Someday - David Levithan

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They think she is the one who is listening. I used to get satisfaction from playing my part well, never letting anyone realize I was, in fact, an actor. It didn’t occur to me that I would ever let anyone see beneath the act, that there would ever be someone who saw me as a me. Nobody did. Nobody until Rhiannon. Nobody since Rhiannon.

      I am lost in here.

      I am lost, and I can’t ignore the most dangerous question of all:

      What if I want to be found?

       Day 6076

      I am woken one Saturday morning by a text:

       On my way. You better be up.

      I imagine that even when you sleep in the same bed night after night, in familiar sheets surrounded by familiar walls, there is still a profound dislocation at the moment of waking. You grasp first to figure out where you are, then reach for who you are. With me, this becomes confused. Where I am and who I am are essentially the same thing.

      This morning I am Marco. I use his muscle memory to unlock his phone even as I’m figuring out his name. I am typing Just getting up. How long til you’re here? before I can figure out who Manny, the person I’m texting, is.

       10 min. Didn’t you set your alarm? I told you to set your alarm!

      Marco did not set his alarm. I never sleep through alarms.

      Stop texting, I reply. Drive.

       Shut up. At a light. Be ready in 9.

      I try to wash away the mental fog in the shower, but I only get a partial clearing. Manny is Marco’s best friend. I can access memories of him from when he was tiny, so they must be lifelong friends. Today’s a big day for them—somehow I know it’s important to get up and get ready. But I’m not entirely sure why.

      It’s 9:04—not that early. I can’t tell whether there are other people in the house, still asleep, or whether I’m the only one around. I don’t have time to check—I can see Manny’s car pulling up to the curb. He doesn’t honk. He just waits.

      I wave through the window, find my wallet, and head out of my room, out the front door.

      Manny laughs when I get in the car.

      “What?” I ask.

      “I swear to God, if you didn’t have me as your alarm, you’d miss your entire life. You got the money?”

      Even though Marco’s wallet is in my pocket, I have a feeling the answer’s no. The mind is weird this way: Without knowing how much money is actually in the wallet, I know it’s not the amount Manny’s talking about.

      “Shit,” I say.

      Manny shakes his head. “I’m gonna start charging your parents for babysitting, you dumbass. Let’s try this again.”

      “One sec,” I promise. Then I’m out of the car and back through the front door, which I forgot to lock behind me. When I get to Marco’s room, I’m momentarily stymied.

      Where’s the money? I ask him.

      And just like that, I know to look for the shoebox under the bed, where there’s a wad of cash waiting for me.

      What’s this for? I ask again.

      But this time, nada. Some personal facts are closer to the surface than others.

      When I get back to the car, Manny pretends he’s been napping.

      “I haven’t been gone that long,” I tell him.

      “You, my friend, are lucky I worked an extra fifteen minutes of fuck-up time into the schedule. We’ve been waiting for months for this, man. Leave your dumbassery in the backyard, okay?”

      Somehow Manny makes dumbassery a term of affection; he’s amused by my delays, not angered.

      “So what have you been up to since the last time I saw you?” I ask. This is one of the many Careful Questions I have in my arsenal.

      “Well, it’s been a fucking lonely ten hours, but somehow I made it through,” Manny replies. “I’m so excited for you to meet Heller after all the hype. The guy’s shit is for real, you know? I still can’t believe he’s doing us.”

      “Unreal,” I say. “Completely unreal.”

      “Ric’s gonna be floored. I mean, his cobra is the bomb, but what Heller’s gonna do to us is going to make that cobra look like a worm, amiright?”

      “So right.”

      I really need to get in the game here. Best friends are like family members when they talk—the shared-history shorthand is a beast for me to decode. I latch on where I can—in this case, I know Ric is Manny’s brother. And it isn’t much of a jump from there to recall the cobra tattoo on his arm, to know that’s what Manny is talking about. Which means, as I clue in, that Heller must be a tattoo artist. And Marco and Manny must be going for tattoos. Their first tattoos.

      Now I understand why Manny is so excited. This is a big day for them.

      I can see the narcotic effect the expectation is having on Manny; he’s smiling at what’s going to happen a short while from now, buzzing on the trajectory that leads from now to then.

      “Have you decided which one yet?” he asks. Then he doesn’t give Marco any time to answer, saying, “No—wait ’til we get there. Surprise me.”

      “That’s easy enough to do,” I tell him.

      “Just DON’T WUSS OUT!” He punches me on the arm playfully. “I swear, the pain is going to be worth it. And I’ll be there the whole time. Whatever you do, stay in the chair, right?”

      Is he saying this because he senses my own hesitation, or because of a history of hesitation on Marco’s part? I suspect it’s because of Marco, but I worry it’s because of me.

      Manny talks some more about when Ric his tattoo, and how he kept taking the bandage off to show it to everyone, and how it came so damn close to getting infected. In trying to get Marco to remember this, I see all kinds of other memories instead. Ric and Manny bringing me to the beach, Manny’s bathing suit a junior version of Ric’s. Me and Manny sitting on his front porch, waiting for his mom to get home, setting our Pokémon cards out, swapping the doubles. More recently: Manny kissing a girl at a party while another girl talked to me and tried to get my attention. Manny throwing chicken nuggets at me and me throwing them back, the same birthday lunch we’ve had for as long as Marco can remember. Whichever of us is the birthday boy always gets a Happy Meal.

      I get caught up in the times they’ve had together, and Manny lets me get caught. I’m not sure how long we drive before we pull up to a house and Manny says, “This is it.”

      I’ve never gotten a tattoo before. I was expecting the tattoo place to be a storefront in a strip mall, neon letters spelling out T-A-T-T-O-O. But this looks like a house where a family of five could live, complete with a side door, like one belonging to a dentist or a doctor with a home office. That’s where we’re headed.

      “If anyone asks, you’re eighteen,” Manny tells me. “But no one’s going to ask.”

      This only makes me more nervous. Manny knocks on the office door, and it’s opened by a guy who’s probably thirty and is covered by more than thirty tattoos—all these different people in weird poses being devoured by the landscape. He sees me staring at them and says, “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

      “Heller, man, thanks for fitting us in,” Manny says, shaking his hand. “The wait list is, what, three months now?”

      “Megan would know,

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