

Thomas and Niko

in the

City of Trees

A Novel by Kid Boise

Copyright © 2019 Kid Boise

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published in 2019 by Boise Urban Publishing Company

Cover art and design by Ethan Kimberling

ISBN: 978-0-578-54748-0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

To Karen and Georgia.

SSDGM
1

Let me warn you now that I'm pretty bad at introductions. If you want to get a sense of me from a paragraph or two, good luck. It's not that I think I'm complicated or anything. Not compared to anyone else, anyway. But if there's one thing I've learned after eighteen years on the planet, it's that nobody—and I mean nobody—can be figured out in two paragraphs. There's a rhythm to these things, a certain dosage of time and circumstance spent with someone before you start to get familiar. And even then, whether you really capital-K-Know them is anybody's guess.

I figure a story has to start somewhere, so the day I turn eighteen might as well be it. Here's the thing nobody told me about turning eighteen: Everything stays the same. I guess I should have known. Granted, there are plenty of things you can do when you're eighteen that you couldn't before, but unless some life-altering event coincides with your birthday, you're probably going to feel the same way you always did.

I could see that being a double-edged sword for many people. It certainly is for me. There are plenty of bullshit facts about my life that I wish I could change. I'll admit that. But there are just as many things I wouldn't give up in a million years—take my friendship with Thomas Chu for example.

Thomas Chu is my best friend. He turned eighteen exactly one month before me. He bought a pack of cigarettes with six dollars and the law on his side. We stood at the edge of school grounds where it's almost allowed and smoked four of them. I asked him whether it was illegal for me to smoke, since I was still seventeen at the time. Thomas said you only have to be eighteen to buy them. You can smoke them at any age you want. That sounded like utter bullshit to me and I went to look it up on my phone, but my favorite teacher Ms. Nolan told my English class a few days earlier that she missed the time when we couldn't look everything up every minute of our dumb lives. She said it was more peaceful back then. That got me thinking a lot for some reason. So I had been trying not to use my phone as much for looking things up.

I remember Thomas turning to me just as I slipped it back into my pocket. The breeze caught his straight black hair and sent it kind of twirling in a way that made me hold my breath for half a second.

"That's right, put it back," he said. His voice is kind of hoarse because he's always using it up. Thomas yells like a maniac no matter what game he's playing. Last fall it was football. You should see him—we used to play on the same team in junior high and his voice would just be going full-force the entire time, no matter what the hell was happening out there. I didn't really make the cut for football once we got to high school. Thomas likes to say my heart was no longer in the game, and you know what? He's probably right. Anyway, I decided track and field was a better fit. I went out for it last fall, and this spring.

"Nobody can see us here," I complained. "Everybody left already."

"What difference does it make?"

"I want to be seen smoking a cigarette," was what I said. That's the kind of thought I would normally keep to myself, not say out loud. But with Thomas, I'm usually more open about the stuff I'm thinking. Usually.

I've been thinking a lot recently about vanity. I believe myself to be a vain person. I'm trying not to be too hard on myself about it, because I would wager that a majority of people around me are also vain. Vain people like me want to be seen smoking cigarettes. I'll explain why: In this dumb school, even if only five people saw us smoking at the edge of the parking lot, word would get around about it, and then we would be the two boys who smoke on school grounds. Who the hell cares what side of the chain fence we were actually standing on? And then I would get asked in the hall, "Do you smoke? I heard you and Chu smoked on school grounds." And I would say, "Not as a habit," and just walk away. I don't need to tell you what kind of a badass statement that would make. Think of it like this: I'm repping a particular brand of person—one who occasionally shrugs off the rules. I find it's not all that hard to stay on-brand, and besides, it really pays to curate your public image in a place like this.

Anyway, all that happened a month ago, and now I'm the one who's just reached legal age. Thomas asks if I want a ride to go buy cigarettes after school and I tell him it would be a waste since he still has sixteen left in his pack.

"Oh yeah," he says. "I don't know where I put them, though."

"They're in your glovebox."

"Oh yeah," he says.

Thomas drives his dad's old maroon Lexus, which sounds pretty nice until you see it. It's from 1990, a year that was covered in the third-to-last chapter of our US History textbook. That's right: Two entire chapters' worth of historical shit has gone down since that bag of bones rolled off the line. I guess it must have been nice back in the day. Nowadays it's pretty run-down, and the engine sounds like a jet and a meat grinder had a baby whenever he gets on it.

People always make fun of Thomas and me for spending so much time together. There are plenty of rumors that we're into each other, which isn't true. It doesn't get to me much, but it bothers Thomas quite a bit. I've told him before that he should just ignore it. I've warned him that making a big thing about it will only fuel the fire. He understands the concept, but he just can't seem to get himself under control.

"It fucking annoys me so much," he'll say. One time, he said the following: "If I were a fag, fine. I'd march around and fly the flag. But I'm not."

We were in his messy bedroom, just lying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling fan.

I grabbed him by the shirt. I made him look me in the eyes. "I don't know where that word came from," I said, "but you can't go off saying it."

"I'm only saying it to you," was his reply, as if that made it better somehow.

"Well I don't want to hear it."

He got really quiet for a while after that. I think I confused him a little.

He worries too much about the whole thing. Both of us have girlfriends. Mine's name is Lexie and she's in all AP classes. We had a moment when we met. Most people in this school already know who they're going to know by the beginning of senior year. But Lexie and me, we'd both somehow missed the fact that the other existed until that first day in McClellan's class. I remember it clearly. For some reason our desks were so close you could hardly drop an eraser between them. Lexie cracked jokes that I'll admit went a little over my head, and she could twirl three pens at once, all the way around her finger and back again. Both of these things impressed me a great deal. I'm not too sure what the hell she saw in me, but anyway, things really clicked between us. It made sense that we should get together. So after a while, that's what we did. She and I hang out a lot after school, and the best part is, she gets along well with Thomas's girlfriend, whose name is Madison. They've become pretty good friends since we all started hanging out together.

This is exactly what I was saying—how I have a lot of good things going on in my life. But it doesn't stop me from constantly devising plans to get out of this dumb town. Thomas and I used to talk about what city we would run off to if we could. Seattle or Portland are the default edgy answers if you're from the area. Everybody who believes themselves to be edgy wants to go to one or the other, even though few people have made actual plans. Many will stay in-state and go to the university up north. Even more will stick around town.

Two types of people will stay here: the people who are too afraid to leave, and the die-hards. Madison is a die-hard. She'll say, "Boise actually has a lot going on. Everyone's talking about it these days. Even the Seattle Times posted this story about how it's growing up as a city and..." She'll go on forever like this if you don't change the subject. Lexie and I always share a look when she talks this way.

Madison will stay here, for sure. I'm actually worried Thomas will stay because of her. He has a football scholarship to U-Dub all lined up, if he wants it. There's money on the table if he stays here, too. I don't know what he'll do. Both schools want him so bad, they let him keep thinking it over way past the deadline. His indecisiveness is getting ridiculous at this point, if you ask me. Every time I think about him staying here, I start getting really, really sad all of a sudden. I'm not sure why, except that we've spent so much time over the past couple years talking about getting out.

That's the thing. I am getting out, and Portland and Seattle weren't good enough for me. I'm headed north. Vancouver. I'm just that edgy. The university up there called my name and I have the grades for it. That might be all I have, but it's enough.

Anyway, Thomas and I leave the school around four to smoke. When I say "leave" I mean that we stand just inside that knee-high chain marking the edge of the parking lot. Not a lot of students smoke these days, so it makes for a significant episode, and this time more people are around to see. Lexie is going home to be with her grandma who is in town visiting from Salt Lake. She's not ready for me to meet her grandma, and I'm relieved about that.

She's driving down the row of cars toward us now. Her windows are down. When she sees Thomas and me smoking she hits the brakes and her dumb old car sort of lurches forward.

"Jesus, Niko, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

The car behind her honks.

I pretend I don't know her and she gives me her we'll-talk-later eyes. She speeds out of the parking lot.

"Niko, my boy, today you're a man," Thomas says, giving me a big slap on the back. He's about two inches taller than me, at an even six feet. Lately he's been showing me the particulars of his workout routine in his dad's garage. His arms are quite a bit larger than mine, but I'm working on it.

"I don't feel any different," I say.

There are no clouds in the sky. It's getting hot. Welcome to your typical late-spring day around here. I'd say more, but there's nothing remarkable about this place. The school looks like a cluster of gray and tan boxes.

We each have two. Another senior called Garrett Landon comes over with his typical swagger and smokes one. Then we close the carton and put it back into Thomas's glove box, and put the matter to rest for a while. We ditch Garrett, and Thomas drives me to his dad's place. It's a three bedroom duplex off of Cole Road with a shared backyard. We walk in and find Thomas's little brother Alfred on the couch playing Switch. Thomas tells him to leave.

"Why do I have to leave?"

"Fuck you, that's why. We want to play."

"You're such a little bitch," says Alfred as he walks out of the room. I like Alfred. He's in the ninth grade and doesn't take shit from anyone, not even his older brother. His voice recently got low and he's already almost as tall as Thomas. But he's way skinnier, and his face is more angular. They barely even look related. They have this kind of back and forth where they say all kinds of mean, filthy things to each other but there's no malice behind the words. It's kind of a beautiful thing to watch. I hardly ever see them fight for real.

Their mom died of stomach cancer almost four years ago. She was kind of a second parent to me in a way, since my mom can't seem to get her shit together most of the time, and my dad is not in the picture, so goes the phrase. I cried about it a lot when she first died. Thomas hardly showed any emotion at first. I tried to hug him and get close to him for comfort but he would just push me away. Then, about three months down the road, he started crying all the time out of nowhere, and got super honest about everything he was feeling. I think that was an important time for him in his life. He kind of grew up out of it and became something more than he was before. I don't really know how to describe it. Every year we light candles for her.

We play Mario Kart for a while and I beat him handily. When we're done, Thomas yells to his brother that the TV's free again. Thomas says we should go to his room because he has something he wants to talk to me about. I can feel my heart beating.

He shoves some neon green running shorts and other dirty clothes off the side of his bed and we lie down on it like we always do. Thomas's room has the kind of feeling about it that all of our rooms do now. Lexie and Madison's are the same. I don't know how else to put it other than to say they're expiring. They're still children's bedrooms, and they're at the end of the line. For example, Thomas has a Pokemon poster on his wall right next to one of an Anime girl with absurd, barely-covered tits just dangling out in front of her. He has ribbons above his dresser from third and fourth grade track meets. His shoulder pads sit jumbled in the corner beneath a grass-stained jersey. There's a small safe on the floor of his closet that I know has a flask of whisky inside it. I'm telling you, it's the most ridiculous place in the world.

Anyway, we're lying there like we always do. Thomas says, "I think I want to go to BSU." This means stay in Boise.

"I know," I say.

"What do you mean you know? I've never told you before."

"I don't know what I mean," I say.

"Well, how do you feel about it?"

"Does it matter?"

Thomas sighs in a really dramatic way. He can be so dramatic sometimes. No one knows that about him but me. "You're my best friend, Niko. Of course it matters."

"What do you want me to say?" I say.

"Just tell me how you feel about me staying here for school."

"You know how I feel."

"No I don't." He's getting super annoyed. I can hear it in his voice. "How the fuck could I know if we've never even talked about it before?"

I'll be completely honest with you. Before now, I had no idea Thomas gave two shits what I thought of him staying. So I think I have every right to be surprised. "Could you just say what you really want to say?"

He looks over at me. "You want me to go to U-Dub."

"I want you to do what you want to do."

He stands up really fast and knocks one of his dumbass trophies from the windowsill onto the floor. "You're such a fucking bitch sometimes."

My gut reaction is to laugh. You try and watch someone Thomas's size throw a tantrum like a three-year-old without laughing. I see him flash hot with anger. Then he cools down. I honestly don't know what made him get that mad so fast. Now he's just standing there, breathing in and out, looking down at me.

It's my turn to be the rational one. I can turn it on like I'm flicking a switch. "Hey," I say. "It's not like Seattle and Vancouver are that close. I don't think we'd see each other much more if you were up there."

"Then what's the problem?"

"You wanted to get out." I don't move my mouth as I say the words.

"What?"

"I said you wanted to get out."

He takes a minute. He's still just standing there, kind of looming over me. I don't know what the hell he's doing. "Don't you think what me and Madison have is pretty important?"

"Lexie and I are going to do long-distance."

"I don't want to. I can see it working for you guys. But for Madison and me, it would be a disaster. She already complains that I don't show her enough affection. How the fuck would that even work over long-distance?"

I admit to him that I have no fucking idea.

"How far is Seattle from Vancouver?"

"Two and a half hours," I say. I've looked it up plenty of times.

It actually seems like he's thinking about it. I realize that he hasn't even come close to making up his mind. I know what to do in these situations. Ease the pressure. Ease off. "Hey man," I say. "I want you to be happy, even if I don't totally get what I want. I'll never know you better than you know yourself. So if you say staying in Boise will make you happier, I believe you."

He's got these kind of sad eyes that he looks at me with. "You're such a bitch," he says. Then he smiles.

We go into the garage and work out together. By now, we've gotten used to spotting each other, and we know all about one another's particular tendencies for bad form and whatnot. What I'm trying to say is, I like the kind of situation where two people are getting more out of doing something together than either of them would have if they were doing it alone. I think it's actually one of the most beautiful things in this world.

The days are getting longer. It's not dark at eight when I go to leave the Chu household. I lean into Alfred's room and say goodbye. He looks up from his desk and gives me this awkward, silent wave. He used to be just a little kid. It's weird how fast people grow up.

We stand out on his front lawn, facing the street. They put some new chip seal on it and dust gets kicked up each time a car goes by. The light from the setting sun floats in the dust. This is one of the first nights of the year that I would call a warm one. I'm anticipating many, many more where that came from. Just thinking about it gives me this incredible feeling of weightlessness.

"Happy Birthday, man," he says.

I tell him thanks.

A car passes by so fast that some little rocks from the chip seal get kicked up onto the lawn.

