Boys Will Be
Photo by Baptiste MG on Unsplash At first, the boys were one — a shapeless mass of shuffling gray-green, flickers of muscle here and there, like the life inside a lake. I squinted at the video on my phone. Slowly, individual bodies materialized. In the murky dark, the boys’ limbs had silver linings; there had to be a fluorescent bulb somewhere out of frame, I thought, the kind that casts more shadow than light.
Two boys stood facing one another with their left hands clasped. They looked as though they were about to clap each other on the back in greeting, thumbs interlocked the same way I’d seen them pose in photos, usually while squatting and faux-glaring at the camera. Only this time they were each taking turns smacking the back of the other’s hands as hard as they could, winding up by raising their right palm up by their ear like a baseball pitcher and bringing it down with a CRACK on the knuckles. The sound echoed like a car door slammed shut.
A new text bubbled up below the video: They’ve been doing this for twenty minutes, B wrote.
My heart gulped. It was the start to my final semester of college, and we had been dating for just a few weeks. It was enough to make me woozy with chosenness, the idea that he might have pressed “record” just for me, opening a door into a corridor of his life I’d never seen. All I had were names and a few character sketches, nebulous as the boys’ shapes in the dark. I knew they had all gone to the same handful of public high schools out in St. Louis County’s exurbs, in towns tangled together like a Celtic knot of highways and big-box stores and insular residential communities with single-file sidewalks. And I knew that while I had been doing the whole college thing — moving from California to St. Louis, fretting over what to major in, studying until my eyes throbbed with cranberry-red styes — the boys had been at work. Most of them, B included, were still saving up to move out of their parents’ houses. In their free time, they did pretty much exactly what they’d done back then, he told me; namely, what they were doing in the video: hanging out in their parents’ garages and drinking cheap beer, testing the give of the night, testing each other. Trying to make something new happen, even if it meant making something hurt.
The camera moved closer. I fought to make myself look. The hands receiving the blows were swollen taut and purple, each set of knuckles a smooth shelf of fluid. That B was the one filming felt important, symbolic. I sensed that he wanted me to recognize that, like me, he was watching at a distance, while suggesting that to turn away from this brute force would be to turn away from him. He seized my gaze and held it still, waiting for me to flinch. A warning, a challenge, or a plea: This is what you’re getting yourself into.
With each smack, the skin below the boys’ wrists juddered like bloated rubber gloves. I did not turn away. I felt dazed, like after a long walk in the cold. There was something bracing, even invigorating, in their dedication to this empty pursuit, this purposeless pain.
The next day, when I abandoned my homework to visit B on his smoke break at the coffee shop where he worked, he told me both of the boys in the video had broken their hands.
As a child, I tiptoed around my peers who played with pain, who wrung forearm skin with
