Page 58 of Hilarina and the Ogre

In the end, he’d never found the ‘perfect’ present. And because he couldn’t make up his mind, he’d ended up with a conglomeration of everything. For the event, he went with a concert, like Annette had suggested, but a classical concert they were giving the next week over at the city. When Trenton saw it, he laughed and whipped out a small envelope with tickets to The Nutcracker—at the same theater, one day apart. Hilary could only stare, and then he was laughing too. He’d seen those tickets during the booking and had been debating between them and the classical concert for hours. He gave Trenton a kiss and set the tickets aside. “I have something else, but it’s not as nice as the other one was.”

They were sweaters—a matching set. The green was a little different from the boutique one, more Hunter than Emerald, but just as nice, really. But they weren’t cashmere—not even regular wool, which would have been too scratchy, but some cheap mix of cotton and polyester that wasn’t classy at all, but the sweaters were soft, and he hoped that was okay.

Trenton was so excited he put it on with the tags still on. “Yours too. Quick.”

Hilary didn’t know why it was such an emergency, but he let Trenton shove the sweater over his head, and once his arms were in, Trenton sat back, beaming and looking as satisfied as he’d ever seen him. “We match.”

Hilary had anticipated this result after seeing the way Trenton genuinely seemed to enjoy their fag-bags, but matching things seemed to be one of great joys of his life. “You’re like a five-year-old,” he told the boy, trying not to suffocate from how much he loved him.

“Can I give you mine now?”

Hilary nearly said yes because the last gift was so embarrassing he didn’t know how he was going to hand it over, so he just shoved it at him, nearly getting Trenton in the eye because he wasn’t looking properly. “You can just throw it out if you don’t want it.”

Coupon books were always tacky, especially when they were made from shitty cardstock from the drawer under the printer. Even his handwriting was horrible, so it really wasn’t presentable. Trenton took it with wide eyes that grew even wider as he flipped it open. Hilary had put in several kinds. In order, the batches came in: Shitty home-cooked dinner, I concede the argument, Make me wear whatever you want, and five that just said Dance. He hadn’t known how to write that last one in any way that didn’t make himself sound like a conceited dimwit. The whole concept of coupon books had really tanked after he’d thought about them for a bit. He didn’t want anything in their relationship to be transactional. As if Trenton were ‘buying’ him when he knew he never would. So he’d gone back and forth on whether to make one. What had decided him in the end was thinking of what Trenton would think, and Trenton was a sucker for stupid shit—and even more of a sucker than he thought. He blanched when he realized the boy’s eyes were wet. “It was stupid! Obviously, you don’t need to use coupons. You can just ask me to—”

“Can I use one now? But I don’t really want to rip it out.”

It was one of the dance ones, obviously. Hilary had been expecting it, so he was prepared to head to the studio, but Trenton took out another package from under the bed—one wrapped to look like the night sky.

“Seriously, how did you get so good at wrapping? And what if I’d looked under the bed?”

Trenton dismissed that. “You never notice anything.”

“I noticed you, didn’t I?”

Trenton grinned, “I’m hard to miss.”

Hilary really did adore that grin. If only it didn’t turn him into such a love-struck buffoon.

And then he got even stupider. “What’s this?”

But Hilary knew what it was. It was a big glass jar full of origami paper stars. They were perfect and folded in the prettiest colors, even nicer than the wrapping had been, and there were so many! He dumped them out into his lap, just admiring the shape and feel of them, all the patterns and textures and feeling like a dragon with its hoard. That was when Trenton did something horrific. He pulled the end of the paper tab out of a star and unfolded it, collapsing it back into ordinary paper—an offense worthy of the death penalty.

It was a note. On one side of the paper—the part that had been folded in—Trenton had written: So close that your hand upon my chest is mine / so close that your eyes close with my dreams – Pablo Neruda.

“I made one for each day until next Christmas,” the boy said, completely oblivious. “Oh, and two for your birthday. They’re not all poetry, though. Some are just words that made me think of you.”

Almost, Hilary couldn’t breathe. What had already seemed like a mountain of work—all that perfectly precise folding and that beautiful paper—became a behemoth. “How long did it take you…?”

“Oh, not that long. About six weeks.”

Six weeks. Six weeks.

“I didn’t originally mean for it to be a present. You know the notebook I keep?”

The one Trenton kept open beside him while he read (and that had been the inspiration for his own notebook). The boy had been keeping one since he was six, all of which were stacked up neatly on the dresser—his top priority to rescue when he’d been stuffing the garbage bags full back at that awful house. Trenton used them to copy down quotes he liked, and they could really be anything. Some were profound, resonating with meaning, but they were just as often silly, or nothing at all—some quirk of Trenton’s brain enjoying the flow of the syllables.

“It took me some time to realize, but after we met, I noticed that almost everything I wrote down reminded me of you,” Trenton continued. “And the stars—I used to make them for the store, an alternative to the cookies if people couldn’t or didn’t want to eat them. But then the night after the Halloween party I went home and I couldn’t sleep, so I started making them, but I was still thinking of you, so I started copying the words down on the paper first in the hopes that getting it out would help me sleep. And it felt good, so I kept doing it, and it became a habit. And then around Thanksgiving I started thinking seriously about what I wanted to give you for Christmas, and I realized that you would probably like the stars, but maybe more than that, I wanted you to have them, like I was giving you my thoughts and all the countless times of me loving you.”

Hilary tried to get up but began crying before he made it to the bathroom. Trenton caught him up, already apologizing even though he didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and Hilary loved the boy, he loved him, and knew that if he ever had to go a day without him, he’d go mad. It wasn’t a good realization. He’d never considered himself unstable. Actually, he’d always thought of himself as pretty practical for a kid his age. But being with Trenton was biting from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. There was no going back. He’d fight God himself if he threatened to make him go back.

“It’s just paper,” Trenton said, helpless to the tears as he always was. “They aren’t even my words. I can’t write poetry the way you do. I only copy others.”

“No, you don’t.” Hilary could only press himself there against Trenton, who was big enough to have become his whole world. “You don’t copy anyone. You’re exactly yourself.”

Chapter Sixteen

Leotard & Tights