Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

I closed my eyes and thought about what someone would think if they came out onto the portico and saw us. That we were boyfriend and girlfriend? That Dee loved me and had snuck over from her dorm to meet me back here? Or would they see the truth—that it meant nothing. I’d thought we had something, until this summer, until Luke. But I’d been stupid.

It was killing me, the wanting. The wanting for this—her in my arms, her tears on my T-shirt—to mean the same thing for her that it meant for me. If it had, if she’d really been my girlfriend, I would’ve asked her why she was crying. Why she was sitting under the columns of my dorm instead of hers. If she’d seen Nuala. If it was her fault that Nuala was here in the first place.

But I couldn’t ask her anything.

“Talk,” Dee said, her voice muffled against my T-shirt.

I thought I’d misunderstood her. I opened my eyes, watched the gray clouds roll in sheets to the ground. “What?”

“Just say something, James. I just want to hear you talk. Be funny. Just talk.”

I didn’t feel like being funny. “I’m always funny.”

“Then be what you are always.”

I asked, “Why were you crying?”

But she didn’t answer, because I hadn’t said it out loud.

The truth was that I was too grateful for her presence here at all to push my luck by asking questions that might frighten her away. So I babbled to her about my classes and the foibles of Paul and Doritos as alarm clocks, and I was completely flippant and funny and even as she began to laugh, I was dying with wanting.

Nuala

If just for a moment to belong

To be caught in the wondrous net of family

Would it be untrue or wrong

To say ‘I live here; this is home,’ so earnestly?

—from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

Watching James come out to rescue Dee behind the dorm put me in a bad mood. I got tired of watching her boohoo-ness really fast, and decided to go to the movie theater instead. If I was going to be witness to that amount of melodrama, I wanted it to be delivered by a highly paid and beautiful head on a big screen. On the walk over to the theater, I thought of the multitude of things I didn’t like about Dee. While I waited in line for a ticket—not that I really needed a ticket—I wondered if she practiced her sad faces in a mirror. Or if she was just a natural at invoking sympathy in male types. Not something I really had talent for myself.

The kid at the ticket counter looked bored. “Which movie?”

“Surprise me,” I told him, and waved money at him.

It took him a moment to figure out what I meant. “Seriously?”

“Serious as death.”

He raised his eyebrows, punched something into the computer, and then gave me an evil grin that made me think fondly on the human race in general. He handed me a ticket, face down. “Go right. Second theater. Have fun.”

I rewarded him with a smile and headed down the dim carpeted hall. It smelled of popcorn butter, carpet cleaner, and that other odor that always seemed to invade theaters—anticipation, or something. In such familiar surroundings, my brain returned to its previous preoccupation: things that I hated about Dee.

One, her eyes were too big. She looked like an alien.

I counted the doors to the second theater and resisted the temptation to look up at the sign above the door to see what movie Ticket-Boy had chosen for me.

Two, her voice was pretty at first, but it got annoying fast. If I wanted to hear singing, I’d get a CD.

Inside the theater, it was quiet and fairly empty—only two or three other couples. Maybe that wicked grin from Ticket-Boy was because he had sent me to a dud.

Three, she used James to make herself feel better. It was the sort of attribute I only liked for me to have.

I chose a seat in the dead center of the theater and put my feet up on the chair in front of me. It was the perfect seat. If anyone came in and sat in front of me, I’d kill them.

Four, she fit in James’ arms too perfectly. Like she’d been there before. Like she was claiming him.

The trailers boomed to life in front of me. Normally I would’ve basked in them, enjoyed the promise of movies to come, but I couldn’t focus on them tonight. For starters, I wouldn’t be around for any of the movies they were advertising—they were all for the Christmas season and next year—and plus, I was rehearsing dialogue in my head for next time I saw James.

“Unrequited love,” I’d say. He’d look at me sideways in that cunning way he did and say, “What about it?” and I’d reply, “It’s just not your color.” Pithy. Just to show him that I’d noticed. Or maybe I’d show myself to her and say, “Guess I’m not the only one who uses humans around here.” And then I’d summon some of Owain’s hounds to chew off the bottom bits of her legs. Then she wouldn’t fit just right into his arms. She’d be too short. It’d be like hugging a midget.

I grinned in the theater.

The movie began with a sweeping rock ballad from the ’70s and a helicopter shot of New York City. The guitar work was inspired—I wondered if I’d had anything to do with it. It quickly became apparent that Ticket-Boy had sent me to a romantic comedy. Not really my thing, but at least it would take my mind off James and the song he’d played for me earlier. It was unbearable to think I might never hear it played out loud again. I was getting a crush on it.

For a half hour, I tried to get into the movie but I couldn’t. It was cutesy, and they kissed, and there was lovey music. And I started thinking how I would fit into James’ arms, if my head would fit just right under his chin like Dee’s had. And then I started thinking about his car, how it had smelled like him, and I imagined that smell clinging to my skin.

Crap.

I got up and pushed my way out of the theater. I didn’t stop to talk to Ticket-Boy, although I felt his eyes on me. He probably thought I hated the movie. Maybe I had. I walked straight out into the twilight. The rain had stopped; thunder growled far away. I headed down the rain-slicked sidewalk, fast, as if I could put space between me and my thoughts.

It wasn’t like there hadn’t been tension of the sexual variety between me and my pupils before—the guys, poor little lambs, almost always wanted to get my clothing off, which just made them work harder and sound all the more beautiful.

But it wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I wasn’t human.

I was so caught up in myself that I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone until the street lights flickered around me, guttering and flickering like candles before shining brightly again. Whoever—whatever—it was, it wouldn’t do to look cowed, so I kept walking along the sidewalk as if I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it was only a solitary faerie who would leave me alone.