Thomas turns to me and says, "I swear to god, one day, I'll get out of this dumb town forever."
2

I can walk home from Thomas's house. It only takes fifteen minutes. I've done that shit for years. I recently found out what it means to be a latchkey kid. I read about it in a book. I guess in a way I was one of those, except I didn't spend much time locked up in the house. Instead I roamed around this whole area. When I was a little kid, I was asked more than once by an adult if I was lost. I had the good sense to say no, of course, but I was always a little confused and caught off guard by the question. I get it now. Baby Niko must have been quite the sight. These days, if I saw some little six-year-old screwing around the Barnes and Noble parking lot alone, I'd be concerned, too.

I mentioned before that I live off Cole Road. It separates our neighborhoods. The road itself is fairly lifeless, but there's more going on if you go down by the mall. We spend quite a bit of time at the mall. It's called Boise Towne Square Mall. We go downtown, too, but you can't get into any of the good places there when you're underage. It's not too hard for us to get our hands on booze when we want it, but I'm still looking forward to the day when I can walk up to the bar and order something for myself. I don't know anyone my age who isn't looking forward to that.

I'm not sure where my work ethic comes from. My mom is lazy as hell and I can only assume the same of my dad. I don't know him personally, but my mom insists he's not dead, and the way I see it, only the laziest of fathers wouldn't be a part of his sons's life. At school, I become this whirlwind tornado thing that slips around from class to class just getting shit done. There's this thing that clicks in my brain every time I'm presented with a challenge. Go. Do it now. Just figure it out, get it done. I have always been that way. Thank god for that. It's my ticket out of here, I can tell.

I get home just before nine. My mom is watching some dumb show on Netflix. The volume is so loud I can't even say hi to her. I would have to yell for her to hear me, it's that loud. There's this little cake from Albertsons sitting on the table. I don't quite know how to describe the relief I feel when I see it. I wasn't offended the year before when she forgot. I really wasn't. What bothered me was all the shit that followed—her remembering, crying, telling me how horrible of a mom she was and then giving me a look that demanded I tell her she wasn't. I told her she was a good mom and she just kept saying no, no, there's no way to fix this. It's the worst thing I've ever done. I'm the worst mom. I would say she wasn't again. She kept going on about it for days until I got really tired of the back and forth. Finally, I snapped and accused her of making the whole thing about her. It was true, but I shouldn't have said it. We didn't talk for a week after that.

Anyway, the cake is there, and I'm so happy to see it, because it makes everything so much simpler. I cut two pieces from it and put them on plates, grab two forks and then I bring one to my mom. She thanks me and says Happy Birthday and all that over the noise of the show. She says, "I should have cut you a piece, not the other way around." Then she goes back to watching her show.

I eat my piece in about three bites because I'm starving, and then I eat one more. I look in the fridge for something with protein since I worked out with Thomas, but the boneless chicken breasts I bought are gone. I ask my mom about that. I have to yell, which has me annoyed right out of the gate.

"I think those were expired."

"How could they be expired? I bought them two days ago."

"I cooked them."

"Then where are they?"

"I burned them."

Jesus Christ. At least we've gotten to the bottom of this one. "How'd you do that?"

"I left them in the oven."

I look in the trash beneath the sink and find all four of them: big lumps of coal. They even melted a hole through the plastic bag. "You should've let them cool down before you threw them away," I say.

"What?"

I give up. We live right behind a fancy organic grocery store. They cost more there, but her car isn't working right now and I don't want to walk all the way to Albertsons. I still can't quite believe she did it for the cake. I'll try to get her car going on the weekend. Thomas knows quite a bit about how they work.

It's fully dark outside. I'm really loving this warm night. There's kind of a breeze and it slips through the branches and new leaves of all the trees around here. There are mostly young maples and oaks in this area. I like trees quite a bit, and one good thing about this city is that there are plenty of them.

Anyway, I get the chicken and even buy some broccoli to steam up once I get home. I'm trying to look after myself and my health. I offer some to my mom but she doesn't want any. I have homework to do before bed, so I convince her to turn down the TV. That way I can focus. It takes me almost two hours to get through all of that horseshit. I work at the kitchen table. I have a math test the next day, so it takes me a little more time to get ready for it. My mom is still watching TV when I'm done. I do the dishes and turn off the light in the kitchen.

"Goodnight, Ma," I say. I kiss the top of her head. She doesn't say goodnight back. But I know she hears me. I know she's going through some mental health issues right now that make interacting at a conversational level pretty overwhelming. I've put some thought into it and I can see how it would feel to be in her position. So I don't push it. She'll be up late, but that's okay. I have a white noise machine in my room that helps me sleep.

The next day, Thomas and I are just hanging out in the parking lot during lunch. Thomas has done a lot of things to turn the tables in his favor. That's not easy to do in this school, especially when you look the way he does. You have to remember that we're talking about Boise, Idaho. You might already have guessed there aren't a ton of ethnically Chinese people around, but even so, you're probably still picturing too many. I bet there are about thirty students in this school of Asian descent. That's out of more than thirteen-hundred total. I'm not that good at talking about race, so I'll just say that, in general, students who aren't white have to fight harder for respect around here. Thomas is a popular guy. Between the two of us, I'm the underdog in that sense. I'll admit it. But he's made his rise to prominence look super easy, when the truth is that it was never easy. You should have heard the names kids called him when we were younger. Two years ago, he almost got expelled for hitting a kid who called him a word I won't say here. But then the administration reconvened, and after what Thomas described as a super whispery meeting, the issue was dropped. You can bet there were a couple of racist motherfuckers in that room who would've loved nothing more than to send Thomas home for what he did. But sometimes it's all about the optics, which were clearly not looking good by that point.

These days, he's so jacked that I doubt anyone would say any kind of slur to his face. He's pretty obsessed with his workout routines and supplements, and he's always trying to push his protein powders and shit like that on me. I tell him I don't like the way they taste, but they actually taste pretty good. I lie because there's no way I can afford supplements like that, and accepting all his offers would start to feel like charity after a while. I'm sure about that. So I'm not even going to go down that road.

So Thomas and me, we're just bullshitting about something out in the parking lot when out of nowhere he goes, "What do you and Lexie get up to? You know...in private."

When I was younger, I always kind of pictured us talking about this stuff when we got girlfriends. I had even looked forward to it. But we never do. We talk about so many other things that it has started to feel like a blank spot in our friendship that needs filling, if that makes any sense. Maybe Thomas feels the same way. Maybe that's why he's bringing it up now.

"We do different kinds of stuff, I guess," I say.

"Yeah?"

"I mean, we mess around quite a bit. At her place, usually, when her parents aren't home."

"Stuff like what?"

I laugh sort of nervously. I can't remember the last time I was nervous around Thomas. "Everything," I say. "You want specifics?"

"Have you gone all the way?"

"Yeah, two or three times."

"Two or three?"

"Three."

"Oh."

I pause, then say, "It hurts for her, so we have to take it slow."

Thomas seems to think that one over for a while. "She's tight, then."

"Yeah. And, I mean..." I just let the words kind of drift off. I think Thomas knows what I mean. Even though Thomas and I are close, and best friends and all that, we're both shy about body-related stuff. It's weird. I've seen the dicks of half the guys in this school, just from being in the locker room. I've probably spent longer than I should looking at them, if I'm completely honest. But it just so happens Thomas and I have never had PE class together. Just by chance. I remember a few opportunities coming up when we were younger, but I didn't let myself look. I'm sure I wanted to look. But I just didn't let myself.

So I've never seen Thomas's dick post-puberty, is what I'm trying to say, and I don't think he's ever seen mine. And right at this moment, I know he knows what I'm implying. It's not that I'm humongous—just larger than average, probably, and that is not information I've ever shared with him.

"You're a bigger guy, is what you're saying."

We're leaning against his dad's old maroon Lexus and I turn so that I'm facing it. God knows why I chose today of all days to wear sweatpants. I fold my hands on the roof, all casual. I'm getting hard. The car window is warm against my chest. "That's none of your business," I say. I don't say it in a serious tone.

"My business is yours and yours is mine," he says. It's kind of a weird thing for him to say in the moment, to be honest. Maybe he's quoting some show we watched together, but I can't think of what it's from.

"So what have you and Madison done?"

"I told you, she's kind of a prude."

He has told me that before, but I was never sure what the hell he was trying to say. "So you haven't gone all the way?"

"Not yet," Thomas says.

I'm trying to get a read on how he feels about it, but he's acting like a robot all of a sudden. "Have you told her you want to?"

Thomas scratches the back of his head. "I kind of suggested it a while ago."

"And what did she say?"

"I mean, I think she's up for it."

"So what are you waiting for?"

He just reaches over and slaps me on the back, which is such a Thomas thing to do. "Just got to make sure it's the right time," he says. "I want it to be special for her."

"I get that."

Neither of us talks for a minute.

"So it hurts for her?" he asks.

"Yeah, but she's still really into it." I'm trying to reassure him. I don't want to give him a reason to put it off, if it's something he really wants. "She says it hurts in a good way." It's making me so ridiculously hard talking about this and I have no idea why. I pretend the scenery beyond the car is super interesting, and keep my body against it.

He turns around and faces the same way as me, which makes me relax a little. "I wonder if I'm big enough that it would hurt for Madison."

I think about it. "I mean, it kind of depends on Madison, too. How tight she is."

"That's true," he says. He rubs himself against the car a little.

I realize he's probably turned himself around for the same reason as me. I bet he's hard, too. I swear to god I'm about to lose my shit against this old-ass Lexus. I don't know what to do. I'm kind of in a panic, if I'm honest. It feels really weird talking to him about this stuff. It feels so new and strange. It would be exciting if it weren't so fucking scary. And it also feels mean to the girls, somehow. Like we're not respecting them by talking about them this way. Suddenly, the right word comes to me: exploitative. Ms. Nolan would be proud. I'm getting things under control now. I think Thomas is, too. I don't know if he knows what I know, or vice-versa. But I get the sense he thinks he might have crossed a line. Thank god for that.

I make up some dumb shit about needing to talk to Mrs. Anderson at the front desk before class, and start walking away from him. I bet he sees right through it, but he just lets me go without a word.

A couple hours later, we're in his car, headed home from school. The air-conditioning isn't working so he puts down the windows. He seems pretty frustrated with he whole air-conditioning thing, just trying the button again and again, feeling the vents. Finally, he quits trying. Normally, I don't think he would give a shit about something like that.

"Can I just drop you off at home?" he blurts out.

"Sure," I say. "Whatever."

"Okay, thanks," he says.

He's thanking me, for that. It seems funny to me, so I laugh a little.

He looks over. "What?" He seems super agitated.

"Nothing, sorry."

"If you have something to say, just fucking say it, Niko."

"You seem a little tense," I say. I know he will hate that, but I'm honestly not too sure what else to say.

"Fuck you," he says.

I don't say anything back. He's being such a little bitch. I get that he's uncomfortable about what happened at the car during lunch. I know that. But he brought the whole thing up. He's driving like a maniac. He keeps getting on the gas, hard, advancing on the car in front of us, then finally backing off, hitting the brake so he doesn't rear-end them. He's acting kind of crazy.

"Please stop that," I say.

He does. He calms down. We don't say much to each other for the rest of the ride and he leaves me in front of my apartment building. He doesn't slow down for the speed bumps on the way out, but that's nothing new.

I go inside. My mom's not home. She might be working a rare day shift. I don't remember what she has going on today. It's Friday, so I'm not going to do any homework. I'm kind of annoyed that Thomas and I aren't hanging out tonight, since I don't have anything else to do and Friday nights are usually pretty fun. Lexie has some weed her cousin gave her. I realize I haven't texted her for hours, and notice I have a couple of texts from her. I text her back and she doesn't reply right away.

Thomas and I sometimes get into fights like that. This time, though, it feels different. It's hard to describe exactly, but it feels like there's something underneath all of this that goes deeper than usual. I wish I could wrap my head around it.

Her text comes in. "Why didn't you answer earlier? I wanted to give you a ride to my place after school."

"Didn't see my phone," I answer back. This is kind of a joke response between us, by this point. We say a lot of things in kind of an ironic way when we text. "What up?"

"Are you with Thomas?"

"No, he just dropped me off."

Those little blue dots just bounce there for a while.

"Well why didn't you fucking answer?"

"I swear, I just didn't look at my phone. I should have. I'm sorry."

There's an even longer pause.

"I need you to pay as much attention to me as you do to Thomas."

The words hit me hard for some reason. It's the first I'm hearing about it being a problem. "Okay," I say back. "Of course I will." I'm trying to dispel the tension. She's right, of course. I haven't thought about Lexie all afternoon. I have no idea why, except that the conversation with Thomas sort of had me preoccupied. He was being pretty weird.

Anyway, seeing as Lexie and I have been together for more than six months now, I decide it's time I grow up and recommit myself to the situation. I'll show her how much I care for her. She doesn't have any reason to worry.
3

So it's a couple hours later and I'm just sitting there on Lexie's bed, and she's pulling on my arm a little, which is usually a sign that she wants some attention from me, and all I can think about is how this whole thing with Thomas will go down.

Like, will he calm down about the whole stupid thing after a day or two, and then we can just go back to being normal friends? I really hope so. He's been mad at me before, but on all of those occasions, I've pretty much known why. It's usually related to me being an asshole in one way or another. This time, even though I'm thinking it through, even though I'm trying to be as honest with myself as I possibly can, I just can't see how I could have acted any differently. If I am partly at fault, then I don't know what to say sorry for. I don't even really know what the hell went wrong. It's quite the fucking quandary, as you can see.

"What's wrong?" she says.

She really does care about me. I'm not sure what to say, so I keep it simple. "Thomas is pissed at me."

"Why?" She looks kind of bored, to be perfectly honest with you.

"We had a moment at lunch, out by his car."

"A moment?"

"Yeah, like, he asked about you and me, and we talked about it a little, and it got weird."

She no longer looks bored. "What did you tell him about us?"

