Falling like the Stars

17

Jared

Okay, that sucked. Things like that always suck, but this time, more than normal for some reason. I’ve given into temptation before, spent the afternoon with a boy, even been kissed a few times, but the more time I allow myself to indulge in that sort of thing, the worse it is when they forget me in the time it takes for them to take a bathroom break. 

And this guy? Jesus, that smile. It broke my heart just looking at him. It is literally not fair for regular people walking on the street to be that carelessly handsome, all tousled-haired and freckled. And to know about art. And to know about the women in art, not just the painters who painted them. What the heck, universe?  Why would you stick it to me like that?

Because, for as long as I can remember, the universe has been sticking it to me. Think back to the worst day of your life. Maybe someone you love died. Maybe you found out you had a terrible illness. Those things are awful, and I’m not saying my worst day was worse than yours, but it was definitely different because of this:  even when the worst things happen, you can still depend on reality behaving a certain way. 

My worst day is my earliest memory, so I am not really sure what my life was like before that. Maybe before that day, I was totally normal. A mother, a home, a baby book, a photo album with pictures of me as I grew. Maybe I even had (have?) siblings. What I remember is this. The first day of preschool, bidding my mother a tearful goodbye. And at the end of the day, just a short day, a little preschooler’s day, no one coming to get me. The teachers’ confusion. The “helpful” policeman. 

I knew my address, but when the policeman knocked on the door of my home, they were met with only a puzzled expression from my mother. I remember standing among the forest of adult legs on the doorstep listening to my mother claiming she had no idea who I was or why I would have given her address to the police. At one point, I ran into the apartment, searching for the safety of my room, only to find it changed. 

Gone were my cowboy-themed walls and treasured possessions. I only have a vague recollection of what was in their place, but it was definitely adult and foreign. Eventually the police took me away, kicking and screaming for my mother. 

This nightmarish scene would repeat itself over and over for several weeks. Every time the police knocked on the door, my mother would answer, the same puzzled look on her face. I was the only one who realized we’d all done this before. 

I don’t really remember how I survived that. Which I realize is ironic, but hey, do you remember the day by day story of your preschool years?  Even your elementary school years?  Neither do I. I remember some things. Emergency foster home placements that lasted less than a day. Homeless shelter workers who were particularly kind, nannies in Central Park who were not. 

How far back in your life can you give a reliable timeline history?  All I can say for sure is that by the time I was eight, I had a reasonable system worked out for myself. I learned what I could get away with and what I couldn’t. 

If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which I learned about in the Museum of Natural History, thank you very much, I’ve got the bottom tier covered; physiological needs: air, food, water, shelter. I may not always have food and shelter lined up as reliably as you do, but good enough. 

Safety is the next tier according to Maslow: financial, health, and personal security. Those can be a bit dicey, like the time I broke my arm falling on a patch of ice on the sidewalk. No medical records, no parent or guardian, no insurance. I had to pull some pretty intense shenanigans in the ER to make sure I was passed directly from one nurse to another until my arm was set to make sure I wasn’t forgotten in a waiting room. Living in New York, there’s always a risk you’ll become a target of some sort of crime, so security is never going to be one-hundred percent. But I get by. 

Once a person’s physiological and safety needs are met, the next level of human need is for love and belonging. In that department, you could say I’m well and properly screwed, and if we are to believe everything Maslow tells us, then I’m probably destined to be a psychopath. I am literally unlovable. My own mother refused to acknowledge that I belonged to her. At some level, I feel like I belong to the large social group known collectively as New York City, so maybe that’s what saves me. 

I’ve met many, many kind and wonderful people that I’ve found ways to include in my life, even if they don’t know it. Lindy at the diner, Walter the security guard here at the museum. I’ve got a map in my head of people I can turn to in time of need all over the city. People who have proven they’ll help a stranger in need, time and time again. 

But someone like Jensen?  I can’t let myself get to know him. When I looked up and saw him watching me, my heart promptly flopped into my shoes. Love at first site is pretty much the only option open to me, and damn, if it didn’t hit me hard with him. I should probably leave the museum for the day, because chances are I’ll run into him a couple more times as we wander around the galleries and I know better than to put myself through that. 

On the other hand, I want to see him again, see that dazzling smile, hear his slightly strange way of talking. I want to ask him what he thinks of other paintings here. Find out which is his favorite. I know it will hurt, but it might be worth it to spend some time in the company of someone whose smile makes me warm all through. 

So, to heck with common sense and self-preservation. I’ll leave it up to fate. I’ll go my way, and if I just happen to cross his path again, so be it. 

I find him an hour later in front of Still Life with a Bottle of Rum by Picasso. Okay, so it’s all together possible that I pretty much stopped looking at art pretty early on and started looking for a sandy blond head. Sue me. It’s my own heart I’m playing games with so I don’t need to apologize to anyone. 

I’ve come up behind him, he doesn’t notice me watching him sketching the painting. He’s pretty good, somehow capturing the essence of this really complex painting with just a few simple stark lines. I come around and sit on the bench next to him, pretending to be looking at the painting.

He looks up at me and his face lights up, the full deal, sparkling green eyes, freckles and all. Yeah. I have it bad. 

“Hey,” he says. “What about this one?”

I’m a little distracted, because there’s something about the expression on his face that I can’t quite figure out. “Excuse me? What about what one?”

“Well, it’s not a woman we’re remembering, but a moment. A moment in Picasso’s mind that he’s daring us to decipher.”

My chest is doing something extremely alarming. It’s like my heartbeat has been magnified so that it fills up everything in me, because I realize that he’s picking up the conversation where we left off over an hour ago. The look on his face that I couldn’t figure out was recognition. 

As in, he recognizes me. 

He remembers me. 

He remembers me. 

Jensen 

Well, s**t. Somehow, I’ve really blown it. That expression on Jared’s face?  I don’t know what it is, but it’s not good. All these things at once, like he’s surprised, but might cry. Maybe he’s a little bit scared too, yeah, that looks like it’s mixed in there, but the thing that really makes it all out of place is how intense it is. He looks like he might grab me for a second and every muscle in my body tenses. 

But then he takes a deep breath and sits back. He blows the breath slowly back out. “Okay,” he says quietly, so I think maybe he’s just saying it to himself, “okay.” 

He’s looking at me so intensely, I have to look back at the painting. “There’s so many things in it at once,” I say, “like he’s scared he can’t capture it all.”

Jared is looking at the painting now, but it doesn’t seem like he’s really seeing it. “You said you had autism,” he says, “what does that mean?  Like, I know what it means in general, but what does it mean for you?”  

I like this, actually. It’s so much easier when someone asks rather than sit there and have all these questions about me that fill their mind so much they can’t really pay attention to me. I pick up my pencil and start sketching again. “For me,” I say, “it means that a lot of the social things that you think and do automatically, I have to do on purpose. A lot of things that you see through a social filter, I see for what they are, without some of those extra layers of meaning on them.”

“I never had a friend on the spectrum before,” Jared says. “If I say or do something wrong, just tell me. That would be okay with me.”

I stare at my paper, hard, trying to figure out if I’m misunderstanding what he just said. I’ve never had a friend on the spectrum before. Is it that easy with him?  We’re friends?  Dad says a friend is someone that you can totally be yourself with, and who you accept for who they are. Dad has this friend who’s a conservative republican and even voted for that obnoxious guy the last election, and they’re still friends even though Dad volunteers at the Democratic Party Headquarters every November. It seems like it would be a lot easier to be friends with Jared. So, alright. 

“You won’t do anything wrong,” I say, and move my pencil across the paper again. 

“What was that you said about not forgetting things, you know, earlier when we were talking?”

“Stuff just stays in my brain. I don’t know.” I fidget with my pencil. I’m done this painting. I want to move onto the next. Last time I asked him if he wanted to hang out with me, he said no, but it seems like something has changed. 

“I’m going to my next painting now,” I say. I tear my eyes up from my sketch book and meet Jared’s eyes for a moment. It’s really just a quick check in, but I still notice how interesting they are, all like a kaleidoscope. “Would you like to come with me?  I know you said before that—”

“I’d love to,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry about before. I— I thought I had to do something.”  

There it is again, and this time, I have no doubt. He’s lying. That’s okay, I know sometimes other people lie to be polite, which seems like a contradiction to me, but it happens. 

We stand and he follows my lead towards gallery 823, home of the Van Gogh's. 

Now that I’m thinking about him lying, I can’t help but keep on wondering about his lie earlier. “What did you say to the docent when you were going into the special exhibit?” I blurt out. I can’t help it. I can’t move forward with our conversation until I know, because the space that big question takes up is starting to crowd out everything else. 

“You saw me then?” he asks.

“Yes, I noticed you because I saw you skip the line this morning and then…” I trail off. It’s probably not polite to tell him I thought it looked like he was lying. “You’re not supposed to skip the line,” I say, and then realize that’s probably not polite, either.

Jared stops walking and his eyes search my face, studying. I’m just about to tell him that it makes me uncomfortable when he starts walking again. “I can’t afford to pay, what’s the point of standing in line?”  

This is what I was thinking about him earlier. Why doesn’t he care about what he’s supposed to do? 

“It’s for the same reason that people say “bless you” when someone sneezes. It’s one of the things that helps everyone get along. Also, it’s so the security camera gets a good picture of you, straight on, that way if you steal a painting or vandalize something, it’s easier to catch you.” 

“I promise I won’t steal any paintings,” he says. 

“I’m serious though. You are supposed to stop and give a polite quarter. And you didn’t answer my question about what you said to the docent at the special exhibit.” 

Jared has stopped walking again, and he reaches out his hand to take my wrist to stop me from walking and make me face him. His fingers are long and delicate, and surprisingly cold. Everything about him looks like he should run hot, all this frenetic nervous energy jittering under the surface. “It doesn’t matter, does it?  They never remember me. All this time, it’s never hurt anyone. Why—”

Something he just said doesn’t make sense, but it takes me a moment to figure out what it is. “What do you mean, ‘all this time?’  You do that a lot?  Doesn’t the docent get suspicious?”

He cuts his eyes away then, and tugs my wrist a little. “Let’s keep going,” he says. 

I walk, but I know he didn’t answer my question. “Well,” I ask, “how many times?  Is it a different docent each time?  Have you ever been caught?”

“No,” he says, “I’ve never been caught.”  He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, a mischievous grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. Not every day, but a lot.”  

“I come every day in the summer,” I say. “My dad’s the curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.”  

“That must be cool,” he says. 

It is really. I’m not one of those kids who’s thinks their parents are dorks just on principle. My father knows more about art than anyone I know, and art is my favorite thing in the world. My mom used to be a lawyer, but she left her firm when she had me. More specifically, when she found out that I was going to be a lot of work. Then taking care of me was her full time job. Now that I don’t have so many appointments and therapy groups and at home behavior therapy and all that, she has a different job; she is a parenting coach for families with children who have autism. That’s not as cool as being a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it’s a very nice thing for her to do. And she’s the one who gets my jokes and knows when to back off and when to give me help. And that’s really the best thing of all. 

