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Bron shook his head at the absurdity of this drunken request. Felt himself as though thrust on stage and made to perform a monologue he’d never even heard. “And what if I refuse?”
“Then I’ll have you fired at once.” Darcy crossed his legs, animated, but immediately uncrossed them. He was smiling an unruly smile, and his eyes were bright and alive, though for the first time Bron noticed one of Darcy’s eyes seemed more red than the other. A little droopy. “No, think of it as a birthday present, I suppose. Please, I beg to know what you think of me.”
“What I think of you?” Bron remained struck by the question, his being put on the spot like this. “I don’t think anything of you—I don’t know you.”
“Well, what is your impression of me, then?” Darcy waved for an answer, decanted yet another drink. “Go on, the honest truth.”
It had never been put to him so directly, a demand to offload his opinion. And opinions Bron surely had. Thousands of them, collected through the years. They spilled out of the contours of his being. Only up until then, he had learned to keep them carefully tucked away, hemmed in, cluttering his insides. A box of differently shaped toys. When Darcy took a sip from his glass and nodded for him to go on, Bron teetered at the edge of a precipice. And he was ready to jump.The honest truth, he says? Well, then—
“Honestly? I think you’re rude and rather obnoxious—”
Darcy snorted his drink. “Rude? Obnoxious?
“Yes, extremely so.”
“‘Rude’ I’ll own up to.” He laughed. “But I simply draw the line at ‘obnoxious’!”
“A hard line to draw when it’s true. I suppose it can’t be easy, listening to what other people might have to say of you.”
“And you have a lot to say about me?” Darcy pointedly interrupted.
“Yes, indeed. You asked to hear it, and yet you won’t let me finish—”
“So I’m the villain here, and somehow good old Giovanni’s bagged himself yet another loyal follower?” Bron heard the hardness seep back into Darcy’s voice.
“I don’t quite know what you mean,” Bron said. “I didn’t say anything like that.”
“You might as well have. I already know what you think.”
“And what is it that I think?”
Darcy raised his hands in defense. “Nothing.”
Bron cradled his arms to his chest. He was frustrated to have been snagged from his leap, of airing his truth. “No, please tell me, if we’re sharing our honest opinions.”
Darcy leaned forward in his chair. “I mean to say that one looks at me and thinks they know everything there is to know about me. Everyone else is allowed their freedoms, to say and do whatever it is they choose, and here I am, merely existing in a box that has been created for me. A cage. And how perfectly I fit, and yet you—and others like you—soar outside these confinements, free as a bird.”
Bron’s heart thrummed at the side of his neck.Free as a bird?“You think I’m free to do whatever I want? And that it isyouwho is confined to a box?”
“Well, aren’t you?” Darcy said. “Free?”
“That is not quite the word I would choose.”
“And what wordwouldyou choose?”
He didn’t give it too much, though. “I don’t know … obscure … lost.”
“Oh, really? Well, let us take, for instance, the way you choose to dress. For truly it is up to you how you go about your day. But what if I said that as an employee in this house, you are representing us all outside these quarters, and that therefore we have something of a say as to how you choose to conduct yourself. How you should present. How would that make you feel then?”
Backed into this corner, Bron searched for a way out, deduced that the only way was to follow through in this game of whatever it was he was playing. “I … I suppose I would feel, as we said, rather confined. Controlled.”
“Controlled! But look at you—so naturally handsome in that suit, and yet you paint makeup on your cheeks, color black around the eyes. With that little tiara on your head. One might ask what it is you gain by doing this, but that is not the point, is it?”
Bron felt the heat creep along his neck and flush into his cheeks. It took everything he had in him not to reach up and pull the headband away. This had been his life for years. There was nothing for him to gain, only the need to defend himself. He could never quite explain it, his yearning for a thing that brought him so much satisfaction at the consequence of so much ridicule. But he would not be forced into hiding, locked in an attic never to be let free.
He regretted this entire conversation. Would wait the question out or give Darcy room to ask another, one that would warrant a simpler response. A question he might have the answer to. But no such question came, and he felt immobilized. “No,” Bron said. “It isn’t.”
“Exactly so. So isn’t the point that you can, in fact, live your own life? That you might be, perhaps, the opposite of lost?”
