they had names that all started with the same letter, those siblings. like the kardashians, is what i might say now, but didn’t then. then, i was fourteen and gripped by things that seemed touchable — the curly mop of a boy’s head, the ambient presence of weed smoke, a banged up skateboard, all of which belonged to him.
+
the high school i attended was a tributary of the middle school, which was fed by the elementary school which, for some children — not me —, was a pipeline from other local pre-kindergarten programs. this is to say that although i wouldn’t have called it a small town, your place in it remained set from about the time everyone started thinking about their bodies and yours from a birds-eye (approximately eight years old for girls and thirteen years old for boys, in my calculation). but girls determined the hierarchy, so the boys never mattered much anyway. only insofar as the girls decided to pay attention.
by the girls, i was paid attention to in all the wrong ways. from the beginning, i saw myself an outcast, and if there were opportunities for me to assimilate properly i genuinely never saw them. there are probably people i went to school with who have none of the cartoonish views about me that i assigned to them (so that i could elevate myself through my own myopic lens of unworthiness). frighteningly, there may have even been people that were kind to me and yet found me withholding and overly nervous, people whom i rejected outright from my prism of narcissistic teenage survival mechanisms. i’m letting you know where i was at in the food chain. or where i thought i was.
the school teemed with predator and prey groups, and when new kids matriculated in (seldom, therefore notable), they became absorbed in the buzz. new girls were put on a high pedestal from which most fell rapidly, unable to adjust to the social norms of girl-groups formed at age five. one girl, i remember, transferred in the eighth grade. she was blonde and pretty, and even though she had a habit of wearing her hair entirely combed over into a high side-pony, she was given a temporary grant to hang around the other long-haired girls who wore theirs, by the way, either straight down or gathered up in a tall pony that swung high behind their heads, set by a headband of pre-wrap (whether or not you actually played a sport which may require such a material was not important).
what most new girls failed at was appropriately calculating the length at which you were supposed to keep the boys. talk about them, obviously. rank them, correctly. pursue one not pursued by the others, but who retained a similar social status. the new girl with the side-pony kept up pretty well, but had an affinity for the wrong type of boys (non-white). this aroused suspicion and subconscious unrest within the rest of the group, but the town was liberal and white and none of us were the kinds of girls who ever wanted to think those kinds of things. the girls had a knack for pushing people past expectations, past reasonable behavior, which may be how side-pony wound up giving a handjob in the subway bathroom (restaurant, not public transportation mechanism). surprising to none, this was her final transgression. she transferred out sometime halfway through high school.
there was some awareness of grades beyond our own — hot older brothers who drove, aspirationally bitchy juniors who drank pink amsterdam, skeevy tenor seniors who took freshman girls to prom and the like — but the day-to-day dramas were confined to the class. the world was small. when i was fourteen i thought that everyone was older than me but also that i was wiser than all of them (i read matilda more times than should be recommended). this kept me on a skeletal axis, from which i teetered without registering and thought myself immune to such trivial teenage phenomena as heartbreak.
+
all along, it was a fever /
a cold sweat, hot-headed believer /
i threw my hands in the air, i said “show me something” /
he said, “if you dare, come a little closer”
in between the main stage and the chorus room sat a hallway with a piano in it. the group of people occupying such a space between the hours of seven and nine on a Thursday night ranged — everyone from dedicated, acapella-group-belonging mezzo-sopranos (hello) to the kids who picked the chorus elective to fill an art requirement because it sounded easier than painting. when chorus 1 took the stage, a symphony of muffled tones distinguishable only in their reticence to belong to any kind of pleasant description floated right over the head of ms. johnson (herself singing louder than all of them) and into the punishing cave of the auditorium. everyone clapped.
waiting for the acapella portion of the evening to begin, i plunked across the hallway piano in a half-hearted rendition of Rihanna’s 2012 masterpiece (it holds up), “Stay.” it was one of those songs that had a memorable yet easily learned piano part — the only kinds i ever learned, as doing so proved to be both low-effort and high-reward. i sung under my breath, careful not to reach decibel levels comparable to the hardcore theatre jockeys, who would soon snag my spot to sing “Defying Gravity” to a respectable audience of only themselves.
i’m halfway into the second verse when the boy sidles up next to me and begins to sing along. it really happened that way. can you believe it? i couldn’t. clichés were things i watched from afar and made fun of privately — they were not ever bestowed upon me until, as it happens, this very moment.
i wrote my number on a scrap piece of paper and tucked it under his jailbroken phone before i left. his name was silas.
no it wasn’t, but for here it is.