“Did I lose you there?” Jared asks. 

“No, I’m right here.”

“I mean, what were you thinking about just now?”

This is what is so exhausting about being with neurotypical people. I was thinking about my parents, of course, that’s what we were just talking about. I don’t really get why a conversation has to be talk, then listen, then talk then listen. It doesn’t leave any time to think about anything that you’re saying. Like a little while ago, Jared said he didn’t have a mother or father and I haven’t had time to think about it. And I still don’t understand how he can pull the same trick day after day and no one has ever caught on. I know most of the docents. Walter is the one he lied to this morning, and he’s not dumb. I don’t get it. 

“I’m thinking about all the things you said. I haven’t met anyone new in a long time, it’s kind of a lot.”  

“I’m sorry,” Jared says. “I actually haven’t met anyone new in a long time either.”

++++++++

Jared 

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life imagining what it would be like to live like normal people. I’ve imagined going to school, having a boyfriend, having a job. Someday, having children, all those really huge, totally normal things that there’s no way I can do. 

I don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself about it, because there’s a lot of things I can do that regular people can’t. For example, last year, I went to Disney World. It took a lot of observation to figure out how to get in, but once I did, I went every day for as long as I felt like it. 

But I can’t help it if sometimes I feel a little lonely, if sometimes I think it’s just unfair, and let my imagination go wandering. 

I’ve never, in all that time, imagined this situation, because it never occurred to me that it might happen. I have no plan whatsoever and a million questions are zinging around in my brain. How long will this last?  Is it just Jensen, or could it be anybody?  I’m dying to test it out, but I don’t want to leave Jensen, because this is the best, best thing that has ever happened to me and I don’t want it to end. And even with all of that going on, I’m still interested in him. 

We stand in front of The Shoes, by Van Gogh, and he’s got this sketchbook full of his drawings of this painting. Full. 

“That reminds me of Monet’s cathedral paintings, how he did so many of the same thing,” I say, and Jensen puts on this smile that just knocks me over.

“Exactly!” he says. “That’s what gave me the idea. Only instead of the light being different each time he painted it, I’m different each time I draw it. Different day, different mood, different weather. Sometimes I’m hyper focused, sometimes I’m thinking about something else.”

He pulls a different sketchbook out of his satchel, and that one is full of sketches of the very painting I had just named. This is starting to feel like a surreal dream. 

It turns out, we like a lot of the same paintings. I guess that’s not so weird, because they are all amazing, of course. Who doesn’t like Sunflowers?  That would be the weird thing. 

“It’s funny we’ve never bumped into each other before,” I comment. “I’m not here every day like you, but I’m here a lot.” I don’t say so, but I definitely would have noticed and remembered Jensen if I had ever seen him before. 

“It’s like the grocery store,” he says. “Sometimes, at the grocery store, you start out at the same time as someone else, and then you keep seeing them in the aisles, all the way through the store. But someone else who started just a couple minutes ahead of you is always going to be a couple aisles ahead of you and you probably wouldn’t even know they were there. The museum is big, more than two million square feet. It’s much more surprising that we’ve crossed paths three times today than it is that we’ve never crossed paths before.”

He pulls a couple pencils out of his satchel. “Do you mind?” he asks. 

“No,” I say. “I’d love to watch if it doesn’t make you nervous.”

He sketches standing up, right there in the middle of the gallery. After a few moments, it’s like he’s completely tuned me out, and everything else around us. His eyes move back and forth between the painting and his sketch, but it seems like his hand is acting on its own, getting the signal directly from his brain where to go over the page. The way he draws this is completely different from the way he was drawing the Picasso, long, connected lines rather than short choppy ones. 

Now that we’re not talking, my head starts filling with questions, loud and urgent. Do I dare test this?  Could I bear it if I went away and this was gone?  I’m going to have to try, because it’s not like I can follow Jensen home, clinging to him like a stray puppy. And if he doesn’t remember me, well then that’s what I was expecting I’d have to deal with anyway when I let myself look for him. 

“Jensen, I… uh, need to use the bathroom. Will you be here for a while? Will you…” the words get stuck in my throat, and for a minute I’m afraid I might start crying. “Will you wait for me here?”

He doesn’t look up from his sketch, but he nods and says, “Yes, of course.”

Because for him, it’s that easy. For me, it’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done. I take a deep breath, then six steps away. I pause at the entrance to the next gallery, my heart in my throat and look back at him. Dressed in loose fitting khakis and a grey t-shirt, he could be any average teenage boy. But he’s not. He’s the one single person in all of my memory who could get to know me. I think again of Maslow and the need to be loved and belong. The pull of that need has never been stronger than it is at this moment, but I have to know. I have to know if this will last. I have to know if the nightmare is over for me. I step out of the gallery. 

Okay. I’ll make this fast. The time it takes to walk down to the information desk, one five-minute loop around, back to the information desk, and then back to Jensen and the Van Goghs. 

It was true, what I had told Jensen. I don’t come to the museum every day, but I come here a lot. The hushed, echoing galleries and the muted colors, graceful arches of the place are very soothing to me. On occasion, I spend the night here, like Claudia and Jamie in The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Only, I don’t sleep in the State Bed. That thing is musty and smells like dust. Plus, I don’t really sleep when I spent the night. It’s more about looking at the collection with no people around. It’s not that I think I deserve some special privilege not afforded to ordinary mortals, it’s just that I know I wouldn’t ever do any harm to anything here, and if there’s never any trace of me, then why not? 

The point being, I know my way around the museum without a map, and I know which of the staff are friendly, and which are all business. Stell, at the information desk is friendly. She’s the one they always call on to hang with the lost kids. Her curly grey hair and grandmotherly smile puts them at ease. 

She looks up expectantly when I approach. “May I help you?”

My hands are trembling, so I jam them into my pockets and concentrate on making my voice come out steady. “Can I ask you a strange favor?” I ask.

“Well, that depends, what is it?”  She has a wary look in her eye, but she’s still smiling. 

“I’d like to leave a note with you, and I’d like you to give it back to me when I come back later today.”

“A note?”  she asks, puzzled. 

“I have a memory disorder,” I say. “I’ll be lucky if I remember to come back and get it at all, but it would really help me if you just held onto it for me until I come back.”

She holds out her hand for the note. I hang onto it for just an extra moment longer, long enough for her to look up at me questioningly. I want to make sure she really sees me. I try not to look like a complete psycho. 

I’ve tested this before. How long it takes. It varies only slightly from person to person, but five minutes usually does it. Believe it or not, I’m actually incredibly grateful for those five minutes. Imagine if people forgot me the instant they turned their back on me. What if it happened in the blink of an eye?  

Five minutes is enough time to take a quick trip through the Egyptian wing, and the whole time, I’m fretting about Jensen. Maybe I should run back up and check in with him. What if he’s forgotten me?  What if he hasn’t? But oh, God, what if Stell hasn’t forgotten me either?  What if this is over?  I swear, I will run through this museum screaming with happiness, and everyone will go home and tell their families about how there was a crazy man at the museum today. It will be awesome. 

I can tell by the look on her face as I approach that Stell does not remember me. It’s open and expectant and completely devoid of recognition. I have to go through with my ruse anyway, maybe just a little nudge will trigger her memory. 

“Can I help you?” she asks, smiling. 

“I left a note with you earlier,” I say. “I asked you to give it to me when I came back. Do you have it?” 

Stell frowns. “Are you sure it was me?”  She looks down at the counter in front of her. “Tawny?” she asks the other girl behind the desk, “did you take a note for this boy?” 

Tawny looks up at me and snaps her gum. “Nope,” she says. Stell gives a side-eye of annoyance. 

“I’m really sorry, honey. If you did leave a note, I don’t remember. When Nancy gets back from her lunch break, I’ll ask her. Check back later, okay?”

“Sure.”  I nod thanks and walk away quickly, heart racing and flirting with the no running in the museum rule because now I’m scared, no, make that terrified that this morning with Jensen has been just a fluke, a glitch in the universe’s regularly scheduled program for me. If he doesn’t remember me when I get back, then this has been a really, really cruel joke. 

Carlos warns me to slow down as I round a corner too fast. I may be too slippery to stay in his memory, but it doesn’t mean that I’m invisible. Breathe, I tell myself. If Jensen has forgotten me, getting there any faster isn’t going to change that. 

I turn the corner, and I see him standing there, just as I left him. Same soft t-shirt, same tousled tawny hair. He’s completely absorbed in the painting in front of him, and its suddenly completely obvious how we’ve never noticed each other in the museum before. I have the feeling that unless I spoke to him, like I did this morning, or walked directly between him and the painting, I could be doing the can-can in an inflatable sumo wrestler suit right next to him and he’d never notice. For my part, I wouldn’t otherwise bother someone who was so totally absorbed in their work. 

A strange thought occurs to me. It’s possible that I have seen Jensen before, standing just like this, and I’m the one who forgot him. I pass by thousands of people on the street every day, and there’s not room enough in my mind to remember all of them. I step closer, and wait. If he doesn’t remember me, I don’t even want to start a conversation with him. I will just walk away. Painful as that might be, better to have it over with than to start it all over again. 

Like he had with the Picasso painting, he’s admirably captured the spirit of this painting with only a few well-placed contour lines. I wonder if the same thing could be done in reverse; create watercolors of sketches. I wonder if Jensen does any original art, or if it’s all this sort of pencil-line homage that he does. I step a little closer.  Nothing. 

Deep breaths to pacify my heart, to barricade my devastation behind a wall of calm. It was nice while it lasted. I just wish it could have been real. A step closer, slightly up in front of him now. Please, I think. Just, please. 

Fine. It’s fine. Two hours ago, I was moving along in my life, surviving and even having fun from time to time, and nothing has changed. Nothing. So I’m just going to walk away and—

“Are you hungry?” Jensen asks. “I know you said earlier that you didn’t want to get a cup of coffee, but that was almost two hours ago. We could have lunch together.” 

He sneaks a quick glance at me, then back again to his drawing. I can only hope that it’s not long enough to actually see the expression on my face, because I am sure that I look like a complete train wreck. That’s how I feel inside anyway. Every muscle from my calves to my ass is trembling and threatening to lay down on the job. My face seriously doesn’t even know what to do. Smile?  Cry?  I have no idea. 

“Maybe you still don’t want to. I’m sorry. I just don’t know how to do this and when you were away just now, it kind of sucked thinking that you might have just ditched me and I had no idea. I don’t have a lot of friends.”

He says it like it’s no big deal. Just a fact of life, and it hurts. I look at his achingly beautiful face, with that spattering of freckles over his nose and all the talent he’s toting around in his bag and think to myself that the world is a really f*****g stupid place. 

“That’s okay, then. I won’t ask ag—”

“No! I mean, yes, I’d love to get lunch with you.” 

