Back to Issue Fifty-Seven

ROLEPLAY

by PERSIMMON TOBING

Fine.

It starts like this, Selì.

Before the fire—before the night I will be born—the boy wakes up to his father, knocking on the door of his room. He can still taste the salt on his lips. The warmth of the floor. Mira and her lover in the castle of ice and stone.

He’s a sophomore in high school, a skinny five foot seven. In eight years, he’ll learn he has miniscule levels of testosterone, a genetic twink cursed to lust after pussy.

What’s that? It’s uncouth of me to brag?

“Bus,” his father says. And there it waits, the yellow school bus, forever a fixture in his window. The boy wears already (did he wake up in it?) a blue t-shirt and gray cargo shorts. He shoulders his backpack from the corner by the bed. When he leaves his room, he nods to his mother and father in the kitchen—his mother typing up lab results on the glass-topped table, his father staring into a tablet on the couch. The boy selects a sandwich from the counter, descends the stairs, kicks off his shoes—“Jacket!”, his mother yells down to him—and drifts into the cold with his puffer over his shoulder. He’s always loved the cold. I’m sure even you know why, Selì, my little LA-starlet. You know what the cold ices over. What it helps keep down.

On the bus, the boy tosses his things into a middle row and rests his head against the window. The engine putters. The air breaks squeal. As the bus rocks forward, the cold and the bumps in the road rattle him into a kind of half-sleep, and the thuds against his skull turn his conscious thoughts towards concussions. In his last Health lesson, he’d learned that concussions occur from violent traumas, or an endless succession of smaller ones. Perhaps it’s the brain, Selì, yearning at all times to break free.

Other students filter on. And salt has been scattered on the roads, to crack the ice and bleed it raw. When the asphalt evens out nearer the highway, the boy reaches out for the dream. He searches for it. He tries to pin it to the canvas of his mind…

You’re always so impatient…was that what her lover had said?

Can I help it? Mira had responded. When will I get a chance to do this again?

It will take thirty minutes to reach Leonia, where the boy attends class. There is no high school in his hometown. In the castle of ice and stone, he remembers Mira Avayne walking through insulated hallways, her lover trailing behind her. The boy remembers looking back at her lover’s short brown hair and quick fingers, listening to the folds of her dress as the two of them ascend the circular tower. Mira’s room, like the boy’s own, holds a window overlooking a courtyard. She has a desk with quill and inkpot, instead of a pen. A bed made from the feathers of winter birds…

The bus takes a hard jump through a New Jersey-pothole and the boy is drawn back to the world where he belongs.

“…Yeah bro,” says a boy named Adi, from the back of the bus. “I thought the Knicks were fucked, but then Lin came through, bro. He’s just like me, honestly. All glory be to God…”

And the dream drifts over again. Mira walks her lover to the edge of her bed and kneels before her.

“Just like that?” her lover says.

“Can I help it?” Mira responds. “When will I get a chance to do this again?”

She brings her lover down. Parts her thighs, beneath the dress. Feels the shudder.

“Cold,” her lover says, laughing. Then she digs her hands into Mira’s dark hair and pulls her hard into the space between her legs. Her lover’s breathing deepens, scatters. Flakes of snow pool at Mira’s feet, falling from her head, rhythmic in the motions of lip and tongue, back and forth, back and forth…

It is always salt that comes to the boy in this part of the dream. The harsh, sudden taste of it. The places change—taverns, forests, cold caves—but never the sex act, and never the role he plays. Can you remember, Selì? At this point in your life, did you know what you were becoming? The last time the dream comes clearly, the boy runs to the corner store after school to purchase a case of instant noodles. For a week, he slurps it down in the school cafeteria, just to let the salt linger on his lips. He runs to tennis practice, drenches himself in sweat, and returns home to lock the door of his room, to lie back and fuck himself while tasting the residue. Can you understand how it torments him? How he agonizes over whether he’s allowed to do it? For years, he wonders if he’s gay, if it’s gay to taste yourself, and on the bus that morning the driver glides down the hill that leads to Leonia High and stops by the side of the school. The boy is still asleep. Dreaming. Everyone shuffles out, even the driver, everyone except the boy and the junior from the back of the bus. Except for Adi. For kids like Adi, the boy has a bit of a reputation. A peculiar softness, a way his body can give under pressure. Adi, long-limbed and dark, a soccer star with no limit of female attention, knows this about the boy. There must be, for Adi, a kind of thrill, right? When he can catch the boy like this, dead against the window, the boy’s hand covering a half-hidden erection.

