Theo was my boyfriend for the summer– just for the summer. We both knew that when August faded out we’d go our separate ways. Theo wore these flannels that fit just right but would’ve been big on me, and that summer the flannels shrunk suddenly in the wash. That’s at least what Theo told me, shrugging and saying, “I guess I ran them too hot” in a deeper voice than usual. Once it started to get cold outside, like silent service at one of those fancy restaurants, I found a flannel around my shoulders and I didn’t think to protest like I usually would. When I got back home, I went to wash it myself, hoping it wouldn’t shrink some more if I tried my hand at it. I knew Theo was no good at chores, or really anything at all. Theo couldn’t cook or clean all that well. Theo wasn’t creative or athletic. Theo didn’t have any real academic aspirations or aptitudes. It didn’t surprise me that Theo would fuck up and shrink a flannel in the wash by picking the wrong setting. When I stuck it in the washer, I noticed that the flannel size was the real culprit. Theo's flannels were always mediums, but this one was an extra small—my size. I decided I wouldn’t say anything about it.
We didn’t do much together. The summer was short, as it always was, and we met in late June. I didn’t mind that we didn’t have much time together. Theo could make a couple of hours feel like a weekend. I could feel the time in the same way you feel drums at a concert kicking you in the chest, reminding you it’s there. I never liked that feeling. My dad used to take me to those hardcore shows, hoping they’d let him get up front since he was with a kid. I’d end up crying and we’d go home because my heart felt like it was being manipulated by the beat, moving arrhythmically– I thought I would die. Sometimes Theo made me feel like I was going to die, like my heart was bleeding out inside of me. But that was only when Theo kissed me, and Theo didn’t kiss me a lot; I always had to make the first move. The first night we kissed was when we drank together in the parking lot of the local botanical garden. I stole liquor from the store I worked at and we sat in the car silently so if the cops came cruising by they wouldn’t notice us. The city lights were low by that part of the Papagos, something about the zoo animals or the military base or something. It was the only place in the whole city where you could see the stars, and I mean really see them. Theo knew all about constellations from the arcane books piled up near the bed procured from thrift store deadstock and dingy metaphysical shops run by crones and their creaky husbands. Well, the books were mostly on the bed. That’s why I never slept over, not even once that summer, though I would’ve liked to. When I asked if I could sleep over Theo would just kiss me again so I would feel like I was dying and forget all about it.
Theo didn’t even mean to become my boyfriend. We sat down by the lake, which isn’t really a lake, according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia calls it an “artificial perennial reservoir” which are all words I know separately but don’t compute together. College kids would sit around it when there was nothing else to do, riding up with their bikes to light up joints and put them out every so often just in case the police decided to show up. They’d dole out fees and warnings to the poor souls, on many levels, who happened to be in the wrong place. Theo’s dad was one of those more important cops so we didn’t smoke weed in public places. When I mentioned it, Theo stared at me for a minute with these moon-sized eyes before saying, “It’s like his eyes are everywhere.” Theo always felt like there was someone watching, like at any minute we’d be arrested for some crime we didn’t commit. Before we left the lake I joked that we could be like Bonnie and Clyde if we wanted to be.
“Like I’d be your boyfriend or something?”
Before thinking about it I said, “Yeah.”
Theo didn’t like when I said that metaphysical books aren’t actually about real metaphysics and that those shops are lying to you and swindling you out of your money. Theo didn’t care and would tell me, “Sometimes it’s nice to just believe in something, anything.” I knew we didn’t have a lot in common, but that’s what happens when you’re home from college; you have no one to talk to about the things only your classmates would know. Our course catalog was filled with topics like gender and sexuality in Korean film and understanding American Evangelical worship which were niche, sometimes absurd, and possibly useless. I’d still burn thousands of dollars a semester on them to pad a schedule of game theory (which is less fun than it sounds) and Macroeconomics, which I insist is fake, but would get me a cushy job in a high rise if I couldn’t find something more interesting and lucrative to do. I went to some fancy school back east, three thousand miles from home exactly, with Oxford in America inspired architecture and rickety old professors who griped about how much the college was changing, yet it felt like everything was staying the same. I couldn’t imagine it any other way until I met Theo. I asked about why Theo stayed in Phoenix, and through a thick sigh Theo explained, “When I go too far I start to forget who I am.” And I guess I understood.
