19. Lance #2
Three hundred yards. Fog. And a man who stood in my doorway two nights ago and told me I’d regret it, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes you see him in every jogger in the county. I have been running that argument since eight o’clock this morning and it hasn’t improved with practice.
I don’t say anything about it to Jonny. He’s had enough of a day.
The apartment is very quiet.
He’s staring at his palms.
I sit down across from him and look at his hands myself. The splinters are still in there—at least three in his right palm, one of them burrowed so deep the skin has closed over it. He’s been sitting with these for hours.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” I say. I want to make it tender, but I can’t. Not now. It hurts too much to try. I go to the bathroom and get a pair of tweezers from the medicine cabinet. “Give me your hand,” I say.
“I can do it.” He takes them and starts working the splinters out of his left hand, setting the long shards of wood onto a saucer I give him.
It’s only when he puts the tweezers into his left hand that I have to intervene. His fingers won’t cooperate—the angle is wrong and his grip keeps slipping. He puts the tweezers down and flexes his hand.
I pick them up before he can try again. “It’s been a long morning and I can’t watch this.”
He looks at me for a second, then extends his right hand, palm up. “Thank you,” he says. Just that.
I work on the first two splinters, which come out cleanly. The third one needs a needle to get through the skin tissue. He doesn’t flinch. I marvel at the dexterity of his fingers—these are the fingers that I remember sketching me from the corner of a classroom. I wonder if he still does that.
I turn to inspect his left hand and find two more splinters he missed. I pull them out silently and put peroxide on them.
“I could have done that myself.”
“Why didn’t you, then?” I ask.
“I wanted to do it when I was at home. That way I wouldn’t inconvenience you.” He tucks the hand against his chest with the cuff pulled down over the heel of it and waits for me to hand over the tweezers.
Inconvenience me. I grit my teeth so hard I’m surprised they don’t shatter.
I nod. “You should eat. I’ve got leftover chicken, some frozen dinners, and half a burrito.”
“Nothing.” He pauses. “But thank you. I think I should go,” he says, standing smoothly.
“Take a shower. Get into my own clothes.” He glances out the window at his aunt’s apartment.
“You can practically see into my bedroom from this angle, I’ll bet.
” He smiles like it’s a joke. I don’t tell him how much I’ve seen from that window.
“Wait,” I say, before he can stand. “Are you angry at me for saying I’d drive you?”
He peers at me, surprised. “Does it matter?”
“To me.”
He hesitates. “I’m not angry. But I wish you’d stop treating people like they can’t sort out their own problems.”
“It’s not all people. It’s kind of a you thing.”
“Why? How can you be a sane person with everybody else and so overbearing with me?”
“I want to—” I trail off.
“You want to what?”
“I thought, when I saw you as an adult, I wouldn’t feel like this. Like I’m still trying to impress you and be your hero.”
He looks genuinely startled. “Impress me? Why?”
“Because you’re handsome and talented and kind. I stopped being amazing a long time ago, but you just got better.”
“Lance,” he says. It sounds like a warning.
“I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to you back then.
” He’s still holding the door. “You’d lost everybody and I decided I’d be everybody.
Your family, your best friend, your boyfriend, the whole lot, all at once.
I thought if I just filled up every inch of the space they left, you’d grow into me.
Like a tree around a fencepost.” I have to stop.
“That’s not love. I know what that is now.
I didn’t know it at seventeen, and I’d have argued with anybody who told me. ”
“People did tell you,” he says quietly.
“Two of them. My mother and Miss Martha.” I look at him. “I thought they didn’t understand.”
He puts out his hands. “It’s a long time ago. Why does it matter now?”
“Because I never got over you, Jonny Bishop. You’re just this splinter in my heart that nobody can pull out.” I look away. “I didn’t even know it was there until I saw your face.”
He looks stricken, but I can’t hold it in any longer. “I know you don’t have feelings for me. I’m not pressuring you, even if it sounds like I am. But I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
Jonny stares at the table, then lifts his gaze to me. For a moment, he looks like he’ll say something, and then he stops himself. He stands and offers me his hand. “Thank you, Lance. For what it’s worth, you didn’t need to apologize to me. It was just the worst timing. For both of us.”
I accept the handshake. There’s something final about it, like putting the corpse of us into a grave and closing the lid.
He goes to the door and turns back. “I’ll get you back the clothes.”
I lean against the wall, ready to throw the bolt when he’s gone. “No need. I’ve got more where that came from.”
“Well, then,” he says, and reaches past me for the door handle. The sleeve of my sweatshirt slides back off his wrist.
And there it is. That flash of green again, except this time there’s nothing over it, and I suddenly realize what I’m looking at.
I blink at it. He turns the knob.
“What’s on your wrist?” I demand.
He frowns at me. “Nothing,” he says, but I see the way he tucks that green bracelet away.
“Show it to me.” I reach out my hand.
“It’s a trinket I picked up in Vietnam.”
“Give me your wrist,” I repeat.
“It’s not what you think.”
“It’s exactly what I think. Please give me your wrist.”
He looks at the door and takes a shallow breath. “If I show you, I’m afraid you’ll see something I didn’t want you to.”
“What if I already know what it is?” I ask.
He’s silent. The knob is turned. He can open it at any moment.
But he doesn’t resist when I turn his body gently to face the light, and then closes his fingers over his wrist. “Please don’t, Lance. Please don’t look.”
“I have to. You know I have to.” I move his fingers away from the bracelet. Tension radiates off his body. I push the sleeve up slowly. His breath hitches softly.
“Oh, Jonny,” I say. Because I’m right. That green thing isn’t just a bracelet.
It was once a toothbrush. A Kermit the Frog toothbrush that’s been reshaped into bracelet form.
The bristles are long gone, but the head is still the same.
Kermit stares up at me, and suddenly I’m seventeen years old, sitting on my bed, handing this stupid, perfect gift to a boy who had nothing.
“I boiled it,” he says, like he can read the question on my face. “Pulled the bristles, dropped it in a pot till the plastic went soft, then curled it around my wrist and held it there till it set. Took me a few tries.”
I am undone.
He sat at my table for twenty minutes and dug splinters out of his own palm one-handed rather than let me near that wrist.
Every day for the past decade he has put this bracelet on his wrist. Through India and back. Through every country, every vlog, every morning. He has carried me with him and never said a word.
Our eyes meet. His face is open, vulnerable, stripped of every defense he’s built over ten years.
“Wait,” I say. I pull my wallet from the counter behind me and hold it out to him. “Open it.”
He takes it, confused. He flips it open and goes still.
Inside, behind the plastic window where a family photo would go, is a drawing—not the pencil original, but a copy, professionally reduced and laminated down to fit a wallet.
A knight in a full suit of armor, no helmet, a sword raised against a background of fire and chaos, drawn to look like the hero in a movie.
In the corner, the signature I watched him write ten years ago.
It’s the best thing Parker Bishop ever drew and he doesn’t know I’ve carried it every day since.
“The original is framed,” I say. “At my parents’ house. It’s—” I stop, because the word that wants to come out is “sacred,” and I’m not sure I can say that without my voice breaking. “It’s not something I can part with.”
He stares at the drawing. Then he looks at the Kermit bracelet on his wrist. Then he looks at me.
“This is a bad idea,” he says.
I say nothing. I can’t say anything.
“This is the worst idea,” he says.
I stroke the plastic of his bracelet. “Jonny,” I say. His name sounds like music on my tongue. “Jonny.”
He closes the wallet and puts it down on the table. He takes a breath. And then, very deliberately, he puts his hands on either side of my face and kisses me.