It’s a shock when David Sampson says that Salome is the most beautiful girl in our class. Of course she is, by far, with long, thick hair the color of honey wheat, a tiny face with vulpine features, slim, wide-set eyes, and enchanted skin. But it seemed as though no one else—none of the boys, that is—had noticed. She’s so quiet it’s easy to miss her. But we see her. We know.
Sampson is the class stoner and should be the class clown, but he’s usually too stoned to finish his sentences. He was, until senior year, a large, soft boy, almost cuddly, if he hadn’t reeked of weed and stale cigarettes. He wore the same oversized navy hoodie every day, covering his close-shaved head like a robe, and he spoke in a drone so soft he might have been praying. But if you listened, he usually wasn’t saying anything good. He liked dirty jokes, dead baby jokes. He told sexist jokes, too, but since we shot him dirty looks, we mostly assumed he was telling them just to get a rise out of us. Besides, the ones he told were the kind with no teeth. His favorite was a silly inversion of a clichéd directive: Get in the sandwich and make me a kitchen. We have to admit, the first time we heard it, we laughed.
His mom is a feminist historian who came to our social studies class to give a talk one day. We’d never seen Sampson slump so low in his chair or pull his hoodie so far down over his face so that only his angular chin showed. His mom gave him a hard time that day, asking him questions that, shockingly, he knew the answers to. “‘I will everywhere make humanity more than sex.’ Words spoken by . . . David, can you tell us?” His mother extended a long, manicured finger in her son’s direction. A long pause, and then from beneath the hoodie came a mumble. “That’s right: Lucy Blackwell. Now, in the 1850s . . .” We all felt kind of bad for Sampson that day. He made more sense to us after that. He became softer in our eyes. He didn’t seem to mind.
In the fall of our senior year, we come back to find Sampson transformed. He’s dropped probably forty pounds. He wears the same oversized sweatshirt that truly is a robe now, draping off his frame, and his face is gaunt. He has let his hair grow, and the curls on his head are a shock of gold. He looks older and harder, but delicate, almost beautiful.
Then we learn (we don’t remember who told us first) he’s been sleeping with Salome all summer. At first none of us really believes it. The pairing seems inconceivable. Besides, so few of the rest of us have had sex—we who are more solid and vibrant and interesting than Salome; we who, even if we aren’t exactly gorgeous or cool or beloved, at least have a presence, a reputation, skills that we put on display in English and choir and theater, teachers who like us more than the others, we who go to nerdy summer programs in college dorms that make us seem sophisticated each time we come back in the fall.
Salome is one of the quiet girls, would be indistinguishable from the rest if it weren’t for her beauty. We see her set her notebook and pencil case (she still carries a pencil case) neatly on her desk in French class; we see her put her hand up in Trig. We watch her chew salad with her mouth closed at lunchtime and staple her English papers parallel to the top edge. We are aware of her the way you’re aware of the mechanics behind every clock and inside every wristwatch: astonishing when you look at it, but you don’t often look. But it’s nice to know she’s there.
Anyway, it’s just not fair. Not that we want to have sex with Sampson. That would be absurd. But we want, at least, to be desired, to be found beautiful—to be discovered. We want someone unusual to push past all the powdered and curled and well-dressed girls in our grade, drawn by our own unusual magnetism, and find us.
But we’re also afraid of exactly this. For as unusual as we secretly hope we are, we’re also terrified that someone will discover we are not. Better to remain a compelling mystery than become a corporeal disappointment.
In a move that none of us expect, Sampson turns up to audition for the high school play. The play is a big deal for those of us who have elected to take theater every semester and showed up religiously for every single rehearsal for every single production. Sampson walks in like it only occurred to him to come five minutes before auditions began.
And we are even more surprised to find that he is, somehow, good. At first, we can’t tell if maybe we’re just thrown by the body he inhabits that we barely recognize. Its movements are quicker, its gestures finer, its angles sharper. It becomes apparent that in this new body he is inventing movement, is creating its own idiosyncratic language before our very eyes. He is a new animal, a species we can’t identify.
When the casting sheet is posted on the bulletin board outside the auditorium, we are not surprised to learn that he has landed the lead. With Sampson at the helm, the usual dynamic shifts; the game has changed. An outsider has joined us, and we get to show him our world.
In French class, Salome has taken to sitting in the back corner. We don’t notice until Madame calls her out. “Tu es moins sérieuse cette année, Salomé?” she says, too confident in the response she’ll receive. To everyone’s surprise, though Salome squeezes out a small smile for Madame, the instant after she turns back to the whiteboard Salome rolls her eyes. We are stunned and impressed. We are just a little bit jealous. Before, when she made herself small and quiet, Salome’s power lay dormant. Now she holds it in her hands, admiring its every facet, and it glows.
