The Answer Is Yes

I lean out the driver's side window and scream loud enough for the black guys on the corner to hear me, "You could easily pass for 22!"

Maggie stumbles over her own feet and turns towards me, brushing the curly red hair out of her eyes. I might have oversold the compliment, but in this moment, she really could pass for 22. She looks like someone I went to college with, a Tri Sigma from my British Literature class. She’s standing in front of a backdrop of banana leaves and backlit with porch lights, holding her shoes in her hand and panting from the jog from my car to her front door. Maggie is pretty, and youthful, and drunk, and she wants to go to bed, but she's sincere when she asks me if l really want to fuck what I can pass for.

I don’t understand what the fuck she means, but I yell back to her before she reaches the door handle. “I guess not! Fine, you look your age! You look 30! Would you fuck yourself now!?” She’s almost inside, and she calls back without looking, “I’d fuck the best version of myself, but I don’t know her yet! Night!”

I light a cigarette and pull the smoke to the back of my throat, exhaling through my nostrils before letting it go any further. I’ve been smoking like this since I was 13 years old, never letting the smoke into my lungs and mostly just cycling it from my mouth to my nose and into the air. Because I am both an asthmatic and a pussy. It should be noted that the person who gave me my first cigarette is dead now. He was my childhood best friend and the first guy I ever experimented with. The last time I saw him, we were in the living room of his mom’s house trading oral for oral and watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with the sound off — it was 2010. Then, last summer, he overdosed on Oxy and never made it to the hospital. Max wasn’t gay, but he took general thrill in “deviant” behavior like male/male sex and shooting up heroin — anything to put him on the fringe. We lived around the corner from each other in a tree-littered subdivision on the Westbank of New Orleans, and went to the same boys Catholic school across the river. We were painfully average, and Max resented that. He died the way he lived. Looking for a way out.

I pull into my driveway and notice that Maggie texted me to make sure I made it home. I tell her I have, and I let myself in the side door. On the kitchen table, there’s a red, heart-shaped box with a Great American Cookie Company logo on the side of it. I eat the clumps of red and brown icing and take my shirt off on the way to my room. I flop onto my bed and scroll through the night’s texts:
There’s Maggie.
Then John.
Then the gymnastics coach from Ruston.
Then the guy who lives with his boyfriend in Monroe, who I think I love. 

Then my recently exed boyfriend, Heath.
Then Wesley, who I used to date and still text.
And finally, Dixon. 

I see smiley faces, and dick pics, and lies, and I wonder if I would really fuck who I'm passing for. I wonder about all of us. Is Maggie passing for 22? Is Max passing for an escape artist? Am I passing for genuine? Would any of us fuck (or even like) the people we're projecting?

Whoever I'm passing for is disembarking this train of thought. Dixon's dick pic got me semi, and now I won't be able to sleep without taking care of it, first. I send him a text that says, "Goodnight, stud," and then I send the same text to the gymnastics coach, the guy in Monroe, Heath, and Wesley. 

I put down my phone and stagger to the kitchen wearing Heath's cobalt blue trunks and a half-boner, compliments of Dixon. I finish the remaining icing clumps and wonder if jacking-off after all my introspect is the same as fucking the person I'm passing for.