We are wrestling in my dormitory, playfighting. She grabs a fistful of my pajama pants, which are pink with cartoon cats. Dragging like a tide, she yanks them to my ankles while I slap her face. She gets behind me, pushes me hard and I get tangled up in my pants, tip faceforward on the bed. The concave place at the base of my throat fills up with the corner of the desk. It feels like it’s gone straight through and I’m eating air as fast as I can, unable to speak.

‘“Are you okay,” she says, concerned as a camp counselor. “Are you okay?”
She looks at me, at the look on my face.
“Oh god,” she says.

For Christmas I hide gifts in her luggage. She sends me a card. Miss you. Everyone at school thinks we are in love and having sex. When she doesn’t come back from the holidays, I have no number to call her at.

During her first phone call from Brooklyn, she invited me down as if no time had passed. I saved up for the train and blew off work for a week. It took an age to get there. During the day, we walked around, hardly speaking, and I marveled at how her cheekbones had emerged. We walked down along the park, past the beautiful library, down down down through Italian and Chinese restaurants until she finally said “you planning on a swim?” and I noticed then that she was limping. I sat her down on the curb and took her feet into my lap, sliding off the plastic sandals. I was holding her foot like it was a hand. Her arches were almost flat, a strange inelegant mismatch to the rest of her sharply cast body.

“Can I buy you an orange,” I said. She looked at me a moment, then put her face down. When she picked it up it was mottled like an angry baby but she wasn’t crying.

“You don’t know what my family was like,” she said. Then: “Ohmigosh, how boring.”
I shrugged. “No more boring than me.”

She told me about going to parties in the city. On a rooftop one night, a woman came up to her, held out her arms and they were covered in blood. She didn’t know what to do, so she took off her rayon scarf and gave it to the woman.

“She was dressed like a blind rodeo clown working the bar at a boutique hotel,” she said. “I want that scarf back. What a stupid bitch.”

I switched her feet in my hands.

“Why do you think you can just come here like this?” she said.

“You invited me.”

She nodded, a convulsion that started jerky and smoothed itself into a rocking motion.

“If you keep saying no, eventually I’ll stop asking.”

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

I said I loved her, but not out loud. The breath was frozen in my throat.

Back home, I wake up on a boat with my shirt on backwards, no hangover. There is a kitchen, a huge central room. I don’t know whose boat this is. My date is asleep facedown on a leather sofa and I think how silly it seems to have a sofa in a boat. I stifle a giggle. There are half a dozen other people passed out on sofas, the floor. It occurs to me I am likely still drunk.

I carry my shoes in my hand and when I get to the dock I see that it is dawn. This thought about sofas, this sunrise, is the loneliest moment of my life to date, an extreme edge of loneliness that I mark on the map of what I can bear up under. It’s like dog-earing a page. Something to know for later, when it’s needed. Something to be forgotten for now. It’s the same way I think of her.

It takes a long time to get to a road with anything on it. Down at the shore, so early in the morning, it’s a ghost town. I haven’t bothered to put my shoes on. There’s a luxury car dealership on the south side of the street, and shimmering just beyond it, a pay phone. I get into the booth like I’m getting into bed and I think this is my phone booth. I have a ridiculous urge to embrace it. Instead, I lift the receiver, blindly mash the buttons. Into the silent phone, I say, “I was just thinking about the time in Walton Hall when I fell onto the desk, remember? For a second I thought I’d never be able to speak again. That’s what I thought.”

Silence from the other end. She’s hung up on me, I think. Then I remember I haven’t put any money into the phone. I fumble for a quarter, I’m going to call her collect, she has to accept, she has to. I look down and see the phone cord is chewed basically in half, some lame vandalism. I am looking at this phone cord like it’s the last physical object in the world, and I slump against the grimy side of the booth. I lean my face on the glass as a hangover asserts itself, presses its fingers under the hinges of my jaw and tries to pull my head off. I pick up the phone to call a taxi, look at it stupidly and then smack my forehead. Moaning through a fog of pain, I touch the buttons and spell her name. It’s better she’s not here, but I want her with me all the same.

The winner of EYE WEEKLY'S short-story contest: Daniel Scott Tysdal's "What Is Missing"

First runner-up: Alexander Cole's "The Kali Yuga"