Milan glided out of the theater, letting loose a high-pitched laugh. She was with a guy. It took her a while to notice us. When she did, she came over.
“This is one of the directors,” she said.
The director was broad-shouldered like a quarterback, but his handshake was surprisingly limp. “Ryen.”
“Cat. Nice to meet you. What a beautiful film.”
“Thanks.” He patted Tristan on the back. “Thanks for supporting, bro. Zee and I appreciate you.”
Milan had a shift, so she took off. “Zee” came to say goodbye to Tristan. By the way they hugged with both arms, I understood Zee was the one he’d come to support.
Tristan turned to me and said, “There’s this cool spot up the street. Wanna go?”
The cool spot wasn’t a chic Mediterranean restaurant like I’d hoped, but the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
“What the fuck, are you Catholic?”
Tristan sat on the steps. “Nope.”
“I’m confused.”
“Sorry, I should’ve clarified,” he said, not clarifying anything.
I sat beside him. A breeze whispered through the tree branches. This part of the city had always felt sequestered from the rest. Sprawling by DC standards. I’d passed the basilica in the car growing up, with its blue-yellow dome, but I’d never truly noticed it.
“Churches calm me down,” he said.
I nodded at the gold cross at his neck. “You always wear that?”
“I never take it off.”
“You don’t seem religious.”
He picked at an invisible spot on his pants. “Yeah, well, you don’t really know me, do you?”
I pushed away my embarrassment. “I know the wild stories from high school.”
“Don’t listen toanythingJay says.”
“So, you didn’t fly off a mechanical bull like Raggedy Ann?”
Cupping his face, he laughed. “Did he tell you I landed on a table with a bunch of glass cups on it? A piece of glass got in my neck. I almost died over that shit.”
I noticed a neck scar partially covered by his tattoo. “Is that where you got that from?”
He looked at me, startled then subdued. “No.”
We sat in silence. I was aware of my body’s inner workings with painful ferocity—the roiling of my stomach, the movement of blood through my veins.
I’d forgotten I’d shut my phone off for the film and turned it back on. It hummed with updates. One was about a Gazan father whose newborns were killed on his way to collect their birth certificates. Slipping my phone into my pocket, I stared ahead.
“Your face just got really dark,” Tristan said. “You all right?”
“What else can a person be?”
“You sure you want to ask a person getting their PhD in philosophy that? Like, do you wanna be here for ten hours?”
I smiled weakly.
