Falling like the Stars

18

Jensen

When I set my mind to something, I am very methodical. My mind is set on seeing Jared again. Things did not go well yesterday afternoon. I knew I was going off the rails, but I couldn’t help myself at the time, it was just too much. Now I’ve had time to process though, and I know I can do better. 

I don’t know exactly what is going on with Jared, but I do know that I am the last person on earth who should push someone away because there is something different about them. Not only that, but I have a lot of experience dealing with things that seem alien or strange, because the way people behave ninety percent of the time seems alien and strange to me. 

When we left, I didn’t ask him if I could see him again tomorrow, even though he was looking at me in a way that I’m guessing was… expectant. Hopeful. Which really says a lot right there. I had a lot of my autism behaviors on display, and not exactly the positive ones, and he still wanted to see me. 

I was just too far in. I had to make a closet in my mind or else completely lose my s**t right there in the museum. That happened once before, and I swore it would never happen again. 

So. I have a three stage plan if he doesn’t show up today. Stage one is to stick to my schedule, that way, he will know where to find me if he wants to. I do not think the chances of this working are very good, so I will only try it for four days. Stage two is to assume that he’s still coming to the museum, but avoiding me. If that’s the case, then I should be able to find him by going to his favorite pieces that he showed me. I think this has a much better chance of success. I have created a rotation of six days, one for each work of art, and I will go through the rotation five times, or a total of one month. 

After that, I’m not quite sure what stage three will be. I’ll have to go over everything he said to me during our two days together, and see if I can find any leads. This stage has an even lower chance of success than stage one, because if the chances of two people randomly crossing paths in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are slim, the chances when you widen the radius to include all of New York City are even smaller. Much smaller. 

Since stage one is so easy for me, I decide that this will be the time that I use to research for stage three. I have two days worth of memory prompts. 

Stage one, day one, I go through my file cabinet to find the sketches I made the first day we met and pack them in my satchel with me. Including The Portal, because even though we hadn’t actually met then, he had been on my mind while I was drawing it. I remember how he had moved among the people on the stairs out front, not really ignoring them, but almost as if he lived in a separate reality from them. I write down everything he had been wearing. A pair of khakis with lots of pockets. A heather-grey Henley with an army surplus field jacket pulled over it, also lots of pockets. 

He’d been wearing Adidas Ultra Boost walking sneakers, which I didn’t particularly notice at the time, but if I look at the picture of him in my head, I can clearly see the brand name and model emblazoned on the back of his heel as he walked up the steps in front of me. I google the sneakers and find that they’re nearly two hundred dollars a pair. 

Which gives me pause, makes me think for the first time about what his life must really be like. How does he have sneakers like that?  Come to think of it, how does he have anything?  He said he was homeless. He said he didn’t have a mother and father. That his mother had left him at school and never come back for him. That after that, he’d never gone to school, but taught himself, with a little help from people at the shelter, and by reading things in the library, and going on tours in museums. 

All this, he’d shared with me without really telling me the most important thing about himself. I briefly considered the possibility that he himself didn’t notice that people didn’t remember him, but rejected it when I realized that it only took me two days to notice. 

Moving on to La Carmencita. The painting where he’d first spoken to me. I comb through the details of our conversation to learn what I can. He’d remarked on how he thought it was cool that we remembered her all these years later. So many clues. What was it he had said about the special exhibit? They never remember me. 

This is why Ellen didn’t remember a boy paying only one dollar to get in. This is why I had to introduce him twice to Tina in the Café. 

And that’s when the biggest one hits me. It’s so huge that I break schedule go directly to Still Life with Bottle of Rum, even though it’s not time yet. I see the security guard look at his watch when I come in, which strikes me as kind of funny, I never thought about how other people would be so conscious of my schedule before.

I pull out the Still Life sketches, and the moment comes flooding back to me. The look on his face when I spoke to him that second time. The incredulity. The intense surprise and relief and me being worried that he might cry or grab me and hug me. Because I recognized him. I remembered him. 

It’s not possible. No one could live like that. No one. I can’t, absolutely can’t be the only person who has ever remembered him. 

Deep shame floods my brain like black tar slowly filling up all the cracks, remembering how I shut down and shut him out yesterday. Imagine what his life must be like. Imagine thinking the nightmare is finally over, imagine his relief at meeting someone who can finally— I don’t have to imagine. I saw it. And then, I pushed him away. The one person. 

I have to find him. I have to. 

My father finds me at lunchtime, eating my sandwich in the café. “I hear you’ve been having an off day,” he says, concern furrowing his brow. 

It irritates me, even though I know people are just looking out for me. I remember the guard checking his watch. I look over at Tina behind the counter, and she looks away quickly. And then I realize how lucky I am. This safety net I have. Surrounded by all these people who know and love me. I can’t even comprehend how alone Jared must feel right now. 

A lot of people think that people with autism or Asperger syndrome cannot feel empathy. They couldn’t be farther from the truth. I feel things just as deeply as anyone. When I was younger, it’s true that I often saw people only in terms of what they could do for me, almost like tools. I didn’t often see people as being separate from myself at all. For example, one of the reasons I never lied as a child is because I assumed my mother knew everything that I knew. If I had eaten a piece of candy in one room while she was in the other, I assumed that she knew I had eaten the piece of candy. 

That’s a developmental stage, and autism is characterized by developmental delays. I know now that people are their own discreet beings, and that they have their own needs and emotions separate from my own. True, most of the time, I’m not interested to know what those needs and emotions are. Most of the time. I care deeply about my parents, and I worry constantly that I’m causing them stress. 

But I can’t worry about everyone. I don’t know how neurotypical people do it, walking around, caring about everyone around them. I can’t imagine walking around caring about the emotions and needs of every single person around me. It would break me down in no time at all. My therapist says it’s not like that. That typically, you would walk down the street and social conventions help you understand the limit of your responsibility for meeting other people’s needs. 

So there you go. Social conventions are something I’m not hardwired with, so I have to make my own limits, which is to have a hierarchy of who I care about. Mother and Father are within the smallest radius, and I care about them a lot. Beyond that are people with whom I have to be polite, and offer help if I see someone in obvious distress. This includes my school mates, teachers, the staff at the museum, people I pass on the street and in the subway. I care about these people in the sense that I am a decent human being, but it’s hard for me to be interested in them. 

