Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“Was your flight delayed, too?”

“What?” Gabe looked confused, then shook his head. “Oh — nope. I just forgot the shuttles ended at nine.”

“You would,” I said, but it didn’t sound mocking; it came out downright affectionately, much more than I’d intended, and Gabe laughed in surprise. My cheeks warmed, and I fiddled with the zipper on my suitcase. We fell into another silence, but this time, it was relaxed. Maybe it was the late hour or the unusual circumstances; neither one of us knew whether our new amity would last once the clock struck midnight and we arrived at old, familiar Mills, where the social hierarchy was as firmly set as the granite foundation. Right then, though, it didn’t matter very much. We had a delicate understanding, a connection like a spiderweb, and we navigated it with earnest, clumsy excitement. It felt like being outside after curfew: an extra hour tacked onto the day, wondrous and strange.

“So,” said Gabe. “What say you? Are we sleeping here?”

“God, I hope not,” I said, but the truth is I was buzzing with excitement. I pictured us making a nest of sweatshirts, a pillow of old tees, searching the airport for coffee and bloated muffins the next morning. Back at school, we would have an inside joke — a raised eyebrow, a “Remember the night we spent in baggage claim at Arcata/Eureka?” We would groan for effect, making it sound much worse than it really was. So my heart went limp when we saw the wide, maroon-colored Mills student shuttle careen around the corner. It pulled up in front of us and ground to a halt.

The door popped open, and out blundered Sandy, the hulking, enthusiastic grounds manager. His curly red hair was pulled into a low ponytail, and he huffed as though he’d run to the airport instead of driven.

“All right, all right, you’re saved,” he said, grabbing our bags, giving each of us an amiable clap on the shoulder. “Load ’em in and let’s get a move on.”

“How’d you find us?” asked Gabe as we climbed into the carpeted body of the shuttle, which always smelled faintly of Cheetos. Was it possible I detected a strain of disappointment in his voice, the same one I felt?

“Hall monitor noticed two of you buggers were missing,” said Sandy, eyeing the rearview mirror and pulling onto the road with a lurch. “We checked the phone in the girls’ dorm — knew you wouldn’t be the one to call, Lennox — and what do you know, five missed calls. Number traced right to the airport.”

“Five?” Gabe looked at me, grinning.

“Well…,” I said in protest.

“Anyway,” said Sandy, “no harm done. Just a little excitement on a Sunday night. I should be used to it by now.”

With Sandy in the car, Gabe and I went mute again, staring out of our respective windows. But there was a presence between us, a fullness, and the molecules in the van seemed to shift to accommodate it. The drive to campus was only twenty minutes long, but it felt like hours. At one point, Gabe shifted his large boy-foot, and his calf — warm, hairy — rubbed against mine. I shivered, and his calf muscle tensed. But then the shiver passed, and his leg relaxed, and we stayed that way: linked by the barest touch as we wound toward school, stars winking in the windows.

When I woke up in my top bunk the next morning, Hannah snoring vigorously below me, the previous night felt like a dream. But when I saw Gabe across the dining hall at breakfast, sitting at a round table with David Horikawa and Michael Fritz, he stuck his arm in the air and motioned me over with the exaggerated enthusiasm of an air traffic controller.

“Yo!” he called. “Patterson!”

A few of the other seniors craned their heads around in surprise — Hannah and I usually sat with the senior girls on our hall — but I grabbed Hannah by the wrist and walked over, feigning confidence. Teenagers have a nose for insecurity, which is probably why we so often pardoned Gabe: everything he did had a robust aplomb that sent us sniffing elsewhere.

“Patterson and I had a little adventure last night,” said Gabe as Hannah and I took our seats. (“ What the —” asked Hannah, who had heard none of this, before I jabbed her thigh under the table.) Soon, the five of us were eating breakfast together almost every day. By the end of September, Hannah had entered into a passionate, ill-fated liaison with David Horikawa, but Gabe and I still hadn’t kissed. We’d had plenty of opportunities — late-night meet-ups in the multipurpose room; riding cafeteria trays down Observatory Hill, Gabe and I crashing at the bottom in a tangle of legs and plastic — but whenever the laughter stopped, we could only stare at each other, red-faced.

“You guys hang out all the time. I just don’t get what you’re doing ,” said Hannah. Blotchy, blackberry-colored hickeys had started to appear on her body in surprising places (collarbone, inner elbow, and once, she showed me, smiling wickedly, her inner thigh); she was baffled by our restraint, not that it was intentional.

“We’re talking ,” I said helplessly, and it was true: we’d become expert in the kind of simpatico conversation that usually only fell into place after years of friendship. Tucked between the redwood trees in the forest behind school, we traded stories: our secret plans (“To be a physicist,” I whispered, hot-cheeked), our childhood fears (“Pill bugs,” said Gabe), our families. What I’d heard of Gabe’s was partially true: he lived with his mother in Tracy, California, a humid town in the San Joaquin Valley—“best known,” said Gabe, “as the place where people stop to pee on the way to Tahoe.” His mother worked from home for a telecommunications company and was heavily medicated for a chronic pain condition that made her yell, he said, or sleep. His dad wasn’t dead, but he “wasn’t in the picture”—a phrase Gabe said with such swift automatism that it sounded like something he’d been trained to say.

I didn’t push him. Instead, I told him about my family. We were closer, maybe, but not cuddly. My parents prized their intellects and encouraged the same in my brother, Rodney, and me. Rodney was five years younger, thirteen during my senior year, and he was the softest one of all of us: a boy unusually gentle for thirteen, who kept a pet newt and wrote short stories on my father’s hand-me-down laptop. They lived in New Jersey, ten states and six hours away, and most of the time I kept them tucked in one compartment in my mind — a compartment I opened up when I went home but otherwise kept firmly lidded.

A narrow channel had opened between Gabe and me, and we wriggled through. What we had was a likeness, an understanding of the way that solitary people could and had to drift together. Though Gabe was often surrounded by a troupe of boys, he was more reclusive than most people knew. He took long, tangled walks alone on weekends, returning to the dorms with dirty fingernails and forearms scratched by brambles. He did his homework in the attic of the library, a tower that one of the headmasters in the 1960s had dubbed a place for silent thought — Gabe claimed he couldn’t think if anyone else was around. Having spent most of the past three years at Mills (“It’s like this weird alternate universe,” he said, “where everyone is sixteen”), we were both independent by design, expert in adopting friends and in letting them go. As solid as Mills felt while we were there, we knew we would have to relinquish it at the end of senior year, just as we had our real families. Against our better judgment, in defiance of our transience and the rush of time, we built a raft and clung to it.

When I was with him, I longed to kiss him, but I was starting to despair. (“We couldn’t do it now ,” I said to Hannah, rolling around in my bunk. “We’re already friends. It’d be too weird.”) On Halloween, Hannah — sick of my whining and already to third base with David Horikawa — came into our room armed with a trough of makeup and a minidress purchased at the thrift store in Eureka.