That smile again. It helps me pull myself together, and my face remembers how to smile too. 

++++++++

Jensen

Something occurs to me as we’re walking to the café. I’m not really sure that I did this right. I’m not sure guys ask other guys out to lunch. I replay the words I used in my head, and it sounds an awful lot like the script that I’ve run with my therapist about asking a girl out on a date. 

Is it a date?  It’s a date, right?  Yes. We’re at a museum and I’m going to take him to lunch. That’s a date. Unless when we get there, and he wants to pay and then it might just be friends. And normally, two guys are just friends. But I want it to be a date, because… I don’t know. Just because. So I ask. 

“Can this be a date?”

He laughs, the nice kind of laugh, which is great because for the past few minutes, I really have no idea what kind feelings he’s having, and I’ve been insecure wondering if I’m doing everything wrong. I want to go back to just talking about art. Or maybe talking about him. He’s said a lot of interesting things, and there’s something different about him and I want to work out what it is. 

“Yes, I think that would be awesome,” he says. “I’ve actually never been on a date before. Better strike while the iron’s hot.”  

That’s an idiom. It means take advantage of an opportunity before you miss your chance. This is actually really good advice. I pack my pencil and sketchbook away. “My favorite is the American Wing Cafe. Is that okay with you?”

“I—I usually eat at the Trie. But that might be nice for a change. Thanks.”

We walk along, and the things I want to know about him grow bigger and bigger in my mind. I think I’m not going to be able to talk to him about other things, because I can only think about these questions. “Is it okay if I ask you some things?” 

“You can try,” he says. What the heck does that mean? I can’t really spend the time trying to put those words in context, because my questions are taking up more and more space in my mind and I have to get them out of the way.

“You don’t look like you’re homeless,” I say, and then realize that it’s not a question, even though it’s several of my questions wrapped in one thought. “I mean, where do you sleep and eat and get dressed?  You don’t look like the other people I see at the shelter.”

Jared doesn’t answer for a while, which I like. It means he’s thinking about what he wants to say instead of just blurting out everything, talking just to fulfill the turn-taking convention of having a conversation. People say a lot of meaningless stuff just because it’s their turn to talk. 

“I don’t have the greatest answer to that,” he says, “but I’d rather be honest than lie because I’m embarrassed about my answer. You know how I explained how I got into the special exhibit without paying?  I have a lot of… strategies for that sort of thing. I slept in a hotel last night, and I ate breakfast at a diner. I do make a little money, and I pay what I can when I can. But when I can’t, I find other ways.”

“Are you saying that you steal?”  It’s interesting, because I wouldn’t expect someone who breaks the law to just come out and talk about it. But that fits with what I was thinking about him earlier on the steps. It’s like he doesn’t care how people are going to react to him. 

“I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”

Again. He’s not saying it defensively, just like it’s a matter of fact. I can’t imagine feeling like it was a fact that I had to steal and cheat. Or even lie. I am a terrible liar. “I don’t lie,” I tell him. 

“I lie all the time,” he says, and then, “but I will try not to with you.”

“What do you mean, ‘try?’  You either lie or you don’t. It’s not like trying to run a mile, or trying to draw a perfect circle. Just don’t say things that aren’t true.”

“I haven’t had a lot of practice with that,” he says. 

“Are you an orphan?  What happened to your parents?” A part of me inside knows this isn’t the nicest question to ask, but if he’s going to come right out and say how he lies and steals, then I’m going to come right out and ask the things that I really want to know.

He doesn’t seem to mind though. “I lost my mother when I was really young, about the time I started school. I don’t remember my father. I had trouble staying in foster homes. Eventually, it worked out that I did better on my own.”

“Are you lying?”  

“No.”

“How will I know?”

“You won’t, you’ll just to have to trust me.”

“Do you go to school?”

“No.”

I steal a glance at him. I might be asking things that are too personal. But he told me that he lies. That’s such a big thing to say, I don’t see how anything else could be too much. “I mean, can you read?”

“Oh!  Yes, I can read. I’m sort of home-schooled in that department.”

“How can you be homeschooled if you’re homeless?”

“There was a lady at one of the homeless shelters I lived at for a while. She taught me at first, but after a while, she wasn’t there any more, and I worked on it myself. I think maybe my mother taught me a little before she was gone.”  

We’re at the Cafe. It’s hard for me to run through everything I know I should be doing, this being a date, because I’m still trying to fit the things he said into some sort of person shape that makes sense. He gets his own tray and moves into the line and doesn’t seem to be acting like I’m being rude, so I do the same. I look at his hands, fingers wrapped around the edge of his tray. Soft and clean. If I were close enough, they’d probably smell like that almond soap they have here in all the bathrooms. 

“Did you really go to the bathroom when you left me?” I ask. 

He looks up at me, startled. “No,” he says. And then, “I went to the information desk.”  I’m still adding up in my head the amount of time that it would have taken to go to the information desk and back, and maybe he can see it in my face because he adds, “and I walked around the Egyptian wing.”

That is not what you would expect someone to do when you just met them and it seems like you are getting along, and they say they are going to the bathroom. So he must have an unexpected reason for doing that, but he doesn’t say what. I am going to have a hard time sleeping tonight, because he keeps getting bigger and bigger in my mind. Maybe that’s why he’s so tall, to make room for all this stuff. All this Jared-ness. I thought that asking him questions would help make him make more sense, but the opposite is happening. Suddenly, I’m tired and overwhelmed. I’m on a date. This was not in my schedule. I don’t know if he’s going to want to continue walk around with me after we eat and I know the polite thing will probably be to ask what parts of the museum he wants to see, but that will pull me even further off my schedule. 

“I’m nervous,” I say. That helps. 

“Because of me?” he puts a Three Sisters Salad on his tray. 

“Because I don’t usually do well with changes to my schedule, and you were definitely not on the schedule today.”

The staff at the café know me. Tina, the girl with the piercing in her nose says hi and goes back to the kitchen to get my sandwich. This is exactly what I am nervous about. Normally, there wouldn’t be anyone with me to notice that they make me a special sandwich here with only one kind of meat and no sesame seeds on the bun. Normally, I just get my sandwich and sit down and eat it. But Jared notices. 

“They know you here?” he says. 

“My dad is a curator. I come here nearly every day.”  Tina hands me my sandwich and looks back and forth between me and Jared, a big, expectant smile on her face. I’m probably supposed to introduce Jared, so I do. “Tina, this is my friend, Jared. Jared, this is Tina who works here.”  I mentally add this introduction to the list of things I will be telling my parents at supper tonight. I personally would like to sit at the dinner table and eat my food and say something if I have something to say. But according to my mom, dinner time is an important time to socialize, so I have to think of things to say even if I just feel like eating. It’s good to have a couple things stored up in my mind so I can just say them and then eat in peace. 

Tina smiles and both she and Jared say “nice to meet you,” like they’re supposed to, but I can’t help but feel like Jared says it in a kind of sad way. His words are polite, and he has a smile on but his voice sounds wrong and this is why it’s so hard for me to understand people. 

I wonder if Jared is going to want to talk while we are eating. My sandwich is plain and familiar, and he is not. Thankfully, he sits down and starts eating without fussing about anything like saying grace, or waiting for me to start eating before he does. My chest loosens a little, and I start eating too, for the moment, just enjoying the plain white bread and ham and cheese and no one telling me that I should have some vegetables, which frankly, is my favorite thing about eating lunch at the museum instead of home. 

After a while, he puts down his fork and asks, “You said you had a schedule. Do you have the same schedule every day?”  

“Mostly, except for a block in the middle of the day when I am supposed to see something new. 

“Don’t you like seeing new things?  I try and come to all the new special exhibits.”

“The special exhibits bother me. If I don’t like them, I feel like it took time away from my favorite things. If I do like a piece in a special exhibit, all I can think about is how it won’t be here forever, and then I can’t decide if I should spend extra time in the special exhibit, because then that takes time away from my favorite things.”

I try not to watch as he takes a bite of his salad. All those things mixed together, corn, beans, squash, lettuce, dressing. I know I can’t say anything. I know I’m not supposed to feel this way. I look out the window over his shoulder. I feel like I am really blowing all of this. Over something as stupid as lunch. First he sees me get my plain sandwich and then I go and spout off on my schedule, and now I can barely tolerate sitting at the same table as him as he eats. Ok, but fine. This is who I am. I’m trying to tolerate him and his lies and his weird life and his salad. He can try and tolerate me, right?

The crazy thing is, I really want this, and that’s new for me. In the past, I’ve seen girls that I thought were pretty, but my discomfort around them outweighed my interest in their prettiness. Now, here’s this boy, and my discomfort about him is bigger than anything I’ve felt in a while, and I still want to be with him enough to try and ignore a salad with corn and beans.

“Does it bother you?” I ask. “The way I am?”  Because to me, it feels like my autism must be all he can see. I feel like I’m out of control of what I’m saying and thinking just when it’s most important to be in control. 

He looks at me then, and his eyes are prettier than a girl’s, which is a strange thing for me to think, but it kind of makes me think about how an artist might see them, so I concentrate on looking at the way the darker blue and brown colored flecks change the whole color of his eye, instead of thinking about all the stuff that him looking at me means.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I am not lying, not even exaggerating, when I say that you are the single most interesting person I have ever met.”

Well. That’s something. 

++++++++

Jared

I am a little bit worried about the idea that I took advantage of Jensen today. I’m not sure there is another person this could have happened with who I could follow around all day and just stand there and think about what the heck this all means without them getting freaked out. 

To be fair, I think he was a little freaked out anyway, but oddly, not because I was hanging around with him and not behaving normally. He did this thing where he would tap his forehead with his knuckles, and if you saw him doing it only once, you might just think it was him thinking hard about something, but I saw him do it a lot, and saw him trying not to do it a lot, and it got to be my signal for knowing when he was getting overwhelmed by me, and I’d just go get a drink of water or something. 

Saying goodbye to him at the end of the day was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do because I just want to follow him around and be remembered when I come back from the bathroom forever. That’s pretty pathetic. 

Like I said, I have fantasized a lot about being normal, and what that might be like. But I never pictured this particular scenario. I’d usually just imagine that I was normal, and always had been normal. And of course, in those fantasies, everyone remembered me like a normal person. The possibility of just one person remembering me never occurred to me. It brings up a whole new set of problems. Say I meet Jensen again tomorrow, and we go to lunch again. Isn’t he going to think it’s weird that Tina at the counter doesn’t know me?  Tina has served me lunch more times than I can count, and she’s never remembered me, and she’s not going to remember me, no matter how many times Jensen introduces us. 

The reality of me would be hard enough for a regular person to take in, but what about someone for whom regular reality is a little overwhelming to begin with?

