 
Rules

of my best

Friend's

Body

a novel by

Matthue Roth

by the same author

FICTION

Never Mind the Goldbergs

Candy in Action

Losers

NONFICTION

Yom Kippur a Go-Go

Automatic: Death, Girls, and R.E.M.

PICTURE BOOKS

My First Kafka

The Gobblings

A HEVRIA PROJECT

bs"d

### Rules of My Best Friend's Body

Copyright © 2017 Matthue Roth

Cover copyright © 2016 Katie Skau

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1535149129

ISBN-13: 978-1535149129

Because of contractual obligations, the author may not profit from this book. You're seriously just paying for the paper and printing. In any case, feel free to copy it, cut it up, share it or give it away. I'd like that. If you could attribute it, that'd be nice, but either way.

If you'd like to see what else Matthue is up to, please check out his other books. Or drop him an email at matthue@gmail.com. He'd like that.

Katie Skau designed the cover with hand papercuts. Check out her stuff and hire her at www.katieskau.com.

Matthue is a part of the Hevria arts collective. You can be, too.

It begins at hevria.com.

# sketchy

The best thing that ever happened to me was, I learned to be invisible.

I had hair that stuck straight up and teeth that stuck out and a dead-on-arrival collection of button-down shirts that my mother got me at a discount outlet. I was the kind of kid you took one look at and you knew you'll be talking to them on a computer helpline one day. In the Yards, the neighborhood where I lived, to be a nerd was to to resign yourself to an early, painful death. All the kids played football, and all the adults worked in factories. If you couldn't fight, well, they made you do it anyway.

My sole saving grace was that I could draw. If a new comic book came out on a Wednesday afternoon, by Thursday morning I'd have copied the cover perfectly. Colors and fonts and everything. I'd draw in other kids in class, too, being caught in Spider-Man's webbing or inadvertently sliced in half by Wolverine's claws. I'd make detailed sketches of their entrails dropping out, wild exaggerations of their faces going How did THAT happen or Huh?! at their unexpected dismemberments.

I tried to hide my violent creations. I drew under tables or inside my desk. I drew with the cover of my notebook closed, a textbook propped upright, just low enough for the other kids not to notice.

Eventually, though, Steve Gibbon made a grab for it. He snatched the paper right off my desk, sneered "What's this?" and gazed thoughtfully at the depiction I'd been inking of him and Perry Kerry getting ripped apart by savage androids.

I thought it would be another excuse to beat me up. Instead they loved it. They wanted to see more. When they threatened me, they started to take my comic covers instead of cash. Gradually, they started to leave out the whole beating-me-up part.

After that, they barely bothered me at all.

They weren't my friends. I didn't fool myself—they only remembered I existed when they needed something from me. The next year, when we got too old to care about Wednesday comics, they barely remembered I existed at all.

That was fine with me. There was more time for me to draw, and more time for me to be alone.

# first one in

One day at Hebrew School I was sitting at my desk before class began, early as usual. My parents always dropped me off ten minutes before anyone else came. To get a jump on things, they said, although I promise you, nobody in Hebrew School ever cared about getting a jump on things. We did our homework while the teacher was calling roll. It was just that kind of a place.

I didn't have anything to do, so I was on my phone. I was drawing. The phone was a model from two years ago, and really cheap. Its cheapness was painfully apparent. It was slow, and it looked lame, and its shell was a bright brown that no respectable smartphone would ever be colored.

This was a few weeks into the year, when things were still new and tentative and unsure. Hebrew School was two days a week, after school. In theory I should have loved Hebrew School. It was everything that lined up with my personality--studying non-required things, and learning Bible stories and Israel stories that were weird and obscure and occasionally violent. In actuality, though, it ended up being a lot of rich kids from the suburbs whose parents were forcing them to go. Half the kids at Hebrew School came from the suburbs, the rich kids, and half were from inside the city, and most of them--most of us\--were average, or middle-class, or poor.

I held the phone beneath desk level, atop my lap. Usually I drew on paper, but sometimes I just needed to draw no matter what. It possessed me. My parents would never splurge on something like art paper or charcoal crayons. That didn't matter to me. I'd draw on anything that was around—catalogues, restaurant menus, my own other hand. But my phone was easiest.

By holding my phone low I was trying to create an effect of subtlety, of sneaking my phone in class, except that not even the teacher was there yet, and there was really no point. Also, the class was completely empty. Here's the visual: A classroom with no students, no teacher, only a sea of empty desks, and me. If you didn't know the dark truth, you'd think I was like that kid who's so excited to see a band that he shows up first to the concert, actually a groupie of Prophets class.

The next person to show up was this girl. I'd noticed her in class before. I mean, she was hard not to notice. She was beautiful. One of these girls who you think, of course they grew up in a castle, with long blond hair in a parabolic ponytail who spoke in immaculate and well-framed sentences like a TV news anchor, always dressing a little too fancy for school, like she's been invited to a nightclub immediately after seventh period.

I didn't look up. I was sketching a new comic cover—tracing outlines with the tip of my finger, a few delicate strokes to show definition, then using the fat ballish pad of my knuckle to do the shading. The drawing program was advanced, and my phone was slow to react—just loading up a single graphic took almost a full minute—but I didn't mind waiting. I had nothing else to do.

Except for us, the entire room was empty. This girl, though, walked right over to my corner of the room.

Without hesitating—the kind of confidence that only suburban kids have—she plopped down right next to me. She didn't even leave a seat in between, the way you do when you sit next to a friend but you're trying to be subtle. She just watched my phone screen, my fingers adjusting the scan of this drawing I'd just done. She kept craning over into my personal space and watching, not subtle at all.

Her chin was cupped in her palm. Her elbow pivoted on the desk. She was like a tripod, like the controls at the base of a telescope, and she was zeroing in on me.

"Do you mind?" I snapped.

"Not if you don't," she said, nonchalantly, almost nicely. Like she didn't even realize anything was wrong with what she was doing.

"I can't talk," I said. "I'm drawing."

"I know. I've been watching you draw in class."

"You've been watching me?"

"Well, there's nothing else interesting going on. The class is boring. The kids are boring. And that—" she peeked over the desk to study my drawing closer "—looks really good."

"It's the new Uncanny X-Men."

"Then why does the person getting crushed by the Sentinel look like Dr. Tolsky?"

I smiled a little. I had to.

"You know what a Sentinel is," I observed. A trace of admiration crept through.

"Well, sure," she said. "I mean, what self-respecting mutant doesn't know what a Sentinel is?"

In X-Men, the heroes were all mutants, people born with superhuman powers who were feared and hated by a world that did not—could not—understand them.

"You are so not a mutant," I said. I didn't realize how defensive I sounded until it was already out of my mouth.

She shot me a knowing look.

"Not all mutations are physical," she said.

"And how do I know you aren't a spy for the government?" I risked making the joke. I could barely believe we were having this conversation.

"Because," she said, "I've been undercover my whole life."

Before I had a chance to react, or to come up with something one-tenth as clever and cool to shoot back, the teacher walked in. Somehow, the room had filled up without me noticing. And, the way that good kids like us were both trained to—and we were good kids, of course, both of us instinctively attuned to the wishes of every adult around, instantly compliant, instantly sheepish, instantly giving 100% attention—we both fell silent.

I pulled out my textbook.

She yanked the phone from my hand.

"What are you doing?" I whisper-hissed in her ear. Sounding, I'm sure, annoying, but I'm also pretty sure she didn't mind.

"Entering my phone number," she whispered back. She daintily tapped the call button on my phone, and hers lit up too. "So we don't have to stop talking."

"Stop talking!" snapped the teacher, who by now was seated behind his own desk, eyes sweeping over the class, trying to command attention and psyche out any potential miscreants.

My phone landed in my lap. I looked at the name she'd typed.

LARISSA FLEISHMAN, it said.

"Arthur Kestrel," I said, sticking out many hand. And then, "Larissa Fleishman," I said, repeating her, running my tongue along the roller coaster of syllables. At the time, I had no idea how often I'd be saying it. But in and out of days, through weeks, it would come to feel like a new language I was learning to speak, as we learned each other's private languages, spending more and more time with each other until we were best friends, the closest people to each other in the world and those words, her name, became the most natural words in the world for me to say.

two tin cans and a dynamite fuse

Alone in my room that night, nothing to do but homework. The bubbled and cracking paint on the ceiling, the shadows of sporadic police sirens in my windows. This was the Yards, the world where I lived, and it never stopped invading my head.

I sat with my drawing pad, my real paper one, which I'd saved up three months and traveled halfway across the city to buy. I squashed myself between pillows and the wall, wanting to draw, but feeling oddly dissatisfied about my usual X-muses. I was sick of copying art. I could try drawing something original—something of my own—I just didn't know what. I tried a few figures, but the guys all ended up looking like Superman and the girls in their spandex looked like girls who were way too hot to ever go out with me, making me simultaneously turned on and depressed.

Then the most unexpected thing of all happened. The phone rang.

You have to understand: people didn't just call me. I'm not the kind of person to talk on the phone for hours about, I don't know, TV or clothes or whatever. Those things bored me, and I didn't know any gossip till long after everybody else. I did have a phone, at first for emergencies and later just for other things, but I rarely used it as an actual phone.

The screen said LARISSA FLEISHMAN.

I snapped it up right away. "Hello?" I said, uncertain, not really sure whether I suspected my Caller ID of lying to me.

"What were you doing just now?"

"Uh...hosting a banquet for my many and varied friends?"

"Tres coincidence! I just slipped away from a banquet of my own."

"Now what would you go ahead and do a thing like that for?"

"You know, it's the strangest thing. I couldn't tell you. I just felt called to adventure. I typed the word adventure into my phone, and your number popped right up."

That's so nice, I thought to myself, the way she spoke to me like a normal person instead of as a girl, as if we were on the same level and I wouldn't leap to obey her every word.

"Seriously, I'm not bothering you, am I?" she said. "I just needed to get out of my world. I figured I'd see what you were doing."

"Oh, please," I said. "The reason I gave you my number is explicitly so that you could bother me."

"Actually, I'm the one who gave me your number. I stole your phone from you, remember?"

Her voice was cheerful and punchy enough so that I felt at liberty to keep the sarcasm going. "That explains everything. Except...why are you calling?"

"Well, I was just so offended that you didn't invite me to your banquet—"

"What banquet?"

Nice one, Arty. Way to forget your own brilliant ruse.

"It's okay," she said, "you don't have to play dumb. I'm not hurt. Instead, you can just make it up to me sometime."

"Sure!" I blurted out at once, way too eager. And then: "Uh, how?"

"Hang out with me this weekend."

"Really? You...you don't have any plans?"

She gave a lyrical grunt. "Most weekends, I just follow everyone else in my class to somebody's house or a movie," she said. "They just don't know how to imagine, you know? They're so stuck in Being Right Here."

"I know," I breathed. I did. I so utterly knew what she was talking about. It was exactly what I'd always thought, and exactly what I thought nobody else ever thought. "What should we, uh, do?"

"I don't know," she said. "What is there to do around you? Where do you live?"

I held my breath. Admitting my native neighborhood was tantamount to a confession. Then I said it, quick and no-biggie, "The Yards."

She took a moment to answer. "Impressive," she said. "You don't seem like a tough kid."

"No," I said. "We're just poor."

"Oh." She didn't have a good answer to that. There really wasn't one, not if you were rich. She recovered quick, though. "Do you like it there?"

"I assure you, if we were to hang out in my neighborhood, we might die of boredom."

"I doubt we would do that. We're interesting people. There must be hidden treasures."

"Come on. In the Yards?"

She snorted a laugh. It was honest and spontaneous and I wouldn't have thought she was capable of it. "Maybe you're right," she said. "It might not be horrible to hang out at a c with you, but we can go somewhere else."

"So where should we?" I was lost. I was waiting for her lead.

"Whatever. Wherever. We could do the most boring thing in the world. We'll figure out a way to make it great."

This all sounded totally exciting. Way too exciting, if you ask me. Nothing remotely exciting had ever happened to me in my life. There had to be a hitch.

"Larissa, can I just ask—I know this is a strange question, and maybe I shouldn't be asking it, but why do you want to hang out with me? I talk funny and I'm into weird things and I get beat up a lot and I'm not like everybody else."

There was quiet for a moment, and I figured she was thinking. Or maybe she was offended that I'd even asked her. Or maybe this was all an elaborate trap, one of the cool kids had put her up to this, like Portia Murray or Mitch Martin, and I'd finally caught on, and she had to think of a new excuse. That must be it. There was no other explanation.

Finally, "Because you're so not cool," she said, and I didn't understand her, I was ready to not believe her, except, uh, that was the truest thing I'd heard all day. "I'm sorry?" I said.

"Don't be sorry," she replied fast. "Honestly, you're the first person I've talked to in weeks who I didn't have to pretend to be another type of person while I was talking to them. It's kind of refreshing. I like talking to you, okay?" she said. "That's all. That's why. And I want to talk more."

I sat in silence, gobsmacked.

"You're really strange," I said.

"Is that bad?" said Larissa, sounding cautious for the first time in our conversation.

No, it wasn't bad. Strange was not bad at all. Strange was what I was, and what my best-friend-by-default Damon was, and he was also basically my only friend, and basically no one else in my world was strange at all.

"Okay, then, you weirdo," I said. "Let's go be strange together."

"Perfect! So I'll drive you home Sunday after Hebrew School?"

"You can drive?"

"How the hell else could I ever escape from the suburbs?" she said, with a snark in her smile, I could see it in my mind. "There are big things in store for us, Arthur. We're going to be great friends."

great friends

I could barely sit through classes in Hebrew School that next Sunday. I was giddy, the kind of giddy that little kids got before a movie started in the theater.

Now if you don't know, it's a totally strange thing to be in Hebrew School when you're fifteen years old. For most kids, you turn thirteen, you get called onstage for your Bar Mitzvah and you say a two-line prayer over the Torah, the audience pelts you with candy, then the next night there's some kind of party that has next to nothing to do with being Jewish and everything to do with getting all the girls in class into tight strapless dresses, and that's it. You can forget about being Jewish until you have a baby and they need to circumcise it or something.

But, post-Bar Mitzvah, everyone's thinking about college, and extra-curriculars, and also about paying for college. And it just so happens that Hebrew School:

a) looks great on a college transcript, and

b) ends, in 12th grade, with you being given a more-or-less official Hebrew School Teacher's Certification, meaning that you'll be able to make (according to the school) some ridiculously high hourly salary, teaching the next generation of suckers.

We weren't religious or anything. We were just nerds. Some of us were in it for the easy money, some of us were banking on it being the little resume booster that got us into an Ivy, or got us out of going to state school. My friend Damon, who was preternaturally smart and could speak Hebrew better than he spoke English (Hebrew enunciation: perfect; English: he had the same guttural ghetto accent as I did), I'm pretty sure he only came here for the ego boost. I hadn't really worked out what my motivation was. I was just there because I'd never dropped out, because it was easier to go with the flow than tell my parents I wanted to quit.

Larissa and I sat in class together, across the room but sneaking glances at every opportunity, texting each other things like 35 MINUTES AND COUNTING when we could get away with it. We'd been texting each other the countdown for roughly 4,320 minutes and counting, ever since that first night. Even the glances couldn't satiate us. A delicious impatience was hanging in the air.

I don't think I drew anything that whole period. I had other priorities now. We hummed with potential.

Afterward, in the fray of parent pickups, I glanced around, seeing who would notice. The parking lot was filled with Volvos and Buicks and boxy minivans skewed at geometrically inexplicable angles. Kids from my classes, kids who looked cool, or stylish, or intimidating, with football jerseys and hundred-dollar jeans and shoulders that were wide enough to balance a table on, suddenly shrunk to the size of toddlers as they stooped to climb into the backseat of their parents' minivans. It was the burn of being fifteen, a burn that would someday cool, but now it felt as red-hot and eternal as damnation itself.

I felt two cool fingers wrap around my wrist. They yanked me southward, toward the bottom curve of the parking lot. "This way," said Larissa. "Allow me to introduce you to Lulu."

"Lulu?"

The twin syllables had barely dropped from my mouth when I found myself face to face with a massive schooner of a red Oldsmobile. Its headlights were large perceptive ovals that made you feel like it was checking you out, and its grill was definitely shaped to indicate that the car itself was laughing at you.

"Arthur, this is Lulu. Be a gentleman and say hello."

I gaped. I backed away from it. There was no way this was possible, but I could swear that car nudged into me.

Larissa swung open the door—it was as long as she was tall—and threw her lithe body around to the other side of it, ready to hop in. She was still a good two months from turning sixteen, but she'd taken the necessary tests the first day she was allowed, three months to the day before her birthday—this was one of the first things she told me about herself, a demonstration to prove just how much she hated living in the suburbs. ("You've only been driving for a month?" I messaged her. "Are you sure it's safe?" "If it's not," she wrote back, "just think what an epic death we'll have.") I must have been staring at her behind the wheel as if she was an alien creature, holding onto Lulu's door handle to stop myself from floating away. She giggled.

"I think she likes you."

"Um," I said. "Hello, Lulu."

"Okay, enough with the preliminaries," said Larissa. "Shall we crash this joint?"

"Actually," I said, climbing in, "I think crashing a joint is when you show up somewhere?"

"Well then," she said, and gunned the ignition, "we've got a whole world of joints to crash."

The car gave a not insubstantial roar. The next thing I knew, we were sailing past irate parents, kicking up dust clouds in flagrant violation of the parking lot's fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit.

"Where to first?" I asked. I watched her carefully, not touching my seatbelt until she reached for hers.

Her lips pulled thin, the edges rising into two faint ghosts of a smile.

"You might kill me...."

"I won't kill you." What power on Earth could make me kill her? I was pretty sure she could say anything and I'd agree to it.

"You have to promise not to kill me."

"I won't even attempt to murder you."

"Can I get that in writing?"

"Do you have two witnesses?"

"Have you seen the backseat of this thing?" she said. "Lulu's big enough to hold a whole grand jury inside."

She was messy enough so there might already be a grand jury hiding out somewhere in here. For someone who dressed and groomed herself like Larissa did—A-list dresses, shoes that looked like designer elevators—her car was an impressive wasteland of junk-food wrappers and old newspapers.

Later I would find out she was an obsessive newspaper reader, on old-school paper, and that she convinced her mom to subscribe to The New York Times. She'd said it was for school, but really it was because Larissa was obsessed with running away to Manhattan. Maybe for a night. Maybe for forever. Soon she'd be asking me to come along, and the yearning to run away would become a dream we shared. But first, she showed me her deep dark secrets. She brought me to the mall.

*

On the surface, it's weird that we ended up being friends at all. Me in my ripped jeans and floppy canvas shoes, her in a spandex dress that managed to be classy and elusive at the same time, the thing I kept asking myself was, what in the world do we have in common? And the thing I kept answering myself was: On the inside, what do we not have in common? I guess what Larissa taught me was, she taught me to be undercover.

If you're a superhero, having secret identity is sort of a given. Superman is a bungling reporter, Thor is a successful physician, Wonder Woman is a nurse in the army. Not X-Men—Jubilee and Cyclops and Darwin and Douglock, they're always Jubilee and Cyclops and the others; those are the only identities they have. This was the only identity I ever thought I needed, being myself. I was like a bad after-school special public service announcement. My body, my wardrobe, my whole social life all proclaimed Be Yourself, Even If Yourself Is the Biggest Loser Ever Known to Humanity.

But in those early days of knowing Larissa, I discovered the value of a secret identity. She had one. She had a million secret identities, a different one for each person she knew.

"Come on," she said. "Don't lose me!"

She tugged on my hand, that Sunday afternoon at Franklin Mills Mall, a mall I would have (in my civilian identity) died before setting foot into, as she pulled me through the fake wilderness—dying palm trees planted in a tropical mosaic—situated between two outlet stores. Little kids walked around with their parents. Groups of teens huddled into corners and crevices, up to no good, or wishing they were. Larissa breezed through it all.

She was so good here. She was such a natural.

"I hate this place," she told me. She moved Quicksilver fast. I was at a daze, my brain stuttering, my whole body caught in the center of a tornado. We flew between worlds, Gap denim fading into Abercrombie crimson, dipping into Hot Topic to sample the dark and flaming miniskirts. "I grew up here," she said, "and I swore that as soon as I could, I would leave it behind. The people. The chain stores. The desperate wishes for everyone to look just like everyone else."

"So why are we here?"

"Because, my dear Arthur," she said, "there are some bodily demands that you just have to take care of. And if I went naked, somebody would arrest me, and we wouldn't be able to hang out anymore."

We went to a drugstore. Never had I thought that such a boring place could contain so many cool things. We reenacted the medieval duel from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with rolls of paper towels. She bought deodorant, three flavors of toothpaste (lavender, cinnamon, and gingermint), and a hairbrush that had a demonic-looking Hello Kitty character on it. She hesitated at the entrance gates to the tampon aisle—she shot me a sideways grimace, Do you think you can handle it?, and I held up both fists, mock-boxing, I am so very man enough.

We went to the clothes store, and she ripped through the racks with a fury like a vengeful god. She swiped aside anything garish, anything sparkly or day-glo or wild, anything too goth, anything too young. I watched her, at first repulsed by the action itself—picking out clothes was something I fundamentally associated with my mom doing—but gradually, and increasingly, curious. I watched her systematic observation of each item of clothing. I watched her purposeful deconstruction of the clothes presented to her.

And then, one arm piled high with easily a dozen garments that were still somehow all draped gracefully, the other cocked and loaded with a credit card, she passed both to the cashier who magically transformed them all into a single Santa-sack and a receipt. The card, I would later learn, belonged to her mother's boyfriend. Like Lola, it was a consolation present for not being around—for her absent father, and her nearly-absent mother, and for the boyfriend who was at least in part the reason for her mother's sporadic vanishings.

But today she didn't burden me with any of that. Today, I think she just wanted to feel ecstatic—unhinged, free, otherworldly. She just wanted to frolic. And for this, she needed a suitable partner.

"That wasn't so bad," I said, panting, out of breath, still astounded at the magic of Larissa's credit card. "What's next?"

Her eyes swept the mall court. Past the Sbarro, lingering on the chintzy shop full of novelty pens and unuseful inventions, hesitating momentarily on another shop. My eyes grazed past that shop too, fast, and then I averted them quick, out of habit.

I saw her looking, pretended not to see her looking, and then I saw her pretend not to see me seeing her.

"There is one more thing," she said. "But I don't know if I should do it with you."

"Why not? I'm up for anything. Isn't that what you said, we should be up for anything?"

"But it's a girl thing. I don't know if—if, like, are we going to be friends? Or is it going to get weird?"

I swallowed. I looked at her. She was on edge, the first time I'd ever seen her that way.

"I am weird," I said. "Being weird's what you like about me, remember?"

"I remember. But we're good weird, right? I don't want to make anything awkward."

"I don't know if you've noticed, but everything I do is awkward."

"Well, okay...." she said. "But tell me if it's weird."

"I'll tell you. Just tell me!"

"Well, I sort of need new underwear," she said, fast, out of the corner of her mouth. "But that might make things really uncomfortable. Wouldn't it?"

"Would it?" I said.

Now she looked at me for real.

"It won't freak you out?"

"If you need to do it, let's do it," I said. "I told you, I'm in it to win it."

The next ten minutes were not my proudest moment, although perhaps—for another me, in another life—they would be. I had such an out-of-body experience: imagine me, the me of two years ago whose head kept getting slammed into concrete, just imagine that he knew I would one day be casually browsing at a lingerie store with a certifiably hot girl, pretending not to look too hard on the way her fingers swept through piles of lace and silk. I don't know if it was a fantasy—it wasn't a fantasy I had ever had; I can honestly say I've thought that any girl, for example Phoenix, of the X-Men, looked way hotter in her battle suit and some glowing mind blasts than in, like, underpants.

I stood next to her. I followed her. Like a servant, like a faithful dog. At first I tried to look purposely diffident, totally not interested, with my hands in my pockets and sort of gazing away. Then I realized that my hands maybe shouldn't be in my pockets—I don't know what the other women in the store might think I was doing. So I kept them by my sides, the way we used to stand in Boy Scouts. I was careful to watch her selectively, making eye contact and giggling when she was watching me, and when she nudged her eyes selectively toward the ludicrous-looking dummies and we both exchanged silent snarky laughs. And then, the moments when she'd become immersed in the bra-decision-making process, I'd look away, worried and self-conscious and not wanting to affront her.

Then we waited in line, and again Larissa presented her magic credit card, and the cashier, who looked like she might be in college (and, I noticed, to my embarrassment, wasn't especially busty or seductive-looking) handed back the receipt and said, "You two enjoy that stuff, all right?"

Larissa smiled and I, dork to the core, beamed a bright, too-loud "Thanks!" It wasn't until after I left, back in the between-stores corridor populated by weird plastic trees, that I realized what she'd meant by addressing us both.

I crushed my face in my palm.

"Oh no," I said aloud. "Oh no."

Larissa laughed out loud. It sounded warm in her mouth and cold when it bounced around the tiled mall walls. "I'm sure she meant it nicely!" she shrieked. "You know, one day you'll be old and married and you'll hope your wife comes home with some nice new underwear."

"I know!" I said. "But I don't want that saleslady thinking about me like that! About us! Larissa, get us out of her head! Oh no!"

Of course I didn't mean that.

Of course, I hoped Larissa didn't either.

# music

We sat in her room and listened to music. Computery pop songs that sounded like they'd been written in outer space, angry girls who throttled their acoustic guitars as if they were strangling them.

don't say that i look pretty

then tell me what to wear

i got plenty of my own thoughts

you got plenty to beware

Johnnie McKenna sang, and we felt her surge of hot anger; we identified it with our own. We lay on Larissa's bed and talked about the things we dreamed of, the things in our daily life that plagued us, the things that we were gonna do when we had the freedom.

Larissa and I weren't like other people. Other people watched nighttime sitcoms and reality shows. Other people knew bad things were going on halfway across the world and inside our own government and on the other side of town and didn't care, or they pushed it to the backs of their minds.

Other people listened to soft rock stations, hip-hop stations, Muzak. We listened to music that made our blood boil. We didn't believe in love songs: to us, lyrics mattered. You had to be singing about something you cared about, something nobody else had ever said, or else why were you singing in the first place? We traded names as furtively as everything else in our friendship: How every Neutral Milk Hotel song was written as a letter to Anne Frank. Or that the new Johnnie McKenna song was really about punching out a guy who tried to touch her on the subway.

Music, for us, became a secret currency: As one of us discovered a new band, through an older cousin or an out-of-town friend or being played on the speaker system at the indie-rock record store downtown, we shared it selectively among ourselves. Proposing a new favorite band was scary and deliberate. There was always the chance of rejection, or a backlash—were they poseurs? Did their lyrics straddle the line between obsessive and predatory? Once one of us pwned the music player and called up our new musical flirtation, this new discovery that was so close to possessing us, the others would yea or nay it, and we would carry on with our lives. Possibly with a new soundtrack. The only approval we ever sought was each other's. There weren't many of us.

Larissa and I started hanging out, and we snapped into place. We understood each other. More than that, we both understood our relationship: When we talked, the things we talked about were deeper and more meaningful and realer than the things we said to other people.

My other friends, the ones I had, were guys. Larissa told me that most of her friends were guys, too. In spite of everything her parents tried to do to her—overbearing, self-involved suburban folks who spent lots of money on pink a satiny bedroom and pink clothes—she never liked to talk about clothes and makeup. Even as a child, she was more comfortable talking to boys than about them.

"I'm just one of the guys," she told me, one of those first nights, shortly after we'd started hanging out. "Guys are less fake than girls, and I just get along with guys better." No, it was slightly after that. A few weeks after we started hanging out, right after we'd started telling each other all our secrets. By this point, I'd known to look past the ponytail and skirts, to pay attention to the secret parts of her and not the parts that were there for cover.

So why me? I asked myself constantly. Why were we like this, and why were each of us not like this with other people?

Larissa had an answer for that. She had an answer for everything. "Because, really, I'm not that much of a guy," she said. "Not on the inside. I'm something completely different, something else entirely. And on the inside, you're not completely a guy, either."

She meant it as a compliment. She didn't need to explain that to me—I knew it already. Girls spoke their own private language, had their own secret values and their own way of understanding each other. They thought emotionally, not like wrestlers and barbarians and every guy at my school. I was only just beginning to figure that out. What girls did, what guys did, and where Larissa and I fit in on the scale. Or if we were on it at all.

She watched me staring off into the distance, sitting still on the end of her bedspread, withdrawing into my own mind. "Stop that," she said. Already, she could tell how my brain worked.

"Stop what?" I said. Already, I was in denial.

She flipped over backward. She extended her arm past her head, then stretched off her bed to where her computer sat. She hit a few wrong keys, then found the right one—the volume. The music got louder.

"You're thinking too much. Get up and dance," she said. She hopped up, feet on the bed.

"What?!" I yelped. I didn't dance. Dancing wasn't something that people like us did. Dancing was a boring thing, an ordinary-people thing, something that people did who were trying to be sexy and made themselves utterly unsexy because of their lame self-idolization.

"No," she said. "Dancing is the highest form of listening to music. Of standing there and letting the music guide you, turning your brain over to it, letting the instruments have the same power over you that the lyrics do and letting it decide which way your hips swish and your sides turn and your arms swing."

"I, um," I said. "I don't think my hips can swish."

"Shut up," she said, "and nullify yourself to the music."

Johnnie McKenna was on the speakers, one of our favorite singers. She had this catchy, evasive, staccato way of singing that wasn't scatting or rapping or talking really fast, but it was more or less all of those things, and sometimes she'd let loose an entirely heart-gripping confessional line and follow it up with an easy doo-de-boppa-poppa-doo and then her fingers would fly on the guitar like she was strangling it. It was both the angriest and the most joyous thing you've ever heard.

My hands were inside her hands. I let her pull me up. She was warm, and her skin was smooth, and as she moved her chest was bouncing and I forced myself not to notice. She wrapped her fingers around my palms and shook my arms with her arms and I closed my eyes and I tried to listen to the music, I tried not to think about anything else, I tried not to think at all and let my body think on its own. I tried to dance.

# sidekicks

My days were spent avoiding high school, or existing in a dazed-out cocoon trying not to notice that I was in high school. And the nights, occasionally I convinced my father to drive me to Larissa's house—I couldn't drive yet—and the other times I talked to her on the phone until one of our parents kicked us off. When we were in contact—hanging out, talking, thinking of each other—the rest of the world disappeared.

But there was always this sneaking suspicion, somewhere in our interactions, that each of us had other things in our lives, things that were not each other. Somewhere in the mix, we must eat, sleep, go to school, talk to other people.

*

One night at her house, she staged the revolution. It getting to be autumn. School had become regular, an expected thing, and so had our friendship. "You should introduce me to your friends," she casually commanded me.

"I'm so not going to introduce you to my friends."

"Come on! Sometimes I feel like, I don't know. Like a dirty little secret."

I gave her a look. That day she was wearing a white fairy dress with lace and paisley and cut-out flowers atop a sheer something. She looked like a Victorian fable.

"Larissa," I said, "no one would ever think anything about you is dirty."

She punched me. Did I say she was a fairy? Her punch hit like a bullet.

"You know what I mean! Like a Stephen King book. Like a monster that only you can see."

"Ooh, I kind of like that. And together we go around hunting ordinary people and eating their fingers?"

"Seriously! Don't you think it's weird? I know all your deep dark secrets, but I don't know any of your friends."

"I don't know any of your friends."

"That's because my friends are boring."

"Well, my friends—" And here I pulled back and I thought long and hard; I tried to see my friends as if for the first time, as if seen through the eyes of a girl who, though respectably weird herself, was not at all a social outcast. She had none of the stigmas we did—no fluency in Battlestar Galactica code and 133tspeak, no Weird Al songs memorized, no horrible wardrobe that still retained elements of our mothers' style choices. I wanted her to realize: I wasn't ashamed of her. I was ashamed of everything but her. "My friends are my deep dark secret. The few friends I have, anyway."

She lunged at me. Knocking me over and onto my back, skidding halfway across her bed, her body hovering over mine, her face grinning with a Cheshire madness and filling up my entire field of vision.

I felt all the blood drain from my face. I felt blood pooling in places I didn't want to think about.

From her predator's perch, Larissa lolled her head around casually. Thankfully, blessedly, she didn't seem to notice my sudden discomfort. To her, we were still just friendly old Arthur and Larissa, bouncing on each other like Winnie-the-Pooh and the denizens of Hundred Acre Wood.

"Come on. Introduce me. Show me around. I want to know everything about you, Arthur! I want to be a part of your life. What are you doing tomorrow night?"

Tomorrow night was Friday night. Friday night was movie night with Damon.

"Uh...going to synagogue?"

"You are not."

"I am! I'm going to be a junior rabbi."

"And I'm going to be the Torah scroll. Come on, Arthur, what are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing! Well...Damon."

"Damon isn't nothing! I mean, he doesn't sound like nothing."

So: Every Friday night that we didn't have anything else to do—which was to say, every Friday night—Damon and I hung out. Usually we had no specific plans. No: usually we had very specific plans, which began with me throwing myself on his sofa and grabbing control of the remote.

Damon and I had grown up together. He was, if anything, even more of a misanthrope than I was. I'd watched every episode of Doctor Who, but he'd memorized all the dialogue. I liked science fiction, but he was into science.

I warned Larissa about him. But what could I do? She was determined. And when Larissa is determined, the only thing that gets in her way is a natural disaster.

This Friday was wildly rare in that Damon and I had actual plans—concrete, can't-miss, real-world plans. It was the premiere of the new Robot Braveheart movie. Damon and I had seen every Robot remake together since Robot Citizen Kane.

Now, the difficulty was this: Larissa and I had been making self-deprecating but genuinely interested jokes since the project was first announced. (It was to be directed, we both noted, by a young, attractive, oddball director who Larissa had a crush on and whom I wanted to be.) The Robot movies were pure Damon and me, but Robot Braveheart fit Larissa's and my strange aesthetic perfectly: self-mocking, ultimately pointless, but still good-heartedly weird. Larissa and I didn't take ourselves seriously, but within that, we took ourselves incredibly seriously. On the other hand, Damon was heady, intellectual, and couldn't tell a joke when it spat straight in his face.

I wasn't sure if Larissa was ready for this. But that Friday night, once we were seated and the coming attractions started up (all of them were advertising stupid romantic comedies and drunken buddy movies, of course; we dismissed them all by rolling our eyes at each other) Larissa and Damon surprised all three of us by getting along perfectly.

After the movie we all went home. Larissa and I called each other's house phones at 11:42 exactly. We picked these arbitrary times to call each other, times when our parents thought we were asleep and when they would probably be asleep, too. Then we synchronized our watches and made sure to call each other at the exact same minute. Usually one of us would dial, and the other would pick up before the phone had time to ring.

At 11:40 I fondled the phone beneath my covers. Pressed to my hip, fingers grazing the buttons.

At 11:41 I forced myself to wait.

At 11:41 and a half, I started to dial.

Immediately I felt the telltale vibration. A fraction of a second before the ring sounded, I picked up.

"What did you think?" I asked.

"He's a little self-centered," Larissa said. "He's really smart, but he thinks he's even smarter than he is. But he's sweet. I think he's one of us."

"'One of us'?" I tried to keep my voice steady and impartial. "Really? Like, inner circle?"

"Not inner inner circle," she said—meaning, I knew, her and me. "Still, he's good people, I think. He thinks the same way we do. When he talks, I can sort of see where some of your thoughts came from."

Cool, I thought. I decided to take that as a compliment.

I was a little bothered when Damon asked for her number, and a little more bothered when Larissa was okay with me passing it along, but we settled into a new normality. They talked, and it was cool. And it was even cooler when I found out they'd been talking about me—things I'd said, my ideas repeated. Without me being there, even. Like I had somehow achieved sentience beyond the limits of my unmuscled body and pale skin—or, no. Just like I was a superhero. People mentioned my name without me being there.

People were talking about me.

#

# strange

# friends   
in places

At first I thought Larissa and I would become each other's universe. Then I realized our plans were bigger than that, way bigger. We were creating a new universe together.

One by one, the pieces fell into place. Damon was the first piece. And this guy Crash Goldberg from my Thursday night gaming group, whom I'd always thought was a drug addict or completely insane. Turns out he was just bored. One day Larissa and I came across him in a used bookshop, reading the Kierkegaard book we'd been after—it was called Either/Or, and he'd written it pretending to be two completely different and opposing philosophers—and we hung out for the rest of the night, Crash pretending to be each of them (or, at various points, both of them at once).

A few weeks later came Larissa's friend Mitch. He went to our Hebrew School. He was in different classes than we were, having gone to Hebrew day school until a few years ago, but we hung out during the breaks sometimes. I'd never really given him a second glance—he wore clothes that were popular, and his body was neither scrawny and pathetic or fat and pathetic—but Larissa spoke up for him. They'd known each other since kindergarten; he used to steal extra pints of apple juice for her, and they'd escape together to the playground during naptime.

Between classes, when we ran out to a convenience store to get snacks, Mitch tried to order in Klingon. That sold me. His mother was an author who'd written a semi-famous feminist science fiction novel in the Seventies. That, too, was a solid resume builder. And Larissa and Mitch had been friends centuries ago, which meant that he had witnessed a valuable piece of Larissa's past, something I would never get to experience. Bringing him into the group, maybe, would let me witness another piece of Larissa—the same motive, perhaps, for her wanting to meet my friends.

