The Shape of a Person

Photo by Igor Rand on Unsplash

I left home to live with the Lanes the summer before my senior year. It was July in New Jersey. My mother and I had gotten into a fight, and despite my threats to leave home, I doubt she expected me to run away.

My mother worked at an insurance firm close to the city; it paid well but never enough, not for the hours it stole from her days. I made a point of leaving when she was at work. Downstairs, a visiting nurse was attending to my grandmother, who spent her days resigned to a rented hospital bed in what had been my father’s office — before he abruptly left when I was in middle school, saddling my mother with debts she couldn’t pay. Through the thin floor, I could hear my grandmother joking about the sitcoms she watched. She referred to the characters as her only friends. “That’s not true,” said the nurse. “You have so many people.”

I stuffed clothes into a backpack. Knowing I’d have to give the Lanes something for letting me stay, I filled a second backpack with DVDs. I had the largest collection among my friends. I bought movies indiscriminately, often regretting the purchases immediately: action movie sequels, horror flicks, derivative rom-coms, spoofs from the ’80s, unrated versions of R-rated films. I also bought movies that played almost nightly on TV — The Matrix or The Rock — because I liked accessing director commentary and deleted scenes. Having what others did not gave me something to offer people. The Lanes owned very few movies, and I hoped to ingratiate myself with the DVDs.

The nurse was washing her hands in the kitchen sink when I came downstairs. She glanced at the backpacks in my arms and shut off the faucet.

“I’m going to work,” I lied. “Will she be okay on her own?”

“I have other patients,” said the nurse.

“I’m not asking you to stay,” I said.

“You don’t have anything to worry about.” She shouted goodbye to my grandmother on her way out.

“I need to leave too, Gram,” I said, loud enough for her to hear me from the back of the house. When she didn’t respond, I brought her a fresh glass of water and was grateful to find her sleeping. It would’ve been hard to lie to her directly. Her long gray hair was pulled to the far side of her face, a few strands stuck to her lips, and I considered freeing the hairs before I thought better of it, unwilling to risk waking her up. I unwrapped two small chocolate bars — she had trouble undoing the wrappers — and placed them next to the water. I doubt I would’ve been so kind if I hadn’t been leaving. The gesture made running away seem less self-absorbed.

The Lanes lived two miles away by road, but a trail through a forest cut that distance in half. Ours was rural New Jersey, a small town of aging farmhouses and mud-bumpered trucks, one stoplight and no mayor, a town cheap enough to attract the sort of people who’d come into money through contracting companies and boat dealerships, financiers who felt superior for starting families away from the intrusions of life in New York. My own father had been one of those financiers — or so we had believed — until one day he suddenly wasn’t, or rather, had never been.

I knew the Lanes through Mitchell, the middle brother of three. Though he was a year older than me, we’d been friends since elementary school, when I joined his class after skipping third grade. Mitchell treated me with indifference, cruelty, and care, which I assumed was how one treated a sibling. He was handsome and athletic, with flopping black hair, a mole on his chin, and the sort of hardened jawline I often compared my face against when I pulled at my skin in the mirror. I had swollen, comical features; my eyes were set close together, and my chin, according to Mitchell, looked like an ass. No hairstyle I had ever