“Haru,” Adi singsongs, whispering close to the boy’s ear. “Time for school, babygirl.”

And do you remember, Selì? How it felt to flinch away? To wake up in terror and spread your arms across your chest? To knock your head against the window even as Adi only laughs, makes a kissing sound and drifts away?

You know what Adi calls him, before he reminds the boy he’ll see him in Spanish. How Adi will flick erasers at the boy in class, find him in the hall, leave marks on the boy’s soft body that the boy will count, later, along with every hair that sprouts from his meager chest.

Say it with me, Selì. Say what Adi whispers as he saunters off the bus. What the boy hides from himself as he tiptoes from class to class.

Say it and I’ll buy you a drink, Selì. Say it and I’ll take you home. Say it because they were right, weren’t they? Because boys are always the first to know. Say it because it’s true, and they can go fuck themselves, but first, Selì.

Say it for me.

Is that too much? Would I be shutting her out, turning her away? Or would she sit with me and take my hand? Part the space between us and bring her own life close to mine?

Maybe it really begins in the punk bar. On the night Selì and I have our first date, I walk from Victoria and Marigold’s beneath the overpass at MLK and turn right to ghost through the streets near Telegraph. Things have not been good. I remain unemployed. My ex-girlfriend, Grace, wants to know where I am, how I’ve been doing.

I live on a couch, I want to tell her. I pass the days pushing off the roommates who try to have sex with me.

And then there’s Selì, staring at her own reflection in the shop window twilight, just another doll I meet up with to pass the time. Dark leather, olive tone, and fingerless gloves, a silver Cupid dangling from one ear. Raven curls and gray-green eyes. By Rose’s Taproom, the Cal Ph.D students fraternize with local color, downing Sangria by the barrel. And Selì, lingering by the open door. A friend of hers passing by, a shared handshake, two clasped fists. And then I’m staring at the slight pink of her lips and thinking, please.

Let it be her.

And if I’d given Selì the story of my name, after we’d said hello, after we walked to Eli’s Mile High, the punk bar on the other side of the overpass…wouldn’t I have started with D&D? Would I have told her anything about faggotry or the fire, my dramas and secret fears?

In the bar, she’s laughing, Selì, drifting gray-green eyes over mine and motioning for me to continue. And I have nothing to lose. There will be other Selìs, right? Other astoundingly hot trans women with eyes that change in the rain—so what can I lose by being a fool?

“Listen bitch,” I gesture with my beer can. “You don’t know shit about salt. You don’t know how it piles on the roads, how they sprinkle it on the asphalt like parmesan cheese.”

“No, Apple,” she says, “You’re right! I’ve never been to the East Coast. They must let the cars just battle it out on the roads, right? Let them play hockey with human lives?”

I threaten to splash Tecaté in her direction and think something like fuck you. Even as she dares me to do it, smiling, offering her face in the manner of a very different fluid exchange. She was so different, I remember, so settled. Solid enough to dart out and try to hook me, to fish me, wriggling, and unspool everything I’ve ever wanted to say.

When I tell her the thing about Adi, she slides her whiskey soda from one ringed hand to another and pushes her hair out of her face. Drifts back for a moment, into the couch, into memory.

“I’ve only ever been called faggot twice,” she says, “on the streets. After middle school I mean.”

She laughs, a harsh, forward thing.

“Wasn’t everyone called faggot in middle school?” she says.

“I wouldn’t lie,” I say, quietly. “This all really happened.”

I can give you the math, I think. We played D&D on Sundays. I can backdate it from the article. And the dream could’ve been—

“Apple,” she says, resting a hand on my thigh. And what I think of is how, before all this, before the story, a man like a blue-collar organizer catches us lip to lip, fervent in his search for a pool adversary.

You two are cute, he says, and it feels nonthreatening, appreciative. It feels like a butch blessing.

We are as close now as we were back then. I am rigid with the smell of her, the divinity of her curls. She brushes wayward bangs out of the shadow of my eyes and leans even closer.