Larissa and I introduced ourselves to each other's friends slowly, one by one. We weren't snobby about it—the first time we hung out with Crash, for example, was completely an accident—but at the end of the night I turned to Larissa and said, "Well, what do you think of him?" and she reached over and tousled Crash's hair (Crash was still there) and said, "I think we should keep him." And so we did.

Sometimes we went downtown, walked around the streets with the bookstores and the bars, the youngest people on the street by twenty years easy, content to swim in the ambiance. Sometimes we went to independent movies, or (occasionally) a concert of a band we'd never heard of, but the alternative newspapers said would be good. Sometimes we just sat around one of our houses and drank strange drinks we found in the all-night supermarket. It sounds boring, and maybe it even was, but we were too happy with ourselves to notice. In the jumble of not fitting in anywhere, we'd found a place to fit in.

One night Larissa said as much to me. At the end of the night, after Mitch had driven home and we'd dropped off Damon and were on our way to dropping off me, she told me: "I think we've done it. We created a real-life X-Men."

"We have," I said, awed, the full grandeur of the statement sending chills through me. "We're like a losers' club. The only thing we have in common is that we have nothing in common with anybody else."

"I don't think that's true," said Larissa. "I mean—it's not the only thing we have in common."

"Well, you and I have our connection. But not everyone else on the team has to be psychic, right?" I said. "Like Cyclops and Emma Frost?"

Only later did I realize that I might have made a mistake—in the heat of the moment, it hadn't occurred to me that Cyclops and Emma Frost weren't really co-psychics; they just shared a psychic bond because they were a couple. And only later, later later, did it occur to me that maybe it wasn't a mistake at all that I said it, but me wishing aloud, or maybe even asking her what she thought about it.

But I don't think that's true. I think, in the moment, we really did build something together—a world, not as big as New York City, but as big as we needed it to be.

# places i can breathe

The whole world was different now. I was bursting with secrets, a whole other life. When I came home to my parents I didn't just avoid them because I didn't want to deal with them, I avoided them because there were things about my life I didn't want them to know—things that were neither naughty nor illegal, but still fell into the category of Things My Parents Should Not Know.

And it wasn't just Larissa, either. It was everything about my new world. They wouldn't Forbid Me From Hanging Out With A Girl—actually, they'd probably be happy I wasn't gay—but still it felt like something I needed to protect them from, something I needed to keep entirely mine.

*

Dinner on this particular night was lasagna. It was one of the better family dinners—not quite pizza, but almost. My mother did most of the cooking. It used to be my dad, but he'd gotten a promotion at the factory that got him home even later, and since my mom did morning shift at the pharmacy, it fell on her shoulders. The lasagna had that sticky burnt cheese that invited gnawing, long stringy strands that you could collect on the edge of your plate and gather into a single lumpy mouthful. And then there was the pasta part, which was also good, and none of the vegetables used in lasagna ever tasted too vegetabley. Garlic bread on the side, made from a long Italian loaf toasted hard, and the meal was a bona fide winner.

The only down side, in fact, was my parents themselves.

THEM: How was school today?

ME: Good.

THEM: What's Damon doing these days?

ME: Nothing.

THEM: Are there any good Youth Group events coming up?

ME: I wouldn't know.

I hadn't gone to Youth Group in years. Literally a year and a half. Larissa, too—we'd both found that, rather than being lumped together with other people who weren't that much like us, we'd much rather prefer to be alone. And so instead we wound up hanging out alone, together.

We spent a lot of time downtown. Not doing anything special. In fact, purposely doing nothing. Mostly in coffee shops. Mostly while already highly caffeinated. We often talked about taking a bus to New York for the night—it was only two hours each way, and the bus stop was a few blocks away from our favorite cafe—and we dared each other constantly about it. The art, the freaky people, the bands playing in submerged coffee bars. New York was like the world as we'd create it ourselves, if only because New York in our heads was a world we'd created ourselves. The more we talked about it, the more it almost seemed doable: leave Philly at 7:00, get to Manhattan by nine, spend half an hour wandering around and get home at 11:30? Even for us, it was a little too crazy.

So no, my parents knew about my distaste for Youth Group. They asked me about it anyway, though. I think out of a vain hope that I would meet more friends than just Larissa, or just some normal people.

The lasagna was good, though.

Over second helpings they asked about school, how it was going, and what we were working on. That, I could do. "In math, mostly it's quadratic equations, but Dr. Bonner was telling us about string theory yesterday," I said. "It's a hobby of his, he says. Mostly everyone was zoning out, but I was really finding it interesting. And in English, we're reading Wuthering Heights."

"Wuthering Heights? Already?" said my mom. "I don't remember reading that till eleventh or twelfth grade."

"Maybe because your teachers were merciful," I snarked, my mouth full of pasta sheets and eggplant.

"You don't like it?"

"I don't hate it. I really like reading those long Victorian-style sentences, and there's a little bit of an episodic plot twist thing, which I like. But Heathcliff and that Catharine lady—"

Oh no. I'd opened up to my parents, started talking to them honestly about my own thoughts and feelings, and now I'd fallen into the classic sand trap. Discussing girls with them. Possibly even relationships.

"Yes?" prodded my mother, anxious to keep the lifeblood of this conversation flowing.

"They don't shut up. They're consumed with each other and everything, but it's getting to the point where it's a little absurd. It's like they have nothing else to do with their lives except mope over each other."

"Well, that's how some people are when they're in love," said my father.

"That isn't love, it's being stupid. They ignore the most blindingly obvious things. I mean, I know how it is, but they don't even try to help each other along or just talk to each other. Emily Bronte is completely clueless about what love's really like. Their whole lives stop. They never go outside of their lame mansions. Even though they're right there and they could, and it wouldn't just make their relationship easier, it would make their whole lives better...."

"That's just how love works for some people," my father offered. "You feel strongly about someone, but life goes on." He was chuckling, but good-naturedly. He wasn't making fun of me just because I was critiquing an author who'd been dead a couple of hundred years and had probably sold about a billion dollars' worth of books.

"You know how it is, is that what you said?" said my mother. Her eyes sparkled with amusement. "Do you mean, you've been in love?"

"I don't mean that," I said. "I just mean, I have an idea how it works when you have feelings for someone."

"Well, I know you haven't spent forty years pining away over someone, but who were you referring to?" she asked. "Anyone we know?"

"No, Mom, it's not," I said. "And if it was, do you really think I'd tell you?"

"You don't have to tell me." She realized how that sounded, and then she said, "No, I mean—it's fine, you can have your secrets—"

"Ugh." I threw my head down toward the lasagna. I wish I would've thrown myself all the way into it.

"Olga," warned my father gently.

"You're always telling me how smart I am," I said, louder than I should have. "So how come you're saying that I can't know what love is like? Aren't I just a little perceptive about human emotions?"

"I'm not saying anything!" my mother protested. "Everyone's entitled to have their own bonds that connect you to other people, whether we're talking about Catharine and Heathcliff or Arthur. I just think, if nothing's wiped you out totally and completely, than it probably isn't true love, the kind that they're talking about in the book."

"Are you talking about Tony?" I shot back. Tony was my mother's boyfriend, the one she'd had in high school before she met my dad.

Her face sealed up tighter than Shabbat dinner leftovers. Lips squeezed together, cheeks puffed in. My father leaped up from the table.

"Young man—"

"Dad, it isn't fair—"

"Don't tell us what's fair! You don't talk to your mother that way."

"But she doesn't get it. She just insulted me—"

He pursed his lips and listened. He was waiting for me to finish. I knew he was on my side, even a little. He could see my point. I just couldn't stop talking.

"You guys think that just because I'm younger, I don't understand this stuff, I don't experience things as vividly? Maybe you don't understand. Maybe you've never felt anything this intense—"

I was losing him. I think it was the you guys part. I shouldn't have lumped him and my mom together. That's how you make enemies.

Fortunately—fortunately for all of us—my phone took the opportunity to ring just then.

I could see my father heating up, getting ready to tell me not to answer it or he'd take it away or something. Using my most well-honed quicker-than-thou video gamer instincts, without thinking about it or waiting for the second ring or checking to see who it was, my thumb jammed the SEND key and I picked up.

I held it out, a foot or so away from my body, as though it was my hostage and I wasn't letting go of it till we were out of there. Easy, now. Treat me with respect and nobody gets hurt.

Neither of them said a thing. My father's face reddened, puffed up, and then deflated. The humiliation of defeat was in his eyes.

The words LARISSA FLEISHMAN were like healing salve to me, the knowledge that soon I would be away from all of this, that I could agonize to her how my parents tried to force me to talk about love, how they were only with each other because of convenience, and they were both really boring people, and she would empathize with torrid stories of her own parents.

"I'm going to take this in my room. I'll be back," I said to them, knowing that I wouldn't.

# a functional unit

#

I used to be jealous of people like us. The jocks, the conventionally hot kids, the people who had people just like them to hang out with. I pretended I was disgusted by them and their identicality and their conformity, but really I wished there were fewer of them and more of me. Or just more of me. Even Carrie Moss and her pack of weirdos, who wore lots of black and eyeshadow and might abuse puppies or just did a lot of drugs, I hated them most of all. How could those people who purposefully repelled everyone else have a group of friends, and I was the only person I knew who was remotely like myself? It wasn't logical. It wasn't fair.

Or maybe it was. Maybe I just had to be on my own until I found Larissa and the others.

Except that the others were, each in their own way, super annoying. Crash Goldberg knew all the words to The Raven, all eighteen verses of it, and would sing it aloud, belting it out like a metal song, over and over again for hours. Damon was always trying to get everyone to stay at his house and play video games, or to go to someone else's house and play video games, or threatening to not show up at all.

And Mitch Martin was always inviting other people along without telling anyone, and without asking if it was okay. He pulled up in that gas-guzzling mutant car of his and it was always a surprise, who was riding in his side seat? Usually a girl. She laughed along with the rest of us and acted really interested in what we had to say, but we could tell, she had no idea, and Mitch would have to explain all our references.

Then he would do something grandiose and unexpectedly nice—like offering to buy everyone falafel—except that, in doing so, he'd also somehow decided that we were all going out to falafel, and not pizza or the vegan hippy place or Vietnamese.

Thinking about it now, in retrospect, it feels like bribery. Or like we were the high-school equivalent of Pavlov's Dogs. Buy us food, and we will believe everything you say. We'll believe in you.

But back when it was happening, all it felt like was: He likes us. This is how much he likes us.

Some of us—Damon, for example—were perfectly happy to accept. "It's free food," he said, his mouth stuffed, traces of hummus caught around the corners. "Don't ask questions." Not everyone went down so gently. Crash left the restaurant and ran to the Tamale Lady on the corner, bought some tamales, and smuggled them back into the falafel shop. He lifted forkfuls of polenta and chili sauce into his mouth, baiting the rest of us by its very smell.

"Hey, bud, I don't know if you're allowed to do that," Mitch said.

"It's your fault," Crash shot back. "I always have tamales Thursday nights. You should've checked my Internet calendar, you would've known."

The rest of us couldn't figure out what to say. It was hard to tell when Crash was joking and when he was serious. I laughed it off. Crash was from the city, like me, so we were always sort of on the same side. Mitch scowled.

Another time, we were walking on South Street. No destination, just walking. It was cold out, the sort of cold where puffs of smoke come out of your mouth and you try to act like it's just cigarette smoke. It was a weekend night, sort of late, and we were all starting to act silly. Crash was climbing up the fences and drainpipes of historic buildings. Damon was going onto different people's Internet connections as we passed their houses and uploading mp3s from Rocky Horror onto their hard drives. Larissa was watching him over his shoulder and giggling. I remember being mildly annoyed, and wanting to dive into a private conversation with her alone, except that tonight it really didn't bother me. I was in love with all of us, and in love with this weird misfitty superteam we'd fallen into, and in love with the night and with the downtown cobblestone streets and, for once, with life itself.

Mitch, for no reason, put on a British accent. He kept calling Larissa "milady" and me "garcon," which was French, not British, and I was waiting for the right moment to point that out. We hit a red light and Mitch took off his hat and waved it impatiently at the traffic post.

"Change, damn thee!" he bellowed.

Larissa lay her hand on his arm. "Constable Martin, a modicum of patience might behoove you," she said softly, teasing but also serious.

"Patience is for those who can't afford otherwise." He sniffed. The light took that opportunity to change to green.

Now we were standing on the edge of Center City. On the far side of the traffic light, South Street ended in a bridge. Beneath it, a 200-foot drop, was a highway. After that, the Delaware River.

We ran madly across, all of us gripped by this wild need to be on the other side, the dark side. Crash was first, running on all fours. The rest of us were nearly as unhinged. My lungs were heaving. It was great.

As soon as we were on the other side, we regressed back to our normal selves. Mostly.

"By Jove," said Mitch, taking Larissa by the arm, "I think I needed that."

"I'm sure you did," said Damon, a little unsettled.

"And what's with the accent?" I said.

"Vhat accent do you mean? Ah, thees accent?" He tried to exaggerate it. Now it sounded even more rubbery and fake.

"Seriously, where did it come from?" said Larissa. "You sound like Dr. Jekyll."

"Ahh," said Mitch, getting louder, "But perhaps I am only waiting to turn into Mr. Hyde."

His fingers snaked around her waist, both hands, and lifted her in the air.

"Mitch!" she shrieked. Playful, but with a slight edge.

"Who ees this Meech? My name is Edvard Hyde!" He kept raising her up.

"Stopit!" Larissa's fists pummeled his shoulders.

"Call me Edvahrrrrd!"

"Edward." I tugged on his sleeve. "Come on. This isn't funny."

Damon gestured frantically from behind Mitch to never mind it, just don't mess with him. Deb and Crash saying, Mitch, you're starting to get a little scary.

Mitch, in his Victorian Freddy Krueger voice, rasped, "Everyone's a critic." He looked up to Larissa to see how she was doing.

Larissa was trying to at once maintain her composure, appear dignified, and keep her skirt from snaking up too high. While being suspended above our heads. It wasn't easy, but she was doing a reasonable job of it. Mitch stopped and blinked up at her, as if to ask for her opinion—or as if he'd just put himself on pause.

"Down," she said flatly.

Mitch's face changed. His posture cleared, although he still had Larissa in suspension above him. Before, he looked like King Kong. Now he was like a father lifting up his daughter.

"Alright. You want to go down? Here's down."

Still holding her, Mitch stepped onto the handrail of the bridge itself. One huge Nike straddled the handrail. That was all that was holding up both of them.

A tall fence lined each side of the bridge. Although the fence didn't look so tall now, with Mitch standing next to it. With Larissa still in his hands, he lifted her over the fence, and—gently, almost tenderly—set her down on the far side.

He hopped off the handrail, then stepped back to admire his work.

I got a jolt—something between jealousy and alarm. I tried to meet Larissa's eyes with my own. Do you need help? I wasn't sure if they were playing, or if this was real. I waited for her to look at me. She didn't.

Larissa stood on a narrow ledge. It couldn't have been more than three or four inches wide, the area on the far side of the fence. Beyond that, just air. A 200-foot drop to the highway.

"Mitch," she said. Her voice shook with a mix of horror, disgust, and something resembling fascination. "You complete sycophant."

She was wearing heels. Not those intense, practically-vertical heels, the kind that were ostensibly forbidden in school but girls wore them anyway, but also not relaxed, easy-to-walk-in, lounging-around shoes either. These were fashionably aerodynamic white studded ankle-boots with stiff heels, pointy toes, and a sideways cut that revealed, if we were being completely honest, a fleetingly meaty glimpse of toe cleavage.

Larissa rotated herself so her feet were both firmly situated on the ledge, and aimed them toward the far end of the bridge. The ledge wasn't long, six or eight inches in width. To one side of her was the fence. To the other, nothing but air, a hundred-foot drop onto the highway below. She took her time. Usually she was meticulous with her body, every movement planned and perfectly executed, but this—this was high art. She didn't even hold onto the fence.

Soon she was at the stairs.

She took them carefully, pausing after each one. The stairs were trickier than the bridge surface. Nothing to support her, nowhere to hold onto as she shifted her center of balance from one step to the next. We thundered down past her, down to solid ground. Larissa was still only halfway. We held our breath. We waited for her to rejoin us, to say that everything was okay, or to simply wave at us or give us a sign. She didn't. She didn't even see us. She didn't acknowledge our existence until she touched ground.

The first thing Larissa did when she landed was to take off her heels. She slipped her feet out of them, stepped behind them, and then hurled them straight into the Delaware River. First left, then right. The river was right there. Two quick splashes, and they were gone.

The second thing she did was to slap Mitch in the face. It was loud, much louder than I expected a slap to sound like. It also looked pretty severely embarrassing. His head jerked back.

Then she turned to me and said, "Arty, could you please hail us a taxi?"

I'd never hailed a taxi before. Also, we weren't exactly in an optimal place for it. This was a deserted spot off the highway that was only in operation as a tourist area, and that only during the day.

Despite both those things, I managed to hop over the wall of bushes that was designed to keep tourists from wandering onto the road, avoided getting hit and injured by that very same traffic, and attracted the attention of an oncoming taxi that happened to be empty, and happened to be piloted by a very courteous recent immigrant who either didn't know the rules about only fitting four people into a taxi, or didn't care.

Five of us piled into the back seat. Mitch sat in front. We could've left him alone—he certainly deserved it after that, and none of the rest of us would've protested—but when the taxi pulled over, he walked over to it with the rest of us. Nobody said anything. Also, he'd gotten a ride down here with Larissa, and we couldn't abandon him here. Even considering what he'd done, none of us would've taken the responsibility of leaving him by the river alone. That's the biggest difference between being in school together and knowing people in actual adult life, I think. In real life, you could just abandon an unrelenting jerk like Mitch. But we were in Hebrew School together, and we knew that a Sunday or a Tuesday or a Thursday would come, and we'd have to live with seeing him again.

Loser or not, Mitch was our loser. It was a weird moment, but we've all had moments like that. And he acted like nothing had happened, like the entire thing had just been one big wacky joke, and Larissa didn't say anything, so we acted like that too. We forgave him and brought him along as we stepped out of that taxi—Damon baffled, Crash still playing with the onboard computer, me staggering out, one leg asleep, and Larissa, who'd stared out the window that whole ride and said nothing, walking with perfect posture and long slender legs held straight, not wincing or flinching as the bare bottoms of her feet touched the cobblestone Center City street.

# LET IT BE KNOWN

# ____________

#

# YE WHO ARE UNAFRAID TO ENTER

# Larissa Fleishman will be reveling in

# the strange existential burden

# OF TURNING SIXTEEN

# not yet old enough to

# emigrate to Eastern Europe

# BUT old enough to

# DRIVE A CAR

# (getaway or otherwise)

# (not that driving will

# help you get to Eastern Europe)

#

# prepare for a vociferous Transylvanian experience

# YOUR MIND WILL MELT

# so will your fingernails

# SO MAKE SURE YOU'RE WEARING

# SOMETHING HOT

# actually it's a costume party

# actually we should've mentioned that

# earlier in the invitation

#

# LARISSA'S LASCIVIOUS LURTHDAY BASH

# FRIDAY FRIDAY FRIDAY

# DOORS 7:30

# COCKTAILS 7:31

# SCREENING OF THE ROCKY

# HORROR PICTURE SHOW 8:00

# please contact Larissa Fleishman to find out which

# character you will play

# or look inside yourself,

# because

# —face it—

# you already know

# the true answer

# birthday

Larissa's birthday was coming. We had big plans. It was an occasion to mobilize the whole team, and to get them to cleave to our will. Larissa was already exceptionally good at that in general—getting people to do what she wanted—but tonight would be a night where each song that came on the stereo came from her collection, where her every whim was our command.

The Rocky Horror part came immediately. Larissa's inspiration, not mine. We didn't know about it for real, only that it was a movie with people as strange and creepy and vividly alien to the mainstream as ourselves. Everyone was supposed to dress like a character—none of us had ever actually seen the movie, but we could Google it, Larissa said. I told her that nobody was actually going to get their costumes—or, at least, no one was going to get them right. She said it didn't matter. That it was the least of her plans for the night.

"And what are the rest of our plans?" I said to her.

"That," she replied, savoring the way her lips formed the words, "remains to be seen, dear Arthur."

"Well," I said, injecting a hint of mystery into my words, "perhaps there'll be some mysteries in store for you, too."

I meant it to sound spontaneous, as though I'd just thought of saying it, but I'm sure Larissa heard something in my voice. Maybe she didn't know what I had planned—not exactly—but nothing got past her.

"We shall see, Artimedes," she said. "We shall see. First, let's just get through tomorrow and make it to the party."

*

Although we went to different schools—her in a paved-over part of the suburbs, me in a crappy armpit of the city—we talked to each other all day about our plans. Between each period, I snuck into the bathroom and sent her photo messages on my phone. You weren't supposed to have them in school, cell phones, but you could get away with it if you kept it in your sock, kept it on silent, and never let anybody notice it. Almost everyone was bad at that last part. They forgot to mute their new hip-hop song ringtone or they stumbled across a new movie they just needed to show everyone. Not me. These people the government forced me to attend school with every day, there weren't many of them who I would call friends. And the only person I ever needed to show anything to was Larissa.

First period I sent her a message, one of my hands gesturing impatiently at an imaginary watch on the wrist of my other hand. (I hated wearing watches.)

After second period I got back a movie of her mouthing silently, in super-slow motion, SOO-OO-OON. A trace of a smile in the corners of her lips.

I sent back a wide-mouthed, freaking out-but-in-a-good- way face.

She replied with a similar expression. Her eyes were crossed—I couldn't do that—and her tongue was sticking out at an inhuman angle (what a great tongue, I thought to myself proudly).

I replied with a series of thirteen photos, my fingers forming the letters H-A-P-P-Y B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y. If you've never tried to contort the fingers of one hand into a capital B while simultaneously trying to take a picture with your other hand, you have no idea how severely I deserve some kind of special Oscar-level recognition for this feat.

On the way out, Carrie Moss, who I didn't hate but whose occasional charitable offerings of a hi I would never mistake for friendship, stumbled into me. She was one of those people who, in an alternate universe, I might have been friends with, or at least wanted to be friends with—black nail polish, knit cardigans in a skull pattern—but who, in this life, was way too involved in her own world to ever notice that any other worlds existed.

Anyway, Carrie was walking out the door to the girls' bathroom just as I was walking out the door to the boys', which, in a true act of high school sadism, the architects of Philip Yardley High decided to set facing each other. Exiting the bathroom was the most terrifying and self-doubting experience I had ever experienced. There was no time to double check that your fly was up, your hands were dry, anything. Just, suddenly, there were girls. There was Carrie. We collided.

"You okay?" she said when we broke apart. Each of us brushed off our respective self. I withdrew as fast as I could, hoping not to give her time to find something wrong with me.

"Yes," I said testily. "Why?"

"You've been in and out of the bathroom constantly all day."

"None of your business," I said. I dove back into a bathroom stall and sent Larissa another picture, this one of me rolling my eyes, exasperated at life itself.

That type of picture, I sent her a lot.

Class that day was unbearable. We'd cross-pic'd a lot before, but never this often. I couldn't wait to beat a retreat to the bathroom and see her, see what she had to say.

French ended. I checked my messages. There was a new one from Larissa, of course. I hit play.

"TOOOOO MEEEEEE!—"

She was singing. Out loud. I silenced it quickly. Quick enough? I wasn't sure. At first I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered my last message—the spelled-out letters—and it made sense. I slammed my palm against my forehead. Hmm, that? I contemplated it. I re-slammed my forehead, took a pic, and sent that back as a response.

Her next reply was in text. I could feel by the way my phone vibrated against my ankle. Text was either really good—she wrote a long reply, or a story—or really bad. I dove into the bathroom and read. I stumbled out.

Last period was longest of all.

Here were our plans, before she sent the message:

Eight of the coolest people we knew—a combination of our real-life gang, some online friends, and a few kids we saw in the hall but we never actually spoke to, but looked cool enough so that we harbored fantasies of one day being friends with them—all of us were going to converge on the basement of Larissa's mom's big suburban house, a basement big enough for her younger brother to hold soccer games in. We weren't entirely sure what would happen once everybody got there, though we had our wishes (Larissa and I, in planning, had spent most of the time debating who to invite and what music to play) but we knew it would be colossal.

Here were our plans, after I read Larissa's note: She would be home working on her term paper. I would be home staring at the ceiling of my bedroom. We would both probably spend the whole night on the phone with each other, who were we kidding? But the party, our party, our perfect night, was—

#### CANCELED. my stupid mother needs to have a stupid business dinner with her stupid lawyer boyfriend at our stupid house. for the purpose of entertaining many stupid clients & making sure the world doesn't fall into the hands of gay people or minorities or teenagers. so completely sorry. spread the word.

Crap.

I spent the first ten minutes of the next class emailing everyone. My half of everyone, anyway. Our friends were all just as furtively active in their online lives as I was during school, maybe more. By the time school was out, everyone would know. And they would all be as plan-less and socially stranded in their own neighborhoods as I would be. But at least there was that one comforting thought. That, as miserable as I would be, I wouldn't be the only miserable person out there. Larissa and me and all our lifeless friends, we would all be alone tonight, and that feeling of aloneness we would share together.

# static

We didn't make arrangements to talk that night, but I still figured it would happen. For some reason I fixated on that number of ours, 11:42. Magic time. I forced myself to stay up—most nights I was awake that late anyway, but tonight there was nothing to do, nothing to keep my thoughts busy, and any book I tried to read was just putting me to sleep—and, though I kept my eyes squarely focused on the display of my cell phone, it steadfastly failed to flicker. I kept unlocking it, checking to see if I'd missed any calls. Nothing and more nothing. I fell asleep with my eyes half-closed, still checking the display, my background picture of Cyclops and Jean Grey from X-Men burned into my vision, fading into dreams.

*

On Saturday I didn't hear anything from her. That night, either. Nothing unusual for normal friends, but this was Larissa and me. We were family. Closer than family. We were practically psychic. I spent the whole day clawing the walls, punching inanimate objects, tearing apart my old Lego sets. I opened my mind to the universe, tried to listen for her voice. I didn't hear anything.

I locked myself in my room that night and spent all night on Internet chat boards, variously pretending to be Larissa, myself, and Robot Citizen Kane. I felt shallow and creepy, though, especially when strangers began to hit on me-as-her and I didn't shoot them down. "My breast size? it's the best size," I replied to them, and then, "lol," I added, just to keep it sounding real. I was momentarily impervious to the fact that the real Larissa would sooner kill herself and be replaced with a real robot duplicate rather than type the letters lol of her own volition.

Sunday morning my parents dropped me off at Hebrew School. It was on the campus of a big, sprawling suburban college. I had to walk through a huge field to get there, through a soccer field and two baseball diamonds. The building itself was a massive brick structure that towered over it all like an impassive castle. Every morning, but that morning in particular, I had never felt so small.

I was early for first period. My parents had to drive me, since it was in the suburbs. When it was up to them, I would always be early.

First period was Hebrew language class. It was my Achilles heel. In every other subject, no matter what school, I approached genius level, but when it came to languages, my brain sputtered and died. Damon said it was because I used my brain too much—I needed to just stop thinking and let my instincts take control. But I couldn't. There was too much to think about. The class discussions were always such mundane, open-ended questions, things like Talk about your day and Where is your favorite place to go. I didn't just want to say random things, give easy answers. I needed to make sure they were the right things to say. Deciding on the answer I really believed in, then telling the steps of the story in my mind, then thinking of how best to translate those words into Hebrew. It was a lot. There were too many things that I loved to do. Squeezing them into my minuscule Hebrew vocabulary was next to impossible.

So was trying to get along with the semi-conscious trendazoid zombies in the class.

"Everyone separate into groups of two," said Morah Lebowski. "You will talk about what you did this weekend." She clapped her hands like she was doing a magic trick.

I was face to face with Joey Friedman. He looked and sounded like a slug.

"So," he said, in English, "what did you do this weekend?"

"Nothing I ever, ever want to talk about here," I said back in Hebrew. I repeated the ever because it used more words.

"Uh, what?"

"We're supposed to do it in Hebrew," I reminded him.

"I know," he said. "I just didn't get what you said."

I repeated it.

Then it was Joey's turn. "Ani halachti le misada," he said. "Achalti shtayim, uh, hamburgerim."

Nice, I wanted to say. You went to a restaurant. I'm sure it was a major spiritual experience for you. I hope you communed with those hamburgers and tasted every bite of meat like it was your last.

"Atah lo sha-alti li shum davar," I said. You didn't ask me anything about what I did.

"Mah atah sheh-ani shoail?" he said. What do you want me to ask about? "Zeh beit-sefer. Anachnu osim maspik." This is school. We did enough.

"I don't know." I gave up. "It's just, like, this isn't enough. This isn't just vocabulary words. This is life."

"Hebrew, please," chided Morah Lebowski, and though I wanted to, I was too annoyed to point out that by speaking in English, she was violating her own rules. "You will speak in Hebrew."

She moved on. Joey Friedman flashed a look at me that was both snide and triumphant.

*

At the ten-minute break between classes we found each other at once. I stepped into the hall and she was already on her way, coming for me. She was walking slower than normal, more careful, cautious, as though she was on a fashion-show catwalk, or just moving in slow motion. Over the next days I would look back, replay it in my mind, and wonder if there was anything I neglected to notice, maybe a bruise or a limping of some sort, her left foot coming down just slightly harder than the right, a cowboy-like separation to her strut. Something that no one else would notice, because she was Larissa, and she was both a natural actress and a natural liar, able to throw anyone off her trail. But she wasn't supposed to be able to fool me. She'd never even tried to keep a secret from me before.

I didn't notice any of it. I was feeling out her mood, waiting for her to start talking, impatient to see whether she was flitty and evasive, the way she sometimes got in public, or her usual intense self. I might have been foiled last night, but the question burned in me deeper than ever, and I was determined to pose it to her.

That day she was wearing casual clothes—loose sweater, a flowy poetry skirt, her hair up in a bun—not like the clingy bodysuit shirts and tight jeans she had started manifesting of late. I felt inexplicably relieved. Like I wouldn't have to be tested by her body as much today.

"Hey," I said.

The word was imbued with meaning. I still don't know how it got to be the word we use for greeting. It was so brusque, so rough and hurried and unfriendly. But it was soft. The way it came out of your mouth, it was almost a kiss.

"Hey," she said back. From her, today, it didn't sound like any of that. It sounded like a dying breath.

"What happened? What have you been up to? Don't tell me—you were thrown into such a severe depression from your party being canceled that you forgot my number. And then you forgot that it was programmed into your phone memory. And then you forgot that you owned a phone."

Larissa registered my attempts at humor with a delicate upward nudge of her eyebrows, but made no attempt to join in. Instead she sighed sadly, as though she wished she had the energy for sarcasm.

"It was a very long weekend," she said.

"Not the good kind of long weekend, I assume."

"What?" She sounded distracted.

"A long weekend. You know, where you get Monday off and everyone else goes to the beach and you and I just spend all day hanging out on South Street in the bookstores." Jokes never worked when you had to explain them.

Larissa looked at me like she was doing a math problem in her head.

"Do you want to go swimming?" she said suddenly.

"It's only a ten-minute break—"

"Do you want to?"

She squeezed my hand so forcefully that I couldn't say no. This was natural for us. For some reason it was totally okay for her to take my hand in school, totally platonic. This was the first time she'd touched me today, though. She led the way, walking slow. I followed just behind, trailing her. I kept her pace.

I thought she was doing it so we wouldn't look suspicious.

*

We never actually swam at the swimming pool. That was just what we called it, going swimming. The pool was directly beneath the corridor where all our classes were. Just sneak into the rear stairs—the stairs that nobody from the Hebrew School used—and, one flight down, we were right there. Occasionally on Sunday mornings there were old people inhabiting the pool, their swimsuits ineffectively designed to disguise the raw, bloated proof of aging, the flab of their thighs and stomachs. Instead it called attention to other, nastier layers of hanging skin you'd never think about—the waddle under your neck, the bunching skin behind the back of your knee. When Larissa and I first discovered the place, we were equally grossed out and engrossed. Since then, our feelings had grown in both directions.

Today there were no old people. We had the whole pool to ourselves. I followed Larissa's lead and planted myself in the corner. The smell of chlorine comforted me. Whatever I was going to say to Larissa, whatever the result, we would always have chlorine.

"I hate my parents," she said. "They get in the way of everything."

"They can only control you physically," I told her. "They can't control our thoughts or the songs we sing in our heads. The second we turn eighteen, we're on a collision course with New York City."

That was our mantra. We had to keep repeating it, to keep reminding ourselves that it was real.

"I know that," she said crossly. "But how are we supposed to make it that long? What if something happens before then?"

"Of course we're gonna make it."

"I have something to tell you," she said.

"So do I."

"You do?" Larissa looked up in surprise, at me. It might have been the first time that day she realized I was really there.

"You first," I said. It felt like I was sitting on dynamite. All it would take was a slight raise in temperature, and it would detonate. My pulse was rising steadily. My body grew hotter.

"No, you."

She was slouched against the wall. Aquamarine and pink tiles. Her back was on a vertical incline against the floor, and her knees were pulled up high. She tucked her hands underneath her head, between her calves.

"Really?"

"Arthur."

"I don't know."

"Arthur, don't torture me. Just say it."

I leaned forward. I needed eye contact for this one. She turned around, summoned by the length of my pause, and gave it to me.

"I wanted to tell you on Friday," I said. "Probably after everyone left. I was going to tell my parents to pick me up late, so I'd stay after and help you clean up from the party. I—I really like you."

"What?" she said.

"Not as friends. Although, that too. I really like you. I like everything about you, and when I spend time with you it's like I'm bigger than myself in real life, and like I'm somehow a different person, specialer—" I stopped. "What were you going to say? Do you have a boyfriend?"

I'd meant to say that as a joke, but now that the words were out, I was getting a sick, slimy feeling in my stomach. Hanging in the air, unanswered, it didn't feel like so much of a joke at all.

"No, no, Arty," she said. "It isn't like that, it wasn't that at all."

But she was still looking like a master of ceremonies at a funeral.

"So...what do you think?" I paused, waited, felt like a circus performer who'd just done a double aerial somersault in reverse for the first time ever, and the audience wasn't clapping. Why weren't they clapping? I'd just made the most major confession I'd ever had to give. My chest was throbbing. My heart felt like it had exploded, like a little baby alien from the movie Alien had birthed, ripped right out of me and landed, still beating and squirming, on the floor between us. I couldn't believe I'd done it. Said my feelings out loud, shaped them into words and breathed them out of my lungs to fly into the world. To Larissa. It wasn't even practice, a drill. This was the real thing. I'd told her how I'd felt. Why wasn't she reciprocating? Didn't she feel it too?

"Do you feel it too?" I said. "I mean, are you okay? What do you think about what I..." I fumbled. Saying it once had ripped my heart out of my body. I was not going to say it again. I couldn't.

She shook her head. She couldn't talk. Her mouth hung open like she was going to cry.

"What is it, then?" I said. "What did you have that you were going to tell me?"

She slid herself up, back against the wall for real now. Turning her head to focus back on the swimming pool, and away from me, she closed and opened her mouth a couple times.

And then she said it.

# party

Mitch Martin showed up at Larissa's house shortly after 7:30, she told me. He didn't want to look bad by being the first one there, but he also didn't want to miss the cocktails. The night's drinks weren't alcoholic—we were odd kids, not bad kids—but Larissa had gone overboard in her research and preparation. She blended piña coladas from actual coconut shavings, and lime rickeys using the juice and zest of over forty limes. Larissa and I had juiced them ourselves after Hebrew School last Sunday. On Tuesday morning my hands still smelled like lime.

Mitch had driven over in his own car. He was three months older than Larissa; the car had been his birthday gift. Larissa's mother discovered him at the door. An apron covered a $700 casual evening gown; she was friséeing appetizers for the dinner party. Mitch extended his hand. His autumn gloves were a leafy brown polished leather, tight. They curved with his palm.

"Mrs. Fleishman!" He tried not to show his surprise. "I didn't realize you'd be joining us tonight."

Larissa's mom smiled at him indulgently. She got on well with his parents, not friends, but close. They talked on the phone occasionally. Every year at synagogue, they sat together in the benefactors' section.

"We didn't realize it either, until today," she said. "Larissa is working in the basement. You can go down and say hello for a minute if you'd like."

At this point I sort of picture him flashing her a bucktooth smile, Geez thanks Mrs. F., maybe threw his coat on the railing of the spiral staircase as if he owned the place as he shot down the stairs. Mitch was a basically cool guy. He always looked straight at you when you spoke. He'd always been like that: eager to entertain, on everyone's good side. Everyone was always saying that. If you'd known him, you'd be nodding right now and saying that exact same thing to yourself right now: Mitch Martin is a solid guy.

He came downstairs to where Larissa was. She was sitting on the '70s fire-hydrant-red squeaky vinyl couch with electric blue trim, the one her mom kept threatening to get rid of and Larissa kept bargaining with her to save. We called it SuperCouch. It was only a loveseat, but horizontally, it was massive; you could surround yourself with books. Right now binders full of homework ringed Larissa's crisscrossed legs. When she saw him, she shot up.

