Losing Texture

It’s a Saturday morning, and you are, once again, tired. Morning is the wrong word for it, really, because the sun is already near halfway to zenith, and the world around you is loud and warm. Tired, too, doesn’t quite fit. You wrack your mind for a few moments, but nothing comes. You’ve never had a great vocabulary, which is sort of a painful thing to admit (you once read nothing but dictionaries for a year, yet you still mispronounce every word you learned from them). 

But this morning is a nap on your mother’s couch at noon, and now you don’t need to say anything. Now it’s just you, outside, and the cobwebs on summer’s edge, breathing it all in. This is the last walk you’ll take before you leave home, the small-town suburbia of Barrington, again. It’s something to be cherished. The public park near your house, the kids playing lacrosse on the fields, the trails through the forest, the squirrels dashing by your feet, the seltzer cans abandoned on the woodchips from the night before. It’s all so unapologetically suburban. 

You love your town, it’s true. You never used to, but it’s grown on you a lot this summer. Partially because of the week your family spent at a dude ranch in Colorado this summer, where the people there knew every line dance and Bible verse as though they’d never had to learn them—as if they were simply a natural extension of themselves. Partially because you spend your school year at a boarding school in rural Michigan. 

Barrington is a town full of kids who only have opinions because of their parents and TikTok trends. You watched all of your friends turn bisexual during 2021, and you watched all of them turn homophobic in 2023. It’s an easy place to exist, mostly because no one cares about anything much. Barrington is the only place you’ve been this summer where you were rarely concerned about fighting with people over politics because Barrington kids are largely unaffected by the outside world.

The ranch in Colorado was full of kids who cited freedom and burgers and “owning the finish line” when asked why they were patriots. They were baffled by the fact that you are not religious and asked to pray for you (which, actually, was really sweet of them). You worry that a few of them might have never spoken to someone who doesn’t agree with their every belief if not for your family. 

Boarding school is full of good people. At school, you’re not the only person who can name more than one vice-president anymore. Everyone claims to be anti-gun-violence and anti-cruelty. They are not, however, all pacifists. This is an uncomfortable thing for you to acknowledge—that a lot of people are only against people being shot until they hate the person who has been killed. You’re not sure what to do with that. Sometimes, school is suffocating. Nuance is easily lost, people are easily shunned. Most of these people deserve it, you think. Still, sometimes you wonder who you are to say they deserve it. 

As you walk, you feel something fold beneath your feet on the dewy grass, and you hesitate, leaning down. A small mushroom, covered in little bumps, now crushed. You recognize it because it’s one of the few things that all three places you’re currently thinking about have in common. It’s a puffball mushroom. This one is still growing and slightly damp right now. You crouch down next to it, narrowing your eyes.

The ranch was one of the most beautiful places you had ever been to and a stark reminder that you will always be slightly “other.” You sat in a meadow with Boy Who Would Hate You If He Knew You and discussed mushrooms. He didn’t know very much about mushrooms, which worked out fine, because you didn’t either. Boy Who Would Hate You If He Knew You said that he was pretty sure the mushroom you were looking at was called a puffball. 

Boy Who Will Never Know You And, Thus, Never Hate You had you run a finger over the cap of the puffball and told you how the warts were things that fall off when met with a little bit too much pressure. You had watched the little bumps float off into the wind, frowning. 

In middle school, you made a friend because both of you liked comic books. The key difference between you two was that she wore her Batman merch proudly. This did not go over well with your classmates; Battinson had yet to come out, and thus, Batman was gay nerd shit. She had yogurt dumped down her shirt and never mentioned Batman again. Neither did you. 

At school, you’ve come across the common puffball more than a few times. Once, with a friend, you told him about how they lose their texture when someone presses down on them. He nodded, and you half expected him to bend over and brush all the bumps away right then and there. Instead, he just kept walking. You still haven’t figured out whether he didn’t care about the mushroom or if he was trying to do it a favor. You won’t ask. 

Boy You Will Never Know didn’t see the sadness in the mushroom losing its texture, and you know it was because he had never lost texture himself. No one who had lost texture would have wanted a poor puffball to lose theirs. 

