Entrance

Barry, Barry… He had been a lot before, at school, and now he was a whole other lot. A lot of personality and cunning and complex things that she was hardly beginning to uncover. Personality, really? The voice was back, usually, called to intervene inside Eugenie’s mind when she was full of shit.

Just… bear with! She begged for patience.

She eyed him, forcing the expression on her face to remain unreadable, praying that she was successful. He had put on a tee-shirt and was drying his ears, looking down at the floor. Some water was still drizzling on his arms, following the curve of his elbows.

Eugenie grimaced. A lot of personality and a lot of curves of elbows and lines and angles and a lot of handsomeness and a lot of circus-like show and colors, and he was living in her house, and because he was not a teenager anymore, she felt very tense about it. Here we GO, GIRL

She sometimes regarded him as a child, existing in an endless childhood, and sometimes she noticed that he had become a young man, a person in early adult years. A person with a heavy responsibility, a secret one that could be shared with absolutely no one, the burden kept his and only his, no one to take care of him, not even Uberwoman. With a status that she should respect, and her own, that she should enforce, on the opposite plane, on a very guarded plane, on a very cautious one too.

“Why are you making this face, Ms White?”

Her attempts at displaying a stoic expression were not as perfected as she hoped to, but she could still lie, “I’m going to sneeze, I think”

Where she should have seen the little student Barry, she saw a guy who had emerged from that five-year-ago tormented juvenile, a grown man. Was it wrong? She saw it, now, better, shook her head. Where she should have seen –with all those shoulds, could she have filled up a river and made a bridge? Undoubtedly— a young man, she couldn’t detach the memory of student Barry. Where she should have seen a kid, she saw a guy, she couldn’t ignore how much of a guy he had evolved into, someone who would wear a suit and tie and whose age would be hard to tell, someone who wasn’t a teenager anymore. Just a guy. But this guy had been her pupil, so she struggled to un-see the “Are you still going to sneeze?” Barry was becoming impatient, “We are out of tissues but I can give you some toilet paper”

And just thinking about it made her tense, for God’s sake! Meta-thinking: why am I thinking about thinking about it? Why am I feeling wrong? You’re not listening, said the voice, obviously, because Barry is hot.

Don’t say that word. She flinched

Okay so: he’s sexy, he’s attractive. He’s smoking hh—

Barry was kind of hot. He was not kind of hot, he was hot. He had been born a generation after her, perhaps even two, and she was a woman close to her forties. Wasn’t she supposed to be interested in men her age, wasn’t she supposed to not label people his age as hot? Was she supposed to –filling another river with a dam of supposed-tos— not even notice younger individuals?

Especially.

What do you mean especially?

Especially, the voice repeated.

His youth was like a pustule under the sun ready to burst and the sun was there every day. It was like a drop of paint too heavy on a canvass, drying in the summer at the corner of a window pane, solidifying into a hard dot but that would never dry if poked. It was contagious, it was a fucking malady. She felt disoriented and unequipped, facing that ancient state of mind she had lost with time and disillusion. It was a distant phenomenon, bodily as much as mentally, and sometimes, it felt like that, like it had been another life but, some other days, hanging out with Barry Masquevert, it seemed like yesterday. The young Eugenie White, the tiny Eugenie White, they were both just there, belonging to the same incarnation as old grumpy and close-minded Eugenie White.

How could she have forgotten, her own days, budding from a little girl to a demoiselle at the lyceeum, before she moved to the United States? It was funny to be so young, she could see it now, and to wait for something fantastic at the bus stop, to actually walk to the damn bus stop with a pair of Walkman’s headphones screaming in her ears and dictating the rhythm and choreography of her stroll. It was so funny to believe, profoundly, that the future would be better, exciting, grand, it was so divine to trust in tomorrow, for a short period, to feel like one was standing at the edge of a gorgeous unknown, stretching their toes into that emptiness, into life.

She had misplaced that feeling, that memory, suffering from amnesia as most adults did, otherwise, she was convinced of it, a lot of them would opt to discontinue living. She had donated those things to forgetting, to oblivion, why? Again, You’re not listening, because, girl, otherwise, you’d jump off the bridge you imagined building with all your shouldnts.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Ah yes, right, she acquiesced

How could you hold those vibrations so dear, so near your heart, and surrender them to extinction one second later? Sometimes she would look at Barry, hiding behind a plate she was drying from the sink, or from behind the screen of her laptop when she was pretending to type some reports, and she thought, why are we so scared to hope again, for the best?

Life is like that, boring. Nothing to offer.

No, I cannot believe it, I didn’t use to believe it

You believe it now, chiquita.

But then, she would really look at him, the perfect shape of his broad shoulders, his back arched like the one of a goose, his chest carved out of marble, the cute undisciplined strands of hair at the back of his skull. Barry’s body was the one of a person who had done nothing but work it out all those years, sleep-deprived, sometimes malnourished or over-caffeinated, but exercised to the limit. Some gods had decided to frame him from a rough stone, all in angles and lines, and round lines, and curved lines, how was such a miracle possible out of stone, sediment perhaps –there is no such thing as volcanic rock—, but still, hard stone?

