OUR PAPER CROWNS, page 1
OUR PAPER CROWNS
FABIÁN TAPIA QUINTERO
Copyright © 2026 Fabián Tapia Quintero
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Translated by: Fabián Tapia Quintero
Cover photo by: Radek Pestka
Playlist
About you, The 1975.
Ribs, Lorde.
Maroon, Taylor Swift.
Mirrorball, Taylor Swift.
The Greatest, Ellie Goulding.
Sidelines, Phoebe Bridgers.
Becoming all alone, Regina Spektor.
Daylight, Harry Styles.
This author greatly appreciates your reading. If you liked this book, I invite you to recommend it to your friends and write a review on Goodreads or your e-book platform. Thank you very much for being here!
Dedication
This will sound very metafictional, but many thanks to Rob and Zilé for showing up and leaving so much in their wake. They are the most beautiful thing that writing has done for me.
CHAPTER 1
This morning I have an unknown thirst for cranberry juice. Thank goodness I have 20 minutes that can either pass unnoticed in the endless line at this cafeteria or that can give me my goal.
What a way to start my morning.
“Sorry, it’s over,” the saleswoman tells me. And then she casts a fleeting glance at whoever has taken the last unit of my irrepressible desire. I tell her it’s okay, I can replace it with anything else.
But that’s not what matters.
What matters is who has caught my attention.
As if it were a replica of my hunger; a thousand emotions in just one second, so indescribable that they hurt.
Weeks later I am in his bed. Both completely naked. Rivers of that scarlet juice run down his chest to his obliques—and beyond. The vision is too blinding to be true. All my senses are on the edge of the precipice.
“We can do this forever,” he tells me.
The tenderness is expansive.
And my lips follow that overflow.
Until the dream breaks and I wake up.
CHAPTER 2
This is the full story.
As if my perplexed look filled with instant devotion had been magnetic.
He turned his head as he headed out of the cafeteria.
Our eyes met.
In that period, I could imagine him and it was just as captivating as in my vision.
He held the can of cranberry juice like it was a trophy.
As if he could read my mind and found a way to call me like a mosquito to its pack.
“Were you looking for this?” he told me later. “Take it”.
I was petrified by surprise. It was an absolute shock; I don’t know how many times I had blinked and how many blinks it took to get my feet back on the ground.
“No, thanks. Surely my morning can continue with its normality. My name is Rob, nice to meet you.”
I was amazed at how I was able to string those sentences together. His presence was a black hole that absorbed attention and logic and words.
“I’m Zilé.”
We shook hands.
Thus he dismantled every bone in my body.
His touch was cold and yet I felt like sunshine.
So that’s the whole story: an opposition in his touch, a dazzle and a counterpoint that made me burn.
“You study here?,” I ask him.
“Yeah. Ballet. And you?”
Of course. Ballet. I must have guessed it from his legs. Guys like him levitate. How could I have missed it all this time?
“I study music. Piano, to be precise. I want to be a piano teacher one day. And compose, although I try to do that daily.”
I wait for him to laugh in disbelief as I’ve seen several people do, but he doesn’t.
“Great, Rob. I just hope to survive my days and you already have your future all figured out, from what I see.”
I try to lighten his statement with a joke, but I can’t think of any. I just think why someone so free only thinks about surviving.
A person with heavy metal in his veins cannot only think about surviving.
But I omit that detail. I lose myself in the lightness of its rotundity.
“Do you have plans for today?” he asks me.
“Today I will rehearse because I have a recital tomorrow at a forum near here. You can come, if you like.”
“Write down the address,” he offers me his phone. “And anything else you want to write down.”
The hint of his eyebrows cannot be of this world. How can I continue to be material after that gesture? Why has such an invitation taken practically my entire life? I don’t complain; it’s just that I’ll never be able to assimilate it. A guy who looks like the most irresistible fallen angel in Copenhagen is flirting with me.
With the least flirtable being on the planet.
I do everything he tells me. I don’t know if he doesn’t notice my shaking or if he’s already used to all the boys he talks to shaking.
Anyway, it’s done. If there is such a thing as destiny, I have already done everything in my power to implement whatever is being planned. That’s it.
He says goodbye to me saying “See you soon” and waving his can of cranberry juice high. As if enjoying a victory. As if extolling the curious coincidence that will lead to something bigger than what we can think.
CHAPTER 3
Tonight I think about how much my devotion to blueberries has increased. Is there a saint or something similar? Because I want to light all the candles in the world until I run out of paraffin.
I am unable to believe that meeting—even if nothing else happened. Still.
Am I a fool for believing in the continuity of the we? It will be possible?
