Chapter 22:

The movie Chloe has selected is boring.

I want to be precise about this because boring is a word that gets applied too broadly, that gets used for things that are merely slow or unfamiliar or requiring more patience than the viewer brought to the experience — those things are not boring, those things are just asking something the viewer hasn't decided to give yet.

This movie is boring.

It has been boring since the opening credits which were themselves boring. The plot is the specific kind of plot that mistakes familiarity for comfort — everything that happens has happened before in a different movie with different actors making the same faces in the same sequence and arriving at the same conclusion through the same emotional beats and I've been watching it for twenty minutes and I could write the next forty from this couch without having seen them —

Chloe is watching it with complete investment.

This is one of the things I find genuinely confusing about her. She will analyze the structural integrity of a pun with the precision of someone who has studied linguistics. She will construct theories about morning as a personality test that hold up under scrutiny. And then she will watch the most structurally predictable film available and be moved by it.

I've decided this is a gift.

I've decided the capacity to be moved by something you've already understood is a gift and not everyone has it and I —

I'm playing Geometry Dash.

The level loads.

The cube moves.

I die.

I restart.

---

Chloe lasts until the forty-minute mark.

I know it's forty minutes because I've been counting the deaths in Geometry Dash and I've died approximately twenty-three times which at roughly ninety seconds per attempt puts us at —

"I have an idea," she says.

I don't look up from the phone.

"The movie," I say.

"The movie will still be boring in ten minutes," she says. "It will be boring forever. It was born boring and it will die boring and nothing I do in the next forty minutes will change its fundamental boring nature." She's already standing. Already moving toward the hallway with the specific energy of a person who has had an idea and is executing it before the idea can be examined for structural flaws. "Don't go anywhere."

"I'm playing Geometry Dash," I say. "Where would I go."

She's already in her room.

I die.

I restart.

The cube moves.

I hear her.

Moving things. Opening something. The specific sounds of a person locating items with purpose — not the Chloe-looking-for-her-shoe sounds, which are chaotic and wide-ranging, but focused sounds, the sounds of someone who knows exactly what they're looking for and where it is —

She reappears in the doorway.

I look up.

She is holding her school uniform.

And a wig.

The wig is — I'm not going to describe the wig in detail because the detail isn't the point. The point is that it exists. That Chloe owns a wig. That the wig has been stored somewhere in her room available for deployment at the forty-minute mark of a boring movie on a Thursday evening and she has deployed it —

Her eyes.

Her eyes are doing something I've seen approximately twice in my life and both times preceded something I deeply regretted agreeing to.

Mischievous is the word.

The specific mischief of a fourteen-year-old who has had an idea and has already decided the idea is good and is now presenting it as a fait accompli rather than a proposal —

"No," I say.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You don't need to say anything," I say. "The uniform and the wig are saying it."

"They're just objects," she says. "They have no communicative capacity."

"Chloe."

"Hear me out," she says, coming into the living room, sitting on the couch beside me with the uniform and the wig and the mischievous eyes. "You are five feet four inches tall."

"I'm aware of my height."

"You have an athletic body," she says. "But not overly muscular. You're not — you're not a big person, Michael, you're a precisely built person, there's a difference, and the difference is relevant to the point I'm making —"

"I don't want to hear the point you're making."

"You have a baby face," she says.

I look at her.

"Not in a bad way," she says. "In the way that means your features are soft enough to be adaptable. In the way that means with the right context they read differently than they do in your usual context which is the neutral face in the school corridor —"

"Chloe."

"You would make," she says, "an excellent femboy."

The sentence lands.

I look at the uniform.

I look at the wig.

I look at my sister who is sitting approximately eighteen centimeters away from me with the mischievous eyes and complete confidence in a proposal that I am not —

"No," I say.

"Just try it."

"Absolutely not."

"Five minutes," she says. "Just to see. For science."

"This is not science."

"Everything is science if you're curious enough," she says. "That's literally the definition of science."

"That is not the definition of science."

"Michael."

"No."

"Michael."

"I said —"

I look at the wig.

I look at the uniform.

I look at Chloe who is looking at me with the eyes.

Thirty seconds.

I last thirty seconds.

Then my hands take the uniform.

My body, again. Making its unilateral decisions. The hands accepting the uniform before the brain has confirmed this is the correct course of action — the hands have apparently developed their own opinion about whether this is the correct course of action and the opinion is yes —

"Don't say anything," I say.

Chloe's face does the thing where it's doing an enormous amount while appearing to do nothing.

"I'm not saying anything," she says.

---

I change in the bathroom.

The uniform fits.

