12
RYAN
“Welcome to Coastal Vision,” the receptionist behind the desk says as a man and his young son walk in.
I’m sitting in a chair upholstered in that particular shade of mauve that only exists in medical offices. My back is straight, my hands are folded in my lap, and my feet are flat on the floor because even in a room full of strangers, I still hear my father’s voice reminding me that posture reflects character. The chair’s fabric has that nubby texture designed to survive decades of anxious patients without showing wear, and it’s doing an admirable job of irritating the backs of my thighs through my khakis.
To my left, a fish tank bubbles against the wall. The water has a faint green tinge that suggests the filter hasn’t been changed recently, and one particularly aggressive angelfish keeps ramming its face into the glass. I relate to that fish on a spiritual level.
Across from me, an elderly woman in a floral blouse is filling out paperwork with a pen that she keeps clicking in a rhythm that’s slowly drilling a hole through my temporal lobe. A mounted television in the corner plays a muted home renovationshow, the closed captions lagging three seconds behind, which is somehow more distracting than if they’d just turned the sound on.
Jackson is wedged into the chair beside me, his massive frame spilling over both armrests. He’s been staring at me for the last two minutes with an expression I can only describe as bewildered curiosity. “I don’t get it,” he says for the third time since we sat down.
“What’s not to get? I need corrective lenses. This is where one procures them.”
“No, I get the eye doctor part. What I don’t get is the contacts part. You’ve worn glasses for as long as I’ve known you. You love your glasses. You clean them with that little microfiber cloth every night like you’re polishing the Hope Diamond.”
“I don’t polish them. I maintain them.”
“Ryan, you named the cloth.”
I did not name the—okay, I named the cloth. It’s called Clarence. But that’s neither here nor there. “The point is,” I say, keeping my voice measured as the pen-clicking woman across from us reaches a truly frenzied tempo, “I no longer have glasses to maintain. And rather than replacing them with an identical pair, I’ve decided to explore an alternative option. Contacts are a perfectly practical choice for someone who?—”
“Back up.” Jackson holds up one large hand. “What do you mean you no longer have glasses? Where’d they go?”
I press my lips together. The fish tank gurgles. The angelfish rams the glass again. “They were casualties of Saturday night.”
Jackson’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline. “The pool?”
“When campus security arrived and Oliver…” I pause, the memory of being hoisted over his shoulder flooding back with unwelcome vividness. His hand on my ass. The flex of his back against my chest. The moonlit sprint across campus. “When we carried me out on his shoulder, my glasses fell off. I knew if I told him to stop so I could retrieve them, he would have. But that would’ve also meant getting caught sooner than we did.”
“Oh, shit.” Jackson winces. “Did you check the lost and found?”
“I went back yesterday morning. The custodial staff had already cleaned the pool area. Nobody turned in a pair of glasses.” I smooth a nonexistent wrinkle from my khakis. “They’re gone.”
“Dude.” Jackson’s massive frame melts against the chair, his shoulders dropping as he sighs. “That sucks. Those were nice glasses.”
“They had tortoiseshell frames, anti-reflective coating, properly adjusted nose pads.” I swallow. “My mother helped me pick out that style. I kept the prescription updated but always chose the same frames.”
The admission slips out before I can catch it, and the air between us shifts. Jackson goes still beside me, his fidgeting paused, his brown eyes softening in that way they do when he knows he’s stumbled onto something that matters more than the surface conversation suggests.
“Ryan—”
“It’s fine.” I cut him off because if he’s gentle with me right now, I’ll unravel in this mauve-chaired purgatory, and I refuse to have an emotional breakdown in front of the pen-clicking woman and the suicidal angelfish. “They were just glasses. Things get lost. I’ve been thinking about it—maybe this is an opportunity.”
“An opportunity,” Jackson repeats.
“To try something new.” I sit up straighter, which is barely possible given my already military-grade posture. “I’ve worn the same style of glasses for over ten years. Same frames, same look, same everything. Perhaps it’s time for a change.”
A clipboard-wielding nurse opens the door behind the reception desk, calls out a name that isn’t mine, and the pen-clicking woman rises with a grunt, taking her instrument of auditory torture with her. The silence she leaves behind is almost holy.
Jackson stretches his legs into the newly vacated space across from us, his sneakers scuffing against the speckled linoleum. He crosses his arms over his chest and studies me with thatspecific expression that always precedes a comment designed to make me wish the floor would open up and swallow me whole. “You looked cute in glasses.”
“I didn’t wear them to look cute. I wore them to see.”
“Both things can be true.” He tilts his head, his messy brown hair flopping to one side. “Is this about Oliver?”
My heart does something violent and arrhythmic. “What?”
