Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

Suddenly, he leaned forward and kissed me. On the mouth. In public.

I pitched forward in surprise and grabbed his shoulders to keep from falling into the painting.

“What was that for?” I asked when he leaned back, but he didn’t say anything. Just shook his head and leaned close enough to the painting that I worried he’d set off some kind of alarm. But there was nothing between him and the canvas at all. He could have reached a hand out and touched it.

He studied it closely, one hand on my wrist. “What do you think that is?” He pointed to a tiny gray splotch between the house and the barn that I hadn’t even noticed.

“Um, a bird, I guess?” I said. I had no clue.

Will just looked at me, but when he led me into the next room to look at the Picassos, he didn’t let go of my arm right away, just held it like it was natural that we should be connected.

IN HIGH school, the week before winter break was a strange animal. The energy would become more and more frenetic, then explode into temporary cross-clique camaraderie on the last day of the semester, everyone bonding over the one thing we all had in common: excitement about getting the hell out of there.

I felt it too, but whereas it seemed like everyone else had plans for break—ski trips with their families, basketball training, group sledding, shopping trips in Detroit—I… didn’t. I liked the time off, of course, but it wasn’t really that much different than the rest of my evenings or weekends when school was in session.

When I was younger and Carter and I were still friends, it was our prime time for movie marathons. Rewatching all the series we’d grown up with. X-Men, Harry Potter, Underworld. And without fail, we watched Lord of the Rings and our favorite DVD extras. Carter’s favorites were always about the sword fighting or hand-to-hand combat in the battle scenes. I loved the ones where they showed how they actually created the Shire—seeding it a year before shooting so that when the actors and crew showed up there was an actual world there. (I didn’t tell Carter my other favorite extra: when Viggo Mortensen kissed Billy Boyd on the mouth.)

I was captivated by the idea that this epic series had an equally epic parallel story. That they created a world for themselves at the same time they were creating a world for us to view.

Maybe that’s why, after Carter had dumped me as a friend, I still spent my winter breaks watching the Lord of the Rings extras. Yeah, I probably should’ve been out trying to make new friends, like my mom and Janie always told me to do. And I tried. Kinda. At first it was mostly just that I had nothing in common with the other kids I went to school with.

Later, once I sort of accidentally outed myself during biology class, it was a combination of people keeping a bit of distance and macho fuckwads deciding that I’d given them an excuse to pick fights.

So I watched DVD extras. Like, all of them. I fell into the world so hard that it started to seem like a movie in its own right. Or a reality TV show where I got to watch these people’s lives unfold. I felt like I knew them—knew what they would say or what their reactions would be. Okay, I was a little obsessed. But I didn’t have that. Friends, a purpose, a… world of my own.

When I came to college, then, a part of me held that out as the model. I loved getting to know Milton well enough that I could predict which parts of Felicity he’d think were funny. Or knowing the sound of Gretchen’s breath on the mat beside me in yoga, distinct from anyone else’s. Being able to anticipate the way that Thomas would weave bits of what was going on into the comics he drew during class. Knowing that when Charles started to bounce his knee up and down while he looked at the computer, it meant he was reaching the part of whatever he was reading that really convinced him—the part that made him believe there was truth to the conspiracy, no matter how farfetched.

The neighborhood, with campus, the dorms, and the blocks surrounding Washington Square, was our own little Shire, and the city stretching beyond it Middle Earth. I was pretty convinced that the building that housed my Cultural Foundations class was Mordor, but when I told Will my analogy—thinking he’d laugh and call me a geek but instead being pleasantly surprised to find he was a fan too—he said, no, Times Square at peak tourist rush hour in the summer was absolutely the depths of Mordor. “One does not simply walk into Times Square!” he teased the next week when I told him about a harrowingly aggressive incident with a selfie stick outside the TKTS booth when I took an ill-advised shortcut.