'Looker', by JJ Graham

He says I look bad on me.
He says it’s not my fault that no one does us any kindnesses since I’ve never done a kindness for someone else, so how should I know how to receive one.
On a computer at the library, he shows me YouTubes of homeless people getting their hair cut.
“It’s not that hard,” he says.
Neither of us needs a haircut, but he says that’s not the point. The point is that it takes commitment.
Real commitment, he says, true commitment, is the rarest thing in this world.
I got a bad fever when we were staying with his friend at the friend’s duplex, and when it passed, I felt a clarity like I was connected to everything that had ever happened in my whole life.
I remembered things I’d forgotten a long time before.
He’d given me a notebook to write down my goals. Instead, I numbered a page for every year of my life up to that day, and filled each page with everything I could remember.
Sometimes, reading through my notebook, I see that I’ve remembered the wrong things. So I erase what I’ve written and write it down again.
In the YouTubes, the homeless people tell the barber about what happened in their lives that brought them to the place they’re in. They talk, and as they talk, they start to cry. But by the end, they’re smiling. A haircut has changed their life.
“But they have to want it,” he says, squeezing the w in his fist.
“Don’t let me see what’s in that notebook,” he says. “That notebook is for you and no one else.”
Things with him are very certain until they’re not.
People say we walk the same, like we think we might take flight.
In the mirror at his friend’s duplex, I try to watch myself walking. But when I look in the mirror, I can’t see where I’m going, and I bruise my shin on the toilet.
Instead, I worm my way into the spaces where he isn’t. I find his uncovered edges and wrap myself around them. That is how I show him my commitment.
On the weekends, we leave the duplex and its sad garlicky smell of someone else’s food, and take the bus down to the library. If we ever get separated, he whistles in a way that only he can do.
We practice it sitting on his bed. He whistles, and I pretend to look around the room until I see him, and then throw myself into his lap like I would if I’d been all by myself and starting to think I’d never find him again.
When someone asks how long it’s been like this, he says it’s always been like this. But I know and my notebook says that it hasn’t been forever. Every now and then, he tells me we’ve been foraged out.
It happened when someone moved into the brown house a few blocks from the duplex. It was an old house that looked like someone died in it.
Every summer weekend, we watched workers pull the house’s rusty guts out the front door. He’d tell me what was what, like, that’s the old knob and tube electric; that’s asbestos. They took the tiles off the roof, carted them away, came back with new tiles. From the front windows, we could see all the way through to the back, where a new foundation was eating up the yard.
“Big garage for a place this size,” he said.
But they kept building up, and soon enough they’d built a giant boxy thing that made the house at the front look like a crab poking out of its shell.
And then one day someone moved in. All summer we’d been supervising the workers, discussing paint, and somewhere along the way, we’d forgotten that someone else would actually live there.
“Well,” he said, “I think we’re just about foraged out here.”
He said it was disrespectful, what they’d done to that house. Someone shouldn’t have let them do it.
He’d been arguing with the friend, too. The friend was bothered by the way we moved in circles around each other, and kept telling him to put me in school. School, he tells me, is where you learn to be like everyone else.
So we trace our fingers along the baseboards until we reach the same corner of a room. We pack ourselves into each other, and then, through a trick of pulling very hard on all the places where we join, we vanish.
The new place is like a child’s drawing of the old place. It always is.
We have a carpeted basement with a window and a door to the outside and another door going upstairs that’s always locked. We have the mattresses and some pillows and sheets that we took from the friend’s duplex.
At night, we go over my textbooks together while someone creaks around above our heads, turning on the TV, turning on and off the faucets.
When he leaves for the day, he sets up a stepladder so I can look out the window at the basement of the house next door. They have a fence that’s probably hiding a nice backyard with a grill and a table. In the morning, a car backs out along the driveway. I watch it for as long as I can still see it going down the street, saying my goodbyes. There’s a window exactly across from me, but either there’s no one there, or if they are, their face is hidden by the window grate.
One day, a shadow falls across the carpet. I look up at the window to see a girl dragging a folding chair up the driveway. I rush up the ladder as she opens the chair and sits down facing the street.
