The Other Line

Gavin Koepke

We weren’t sure if the unfinished General Tso’s that lay atop the dresser--next to my deodorant and his lotion--was from last Friday or the Friday before. A single fluorescent lamp flickered above my head as time continued to tick away and my glasses slid further down my nose. As I plodded down the mountain of text, what sounded like the first murmur of an avalanche began behind me. It was the sound of a boy who had devoured an entire chicken parm pie just moments before. A boy who looked like his father and joked like him too. Whether it was on the court, the field, or the strip, he went hard or went home like he’d always been told he should, and at that moment he had decidedly chosen the latter. There he lay, arms and legs extended as if he were reaching for the ball in his dreams, running down a vertical court, his only opponents phantoms.

Outside of our dorm room he was a Westchester Warrior or a Masters Panther or a decorated NAAC Fencer. In here, none of those versions of him even existed. They were shed as soon as he entered the door. His clothes, many of which were emblazoned with block letters that spelled out Brooklyn, mixed with mine to form one muddled mass acting as pungent carpeting for our hardwood floor. The lacrosse, fencing, volleyball uniforms he had discarded for the night hung on every fixture in sight. This was his armor. These suits provided a layer of anonymity out in the world that was rendered purposeless the moment he crossed the threshold into our room. Two of his tools, a half- strung lacrosse stick and a scuffed fencing sword kept each other company in the far corner. His fencing mask glared up at him from under the bed, nearly suffocating in the sweat-stained sea of jerseys. 

In this room he needed none of these things. No one cared about his gleaming new kicks or fresh line up or consecutive wins. His Brooklyn born-and-raised attitude made him loud and aggressive and it meant nearly everyone came up to me asking, “Does Shomari like... hate me? It really seems like... he like hates me.” Us boys open text messages and don't respond to seem aloof. We flirt but never once admit to “catching feelings.”  We pillage and plunder the emotions of the girls around us and shrug it off as if it’s just the way things are meant to be, as if it was all just a part of the game. The pressure to toughen up and “act like a man” is a plight we all face, but he seems to carry a heavier burden than the rest. Our days of posturing and competing can only last for so long. In the room, that burden is banished to the floor. It is danced on, kicked around, and altogether ignored. 

One layer proved to be far more tenacious than the rest. He lay there with his phone glued to his face for hours into the night, whispering slowly, repeating mumbled phrases. A response was barely audible. It was the crooning of a girl who wished the distance was smaller, longing for this boy who, for no particular reason at all, could barely find the time to talk. He always smiled as if he and life had some inside joke. Now that alligator smile dulled as the barrage of questions over the phone persisted. He never was an endurance athlete. Sleep had been ringing the other line for over an hour. When he finally succumbed, he answered its call with a resounding snore. Once the girl on the phone realized his steady, mumbled “mhms” had stopped, she diagnosed him as unresponsive and her incessant questions became a flurry of text messages attempting to wake him, every piercing buzz drawing the phone further down the side of his face. Finally, it peeled off altogether and landed with a resounding crash next to the fencing mask, leaving his face bare under the twinkling light.

At that point I had made it through about half a chapter of the three due the next day and it was 2:30 AM. Distraction had been a cheetah and my resolve a wounded gazelle. A penny on the train track. Steph Curry versus a twelve-year-old. Angry and tired, I threw myself on my bed and drifted to sleep thinking, maybe my high school career could have gone better if I’d had a single, or my roommate were a little more studious.

Shomari has been incredibly inconsiderate. Whether it’s the booming voices of the freshman that follow in his wake, his music that shakes the entire hallway as he choreographs, or his droning on on the phone for hours, it's like he never sees me toiling away with my studies. It’s a constant struggle to stay focused and that night was not the first time I despised him for that. The truth, however, is that it would be easy to ignore the constant goings on in the room if I weren't interested. His tales draw me in and are far more gripping than endoplasmic reticulum and adenine triphosphate. I sit and listen, jealous and in awe of his abilities. We both get three hours of sleep a night, yet I struggle to make it through my classes without nodding off, while he’s playing three varsity sports in the same season. We meet on matters of mind and soul in our late night conversations, and that's been more valuable than any lesson I've ever learned in a classroom. I will never forget those formative nights, staring out our window at the glimmering bridge and talking about the entire universe, or nothing at all. There the layers sit on the ground every night, only to be hastily pulled back on the next morning as we sprint to school three minutes before the bell.