, whose smoky eyes and shiny hair made me feel extra freckly and devoid of experience. “PLEASE,” he begged, only half kidding.
We squared off in the kitchen, where furniture was sparse. He told me to keep my thumb on the outside of my fist. I wound up and punched his skinny bicep. It made a pathetic slapping sound, and he smiled without teeth. “Again.”
“You need to give me a reason,” I told him. “I need, like, a backstory.”
He shook his head, smug and taunting. “Don’t overthink it,” he said. “Just punch me already.” His eyes skimmed my form as I wound up again, and I felt my contours shimmer.
I set my mouth straight and glared at him before I let another one fly. This made him smile wider, which made it hard to keep glaring. It was difficult to tell whether he truly wanted to see me buck up, be bad, get angry, or whether he liked to watch me try and fail.
I couldn’t land a single solid blow. Even as I told myself it was okay, he said so, it was like there was a string attached to my elbow, tugging against its force. I didn’t want him to hurt, didn’t want to be the one to hurt him, even as I wanted to be able to.
Spring, and ribbons of neon wound up the cement columns of the basement auditorium and washed the room in red. I’d invited B to a pop-punk show hosted by my school’s student-run radio station. Waiting for the band, I stood close to him with a loyalty almost canine. I thought about reaching for his hand, then didn’t. The room was only a quarter full. He murmured in my ear, rattling off the coffee orders of at least five of the stoned students milling around us. He smirked in a grim, resigned sort of way — his discomfort was palpable, but I still felt grateful to be there with him, feeling apart together. Before B, I would never have made an effort to go; I liked the headliner, but I tended to avoid the clique of boys in charge, who treated music like a multiple-choice test they’d been studying for their entire lives. I squeezed B’s pinkie with mine and imagined us as an illustration on one of those sheets of clear acetate in children’s books, superimposed on the concrete. You could flip the page and we’d disappear.
It was like being gargled inside a mouth with a handful of pop rocks, at first, charged up by the frenetic guitar. But soon the fizz fizzled, and we were all just bouncing from our knees and watching as the lead singer, a girl about my age, ricocheted everywhere, kicking her leg up by her ear and jumping so high I worried she would hit her head on the ceiling. “I’m going to start a mosh pit,” B yelled over the crunchy guitar. I grinned and nodded, relieved that the music was good, that the band was fun, that he felt at ease enough to make the space at least partly his.
I stayed put as he picked his way through the sparse crowd. Suddenly, I felt a hard nugget of apprehension slide down my throat like an ice cube swallowed whole — it burned, the awareness of just how little control I had over whatever was about to happen.
My stomach hurts, the girl sang, ’cause it’s hard to be a punk while wearing a skirt.
Just below the stage, close enough to be spritzed by the singer’s sweat, B began to jump and jostle. It seemed like it was working for a few seconds; I felt the hitch in the room’s chest, then a swirling, like we were water and a plug had been pulled. But it died just as quickly as it began, and my heart sank as the students edged away from the force of him, smirking, bemused at the boy in the basement, thrashing by himself.
Can you hear me? the band warbled. Can you hear me?
I was reminded of a game I had played at day camp as a little girl: Seated in a circle, we would send one person out of the room, then choose a leader to set a beat. It was the leader’s job to change the rhythm, ours to follow, and the guesser’s task to identify the leader. The more people drumming, the more difficult it was to guess. It was a turbulence that only worked when shared.
When B retreated, he was quiet. I fought against my impulse to apologize, knowing that would mean speaking on behalf of these people, somehow aligning myself with them, and admitting that something had gone wrong. I tried to hold the entire situation at arm’s length, to allow myself to be in my head what I had been in the room: an onlooker. But I still felt that somewhere I had failed, perhaps in assuming we were all playing by the same rules. I had betrayed him, and I had somehow betrayed them too.
“I love you all sooo much,” the singer cooed into the microphone as we walked up the ramp and out the door. “If anyone makes you uncomfortable in the crowd, we’re here to tell them that’s NOT okay.” It sounded like something she said to every audience, but I couldn’t be sure. My cheeks burned, but anyway, we were gone.
B and I never spoke of the concert again, but we didn’t need to. I’d learned that the boys’ disruptiveness could bleed outside the lines we drew around ourselves, but only when our numbers could bear the consequences. And so I placed my faith in their togetherness. In our togetherness.
One night, after I’d graduated and decided to stay in St. Louis to be with B, the core members of our crew — Jonah, Miles, B, and I — were joined at our usual dive bar by a boy named Jake, a friend of theirs I’d met only recently. Jake struck me as a misfit in the group. He looked totally unremarkable: average height, symmetrical features, short hair, sports cap, track jacket half-zipped. He wouldn’t have been out of place in my macroeconomics class, I thought. And in fact he was the only one of them who was in school, studying English and marketing at a community college while serving at Red Lobster. We’d bonded easily, and I noticed that I didn’t feel wound up in the way I usually did around the boys. Then I felt like a normie for feeling that way.
After B told me Jake had been in the garage the night the boys broke their hands, I caught myself looking at him differently and more often, wondering.
On this particular night, Jake was wasted. From the bar’s bathroom line, I watched him dance in the tight clearing by the DJ booth, a kind of rhythmless bump and grind with his eyes closed. A few feet away, an equally drunk bearded man dressed like my old rabbi jerked and undulated, his white button-down coming untucked over his wide black slacks. Jake kept edging into the rabbi’s five-foot radius, which the guy didn’t seem thrilled about. I was opening my mouth to laugh when, suddenly, a step too close, a shove, and Jake tottered backward. Swiftly, like members of the Secret Service, B and Miles swooped forward and muscled the rabbi against the wall, a boy at each arm.
