December122011
story by kpbstevens
Same Room
The thing that connected them from the very first was that Diane moved into his bedroom. Not his anymore, of course, since his family had moved out and sold the house, and her family had bought it when they moved. She only knew that it had been his house, and that her bedroom had been his bedroom, because his friend DJ came to the door looking for him. It was at the end of summer, and the house was full of boxes, and Diane’s parents had put their porch furniture out, but still DJ thought that his friend Brendan might be living there. Diane supposed it was force of habit. DJ stood on the porch and tried to peer into the house as he talked to her. “Which one is your bedroom?” he asked, and she told him. “That’s Brendan’s bedroom, all right,” he said. So she started school looking for Brendan, wondering who he was.
He was a basketball star and on the homecoming court and she was just, well, a normal girl. She wasn’t popular or unpopular. She made friends, she went about the school with them in a comfortable little clique, but she doubted that Brendan knew who she was, or even cared. She sat behind him in biology class and was there that day when he and his friends played catch with the snout from a fetal pig that they were dissecting. She was a witness to the look of joy that covered his face as he caught the snout and threw it. At night, in her bedroom, she looked about at the four walls and remembered that look and said his name to the quiet, naked air. “Brendan McCoy.”
Even after they went to college, she kept track of him. This was in 1991, before there was an internet, and the information that she learned came from friends’ comments and the grapevine of her mother’s acquaintances. She met someone, got married, and still she occasionally thought of Brendan. She wouldn’t have said that she was obsessed. Just that she thought her life was linked to his, for no other reason than that she’d spent her adolescence in the room that he’d spent his boyhood in, and went to sleep every night breathing the air that he had breathed.
She didn’t look him up when she joined Facebook. She wanted to know, but she also didn’t want to know. Then he sent her a friend request. She stared at it, then reached out slowly and clicked her mouse and accepted it. She closed her office door and studied the computer screen as her coworkers passed in the hallway. Brendan McCoy. In every picture, he had a weak chin. He seemed to duck his head to try to hide it, which made it look like just another fold in his neck. He was balding a little and he’d started wearing glasses. He had friended every person in their graduating class.
She wanted to get up from her desk and drive back to Iowa, to go to the house that her parents had moved out of two years before and knock on the door. She would push past whoever was standing there and go up the stairs to her old bedroom and lie on the floor. Then Brendan, the real Brendan, would settle against her skin, a ghost made up of particles, or molecules of air that he had once breathed and she had breathed in and filtered in the depth of her lungs.
Tags: /Facebook /high school /friends /aging /web fiction /flash fiction /flash fiction lit /literature /lit