In rehearsals, Sampson is his usual goofy self, but when he gets to work he is utterly sober. This is the first time we’ve seen him go quiet immediately when a teacher speaks to him. It’s partly the hypnotic power of our director, whose elvish qualities and spritely energy are impossible not to fall in love with. We watch her give him direction and see him really listen, spinning her instructions in his head, making something private that we can’t see. It’s the first time it really occurs to us that Sampson has a secret self, just like the rest of us—one where he gets to be the person we have not yet let him be. But something is reeling him out, little by little. Or maybe we are actually, finally seeing him for the first time.
Salome’s friends were two mousy girls with interchangeably forgettable names. One of them liked to tell anyone who’d listen about her aspirations to become a dermatologist, because of how much she loved securing a pimple between her two fingernails and slowly applying pressure until the pus burst. The other seemed to become nervous beyond reason whenever we spoke to her, so we generally didn’t.
But we don’t see Salome with these girls anymore. We see them sitting together at lunch, business as usual, but Salome isn’t there. We don’t know where she goes. We don’t see Sampson, either, but we’ve never known where he goes when he’s not around. We’ve never particularly cared, until now. Now we find ourselves not only aware of his movements, of his orbit around school, but curious about them.
One day, leaving school, we see him and Salome across the street at the gas station. He’s leaning against a car—her family’s—and her reedy body leans against his, standing between his legs. It strikes us how beautiful they both are. It’s almost striking enough to keep us from feeling the jolt of something like betrayal. But that’s silly. We are only borrowing him. Someone else got to him first.
Sampson still makes jokes that make us cringe. But at Saturday rehearsals, he makes sure there is enough pizza for everyone when we break for lunch. He lets us know when there are crumbs in our hair. He teases us, but he never pushes too hard. He recognizes that some of us are more delicate than we used to be. He is more delicate than he used to be.
When we ride the late bus home from play practice, Sampson is one of us, joking and laughing about all the same things. But in the morning, on the regular bus to school, Sampson either talks to his non-play friends or is quiet. He doesn’t talk to us.
Late one night at a long rehearsal, we sit with Sampson at the side of the stage during a break. He has taken to wandering over to us between scenes, striking up mundane conversations that we wouldn’t have the energy for if it were anyone else. The mundanity of conversations with him is imbued with something that makes us smile and smirk and fidget. We want to hear every dull syllable that comes from his lips.
“We should get food,” he says.
We laugh. We tell him we’re surprised: it doesn’t look like he eats much these days. We’re trying to tease him, or maybe compliment him, but our concern slides out headfirst.
“I was too fat,” he says. “Now I’m too skinny. That’s why we should get food. I’m going to waste away.”
Then he looks at me and says, “You’ve gotten skinny, too.” He takes my hand, its back facing up, and tells me to lift my fingers up by the knuckles. “See?” He taps each one of the long, delicate bones that protrude in response. “You don’t have any meat on you.”
“Neither do you,” I say.
We look at each other. Our director calls us to attention. But I can hear his mind still purring next to mine, like he and I are by ourselves in an adjoining room.
At the end of rehearsal, Sampson asks me where I live. “I ride your bus,” I say. “Every day.”
“No way,” he says. “How didn’t I know this? Why didn’t you tell me?” He faces me. “We should go get food. Let’s get food sometime.”
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s.” And I know that we won’t, but I’m praying we do.
We talk about it, how Sampson wants to get food with me. One of us says, “He has such a huge crush on you, Catherine. He gets so flustered when he’s around you.”
“I don’t think so,” I say, with a laugh. “He has Salome.”
“I mean, yeah, they’re fucking, but he likes you.”
“It’s like, he wants her, but he adores you.”
I don’t understand the difference, but we laugh it off. It’s sweet that he likes me, that he’s trying so hard. It’s funny, to think about getting food with Sampson. We can hardly imagine it!
But Sampson doesn’t mention getting food again for a long time. We assume that he was joking, or was stoned and forgot about it, or maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he was just hungry.
In French class, we match verbs with appropriate objects. The verbs are acheter, aimer, oublier, adorer, saluer—to buy, to love, to forget, to adore, to greet. The objects are abricots, devoirs, amis, cahiers, Dieu—apricots, homework, friends, notebooks, God.
We go around the room. “J’achète les amis,” says a boy in the back, snickering before he’s even finished his sentence. We would be amused, but it’s like this every day, and we are tired. He looks to Salome for approval, who does not look at him. She seems tired, too.
When it’s my turn, I say, “J’adore les abricots.”
“Non, non,” says our French teacher. “On aime les abricots. On adore Dieu.”
We’re in class when we hear commotion in the hallway. The door to our classroom is open. One of the English teachers is walking briskly down the hall, trailed by a lanky, smirking Salome. Our teacher pauses slightly to watch, but the trouble falls from his face just as quickly as it landed, and we resume.
When class lets out, we walk to the cafeteria for lunch and hear whispers that Salome, noticeably addled in class, was suspended for being stoned at school. As we’re digesting this, we see Sampson cut through the crowd in the hall, his bag dangling from one shoulder. The head of upper school is close behind. “Mr. Sampson,” he calls, “please don’t let this turn out poorly for you, too.” But he’s already gone, the door swinging apologetically behind him.
We’re stunned. Some of us are impressed. Some of us feel like Salome has gone too far. We frame it in worry—we’re concerned for what’s happening to her; we wonder if everything is okay— but we’re not worried. Secretly, we’re a little relieved. The awe we’ve felt for her has been tempered by consequence. No one’s burden is that light.
Performances begin. We’re nervous and excited and our energy spills off the stage, literally: in the first performance, someone accidentally knocks a plate into the orchestra pit, where it shatters to the sound of laughter and applause. Fortunately there was no orchestra in the pit, or things might have ended differently.
As the shows go on, we watch each other, really watch each other. We’ve all grown so much since we each slipped timidly into our roles like a chrysalis at the start of rehearsals. Now we are magnificent. We speak our lines like they’re our own words, as easy as thinking, as easy as hope. We will miss the intimacy our characters share when this ends. We will miss the close physical space the play has forced our bodies to inhabit together.
We’re thinking about this onstage and off, in the wings while we’re waiting for our cue. We’re thinking about it just before our final entrance, while we stand alone in the wings. Then there is another presence, a breath, beside me like a ghost, but this is a ghost I know. Two slender hands alight on my waist, and when I don’t move away, they encircle me, and the body that belongs to them nests itself behind me. I have never been touched this way. I can feel every curve of his body even though he barely hovers behind me, his touch so light. I feel so light. I thread my fingers through his and I feel, for the first time in a year, more than the thrill of the stage or the draw of Salome’s beauty or the divinity of an empty stomach. This is adoration.
He and I stand there in the dark, our sad, hard edges locked together to make something larger than ourselves, until we hear our cue. And so he and I break apart, and he and I drift onstage, and we resume our roles.
The play ends. Things go back to normal. We go back to riding the four o’clock bus home. We’re relieved, but a little sad. It feels like a larger kind of ending.
The season changes, and so does the light. It streams long and late through our classroom windows onto our desks. It shoots and bends through the bus like a prism. We are illuminated. We feel, however fleetingly, like we’re coming alive.
Here at the end of the year, all of us about to go our separate ways, everyone changes. It’s sort of sudden, but when it happens it’s like we knew it would happen all along. It’s like the curtain has fallen at the end of the play that has been our time at this school, and we’re leaving the theater, freed from the characters we have played for so long. We are finally ourselves.
People talk to us who have never really talked to us before. People do things they’ve never done before. Some of us get wasted at the graduation party and find ourselves embracing people we thought we hated. Some of us are a little drunk, leaning against a wall at the graduation party, watching our friends, when Salome appears.
“Come to the balcony,” she says. Then she takes my hand, and we thread through the throng of all kinds of people I suddenly don’t care about as she leads me there.
Waiting on the balcony is Sampson. He smiles, then exchanges a look with Salome.
“So,” Salome says, “we heard you wanted to try this.”
I stare. Then Sampson produces what looks like a skinny, hand- rolled cigarette.
“Oh,” I say, “it’s really okay.” But Salome has already taken it and lit it, and she puts it to her perfect lips, inhales deeply. Then she passes it to Sampson, who takes a drag, and then offers it to me. Hesitantly I take it, lift it to my lips as they watch.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit.
“Just breathe,” says Salome. I expect her to be impatient with me, but she’s smiling, eager, like we’re all in on something together.
I inhale and then cough. Sampson pats me on the back, and when I can finally take a breath, I see they’re looking at me expectantly. I’m about to give them a smile, to signal I’m okay, when it comes over me: the lightness I’ve been chasing all year, that I’ve only found onstage or in an empty stomach, or just one other time, when Sampson held me in the dark.
We pass the joint around as the sun sets behind the city skyline, until I can’t take anymore. Salome and Sampson talk a little, but I’m content to just listen to the sound: the music of two voices that know each other so well they’ve become seamless.
“I’m going to miss you guys,” says Salome. For an instant in her voice I hear the old Salome, the shy, quiet one—the one I thought everyone had missed but me. Then I think: Maybe there is no old Salome. Maybe she never really changed. Maybe it’s us who started seeing her differently. Then I remember we’re all high.
“You won’t miss me that much,” I say with a laugh. “We didn’t really hang out.”
“I always thought we might,” she says. “Anyway, it’s been nice to know you’re there.”
We’re quiet again. “You feel okay?” Sampson says to me.
I nod, but in the dark he can’t see the motion. The lightness rolls in waves. I take a breath and reach my hand out, and as I do I feel his reaching out toward mine.