skin.
it’s the week before the summer session is going to start, and the staff eats together, girls and boys flirting and smiling, the undercurrent of tension that usually runs through the two camps out in the open, tangible. we’ve been sorted by birth month; senior staff tries hard to get us to intermingle, break the cliques that have been around since we were all ten. cliques which i was not aware of, took no notice of, and now am not a part of.
i am sitting next to a boy who has a small container of play-dough in his pocket and who constructs a better snowman than i do with it. because there are so many of us at the table our chairs are almost touching. he shifts, and our knees do touch, and even when i shift away his knee follows until i am crowded away, but our skin stays connected throughout the entire meal. even when i stand up to refill my glass of milk, when i sit down there is immediate contact again.
he doesn’t try to flirt with me. he doesn’t pay more attention to me than he does anyone else at the table. but it is comforting, somehow. knowing that although we will never talk, never smile at each other, or give each other high-fives, there is this small unknowing secret between us. strange, disconcerting, but comforting.