Speaking of people for whom reality is difficult, I am staying at a shelter tonight. I am a connoisseur of homeless shelters, really. I’ve been in more than my fair share, way more. And here’s something you might not expect. Some of the people who work in homeless shelters can be real assholes to the homeless. I think I get why; some of them are two steps away from being homeless themselves, and that’s a lot of stress. Imagine the thing you’re most worried about, and imagine you work in your worst case scenario worry. 

Most are staffed with pretty decent human beings however, and some are staffed by the sort of people that you read about in Readers Digest. Regular angels on earth. Take Winifred, the lady who serves dinner at the Samaritan Inn on Lexington Avenue. She’s not just slinging food onto our plates, she makes you feel like she cares about every single one who comes through the line. 

“Hey baby doll, you hungry tonight?” she asks me. “I made the green beans myself. You need to eat your vegetables. Growing boy like you.”

I smile, thinking that she’d never imagine the salad I had for lunch. And that makes me think about how nervous Jensen was, and how hard he was trying. 

“Hey, that’s a gorgeous smile. You keep that up. Whatever your deal is, you’ll get through it, honey.”

“Thank you Winifred,” I say, without thinking. This is a mistake I often make, referring to people by their name even though in their minds, I shouldn’t know it. 

Her brow knits together, trying to work out how I might know her. I leave it. She’ll eventually just find a way to explain it to herself, or forget about it. I take my green beans, along with a baked chicken thigh and instant rice to a table. 

Green Alice is sitting at the table already. She eyes me suspiciously as I sit down. I know from experience that she doesn’t like strangers, which by definition includes me, but that she’s basically harmless. 

“What’s your story?” she asks, her voice as sour green as the clothes she wears. “Have a fight with Mommy and Daddy?”

In general, this is the typical attitude I get at shelters, which is why I don’t stay in one every night. Jensen was right, I don’t look like I belong in a shelter. I’m not trying to be snobby, this is just the way it is. For one thing, this is the only life I’ve ever known, so spending the night in the shelter is usually something I planned on, something I’m used to. I’m not ashamed, disappointed, sad or crazy, which, if you look around this place, is what you see on the majority of the faces. 

The other thing is my clothes. I used to shoplift all the time and not think too much about it. I justified it by thinking that my life was really hard and that I had no other way of getting clothes, so it was just something I had to do. Then when I was thirteen, I read The Stand, by Stephen King. In that book, there’s a character who’s in prison when the apocalypse happens, and everyone dies and there’s no one left to let him out of his cell. I won’t get into the gory details, but what happens to him is pretty bad. Ever since then, I have a morbid fear of getting caught for something that could send me to jail, even overnight. Because getting forgotten in a restaurant is one thing, getting forgotten in a jail cell is another. 

So I buy my clothes, it’s one of the things that I save my money for. I take care to buy really well-made, rugged clothes that will last me a long time, and I care for them very well. I could get my clothes from the Salvation Army or the shelters or from the dumpster behind the Target in Queens, but honestly, I don’t need to, and it’s hard enough for me to get around in this world with some dignity without having to do it dressed in cast off t-shirts and bad fitting jeans. 

I don’t really want to talk tonight, I want to think. I want to think about everything that happened today and just wrap myself up in the memory of Jensen. His smile, his voice, his nervousness. His skillful long fingers flying over the page of his sketchbook. The awkward good-bye, where I just wanted to throw my arms around him and thank him so hard for being the miracle that he doesn’t know he is, and how he looked so terrified that I just smiled like an i***t instead, and watched him walk away, and then I was the one who was terrified. 

And then, I have to plan tomorrow. I asked Jensen if he would be at the museum again, and if I could see him. He said yes and took a photocopied page out of his notebook and handed it to me. When he’d said before that he had a schedule, I was picturing something like, statuary in the morning, then impressionists, lunch, then modern art in the afternoon. I had no idea. I pull the paper out of my pocket now. 

10:00 to 10:05 Wait in line 

10:05 to 10:10 Walk to The Portal. Gallery 819 

10:10 to 10:30 Sketch The Portal 

10:30 to 10:45 Use second floor bathroom near special exhibits 

10:45 to 10:50 Walk to La Carmencita. Gallery 999 

10:50 to 11:10 Sketch La Carmencita 

11:10 to 11:15 Walk to Still Life with Bottle of Rum. Gallery 822 

11:15 to 11:35 Sketch Still Life with Bottle of Rum 

11:35 to 11:40 Walk to Shoes. Gallery 823 

11:40 to 12:00 Sketch Shoes 

12:00 to 12:05  Walk to American Café 

12:05 to 12:25 Eat Lunch 

12:25 to 12:30 Walk to Expressions exhibit. Gallery 691 

12:30 to 12:55 Expressions Exhibit, sketching optional 

12:55 to 1:00 Walk to Two Tahitian Women. Gallery 826 

1:00 to 1:20 Sketch Two Tahitian Women 

1:25 to 1:40 Use second floor bathroom near special exhibits 

1:40 to 1:45 Walk to Pasiphae. Gallery 913 

1:45 to 2:05 Sketch Pasiphae 

2:05 to 2:25 Sketch Dutch Interior, also in Gallery 913. 

2:25 to 2:30 Walk to The Beeches. Gallery 759 

2:30 to 2:50 Sketch The Beeches 

2:50 to 2:55 Walk to Cow Skull, Red White and Blue. Gallery 900 

2:55 to 3:00 Sketch Cow Skull Red, White and Blue 

3:00 to 3:05 Walk to Ceiling Painting from the Palace of Amenhotep III 

3:05 to 3:25 Sketch Ceiling Painting from the Palace of Amenhotep III 

3:30 to 3:35 Walk to The Glorification of the Hungarian Saints. Gallery 622 

3:35 to 3:55 Sketch The Glorification of the Hungarian Saints 

3:55 to 4:00 Walk to exit of museum. 

It was the exact schedule that we had followed after lunch. He really did sketch all those paintings, and he really does do it every day. I asked him why he did the same ones over and over, and he’d said that every single time he sketched one, it was different, because he was different. He said for the rest of his life, he’d always be able to know which were the sketches that he had done that afternoon with me, because he was more different that day than he’d ever been. 

“Yo. Mr. Dreamy. What you got to smile about?  Eh?”  Green Alice again. Green Alice is not particularly nice, but she’s interesting. 

“Daydreaming about a boy,” I say. I really never, ever have to get embarrassed. Think about it. 

“My last husband, he was my seventh, you know, was an alligator wrestler at Gatorworld in Florida. That’s why I wear all green. He was an animal in the sack.”

“Is that so?” I say, as if I hadn’t heard this story several times already. The details never vary, so I suspect she’s actually telling the truth. Hey, someone’s got to work at Gatorworld, right?

“The point is, you can day dream all you want, but when you find that one special man, you gotta go at it like white on this rice.”  She waves her hand at me, fingers splayed just so, as if they are used to holding a cigarette. “Like you’re going to have any trouble. Get your ass out of this hellhole, go home, and go on a date with your boy. Don’t waste my time, mooning around about it. Sheesh.”  

It’s amazing how many times I have to listen to the same conversations. It’s like people have this standard “new person” repertoire that they pull out every time. I really crave something different. Getting to know someone better. Getting beyond the same thing, day after day. 

Which makes me look down at the schedule in my hand. Day after day. What am I getting myself into here?

Jensen

For a while I don’t think I’m going to be able to eat dinner with mother and father. I feel like a steel bearing, held in oscillating stasis between two very powerful magnets, the desire to tell them about my day, and wanting to just take a break from it. I don’t think Jared had any idea how overwhelming it was to meet him, to be with him. To learn about him. I spent the whole train ride home with my knuckles pressed tight against my forehead, trying to keep everything in. 

We live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, and the walk from the subway station to the house is only a few blocks, not enough for me to get my headspace to shrink down to a manageable size. Mrs. Highsmith’s French boxer barked at me as I went by and the high pitched sound felt like it was poking me in the ear. That didn’t help. 

So when I got home, I put my bag on the hook and went right to my room. I closed the door, which is something my mom isn’t ever completely happy about, but we’ve negotiated my right to do so. I’d like to get in my closet, and close that door too, but I also want to try and see how I can stand this without having to do all these things that other people don’t do, because I really don’t want to blow it with Jared. 

It’s like school. I hate school. I don’t understand how all those kids go to school every day and never question why they have to do it. None of them like math, really, even the ones that are good at it. I do not believe that if you asked any of the people in the world if they would rather do math or watch an episode of Seinfeld, most people would choose watching Seinfeld, even if they didn’t particularly like Seinfeld. 

I get that you need to go to school to learn stuff so you can get a job and all that. But every day?  All day?  And learn about all the things?  No one gets a job where both knowing about Alexander Hamilton and how to diagram a sentence are important. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have to go to school. I know that we do. I’m just saying, couldn’t we just talk about it?  Do we really have to just go, and that’s that, and no one gets to ask why or think about other ways we could all grow up and get jobs without having to learn the past imperfect tense of the French verb, tenir. It’s just a colossal waste of time. 

Which is the background to my point, which is that I hated school and everything in it, even art, until my freshman year in high school when we started learning art history. It’s like, all this time at school, my brain was like a big building with long, boring hallways full of doors that were shut. A door that said math, a door that said literature, doors that said biology, social studies and chorus. And there was nothing, not a single thing that tempted me to open those doors, and so I hung out in the boring hallways and it was torture, and I didn’t want to do homework or study for tests or even listen to why what was behind those doors was important. But then one day, I found a door marked art history, and I’m not sure what made me want to go in there, but when I did, I found it was crammed full of more interesting things than I ever imagined could exist. I could stay in this room forever. I would never get bored, and I found I actually liked learning about the things in this room, and more than that, I was good at learning about things in this room. I did homework. I studied, I practiced, I opened every closet and cabinet I could find, and still wanted to look for more. 

This is what it’s like with Jared. People do not interest me. You may think that’s weird, but think about yourself for a moment. Think of all the billions of people living on earth that you know nothing about. You might care in the abstract about starving people in Africa, or be interested in watching celebrities on TV, but the actual number of people you personally know and actually care about is an infinitesimal fraction of the actual people living in the world today. My number is smaller than yours, but when compared to the billions of people on the planet, the difference between your number and mine is practically nil. 

I love my mother and father. Of course. And I appreciate my teachers and therapists. At least some of the time. But it’s like walking down those hallways with all the closed doors. I’m just not interested in finding out what’s inside any of them. 

Until today, with Jared. It’s like I’m standing in a doorway of an amazing new room, and I’m not sure how I know, but I do, that I want to go in and learn everything I can about it. But, it’s scary. I think about how much energy and interest I spend in the art history room. Can I really start in on this new room?  The idea of taking time away from my art makes me feel anxious and agitated. But this is what people do, right?  I’m not so out of touch that I don’t want to be “normal.”  It’s just that a lot of this stuff doesn’t come naturally to me. 

There’s one thing that makes me think I can do this though, and that’s this. It’s not like I met Jared at the zoo, or the supermarket, or at a kite flying competition. I met him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My favorite place in the world. And we talked about my favorite things in the world, and he actually knew what I was talking about, and if we can have at least some of that, I think I can do this. 

