The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

has. For me, at least.” He blushed. Beneath the hesitant flirting huddled the boy Peter had been. I imagined that child, wearing outfits picked by his mother, eating the eggs she prepared, her licked thumb wiping muck from his cheek. These helpless qualities intrigued me. It was helplessness without calculation. Again, I saw in Peter what Blake wasn’t, though I wish I looked deeper than the superficial differences between them, because I never saw Peter, only the inverse of Blake—or what I believed was the inverse of Blake. My interest in Peter, I’ve come to realize, was not about Peter but about what he might grant me: the chance to empower myself in ways I hadn’t with Blake. Blake reduced me. And perhaps the most accurate way to describe my attraction to Peter is that he made me feel the way Blake felt around me. Here was a chance to be more than the person I was with.

“Peter,” I said. “Why are you here? The other men, they’re vulgar and bitter. But you’re so prudent. You planted a garden—it’s charming. No one here is charming.”

“You’re charming,” he said. It was the most brazen I’d ever seen him.

“You shouldn’t flirt with me,” I said.

He apologized.

“I didn’t tell you to stop.” I liked teasing him. And I felt a charge inside me, the same charge I often felt at my restaurant, or out at bars, that tingling thrill of someone wanting me.

We crossed into the forest. He stopped. “You can’t judge me if I tell you why I’m here.”

“I’m not a judgmental person,” I said, and continued to walk.

Peter didn’t move. “You have to promise or I’m turning around.”

I chuckled at his seriousness. “Okay,” I said. I lifted my right hand. “I promise.”

He said nothing for some time but shifted his lips as we walked, tallying thoughts and working up the courage to speak.

“Just say it,” I said.

“Man horde,” he mumbled.

“What about them?”

“I was in one.”

I said nothing for a long time. If he were anyone else, I would’ve thought he was joking. But Peter was too sincere of a person to joke. “Oh,” I eventually said.

He cupped his hands over his face and muttered into his palms: “I knew you’d judge me. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.”

“I’m surprised,” I said. “Dyson told me your greatest regret was something about avocados—eating too many?”

“I didn’t want them to think I was evil,” he said. “And I really did give up avocados, because I don’t know how anyone eats them—the waste that goes into producing just one. Twenty-five gallons of water. For what? Some guac?”

“Stick to the man horde,” I said.

He let out a trembling sigh and began.

After his mother died, he had no one to share his grief. His father had left decades earlier. He and his brother didn’t talk. He lived alone in the house where he’d watched his mother die over the course of six months, increasingly isolated, embracing the isolation—eating delivery every night, wearing headphones in public—until one day, while shopping for double-A batteries, Peter blacked out. He woke on his couch to the sound of police pounding on his front door. He and five other men had trespassed on an elderly woman’s property and weeded her vegetable garden, added fertilizer to the soil, picked a basketful of lettuce—all as the woman shouted in terror, demanding they leave. Peter was found guilty of criminal trespassing and sentenced to community service. It was recommended that he enroll in therapy. WHY was the cheapest available option. “I know how horders are talked about. You end up in a horde, it’s because you’re a freak, you’re evil. The others needed a story about me, so I gave them a story.”

Peter had always seemed so unintentionally forthcoming; like a sieve, things poured out of him through design. His duplicity shocked me even more than the horde.

“Dyson asked everybody, point-blank before we got here, whether we’d been in a horde,” he said. “I lied to him, Sasha. I had to lie to them all.”

Even more than I liked the idea of keeping a secret for Peter, I liked keeping one from Dyson. It was time I had something he didn’t. “It’ll stay between us,” I assured Peter.

He wrapped me in a hug but sprung back, apologized.

“Don’t apologize, Peter.” I laced my fingers with his, clutched and released.

On the walk, Peter nervously crunched through a bag of cough drops. He stayed ahead of me out of an impulse to protect. He pulled aside low-hanging branches, warned me against divots where I might turn an ankle. “Look out for rocks,” he said, dozens of times. At any other point in my life, I would’ve found this treatment condescending and obedient. But the deference he showed reminded me of hiking with Blake during our stay at the cabin, back when he pretended to care about me. Peter was Blake stripped of the vanity and middling music career. Peter was the Blake who never performed. He was a gift from the universe: a chance to correct all that went wrong.

During my exile, every spark of public hostility seemed directed toward me, until the man hordes offered the world new people to hate, other news to dissect. They gave me hope for a future of anonymity. They helped me lose track of myself. And knowing Peter had been in a horde filled me with a peculiar gratitude that veered close to attraction. I liked, too, that he had lied to Dyson and the other men about being in a horde. This complicated Peter, made him less ordinary—we both had secrets to hide. Sturdier intimacies have been founded on less.

The men were hosing the trough when we reached the tree line. Peter stopped me. “I know you don’t like it here, but we’re all grateful you’re here. You listen to us.”

“Dyson listens to you,” I said.

“He doesn’t hear us. Not like you do. You’re the reason this works.” He looked at his feet. “What I mean is