Chloe Hollowell Hooks is a writer from Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Image, Duke Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Columbia University. More at www.chloehollowellhooks.com.
The elevator opens directly into the living room. The condo is gaudy, even for Cancún. I move into the kitchen without waiting to see if he will follow. He does not, and it surprises me. Instead, he slides apart the glass balcony doors. Orange linen curtains undulate in the breeze. The high tide crashes and churns below us in a perfect loop.
“I’ll be in the bathroom,” he says, in accented English.
“Where are the glasses?” I ask.
He crosses to the kitchen and reaches above me, with some effort, to retrieve one. He is squat, muscles blunted by a moderate layer of fat. He is short for a teenage boy. I am tall for a teenage girl. He has blue eyes, and I do not. He puts the glass on the counter rather than in my hand, and the cool surfaces clink against each other.
“You could’ve just told me where,” I say.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Never mind.”
He leaves the kitchen, rounds the corner of the hallway and enters a room I cannot see. I fill the glass with water, guzzle it. My calves itch. Salty and overheated, I step out onto the balcony. I hear a burst of feminine laughter and look down. Below, his parents are lounging next to mine, growing drunk under pink beach umbrellas. Our mothers were childhood friends, so he and I endure summers together as eternal consequence.
I step back inside and fill my glass again. When I shut off the sink, the sound of running water continues. I realize, then, that he is showering in a nearby room. I imagine the pale sand running down his legs and into the drain.
Am I supposed to leave? Or do I wait here until he is done? The correct decision is to go, but I continue to stand in the kitchen, feeling sunburnt and grainy and stupid.
He appears in shorts, made from some soft material, and a white shirt. His hair is wet and longer than I’d realized.
“Look,” he says, walking to the living room. “I wanted to show you.” He hits a button on a remote control, and a large piece of art flips into the wall. A TV takes its place.
“Cool,” I say.
“Thought you’d like it.”
“I’m not watching a movie with you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You just wanted to show me the TV?”
“You like movies. You like the old ones.”
I am upset he possesses this detail.
“I guess so,” I say.
“My English isn’t good enough for them. They talk different from today.”
“So? Use subtitles.”
“What’s so great about them, anyway?”
“I don’t think you’d get it,” I say. I don’t say that even with translation, you lack the depth. Even if I draped myself in Spanish, you wouldn’t be able to see the shape of me underneath.
“I think you like them because no one else does,” he replies. “Makes you feel smart.”
I feel a simmering redness creep up my neck.
“It smells like cigarettes in here,” I say. “I thought your mom quit.”
He shifts his feet.
“I like old films because they’re beautiful,” I relent. “They’re passionate and classic and you can always trust them to end up the right way.”
He looks at me and nods. I am worried now that I’ve exposed myself, that I’ve revealed something personal he can use against me, to take what I know he’s claimed from the many other girls my age, some in worse ways than others. It feels like I’ve shown him a birthmark on my body that he will now describe to every boy on earth. Why did I even agree to come up here?
“I never understood what it was that I did to you,” he says.
“You didn’t do anything.”
“But you hate me.”
“Yes. Because I understand you.”
At first, a wave of victory: by saying the perfect thing, I am now the sassy, precocious girl in the television shows who has smooth hair and makes perfect grades and already talks about law school.
But then, he lets out a quick exhale. A flinch. It wrecks me entirely.
The tone of my voice rings brattish in my own ears, and at once I am the bully, which only makes me want to lash out further. He forces a smile, fumbles for something to say, and I am aggravated that he can hurt and that he is showing it to me. It all feels so manipulative.
“I wish you did understand me,” he says, at last. There is an openness to his face. It’s like he believes that he could be a good person if I’d just tell him that he is one.
I am by the sink again. A quartz island splits the space between us. It’s time to leave.
“Do you have any food?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
We approach the refrigerator. He smells fresh and wears a white shirt and has blue eyes and wet hair and I hate him for making me feel attracted to him when he has touched so many girls without kindness or meaning and when his face is rounder than it should be.
“I know what you want,” I say. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“You’re smarter than me,” he says. “But you don’t know what I know.”
He retrieves a single clementine from the fridge and shuts the door with surprising force, blasting me with cold air. I move away until my back connects with the island. He leans against the fridge, casually, as if to make my retreat seem unduly dramatic. There is nothing between us. He peels the clementine with ease so that the unbroken rind spirals off the fruit in a single, fragrant ribbon. I feel gangly and awkward and embarrassed of my sunburn and the way my hair is frizzing around the edges of my face.
“And what do you think you know?” I say, with venom in it. I want to prod him into telling me that I’m stuck up, that I’m frigid, that there’s something wrong with me. I will be relieved to have permission to excoriate him.
He regards me, divides the clementine in half. It makes a soft ripping noise as it parts with itself.
“Just say it.”
The words come out of me in a way I don’t expect.
He takes a clementine slice and pushes it between my lips, along with, briefly, his thumb. Then, the burst of tang and sweetness combines with the heat of his mouth. There is passion and weight behind the motion, but also truth, tenderness. When I tip my head back, I see us from outside our bodies.
We look like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. We look like them exactly.
He pulls away. He examines my face. Then, he makes a choice. He calls for the elevator, puts me in it. He does not enter. Instead, he watches me from the living room. It seems, for a moment, that he’s going say something before the doors close, but he does not.
The elevator shuts, trapping the dark, stale air. My breath explodes out of me and I am crying and do not know if it’s because I am right or wrong or irresistibly beautiful or foolish in a way I have never known before.
I feel his absence acutely. It is either empty or full of meaning.
The elevator dings and the doors open. I squint into late afternoon sun. The ocean is crashing over itself and a child is screeching and I can hear my mother in the distance saying why yes, a private education really is an irrevocable gift.
Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25
Chloe Hollowell Hooks