"He just asked if we had done it before. Like, all-the-way done it."

"Oh."

"I hope you don't mind. I told him we did."

She's playing with this little plastic toy horse her grandpa gave her before he died. She keeps turning it over in her hands. "I don't mind."

"Anyway, he got a little weird about it. I think he's nervous about stuff with him and Madison."

"She keeps asking him about it."

I turn to her. "She does?"

"Yeah. Why, what did he tell you?"

"He wants to," I say. "He says he's waiting for the right time."

"Yeah. I think she's waiting for that, too. I bet they're both nervous."

"They deserve each other," I say. I think this is a pretty clever thing to say, but Lexie doesn't even seem to hear it.

She looks out the window. "I miss my grandma already. I wish she could've stayed longer."

"Maybe I'll meet her next time," I say. She seems happy that I said it.

We go to the window and crack it open and smoke up. I'm feeling kind of blurry and her skin starts feeling really soft as we lie back down on the bed. I keep touching her skin, especially her pale collarbone, because it just feels so nice and soft.

"Niko, if I ever see you smoking again, I swear to god..."

The air is thick. I can see the individual particles of it swimming around the room. I can feel them bouncing off my skin. My shirt is off.

"What do you call what we just did?"

"That's different." She's just talking, but the words sound like notes in a song. "That's from the earth. No chemicals."

We're not wearing any clothes.

—

It's the next morning and I wake up in my own bed. Lexie tried to get me to stay since her parents are both away, but I was kind of worried about my mom. It turns out she was fine, but lately I keep getting this feeling like something's about to go wrong.

I text Thomas to see if he'll help me look at her car. He says he'll come right over. Thomas is really good for stuff like that.

"It's still a good car," he says as he opens the hood. It's already hot and he's wearing a shirt without any sleeves. This will sound so weird, but I like that his armpit hair looks exactly the same as the hair on his head: black and straight. I think it just brings everything about him together, in a way. I know that's a weird thing to say, but it's true. He's looking extra big this morning. I bet he got up and worked out. I'm kind of proud of him for doing that on a Saturday. He drags his toolbox along the ground. "I'm fucking terrified about finals," he says as he looks down at the engine. "What year is this thing? Ninety-six?"

"Ninety-seven."

"Cranks but doesn't start? I can already tell you it needs a new distributor cap. That's about the only thing that goes wrong on old Civics. At least ones of this vintage."

I like that he used the word "vintage." I ask him how much.

"Probably about a hundred and fifty." He looks at me for a second. "Want to split it?"

"What the fuck?" I say. "It's my mom's car. Why would you pay for it?"

"Just offering," he says in kind of a slow, quiet voice. He pauses. He's just standing there looking down at the engine. "I thought maybe you could help me study. Then I would pay half."

"I'll help you study. But you're not paying for shit. I'll be picking up more shifts in two weeks. Marlon says he can give me thirty hours a week this summer. I'll get by until then, easy."

It seems like I've convinced him. We get in his car and drive to the auto parts store.

"Yesterday, that was fucked up," he says completely out of nowhere as we turn right on Fairview. "Sorry I got mad about it."

"It's fine," I say.

"You and Lexie hang out last night?"

I told him we smoked up.

"And you didn't call me after?"

"You were being a little bitch," I tell him. He laughs at that.

We pick up the part. I pay with my debit card. Thomas says if it doesn't fix the problem we can always bring it back, which makes me relax about the whole thing quite a bit. Well, we get back to the car and it takes Thomas about half an hour, and I'm just standing there like an idiot holding his tools for him.

I would take all his finals for him if I could.

The car starts right up. It has a nasty exhaust leak that makes it sound awful, but that's nothing new. All I can think about is how happy my mom will be that she doesn't have to walk to work. It makes her feel a lot more confident when she can drive around town like a normal person.

I don't want to invite Thomas up, but his hands are all dirty from fixing the car. So of course I have to. He comes in after me, and I can tell by the dumbass way he's stepping around that he's feeling pretty weird about it. He hardly ever comes into my house.

While he's washing his hands, I go knock on my mom's bedroom door. She says I can come in. She's sitting up in bed, on her phone. She actually looks fairly rested.

"Me and Thomas fixed your car," I say.

Her face lights up. I don't remember the last time she looked so happy. "How did you do that?"

"New distributor, or something. Thomas knows all about it."

"How much did it cost?"

"It's crazy," I tell her. "The part was only twenty bucks." I don't even hesitate telling her the wrong amount. I'm sure you can see why it's for the best.

She insists on paying me back. She's actually pretty adamant about it. She has me go over to her dresser and take twenty dollars from her wallet. I'm surprised she has cash in there, to be honest. I can tell she's feeling good about the car, and about paying me back. She gives me a big hug and squeezes me tight for a long time. I start feeling emotional out of nowhere, but luckily I don't tear up or anything. I tell her to try and take it easy, and then Thomas and I leave the apartment.

Thomas's dad has a really good job out at Micron. That's why they moved here. It was right before his brother Alfred was born. They could have a better house if they wanted to, but his family has always been very modest in the way they live. His dad would probably still be driving the old Lexus if Thomas hadn't gotten his license. And the car he upgraded to is a Honda Odyssey from 2008. That's a minivan. Some people just don't need to drive a nice car to be happy. It's a sign of modesty, and I have a lot of respect for that. I actually aspire to be more like that, even though some of my actions might indicate otherwise.

Anyway, we head over to Thomas's house. There's a whole pizza left over from the night before in the fridge. Thomas drags it out of there and we just sit at the kitchen table eating it. Alfred comes out of his room and sits down with us. Their dad is in the backyard mowing the lawn. He used to only mow the half that was on their side of the duplex. He and the neighbor used to fight about where the borderline was and there would occasionally be this dumb strip of long grass going down the middle of the yard which neither of them would claim as theirs to mow. But the neighbor is getting old, and he fell down last Christmas, and it took eighteen hours for someone to find him and help him up. Ever since then, Thomas's dad just mows the whole thing and doesn't say a word.

"What do you guys want to do today?" Alfred asks.

"Nothing with you, dumbass," says Thomas.

I think it's nice that Alfred wants to hang out with us, but I don't feel like butting in. "When do you want to study for finals?" I say.

Thomas looks down at the table without blinking. "Not on a Saturday, that's when."

"Let's go walk around downtown, then."

I'm kind of surprised when he perks up at the idea. "Maybe the slide's open," he says.

We're getting ready to leave and Alfred's just sitting there on the couch. "You coming or not?" I say.

"Sure," he says. He's super happy to be invited, I can tell.

We're in the car and Alfred is kicking the back of Thomas's seat, which really pisses him off. "This is why I don't fucking let you come," Thomas says.

Alfred stops kicking. The windows are down. The traffic on Fairview is just creeping along for a while. There are some faint waves of heat coming up off the parking lots, distorting the light. That's the kind of thing you only notice at the beginning of the hot season. It's all new again.

We take the onramp to the 184 and warm wind rushes in through the windows. Thomas puts on Kendrick and we sing along. Alfred is pretending he knows the words, which I secretly think is the greatest fucking thing. We're downtown in a matter of about eight minutes and Thomas pulls into a garage off Main.

We walk over to see if the slide is open, but it's not. Thomas doesn't seem too disappointed. They have the fountains going again though, over in the Grove. Alfred walks a few paces behind us, like he's our pet or something. We're just standing there watching little kids play in the fountain when Thomas's hand brushes against mine. He instantly jerks it upwards like he's about to smack me with it, and looks over with a threatening face. It's all a joke. Thomas buys us ice cream. I don't feel that guilty about accepting this time because I know his dad puts quite a bit of money on his debit card every month, and anyway, it's just a one-time thing. We stand there, all of us really still, eating our ice cream on the corner of 10th and Main. The cars just float by like they aren't on the way to anywhere. Thomas wants to see if the Record Exchange has this new album he's waiting for, so we go over there. He picks it up. Outside, he holds it high above his head. He's still wearing that sleeveless shirt. He does a victory lap halfway down the block and then comes back.

—

That night, it's just Thomas and me in his room. It's probably around nine o'clock. His door is closed.

"We should text the girls," he says.

"Sure," I say. I had already been going back and forth a little with Lexie, so I ask if she wants to come by. I like how I don't even specify that I mean Thomas's place, she just assumes. It's been that way for a long time now. It turns out she and Madison are already together. They've started doing that quite a bit lately, hanging out on their own. I'm glad being friends is working out so well for them. They say they'll be over in about half an hour.

Thomas puts on the record he bought earlier. He's been getting really into music lately. A few months ago he dragged his dad's old stereo out of storage in the garage and set it up in his room. It was the kind of move that has hipster vibes written all over it, but I don't think Thomas could ever actually become a hipster.

The music sounds kind of experimental to me and there aren't a lot of lyrics, but one of the songs has this nice beat that gets us both up off the bed for some reason. Thomas is a better dancer than he would want anyone to believe. At all the school dances he pretends like he's just messing around, doing it ironically or some shit like that, but the truth is that he is naturally very good at it. I bet he practices alone in his room.

Anyway, suddenly we're kind of dancing and just fucking around in the open space between the foot of his bed and his desk. I get really brave and pretend like I'm grinding up on him. I know that will mess with him quite a bit. He laughs and shoves me toward the bed, hard enough that I pretty much fall onto it. All I can say is, everything is happening really fast. I go to get up, but he pounces on me, holding me down. He's just wearing basketball shorts and I can feel his junk through them, against my hip. I kind of squirm around, but he's stronger than me and I know that if he really wants to keep me there, he can. I only use maybe half my strength to try and get out of it, because really, why would I even try at this point?

I'm on my stomach. He has his arms wrapped around my chest. It comes to me as this wave of realization. I don't know. Maybe I've always kind of known. Maybe this is how it feels to suppress something. Maybe it's like when people have those recovered memories that I've read about, where your mind suddenly acknowledges something hiding in your subconscious—some shit like that.

The fact is: I want Thomas Chu, my best friend in the world, to keep holding himself close to me like this. His body is so sweaty and hot that it's pretty much steaming, and that heat is all around me now. The music is still going. I can feel his dick pressing against me more clearly now, because it's hard. Thomas is hard. And so am I, and I'm already about to lose my shit. What the fuck is wrong with me?

He's moving against me. I move against him. That's all it takes. He makes a weird sound like he's about to say something but he can't get the words out, and then I feel something wet against my back. That's right. And guess what? I immediately jizz inside my pants.

The song is still going. Neither of us moves right away. We just lie there breathing in and out, and he's still on top of me. Then he stands up really fast. He goes over to the stereo and I hear a banging sound. The music stops.

"Fuck, man," he says. "What the fuck?" He's angry. I can hear it in his voice.

That's all he says. I can't get him to say a word while we clean ourselves up. His jizz is on the back of my shirt. I tell him I'm going to need another one and he goes over and tears open a dresser drawer. He throws the new shirt in my direction without looking at me. Then he's just standing there holding a fresh pair of underwear.

Suddenly he says, "Can you fucking get out of here while I change?"

"Give me a pair," I say. "I'll change in the bathroom."

"Why do you fucking need to change?"

He wants me to spell it out for him. I swear to god, Thomas can be so stupid sometimes. I just look at him. I wait for him to look me in the eyes. When he does, I say, "Because I came too, you idiot." I state it clearly. I'm not going to be the one who's afraid right now.

He's got the strangest look I've ever seen on his face. I don't know if I would call it relief, or shock, or disgust. Whatever it is, I guess it's a good indication of how fucked up everything is right now.

I'm standing there in the bathroom, just giving myself a good, long look in the mirror. I change, and when I pull my pants back up around my waist, I find myself face to face with this intricate red Chinese knot, hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Thomas's mom put them up all over the house years ago.

I start crying. I keep it really quiet. I don't make a sound. It goes on for a minute or two, and then I stop. The girls will be over soon. Thomas is really good at putting on a face, and so am I. I go back to his room. I lay myself down on his bed and stay still. He's over at his window, staring out at the backyard. He turns back after a while and looks at me.

"Not a fucking word," he says.

"Are you kidding? Never."

We nod at each other. It feels like the kind of pact that can only be made between good friends. We've gone through a lot of shit together, Thomas and me, and after it all, our friendship has stayed intact. What the hell am I saying—it has stayed strong. Gotten stronger. Strong enough to get through another day, even in the face of this.
4

So the girls come over and we're all just sitting there in Thomas's room.

"Why does it always stink in here?" Lexie says.

Madison says she likes it and gives Thomas's big arm a squeeze. Lexie looks at me and we share a private smile, because Madison is just too much sometimes.

For the first five minutes, Thomas is in another world. I can tell by the dumb look on his face that he's not seeing anyone around him, not hearing anything we say. Madison clasps his hand in hers and says something sort of witty and laughs and looks over at him. His gaze just drifts slowly over in her direction and he puts on a mild, forced smile. He's tuned out like this for a solid five minutes, and somehow nobody notices but me, and then he's back.

"I still have that whisky," he blurts out, scrambling to get down to the safe on the floor of his closet.

"We can't drink it here," says Madison. "Your dad will know."

"We'll go to Winstead," Thomas says. He opens up that flask and takes a huge swig from it before so much as standing up.

"Take it easy," says Madison. Her voice is so quiet and soft compared to Lexie's. It's kind of breathy.

Lexie gets this sly look on her face and pulls out two joints from her purse. "And when we run out..."

"We won't run out," says Thomas. "I hid a fifth in the garage, too." Thomas doesn't smoke weed. He's never even tried it. He calls me a stoner even though I've only ever smoked it maybe fifteen times in my whole goddamn life. I think he's afraid of it, but I would never say that to his face.

We go out into the kitchen and he opens the cupboard. He passes each of us an empty protein shaker, lid and all. "Let's see about a mixer." He opens the fridge. "Orange juice? Probably not."

Lexie laughs. "Holy shit, Thomas, I'd rather have it straight."

I look in the bottom drawer of the fridge. There's a whole unopened bottle of coke in there. I lift it out and show it to the others.

"Oh thank god," says Lexie.