"What are you doing here?" she said. "The party was canceled! I left you a message!"

"What, on my phone?" he said. "I never check messages."

"My mom's gonna kill me. She said I have to stay down here for the next three hours and pretend I don't exist. I can't even use the upstairs bathroom," she said. "And I have this term paper I've been neglecting. I have to get it done before the weekend."

"Your mom doesn't care if I'm here. She likes me."

"She's just being polite. The second you're gone, she'll change into Imperius Rex mode. She'll start screaming that it's my fault you came."

"It's not your fault. I didn't get the message."

"Yeah, but you're committing the grievous error of assuming that my mother uses logic to make her decisions."

"At least let me sing you 'Happy Birthday'."

"Ugh." Larissa fell back into the pillows. "Whatev."

Mitch threw off his coat. It landed on the floor behind him, lifeless, as though it was disposable and now he had no further need of it.

"Happy BURTH-day, Miss President..."

He settled down into the couch. Larissa moved aside some of her books. It was a two-person couch, but Mitch sat right in the center, not off to the other side, so that the triangle of her folded legs brushed him. Larissa wore black leggings, skin tight, the around-the-house kind, but still sexy.

Usually, when you bump into someone, you retreat away, but this time Mitch didn't. He was the kind of guy who, if there was a sandwich lying on the table, assumed that somebody put it there for him. He just left his knee there, in the center of the pillows, brushing up against Larissa's leg. They were already touching, and he pushed this further by doing an exaggerated Marilyn Monroe dance, wiggling his pudgy babyfat body, using comedic effect in order to gain valuable millimeters of physical contact. He sang the chorus again, just in case she missed it. Happy burrrrth-day to yoooooooo...

"You dork," she said, giving him a shove. "Okay. Thank you. Now get out."

"You don't want me to do that." He smiled that smile that said he knew everything. He grabbed her hand, as it was already on his knee, mid-shove. He caught it and he didn't let it go.

"Ha ha. It'd be great if you didn't have to, and I was allowed to just have a party, and then you could stay all night. But, unfortunately, you can't be here..."

"But I am here."

"Yes, you are here."

He was still holding onto her hand. She wasn't holding back onto his, but she wasn't pulling it away.

He moved forward. He kissed her.

It was her birthday. Her party had been canceled, and she had homework to do.

She closed her eyes and kissed back.

He might have said something next, when they separated for air. That was good, maybe, or I've been wanting to do that for so long. And maybe she agreed. Maybe she said something like that on her own.

What happened next, according to what she told me, was this:

He kissed her again. She kissed back. His tongue came inside her mouth, and hers welcomed it. ("Ew," I said. "Larissa, you really don't have to provide all the explicit play-by-play—" "Arthur," she said. "Stop. Just wait.")

His hands went under her top. She did not stop them. It was uncomfortable. The shirt she was wearing wasn't meant for it; it was too starchy, too tight—if that was possible—and not stretchy enough, not enough room for both of them. And then her bra.

She pushed them away, his hands. He thought she was playing with him. He moved them to her hips, then to her back, just above her buttocks. She thought he was just trying to cuddle.

So they did. He was calmer at first. They pressed against each other, still, except for the rocking of his body. She tried to ignore it. Except for that, they were basically just hugging. His arms around her. Hers around him. This was what she could be sure of, the friendship that they had. Holding onto each other. Her fingers gripped him tight. Friends.

Then she felt his fingers. They were at the hem of her shirt, worming their way underneath. Searching for her leggings. Pulling them down.

No, she said.

Let me. Please.

This is too much.

I want this so much, Larissa.

He started to move again.

Don't do that.

Let me.

Please.

Come on.

Stop it.

Stop fighting it.

Mitch.

Larissa.

MITCH.

She could feel him, now. There was no barrier of clothes now, just him. He was on her. He was on top of her. The more she tried to move her legs away, the more he buried himself between them.

Her hands struggled beneath his body, struggled to push at his bare chest. She could barely move.

I want you so bad. I've liked you for forever.

I like you too. But not—

Ssh.

He was heavy on top of her. He was naturally a big guy. Born big, well fed. She tried to push him away. He thought she was writhing against him. He went to kiss her again. On top of her, pressing her head into the vinyl sofa fabric. He kissed so hard that he couldn't feel she was trying to pull her head away.

"Mitch!" She bit his lip. His head yanked back.

"Mmm."

"Stop it. Get away from me."

"I can't stop this now," he said. He had her pinned down. More flesh touching than clothes. "Come on. I want this so bad. I need this too much to stop." And he was inside her, and he would not come out, and he kept going.

# i need to be

# alone

When Larissa started talking, her voice was heavy with phlegm, about to cry but never actually crying. By the time she had finished it was craggy and dry and worn out. The whole time, she didn't look at me at all. She stared straight ahead and talked to the pool. The water I stopped focusing on her. My eye contact drifted away. After a while, I stopped listening to her voice and instead read her lips as they curved around each word.

"Are you okay?" I asked when it was apparent that she'd finished. "Do you want me here? Or do you need to be alone?"

She shrugged. "I'm fine. It's over. I don't need anything now."

There was this space between us. I hadn't noticed until now, but it was greater than usual, like we'd never touched before. I looked uncomfortable. I felt miserable. "Can I hug you?" I said, not even sure whether I should be asking for permission.

"Yes," she said. Reaching over, grabbing me, squeezing her negligible presence between my arms until she was sticklike, almost nothing. Her hands looped my around my waist and hugged hard, hugged violently, hugged like the apocalypse was coming. I hugged back lightly, less full-bodied than her, partly because I didn't want to suffocate her or squeeze her or hurt her, and partly because I was (I'm sorry, but it's true) embarrassingly hard at that moment.

We broke apart. I separated first, released her fast, leaping back from her skin to the reassuring air. I didn't want to scare her. I shouldn't be touching her at all. My mind flashed back to the things I knew. What did she need? What was I supposed to say, to do? "I'm sorry," I said, feeling weak as I said it, insufficient. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there."

"I know," she said. Her voice had been shaky and intimate during the telling, her fingers moving in a quiver as she spoke, her lips ready to cry. Now she was still quiet, but it was an empty sort of quiet, like she didn't have any sadness left. "It was such a stupid plan. We shouldn't have had the party in the first place. What were we even thinking?"

"It was your birthday," I said weakly. It didn't feel like an answer at all. It felt like a trap.

"It was a nightmare," she said, even quieter, and hugged herself. She was shaking. She was trying to hold herself still.

"Do you," I said, being careful, trying not to make her upset—trying not to show how upset I was. "Do you want to talk to the police?"

"No!" she yelped.

The noise bounced off the empty pool walls and the high chambered ceiling, and she turned a bright beet red.

"No, Arthur," she said, a throaty whisper this time, compensating. "I mean—it's not a police thing. It was just a misunderstanding. It's not like—he's not a criminal. He's not going to strike again."

"Are you sure?" My hands clenched and unclenched, wishing I was holding something hard or sharp. I wanted to lash out, to hit something. Larissa didn't sound like she wanted to hit anything at all. "Larissa, we should do something! We need to take care of him."

"This isn't a gang war, Arty, it's Mitch. He's not a criminal. He might not even know it happened."

"He is a criminal! He did something criminal and he should be punished. I'm sure that monster knows exactly what he—"

"Don't be that way, Arthur! He knows what he did. I'm just saying—I don't know if he realized it. How I felt. When it happened."

"He'd have to be pretty dense, if he was that close to you at the time."

"He had...other things on his mind."

"But you said no."

"It's complicated. A—a lot was going on. idontknowifheheardme." This last part she muttered through tightened teeth, and mostly to herself.

"What did you just say?"

"Nothing."

"Come on, what did you say just now? You can tell me."

"I'm just, I'm not sure if Mitch heard me."

"But, like, of course he heard you. You were in the room. There's no way he could not be paying attention to you, Larissa, you're perfect—" I stopped.

"Arty," she said. "Please. Don't. Don't say that, it's not true."

"You don't even know how awesome you are, Larissa. You don't deserve this. You're the most incredible person ever...."

I stopped, not knowing what I was saying, not knowing how to stop myself. I was in awe of her. I was sad and angry and jealous. In the middle of this, between my confession and Larissa's confession and what was supposed to be just a normal Sunday at Hebrew School, I could still feel my desire straining at the limits of myself, wanting to be made manifest. As she sat there, curled into a ball, her arms pulled into her chest, I thought of her hands wrapping around her breasts, the way that they might feel. If she'd ever hold them like that to show to me. No. That was not how I was supposed to react. How was I supposed to react? My mind raced to health classes, afterschool specials, the only places I'd ever heard this talked about before. Only, this felt less real. I needed to be spineless, blindly supportive, robotic. "Just tell me what you need," I said to her. "What do you need?"

"I don't know." She kept looking at the water instead of at me, as if some glowing lady would rise up out of it and hand her a magical object to help her with her problems. A sword. A taser. A pregnancy test. My mind was racing. If she wanted to hide out alone in a cave, I would find her a cave. Or we could find a group of friends and go after him.

"Arty!" she snapped.

I looked up, stunned. Punched, almost.

"I don't know right now, okay? I'm still sort of in shock. I promise, as soon as I need anything, I'll come find you. I'll come running. Right now, I'm just dealing. Okay?"

"Okay."

"You can help me deal, if you want. Stay here with me. Talk to me."

But what do you think about what I said? I wanted to ask. I couldn't. Even I couldn't be that tactless, not all the time. Not now.

"Hey, guys!"

Damon was on the far side of the pool, walking around toward us. "What happened to you today? You both missed the whole Holocaust Film class. I had to sit alone with all those suburban geeks from Bridleton. We watched the rest of Inglourious Basterds. You'll never guess how it ends."

In no time Larissa was on her feet, blinking twice, clearing the tears and salt and redness from her eyes. She stood up straight, one arm slinking against the front of her hip and thigh, her chest perking up against that flat grey sweatshirt in indefatigable rebellion against her misery. It was all but impossible to tell that she was the same person who a moment ago had been slunked against a wall, on the verge of losing it. Now it must have appeared to Damon as though Larissa was the one comforting me.

She reached down a hand—her palms, at least, were still sweaty—and helped me up.

"Oh, noes, Damon," she said to him. "How did it end?"

"The Nazis lost World War II. I mean, spoiler alert! Just kidding. Well, not really kidding at all. Hey, if you guys are gonna cut class, the least you could do is tell me about it."

"We're sorry, Damon," said Larissa. She sounded, as only she could manage to sound, genuinely sorry, not fake at all. "We didn't even realize we were doing it. We were just talking and before you know it, it had gotten to be—well, now."

"It's okay. I'm not offended."

He was, of course, Nobody ever said they weren't offended unless they really were. But of course he would be—he never understood Larissa and me, he was always trying to play catch-up, and this was one more thing between us that he would never understand. We rallied out the pool doors, passing, on the way, a man and woman both wearing Speedos who gasped in surprise to see us. Except for us, the pool was usually deserted at this time of the day. They were holding hands in a lusty pretense of amorousness, eyeing each other hungrily. They opened their mouths to say something, but we went too quickly for that to happen. We hustled out of there fast.

Instead I caught the tail end of a meaningful, angry glare from Damon, a glare he must've been sending in my direction for a while. It might have been betrayal, that I should've been in class with him or at the very least invited him along—as though it was my fault—but, after playing it back in my head, Damon's angry face didn't look like that at all. It looked like jealousy.

# decoy

My parents picked me up that day, both of them. I sat in the backseat. I was silent. That was nothing new.

It wasn't that I hated my parents, or that there was anything to hate them for. I was just preoccupied. I had all these thoughts in my head—big thoughts, grand thoughts, universe-expanding thoughts—and they would not know anything about them. Some were about girls. Others were about G-d, and what I was doing here on Earth in the first place, and whether there was any reason behind it. Most of these were things that my parents had probably never questioned in the first place. If they had, and their theories were anything like mine—

• We have the imperative to fulfill every bodily desire, and so we should eat junk food all the time and have sex with anyone who wants to have sex with us.

• It really is a jungle out there, and the biggest and strongest of us will inevitably rise to the top, so I should spend as much time isolated in my room as possible, hiding out, and bone up on my hacking skills, since they were the only conceivable weapon I was ever any good at using.

• Maybe all that really mattered was what happened in our minds, and everything else was an illusion. So I should really just think a lot, and read a lot of books—in other words, exactly what I was already doing—and masturbate as often as I conceivably could.

• And, okay, if there really was a G-d, or someone or something who created universe and engineered our biology to act this way, then why did we want sex so bad? Like, why did we want it more than we wanted to protect our friends or keep them safe? Why was sex so irrational? Why would G-d curse us with wanting it so bad?

—I definitely didn't want to know anything about it.

I couldn't stop thinking about what Larissa had told me. More than that, I couldn't stop thinking about how it had happened. First I thought: Mitch raped her. And then: Mitch had sex with her. And then: Mitch got to have sex with her.

I loved Larissa (loved? Yes, as a friend...that was okay, wasn't it?). I'd thought (more times than I'd ever admit) about being with her, alright, about having her, being with her, not like that of course, but with many of the same specifics. Naked. Entwined. So close you could smell what each other ate for lunch.

And then, because I have no control over my brain, the Larissa in my head who'd been crying in my shoulder turned into a slightly more naked form of Larissa crying on my shoulder, and I started thinking about the way her shirt shifted against her body, and I wanted to stop thinking like that but my mind just wouldn't stop. The more I tried to force myself to stop, the more it just, I don't know, kept going.

I wanted her. I wanted to hold onto her, to protect her, to have her, to own her completely.

And then I started to realize: I was not that different from Mitch Martin.

My father, at a red light, changed the music from the evil soft-rock station they usually listened to (Celine Dion marathons every day) to the college station I'd recently discovered and which I was trying to evangelize to them. They didn't play the loud punk stuff and the experimental noise that I was really discovering, but they played good, less-famous bands, and there was more variety. I wanted my parents to be like the kind of people who listened to this station. Like themselves, but a little more adventurous and a little more sophisticated. I thought it'd be good for them.

Usually I forced them to put it on, or did it myself. Today my father turned to the new station himself. He flashed me a capitulating smile through the rearview.

Most days I'd feel a sense of victory. Today I barely managed a weak smile before turning to stare into the car windows in the next lane. Victory couldn't have been further from my thoughts.

*

That afternoon I lay outside in my parents' yard. It was too cold for it, almost winter, but I did it anyway. Our house was right back against a factory where they made snack cakes, with a hundred whirring fans in the wall and rounded metal chimneys coming out of the roof. They looked like decapitated robots. It was such a shitty neighborhood, the Yards. My parents had both grown up here. So had their parents. It was where most Jewish immigrants had settled, straight off the boats. Housing was cheap and there were plenty of jobs in the shipyards. But somewhere along the way, most families had gotten out of here, scored better jobs, moved to the suburbs. Only some of us got stuck at this particular rung of the evolutionary ladder.

Mitch and Larissa had both grown up in Bridleton, in the suburbs. It wasn't so far from here, but it wasn't so bad. There were parks, malls, better schools. Maybe it was better to come from here, not be incredibly privileged, and not have all that bad stuff happen? No. Living in the Yards was a completely different kind of torture.

I lay there. The cold from the grass crept through my clothes and into my back. I didn't mind. I wanted to suffer a little.

I crushed my nails into my palm and squeezed hard. I couldn't see inside, but I could feel my flesh turning red, my skin blistering. I wanted the blood to come. I wanted to take today back. Everything I'd said, the supportive, smiling, utterly stupid and unhelpful yes-man I'd been. I wasn't making anything better for Larissa. Telling her how I felt about her hadn't evoked any response from her. I mean, given the circumstances, it was understandable—but then, why had I even done it? It was dumb. It was foolhardy. I'd leaped into a situation without a plan, putting the onus on her to reply, and now I was stranded.

ME: I really like you.

HER: Oh, so do I!

Embrace. French kiss. Curtains.

ME: I really like you.

HER (sassy): What are you going to do about it?

I pull her to me. French kiss. Curtains.

ME: I really like you.

HER: Oh, crap. Regrettably, I'm having an existential crisis. I might be gay, or possibly just asexual.

Six months later we slip on some black ice in the middle of the street. Fall on top of each other. French kiss. Curtains.

But, no. Instead of me waiting for the perfect opportunity, it had to be:

HER: (Very obviously distracted by some sort of emotional event that she hasn't mentioned anything about.)

ME: I really like you.

HER: I was raped.

The Earth ruptures. The sky is streaked with blood. Onyx dragons fly out of the earthquake cracks in the land. Absolute apocalypse.

I bit my lip, hard. This time I really did taste blood. I pulled my back away from the grass where it was getting warmer and rolled myself into a fetal position on the ground. I wanted to cry—not because it hurt, but because it didn't hurt enough.

# normal

The week began. It was a relief. Larissa texted me Are you okay? and all I could do was write back, are YOU okay? All day we sent each other these aimless, fluffy messages; we didn't say anything in them. They weren't aimless at all. The were just reassuring each other: we were still here.

Then Monday night Damon came over to play video games. My parents wouldn't let me buy a game system—they said that I didn't need one, and I pressed them about whether they meant that it would distract me from my studies or that we couldn't afford it, and they said, with a look of defeat, We just thought you were better than that.

So Damon brought his game system over, and we plugged it into the big TV in my parents' basement. It was really old, but huge. The only trouble was, the screen got staticky on the bottom, so on certain games, you were never sure how many points anyone had until the end of the level.

Damon also brought nacho chips. As he ducked behind the TV to hook up the console, I popped open the bag and dug in. Damon and I had that kind of easy, you-don't-have-to-ask friendship where we'd walk into each other's houses without knocking. He spoke to me and I went straight onto autopilot, talking without thinking. I sometimes do that, like a knee-jerk reaction of my mouth, whenever what's happening around me is light years away from what I really care about:

DAMON: Hey, is it okay if I open the salsa and the cheese in the fridge?

ME (distracted): I don't mind.

DAMON: Is it okay if I finish the last Pepsi too?

ME: I don't mind.

DAMON: Is it okay if I play first?

ME: I don't mind.

He didn't take it personally. He was used to me and my brain.

Damon and I had been like this forever. We were the only two geeks in the Yards; we grew up on a steady diet of TV (almost always, public television and cartoons) and football (neither of us knew how to play, making us the only two guys in the entire Yards who didn't, so we always hid out in school during games). The social hierarchy of the Yards dictated an economy of kill or be killed. For most of my life, Damon was the only guy who it was safe to be a guy with.

First up was a game called GizmoNo. You were this tiny furry creature called a gizmo, possibly an alien, possibly just a weird little animated avatar. Officially, the object of the game was to collect gadgets of some sort, and at the same time, you had to try and not get yourself turned into a scaly goblin—which happened when you did any one of a zillion random and stupid things. Shortly after buying the game, though, Damon and I discovered that it was way more fun to turn into a goblin right away. Then you could spend the rest of the game ripping apart the gadgets, eating other furry creatures, and generally wreaking havoc. Remarkably, once you turned into a goblin, your points actually started subtracting. When you dropped below zero, you started earning negative points. You probably weren't supposed to play this way, but our games often turned into a competition between Damon and I to get the absolute lowest score possible.

Damon started playing alone, then once I'd eaten my fill of chips—less than a quarter of the bag—I plugged in and we went multiplayer.

It started innocent enough, with both of us finding treasures (him: an old telephone, me: a wind-up toy bird) and trashing them. Damon's goblin tore the plastic buttons off the phone, one at a time. He tossed each button in the air, caught it in his mouth, and devoured it.

Meanwhile, my goblin ripped out the gears from beneath the wind-up bird's wings. I carried them over to the balcony and hurled the gears at other, more law-abiding gizmos below.

"Hey," said Damon, in real life. He flashed me a disgruntled look. "What are you doing that for?"

"Why, what's wrong?" I said. My goblin hopped down from the railing, still balancing the gears in one hand like a stack of pizzas. I twisted my controller and sent one gear flying into the air like a frisbee. It sailed up through the room. Then it crashed straight into a golden clockwork chandelier, shattering upon impact into a million pieces. It sent shards of glass raining down on both of us. My score was rocketing up by the negative thousands.

"You're being destructive," said Damon. His demon pulled away, leaping for higher ground.

"Isn't that the point?"

"Not at the expense of other players! Did you see what happened when all that glass hit me? It took away like half my life points."

"I didn't do that! You lost them when you fell off that slot machine two worlds ago."

"Are you crazy? That fall barely took off two hearts."

"It did not, it took off a lot more."

"Two hearts. One and a half, maybe. Hey, what were you and Larissa talking about the other day in Hebrew School?"

"Which time?"

My face drained of color. The controller shook in my hands.

"Last time. You guys were talking about something, then you shut up as soon as I came along."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Whatever," Damon said. Now he was standing atop a mountain of broken computers, televisions, cell phones, and kitchen appliances. In game parlance, it was called the Trash Volcano. It was famous, inside the game, anyway. You could always go there and dig around the edges to find a power-up or a trinket to lure away goblins with.

But you had to be careful. One uncertain step, or if you attempted to move the wrong piece of electrojunk, and the entire mountain could come crashing down on top of you.

And Damon had scaled almost to the top.

"What are you doing?" I said slowly. The mere act of prodding through the Trash Volcano was dangerous. Setting foot on it was ridiculously risky. Damon had excellent command of the controller, and his avatar's dexterity was ranked near the highest, but this was pure suicide. "You can't just jump up there and—"

He jumped.

There was a low rumble, louder and heavier and angrier than anything I'd ever heard come out of the TV. The ground shook. Fragments of trash bashed against each other. The entire volcano shuddered against itself. You could see its intricate maze of rubbish distending, unfastening. The entire thing was wonderful and terrible to watch. I had to admit, the animation was pretty great.

And, as I watched, the Trash Volcano crumbled and collapsed. At the very bottom was my poor tiny avatar.

It's impossible to describe how it felt. One minute I was there, on the screen, my body controlled by a bunch of buttons, existing in a world vivid and meticulously rendered and two-dimensional. The next, I was sitting in a living room that smelled like air conditioner and Fritos, holding a piece of plastic in my hand and those buttons just did nothing. A bright green lizardlike speck flashed at bottom of the television screen, swallowed up by the wave of detritus.

I tried to dodge it, but it was too late. There was nothing I could do.

I sat there, open-mouthed, trying to pull myself out of the game and back into my body.

"Why'd you do that?" I cried.

Damon shrugged.

"I didn't do it," he said. "The volcano did."

I fumed silently. Well, I tried to. But Damon's eyes were glued to the screen. My presence in the room was extraneous.

Okay, okay. He'd made his point. I hit the reboot button on my controller and waited for my gizmo to rematerialize—back at the beginning of the level, of course. I'd be completely depowered, not even a goblin. I could still try to regain my status, and it wouldn't take too long. Mostly it was just a pain.

Mostly, really, it was just uncalled for. I was usually miserable at video games. Since I only got to play them while hanging out with Damon, this was my sole practice—which also meant that Damon was way more studied and talented than I was.

Maybe I was getting haughty. But not enough to make him kill me.

At least, I didn't think so.

Something was wrong. My gizmo wasn't resetting.

"What's up?" I said. I strained my controller further, bending the joystick as close to full-circle as it could go. Nothing changed.

Damon went all the way up to the TV. He strained to see what was happening beneath the static.

"I don't think you're dead, Arthur," he said.

"What do you mean? I have to be dead. A mountain of random crap just fell on top of me."

He switched to his tablet. He'd kept it in the same bag as his game system. He yanked it out and entered something in. He scrolled through one website, then another.

"It looks like you're still alive," he announced at last.

"How can I still be alive?" I pulled the tablet away from him, less relieved at my non-death, and more annoyed at his knowing more about my avatar's condition than I did.

He pulled up the Gizcyclopedia. According to the entry on the site, not only did goblins love the taste of gadgetry, but they were also impervious to it. If you were a goblin, there was no way you could be killed or crushed by metal. (I knew that. Goblins loved metal. You didn't even have to tell your character to eat a gadget; all you had to do was move close to it, and your goblin would start eating it.)

However, according to the site, I hadn't been attacked or crushed. I was buried.

Burial, it said, was unavoidable—and, apparently, even worse than death. Depending on which rumors you believed, it could take between five days and a month for my goblin to eat his way out.

"Sucks to be you," murmured Damon. He'd picked up his controller again, and he was back in the game.

"But can't I start over?" I paged through the Gizcyclopedia site, looking for a trick or a loophole. "Or create another character?"

"Nope," he called back. His voice was flat, like he wasn't really paying attention. "Not without paying for another character to start all over again. All you can do is wait till your guy gnaws his way out."

"You knew about this," I said. But I said it weakly, and my voice hung with desperation.

"Did not," he replied.

I didn't even bother to did-to him in reply.

hulk smash

Dinner was a weird, disembodied kind of torture. Sitting with my parents, watching each of them singularly absorbed in the bare mechanics of serving themselves food, the different levels of bringing it from the serving dish to their plates, from their plates onto forks, worming its way inside their mouths, I couldn't believe food could be that interesting. Food was something bland, mushy, necessary. My teeth grinded and chomped. I wanted to rip through things, to go hunting and eat meat. This soupy casserole, its autumny flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg and some kind of leaves, felt like a tease.

This was what I least wanted to be doing right now. I had no desire to sit here, pretend I was a fully-functional, well-adjusted teenager and that the world worked perfectly, with a space for me in it. I wasn't. It didn't.

I felt the way Superman must have felt, trapped in a newsroom, in his civilian costume, watching some horrible explosion happen halfway across the world while he was powerless to stop it. Or, no: I felt like the Hulk, anger and gamma radiation rippling inside me, just beneath the skin, trying to remain human while feeling these radioactive feelings surging and soaring, ready to explode.

I threw down my fork, shoved away the untouched whatever, and pushed my chair away.

"What did we do now?" said my mother to my father. "Doesn't Arthur like...um, what is this again?"

I slipped out the kitchen and up the narrow stairs to my room. The door shut, and I twisted the lock that I was officially not allowed to use and if my parents discovered it was locked I'd probably get in major trouble, but sometimes I just needed the assurance of being alone.

"Hello?" I said.

I didn't need to ask who it was. For one thing, not that many people actually called me. For another, nobody else would stay on an unresponsive line for the minute and a half that it took me to pull off my escape. And finally, it had to be 7:19 P.M.

7:19 was one of our times.

"G-d," I said. "It's so good to hear your voice."

"Arthur Kestrel," said Larissa, "I haven't even said anything yet."

I smiled to myself. "Call it a premonition."

"All right. If you insist."

"If I insist what?"

"If you insist, I'll call it a premonition."

We were so smug. The playful banter, the whole Nick and Nora Charles/Holmes and Watson rapport that we always shared, it sprung right back into action. I don't know why, but it just then occurred to me how worried I'd been over the last few days that we'd lost it. We'd barely spoken. Enough to know she was alive, but not much more. Just these few seconds we'd been talking were sweeping the breath of life back into my lungs. Traces of our fake put-on English accents were creeping in. We still had our game.

"So, nu, tell me things! We haven't said anything deep all day. You have to have developed some wild new philosophical insights in that time."

"Well, I emailed you about that idea for listening to a different song in each ear so that..."

"So that you could influence your mood in two different directions, with angry music in one ear and soothing music in the other, yes," she finished. "But, I mean, your life. I don't know what you've been doing for every hour of the day today. I'm deprived, Kestrel. Fill me in."

"You're depraved, you mean."

"That too, maybe. But after everything I've been through, I think I'm allowed to be a little silly."

We both laughed, and when it died down, I said, "Yes, you're definitely allowed a little more silliness than usual."

It was the first mention she'd made of what happened, and I didn't know how to react to it. Did I dare talk more about that? Should I change the subject entirely?

I was silent. She took care of it for me. "So," she prompted, "you were saying, about your exciting life?"

"Have you spoken to Damon lately?"

"Sure, just last night. I called him to apologize for blowing him off at the pool. Why?"

"Did he seem weird to you?"

"What do you mean? Be more descriptive. He's always weird."

I struggled. "Different. Angry. Off." I tried harder to come up with words. "I don't know. A sort of weird passive-aggressive. Just weird, I guess."

"What happened?"

Larissa didn't play GizmoNo. To explain would take too much time, and I didn't want to spend the whole time talking. I only had a certain amount of Larissa time in any given night, and I couldn't waste our whole conversation on footnotes. "Maybe it was just me," I said. "I keep wanting to slam my fist into a window. I feel like I've had a Nine Inch Nails song playing on repeat in my head all day."

"All day?" Her voice went down a notch. Nothing got past her.

"Since this weekend. Since what happened."

A long silence.

"Yeah."

More silence. I know I'd killed the whole nonchalant tone she was working to maintain. "I'm sorry," I said.

She gave a long, biting sigh.

"It's okay," she said. "I probably deserve that. I haven't been thinking about it at all. I suppose a certain amount of escapism is okay, but I'm probably escaping too much. It's basically been completely out of my head."

So she hasn't gone to the cops, I thought.

"It's understandable," I said. "You're allowed. After what you've gone through—"

"But that's just it," she said. "Nothing happened. I mean, it did. But I keep going through stuff, replaying it in my mind, and trying to figure out the one spot where I could've stopped it—said it was hurting or pushed him away—and it never comes up. I just never got a chance to. The whole thing feels like a dream. It doesn't feel like it—like what I thought happened—actually happened."

I tried to think of the right thing to say. A tiny voice inside myself, the kind of voice I usually ignored, whispered to me that the less I actually said, the better it would probably turn out.

"Did you tell him no?"

"Arty, you know I did—"

It was a rhetorical question. I was brewing with purpose. I felt on fire.

"So there. Did you want it to happen?"

"No! I told you—"

"Then that's what it is. Larissa, it's the fucking dictionary definition of the word."

I don't know why I was being so insistent. I didn't want to say the actual word. We were standing on top of a Trash Volcano, and that Trash Volcano was Larissa herself, and I could feel how close she was to exploding. "Don't question yourself. Don't doubt yourself. Whatever you did is the only thing you could've done."

She was breathing heavy, trying to steady herself. She didn't say anything, and so I just kept talking. Filling the void of the silence of our phone conversation. It was the only thing I could think to keep doing.

When she finally spoke, it was in a troubled, trembling whisper. "I'm not scared of the past," she said. "I'm afraid of seeing him in Hebrew School tomorrow afternoon. I haven't spoken to Mitch once, Art. I haven't heard from him at all."

# fire exit

I didn't know what I was still doing here. The building too rich and suburban and faraway for my poor undriving self, the Hebrew School itself a boot camp for synagogue-goers and Perfect Jewish Lawyers, the kind of future I knew I'd never have.

The whole place reeked of phoniness. Even before the thing with Mitch happened, Hebrew School had been this weird no-man's-land of sexuality, a youth-group dance with better lighting and overtures of hookups happening somewhere (broom closets? the cafeteria?)—somewhere where I wasn't, thought it must have been close by. Between the girls who only took Hebrew class because of the hot Israeli instructor, the guys who only took Hebrew class because of the theoretical promise of hot Israeli girls on a future summer trip, and the terminally boring stoner kids who just showed up because it was exactly what their parents used to do when they were our age, the whole place was really just basically a racket. There was some unspoken agreement among all of us, students and staff: Nobody question anything, just keep Judaism continuing as normal, we'll all pretend we're happy here and then nobody will give anybody else any problems.

I used to love the idea of G-d. Every book I loved had an author, and every great science fiction movie a creator; I was, after all, the kid with pictures of the guys who created Star Trek and Lost on my bedroom wall. Who better to pay ultimate homage to than to the Ruler of the Universe, the original Creator? I thought of this planet as the first story, the greatest TV series and most densely-plotted and most immersive environment ever conceived.

Which—because I was a good little nerd who used to show up to synagogue every week and believed exactly what everyone told me to—made the Bible the greatest book adaptation ever. The official Robot Citizen Kane comic books had nothing on this. The Torah, written by Moses with executive consultation from G-d G-dself, was the most incredible collaboration that a fanboy could ever wish for.

Lately, I had been changing my mind. Thinking that G-d didn't exist, or really hoping G-d didn't. Because, if G-d did exist, some of the decisions He must have made were supremely sucky. Yes, it was a miraculous thing that billions of people on the planet lived and interacted together every day. But the sense of completion was all but totally nonexistent, and the poetic justice was lousy.

Why did shitty things happen to good people? Why were there so many problems that never got resolved? Why do good people get killed and beaten and arrested, and guilty parties—no, more than just guilty parties, complete jerks—get rich and get girls and get to walk around like they own the world, and some of them probably do own the world?

I guess I'd been thinking all this stuff slowly, over the past few months, passively watching the news and how thanklessly my parents worked at their jobs, witnessing events and adding up the columns, letting my mind drift to its own conclusions. I wasn't quite ready to say that G-d is dead, or that G-d was never alive to begin with, but I guess you could say that I had my finger on the trigger. But, again, purely passively. Again, only thinking of it in the back of my mind. Everything that happens is completely random. G-d doesn't exist, and G-d never had.

And then G-d sends me a message, like getting dropped off at Hebrew School ten minutes early that Tuesday afternoon—spurred by my parents, who still labored under the belief they were raising a good kid—and running straight into Mitch Martin.

He strode down the halls in cool-kid slow-motion, his walk a positive cowboy saunter of self-assuredness, books on his hip, shoulders swaying, arms carrying him along like some sort of varsity swim. He looked at me with that look, the look of someone who owns the world and doesn't need to worry about a thing, cause he bought it on a credit card and it's insured.

It wasn't just the way he ordinarily looked—although that was how he ordinarily looked. The way he smiled at me made me know he'd had her, taken her, in a way I'd never known outside my most tucked-away hidden fantasies.

And the way he nodded at me, I knew he knew both how lucky he was and how bad I'd wanted it. He'd stolen something from her, something she could never re-own, and even if it were possible, he had no intention of giving it back.

I could feel myself heating up.

Or maybe he didn't even realize. Maybe this drama was all in my head (and, although I didn't think it, Larissa's). Was it possible Mitch was so self-centered that he didn't realize what had happened, that he wasn't paying attention to Larissa the entire time, that he was too convinced that everyone loved him to think for one second that Larissa didn't want him to do what he was doing?

Sure, it was possible. But it didn't make him any less evil for doing it.

Mitch was slowing down. He was stopping for me.

"Arthur, man," he said. "How was your weekend?"

"Don't," I said.

He was talking right into my face. His smile smelled like Dr. Pepper.

"Whoa, what's wrong?" He put up his hands in surprise.

"I know what happened," I growled. "Larissa told me everything."

He looked surprised for a second, then confused, then steely cold. Something in his eyes glinted: that same glint as when he was treating us all to falafel.

"Did she really tell you everything?" he said. "Did she tell you how good it felt?"

He moved away. His body retreating, his eyes still glued to me. His hands traced out a pattern in the air, an hourglass, his hands pulling the invisible person toward himself. No question as to what he was referring to. I could feel the Hulk in me boiling.

"She told me how bad you were."

"Maybe you should ask me instead," said Mitch. "I could tell you how good she was. I could tell you how into it she was when it was happening. I could tell you everything."

I stood there, willing myself not to run. My hand was shaking and I could not stop it. Then I realized it was my whole arm. Then my stomach, too. Everything.

He kept walking away. Walking backward, still watching me. My teeth sunk into my tongue. Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. When he was finally out of sight, I felt my body surrender. Released from its puppet strings, I had no energy left. The fear had eaten it all. I had to get out of there.

I ran to the bathroom. There were only two stalls in there. I took the one that was less readily visible when you walked in.

When I entered, the other stall was occupied by someone. I sat on the rim of the seat, pants on, and hung my head between my legs.

The person in the other stall was going to ask if I was okay. Maybe from my whimpering, maybe by the way I'd thrown my bag down violently as soon as I came in. I could feel the hesitation. But that hesitation only lasted a moment, and then the person was gone.

Meanwhile, I used that bathroom as my own private fortress of solitude. I held myself with my arms wrapped around each other. I was shivering. I wanted to throw up.

The minutes flew by. I heard the rumble of crowds through the hall outside, then silence. I waited. One person came in, and a little while later, another one. Two people arrived at the same time. One clicked his tongue loudly, obviously offended that one of the bathroom stalls dared to be occupied.

He left, eventually, whoever it was. It took a while before he did, though.

I tried to clear my head. I swept all my thoughts out, and anger flooded in. I tried to push that out too. I'm not scared of the past. I repeated Larissa's words to myself over and over like a mantra. I let her stony certainty fill up my stomach and my thoughts. When I went into my Mysticism class, I would need to project my fortitude to those good kids and fluent Hebrew speakers and Russians. I couldn't be weak and vulnerable. They would leap on me like wild dogs, attack me and rip out my heart. They didn't deserve to see me weak and vulnerable. What had they done to earn that? Nothing. I was power. I was a Man of Steel.

"There is a division between our outside and inside selves," the teacher, Mrs. Szmerling, was saying. "Our bodies are fallible and weak. They have limits. So many things we are simply incapable of doing. But our minds are capable of anything. We can think literally anything in the world. In the Torah we are told, we were created in the image of G-d. How is that possible? G-d doesn't look like anything. G-d doesn't have a body. But within ourselves, humans are capable of literally everything."

You're totally right, I thought. We're capable of everything, good and bad. It's not that the Torah was completely full of shit. It's just, the Torah had no idea just how evil people could be.

