Seven
Garrett is gone when I get up in the morning, so I decide to work on a composition I’m writing for my wind quintet.
Five of us—me, Trevor, Katrina, and our friends Ryan and Marcy from band—get together once a week to play for fun.
We’ve gotten good over the past year and have even been paid to play at a few weddings.
I arrange a lot of our music, and I have this stupid dream that we might perform something I composed myself one day.
I’ve written a few pieces for one of my online composition classes, but most of them feel uninspired, unoriginal, and unfinished.
I was proud of the last one I wrote, proud of the instrumentation and sweeping melodies, so I brought it to rehearsal. We played it all the way through, and when we finished, Trevor and Katrina exchanged an uncomfortable look.
“Uh, Enz?” Trevor had said. “Isn’t this the love theme from Star Wars: Episode II?”
And dammit if he wasn’t right. I had spent three weeks thinking I was a creative genius when I was accidentally rewriting the soundtrack to Hayden Christensen’s shitty acting from memory.
I haven’t finished a composition of my own since.
Too afraid that the strains of music drifting through my mind belong to someone else, I haven’t put any of them down on paper.
The only way to chase my dream of composing film scores is to actually write something, but that would mean I have to confront the mediocrity of my skill.
I plunk at my piano, trying to catch a melody just out of reach. It’s undeveloped still, more a feeling than a sound, a feeling of wanting—of something that’s missing but waiting just out of sight—a feeling like the heat that surged through my body under Garrett’s gaze last night.
But when I look up, the melody vanishes, my attention focused on something more tangible. Garrett’s door hangs open, morning sunlight streaming into the hallway from his window. Curiosity pulls me toward his room, and before I realize it, I’m standing inside.
He usually keeps the door closed, so I haven’t looked in here since he first arrived, and I marvel at how different the space is from the spartan guest room it was a week ago.
Dirty laundry lies scattered across the floor, an open duffel bag resting against the closet door.
A Raiders jersey is pinned to the wall above his unmade bed.
This surprises me. I thought sports fans stuck to one team.
Doesn’t Garrett always wear Falcons apparel?
And the room smells like guy. Musk and stale sweat and deodorant.
Hovering somewhere within that, though, is the smell of Garrett, musty and wild, like the woods that cover the iron hills to the north of town in late October.
I know I shouldn’t be in here, but now that I am, I can’t seem to leave. He is a puzzle whose pieces I have been collecting, and standing in his room is like glimpsing the picture on the box, like briefly seeing a more complete picture of him. It’s a chance to put a few of the pieces together.
A camera hangs above his desk by its strap.
It’s a good one, I think. In the empty space beside it, twine has been strung up, zigzagging across the wall, looped around thumbtacks.
Miniature clothespins clip a dozen or so photographs to the twine, photos I assume he’s taken. I move closer to get a better look.
In one, Garrett poses with a group of friends in front of a fountain.
He’s on the end, leaning in, obviously the one who set the self-timer and ran to join the group.
He looks different from the person I think I know—freer, somehow, the carefully controlled way he holds himself replaced by a wide smile, his arm thrown around the girl next to him.
And his friends don’t seem like the Tyler Jorgen and Evan Hegge type.
The girl next to him has a sharp, bleached pixie cut and combat boots.
In the middle of the group stands a round-cheeked boy, his hips popped out to the side, in a pose that screams out-and-proud. The group is eclectic, weird, cool.
Another photo catches my eye, a shot of items someone put on their lawn for garbage pickup.
I can make out a massive suburban home in the background, and I wonder if this was taken in Garrett’s neighborhood.
An old red tricycle serves as the focal point, rusted and missing a back wheel, propped in front of a cracked mirror.
The camera position makes the tricycle reflect in the mirror from a dozen angles, disjointed abstractions of metal and crimson.
The photo is good. I don’t know much about photography, but from what I remember from freshman art, the framing is perfect, the focus great, and it makes me feel a sense of nostalgia and loss. I wonder if the music I’ll compose will ever make another person feel something the way this picture does.
Most of the photos are like this one, capturing the sorts of things or people or places that we encounter in our daily lives but don’t take the time to notice.
Above all, that is what holds me in front of this makeshift gallery: the noticing.
The way Garrett’s eyes saw these things differently from anyone else, how he took ordinary objects and made them art.
