[Pretending]

The sweat slicking his forearms mesmerized her. The way the moon hit it so that they shone like he’d been lightly dipped in silver. How it washed out the angry symbols and barbed words across his flesh. And how he’d gotten that sheen from rushing to the cemetery after his shift. He’d run to the end of town and still missed visiting hours. The iron gates had been firmly chained together, and barbed at the top to dissuade, he must’ve thought, but not keep out completely, the people who couldn’t quite make it in time. That, in her mind, was the only explanation she could give to him throwing his sapper coat over the gate and shimmying up its bars. To edging over the fabric and the spikes underneath, and getting his hand caught on one. He sucked the wound now as he paced on a new piece of sod.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. Like always, he kept his voice down while he talked to her.
She perched on the top of a headstone and crossed her legs.
“You saw around that,” she said.
His lips twitched, and the scar at the corner of his mouth widened. He nodded.
“Nice day.”
“Absolutely gorgeous,” she said.
“Night’s better.”
“I always did like it more.”
He kept moving across the front of the headstone, a lonely, hunched silhouette.
“Weird without’chu home.”
“You mean it’s not really a home anymore,” she said. She examined her glitter nail polish.
“Yeah,” he said. His lips twitched again, as if they wanted to smile but had frozen in a grimace. “You always been better at words, kid.”
She scraped the dirt out from underneath her thumbnail.
“I’m not better. Just different.”
He wet his lips and brushed an itch out of his scalp.
“Different areas, different backgrounds. You grew up in a place I’ll never understand. Just like you wouldn’t be able to fully understand where I came from. It’s all about differences.”
“An’ loving despite that,” he said. His gold-green eye twinkled in the starlight. His orange-brown one looked at her with the dull shine of an animal.
“Exactly,” she said, “It’s those differences that make everyone beautiful.”
“You diff’rent ’cause you more beautiful than all them,” he said, waving his hand out past the gate to the town half-asleep.
She rubbed her hand across the craggy stone, feeling it scratch and prick her palm.
“No, Polk,” she said, giving her red ballet slippers a melancholy smile, “I had an ugliness inside of me.”
He stopped moving, and shook his head as if he could shut her up with the one simple gesture in the dark.
“You saw it.”
He swallowed.
“Please, kid. Don’t be talking ’bout it.”
“You can’t pretend it never happened.”
“It didn’t,” he whispered through his teeth.
“Do you remember the excuses I used to give you?” she asked, kicking her legs playfully.
“Please, I don’t want to.”
“I had a big lunch,” she said, “Or, I’m really not feeling well.”
He shook his head firmer.
“Or how about those times when you would almost be on to me, and I would kiss you before you could figure it out? Remember?” she asked, sounding as if these were memories to be cherished, “I would touch your chest and you’d forget all about how when you touched mine you could count my ribs through my sweater.”
He ran his injured hand down his face, pinching his nose as he continued to shake his head, slower now. It drew a patchy line down his cheek like a child had drawn on him with a red crayon.
“But after a while I couldn’t hide it from you anymore.”
“I loved you, kid. I still do,” he said, desperate, hoping that would make all the difference in the world. She could see that.
“And all the effort I put in, when it turns out that you never wanted to know. You denied what was going on until the end.”
“No. I wanted to help–”
“It must have been easier that way. It was definitely easier for me. Happier.”
“I woulda done anything,” he said.
“But this is what I wanted.”
“Why’d'ju want that?” he asked. His question stumbled on the misery caught in his throat.
“I don’t know,” she said.
But really, he didn’t know–because she would have. She, the girl sitting on her own tombstone, would’ve known why she was in the ground. And that was why he was on his knees, alone, in Arch Grove Cemetery. Pretending.