We fill the protein shakers part of the way full with coke, then go out to the garage. Thomas hunts down his hidden fifth of whisky. He goes around to each of us, filling those blue plastic goblets like he's the star of the party, and when he gets to his own, I notice there's no coke in there. Instead he fills it a little over half full with straight-up whisky. Thomas Chu has a number of signature moves, but that right there, that's his number one. The girls are laughing about something with their backs to us, so I doubt they even notice. But I do.

Winstead Park is only about a twenty minute walk from Thomas's house. There's this hidden little area at the back by a fence where we can get really quiet if any cops come by. A massive pine stands over it and shades it through the heat of the day.

We're just walking along Northview. The repurposed protein shakers are hidden in Lexie's backpack. Thomas keeps pulling his flask out of his shorts pocket and taking furtive little swigs from it.

Lexie's holding my hand on and off. She falls back to talk to Madison. And then Madison says, "Where'd you get that shirt, Niko?"

"It's not mine," I say.

"I know," she says in her breathy voice. "It belongs to this guy." She plants her hand in the middle of Thomas's broad back as he's walking.

"I gave it to him," says Thomas. I kind of think this whole moment is eating him up inside. He takes a long drink from the flask. "I hate that shirt."

"I think it's nice," says Madison. "But it looks better on Niko." She just won't stop talking.

"No one asked you," he says. He sounds serious. By the time he turns around, he's put a smile on, but I think Madison's hurt a little.

We're walking through the park now, and we have to be quiet because it's getting dark and we don't want anyone calling the cops on us. Luckily, the hidden area by the fence isn't near anyone's backyard. There's just a small open field on the other side.

Anyway, we get kind of nestled in there and Thomas is up against Madison and Lexie and I are up against each other, across from them. We're all just drinking from our protein shakers. If you want to know the truth, I'm having a pretty good time at this point. The night is so warm and the vibes are so good that I'm not having too much trouble forgetting about what happened earlier with Thomas. Something like a half an hour goes by where we're just talking and laughing quietly. Thomas and Madison are kissing each other. Lexie and I don't really like PDA, so we only do that kind of stuff when we're alone.

After a while, we're all fairly buzzed, but Thomas most of all.

He kicks my shoe. "Nikola, what are you looking at me for?"

"I'm not," I say.

"Every time I look over you're looking at me."

"I said I'm not."

"You in love with me or something?"

I lock eyes with him. I communicate with him telepathically. I tell him to fucking rein it in, for once in his goddamn life.

The girls seem pretty unmoved. They just sit there and act bored.

"You guys and your bromance," says Lexie. "Why don't you just fuck already and get it over with?"

"I keep begging him," Thomas says. His words are falling all over each other. "Niko, baby, come home." He laughs.

The girls laugh, too. I feel like I'm actually going to lose my mind. For just one second, I swear I could kill him. Just slit his throat. Then things start to calm down. Thomas is flat-out drunk now. Thank god I'm feeling something too. Otherwise I would probably have to kill myself.

We're walking back across the park. It's dark as hell outside. Madison gets a little weird around Thomas whenever he's drunk, like she would rather distance herself until he sobers up. A consequence of this is, I'm the one he uses to support himself. We're back on the street. The girls are way ahead of us. They turn right, away from Thomas's house, and then it comes back to me: They're going to sleep at Lexie's. Her parents are still gone, and if Thomas hadn't gotten himself so shit-faced, we probably would've been invited over too.

I think they're both thankful in a weird way that I'm so ready and willing to take care of him. He's got his arm clear around my shoulder and he's super heavy. He mumbles something I don't understand and I ask him to repeat it.

"Why are you so in love with me?" he says.

"Fuck you."

He puts his hand under my shirt and kind of starts feeling up and down my abs.

"I said fuck you, Thomas." I swat his hand away.

He goes back in, determined, this time sliding his hand straight down my pants. I feel it close around me and I freeze. I grab his wrist and he releases. I pull his hand out of my pants with so much force that we both lose our balance and fall.

We're sitting there in a little heap on the edge of Northview. The whole thing is just too much to handle, and I start to cry.

Thomas manages to prop himself up on his big arms. "Why you crying, Niko?" He looks so confused. "Shit, Niko, why you crying?" The thing is, he starts crying, too, and it becomes this horrible sob that just completely takes him over. Eventually he starts to calm down, but when I try to get him to stand, he won't do it. "Leave me here," he says. "I'm so fucked up. Fucking leave me here." He says it over and over and then he starts to yell, which I know will cause a scene in this quiet neighborhood, so I stop trying to get him to do anything. He stops yelling. I sit back down on the sidewalk with my back to him.

"Something's wrong with me," he says.

I turn and look at him but his eyes are closed. I look back out at the quiet street. Everything's lit up in orange light. I just keep sitting there for what feels like forever, wondering how the hell we're going to get through this one. That warm breeze just keeps coming in from the west. I want to believe it's coming all the way from the ocean.

I hear a rustling sound behind me. He's standing up on his own. He's swaying a lot and almost falls, but somehow he steadies himself. And then, slowly, shaking a little, he reaches his hand out to help me up, and in those dark brown eyes is this crazy, intense look of determination.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the true Thomas Chu, underneath it all.

—

I wake up the next morning with a vague memory of getting Thomas home, then continuing on. Anyway, I'm in my own bed again, that's all I know. I text Thomas first thing because I know he has a final tomorrow. I'm pretty sure it's his math final, and I'm also pretty sure he's not ready for it. But Thomas is in regular math, which I shredded to pieces last year, so I figure it won't be too hard to help him get in shape for the test.

I work for a guy named Marlon, and he runs a coffee shop. It's one of those weird little shacks out at the edge of a Winco parking lot, trying to be something it's not. I only work Sundays during the school year, and occasionally Thursday evenings, if there's an event going on at Central. But damn, you should see the number of cars that roll through each morning, even on a Sunday. Shit, especially on a Sunday—although the peak time is later, which is why I don't go in until eight-thirty.

I have a headache from the night before, but a couple glasses of water seem to make it subside. I don't eat any breakfast. Thomas would hate that. Anyway, I get to work and there's a steady rush as usual. You wouldn't believe how impatient people who go to church can be. Jesus Christ, if they have to sit in their climate-controlled SUVs longer than ten minutes or so, they seem to forget everything they just learned, or are about to learn.

So I'm sweating away in there, more than usual because Marlon hasn't gotten around to installing the window unit yet, even though he knew there was a warm front coming in, and I keep kind of glancing at my phone, waiting for Thomas to text me back. Up until noon, I ascribe the whole not-texting-back thing to him being drunk the night before. I don't think too much of it, although he never sleeps in late. Never, not even after a night like that. After lunch, things start to slow down, and I've got both windows open and a nice breeze coming through, and also plenty of time to wonder why I still haven't heard back from him.

I text him again, and in another hour, still nothing. I want to make sure he didn't die in his sleep or something awful like that, so I give him a call. He doesn't answer. I don't leave him a voicemail. I can't remember the last time I left anyone a voicemail. Anyway, you can probably guess that I'm waiting around for the entire rest of my shift for a response from him, and nothing ever comes.

I go home and study. I study for maybe four hours until I'm completely starving. My mom bought some deli meat, if you can believe that, along with bread and cheese and a head of lettuce. I make myself a ham sandwich.

It's when I'm sitting there eating it with not much else to do that I start getting honest with myself. I haven't forgotten about last night. Of course I haven't. I'm trying not to think about it, but I haven't forgotten. I'll get really honest with you here: I don't want to forget. I want to remember what it felt like, face-down on his bed with him on top of me, breathing on my neck. I don't know what the fuck that means about me. I'm scared to go down that road.

I remember later, too, when we were on the street. I remember, vaguely, the moment that made us fall. I know I cried, but I'm not sure what exactly about the whole fucked up thing made me so emotional. I don't usually get like that. Usually Thomas is the emotional one. We were both sitting there crying. I don't even want to think about it now.

The only thing that sort of helps me get my spirits up is the fact that my mom gets home, and she's doing pretty well. She has good weeks like this sometimes—she'll even have a good month here or there. She tries so hard to get better. She tries harder than anybody I've ever known.

Lexie drives me to school the next day, which she sometimes does. We walk in together and a couple people we know join up with us in this cluster near the entrance hall. I'm just shooting the shit with this guy I run track with, when Lexie leans in and shows me her phone. There's this text from Madison on the screen saying Thomas blew up at her. My heart kind of aches for her in that moment, but I have to act like I have no idea what's going on.

"Did he seem weird to you yesterday?"

"I didn't see him yesterday," I tell her.

"What about his texts? Did they seem weird?"

I admit that I tried to text him a few times but he didn't answer. I even admit that I tried to call him and he wouldn't pick up.

"Why the fuck am I just hearing about this now?"

I mutter this dumb string of words—something to the effect of me just being so busy studying that I didn't have time to deal with it.

She's not even listening. She's back on her phone texting furiously with Madison. "This is so unlike him," she's saying. "I just don't understand."

I have this pit in my stomach. It grows larger and larger and I start to feel a little panicky. At least Thomas didn't die in his sleep. But now I know exactly what's going on, and it has everything to do with what when down on Saturday night. There is simply no other explanation, and the more honest I get with myself, the more obvious it becomes. I can feel myself getting so incredibly angry at him. Come on, Thomas, you stupid bitch, why can't you fucking get it together?

At first I'm thinking it's the worst possible week for something like this to happen. But then I start to wonder if maybe it's a good thing. You'd better believe I take this finals shit seriously. This is the last push. My full scholarship as an international student at UBC depends on my performance over the next five days. That trait I told you about earlier, the one I'm so lucky to have—I can feel it starting to kick in. I feel like I'm swept up in this wave of great urgency.

"I have to study," I say all of a sudden. And then guess what? I just leave. Lexie understands. Lexie knows how important this is to me. She's too busy consoling Madison to notice, anyway.

I stay focused on what's most important in my life. Right now, that's my grades. I don't care anymore if I sound like a huge nerd. If it was your only way of getting out of here, you wouldn't care either. The whole school day goes by and I swear to god, I barely think about Thomas at all. We have this crazy block-scheduling at my school, and he's not in any of the three classes I have today. How I manage not to pass him in the halls is anyone's guess. I finally start to wonder if he skipped school. But then I remember he has that math final—there's just no way. I haven't looked at my phone all goddamn day, so I don't have an update from the girls. I don't want one.

I'm headed out to the parking lot to meet Lexie at her car. It catches me off guard when I see Thomas's car just sitting there, only five or six spaces away from Lexie's. She'll be a few minutes, I'm sure, because she's never in a hurry to get out of that place at the end of the day. Don't ask me why. Anyway, I guess I've got him trapped, like some kind of parking lot ambush situation. I make up my mind that it's a good thing.

And then he shows up. I watch his face change when he sees me. What the hell was he expecting? He's got to be as surprised as I am that we went this long without running into each other. We both knew the moment was coming.

He's standing there with his key in the door. I walk right up to him. "What the fuck?" I say.

"I'm sorry." He's looking really strange, not like himself at all.

"This is all because of Saturday, isn't it?" I don't know quite why I'm so livid with him.

He grabs the sleeve of my shirt. I can feel a few pops in the fabric. "We can't do this. Do you fucking understand? I can't talk to you."

"What the hell?" I rip myself out of his grasp. "It's not my fault you've lost your fucking mind over this. I thought we said we were going to keep quiet about it."

"Quiet about what?" he says. "Nothing fucking happened, Niko."

I pause in order to compose myself. Sure, I'm willing to play his dumb game. "Fine," I say. "You're right."

He's starting to look emotional, to be perfectly honest with you. I get the sense he's sort of begging me to leave, in that telepathic way we have of communicating with each other. But it's what he says out loud that really gets to me: "Niko, we have to stop spending time together."

"What are you talking about?"

"How do you not fucking understand?" He's pleading with me now. "Fuck, dude, how do you not get it?"

I just don't. That much is clear to me. All I can see is how broken up he's getting over this. I start saying something, but he's already getting in his car. I try to hold the door open but he wrenches it closed so hard I have to jerk my hand out of the way before it gets crushed.

If you think I'm dramatic enough to stand in the way of that shitty old Lexus, you're wrong. He's clearly intent on leaving. Fucking good for him. I let him go. I turn away as he speeds out of the parking lot.
5

As you can probably guess, I'm pretty quiet in the car with Lexie. She showed up just as Thomas's car went out of sight, so she's none the wiser about the whole thing. But she only puts up with me being quiet for a few minutes before getting into the tough questions.

She turns to me in desperation. "What's going on, Niko? He won't talk to Madison."

"He's just working through some stuff," I say.

"He barely paid attention to her today. She needs him to be honest right now, but he won't tell her anything."

I guess I'm trying to protect Thomas at this point. Or maybe I'm more selfish than that. Maybe I'm starting to see how this could all land back on me. I'm madder at him than I've ever been over this, but I don't want to say anything that would implicate either of us. That means I have to lie to Lexie. I'm feeling really torn up inside. But I figure I'll do anything to buy him some more time to calm down. If he can get over this and blame it all on something else, then we'll be safe. I just want all of it to blow over so we can get on with our lives. Because that thing we did, it only happened once, and it won't happen ever again.

"He won't tell me, either," I say. "I tried to get him to talk to me, but he won't."

"When did you see him?"

The way she's driving has me holding on tight to my door. "Just before you showed up."

We're stopped at a red light. She's looking over at me for a long time, not saying anything at all. She knows something isn't right. I can tell. She knows I'm not giving her the full story. Or maybe I'm being paranoid—I can't be too sure of anything right now.

"Why aren't you freaking out about this?"

"What do you want me to do?" I say. "Don't ask me why he chose now to lose his shit. I don't fucking know. It's finals, Lexie. I have so much to do. I'm not going to let him throw me off my game, no matter how fucked up his behavior is right now."

"Well I think that's shitty of you," she says.

I don't say anything back. The less said the better.

She's trying to calm herself down. "Will you please come to my house?"