All this is to say that I’ve come up against something for which I am not really emotionally equipped to deal with, and that is the depth to which I am distressed about Jared. My body feels tense, and my brain feels slippery. I want very badly to ask my father for help with this, but I can’t. No one can help.

This must be how he feels all the time. 

Then again, maybe not. I think how quickly he referred to me as a friend. I think of how many times he smiled. Of the look on his face when he was showing me his favorite pieces of art. He must have made some sort of peace with the way he is. 

It doesn’t matter though. Just because he can survive being who he is, doesn’t mean that he likes being alone. No one deserves that.   

“I’m worried about a friend,” I say. 

I won’t lie, the look of surprise on his face hurts a little. To be fair, my life is not overflowing in the friend department, but still. I can literally see him swallowing the phrase what friend?

“Okay,” he says, “what’s the problem?  How can we help?”

See?  I do not understand people who “hate” their parents just on principle. 

“I’m not sure yet, and that’s what’s got me so….” I rap my forehead hard with my knuckles to show him how I am. “But I’m okay, I mean, myself. I just have to work through what I’m going to do and I don’t have it yet.”

My father looks at me for a while without saying anything. Then he says, “You’re a really good kid, Jensen,” and gets up. “If there’s anything I can do, just ask, okay?”

“Okay.”

I have to be patient. I have to remember that this is just stage one, and I already knew that stage one was probably not going to work. 

As he’s walking away, I realize there is something I want. “Dad?” I ask, and he turns around, his face eager. It’s almost sad how badly my parents want… I’m not exactly sure what they want. A richer emotional life for me?  Some sort of proof that I’ve got a beating heart underneath my autism armor?  Why don’t they know it already?

“I’d like to view a print in the archives,” I say, and pretend not to notice how his face falls a little. 

“Sure,” he says. Come on back when you’re done eating. “I’ll set you up.”

The print I want to see is a chromogenic print, which is just a fancy way of saying that it’s an actual photograph made from a film negative. It depicts the legs of what appears to be several show girls and tuxedo-clad men behind a partially raised theater curtain. The title is The Lonely Life and I want to see it because of how the curtain is hiding the faces and most of the bodies of the performers. 

I think of Jared, imagine him standing behind a curtain. I think how for him, the curtain might raise all the way occasionally, but fall just as quickly. In the theater, every time that curtain raises, the audience is new, experiencing the show for the first time, even though for the performers, they’re doing the same thing over and over. 

What I’d like to do for Jared is to keep the curtain up for once, even if it’s just for an audience of one. 

++++++++

Jared

Thursdays is my day for school. I long ago gave up trying to go to elementary school or high school; inevitably I’d spend the whole day getting forgotten in the guidance counselor’s office while they tried to make put together paperwork to enroll me. In every school building you walk into, look at the bulletin board in the entrance to the building. You’ll find a cheery little flier that says all students have a right to an education, even those without a home address. Ha. I try not to be bitter. 

But once I was old enough to look like I might pass for a college student, I could take pretty much whatever class I want. Those big lecture halls are perfect, I’m just another anonymous face in the crowd. 

Two years ago, I did a bunch of research in the New York Public Library on what career I might be best suited for. I took you don’t even want to know how many quizzes online and in the back of self-help books to find out what color my parachute was and what kind of career I might enjoy. Here’s a list of my results from one online quiz: 

•       Farm owner 

•       Recording technician 

•       Biologist 

•       Retoucher 

•       Martial arts 

•       Substitute 

•       Train driver

These results made me laugh, not only because “farm owner” is simultaneously the perfect job for me and the least likely thing ever to become reality, but also because the results were presented in this sort of word cloud format, and the last three were all one line, like this:  martial arts substitute train driver. Which could be three separate things, two separate things, or one really crazy job. Sometimes when I need a good laugh, I try and picture my life as a martial arts substitute train driver. 

The point being that who the heck knows what kind of work I would be best suited for. So I just take classes on subjects that interest me. This is how I got started in photography. I had some sort of vague idea when I was younger that if I really understood how photography worked, I could figure out how to keep myself in a photograph. I took a bunch of photography classes at NYU, and found in the process that I kind of have an eye for it. 

Today though, I’m working on a liberal arts degree. Not really, of course, I’ll never get a degree, but I decided I’d feel a little better about myself if I felt like I was at least as educated as the average person on the street. So I’m following the curriculum for a liberal arts degree at City University of New York. 

Today though, my heart’s not in it. I’m in pre-algebra, and although I “did the homework,” the numbers up on the big smartboard just aren’t arranging themselves into any sort of meaningful information. You might think this is the ideal way to take a class, auditing it really; no homework, no tests, every student’s dream, right? The problem is, if you get lost, if you find yourself heading down the wrong path with a problem, there’s no one to guide and redirect you. This is the second time I’ve taken this class, and this is just about the point in the semester when I start to fall behind. 

I keep thinking of all kinds of excuses to go back and find Jensen. Like, maybe he deserves to hear the truth. Maybe I should at least thank him. Maybe there’s some way I can— but really, it’s all just rationalizing my own selfish desire. 

I tap on the arm of my desk until the girl next to me shoots over a dirty look. Lord forbid I distract her from her i********: account, which she spends the majority of class updating from her phone. The number of times I’ve seen this girl take a selfie of herself with the smartboard as a backdrop?  No doubt she’s trying to convince someone that she’s smart, or at the very least, going to class. 

This is hopeless. I’m going to have to cover this material on my own, maybe on Math Planet online, or at the library or something. My head’s just not in it. I pack up my books and leave. A few people look up, including the teacher, and follow me out of the room with their eyes, but they’ll forget about it soon enough. It will be like I never happened. 

I try to console myself with the second best option, the Museum of Modern Art. Which, truth be told isn’t exactly sloppy seconds. They have Starry Night, and The Persistence of Memory. The photography collection is better than the Met’s in my opinion at least, so that’s something. But it just doesn’t have the same romance that the Met does. 

And I checked. The sign at the admissions desk does not say “recommended”. Admission is free for kids under sixteen, so sometimes I can get away with that, but I don’t feel like waiting in line just to be turned away if I happen to be looking a little older today, so I just go in the service entrance instead. This is just a case of looking like I am there on purpose, like I have a good reason. I have literally never been stopped. Of course, I don’t come here as often, so it’s not like I can compare my success rate to the Met. 