I pulled myself together. I pulled on my happy, lying-to-my-parents fave, my Clark Kent disguise. I fully resolved to leave that bathroom, to walk into my class, which by now was undoubtedly well underway, and sit calmly in the final seat in the back, face a veritable mask. If the teacher asked, I would pretend that nothing had happened. It was her fault for asking. What, hadn't I been there all along?

As soon as I stepped into the hall, however, the bell rang.

My Mysticism class—the entire period—was over.

I stood between two class doors, equidistant from both, far and yet not far enough. I braced, getting ready for the between-classes swarm to hit. That rock in the pit of my stomach rematerialized. What if I encountered Mitch again? Alone was bad enough. One well-placed loud-enough comment from him—which, I realized with an ice of fear, he was more than capable of aiming just right—and every person at this school would hear him embarrassing and ridiculing me. I didn't know what he'd say. But he'd say it.

A hand touched my arm, a cloud of warmth as someone yanked my body. Pulling me around, spinning me next to her.

It was Larissa. Her face was ashen. Her eyes were desperate.

"I need to get out of here," she said. "Will you come with? Can you get me out of here?"

We ran.

*

Larissa's car surrounded us. I rolled up the windows. It was a submarine, the only safe space to be. The rest of the time we were drowning.

At least you get a car, I always complained at her.

At least I know how to drive, she always shot back.

Why would I ever need to learn? I'd say, settling the debate with my own ballsy irony. You already do it well enough for the both of us.

And there it was, our relationship. She drove the getaway car. I was her motive, a reason to flee. I also thought that maybe I was the brains of the operation, but that inevitably crumbled. I was only book smart. Larissa understood people. She was way more intelligent than me at real life.

We climbed into the front seat. A couple of teachers noticed us. They were hiding by the fire exit doors, stealing a smoke between classes even though they weren't supposed to. Mr. Dahill's mouth flopped open, like he was gunning up to come after us, but Ms. Neiman touched his arm gently, as if to remind him that they weren't allowed to be out here either. At that moment they seemed so young, framed in the fire doors, like real twentysomethings from a cafe, and how much older than that were they, anyway?, not much, and I wondered how long ago they had to go through the stuff that we were going through, and whether they'd completely forgotten it all. Ms. Neiman did. The way she touched his arm, she must have.

Larissa coasted us out of the parking lot, and we rattled through the speed bumps. Her knee bumped my knee. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, but she was watching the road. She turned off the sleepy college road to the suburb's main boulevard. We picked up speed. She signaled right, and we shifted lanes. We inclined. We were going up an on-ramp.

"Larissa?" I watched her drive, trying to sound curious instead of worried. "What exactly did you have in mind?"

"Relax." Her eyes were glued to the road with a kind of steely determination that seemed specifically intended to contradict that command. "We're just picking up some snacks."

We left at the next exit. We went maybe a block and a half off the freeway, going eighty the whole time. She entered the parking lot and swung around and took a spot up front, right outside the Wawa doors.

If you've never been to Philadelphia, it's impossible to describe the full existential magnitude of walking into a Wawa. It was a convenience store, but it was a convenience store the way that a Swiss Army knife was a knife. It was a deli, produce market, bakery, soft pretzel dealership, casual hangout spot, nightclub. Some Wawas were even restaurants, having merged with other fast-food places to create strange mutanty hybrids (the WaTaco, the Wizza Hut). Every sort of person frequented it, from frosted-hair moms to geeks and goths. It was the site of intricate jock mating rituals—most consisted of slurping Slurpees straight from the dispenser. By every natural right, we should have despised it. Yet we found ourselves irresistibly drawn to enter through its doors, drawn to eat its food, drawn to spend hours and entire nights of our lives inside its captivating aisles of premade food. We hung out there for hours without ever buying anything, or even thinking of doing so. It was our home, in a way that our real home had long ago stopped being one.

We stomped through its golden doors. Larissa touched my elbow. "Get a basket," she told me.

Astonished, I followed her command. Even when we bought stuff, it was never more elaborate than a simple meal (chips) and dessert (a donut). We never needed a basket.

She led the way. We bypassed the aisles of car fresheners and hygiene products and went straight for the jugular—the snack food. She crammed in Krakle bars, Ghirardelli squares, those malted triangle things. "What happened?" I gasped, even though I knew better than to ask. She'd let out these things when she was good and ready to.

She turned to me, rolling her eyes with as much casual gusto as the night I said would she really be awake at 3 A.M. "Do you really have to ask?" she said.

The first class that afternoon, Israeli History, was a class they had together. Larissa, playing it cool, sat in the middle of the room, off to one side near the window. Mitch, upon entering, took the opportunity to sit directly next to her.

He smiled at her. Rows of white teeth, untouched by cavities. He said he'd enjoyed the time they'd spent together last week, and that they should do it again some time.

Larissa got pale. She, too, felt like she was going to vomit. She replied back, trying to maintain the facade of paying attention but really shaking in her seat, that she did not have a good time, that she valued his friendship and hoped it would continue, but she did not want it to happen again.

"And Mitch said back—just, calmly, the same way he always is—he said, 'What makes you think what you want has anything to do with it?' The whole period, he was so calm. He was so normal. It was like—it's like nothing ever happened to him."

She said that in an even, steady voice. She was looking at me from opposite sides of a display, snack cakes on her side, chocolate on mine. She dipped below the horizon, reappearing with a handful of Tastykake fruit pies—lemon, cherry, pineapple. Her eyes swam, unfocused. She was about to cry. She tossed them at me. "Put them in the basket, will you?" she told me.

"But it's expensive," I said.

"I don't give a damn about the fucking price," she said. "I'll pay."

I dropped them in the basket. I thought to tell her (but didn't) there really wasn't that much—she had about $50 worth of candy bars and chips, and all I had in there was a single pack of Chex Mix.

"We don't have to talk about it if you don't want," I said instead.

There wasn't much left to tell. She sat there in shock, like she'd just been punched in the mouth. The teacher had just asked a question, about Josephus and his role in the attack on Masada. She called on Mitch—perhaps because she'd seen him talking and wanted to make a point, or perhaps just because his name was next in the roll book. He answered it perfectly, Larissa said.

"I think that's the part that hurt the most," she said. "That he could just dip right out of our conversation and answer a school question like he'd been thinking about it the whole time. Like he couldn't even be bothered to devote his entire brain power to terrorizing me." Her voice shrunk. "I took a test the other night," she said. "It took me almost the whole week to work up the nerve to buy it, but I did. I'm not pregnant. That's good news, right? At last I have some good news." She dropped out of audible speaking range. Now she was starting to cry.

For the moment, just for now, I didn't care about being in love with her. I just wanted to be her friend, her servant, her robot. I wanted to be whatever she needed to make herself better.

The people in the Wawa were watching us. Two cashiers, the guy behind the hoagie counter, a couple of customers. It was close to dinner time. Most people were commuting or already home. Nobody had any need for junk food; they had real lives. My parents would be showing up to Hebrew School soon to pick me up. The days had been getting shorter, the sunset creeping a little earlier each day, until daylight savings time hit last week and twilight started stepping all over the border of the afternoon.

It was like that today, in the Wawa, as we shopped: Shadows got long, and the windows all filled with an orange and grey and purple tragedy of light, turning us all to stone. The people in the Wawa stared at us, saw Larissa cupping her face, shaking hard, and me looking miserable, and they thought I was the reason why. No, I wanted to protest, weathering the weight of their silent judgment. I wanted to show them the mountain of comfort food I was holding, which seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment. No, it wasn't me. It was just life. It eats all of us alive.

# back to reality

The first week or two after it happened we talked constantly. Every day—between classes, after school, and into the night. On the phone, until my mother started casually inquiring whether I was planning on using up my share of minutes for the month all in one night. Then online, until one of us (usually me) was kicked off the computer for the night. Then we would fire messages at each other on our phones—sometimes we typed in our pockets, without looking at the keys, and hoping to G-d that Autocorrect would fix our mistakes and not compound them. Our messages would be short texts and incomplete bursts of sentence that shrunk our conversations down to a couple of vowelless words, compacted almost beyond recognition, but we both knew the sentiment was still there.

*

We could have just been sending each other exclamation points and asterisks, for all it mattered. Really, we were sending out smoke signals, flares of light. Just anything to let each of us know that the other was still around.

I don't even remember what we talked about, for the most part. Not the rape. Anything but that.

*

And then the talking faded. Not because we were avoiding each other, but—from my end at least—because we didn't need to. We'd send each other messages and spend hours pouring over our volleys, letting the gravity of each word seep in.

Or maybe she just needed more time alone, and I was just naive? But, no. I don't think it was that.

I really didn't think it was that.

*

I took risks. The need to talk to her would grow inside me, well up like water collecting in a bucket, and then spring a leak. Usually I was really good about sneaking into bathrooms or keeping my phone on the down low, but these days more than ever I had a damn-the-torpedoes attitude about someone catching me. Larissa was more important than school. She was more important than getting caught.

At school there were three separate occasions where I almost got caught writing to Larissa. The first was when I was wearing socks with their elastic worn a little too loose. I jerked my leg to the side while launching myself into my desk, in advisory, the beginning of the morning. It clattered on the floor. I scooped it up before anyone had a chance to see, jammed it in my bag.

From the other kids came looks of resentment and suspicion. What do you have that I don't? Nothing, I wanted to tell them. Nothing.

The second time was another audio message. I thought I was picking up another text, and then the phone just started talking in her voice. Out loud.

"Today I got to school like half an hour before they unlocked the doors," she said. "I just needed to tell you exactly what the world looks like then. The sun is just this tiny ball on the treeline, you can blot it out with your finger—"

I hit silent. I looked around to make sure no one had overheard. I was sitting outside school, in one of those vacant stone jetties in the building's architecture. They were made for no specific purpose. Last year, when I was a freshman, I used to hide here all the time. Somewhere in my head, I made up a story where the architect who first designated the school building was also a loser who liked to hang out alone, just like I did, and he or she created them for just this purpose. More likely, they were just an excuse to fill up empty space.

No. No one was around.

I was safe.

A day or two later, I snuck out there again and Larissa and I managed to have a real conversation. She was at the end of her lunch period. My gym class had just started. My gym teachers and I had a mutual understanding, sort of: I wouldn't have to show up, they wouldn't have to try and make me perform menial tasks that I would waste hours of their time trying to do and completely fail at anyway. I wish I was exaggerating. The first week of class, I spent fifteen minutes dangling on a rope, grasping it with my arms and legs as they yelled at me to climb up it, and all I could do was tell them that my arms and legs would not do it. I didn't know why. My body just didn't perform at that level of sophistication.

"What do you see right now?" Larissa asked me.

I looked. I pretended my eyes were her eyes and I told her.

"In front of me, concrete. I'm staring at the ground. Between my shoes, a glob of concrete, with different small stones stuck in a grey concrete soup. They're all colors, but mostly brown and mustard. If I look up a little, there's the lawn. In the distance I can see a gym class, probably the gym class I'm supposed to be in—they're all wearing yellow shirts and gaudy red shorts, even in this weather, like a form of torture in addition to the fashion crimes they're perpetrating. And a bunch of kids passing closer. They probably have lunch period. Some of them look like they could be cool, but most are just trendazoids."

"Who looks cool?" she asked. I heard the ambient noise from her end. I wondered if she was outside too.

"Carrie Moss. She looks totally strange, but in a way that makes you wonder what she's up to. She has short hair, like Tinker Bell, but it's black. She's wearing a side backpack with a bunch of stencil graffiti on the flap. Then there's a guy who's listening to music on his headphones and thrashing his head madly. Another guy is jogging, but reading a book at the same time."

"Talk to them."

"No."

"Why? At least you get cool kids in your school." My city public school had 2,600 students, nearly 700 of them in my grade. Larissa's school had two classrooms for each grade. She saw fewer than one hundred people each day, probably including teachers.

"Yeah, but it's not like that. It's not like you can just talk to someone with no consequences."

"What sort of consequences do you need?"

"Well, what if I confide something amazingly deep and personal in someone, and then I run into them in the bathroom, or I have to sit next to them in Algebra 3-Trig for the next year of my life? Or gym?"

"That last part's invalid. You don't even take gym, Artomaton."

"So? I might get a different teacher next year. I might actually have to."

"Take a chance. You only live once."

"I won't say the right thing. You know I never do."

"You always say the right thing."

"I'm conversationally retarded. Using that word in every sense."

"Yeah, but you do it well. It's sweet."

"That's only because you see inside my soul and you know what I actually mean to say."

"You should try it. I think you'd surprise yourself."

"Don't you have to go? To class or something?"

"I probably should. That doesn't mean I will."

It was the first time in the whole conversation that Larissa said anything about herself. It was also the first thing I'd ever heard her say in that tone—low and growly, almost criminal. It was a new level of disturbing. Not because we were good kids at heart (although we both were) or because we'd ever dabbled in being bad kids (although we both did), but because I had no idea where it was coming from. For the first time since I'd met her, I witnessed Larissa's thoughts leaping from one thing to the next, and I had no idea how that progression happened.

"Seriously, Arty. Find someone to talk to. Right now."

"No, I can't—"

"Come on. I dare you. Just do it."

"It doesn't work like that."

"That girl with the pixie-black hair—"

"No way, she'll think I'm a stalker—"

"Or she'll think you're sweet."

"I can't."

"Fine."

"What?"

"Just do whatever. I don't want to pressure you into doing it, I just thought it was a cool game. You don't have to do it."

"I just said, I'm not going to do it."

"I know! That's what I meant."

"So I'm not doing whatever."

"Arty. I said, fine."

"Fine."

And we stopped what we were doing and we laughed a little about it. But only a little. After that, we both got off the phone quickly.

When I hung up, I realized how badly I was trembling.

#

# tight

That was the winter of girls wearing tights without pants. Leggings, they called them, although the difference between the two was almost entirely lost on me. All I knew was, at first it felt like an alternate universe—to see a school hall full of girls without pants on, or skirts—but soon my weird, tortured teenage brain just resigned itself to the fact that it was sexy, and I learned to deal. Or didn't.

At the beginning of the year, when the weather got colder and the leggings thing just started to manifest, it felt like I was walking around on a science fiction TV show—you know, one of those ones that takes place on a spaceship and everyone is wearing sets of coveralls that are basically just an excuse to show off their curves, a "uniform" that's a thin layer of nothing over immaculately-sculpted bodies. Except, this was school. It was real life. You were supposed to be able to think about things besides girls' bodies.

I mean, allegedly.

Mostly I was into breasts, I guess. I had figured this out partly by default, where my eyes naturally veered, but also based on extensive research reading men's magazines. I hated those magazines, but I always wound up paging through them anyway. Mostly in the bathrooms of friends' houses. At first casually, flipping through them when they were around, then more obsessively. I combed them for details, those sidebars and model interviews and drink recipes, as if they contained clues to the nature of my own masculinity that I was unaware of. The magazines still terrified me. Reading them felt sort of like having a conversation with a guy who might beat you up at any moment, you just weren't sure what would make him erupt.

Anyway, according to these magazines, you were either a breast man or a leg man. And I was sure I was a breast man—until that week. Until that morning, in English class, to be exact.

This one girl who sat next to me in English, Kendra Aiken. She had peach-pink skin that lay perpetually in between the realms of tan and made up—not just her face, but her whole body. One day she was wearing this tight shirt and even tighter pants. Non-pants. Whatever. Actually, they could have possibly been shorts; she wore boots up to her knees that might have made me think of Batgirl or Rogue if I hadn't been thinking of her.

My mind wasn't ordinarily this brazen. I mean, I didn't think it was. But my objectivity had been seriously called into question a few years ago, once hormones started showing up and interfering with the way I thought about girls and the normal trajectory of my life, and ever since then it felt like a battle. Like every time I had a conversation with a girl, part of me would be forcing myself to focus on what she's saying, focus on what she's saying, and another part would be directing my head to break off eye contact for just one second, just one line of our conversation, and direct my gaze south, to her chest.

The female body had always been a source of mystery to me, from the inexplicably sudden appearance of breasts to the myriad of womanly parts that could be sexualized (all of which had names, none of which I knew) to the equally inexplicable reaction of our own bodies to these new discoveries. And that day, all of those discoveries seemed personified and epitomized with Kendra Aiken.

Kendra Aiken sat near me in English. She had peach-pink skin that lay perpetually in between the realms of tan and made up—not just her face, but her whole body. One day she was wearing this tight shirt and even tighter pants. Non-pants. Whatever. Actually, they could have possibly been shorts; she wore boots up to her knees that might have made me think of Batgirl or Rogue if I hadn't been thinking of her.

The room was divided in two, each half facing the middle. The way our alphabetical order laid us out, she sat right across from me. If all we did all day was face forward, we'd have had constant eye contact. Most days we were writing, face down. That day I couldn't stop looking at her.

She had these skintight leggings. The only creases came where her body folded, behind her knees, at her hips. Otherwise it was amazingly smooth, the way only robots and comic book characters were supposed to be. Her boots were exactly as tight as her legs. If you purposely pulled your eyes out of focus, dulled out the shine of the black leather, it looked like one smooth, contiguous flowing chassis.

Kendra's face was otherwise occupied, alternately watching Ms. Bing and pretending to pay attention, then glancing idly around the room—maybe daydreaming, maybe checking out other people. The curve of her legs, from thigh to hip to butt, where one ended and the other began, all those mysteries of wordplay and the human female anatomy. What exactly counted as a thigh? Would I ever know? And why in the book I was reading had it said that a thigh was an erogenous zone—did that mean it was like a penis, that anything you touched could cause an orgasm?

I felt bad about looking at her. I mean, I felt bad about checking her out, experimenting on her body with my eyes. I felt so clinical and so dirty—I wondered how she could move, the way that her hips would gyrate during sex, whether her legs would be spread straight or curve around her partner's body. What her breasts looked like flat against her chest, and dangling away from it, and upside down. How she would look at him.

She was looking at me.

I flooded with shame. A deep void at the bottom of my stomach. I was the one who never checked out girls or objectified them. I even said I was a feminist. When guys started talking about which girl in our class they wanted, I sunk into a corner and said nothing and hoped no one would challenge me. Not because I didn't think those thoughts, but because I didn't want to demean women by speaking those thoughts out loud. But that wasn't enough. If I really wanted to be a feminist, if I really wanted to not hurt women, I should just shut off this part of me completely.

She was looking at me. Her mouth twisted into something impossible to pin down. It was neither a come-hither smile nor a get-lost scowl. Her lower lip hung slightly open, as if doubting my sincerity, or doubting I'd actually be capable of thinking something so raw and frankly carnal.

I had to do something. Shoot my eyes downward. Offer her an apologetic smile. Offer an apology? I couldn't. I could never actually speak to her, to admit what I did out loud. I had to stop looking. I had to.

I couldn't pull away.

No: I could have. It felt as though I were possessed, like some evil inclination had sank its claws into me and was controlling my mind. Afterward, when I was standing outside the class and I was in control of myself again, I would come to curse myself. How was it possible that I couldn't look away? My head was mobile. I wasn't paralyzed. She wasn't the hottest girl I had ever seen. Her legs weren't the skinniest (that was Kirsten Ballowitz) nor the curviest (Portia Murray). But there they were. Crossed, craven, clad in Spandex. The space between her legs, not obscured at all, an indiscernible flat wall that revealed nothing of what was beneath, but it was skin-tight anyway, no skirt or shirt to hide.

She was still looking at me. Her expression was impossible to read. Not encouraging, but not disgusted. But she had encouraged it, right? By dressing that way? It was like she wanted me to do this. It was like she was asking for it.

My face burned when I thought that. My entire body shook. Oh, G-d. She was asking for it? I was thinking like an animal. I could feel Mitch Martin inside of me, infecting me. Except, no—this was all my own doing. I needed Larissa here. Except that would be the worst thing ever; I would want to get with her; I would hurt her; I would turn into a monster. I was thinking too hard. I needed to stop myself.

I ran. I got up and ran. I let go of my book and got out of my desk and lunged for the door and pulled it open and ran out from the classroom. The process took several steps but it all happened in the blink of a second.

And then I was outside the room. I was in the school hallway, surrounded by lockers, the whole world spinning around me.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. My backpack was still inside there. My book sat on the desk, evidence of my perversion. I had been in there. Now I was not.

Was there such a thing as visual sexual assault? Was I any better than Mitch, tossing around my lust without caring who it hit? Now, in a different environment—far away from the classroom and everyone inside it, feeling the stale recycled air of our school's ventilation system coasting in my face, it all felt ridiculous and faraway. I could have stopped myself. I was just pushing it, playing with my limits. There was something dangerous in me, the intersection of my hormone-induced thoughts and the forced daily interactions with people who I'd otherwise have nothing to do with. It made me feel these things.

I shot up. There were footsteps, crisp new-shoe footsteps, coming down that empty hall.

Carrie Moss, that girl from the bathroom. She always seemed like a sensible, even-tempered person. She had that big-eyed, gentle-smiled round full face. She waved hi when she saw me.

"Hey, Arthur. Is everything okay?"

She was wearing a sheer shirt. One of those long-sleeve shirts that's basically a tank top with the clavicle and arms and collar made of this see-through mesh material. Her breasts strained against it. They were as large as her head.

I was staring at her breasts instead of her face. Stop it. Dammit, sexuality, just turn the hell OFF for a minute.

A month. A year. Forever.

"I told you I'm fine!"

I nearly bit my own lip off when I yeeped that.

My face burned bright red, and I backed away. "I just, I have to go! Elsewhere! Immediately!"

I didn't stick around to see how she reacted. I turned around and snapped into something that was way too fast to be called a walk, and I beat it out of there.

I didn't stop till I was outside. The second-floor balcony, extending over the sports field, a sleek sheet of aluminum outgrowth, stretching from the school building. I flung open the doors with both arms and sailed into the big blue day, airplanes and clouds over my head, a frozen refreshing chill on my cheeks. I was only wearing a shirt. It felt so good. I could run free forever. I could almost fly.

"Show me your school ID," said the disciplinary aide from behind me.

I stopped in my tracks.

"Is this your lunch period? Students are only allowed on the balcony during their lunch."

"No, ma'am," I said. "I just...I finished a presentation in class. I needed to get some fresh air. I have this anxiety condition..."

"Do you have a doctor's note? I don't think you're allowed to get air without a doctor's note."

I scrunched up my face as if to say, Do you ever LISTEN to yourself when you speak aloud? I avoided actually saying that, because it would be perfect grounds for her to write me up for real. Instead I just waltzed back inside before she could ask for my ID again, letting the door swing shut behind me. Those disciplinary aides weren't that bad, really. She probably just wanted to have a cigarette and figured she should do her job while the opportunity presented itself.

After that, it wasn't long until the period finished. I needed to go back into Ms. Bing's classroom to retrieve my books for the next class, which was Chemistry. (I also needed the lab goggles in my backpack pocket so my eyes didn't burn out.) I waited very carefully out of sight, down the hall from the classroom, until it seemed reasonable to assume that everyone was out.

I ducked in. Ms. Bing was at her desk, marking things with a red pen. Red pens were never a good omen. Larissa always called them Passive-Aggressive Wands of Doom. And that was in Hebrew School, where grades didn't count.

Ms. Bing looked up as I entered. "Everything alright, Arthur?"

"Yes. Fine. Thanks."

"Good." She watched on, waiting for an explanation.

I fished. What was I going to tell her, what was my excuse again? It had flown completely from my head. All I could think of was what everyone said—

"Sorry for that, uh, unexpected denouement," I frowned like I really did feel bad about it. "I was having female troubles."

My cheeks burned. I don't know where that came from. Larissa? My fight or flight impulse? Wit was a risk.

This time, it paid off.

Ms. Bing let out a little laugh, slightly bawdy, the kind that teachers give when they're not in front of a class.

"It's no problem, Mr. Kestrel," she said. "Just please try not to make it a habit."

"Not at all, Ms. Bing."

I disappeared before it could get any further than that.

violent mind

I had these dreams. Each one was radically different, as different as my dreams always are, but these all felt like the same dream, or a remix of the same dream, or like several different children who had all been born from the same pool of genes.

They all started when the sun went down. All the dreams took place in Larissa's basement. Also, for some reason, the song "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man" by Loretta Lynn was always playing in the background. (Ms. Lynn, a country singer in the Good Ole Opry style, was a favorite of Larissa's and mine, after our having discovered several of her old records together at a yard sale.) Sometimes the basement was clogged with people; sometimes I was there alone. Often Larissa was there. Only, in all of my dreams, we were never there alone.

The first few times I tried to push my way through to talk to her (through a crowd of people; a zoo of animals; and a thickness of computer parts, stacked high against each other) I never could. Sometimes I'd reach people I thought were her, only to find that they were not. Sometimes I'd start talking, not realizing it wasn't her, or realizing that and not caring, pouring out my secrets regardless. Other times the girl would be really hot, model-hot, or have some other advantage over Larissa—once it was an actress from a TV show I used to watch as a child—but the thing that I wanted to say, whatever it was, I could never fully communicate to her.

The basement was always beneath Larissa's house, but it wasn't always a basement. Sometimes it was my first bedroom, from before my parents moved out of the apartment and into our house. Once it was a jungle, and I pushed my way through vines and bramble, scratching my face, oozing out a trickle of blood. When I woke up to find my cheeks clean of cuts, I felt sad and disappointed.

Night after night, through manifold incarnations of Larissa's basement and manifold dreams—or maybe each was an extension of the same dream—I struggled to deliver my message to her, and to force myself to remember what that message was.

Gradually, however, my dream began to change focus. Instead of trying to rescue Larissa (because that's what I was trying to do, this whole time, like a mission in my mind, knowing I somehow had to do it) I was hunting for someone else.

I never found him.

At first I thought it was Mitch I was hunting for. I would catch a glimpse of him, push toward his shock of just-buzzed hair, but he always eluded me. I never found out for sure. I pushed through crowds, through a solid wall of people from school whose names I couldn't remember but who I knew were judging me.

Once I almost caught him. His shiny slicked-back hair so oily, slipping out of my fingers, until I reached past it and caught his nose and chin. I brought him close and turned him around.

Whether it was Mitch or not, I knew that, whoever it was, I needed to kill him. In the moment, I was sure that strangling would be the easiest way. Everybody's neck was vulnerable. Thumbs on their Adam's apple, and then you press in all the way.

My thumbs closed around the depression at the center of his neck. As I pressed in, the mask that was his face crumpled away. Then it fell off, and beneath it was my own.

# the past tense

# of us

The weather got colder. The outside world was turning completely grey. G-d was brewing up something, maybe reacting to my own foul mood, or maybe taking inspiration from it; there would be snowstorms soon.

I was having panic attacks whenever we approached Hebrew School. The car got close and my hands turned cold and clammy, resting in the rubber handle of the car door. The building rose up from the horizon and I got a taste of pre-vomit in my mouth.

Yet so far I had managed to avoid running into Mitch again.

Larissa kept telling me not to think about him. Of course, the act of her telling me involved us actually speaking to each other, an action which was growing increasingly rare. She texted me less often, perhaps aware that every time we spoke it was likely that we'd just talk about, or not talk about, the rape; and I texted her back less, afraid of what I might say to her. She knew how I felt about her. She hadn't said anything back.

We stood opposite each other in the hallway during that ten-minute break between classes—a break which now felt too short to run away to the Wawa, or the pool, or anywhere. We didn't even bother trying to have substantial conversations. We stood opposite each other, her pronounced curves putting my wimpish figure to shame. She looked in my eyes. My eyes roamed the hall.

"Stop looking for him," she said.

"I'm not looking for him. I'm just looking."

"I'm the important one here, remember? Watch me instead." The edges of her mouth twitched. My eyes retreated into an underground bunker.

"Okay. Have you seen him?"

"Arty!"

"I was kidding! I'm just looking out for him for—" I realized I was avoiding eye contact with her, gazing instead over her shoulder. "I want to make sure he doesn't bother you."

"So, no. I haven't seen him. And I've decided that I'm not going to." She sounded chipper, spry, almost happy.

"You can just decide things like that?"

"Arty, I've been giving this a fair amount of thought. I can. My brain's been in overtime about it. I'll ignore him. Even if he's right in front of me. Even if he accurately predicts the outcomes of horse races. I won't even write it down. I'm not going to listen to him. He's out of my life, and I don't really care. I've got too much going on to worry about Mitch Martin."

"What is going on with you?"

"You know. Just the usual."

"No, I really don't know. Larissa, the past few weeks have felt like months."

"Life is really absorbing. I don't know how we could afford to talk on the phone as much as we did."

"Did? Did you just use the past tense?"

"Arty! Don't be like that, I didn't mean it that way. It's just, like—"

"Yes?"

"There's tons of stuff. School. Piano. This place. College visits. My mom is making me start to look at colleges. Each one has a hundred-page prospectus. I have to read it all, and there's eighteen of them—"

"Eighteen hundred pages? Shirley you can't be serious—"

"Who's Shirley?" She grinned, recognizing the joke. That part of us, at least, was unchanged. "Okay, I'm exaggerating. A little. But life has gone seriously wonky. All these things I have to do, and the stuff on the side that I want to do, and I've missed you a ton, Art."

"I missed you too." Just saying so felt inadequate. I thought maybe we would hug, but in between classes at Hebrew School? Probably not.

"I know." A quick flash of emotion, and I saw her face close up. She was back to being perky and cheerful and Miss Hebrew School, Larissa, the straight-A student who never skipped class. We were over. For now.

I waited for her to say something to make it better, to tighten the slack between us. I think she could sense it.

"Hey, we have Newspaper next, don't we? Tell you what. When it's time to write articles, you write what you've been up to, and so will I. We'll make it like letters to each other, but we'll do it in the form of editorials or feature stories or something. Then we'll make sure we get each other during editing time."

*

It wasn't that we'd been avoiding each other. We were rarely in the same physical space, so that part was easy. And it wasn't that we spoke less, since we still spent the same hours on the phone, talking or listening to the same music at the same time or just sharing air.

It was our trust. At one point, we trusted each other with our lives, we could say anything to each other. And now that anything felt like a threat. Like we weren't allowed to touch or even mention it—not just the rape, but our friendship, each other. We only talked about other things, not ourselves. It was a box that couldn't be opened, a spell that could never be uttered. As though, if we did, it could be even more dangerous for us than what had already happened.

*

Our Jewish Newspaper class was exactly what it sounded like—every month we produced a newspaper and distributed it to the school. Mostly it covered burning contemporary issues like going to Israel and whether it was okay to date non-Jews and which singers and TV people happened to be Jewish.

Our teacher, Milt Levin, was an old grumbley veteran of the Yiddish press. He was about a million years old and he cursed like a coven of witches. He said he'd been in sixteen wars. When we checked, it was more than both the United States and Israel had been in, added up together, in the past century. But when one of us asked him how—or why—he would fix his unwavering gaze upon us and say, "Let's just hope you little slackers never have to find out." He always wore suspenders. His breath smelled like museum.

He hated most of us, but he loved Larissa. He always said she was tough. "Any pretty girl who makes it through high school alive has gotta be a survivor," he said to her.

"Like Auschwitz?" Mitch used to joke, and poked her in her too-skinny ribs. I should have seen it coming. Milt hated Mitch, too. He used to shoot down Mitch every chance he got. Which was often.

Milt also saw the monthly newspaper project as a waste of energy, and took as much time as possible telling us journalist survival stories. Today he was talking about Bali.

"I thought Bali would be a vacation," he said. "It was brilliant there. The beaches, the night clubs, the women. One day you will know what I mean. Israelis were everywhere. They had all just finished their mandatory army service, and they were ready to let loose for the first time in three years. They were allowed to be normal people again. They were so young. They didn't even know how to be alive."

I looked toward Larissa, tried to link with her gaze. This was the part during the monologue where we'd normally make eye-contact solidarity. Of course we were different. We knew how to be alive.

I reached for her with my eyes. She wasn't there. Her eyes weren't. She stared dead down into her notebook. I looked down at my own book. I wished I was drawing. I had a pencil in my hand, but my eyes just swam. There was nothing I wanted to draw. I didn't even want to draw; I just wanted to do something. Just, anything but thinking.

"The bombs hit down the street from the hotel where I was staying. A car, a suicide bomber—no one knew it back then. All we knew was, the whole street was on fire. Everyone was running away from the club. So that's where I ran toward.

"They were lucky I was a reporter, not a photographer. I could write later. My first job could be getting people safe.

"From my time in 'Nam I learned how to carry an injured body without doing further damage. In Abu Ghraib I was taught to set broken bones. Six people under my watch. Four men and two girls. Six people. Four of them made it. I just had to wait until the medics showed."

Larissa's hand shot up. "Milt, wasn't Abu Ghraib a prison, not a war?"

She could call him on that. She was the only one of us who could.

I ripped out a piece of notebook paper and started my article for Larissa. I wrote a public awareness article about anger management, and I talked about the danger of bottling in your feelings. I didn't give specifics, but I referred to urges that take control of you and make you inhuman, into an animal. Everyone's a hypocrite, I wrote. She would know what I was talking about.

I tied it into Jewish stuff by talking about what Mrs. Szmerling, our Mysticism teacher, tried to lecture about the other day. She was Hasidic, one of the super-Orthodox Jews who wear hats and wigs, and nobody really understood what she was doing at our school; everyone was either suspicious that she was trying to convert them or thought she just needed money. I liked her, though.

She said that Hasidim believe that everyone has a Good Inclination and an Evil Inclination, sort of like your conscience on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The Evil Inclination is constantly whispering into your ear, sleep late, steal money, hit people you don't like—those impulses we all feel sometimes and ignore most of the time.

So if the Evil Inclination is so evil, said Mrs. Szmerling, why did G-d create it in the first place? And she answered herself, the way teachers love to do: Because the human mind needs conflict. There will always be battles, people you don't get along with, ideas to argue against. That's what the Evil Inclination gives us. It keeps us on our toes, that part of our brain that's always critical of ourselves, always trying to figure out what we're up to. Used the right way, she said, the Evil Inclination gives us something to fight against and triumph over.

That's where I started from, sharing the fable of the Big Bad Inclination. And this old Hasidic belief—I wrote, now, in my article for Larissa—is so ingenious because it works. No matter what you believe, whether you're a good person or a selfish one, it still holds true. There's always a voice in your head whispering, like in that kids' poem:

Listen to the mustn'ts, child

Listen to the don'ts.

Listen to the couldn'ts, the impossibles,

the won'ts.

Why would G-d create the world this way? It was like a mad science experiment, like Mitch playing with the rest of us, giving us free stuff and driving us around and seeing how we'd react. If that was the sort of creator who G-d was supposed to be, I wanted no part of Creation.

And even though I don't believe in G-d—and this was my big bad conclusion, starting with that bold admission, which I was only just realizing as I wrote it, which I'd never thought I'd be able to think without fearing for my life—even though I didn't believe in G-d, the Evil Inclination is an incredible invention. Because, no matter who you are or what you believe, that idea forces you to be it more.

Milt finished his story. Half the class looked like deer caught in headlights, confused and traumatized, not really sure what'd just happened to them, still thinking about the graphic details of the bloodshed. The other half just looked like they'd rather be Xboxing. Milt tsked. That half were probably the only ones he noticed.

"You kids," he said. "You're so worried about what clothes you can afford to buy or what boy will take your number. It doesn't matter, none of this. Your problems are little kid problems. No matter what happens, you're still alive. And that could end—" His arm shot out and his wrist flicked at an inhuman angle and it made a sound, krak, like snapping your fingers but a hundred times louder "—like that."

He sunk back to the desk. He sat on the edge, deflated.

"Now," he said. "Go write your articles. Stay in this little world. Hold onto it as long as you can."

That, I thought grimly, would never happen. I was still stuck in the same little world, no car and no friends and New York so far away, but the rules of this world were different now. And it would never be an innocent world again.

Everyone else was starting to write. I looked down at my paper and remembered with a shock that I'd already finished. I turned to another page and drew in the margins and awaited, anxiously, Larissa's communiqué.

Ten minutes before the end of the period, Milt called switch and we paired up. Larissa and I sprung for each other immediately. "Here you go," I said, nervously depositing my entry in front of her, upside down to me, right-side up for her.

She slid her paper across the tectonic break of our joined desks. " 'Music Review: Façades I Thought Of'," I read aloud. "Nice title."

"Not out loud. Just read it."

"Okay."

Music Review: Façades I Thought Of

by Larissa Fleishman

Once upon a time there was a girl named Lore Izza. She made a record and everybody loved it. The fast songs rocked and the slow songs were never too slow. The three singles were so jangly and funny and fun that it made you want to be her best friend and hang out with her constantly, and the sad songs made you wish could comfort her.

Lore Izza wasn't her real name. Her real name was Laura Isabella Rosencrantz, a real live Jewish princess from the kingdom of Long Island, but the label people changed it. They told her it sounded more like who she should be trying to be. Her first album, Mirrors, came out two years ago, almost to the day.

So what if her lyrics weren't completely polished, the melody lines simplistic? She was still young, and fresh, and new. She hadn't lived much, not yet, so there wasn't much for her to be disgruntled about. Perhaps this album didn't inspire genuine emotion so much as it did vague feelings of joy and giddiness. But it didn't need to. The keyboards sounded like your happiest birthday. The drums were so perfect, you couldn't tell if they were real or fake. You heard stories of boys, and sometimes girls, falling in love with the photo on the cover. Her glass blue eyes.

