Nicholas

We sat next to each other during music class, Nicholas, Vikram and I. At the time, I was unaware of how we always managed to end up seated together. Obviously, I recognize now that it was due to our lack of roots here in this foreign land, in the countryside of Southern England. It was reason enough to band together, so as to weather the onslaught of hate from the natives.

Much like I, both Nicholas and Vikram were charismatic, it was the only way to survive back then. I’ve dedicated several short stories to Vikram already so I won’t go into detail with his character, rather this particular account concerns my Russian ‘friend’ Nicholas.

Apologies to my lover, for I am about to describe one of my ‘types’ to a fault, of which he falls under. Simply put, tall skinny white boys covered in tattoos with short blonde hair. To be specific, they are not necessarily the people I end up dating but possess the physical traits I typically yearn for. Nicholas was all of that, sans the ink.

Aside from his physical traits, what I remember clearly was his incessant passion regarding all things Chechnya. He was obsessed with the heroism of the so-called freedom fighters, and how they stood their ground against his fellow countrymen back home. For a period of time, it was all that mattered to him.

I didn’t care much for the stories Nicholas would tell me, the ones that included bombings in particular, which was most of them, it made me anxious. Especially, because at the end of each account he would playfully jab me in the side with his pen. He was a captive storyteller insofar as I was literally his captive, held at ballpoint.

Sometimes I wondered why Vikram was spared. He bore the brunt of most insults amongst us for the fact that he was of Indian heritage, so why not him? Nicholas, albeit a fellow immigrant, was white and like the rest of them, racist. He made sure to remind me of that, so how come?

Each Tuesday, upon returning from school, my mother would ceaselessly question me about the blue stains on my uniform, and complain about the number of shirts I had ruined. She would kneel down before me, peel my shirt up over my head so as to tend to the freshly made wounds along my bony rib cage. In the act of wiping them clean with her cloth, the blood and ink would streak purple.

On account of my mother’s frustration, I decided one morning to put an end to the banal terrorism. If memory serves me right, I brandished a pen of my own, a Montegrappa fountain pen, from the Armonía series to be exact. It was a gift from my father for having been accepted into Walstich, the prestigious all boy’s school I was attending.

During class that day, we sat there, our chairs facing ever so slightly inwards towards one another, our weapons kept hidden, out of sight from the teacher.

This exercise of recollecting the incident many years ago has me wondering why our mirrored pose didn’t elicit any sort of empathy in him. I read an article recently purporting that mirroring the body language of another individual heightens your empathy, what a crock of shit, for I clearly remember Nicholas ecstatic, practically salivating.

The remainder of class was spent quietly struggling for control, taking turns stabbing one another. Our adjacent legs intertwined from the waist down, a pair of snakes in the throes of battle.

It was in this precise moment, that I became privy to the appeal of what was occurring. I understood why I had not simply chosen the path of seating myself across the room from him, how I was a captive by choice.

Towards the end of class, I asked Nicholas for a ltruce, a ceasefire at the very least. The initial excitement had abated, the pain was now just that, pain. He stabbed me in the side in response, and I winced out loud with a tender yelp.

Ms. Sutherland, our music teacher, whipped her head around, and glared at us from across the room. She picked up a tiny sliver of what remained of a stick of chalk from the blackboard and threw it in our direction. Her aim was notoriously terrible though so it ricocheted off one of the tables at the center of the room and flew over our heads.

The room fell silent and I sighed with relief when our weapons of choice were confiscated from us. Vikram was allowed to stay seated next to me, but Nicholas was exiled to the furthest corner of the class, far away, out of reach.

Class resumed, and Ms. Sutherland proceeded to explain music theory on the board. I regularly wondered if the instruments that lined the walls of the room would ever be employed. They may have, I have no recollection of playing with them however, so it couldn’t have been very memorable.

My mind trailed off, my fingers wandered. They found their way under my shirt, and proceeded to probe at the freshly made wounds. I would bring my fingertips out to covertly inspect them before wiping them on my pants. Depending on the ratio of ink to blood, the color would drastically vary. That day, it was a deep crimson with specks of blue.