“Why do you already think,” she says, pressing a finger to my lips, “that I won’t believe you?”

Well then, Selì. Stay true. Stay the course. Before it gets worse, it has to get better.

I promised you Dungeons and Dragons and here it is: the very same week, on a dry Sunday evening, the boy’s father drops him off at his friend Noah’s apartment.

“Nine o’clock,” his father says, face hidden in the shadow of the open car door. The boy nods and turns to walk away. But before he can enter the apartment, his father calls his name.

“What time did I say?” he says.

“Nine o’clock,” the boy says. And then even as his father looks on, the boy disappears into the labyrinth of Noah’s apartment building.

Each week for the last four years, the boy has been driven here, clutching his backpack full of pens and the ice-blue folder containing his character sheet. In the beige hallways between housing units, the boy imagines flakes of snow, bloody tongues the color of cherries. Noah opens the door when he reaches their third floor apartment, Noah who he’d call his closest friend, though there are many things, the boy thinks, that Noah doesn’t know about him. Showers of acne dust Noah’s brown face, sunder the skin beneath his sandy hair. He’s a slight, stick-limbed distance runner, an immigrant from Brazil during the boy’s fifth grade.

Noah and the boy exchange greetings, the boy, from their quick hug, feeling many of Noah’s shallow, birdlike bones. And then he’s inside. Each time he enters this messy, two-bedroom apartment, breathes deep the scent of detergent and folded clothes, looks over the living room with its black couch and flat-screen television, he feels a part of him slough off, the great hardened shell of the person he needs to be. He has pulled all-nighters in this apartment, played video games resplendent in their violence, and lived almost a full life in the world of Solstice, body pumping with cheap pizza and cheaper soda.

Asher, Noah’s older brother, smiles at him from the dining table. And the boy smiles back. He smiles despite the metal flask near Asher’s right hand, despite the desperate, occult knowledge that all of this is coming to an end. As the boy sits down at their dining table, arranges his pens above the geometric line of his folder, he knows that Asher, messing with music software across from him, carries somewhere on his person the powder and flasks and cigarettes he needs to get himself through the long nights of his law degree. When the spring comes, Asher says, he’ll need to stop playing. And Noah on the couch—even as he does now, Noah will dig deeper into the joysticks of his controller, he and the boy’s paths continuing to diverge, the boy to his AP classes and test-prep, Noah riding the pipe dream of becoming a professional gamer.

And yet as they do every Sunday, Asher calls Noah over to play. Asher wears his yellow number 10 Ronaldinho jersey, his features rounder and smoother than Noah’s beneath longer hair, and even though Asher doesn’t swim anymore, the boy feels the echo of the thing he first felt two years ago, when Asher had roleplayed a scene involving the death of Mira’s father, and the boy had run home, shut the door of his room, and thought no, not a crush, not me. Had pumped his mind full of video game tutorials and homework, refusing to let his hand drift any lower than his waistband. Asher still smiles at the boy as he puts away his headset, as he hands out pencils and erasers and the seven plastic polyhedrals that govern fate in the world of Solstice.

“Ready?” Asher says.

Noah nods. And the boy is already half-here, in the apartment that smells of home, and half-somewhere else, in that world of winter and cold. In that world where his hair is long and dark, and he can weave ice from the tips of his fingers.

The dice clatter. The other world comes fully into being.

Are you with me, Selì? Would you wear the skin of this world for a while?

Follow me, then, as we gust through the courtyard, with its half-stone, half-ice statues of Frostmark heroes. Scythe with me between parapets, dart beneath snow geese, around armorers as they churn out weapons in that trademark silver steel.

There’s a war on, don’t you know? A rebellion. A chance for something to spring free.

In Castle Frostmark, in her childhood bed, Mira Avayne lies alone in red-and-silver livery, in her dress of royal silk. She could be sleeping, but for the stab wounds that circle her heart. But for the blood, thick and cherry-dark, which coats her upper body. At the table, the boy feels at his chest, at the spray pattern of bruises Adi had left behind, when he’d cornered him after Spanish class, alone.

I just need a pencil, Adi had said, smiling as he held out thumb and forefinger. Come on, Haru. All I need is a fucking pencil.