"I won't get any studying done at your house, and you know it." Normally she's more supportive when I get super into my schoolwork. Normally she understands, because she cares about her grades, too. Not as much as me, but she's also smarter than me and therefore doesn't have to try as hard. She knows that.

"Come on, Niko, you would have to royally fuck up at this point to lose your four-two. Don't be selfish."

That sets me off for some reason. "Holy shit, Lexie, it's one fucking week of our lives. Can we stop acting like everything's so dramatic for one fucking week?"

She smacks the steering wheel. "You know what? I think it's better if I just drop you off." She's using this creepy, flat kind of voice that means she's so mad she's gone all the way around to calm again.

"I think that's a fucking genius idea," I say.

Now she doesn't say anything at all, she's so mad. Nothing, for five whole minutes. It's longer than it sounds. I don't say goodbye when she drops me off. I just walk away from her stupid little car like I don't know her.

—

I get along fine on my own over the next couple of days. You would be surprised how easy it is to avoid people. Even your close friends. It's not like I become some kind of anti-social freak, either. I hang around with Garrett and some of the other guys at lunch in order to bring down the stress. A lot of them, they don't give two shits about their grades. A few, like Thomas, are headed places due to their athletic ability, and only minimal effort in the academic department. Around here, that mostly means football. Don't get me wrong, it's not exactly my preference to be hanging out with these guys all the time. There's a reason I'm not as close to them as I am to Thomas. Some of them are pretty dumb, if I'm honest. Others spend all their time just talking shit about people, which tends to freak me out a little. You should hear them. Some of these guys will straight-up trash anybody they perceive as lower than them in this school. Anyone from try-hards, to poor kids, to girls who sleep around a lot, to guys who don't sleep around enough...the list is a mile long and anyone is fair game. I always wonder, though: If you really think you're better than them, what's the point of rubbing their faces in the dirt? It's messed up, is what it is.

So anyway, it's Wednesday night and I'm just sitting at home. I'm working on this essay, because that's my final in English. I'll be honest. I'm trying extra hard on it, not because I'm worried about my grade in that class, but because I want to impress Ms. Nolan. I can't explain to you what it is about her that I like so much. Every day, she just shows up to that school like nothing can get her down. She's nice to everyone, she believes in everyone, and she notices when people are hurting. I think I got on her radar because my mom never shows up to the parent-teacher conferences. They're just too much for her to handle. Anyway, I had Ms. Nolan for English in tenth grade, and again my senior year. I don't take AP English. I only took AP Physics and Math this year, which is why a four-point-two is the best I can do. Luckily it's enough for the scholarship. Ms. Nolan seems to have it in her mind that I should've taken AP English, too. She's given me a few books that the other class reads, and that's fine. I like reading them, and talking about them with her. But I'm not completely dumb. I know she knows that I capital-G-Get them, if you know what I mean. So she's probably expecting a lot out of me for this essay. I won't disappoint her. My laptop is a huge piece of shit and freezes up a lot, but other than that, I have a good time writing it.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea about my mom. Her early life was messed up. She came to Boise in 1994 as a Bosnian refugee, along with a shit ton of other Bosnian refugees. There's a lot I don't know about her childhood. You can hardly get her to say one word about it. But once, a couple years ago, I got super mad and asked her why she was so crazy. And she looked right at me and said, "That's what happens when little girls get made into women before they're ready." She was mostly on her own once she got here. And she was still pretty young when she got pregnant with me in 2000. And like I said, my dad didn't stick around, which I think only added to the whole situation. She's made a lot of effort to improve her life, and even though she still has it rough most of the time, she never gives up. You can't fault her for that.

Anyway, I finish the essay, and I'm just sitting there looking over it. There's really nothing left to do with it, nothing I want to change, and it's getting close to ten, so I decide I'm done. I get ready for bed and say goodnight to my mom. She turns down the TV without me even saying anything about it. I realize I haven't worked out at all since Thomas and I quit hanging out. I've got this dumbbell I keep in the corner of my room, so I use it to do some curls, and I stretch, and I do crunches and pushups.

I'm lying there in bed, and of course I can't sleep. I'm so tired, and I miss Thomas so much I could die. I start to freak out a little, just in my head, because I realize there's a small chance he could be serious about all that shit he said. He's one of those people where once he's made up his mind about something, it's pretty much set in stone. But there's no way he's made up his mind about this. Right? There's no way he's so stupid that he'll throw our friendship away over something like what happened. I start getting really worked up over all of it. I just wish he was here, because when I get like this, he's the only one who can calm me down.

I know I'll have to get to sleep somehow, so I pretend he's here. I think about all the things he would say: how fucking legit this summer is going to be, or how much it's going to suck, depending on his mood. I pretend he's lying in my bed next to me. It's just a twin bed, so there's not a lot of extra room. We've only tried it a couple of times, when we were younger. Shit, nowadays we'd just be spilling off of it, unless we got close.

I know you're not stupid. I know there are things I'm not talking about. I want to get close with him. Every day of my life, I want to get close with Thomas Chu. I'm just not sure what that actually means. I have no idea what the endgame would be, and I'm just so scared of even letting myself think about it.

Thomas knows more of my secrets than anyone else. But not this one. Not the fact that I get these quick little rushes when I notice how big he's getting. Not how, in the deepest, darkest corner of my mind, I want those arms around me, protecting me. We spend most of our lives together as it is, and I want to keep it that way. But sometimes, I want more. And when I go off to school, and we don't see each other as much anymore...well, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do.

I'm just so tired and scared, so I give in. I imagine what it would feel like to have his arms around me now. I try to feel that warmth he radiated during the insane moment we shared Saturday night. Instantly, I start to calm down. I remember more of that moment. I remember him against me. I reach down and it doesn't take me long at all. After I'm done, I sort of feel around for something to clean myself up, and I don't remember anything after that.

—

Other than turning in my essay, there's not much I'm looking forward to in English class the next day. The main problem is that Thomas and I are both in that class. It's kind of the perfect storm, to tell you the truth: The class takes up two hours of the afternoon, there's nothing to do because we're mainly there to turn in our essays, and Thomas and I are each pretending the other person doesn't exist. On Tuesday it was fine because we were allowed to work on our essays either in the classroom or the library, and you better believe I busted my ass to the library the second I saw Thomas setting up camp at his desk.

Today we're both stuck in the classroom, and I don't have much to distract myself besides studying for my Physics final tomorrow. Anyway, I keep myself looking busy doing that for a while. Thomas is just talking and laughing in the back corner with some varsity football guys. They call me over but Thomas doesn't look like he wants me to join, so I tell them I better keep studying. They make fun of me quite a bit for that, and keep sort of antagonizing me while I pretend I'm super focused on my textbook. The whole time, Thomas doesn't say a word.

I go up to Ms. Nolan and ask if I can study in the library. She gives me a smile that says she understands, and I excuse myself.

"Come on, Savic," says a guy named Driggs who I normally talk to quite a bit. "We're just having a good time. Join us."

I tell them I really have to study for this test. They let me go without too much trouble. I don't know what the hell is going through Thomas's mind at this moment. I bet it's killing him.

I get to the library and find a quiet corner. I'm sitting there picking at the cover of my textbook, thinking of the boys back in the classroom. I get this strange feeling, because I realize none of them are in my classes tomorrow, which means that was the last time we would all be sitting in a class together. I don't hang out with many of them outside of school, at least not regularly, so who knows which of them I'll ever see again, if any. That moment back there, when they were having their fun at my expense, it all starts to feel so insignificant, like it's already fading behind me. I'll start college up north (or university, as they call it) and every single thing about it will be new. The people, the places—even stuff about me could be new. Maybe the person I want to be up there is a little different than the person I am down here. Honestly, that idea gets me pretty excited.

The last day of school is pretty weird. I take my Physics final and do fine on it. We get out of the last class and people are sort of wandering around like they don't know quite where to go. I wish you could see it—it's the strangest sight. Some people are kind of teary-eyed, saying their goodbyes and whatnot. I'm chatting with a few guys and we're just talking about summer jobs, and college, and how we're going to hang out a ton this summer and all that bullshit.

I pass by Ms. Nolan's class and she's talking to a couple students. She looks past them at me and motions for me to come in. I sit kind of awkwardly by the window with my ass against the heater until the other kids leave. Then I sit down in my usual spot by her desk and we have a nice little moment.

"You're not a student here anymore. In fact, you're an adult," she says. She stresses the first syllable the way some people do. "Just between us, I want to exchange contacts. You okay with that?"

I'm not sure what to say. I just nod a little. She hands me her phone and asks if I'll put in my number. It feels really weird, just sitting there holding Ms. Nolan's phone. I do as she asks, and she looks happy about it.

"You're going to get up there, and everything's going to open up for you. Do you understand what I mean by that?"

I tell her I understand.

"There will be so many new things to do, and try, and be. I don't want you to be scared or hold back. Just do it all." I start to laugh but she says she's serious. "I know you'll make the right decisions, when it matters."

I thank her, for everything. She gets emotional. She tells me not to be a stranger. I tell her I won't. After that, I walk out of the school. I don't see anyone I know on the way out. I'm not looking at any of the faces.

—

I told you before when I realized how little all those guys matter to me. Even if it meant never seeing any of them again for the rest of my life, I'd still want to get out of this place.

But what about the person I would give it all up for? That's right, even now, if going meant never seeing Thomas again, I would stay. In a heartbeat. I would stay forever in this dumb town. I guess that should give you some idea of how much pain I'm in right now. It doesn't help that school's over. And it really doesn't help that I'm still not talking to Lexie.

I never told you why my mom stays up so late. One reason is that she has insomnia like you wouldn't believe, and the other is that she likes working the night shift at her job. She works the counter at a convenience store over at Milwaukee and Emerald. It's one of the few in the city that stays open twenty-four hours, but even so, it's usually pretty dead. I think that's what she likes so much about it. Her shift starts at nine. She'll get home around the time the sun's coming up and sleep all day. She's done it on-and-off for years.

She's not home now. I don't know where the hell she is. I've never been able to decide if I'm an introvert or an extrovert, but it's times like these when I'm fairly sure I'm the latter. Even when everything's going fine, I don't usually like to be alone for too long. But everything's not going fine. I start wondering if maybe Thomas and I developed some kind of co-dependency along the way, which I understand to mean that we'll start going crazy—maybe literally crazy—if we don't talk anymore. If it were true, then that would mean he's feeling the same way I am, right? I try to remember what it's called when only one person needs the other, then realize that's just dependency. Damn, I really don't like that word.

Well, if I text him, he's not going to answer, so what the hell are my options? The only real option I can see is to text the person who will answer, even if we haven't been talking for the past five days.

So I type the following into my phone and hit send: "What up?"

Those little blue dots show up right away, but it's a long time before her response comes through.

"Not a lot, Niko. Will you come over?"

Twenty minutes later, I'm at Lexie's place. She shows up at the front door, and I can already tell by the look on her face that she's forgiven me. I'm such a fuck-up sometimes, it's a miracle she's put up with me for so long.
6

For the whole entire weekend, Lexie and I hang out. And I mean it—other than going home to sleep, we're around each other all the time. When you're a couple, it's expected that you spend a lot of time together, and I'm feeling pretty good about making up for my recent absence. We have a lot of fun just smoking up, avoiding her parents, and doing some other things I won't mention here. It's the first time since Thomas quit talking to me that I've managed to forget about him.

Lexie is golden. After Thomas, she's my best friend in the world. Her insanely long hair, the way she throws her hips back and forth in an absent kind of way whenever music's playing, it's all just so enchanting. She'll do the hip thing with her back to me, just going through her jewelry box as I'm lying there on her bed. The sunlight pours in through her open window after passing through the tree branches outside. It makes this complicated, shifting pattern on the floor that I could stare at for hours on end.

She passes Madison's updates along to me. Madison says he's just going through some stuff and he'll be fine. I don't ask for any more information than what Lexie shares with me.

It's Sunday night when we finally decide we'll do our own thing for a while. I've kind of been itching to check in with my mom, anyway. I get home around seven and she's not there. She usually doesn't leave early for work, so I text her. She texts back and says she's running some errands first. She normally spends a lot more time at home than this. I'm starting to wonder if she might be seeing someone. Don't ask me if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. I have no idea.

I kill time for an hour or two. It gets dark outside. It starts raining, of all things, but I guess it's technically still spring. I didn't even notice the clouds coming in.

I'm just lying there on the couch, about to put something on TV. I'm not really feeling much of anything, if I'm honest. All of a sudden my phone goes off, and I look at the screen and it's a text from Alfred Chu. It says: "Thomas is messed up. He won't come out of his room. He's been in there all weekend."

"Madison said he was fine," I text back.

Alfred texts: "I don't know. He seems messed up to me. Our dad just brings food in to him and that's it. He's got our dad thinking he's sick but I think that's some bullshit."

What the hell. I call him up. His greeting is just comically deep over the phone.

"Alfred, buddy," I say, "he really doesn't want to talk to me right now."

"He doesn't want to talk to anyone. But I know he'll talk to you. I know he will, if you try."

"I doubt it. We're uh...we're having some problems right now."

"Please, Niko. Something's wrong with him."

Shit, the kid sounds serious. "Try to put him on," I say.

"He'll kill me if I open his door right now. He'll kill me if he ever finds out we talked. Can you please just come over? I'm scared, Niko. I'm scared he might do something."

I can hear the kid choking up a little. Fuck. "I'm coming over," I say.

It's insanely warm outside, but it's raining kind of hard. On the way over, I'm just thinking about all the things I could possibly say, but I can only come up with one thing. It's not so much something to say, but just an attitude. I'm not going to let him take this friendship away. I'll do anything, say anything I can to make sure he doesn't.

I'm pretty soaked by the time I arrive at the Chu household. I let myself in and take off my shoes and go straight back to his bedroom. I open the door and find him in bed, on his phone. I think he's pretty surprised to see me standing there. I'm dripping wet, too, which sort of makes the whole thing appear more dramatic than I want it to be. He doesn't exactly act like he wants me to leave. He doesn't do much of anything at first, except turn so he's facing away from me. I roll his desk chair over so I'm kind of sitting next to him. He has his back turned to me. He pulls his blanket up so it's almost covering his head. His hair is greasy, but he's looking all right.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" he says. His voice sounds calm, but I have no clue what the hell he's really thinking.