Tonight, I think and think and think.
In his name, for example. How it drains like honey through my senses.
Zilé.
I think about how I will suppress this in the future. How I will repress my innocence and fantasy of all these scenarios.
But my inventions weigh more.
I think I’m his prince.
I have a paper crown tonight.
CHAPTER 4
Minutes before leaving for the forum my mom lubricates my hands with one of her many miraculous liquids. Since she discovered my habit of taking extra care of those parts of my body, she has not stopped looking for protection. She says that water is from a sacred spring in Japan. She stole it for me.
That thing about my hands is pure and simple hypochondria.
A fear that if something goes wrong with them I will stop doing the only thing that holds me to this life: the piano.
Because if something goes wrong with them, I’d be hopeless.
How serious all this sounds.
Anyway, I’m already in the forum.
It fills up gradually. By filling I clearly mean the capacity that a pianist like me—who is just starting out—can afford. It’s satisfactory, anyway, in these beginnings.
I have never paid as much attention to the audience as I have until now.
I look for her dark hair shining like a stormy night, but I can’t find it. Minutes before starting I look around the audience again and it’s not there.
It’s disheartening.
All this movie that I had played in my mind transforms into static and there it remains: in the purest silence.
I should never have gotten my hopes up.
Then I understand: I should have written him in that damn note to stop his monstrous seduction with someone so new to love.
Guys like me aren’t made to burn.
CHAPTER 5
It happens when I least think about it. He also says the most unexpected words when I least expect them.
“That’s how it had to happen, lovebird. I always prefer my love interests to wait until the second date to see if the interest is still intact.”
And? Is it still intact? I want to ask him, but I don’t dare. I don’t dare to receive one of his blunt answers. I fear the way that feeling shakes me.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if it’s still intact on my part? What’s happening? Are you angry?”
“Being angry is not the correct expression. It’s just that... I made a whole fairy tale out of myself, Zilé. And that you are this unpredictable makes me nervous. I am an anxious person and a worst-case planner. Latest changes are not my thing now. Is that weird of me?”
“I would say that it is anything but strange. I like it,” he says. His way of making light of the matter makes me float.
“So you were telling me that you were at my entire show and then you came to wait for me outside my dressing room because it was exasperating you that I hadn’t noticed you in the entire audience... Damn, this looks like a vampire movie. A pianist turned by a vampire ballet dancer.”
“Now I know what you mean about your fairy tale. Do you have a fantasy of me being a vampire and turning you? Because we can try...”
I blush. I’m sitting on a desk and I feel like he’s gotten too close to me until he’s trapped me between his legs. I disrupt the image before my blood vessels burst.<
“That sounds more like your fairy tale than mine, Zilé. And it would have happened if you had respected our first date.”
“Do you want me to apologize for that? I can do it without any problem.”
“No, don’t do it,” I say; I hate scenes of pity. Although seeing him apologizing seems so unreal that I’m tempted to ask him. “I totally respect the dynamics of your dates. Also, I don’t think it would have been a date as such. And I’m one hundred percent sure that both of our interests remain intact.”
“And even more so after seeing you play.”
“Are you serious?”
“I have never said something so serious in my life. You may never witness me saying something so serious again, so mark my words well.”
Wow, it was a miracle for me just to see him again. And now that he tells me that dismantles me. I must be dreaming. Increasing someone’s interest in something that was not even planned, that arose from me spontaneously, is the craziest thing that would have occurred to me.
“What a nice way you have to shatter my stage fright.”
“Do you have stage fright? I never would have imagined it. Are you having stage fright now?”, he asks. He gets closer to me. He puts his fingers on my wrist. He’s looking for my pulse! Who does he think he is to investigate my nervousness? Oh my God. His touch. His stupid and volatile and warm and cold at the same time touch. I think he’s trying harder and harder to disintegrate me.
“Has my pulse told you something?”
“Your pulse, Rob, is telling me many things.”
“For example…?”
“These are things that cannot be said.”
“Or they are things that only you have invented.”
“No, I never make anything up. I always leave that to others.”
“I guess they have a long list of fantasies behind them. What will you do when you find someone who doesn’t fantasize so much and only loves you in your captivating reality?”
Looks like I’ve checkmated him.
God.
It seems that he has been left speechless.
He twists a smile.
His impassive, serene and confident face is besieged by emotions.
What have I done?
I hear his laughter filling the corners of this gloomy dressing room. How do I save it? It fascinates and hypnotizes me. I can swear that his laugh is capable of stopping time.
“Well, in that case I wouldn’t have any other choice. I’m sure I could invent new techniques. Never underestimate the capacity for reinvention of those who have everything by default. And even more so, I like difficult things, bordering on the impossible.”