The boy takes a breath. The world of the apartment skitters and is gone.

“Will she wake up?” asks Noah, in the voice of a black-armored knight named Solan. In this world, he holds his helm under the crook of his arm, his jaw strong, his beautiful sandy hair longer and better kept.

“No,” says Asher. Says the voice of God.

“Something feels off,” Asher continues, in a drone that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. “You begin to realize they might be stalling.”

The bedroom is crowded with royal advisors. White-haired women in silver robes, women wearing circlets, women bearing bronze daggers and somber faces. Shifty eyes, the boy imagines. Female warriors in silver plate, edging towards Solan, their backs to Mira’s bed. Dubious herbs brought by healers that the robed women deliberate over, push away. And Solan in the corner, greatsword across his back, pacing relentlessly backwards and forwards.

“Perhaps,” Asher says, “they think it best if Mira remains in the coma.”

He looks to the boy. “Perhaps they want you to stay like this forever.”

And normally, the boy can’t get enough of this stage in the proceedings. The set-up and betrayal, how he and Solan can rely only on themselves and each other, which feels so aligned with the world he’s forced to inhabit. But he can’t help himself. It all feels so predictable now. He can see the lines in the Matrix, the way plot juts out like overexposed bone. He knows Solan and the guards will be coerced into battle. That dice will fall, metal scraping metal, that the advisors will flee, forcing Solan and Mira to clear the room and chase them, sending the game into its next scripted scene, but before he can protest, he finds Asher, at the table, staring at him.

“Mira drifts in and out of consciousness, dreaming dark dreams,” he says. Asher drills his light brown eyes into the boy’s own. “What would you say she’s thinking about right now?”

The boy squirms. He can’t help it. He, or her, or both of them—they’ve all been dreaming about death. Perhaps these are Mira’s thoughts, so close to her own demise, maybe he’s only infecting her thoughts with his own, but as he considers this, he begins to lose his grip on it, the world of Solstice. It all falls away from him. He turns from a character sheet strewn with markings—snowflakes and blood drops and silver swords—and thinks about that other question: could he live in a world without Mira Avayne? Obviously, you can make other characters, be other people, but the boy is considering a deeper death than that. If Asher really stops playing to focus on school, if Noah sighs and shrugs his way back to his notched controller and lubricated joysticks, then it really will die, the world of Solstice. The boy cannot keep the game going alone, even as he knows he needs these Sundays more than either of them do. He has no way of knowing what happens next. There’s a part of him that feels—that has always felt—that without it, he’ll walk alone through the night on a pale winter evening and make a turn somewhere and simply disappear. No one will find him. He knows this as surely as he knows that his world is wrong, that it cannot hold him, that he does not belong here.

“I mean, fuck,” the boy says.

Weary is the word that comes to him, but he shakes it away.

“I think she’d be like, I want to fucking live. Right?” he says.

And if she did die, the boy wonders, does anyone come after her? A young witch? A spry thief with quick legs firing a bow from a windowsill’s edge? A girl with sharp eyeliner and long, wavy hair? What happens to his dreams, if Mira dies? What happens to the taste of salt?

With Asher still looking at him, the boy leans back in his chair and says, “I don’t know man. Let’s just do it.”

Asher shrugs and stares at the boy for a moment, but then he moves on. As he nods, so begins the meat of the game, the part the boy enjoys less, the enemies that always assail them, the endless combat turns that sap his time in the world of Solstice. It is always the same. This time, the reveal is some plot on Mira’s life, some runic dagger plunged into her body, as the heir to Frostmark, and as Solan cuts his way through the guardswomen (traitors all) and chases the last advisor through the hidden tunnels of the castle, as a revived, near-dead Mira tears half-heartedly through scrolls to uncover some jealous, long-lost sister, during a particularly dull moment where Solan and the curse-augmented advisor have trouble striking one another, the boy gets up and walks to the couch. For a brief moment, he considers his own sister, her life, what her pain might be like. Then he is lost in the night, in the snow that he can see through the verandah window, snow that is no doubt being swallowed up by the dry, greedy ground, swallowed like it had never fallen at all. At the table, he sees Asher and Noah look at one another. Asher suggests a break. He grabs his jacket, puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder as he passes, and opens the door to the verandah so he can smoke outside.

