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THERE WAS NO ONE incident. It wasn’t like a scar--a body knew how it had been scarred, a body could trace a scar back to its start--and not all scars were bad. Case in point: when Roy was eight, he scaled a tree and slit the underside of his own jaw, and it wasn’t like, it wasn’t... it wasn’t deliberate. It was a mistake. It didn’t hurt now to think of it.
So while there was no one incident, no single scar, there were incidents, accruing over time. Like dust or bank interest or a series of injuries, an undertow of ambiguous experiences and false leads and dead ends, sinking into bed every night only to surge terrified and upright into every cold and indifferent morning. There was a feeling, pervading every interaction, draining it. Roy would forget about that feeling ‘cause of its omnipresence, which meant that he had to notice it again for no reason at all. And it wouldn’t be sudden--it would diffuse slowly--like when Donna changed the radio to her favorite F.M. station, and before Roy could say anything uncool, Wally blurted: “Wait, Wonder Girl listens to F.M.?”
Roy knew that Donna was sweet on Holley Hip, but somehow he didn’t think that she’d tune into F.M. on the regular. He kind of hated that he’d never asked. He rolled with it anyway, kicking back and drawling, a tad condescending, “Like that’s news?”
“Well I thought, you know... Donna’s so wholesome and all.”
“Why do you talk about me like I’m a bale of hay?” Donna complained, arms folded across her chest.
“Oops, guess my motormouth ran away from me again! Haha, get it?”
Donna sighed loudly. “We get it,” Dick said, translating for her.
Lounging in his tank, Garth called, “If this is F.M., then what’s A.M.?” Which launched Dick into a spiel about music genres and wave frequency versus amplitude, and Garth responded with something about echolocation and crust-stations, which also made Donna perk up in interest.
Roy would rather choke than admit that he was seriously out of his depth. A guy could rig an exploding arrow and still know nothing, it seemed.
Vying for Donna’s attention, Roy leaned over and said, “So how ‘bout Clapton?” To be truthful, he didn't care at all for Clapton, but Ollie had a bunch of records lying around and Roy figured that Clapton was a safe bet. Obviously it paid off, since Donna’s face lit up. She plucked an air guitar the way that she’d pluck a zither, and Roy didn’t have the heart to fix her grip.
“Laaaayla, I’m beggin’ darling please,” Donna crooned.
Roy laughed. “Ya know he wrote that for Pattie Boyd?”
One of Donna’s hands came up to cover her gasp. “But isn’t Pattie Boyd married to...”
“George Pattison? Hell yeah.”
“I can always count on you for the latest celebrity gossip,” Donna said. Roy would’ve bristled if anyone else had said it, but Donna’s voice contained no judgment, only fondness, so Roy just felt vaguely pleased with himself.
“I mean--Ollie’s the one with the details,” Roy said, trying for modesty.
“Oh, please. You didn’t hear it from G.A.!”
“I did too. C’mon, Diana must’ve said something at some point.”
“The Leaguers are massive gossips,” Wally confirmed. Impulsively, Roy shoved him off the arm of the couch. “Hey!”
“You were invading my personal space,” Roy said.
Then the song on the station changed, and whatever Donna was going to say morphed into an Oh! Dick stopped gushing over the Atlantean contraption that Garth had produced from his belt, and he and Donna exchanged a Look. F.M. or not, Roy thought, no sound wave in the world could travel like that--like that Look, loaded with a secret, electric meaning.
A strange and cold unease percolated in Roy’s chest. Dick tapped out the tempo on his knee and gave a decisive nod. “I mean, I like it funkier, but this’s cool,” Dick said.
“Only cool?” Donna said, skeptic.
“No, no, more than cool.” Dick stopped tapping his knee and grinned. “On my count?”
“What?” Garth said.
“Yeah, what?” Roy echoed.
“No, on my count,” Donna said, tossing Roy a quick, sly wink. Roy waited for the familiar upwelling of affection--it rose in him distant and remote, not because it had faded in intensity but because there was a veil in him, draped over him. Donna and Dick shucked off their shoes--“What,” said Wally, always quick on the uptake--and slowly shimmied their way across the coffee table, giggling and wiggling their hips.
Dancing, they were dancing. Leaves of newspaper cut-outs scattered beneath their heels. Nixon’s wrinkled black-and-white page-one face stared at Roy from the floor.
“O-kay, so that’s what that was,” Roy said, suddenly annoyed. Garth glanced at Roy and didn’t comment.
With his usual grace, Dick crouched to save a water glass before it got trampled. Roy reached out--to help him or to drag him down, Roy couldn’t tell. His gloved hand closed around the glass instead of Dick’s wrist. To help, then.
“Thanks, Roy,” Dick said. Donna spun him in a wobbly circle and dipped him. Their ankles were frail-looking and graspable and weirdly lovely, their scars like lace. Wally whistled.
“No prob, Rob,” Roy said, dumping the leftover water into Garth’s tank. “Drink up, Gill-head.”
“Thanks,” Garth said wryly. He clambered over the edge, sloshing Roy in the process and using Roy’s shoulder as a handhold. “And thanks for the assist too.”
Roy tipped him a salute. “Sure.” His annoyance faded into awkwardness, then into an uncomfortable panic. He wrung out his soaked cap and jammed it back on, wrestling with his excruciating secondhand embarrassment for Wally, who was taking himself too seriously with his Midwestern Central City type of dancing. And for Garth too, since he always seemed to forget to move his arms.
But they were having fun, which was more than what Roy felt. Surrounded by his best friends, he was abruptly aware of the boundaries of his own body, where the borders of his own goddamn skin prevented some kind of perfect emotional union with the people around him. And no one was shutting him out, that was the thing. He was his own wet blanket, his own buzzkill, but he didn’t know what it would take to make himself happy beyond what he was already doing--being here, with the only people in the world who cared where he went or when he slept or what he ate for lunch. Even now, Donna was reaching for him, and Dick was making room for three--“What are you waiting for, a signed invite?” Donna said.
So that was how it was. There was no one incident, no single scar--just Donna looking radiant, haloed by the ceiling light, and Dick’s dark head bent toward hers, and Garth dripping unselfconsciously onto the carpet, and Wally laughing with his whole body.
Am I losing them? Roy thought. Then he thought, Am I losing me?
But that was a question without a real answer, and Roy couldn’t turn back time to reinhabit his old self anyway, which made wishing for it useless. So he stood with a straight back and squeezed his eyes shut and let Donna pull him up, hoping that if he tried a little harder, a little more, then maybe they would touch and hold and embrace him with their warm, calloused hands, just a little longer.