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C O N N O R
EVEN THIS PERPETUAL shroud of Northwood haze is hazier than he remembers, the mist a mouthful of raw and dirty ice with a hand digging his face into the muddy snow. Connor's grip on the lacrosse stick slackens; he can barely make out the end of the field, a sugar-dusted, near-September green with a mirage of a goalpost swimming in the center. The voices around him lull, more like a bedtime story than a mapped-out play.
Maybe the fog is supposed to make everything harder to see. Maybe it isn't fog at all. Maybe it's a compact mirror, like one of those broken ones from a souvenir store with the lipstick-stained glass cracked down the middle and a hinge missing. It is holding his chin up and keeping it firmly in place—you can't look at the ground, no, only yourself, and every stupid mistake you had the gall to make.
Mistake One runs down the longitude of his vision: Ezra Reginald Atkinson, just another image and yet clearer than the rest, helmet a crown, stick a scepter.
Ezra Reginald Atkinson, the first mistake that turned his childhood inside out. But was he, really? Or was he the third, the fifth? A mistake nonetheless, as primary as red, yellow, blue.
It's stupid to blame him for staying quiet. It's stupid to blame him when his friends were at fault, Brandon and Tommy and Danny—no, no, Charlie and Nathan and Valerie, stupid mist; but it's stupid blaming his friends, too, when it was Connor's fault all along. Connor is the filthy faggot who'd made the same mistake all the girls did.
But the girls were never pushed into lockers or threatened, or choked, or forced to look up from a sterilized floor. Adoring Ezra Atkinson was only a natural trait, a given, if you were a girl. Otherwise, he would avoid you in corridors. He would stop coming over when his father did. He would plug his earphones in every time Charles Danforth said something to you. He would tell people he didn't know you, not at all, not really, not more than the occasional nod across a classroom.
If Ezra knew you loved him, he became an atheist in a room full of prayer.
And Connor hates himself for still caring about him.
It isn't attraction anymore, and shame on him if it is after this three-year cleanse. It is still lust, though, but a lust for revenge, maybe closure. Or maybe it's just envy, that tightrope between love and hatred, the wavering line where all emotion ultimately lives.
See how he brandishes that stick, Connor thinks, like he'll knight those who listen and slash those who won't. Connor tries to follow his movements across the field. Ezra is walking backward now, his stick a blur between the people he points it at and the crook of his neck. Attracting attention still seems to come easy to him, all senses in the vicinity ripped from their roots so he can cradle them in his clenched fists.
Some people are just born to make others listen, and messengers are chosen, and can't be made. Connor isn't a messenger, Connor is just another boy who wants to be Ezra Atkinson, another person who's hopped from a middle school crush to envy. There's some truth in how one can't exist without the other. You love someone because they are ideal, because they are complete. You hate them because you aren't.