So I’m not going to go in the closet. I’m going to lay here on the bed until mom calls me for supper. And then I’m going to tell them about my day, and hopefully dinner will be something that is reasonably tolerable.

It’s only twenty-three minutes before my mother calls me.

“Coming,” I say. 

When Mom calls us for dinner, Dad and I are supposed to stop whatever we are doing and go directly to the table. It doesn’t matter if what we are doing is much more interesting than whatever mom is serving. It doesn’t matter if it would only take a few more moments to finish something. This is extremely annoying to me. My mom hates when she walks in a wet spot on the floor in her socks. I don’t think if she was reading a book, and I called her to come walk in a wet spot in her socks that she would be really excited to do it right way. So unless she’s making swiss cheese slices for dinner, which I highly doubt, it’s hard to get excited to go to the dinner table.

“Macaroni and cheese, your favorite,” she says when I get to the kitchen. 

This is an incredible exaggeration. Okay, of all the things she makes, macaroni and cheese is something I can actually eat. It does have swiss cheese in it. And she makes this topping out of torn up French bread chunks, because for some reason, she doesn’t seem to notice that French bread is actually just white bread, and I will take white bread any time I can get it. 

“So, how was your day, Jensen?” Dad says as he’s sitting down. 

“Did you go to the Expressions exhibit?” asks Mom. 

People make a big deal in therapy about the social conventions of a conversation. And one of the biggest things they drill into your head is turn taking in conversations. Which is totally stupid, because no one in real life actually talks like that. If you read a book, and you look at the dialogue, each person has their own lines on the page, one after the other. In real life, if you really listen to how people talk, you would find that they interrupt each other all the time, finish each other’s sentences, talk over the end of each other’s sentences, and do things like my parents just did, which is ask more than one question at once, before you’ve had a chance to answer the first one. 

“I did not go to the Expressions exhibit, because I was having a very unusual day.”  Ha. Answered both questions at once. 

Both my parents freeze, like a cartoon, and stare at me. I feel like I can literally feel their beams of sight pressing into the skin around my eyes. I look out the window. 

My mom is the first to break. “Really,” she says. “What do you mean?”

“I met a boy today, and I took him to lunch at the American Café and then I was too agitated to look at all those faces, so we walked in the rooftop garden instead.”

I think my dad’s mouth is actually, literally hanging open. I can’t look though, because they’re still staring at me. This is incredibly satisfying. My parents say stuff all the time like, “you can do anything you set your mind to Jensen,” or “someday, we’re going to see your name in lights.”  When in reality, they’re both at least a little nervous that I might still be living with them when I’m fifty. The surprise on their faces is evidence of that, and it feels so good to prove them wrong. 

“What boy?  How did you meet?  Is it someone you know from school?”  My mom again, with the multiple questions and complete lack of turn-taking.

“I met him in Gallery 999, looking at La Carmencita. I asked him if he wanted to have a cup of coffee, and he didn’t and then I saw him again in 822 while I was sketching Still Life with a Bottle of Rum and I asked him to lunch and he said yes, and he spent the rest of the day with me.”

More shock. 

“Well, what’s his name?  What is he like?” 

“I didn’t know you liked boys,” my dad blurts out. My mom smacks him in the arm. 

I ignore my dad’s comment, because I didn’t really know I liked boys either, in the way that he’s talking about, and I’m still not even sure that’s what this is, and I can’t think about it right now. 

“His name is Jared, he said he chose it himself because he doesn’t have a mother or a father. He knows about art because he taught himself about it in the museum and he didn’t know you had to stand in line and give a polite quarter, even though he never pays because he’s homeless and doesn’t have a lot of money, but I told him you are supposed to, and he said he’ll do it next time.”

This does not have the effect that I expected. I thought they’d be proud of me, like when I got the Parker Award at school for my the end of the year student art exhibit. Instead, they do that thing where they are looking at each other and not saying any words, but I can tell that they are reading each other’s minds or something because they both have the exact same expression on their faces, and it’s not pride. 

“He’s homeless, you say?” Dad asks.

“He didn’t tell you his real name?” Mom says.

“How do you know what his real name is?” I ask back. I’m confused, and the unexpected direction this conversation is taking is making it so that the macaroni and cheese is not worth this aggravation. I press my knuckles into my forehead, but I don’t tap, that just gets Dad stressed too, and I really wish I could figure out how to get this situation back on track, and getting Dad stressed will not help with that. 

“Okay, okay,” mom says, why don’t you start at the beginning, and tell us everything that happened.

I pictured Jared the first time I saw him, on the steps and all of a sudden, I could understand why someone might feel like they need to lie. 

“No.”  I say, and leave the table. 

I go back to my room, and this time, I go into my closet, too. 

++++++++

Jared

The shelter is home for some people. Like me. I sleep just as well in the shelter as I do in a hotel. The only difference is the smell. But for a lot of people, there’s just too much emotional baggage attached to their stay here. Those people don’t sleep. You can hear them trying to get comfortable on their beds. You hear them doing that sort of breathing you do when are trying to relax and sleep, but can’t. Some of them sniffle, some of them outright cry. 

Tonight, I’m getting an extra dose of all that, because for once, I can’t sleep either. I keep thinking about tomorrow. Wondering if Jensen will still remember me. Wondering how I’ll start if this thing is real. Trying and failing to think about what kind of relationship we might have. 

So, okay, there was something there. Something more than just the ‘miracle’ for me. Something more than just how good looking he was. Something that I couldn’t nail to any one particular thing about him, just… something. Something that made my heart glow with warmth one moment and squeeze with fear the next. 

“Settle down over there!” Green Alice hisses at me. In the dark, she’s already forgotten me. In the morning, she’ll wake up one cot over from a total stranger. 

Tomorrow is Tuesday, and it’s supposed to be a sunny, mild day, so that means photography for me. One thing I’ve discovered is that photos that I take persist, as long as I’m not in them. I’m a pretty decent photographer, and so I sell photographs of New York landmarks to tourists in the park, or Greenwich Village. I can make enough money in the morning before the museum opens to get me through the next few days when I add it to the eighty I made dog walking yesterday. 

And then what?  Supposing Jensen does remember me, what next?  Follow him around to his ten paintings all day?  And the next?  I’m not insensitive to what we’re dealing with here, he was very upfront about his autism, it’s just I don’t quite know exactly what that means for him. I’ve seen movies and read books with autistic characters. Actually, I don’t think you’re supposed to describe them that way. You wouldn’t describe someone with bad cholesterol as cholesterolemic, you don’t describe someone with autism as autistic. But hey, this is the space in my own head, so I’m going to take the easy way out on that one. 

So anyway, I suspect that those characters are a bit romanticized. All that genius stuff, like Rainman counting the toothpicks. From what I’ve gathered in real life, there’s a reason they call it a spectrum. On one end you’ve got Temple Grandin, and if we’re to believe everything we read, Albert Einstein. On the other, you’ve got kids who can’t speak and flap their hands in distress all the time. 

Jensen’s somewhere in between, I’m sure. From what I’ve seen, he’s not a big fan of changes in his schedule. I’m not sure if he’s interested enough in me to try anything new. I’m not sure what sort of things might upset him. Which, I suppose is the same with any person. The difference is, Jensen is just more than one in a million to me. He is it. If I upset him, if I lose him…  Even though I haven’t been able to imagine what a relationship between us would be like, imagining going back to the way my life is alone again is even worse. 

I really have no way of knowing the best way to build something with Jensen without risking losing him, so I’m going to have to go at this the way I do anything in my life; watch, observe, try out some different things, see what works. It’s just that the stakes are so high. 

When I wake in the morning, Green Alice is sitting on her cot, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and dragging her fingers though her tangled blond and grey hair. “Look what the cat dragged in,” she says. “Where’d you come from?”

“Hitchhiked up from Orlando,” I say. “Ran out of money around Maryland. A bit harder to find work up here than I expected.” This fits in perfectly with Alice’s world view, so she just nods and yawns, saving me the boredom of a rant or inquisition. 

Breakfast at the shelter this morning, I have no time for a diner. Oatmeal and toast, and really crappy coffee. I put on an apron and help clean up in the kitchen when I’m done, good karma and all that. 

My different jobs require different uniforms. Comfortable walking pants and shoes for dog walking, artsy scarf and field coat for photography day. I like photography best, because it’s really the most honest work that I do, and I like the idea of little pieces of me going home with all the tourists and finding homes in their scrap books, pinned on their bulletin boards. Even if they’re resigned to the attics, they still wait there, ready to remind the viewer of something I saw once. Souvenir. What a lovely word. 

My best spot is in The Village, at the Sunflowers Café. First, it’s a beautiful café with a hook that tourists cannot resist; the outside of the café is decorated with wide swaths of color on the awning, tables and chairs, so that when you are coming at it up the block, it looks like the café in Van Gogh’s painting, Café Terrace at Night. Last year, I took some photos of it and had them made into post cards, and I sell just as many of those as I do my regular photographs. 

Tammy, the owner of Sunflowers is picture of a Greenwich Village artisan. Her glorious pile of mousy-blond hair is gathered up and piled on top of her head, threaded with beads and held in place with colorful strips of cloth. She’s got a pale, open face and she believes in the spirit of adventure, at least, that’s what she tells me every time I ask if I can set up my little stand and sell photographs outside her café. Also, she’s wearing a blue Adventure Time t-shirt, which makes me love her even more. 

“The police will come and make you pack up if they see you,” she says. “But you just come back later.”

“Thanks,” I say, “that’s kind of you.”

“Nah,” she says. “I’m just following my bliss. I think everyone has a right to. Your photos are gorgeous.”

I set up, carefully positioning myself in front of the window so that Tammy can see me the whole time she’s working the register. The police don’t even bother me once today, which is nice, because every time I pick up, I can’t just come back and set up again, I have to go back in and introduce myself to Tammy again. 

With no trouble from the police, and Tammy coming out to chat when it’s slow, it takes less time than I thought it would to make my goal amount of sales than I planned, and I’m anxious to pack up and head over to the museum. 

One of these days, I’m going to have to get one of those fitbits, just to see how many steps I put in each day. I’m curious. I walk everywhere because it’s important for me to stay healthy. Doctor’s office visits are not in the cards for me. It scares me to think about my future, as an old man, so I do what I can to try and make sure I stay as healthy as I can for as long as possible. 

No matter what I do, my thoughts keep coming back to this. My future. How my future might be different if I had someone. That’s huge, and it’s a lot to expect of any one person. Never mind someone who has challenges of their own. But just one step at a time. Pun intended. 

I glance at the schedule. Ten thirty five. Jensen will be in the bathroom if I am to believe that he sticks to this schedule as closely as he says. Based on what I saw yesterday, if the schedule says he’s going to be in the bathroom, then he’s going to be in the bathroom. That means I can meet him at La Carmencita, which gives this whole thing a nice little dose of symmetry. I like it, that’s good luck. 