It is eight-thirty. Noah sits down next to the boy on the couch.

“You good, dude?” Noah says. But before the boy can respond, Noah turns on the flat screen and picks up his controller. Soon, the boy has lost him to an online match, Noah’s hands flying through the inputs of the fighting game he loves so much.

“Yeah,” the boy says, watching Asher’s cigarette flick up and down in the cold. “Of course. I’ve never felt better.”

In the punk bar, when I pause, I see Selì drift away from me. Her eyes take in the night above us, the open air nothing more than a window for the stars.

“Oh don’t tell me,” I say, finishing the beer. “You don’t go in for fantasy?”

“It’s pretty,” she says, not looking at me.

“The sky?”

“Your story,” she says. “It’s a very pretty story.”

I wonder if she’s thinking, too good to be true. In the tilt of her hand with the fingerless glove, her soft skin, the slight angle of her face and jaw.

Or maybe it’s right now. This night. Everything that happens, that’s happening.

Because this isn’t what we do, the night of our first date. We don’t come here to swap stories. In the second floor of the punk bar, ascending to the balcony, we found the darkness for other purposes. My selfhood pinned in very different ways.

But I don’t want that. I want to keep going. I want to tell her, hey, do you want another drink? Do you want to keep listening?

“And how do you feel,” I would say, as she turns back to me. “About fathers?”

“Delighted,” she says, taking my hand. “As long as we don’t talk about my own.”

Dry is the way it feels when the boy walks home that night, the ground, despite the snowfall, as chapped as it ever is. Do you know that feeling, Selì, when you wear the perfect outfit for the cold, and your legs in the fishnets lose the perfect amount of sensation? It’s the boy’s hands that go first, as he walks beneath lamplight, then his legs, and then, almost, his toes. But by that time, he’s undone the lock of his parents’ front door, and stepped into the house that some would call his home.

It’s almost eleven. When his father did not call him, the boy remained at Noah’s apartment until far past his curfew of nine o’clock. Somewhere beyond ten-thirty, with Mira about to confront her sister, the one who stabbed her, Asher taps out, citing a class early the next morning. The boy looked down to check his father’s texts—normally, I’m here; where are you?; Haru, hello?; Walk home alone—but saw he’d been sent nothing. There was something more ominous about the walk, as the cold took him past empty houses, this ignored and forgotten trudge through the darkness alone.

In his parent’s house, the lights are still on. The boy kicks off his shoes. Slowly, he ascends to the kitchen and dining room and there his parents are, waiting. They gaze at him, his father wearing a gray polo and wire-rimmed glasses, his mother, in slacks, bearing a glass of wine. A symphony is playing. Trumpets graze the silence of the room.

“Well,” his father says. “You made it.”

“I’m sorry,” the boy says. It’s too soon, he thinks. The cold hasn’t left his body. He needs to warm up, five or ten minutes, to remember what it is to feel, so he can shut it all off again. “I—Can I drop my things in my room?”

His father eyes his backpack. He looks at the boy and shakes his head.

“No,” he says.

The boy stares. Then, still defrosting, his fingers pinpricking and the rest of his body going haywire, he walks over and takes the seat across from them. The lights feel too bright, the windows too dark. He takes off his bag and places it in the chair next to him.

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right,” his father says. He looks at the boy’s mother, who is inspecting the color of her wine. “We were just curious, your mother and I. Weren’t we, honey?”

It’s like she’s been given a cue.

“Well what were you even doing there?” she says. “What could you possibly be doing to make yourself two hours late for your father to pick you up?”

The boy thinks, ninety minutes.

“You know,” he says. “Just games. We’re just playing games.”

“Hear that, honey?” his father says. “He’s just playing games.”

“Games?” she says. “What do you mean? Video games?”

His father eyes the boy’s backpack. “What do you need that for? If you’re just playing games?”

“For notes,” the boy says. “Notes on the games.”

“I’m cold,” he adds, and at that, his mother stands and begins to refill her glass from the bottle on the counter. It’s the wrong thing to say, even if it’s true. He would not be cold, after all, if he’d just brought a jacket. If he’d shown up on time. He sees the frustration in his mother’s eyes as she sits back down, and his father continues to look at him.

