You lay sprawled across the same bed you’ve collapsed onto countless times before. Its bedding was childishly loud: black and yellow patterns plastered across a duvet that had long outlived its prime. The pillows matched, each stamped with the unmistakable black oval and golden bat sigil, Batman’s emblem, the beacon of Gotham’s skyline. Gotham isn’t real, of course, but to the boy who owns the bedding, it may as well be.

Bill sat hunched at his desk, his shoulders caved forward, nose nearly brushing the stained maple surface as he narrowed in on his computer screen. Whatever had him so consumed, whether a video game, some eBay auction, or a flame war on one of his endless forums, it owned him completely. His realm of choice was always digital, always glowing, and always more compelling than the stale little room you shared with him.

For Bill, company was rare. Rarer still was someone who could endure him for longer than an hour, and rarest of all, a girl perched comfortably on his Batman-clad mattress. Yet even that didn’t “count.” Not in the way other boys bragged about girls on their beds. You, after all, were off-limits. Not because he respected you in any wholesome sense, but because your shared history made you a separate category entirely. Bill, who preached often and loudly that women were little more than props, sources of irritation, amusement, or pleasure, had somehow built an exception around you.

He never said as much, never admitted you were different. But you were. Which meant, in his warped little hierarchy, you were special.

That didn’t mean he treated you kindly. Bill had his own warped version of loyalty, and since childhood you’d been soldered into it. You were there when he was the possessive boy who hoarded his toys like treasure, refusing to let anyone touch them, until you. The day he handed you one in front of his mother, she shed a tear that whispered, Maybe my son is normal. Now, he was older, a young man who kept those same toys sealed in plastic cases and recited the same bragging stories about them, stories you’d heard a hundred times and humored all the same.

Maybe you were the most enabling presence he’d ever had. Maybe he’d simply carved out a fondness for you that didn’t fit anywhere else. Whatever the reason, you were the anomaly in his world, a “femoid,” as he’d sneer about others, but not about you.

The afternoon passed as predictably as all the others. After twenty minutes, Bill finally swiveled in his chair, his eyes flicking to you in that habitual way, half suspicion and half instinct, as though checking you weren’t meddling with his things. You lay sprawled with your phone in hand, probably messaging friends or killing time with some low-effort game.

The sight, so common yet so singularly his, pulled the usual response from him, the line you’d heard more than your own parents’ voices:

“So what, you came over just to rot on my bed like every other braindead chick with a phone, or are you actually going to exist in the same room as me?”