I want to tell him that when it comes to him, I am anything but impossible (vapor, dreams, fleetingness, pastel colors). I want to tell him that when it comes to him, I can be the easiest riddle in the world.
“Perhaps my revenge for your rudeness is to make it difficult for you. You never know, Zilé.”
“I like that tone. I say it sincerely. Do you know what I thought when I heard you play so serene and so focused? I said, I want to make a catastrophe out of that guy. I want to set him on fire from head to toe.”
“And are you sure about that desire? What would happen if once chaos is unleashed you no longer want it?”
“Rob Hilsen, I love living in chaos.”
And so, he left. His touch still beating in my pulse. His perfume of roses spreading on my skin. His words beating me like a second heart. And with more promises than seconds.
I watched him leave and I could only imagine the temptation of his back and the length of his legs and how ridiculously beautiful it would be to see him coming towards me from then on.
CHAPTER 6
I wonder how there can be people who force you to feel your own body in order to check reality. I wonder how they can be so fantastical and so charming that it’s hard to believe. And then how can there be people like me, mostly ordinary, with the strange luck of finding them.
Meeting Zilé has been added to my list of unexplained feats.
There are so many hasty things I want to tell him.
So much panic, so much anxiety and so much devotion right off the bat.
If I told my friend Picaza, she probably wouldn’t believe it.
Have I stopped putting my feet on the Earth so quickly? Is Zilé’s effect on my life that tremendous? How long will it last? Will it be my first relationship or just a passing illusion?
I know what my dad would tell me: “There is only one way to find out, and that is to dare to live it.”
So, for the first time in a long time, I have to dare. I have to go out into the light of day and not regret anything. I deserve it. Well, I think I deserve it. Everyone has the right to live a great love, right? A love that exceeds even your own dreams, your own fantasies and your own limits.
Therefore, when I see him in the hallways of the university I don’t flinch. I say hi. Sometimes I shout him “Hello!” and my greeting pierces the student hordes as if it were an arrow and he listens to me and answers me. Her smile with its dimples would make me fall apart even if I saw it from hundreds of meters away. It’s something that has settled under my skin. I would know when he was smiling at me even if the whole world turned off and we were left in darkness. His straight teeth would be my lamps and thus I would travel to his lips.
“Mr. pianist,” he says to me now, in the faculty courtyard. “How are you doing? I don’t think you’re one of those who stay late, but just in case... I thought that you and I could go out in a more organized and formal manner. You understand me.”
I would like to understand you, I want to tell him, because the truth is that hearing him say that he has plans for us is a direct attack on my sanity.
“Of course. I’m good. I’m free, actually.”
“Well, in that case I’ll leave you the address where I’ll be rehearsing this afternoon. After there we can go to a cafe. The one you want. It’s on me.”
It’s like I’m looking at lightning head-on. I urgently need to wake up.
“It seems perfect to me,” I manage to articulate. I am grateful that, once he leaves, Picaza or anyone I know will find me. They’ll think I’ve been mugged or worse. I just find it hard to believe it. Every day the disbelief doubles.
To.
A.
Suffocating.
Degree.
But a nice one.
That afternoon I came just as he told me. I suspect that this rehearse room must have been built by the city’s aristocrats. I have never seen one so well-conditioned. The floor is almost capable of returning my reflection to me so pristine. Plus, it’s gigantic. It is like a great cube of light where Zilé and company are swimming.
I see his legs move with a grace that comes as natural to him as breathing. Their extensions are so perfect and precise that they are difficult to process. Seeing his muscles in tension from afar—and at the same time seeing that everything about him seems to float— is a dream. That’s too suggestive. His clothing does not cooperate with my attempt to see him with complete composure. I see him with total delirium, just as he is: a complete outburst, an exuberant being in terms of beauty. People like him should belong in museums. What are they doing driving simple, innocent mortals like me crazy?
I see him taking a break.
Then he sees me.
He sees me. He greets me. I say hi back.
I actually want to run towards him, but in terms of composure it would come out very badly. And, speaking of standing, I think seeing him has given me a very undisguised erection.
Can one of those mirrors swallow me right now?
“Was this a rehearsal or was it the final presentation?” I asked.
He blushes in response. Next, he checks his right arm. I look away. Luckily, things are getting back to normal. In these seconds I have thought about all kinds of horrible episodes like the smell of the bus in the morning, my neighbor’s boiled cabbage dish and Kanye West’s music. I sit up when I’m sure it’s gone.
“Is everything okay with your arm?” I ask, as I watch him remove a bandage.
