The next morning, Manny woke with a start, fancying for a moment that his crumpled blanket was a person on the bed beside him. When he had stilled his racing heart, he got up to get ready for the day.
The morning was slow. Israel seemed slightly pouty in Algebra class. “Nothing came up on the email registry,” was his explanation for the unusual mood.
Manny shrugged off the disappointment. “Doesn’t really matter.”
“Just wanted to know what kinda thing you like,” Israel mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing.” There was some irritated hand flapping. “Whatever. Forget about it like you said.”
Manny went to his other morning section, then headed to the library to check out a bone box. “They’re both checked out right now,” the librarian told him with a lipstick smile. She gestured to the group work tables to the left. A small collection of students sat huddled around a bone box on one long table. A single student sat in front of the other box at a different table. That girl. The one who liked studying alone.
“Duplicate bones,” Manny muttered under his breath. “Never mind, I’ll come back later.”
Israel had perked up by supper time, referring to Manny’s one night stand only when he decided it was necessary and only as “that old thing” like the affair was somehow a thorn in his side.
Evening crawled in, and Manny headed to the UC building to get a change of scenery and hopefully get some homework done. On the third floor, he popped open a bag of cafeteria-snatched chips and sat down in a chair by a large window. He pulled out his computer and a calculator, but ended up watching the leaf-stripped trees lining the campus sidewalks. Cars on the road that ran by the Zeta Phi house looked like bugs on a stick.
So that was it, then. “Angel” was as far as Manny would get in knowing who that beautiful boy with the bird tattoo was. That was a good thing. This whole business had been nothing more than an overblown distraction.
Someone was walking down the street that ran adjacent to the one passing Zeta Phi. It was strange how small people looked when they were far away. That was how this beautiful boy would be to Manny, one day: nothing more than a dim figure in the distance, slowly walking away. Or walking towards?
Manny squinted slightly at the window. No, the figure seemed to be walking towards campus, not away from it. Manny slumped in his seat and lifted a crinkle-cut chip from the bag he held. In a few years from now, he would be well on his way to achieving a life-long dream: becoming a doctor. He would be a highly paid physician, and his family would never have to suffer financial difficulty again. Ana would learn to believe in him. It was like Leon had said. People needed time to come around. In time, they would understand.
I need to get some work done. Manny passed his finger over the touchpad on his computer to bring the screen back to life. He opened an algebra homework assignment and took out a notebook to work out the first problem.
But then he was again staring out the window. Eyes searched for the figure he had been watching before. There were more people walking about now—two together on the sidewalk, a group of three passing the frat house, a girl with a pink backpack headed towards a parking garage. Manny was not even sure which of those people it was. Wait—no, it was that one.
Manny sat up slightly and narrowed his eyes. Yes, he remembered the black on black, now. The dark-clothed figure had turned off on another street and was heading towards the part of 12th Avenue that ran under the interstate bridge. It was almost too dark to make out much besides the black clothing. But right before disappearing around the corner, the figure passed under a streetlight.
That haircut. Asymmetrical with the front on the one side long enough to reach over the shoulder…
Weird. Manny had never seen that haircut before he had woken up beside someone with it. He swatted his hand out in front of his face, as if to usher away the uncomfortable memory. He slipped his fingers into the chip bag and stopped. Eyes lifted to the blank wall in front of him.
“Damn it.” He stood up, slammed his laptop shut, and shoved everything back into his backpack. Then he was hurrying down the three flights of stairs to the exit at the bottom.
Why am I doing this? Ran like an annoying buzzing in Manny’s head as he started quickly towards 12th Avenue. He cut across a small lawn patch and two tree-planted islands. Then he was on Canvas Street, half walking, half running to where it crossed 12th Avenue.
There was nothing. He was gone.
Manny stopped in the incandescent-lit intersection and let the cold air freeze in his lungs for a moment. The figure he had seen through the window on the third floor of the UC had vanished into the streetlight lit surroundings.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing. I don’t even know who the hell that was,” Manny told himself aloud. He started to turn back, but halted again, eyesight catching on something. Was that…? That was the figure, wasn’t it? The person had pulled a hood on and switched sides of the road. But still walking in the same direction on 12th Avenue, fading away under shadows between streetlights.
Manny hesitated, hand on his backpack strap. “H…hey!” His voice was feeble, clouding on the air in front of his face and certainly inaudible from the growing distance between himself and the stranger.
What are you gonna do? You have nothing to say to him, if that’s even him at all.
“Just want to see if he’s…real.” Manny broke into a run. His shadow leapt and faded on the sidewalk beneath his feet. After gaining on the figure for several moments, he slowed to a quick walk. Allowing himself to catch his breath likewise allowed his mind to reassess his object. What was he doing?
Manny’s pace slowed still further, eyes pinned on the receding figure in front of him. What was he after? What did he expect? What did he want? I should stop. I need to go back. I don’t know what I’m doing.
Manny’s feet stopped on the concrete sidewalk. In front of him, that figure kept moving. Then, unexpectedly, the figure stopped as well. But rather than turn—or even glance—in Manny’s direction, the stranger put two hands on a nearby chain-link fence, then swung over the top and dropped down onto the other side.
Manny’s feet moved of their own accord. Harsh breaths of nervousness breaking from his lips, he found himself standing in front of that chain-link fence mere moments later. The rusting metal fence enclosed a small portion of exposed drain-way. A trickle of water crawled along the black-stained concrete slide and disappeared into a pipe running under 12th Avenue. And there, in the yellow glow of an odd-angled streetlight standing on the edge of a parking lot above, that dark figure sat crouched beside the slow sewer stream. A crowd of silhouetted trees partially hid that lowered shape. Manny shifted silently to the left, straining his eyes in the yellow-black light. His fingers brushed across a rusted post in the fencing in front of him.
The dark figure was pulling up its sleeves, then lowering two hands to the drain water.
Manny side-stepped again, the tread of his shoes lowering to the concrete as quietly as possible. Then he was standing directly over the pipe under the street. The drainage ramp lay straight out in front of him. He had a clear view of that stranger. Dim yellow light shown on the stranger’s face, glimmering on a jewelry piece on the lower lip.
Manny sucked in a tense breath. Fingers slipped into the wire holes of the fence and gripped it. Recognition hit him like a punch in the gut. That face, those riveting features. Things he did not even realize he remembered came back to him about it. The high cheekbones, beautiful shape of the jawline, the way dark hair framed that face.
What is he doing? Manny had only just begun to wonder when the beautiful boy cupped a hand in the water and raised it to his forearm. That shadowy shape visibly gasped as the cold liquid contacted his bare skin. Shuddering, the boy lowered his forearm into the drainage stream and began washing it. Manny was not even halfway to deciphering why the strange boy was cleaning his arm in runoff water from ice melt on the street when that figure changed his position and began washing the other forearm. His movements were quick, stiff, almost pained. The sounds of the small splashes were drowned out completely by the sounds of traffic on the nearby interstate bridge.
I should go before he sees me, Manny told himself. And yet, the uncanny curiosity held him where he stood. He could not think of a single reason why this beautiful boy might be out here cleaning himself in the gutter. All he knew was the feeling it left him with, the feeling the boy’s movements were written with: desperateness.
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