Joel

I

Anticipation began to twist my stomach into itself as I sank lower into my seat. Between the obnoxious blue of the BX6's interior and the mysterious brown stain seeping into the seat beside me, nausea ensued. I shifted my focus to the window beside me and watched my neighborhood zip past me as the bus bobbed through a continuous strip of potholes. The turning leaves of the trees bled in warm hues of yellows and oranges. Dark clouds spilled over the setting sun.

Lucky's Chinese Takeout blurred into Tio Julissa's Beauty Salon in ethereal hazes of fluorescent purples and greens. I imagined the savory crunch of an egg roll paired with the simultaneous smell of olive oil that smothered customers' fresh blowouts, sweet and potent. It was a simple pleasure of mine whenever I had to walk down the block to the bodega to pick up Papi's pack of shorts and a half gallon of milk for the fridge.

A group of men were stationed in front of the local auto body shop on the next block. They sat on black crates, slouched over with their hands slung over their hanging stomachs, passing around a rubber hose attached to a hookah sporadically surrounded by glass bottles of Coronas. Their oil-stained wife beaters and khaki cargo shorts of peculiar calf length contradicted the cool weather that began to frost the store's exterior windows.

Now and again, my reflection would flash before me amongst the smudges of stubby fingerprints. The arch in my eyebrows began to camouflage in the new growth of untamed hairs. The remaining heat of the past summer's tan melted away, revealing a pale complexion. Splitting strands of short, artificially blonde hair divided at a deep brown root and laid flat against the top of my head. I looked down at what I was wearing: a pair of slouchy gray sweats, a yellowing pair of air forces, and a faux-vintage Queen t-shirt spotted in burning red bleach stains. Not the cutest look to say the least.

I lifted my backpack from between my feet and rested it onto my lap. Reaching inside of its unzipped mouth, my hand rifled against mounds of trash until it finally found my laptop. The only notifications I had been getting lately were from Blackboard reminding me of an assignment I was purposefully trying to ignore, Bank of America notifying me of my dangerously low balance, or the Citizens app alerting me of a new missing person. According to News 12, several gay men had gone missing in the past couple of months. If you asked me, it was a bunch of bullshit.

Gays are flighty; it's in our nature. The honest truth is any of them younger than seventeen probably ran away from home with their boyfriend of a predatory age gap and any of them older than twenty-one was most likely laid out by a dumpster recovering from a bender of poppers and bottomless mimosas at Sunday brunch. Either way, no one was actually interested in finding them.

I settled on mindlessly scrolling through a neverending rotation of social media platforms to kill time.

Ever since I was old enough to have a phone, I spent most of my time wreaking havoc online. Its lack of real-world obligations paired with the fact that my parents were completely oblivious to how it truly worked made it my personal playground. No holds barred. I could be whoever I wanted to be: an obnoxious "woke-ivist", a cutthroat Nicki Minaj stan account, or my personal favorite, barely-legal jailbait on Instagram.

Instagram was the most efficient way to connect with other inner city gays of the twenty first century. It was an unspoken competition to see who could show off the most skin without having to leak your own nudes, unless that was your prerogative, of course. Posing online in a pair of low rise jeans and a pair of lacy pink panties I swiped from Victoria Secret's sale table had a specific thrill to it. The fact that most of the people who would see it were complete strangers only added to the thrill. Imagining a greasy middle-aged man with a balding comb over and cheeto-stained fingers hiding behind a photo of a twink with a fairy filter was an image that was sickening yet compelling. Attention was attention regardless of who was paying it.