But like pre-algebra, everything I see just sort of glides by on the surface, like I’m seeing, but my brain isn’t really processing what I’m seeing. I go visit Persistence, and it’s just a blur. My eyes well up with tears, and my heart squeezes painfully. What I really want to look at is Pierre August Cot’s matching set of larger than life oil paintings, The Storm and Springtime. Which are housed, guess where.

Who am I kidding?  What I really want is for someone to look at me like the youths in those paintings are looking at each other. Drunk on first love. I had less than a day where I fooled myself that it might even be possible. And even after that very small taste, I feel hollowed out and empty in it’s absence. 

I wonder how Jensen is doing. I worry about how he is doing. I think back to how many months, probably even years it took me to adjust to what happened to me. It was a long time before I gave up trying to get someone to believe me. What is he going through right now?  Has he even put it together?  Maybe he just moved on. 

I spend the rest of the afternoon lying on a cot in the homeless shelter, feeling sorry for myself, ignoring the pointed looks and heaving sighs from Green Alice, who obviously wants to tell me about how I have it pretty good, and how she’s such a hard case and somehow more legitimately homeless than I am. 

I feel mean and crappy. Resentful. I pick at the meatloaf and instant mashed potatoes for dinner and I don’t offer to help with the dishes. Which of course, doesn’t solve anything. 

Maybe I need to take a trip. I think of someplace I’ve always wanted to go. Hollywood, to the Chinese Theatre and see all those handprints in the sidewalk, people remembered, immortalized on the silver screen. The opposite of me, and yet a lot of them were still unhappy. 

Or perhaps the Grand Canyon. Something so much bigger than me that I’ll have no choice but to stop feeling sorry for myself. 

Or, maybe, I could just stop feeling sorry for myself without the big grand gesture. Get busy. I pull out my math textbook and work with the numbers for a while, which seems to satisfy Green Alice in some strange way.

As the conscious part of my mind tackles the math problems, my subconscious mind drifts to a different sort of problem, something that I think about a lot, though I try not to; if there are other people like me out there, how would I find them?  

Maybe I meet many people like me all the time. Maybe we all do, and we just don’t know it. It’s not like I walk around with a big sign on my back advertising what I am. And this isn’t the sort of conversation you have with someone you just met. So we would have forgotten each other before we ever had the chance for it to come up. 

So it would have to be something external. Some way of advertising our presence, letting each other know: you are not alone. But how?  It’s not like I can take an ad out in the paper. And even if I did, what are the chances that someone like me would see it?  It would have to be huge, something you couldn’t miss, like sky writing or something. What would it say?  “You are not alone” is not specific enough. It would need to leave no doubt for someone like me that the message was for them. On top of that, it would have to have specific instructions. What to do, how to make contact, where to go, something like that. Coordinating something like that is just so completely beyond my abilities it’s not even funny. I can’t even place an order at a restaurant and be certain that I’ll get my food. 

I sigh. This whole thing with Jensen has left me so lonely. Because let’s just pretend for a moment that we were able to manage some sort of relationship. Who’s to say that it would last?  What are the chances that the one random person who just happens to be able to keep me in his mind would be the one. The one that I could love, and who would love me back?  For life?  

And yet, a tiny voice in the back of my mind says that the chances are very good. Maybe he could remember me for a reason. Fate, or destiny or whatever. I don’t think very often about God, but I do have a vague sort of sense that he’s up there somehow. Maybe this is his peace offering. Giving me this one thing to hope for. 

I think I’m finally figuring out this whole ax+ by = c thing, and as the mathematical knots start to unravel, I start to feel a little better. My appetite returns with a vengeance and I soothe myself with a helping of cake and ice cream at the kitchen counter. The ice cream is melting, and the cake is a day old and from the grocery store, but the sugar shock helps bring me out of my funk a little. 

Tomorrow, I’m going to do it. I’m just going to go to look. To see how he’s doing. Because if there’s some sort of cosmic fate thing going on here, I don’t want to make it harder on the universe by staying away. I’m going to make myself available for a miracle to happen. In fact, now that I think about it, the miracle already happened. I just need to let it keep happening. 

Jensen

It’s day three of stage two. I’ve fretted a little bit about probability and stage two. Is it better to spend one day at each of the six pieces, one after the other, and rotate, like I planned, or would it be better to spend five days in a row at each of the six pieces?  What if I was always a day ahead of him?  And now that I’m off my own regular schedule, what if he’s looking for me there and can’t find me? What if, what it, what if?  The shiftiness of all the possibilities makes me feel loose and uncertain, wanting so badly to find some way to contain everything. 

Luckily, one of my best forms of therapy is readily available. I throw myself into the challenge of sketching something new, and this is eventually what helps me make up my mind in favor of one piece for five days straight. Doing a new sketch each day would just be too much. A little familiarity goes a long way towards soothing my nerves. So, actually, I’m cheating a little and spending ten days in this gallery, which houses two of Jared’s favorite pieces. Springtime, and The Storm, both by Pierre Auguste Cot.

It’s easy to understand why Jared likes these paintings so much. The colors are lush, and the sheer size of the canvases overwhelm the senses. But it’s the emotion that’s written plainly on the faces of the figures that draw in even the most cynical of hearts. The way the youths are looking at their respective mates, there’s no mistaking that look. There’s no critical debate about the meaning. These are paintings of love, of tenderness. 

Jared may have adapted to the way he has to live his life, but everyone, even me, wants to feel love like you can see in these pictures. To have someone feel about you that way. To have someone look at you like that. 

I’m trying to capture that in my sketches, but it’s very difficult. Because it’s not just a matter of the mechanics of facial expressions. These people are lit up from the inside out.

I look up from my sketchpad, and there he is. 

He’s looking at me in such a way that I know if I hesitate for even a moment, I’ll lose it. I meet his gaze, and keep it, something that is normally very difficult for me, but in this case, it’s just like my eyes are an extension of my hands, and I keep drawing, right over the work I’d already done. I draw his eyes, and feel how Monsieur Cot must have felt when he captured the magic for his paintings. 

He stands perfectly still, though his hands and possibly lips are trembling. But his eyes are shining, and I know I’ve done the right thing, waiting here for him. Now he knows how badly I wanted this, that I wasn’t just willing to leave it to chance. 

When I’ve got it, I set my sketch pad down on the bench behind me and take two steps forward, and hold out my arms. He rushes to me, and I wrap my arms around him so tight. Suddenly, I realize that this is the first, the very first moment, the first person I’ve ever known who needs me to take care of them more than I need them to take care of me. And I know I can do it. 