But that wasn't love, that was lust. Even if it sounded poetic, it was still only lust. And those songs Lore sung, the ones you think you fell in love with, they weren't her real songs.

You see, Laura Isabella Rosencrantz was raised in a whitewashed suburb, a place that appeared so clean and perfect that she grew up knowing instinctively how to whitewash herself. She spoke like a runway model being interviewed, even among her friends. She chewed like someone had taught her how. Her grandparents might have run for their lives, been chased across countries and hunted for supper, but she grew up not even having to order her own take-out. And those problems that Lore sang about on the record—or what you thought were her problems, and, at some point, Lore had probably mistaken them for problems too—they weren't really problems. Not only that, they weren't really hers.

Mirrors was released two years ago. This week, her new album, Façades I Thought Of, will appear in stores and online. The tracks will confuse anyone who's heard any of the songs on Mirrors—which, by now, means nearly everyone in a first-world country. It's loud. It's angry, and raw, and not very pretty at all. Likewise, the cover—which Ms. Izza has insisted not be Photoshopped or otherwise altered—is of a much less pretty girl, screaming, wide-mouthed, with teeth that aren't uniformly white and straight.

The lyrics, too, have lost some of their allure. They aren't wry or mysterious or charming at all. If there's any way that they may be compared with the lyrics on her first album, it's that these new songs are less idyllic and less perfect.

But the more this reviewer listens to it, the more less perfect seems like a compliment.

Lore Izza has declared she will not be touring for this album. As a matter of fact, it is widely rumored—and Ms. Izza has said nothing to quell these rumors—that she will leave the country, or otherwise disappear, following its release.

And that doesn't seem like a purposeful statement against the new album, or its possible reception, at all. In fact, it seems like one more piece of whatever story the album is attempting to tell.

"My life until this point has seemed like a fairy tale," she said to the music site Pitchfork last month. "Enchanted castles, poison apple and all. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. But the thing about those stories is, it feels like the princesses never actually have a hand in deciding what happens to them—it just happens. And I need to write my own fairy tale for a bit."

broken

I looked up. "You wrote that all just now? In one sitting?"

Larissa looked uncomfortable. "Yes," she said. "I mean, it's all a lie, of course. She doesn't exist. I didn't make up that girl or her record until now, until I started writing."

I flexed my hands apart and together. They were perched on the side of my desk, the side closest to her. Our desks were a lefty and a righty, the two arms set next to each other. I wanted to be touching her arm.

"So what does that mean?" I asked. "Are you going to go away?"

She rubbed her palm with a thumb. "No. Yes. I don't know," she said. "I can't really disappear. I can't go anywhere. I have school."

"I just want to be with you." I was desperate. Grasping for words, whatever words fit into my mouth. "Any way you want. I don't have to like you. I won't do anything you don't want. I just don't want us to stop."

"Arty, don't. Don't. You aren't supposed to be alongside me every single moment, every single thing I do. And anyway—I don't think that you can." She rubbed her arm, the place where I would've been rubbing it if she let me. "You're always asking me, what can you do, how can you help, how can you be involved in this. Sometimes it's not about you at all, okay? How you can help is, you can give me a little space. I think I need to help myself for now."

"So does that mean..." I said again. I struggled to piece it together. Me, the voice in my head kept whispering. She wrote that article about me. "Are you breaking up with me?"

"No!" she cried, loud enough for other kids to look up. "I mean—we aren't going out. But, no, Arty, we aren't breaking up."

"Then what?" The words were murky in my mouth. It felt like all my teeth were melting together. My heart was beating fast. It was halfway up my throat.

"I think I need to take a little break."

"From me?"

"From everything."

I shattered.

"I just feel..." She tried to explain. Rubbing her palm again. "I feel like I haven't been doing well for a while. I need to stop running myself down. I need to just stop everything, and fix myself."

The bell rang. She got up and went out quick, without looking at me.

I never felt so broken.

# all out war

I tried to listen to her. I really did. If I wanted to make Larissa happy, and Larissa didn't want me talking to her, then I could do that. I had a full and fruitful life without her. I had music, art, video games. I had the posse.

I went to Damon's after school. He told me in school that my GizmoNo goblin had finally eaten his way out—"if you care," he said—and I could come over and finish the level if I wanted. I figured I might as well. My 90-day trial subscription was running out, and I needed to make use of it. Or to get as far as I could without having to pay, which was basically the same thing.

When we got there, though, Damon wasn't in the mood to play. He wanted to look at porn.

We threw our bags on the kitchen table and closed in on the snack cabinet. My parents only kept salty stuff in the house, pretzels and tortilla chips, but Damon's family were chocolate addicts. We ripped into an unopened bag of Rollos—

ME (careful): Are you sure they won't mind if we open them?

DAMON (not caring about anything at all): Why would they mind?

—and I didn't tell him how my parents noticed everything I ate, even if it was just a few potato chips, even if I tried to roll the bag up perfectly.

He wasn't paying attention. He barely cared that I was there at all. It was weird—in all the time I'd known him, Damon had never treated me like this. Only now did I realize, he'd always been kissing up to me, treating me the same way I treated Larissa. Now he'd dropped his defenses. Now he didn't care what I thought of him.

We stuffed our faces, on that and a bunch of other stuff, and when we were almost finished the bag he turned to me and said, "I'm going to put on some porn, is that OK with you?"

I said yes. I thought he was joking. Maybe he meant ironically, robot porn or something, or maybe he'd just put on Jurassic Park and let out a shriek halfway through, "Aaah! All the dinosaurs are naked!" I was thinking that it was a Damon sort of thing to do. I was thinking, the way I always do, how I was going to tell Larissa about this afterward. No: I don't know what I was thinking.

I sat around the living room, eating Cheez Balls out of the bag, while Damon ran upstairs to get his game system. About a year ago, Damon had lost most of his electronics in one of the sporadic break-ins that happened to everyone in our neighborhood. Usually the burglars were just after a TV, or checking if any smartphones were lying around, but that time they'd gotten their hands on Damon's whole digital arsenal. It was a crippling defeat. Damon saved his allowance, first purchasing a massive unbreakable Feynman safe, then buying back every game system and every game he'd lost. He could've just copied them online, but he wanted the actual disks and the actual packages. He was dedicated, if crazy.

Damon came back down with GizmoNo and the game system, and an old black VHS tape. "You can play on the kitchen TV," he said, and he went over to plug it in. The kitchen in his house was basically in the living room, separated only by a counter. A small old TV, the box-shaped kind, sat atop the counter.

"Hey, it's okay," I said. "I don't really have to play it, we can do whatever you want—"

"I don't mind, I'm done." He rose up from behind the TV and turned its power on. The GizmoNo theme song was already playing.

"So you're just going to watch...?"

"Some porn," he repeated solemnly.

He pushed the VHS tape into his parents' ancient box. He took a seat on the couch, sort of half reclining, not lying down or in any indecent position, but not exactly sitting on the edge of his seat either. I wondered what was going to happen.

I tried to focus on the game. On this midget screen, where my goblin was the size of a toenail. I had landed in the middle of a drawing-room with tasty mechanics scattered all over the floor, lying in open sight with no booby traps. I barely had to signal a direction and my little avatar would leap on a sprocket or a gear and start munching away.

It was hard to concentrate. On the much-bigger screen in the other room, a couple of friends were sitting in a cafe. Three of them. Two girls and a guy. They were talking loudly, in overstrained voices, about something real people would never talk about. I forget what it was, maybe the sexual experiences they'd had last week? A sex scene in a movie? One of the girls stood up and said she had to make a phone call. As soon as she left, the other girl leaned across the table and started without warning to caress the man's arm. He didn't seem to mind.

"I have my cell phone set to vibrate," said the woman. "And you'll never guess where I keep it." She took a hold his wrist and showed him.

I tried to ignore it. My mind was a solid series of red exclamation points, Oh my G-d, he's serious and How is this happening and He is watching porn. I mean, we'd been friends since elementary school. That television was the same one we'd watched Saturday morning cartoons on. (Well, no—that particular TV got stolen a few years ago. But the TV space was the same. It was holy space.) Now the new tenants of the space were...well, that.

Those horrific realizations led to another, more realistic horror: More than that Damon was watching porn, I was watching porn. Even though I was doing it secondhand. Even though I didn't pick out the film or know its title. Somewhere in my mind, I'd decided I never wanted to watch porn. I just wasn't that kind of person. One day far in the future, I would have a girlfriend—I'd always imagined it to be Larissa, but even, as my life seemed to be indicating, if it wasn't, this would still happen. We'd be stretched out together, in bed maybe, or on the lawn outside the Art Museum, and I'd be silently admiring her recumbent form. She would turn to me and ask, seemingly out of nowhere, "Have you ever watched a porn movie?" like the possibility was the silliest thing in the world, and it had just occurred to her. No, I'd say. Curious, she would ask why, and, running my hand down her curvaceous side, I would say, innocently, "Baby, you are my porn." I would call her baby. She would be okay with that.

On screen the woman was, for no earthly reason I could follow, now completely naked. The man was still wearing most of his clothes. He was crawling all over her. It looked like it would be really uncomfortable. Like, was his belt buckle digging into her skin? He would press up against some random organ of her body, like her navel, dragging his tongue all along her completely-hairless leg, and then switch to her boob. ( It was Larissa who'd taught me to call them boobs, a nonchalant and self-deprecating way to desexualize those most sexual of organs.) It seemed like just an excuse to show the different parts of her body, or to make the sex part last longer. It was still only like three minutes into the movie, and they were already having sex.

The worst part was her breasts. They didn't even look like a part of her body. They looked like they'd just been plopped on, attached by ill-intentioned aliens who'd been experimenting with the human genetic systems, seeing just how much in the way of mammary glands the human body could handle. They were like completely independent organisms. Even when she moved, they didn't.

I was afraid to look over at Damon. I did, eventually, just to check. He wasn't doing anything. I mean, he wasn't doing anything sketchy. He was just sitting there, one hand sloshed against his stomach holding the remote, the other dangling off the couch.

He noticed me looking. "Are you okay?" he asked, not looking at me.

"I'm fine," I said. "Do you want me to leave?"

His eyes never left the TV. "You don't have to. You can if you want."

I thought about doing just that. I didn't particularly want to go home. That was the only other place I could think of going. And something about the situation bothered me. Like, if I left now, I'd be admitting that I morally disagreed with Damon, which would be like saying that Damon was on the other side, Mitch's side.

"I don't understand," I said instead. "Where did the other lady go? Or am I not supposed to think about the storyline...?"

"No, she comes back for the second scene. After Jasmine and this guy finish up, she comes back down and they both have their way with her."

I was trying to play it cool. I could treat it like learning the rules to a new video game, or a new culture. "So, you've seen this one before?" I asked casually.

"Oh, yeah, tons. We don't have a lot of videos here, just a few. But this one is the best. That other girl, the phone call one, she's really famous."

"We?" I said. Damon didn't have any brothers.

"They're all my dad's." On the screen, the woman's hips looked like they were about to split in half.

"Does he—does he know you know about them?"

"Mm-hmm, yeah," Damon said absently. "He doesn't know I watch them, but he probably figures I do. My mom always yells at him not to keep them in the open, but it's not like he can hide them. Besides, he gets Playboy, and we keep that out." He waved over at the magazine rack that I'd already known about, that had scared and fascinated me as a kid.

"Those women in the movie. Do you think they..." I trailed off.

"No. You think they mind? They make tons of money off of this. You know there are conventions, they go on tour? You can write them letters and they'll write back. Not in a gross way, like a fan club. Some of these women are more famous than actresses on TV shows."

"Damon, they are on TV." Extremely on TV, actually. Currently, there was more of this woman on the television screen than most regular actresses would be in their lives.

"You know what I mean."

"But she doesn't look like she's enjoying it."

"Sure she is. That's what they call acting."

"Or getting used."

"You can't think of it like that, Arty! She wants to be there. She's not, like, smiling. But people don't smile when they have sex, they don't look like Ronald freaking McDonald—"

"How would you know?" I said.

"How would you know?" he said, and I was quiet.

We sat there, subdued, everyone under the spell of the moment—my quavering, tranquil freaking out, Damon's unmoving poise on the edge of the sofa, posture straight and rigid like he was in school, like he was at a yoga retreat, and the girl on TV, her eyelids flickering dramatically, meditatively shut and then half-open. She had big, soft, ovular deerlike eyes, not the kind you feel like porn women should have. Cold shivers shot down my spine. I wasn't sure if this would arouse me. As it was, I wasn't thinking about sex at all. I was thinking about the movie. I tried to ignore her below her chin, as if I was having a conversation with her. I tried to read her facial expressions and wondered what emotions she was trying to convey. Did she think of herself as an actress? Was she really trying to act? Was this really what sex was like, was she enjoying herself, was she really what women were like when they had sex? I mean, she was having sex. At this moment, in this recording, at one point that had been captured on film. She wanted Damon to watch it, and he wanted to, too. There was nothing wrong with the picture except me.

And he really did know more about sex than I did.

"You don't have to be here." Damon sounded snide.

"I'm not—" I started to argue, but put the brakes on. The moment I started to speak, I could feel that my lips were twisted into a scowl that I didn't even know I was making.

But the real reason I stopped talking was that I realized, nothing I could say would make a difference. Damon didn't want me here. My goblin in the video game was being ignored. Everything he said was right—aside from me, everyone was completely happy. There was a perfectly balanced ecosystem going on here. I was the pollution.

Outside, the air on the street cut the moisture in my eyes and the corners of my mouth. It had turned from just-cold December into bitter, hardcore February in the space of an afternoon. The sky was dark when I walked home. Daylight had vanished, just like that. By the time I got home, my parents had already finished dinner. "Do you want to eat?" It was all they ever asked me. It was the only relationship we had.

My mother was unbothered by my showing up late. I said I wasn't hungry. I pulled out the three-ring binder from my bag and made a tower of textbooks on the kitchen table as my father wiped up. Annihilate my classes one by one. And then I would be finished, the tower would be gone, and my time would be my own.

# i see now

#

Start with the villain.

You can always introduce the hero later. You don't have to make your audience love the hero: They already do. Bring out the villain first—show him, not as a villain, but as a character. Then the fight in the audience's mind will be a fairer fight, and they won't automatically root for the best people. They will have looked evil in the face and thought, if only for a moment, that they could be friends with it.

I drew the villain big. Hair short and spiky (like Mitch), a jutting triangular jaw (like Mitch's). His stomach was convex, sinecurvelike, like a little kid who'd stuffed a pillow under her shirt, pretending to be pregnant. It was a pre-21 beer gut, an early warning system for the rest of us, considering Mitch was the only one of our friends (our ex-friends) (my ex-friends) who drank. He had babyfat all over—his palms, his forearms, his double chin—but that tummy was the most pronounced of all. Sometimes in his polo shirts you could see the outline of his belly button stretching the starched cotton. In Spandex it would look even worse.

I put him in Spandex. Red and purple, Magneto colors, modeling him after that presumptive arch-enemy of the X-Men, most hated of mutants. A genetic freak who couldn't be comfortable with his own freakiness until he'd enslaved the rest of the Earth. I gave him undies, on the outside, of course. His paunch hung over it. I made the crease of his privates small. Revenge.

I gave the page a simple 4-panel layout. In the first, our villain faces us. The second, an empty, lonely city. The hour late, the streets barren of pedestrians, a few scattered streetlights casting uninterrupted shadows.

In the third panel we meet our heroine.

(This isn't right. We should take more time introducing each character—more drama, more pace before the punch. We should introduce their quirks, their defining attributes, let the reader see them from every angle. This is why comics develop a more rabid fanbase than any other art form: unlike paintings, we see our subjects in all positions and scenarios; but, unlike film, we have to fill in the movements between panels ourselves, a bond shared between reader and character.)

But: I can only draw so many panels, especially when I'm supposed to be paying attention in class, especially when my mind is racing so fast. We catch Our Heroine already in action, in the middle of her day, with only hints and speculation to use in divining the greater facts of her life. In this panel she's already in mid-run, both feet touching off the ground (flying?), keys in hand (she has a car), wristwatch extended, fresh from being checked (she's late), glancing behind her (has she heard something?).

She's both specific and anonymous. She's everywoman, caught in a situation we've all found ourselves in: late and lost, alone around a hostile presence, possibly about to be attacked. I had to tone her down, for purposes of my story. She is attractive enough for us to care about her, but not so attractive that we're turned off caring, thinking she's too good for us, invincible.

In the next panel comes the reveal: She is invincible.

Mitch-neto, Mitch the Merciless, Queen Mitch, His Royal Mitchiness, touches down to Earth in front of her, cape flowing behind him, his full magnanimosity on display. He raises up a gauntleted hand, palm up, not doing anything, but, in our ignorance (so far), we fear and suspect that—in that costume, with those powers—he could do anything.

His dialogue—sorry about this—is a bit expository.

VILLAIN: For centuries, your family has possessed the CRYSTAL ORBS, that source of man's PASSION and MAGIC. Now I have FOUND you! You must TURN them over to ME!!

The two ends of her mouth move in different directions, because I can't decide which expression to give her, terrified out of her mind, or smiling with the secret thought of the ace up her sleeve.

The last panel is a quick one, all the space that's left on the page. Her hand clutches at the magical talisman, on a chain around her neck. It's the most valuable thing she owns, a pair of glowing marbles that have the power to distort or recreate reality in a your-way-right-away fantasy—and Mitch is about to snatch it.

Which means, basically the entire picture is of her breasts. Her hand is grabbing at the necklace, which blocks them a little, but it's off-center, which means that the direct vortex of perspective is centered exactly over her nipple.

The picture makes me feel a little guilty, and so I try to finish drawing it quickly, without lingering on details or perspective or my memory of the real thing. As a result, it ends up looking rushed, and out of focus, and way too sexual. Her breasts, with no defining bottom curvature, seem to swell up and continue outward forever. The valley between them gives them too much weight, and they seem pendulous, unsightly, threatening to balloon everything else out of the picture.

To lessen the effect, I pencil vague swishes, curdles of mystical fog that are already starting to pool around the CRYSTAL ORBS. I'll go back and finish them later, after school, some time when I'm not right in the middle of being inspired. I flip to the next page and drop right into the next picture—no borders, no outlining. A full-page splash.

This is where I thought I might come in. A drop-punch or a sneak attack. Also in spandex, more generously proportioned, or at least better concealed.

Only now do I see, I don't belong there. It wouldn't be true to the story. I'm not part of the problem, and so I can't be a part of the solution. Even in something as straightforward as a retro-early-'90s Liefeld-inspired short, a three-page chem-class fisticuffs of one hero vs. another, there are still stories that work and stories that don't. I don't even have a place in my own comic.

Instead I drew this:

A fierce wind blows up. It swirls around the heroine's skirt around her knees and her hair around her back. It knocks the bad guy off his feet, and he's caught in the midpoint of the slow act of falling: legs twisted half-around each other, arms shooting up in a defensive position, hands raised in front of his face.

For the CRYSTAL ORBS had flown out from their hiding place beneath her shirt, and they were now fully on, amplifiers cranked up to 10, doing everything that, in their brief existence in this story, I had given them the power to do—to completely rearrange reality and, well, fuck shit up.

Dragons nipped the air around her shoulders. Gryphons raked the air beside her legs. even the wind itself, on its foamy tips, had claws and fangs. Every aspect of nature was at her command. It wasn't as if she had summoned it. Instead it was like she was this supernatural force, restocking the deck, turning the odds against this supposed attacker, making him the victim instead. The last thing I added had to be a speech bubble, coming from her, small but solid, letting the words alone carry the necessary force:

"I don't NEED saving. I'm saving MYSELF."

# dangerous information

I didn't talk to Damon for a while after he showed me his porn. I didn't call Larissa, either. None of my old friends felt like people I'd want to see or have anything to say to.

I'd been spoiled by Larissa. When you could open your mouth and anything you could possibly say, she would understand, and she'd be able to hold her own—philosophy. School. Why people are the way they are. Whatever we had together, we really had it.

Thanksgiving was coming. It was an impending promise of a breath of air. I'd gotten too caught in the rhythm of school and Hebrew School and avoiding my parents, with nothing to fill in the blanks but my art and the screaming in my own head. Things felt empty. There wasn't really anything left except the things I had to do.

I entered the kitchen, plotting to steal a handful of Cheez Balls before dinner. I found the table empty except for a single sheet of paper. My mother sitting, my father hovering behind her. My mother said, "We got a letter from your Hebrew School."

DAD: It said you've been missing classes.

MOM: You were late to some. You didn't show up to several.

ME:...

DAD: Where were you?

MOM: What were you doing instead of going to class?

DAD: Do you even have an excuse?

ME: Maybe the teacher forgot to mark me present.

MOM: The absences, maybe. But lateness? When were you ever late to anything?

DAD: Were you with friends?

MOM: Were you with Larissa?

DAD: Don't embarrass him.

MOM: I just asked.

ME: I wasn't anywhere.

DAD: You had to be somewhere.

MOM: We know where you weren't. All we're asking is where you were.

ME:...

DAD: If you don't want to go—

MOM: If you aren't happy in Hebrew School, we want you to tell us. We spend a lot of money for you to go there. If we're wasting it, just tell us.

ME: You aren't wasting it.

DAD: Do you want to go there?

ME: I mean, I'm good at Hebrew School. The teachers like me.

MOM: So why are you cutting classes?

DAD: But do you want to be there?

MOM: There are lots of other things you can do. Play an instrument. Do an internship. Volunteer somewhere—

DAD: You can volunteer!

MOM: Or if you want to do something for you, you can. There are lots of places you could work in that part of Center City you're always going to. The point is, Hebrew School isn't the end-all and be-all of everything. If you don't want to be there, we can take you out—I'd rather stop wasting the money now than in two and a half years. And we'll find something else for you to do.

DAD: You can do anything. You just have to do something.

*

It turned out that they hadn't prepared anything for dinner. My dad got in the car while my mom called for pizza. Their favorite pizza place was fifteen minutes away, and there was always a fifteen-minute wait for pizza, so they split up tasks. My parents were scarily efficient.

"Hold on." I ran to the door, met my father there. "You want company?"

My dad turned to me, astonished. "By company, do you mean you?"

I shrugged. "If you're up for it."

The reason I hated my parents, I think, is that their lives were literally nothing but routine. They went to the same place every day, woke up and went to bed at the same time, went grocery shopping for the exact same food. Something as alien and unexpected as an avocado would never make its way into their shopping bags. And that was exactly what I was turning into. So what seized me just then, what empowered me to throw myself into the mercy of my father's passenger seat, was that feeling—a sudden panic of sameness and the knee-jerk reaction against it, like, why not just do something that I never do?

Even if that thing was riding in a silent car, cruising for pizza with my father, staring at the whitening patches of hair in his close-cropped beard.

"I envy you," he said.

He didn't hide it or couch it in that fake soft-and-wise voice that he sometimes used. He just said it, like a fact bomb, dropped it on the floor and left it there to smoke.

"What do you mean? You're always telling me that I'm doing the wrong thing, and correcting me and telling me I don't know anything."

He regarded the world outside the window with a contemplative nod. "Well, yes, there's that," he said. "And that's all pretty true. I've been alive a lot longer than you, you know, and I've had plenty of more time to make all mistakes you did."

"Thanks a lot, Popsicle."

"But all the possibilities are open to you. Your job—you can pick whatever it is you want to do, or you can do nothing. For now, at least. You're always running off to here and there, discovering new little things, meeting new people and new girls. I just sometimes wish that had that flexibility."

"Ugh. Dad, you are not allowed to meet new girls—"

"Not like that! I just mean, your life doesn't have any rules. If it does, you're the one who makes them. You don't have half a dozen bosses like me, all of them asking for exactly the opposite thing from you. You just—you can do anything you want."

My first thought was of Larissa, and her ban on having anything to do with me. "Not anything," I grumbled.

"Why not? Forgive my saying so, but you don't have anything too pressing right now—no afterschool job, no major investments to protect. If there's something you're afraid of doing, why not just do it? The worst that happens is, it doesn't work."

We pulled up to the pizza shop. Without another word, he popped open the door and hopped out—the same as always, stuck in his normal motions of life. Usually I was around when my mom made the call. She always asked me what toppings I wanted, and I had free reign to choose anything. Tonight I'd forgotten and so we wound up ordering plain, no vegetables, no extra anything. Most of the time pizza was a special dinner but tonight, that plainness felt like there was something missing, something lost, as though between the tent of bubbled cheese and the undercurrent of sauce you could taste the rumble of incompleteness, of something forgotten and yet unfinished.

*

I called Larissa. I planned to hold out until she said it was okay for us to talk again, or at least gave me some sort of sign or stray sad glance, but that night I felt so low that I needed to. Or it just happened. Or I don't even remember making the decision or dialing the numbers, I was just on the line, the speaker next to my ear, letting the telephone ring.

"Hello?" said her mother.

"Hi, is Larissa there?"

"Arthur?"

Why are you calling my daughter?

"I was just wondering—"

"She isn't here, Arthur. She's out."

"Oh."

Wham. Wham. Did she really need to tell me twice?

"She'll be back home later, I'll tell her you called—"

"Thanks, you don't have to do that."

"She might get in late. She'll probably call you back tomorrow."

"That's okay, I'll just talk to her later, you don't have to say anything."

"Arthur?"

"Yes, Mrs. Harcomb?" I remembered to call her Mrs. Harcomb, and not Larissa's father's last name. That had to score me some points.

"Are you trying to ask me not to tell Larissa that you called?"

"No, Mrs. Harcomb, I'd never say—"

"She's out on a date, Arthur. I don't know if she wants me to tell you that, but you should know."

"No, that's okay."

WHAM. I felt the daggers plunge into my stomach.

"I didn't know that's where she was tonight, but we've been missing each other. I've been really busy, you know."

"Okay."

"Did she happen to mention who she was meeting?"

Larissa's mother made a sound into the phone that was the guttural equivalent of you obviously don't know whom you're dealing with.

"Listen, Arthur. a) She's my daughter, and

"b) it's really inappropriate for me to be telling you this at all, and

"c) it's even more inappropriate for you to be asking.

"Don't torture yourself, pal, okay? Just move on."

Her Yards accent came out, just an edge of it, toward the end of that. She wasn't yelling. She was frustrated at me, maybe even angry. I held onto that moment—that one moment of her defenses falling down, and forgetting what she'd built herself into, and reverting into the person she used to be—and I held that. I wanted that to be the moment of this conversation (which, in every other way, was self-defeating and utterly humiliating) that I would remember.

"That wasn't what I was asking," I said, setting up some great excuse, but she'd already hung up.

*

Milt had his own way of calling roll in class. It was the same way he talked. Like he was taking volunteers to storm the gates of Hell.

"Kirshner!"

"Here."

"Matosz!"

"Here, sir."

"Martin!"

I glanced nervously at Larissa to see what her reaction to Mitch's name would be. Today she sat all the way on the other side of the room, first row, her eyes glued to the teacher.

"Martin!" He bellowed again, louder now. Hell was clearing out a fresh seat in its ranks.

"He's not here," piped up a voice from the rear. We turned around. It was Dr. Tolsky, the principal of Hebrew School and also probably the person who'd sent that letter to my parents.

"Not my problem. He gets a zero for today," snarled Milt. "No skin off my back. He wouldn't make it two minutes in the Times war room."

"Mr. Levin, Mitch Martin no longer attends this school. He's withdrawn. He came into my office this morning, said he was sick of hanging out with a bunch of liars and losers, and he can't see how Hebrew School could possibly be relevant to the rest of his life. And then he jumped in his car and zoomed away." She said it to us like we were her confidantes, the whole class. As if we wouldn't be able to believe it either, because we all thought Hebrew School was the most meaningful experience of our lives.

"So the boy's got baitzas after all," said Milt, more impressed than Dr. Tolsky was probably aiming for.

"And if you don't mind," she continued, "I'm going to stick around for the duration of your lesson today. There've been some complaints that the quality of the writing in our school newspaper is a bit...ah, overly caustic?"

"Don't know who would've said that," Milt muttered darkly to himself. "Not like any of these kids ever had to cauterize a thing."

"My point exactly." Dr. Tolsky smiled at him indulgently. She leaned against the doorpost, settling herself in.

The class was painful. One long 45-minute stretch of Milt trying to play nice and failing miserably, twisting his ever-present grimace into a smile. His voice perpetually sounded like it was wavering between a fake-pleasant falsetto and his usual growl. When it was finally over, Larissa sprung into the hall.

I shot out after her. My hand reached out, brushing the back of her elbow. She turned around.

"Can we talk?" I said.

"My mom told me you called."

Her face was narrow and ashen. All my instincts were telling me that now was not a good time. I pressed on. Ordinarily I was a wimp, buried deep in avoidance. I would ignore things that stared me straight in the face. This is what I needed to get over. I couldn't wuss out now.

"Yeah. Sorry. I needed to speak to you, and I know you want space, but I was feeling so alone, and nobody else would under—"

"Okay. Pool?"

I took one look around this oppressive corridor and agreed.

Downstairs there was the familiar smell of chlorine, warm on my nose. I watched the comforting ululation of the water's slow current, distorting the black stripes at the bottom.

"So, what happened?"

"I've just been feeling really alone lately. Like most of the time I don't even want to talk to anyone, and when I do—when I have some crisis, or if there's just a really important idea—I always think of it in terms of how I'd tell you about it."

"Mm." Larissa sounded distant, clipped. She wasn't even making eye contact.

"I was at Damon's. We were just hanging out, and he put this porn movie on."

She waited, not saying anything.

"I don't know. I was just in the next room, but I could see everything. I don't know if he wanted me to watch it with him or what. It was really unpleasant. It was...there were these women, and this guy was making them do all these things to him. I mean—he wasn't forcing them, but they still didn't look like they wanted to be there. They were right up there against the camera lens, plastered there. It was awful to watch."

"And?"

"I don't know. It was just, like...is that sex? Because if it is, I don't want to have it. I don't want any part in it."

She sighed.

"Arty," she said. "Please don't make this about jealousy."

"Jealousy?" I honestly didn't know what she was talking about.

She looked at me askew. "Didn't you know, I was out with Damon?"

"Out?"

"To a restaurant."

"On a date?"

"Just to dinner."

"Oh my G-d."

"I thought he told you!"

"How would he have told me?"

"I don't know, I just thought—you're friends—"

"Did you kiss him?"

"Arty!"

"Okay, maybe it's not fair to ask."

"It really isn't."

"But...Damon? You went out with Damon? Like, romantically?"

"Arty, I'm sorry. It's all bad timing, all of this—he's felt like this about me for a while. He told me a few days before you did. We realized it would be awkward for you; we were all going to talk about it—"

"A few days before?"

"Neither of us wanted to upset you!"

"It's not a race. It shouldn't be, like, whoever asks you out first wins."

"Everything was happening so fast, and I couldn't—"

"Did you like him? Like, before he asked you?" My brain scanned through the events of our recent past. Searching for evidence, for some event or interaction I'd interpreted the wrong way. A clue. I had no clue. They couldn't hold it against me if I had no clue, could they. "Did you like me?"

She squirmed.

"I don't know," she said.

"But don't I at least deserve a chance? I was your best friend, don't you deserve to give me a chance to prove myself to you? Before you go and throw yourself at my best friend?"

"I didn't throw myself at him! Arty, you and I have a really intense relationship. It's...it's beyond just a crush. But I never thought of you like that. I want us to be forever friends. I didn't just want to kiss you and ruin everything forever."

"Kissing me wouldn't ruin everything forever," I said. "It might have been the beginning of forever."

She sighed again and slid to her feet. "I'm sixteen," she said. "Forever feels so far away. And to be horribly honest, any sort of romantic stuff these days is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to try it out—I wanted that—him—to not be my only sexual experience. But I'm just not ready for it, Arty. With you or with anyone else."

"So..." I fumbled for truth, for some sort of constant. "What's going to happen with you and Damon? Are you still going out?"

Now she was close to the door. I could feel the encounter slipping away, and along with it, any chance I had to make it all better. She considered the question and looked at me askew "That's something Damon and I have to work out for ourselves, just the two of us. It's completely separate from you and me, Arty."

"So there's still a you and me?"

"Arty, of course there is! We're friends!"

"Well, you can't be too surprised at my reaction. I mean, if you asked me ten minutes ago, I'd say you and Damon were just friends, too."

It took her a long time to reply, and when she did, her voice was hollow and sad, as if, in that thirty-second window, she'd gone away for ten years.

"Arthur," she said, "you and I are wonderful together. We have an amazing connection, and I want it to last. But we aren't acting like friends these days. You keep acting like you want something from me, and I don't know if it's something I can give. I'm getting on with my life without you, Arty. You should, too."

She left. She left, and I was alone, one person in a pool big enough for hundreds, and I wasn't even wearing my swimming suit.

# hey ho, let's go

I was still wet when I crawled into the back seat of my parents' car. My drenched hair was matting in front of my eyes. It was the closest I'd come in weeks to making them ask me what was going on. They still didn't say a word. I was meticulous about my school work, my projects, my tests. As long as I stayed on top of that, they let me slide on other things.

I pressed the side of my face against the glass. The cold outside the window instantly spread to my hair and my ear. I wondered if I could catch a cold like this, without ever going outside.

A song came on the radio and it was one of Larissa's favorite songs. I'd never really liked it. The singer's voice was adorably confident, like she was telling you secrets and like she couldn't be happier about it, but the music was too broken-up and staccato. It was all rhythm and no melody. Tonight, I understood every second of it. I let my head fall against the window for real now, most of my face turned toward the outside, because I was crying, and I didn't want my parents to see it, but it felt so good to cry. My tear ducts opened up and they came, freely, like a valve had been opened, and as they flooded out so did all my bad memories. Gone, just like that.

I inadvertently let a gasp escape.

"What's wrong?" said my father from the front seat. "I changed to your radio station. I listened to it all the way from home."

I knew he wanted me to be proud of him, for expanding his musical tastes on his own, and maybe I was. But I couldn't show it. I was feeling more withdrawn than ever.

*

I loved doing homework. It was like my favorite kind of video game. Tetris, Donkey Kong, Q*Bert, Legend of Zelda: where you don't have a quest for anything, you just go through rooms, or bash bricks, or vanquish little monsters, your basic task-oriented sweep-up. (Oh, I knew that Zelda had an ultimate goal, but it was so much smoother to go through each room on a level, cleaning out all the creatures from them, especially since I could only play at friends' houses, without the luxury of the days or weeks required to beat the game for real.) I just sorted my work into piles, all of them surrounding me on my bed like a miniature Stonehenge—a book to read, a proof to prove, a set of chemical equations to balance, and show all work, even though I usually did it in my head too fast to write everything down.

Five piles. Five rooms to defeat. Really, it was no problem. You just had to kill them one at a time. You had to know how to defeat each one, and then you had to do it.

I kept the radio on while I worked. It was a compromise with my parents, who didn't want me to be distracted during my homework, but I told them it was only music and it helped me to work, it helped me keep going.

They had no idea.

There was no such thing as "only music." Music wasn't only anything.

I turned it on—the real staticky, edgy station that I loved to listen to, not the acceptable-but-not-lifechanging station that I'd introduced to my parents—and the music poured out through speakers. The bass vibrated my skin against my skeleton, and the lyrics seeped into my brain. The chords changed. In my notebook, chemical reactions fizzed and burned. The answers checked out in the back of the book. The song climaxed.

Without meaning to, my hands were playing air guitar.

All was right with the world.

At some point, my meditative state was interrupted by the DJ. I was just getting through my math, building up to English. English was my worst subject. I still got good grades, but they were acceptable, did-your-best good, not astoundingly good. I could tell. The way teachers graded me, it was like they were saying, Stick with the numbers.

"Rounding out that set was Johnnie McKenna," he said. "If you liked that track, why don't you check her out later this week, she'll be playing live with her band next Saturday night at the T.L.A. Theater—"

I didn't hear the rest. I didn't need to. Johnnie McKenna was coming to town. When her album came out, Larissa and I found it online like a hidden treasure and listened to it on repeat while doing nothing else, just lying in front of the speakers, head to head. She was going to be here. In Philadelphia. This was a climactic moment in my and Larissa's lives—

If she'd ever talk to me again, I mean.

*

All night I wrestled with the compulsion to call her. If things were normal, an event like a Johnnie McKenna concert would be a three-alarm emergency, worth a midnight text or even trying to sneak a phone call. I withered through the knowledge that she was probably completely unaware of it, and that I held the secret key to unlock this potential magic spell.

I heard the announcement on a Tuesday night. Wednesday in school I held my phone in my sock instead of in my backpack, where I'd been keeping it, since there was no one these days who needed to get in touch with me immediately. It didn't ring at all. Thursday was completely dry, too. It was killing me, this news stuffed inside my chest, clawing at my flesh to get out.

By Thursday afternoon—Hebrew School again—I'd reconciled myself to solitude. If she spoke to me, if she took the initiative, I'd tell her about it. No. I amended that rule in my head: I'd tell her if she even glanced at me. Because maybe that would mean that some part of her wanted to talk. I'd shoot her an imminent look in reply, I need to tell you something, and then I'd tell her. And then I would leave. Just drop the bomb and get out. I found out this information. Do with it what you will. I'd show her I was being selfless. That was the most amenable way to deal with it, I decided—to leave it in her court.