+
silas lived in an apartment complex that was adjacent to mine — both populated mostly by young professionals in the area and college kids whose parents paid their rent. he wore patterned, short-sleeve button downs and long, henley shirts. he wore vans and sometimes a hat that barely contained his unwieldy, curly hair. he wore the same things all the time, which some people would think was a fashion choice but which i knew was hardly a choice at all.
there was an overlook somewhere along the walk between the high school and his complex, and in the fall when we knew each other i would listen to the newly-frosted twigs crunch between the soles of our feet and the concrete. he carried his skateboard correctly (i soon learned both what a “mall grab” was and also that i was prone to doing it). his bedroom was right by the front door, like mine, which would be perfect if we were sneaking around but was ultimately unnecessary given the limited supervision that applied to both of us.
silas lived with his sister, susan, who was 23 at the time. susan had her boyfriend over a lot, who silas didn’t take to very kindly — mostly because he felt that the boyfriend tried to occupy an uncomfortable space somewhere between friend and father, never quite convincing enough in either category. susan was 23 and acted like a real adult. when are you gonna finish that essay? get a few more greens on that plate. don’t stay out too late tonight. that kind of stuff. she was cool and she liked good music and she liked me. after dinner, the four of us would watch movies and silas would tap his leg on the carpeted floor, jonesing for some more weed. i felt like i belonged there, with them.
by that time, i was used to having a backstory that i relied on to seem interesting. my mother is mentally ill and left me on a train when i was eleven. after the divorce, we went bankrupt and our house got foreclosed. my dad and his new girlfriend are about to have a baby. i am self-reliant and bookish, but one time i snuck a cigarette from my dad’s work coat pocket and choked it down in the parking lot of our complex while listening to the arctic monkeys. i felt myself to be intriguing in ways inaccessible to those around me, partially because i felt familiar with a kind of tragedy that most i knew had never touched.
both of silas’ parents were dead. the self-satisfied way in which i announced my own childhood misfortunes hung like an acrid smell in the room after he told me. both of his parents were dead. this is not character development. the information sank me like a rock in a cool pond, and the cruel possibilities of the world became to me in that moment much more real than ever before. i put my hand on the arm of the boy who had two dead parents and i told him that i was sorry. and i didn’t really know what else to say.
+
we took the city bus into town and walked around the top floor of the parking garage. we had dinner with my dad and he was so high that my dad started laughing. we dawdled near the edge of the creek and i put my hand in the sleeve of his jacket. we sat in the gazebo and he said, come on, just a little bit, open your mouth, i’ll blow it in, and i tasted a hint of weed for the first time.
he was the first boy to ever take my shirt off. on top of his plaid comforter, after he became the first boy to ever put his finger inside me, he put it in my mouth. my eyes widened cartoonishly (i had only ever seen this in porn. was i a porn girl? now that i was getting fingered?) and he stopped. have you ever done this before? talking about the fingering. i shook my head. have you ever done this before? talking about my bare chest. i shook my head again. he laughed. you have to tell me these things, he said. i would have been slow.
being that he stopped at my first sign of discomfort — something other boys saw as a challenge instead of a warning — i looked up at the ceiling and felt that things had never gone slower. my want for him dripped like molasses, warm and soft, and slow.
+
i called silas crying from the back of a cab on new year’s eve to tell him that i had cheated on him. the cabbie looked disinterested as i tried to catch his eye in the rearview mirror. could he see how dirty i was?
i kept saying i’m sorry and i’m sorry and i’m sorry. the words spilled out of me in puddles, and i hung up unsure if silas could even understand me in my state. he kept asking me questions. i watched the blurred lights of passing cars morph into one indistinguishable wave, and then the driver dropped me off. stumbling from the car to my doorstep, i almost missed silas sitting on the curb. you are so drunk, he said. come here.
the next day, i made him promise that he wouldn’t say anything. of course, he wanted to kill the guy. sitting in the gazebo with my legs across his lap, a joint in his hand darting back and forth through the air, he described in detail the ways in which he might kill the guy. for the first time since it happened, i laughed. i saw the guy later that week and pretended like he didn’t tell me we had to keep the door closed. he pretended like i didn’t shove him into the wall so hard the dresser beside him trembled.