“You came,” he whispers into my ear, and I run my hand up into his silky hair.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m so, so sorry I pushed you away. I didn’t realize yet.”  He should know this. I’m a good person, and I did something awful and hurtful. It should be obvious that I’m sorry and that I feel bad, but I’ve learned in therapy and from my parents that even if it’s completelyobvious how bad you feel, you still need to say it. Out loud. 

He pushes back a little, peering at my face. I look away, and just feel him. Feel him in my arms, the heat of his chest, feeling his hitching breaths against my ribs. 

“Realize what?” he asks. His voice is scared and hopeful at the same time. This must be the first time he’s ever been able to talk to someone about this. 

“What you’re like,” I say. “About the forgetting. There’s no other way on earth that my parents would have forgotten about me saying I liked a boy. Or that Ellen would have forgotten someone who only paid a dollar.”

He smiles, and all this tension that I hadn’t known I was keeping in my chest lets go, and it’s suddenly easier to breathe. 

“I only paid a dollar again today,” he says. 

I laugh. “And?” I ask.

He laughs too. “Same thing.”  Then he does something that reminds me of myself, he looks at my chest instead of my face, his eyes lowered. “Same thing as the last two days. I was looking for you in the wrong galleries.”

“That was stage one,” I say. 

As we break the hug, I let my hand slide down his arm and take his hand in mine. It feels amazing, like my feelings are swirling around me in a whirl, and yet grounded and sure at the same time. 

“How many stages were there?” he asks. 

“Three, but to be fair, I only had the vaguest idea of how stage three was going to work.”

He looks thoughtful. “It’s something I think about a lot. How I could find someone like myself. I don’t know how I would do it.”

“I have some questions,” I say. “I… I’m sometimes not sure when I’m being rude. You don’t have to—”

“Try me,” he says. 

“Why do you have such expensive shoes? How did you get them?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment, so I’m afraid that I did exactly what I was worried about. Asked a question that was too personal. But when I look up, his face is… amused. Maybe surprised a little mixed in there. If I tried to look this up on my MARA app, it might be titled “happily surprised,” but I’m not sure that’s exactly right. 

“Of everything you could ask, that’s the first question you want answered?”

“Yes.”

We sit down on the bench, and he picks up the sketch I did, his eyes superimposed on top of the Storm sketch. 

“I had to steal them,” he says, and I squeeze his hand gently to let him know that it’s okay. “I can’t have a regular job, I have no family. I have some ways of making money, but not much. I try and buy most of my clothes, but I walk all day, every day, I need sneakers that I can’t afford. It’s much easier to steal one pair of high quality sneakers than it is to steal a lot of pairs of crappy sneakers that wear out right away.”

His voice catches, it sounds raspy and swollen in his throat. “Do you really…” he stops, and swallows. “Do you really understand what I’m like?”

“No.” Because I don’t. How can he be someone that no one can remember?  “I mean, I figured out that no one can remember you. But what does that mean?” I’ve been spending most of my mental energy figuring out how to get back to him, I kept pushing the bigger questions aside. 

“It means just that. I don’t stay in people’s memories. About five minutes, that seems to be the limit, I’ve tested it. You’re the first one.”

“What about notes or pictures or recordings?”

“I don’t know how it works, but it doesn’t. If your dad took a picture of me, once he forgot me the picture would be gone too.”  As he says this, he traces his fingers around the outline of my sketch. I wonder what would happen if I drew him. 

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been this way as long as I can remember. Since the day my mother forgot me.”  

“Okay.” I mean, it’s not okay. It really sucks. I mean, forget about how much it sucks for him, which is much, much larger than how much it sucks for me, but I can’t help think about how badly my parents want me to find someone, fall in love, have a family, do all that normal stuff. Well, I’ve done the first thing on the list, if not exactly the gender they had in mind, and I don’t have any experience with the second, so I’m not really sure, but it sure feels like the second thing is happening. But they’ll never know. Or they might know for an afternoon, or a day, but they’ll never really know. 

But. That’s what love means, right? It means that your feelings for the person you love are bigger than the difficulties that stand in the way of that love. Right?  

“Okay?” he asks. I can see his body is held up tight, like his chest won’t really let him breathe. 

“Yes, okay. You are part of the world I didn’t know existed before now, and your weirdness is not even a little contained, but I want to get to know you, so I have to be okay with that. And so ‘okay’ is what I said.”

His smile is so intense, that I can’t look at him. I look down at my sketch and wonder again. 

“I felt really bad,” he says. “I thought I freaked you out.”

“You did. But now I know. And also, you can show me, and we can test different things out now. And I can learn and the more I learn, the less the weirdness will freak me out.”

“Test things?”

“Well, yeah. Like what if we talk to someone, and you leave, but I keep talking about you while you’re gone. What would happen then?”

He taps the drawing. “Or what about this?  What if you drew me?”

“That’s what I mean. Test things. Start by showing me.”  

++++++++

Jared

I cannot describe the feelings swirling around in my head at this moment. No, not just my head, my whole body. I literally feel excitement rushing through my bloodstream, like a wave. Jensen’s holding my hand like that’s the most natural thing in the world, and it feels strong and warm and good. Real. There’s someone real besides me who understands and believes. 

I love stories with unreliable narrators. My particular favorites are when it turns out the protagonist is insane, or seeing the world in a radically different way than it really presents. You might think that might not be comforting to me, but it sort of is. Sometimes I imagine that I’m just crazy, but otherwise normal. That maybe all this stuff about people not remembering is just in my head, and that I’m really just another crazy person living at the shelter. Because that means that maybe, at some point, I could be fixed. Get the right psychotropic drugs or something, and lead a normal life. Be part of the healthcare system. Not worry about starving to death in prison or dying alone in the streets. 

But this? Knowing for sure that I’m not crazy?  One million, trillion times better. Having someone believe me?  Having someone who I am reasonably sure is still going to believe me tomorrow and the next day and the next day?  I feel so full of relief and hope and warmth that I just want to—

But before I even think it, he’s doing it. Jensen stops in his tracks, and pulls me to face him. He’s smiling like the sun, and I can tell it’s because he knows he’s made me happy. His fingers reach up and touch my hair, push it away from my eyes, and then he kisses me. We’re kissing. His lips are soft, and his hand slides down my arm, around my back and pulls me in tight. It is everything I’ve been waiting for for so, so long. 