As it turns out, I couldn't even do that. I glanced at the far side of the classroom and she wasn't there. The class was remarkably empty. Siggy Nudelman (one of the worst nerd offenders in the whole school; compared to him, I was almost socially acceptable) informed us that Bridleton High had the day off for teacher training.

"It's worse than I thought." Milt let out a snort strong enough to make me want to offer him a tissue. "Looks like we're down to the last guys standing." He gave us a grim nod of respect.

Then it was Friday, and Fridays moved fast. When I got home that day, I told my parents that, tomorrow night, I was going to a concert with friends from school.

It came out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. I froze. I released a silent prayer (before I could remind myself, yet again, that I didn't believe in G-d) that this would go easy.

"That's great," said my mother. "Do you need a ride?"

No other questions.

I was so thankful, I ran straight to my room and spent the rest of the night doing homework—English homework, even—in gratitude.

# keep it like a secret

I took the El train downtown. I could have asked my parents to drive me and saved the money—they would've even dropped me a block away, if I'd asked them to—but I didn't want to feel indebted to them. I wanted tonight to be all mine.

I got on the train at the end of the line, not far from our house. I was able to get a seat to myself, and I moved in all the way, kissing the glass again. When my stop came and I pulled away, I caught sight of my reflection and I didn't recognize myself. My hair long and wild, my clothes dark, tighter than they used to be. I only stopped for a second, and then there was the train's dispassionate voice, warning me that the doors were closing and the next stop was City Hall. I got off quick, still haunted by myself, and trying to shake it off.

At the door I paid my cover—my dad had slipped me a pair of twenties on the way out—and entered into the concert hall. I bypassed the table (her only album, Drunken Water Walker, I already owned, and I was definitely not the sort of person to buy a t-shirt, even one of hers). I saw a gaggle of girls who might have been a year or two older than me, except for the way they were acting. Tight clothes, too much makeup, and a volume of giggling that seriously should've come from a crowd three times their size. They were ringed around a calendar of upcoming features, discussing which bands they'd heard of. Needless to say, they only knew the groups who were already on mainstream radio, and they'd already decided that all the other bands sucked. Please, I thought (praying, I realized, for the second time that week), don't let Johnnie get famous, not just yet. Don't let people like these be the whole audience.

It wasn't until I stepped into the main room that it occurred to me, maybe Larissa did know about tonight. It had probably been announced on the radio more than just once. Then there were advertisements. Newspaper write-ups. The Internet. Johnnie's blog. No. Did Larissa still subscribe to Johnnie's blog? I was terrified that she would be here. I was terrified she would miss it. Really, I was just terrified of life without Larissa.

The concert room was large and relatively empty. It was a huge black box with a stage at the front, more like a drama rehearsal space than a concert hall. A few packets of people stood around—a few younger than me, most noticeably older. One small group staked out the territory right in front of the stage, at the center, so they could make eye contact with Johnnie before anyone else did. Everyone looked really cool, really casual. Why had I changed into a button-down shirt and slacks before coming? The last concert I'd been to was the Philadelphia Orchestra's holiday show with my parents. I think I was five. Or else it was a kids' band called Trout Fishing in America who sang nursery rhymes that all ended with "throw him out the window."

Here, everyone was dressed like they were hanging out at a friend's house.

I didn't know people dressed this way. I just didn't want to look like I didn't belong here, like I wasn't worthy of knowing about the concert. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling hopeless. Then I attempted to retrofit, folding my arms in front of my chest, no-nonsense style. Nope.

Other people were looking at me. Not conspicuously, just checking me out. Who's that kid overdressed and all alone? I stuck close to the stage as though I was waiting for the opening band. Maybe they'd think I was a big fan of this first act that no one else had ever heard of.

The band started mercifully soon. They were called Bloody Awesome, and they were a singer, a drummer, and an accordionist.

"We are Bloody Awesome!" shouted the singer when they were all ready. She paused for people to laugh, but nobody did.

They launched into their first song. They were surprisingly good. The small crowd at the front of the stage quickly dissipated—they probably wanted the opening act to be exactly like Johnnie, and it wasn't—but I was riveted. The way that woman screamed instead of singing. How the drummer tried to play three rhythms at once to compensate for the lack of other instruments. How the accordion lines were unexpectedly catchy and fun to listen to. I stood through the first songs of the set, enraptured. Just watching them.

When I finally broke away to check out the crowd, it appeared that the room had filled up. I'd harbored a momentary fantasy/fear that only a few people would show up, and Johnnie would be forced to play before an intimate crowd. Maybe she'd call on each of us and ask us our favorite song. Maybe I'd get the title wrong and she would laugh at me.

No, there were enough people. People swarming the main floor. People at the bar, ordering drinks and flirting. People pressed against the back wall. The only place there weren't people was toward the front. A couple of kids, mostly girls, spontaneously decided to dance to the whacked-out thrash-polka band. Hand in hand, they whirled each other in circles around the crowd-less space. (Everyone had probably cleared out because they were afraid of being attacked.) I stood for a moment in admiration, turning away from the band, watching the controlled chaos of those kids.

Then I felt someone grab hold of my wrists.

I protested, tried to squeeze out of them. It was a mistake. The girl's hands were surprisingly firm.

"Sorry," I gasped, "you've got the wrong—"

I gave up. The world was spinning.

No.

I was.

The room was no longer a box, but a 360-degree circle. My feet moved faster than I could control. Kicking into each other, trying to keep from falling down. Trying to keep up.

The world whirred. I saw the colors of the concert hall, velvety backdrops, the bright blue bar, the multicolored stage lights. They blended together. I threw my head back.

I stopped fighting it. I threw myself into the dance.

The song broke off. The accordionist was unstrapping his accordion, the drummer walking away. The lead singer grasped the microphone stand, beaming triumphantly at the crowd.

"You guys are the bestest," she said. "Not you zombies watching from the back. I'm talking about the kids pogo-ing up here. They could teach us all a lesson. Thanks, you guys."

My face reddened. I could feel it burn. She was talking about me. Well, not me, but the group who'd abducted me.

The group.

The girl...

"Nice job, Arthur," the girl beamed at me. "I didn't know you had it in you. I honestly never thought you could dance."

"Carrie?"

Her hair was like I'd never seen it before, wild and serpentine, set in explosive gravity-defying braids. She wore a tank top made completely of sequins and a '50s poodle skirt. I barely recognized her as the girl from the school bathrooms, like she was usually Peter Parker and tonight she was Spider-Man.

Or, rather: Like usually she was Clark Kent and tonight she was Superman. Because tonight, this—this felt like the real her.

"I can't dance," I confessed to her. "Or I never could until just now, at any rate."

Carrie Moss laughed. It took me a second to realize she was laughing with me, not at me. But then I laughed, too.

"I had no idea you knew who Johnnie McKenna was," I told her. "I thought you were too—"

"Too angry?" she suggested, teasing, but good-natured.

"Too cool," I replied at last. By then, the band had gone off, and they'd started playing DJ music on the speakers. I had to yell in her ear.

"There's a lot you can't tell about a person when you only see them between second and third periods," said Carrie, grabbing my shoulder so she could yell into my ear too. The way she grabbed my body felt, not flirtatious, but like a privilege. Like we were suddenly and certifiably cool with each other.

She introduced me to her friends. As soon as she said their names, they passed into and straight out of my memory. It didn't seem to matter. They didn't want to know anything about me; just took me in as Carrie's friend. In the break between bands, the crowd closed in. We stood against each other, shoulder to shoulder, and staved off the intruders.

"They're brutal," complained a tall, loud kid with shiny skin whose name might have been Roger or Ryan or Brian or Broderick. I suspected he might be gay, but I felt weird asking.

"Yeah," I agreed. "They don't wait around for the openers, but they still think they deserve the front row."

"Deserving has nothing to do with it," said Roger/Ryan/ Brian/Broderick. "It's simply that these people don't know how to dance, or they refuse to. If you're going to be in Miss Johnnie's sight range, you might as well show her you're here to enjoy it." He said it nicely, though.

I winced as someone's elbow dug into my lung.

"That's actually sort of brilliant," I told him.

"Well, aren't you sweet."

"Shut up!" Carrie squeezed between us and draped one arm across the back of each of our necks. "I think I see her drummer!"

A moment later, Isaac Humbert Humbert, Johnnie's longtime percussionist and touring partner, walked onstage and seated himself nonchalantly behind the drum kit. He was followed by a stocky, diminutive woman, her green and blue hair glowing in the stage lights. Her lip-ring sparkled like a star about to go nova. I'd seen a million pictures of Johnnie McKenna, but now that she was twenty feet in front of me, this small shape didn't look as though she could sound anything like the singer I knew.

In one fluid motion, she shouldered on her guitar strap and sauntered up to the microphone stand. She touched her lips to it and gave a nervous giggle.

"You guys, stop staring at me!" she said. "I'm just up here, and you're just watching. Isn't that weird? I mean, y'all already know the songs. You don't need to listen to li'l ol' me. Now let's just have some fun." She plucked one string and twisted its peg, bending the note until it warped into another note entirely. The stage lighting changed from blue to red to a show's-over amber. Not even the lighting guy knew what to make of her. "You ready?" she said.

The audience cheered. We cheered. She giggled again.

"Oh, I was asking Humbert," said Johnnie. "But you know what? Never mind."

And she brought her fist down into her guitar strings, and she launched right into the first song. Humbert was right on top of her. Both his drum sticks crashed into the snare drum, producing the appropriate earthquake.

And then the whole concert hall was dancing.

*

I could just tell you the titles of all the songs she played, if that's what you want to know. There's no possible way to describe how good that concert was. When I woke up the next morning, I would still remember every song she sang. I could hear the concert in my head, the intro music and whatever she said before each song, clearer even than the album that I'd listened to thousands of times.

But that night, Johnnie McKenna almost didn't need to be on stage. The music was bouncing off the walls and the audience was absorbing it and we were at the very center of the wild rumpus: Carrie Moss swinging her skirts, thrashing her hair, letting the music possess her body so completely that watching her dance was like watching the song itself dance. Roger/Ryan/Brian/Broderick, who could twirl around and wave his long fingers in the air like he was performing magic tricks. This blond girl, thin and lithe, who in another world would be a cheerleader, and the head of the pack; here she was just a bouncing, getting-down kid, the same as the rest of us. And the girl they kept calling Little Jen, who wasn't that little but was short, with a solid, hefty-but-not-fat body, balloons of hips and the biggest breasts I had ever seen. It was hard not to watch them, as if each one were a distinct member of our crew. She wore a strapless tube top, and they were creeping up out of it like twin sunsets in reverse. When she danced, they moved independently, always a second ahead of the rest of her or behind her. When they jiggled, it was like they were trying to catch up. She seemed amused by the whole thing. Her head faced downward as she danced, shaking her hair, and there was a kind of synchronicity between them and her, as if she were dancing with them, or like she just wanted to appreciate the sight of her own mammaries. I'd always thought that girls were ashamed of their boobs, or that they wanted to hide them.

She glanced up at me during a song and caught me looking. After that, she shifted away. I felt embarrassed, stunned, as if I'd been doing something wrong all along and it took her looking at me to remind me of that.

After the show was done, we all crossed into the street to Lorenzo's Pizza. Almost everyone else got slices. I just wanted a drink. I got a Mountain Dew, packed with caffeine, because I didn't want this night to end. Roger/Ryan/Brian/Broderick wolfed his down and then vanished around the corner with this big goth guy with an arrowhead piercing through his nose. They were holding hands. I guess I was right.

Little Jen was singularly occupied with her pizza. Carrie and I were next to each other at the bar, her huge slices spread in front of her, me sitting on a barstool, Carrie standing (I offered her my seat, but she said pizza tasted better when you stood). She was eating, too. I was babbling.

"I never go out to concerts," I said. "But now I feel like I really should. I mean—it was so good. We were all so good at it."

"I've been thinking about that a lot," Carrie remarked. "You know how musicians say that they only really feel alive when they're playing a show? I think it's the same for some people in the audience. Like, there should be professional concert watchers."

It was amazing how human Carrie was tonight. All these bits of her that never came out in school. Her clothes, sure, but also the way she said things. The more we talked, the more parts of her came out. And the more we talked, the more Little Jen warmed to me, too. Not that she spoke directly to me, but I could see, as soon as my eyes stopped being magnetically attuned to her, she stopped being afraid to look at me. I didn't know anything about these people, or the kind of lives they led, but I could see myself becoming a part of it.

Eventually, R/R/B/B returned ("The guy was so strange," he confided to us. "He was such a gentle kisser, but his ringtone kept going off, and it was Metallica") and we all decided we should head off. They were going back to the Yards, too, though not nearly as far into the Yards as I lived. But Carrie had a car and gave me a ride part way, knocking a good dozen subway stops off my route. That way, she said, I could bypass the slow part of the ride, and we could all talk longer.

"I hope this helps," she said as she pulled up in front of the hospital-blue subway logo.

"The ride or tonight?" I said. Before she could reply, I answered myself—"It does," I said, "more than you know"—and I hopped out, flashing her a three-quarters smile just before I slammed the door and ran for the arriving train. The doors slid shut and only then did it occur to me just how happy I was, how right it felt to be with them, how I felt like I could say anything and they'd understand me, or even if they didn't they'd still think I was cool—and how long it had been since I'd felt anywhere near that happy except for when I'd first met Larissa.

Larissa. I realized with a shock, I hadn't thought of her all night.

# t.k.o.

In the morning, my body lodged a protest against the previous night. Muscles aching, bones raw. The only thing that made it better was the cold—the weather had finally stopped messing around with this half-assed fall and finally started being winter for real.

I roused myself, forcing my joints to move. It slowly dawned on me that (a) I'd slept in my clothes, and (b) I hadn't even made it under the sheets. A thin trail of loogie marked the spot atop the blankets where my head had been. It didn't matter. I felt great. Electric. Hope rolled through me, hope for the future. I couldn't wait until school Monday. I hadn't felt this good since Larissa and I had stopped talking.

Larissa. Oh no.

I had Hebrew School today.

*

I wanted to shower but there wasn't time. I grabbed a handful of Cheerios (dry) and ran out to the car with my mom. She tried to ask how my night had been but I shrugged off her questions. She didn't even have on the good radio station. Some people never learn.

I got there moments before class started, rare for me. People sped past me in the hallway like a Black Friday sale. The shelves packed full, the quantities depleting. We could run each other over, trample ourselves to death. Where are you going? Why are you rushing to class? It's only class. All you're gonna do is sit there.

But there was something to it, this rushing, and I was feeling it too. An impatience in the air. Firm and juicy, about to explode. Big things were happening.

A hand closed on my arm, yanking me out of my path. "Arty." The name breathed into my ear. It reminded me of last night.

But then I gulped, cause I was face to face with Larissa.

She had never looked so sharp. Her face a tight mask, hair pulled even tighter, and so shiny. Sleek, clingy, down-to-business clothes. A skirt and tights. Boots too. Was she dressing like this for somebody specific, or for herself? It had only been a few weeks since we stopped talking. It wasn't that long. It's been forever. She was still a mystery.

"I needed to talk to you," she said.

"I know," I said. "G-d, I'm sorry. I didn't want to go without you. But I also didn't want to call, and then it was already Saturday, and Johnnie McKenna kind of changed my life. Not her but it. Seeing her. I should've let you know, I should've warned you—"

"Johnnie McKenna?" Larissa shot me a puzzled look. "Where did you see her? On TV?"

"No, in person."

"Like on the street?" She sounded impatient. She was not getting it.

"At the T.L.A."

"Your parents let you go into the city alone?!" She was incredulous.

"No one. I was there by myself. But I met all these people, once I was there..."

"Wait! Hold on, Arthur," she said, her face darkening. "I really need to tell you something, something important."

I was lost too. Was this about us? Were we speaking again? Did she miss me? Had she dumped Damon? Did she need to confide in me about him?

"It's Mitch," she said. "I saw him, this morning. He's here, Arty. In school. He dropped out of Hebrew School but he's come back."

The life drained out of me. I honestly thought I'd never see him again.

"Don't worry, okay?" She squeezed my forearm. "I'm fine. I'm just not going to say anything. I'm going to pretend he doesn't exist. I just wanted to tell you so you don't get worried for me."

That warmth in my ear. I wanted it to stay there. I wanted us to be together, and us to be us, and for this whole Mitch thing to never enter our lives again.

"And," she breathed, "so you don't do anything stupid, okay, Arty?"

I nodded. In spite of myself, I nodded—dumbly, obediently. But before I could ask if she was talking to me again, or if she wanted me to do anything like stick by her side or have a talking to with him, she had gone. She was darting into her room, the good-Hebrew-speakers room. And my ear was getting cold.

The rumor mill in first-period remedial Hebrew confirmed it. Mitch was in school today. Someone said he was dating a new girl—a freshman or a senior, one of those—and he'd come to hang out with her. Somebody else said, his parents were letting him quit school and only study the things he wanted to. Then someone asked, if that was true, why would he come to Hebrew School, and nobody had an answer to that.

No one seemed to know why he'd dropped out in the first place. "Was he just sick of Hebrew School?" I whispered to Vicky, this girl from Bridleton who seemed to know what she was talking about.

"Nah," she whispered back. "Some bad breakup. This girl was giving him too much drama. He told his parents, and, like, that was it. They took him out. They didn't question him about it or anything." She spoke in an awed, he's-so-lucky way, as though she couldn't wait until her own parents let her ditch Hebrew School, too. I resisted the argument. Clearly, she was a non-nerd. Not one of us.

First period was torture. I mean, it was always torture, but especially now. Each question the teacher asked grated on my nerves a little more.

"What is the word in Hebrew for restaurant?"

"I achalti. You achalta. He or she does, what? Anyone?"

"In what thing do you make the food warm? Who knows? Anyone? Who know this?"

There was something fundamentally messed up about having someone who couldn't speak fluent English trying to instruct us to speak another language. All year I wanted to protest to a higher authority, or, instead of my homework, hand her a copy of The Elements of Style, but this wasn't a democracy. This wasn't even real high school.

For the last ten minutes of class, we had to speak only in Hebrew. We went around in a circle and we were each supposed to tell the class what we were looking forward to in the coming week. And I know that I'd just had the best night ever and I had the greatest of expectations for the week ahead—but just then, I couldn't remember that at all. Any of it. My mind was like a bleak, blank canvas.

"My boyfriend takes me to his box at the Eagles game," said one girl in Hebrew. "I do not like the game. But I like him, and it is fun to wear nice clothes."

"I will go to the house of my father. We haven't seen him in a month. We will eat pizza every night," said another.

"The new episode of House Full of Models," said a third. (She said the title of the show in English.) "My favorite two women are having a starve-off." (She said "starve-off" in English, too.)

"Shoom davar," I said.

Nothing.

The teacher broke into English.

"You do not have to say what you are in truth going to do this week, if the words you do not know. You may make up a fanciful story—"

"Lo. Ain shum davar ba olam hazeh sheh ani rotzeh laasot."

No. There is nothing in this world that I want to do.

The teacher licked her lips. She was lost, confused. She raised her coffee mug and took a deep hit from it. I guess she hadn't expected this much nihilism in first period.

The other kids were staring at me in horror. My words weren't that hard to understand. I think they were just shocked that someone was taking the assignment seriously.

Her lips shook, wavered, then bravely tried to reassemble themselves into a normal shape. "This is so sad, Asher," she said, using my Hebrew name, the one most of my teachers didn't even bother with anymore. "I hope for you to find many beautiful surprises."

I half-closed my eyes and nodded, feeling bad that there was probably nothing she could do to make me feel better.

The bell rang, and I bolted from my seat as fast as I could. In sixth grade, when we switched from elementary to middle school, I hated almost everything, but the one thing that made me feel better was switching classes every period. It was like a chance to reinvent yourself every time you left the room.

As soon as I left the room, I ran straight into Mitch Martin.

I wasn't prepared for this. In my head, this exact moment happened constantly, on repeat. In nightmares, or in revenge fantasies, but never like this. It had been so long that I'd forgotten what he looked like for real, only the way that my mind had redrawn and reconfigured him as being. His nefarious-looking stubble was still mostly white fluff. The rolls of fat under his chin were just babyfat.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Arty! My good man, how pleasant to see you." Mitch's arm wrapped around my shoulders, gripped my neck hard. "I'm just passing through town to visit a girl."

"Too bad for the girl."

I tried to pull away. His grip was too tight.

"You aren't mad about Larissa and me, are you? It's okay if you are. I mean, we got pretty intense. Not that you'd know anything about that, of course, because you're her cuddly little man-friend who'd never dream of touching her, but that every other guy in the world just can't wait to—"

"Rape her?" I suggested.

Mitch turned white. I had never seen anyone turn that pale. The color all left his face like he was a slaughtered animal being drained of blood. I might be her platonic snuggle-bunny (a role which, in the previous incarnation of our friendship, I would have been honored to call myself), but Mitch was just wrong. His cheeks jowled and the corners of his mouth dropped and his tongue puffed up, like he wanted to say something but his body was in too much shock to let it out.

You'd think he never heard the word before.

I realized then, he probably hadn't heard it before. At least, not in connection to that night, or in conjunction with what he'd done to Larissa. That whole time, he hadn't thought about her or asked her whether she wanted it or even cared about the possibility that she hadn't. In his mind, everyone did what he wanted them to do, all the time. He was so damn spoiled, why would anyone not help him get what he wanted?

His shock of surprise morphed into disbelief, and then annoyance.

"Is that what Larissa told you?" he said. "Puh-leez. She's crazy about me. She was so into it, I had to drop out of this place to stop her talking to me all the time. You and I both know—"

"You and I don't belong in the same sentence," I said. "Ever."

And I punched him in the face.

# i will make you hurt

My body must have been preparing for the punch even before my mind was ready to do it. My hand curled into a fist so tight that it was cutting off its own circulation, nails digging into my own flesh. My muscles were pulled taught, coiled up, ready to spring. My teeth grinded against each other, even before I said what I said. My entire body was like a jungle cat, a predatory Jack-in-the-box, wound tight as metal could go, ready to spring.

And then he set me off.

I sprung.

His body flew backward. Arms splayed out, legs rising off the ground like a video game. I half expected his body to vaporize or turn into coins. And then I would get my reward, start flashing with the power of invincibility, or grow a tail, or gain the ability to launch fireballs out of my sleeves.

It didn't, of course.

He was back on his feet in no time. His fist landing in my stomach. I was too far away, and it barely hurt. But he was rushing toward me, eager for more, yelling I'll kill you, I'll KILL you, bloody murder painted across his face. His face filling with blood now, and rage.

It must have been a mirror of my own.

Kids seized his arms, and mine. Kids pulling us apart, away from each other.

Why? I thought loudly. Don't they realize I'm beating up Mitch Martin? Who would want to stop this? Justice had to be done.

There were more people pushing through the crowd, and they reached us. From one direction, Milt. He was shouting. "Let 'em breathe, let 'em breathe. I was in Iraq. You just gotta fight these things out." When he reached us, his jaw popped open in shock.

"You?" he said when he saw me. I think he was a little bit impressed.

The second person to reach us was Principal Tolsky. She did not look impressed at all. She took one look at both of us and spun around. No hands were holding us back now, but we weren't able to leap at each other's throats. Her presence paralyzed us. That hot anger had passed, leaving behind a dull, throbbing rage of a different sort.

# hot rage

Once we were inside Dr. Tolsky's office, my head started to clear. I felt like a drunk coming out of an alcoholic blackout, half asking myself What have I done? and half What do I do now? I'd gone ten grades without being called to the principal's office. And even though this was Hebrew School and not real school, it had an unpleasant sensation of foreboding, like this could lead to real life consequences as well. My extra-curriculars were screwed. Probably my social life as well. Not to mention my parents.

We sat in shiny padded chairs in a ring of three, all facing the principal's desk. Mitch to one side, me in the middle, Larissa to my right. She got called in a short while ago, while Dr. Tolsky was still piecing together what had happened.

Now Larissa sat with us, slumped miserably in her chair, making eye contact with the floor. She refused to acknowledge either Mitch or me. For once in my life, I was fine with that.

Mitch, meanwhile, looked down his nose at me as if he wanted to bite me in half. I studiously avoided noticing him at all. Dr. Tolsky shuffled some papers. This seemed to go on forever.

"Well?" she said.

"Well what?" said Mitch immediately.

She shook her head once, strong, as though that was the wrong answer.

"Just tell me what happened."

"Arthur decked me in the stomach!" Mitch cried.

"He leaped right into my fist," I said. "And also Mitch hit me, too."

All during the long silent wait, I'd been planning exactly the words I would say. Somehow, on the outside of my mouth, my speech sounded a lot less effective. Also, a whole lot shorter.

"And Ms. Fleishman?"

Larissa didn't move any part of her body. Except, presumably, her lips, which were concealed by her long sheltering hair, and those moved only barely. "I have no idea why I'm here."

"You don't?"

"No." She was unhesitating.

Dr. Tolsky frowned. She never had to deal with real actual confrontations. I mean, this was Hebrew School. She didn't know how to react to resistance. It might have been the first time within these walls that somebody actually cared about something.

"You have no idea why these two boys are here?"

"Because they're both sanctimonious idiots."

The principal sunk back into her chair. Her chair, I noticed, was nicer than ours.

"Honestly," said Dr. Tolsky. "Honestly."

Her fingertips massaged her lips. It seemed like she was having trouble picking out exactly which words to use on us.

"I mean, look at the two of you. I know you have a lot of pressure and a lot of priorities. Hebrew School isn't supposed to be the most important thing in the world—I get that, guys, I really do! But, really? You two smart, perceptive, skilled gentlemen are fighting with each other—fighting over a girl?"

Mitch's mouth swung open, first incredulous—he looked like he'd just gotten pranked on camera—and then he snorted as if he was about to burst out laughing. I felt a surge of prickly electrical energy. I needed to shout, no Dr. Tolsky that's not it at all!

I caught a glance from Larissa. I could feel the ten-yard burn of her eyes, of her stone-set face. Don't you dare.

"There's this thing the ancient rabbis talked about, it's called the Evil Inclination—"

"I know about it," I said quickly.

"Oh, me too," said Mitch. His eyes glinted something steely. "I know it so well."

Dr. Tolsky continued as if she hadn't heard. "And it's with us all the time, at every moment. And we can never be sure what form it takes—it's not evil, like, ha-ha evil, the kind of thing you can look at it and say, yep, that's Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. Sometimes it takes the form of the most righteous feeling in the world. Sometimes you're being hateful and destructive, and the Evil Inclination convinces you that you're one hundred percent doing the right thing."

She looked from Mitch to me to Larissa. No one was giving her anything.

Dr. Tolsky switched tactics. "Larissa, I'm sorry for drawing you into this. But, honestly, I'm stumped. Is there anything you can say to them?"

Larissa let out a groan that could have summoned a tsunami.

"I don't think either of them would know what sense is," she said, "if it punched them in the stomach."

Dr. Tolsky took off her glasses and scrubbed them with the edge of her shirt. She really wasn't an idiot. The more lulls and dead-times there were in this conversation, the more my eyes decentralized and I started checking out the books on her bookshelf. There was some really good stuff there, even not-specifically-Jewish stuff. I even caught sight of some Sartre.

"Larissa!" I said. "We're not the same at all. I'm your friend. Mitch is—he's an animal!"

Mitch raised his eyebrows. "Woof," he said, deadpan.

"Do I have to be here for this?" said Larissa.

Dr. Tolsky bent away from us. Her chair bobbed up and down, and she took in the ceiling with a serious measure of thoughtfulness.

"Do you have to be here?" said Mitch. "Why the hell do I have to be here? I quit this place! You aren't even legally allowed to hold me in your office!"

At the word legal I wanted to leap up again, but I remembered Larissa's stoic look, as impersonal as we've ever been. I never wanted to see that look again.

"You know what, Mitch? You're absolutely right," said Dr. Tolsky, and pushed the intercom button on her desk. "Have a good day. You're free to go."

"About time," muttered Mitch. He snatched up his jacket, shot one last dirty and triumphant look at us, threw open the door to her office, and walked out.

And stepped right into the waiting arms of a security officer.

*

The building that the Hebrew School was a part of was a multi-purpose building—there was a gym, a restaurant, and the aforementioned old people's leisure facilities. It was the most inoffensive place in the universe, but every few years they still got an anonymous bomb threat, or an anti-Semitic whacko in the lobby, or something. Because of this, there was a second-rate, generic-looking security force they employed to hang around the building. The officer stationed most frequently near the Hebrew School, during its hours of operation, was an unlikely character named Riff, a bald and bulky weightlifter who was getting on in years—his head stubble, when it showed, was bright white—and was rumored to be an ex-biker, an ex-boxer, and a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Once I asked him if that was true, and if so, why was he working for the Jews, and he replied with a grin that I'm still not sure if it was ironic or not, "Well, you guys control all the money, don't you?" He was pretty nice, though, for the most part.

Anyway: Riff and the other security people had no official legal jurisdiction, no arms, and no uniform (well, they had matching hoodies with a logo on it)—but that day, Riff came the closest he ever did to acting like an actual police officer.

He pinned Mitch's arms behind him and wrestled him down the corridor, out of the school, in front of everyone. He walked Mitch right out the main doors and shoved him into the parking lot.

Everyone talked about it for weeks. It was a great image. Or it would've been, if we were there to witness it.

As soon as Mitch was out of the office, Dr. Tolsky's head collapsed into her hands, on her desk.

"Christ," she said. "You kids."

There was a second during which Larissa's and my glances met. Confused as to what had just happened and unsure what they had planned for us. Then Dr. Tolsky recovered and sat up, back to normal, and talking again.

"That utter moron," she said. "That, excuse me for saying this but, that prick. He thinks he can drop out of my school, badmouth it to his parents, and then waltz right back in just because he has a crush on one of my students?"

She smiled at her own aggressive behavior. "Now, as for you two. You really don't have to stick around for this period if you don't want to. I'll speak to your teachers. If you have a way of getting home, that is. Larissa, I am so sorry you had to go through that. I've always seen you guys hanging out quietly, talking peacefully, never any of that I-own-the-world stuff like Mitch Martin gives. Ever since I started here, I've tried to make the Hebrew School a place that can protect people like you from people like—well, him. Sometimes it even succeeds."

We both gave her dull stares. Much later when I thought about it, it actually seemed like a nice sentiment—a nice dream. But in the moment, neither of us wanted to hear it.

"I'm really sorry, Larissa. I'm sorry you had to go through any of this. Do you want Arthur to walk you out? Do you want to be alone?"

"Alone," said Larissa quietly.

Before either Dr. Tolsky or myself could say another word, she got out of there.

The office seemed suddenly empty. I pushed my chair back uncertainly and rose from it. Dr. Tolsky turned back to her papers.

"Oh, and Arthur?" she said as my hand touched the handle of the door. She signed her name to the bottom of a piece of paper and whipped it into the air, between two fingers. "Take this with you."

Once I was outside, I read it. It was an official school notice. I was suspended for two weeks.

*

I bolted. I ran down the hallway, not caring who was watching from the doors of their classrooms. A teacher might have called out for me to stop, but I didn't hear. I reached the parking lot just in time to see Larissa's car pull out.

I stuck around till the end of the period. The last thing I wanted was to call my parents and ask them to pick me up half an hour early, then have to explain why.

I found a place on the campus to sit—a hidden place, surrounded by trees and evergreen bushes. I let the winter creep into my fingers, under my jacket and into my bones. I used to think I wanted to run away to California, a land that seemed magical and adventurous when I was a child. I don't know when it switched to New York, but it seemed like the sort of place where someone like me could have a lot more friends than I could in Philadelphia. A bigger place, a place where they accepted you no matter what kind of freak you were, where being a freak could get you things like lots of money, and respect, and famous. New York was expensive, but when you lived there, you'd work a New York job, get paid a New York salary, get known, and accepted, by every other important person in New York.

I'd been outside for a while now, and the numbness was starting to set in. New York was a cold place. I guess I had better start getting used to that. I tucked myself away, into the trees, and dug my gloveless fingers into the frozen snow.

I watched the people from afar, kids cutting class and college students walking, and I felt invisible. I enjoyed being invisible. I'd been spending a lot of time alone these days, but it still didn't feel like enough.

# ruok

r u o k ?

I texted her. Just those five characters. I didn't want to push, but I didn't want her to be alone. Clean, noncommittal, to the point. If she didn't want to reply to me, she didn't have to.

I couldn't take the thought of her not replying. My mind retched and reeled. It refused to compute the utter possibility of it. After thirty seconds, my phone hadn't so much as vibrated. After two minutes, I decided I should probably not be holding it directly up, thumb on keypad, the screen an inch and a half from my eyes.

I started to draw a comic. Not a continuation of the last story—I mean, Crystal Orbs, really? Even I was already ashamed of that one—but a simple, straightforward poster-size action scene. I divided the posterboard into two triangles. I began sketching the arrangement of body parts, a tangled swastika of limbs (the Indian kind, not the Nazi kind). The upper left triangle was Mitch-neto, flying backward into the air. The lower right triangle was me, punching him.

My hands had just started getting into the details—costumes, facial expressions—and my brain had just started asking whether this wasn't a colossally stupid idea, reliving the fulfillment of a lame and dangerous fantasy, when the phone saved me. It was set to silent, but its little plastic body shuddered so hard that it flopped off my desk and down onto the floor. I scrambled to check the text. It was from Larissa.

Well I'm not being raped at this very moment, if that's what you mean

If I ever had a doubt that I was texting Larissa—not that I did—that would have dispelled it. Only Larissa could be so callous and so sensitive at the same time; so wry and ironic about her own trauma. Humor. Praise be to G-d, she answered me with humor. Even though our friendship was malfunctioning, toxic, or simply blown up, we still had our witty rapport. I replied fast, an ironyless smile face and a can I call before she had a chance to put down her phone and walk away.

A few moments later, my phone rang.

"Yello—"

"What is it, Arthur?" she said. "I have homework."

"I wanted to know if you were okay. You probably don't want to talk to me, but if there's anything I can do, even secondhand—"

"And staying away is too hard?"

"But I'm trying to be your friend—"

"The worst part of what you did today," she said slowly, "is, you don't even realize what you did to me."

"I didn't do it for you. He was asking for it."

"See? You don't even realize it now. You told the whole school I was raped."

A moment of silence. My brain feels like it's on fire.

"I didn't say anything, though!"

"Maybe not, but you basically did. Yes, Mitch is a jerk. But there are about a million other ways to be a jerk, Arthur, and I think you just about pounded the nail on its big ugly head."

"I didn't mean—"

"It's not what you meant, it's what you did. I thought maybe we just needed some time, some way to hit the reset button. We're exactly where we were before. Please, when I hang up, don't hit redial."

The conversation was slipping away from me. The conversation. Her. This couldn't be the end. It couldn't be. "Larissa, don't do this—"

"Arty. Stop not getting it. We're not the only people in each other's lives, and now because of you, every time I walk down the hall of that place, people are going to be looking at me and imagining me naked, they're going to know what happened to me. They're going to know I had sex. My own rape isn't even mine anymore. Now will you please leave it at that?"

There was a click. Not her hanging up, but me. I don't even think I realized I'd done it until I saw the phone back on the nighttable, my hand resting on the little silver logo. There was a horrible thud like an anvil landing in my stomach. Up till now, everything had felt temporary, tentative, as though we were just trying it out. But this—this had the devastating whiff of forever.

I didn't know how things had gotten this way, but a horrible gravelly feeling in my stomach let me know I had no one to blame but myself.

# be cool, be ice cold

That first day, the first Monday morning headed back to school, I desperately, torturously, had to pee. The feeling welled up inside me on the bus, first as a thought, and then as a physical feeling, explosive, all-consuming, pressing on every part of the inside of my body.

The other all-consuming feeling, the one in the back of my mind, was this: Today was my first day in a world without Larissa.

It didn't just feel like we were taking a break again. It felt like there was no Larissa. Or, worse, like there was—but in a totally separate dimension from mine, a dimension I was not allowed to enter. I could not just-this-once text her. I could not type under my desk on my touchpad as the teacher spoke, hoping I was hitting all the right letters and not the tohjy ;ryyrtd. Without sneaking out of class and into the bathroom to message her. (Aaaaaaah. There it was: thinking of the bathroom again.)

The bus stopped. I hopped off, ran into school faster than I ever had and bolted straight toward the bathroom. Unburdened myself, and then walked out, once again silently cursing the alignment of doors.

Smacked straight into Carrie.

"Whoa there, cowboy," she said.

And suddenly, in my head, the only life-changing event I could remember from this weekend was the concert Saturday night.

Carrie smiled at me with a hint of shared secrets, those undercover memories of our extra-curricular lives. This morning she was wearing a plaid librarian's dress and a chain- link skull necklace. Was this new? Or had she always broad- cast signals of irony and coolness, and I just hadn't had been tuning in?

I straightened up, feeling the well of my own outside- school coolness.

"Giddyup," I said.

It was still way early. Homeroom didn't start for another thirty minutes or so. I got to school early by habit, more time to not be around my parents.

I followed Carrie to the bottom of one stairwell, in that vacant basement landing where no one ever went. It dipped half a floor below the lowest floor accessible, just a sort of architectural afterthought. The steps were dusty and the walls bore the mellow brown fermentation where the janitors didn't even bother to clean. Anywhere else in school, it might have created an appearance of a sewage reservoir or a dump for old tests, but this felt like a mystical undiscovered library.

