1 5

roll

verb. using quick drum strokes to produce a sustained sound.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

I CAN ADMIT WHEN I'M wrong about a person.

I try not to be wrong about people in the first place—by listening and being attentive to their words and behavior—but if I'm wrong, I can apologize and adjust.

Isabella Rodriguez? I have no idea whether I'm wrong about her or not. See, that requires knowing the truth of her, and being able to compare the truth with my perception, and I have no fucking idea who she really is, underneath it all. I listen to her speak. I watch her actions. And the aggregate sum of these clues is a mess of contradictions, a mosaic of every potential personality trait.

Is she extroverted or introverted? No idea; she hates people but she likes to party—but does she even like to party or does she attend out of a weird mix of conformity and curiosity? I watch her treat the other percussionists with such gentleness, such attention to detail, such unwavering motivation. Her energy doesn't fade the way mine or the rest of the drumline's does; she's our rock, hard and punishing as rocks are.

Three weeks into the semester, I have come to agree with Keller's decision to make us co-lead. Bay teaches me things I can't learn from anyone else. She challenges me, and she brings qualities to the band leadership I don't have. I kind of hope she thinks the same about co-leading with me, our personal feelings aside.

It's Tuesday, nearly midnight, one of those nights when I can't sleep again.

After marching band practice and dinner, I called Mom and Christian. He feels shy around his new classmates, he's so attuned to the way people look at him with sympathy and he hates it. I tell him that he has the next four years to meet people and make more friends.

"Don't worry about it," I comforted, "everything will turn out okay."

Then I did two hours' work on a coding assignment, and finally I give up trying to use schoolwork to lull me to sleep. I shrug on a hoodie and grab my skateboard from the porch. Earphones shoved in, skating playlist blasting, the asphalt blurs beneath my feet. While I skate around Halston, the campus yawns wide; still awake, but rolling over and falling asleep.

Lamps spotlight the empty streets, dropping cones of yellow in the air for moths and insects to fly into. The fall nighttime air is cold, and the whole time I only see three or four students wandering home from libraries or study spaces, feet shuffling wearily.

When I pass through the Quad and the Foxhole, I see a familiar silhouette walking alone. Her hair is bundled up in a textured mess at the crown of her head. She has an unbuttoned denim shirt over a simple t-shirt dress, and I can see the strap of her Foxhole apron hanging from her tote bag. When my skateboarding becomes audible, Bay glances over her shoulder. Looks back to the front. Double takes.

She turns back around and hangs her head in defeat, slowing to a halt in a pool of lamplight. "Vierra." By the time I dismount and stroll up to her, she's propped an impatient hand on her hip. "What do you want?"

I grin at the subtle acidity in her voice. "How was your shift?"

"Fine until about three seconds ago, at which point my night went to complete shit."

"Ha." Bay starts to walk once more, and I quick step to stay by her side. "Let me walk you home."

"No, thanks."

"It's dark out, and you're alone."

Bay groans and finally admits, "I'm not going home."

From the pocket of her denim shirt, she pulls out a folded-up baggie with a half-smoked joint. It's in open air for just a second before disappearing. I shrug, my skateboard clutched horizontally in my hand. Maybe this will make me sleepy. "I'm game."

Bay's dark eyebrows dart up. "Did I offer?"

"Did you?" I return. With one hand I dig around in the pocket of my jeans. I'm the sort of person to never leave the house without cash. I flick open my wallet and flash a twenty dollar note in front of Bay's eyes. She purses her lips, deliberating.

She shrugs. "Fine."

Bay leads me to the back of the Philosophy building. There are winding metal stairs attached to the side of the red brick, but instead of climbing she wanders underneath the first flight and presses her back against the wall.

"Blocks the wind," she explains. I set my skateboard against the wall.

Flicking her Zippo at the blunted end of the joint, she takes a long drag, the embers glowing orange and hungrily crawling up the roller paper. She passes the joint to me with an assured, elegant hand. I draw in breath, hold the smoke deep in my lungs until it starts to burn my throat, and then exhale slowly. Bay's hand rises, her fingers cold and satiny on my cheek.

She's never touched my face before, and I'll admit, my mind plunges into a vivid daydream in which I grab her chin in return and angle her mouth to mine—

Then I see her nose wrinkling and realize she's turning my head away to stop my smoke hitting her.

"Sorry," I cough. I don't know where my thoughts are coming from. A tingling heat settles into my chest. Heat from embarrassment, heat from the smoke, but also heat from Bay's touch, so gentle it lingers like a breeze. "So—"

"—you don't have to fill the silence with obligatory conversation—"

"—have you ever dated anyone before?" I finish daintily. "Like, in a serious relationship." I know she's hooked up and had situationships before.