When we pull apart, his smile has turned shy, his eyes still happy, but he’s looking at a spot on the floor about three feet behind me. “That was okay, right?” he says. “I just—”

“Yes,” I say, “that was perfect." I smile and touch my lips, because I can still feel the warmth that Jensen put there. In this moment, I don’t care if anyone in the rest of the world can remember me, all that matters is this, right here. That Jensen can remember me. 

“Let’s do a loop around through the galleries, and come back.”  Jensen tugs gently at my hand. It takes me a moment to realize what he’s getting at, because that kiss, my first real kiss had pushed away everything else. I forgot that I was supposed to be showing Jensen how I work, what my world is like. 

We do a loop, as Jensen suggested. The eight-hundreds galleries are my favorites, and we take our time, stopping briefly at Still Life with Bottle of Rum and The Shoes before heading back to Gallery 827 and The Storm and Springtime. We both look around and spot Malcolm at the same time. Malcolm is the security guard for the eight-hundreds galleries, and he never misses a thing. If someone steps one inch beyond the appropriate boundary around the paintings, he can sense it from three galleries away. He’s a graying redhead with a beard, and he looks more like he should be out scouting in the Appalachians than guarding art, but maybe that’s what makes him so good. 

We drop hands before we come within sight of Malcolm. I walk in the gallery first, and make eye contact with Malcolm. He sees me and nods politely, but there’s no flicker of recognition, even though I was just in here with Jensen fifteen minutes ago. Kissing him, I remind myself. 

This is normal for me, and feels normal and expected, but I am curious to watch how Jensen takes it. He enters the gallery a few steps behind me and starts walking towards Malcolm. The difference is immediately apparent. When someone knows you, their whole body reacts differently. He turns slightly, his posture loosens. There’s a light, I’m not sure that’s the right word, but that’s all I’ve got, a light in his yes that says, hello, I know you. 

I stand just a few feet away, pretending to be admiring the painting there, Boldini’s portrait of the Duchess of Marlborough and her son. Malcolm can clearly see me. 

“I’m looking for my friend,” Jensen says. “He was here with me earlier. Kind of long hair, a little taller than me?” 

Malcolm smiles broadly. “A friend, you say?” 

“Yes,” Jensen says. He starts to add something, but stutters slightly, “M-my boyfriend.”

I really like how everyone here knows Jensen, everyone feels protective of him, and how everyone seems so genuinely happy for him to have a friend. The warmth on Malcolm’s face is wonderful. It’s nice, but also a little sad. It suggests that maybe they didn’t think that was in the cards for him. 

“Why don’t you tell me his name, and if he comes looking for you, I’ll let him know that—“

“Oh, wait, there he is,” Jensen says, gesturing towards me. 

Malcolm turns towards me, surprised. I have the feeling he doesn’t even remember seeing me come in only a few moments ago. 

“Well. There you go.”  Malcolm tips his hat at me again. Jensen looks back and forth between us, studying our faces and Malcolm’s reaction. 

“It’s lunchtime,” Jensen says to me. “Let’s go talk in the café. Thanks, Malcolm.”

Malcolm gives us a little wave and a vague smile as we walk away. I squeeze Jensen’s hand, because the for the first time, walking away is a little less lonely. 

“Was that right?” Jensen asks me, and I’m not sure what he means. 

“Was what right?” I ask. 

“Are you my boyfriend?  I said it before I thought about whether or not that might be true.”

I think about that kiss. I think about him waiting for me by Springtime and The Storm. I think of the feeling that welled up inside me when I first saw him there. I think about that stupid old saying, if you love something, set it free, if it comes back to you, it’s yours. “Yes,” I say. “That’s right.”

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Jensen

When my mother gets home from her client’s, I’m in my closet, but the door is open, as is the door to my room. 

“Why, hello,” she says. I’m trying not to be irritated by everyone’s surprise at me doing normal things, because on one level I understand that it’s kind of justified, but on the other, it would be easier for me to keep on doing some of these normal things if they didn’t get such a reaction. 

What I’m doing at the moment is transferring the sketch I made of Jared’s eyes onto my closet wall. At the very top. It feels right, and it feels like something that's good for me to do, and for once, I’m not in here because I need to get away. I’m just doing my art. 

Mom glances down at the sketchbook as she’s taking off her scarf. She dresses very professionally for work, but at home, she just wants to be comfortable. Yoga pants and her old Boondock Saints t-shirt are next. 

“Wow,” she says, tapping the sketch. “That’s different.” She picks up my sketchbook, studying the drawing. “Is this someone you know?  You really captured something here.”  

“A boy I met at the museum,” I say. Not a lie. 

“I like how you did it right over the other sketch. That really works.”  She frowns slightly, peering a little closer. “That’s not one of your normal pieces, is it?”

“No. It’s The Storm, by Pierre Auguste Cot. I was drawing it when I first saw him.”

“Very cool,” she says. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Cheese soufflé,” I answer. One thing that was really great about mom quitting her job as a lawyer and staying home with me is that she learned to cook. She can make about sixty-three different dishes that feature cheese. Cheese soufflé is the best. And also, doesn’t have a lot of fancy ingredients, so I am relatively sure that I can get it if I request it. 

“You got it,” she says. She starts to walk away, but then hesitates. “You met a boy?” she says.

Again, I’d really just like it if everyone stopped acting so surprised about this. Then I realize what that means. They will never stop being surprised. I mean, right now, I kind of get it, kind of expect it, because this sort of thing is new to me too. But if Jared is going to be my boyfriend, which he said he is, then no matter how long I’ve been with him, no matter how well I do with this particular social skill—having a boyfriend, being in love, thinking about someone else’s needs—my parents are never going to know. They’ll never be able to be part of that success. 

I look up at the top of my closet, at the expression in his eyes I’ve drawn there, and take a deep breath. “Yes,” I say, “I met a boy.”

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Jared

If I were a normal person, I would have run all the way home and spent the night texting my friends and hoping that Jensen would call. 

I don’t have a phone, and even if I did, no friends to text. Green Alice will have to do. 

“What have you got to smile about?” she asks at supper. “This s**t tastes like slop. If you’re that happy, go home, get out of here.”

“If I could go home, I wouldn’t be staying in a homeless shelter,” I tell her, although I know it’s not true. Plenty of people choose this over home, though I would argue in those cases, “home” is probably nothing of the sort. 