My problem is that I can't think of what to say, now that the moment has finally come. It feels like a lot is at stake, and I'm suddenly wondering if this was a terrible idea after all. "Don't you miss hanging out?" I say.

I just let the question rest there for a while. I hope he'll say something back, but a long time goes by and he doesn't say anything.

"Fuck, Thomas, I miss you so much."

At this point, you need to understand that I'm not afraid to lay it all on the line. I'm feeling like I don't have a lot to lose. Just knowing he's right here, listening to everything I'm saying...it's all starting to be too much for me. I know he can hear me getting emotional. "I'll do anything..." I'm looking at his big muscly shoulder, peeking up above the blanket. Goddamn. "I just need you to talk. Please."

"You know why we're not hanging out." He rolls onto his back. I'm surprised to see him teary-eyed. "Fuck, man, you know what all of this means. I know it's not just me. It's both of us."

I'm feeling like it would be so easy for me to say the wrong thing. But I want to be clear with him. "Are we still pretending it didn't happen?"

He shakes his head. "No."

"Then what are we doing?"

"I don't know." He slings an arm over his face. "I'm just feeling so fucking guilty, man." He's crying a little. "Later that night, that thing I did to you when I was drunk. I remember. That was so fucked up."

"Don't feel guilty for that," I say. "You didn't know what the fuck you were doing. I'm not worried about it."

"I knew exactly what I was doing," he says. "I was going after what I wanted."

He's making me super uncomfortable now. It's not that I don't feel the same way. I'm just not ready to be so bold about it all.

"I'm asking because I need to know," he says slowly. "When did you realize you had feelings for me?"

I'll tell you this much: I don't think I've ever been so caught off guard by one single question in my whole life. I'm just looking at him, alarmed, with absolutely nothing to say. Do I actually have feelings for Thomas? God, my mind is such a messed up place, I'm telling you. The proof is all there. Of course I do. I envy him now, because he's able to say aloud something I've barely ever let myself think about.

He's still waiting for an answer, and I still don't know what to say. I think about it as hard as I can. "When you were on top of me the other night," I say. "That's when I knew." I can hardly believe the words are mine.

He's looking at me now in the strangest way, like he doesn't know me very well. I'm freaked out by the expression on his face, to be honest. But then he seems to compose himself a little. He looks back up at the ceiling. "Well I knew a long time before that."

I'm pretty shocked to hear him say it.

"That's how I know it's never going away," he says. "The older we get, the more I feel it." He turns to me again. "Now do you see why we can't hang out anymore?"

"No." I just say it. "No I don't, Thomas. Fuck, now that it's all out in the open, don't you think that'll make things easier?"

He thinks on it a minute. "I don't know."

"What's our other option? Never seeing each other again? Come on," I say. "That's so fucking stupid." I stop talking and he's just looking at me. I know what he's trying to get me to say. I know I'm not the best at being honest with myself, and he can see right through it. He won't look away. He wants me to say I've always known. Well, fuck you, Thomas Chu. I'm not going to do it.

"I thought I could handle not seeing you," he says.

I look him up and down. "And now look at you. Fuck. What a mess."

"Shut the fuck up," he says. But he can't hide his smile.

"Let's just do our best," I say. "We'll see how things go." The ambiguity of the whole statement is hilarious, I know, but what else am I supposed to say?

"Let's hang tomorrow," he says. "You have work, right?"

"Yeah," I say. "I'll come by after."

"Cool," he says.

—

I'll tell you what, the next day, I've got all the time in the world to think about things, sweating all day in that coffee shack. It's called "Spill the Beans" if you can even believe that horseshit. Jesus Christ. To make matters worse, it kept raining most of the night. Now it's sunny again and humid as hell. Marlon texts to tell me he'll have the window unit in tomorrow. I'm not sure I'll make it.

The rush is mostly over by ten, and it will only come back a little after lunch, so I'm standing there thinking over what we talked about the night before. I guess Thomas's main worry is that something will happen again. It seems sort of unlikely to me. He has a lot of self-control, at least for most things, and so do I. I'm looking at pictures of him on my phone. I do that a lot. He's one of the most photogenic people I know. There's one from when he was swimming with his cousins last summer. He has his shirt off. I just stare at it for a while. I don't know what to do. I decide it would be a good idea right about now to stop looking at those pictures.

Outside of the shack, it's just full-on summer. The puddles have mostly evaporated away. I'm situated in a part of town where a lot of refugees have moved in over the years. You get to see all kinds of people going in and out of the Winco, just getting their groceries. Even though I complain about this job a lot, it's not like it's the worst way to spend the day.

I get off work at four and go straight to Thomas's place. Alfred is sitting on the couch in the living room. I can tell just by his expression that things are already much better. The way that kid was talking the night before...all I can says is, I'm happy he doesn't have to worry anymore. I go into Thomas's room. He's at his desk reading about some band on Wikipedia. I lie down on his bed. It's really pretty crazy how normal everything feels again.

"How did finals go?" I say.

"Don't ask me," he says. "I don't fucking know."

"You think you did okay, though?"

He turns his chair around. "I think I did all right. Probably would've been a lot better with your help, but I didn't fuck them up too bad."

I don't know why I feel so relieved. They're not my grades. I'm such a dumbass sometimes. "Can you believe it's all over?" I say.

"Not really," he says. "Doesn't feel the way I thought it would."

"I know."

"I don't miss it yet," he says. "Not at all."

"Thought you were going to miss that shithole already?"

He grins. "No. I guess I'm just surprised. Feels almost like I never will." He's just sitting there shaking his head. "Feels kind of far away now."

"I know," I say. "The great world is unfurling before us." I have a habit of just throwing out shit that sounds like something I would read in one of Ms. Nolan's books. Sometimes it's a direct quote, but usually it's just a string of bullshit like that. Thomas used to think it was annoying, but he's been getting a little more artsy these days, and I think he's starting to like it.

"Fuck yeah, man," he says.

He puts on music and we chat about nothing while we wait for rush hour to pass. He's always got some new shit playing. I've learned to be careful when I ask what's on. I swear, this time all I ask is what language they're singing in—that's it. And you know what he does? He spends the next twenty minutes lecturing me on how this entire country is fucked because nobody listens to the voice of Hamed Sinno.

Eventually, we get in his car and drive around town. The air-conditioning still isn't fixed, but that's fine because I'd almost always rather have the windows down. Later on in June or July it'll start getting up around a hundred degrees some days. Even then, I'll be happy just to sweat it out with the windows down.

We're driving through Garden City toward downtown and they've got all this new housing going up right and left, all along Chinden. There's a guy sort of dangling from some scaffolding and man, I bet he has a great view from up there. I bet he's happy he's not stuck in a little prison cell serving coffee all day.

Anyway, we get to the onramp and Thomas jams his foot down, and the big engine just roars and the car whisks forward. It's not all that dramatic at first, but by the time second gear gives up we're going ninety miles an hour down the middle lane of the connector. The little city skyline drifts in on the left and we start going around the curve. Thomas spots a cop at the bottom of the ramp and gets on the brakes so hard that we're skidding, tires screaming, down that middle lane. The antilock doesn't work anymore, so Thomas is just fighting with the wheel, trying to keep the car in a straight line. Don't ask me how that cop didn't see us. I'll never know.

—

That night, I decide to stay over at his place. We're just lying there side by side on his bed like we normally do. I don't know what the hell to say about what we're doing. It's like, we're really liking being in each other's company, and that's all there is to say about it. Man, we walked around the streets and the parks for hours earlier, just talking and kind of smiling at each other every now and then. Sometimes we would look at each other and not look away for a long time. This new honesty between us, it's making everything feel so fresh and new and exciting. It just feels so good to know that we both know, and we're both okay with it.

"I want to change my answer," I say. I don't give him any context.

He looks over.

"I knew a long time ago, too."

He looks back up at the ceiling. "Oh," he says. "That."

We just keep lying there for a while. He turns on his side so he's facing me. "What are we going to do, Niko?"

I turn so that I'm facing him, too. His eyes just fixate on me. "Remember last summer," I say, "when we were swimming at the pond in Veterans Park? Garrett and Owen and some of the other guys were there."

"Yeah, I remember."

"You'd started working out a lot more around that time. Anyway, I hadn't seen you with a shirt off for a while. So I guess I was just noticing how you were getting bigger, and I..." I pause.

He's got the biggest grin on his face. "You what?"

I just can't believe I'm actually telling him. "I had to excuse myself."

"Where did you go?"

"To the bathroom. You know, to take care of business."

He laughs so hard I'm worried we'll wake his dad up. His dad goes to work super early in the morning. Thomas quiets down pretty fast, and we just lie there for a while longer. "I wish we could've talked about this stuff a long time ago," he says.

"Me too."

It's late. I figure it's about time I get ready for bed, so I say something to that effect. He kind of clears his throat and makes a big deal about getting ready first. I don't know what he's up to. I guess he just wants to show me that the moment's over. This is where we draw the line, and all that. He gets back, and then I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. (That's right, I keep a toothbrush over here. I've done it for years.)

Anyway, I go back into his bedroom and he's just standing there in the middle of the floor. He looks up at me as I come in and tells me to close the door. I do so and then I go up to him. It feels like the most natural thing in the world, facing him, looking right into his eyes. We're so similar sometimes, him and me. We're after all the same things.

He leans in and I feel his mouth against mine. I just start kissing him, pressing my lips into his again and again. I'm full of this crazy kind of desire that I never knew existed in me before this moment. His lips are so much softer than I expected. He's feeling my cheek with his hand, running it down the side of my neck, over my shoulder.

He has a little bit of stubble on his upper lip. Man, that's such a turn-on, let me tell you. He's pressing his whole body into mine, and suddenly I can't hold my ground against him. I'm not sure if he knows it but I'm losing my balance. I can't stop kissing him. I won't. I stumble backward, and he's still against me, and my back just fucking slams into the wall.

We stop then. We're holding still, just breathing in and out, standing in each other's arms, waiting to see if we woke his dad up. After half a minute or so, it seems like we're in the clear. There's not a lot hiding the fact that we're both hard. We're each wearing these basketball shorts that leave very little to the imagination. We part. And then I'm just looking down at what's going on between us.

"Want to take care of this?" he says under his breath.

I nod.

He lays an old shirt out on his bed and we both stand over it. I'm looking over at him the whole entire time, and I realize he's just about the same size I am. I manage to keep mine mostly on the shirt, but Thomas just can't handle himself and most of his shoots right past it, landing on the blanket. We do that shit two more times, and then we finally go to sleep.
7

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it. I'm just saying maybe we should have been more realistic about what we knew was going to happen. My mind is still doing backflips over the whole thing.

Would you believe it if I told you Thomas and I slept peacefully in his bed all night long with two feet separating us, the same as we've done for twelve whole years? Well, that's exactly what we did. Picture him and me, best friends just keeping that childhood arrangement alive for yet another night like nothing happened. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. And when I woke up in the morning, and everything was just so goddamn familiar, it actually took me a second or two to remember. Once I did, and I looked over at him and he was still sleeping, I had this crazy, warm feeling wash over me. I guess you could call it euphoria. I felt a strong desire to reach out then and put my arms around him, but of course I didn't actually do it. All of this has been such an unpredictable shitshow, who knows what the result of that would have been.

I stood there beside his bed for a good minute or two. I was trying to decide if I should leave without waking him up, which I normally wouldn't have any qualms about. This time I decided it might not be the best idea. I said his name softly and he rolled over and looked up at me.

"I'm going to work now," was what I said.

He gave me this kind of shy smile that made me feel really good about everything and said, "See you later on."

Well, now it's back to reality, and I'm standing in this dumb little booth, and I need some time to process all of this, you know? And I know he does, too, no matter what he says, no matter what kind of one-eighty he's made in the last couple of days.

The good news is that he's texting me back—he was the first to say something, actually. It's not like I was really worried about that, though, since he seems to have completely moved past his whole doom-and-gloom phase. It helps me get through the day, along with the fact that my prison cell is now air-conditioned.

The first thing he says is, "How did you sleep?"

"I slept well," I text back.

"No regrets," he says.

"No regrets."

We're just sort of texting about nothing for a while. And then I say, "We need to keep this under control though."

His reply comes in right way. "No fucking shit." A pause. "We can't just go and do that shit whenever we want."

I type the words "The girls" and then just stare at my screen trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to finish that thought. And then I give up and hit send. I'll let him deal with it.

"I know," is all he texts back.

Things go quiet between us for a while. As I'm serving cars I keep opening our message thread and it just looks so sad and pathetic they way we left it. We're the ones who are pathetic, is what I'm trying to say. A while later, determined, I pick my phone back up and type, "You know it counts as cheating right?" But I only put the words down on the screen. I don't send them. I look at them for a little while, and then I erase them. Half an hour later, I write them again. Then I erase them again. I'm the craziest piece of shit. I wish I understood myself better sometimes.

It's getting close to four. I'm just cleaning up some stuff and throwing a few rags into the laundry bag when that beat-up old Lexus just grinds up and lurches into a parking space nearby. Thomas gets out and he's wearing the red variety of his famous sleeveless shirt. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and comes over.

"Did you work out without me?" I say.

"No. I thought we could, if you want to." He crosses his arms on the little order counter. "Hey, so I was thinking we should actually quit doing that other stuff, for now."

"I agree," I say. And it's true. I do agree. He's exactly right. Look at all of this other shit we have going on right now. That kind of behavior is totally incompatible with either of our situations, and we both know it.

"Like, actually fucking control ourselves," he continues, "and not just say we will."

"We've been friends for years," I say. "So I mean, we know what it's supposed to look like, just being regular friends who don't do that stuff. We'll go back to how it was before."