For Jensen’s sake, I wait in line. 

I step up to the desk and hand over one dollar. 

“The recommended admission price is twenty five dollars for adults,” the attendant says. She has big, bouffant hair that she’s dyed black, and bright red lipstick, perfectly applied. 

“I wish to pay one dollar,” I counter. I keep telling myself it’s good karma, which I need all I can get today. I want to see Jensen again so badly, and I’m not going to take any chances. 

The attendant rolls her eyes and waves me in. Not exactly gracious, but hey!  I’m in. 

Up the stairs to La Carmencita. I try to enjoy the things I see on the way by. The coolest thing about the museum is that the whole thing is art, not just the paintings or statues or items on display. Go ahead. Google the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then click on “images.”  How beautiful is that building?  The symmetry, the grandeur. You feel like you’re a better person the minute you walk up those steps. And all the little alcoves and places where they’ve tucked pieces of their collection are just everywhere. A marble faun here, and Tiffany stained glass there. 

Because if Jensen doesn’t recognize me, I’m not coming back here for a long, long time. 

If you like short stories, read The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton. It’s not long. It won’t take hardly any of your time at all, but it will stay with you forever. The general idea is that a man fell in love with a girl he was too low-born to ever hope of marrying, and her father finds out. He offers a game in lieu of punishment. The man is to be placed in an arena across from two doors. Behind one is a hungry tiger that will surely rip him to shreds and devour him. Behind the other is a beautiful young girl, who he may take as a wife. All he needs to do is open the correct door. At the last moment, he glances up into the audience, to see the face of the girl he fell in love with one last time, and she gives a nearly imperceptible indication with her finger which door he should chose. The author does a really good job making you question whether she’d rather see her lover torn to shreds or married to another woman. The story ends when the man makes up his mind and opens one of the doors. But you never get to find out which.

At odd times in my life, it comes back to my mind, and I have this feeling that the answer to the riddle exists in the real world somewhere. That time isn’t frozen just before the answer is revealed after all, and if my brain could just reach out a little farther, it could know the truth. 

It comes to my mind today. I stand at the top of the stairs, and the pull of what lies ahead in the gallery with La Carmencita is so strong, and so terrifying, that for a moment I am paralyzed. I have a lifetime of experience telling me that he will not remember me when I enter that gallery. I have a heart full of hope that he will, and no way of knowing unless I put one foot in front of the other and go find out. 

Every muscle in my body feels icy cold and tremulous as I walk forward. With each step, my strength seems to lessen until I need to pause and take some deep breaths. A woman with iron grey curls and a tartan poncho breaks away from her tour group for a moment to ask me if I’m ok. I nod and smile as best as I can and she scurries along to catch up with her group. 

“What are you doing out here?” Jensen asks me. 

I whirl around, my heart jackrabbiting all over the place inside my chest. He’s coming up the stairs behind me, looking slightly puzzled. 

“Out where?” I say, stupidly, because I can’t do what I really want to do, which is to run the last few feet between us and fling myself at him full blast and squeeze so, so hard. 

I went to the library last night and sat on the floor next to the 618 section and pulled down every book they had on autism and asperger, trying to put together a mental field guide. And that was a crap idea because guess what?  People on the autism spectrum are human. Which means that you never know what you’re going to get. Maybe Jensen loves hugs and touching. Maybe he hates it. Same as any other person. 

“Outside the gallery. My schedule is La Carmencita at 10:50. Not out here.”

I can’t help it. Tears well up in my eyes. “You’re not in there either,” I point out gently, my voice just coming out as a squeak. 

Jensen ducks his head down, hiding one of his dazzling smiles. “I was looking for you,” he says. “I wasn’t sure you were going to come. Maybe you were just being nice to me yesterday. So I kept checking at the front desk to see if Ellen had seen you come in.”

As he’s talking, Jensen starts moving towards the gallery entrance. He takes my hand as he passes, it’s soft and slightly warm, and he does it totally without a trace of self-consciousness. I squeeze my fingers around his palm and follow him. 

It occurs to me, only a few moments later, that he had changed his schedule for me. And then, the realization of what he was doing hits. 

“Is Ellen the lady at the admissions desk?” I ask.

“One of them,” he says, “the one with the big fake hair.”

“She’s the one I gave my dollar to,” I say, “she probably sees a lot of faces every day, so she probably didn’t remember me.”

“That’s exactly what she said.” He stops, and turns toward me, questioning. “You paid to get in?” he asks. 

“One dollar,” I say, and feel absurdly proud. 

“Well, now we’re even,” he says. “We both changed a little for each other.”

++++++++

Jensen

He has no idea how agitated I actually was, which makes me kind of proud. And also, I’m really, really glad he came back. 

A lot of nice girls do this thing where they act nice because they don’t want to hurt my feelings. Which, as far as I am concerned, is totally stupid. First of all, why would my feelings be hurt if, for example, a girl wasn’t interested in art history?  Lots of people aren’t interested in art history. Lots of people are interested in dinosaurs, and I’m not. There is not a single work of art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring dinosaurs. There is one photograph, a gelatin silver print, but it’s not on display, and it’s not a photo of an actual dinosaur. But you don’t see me going around, worrying that I might be hurting people’s feelings by not being interested in dinosaurs. 

Furthermore, when someone acts like they like you and are nice to you in the library, but then you see them in the cafeteria and they don’t sit next to you or talk to you, they’re still hurting your feelings. I guess the difference is, they would rather hurt your feelings when they don’t have to see it happening. So it’s cowardly, as well as stupid. 

So all morning, I was trying to decide if Jared was like those girls, or if he really might be the type of person who would want to hang out with me. That was hard for me, because I really liked him yesterday, and because I didn’t want my mom and dad to be right.

I know what mom and dad would have said if I stayed at the table last night. They would have done this big talk with me about how sometimes people take advantage of others, and how because of my autism, I might not be able to read the signs that someone was taking advantage of me. Which is pretty typical. I don’t know why it’s so hard for them to believe that I might actually be able to judge someone’s character on my own. I always knew when those girls were just being nice to me in the library. And I notice a lot of little details that other people miss. 

For example. 

“There’s something that’s bothering me,” I say. I rub my thumb over the back of his hand, and his skin is soft. Not like I would picture a homeless person’s skin to be like.

“What is it?” Jared asks me, and his face is so much like the over-exaggerated “worry” face that therapists are always using to teach kids with autism what the expression “worry” looks like that I almost laugh. Almost. I rub my thumb over the back of his hand again.

“I don’t understand why Ellen didn’t recognize you. In the café, she’s always complaining about the cheapskates that don’t pay the full recommended admission price. She definitely would have remembered you if you only paid one dollar.”

“I was wearing different clothes yesterday,” Jared says. “How did you describe me?”  

“I said you were medium handsome with floppy brown hair and brown and amber eyes. That you were my age.” We’re standing in front of La Carmencita, exactly where we had spoken to each other for the first time yesterday. Now that I think about it, it was right around this time, too. 

“I’m sure there are a lot of guys who look like that. Besides, my eyes are not brown and amber. They’re… sort of green?”

I look closely into his eyes. He’s right. Sort of. More like blue and brown mixed together to kind of look like green. “But not many who only paid one dollar.”

“Maybe she was distracted.”

I look hard at Jared. I try to imagine being distracted by something so much that I don’t remember him. I can’t do it. There are not many things in the admissions booth that could distract you. You are only a few feet away from the person on the other side of the window. I know that I have a really good memory, but this seems like something anybody should be able to do. Remember this boy. He’s takes up so much space. He’s so much there.

I must be lost in thought, because when I look up, Jared is looking at me expectantly, as if I am supposed to say something. I made a list last night of things we could talk about, because my therapist says that one thing I need to work on is talking about things that other people are interested in, not just what I am interested in. Here’s the list:

1. Does he have a hobby? 

2. What does he want to be when he grows up? 

3. What kind of movies does he like, what is his favorite movie? 

4. What is his favorite book?  What book does he think I should read? 

5. Does he have any artistic talent? 

6. Who is his favorite artist, what is his favorite piece of art? 

7. Does he ever go to the other museums in New York? 

8. Why doesn’t he have a mother and father? 

9. What is it like to be homeless? 

10. What did he dream about last night?

I am not sure which of these things I should pick. I might have gone over it with my mother, but I’m still pissed at my mother and father for last night. I was worried this morning that they’d want to talk about it some more and so I didn’t want to bring up talking to Jared. Luckily, they didn’t seem to want to talk about it at all, which is weird because mom always wants to talk everything out. But I just kept my mouth shut until I left the house, and that seemed to work. 

So, I do what I often do, which is find a way to randomly select a number. The first number I see will be the number I pick. I realize this is not completely random, because if I see a one, I can only chose one if it is not followed by a zero, which makes one less likely to be chosen than the other numbers, and ten the least likely, but unless I use the random generator app on my phone, it’s the only choice I’ve got, and even I know how dorky it would be to pull out my phone to try and help me chose a topic of conversation. 

Also, I should have realized that eight would be the most likely number, because we are headed for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century European Paintings and Sculpture, and those galleries all start with eight. 

“Why don’t you have a mother and father?” I ask.

His hand stiffens in mine, and he doesn’t answer for a while. I am not sure if I chose the best out of all the subjects. Random doesn’t always mean the best. But it does prevent you from using bias to select the thing that you secretly want, which in my case were numbers five and six. 

“I don’t know what happened to my father,” Jared says. “I don’t have any memories of him. My mother dropped me off at school one day when I was four and didn’t come back for me.”

“Wh—”

“I don’t know why.”

“But normally, when a kid loses their parents, they get adopted, or put into foster care or something.”

“I did. Foster care, that is, but I never stayed anywhere long, and now I think I’m too old for foster care, I’m not sure, but I think I’m seventeen or eighteen.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I didn’t keep track when I was real little.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“I don’t know.”  

This makes me tap my head. I picture the years as a cylinder that revolves around, with no seam to tell when you get back to the beginning. Time, spinning and infinite, not divided into blocks. My time is divided into blocks, each the same size, except for leap years, and then the difference is only 1/365 th greater than regular, which is imperceptible to the human eye. 

“Today,” I say. 

“What?” he asks.

I need to do this to make that spinning stop. Today can be the day where the seam is, dividing one year from the next. 

“You said you made up your name, why not make up your own birthday?  Today.”

He gives me a look that does not match any of the facial expressions on my MARA 3D facial expressions app. And that thing has over 200 different emotions preset into the database. “Seeing a cute kitten,” and “Got Brussels sprouts on my pizza” included. 

“Yesterday,” he says at last, and smiles. “Let’s say yesterday was my birthday.”

++++++++

Jared

This is so much easier than I worried it would be. While Jensen sketched, I looked at paintings in the nearby galleries, checking in with him from time to time. I was worried about lying to him about certain things, but found out that I could pretty much tell the truth about anything he wanted to ask. I mean, no one ever thinks to ask, hey, do you have a supernatural curse that makes your life different than anything I’ve ever even considered imagining?  

