Dear Edward(21)

“Motherfucker,” Gavin said at the end, covered in sweat and grime. “We fucking did this.”

He held his fist out to Benjamin, and Benjamin, grinning, met it with his own.

“We sure did,” he said.

They became friends that night, and it was no big deal—just nice, but nice meant something to Benjamin. They had actual conversations, mostly because Gavin asked Benjamin questions and seemed interested in the answers. Benjamin told Gavin that he barely remembered his parents and that Lolly wasn’t his real grandmother—she had found him in a stairwell at the age of four and taken him in. Gavin told Benjamin that his father wanted him to take over his dental practice and that teeth made Gavin queasy, so he joined the army to escape the future that had been mapped out for him before he was even born.

Gavin was friends with everyone, so his friendship with Benjamin was a small part of his military life, but it was a significant part of Benjamin’s. Gavin liked to smoke pot—there were weeks of no activity on base, and in times of boredom, the captain looked the other way on things like marijuana and video games—and when he smoked, he told the kind of knock-knock jokes usually favored by nine-year-olds. Benjamin never smoked, but he made sure he was around when Gavin did, and he laughed hysterically while the other guys groaned.

The first-class flight attendant walks by his seat and gives him a smile. Boom chicka boom. Benjamin can hear her soundtrack so clearly she might as well be carrying a speaker on each hip. In his neighborhood, she’d have a line of men following her down the street, dancing to that beat.

He glances around at the rows of civilians with their untucked shirts, beer bellies, and pointless chitchat. The flight attendant is neat, pulled together, and in uniform, which he appreciates. The mess of everyone else’s appearance, and of their non-military lives, confuses him. Pull yourself together, he wants to tell the old lady next to him and the rumpled dad across the aisle. How hard is it to tuck in your shirt, straighten your posture, lose ten pounds?

Benjamin clenches his jaw. He’s not made to sit still. If he could only take a short break to run sprints, do push-ups, or even just stride someplace with a sense of purpose. He touches his side now, checking that the bag is in place, that he’s still contained by his own body.





July 2013

That night, when John and Lacey go upstairs, Edward is finally able to unfurl—his sadness, his blankness—into the empty living room. He’s not tired; he feels terrible and awake the same way he did ten hours earlier. I must be missing hormones, he thinks. Something to do with the word “endocrine.” There is a cycle that normal people ride: They wake up with the light, rub their eyes, get hungry, eat cereal, go about their days, and then, with sunset, begin to wind down. They eat again, watch TV, yawn, and climb into bed.

Edward sits in the middle of the couch, wired and surrounded by shadows. He hears the upstairs sink run, and the toilet flush; John is getting ready for bed. Edward had told himself that he wouldn’t do this again, but nonetheless he stands up, leaves the house, and hitches his way across the lawn.

When Besa opens the door, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Nonsense,” Besa says. “We’ll just have to find something more comfortable for you to rest on than a chair.” She leads him up the stairs.

Shay is wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants this time. Her hair is in a ponytail. She nods when she sees him. “I was thinking about you at camp today,” she says. “I’m glad you came over.”

“You are?” His voice squeaks with relief. This means she won’t send him away.

Besa has disappeared; they are alone in the lamplit room. Edward sinks down in the chair. He balances his crutches carefully against the bookshelf beside him.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.” Shay is on her knees on her bed. She looks excited. Edward identifies this emotion as if it’s an answer on a test. That’s a nimbus cloud. That’s the pancreas. That’s excitement. He feels around inside himself and touches the four corners of his flatness.

“You’ve read Harry Potter, right?”

He nods. Jordan was given the series as a birthday gift and then had the idea to take the books out of the library as well, so he and his brother could read them at the same time. They lay in their bunks for hours, for several weeks on end, mowing through one book after another. Jordan would call out from the top bunk: Holy cow, Eddie, are you on page 202 yet? The brothers had long conversations about whether Snape was in fact a bad person. They had once, after splitting a nearly full gallon of apple juice at the kitchen table, gotten into an argument so intense—Jordan insisting that Snape was the key, even the genesis, of all the evil in the books, Eddie saying he was essentially good—that their father had to send them to opposite ends of the apartment until they calmed down. “No more sugar!” Bruce had yelled. “And what the hell is a snape?”

Shay bounces lightly on the mattress and studies Edward. Her gaze makes him uncomfortable.

“I’m going to blow your mind,” she says. “Are you ready?”

The sinkhole inside him grows deeper, and he can taste weariness in his mouth. “I guess so?”

“You’re just like Harry Potter.”

He looks at her, not sure what to say.

“Okay, listen. As a child, Harry survived a terrible attack that no one should have been able to survive, right?”