They were all sitting there. Not doing anything, just hanging out. It was like they were waiting for me. It felt like the ending of a movie, where the main character learns his true friends were with him all along. And YOU were there, Damon. And YOU were there, Crash Goldberg.... Except that none of those people would show up here, my old friends, the people I'd shared Larissa with. We were goners; we'd self-destructed in a poof of our own vices. We'd never really encouraged each other's weirdnesses; it had just been a marriage of convenience, all of us losers, so we might as well be losers together.

But these people—even after one night, they felt like my cheerleaders.

Roger/Ryan/Brian/Broderick was the first to greet me, bouncing up at once and throwing his arms around me. He engulfed me in a monster bearhug.

"You remember Roderick, right?" said Carrie.

"Roderick," I repeated, turning my head so it was only my ear that was crushed against his chest, not my whole face, and simultaneously allowing the rest of me to breathe. "Of course I do."

Mercifully, he released me. He beamed down at me, approving. Whatever test they were giving, I'd passed.

I settled in. To one corner of the nook, and to those people. They passed me a coffee. I looked around for the thermos from which it must have come, but I couldn't find one. Instead Little Jen was pouring herself a refill from a French press. "Wow," I said. "You guys have everything here."

"Yeah," said Little Jen with an air of breezy nonchalance. "We basically moved in."

Attached to that was the unspoken invitation: And you should, too.

*

The thing about my and Larissa's unlikely friendship was exactly that: It was unlikely, so close to being impossible that it nearly didn't exist in the first place. We occupied different neighborhoods, different lives. We didn't overlap in schools, cities, or friends, except for the ganglion of friendships we had manufactured for ourselves. All we really had binding us to each other was Hebrew School.

We should never have been friends in the first place. At first, that was what devastated me about our breakup—that we'd never be able to rekindle that. But the longer we stayed apart, the less vital it felt; my life moved on without her; interesting things were still happening; maybe our knowing each other wasn't necessary in the first place, and just a cool, if momentary, blip in the continuum of reality.

And time passed. I didn't think about Samson, I didn't think about Theodor Herzl, and I didn't think about Larissa.

Only, I did.

*

I started coming to school early every morning. It was nice, you know? To not worry about anything, and to actually enjoy being there. That nook at the bottom of the stairs became my hideout, and the gang became my gang. Carrie and I had this weird bond like we'd known each other since we were kids. And Roderick had a way, every time you spoke with him, of making you feel like the king of the world.

Bethany, the blond girl, had two classes with me, and we'd never noticed each other. She was one of the Beautiful White Girls. I was a Socially Awkward Nerd. Before, we'd regarded each other as stereotypes and we were afraid of trespassing into the other's social echelon. Now we saw each other as undercover outcasts from those very same roles. Now we were comrades.

Before class started, we hung. Sitting inside, we traded furtive expressions, rolling our eyes when someone got ridiculous toward the teacher, gaggling at an impossible problem, sharing twin looks of dread—and twin don't-worry, you'll-get-through-this looks of reassurance—when Mr. Roff popped open his desk drawer and sprung out a surprise quiz.

Walking from class to class with Damon, I saw Roderick approaching. He saw me too. He stretched out his long arm across the hall, palm open. I met it in a high five. He didn't say anything, just smirked vibrantly and kept walking.

"You know that guy?" Damon said.

I felt a surge of anger well up, just instinctively, but at this point I was through fighting with people. If Damon wanted to be civil, I could be civil. "Sure," I said, as pareve as I could manage.

"But he's a gay, isn't he?"

"Yep," I said, as does-it-matter? as I could muster.

Damon gazed thoughtfully after Roderick's departing form, only now considering the possibility of the existence of such a phenomenon as a gay person.

"Okay, I guess that's cool," he said finally. He walked away, head shaking, mind completely blown.

But most of all I spent time with Carrie. She really was awesome. Funny and thoughtful and schooled in all the books and bands of my counterculture, the ones that I'd thought that nobody knew but me. She showed me how it wasn't about finding bands you liked, but what you did with those bands; how you learned from them and internalized the lyrics and made each song a part of yourself. Had I been doing it wrong the whole time with Larissa? For my whole life? No: Carrie and I weren't discovering musical similarities so we could be United Forever, or whatever I'd thought of Larissa and me. Carrie was just an ambassador. She was where I could be in a few years, or a few months, or however long it took me to feel okay about my life.

And then she'd look at me intensely from under the clear rims of her silent-film-star glasses as though she was telling me something deep and serious and intense. At first I thought I was supposed to kiss her. I soon realized, it wasn't that at all—she wasn't after me at all, and she definitely didn't want me going after her. She was just watching to check that I really understood, that I wasn't just faking it. We'd both been alone our whole lives, surrounded by people who had no idea what we were thinking. Finding other people who did think was a rare prize, not to be taken lightly.

Monday I got home from school late. Tuesday I was even later.

"Let's get moving," called my father, already jingling the keys to the car. "We're already late. We've got to get you to Hebrew School in light speed."

My heart got stuck in my throat. I had planned on confessing to them about my suspension Sunday, first thing after I got home. I was still in the moment, nervous and scared and shaken. It would sound honest. They'd take pity on me. Only, when we got home, they both vanished to do their things and left me to do mine. Later it just seemed too big to talk about. Like the sort of thing that would go away if I ignored it.

"Okay," I said. "Let me just grab my books."

*

I ran into the lobby and watched my father drive away. My heart convulsed against my ribcage. I watched the doors. Would Dr. Tolsky have Riff take care of me, too, if she found me? Every second I waited was a new danger.

I waited for my father to be completely gone. Then I doubled back. I walked out the parking lot, then onto the boulevard, and then the freeway. Cars sped alongside me, whipping my hair in my face and whipping my face with mean and crazy tailwinds.

I got off at the next exit. The Wawa was easy to find. I bought a Mountain Dew from the soda fountain. I got the largest size. It was so big that I'd probably be able to leave some of it to my descendants. As a last thought, I added a single-serving fruitcake. I always hated Christmas-branded things, but today I needed desperately to feel merry. This was the first solo adventure I'd had in practically forever.

I tried not to think about the ghost of Larissa trailing me. Even the cashier looked at me askew, as though I was missing something. As though I was missing half of myself. I walked back to Hebrew School and I got there just as last period was letting out.

Perfect. I was perfect.

*

During my fortnight suspension from Hebrew School, I barely thought of anything Jewish. It amazed me how fast these things could evaporate from my brain. On a three-day weekend I'd get stray mental flashes of the book we were reading in English class, or feel a quiver of uncertainty about whether or not I finished my American History essay; while drawing, I would see a parabola superimposed on the arc of a dragon's back and feel compelled, even for just a second, to think in mathematical terms. With Hebrew School, there was no such baggage. No Prophets, no Hebrew, no kosher. Once I thought I heard Milt yell at me from across the street, but it was just an insane homeless guy.

Most days, I stayed late at school with Carrie and her friends. Or we went to Roosevelt Mall, where all the Yards football-jacket kids hung out, but they never touched the places where we went. We hung at the post office and the record store. We went to the tattoo shop, which Little Jen's parents ran, and although you had to be 18 to enter they let us hang out and eat Tastykakes and watch Jeopardy! in the back. It was the first time I didn't feel ashamed for knowing most of the answers. In fact, Little Jen knew even more of them than I did, and it turned into a whole competition.

"What is Tripoli?"

"Who was Richard Feynman?"

"What is 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'?"

"What is forty-two?"

At first, everyone was rooting for Little Jen, since they knew her better and it was her parents' shop and all, but their support quickly evened out as the questions got harder. Someone hit the Double Jeopardy question, and time ran out on us; neither Little Jen nor me had any idea. The on-screen contestant had no idea either—until, a fraction of a second before the buzzer sounded, something clicked in my mind and I yelled out,

"A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to reap!"

which was the lyric to one of the songs that they always played on my parents' radio station, the station I hated listening to. No more, I promised G-d, just as the TV host repeated the same exact words I'd just said.

I looked up at Little Jen, who'd been gnawing on her thumbnail in consternation. Now her whole mouth hung wide open.

Then Roderick scolded me: "You forgot to phrase it in the form of a question."

And everyone burst out, laughing and cheering at once. Little Jen, too. She reached over and ruffled my hair in admiration. Behind everyone else was Carrie, beaming at me proudly—not for getting the question right, I was reasonably sure, but for having broken myself in with the rest of them.

# team portrait

I drew them. It was an inevitability, as sure as secrets need to spread, that once Carrie's and Roderick's and Little Jen's and Bethany's faces started appearing in my line of vision on a daily basis, they'd be in my head too. And once they were in my head, one way or another, they were going to come out.

I drew them as a superhero team. But not as the Justice League or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, all bright colors and victory hugs. That wouldn't have been real. It wouldn't be them. Instead I took visual cues from movies, from internet videos, from their lives. Instead of bright spandex, I gave them leather and kevlar, slick jackets and skin-thin gloves, goggles and tech and metal robot appendages. In the center was Carrie, our team leader, our Professor X, facing us head-on, arms crossed over her chest, an in-control smile with just a hint that maybe, just maybe, she was secretly teasing you. She wore a short black dress (a grey pattern of skulls and crossbones, only discernible if you looked closely) with the hedges of a cape (black, leathery) perched on her shoulders like bats.

There were no costumes. There were no superpowers. There were just us—each of us, as fabulous and weird and unreal as we were in real life.

To one side, Roderick leaned on her shoulder, the most exaggerated and supernatural of the group, tall black boots, just a hint of puffed-up abs and muscles—I wanted to keep his uncanny skinniness, the twisty dexterousness of his body, that sense that he could dodge bullets. Flanking Carrie's other side was Little Jen, in a tube top that I hoped wasn't too cleavagey or sexist, except that her pants—tight, shiny, and at least two-thirds covered by even-tighter boots—were even more unapologetically sexual. But it wasn't pervy—or, perhaps, it wasn't only pervy. She had spiky don't-touch-me hair, the way she cocked her hip, the way she lay her hand on top of it, spreading her fingers across its curve, the kind of sexy that guys could check out, but that she herself owned.

Bethany stood off to one side, smiling, happy, mostly-quiet, blonde, but enigmatically blonde, because she could easily pass as popular, she could be one of those girls who ruled boys like sheep, but benevolently, like Larissa, saying you don't have to be afraid of being friends with me, and meant it—but Bethany just wasn't like that. It was like she'd made it to the top of the food chain and then flat-out rejected the whole thing. I made her costume more utilitarian than sexy. I thought she'd appreciate that.

And I drew me. I wasn't sure if I should, but by the time I'd gotten that deep into the drawing, it just sort of naturally started happening before I knew it. And there was no reason not to—I'd been hanging with these people practically every weekday for weeks. Was I one of them? It felt a little presumptuous, but why not? I wasn't confining myself to them. I wasn't making Carrie and her band the borders of my life. They were just one comic I could draw, one in a library...but one comic that, these days, I really liked coming back to.

I drew a volcano surrounding us. Either because we were immortal, or because we all knew our entire world could blow up at any moment.

I wasn't going to show them the picture. I didn't want to give away their secret identities—to them or anyone else.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on the volcano crater, though, Roderick walked by—or sashayed, really, dancing to the beat of a song the rest of us couldn't hear. (No, he wasn't wearing a headset.)

As soon as I saw him seeing me—seeing us—I turned a Daredevil shade of red. "It's, uh, it's not real," I stammered. "I know you guys don't dress up in costumes. I was just, um, sketching—I do this all the time—"

"Not real? Is that what you think?" Roderick smirked at me, either dirty or wise or paternal or some sort of other thing I didn't yet know the word for.

And then he said to me: "Honey, you have no idea."

He patted my head as he walked away, leaving me to wonder just what he meant by that.

# dancing on my grave

In my mind I kept replaying scenes of Larissa. Like it was a movie I'd seen long ago, or a book I'd once read, one of those stories that hit you at exactly the right time in life and change the way you see everything else. And then you read some other books, or see a bunch more movies, and you kind of forget that the old one ever existed.

Had we really been that close? Had we ever done the things we'd done? Sending each other dozens and hundreds of picture messages in a day, pretending to be on different continents when really we were across the class from each other, whispering secrets while lying on a bed together while we (painfully, painfully) avoided touching. Walking down the stairs to the Delaware River...or maybe walking across the water itself. Had she really taken me along to buy underwear, that first day of our acquaintance, the day we'd overrun the mall and made it ours together? Had any of that really happened? We were dreamlike. We had been.

These memories felt fake and faded. As if I'd made them up myself, with no one else to remember them but Larissa. And now she wasn't talking to me. There was a shadow where her presence was. Sometimes I'd want to turn to her and say, "Hey, didn't we—"

But I'd lost that right.

Still, I could remember it all. I remembered one day, stumbling upon a protest downtown, five hundred people spread across the Quadrangle holding signs and yelling at the absent mayor of the city and the faraway brokers on Wall Street, shouting that we needed a change and we needed it now. We didn't know it was happening, but we knew we agreed with it. Larissa and I shouted a bit—she threw her fist in the air; I was too embarrassingly self-conscious to—but that wasn't why we were there. We were there because of the passion in the air; the spirit of things being new and volatile and on fire. Oh, we believed in the cause, too, but mostly that was how we felt about ourselves.

*

I shivered. I wasn't outside. It was no longer sunny out, or warm. That time was an eternity ago. I was surrounded by mustard-colored walls, and underground, and beneath a set of stairs. In a corner, Roderick was choreographing Bethany, showing her how to spin and place her hands on her hips: he wore a baby t-shirt, and she wore a knitted sweater, and both were too short, and both rode up at the same time, exposing their belly buttons like that was a part of the dance routine.

"You alright?" Someone touched my wrist, my bare skin, and for a second I thought it was Larissa. Then I jumped: Little Jen, startled, pulled away from me. She was staring at me with a worried look. I hoped she wasn't offended.

"I'm fine!" I yelped, coming back to Earth. "I'm sorry about that. I was just...thinking."

"It's okay, man," she said, gruffly, but concerned. "You just looked really faraway for a second. You looked like someone was dancing across your grave."

# one of the guys

Three sharp clinks against the glass of my bedroom window, tink tink tink. Even though it was freezing outside—snow was expected that weekend—I threw it open and looked down at the street. Thinking in my daze that it must be Carrie, or Roderick, or one of the others. Hoping against hope that it was Larissa.

Against the charcoal black was the white of Damon's winter parka. The hood was pulled tight around his face.

"Damon?" I said.

"Hey! Can I come up? Is it too late?" A stiff, mittened Disney animal fist waved up at me.

"What are you doing here? Don't you hate me?"

"Don't you hate me?"

I thought about hating him. I thought about the last time we'd talked, the porn, the lost GizmoNo game, everything about him and Larissa. I hadn't talked to him at all about it. I'd just decided that he was one more traitor and that I hated him. I thought about all hate I was feeling these days, and all the people who were a lot more complicated than just hate. There was still anger teeming in my body, but Damon seemed right now like the weakest target for it.

I waved at him to come up.

My parents probably would've said no, but they'd been silent for too long by now, either watching the late show or asleep. I was up. The way I was buzzing from school, I would still be up for hours.

Without waiting for me to say no, he took off his gloves and scurried up the drainpipe. The pipe was slippery, and probably freezing as well, and so watching Damon climb was a little embarrassing. He'd done it a hundred times before, only never quite this disastrously. When he finally reached the top, and threw himself over the ledge to my bedroom, he slammed the window down (another, much louder tink) and sank against my wall.

I gave him space to recover. He rubbed his hands together and breathed on them. Soon he stood up, peeled his coat off, and started hunting for something under my boxspring.

"Damon, what are you doing?"

"Looking for your snack food. Come on, why isn't it here?"

"Not that. I mean, coming over here at midnight after you haven't spoken to me in forever. You almost broke my window."

"Did not."

"Almost."

"Almost doesn't count. Arty, just tell me, where are they? Being this cold makes me hungry."

"If there's a single crack in that glass..."

"Please?"

"I switched the hiding place. They're over there. Inside the Enterprise."

I nodded to the scale model of the starship that had stood guard on my bureau forever. He unscrewed the saucer section. It was still mostly full of pretzel knobs. He dug out a fistful.

"Just pretzel knobs? I was expecting Party Mix."

"Oh, that's like the prize at the end. They're hidden inside the rear nacelles. So what brought about this change of heart?"

"What change?" He was all innocence, crouched on my bedspread. Innocence and a splattering of white pretzel crumbs across his chest.

"You know, last I heard, you were dating my best friend and not talking to me."

He shifted. He stopped eating.

"I wasn't dating her," he said. "Or at least, I'm not dating her anymore."

"What?!"

"It happened a while ago. I asked her to go to a movie with me. We went out once or twice, but it was too weird. That's what she said, anyway."

I knew that Larissa would've been the one to say that. I could practically hear their whole conversation in my head, both sides. I knew them both that well. If it was up to Damon, they'd still be going out, and they would've gone up to one of their bedrooms at the end of the first date and never come out. Presuming they made it as far as a bedroom.

I must have looked truly nauseous, since Damon leaned across to the desk chair I was sitting on and gave my knee a weak but friendly shoulder-pat. "I'm sorry, man," he said. "I should've asked you if it was okay. I know how close you guys are, and I owe you. I mean, you're the reason Larissa and I know each other in the first place."

I said "hmm," agreeing with his apology, if not with his reasoning. Then I asked again, "Why did you come to my house tonight?"

"Oh!" Damon said as if it were the most obvious thing in the universe. "I heard you beat up Mitch in Hebrew School. I wanted to say, congrats, and sorry I missed it."

I eyed him strangely.

"I was in Advanced Ladino when it happened," he explained. "I tried to find you after, but you'd already gone."

"But Mitch is your friend," I said, being deliberately vague. I didn't know how much Larissa had told him. Or if she'd said anything at all.

"Mitch is a dick," Damon said matter-of-factly. "He was your friend. I always tolerated him because of the free stuff. But he bugged the crap out of me." He popped a pretzel knob into his mouth. "Why, what finally did it?"

"Did it?"

"Pushed you to the brink." He narrowed his eyes. "Made you pull the trigger."

"Oh," I shrugged, still trying to be vague. "You know. Just stuff would pour out of his mouth, and I'd have to try to ignore it. He thought he was the only person on Earth whose opinion counted about anything."

"He thought Larissa counted, too," Damon countered.

"What do you mean?" I tried to steady my voice. Keep it normal, innocent, I told myself.

"Come on, you had to know. Mitch had the hugest crush ever on Larissa. When I first heard about you guys duking it out, I sort of automatically suspected that was what you were fighting about."

"But I don't like her," I blurted out.

"No, I know that! You're probably the only guy alive who doesn't like her," he said. "I mean, like that. But I figured, you can get sort of protective sometimes."

"Did you hear everything about today?" I said. "I got suspended. My E.C.s are blown. My college admissions are completely shot to hell."

"Nah. You've got a tight academic record, so the midrange schools will probably overlook it and the top-tier schools might turn a blind eye, as long as the rest of your stuff is solid. Or, what if, maybe you could sell it to them a different way? Let's say you list each class as a separate skill, Hebrew and Bible coursework and an internship with a freelance journalist. You don't even have to mention that you got grades, or that you got suspended. It'll be like you did five extracurriculars instead of one."

"Damon," I said, glowing, "you're a genius." I rose, surprising myself by getting ready to hug him. For the first time all day, I felt like I still had a future.

Thankfully, he interrupted by holding up an unbroken nacho-powdered tortilla chip like it was hidden treasure. He smiled bashfully. "Are we good again?" he asked, a little anxious, a little hopeful.

"We're good," I told him.

# reprise

Winter descended. The sky gave in and finally snowed. We started to move slower, all of Philadelphia, like fish hibernating in frozen water, still swimming, still breathing, still feeding, only doing it all in suspended animation.

I read on some website, there were a bunch of arrests in Bridleton for drugs. The article mentioned two high schools by name. One of them was the school Mitch and Larissa went to.

My parents mentioned it to me over dinner. "So," said my mom, "seems like the suburbs have it just as bad as the city." Yep, there's nothing like relative crime rates to make you feel more secure about your ghetto.

The truth was, I didn't mind. I didn't feel superior like my mom did—I didn't need to. If I never saw Mitch Martin again in my life, I'd be pretty satisfied. And if I did...well, I had a feeling we'd just walk our separate ways.

Larissa, on the other hand, I wasn't so sure about. My new life, my life without her, had achieved an oddly stable balance, and I was steadfastly determined not to do anything to upset that balance.

*

I was getting the hang of it. My new friends. Life.

They were so weird, their clothes so loud, their music so eerie and alien, the very antithesis of Larissa's and my undercover weirdness. But I was learning how to appreciate that loudness. Carrie and I still saw each other between classes, and occasionally alone outside of that. That week there was this famous comic artist speaking at the local community college, and we walked in with a bunch of college kids so the guards in the lobby wouldn't check our I.D.s and we sat together in the back. During the question and answer period, I whispered to Carrie the question I'd wished I could ask but was too nervous to, and she surprised me by sticking her hand in the air and standing and asking it herself.

Another time we went downtown after school. We sat in 30th Street Station and I sketched people coming up from the train platforms and handed the sketches to Carrie, who wrote little stories about them in the blank space. I thought of telling her my plans for running away to New York, but I couldn't. It felt too private, still. Too mine.

One day we were lying on the frozen grass outside school, alone together, and Carrie asked me, "What do you want?"

"Out of our nascent friendship?"

"Out of life."

"I don't know. A good college, and then a job, I guess. Hopefully one that's somehow connected to drawing."

"No, not that kind of stuff. I mean, what do you want? What would make you happy?"

I thought. Hard prickles of grass pushed against my back, inside my sweater. I tried to really ask myself, to remember, when was the last time I knew for sure what I wanted?

World peace. Naked girls who would do anything I asked them to, and more. A really big bowl of Cap'n Crunch that never got soggy.

"This," I said. "I mean, mostly this. I'd like to make the world a better place, I mean, for everyone else, and feed hungry people and cure AIDS and neurological disorders and stuff. But I think I'm doing okay. If I could just freeze time, and make right now last forever, and not push anything too far or never find out whether I'm going to be a success or a failure or have to deal with any of the problems that will eventually come up or grow up or get any younger, I think I'll be pretty utterly fine."

"That's great," she said.

"What about you?" I said.

"I don't know." She lifted a piece of grass between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, a single unbroken stalk that was longer than both her hands. Then she snapped it in half. Tiny flakes of frost flew in all directions.

"What do you think?" I said. It was an old trick from my middle-school English teacher: You can say you don't know something, but you can never say 'I don't think.' I stole it often.

"I think," said Carrie, settling again comfortably into the grass, "that I live in an ideal and very delicate state between incredible happiness and incredible tension. And it's hard to get the right balance, because when you're too happy you never have to try for anything, and when there's too much tension, it feels like you'll never be happy again."

I didn't know what that meant, or whether that was really what she was thinking, or if there was some subtext I should have been following but wasn't. But I knew what she meant. And I knew that there was one thing that wasn't completely right with my life. I mean, I knew exactly what was wrong, and I sort of knew exactly what I had to do to make it right. But once I did it, I didn't know what would happen next.

I had to tell Larissa I missed her.

I looked away from Carrie. I knew she wanted me to reply with some sort of equally philosophically obtuse answer, but in the moment, I'd lost the ability to speak that language.

*

Once you name something, you take its power away. It worked on the Goblin King in Labyrinth, it worked on Mister Mxyzptlk in Superman, and it could work for me. The whole suspension thing had been building up strength in my mind, lurking in the shadows, growing from an elephant in the corner to a whole demonic monster in the corner. And my peregrinations to Wawa weren't doing any favors to my paranoia. I'd consumed so much Mountain Dew in the past few days that I could swear my skin was turning day-glo green, and I hadn't been able to sleep in weeks. (That was probably more a result of the caffeine than my paranoia, but I was taking no chances.)

So on Thursday before Hebrew School, I decided to casually spill the beans.

"Let's get moving," said my father. "Hebrew School Express, leaving in T-minus ten seconds."

"Actually," I said, "that won't be necessary."

"What do you mean?" My mother rested her coffee on the kitchen counter and looked up. She had this supernatural sense when trouble was coming. Or maybe she always suspected that trouble was coming.

"I, uh," I said, "I'm not supposed to go to Hebrew School until next Tuesday."

"Was that on the calendar? Let me check the calendar...."

"It's not on the calendar." I spoke slowly, with purpose. Owning every word as it left my mouth. "I was suspended. For getting into a fight. I'm suspended until next week."

"Oh." A quiet, unexpected resignation. My father dropped his coat and sank into the sofa, then changing his mind and leaning forward. His hands cupping his knees. "Oh."

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry about that."

"What?" said my mother. She abandoned her coffee, walking into the living room with the force and speed of a fire that needed to be put out. "Well, what happened? Whose fault was it? Did Dr. Tolsky know? When exactly did this happen, and what do we have to do? Do we have to come in and talk to the principal or—"

"It's done," I said. "It happened about a week and a half ago. It's just through next Sunday."

"And just how long were you going to wait to tell us?"

"Since then, Mom. It's not like they wait to suspend—"

"Can you please stop saying that word? Can you just tell us what happened?"

"It's nothing! I just got into an argument. We got sort of heated, and then we started, I don't know."

"What don't you know? Were you hurt?"

"No! I can take care of myself."

"Obviously you can't! If you're getting suspended—"

"It just happened once!" I screamed. "It was a stupid mistake! I'm already being punished for it, you don't need to punish me too!"

"Who was it with?" said my father. His first volley into the conversation.

"What difference does that make?"

"Do we know him? Or her?"

"It wasn't with a girl—" I don't know why I felt the need to protest that.

"Was it with Larissa?"

"What?"

Both me and my father stared at my mother for that one.

"I don't know. You two always used to talk to each other, nonstop. Then all of a sudden, she's never calling."

"She never called that much." My hands turned icy. "We were just friends."

"Arthur. We know about the late-night phone calls. Don't be silly. It's okay."

"Don't call me silly. You have no idea—"

"I know we're overprotective. We aren't clueless. We know you talk on the phone late at night sometimes."

"You don't have the right to—"

"We don't listen in! We do know it happens, that's all. We have to know, it could've been drug dealers or phone sex or—"

"You have no right."

"We have every right, Arthur," she said. "We're your parents."

"No," I growled. "The fight wasn't with Larissa. That's ridiculous of you to even say. And it's awful. I would never hurt Larissa."

"Well," said my father carefully, "was she around for it?"

"Yes," I said. "She was."

I hadn't yelled that. I felt the fire leaving my words, dropping out of my voice. I think my parents could feel it, too.

"And what did she think of it?" demanded my mother. She didn't know when to stop. I remember thinking that, and feeling like a jerk for thinking it, but just: You don't know when to stop.

"She thought it was a stupid, selfish thing to do," I said.

"And how long does it last?" my father said. "This suspension?" He said suspension like it was a word in a foreign language.

"Just through Sunday. Then I go back to class, just as normal. My teachers can assign me make-up work. It won't affect my grades, she said. It's just a suspension."

We were powering down. The anger seeping out of us. Our voices lowering in volume and growing hoarse, the blood in our veins slowing to a normal rate. I never thought I'd be able to say the words just a suspension and believe it.

I also never thought I'd be able to say that to my parents, tell them I'd been suspended, and have all three of us survive. It was one of those ultimate wrongnesses, a dark black hole that I'd never be able to recover from or move past.

But that was the thing, right? No matter what, life moves on. Getting suspended. Finding out about Damon's porn fetish (addiction? compulsion? No, he was just a regular kid. So many people I knew probably watched porn; I just didn't know anyone else well enough to know about it. Underneath it all, we were all of us weird, all of us total abnormal freaks). Larissa's rape. Things happen to you, sometimes the worst shitty things happen to you, and you keep going. Like a shark, unable to stop moving until it dies. We have to keep living until we're dead.

My parents boiled another kettle of water. We all sat around the table, drinking their instant coffee (I drank pennyroyal tea). They took out the cake that they were saving for a dinner party they were going to that weekend, and we cut into it at first tentatively, then greedily, wholeheartedly, cutting ourselves bigger slices each time. My mom started telling us about her job. She was the receptionist at a doctor's office, and almost every day she came home complaining about her clients. Usually I dreaded it, but today her descriptions were things I could laugh at. My father was laughing, too, and my mother was baffled at first but then she laughed along. The whole world was ridiculous. There was nothing we couldn't laugh at.

dreaming little dreams

I dreamt about Larissa. We were at summer camp, or on vacation, or someplace with trees and ocean and a bigger sky than there ever was in Philadelphia. I must've arrived with my parents, or maybe not. Other kids from my class were there. We were all in swimsuits, and my shirt was off, and I was feeling more exposed than ever. I pushed through the crowd, each time running into someone I knew—first Damon, then Crash, then Perry Kerry. I would make a sort of desperate excuse to each of them about why I wasn't in better shape and why my chest was sunken-in and concave, a paunch of fat with no visible abs. I needed to find a towel.

Later I was shaking water off myself desperately, like a dog. I don't remember going swimming, only finding myself wet and dripping. I was in a locker room. I kept watching people enter and exit, positive that a girl was going to intrude on me.

Finally, one did. It was Larissa.

"Don't you have a towel?" she said. "Everyone should have a towel."

"I don't," I said. "As a matter of fact, I'm cold."

"Don't be cold," she told me. "That's not a good way for you to be."

She didn't have a towel, but she handed me a hooded sweatshirt. It was big enough for us both. I said as much, but she laughed at me and said, "If we ever get together, it's not going to happen that way. Not with me."

The next thing I knew, we were in bed together.

I mean—not like that. We were both in pajamas, or clothes that were comfortable enough to be pajamas. I was under the sheets. She was on top of them, but right next to me. Our bodies were touching in a way they never had before. Spooning, people called it, and although that word always sounded like a prelude to sex, I understood right then exactly what it meant. How our bodies were created so that they could fit together, like Legos, and how that was actually what they were doing right now, thigh against thigh, knees to knees, hands fumbling for their match. Every bit of myself was so sensitive. Through the fabric of the topsheet I could feel her skin breathe.

"Have you missed me yet?" she said.

"I've been waiting so long to be here," I said.

"This isn't what you've been waiting for," she said. "Not with me. This isn't what you miss about me."

"It's not?" I wasn't sure if this was the dream-me talking, or if this was really me.

"Oh, you miss me, all right," she said, "but I'm mostly a safety. What you miss is our beginning. The unknown. And we can never have that beginning again. So you'll just have to make another beginning."

"I want that!" I cried. I was joyous and also excitable. This was the chance I'd been wanting, the chance I'd been waiting for. I had to seize it now, as loudly and as enthusiastically as I could, or else she wouldn't know I really meant it.

"That's exactly what I want! I want us both to start over," I said, "we can start over together." We were suddenly facing each other, from sort of far apart, looking at each other across a wide gulf, although we were also still spooning our bodies together.

"But not together," she said, "or, maybe, not like this," and then she reached over and touched my nose. Her fingertip was warmer than the rest of her body combined, and oh, it felt so good, just that stupid ludicrous gesture—to be so close to her that we could be weird like that again. As soon as she did, I woke up.

The LED numbers of my clock burned in the dark like devil eyes. It was just after five in the morning.

*

I didn't go to sleep again. I lay there for what seemed to be hours, for what probably was hours, trying to remember every second, trying to recreate it in my mind. I thought about taking out my sketch pad and trying to draw the dream in pictures, but I knew I wouldn't be able to capture it right. It was the feeling, that warmth and familiarity and safeness, which was already fading into the waking word. If I was motionless, if I could summon the exact feeling of that dream, I could hold onto it forever. I could already feel it drifting away.

Presently I heard the shuffling noises from below, my parents making breakfast, getting ready for their jobs. I knew I should get moving, too. School had completely changed for me. It was no longer something I dreaded. Lately, I was leaving even earlier than usual, making my pre-class time into a real part of my day.

But today, my dream's claws dug deep. One little part of the past that I couldn't let go of, no matter how hard I'd been trying. Today, it felt like any struggle against the power of the past was pointless. That dream was the only thing I wanted. If I could have, I would have lived inside it forever.

# late night double feature

"Meet us tonight at the Rendezvous Point," Carrie texted me. "Wear all black. Be fabulous."

Okay, so: her message puzzled me. Not the part about the Rendezvous Point—that, I knew, was the subway stop where they had dropped me off, that first night. But why? And what did be fabulous mean? And what were we going to do anyway on a Saturday night in town?

Carrie and I had been messaging each other constantly, with a speed and wit that would have impressed Larissa, if I could've told her about it. It wasn't like flirting—our relationship was way less boy/girl, way more student/sensei— but there was always this teasing quality to it, always like she didn't trust me entirely...or like there were secrets she wasn't yet telling me. So far our friendship, like school, was Monday–Friday only.

I was sitting on the couch, in a ball, watching a black-and- white Alfred Hitchcock movie on PBS when I got the text. My brain had slipped into a mode it hadn't been in a while: I was writing mental notes, thinking about the things I'd say in the movie to Larissa. My phone let out a shrill beep, the kind that attacked my nerves like sandpaper.

"Who was that?" said my mother, trying to sound un-prying. "A girl?"

"Just a person," I said. "You're always so sexist. Why do you have to be prejudiced like that? And, uh, what do you think 'be fabulous' means?"

My father gave me a look. "Maybe we should wish it was a girl," he muttered.

I ignored them. Feeling singularly directed by Carrie's message, possessed, as if it were an command rather than an invitation (actually, it did read more like a command), I ran upstairs to scavenge through my few clean clothes and find a sweater and pants that were black, or reasonably close to it.

My parents offered to drive me to the subway. I was going to turn them down, but accepting felt like a sportsmanlike thing to do. That, and it was bloody freezing outside. I climbed up to the elevated train platform, pulled my hood tight against the headwinds, and watched the inbound pull in.

When I got off the subway, my friends were already waiting.

Tonight they crowded into Roderick's car, an old, large boat of an Oldsmobile that made me feel like maybe the El train had been secretly replaced by a time machine. Of course it had been. Getting out of my neighborhood was like venturing to a secret world where I no longer needed to live there.

The back door swung open. I hopped in. I was sitting next to Little Jen, the last place I would've chosen to sit. It wasn't that I didn't like her. It was that I did like her, and I was deathly afraid of what she thought of me. She was so cool and distant and elusive, always letting you speak, never speaking. Every time I was around her, I instantly felt like my hair was sticking up and my nose had a booger dangling out.

Carrie leaned over and gave me a half-hug, which we always did, and she handed me a brown paper bag. I took it in my hands. Something crumbled against my fingers.

"What is it?" I asked. "Can I look inside?"

Carrie smiled mischievously and Little Jen waved a cautionary finger. "No peeking," she warned.

Roderick whistled innocently as we drove through the loud and crowded streets. Back in the Yards, Saturday night was already winding down, but here, in Center City, it was nearing the high point of the evening—when everyone who was out on the town was finishing dinner and deciding what they should do next, when the concert people were moving to bars and the dance-club people were finally arriving at their dance clubs. Roderick drove much like he did everything else, with impeccably precise movements. We skirted in and out of traffic as if inside a video game. In the backseat, Little Jen whipped out a tube of lipstick.

In a moment she was on top of me, straddling my waist.

"Hey!" I shrieked. "What are you doing?"

Carrie reached over and pinned both my arms down. Little Jen lowered herself to my face and cupped my chin in her palm. Her nails raked my cheek. I struggled against Carrie's large firm hands, not sure whether I should actually use force or not.

Next to me, Bethany giggled. At least she was only watching.

"Nggh!" I said. Little Jen's fingers had effectively muted me.

"Just chill," said Carrie. "Most guys would kill for a view like this."

I did have to admit, in this position, her breasts were incredibly close to my face. She was wearing some sort of black-and-white bustier, heavily sequined and glittering blindingly. I averted my eyes as best I could—not because I was a monster, just out of politeness. Oh, do you have boobs? I imagined myself saying. How nice they are; I hadn't really noticed they existed....

Little Jen finished my lipstick quick. Then, barking an order to Bethany, a handbag was quickly produced, and Little Jen burrowed inside it for mascara. She lined my eyes and then started tracing a swirl on my cheek.

"I don't know what you're doing, but I'm kind of afraid," I said. Or, I tried to, with Little Jen's fingers squishing my cheeks together. It came out sounding more like, Aah oonow waa oor oogie.

"Sit back," said Little Jen. Her lips were deathly close to my face—her own makeup looked like a cross between a vampire and a zombie, both sophisticated and savage. "And try to enjoy it."

She smiled. The look on her face was that of someone who was being thoroughly evil and thoroughly enjoying it. My head flopped back into the seat rest. I heaved a sigh, and, indeed, tried to convince myself that I was enjoying it.

We pulled up in front of the old theater, and my suspicions were confirmed. It was 11:15. A crowd of people had already started to gather. Most of them were a few years older than us. Some merely wore black; others were decked out in more extravagant, spectacular costumes.

I marveled how some of them could be dressed that way in this weather and not be either frostbitten or miserably sick. Their noses were solidly, immaculately non-runny. It was nearly inhuman. We were close to the edge of town, and it was easy to find a parking spot, provided you didn't worry too much about which blocks looked safe to park on. (No block around looked safe to park on.) Roderick depowered the engine, and we all climbed out.