However. 

I know I can’t do this forever. I love the museum as much as the next person, but I’m going to want to do other things too. Jensen seems pretty content to stick to his schedule. No, not just content. It’s like he has to follow his schedule. 

At lunch, I suggest we eat somewhere other than the American Café. Yesterday, he had said that it was his favorite. Not that it was the only place he could eat or anything like that. 

He smiles nervously, tapping his forehead slightly with his knuckles. This might not go over. 

“They have a sandwich for me,” he says. He keeps his eye on Still Life with Bottle of Rum. “Maybe after a little while, we could have lunch somewhere else. But not today. Or tomorrow.”

We both have issues we need to tiptoe around. 

At the American Café, it goes exactly as I had feared it would. That girl Tina, with her big, expectant smile. 

“Hello, Jensen,” she teases, “who’s your boyfriend?”

As nerve wracking as this situation is for me, I get a little glow of warmth in my chest hearing those words. When I say I hit the lottery with Jensen, I wasn’t kidding. I would have been happy with just someone who was willing to talk with me. 

“It’s Jared. Remember, you met him yesterday?”

Tina looks at me again, her smile faltering slightly. “Jared?”  I can literally see her scrolling through her mental rolodex, trying to remember having met me the day before. I had held out a small hope that it might be different, that something about being with Jensen would take this away, but it was only a tiny spark of a hope, so it’s not exactly surprising or devastating. 

Jensen is looking from her to me. “He wasn’t wearing a scarf yesterday,” he says, and takes the sandwich. 

“Nice to meet you,” I mutter, and follow him to the table, a turkey club in hand. 

“What do you have planned for special exhibits today?” I ask. It’s the one variable on the schedule. 

“We spent all day yesterday and this morning on my schedule, so I wrote ‘Jared’ in for special exhibits. I want you to show me your favorites.”

He looks so nervous, I reach my hand over and put it on top of his, softly. “I’ll take it easy on you,” I say. “No statuary.”  I remember that he told me yesterday that he doesn’t like how sculptures are just out in the open, uncontained. 

He taps his head, looking down at his sandwich. “No,” he says. “We can do that if there’s something you want to see. I can do it.”


There is something I want to see. My favorite piece in the museum. 

The first time I saw Memory, I was coming at it from the north entrance to the gallery, and I didn’t see the name on the plinth. I loved her immediately, even without knowing. So I don’t feel that sort of cheaty feeling I might have if I had known her name first, kind of like I have with Dali’s Persistence of Memory in the Museum of Modern Art. I love that painting, but there’s a little voice in my head that says I only like it because of the title. To be honest, it doesn’t really fit with most of the pieces I would call my favorites. 

I like pretty art. I know that makes me a seriously second class patron of the arts, shallow and dimwitted and all that. But why not?  Why shouldn’t I prefer to look at pretty things?  I understand that there’s often a deeper meaning in pieces that aren’t so attractive to look at, but in my mind, that’s for studying time, not how I want to fill my eyes when I’m doing it just for fun. 

Memory isn’t just pretty. It’s beautiful. Breathtaking. Gorgeous. Memory is a Carrara marble statue, featuring a young woman or goddess seated nude and gazing into a mirror. Her hair is delicately braided and piled on top of her head, and her modesty is nominally protected by fabric gracefully draped over her lap. 

If I lean back, and turn my head around to the left, I can actually see her from where I am sitting in the American Café. This is what I meant earlier when I was talking about the museum itself being a work of art. Here I am having lunch, and I can glance over and see some of my favorite works of art. You’re in a whole other beautiful world when you’re here. 

“What do you like about it?” Jensen asks me as we stand in front of her after we’ve eaten. 

“Besides how beautiful?”

“There are a lot of beautiful things in the world. They don’t make it into the museum unless they are also interesting.” He’s got his sketchbook out, and he’s already tracing some rudimentary lines, capturing if not the detail then the suggestion of the form and essence of the statue. 

I think carefully before I answer, wanting to get it just right. “If you look it up on the website, it tells you that she’s looking into the mirror, contemplating the ‘ephemeral nature of beauty, youth and life.’  But to me, it has a different meaning. Her name is Memory, and she’s looking into a mirror. She makes her own memories. She’s lonely, but not sad. I like that.”

“There’s a lot of interesting history to this piece,” Jensen says, continuing to sketch. "The sculptor, Daniel French, also did the Lincoln Memorial and the Minuteman in Concord, Massachusetts. The model for this piece was Audrey Munson, who was the first woman to appear fully nude in an American motion picture.”  He pauses for a moment to walk to the left of the statue and peer a little more closely at her face. “It’s like the statue has its own memories, if you think about it.”

“That’s amazing,” I say. “I just picked out a totally random piece, and you knew all that stuff about it?”

“I told you, I remember nearly everything I hear or read. I spend a lot of time here, eventually I learn a little bit about nearly everything on view. When I’m not here, I read a lot.”

“Fiction or non-fiction?”

His hand pauses sketching right where he was rounding the delicate angle of Memory’s knee. “Mostly non-fiction,” he says. “I know that’s boring, but I don’t like the idea of fake facts from fictional stories getting into my head and mixed up with real facts.”

I’m not paying attention as well as I should, because out of the corner of my eye, I see Tina talking to a handsome man in a very, very nice suit and pointing towards us. This can only be Jensen’s father. The same tawny colored hair, a little less tousled than Jensen’s, the same easy smile. And he’s looking at us and smiling huge right now. 

This is not good. This is not good, this is not good. I feel panicked, trapped. He’s seen us, and he saw me see him see us. I can’t run away. I had forgotten that Jensen’s father actually worked here, and even if I had remembered, I would have assumed that it was in an office somewhere, maybe not even on-campus. 

“Jensen!” his father says warmly as he approaches. I had had my hand on Jensen’s back, looking over his shoulder at his sketch while we talked. I snatch it away and put a couple more inches distance between the two of us. 

Jensen looks distinctly like he’s been caught red-handed doing something he really, really shouldn’t. 

“This is Jared, the boy I told you about last night,” Jensen says, and his voice is oddly monotone and flat. “Jared, this is my father, Alan Ackles.”

Mr. Ackles looks at me for a moment, and I can practically see his world view twisting around into a new shape as we speak. He saw my hand on Jensen’s back, and he’s trying to decide how he feels about it. “Very nice to meet you,” he says at last, and shakes my hand. “Jensen, you should have told me you were meeting a friend today, I would have arranged a tour.”

Jensen still doesn’t look up and he seems like a different person to me. Stiff, closed off. In that same detached voice, he says, “I did tell you about him. At dinner, last night.”  

Yesterday, when Jensen had talked about his father, it had been with a sort of sheepish pride. He thought, and rightly so, that his dad was a pretty cool guy. He talked about how important he was to the museum, and how much he had taught him about art and the collection at the Met. Now, it’s like he’s completely disengaged. 

Mr. Ackles’ blank look tells me the whole story. Of course he doesn’t remember Jensen talking about me. This feels like a train wreck coming down the tracks. How many times will this exact scene play out?  How will Jensen, who gets agitated whenever he goes off schedule, deal with something like me?  

The answer is, he can’t. It’s not fair for me to ask him to. I know how much support his parents give him, and they can’t help him with this. 

“Jensen’s given me a fantastic tour himself,” I say to bridge the awkward silence. I gesture towards Memory. This is my favorite piece, and I had no idea the same artist did the Lincoln Memorial.”

“Well, then. Sounds like you two are doing fine,” Mr. Ackles says. His smile has slipped into a polite disguise for the sadness I hear in his voice as he sneaks glances at Jensen, who still hasn’t even looked at him. “Just make sure you let me know if there is anything I can do to make your visit more enjoyable.” He makes as if to clap Jensen on the back, but then thinks better of it and offers me his hand again. His face is a mix of hope and defeat. I get it. He really wants Jensen to meet a nice girl, fall in love, etc. He probably doesn’t even mind that I don’t fit perfectly into that vision, but he sees Jensen’s turned back and thinks it’s not going to happen, he thinks Jensen will blow it.

I hate myself for who I am at that moment, because Mr. Ackles is right, it’s not going to happen, but not because of Jensen, because of me. And the worst part of it is, Jensen will remember, and he won’t understand, and he won’t be able to seek solace in his parents, because no matter how many times Jensen brings it up, they won’t remember that he had his heart broken by a medium handsome boy. 

Jensen

In communications, an operator only needs to get a reading from three different data points to triangulate the exact location of any given signal. In linguistics, babies only need to hear a word in context three times to code its meaning into their vocabulary. 

If you’ve noticed something odd twice, and start to have suspicions, a third time constitutes proof of the pattern. Because the thing I’ve noticed is so weird, the third time isn’t good enough. The two other clues I have aren’t good enough either.  I have to test it one more time. And that’s what I am going to do. 

“I had lunch today with a boy at the museum,” I say when I sit down to dinner. Spaghetti. No sauce for me. Mom, who is an incurable optimist, has put a small salad next to my plate. 

Both my parents freeze, staring at me in shock. Amazingly, the exact same expressions they had on their faces last night at the dinner table. 

Dad recovers first. “A boy?  Like, a boy your age?” 

“What’s his name?” Mom chimes in. Again, before I can answer Dad’s question. She pushes her sheath of smooth, dark hair away from her eyes, tucks it behind her ear, a habit she has that she does when she’s really interested in something.

Tonight, I had thought about the things I should say beforehand, so now I know it’s probably not a great idea to say that he’s a homeless orphan and that he had been trying to sneak into the special exhibit and that I had to teach him about giving a polite quarter. 

“His name is Jared, he’s my age, and he knows a lot about art. We met at La Carmencita, and he knew that there was another one.”

Mom and Dad sit there, blinking at me. 

“You should have come get me,” Dad says. “I could have arranged a private tour.”

And that’s when I know. I’m not sure what it means, but there’s no doubt in my mind any longer. For some reason, no one remembers Jared. Not Ellen, the admissions clerk, who would definitely remember someone who insisted on paying only one dollar, not Tina, who had been so happy to meet Jared both times, and not my dad, who shook his hand and learned that I like boys right there in the middle of the Charles Engelhard Court. Mom and Dad can’t even remember talking about him last night, and believe me, this is something they would remember. I was shocked this morning when I didn’t get the “let’s all examine our feelings” talk at the breakfast table. I thought I’d been let off the hook, but now I see it’s something all together different. 

Even all this might not make me so certain if not for the two things he told me, that his mother forgot him at preschool, and what he said about liking that the woman in the statue made her own memories. Those were two big clues. 

I don’t know what it all means, but surprisingly, I’m okay with that. I’ve spent two days with Jared, and the whole time, right from the first moment, I’ve felt like there’s something about him that doesn’t quite fit in with my understanding of the world. And nothing bad happened to me. 