“I’d like to see them,” his father says. “These notes.”

His father turns to his mother, who nods along.

“Yes,” she says, swirling the glass. “Show us, then.”

When the boy does not answer, his father says, “You know? I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait two hours for anything.”

He laughs. “How about that, honey? Maybe the DMV. What would take longer? Picking up your son or renewing our car’s registration?”

When the boy still doesn’t respond, rubbing his hands together, his father looks to the windows.

“You know,” he says. “It can always get colder.”

“I’m not sure they’ll make any sense to you,” the boy says. “The notes.”

“You’re smart,” his father says. “Please explain them to me.”

“I’m sorry, okay?” the boy says. “I just got carried away. It won’t happen again.”

“But this happens every Sunday, doesn’t it?” his father says. “You coming late to the car. Two hours I would have waited. The engine stalling. Draining the anti-freeze. I think we need to find the source of the problem.”

“Wasting six hours a week,” his mother says.

“I’d like to know what I’ve been waiting for,” says his father.

The boy almost rubs his hands again, but thinks better of it. “What do you want me to say?”

“You could open that bag,” says his father. “Ten minutes we’ve been watching you stall, hoping you wouldn’t have to open that bag.”

The boy doesn’t want to give that to him. He knows that to open the folder will release some part of him into the house, a part that doesn’t belong there. He doesn’t know why. His father would not understand the character sheet. He would probably not even know Mira’s name, let alone her powers or gender. There are many, many leaps his father would need to make to understand the nature of what happens every Sunday. But all the boy knows is that he doesn’t want his father to see it. He knows, suddenly, that the two of them must be kept as far from each other as possible, and just like that, it starts, the crying.

“It’s just a game, okay?” the boy says, bringing his hands to his face. “It’s like…a video game. It’s just another way to hang out.”

His mother retreats to the counter, though her glass is still nearly full.

“He’s crying,” she says, and it’s an accusation, but the boy knows she’s directing the statement at his father. It’s strange, how aware of these things he becomes, when he loses control of his body. He is dimly aware of himself convulsing, can hear the sounds he’s making, but it all feels very distant. Like it belongs to another world.

“Just let him take the bag,” his mother says. “He needs to practice.”

“I don’t know, honey,” his father says. “What if it’s drugs?”

“Drugs?” his mother says, with a quick, vicious gulp of her wine. “Our son, doing drugs? Look at him.”

His father does, look at him. His son in a stained shirt and thin, ill-fitting shorts. For a moment, perhaps, he remembers something, maybe the connection between them, and rises to press the boy’s face against his chest. The boy registers this, the softness of the polo’s well-worn fabric. Then his father and mother walk away, taking a moment to look at him together. Five minutes after they leave, the motion-sensor lights go out.

In the darkness, the boy finishes defrosting. He thinks, if only I had those ten minutes. He thinks, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Yet he’s won, hasn’t he? He still has Mira, safe in his bag. He’s won.

It’s somewhere past eleven-thirty. He has forty-five minutes of practice before he can sleep in his day clothes.

Ten minutes pass before he peels himself from the chair. He walks up the stairs, to the piano in his parents’ bedroom.

This, I think, is going too far for sure. But I lied anyway, about Selì, the parts of me I gave to her. We did not talk about the fire, my name, everything after. This is what really happened.

Selì was every bit as gorgeous as one could imagine, with the olive skin and the dark, curly hair. The pictures on her profile seemed surreal—how beautiful she was, in the sunset, in the red light of her room. On the couch in Marigold and the DJ’s apartment, girls who will become important later, I dodged a kiss from Vicky as I did my makeup for the date, busing down Telegraph with my reflection glowing, catching Selì as she was dropped off in her girlfriend’s car, and following her down the street to Rose’s Taproom.

We really did get drinks together. We really did journey under the overpass, almost hand-in-hand, to Eli’s Mile High, where we talked about our gamer pasts, about ketamine. Where a butch organizer catches us making out, where I make a fool of myself at pool, causing Selì to promise me that she isn’t upset, isn’t embarrassed. We take our drinks into the rafters and the balcony is empty. But we didn’t go so I could tell her the story of my name. We go for the space and the privacy. We go so she can pin my body to the wall.