"Exactly," he says. "Man, I knew you would think of the perfect way to say it."

A straggler pulls up in a white Buick. It's a sweet old lady with a mile-long order. Thomas waits in his car until I'm done. I close up the place and go over to his car. I get in and shove some stuff in the back seat. We go back to his place and run through our whole routine in the garage. It feels so good to be working out with him again, I'm telling you. And when we finish and he pushes his protein on me, I accept that shit. I'm like a new man.

I know this might be hard to believe, but we go the whole rest of the week just being normal friends, like before. The thing about Thomas and me is that we care about our friendship more than anything. I'm hanging out with Lexie too, on and off, and things are going pretty good for us. Damn, that girl loves to smoke weed. You should see her. Now that summer has arrived, she's really relaxing about a lot of things. She got this job as a cashier at a store called Lazy Afternoon that mostly sells crafts and shit like that. She tells me she can do it with her hands behind her back.

Thomas's job starts next week. He's a shop assistant to a mechanic in West Downtown. He did it last summer, too. He's all over that kind of stuff.

My mom starts showing up around the house a lot again. She's brought a bad mood back with her. I mostly avoid her, but sometimes I get the sense that I need to talk to her and make sure that nothing too serious is going on. It's Saturday afternoon and we're both at home. She's in the living room and I sit down on the chair next to her. I turn down the TV and she slowly turns to look at me.

"Everything okay?" I say.

She's just kind of reading my face for a while. "When was your high school graduation?"

"A couple weeks ago," I say.

"But you just finished."

"I know," I say. "They do it before. But it's contingent on passing your finals." She never even asked me how my finals went. She's always taking it for granted that I do well on that stuff.

"Why didn't you tell me, Niko?"

"It's not a big deal," I say. This is going to be a bad one, I can already tell.

"Of course it's a big deal," she says. She's still putting on the calm front. "A mother should go to her own son's graduation ceremony. Don't you think so?"

I'm already feeling pretty exasperated. I wish there was something I could do to keep my nerves under control in these situations. "I don't have an opinion on it," I say calmly.

"Of course you do," she tells me. "I'm sure everyone else's mom was there. I'm sure it made you feel terrible that I wasn't there."

She's wrong. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have gone at all. The only reason I attended and walked is because all my friends did, and it would have looked super weird to them if I didn't show up. The point is, I didn't want to be there, so why would I care if my mom showed up or not? I take a breath. "If I wanted you to be there, I would have asked you to come." I know right after I say it that I didn't choose the right words. I can be so goddamn stupid sometimes.

"How could you do that?" she says. She's not even looking at me. She's lying on the couch, staring at the wall. "How could you go and do that, and not even think to invite me?"

It just doesn't even make sense, what she's saying right now. The school sent out invitations to every parent. I remember exactly what the envelope looked like when it came in the mail. I brought it in from the mailbox and set it on the kitchen table. I left it on the top of the stack. I know she saw it. I know she opened it.

You have to understand, I didn't bring it up with her at the time because of the way all those conversations have gone in the past. First she'll run through a series of excuses, and then, at the very end, say some shit like, "But no, really, I should go," and then I'll say okay, and then she'll just start going through all those excuses again, and finally I'll say something like, "You know what, Mom? It's really okay with me if you can't make it. I promise, it's okay if you don't want to go." I'll dress it up for her. I'll get really convincing about it. Because I know that will make her feel much better in the end about not going.

She's always doing this stuff. She's always saying things that don't quite work with reality. I'm so sick of it.

"If you cared about me at all, you would have invited me," she says.

"I care, Mom." She's getting me pretty worked up inside. "You know I care."

"Times like this make me wonder," she says.

That's it. She's triggering me like you wouldn't believe, saying something like that. I do her the biggest favor I possibly can in that moment: I get up and leave. I stomp back to my room like a child and throw some shit in my backpack, then unplug my phone from the wall. I walk right out the door without saying another word to her.

The thing is, if I had stuck around, I probably would've ended up saying something hurtful. I can't do that to her. She just doesn't have the tools to handle it, if that makes sense. Every now and then I catch myself thinking that if I do talk back, it's because she deserves it. But the truth is that no matter what kind of dumb shit she says to me, the woman has clothed and fed me for years. We've lived in that dumpy little two-bedroom apartment my whole life. Can you believe that? I've always had a place to call home, because of her. In return, during moments when she's being like this, the least I can do is not mouth off to her. No matter how tempting that can be, it's always better to walk away, to refrain from saying some dumb shit of my own that I know I will later regret. I don't always succeed, but today I pulled it off.

I'm walking pretty quick, winding my way out of the apartment complex. I get to Cole and just stand there on the corner for a while. Man, I can't even tell you the number of times in my life I've stood on this street without a plan in the world. The maple trees lining it are kind of gently shuffling around in the warm breeze. The leaves are still new and practically glow this intense green. It's such a beautiful sight.

I walk absentmindedly to Thomas's house. His dad left this morning on a business trip to Salt Lake. I imagine he'll be down there for a few days. Alfred's lying down in the middle of the front lawn, looking up at his phone. He's wearing these bright blue Yeezys that he bought recently after saving up for months. He's so proud of them.

"What are you up to?" I say as I pass by.

"Reading," he says. He has about a million books on his phone, and he always has his nose in one of them. I hate reading books on a screen but it seems to work out fine for him.

I go into Thomas's room and he's taking a nap. I decide to let him sleep but as I'm leaving he starts moving around and I hear his deep, gravelly voice go, "I'm up, I'm up." He sits up. He's got this worn-out white t-shirt on from when he was smaller. That shit barely fits him anymore. He slowly props himself against the headboard and gives me kind of a blank stare. "What's up?"

"Not much," I say. "My mom and I had a thing. I had to get out of there."

"Fuck, man," he says. "I'm sorry to hear that. Are you okay?"

"I'll be fine," I say. The truth is, now that I'm around him again, I don't really care about anything else. "You look tired."

He shrugs. "I ran around the reserve earlier."

I sit down on his desk chair. "What did you get up to last night?"

"Not too much. Just hung out with Madison." He crawls out from under the covers and lies on his back. His running shorts are riding way up his leg. "So what did you and your mom fight about?"

"I don't know, man. She's just giving me shit about how she missed the graduation ceremony."

He looks right at me. "How does that work? She's the one who didn't fucking show up. Remember how pissed you were about that?"

"I guess so," I say. I don't remember being that pissed but I guess Thomas remembers it differently.

"And she's the one giving you shit?"

"I don't know," I say. "She just said some stuff about it, so I got out of there."

He takes a minute to think about it. He sort of scoffs and looks off to the side. "Shit, man." He gets up. I'm still sitting on his desk chair and I roll myself out of the way as he goes over to his dresser. He changes his shirt and pants right in front of me. For a quick moment he's down to just his underwear. I could probably count on one hand the number of times he's done that before. Once he's done he says, "How about we go get something?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know, Delsa's or some shit like that?"

"Sure," I say. Thomas loves his ice cream, that's for sure. He always has this low-key way of bringing it up, but I bet he's been thinking about that little parlor ever since he ran by it earlier.

We walk, since it's not too far away. You should see the inside of this place. It's got the classic red and white booths, mint green paint all over the walls, the whole thing. We go up to the counter and I order first. As I'm taking out my card, Thomas grabs me by the shoulder and shoves me out of the way. By the time I recover, he's already said his order and he's taking out his own card to pay for both of us. I just stand there, staring at him for a second. The whole thing comes across as a pretty baller move. I get this weird little rush. He knows how to look out for me. That's for sure.

I say thanks as we're sitting down.

He's just casually spooning that ice cream into his mouth. He says, "You deserve it," and just leaves it at that. He has this goofy smile on his face.

We get back to his place and he takes a shower. Then we're just sitting in the living room doing nothing and he says, "Maybe we should invite some people over, seeing as my dad's out of town."

"Sure," I say. "The girls?"

"And a few more?"

"Sure."

We start texting people, and before we know it, about ten or twelve people say they'll show up. We tell everyone to be here around eight. I'm actually looking forward to it quite a bit. My attitude has changed since the last day of school. Just because I didn't specifically plan on seeing anyone again doesn't mean I'm going out of my way to avoid them. I still have an entire summer to kill in this town, so I might as well light that shit up.

"The best part is, the neighbor's gone too."

"He is?"

Thomas nods. "His daughter came to pick him up for the rest of the weekend. We can be as loud as we want."

All right, I'm actually getting excited for this thing. "What about Alfred?" I say.

He shrugs and thinks about it for a minute. "Freddie's old enough to learn how to party, don't you think?" He gets up and goes over to the screen door. "Hey butthole," he says. "We're having a party. Anyone you want to invite?"

I can't hear what Alfred says. I bet he's super into it, though. A while later, he comes in and watches Thomas and me play Mario Kart. "Can two of my friends come?" he says.

"That's what I fucking said."

"Hell yes." The kid looks so excited. He's back on his phone, texting away.

All I know is, moments like this are never as simple as they seem on the surface. Part of the reason Thomas is being so nice is because if Alfred is involved, there's no way he'll ever tell, purely out of gratitude. It's a genius move. But I'll bet you a million dollars that Thomas isn't just passing over the moment unmoved, either. His baby brother is finally old enough to join in the fun. That's actually a big deal in the whole scheme of things, if you stop and think about it.
8

So word gets around and about twenty-five people show up. Owen's older brother works at Urban Brewing and supplied a keg, which ends up being a pretty big windfall. We all chipped in and Thomas and I went down the hill to Garden City to pick it up. Anyway, it's getting close to ten now, and everybody's having a good time. I'm standing in the kitchen next to Lexie, and we're arguing with Garrett and some girl from Borah High that he brought with him.

Lexie is well into her third whisky-coke (she hates beer) and she's the one steering this ship, so goes the phrase. "You know what, Garrett? Fine," she says. "If you really want to believe they're all just out there choosing to sleep in the cold, choosing to eat food out of a trash can, I guess I can't force you to open your eyes."

"Why the fuck else would they be out there?" he says. "They have places they can go. There's open beds in the shelters all over town."

"Let me tell you what you're going to do," she says. She's kind of sloshing her drink at him. "You're going to search the words 'homeless' and 'mental health' and read some of the articles that come up. And then you're going to come back to me. I won't waste my breath arguing with someone who has decided not to inform himself."

Garrett kind of scoffs. "Yeah, I'll look it up sometime."

"I fucking bet you will, Garrett Landon." She's poking him in the chest with her index finger.

I'm loving this moment. He's looking at me now, saying, "You have anything to add to the debate, Savic?" I tell him Lexie's said enough for both of us. Meanwhile, the girl Garrett brought with him doesn't seem to have much of an opinion about anything.

The so-called debate dies off and Lexie and I go into the living room. Thomas has music playing so loud from his bedroom that it fills the whole house. A few people are kind of dancing around in there. Alfred's standing in the hall with a cup of beer in his hand, which is a sight to see, across from this girl he seems pretty interested in. Two of his other friends showed up and they're playing Switch on the couch. Driggs and a girl named Chloe are talking to Owen and his girlfriend, this junior whose name I don't know. Three other guys from the football team are here. Thomas and Madison are nowhere to be found.

I get the sense already that the energy is building. The music gets turned up another tick. The air-conditioning must not be running because it's hot as hell in here. I go back into the kitchen and open the window over the sink. I open the door to the backyard. Lexie grabs my arm and escorts me out onto the lawn. We're just acting dumb and dancing around on the grass for a while. It's another warm night. The light from the moon fills every inch of the backyard.

We go over and lean against the storage shed. Lexie moves in and kisses me. She finishes her drink and spins in a circle, looking around in every direction. Her eyes land back on me. "Where did Thomas and Madison go?"

"I was wondering the same thing," I say.

She smacks my chest. "I bet they're at it again. The floodgates are wide open now."

"What are you talking about?"

She stops moving. She looks right at me. "Thomas didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"They finally did it—last night. They went all the way. Madison texted me this morning. Can you fucking believe how long it took?"

"No," I say.

"I can't believe Thomas didn't tell you," she says. "Jesus, what do you guys even talk about?"

I sort of laugh. It's a good way of hiding my surprise. "Not much, I guess."

Lexie is already over it. She's pulling a joint from the front pocket of her jeans. "Quick, before anyone comes out and sees us," she says. "I didn't bring enough to go around."

I'm happy for the distraction, and after Lexie takes in some of it, I have a turn. I inhale just as Thomas and Madison make their grand entrance onto the lawn.

They really do make a stunning couple. If Madison is a prude, then she's a gorgeous one, and I guess some people might say Thomas is a lucky man. But the truth is, he's not lucky at all. It's not called luck when the universe thrusts two people together like Barbie and Ken. They've been the looks-good-on-paper darlings of that dumb school since the beginning. I would know. I was there on all those crisp Friday nights, screaming his name from the stands, fully aware of her presence on the sidelines, cheering in full uniform, standing closer to him than I ever could've hoped to. Jesus Christ, Lexie's right—considering those odds, it's amazing how long it took them to fuck.

I exhale. They come up to us and Thomas punches me in the shoulder. I just look at him, and he looks back for a second or two.

Madison reaches for the joint. "Do you mind sharing?"

"For you? Are you kidding?" Lexie hands it over.

Madison takes a small puff and casually passes it to Thomas. I think we're all expecting him to decline, so it's to everyone's surprise when he brings it to his lips and inhales. He passes it back to me, but I've already had a lot, so I give it back to Lexie.

I'm just looking over at him for a quick second. My head is already buzzing. "There's a first time for everything," I hear myself say.

He looks at me with what I'm tempted to call a twinkle in his eye. "Fuck yeah, dude." He looks back at Madison. He keeps his eyes on her. He's doing it because he's supposed to.

We're standing there with stupid grins on our faces for what feels like a long time, but it's probably only a minute or two. Another group comes out of the house and they have weed with them, too. We go over to them, and I don't want any more, and neither do Lexie or Thomas. But Madison of all people lets Driggs hold that larger joint right up to her lips, and she inhales deeply this time. I know she's probably riding high over this latest development with Thomas, just scaling walls and ready for whatever bold new adventure comes her way, and all that. I'm happy for her.