“I gave him a tour myself,” I say. Which is true. 

“Will you see him again?” Dad asks. 

“Would you like to invite him here so we can meet him?”  Mom asks. 

I want to do both of these things. I decided yesterday that I wanted to open the Jared door and find out what’s inside, and I haven’t changed my mind just because what’s inside is unexpected. A lot of the things that happen in my life are unexpected. Like how people don’t appreciate you telling the truth when they ask your opinion. That’s something that’s very unexpected. Like how most girls automatically don’t want to know me when they realize my behavior is a little different, even though I’m smart and kind and interesting and very good looking, that’s unexpected. 

After dinner, I get online and start searching. 

People who you can’t remember yields a bunch of articles about facial recognition disorder, which is called prosopagnosia.

Reverse Prosopagnosia , interestingly leads to a blog article by a man with autism who frequently thinks he sees someone he knows, only to find out that he is mistaken. 

People can’t remember me brings me to the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song, i***t Wind, but it’s not about someone that people can’t remember. 

Boy who no one can remember yields a bunch of varied results, a few romance novel titles, more song lyrics, and an interesting article on childhood amnesia, also known as infantile amnesia. 

I can’t seem to find any references to this particular weirdness that is happening to Jared. I go into my closet and close the door. 

A lot of people do not understand my closet. My Aunt Beatrice, for example, thinks that I’m having the equivalent of a temper tantrum when I go in my closet. In fact, it’s the opposite. A temper tantrum is a complete loss of control. Going into the closet is my way of regaining, or retaining control when things start to feel too intense for me. 

For example. Outside, the world and outer space go on forever. If you ever stop to really think about what that means, it will give you a very, very uncomfortable feeling. I’m very sensitive to that uncomfortable feeling. Being in an enclosed space makes me feel more contained. More certain. There’s less noise. Less things to look at. Fewer things screaming for my attention. 

If things are particularly bad for me, for example, if someone sat next to me on the subway and ate shrimp lo mein with wooden chopsticks out of a paper carton, and they didn’t keep their mouth shut when they were eating, and their noises and smells filled up my entire brain and won’t leave, in such an example, I might go into the closet and turn the light off and wrap myself in my green chenille blanket and just wait until I can think normally again. 

Other times, when I just need a little time to get away from all the everyday little stresses that add up and start to make me feel agitated, I go in and draw. 

My dad took all the shelves and clothes rods out of my closet when I was first old enough to know that I wanted to go in there. Mom painted the walls in there white, and they gave me a set of markers. Not Crayola Washable markers, like most parents would have done. Dad told me, “all art is art.” Which meant that if I was expressing myself through drawing, then it was art, and they saw value in it. 

You know how some families have a door frame they mark their children’s growth on through the years?  My parents have my closet. Down low, you can see my clear progression from random to controlled and then named scribbling as high as my arms could reach. Above that, pre-schematic and schematic scenes depicting our family, mother, father, myself, and occasionally the baby that my mother lost before I was born, which was an intense source of preoccupation for me for some time. My transitional stage was very brief, and can only be discerned in a few places between the lower and upper reaches of the closet. The upper areas, I’m still working on. 

I try not to be overly deliberate in what I put on the walls, but I’m acutely conscious that not only my father, but also some of his colleagues occasionally study what I’ve drawn. Neil Pinna, who is chief of acquisitions at the museum has more than once made an offer for the walls, as well as Cynthia Cornwallis, who owns the Telton Gallery between 5 th and Madison Avenues. I think this is stupid, because in the first place, it’s not finished. I’m seventeen and I’ll probably continue to work on it as long as I live with mom and dad, which frankly, may be for a while. Secondly, no matter what my father says, this is not art. This is therapy. There’s no intention or theme to the overall work. I’ve declined, but at this point, it almost seems like a competition between my father’s friends. They want it, and are prepared to keep offering. 

Tonight, I work in just black, cracking open some new sharpies. I have Memory on my mind, but also Jared. Instead of holding a mirror, my figure is reaching out in supplication. Despite the difference, I think most people would recognize it as an adaptation of Memory. 

By the time I am done, I feel better. Mom hears that I am out, and asks if she can see what I drew. I nod, and she stands in the closet doorway. “Interesting interpretation,” she says. “What made you change her that way?”

Of course mom recognizes the statue. In the first place, she’s the one who would bring me to the museum every day before I was old enough to go on my own. In the second place, I am a very good artist. 

I can’t help it, I have to test one more time, just to be sure. “I met a boy at the museum today, and he reminds me of Memory.”

Mom gives me a searching look. “A boy?” she asks. “Like, a friend?”  There’s a lot more questions in that question than just the words say, but it’s also a very definite answer. 

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Jared

It’s Wednesday, which is good for me, because that’s the day I volunteer at the shelter and I need something to keep my mind off Jensen. I usually sleep at the shelter the night before I volunteer, but I felt so sad last night that I treated myself to the Hilton at Times Square. I have a key card there that I took from a cleaning cart a few months ago, and so far, so good, it still works. 

Working at the shelter is very, very good for me. It helps me feel like I’m not such a terrible free-loader as you might suppose me to be, with all this stealing and sneaking and walking out on my diner tabs. There are a lot of people really down on their luck, so much more so than I, and I wish they could all live as comfortably as I do. Helping out is the least I can do. 

But the main reason it’s so good for me is that I sort of have friends here. They just don’t know it. At the shelter, there’s lots of volunteers who come in and out, showing up once in a while only because it looks good on a college resume, so no one thinks twice about seeing someone they’ve never seen before stocking cans in the storage room. There’s a core group of regulars, and then there are some people who are actually employed at the shelter. These are my friends. I’ve been there with them through marriages and divorces and pregnancies and grandchildren being born. Through relationships and break-ups and college graduations. Sometimes they think it’s weird that the stray volunteer kid in the back gets all choked up on their behalf when something bad happens, or is beaming for joy for them when they get engaged, but for the most part, they take it in stride and they’ve forgotten about me later that day anyway, so no big deal. 

A regular job, with training and human resources and paperwork and paychecks is just not an option for me. But you’d be surprised how necessary a job is for a social life. Not that I really have a social life, but working at the shelter lets me pretend I am part of a social group, at least for a day.

Today, I’m washing dishes. You would not believe the steady stream of pots and pans that the cooks can produce. I can stand at the sink literally all day and never run out of work. By the end of the day, I’ll barely be able to straighten my back, and I am definitely sleeping in a hotel tonight. Preferably one with hot tub jets in the baths. 

My heart is so heavy as I fill the sink, scrub, rinse, set aside to dry. Scrub, rinse, set aside to dry. 

“Hey there, what’s your heartbreak?” Sandy McCoy asks me. Sandy is one of the paid employees here, and she supplements her income bartending at a club downtown on the weekends. She is particularly gifted at listening to other people’s problems. “You look like you lost your last friend.”

Hearing it like that knocks the wind out of me. Not just my last friend, my only friend. Literally the only possible person who could be a friend to me, and I have to walk away. 

Sandy holds her arms out for a hug, and I go in, feeling tears squeeze out of the corners of my eyes. She’s a super good hugger. Sandy broke up with her long-term boyfriend about six months ago, and since that time, she’s asked me out three or four times, each time acting like she was surprising even herself. One time, it happened close enough to the end of the shift that I was able to stick around with her and go to a movie together. She’s a sweetheart. 

“Someone break your heart?” she asks, pushing back so she can see my face, but not fully releasing me from the hug. 

“More like the other way around,” I say. “I don’t want to, but it’s the right thing, you know?” 

She nods her head. “Maybe,” she says, “Maybe not. Give it some time, you’ll know if you did the right thing or not.”

“I’m lonely,” I whisper on her shoulder. It’s easy to confess these things to someone who won’t remember come tomorrow. 

“Sweetie,” she says, “you won’t be lonely for long. Not with that styling hair net.” She gives my hair net an affectionate pat. “Besides, we’re all lonely.” She takes up position drying dishes as I wash. “I bartend at a club in mid-town on the weekends, and every single person sitting at the bar is lonely. It’s the human condition. Married people are lonely. Single people are lonely. Beautiful dishwashing boys like you get lonely. You’ve just gotta get your little bit of happiness while you can and call it good.”

That gets a smile out of me at last. Beautiful dishwashing boy. But it also makes me think of Jensen’s more honest assessment of me as medium-handsome. That’s what sucks about this so bad. Right from the very first moment he was one hundred percent honest, and one hundred percent himself. And all I could do was lie and hide who I was. Doomed from the start, and I had to stupidly let him get dragged into it knowing there really was no chance. 

The dishwater is getting old, cold and dirty, so I pull the plug and drain the water. I help Sandy put away some of the pots and pans she’s dried, although I am not really eager for his part of the job to be done; it’s nice having her around, even if for just a little while. If she goes back to the store room or something, I’ll have to start over. It’s exhausting. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning and I’m exhausted.

I’m only seventeen, and I’m exhausted. 

And furthermore, now one of my favorite places in the city is off limits. For a good long while at least. 

Or is it?  

I wipe down the bits of soggy food off the sides of the sink, rinse it down and put the plug back in. Lots of soap, some hot water, and look at my sparkling dishwater. Sandy helps me carry over a load of skillets from the cook’s station.

Okay, if I don’t want to bump into Jensen, theoretically that doesn’t mean I have to give up going to the museum. I have his schedule. I could just make sure I’m not in any of those areas at his scheduled times. 

But even as I am saying it, I know what I’m doing. It’s the same thing I did on that first day, when I told him I didn’t want to go for a cup of tea, and then convinced myself that I wasn’t actually looking for him after that. I just couldn’t stay away. If I really wanted to avoid seeing him again, all I’d have to do is just go after four o’clock in the evening. 

“What do you do when you really want to be with somebody, but you know you’re not right for them?” I ask Sandy as I scrub one of the huge stock pots. 

“I’m not sure that’s up to you to decide,” she says. “That’s patronizing. You be the best person you can be, and let them decide if you’re right for them or not.” 

She has a point. But I remember how Jensen had been so withdrawn after his father met me. How he’d gone with me to all my favorite pieces, but that he had stopped talking or even making those fleeting glances that he’d been giving me up until then. Throughout the afternoon, I came back to him often to find him not just tapping, but actually knocking his forehead with his knuckles, drawing stares from people around us. 

Please do not misunderstand me. I did not feel embarrassed. I did not feel uncomfortable. I felt guilty. It’s one thing if you think you might be bad for someone, another thing altogether if you can see that you are literally causing them distress, just by being who you are. 

“So…. does this mean you’re on the rebound?  Need a little company?” Sandy quirks and eyebrow at me, “Maybe after work we could—”

“I’m seventeen,” I cut her off. “And no offense, but… I go the other way.” 

Although in all reality, the fact that I’m not into girls is only one of the reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea. Not the least of which is that my heart is currently busy knitting itself up in scar tissue. 

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