“Then, I guess, I wanted to hold on to it.”
“To me, you mean?”
“To you.”
“By lying.”
“Except I didn’t think I was.”
“I’m sorry. You weren’t pretending to be someone else?”
“I was.”
“So how were you not lying?”
“What if everything I said felt true?”
I held the phone tight against my face. Daniel’s voice eventually broke through the semidarkness.
“I thought you were going to hang up on me,” he said.
“Me too,” I said.
“What else?” he said.
There was a little humor in his voice. Maybe because he knew there were never enough “what else’s” to even the score, to forgive what he’d done. No matter how many details I knew about him, how many vulnerable moments he presented to me, there would never be a way to chipaway at that first lopsided power dynamic. It couldn’t be erased. Still, I felt the urge to try.
“Your phone takes pictures, right?” I said.
“It does...” he said. “Because I don’t live in 1985.”
“I want you to take your picture and send it to me.”
“It’s a little dark.”
“Turn on a light, genius.”
“Should I send it to you now?”
“I’m going to hang up,” I said, “and then you’re going to send it to me. But there’s one last thing.”
“What?”
“I want you to be naked in the picture.”
More silence.
“It’s only fair. I think you know that.”
I didn’t wait for a response. I just ended the call. And I fully expected that he would call right back and try to argue his way out of it. But he didn’t do that. And as time passed at a rate of about an hour per second, I wondered maybe if it was better if he didn’t do it.
It would give me a chance to break contact, to prove that he never really wanted to be on even ground with me. What does a true liar do, after all, when you ask him to stand naked?
My phone buzzed with a message. There was no text.
Just an eighteen-year-old boy, naked in the mirror, holding his phone in front of him. I realized as soon as I saw him that he didn’t look the way I thought he might. Despite all Daniel had told me, I had imagined someone thin and rangy with strong facial features. Someone like Jonah. But of course he didn’t look at all like this.
His skin was light brown, and his body was solid, a little stocky even. Like maybe he used to be overweight as a kid, but he’d worked hard to overcome it. There was dark hair across his chest, arms, legs, and groin. His chest was firm and so were his arms, and a small hard belly protruded just slightly above his penis (which hung, just nudging his right leg). He was looking directly at the mirror with squinty brown eyes and heavy dark brows.