This is — the uniform fits is a sentence I'm going to state simply and without elaboration because the elaboration would require me to examine why the uniform fits and the examining would produce thoughts I'm not prepared to have in a bathroom on a Thursday evening while my sister waits in the living room with a wig —

I come back.

Chloe looks at me.

She looks at me for approximately four seconds.

Then she puts the wig on my head.

Her hands are quick and certain — she's done this before, or she's thought about doing this before with enough specificity that the execution is efficient — and the wig settles and she steps back and looks —

And then she gets her phone.

"Wait —" I say.

The picture is taken.

She looks at the screen.

Something on her face.

"Hm," she says.

"Don't hm me."

"I'm just —" She shows me the screen.

I look at the screen.

I look at the person on the screen.

The person on the screen is —

Okay.

I look cute.

I want to be very clear about several things simultaneously and I need you to receive all of them at once without making a face —

First: I look cute. This is an objective assessment, not a subjective one, not a self-complimentary one, just the accurate description of what the screen is showing me which is a person who is five feet four inches tall with a baby face and an athletic-but-not-overly-muscular build wearing a school uniform and a wig and looking — cute is the word, it's the accurate word, I'm committed to accuracy —

Second: I do not like this.

Third — and this is important, this is very important, I need you to have this information clearly and completely — I am a very manly person. I want that on the record. I want it filed and confirmed and not subject to revision based on the current photographic evidence. I lift things. I cook with a wok. I once held a neutral face through a jaw punch. I am a manly person who happens to have a baby face and a 5'4 frame and who looks — I'm not going to say it again. The record reflects what the record reflects.

I hand the phone back.

"I don't like this," I say.

"You look —"

"I don't like this," I say.

She grins. The self-explanatory grin. "You can take it off."

"Good," I say.

"After you beat me in a game," she says.

I look at her.

"A drawing game," she says. "We each draw something. Whoever draws better gets to make a rule. Your rule can be taking it off."

"Define better."

"We both know when something is better," she says. "It's not a complicated metric."

I look at the wig in the mirror across the room.

The person in the mirror looks back.

Cute, unfortunately.

"Fine," I say.

---

She draws first.

She gets a piece of paper from her school bag — slightly crumpled, already has some homework on the back, she doesn't care — and she draws with the specific energy of someone who has a vision and is executing it with confidence disproportionate to their technical ability.

A landscape.

A city. Bustling — she's going for bustling, she's attempting to communicate density and life and the specific chaos of a city that is full of people doing things simultaneously, the buildings are there, the streets are there, there's something that might be a crowd or might be a particularly ambitious series of vertical lines —

She draws fast.

She finishes.

She holds it up.

It is not good.

It is ambitious and confident and completely hers and it is not good in any technical sense — the perspective is committed to a theory of perspective that the rest of the drawing doesn't support, the buildings recede in directions that defy the established vanishing point, the crowd-or-vertical-lines are energetic but illegible —

"Well," she says.

"It's —"

"I know what it is," she says. "Your turn."

I take the paper.

I take her pen.

I look at the paper.

I don't think about what to draw.

I just —

Draw.

The pen moves.

A boy.

Small. In the lower left quadrant of the page. Walking. His back to the viewer — you can't see his face, just the back of him, just the shape of someone moving in a direction. Around him is — nothing. Just space. Just the white of the page extending in every direction around the small precise figure of the boy walking through it.

No destination indicated.

Just — walking. Just the boy and the direction and the space and no indication of where the direction leads or whether it leads anywhere at all —

I finish.

I look at it.

The boy walking to nowhere.

I look at it for —

I put it on the table.

"There," I say.

Chloe looks at it.

She looks at it for longer than I expected.

Something on her face that isn't the mischievous eyes and isn't the smile-adjacent thing and isn't any of the twenty-one logged items in the collection —

"Okay," she says quietly.

"I win," I say.

"You win," she says.

---

I change back in the bathroom.

The neutral clothes.

The usual configuration.

I come back. Put the uniform and the wig on the couch beside Chloe who has returned to the boring movie which is still boring and will always be boring and she is watching it again with complete investment as if the last twenty minutes didn't happen —

I sit.

I look at the drawing on the table.

The boy.

The nowhere.

The space extending in every direction around the small precise figure of someone who is moving without a destination indicated.

I pick it up.

I look at it.

I put it down.

I pick up my phone.

The level loads.

The cube moves.

---

"Michael," Chloe says.

"Mm."

Her eyes are on the screen. The boring movie doing its boring thing. "The drawing was good."

"I know," I say.

"I meant — the boy."

I die.

I restart.

"I know what you meant," I say.

She nods.

We watch the movie.

I play Geometry Dash.

The cube moves.

The boy on the table walks to wherever he's walking.

The apartment hold us.