Bay snorts, pressing her full lips to the joint. "No." I keep silent and wait her out. "Relationships have bad odds at this age."

"What makes you say that?"

Bay passes the joint to me and starts to speak as I smoke: "The person I date has to know me. They have to see me as an equal and an individual."

"Naturally."

"But do you know what I see in most men in college? They are simultaneously sexually attracted to and emotionally repulsed by women. They love their boys, their masculine hobbies, their own perspectives. They hate women's conversations and our hobbies, they hate our emotions and our detailed observations. The only reason they entertain it is because they want to find a Mommy McBang who will fuck, cook, clean and perform all their emotional labor."

None of my guy friends are like that, thankfully. If you're a guy that cares about his impact on the world, there is a constant anxiety in the back of your mind asking whether your friends are secretly misogynists or whether unwittingly you've ever made a girl uncomfortable. It saddens me to hear that Bay has run into the type of people who only cares about themselves.

My lips part and Bay reaches a hand out again, this time to tip my jaw closed. "Hold your rebuttals, Vierra. That's the greater evil. The lesser evil are the men who believe they are good men. They love befriending women and not trying to fuck them—gold medal," she quips. "They know feminist terminology now. I check my privilege. I paint my nails and love my mother. I'm unlearning my biases every day. But when you look at their relationships, their sisters and mothers and girlfriends are all fit, neurotypical, and attractive. Bonus points for culturally diversity because I'm intersectional. I'm not saying they only respect women they're attracted to, but Nice Guys conveniently don't invest in the women who tangibly challenge their world view. Just the ones that boost their social capital. They surround themselves with women to be their green flags."

I have a lot of woman friends. Is she talking about me?

My head is spinning. A wave of dizziness passes over me as the weed hits my bloodstream, but after it lifts I just feel rubbery and relaxed. More than ever I want to know the truth of Bay. I want to know what she thinks. What she really thinks of me.

Is her aversion to dating based on bad memories or casual observations? If there are bad memories, who hurt her? Who did she hurt? Why does she dislike me? Am I a Nice Guy to her, which really means a bad guy?

I ask whether she's dated women before.

Bay clicks her teeth, disappointed. "I've tried. I can't be equal with men, but I can't be individual with women. You know what happens when you remove gender barriers? Oh, my God, you completely get me. The clitoris! Dress pockets! Sharing makeup and clothing! We have so many shared experiences and traumas! They all mistook commonality for compatibility and fell so fast, so unguarded. It's like they wanted to merge their emotional world with mine. Slow down, but they don't slow down, and then I had to cut and run," she tells me, matter-of-fact. "No gender or orientation is exempt from heartbreak, so now I'm exempting myself by not participating. Okay. You may rebut now."

I don't think I could put together a coherent thought if someone paid me. Is this some hidden trauma speaking or just the Philosophy major side of her?

All I know is that when Bay opens up like this, and pain comes flooding out, I feel like I'm staring into some sort of cavern, a crevasse. Initially it's just darkness, nothing but darkness, and then are fireflies or stars that blink out of the shadows. Her criticisms of society are true, but only from one perspective. A different viewpoint would change the picture entirely.

"Maybe when I'm thirty, the men will have finally resolved their internalized misogyny and the women will have delineated their sense of self from the people they love and then I'll try again."

"Do you think a relationship is failed if it ends? Because that's reductive."

"What use does an ended relationship have—"

"—life experience. Knowing yourself better. Knowing others better—"

"—that I can't get elsewhere?" she finishes. "I feel like a love guru without ever having participated in it, just from reading and watching and paying attention."

"But you're making such sweeping generalizations. Not every person our age has something wrong with them."

"That's your rebuttal? Whataboutism? Seriously?"

"Most people can make it work, so it's valid in this case." I turn ninety degrees to lean my shoulder on the concrete wall and stare down into her reddening eyes.

"Barely. If you limit comments about society to those that are unconditionally true then no social commentary can ever happen. You can't say anything without a whole host of quantifiers and caveats, which is a waste of speech." She clears her throat roughly, swiping her thumb across her bottom lip. "But I'm a mathematician. I believe in the founding statistical principle that a large enough data set can be used to draw valid conclusions even if many individual data points aren't exactly on the line."

I want to hate how coldly intelligent Bay is, drawing concepts from the entire range of human knowledge just to shut me up, but I like it. It's intimidating and it's my favorite thing about her. She sucks the last of the embers right up to the filter, then drops the stub onto the ground and crushes it with her shoe.

"Litterer."

"It's biodegradable, you blond fuck." That makes me laugh, really laugh, from my gut. Bay tries to stifle her smile and fails. She has a fantastic smile. I never get to see it.