She nods, picking at her baked ziti. “Ain’t that the truth. Anyway, you look like you swallowed a coat hanger. You get a little strychnine with your throrazine tonight?”

“I met a boy,” I say, and it’s true, I’m smiling so hard I can’t stop. It’s an unbelievable feeling, knowing there’s someone out there who’s thinking of me. And the incredible luck that it’s someone as amazing as Jensen. 

“Ah, I remember those days. When I met my third husband, I walked around like I was shitting rainbows for months. Too bad he got killed in an industrial laundry accident. That man was a fine specimen, let me tell you.”

I’ve gotten all of Green Alice’s husbands sorted in my head, what they did for work, how they died, and whether they were “animals” in the sack or not. Except for the fifth one. She’s mysteriously quiet about how that one died. Sometimes when she’s being a real pain in the neck, I do a little “psychic reading” act with her, and she changes her attitude towards me to deferential awe. 

Not tonight though. I don’t have a mean bone in my body tonight. I’m kind of regretting staying here tonight. For an occasion like this, being in love and all, I should have treated myself to a good hotel, but it’s the weekend, so it’s hard to find an unoccupied room. 

I’m a little anxious about tomorrow. Jensen says he’s been conscripted to help his parents with a party and won’t be going to the museum. Now that I’ve found him, I want to be with him all the time, even though I know that’s not realistic or fair. He has other people in his life, just because I don’t doesn’t mean he has to go from being a stranger to being my life support overnight. 

We tested out a couple things yesterday, and it’s amazing how much easier life would be as a normal person, or at least with a normal person. We ate at the Member’s Dining Room, with table service and a waitress, and although she came back to the table once after a long stint in the kitchen and looked confused to see me there, I got my food. They made Jensen a plain cheeseburger with no condiments and my salad never tasted so good. 

He took several pictures of me with his cell phone, and we kept checking them and giggling like kids on Christmas morning. When he gets home, he plans on showing them to his mom, more than once, to see what happens. I wrote him a note to keep with him. The idea that something of mine has permanence dances around in my head like sunlight on waves. In sleep, I dream of statues in a barren field, pristine and gleaming in grey winter light. They all have my face. 

When I wake, Green Alice has died in her sleep. It’s early, and most of the residents are still asleep. No one has noticed but me. She lies on her side, eyes open and unseeing, her gnarled hand curled up under her cheek in an eerily child like pose. I creep from my cot and go find Winifred, who sleeps in the staff room on overnight shifts.

She rubs her eyes blearily when my tap at her door awakens her. “New here, honey?” She’s kind, even before she wakes. 

“I slept here last night,” I say. “But… It’s Green Alice. It looks like she died last night.”

Winifred does a little double take, like she’s going to ask me how I knew Green Alice’s name, but gets right to the business at hand. When she confirms what I saw, she wakes two other staff members, Big Mike and Jeff, who carry Alice, cot and all, into Winifred’s bedroom, quietly, so only a few residents see. 

I can’t help but hover around, not really sure how I feel or what to do. I’ve seen people die on the streets before, but Green Alice is the first one that I knew. Winifred is too busy to shoo me away. 

“… know anybody?” I hear Winifred asking Big Mike. He shrugs. Winifred wipes at the tears welling at the corner of her eye. It’s part and parcel of her job, but that doesn’t make it any easier. She’s got the coroner on the phone, and she’s nodding, jotting down a few notes. 

Jeff has come back from the lockers, a big purse and a scant armful of green clothes and starts going through the pockets. I know what this means, I know what it means for Green Alice.

People who die in New York City without friends or family to claim their bodies are sent to Hart Island. Over eight hundred and fifty thousand homeless people have been buried there over the past century, mostly in unmarked mass graves. 

Panic compresses my chest. If this were me, that’s where I would end up. No one, not one person would know. Jeff wouldn’t even know I had a locker here. Winifred would shake her head, wondering when I showed up and why of all places I had to come to hers to die. 

I hear Big Mike echo my thoughts, I hear him mutter the word Hart, and I blurt out, “She had seven husbands.”

All three turn to stare at me in surprise, as if they’d forgotten me already even though I’m standing right in the doorway. It’s so much like the fears I had just been playing with in my head that my throat closes and I have to force my next words out, and they sound scratchy and thin. 

“We were talking last night. I can remember all their names and where they’re from, and I know you think I’m crazy, but if you check, you might still be able to find someone who knew her. So she won’t have to—”  My voice cuts out completely for a second. “So she won’t have to go there.” The last word comes out as a whisper. 

Winifred blinks a few times before recovering and then picks up her pen again. “Okay, honey,” she says. “I’m listening.”

++++++++

Jensen

One way my parents are very lucky is that I’m mildly germophobic. I’m not insanely so, and I don’t really have any compulsions about it, like Sheppard, that kid at my school who’s hands are always cracked and bleeding because he uses too much antibacterial sanitizer. But things like dust, which, in case you didn’t know, is composed of pet dander (our two Siamese cats), insect droppings, flour and dirt. A lot of people say that it’s mostly composed of human skin cells, which is just not true, because we shed most of our skin either in the shower or into our clothes, which end up in the wash. But the pet dander?  That’s skin cells with a healthy dose of dried saliva mixed in. Enough said. When my parents ask me to help vacuum and dust, I help vacuum and dust. 

Mom’s in the kitchen, cooking eight different types of hors d’oerves, as well as a poire tatin, and chocolate espresso wafers, which are a particular favorite of Neil Pinna, who is coming to the party tonight. 

My parents do this from time to time, have too many people over and stress themselves out. My mother refers to this as “having a normal life,” and my father says it’s part of the social expectations of his job. I think they both like it though, and I can’t understand why. All this cleaning beforehand, and even more the next morning. Steve Chapman from the Winchester Gallery always drinks too much, and Cynthia Cornwallis always gets competitive. It all makes me uncomfortable, but I’m expected to at least make an appearance. Nine times out of ten, I end up giving a tour of my closet, which I don’t mind as much as you would think I would. My room is clean and interesting, nothing to be embarrassed about. 

There are certain expectations, one of which is that you do not show up hours early to a party like this. We’re still cleaning and cooking and, in my father’s case, trying to put together a music playlist that’s low key enough to not be a distraction, but interesting enough to not put everyone to sleep either. So at six PM when the doorbell rings, hours earlier than we expected anyone, we all sort of freeze and look around in panic, checking things like whether we left the toilet brush standing up on the toilet, or whether dad still has mom’s floury handprints on the seat of his pants. 

