“We moved here from Pinetop a few months ago,” he said. “Great timing, right? I got like two months at my new school before it shut down. Me and my dad. It was so not okay up there.”
That made sense to me. He’d been all closeted up for so long, and now that he could, he was wearing his queerness on his sleeve. Because he could. Griffin was veering left and right, like a prisoner on his one daily outing, which I suppose in a way he was. I stopped to let him sniff and then water a tall succulent that sat in front of a short peach fence. Daxton stopped too, and he crossed over toward where I was. I looked behind me, wanting to make sure there was enough room to give him distance.
“That makes sense,” I said. “Do you like it here?”
He nodded. “I like my high school. School for the Arts, you know it?”
My eyes lit up. “Oh, cool.”
“Yeah, my dad did okay on that one. He’s like NASCAR Dad with a heart of gold. It’s totally weird.”
We lingered as our dogs sniffed near each other, and the two adults were far in the distance now. I pointed, as if to say we should hurry up, and he shook his head and said, “It’s Caj.”
I wasn’t sure I should, because people don’t like being corrected. But I took my chances.
I said, “Um. It’s actually Kaz. Like with a z.”
He gave me this look like, What?
Which was when it hit me that he meant their little dog-walking brigade. Was caj. As in short for casual. And I thought, Why do I even speak, ever? This is why I should join a monastery. So I nodded like I hadn’t just made a fool of myself, and then I played the scene back in my head and realized that there was no way to avoid it, so I giggled. And he giggled. And that made the awkward feeling pressing against my chest go away.
“Hello, Kaz with a z,” he said. “I’m Daxton with an x. And other letters.”
I’m sure he could see I was blushing, but I hoped to god most of the red was under my mask.
We made a plan to meet up to walk the next day, and somehow, I didn’t spend the entire day obsessing about conversation topics.
Who am I kidding? Of course I did.
—
The next day was one of those rare rainy days, when the sky sags in the corners, where it goes foreboding gray and you kind of know you might be in for a monsoon. We walked alone, just the two of us, and while I felt a little like Yoko Ono breaking up the Beatles, I liked it better this way.
He wore a black and red mask with the word love in cursive all over it. I wore a hospital-issue blue paper one. This seemed a little descriptive of the difference between me and Daxton.
What I longed to do was take my stupid mask off. Mostly because maybe it would get him to do the same and allow me to see Daxton’s full face. Without seeing his mouth, it felt like I was still missing this essential part of who he was.
I pulled at my mask dramatically.
“Damn. I wish we could take these off.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “But my dad has diabetes. He’s high risk. I definitely can’t.”
I sighed, defeated. “Yeah. My mom works in a hospital. She’d kill me if she found out. On the plus side, at least I wouldn’t die of the pandemic.”
As we waved to the old lady with the German accent who sat on her porch in the mornings with her cats, Daxton said, “Do you ever get tired of yourself? Like, really tired?”
I stopped walking. Griffin pulled toward the cats, but my mind was on what Daxton had just said. I stared at him. Yes, of course I did. But this seemed like a trap. Like something a Normal says to make you let your guard down, and then they pummel you with it.
“I don’t know.”
He had stopped walking, too, as I guess he needed time and space to ponder my brilliant comment. Then he said, “Well. I sometimes think, like. I can never leave my brain. It’s always talking, twenty-four-seven. I’m so sick of me.”
And I thought, Yes! Me too! But I didn’t dare say it. So instead, I nodded a lot as we strolled down different sides of Pinchot, and he shared things that were way too personal for me to ever say loud enough to be heard fifteen feet away, things about his mom’s death, and his dad crying softly behind closed bedroom doors after. I watched him, wondering what it would feel like to be confident enough to share private stuff like that, and this little part of me wanted to say something about when my dad left two years ago, my mom told me we had thirty days to mourn, to cry and be sad, and then we had to be done. But I wasn’t Daxton, and there was no way those words would ever breach my lips. So instead I nodded a lot, and said “yeah” and “right” a bunch of times, and when we got to my house, we paused, I did a meek little wave, and he wiped sweat off his forehead with the bottom of his tank top. Despite the cloudy day, it was already pretty hot. I tried not to stare at his bare belly button and the smooth musculature of his torso. It was weird. I had now seen that but not his mouth. I wondered if the first time I saw his actual mouth, it would be like the first time seeing Nimo naked.
“I’m sorry