“Oh yeah?” she says, as she guides me from the chair. “Is that what you want?”

What I want. Always getting what I’m supposed to want, Apple, the things I’m better for. Selì wears press-on nails, pink, white, black. I tell her to press her knee into my crotch, to thrust my arms against the wood.

“Like this,” I say. “My wrist, not my hand. It’s more stable.”

And maybe I see…am I making it up? Concern in her gray-green eyes. As if she’s worried we’re going too fast, like she can’t decide if it’s right to devour me right then and there, to split me open and scoop out whatever’s still inside. Maybe I push her. Maybe I do want it. It is everything I am used to.

She runs her eyes over my body. She makes her decision.

“Like this?” she says.

I nod. I close my eyes, to disappear.

“Harder,” I say, as she kisses her way down. “Harder,” as she tears the thin fabric of my top.

After, we take a car back to her place. It’s only a four minute drive. She has her hand between my thighs the whole way and again, I think about wanting it. How I always end up getting the thing I’m supposed to want. We stumble inside, kissing, kissing, and after she falls onto the couch, I loop one leg over her lap to straddle her, to fix her there. But she’s pulling away, suddenly, those soft, soft arms wrapping around herself as she goes empty, scrunching up her nose.

“I don’t know,” she says, after a long moment. “I really like you, Apple.”

“I like you too, Selì,” I say. Mechanical.

“No,” she says, “I like you, like you. Like I don’t just want to fuck you, you know? Like I think if we fucked and I never saw you again, it would break me.”

I rise, leaving her behind. I get it, what she means. What she wants. There is a cup of water on the fireplace mantle and I go to it to take a quick drink.

There are certain things, I think, that we can handle, at certain moments. And also things we are forced to become.

“Fuck,” she says, “Fuck, Apple. Is this too much? Is this bad?”

“No,” I say. “No. Not at all.”

But I’m lying. I can see, already, the two parts of me. The part that will run away, that will call a car and head back to Marigold’s apartment, remove Selì’s profile, and block her number. And the other part, the part that would sleep over and see it through. In the window, I see that other self, that pretty girl, with the metal reflected in her right hand. Done up and staring. And behind her, a moonless night.

What if the moon had been full, I think now? What if I’d had something to bless me?

Selì waits for my response. As I stand there, it comes to me that I must be waiting, waiting for something, too.

It’s always been so much easier to play pretend. To keep imagining this version of our date where we don’t fuck, where Selì and I just hold each other. Where I know, because I decide what happens, that she won’t run away with everything I’m going to give her.

In that version of our date, at Eli’s under the stars, I wipe my eyes and clear my throat.

“What do you think happens next?” I ask her.

“I would assume,” the other Selì says, smiling, her hand on my arm, “the fire.”

On the day of the fire—a Tuesday, dated from the article of the Avalon blaze—it’s drier than ever. It’s so dry the boy buys a water bottle. It’s so dry he tosses in a nasal spray and forgets to pay for it.

Don’t they say, Selì, that early girlhood is defined by shoplifting?

The boy works after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, watching over kindergarteners left at the music school for enrichment. From time to time, he’ll look up from his fantasy novel to smile as the boys show him math homework or stuffed animals, before they’re old enough to know words like faggot or pussy. He works near Noah’s apartment, at the Avalon, but never visits on the weekends. He has no interest in watching Noah play Smash, or stopping by with Asher off dorming in the city.

Somewhere after seven, when the boy’s shift ends, he turns the corner and finds it waiting for him, the fire. The watchers, quoted in interviews that will later make the news article, say it first appeared like everything below the cliffs was aflame. That it was a relief to know it was only one building, yes, one building of shoddy construction that had already gone up a decade ago. Shouldn’t they have known? Couldn’t they see the dry trees and old petrol tanks? Didn’t they know the lot had once been a graveyard? Of course they’ll build it again, these companies. Two fires in twenty years…

Though the news story reports embers forty-feet high, a street-spanning, all-night inferno, the boy remembers little of what the fire looks like. Of all those on the salted asphalt of River Road that night, he alone is staring back at the watchers. He sees dogs dragging their owners away from the blaze. Joggers who aren’t jogging, shoppers with split paper bags, mouth after mouth after mouth set into wide, disbelieving o’s. How dare you, he starts to think, how dare you. Look away…but what is he going to do? How would the watchers know what they’re looking at? He passes a camera crew unsnaking their wires, an anchorwoman using the firelight to fix her hair.

