Page 2 of In What World

I swear, everyone involved in drama is gay, gay, gay.

“It’s all good,” I tell her. We might have a lot of complex dynamics within our cast, but everyone really does look out for me. Most of the time. “Let’s move on.”

“Okay, let me think.” Jaz begins her search again, her eyes roaming around her basement for a new challenge.

That’s when Priscilla lunges.

Her mouth crashes into mine, searching and insistent. There is no time to stop my body’s reaction. I pull her closer as my lips part, making space for the slick heat of her tongue, and I smell the faintest whiff of alcohol she must’ve snuck into this parent-organized cast party. The pads of her fingers grip my shoulders so hard I feel it in my bones.

My head whirls with how good she tastes, the genuine shock, and, god, the raging pulse between my legs, completely unrelated to the girl who has one knee wedged between my thighs and her mouth suctioned to mine.

When I pull back, finally able to connect my mind to my body, Priscilla doesn’t look away. Doesn’t wipe my spit from the corner of her mouth. Doesn’t let go of my shoulders.

“I never back down from a dare,” she says, breathless.

PresentDay

1

Marlowe

December

Dallas Winthrop offersme the rest of his croissant as we walk side by side through Wilbur Reed High School. Even though I’m not hungry, I take it, catching the falling crumbs in my palm as our steps fall into sync down the English hallway.

Classes are over, but the after-school activities haven’t started yet. In this brief interim, our school becomes a museum, with us teachers serving as the docents, eager to share all the new history that’s unfolded today among these withering WRHS artifacts.

See that spot beside the water fountain where the linoleum is cracked? That’s where Brayden McCaffrey shoved Asher Kincade after lunch, earning Brayden his first-ever in-school suspension. What neither boy knows is that is also the place where class of 2010 alumna Marlowe Jenkins got rejected when asking class of 2009’s Katy Thatcher to her final homecoming. That spot, you see, is a place of great suffering.

I wipe potential croissant flakes from the corners of mymouth and pop my head into my girlfriend’s classroom. “We’re on our way to break the news,” I tell her.

“Good luck!” Alice says, smiling as she makes little cheerleader fists of enthusiasm.

Dallas, wearing a handmade velvet cape and a matching velvet beret, stumbles backward into the lockers outside Alice’s door. He clutches his stomach, staring down as if he’s been stabbed, hands trembling in performed shock.

Alice Yeung, never one to remember the conventions of theater, even after six months of dating me and almost twenty years of knowing me, palms her forehead. “Sorry! I’m fried from reading essays,” she says. “I meant to say break a leg.”

Dallas continues clutching his imaginary wound. “If you keep sticking your foot out to trip me, I just might.”

“I’m sorry!” she says again, her eyebrows sloping downward in regret.

“I’ll forgive it.” Dallas lets the sentence linger, the obvious completion beingbut I won’t forget.

Alice and I went to WRHS at the same time. She was a grade below me, but we did yearbook together for three years. Graphic design was legitimately Alice’s passion, and she had a knack for it that went far beyond any other student on staff. She loved the creative aspect of putting together the yearbook, and her work won our school multiple awards. I just knew yearbook was a good activity for college applications, and I liked having something non–theater related to do between shows.

Alice and I both consistently turned in our materials early, and we were always among the first to volunteer for the miscellaneous field trips that sprung up, like visiting the printing press or going to the three-day-long yearbook convention. I recognized in her then the same thing I used to see in myself—a determination to go above and beyond, believing that themore you committed to something, the more you’d be rewarded, like there was some sort of cosmic scale that weighed your effort and provided you the appropriate compensation in return.

When Alice got a teaching position at WRHS last year, it felt like fate had pulled her back into my orbit. The cosmic scale had betrayed her in the same way it had betrayed me, placing zero value on our dedication to our respective crafts. She’d been laid off from her graphic design position, replaced by AI, and was forced to return to her hometown in pursuit of the kind of job where she couldn’t be exchanged for a computer.

At least not yet.

She’s gotten even more stunning since we were teens. Her long black hair is still as shiny as I remember, but now it looks professionally styled every day, which I’ve since learned is due to her evangelical commitment to her Dyson hair dryer. She’s traded in her Old Navy polo shirts and flip-flops for flowy, neutral linens that turn her into this very hot, very competent-looking woman who you’d want to do knife-sharpening ASMR for you as you fall asleep.

“Will you still be here in an hour?” I ask her. “We can have dinner together.”

“I’ll be here,” she says. “That sounds great.”

“It could be longer. We might get held up by some…questioningparents,” Dallas warns, putting on his best grande dame voice to emphasize the drama of it all.