On Rotation(9)

“Nice of you to wait”—I checked my phone for the time—“fifteen minutes to tell me that.” I bent forward in a stretch, making a show of shaking out my kinks. “Are you almost done?”

“Yup,” he said. “Just hang on a second.” He pulled a corner of his top lip into his mouth, his eyebrows furrowed with concentration. I watched him as he switched between colored pencils automatically, using only red, yellow, and blue. After a few more minutes, he grinned up at me. “Okay. Here.”

I sat next to Ricky on the bench, accepting the sketchbook when he handed it to me. In the millisecond before it could exchange hands, it occurred to me that he could like to draw but be terrible at it and I would have to praise this stranger for highlighting my worst features—

I needn’t have worried.

“What the hell, Ricky,” I said, dumbstruck. By cross-hatching the primary colors together, Ricky had managed to bring a new, shimmering dimension to the garden, merging and blurring the flowers and leaves into a mere suggestion of themselves. And the image of me—it emanated peace and contentment and none of the turmoil I was feeling in reality. He’d made me so beautiful, and so effortlessly. My throat tightened, and I felt my eyes well with tears again.

“Do you like it?” Ricky asked.

“O-of course. It’s stunning,” I stammered. The tears I tried to hold back trailed down my face, and I sighed and wiped them away before they could fall onto his small masterpiece. “Oh no,” I said, exasperated. “Sorry. I can’t seem to stop doing this today.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Ricky said in a low voice. Then he added, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No offense, Ricky,” I said with a snort. “But why do you care?”

Ricky’s expression didn’t change. Instead, there was a flicker of strain behind his eyes, like a light being turned off and then back on again, gone and back so quickly that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been specifically searching it out. But then his smile disappeared altogether, and he leaned back on the bench, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“I . . . Honestly, I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just knew that if I didn’t talk to you, I’d regret it.”

You are not an experience, Rational Angie said, but Hopeless Angie had already taken over. This close, I could see that Ricky’s eyes were the color of Coca-Cola, the kind in a glass bottle, clear mahogany in the shifting afternoon light. That he smelled like freshly laundered clothes and spearmint gum. My gaze drifted to his exposed forearms—not muscular, exactly, but masculine, with roping veins and long lines of sinew. I wanted to ask him what about me he thought he would miss. I felt like he would answer truthfully, and that that answer would fill me.

“Fine,” I said. “But . . . law of equivalent exchange,* okay? I need your tales of woe too.”

If he was offended by my demand, he didn’t show it. Instead, he let out a bark of laughter.

“Oh my god,” he said, looking at me with awe. “Is that a Fullmetal Alchemist reference? Are you a weeb?* See? I knew it. I knew you were kin.”

His smile was so damn bright that I had to avert my eyes. Thankfully, he was too busy fiddling with the zipper of his hoodie to notice. I thought at first that he was removing it because he was too warm, but instead he pulled the lapels apart to show me the symbol on the shirt he was wearing underneath it.

“An Earthbender,* really?” I said, chuckling at his enthusiasm. I would give the man credit where it was due; he was very good at cheering me up. “Would’ve pegged you for Air, actually.”

Ricky looked genuinely affronted.

“An Airbender? Me?” He scoffed. “What would give you that idea?”

“Your sunny disposition?” I posited. “Your general spontaneity?”

“Me?” Ricky said. “I’m not spontaneous at all.”

I snorted, gesturing in an arc around us.

“Ricky. Hate to break it to you. But, uh . . . why am I here, talking to you right now, if you’re not spontaneous?”

“I thought we established that my talking to you is part of a great cosmic plan,” Ricky said, smirking. “No, but really, I’m not. I angst over every decision I make. It took me years to build up the courage to just say fuck it and do what I wanted to, you know? I almost ended up going to law school because of that.”

“Law?” I swallowed, imagining Ricky, hair slicked back, socializing with Frederick and his seedy lawyer friends in the back of a bar that straddled the line between classy and drug front. “That’s . . . huh.”

“Yeah, I don’t see it either. My grandpa did, though, so I entertained it for a bit,” he explained.

“Really?” I asked. Immigrant parents pushed their kids into medicine all the time, but, as Momma had astutely observed, Lawyers don’t make that much money these days. “Does he work in the field?”

Ricky laughed.

“Nah,” he said. “He’s a carpenter. Like it or not, I clearly got the art thing from him. He mostly builds custom furniture these days.” He pulled out his phone, beaming with pride. “Like . . . check this out.”

He skimmed through a series of photos showcasing beautifully sculpted, detailed vanities. One of them even had an interactive mirror, the likes of which I had only seen on the internet. I gaped.