Further down the news article, they’ll report it was a gas leak. Faulty fire prevention measures. That the alarm was raised so early no casualties are reported, that folks even had time to rescue their dogs and cats. Noah later tells the boy his family had left early, when it was clear the fire was real, worried some offshoot spark would light the trees on the cliffs behind them.

“A damn miracle, don’t you think?” Noah says, when the boy joins him at Target to help shop for new clothes.

“Something like that,” the boy says.

When the boy gets home the night of the fire, he can still see smoke a mile down the road. He wonders what Mira would have done, if there is ice enough in any world to curtail the burning. But then he remembers—even before he ducks under caution tape two days later, walking through the corpse of the Avalon and what it’s become, the great gray field of melted lockets and burnt computers and character sheets and dice—he remembers if Mira’s world is dead, then she’s probably dead, too.

It’s an imaginary game, Dungeons and Dragons, and certainly the world can be recreated anywhere, but even before they try again, Asher and Noah and the boy, the boy can feel it’s dead, that they will never play again. He feels this before Noah ever texts him to tell him he’s okay, before he meets Noah two months later in his family’s new home—crowdfunded? Honey, wouldn’t you like to crowdfund your son’s education?—before the failed online sessions where Asher says things like “fuck this dumb Discord shit”, unable to keep the slurring from his voice, before they stop scheduling sessions, before the boy recommits to school—to the tennis team, to his AP classes and test prep, to his parent-mandated piano competitions that earn him a performance at Carnegie Hall, before the boy takes off his glasses in Senior year and replaces them with contacts, before, as he wears a polo shirt and pastel shorts, a girl named Young-hwa says, “that’s not Haru anymore, that’s Harry”, before he drinks his first screwdriver in a New Jersey noraebang and sees a girl named Angel eye him like he’s naked, before he returns home from the West Coast’s most elite undergraduate institution to see they’ve rebuilt the Avalon, as he sits in the gazebo they’ve constructed in the new courtyard, staring out at the city, before he realizes he still yearns for something he doesn’t understand. Before the night is even over, the boy considers that question again: what would you do if Mira dies? He knows the answer now. He’ll find someone else. He will always look for someone else.

In his room, he turns on a printer and births a new character sheet, dreaming up a blank slate of a girl—a young, spry girl with beautiful, wavy hair, just a little bit slutty, a girl who will love dresses before she hates them, who will walk through the world with eyeliner sharp enough to kill—and scrawls my name across the top of the page. Apple. A girl you can sink your teeth into. A girl to get stuck in your throat. But before he can finish the character sheet, he thinks again about what he wants. About what he’s really doing. And then instead of drawing me up, he sits there with that piece of paper and withdraws his folder from his bag, to take out Mira’s character sheet, too. Four or five times, he’s remade her sheet, erasing and rewriting her health points and abilities, and now he takes both in his hands, walking out of the empty house and into the driveway, where he finds the old gas grill his father never uses anymore, and the gas lighter resting on the ground next to it.

“Did you burn it?” asks Selì, the Selì from the night where we don’t fuck. The one who isn’t real. “You tried, didn’t you? But it didn’t work, did it?”

Her laugh is a hollow thing, echoing through the empty bar. She stares at me, her eyes a ghostly gray.

“And yet you’re still here,” she says. “And yet you made it.”

She looks at me. “Didn’t you?”

On the night of our real date, Selì leaves the couch to go to the bathroom. And I leave, too. Just up and walk right out of her apartment, not even bothering to call a car. Under the overpass, I walk alone, bright and blinding, past men who stare but who would never fuck with me. I walk into the moonless night, where I belong.

 

Persimmon Tobing is an Indonesian-American trans woman—raised in New Jersey, but a California girl. She is a Kundiman fellow, an Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholarship recipient, an Associate Editor at the Northwest Review, and a scholar to the Tin House Summer Workshop. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript called “What Makes Us Girls,” a novel in which “Roleplay” is the first chapter. If you’d like to keep up with her (at times professional) life updates, you can find her on Instagram at @daik0ndyke.

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