Theo never called me girlfriend or baby or even babe which I detested but would have preferred to nothing. I did get a lot of sweet girl. I’m not sure why, but it made me feel like a lollipop. I felt like I’d just be licked and licked until there was nothing left. When I made Theo come with me to shop for shoes at Nordstrom one of the employees saw Theo moping by the insoles and said, “Your girlfriend’s a keeper.” Theo’s eyes rolled so fast I swore they were gearing up to knock out some bowling pins. I may not have been a girlfriend, but Theo was certainly my boyfriend. It was evident in everything. The way we walked next to each other, the way we held hands, and, when I didn’t expect it, I’d get wrapped up from behind with a hug like my sister’s boyfriend always did to her. At restaurants, the waitstaff slid the bill over to Theo, winking usually. I thought a lot about my sister’s boyfriend in comparison to mine. It scared me how similar they were, especially because Theo always struck me as different, which is why I didn’t mind that we had nothing in common. Theo would ramble about something real, like crystals, that I didn’t believe in before I rambled about something like NASDAQ, which isn’t real, but I believe in.
Before Theo, I never thought I’d get a boyfriend. The first crush I ever had was this freckly redhead in the first grade who always smelled like one of those Strawberry Shortcake body washes my mom couldn’t afford. I was so mad at that redhead, and I would have this impulse to bite her in the face so she could never talk again. I’d get so angry that I would cry every day in the lavatory at lunchtime when she would sit around with her pretty friends who didn’t like eggheads like me. One day she saw me crying and asked me where it hurt, so I pointed to my cheeks which were sunburnt because my single dad didn’t have a wife to tell him to put sunscreen on me. After she gave me a kiss on each cheek, I realized I didn’t want to bite her; I wanted to kiss her. I asked her to be my girlfriend in the schoolyard and she said yes, but I think she thought we were just playing pretend. I still think about her sometimes.
Since then I’d only had girlfriends, and I liked having girlfriends; I liked the way it sounded, I liked the way it felt. I liked braiding their hair during lunch and giving them kisses in the odd spots where I knew the security cameras were blind at school. I liked having sleepovers while my sister’s boyfriends had to leave after dinnertime. I could stay up at night with my girlfriend and conjure shapes out of hickeys, making rounded stars on our stomachs and arrows pointing toward our hearts. Even though Theo wasn’t my girlfriend I was okay with that. I would’ve been fine if she was, but it just didn’t suit her. It didn’t suit her just like the name Thecla didn’t suit her. I’d never heard the name before, it sounded peculiar and antediluvian. I was mostly right. “I was named after this Saint who left her fiance to follow one of the apostles around. They tried to kill her but God smited them or something and she just ended up living in a cave.” Theo thought it was funny but I took it like gospel, like the name decreed some sort of divine protection.
Theo walked with invincibility, so maybe she took it like gospel too. I noticed it in girls like Theo, the type of girls who were boyfriends. Girls who wore board shorts in the summertime and men’s cut jeans from the GAP. Whenever Theo went to a frat party and all the brothers went to send the girls who were clucking around in the living room back down to the basement, they never included her. It seemed to bother Theo sometimes, but other times it didn’t. It depended on the mood whether or not “woman” was stolen from her back pocket, like a wallet no one thinks about until suddenly it’s taken away, and all you can remember is maybe an ID was shoved in there and a few grocery receipts but you want it back anyway. It didn’t bother Theo when that meant drinking beer on the patio on the Fourth of July, even if the football and mechanical jargon tossed around were too culturally foreign for her comprehension. Theo liked it when it meant blending in and didn’t like it when it meant sticking out.
When it was time for us to break up and go back to school I knew I didn’t want to stay with her. When we talked, we didn’t talk about anything, or we just argued because Theo was dense and I was too stubborn. Theo wanted a wife and a family and didn’t care about fame and I wanted to be so important that I could win myself an obituary in the New Yorker and never know that I did because I’d be dead already. Theo wanted to stay here, let the city coat her lungs with its poisonous particles and have it settle there. I wanted to move somewhere unfamiliar and labyrinthine like Istanbul, which would take lifetimes to comprehend. Theo believed in things and I didn’t. When it was time to say goodbye I let Theo drive me to the airport. After we pulled into departures Theo grabbed my bags from the trunk and hugged me goodbye. As we hugged, it occurred to me that I convinced myself for the entire summer that Theo wasn’t good at anything, but that wasn’t true. Theo was a good boyfriend. She was better than my sister’s, or my best friend’s, or even my roommate’s. Theo was so good I wouldn’t want another boyfriend after her again. I decided I wouldn’t tell her that. But when Theo turned away to get back into the car for the last time, something came over me. I was supposed to let her go, but I grabbed her arm and pulled her back in instead.