Miller, Yngve, and Cole looked like a trio of pale, upright deer, like they belonged to their own particular species, and you could be forgiven, if you were in a hurry, for thinking them related. Then Yngve and Cole, who were merely tall, and then Vincent, who just scraped under the bar of average height. Or, no, more specifically, he saw Miller, who was extraordinarily tall, the easiest to spot. There, among the burgundy wooden tables nearest the lake, he saw the four of them.

The noise demanded vague and strange things from Wallace. There was also the matter of the noise, the desperate braying of everyone talking over everyone else, the bad music, the children and dogs, the radios from the frats down the lakeshore, the car stereos in the streets, the shouting mass of hundreds of lives disagreeing. It might have had something to do with the crowds, the insistence of other people’s bodies, the way the birds circled overhead, then dive-bombed the tables to grab food or root around at their feet, as though even they were socializing. It had been a couple of years since he had gone to the lake with his friends, a period of time that embarrassed him because it seemed to demand an excuse and he did not have one. Wallace stood on an upper platform looking down into the scrum, trying to find his particular group of white people, thinking also that it was still possible to turn back, that he could go home and get on with his evening. Overhead, gulls drifted easy as anything. The air was heavy with their good times as the white people scattered across the tiered patios, pried their mouths apart, and beamed their laughter into each other’s faces. People coveted these last blustery days of summer before the weather turned cold and mercurial. It was a cool evening in late summer when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor