Here, He Is

Written By: Hannah Hu
Graphic By: Anya Verma

        There is smoke curling out the bathroom door. 
	Outside, the din of the party crackles like static and I fall into it, tingles spreading across my neck and fingers as I approach– there is a man here. His bespectacled eyes gleam in the light. His face glows like the moon. I put my head on his shoulder; we do not talk. 
	I knew him once.
       When he was twelve, he spent weeks building a life-size model of the Mercury-Atlas rocket out of cardboard. The rocket’s engines were loud and so was the saw that shaped it, going back and forth and back and forth until the girl next door poked her head through a sliver of fence and told him to stop; he didn’t hear– his eyes were too busy admiring to see.
        When he was fourteen, he spent days looking at the girl instead of the algebra problems on the board. She smiles; his head perks up. He laughs; her fingers inch toward his. A week later it is snowing and his hands shake when she holds them.
        When he was fifteen, he spent a night lying on the side of the road. Vomit courses from his throat, his mouth doesn’t open fast enough, and there is the smell of something stale in his nostrils. He clenches the bottle in his hand tightly. 
      He trembles like a dog caught in the rain. His head aches, his muscles throb. There is a figure under the streetlight. He crawls toward her but his limbs are too heavy; she is gone. The void in his stomach stretches wider. 
      They find him in the early morning. His face is pale. His lips are blue. Sirens ring down the streets, blue and red flashing past her window. She calls him. The line rings, rings, disconnects– he is gone. 
      The empty desk next to hers is filled in a week, the locker three rows down cleaned out at the end of the year, and all that is left are rumors– rumors that he was buried in an unmarked grave, that his family moved away and took him with them, that he survived and is just lying low among the homeless in the tents of Fifth Street, shaggy and bleary eyed and sometimes just clear headed enough to crack a joke before asking for money. 
      Still, she searches for him. 
      Still, she presses herself against the man with the gleaming eyes, her hands on his shoulders, his on her hips, swaying to the beat of the chatter outside, and when he leans in, his hands still shake a little and she holds them tight– I hold them tight– and 
      he is here, 
                          he is 
                                    here, he is 
                                                           here. 
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	There is smoke curling out the bathroom door. 
Outside, the din of the party crackles like static and I fall into it, tingles spreading across my neck and fingers as I approach– there is a man here. His bespectacled eyes gleam in the light. His face glows like the moon. 
	He cocks his head, exhales a plume of smoke, asks, “What are you doing?” 
         I shrug, wrap my arms around myself. “Just looking for someone.”