The warmth of the blood, coupled with the coldness of his absence intensified the desire now supplanted in me to engage with him more than ever. I wanted to feel him restrain my struggling wrist in the manner I had grown accustomed to each week.

I was seated off to the side, in front of him, such that I could feel his gaze burrow into the back of my skull. When Ms. Sutherland stepped out to gather some supplies from down the hall, Nicholas ran over to where I was seated, pulled up a chair and sat down across from me. He placed his right elbow on the table before me, fingers outstretched in front of my face.

We gripped each other's hand, and pulled our seats closer to the table, in preparation for an arm wrestle. This match had not been discussed prior to that moment, when attending an all boy’s middle school, arm wrestles were par for the course, as common as a spontaneous erection, no reason necessary.

It was during this moment, as our mutual friend Vikram made the countdown, that the softness of my hand had just then dawned on him. This was obviously not the first time that he had felt my hands, but maybe rather the first time we had engaged with no weapons.

Whether this was a clever ploy to feel further along my body or genuinely coming from a place of fascination, he proceeded to feel my forearm with his left hand, never letting go of the right.

His grip loosened though, and as the fingertips of his left hand skimmed across my forearm, past the bend and up towards my shoulder he stopped just shy of the opening to my rolled up sleeve. I feel pathetic for having fantasized about this moment for the next several years, how I wish he had slid his fingers up further.

We both stared down at his hand, then turned to look up at one another, and for the first time, I could make out his expression, or rather, the tenderness to it. Vikram sat there dumbfounded, unable to ascertain what he was witnessing. Even had he known, I doubt that he could have fathomed the depth of what this meant to me.

It was short lived however, Vikram wanted to feel for himself. He wedged his hand between us and considered this discovery worthy enough to call the other boys in the class over. Within a matter of seconds, we were swarmed by a curious mob.

They took turns feeling the back of my hand and forearm. Some of their fingertips were as equally smooth as Nicohlas’s, others, not so much, coarse like sandpaper even. I welcomed them all.

Gradually, a couple of my classmates decided to take it up onto themselves to play the part of intrepid explorers, with the task of surveying the land.

One of them placed his fingertips just within my shirt collar, and ran his fingers along my collar bone. It was Rupeng, the Chinese student who kept to himself, an equally recent arrival to this foreign land. I caught a glimpse of his expression over my shoulder as I craned my neck to look behind me, and unlike Nicholas, who I had a hard time reading, it was clearly that of desire.

Also, it may have just been my imagination, but I swore that one of the boys had swiftly run his fingers through my hair in the midst of it all. I had spun my head around to find the culprit, commit them to memory, but it would have been close to impossible given the sea of hands that surrounded me.

The choreography of all their bodies were fluid, each cog, indistinct from one another. I was being engulfed by a couple dozen fingertips, at the center of a vortex.

In the midst of the storm, it took me a moment to notice the absence of Nicholas’s hands on me. I only saw the back of his head, as he swam against the current. My hand reached out but to no avail, he was headed back to his seat.

It made me bitter, and for the first time I found myself pitying him. In spite, I wanted to be kneaded by the hands of my peers into a collective image of their desire, no longer of his.

I leaned back in my chair so as to tip it past a point of no return, I trusted the boys to catch me, or rather, soften my fall.

My hope misplaced, for rather, the back of my head slammed against the tiled floor. I could feel a wet warmth emanating from my head as they descended upon me.

Laying there, I stared up at the ceiling listening to the sound of the fabric on my skin rustling, as it was being displaced by eager hands, curious to explore.

My clothes were being torn to shreds.

They were plucking me clean, robbing me of various bodily keepsakes.

From yanking handfuls of blood soaked tufts of hair, to clawing out my eyes. With no regard to my muffled cries, they peeled me clean, like the skin off a tangerine.

What may have sounded like a cacophony to outsiders, was rather an orchestral symphony of honest desires, music to my ears.

Nicholas, are you listening?