From her pocket, she produces a deck of cards that she holds out in a fan with the faces pointed down. I watch her pick a card from the fan’s middle, show it to an imaginary crowd, and slide it back into its place. She shuffles, staring through her fingers. Then she stops, takes a deep breath, and draws the same card off the top of the deck. She shows it to the crowd again, hitting all the angles in front of her.
Applause.
But of course she can’t know if it’s the same card; she never looked at it.
And from where I am at the window, I can’t tell either. She reshuffles the cards and does the trick again.
She does it again, but slower this time. She holds the cards like they’re so special, she’s afraid someone would come and take them.
And then something makes her stop and stand up. She turns around. As she folds up her chair, her eyes pass over my window. She sees me. For just a moment her face changes like she’s getting ready to smile. Then she turns and goes inside.
Of course a magic trick only really works if you have someone else to work it on.
I’m still looking for her a few days later when the door that’s always locked swings open. A fat bald man in his underwear walks into the basement.
He doesn’t notice me at first. When he does, he jumps, and then I see him take it all in: my snacks on the carpet, two mattresses, two piles of clean clothes and a third pile for dirty.
“Fuck,” he says.
“Are you living here?” he asks.
I don’t know what to say. It seems so obvious I am, I think he must be asking something else.
When my dad gets home - he has become, while I swing my legs at the kitchen table and watch TV through my fingers, my dad, the only one I know and the only person who can save me - he and the bald man go into another room to talk.
Then he takes me downstairs. We hear the door lock behind us.
I expect him to say that we’re foraged out, but instead he asks me if I know what a musical key is. He looks around the basement.
“We don’t have a guitar,” he says, as if it’s the first time he’s noticed.
He gets a piece of paper and draws the outline of a guitar. He draws lines across the long neck of the guitar. These are frets, he tells me.
“And if you,” he picks up the piece of paper to lay his fingers across the strings near the top of the neck. “If you put your fingers here, you make a G. If you move your fingers up here,” he slides them farther down the paper, “you make an A. And then a B, and a C, and a D. You hold your fingers the exact same way, but the guitar makes a different sound. Does that make sense?”
We’re going to change our key, he tells me. Same hand position, different key.
I don’t remember if we ever said goodnight, that night, or ever. I don’t remember if I ever saw him sleeping.
The next morning, he wakes me extra early and takes me with him on the bus and drops me off at the library. That’s our new routine, our new key.
What I like about the library is that it’s no one’s business why you’re there.
They have a train set and a giant stuffed bear that I can sleep on.
They have a special room for storytime with pillows for while you listen to the story.
But even if you find a quiet place, people can just come in and out. And they have all kinds of people. Homeless people using the computers. Old people with paper cups reading newspapers.
It doesn’t take long before the girl from next door is there.
When I see her, it’s like I see her whole self. I couldn’t even say what she looks like, but I know right away that it’s her, the same way that what I see first in the big glass library door is always my own reflection.
She’s there with her mom. They stop by the giant stuffed bear and take some books off of shelves, showing them to each other. Her mom carries their jackets and helps her reach the water fountain.
When storytime starts, I grab a pillow and sit down next to her. Too close, maybe. I lean my head on her shoulder.
Adults involve themselves.
I’m found to be there without a parent.
Someone says that I’m there all the time.
Someone asks me where I live, and I point to the girl sitting next to me, and say, by her, and all hell breaks loose.
I got sick recently, really sick, and when the fever broke, I felt a clarity I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was like all my life was a snaking river and someone had cut a channel straight through to that time in duplexes and basements.
I still have my notebook, which they went and got when they took me away from the house like a child’s drawing. When I was done being sick, but still feeling that feeling of clarity, I got my notebook out and read what I wrote back then. It wasn’t that long ago, really, and still I couldn’t recognize a single thing.
What I found was a weaving scrawl of memories that, if they were mine, they belonged to another part of me that I can’t find anymore. To my old shoes, to a textbook left behind in one of our moves.
My memory now is so much clearer.
I take a pencil and start to erase, vanishing the words into little crumbs of rubber.
“You’re a looker,” he says to me. “I can tell you’ve been looking your whole life.”
Yes, I say, nodding, eager to be known. Yes.

JJ Graham lives in Rhode Island. Recent work has appeared in CommuterLit, Oblong Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review.