The stone is what your heart should be made of

What if, she opposed provocatively, my heart is still young? Maybe I’m still that little girl who jumped from the boat in her undergarments to swim with the whales?

Don’t think those things. Don’t think those things.

She had learned to cease asking Barry to put on a shirt, and she learned to take it like a lady of good reputation and maturity. But beyond the issue of being dressed or not, then, there was his overall attitude, his face perched on top of his chest, the little things his mouth did, unaware, like clicking his tongue, pouting like an entitled prince, the things the rest of him did, crossing his arms, tapped his fingers, tilted his head and plunged into eye contact, his face so young and impertinent, his stare dark and soft. She really had to stop, as they were entering their tenth month of living together, as she had the very scary feeling that Barry’s special abilities also provided him with some sort of an added sense, a perception, and she was terrified he could read her mind –even though he really couldn’t.

Another late night and she had been reviewing a pile of essays on her couch, legs resting on a fluffy pillow that she’d put on the coffee table under her feet, and he was walking around experimenting with a radar, the hood of his sweater brought back on his head, some unkempt locks of his hair sticking out of it, when he had abruptly stopped and looked at her, “you have a shitty Internet, Ms White, and that’s the truth”

“Will you give me a cookie, please?” she had said, too absorbed by her task to react to his comment on the quality of the connection in her apartment. She had baked those cookies the day before with chocolate chip and they were nicely waiting to be eaten under a plastic cover. “I’m stuck under this tower of papers”

He had recoiled and frowned at her, gotten rid of the hood on his head, his hair bouncing and swaying, “a quickie, what the hell?”

“Barry!” she shouted out, honestly amused, “oh my god, a coo-kie, from the kitchen, please, one of those? Not a quickie, oh my god, you’re hilarious”

He retreated towards the kitchen while facing her, pointed a finger at her, “you said quickie”

“I didn’t” she defended herself, laughing generously from the silliness.

“Okay” he admitted, “I did that on purpose ‘cause I love making you laugh. That’s like, my thing. And obviously it worked because your mental age is, like, twelve, and your mind is in the gutter”

“it’s comical, isn’t it?”

He shook his head as he brought her the prized cookie on a little paper napkin, “should I, like, deliver it to you in an enticing manner, then?” and she was too busy laughing, she didn’t immediately realize that he was making the delivery unusually playful. He could sometimes do that, gaze at her from deep under his eyebrows, bite his lip, shimmy his shoulders under his shirt to impertinently show off, as sometimes Barry wearing clothes and just existing was as testing as him brushing his teeth while activating the kettle on the kitchen stand in his underwear while drying from the shower.

That time had been the cookie episode, and he had taken it as far as stepping one leg on the other side of hers, looking down at her and leaning forward like he was going to sit on top of her lap, slightly folding his knees, and Eugenie White had held her breath, waiting, not thinking about anything, just staring at his warm, gentle and somewhat wise clear eyes, in which a remnant of icy blue lightning always seemed to be dancing.

“Well done” she said in a low voice, snatching the cookie and putting it on the cushion next to her, but he lingered one more nanosecond, his face almost at level with hers, so close. She maintained his gaze without saying anything. She knew she could produce a pretty respectable poker face, which she had polished with years of having to remain impassible in front of all the shocking things high school students were able to come up with. She knew, well, she assumed. She certainly wished for it to be true at that very moment.

At last he had broken his own little spell and laughed his fresh laugh at his goofiness and maladroitly skipped out of the couch area, barely avoiding all kinds of obstacles, “eat your cookie, ah fuck” he tripped against the cat toys, “Ms White”

“Thank you for the cookie”

“The cookie is all yours” he recited, like a poem. Ten minutes later and he had noticed that she had not touched the cookie, “it was all to get my attention, wasn’t it” So she had eaten it with no appetite, just to bring back the peace. There was a turbulence in the air that needed tempering.

You handled that well, you crazy litchi bitch, she had told herself.

As opposed to what? Letting Barry sit on her lap and scatter all her carefully arranged sheets of paper at the four corners of her flat, blown by a savage breeze? Shoving the cookie in his mouth and biting off the other half? Handling it very poorly now, she heard.

Those are just thoughts

Don’t think those things. Don’t think those things.

As opposed to what? Grabbing his glorious elbows and pulling him against her? Using his powerful shoulders to hook her hands on them and climb him like a tree? Sixteen-year-old Eugenie White was watching, her lips slightly parted, she was breathing shallowly through the cheap lipstick she had bought at the mall, skipping ninth period, she was gushing, texting all her friends about it. She was listening to a Mariah Carey song in her CD player lying on her bed and daydreaming about it, replaying the fantasy in her mind over and over.