Dad recovers first and goes to the door. I keep dusting. Maybe it’s a delivery or something. 

“Why, yes, come on in,” Dad’s voice sounds exaggeratedly polite and excited, and it seems familiar, like I’ve heard him talking that way recently…

It comes to me only a moment before I see his face. That was the voice dad was using when he met Jared at the museum. And here he is. I freeze for a moment, lemon-scented furniture polish in one hand, chamois cloth in the other. 

He’s dressed in the same clothes he was wearing yesterday, soft, worn olive green cargo pants, slate blue t-shirt and army field coat. Something is different, though. His face looks strained and pale, and his shoulders are crumpled in, somehow making him look smaller. When my father steps aside, he makes this little motion like he wants to run to me, but he’s not sure, so I hold out my arms. When he launches himself into me, I hold on so, so tight. Whatever are the good, strong parts of him, I try and keep them together, contain them in the circle of my arms.

“A lady I knew from the shelter died this morning,” he whispers in my ear. “And no one knew where her family was and they were going to send her to Hart Island.”

I squeeze harder.

“I need you to help me,” he says. “That can’t happen to me. Please.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I say. I push him back a little and give him a wink. “But first, let me introduce you to my parents.”  When he smiles, a little private thing, just for me, I know I said the right thing, and I know that I’m going to say it again, and again, and again. And that’s just fine by me. 

++++++++

Jared

I don’t want to stay for the party. For one thing, I wasn’t invited, for another, I’m clearly not dressed for it. Even though she’s doing the dishes and has a smudge of flour on her cheek, Jensen’s mother is in heels and pearls, and both Jensen and his father are in tailor-made suits. A brigade of help arrives shortly after I do, and I’m not even dressed nice enough to be one of them. 

You wouldn’t think it though, to hear Mr. and Mrs. Ackles. I think I could be wearing cutoffs, flip flops and a “f**k Da Police” tank top and they’d still be looking at me like they want to put a dollop of cool whip on me and eat me with a spoon. They want me to stay, but all I had needed was that reassurance from Jensen. 

“I’ll come another time, I promise.”  

Mrs. Ackles has made me a cup of coffee, and Mr. Ackles excused himself to his office the moment he heard what I had to say about Alice, I had the distinct feeling he was “making some calls” on her behalf. It’s almost bewildering, being a part of this. Feeling connected to these people in a way that sticks. For one of them at least. 

“I have to get back to the kitchen,” Mrs. Ackles says, tying her apron back over her svelte black dress. “But let me know if you need anything.”  She disappears around the corner, and I’m alone with Jensen at last. It doesn’t feel awkward, if for no other reason than that his home looks an awful lot like an art museum, and we’ve been there before. 

“It’s not just Alice,” I say, somehow not able to add the Green to her name that I always have. “I was the only one who’d ever listened to her. I was the only one who knew that stuff. I realized all of a sudden, it can’t just be you. That’s too much. I can’t—”

“You can though,” Jensen interrupts. “It’s okay. We’ll figure out—”

“I know you want to,” I say, “but even if you want to, you can’t be there all the time, forever. I think the best thing you can do to help me is figure out how we can find other people like me. Maybe if there’s other people like me, some of them have things figured out that I haven’t. I’m so glad I found you, but I want you to be… something else to me than just a tool. There’s more here,” I put my hand on my heart, “than that.”  

“Stage three,” is Jensen’s enigmatic answer. His eyes are not focused on me, kind of like he’s seeing stuff in his head more clearly than the things in front of his eyes. 

“Excuse me?” I ask. 

“I told you I had a multi-stage plan to finding you. Stage One was stick to my routine, Stage Two was watching your favorite pieces, and Stage Three was going to have to be some way of finding you out there in the world. I had some vague ideas, but…”  he trails off, far away inside his head again.

I wait. I watch his eyes dart back and forth, almost like he’s reading, or following routes on a map. His long fingers mark off counts on the table top. I hear his mother puttering in the kitchen, and the quiet feet of the hired help. Behind his office door, his father speaks softly on the phone. 

“I think… I think I have an idea,” he says at last, his eyes coming into focus and finding mine. “But we have to think of it as only one idea, it might not work, and if you can trust me, I’d rather not tell you about it right away, not until I can see if the first part will work. If it doesn’t we’ll keep thinking, right?” His fingers relax, and he reaches up to take a strand of my hair between his fingertips. “Your hair is so silky,” he says. “Look how it looks in the light. How can anyone forget that?  It must be on purpose.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not natural, it doesn’t make sense. It has to be on purpose, like God or something, and if you are the way you are on purpose, then I must be special on purpose too. The only person who can know you. How lucky am I?”

“Not half as lucky as I am. You could have been some crabby old lady or even worse, a toddler or baby too young to notice what you were noticing. Or anyone for that matter, who maybe could remember me, but didn’t realize that they were the only one. Maybe there are lots of people who can remember me, but I just have bad luck noticing them.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. You’ve got a dozen or so years of random sampling. Plus, I like my theory better.”  He smiles, and rubs his knuckle on my cheek. 

I’ve finished my coffee, and I feel better, just knowing that he gets how important this is, and that I’m not alone in this any more. It’s starting to get dark, which means the guests will be showing up any minute and Jensen still needs to put on his tie. If I slip out the door now, neither his mother nor father will ever know I’ve been here. Strangely, that makes it a little easier to leave. No awkward goodbyes. 

“If we ever get separated again, let’s make it our thing to meet at The Storm,” I say. “That worked out perfectly.”

“Meet me there tomorrow, and I’ll tell you if the first part of the plan worked,” Jensen answers. 

I love how that sounds. The first part. It implies other parts to come. It implies a chain of events beginning and ending with us working together. A beginning that doesn’t have to end before I’m ready. 

Jensen

I really think this has a chance of working. I stand in my closet, looking up at the last sketch I transferred up there, Jared’s eyes scrawled over the backdrop of my sketch of The Storm. 

The word last can have two meanings in this case. It can mean most recent or it can mean final. Both apply in this case. Something feels complete and done, and stepping back and looking at it as a whole piece, rather than as a collection of separate pieces, it’s actually quite good. It tells a story, rich with detail, an interesting story. It’s the sort of piece where the more you look at it, the more you see, the more layers of meaning and narrative appear. 