You’re sensitive. Too sensitive, really, is what people often tell you. Your dad reminds you of long car trips, just the two of you, when you would ask him why people couldn’t just throw all the bombs away. He called it childhood naivety. Blind optimism. If it is naivety, or optimism, then that’s a bit of texture you never managed to shave away. You’ll never understand why we can’t simply just throw the weapons away. 

Boy You Will Never Know had dropped the mushroom after a few seconds, already looking around the floor for something else. When you asked what it was he was looking for, he told you they usually grow in groups.

Remembering this fact, you look around the forest floor you are now walking on, and there are a good amount of puffballs around. You smile to yourself, looking down at the little things in their own groups. Puffballs are a social mushroom. They can grow around pretty much anything. As you think about this, you lean over one and look at the bumps on its surface. 

One of the things you’ve learned, being so sensitive, is that people get upset easily if they think an opinion they dislike is one you share and like, and being upset is all it takes for a lot of people to decide they hate you. You’re not unfamiliar with being an “other,” mostly because, however adept you may be at blending, you can’t quite cut off the roots of your hometown or the oddities you’ve always carried with pride. You are good at hiding the odd in yourself with the normal, and at times, this means your humor, your opinions, your intimate knowledge of all eight canon Robins. At other times, this means your other type of humor, your other set of opinions, your genuine love for Almost Friday Instagrams. 

But you refuse to hide your opinions. You stand on every belief you have, but you do it carefully. You always make sure to frame an initial statement as if it’s not your own: “They believe this,” or “When you’re this, you do this…” Never is a first-person statement made, not until the person has already empathized with the scenario you’ve set up. 

This rule is how you have friends in Barrington, Colorado, and at school. You try to prioritize understanding other people’s opinions first, and you spend a lot of time sitting down with people and discussing their politics.

In Colorado, you listened quietly to a conversation about why God is not mentioned more often in politics. They would vote for someone right on sight if only a politician mentioned a verse, they said. 

Boy Who Will Never Hate You Enough To Know You considered himself to be a patriot. You know this because he wore an American flag flannel shirt when you went out riding every morning. You don’t know how he even got that many pairs of the same shirt. He believed that America is a country composed of beliefs we are losing (which you agree with, but you’re fairly certain it’s for different reasons). Despite being a patriot, he will never take an American history class, though this isn’t strictly his fault. American history has been heavily fictionalized in the small town he lives in because the truth most universally accepted is nothing more than a lie invented to kill God. Obviously. 

You consider yourself a patriot, too. (This is the greatest form of revolution you can manage.) You love your country, you love yourself, and you love everyone in it. You will never hate your country, never hate its people, no matter how bad they want you to hate them. Love, you explain, kindness, gentility, patience, this is how you win the war against our country. Both of you, you continue, and everyone wants America to be what it was promised to be. You’re saying the same thing, you really are. 

When he heard this, he rolled his eyes and called it a cop-out. You told him that your friends from art school said the same thing. He processed this for a beat, not wanting to be the guy who agrees with artists. Artists, he said, are woke and crazy. He was a little bit right, considering the friends you were quoting, but still, you worry about that stereotype. You wonder how anyone could be so opposed to art. 

“Even a broken arrow strikes true every so often,” he finally said. 

This isn’t the right phrase. You assume he’s trying to say that even a broken clock rings true twice a day. You don’t correct him because you’ve been trying to get better at not doing that. You’re insufferably pretentious—another bit of texture you haven’t lost.

The common puffball grows in nearly all fifty states. It’s one of the most widespread mushrooms in all of North America, actually. It’s because every time it loses texture, loses a bump, it’s losing a spore. It’s spreading more of itself into the world every single time the world tries to hurt it, and it keeps growing.

The puffball in front of you right now on the forest floor hasn’t lost texture, not yet. You sort of want to keep it in a plastic bag and keep it safe from the wind and other predators. But then, if it never loses texture, it’ll never learn to spread its roots. 

And you think, maybe, that’s more important. 

You walk away from the patch of mushrooms in front of you. You call your mom, who wants to know where you’ve been. You aren’t known for leaving the house all that often. 

“I’m on my way home now, Mom.” 

Cam Joyce is a junior studying creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy. Most recently, her work appears or is forthcoming in Fiction on the Web, Robot Butt, and The Milking Cat. When she's not writing, you can find her reading superhero comics or watching sitcoms.