When I Close My Eyes

But quickly, firmly, I refused, more firmly than I had ever spoken to him.

Lilith Fidel,” he says softly.

In the depths of my stomach, there is an old high-school sensation of having been caught doing something wrong, found in a place I shouldn’t be.

this was our shtick: tease; goad; challenge; coax; confess. Know when to pull apart or shore up. Do both with honesty.

She is all blondeness and brightness, with eyes that see everything. But in this first instance, she is not what I am seeing at all. Not at all. As the child turns her face towards me, in a flash, all I can see is Dylan.

There are the first signs of tracks around his eyes, where he has laughed, or cried,

Now I looked at him. This is why I’d wanted to tell him. For him to make it light-licked, and not seeped in darkness.

floated from the debate team to the entrepreneurs’ club, to badminton squad, and to the group of stand-arounds

, the raw edge of his emerging masculinity.

crowd-pleasing vulnerability,

But apparently it was only brave when a boy showed feeling.