Micah Nemerever

It was easy for him to hate her; it was almost primal.

You could do anything to me and I’d let you.

“I love you,” he said, and once he’d spoken, the words took hold of his tongue like a prayer. Julian pulled him nearer, but he didn’t dare open his eyes. I love you. I love you. I love you.

It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly.

“I don’t worry,” he protested, and when Julian looked skeptical, he dug in his heels rather than let himself be mocked. “I ruminate. They’re distinct actions.”
“Are they?” said Julian. “From this angle . . .”
“Worrying,” said Paul, “means you’re afraid it’s going to happen. Ruminating is when you know it will, if it hasn’t happened already. One is neurotic, the other

“I don’t worry,” he protested, and when Julian looked skeptical, he dug in his heels rather than let himself be mocked. “I ruminate. They’re distinct actions.”
“Are they?” said Julian. “From this angle . . .”
“Worrying,” said Paul, “means you’re afraid it’s going to happen. Ruminating is when you know it will, if it hasn’t happened already. One is neurotic, the other is fatalistic, and fatalism is supported by evidence. It isn’t the same.”

One corner of Julian’s mouth went a little higher than the other when he smiled; Paul remembered something he’d read in his art history class last semester, about how the Japanese believed there was something poignant and endearing about asymmetry

Paul couldn’t tell if its name was really Sweetpea or if that was just a nickname, but it inexplicably decided to sit on his lap as they drove.

“Julian’s told me so much about you.”

The countryside spilled past them in a blur. Joy steered one-handed as she lit a cigarette—a peculiar one, long and skinny, with a striking resemblance to a lollipop stick. Paul stared at her, trying to decide what she might mean by “so much.”

Joy looked at him sideways and seemed, quite suddenly, to take pity on him.

“He says you’re absolutely brilliant,” she went on. “And that you do wonderful creepy paintings of moths and dead things, and that he wishes you’d major in art instead of—oh, I forget, it was something dreadful—”

“It’s ecology,” he said a little defensively. “It’s not dreadful.”

“Oh! Thank goodness, I thought it was economics. That’s what Daddy does, something at the Treasury, and he despises it.”

Joy was visibly horrorstruck. She took a long drag from her cigarette to cover her silence.

“He’s—warned you about them, hasn’t he?” she said carefully.

Paul avoided her eyes. Instead he looked at the dog, which grinned up at him as its paws pressed into his thigh. He wasn’t sure if there was a correct way to pet dogs the same way there was with cats, so he patted its forehead gingerly with the tips of his fingers.

“Of course,” he said. It was true in that he could read between the lines of what little detail Julian had ever given him, but he knew that this wasn’t what Joy meant.

Joy wasn’t forcing Paul to hold up his end of a conversation, which he slowly recognized as a deliberate kindness. She talked in fits and starts, amiable monologues about her parents or her boarding school that allowed replies but didn’t demand them. Her silences didn’t ask anything of him, which was hardly ever the case, even with people who knew him well.