And autism has a certain sort of cache these days. It seems to be the fashionable diagnosis, and art by artists with autism is a hot commodity on the market. I did some research, and in 2013, Stephen Wiltshire, a man with autism, flew over New York City in a helicopter, and then drew the city in amazing detail over the course of the next three months. That piece sold at Southeby’s for sixteen million. Cynthia Cornwallis and Neil Pinna were both at that evening auction and lost out to the eventual buyer. 

They’ve already both offered to buy it from me. I try and picture it as a triptych, lifted whole from the wall, mounted in a gallery. This is something I know Neil and Cynthia have also pictured in their minds. I see glitter in their eyes when they look at it. They covet it. 

Selling it would be no problem. But selling it is not going to be good enough. We need to make the news. 

And for that, I need a little fear. And nothing strikes fear into the heart of people like Cynthia and Neil like thinking that someone is going to get in on the latest trend before them. 

The party is well underway when I leave my room and join the glitterati assembled in my living room. Mom is glowing, because she had invited that actress from The West Wing, and it was probably going to be the sort of thing where she checked in for a few minutes and then left for some better party with higher quality people, but instead she ended up staying and calling the producer who showed up half an hour later because his wife is a big patron of the arts. 

Neil Pinna and Cynthia Cornwallis are both there, along with a pretty good assortment of private collectors and dealers, several gallery owners and several artist hopefuls who want to be noticed as part of the “scene.”

Speaking of which, there’s a cluster of young artists standing near Cynthia, probably with the same ulterior motive as me. They all talk a little over loud, with flamboyant hand gestures and little side glances to see if she’s listening. 

“The things she does with liquid glass, just amazing,” one heavily pierced red-haired man is saying. “Jensen, what do you think?  Have you been to the State Street Exchange Gallery yet?”

They all know me. I’ve been a standard feature at these parties since I was old enough to toddle around between the stilettos and wingtips. 

“No, but I thought I’d bring my portfolio down next week. They put out a call for submissions.” 

“I didn’t know you made art too,” Amelie Stewart says, she’s relatively new to the scene, she does negative space splatter paintings, they’re actually quite interesting. The others give her scathing looks. 

“Oh, you absolute lamb,” exclaims Hillard Deutsch. He owns the Elan Chance restaurant in the upper east side, and fancies that he has the inside scoop on everything. Most people flatter him because the chef at Elan Chance is actually one of the best in New York, and it never hurts to be in with the owner at a restaurant like that. “You simply must see some of Jensen’s work. He’s a complete marvel.”

I think he’s the most boring person that regularly makes mom’s guest list, but he’s caught the ear of Cynthia and the dealer that she’s chatting with, so I try not to be too irritated. 

Amelie raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Oh, really?” she says. 

“He’s certainly very talented,” Cynthia chimes in, edging over to our group, raising the average age by about twenty years and average annual income by a few dozen million. “In fact, I’ve been after one of his pieces for years.”

A small crowd is starting to gather. I’m just a regular old party trick. It’s never bothered me before, like I said, my room is clean, and my art is nothing to hide. But somehow, right now, the predictability of this scene feels patronizing to me. I push those thoughts aside, because that’s the point. I wanted this to happen, and I knew just what I could do to make it happen. 

“Yes,” Neil chimes in, not to be outdone by Cynthia. “His work has generated a lot of interest in the community. One piece in particular, which I am sure he will not forget, he’s promised me the right of first refusal.”

I’ve promised him no such thing, and he knows it. He just said it to get a rise out of Cynthia. It works. Her face flushes and blotchy spots appear on her chest. 

I pretend not to notice. Casually, I say, to neither of them in particular, although I know they’re both hanging on my every word now, “Actually, I just finished it yesterday. I think I might—”

“You finished it?” Cynthia gasps. “We must see.”  

This has also caught my father’s attention. He knows the closet isn’t a piece of art for me, but rather a form of therapy. I’m sure he doesn’t know whether to be proud of me or worried if I say I’m done with it. 

“I’d love to see it,” Amelie says, her voice low and different in a way I can’t put my finger on. She’s standing very close, her hand lightly on my arm. Then my mother comes and literally pushes herself between us. 

“You don’t have to,” she says. She’s always recognized how people treat me at these parties. 

“No, that’s okay,” I say. “I don’t mind.”

Once the small troupe surrounding me detaches from the party and shuffles down the hall to my room, eyebrows are raised, and several people tag along, afraid to be left out of something that such luminaries as Cynthia and Neil are part of. 

My room is large and neat, with a window seat for reading looking over the Blaine Street green. I have several pieces of original art that my parents have had me collect over the years, including a few Whistler sketches that my father won at auction. I let my mom take care of the décor, and it’s actually a very soothing room to be in, with shades of grey the color of river stones, and soft lighting.

The closet is particularly large for a New York brownstone, this room was probably originally intended as the master bedroom. The French doors open into a seven by ten foot room, empty. At least some of the gasps from the entourage are for the enviable size of the closet, rather than the art on the walls. As they filter in, exclaiming here and there over details that catch their eye both Neil and Cynthia vie for the proprietary role; Neil is pointing out features as if he’s giving a tour in his own museum, Cynthia is scolding people not to touch, as if it’s her own already. 

“Well, Jenny,” Neil says. His use of my nickname, Jenny, which no one ever calls me is his way of trying to make it look like we are on more intimate terms than we are. It’s not that he’s a sleazy guy, this is just his business, and he’s good at it. “Now that you’re done, have you reconsidered my offer?”

The room goes quiet, all eyes turned towards me. If you used my MARA 3D facial expressions app to look up the look on the artists in the group’s faces, you’d see “unabashedly envious.”  Cynthia’s might come in under “unbridled avarice.” Behind her, there’s a quiet collector I don’t know, and his face would be “quietly crafty.”

“Maybe.”  I say. I try to make it sound like I’m not overly interested. Like I care more about what brand of swiss cheese my mom buys (which I actually care about a lot) then whether or not anyone wants to buy my closet walls. “I would only be interested in a very specific type of buyer, under very specific circumstances, and frankly, I don’t think my expectations are very realistic.”

There’s a crush forward and an incoherent babble of reassuring noises. Cynthia and one other lady reach out their hands, presumably to reassure me, but all of a sudden, it’s too much for me. I step back and shut down. I did what I needed to do, everything is in place, now I need to get out. I know I’m being rude, but I just walk away without another word. 

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