I took a long stride backward with the girl ahead of me in line, as close to the wall opposite as we could get. We glanced at each other as the bouncer materialized and they all tumbled outside. Boys will be boys, the look seemed to say. And, Isn’t this funny? And, Should we be scared?
For a split second, I wondered what it would be like to stay, to go up to the bar and order another beer, to divest from the force of them. But with every moment I lingered, a tugging grew at the base of my diaphragm, a string tethering me to them, one woven of belonging and responsibility, taut as love. I heaved a sigh and followed them out.
The tableau materialized before me like a baroque fountain, both static and surging. B was belly-up on the ground, gazing up in outrage at the bouncer, who loomed over him. Jake looked nonplussed, like he’d just woken up from a nap. Miles and Jonah and a few strangers stood in a scraggly semicircle, watching. I felt weightless, matterless, invisible. This was what wearing virtual reality goggles must be like, I thought. Presence without consequence. Everything about me dematerialized but my ability to look. We were all waiting, I realized; there was a version of what happened next where B hit the bouncer, the bouncer crushed his fist into B’s face and flattened his nose like clay, the boys came to his aid and got the shit kicked out of them. Would I try to break up the fight? Would I cheer them on? Would Jake, who seemed so gentle?
None of that happened. B scrambled to his feet before I could put out my hand.
We all stood in silence for a beat. Jonah glanced around at us before muttering an excuse and ducking back inside. B turned and stormed down the block while I lingered, waiting for Jonah to reappear, waiting for him to choose us. But he didn’t.
We left without him, Jake somehow still obliviously cheerful, B in stony silence. “Should I have done something?” I asked, but he just shook his head. I ached to touch him, but he kept several lengths of sidewalk between us, and I fought to find the shape of him in the dark.
The studies I find on punk and deviant masculinity agree that women and non-cishet men perform various kinds of emotional labor to earn their belonging. The assumption in these investigations is that “belonging” derives from one’s capacity to do what the boys do: perform, occupy public space, take up room. To construct yourself against what you’re assumed to be — for girls, to “overcome notions of passivity, compliance and naivety.” Looking back, nights like the one at the bar make me suspect that belonging didn’t demand simply overcoming passivity or emulating its opposite. If there was something to mirror in these masculine spaces, it wasn’t only aggression itself but also impassiveness in the face of it.
On the morning of the local Mardi Gras parade, B — who’d been drinking since nine in the morning — began approaching strangers and asking them to punch him in the face. I was leaning against a brick storefront with one of the boys. It was seven degrees, and I felt numb everywhere. The boy made no move to intervene, and neither did I. Instead, I scrolled on my phone, glancing up every so often. When I next looked, B was following a guy in a hockey jersey down the block, hopping in front of him with his knees bent so their eyes were level. Then the man grabbed B’s narrow shoulders and threw him onto the concrete.
One more time — for the last time, I promised myself — everything froze. The carnival din receded, and for a moment the street unfurled itself before me like a jetway. B’s expression was impossible to read. I felt a surge of something like despair, or maybe the shape of where despair should have been. I imagined the storm in his face if I crouched beside him. Imagined what I might say. Imagined setting my thumb on the outside of my fist, bringing it to my ear, letting it fly.
The boy beside me heaved a sigh. We both stayed still, waiting, our arms crossed tightly around our insufficient jackets as if to keep broken pieces of us from falling off. Before us was the boy whose eyes I’d poured myself into. Watching him dust off his palms and storm off, I felt a little of me pour back out and splatter on the concrete.
In Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers comedy I’ve seen so many times I know it by heart, two men in the same white nightgown and cap stand on either side of a shattered mirror, reflecting each other’s movements in a slow, precarious dance. They are adversaries, one masquerading as the other. Their imitation is imperfect — one cocks his head to the left a hair too fast, one drops his hat mid-bow only for the other to hand it back to him — and still, they preserve the illusion, staring into one another’s eyes as they step in a careful circle over the shards at their feet, trading places. This is the joke: that all the while, they know the mirror is broken. It’s only when a third identical man appears that the spell is broken, and one of them tackles the rest through the nonexistent wall.
I’d thought the boys were my chance to undo the years spent teaching myself to feel less, a chance to sensitize myself to confrontation. I would slip through their echo like a door into who I really was, how I really felt. I wanted surrender. I wanted permission. But only you can grant access to the catacombs of your own feeling, and no troop of foot soldiers can keep you safe inside them. We were all slamming our heads against different walls. Confrontation on its own isn’t feeling; it’s just another kind of loneliness.
One year after Jonah’s abandonment that night at the bar, Jake fell down a flight of stairs while drinking with some of the boys I didn’t know as well. Oblivious, indifferent, or cruel, they left him passed out in the stairwell, and he spent a week in a coma. B only found out days later. When Jake woke, he was changed, his mind a chiseled thing. It’s freaky, B told me, though by then we were technically broken up. It’s like he’s someone else.
B was the only one who tried to visit Jake in the hospital. It was possible the rest stayed away out of shame, but I suspected it was something more like resignation. Part of me felt certain the boys had always known what I’d let myself forget, swept up in their performance of togetherness, the false promise of their tandem ferocity: the hurt they wagered was always their own. Kindred expressions of anger and pain didn’t mean those feelings were shared, or make them easier to bear. And besides, my hurt was a different animal.
It took me even longer to realize that I hadn’t been simply trying to be like them. I had been trying to be good for them, and to believe we were good for each other. I had been trying, and failing, to be everything: the mirror, the mirror image, the one punching through it. And the one sweeping up the shards.