I was wholly unprepared for how everyone had dressed. Carrie wore miniature shorts, a sequined strapless top, and lace-up tap shoes. Little Jen was in a French maid's outfit. Roderick had on what I first took to be leggings, but his coat bounced back and forth as we moved and I soon realized that they were actually thigh-high stockings. His hands were encased in leather gloves.

"Oh, no," I whispered. "Are we really going to..."

"You'd better believe it," demurred Carrie.

I had to remind myself, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had to trust them. Looking down at myself, I didn't even had an idea of what I looked like.

We moved slowly past the line of people. At first I thought we were just strolling past to check out everyone, the rest of the audience in their crazy costumes and fetish clothes. Everything was so wild and exaggeratedly sexual that it was hard to believe anyone could find them sexy.

It was also the least weird I'd felt, sexually, in ages. In school, we tried to pretend it didn't exist. No, we weren't checking each other out; I wasn't thinking all these untoward and unmentionable things about you; we're just talking American History, same as always. Even with Larissa, even when we lay in bed together in matching fetal positions, eyes locked into one another like they were our umbilical cord, it felt like the least sexual thing in the world: as though, if we tried hard enough, if we kept our conversation intellectual enough, we could evade all the weirdness and explosiveness that had to do with sexuality. Like someone else could instantly walk in and say, we were only cuddling, and both of us would think it true.

Here, outside, in the seasonally-inappropriate weather and weather-inappropriate clothing, it was all different. It was like all these people wanted you to look at them. They weren't teasing you or playing with your head or playing games with sexuality; they were laying it all out, Here I am. Check me out. My mind was spinning.

And then we moved past the line of people, and straight into the theater.

I tugged on Bethany's sleeve. It was loose and bulky. She was wearing a trench coat straight out of the sleazy-old-man rulebook.

"Don't we have to get tickets?" I whispered. A hint of desperation sprung into my voice. I was quickly falling behind everyone else. "What are we doing?"

"Oh, we don't need tickets," she replied breezily. "Haven't you figured that part out yet? We're the show."

I turned around, taking one last glance at the line of people before Roderick yanked me in. Hovering above them in the sky like a big shining UFO was the marquee, with four words spelled out in blood-red capital letters:

### ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

I flashed back: That night that never happened, me in heavy plastic glasses with my hair combed into Vintage Nerd style, next to Larissa in a white satin slip, the two of us deep in our roles, pretending to be cozy in love. Mitch playing the mad bare-chested monster. We never made it that far, and I thought now, could we ever? Did any of us feel as comfortable in our bodies as Roderick and Carrie; could any of us have pulled off the moves, the attitude?

Backstage, everyone was all business. Carrie directed two huge, burly shaved-head guys with backdrops and props. Roderick craned over the shoulder of this slight girl who sat at her computer, arguing with him over the pre-show soundtrack. Little Jen stuffed more bags with props, the same props that were undoubtedly in mine: Bags of rice, newspapers, rubber gloves, a roll of toilet paper, pieces of toast—the latter to throw during the scene where Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing sex-crazed alien, offers a toast. I knew this. I'd learned it all with Larissa.

Now, I suppose, I was moving into the big time.

*

I don't know if you've ever seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but chances are that you've never seen it like this. It's a movie about a naïve young Middle American girl and guy who stumble upon a house full of aliens with an incredibly bizarre wardrobe and even more bizarre sexual practices.

Anyway, it's a movie, and you can watch it at home or whatever, but the real experience can only be obtained watching it in a theater. There are actors playing all the parts live, in front of you, as the movie's playing, and the audience shouts lines out loud—like, one character says, "Oh, I was saving myself!" and then everybody yells at her, "For a rainy day?!"

So that's one level of the real Rocky Horror experience. Even more intense than that, however, is watching your friends—or people you've gotten to know fairly well in a conventional, modern-day high school type of setting, transformed into lusty Transylvanians in tight-fitting clothes, vamping around and lip-synching and groping each other onstage.

The lights went dark, except for a spotlight. The curtains came up. Little Jen stood at the front of the theater, perched in a seductive pose. The film screen towered behind her.

I sat in the front row, alone, nervous and terrified.

The rest of the row was empty. I'd only been to Rocky Horror once before, with Larissa. I didn't have all the call-and-response lines memorized. What if they put me on the spot and single me out? What if they embarrassed me in front of the entire theater?

It didn't take long to find out.

A pair of giant lips, shockingly red, splashed across the movie screen. A single lascivious lick, and they started to sing. At the center of the stage, Little Jen mouthed along.

From the first line she was electric. Her entire face contorted with each word, acting the song, owning it. Her body unfurled into an even more lurid, erotic dance. Before the first verse was over, she'd jumped down from the raised platform and made her way into the audience. And then she was going for me.

"Science fiction," she fake-belted out, planting her hands on my armrests and throwing her head back, her mouth wide open as she sang. "Double feature," she flung herself forward, way too close to me, jiggling her cleavage in my face. She was an excellent performer. To everyone else, I must have looked like the luckiest guy alive. Up close, though, she grinned, wide-toothed, teasing me, whispering friendly taunts at me the whole time.

I wasn't watching her body. I was looking at her eyes. And the weird thing was, inside her eyes—behind her confident body, where every move was purposeful and impeccable, she looked trembley, unsure, not risque but risky—she didn't know what she was doing. She was trying this out. Just like I was in an uneasy dance with my body, as it told me what it wanted and I tried to balance that with my out-of-control feelings, she was feeling out the wild surges within herself. She thrust her torso one way and the other, stuck a smooth bare shiny leg in the air, high-heel propped on an armrest, shook her breasts in my face like she wasn't sure what they would do, if they would actually jiggle, or what my reaction would be—she looked at me and behind her confident body Little Jen was as bewildered as I was, and just as confused.

She was still working things out. She was still getting used to being her.

"Wow," I whispered.

"Wow yourself," she said into my ear, and everyone probably thought she was giving my earlobe a tongue bath. "What do you think? Next week, maybe I'll lend you this costume and we can switch?"

She unhooked her leg from my armrest, pulled away, and strutted her way down to the fourth or fifth row. She walked with one high kick after another, sending a leg over the head of each person as she passed them. Appreciative cheers came from the crowd. I watched her work the audience. She had them in the palm of her hand—this girl who, the first day I met her, treated me hostilely for checking her out a second too long—and I marveled at the difference. Now, she was really showing off. But now she was the one in control of how she was doing it.

The number ended, and the show began for real. Bethany and this guy I didn't know were the innocent couple. Usually Bethany was so snarky, and everything she said was ironic or had a double entendre attached. That made it even stranger to see her so doe-eyed and eager, cowering on her stage boyfriend's arm, nodding gullibly at everything he said.

Then Roderick came on, as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, and the whole atmosphere of the place changed. The way he strutted out on his stiletto heels, digging them into the theater's trim carpet. He commanded attention. He peeled off each rubber glove, snapped it with no small amount of suggestiveness. Everyone went crazy for him. And then he tsked, once, and everyone fell silent.

He was so good. He was Roderick, harmless, friendly, perpetually back-slapping and ego-boosting, and yet, now, he wasn't. Carrie, Little Jen, and the others fawned over him. Bethany and that guy she was with quaked in fear of him.

The others made eye contact with me, checked in sporadically to see if I was doing okay. (I always flashed them a smile or a thumbs-up in reply.) But Roderick would never. Breaking character, I got the feeling, would be against his religion.

And he got the others into it, too. When I saw Carrie scrape her nails across his bare chest, I admit it, I got jealous. He was easy for them to flirt and act and play with because they knew it wasn't real. He wasn't a straight guy, he wasn't even Roderick—he was Frank-N-Furter. And neither Frank-N-Furter nor Roderick would take their flirtation any further than they wanted to take it.

I was so enraptured, so caught up in the spectacle of the show, that I didn't notice somebody slip into the seat next to me.

A hand touched my wrist on the underside. The soft part.

I yeeped.

Fortunately, my cry came at the exact same part where everyone onstage was doing the Time Warp. The music was blasting, rendering the poor unequipped theater stereo system as a huge wall of fuzz. Nobody heard.

Nobody, that is, except the person who touched me.

Two marble-dark eyes stared at me in disbelief. For my own part, I pulled back from them in the chair, maybe to get a better view, maybe just because, at that moment, I felt more secure and at home in this cold, dark, and unknown theater than I did looking at the person standing beside me.

"Arty," said Larissa, "what in the world are you doing here?"

# larissa

"Arty," she said again, "how did you get here? Don't you realize how late it is?"

At first I thought she sounded worried about me. Then I realized she was fiery mad.

"I—I came with my friends," I stammered. "I have all these new friends."

"Really? Then where are they?" She seemed heated up, and I didn't understand. "Please, Arthur, tell me you didn't follow me here."

"You're out late, too," I pointed out to her.

I stammered through three varieties of trying to tell her that my new acquaintances were actually the performers, the freaks and the weirdos and the people who she was paying to see, but I tried to say all three things at once and none of them came out.

"I just..." I paused. I swallowed—not just my phlegm, but everything I was going to say, the explanation, the excuses. "I have other friends now. I don't need you, Larissa. Not any more."

"Is that what we were about to you? Just that we needed each other for something at some point, and now we're through using each other?"

"Maybe you should tell me," I said, nearly shouting. I wasn't talking higher, though. It was just, the words that were coming out of my mouth were bigger, louder words. "You're the one who first decided we were finished."

"I didn't say we were finished!" she erupted. "I just couldn't take you being more traumatized than I was about getting raped!"

We both stopped talking. Neither of us realized until that very moment just how loud we had gotten.

Larissa cut herself off abruptly. Everyone in the theater was staring at us. The people right behind us. The people way behind us. The actors.

My friends.

Above our heads, the movie played on. The film was still loud, but, with the audience focused elsewhere, it felt curiously muted.

"Excuse me," said a man in an aisle seat—clearly a tourist; he was wearing a shirt that said I Love Philadelphia, which no one from Philadelphia would ever wear—"is this a part of the show?"

"No," said Larissa.

"No," said one of the actors, a beefy three-quarters-naked blond guy whose chest Carrie'd been rubbing oil all over before the show.

And I felt the earth tilt and split; I felt the page end, and the panel cut off, and I was standing in the blank white margins, the space where nothing was supposed to exist, and I could tell I was out of my element. I was not supposed to be there. My new friends, the Yards kids, the people who knew where I was coming from, were on one side. Larissa and the rest of the audience, the safe place, the place I'd tried to exist and failed, were on the other. And I was stuck in the middle. In the no man's land.

I reached out in the dark, grabbed Larissa's wrist. She was wearing a long-sleeve shirt but it ended early, and my fingers, when they went to her, touched bare skin. Her skin felt hot and unfamiliar.

"I'm sorry," I said. Not to Larissa, but to the whole audience. I was only speaking at a normal volume, but my words carried throughout the room. "We'll step outside."

Carrie, still in position next to the nerdy guy, and still in character, took a single step toward me. In the unspoken language of new friendship that we were only just learning to speak to each other in, she was asking if I needed her to come.

I smiled back sadly. Thanks, but no thanks.

I've got to do this alone.

*

Outside the night had turned bitter. It was below zero for sure. Zero was supposed to be freezing, and our bodies were mostly water, so how was it possible that people standing outside didn't literally freeze into fleshy ice cubes? I reached inside my mind and pushed the theoretical chemistry aside. Larissa was in front of me, in a thin jacket and leggings. It was impossible to see what was under that. Her hair whipped all around her head in the wind, giving her a distinct resemblance to Cousin Itt. She was composed and a mess and unnervingly beautiful.

"Is that all you're wearing?" I said. "Do you want my jacket?"

"What are you, my mother?" She half-laughed, half-coughed. "I'm fine. I thought we were just going straight into the movie, that I wouldn't need one."

"But the line took like an hour—"

"We were running late," she said. "Do you really want to talk about this?"

"I guess not."

"Should we walk?" she said.

We walked.

The buildings moved by fast in the background. The air was cold on my face. I could only imagine what it was doing to her skin. We rounded the border between the slummy outer downtown, where the theater was, and the sleek new buildings on the other side of Broad Street. It was like we'd stepped out of a post-apocalyptic future and into the '80s. I wondered how far away from the theater we'd let ourselves wander. I felt too nervous to break the silence, and so I waited for her to.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't really think you were stalking me."

"That's okay. A month ago, it probably would've been true."

"You weren't kidding, huh, Arthur? You really did come here with the performers."

I shrugged, unsure how I was supposed to act—proud? chill? nyah nyah nah nyah-nah? "They're all from the Yards, can you believe it?"

"I always said the Yards had hidden treasures."

"You always agreed with me that it was a rotting, maggoty hellmouth!"

"Okay, um, yeah, okay, maybe. That's true. But look at you! Ten-fifteen on a Saturday night and you're downtown, in the center of the city. Arty, you're definitely doing something right."

"You're here, too," I pointed out charitably.

"Yes, I am. I'm here with—well, you saw them. The entire population of Bridleton High. The portion that isn't too afraid to venture to the city, anyway."

"Nice of you to invite me."

"Nice of you to ever call."

She had me there.

"So are we finished?"

Until she replied, I wasn't sure which of us had said that, her or me. No, it wasn't me. It was the aching, quaking fear inside me, which had grown so big and so distinct that it was practically its own artificial intelligence.

"Sometimes I think of friendships like animals," she said. "We're like bears, or fish. Sometimes we're running around the forest, we're doing everything together, and then sometimes we need to, like, hibernate."

"Is that what we're doing now?" My heart and stomach both leapt. "So we're going to sleep through the winter and wake up...together?"

She rubbed her lips together and tasted the cold. A million smells floated in the air, alcohol and people's stinky perfume and French fries.

She said, "There was a time when we thought absolutely no one would ever understand us except each other. Do you remember?"

Did I remember? I could think of nothing else. Some days I had to force myself not to think my thoughts in terms of what-am-I-going-to-say-about-this-to-Larissa. Right now, being so close to her, I was trembling. It was all I could do to not hug her and never let go. My entire body was throbbing with her-ness.

But: what did she understand about me, anyway? She must have known how much I'd needed to talk to her these past months. If she'd known how bad it was tearing me apart—I mean, if she'd really known, really felt it—she would have called me in the flash of a second.

I tried to say something, but my throat was too close to crying. I just nodded and hope it didn't seem too loser-esque.

I felt numb. I felt horrible. I hadn't even thought to ask her how she was, what was she doing with her life. As if right now I knew anything, anything about her. I nodded dumbly and let the cold take over.

"I think I've learned not to invest all of myself in one person," she said. "I think that before I do that, I need to figure out who exactly I am."

"What do you mean? You've got so much going on. You're more intense than literally anyone else I know."

"Maybe that's it. I don't want to be intense. I don't want to be the girl Mitch raped or the girl who Damon wants to date or the girl who might be in love with you. I want to be a lot of things. But for now, I just want to lie low and figure out what I already am."

"I don't ever want you to stop being who you already are," I said. "We had so many plans. We were going to take over the whole world."

"We will, Arty," she said. "But I think everybody does that, sooner or later."

"I'm sorry I abandoned you, Larissa. I'm sorry I—that I cared more about how what happened affected me than how it affected you."

"Yeah," she said. "You spent a rather long time being sort of an ass."

I felt my cheeks redden, burn, grow radioactive. She was right. She was completely right, and I was completely an ass.

But that wasn't the only thing.

"And you spent a really long time being—I don't know. Not you."

We stepped off the curb and crossed Broad Street. Instantly we went from no light to a watershed of bright light everywhere: Streetlights, marquees, the loud lights of cars and cabs, the muted blue and purple glows of sophisticated bars, the hot primary-color lights of the dance clubs and the gay clubs. One second we had no shadows; the next, each of our bodies cast shadows in every direction there was.

"Because you shared all of yourself with me and I burned you?" Larissa said.

"Is that what happened?" I said.

We stepped up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. She heaved a sigh.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I guess I just couldn't deal. You and Mitch were two of my closest friends. And then he did what he did, and you told me you liked me, and neither one was something I could handle at that point."

"And so you went out with Damon instead?"

"Only for about twenty seconds."

That's twenty seconds longer than you went out with me.

I didn't say that. I wanted to, and I knew it was an evil thing to say, and I held myself back from saying it.

"Yeah, what was that about?"

"He asked me. He asked, and I needed something simple. Damon is easy. Dependable. It was basically just like, we sat around and watched a bunch of movies together for a week or two. It was like hanging out. It wasn't something deep or scary or world-shattering."

"I wouldn't have shattered your world!"

"You don't think so now. But we were so intense, Arty. We spent half the night talking every single night, and the other half thinking about everything that we talked about. I was too shattered. I needed to build some new walls around myself."

Now she had stopped walking, and so had I. We stood in the red swath of a fancy club, one of those clubs on the ground floor of a hotel. Larissa was talking so fast that her body was shaking. I was moving too—my whole body, swaying with the rhythm of her sentences, like a Hasidic Jew when they prayed.

"You have changed," I said. "You seem better. Happier."

"You seem happy, too."

"Happy? I don't know about that. But you know me. Happiness wouldn't really make me happy. It'd probably make me completely miserable."

"I don't know about that. When that girl was crawling all over you, you seemed pretty...enthusiastic." Larissa smiled. She smiled in a way that was amused and intrigued and excited all at once, and I remembered when I had wanted more than anything to get that smile out of her.

"But I want to be enthusiastic with you," I said. "You're all I've ever wanted."

Her expression flickered. She was still smiling, but now it was a smile of utter sadness.

"Oh, Arty," she said. "At one point I thought so, too. I thought we were so perfect for each other—we loved the same things, we had the same thoughts. And after a while, we were trapping ourselves in those thoughts. It was like, we weren't being each other's soulmates—we were trapping ourselves inside what we wanted each other to be."

"And now these kids you're with—these Bridleton kids—are they any better for you?"

"No, but I'm with a bunch of people who, wherever they are, it's basically the suburbs, and we're all going straight back as soon as they finish teasing me for forcing them to go to something as weird and depraved and un-normal as Rocky Horror. Seriously, the kids I'm here with—they don't know how to participate. They don't get that you're supposed to jump up, you're supposed to be alive. They just watch it like a movie."

"Well, we didn't know the words either—"

"No, but we tried, didn't we? We faked it, and we kept on faking it until we got the words right. We brought our toast and toilet paper and water pistols. Errol—he's this new guy I'm sort of seeing—he has to make fun of everything. He keeps asking if Frank-N-Furter is gay or what."

"Oh, that's Roderick. Yes. Incredibly yes."

"Roderick, huh?"

She sounded sad that I had new friends who weren't her. She said Roderick's name like she was saying goodbye.

"So why are you dating this guy?" I asked. "He sounds like a wad."

"He's not. He's small-minded and uncritical and a total conformist, but...he's sweet, Arty. He's really nice. Sometimes he says stuff like that because he's afraid he can't keep up with me. There's something strangely touching about the way he sees the world."

"But you thought I was sweet. I can be simple, too."

"But you don't want to be simple."

"Sometimes I do."

"I don't want you to be simple, either. Oh, Arty. Would you even want to date me anymore?"

"Yes," I said immediately.

G-d yes. Oh yes. The sun, stars, and several major constellations yes. Yes.

But that wasn't a real question, and I knew it wasn't. She would never let it happen, either. Or she just didn't believe me.

"I wish we had different lives, Arty," she said. "We're so wrong for each other, but in an alternate universe, we'd have a hell of a time finding that out."

"But we had a hell of a time anyway," I said. "Didn't we?"

She looked at me. She cradled her head in her arms and looked at me, and I could feel the rush of memories sweeping over both of us, of everything we'd been: the books we'd read together, the way we walked around towntown like we owned it, the pool runs and convenience-store runs and the way we'd run straight to the basement upon arriving at her home in order to avoid her mother and the way even the mall was cool when it was with her. The first time she'd typed her way into my phone.

The picture I was drawing when I met her, and all the picture since.

The club we were standing in front of was emptying out. Last call was called, and people were fleeing. The overhead lights rising, bringing to an end all the half-lit illusions, women with streaked makeup, men in jackets too big for their limp shoulders.

"So are we going to be friends?" I asked. I felt like I sounded very tiny at that moment. It might have been the most pathetic thing I ever said.

"Of course we are," she said. "Forever."

"But will we still be...what we were?"

She knew what I meant. More than anyone else. We shared secrets that the rest of the universe couldn't touch.

She smiled at me. "Look where we are."

I'd looked into the club before, but now I looked harder. Shiny walls. Glittering chandeliers. It was weird and arty, trying too hard, like an alien world on a '60s science fiction TV show.

"No," said Larissa. "Across the street."

The bus station. Not like 30th Street Station, with its scuttling businessmen and Greek-palace columns. Here was the entrance plaza to the Greyhound station. Populated by sad-looking teenagers and broken old people and the drug dealers who never left. We could walk in, buy a ticket for $20, and be on an hourly bus to New York City. Or to anywhere else.

"Oh my G-d, Larissa," I said. I grabbed her hand. "This is so crazy. We're basically here. We could go—we could be in New York in no time. We could leap on the bus and by the time the sun comes up, we could be sitting atop the Brooklyn Bridge."

"You could," Larissa said. "I'm not really sure New York fits me right now."

There was nothing to argue with. I knew she was right, and she knew I wouldn't go. Not tonight, anyway.

"What should we do now?" I said. "Do you want to go back to the show?"

"Screw that," she said. "We probably missed the orgy scene anyway. Let's sit on the stairs till everyone comes out at the end, and you can tell me about your Rocky Horror friends."

# me

I still stayed up late most nights. The weather was getting warmer. The sun was getting less sleep, and why should I be any different? My parents and I still had our evenings scheduled to the tightest rhythm—6:00 dinner, 6:45 homework, 9:30 showers, 10:00 lights out—but I couldn't help not falling asleep right away. Sometimes I lay there for hours, just wondering about the past, feeling out the possibilities of the present.

Sometimes I messaged with Damon. We barely saw each other, even though we went to the same school. He had his crowd, and I had mine. We checked in every week or two, partly just to catch up on geek news, partly—I think—to remind ourselves of where we came from, and to make sure that we both had escaped.

The other night I asked Damon about Larissa. Nothing specific, just how she was doing. "How's that guy she was seeing?" Actually, I might have said something like that.

Damon sounded surprised to hear it. These days, Larissa and I talked nearly not at all. I suspected that most of our friends thought we went through a bad breakup. Hell, I had no idea. Maybe that was closer to the truth than I knew.

"Ancient history," Damon told me.

"Really? Is there a new guy?"

"There isn't, as a matter of fact," he told me. "She says, she wants to get back to being me." There was a pause, and then he clarified. "She means her, I think. Not back to being me, I mean."

The last time we'd spoken, she'd told me she felt like she was hiding herself inside other people. I felt a warm, weird swell of pride that she was following through with her own advice—that, even if we weren't still bonded, we could still be doing good things individually.

"Hey, why do you even care?" he wrote. "Don't you have this hot new actress girlfriend or something?"

I grinned. Score one for me.

"Mostly or something," I replied. "But, no. I have zero interest in Larissa at all, in that way." Any more.

"OK, dude. If you say so."

"Besides, Damon. I am so not after your sloppy seconds."

"If it helps, she wasn't a very good kisser."

"She wasn't?!?"

"Not at all. Not with me, at least. She just sort of opened her mouth and didn't do anything with it."

My lack of immediate response must have disturbed him sufficiently, because he added, after a lull, "I'm sorry if that sounded, you know, inappropriate or sexist or anything."

"It was, a little. But it was a nice thing to say."

I assured Damon that, indeed, he had helped me (morally, spiritually), and we said a brief goodbye. And you know what? It really did help. It felt like wisdom worthy of coming from Larissa herself. You can't always get what you want. But you get what you need.

"And what about you, Mister Cuddle Bunny?" he said. "What's going on with you and the female subspecies?"

"Things work out," I told him, with a pinch of the wisdom that I'd stolen from Larissa. "One way or another, we get what we need."

These days, I was feeling a bit of zen—existing in that world Mrs. Szmerling told us about, the one of not thinking too hard and just dancing. I think that maybe I'd started to believe in G-d. Or maybe that this whole time it wasn't G-d that I didn't believe in, but the idea that everything that happened to us happened on purpose. Maybe a lot of the bad stuff that happened was just caused by us and our own bad decisions. Maybe G-d was just a spectator to some of this stuff as well. What kind of a G-d willingly let someone get raped? It still wasn't a good thought, and I was still pissed as all hell at any G-d who would exist and allow it to happen. Like, G-d could've sent locusts or a hailstorm or ninjas to interrupt. But maybe, the way that things ended up, they really were supposed to end up this way.

And that's what I was thinking about now.

*

There was a ladder attached to the wall that ran up to the roof of the factory behind my house. There was a fence, but it wasn't barbed or electrocuted or anything. I'd stared at the damn thing for sixteen years, and never tried to climb it once before today.

From up here, you could see almost the entire sky. Was it only this blue in spring, or had I just spent all winter living too close to the ground? From up here, the barren rows of factories and dollar stores and bars and beauty shops were almost beautiful. Was I finally starting to like the Yards? Okay, that was going too far. But I was finally finding a poetry here.

*

Darkness fell that night at 6:00 or so, a more reasonable time for it to occur than the absurdly early 4:30 of the winter months. The world was finding its balance again.

I walked through my parents' house in the unfamiliar dusk. My mother's voice called from downstairs.

"There's a car waiting in front," she said. "I think it might be your friend?"

Without bothering to check, I grabbed my coat and ran outside.

It was Carrie. I knew it would be. She grinned when she saw me, and I grinned back.

I launched myself into the shotgun seat and she turned to me in surprise. "You're sitting up front?" she said.

"Well, at first. I'll switch when we get her, if that's okay with you?"

"Don't you dare slobber all over my backseat, Arthur Kestrel. I just had it spring cleaned."

"I can't believe you clean your car," I said. "It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

"If you'd prefer that I didn't have a car, or maybe that I just didn't give you rides in it—"

"No! I love your car, Carrie. You know that." Her car, an old brown station wagon with green canvas seats, could fit a family of seven, and probably did, back in the Stone Age when it was born. "I'm just speaking objectively, is all."

I was making fun of her. She wouldn't take it the wrong way. We had finally hit that level of security where we were cool with each other, trusted each other, and everything we did was fair game for making fun of.

I grabbed the music player that was hooked up to the dashboard stereo, an old 8-track with wires pouring out of it. I started sifting through titles.

"You want to put on Rocky Horror and start practicing for your big debut?" she said.

"I told you! I'm really totally happy just cheering you guys on from the audience."

"You get too happy there and we're going to start charging you admission."

"Didn't you tell me once that being a perfect audience member is just as important as being a perfect performer?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Carrie put on her poker face as she pulled up to the house. She tapped the horn five times—two long, then three short.

The back door swung open. "Hey now!" said Little Jen. She slid straight across the backseat as if it were a bar. "What are you doing sitting up there, mister? I demand you come back here right now and give me a lap dance." She affectionately patted the spread of her miniskirt.

"Coming!" I chirped brightly.

"Ew!" said Carrie. "Don't you dare!"

"Fine, he can stay there. This way his butt's easier to grab."

"Watch it!" Carrie slapped her hands away from me playfully. "Don't objectify Arthur. Not in my car, anyway."

"What if I like being objectified?"

"Hmm."

"Iieee!"

"Okay, okay, you can grab his butt. But if you get one speck of dirt on my car..."

"Isn't it a few decades too late for that?"

"Watch it! Or your heavy-petting privileges will be revoked within the bounds of this vehicle."

"Mmm...scratchy '70s interior...."

"One more word, and you both are walking to this party."

"Obsequious?"

"One more dumb word."

"Vacuous."

"Ooh. 'Vacuous'. Nice."

"That actually is a good word."

"Thanks."

"Mmm."

"Mmm."

Carrie's eyes turned back to the road. Jen's and mine turned to each other.

*

We were the youngest people at the party by at least ten years. It was a penthouse condo, and most of the other people there looked at us like we were savages or possibly aliens but we didn't care. Roderick especially: The way he said hello to people, he made himself comfortable anywhere. His nonchalance was contagious. I grabbed a tiny sandwich off an hors d'oeuvres table and downed it in one gulp.

There was punch that was spiked, punch that wasn't spiked but was made from the fruit of seven endangered species of plants, and a drinks list that read like a bawdy 1920s noir. "What's a cachaça?" I asked Carrie, directing my confused look from her to the bartender and back.

Carrie shifted away from the rest of us, an imperceptible amount for anyone else but enough for me and Little Jen to notice. Instantly, it was as if the rest of us didn't exist. Little Jen and I exchanged looks. Uh-oh, her eyes said to me.

The party was being thrown by ___ _______, a patron of Philadelphia's experimental arts scene and a board member at several local theater companies. He was a friend of Carrie, though not yet a close one, and Little Jen had warned me earlier that Carrie intended pretty heavily to flirt with, and possibly eventually date, Mr. _______, and tonight was the night when she fully intended to launch her plans.

"Which means," Little Jen summarized, "don't get in her way."

"Okay," I saluted her like a soldier. "Duly noted."

When Little Jen and I started going out—or doing whatever it is that we're doing—I asked if Carrie would be mad or jealous of us. Little Jen laughed in my face, lips so red and plump you'd think you could drink juice from them. I pulled back, startled. Little Jen told me I shouldn't be offended. "If you aren't at least twice her age," she said, "Carrie won't even think of you as possible boyfriend material. That's just the way she is. It's the way she's always been."

And indeed, back at the party, a polished, austere gentleman with a two-day beard, hair that was just beginning to go grey, wearing an Italian-tailored jacket over a ripped Pixies t-shirt, had dignifiedly jumped the drinks line and was now leaning on the bar.

He was gesturing to the bartender with one hand. The other was perched on the small of Carrie's back.

"Let's get out of here," Little Jen said into my ear.

Warm, warm breath. Lips you could seriously drink juice from.

*

I only call her Jen when we're alone. She gives off airs of being a bimbo, but that's only because she doesn't like dealing with people she doesn't care about. Conversations about bands and religion bore her. Guys try to charm her with money and tech and worldliness, and she just zones out.

That's not what she likes about me.

She locates a bedroom with impressive speed. It is small, and warm, and out of the way. She holds my hand and I trail after her. She pauses at the doorway, looks around, surveying the place. Doesn't turn on the light.

She pulls me in.

The door clicks shut behind us. She turns the knob with one hand and with the other she twists into me and traces the buttons of my shirt. One, two, the unfastened third button at my collar. Her fingers grind to a halt at my clavicle, the fleshy part between shoulders and neck.

My heart is vibrating hard. I can't slow it down. Her fingertips are confident and decisive. She traces out my muscles, my bones. I lean in and she's even warmer. The air in front of her. I want to kiss her.

It's so strange to be this close to someone. I don't even know her that well, I have to keep reminding myself. I never even thought I'd let someone else get this close to me, violate my personal space like this. No, that's a lie. I've been thinking about this forever. I just never thought it'd be like this.

I never thought she'd be the person I felt like this about.

I never thought I could be the kind of person that somebody felt like this about.

Jen's hands hands catch me before I can reach her. Deflecting my purposeful head, redirecting it from her lips to the air. Her laughter in my ear. "Not yet, cowboy," she murmurs.

I let myself unclench. I retreat.

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to make you..."

"Don't be sorry. I want you to. I want you to a lot. Just, not yet. Wait."

Her hands trace my torso. Curves I didn't even know I had. Sinking lower, around my waist, keeping me close. She begins to explore me. Hips, pectorals, ribcage—to her, it's all fair game.

Our breathing gets heavier. It sounds like the dramatic moment on a hospital TV show. Or porn. Omg, what if other people here can hear us?

"What's wrong?"

Her hands stalled in their grabbiness.

"Nothing. I'm just—"

"Touch me."

I am already touching her. I continue to do so, but more, my fingers moving stronger, more purposeful. Like my camp counselors yelled at me when I was a kid—Use a man handshake, not a limp one.

"Uh..."

"Yes, Jen?"

"Not like that."

Her whole body gives a sigh. It changes from the pert, ready-for-anything pose of a second ago into something that feels more...resigned? "You don't have to touch me like you're afraid to do it," she says.

"OK," I say.

I try to sound assertive and guylike. They come out as the two least confident letters to ever leave my mouth. I brace myself for the put-down. Or her just leaving me. Or her saying don't worry, it doesn't matter, and it mattering.

Is she the charitable type? I still don't know her well enough to tell. There are so many things I don't know about her. Does that mean I also don't know her well enough to be here, with her? To do this?

My eyes adjust to the light. I can make out just enough of her face to see her scoping me out, concerned.

"Are you afraid?"

The bed is only a few feet away. Strewn with coats, but that doesn't matter. We could throw them on the floor. We could sit together, not messing around, but I would probably just try to explain and lose it, explode into tears. I was good at losing it.

Or I could keep some stuff to myself.

I remove my hands from her hips, trying to keep the movement from being too awkward. Epic fail.

"I don't want to do anything you don't want," I say.

"You're here," she says. "I want you here."

"You really, definitely want me to touch you? I mean, to do all this stuff to you?"

"Don't you?"

"Yes. But I don't want you to participate in this stuff just because I want it, because I'm a horny teenage boy or whatever."

"Arty. I'm doing it for you. But I'm also doing it for me."

"Do you promise?" I say. "Are you sure?" My bottom lip starts to quiver. Not now not now not now. I seriously am not sure whether I'm going to have an orgasm or break down crying. I don't know what to do with myself. My soul is thrashing back and forth against the walls of my body, ready to explode. My body is not sure how to react. It trembles: in desire. In fear.

She takes my hand in hers. She lifts it up to her chest.

There is skin, and warmth, and fabric, too, a cool clingy spandex that moves with my finger and pulls away to offer more warm skin underneath. I find that skin and I trace her veins. Her blood is thumping, skin throbbing, touching my fingers, a rush of blood moving quicker and louder, now, and the pulse of it in my fingers, too, my own circulation matching it in speed and velocity, as if our veins connect and weave into one contiguous circulatory system, and although in the future we will have different experiences, and different things will alter our pulse rates, and some of those things will be other girls or other guys, others as innocent as a pop quiz or the thought that G-d was watching us in every moment, doing everything we do, right now—right now—we have each other, and we are holding onto each other, and together we are holding onto the universe, if only just barely. My hand cups her breast and her feet hover just above the ground, the entire world is spinning beneath her, and she wants me here, she wants me to be touching her and her hand sits on top of mine, keeping me there, and I don't know why this single sensation of touching her breast makes me feel so perfect or how she knew it would, but right now, for just this moment, the universe fits together completely and everything is right. It just is.

the end

# thank youse

OK, the idea exists in our culture at large that it's cheesy when people start out by thanking G-d, and the only people who really do it anymore are hip-hop and country singers, but I want to say it anyway. I'm not in control of most things in this world, and the fact that I could stand on the subway and write a whole freaking book and not get injured or tripped over or spilled on must be more than coincidence. The odds are against it on such a cosmic level. So thank you, G-d. Also, I really like both hip-hop and country music. Okay, you can think less of me now.

I wrote the first chapter (well, what was the first chapter at the time) (it was "birthday," if you're curious—yes, at one point, I really thought the story started there) and put it away. Then I had a long conversation with Michael Northrop, who told me about the holy trinity of what sells a book (a good title, a good concept, and a good cover) and told me that this one had legs. I dug it out. I wrote it.

Also, I was walking in Chinatown and talking on the phone to Laurel Snyder, who told me other amazing stuff. One thing I remember is to make each scene come out of the last, and have a harder punch than the last. I was like, "You know, the book starts with a rape," and she was like, "Then you'd better make everything else hit even harder." I hope it worked.

I finished writing this at a coffee shop on Cortelyou Road, made an impulse call to Alex London, and told him I needed an agent. Alex, my shadchan, my Yenta, sent me straight to Robert Guinsler, the most kindly, gentle, patient and understanding mama bear there ever was. Over years, breakdowns, and my own inner naysaying, he was the exactly what this book needed—a shadchan of its own.

Keeping sane when you write is the hardest thing in the world. You lock yourself up in a private room for hours and days and eons, and you come out a few years later with a book, and you're never quite sure if it's any good. I am tons and tons of grateful that I don't write in a vacuum. Thank you, Eric Kaplan and Liz Matusow and Harbeer Sandhu and Goldie Goldbloom, for reading this book from the start and for giving us hell. Thank you, MFA cohort, and all my professors, and the other students who threw themselves into this, and especially Kate Simonian for keeping us all together, and also Caitlin Campbell for being the cement. Thank you, Elad Nehorai, for sharing my dreams and letting me gang up with yours, and to everyone who's written for Hevria.com, and who's read it and shared it and made a real live community for oddball Hasidim and weird religious people and really everyone who doesn't fit inside the margins.

The nonfictional artists who let me work with them and let me share our imagination: Fred Chao, Katie Skau, Ethan Young, Rohan Daniel Eason, and Tim Chi Ly.

Everyone who was around, and everyone who helped me, and everyone who let me steal little bits of their lives. I hope, with the one obvious exception, I managed to honor the good stuff and exorcise the demons of the bad stuff.

Thank you Itta for being the responsible one.

Yalta, you create worlds in your imagination that I can't wait to live in. Freda Belle, you turn every moment you're awake into art. Rashi, let's never stop holding onto each other. Mishaela, never stop waking me up. I love you.

