Fall by Colin McAdam

Julius’s friends superior to him? I think we all started wondering more profoundly about the future that year.
    I felt the bed shaking a little and realized he was crying. I felt terrible. I wondered whether I imagined the shaking, and thought he might have fallen asleep. He sighed and I realized he was still feeling bad.
    “Sometimes people surprise you,” was all I could offer. I didn’t even know what I meant, wondered if it was one of those platitudes, borrowed from someone else, that appear on the tongue at awkward moments. I was trying to remain essentially quiet, to let things happen at a calm pace, but being privy to his secrets, being there in that private space with him and feeling a potential friendship bloom, I felt like I should offer something of myself.
    “It’s just a lazy eye,” I said. “I think people think it’s something more serious. It’s just a muscle problem. I can’t control the eye.”
    “Okay.”
    “And the eye and eyelid go into spasms. I know it makes people uncomfortable.”
    I felt like I had stepped off a cliff. Why did I talk about my eye out of the blue? I cast about in my mind for some way to change the subject, for a joke to tell, some way to bring the talk back around to Julius. But all I remember saying was, “I find it hard.”
    There was silence again and I found myself retreating. Shutting everything down and thinking this year is only a year and I will get through it quietly and on my own terms.
    Julius said, “I think it’s cool. I think you’re a handsome guy.”
    It was still noisy and bright out in the hall. I was still wide awake.
    I was warmer than I’d ever been in those strange beds.
    “Goodnight,” I said.
    “Goodnight.”
     
    I had seen Fall that weekend. I saw her come out of the front door of the Girls’ Flats on Saturday during the day. She had a book in her hand and I wanted to see what it was, but couldn’t. I had never spoken to her.
    I saw her that Friday night, too, in the TV room. It was the one place on the Flats (between the Girls’ and Boys’) where both sexes were allowed to mingle. People often wore their pyjamas there on the weekend. Someone would rent a movie or two and usually whoever was staying on the Flats would gather in the dark on the old couches and watch movies until a Master would come around and call Lights Out.
    I often found it an annoying scene, people in their pyjamas getting cuddly. Occasionally a boyfriend and girlfriend, or several of them, would be in there and often enough they would be making out, their hands busy under blankets, and I found it all repellent. Everyone seemed to settle into a phony vulnerability, as though wearing pyjamas and slippers revealed their soft nature, as though they were all the same. People made sure they laughed in the right places, groaned in the right places, the girls always cried when a movie was sad. A group of flannel-clad, insincere emotions.
    I would walk through the TV room most Saturday nights to see if there was a movie I was interested in. I rented Fellini’s
Satyricon
once, but only a handful of boys stayed to the end, in hope of more nudity. I was generally not interested in their movies, and the sight of them all irked me, but Fall was there that Friday and I stopped for a while.
    I sat at the back of the room, and the couch she sat on was to the side. She angled her head toward the screen and I saw her inthree-quarter profile. There was little danger of her noticing that I was staring at her.
    There was such a hungry curiosity in her look, regardless of what banality was on the screen. I stared at the light flickering over her eyes and thought of some lost white sheet blowing in the night and settling into dark water. I wanted her to look at me and I wanted to be absorbed, transformed in her mind into something calm. I wanted her to help me. I had wanted that for years but I had never articulated it, and I was shocked to realize it. I felt weak. I realized that the