+
home was becoming an increasingly difficult place for me to be, so i often wasn’t there. it was mid-january, around my birthday, and dad’s girlfriend was about to pop. nobody had put curtains in my room yet, and i was using an upside down cardboard box as my nightstand. when the morning light streamed in, unforgivingly, i would blindly grasp for my phone, toppling the cardboard box and all it was housing. waking up from your mattress on the ground to see all your shit on the floor kind of takes it out of you after a while.
silas and i spent saturday mornings perusing his record collection, most of which were left to him by his dad. susan would pop her head in to encourage us towards the path of schoolwork (she knew i was a good influence in this way), and silas would shrug her off. i’m thinking of just getting my GED online, he said, thumbing a lennon record. yeah, that’s smart, i said, purposely not thinking about what the implications of him finishing high school early would be.
when my dad wasn’t home, he would curl up at my feet like a dog and beg to go down on me. i would laugh so hard and he would bury his face in the blanket. i never let him. i knew he had sex before me, and the fact that he was willing to go without for the time being seemed like the biggest sacrifice a sixteen year old boy could ever make. i knew then that i loved him. i knew before, is the truth.
my senior year i pulled in a record number of absences (82) for someone who also ended up being valedictorian. but before then, when i was fifteen, i went to class. when silas skipped, he’d snapchat me videos of him skateboarding down the greenway of a neighboring village or a picture of the weed he’d just picked up with the caption “gas.” i would roll my eyes and smile at my own concern for his education, maternal as i was. susan got on him about it more than me, of course, which kept me from being a nag — something i never wanted to be, especially in the company of someone so free and liquid as silas.
i loved being his neighbor. i loved knowing where the spoons were in his kitchen, how to hit the lightbulb in the bathroom just right so it turned on, how to get susan out of her spiral about silas’ tardies and into a laugh about some dumb joke we made earlier. i had temporarily given up starving for attention, and with the due date so close my absence was hardly noticed at home. one time i went three days without calling or texting and when i showed back up on monday my dad said oh, hey.
+
usually silas and i didn’t hang out too late into the evening on school nights, on account of me doing my homework. i was trying weed and getting fingered, sure, but none of that was going to stop me from funneling my need to control my environment (eating disorder hiatus) into academic success. this is why i found it a bit strange when he texted me, hey did you leave anything at my house except that sweatshirt? after i was already in bed on a tuesday.
ten minutes later, i opened the door and silas looked at me, backlit by the high beams on susan’s car. it was raining. can you believe it?
when he left, i crumpled into a pile on my bathroom floor and cried like i had seen women do in the health class videos where they give birth. i texted silas even though he told me he wouldn’t have a phone anymore. everybody leaves me, i spoke into the tile. my spit bubbled up between the grout and my face, popping into my mouth. i could hear the basketball game on tv in the living room. i breathed out of my mouth in shudders. everybody leaves me.
+
i think of silas a lot now. i also think of susan. susan, who ruined my life and sent my boyfriend to foster care. susan, who was 23 and texted me sternly that her parents would be rolling in their graves if they knew she let silas drop out of school. speaking of her parents in the present tense. i tried my best, is what she said. i didn’t believe her then, but now i do more than anything.
do you know i’ve never seen him again? not even once in person. i kept in touch with his younger brother, sebastian, as a way of keeping in touch with him. then sebastian and i became close — falling asleep on facetime together, screenshotting astrology instagram accounts (we were born on the same day), talking about the future like it was something we could map out on our hands. sebastian came to stay with me for a few days in the early summer of 2020, when i holed away in my grandmother’s declining beach condo. i spent a lot of time telling him that if he wants to sell weed so badly, he should move 50 miles north to DC so he can stop getting arrested for it. i sounded like susan. he smiled.
when i asked, he told me that silas was working on cars. saving up. i smiled behind my sunglasses and threw a net ball at leo, sebastian’s dog, who dutifully chased it into the sea.
i’m including an unlisted link to a song i wrote about silas shortly after he left. it was recorded on my iphone and played on a ukulele. such was the time.
the way I still remember you posting him on instagram and I was like omg she got the cool new skater boy !! but no idea the background of what he went through. that first love connection with someone is so special. thank you for sharing with us ❤️
this was stunning