A cold wind whistles through the slats of the stairs by our heads, whisking away the stinging scent of cannabis and winding Bay's flowery perfume around me like a blindfold.

I blink away the spots across my vision. "So you're not gonna date in your twenties at all?"

"Nope."

"Even though there are good people out there."

Bay scoffs darkly and recounts a handful of conversations she's had while working at the Foxhole, ranging from lovers' spats to full-blown abuse. She tells me that even love won't fix a lack of awareness or ingrained bad behavior. She tells me that one time, a woman came in with an abusive partner so Bay offered herself up to be the Other Woman, the Homewrecker, as an avenue for the woman's escape. I am stunned. I vaguely remember hearing about these events last academic year, and blindly believing that Bay was capable of such callousness. I was wrong. Totally wrong.

"There are good people out there, I agree, but the odds are shit and the search is torture. And for what?"

"Love." Intimacy. Companionship. Don't people need those things not to go insane in the void, throwing themselves into oblivion?

Bay scoffs. "I get love from places other than romance. It's actually a sham—marriage and nuclear families are all based on armies and workforces, you know? I've freed myself from the capitalist, militaristic brainwashing."

"Debbie Downer."

"Toxic Positivity Pete."

"Are you aromantic?"

Bay scoffs. "No. I'm just extremely bitter."

"Really? Never would have guessed."

She gives me a withering smile, tucking her head lower but not before I see her expression soften.

I pick up my skateboard. We start walking back to her hall of residence. My brain, uninhibited by its usual filters, circles back to the idea of Bay meeting Christian. I first imagined it at band camp, when I saw the almost maternal way she led the percussion section. I imagine it the way I imagine tigers—solitary, intelligent killers—surprisingly softening up when you give them a household kitten. Bay really is only this vicious when I'm around; she was friendly with Lien, patient and kind with the younger percussionists, so it stands to reason the more vulnerable the person, the gentler Bay is with them.

Which means she must wrongly view me as invulnerable.

I don't how the idea ever emerged, introducing my brother to my rival, but the curiosity pulls at me like one singular strand of hair being tugged. A little painful and a lot irritating.

As we walk, Bay hums, "What about you? You give me such committed relationship vibes."

"Do I?"

"Oh, yeah," I sense another jibe coming my way, "but not successfully." Knew it. "You had a high school sweetheart but broke up when you guys went to separate colleges. Will date a girl in college but that won't work out, and then you'll meet your future partner at your future workplace—who I actually feel is going to be a man—and get married on a yacht but the college girl will always going to be the love of your life."

Does... she think I'm a trust fund baby or something?

"Never had a high school sweetheart," I inform her smugly. "Can't say anything about the yacht and the hubby, but as for college, I get more than enough love from the people around me."

Pausing, I turn my head to face hers. Just to check her expression. Just in case I engage seriously in the conversation only for Bay to make a satire of it. She hates people and relationships, evidently. I expect to see her eyes glinting with disdain, but her face is serene, interested. She raises an eyebrow.

"Friends, parents, my brother," I continue. "I agree that romantic love isn't inherently the ideal form of love. I already have so many people for advice, company, hanging out, and quality time," again I glance over expecting to see her lips stretch in mockery, but she just releases a contemplative murmur, "that I wouldn't date just to fill a hole in my life. I'd only date if it extended my life in some new way. So I'm going to live life as usual, and if romance finds me, cool, if it doesn't, cool."

Bay's residence hall is at the end of the street, a disorganized patchwork of rectangular windows illuminated, representing the night owls, and already dark, representing the slumbering.

"I think this is the first time you've said something intelligent in my presence."

Ah. Success. I shoot her a knowing look. "I say clever things frequently. This is just the first time you gave a shit."

"I still don't give a shit, Vierra," she sighs. "You just smoked my weed and monopolized my attention."

"As if I don't always monopolize your attention."

She rolls her eyes and flicks her hand to the front door. "Thank you for escorting me. Goodnight."

Cute. Bay doesn't believe in manners—I believe she once said civility is a tool for perpetuating the status quo—but she never abandons them. I remember her holding my wrist as she thanked me the night she stayed over, a twin burn to the one she left on my cheek tonight.

"Wait." One hand on the door handle, she glances back, confused. "I'm glad we're co-leading," I tell her. "This would be a lot harder without you."

She blinks, her dark lashes fluttering. "Oh." Her lips open. Close. Open.

Compliments disarm her. I've known this a long time. She thinks she has to say the same thing in return, or something of a similar weight, otherwise she loses the moral high ground. The same with manners.

So, opting not to have to hear sugary empty words from Bay, I start skating towards home, the cool air soothing across my cheeks and neck.

And I don't look back.