I step back from the photo wall and focus my attention on the mystery of the Raiders jersey.
Maybe he’s only into a certain player, and not the whole team.
The name NASSIB, printed above the number 94, stares down at me, taunting me with my lack of NFL knowledge.
Pinned to the hidden side of the jersey, its corner just visible, is a small card.
I shouldn’t look at it.
But it seems like a gift tag or something, and my interest is piqued. I decide to take one quick glance and then leave his room alone.
I have to lean pretty far over his bed to read it, so I brace my arm against the wall to avoid touching his blankets. Groping his unmade bed would be an invasion of privacy. All of this is an invasion of privacy, but touching his bed would be too far.
I pluck the card out from behind the fabric of the jersey and read. To: Garrett, it says. From: Corey and Lisbeth. You know why.
This means nothing to me. Why did I think it would mean anything? I’ve never met those people, and the only thing I know about football is that wide receivers run fast and catch things.
“What are you doing?”
I yelp, lose my balance, and fall onto Garrett’s bed, my face mashing into his pillow. My brain registers the residual scent of his shampoo and hair product. It reminds me of those perfumed strips in the middle of magazines that are chemically engineered to smell like beautiful men.
I sit up. Emma leans against the doorframe, a bemused smirk playing across her face. The sunlight from the hall’s window illuminates the piles of brown curls on her head like a halo, as if she’s a judgmental angel who’s caught me doing something wrong.
“I’m doing laundry,” I lie.
“You’re in Garrett’s bed.”
I stand up. “No I’m not.”
She tilts her head to the side. “You do Garrett’s laundry now?”
“I can do nice things.”
Her eyes narrow, and she nods at the jersey. “I don’t think that’s dirty.”
“Duh.”
We look at each other across the room.
“Well,” I say, “what do you want?”
“Dad needs you,” she says. “Something about taking inventory of the Precious Moments figurines.”
“Then I should go help him,” I say, moving toward the door.
“I thought you were grabbing Garrett’s laundry.”
I glance at the clothing spread around his floor. A pair of inside-out joggers. Wrinkled T-shirts. Dirty boxers. Too many socks to count. I’m a guy. I know that some of those socks have more than just foot sweat in them. There’s no way in hell I’m touching another dude’s Special Socks.
But Emma is watching me suspiciously, and I’m not ready to admit why I’m really here.
I bend over and pluck a pair of athletic shorts off the floor and toss them into the laundry basket in the corner.
Then a sweatshirt. Then a few T-shirts. I avoid touching the socks and underwear, waiting for Emma to leave so I can drop this whole charade.
But she won’t budge because she knows I’m lying.
So, under her watchful eye, I collect every sock and every pair of musky boxers and place them in the now-full basket.
“This is really nice of you,” she deadpans.
“Thanks.”
Finally, having touched every piece of Garrett’s dirty laundry, I grab the basket and follow Emma downstairs. She peels off into the living room, and I back through the swinging door to the kitchen, having accepted that, at the very least, I’ll need to load all of this into the washing machine.
That’s when I run into Garrett.
Literally.
He’s standing on the other side of the door, looking at his phone, home early from football.
He’s wearing a tank top today. He looks good in a tank top, like he intentionally chooses the kind of clothes that will make other people want to take them off of him.
He’s all striped fabric and hard curves and warm skin.
As the laundry basket in my arms collides with his chest, his gaze shifts from his phone to the basket to my face.
He pops his earbuds out. I can hear the tinny sound of country music. “Is that my laundry?”
I look down at it, trying to buy myself precious seconds to come up with a valid reason for holding a basket of his laundry. “Oh,” I say with a shrug, “I was just doing a load, so I thought…”
“That you’d do my laundry?”
“Yes.”
He scowls at the basket. “I don’t see any of your clothes in there.”
“Shit,” I say. “I must have forgotten them upstairs.”
He squints at me. “You went into my room. And grabbed all of my dirty laundry.”
“Yeah. I guess.” At this point, I wonder if it would be less awful to just tell the truth, but I’m unsure which is worse: admitting to snooping around his room, or pretending to be his laundry bitch.
“Who the hell does that?”
Me, apparently.
He holds out his arms. “I can do my own fucking laundry.”
I hand over the basket. “I know.”