Chapter 3 #3
I nodded.
We drove in silence. At the front of my building, Stephen kissed me, hand against my face. The seat belt sliced my collarbone. It would be easy enough to take him upstairs, get into bed, fold against one another. But instead I said, “Let’s make another plan soon,” and bolted from the car.
I lay on the couch, staring across the room, and noticed the box from the cell phone store.
I sat up and opened it. The phone felt strange in my palm, surprisingly weighty, my thumb slipping across the slick surface.
It hummed to life and I moved around its layers.
I opened the camera and found the way to flip it around, so my face filled the screen.
I scowled at my image and clicked it shut.
And then I saw the little square for Facebook.
I had an account I never used—someone in my grad cohort had insisted we all sign up.
I guessed at my password, the same one I used for everything.
People I hadn’t spoken to since coming to Sawyer populated the little screen.
Someone had landed a new job, the announcement followed by a chorus of praise.
There were photos of babies and somebody’s dog that had just died.
That seemed an odd thing to broadcast to the world.
There was a message at the top asking me to update my information.
My location was still set to New York. It felt sad to put in Sawyer; like accepting defeat.
But then it occurred to me—would Tyler be on here?
It took three attempts to type his name into the tiny search bar—how did people get used to a phone without keys?
—and then his page appeared. A whole world revealed itself to me, but in a code opaque and undecipherable.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of what Tyler and his friends were talking about, although Sawyer and what it meant to be a Sawyer student was a running dialogue.
What they took for jokes felt harsh or inexplicable.
Tyler posted photos that had nothing to do with him, spelled things wrong on purpose, made bold proclamations and then contradicted himself on the next line—about television shows, bands, food, anything.
There was something annoying about it, or cloying.
Something typical of his generation. A performance for its own sake.
Moving backward in time, I got to Tyler in high school, in Charlotte.
Some photos from soccer, overblown snapshots with friends at house parties.
A mound of bodies squeezed into a car. A gathering in a clearing in the woods.
In almost every photo, six-packs and enormous plastic handles of cheap liquor.
Lit joints lifted in grand, hubristic gestures.
Did none of these kids have parents? It wasn’t my idea of fun, but there was a togetherness, and I felt a kind of envy.
This had been Cassie’s life, perhaps, but not mine. Not then, not now.
I clicked another photo: Tyler prone across the roof of a car, arms spread wide, reaching through the black surrounding space.
Looming above him, a shirtless guy in baggy khaki shorts gripped a bottle of something at his crotch, fat tongue spilling out.
Liquor streamed from the bottle into Tyler’s mouth, like piss.
It seemed embarrassing for Tyler, playing at masculinity to fit in.
In the comments someone had called him a “homo,” but he replied with a joke, a funny admission.
And I understood: Tyler wasn’t trying to fit in, he just did.
There was no secret here, nothing to hide. And then I felt embarrassed for myself.
I opened another album. Childhood photos.
I clicked one. A picture of Tyler with a woman.
Even in the small, grainy scene, the resemblance was immediate.
His mother. It looked like a camping trip: a hardscrabble of trees, gray river just visible in the background.
Other Sawyer students had spent their childhood summers on Martha’s Vineyard, at art camp in Italy.
His mother’s mouth was set in a thin line, hand at her hip.
I could imagine Tyler’s father coaxing one more shot, the mother impatient.
Beside her, Tyler crouched on the ground.
Twelve, maybe thirteen years old. His child’s face had not yet grown around his changing features, which looked misplaced or uneven, stretched out like putty.
That distorted look of early puberty, his next self straining to emerge.
Tyler held a snorkel in hands too large for their skinny arms, clutched in front of a bare, concave chest, his skin flush with sunburn; a pink ring marked where his shirt had been.
I stared at the photo, my chest buzzing—and then a tidal wave of surprise crashed over me.
I tossed the phone, hurling it away. What the hell was I doing?
I looked up at the clock on the opposite wall.
Over an hour had passed. It was like I had blacked out and just come to.
I reached for the phone and picked it back up.
I pushed on the Facebook app, like the guy at the store had shown me, and deleted it.
It melted into the ether, making a small, satisfying sound, like completion.