We go back inside and now pretty much everyone is gathered in the living room and kitchen. Thomas goes into his room and drags the speakers over so they're facing out the door. He puts on a club music playlist and dims the lights a little. Then he picks up the coffee table and carries it back to his dad's bedroom. Who knew he was such a good host? I spot Alfred with his three friends over by the door and they're all looking a little drunk. Thomas comes up beside me and he's looking at them, too. "I'm going to tell them to ease up a little," he says, then goes over and talks to them. If they'll listen to anyone in this whole entire house, it's Thomas.

Anyway, basically everybody starts dancing, even though some are a lot shyer about it than others at first. I'm in a tight little group with Lexie and Madison and Thomas. I'm not feeling that high, but I do notice the beat moving through me like it's taking up actual physical space in my body. I stay fascinated with that sensation for a while.

If you want to know whether or not Thomas and I are making eye contact during all of this, the answer is yes. I remember back to that night in Winstead Park and I'm thinking about how he accused me of looking at him too much. Well, maybe I was. I don't remember. Either way, he's the one doing all of the looking now. He's the one trying to catch my eye, over and over, and I let him have it a few times. I look back at him with an expression that I'm pretty sure is full of desire. I'm letting loose. I don't have any control over it.

He asks Madison if she wants another drink and she says no. He goes to the kitchen and comes back with two full cups of beer. He gives one to me. I take it from him and drink a third of it in one go. He's buried in his for so long, I bet he downed more than half.

Man, I can burn through a lot of time dancing, especially when I'm not sober. I have to be careful, otherwise an hour or two goes by and I barely notice. A while later I look at my phone and see that it's almost midnight. I look around and see some new faces. People have trickled in as the hours pass. Everybody's getting comfortable now. I see people who don't know each other having intimate conversations. Owen's managed to balance a lampshade on his finger and he's spinning it like a basketball. He catches my eye and gives me a big smile. Owen and I have always had a pretty nice back-and-forth. For starters, he's one of the nicest guys I've ever known. Like me, he has a refugee background, only his family came from Congo. Also like me, he was born here. But he's got a big family, including an older brother and sister and a cousin or two. All of them were born over there. He's the baby. His family's always teaching him about these cool Congolese cultural things. My experience is pretty different from his in that way. My mom and I are all alone, and she hardly ever says anything about Bosnia. My dad is allegedly also Bosnian, but like I've said before, I don't know him.

I go to the bathroom at some point and when I come out, Thomas pulls me into his dad's room. It happens so fast, I barely know it's him at first.

He closes the door and fucking asks me how my night's going. The music sounds blurry, just pounding through the wall.

I don't tell him how my night's going. I say, "Why didn't you tell me?"

He doesn't even ask what I'm talking about. He might be drunk, but he knows what he's guilty of. "I don't have to tell you everything that happens to me," he says.

"That's a big deal, though."

"I know." He's not looking at me anymore. "I was going to."

"Well, you should've known I would hear it from Lexie if you didn't tell me right away."

"So what's the big deal?"

"I wanted to hear it from you," I say.

"Why?"

I think about it for a second. "I don't know, I just did. I don't have to fucking explain all of my feelings to you, Thomas."

"Fuck you, neither do I."

I pause again. For a quick second I sort of forget what we're arguing about. I'm just looking at him. I don't take my eyes off of him. I make him look at me. "Come on, Thomas, why the fuck didn't you tell me?" I just can't let it go. "We went and got ice cream. You had plenty of time."

"I didn't want to talk about it," he says. He's looking at me like he's kind of lost. "I'm sorry. I should've told you."

I'm just standing there. Despite being kind of drunk, I'm feeling a little vulnerable here in the middle of the room with nothing to lean up against.

Before I know it he's pulling me into a hug. "I don't fucking know what I'm doing," he says. "This situation's kind of fucked up."

I feel his voice more than hear it. "I know," I say. His hands start exploring my back. They move down, and then he pulls us both together at the waist. He exhales against my neck. His body feels so good up against mine that I start to ache. Jesus Christ, I want him so bad. "Thomas," I say, careful to keep my emotions under control. "Why'd you do it with her now? Why now?"

He starts softly crying into my shoulder. I feel his body shuddering against mine. "Everything's just so fucked up."

We part. He's looking at me expectantly, as if I can give him some kind of assurance right now, which I cannot. He's looking exasperated, to be honest, and he's still got tears in his eyes. "I don't want to be this way," he says.

"Well good luck changing it," I say. I'm praying no one opens that goddamn door.

"What about you?"

That's one big, scary question he's asking me. Maybe it's better that I'm drunk. Who knows what I might say? "I wish I wasn't," I tell him. "But I am."

"Fucking say the word then."

"Fuck you," I say. "Why don't you say it?"

For a second I think he's about to. That would be the surprise of the century, right there, let me tell you. But then he sort of starts to break down again. "I can't." He's drunker than me, I can tell. "How long did you know you were like this?" he asks.

I tell him forever.

"Me too," he says.

Good, I'm thinking to myself. We've had our moment. We've established that through some freak coincidence, we're both saddled with the same affliction. Would you fucking look at that.

"I'm not ready to deal with this," he says all of a sudden.

"Neither am I."

"They're both out there. Right through that door." He's pointing at it like I don't know where the fucking door is. Sometimes, for Thomas, it's all about the drama.

"I know," I say.

He goes into his dad's bathroom and leaves the door open. I can hear him just pissing away in the toilet.

"I'm going back out there," I tell him.

"Yeah," he says. "Whatever, man."

I join back up with Lexie and Madison and some of the other people they're talking with. Someone turned down the music and not as many people are dancing. They ask me if I've seen Thomas and I tell them no. Madison goes to look for him. If he tells her we were talking, that's fine. I don't care about having my story straight anymore.

Lexie and I go into the kitchen and she makes herself another drink, and I get myself another cup of beer. A bunch of people have sort of migrated outside, so we go back out there. The music is just softly bleeding out onto the lawn. For just a second I imagine the fallout if someone were to call the cops on us. I'd probably get charged with underage drinking. I could lose my scholarship. My heart is thumping in my chest. I start planning my escape route. Since I practically grew up in this neighborhood, I know the network of backyards pretty well. I could get myself over the fence without too much trouble. I could hide out in any yard of my choosing and emerge safely onto another street. At that point I'd just casually walk home. I tell myself to calm the fuck down, and I take a good long drink.

And then, Thomas is standing on the roof of his house. He's up there just taking it in, looking up at the big empty night sky like he's seeing it for the first time. He's such an idiot sometimes. I make eye contact with Alfred across the lawn. He has his little posse standing around him. We both look back up at Thomas. I don't think many people have noticed he's up there yet. But then, little by little, everyone does. Someone yells, "Hey Chu. Get off that roof."

Thomas looks down and freezes in place, like it's a total surprise to him that he's attracted an audience. But now that he has, of course he takes it upon himself to improvise. He spreads his arms wide. "Gather round, one and all," he yells out. People quiet down. The soft beat of the club music is still thumping from the house. "I'd like to take this moment to thank you all for coming tonight." He hesitates. You can tell he has no idea what he's going to say next, but it just adds to all that drama he's going for. "Many of you know me for my performance on the field." A few people cheer him on at this point and he puts up his hands, as if to say he's not after their praise. "Well, I want you all to know that I am much more than that." It's strange, because in a way, he seems only barely aware of the twenty or thirty people watching him. "We all are," he continues. "We are all much more than what we show on the outside." At this point, Driggs shouts, "That's fucking deep, man," and a few more people cheer. Thank god he hasn't lost them. Even in his drunken state, Thomas really knows how to string the crowd along. "With that in mind," he shouts, "let's keep this party alive all fucking night." Everyone cheers now. Even I'm cheering him on. He disappears over the peak of the roof, and everyone just goes back to laughing and drinking and dancing on the lawn like nothing even happened.

Lexie and I walk around the house through the side yard. We find Madison standing on the front lawn, looking up into the branches of the big oak tree at its center. I end up feeling pretty stupid, because I just can't figure out what the hell she's doing until we get all the way over to her. She points up. The first thing I see is Thomas's denim pant leg, and when I look up higher I can just barely make out his face sort of peering down at us, it's so dark in that tree.

Madison says, "Thomas is up in the tree."

"Are you coming down?" I ask him. He's probably about ten feet above us.

"No," he says.

"Why not?"

He's quiet for a minute. "I like it up here."

"Thomas," Madison says, as loud as her breathy voice can muster, "you better come down or we're going to have to send someone up after you."

"Oh yeah? Who's it going to be?" he says.

We all kind of look at each other. I put my hand on Madison's shoulder. "He's all yours."

We give her a boost and she climbs up there and sits next to him on the branch. I can hear them talking and giggling about something dumb. Lexie walks away from the tree and sits down on the edge of the driveway. I go over and sit next to her. She leans in and kisses me. I kiss back as best as I can, because I'm not feeling too well. We sit there for a little bit and she says some things to me that I don't remember. I excuse myself and go into the house. The main bathroom is occupied so I use the one in Thomas's dad's bedroom. First I bang my shin against the relocated coffee table. Then I go over to the toilet and throw up. After I clean myself up, I'm just standing in that dark, empty bedroom for a while.

People are always referring to one thing or another as a slippery slope. Whenever I hear that phrase, I actually picture somebody standing with their feet planted on some grassy hillside somewhere. And then I imagine that first little slip. For a long time, I had a pretty good handle on the way I felt about things in my life. I kept control over my emotions and my desires. That was before all of this. At some point in the last few weeks, I'm not sure when exactly, I let go, just a tiny bit. And now, no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to get a foothold, I can't stop that slide. It's gathering momentum, in fact. When I was looking into Lexie's eyes out on the driveway, I knew suddenly that my feelings for her, those true, romantic feelings, had started to fade. And they keep fading by the second—I can feel it happening right now.

I guess it all comes down to the permission we give ourselves. Permission to feel or act a certain way. Somewhere along the line, I gave myself permission to start seeing Thomas Chu in a different light, and in that moment, I came to know what true desire feels like. Now, I'm standing here all alone, and he's all I want, and I can't do a thing about it.
9

It's past three in the morning and the party is starting to quiet down. Maybe Madison finally convinced Thomas to come down out of that tree, or maybe he made up his mind to come down on his own. Either way, we all sort of reconvene in the living room. Thomas turns down the stereo and people start to leave.

Garrett and Driggs are both passed out on the floor by the kitchen. I see one or two more people just stumbling around on the grass in the backyard.

I'm amazed the four of us aren't a little more fucked up, all things considered. Especially Thomas. He might actually be the least fucked up among us. I don't know what's gotten into him. He goes into Alfred's room to check on him and reports back that he's just sleeping peacefully in bed. The kid's friends must have left at some point. A lot of people were booking cars to come pick them up, so maybe they got into one of those. Lexie's makeup is smeared a little and she's going around like a zombie dumping bottles and cans into a black trash bag. I step around collecting a few more and she holds the bag open for me. In that moment, I'm feeling very grown up. Don't ask me why, because I don't know.

"We'll clean up the rest in the morning," says Thomas.

Madison has fallen asleep on the couch. Thomas picks her up and carries her to his bed. I watch the whole thing unfold, from the way he gently hooks one forearm under her legs and the other under her back, to the way her long blond hair just spills over his shoulder. He lifts her like she weighs nothing. As he's passing by me, his eyes just sort of fixate on mine. They're saying, "What the fuck am I supposed to do?"

Lexie and I sleep on Thomas's dad's bed. We're really careful not to disturb anything. We even bring in sleeping bags and lay them on top.

"I kept thinking the cops would come," she says.

I'm lying there next to her. Our sleeping bags open up toward each other. "I'm pretty amazed they never did," I say.

"Were you planning to run if they did?"

"Yeah."

"Would you have taken me with you?"

"Of course," I say.

She smiles. "Well, it never came to that. I guess you get a free pass sometimes."

I guess you do. She reaches for me in a suggestive way a couple times and I tell her I'm just too exhausted.

I wake up at ten in the morning. I feel like I haven't slept enough, but I can't seem to get back to sleep. I get out of bed slowly so I don't wake up Lexie. I walk past the open doorway to Thomas's room and am surprised to see his bed empty.

I go out into the kitchen and survey the place. Somebody already did some cleaning up. Anyone who stuck around to sleep on the floor or the lawn or wherever else is long gone. I'm kind of wondering where the hell Thomas and Madison went. I go over to the garage door at the edge of the kitchen and open it.

There he is, lying flat on his bench. He's in the middle of a set. I let him finish and then I say, "You shouldn't do that without a spotter."

He sits up and stretches out his fingers. "Get the fuck over here, then."

"Where did Madison go?"

"She had to go home and sweet-talk her mom. Turns out she never got permission to stay over."

"Wow," I say. "Who is this person?"

"I know." Thomas is looking pretty energized from the workout. "She really mellowed out once school ended."

"I'm starting to think we all did," I say.

Thomas doesn't answer me. He's just staring off into space for a while. "Your turn," he finally says.

"Are you fucking kidding me? I'm not doing that shit right now."

He makes way for me to lie down on the bench. "Come on," he says. "It'll make you feel better."

"That's a lie."

"I promise." He's just looking at me.

In all honestly, those dark eyes have a way of convincing me to do just about anything sometimes. Fine, you win Thomas. I'll just do whatever the hell you want. I lie down on the bench and he helps me get going. It's too much weight for me, so we have to remove some. I do what I can and he's just encouraging me through the whole thing. Anyway, I finish up in good form and set the barbell back on the rack. I sit up and take a moment to breathe in and out a few times. I decide I'm not going to focus on anything else but my breathing.

But then Thomas says, "I kind of thought something might happen again last night."

"Excuse me?" I say.

"We were both pretty drunk, right?"

"I guess," I say. Classic Thomas, bringing this shit up out of left field. "I mean, didn't something kind of happen?"

"I don't know," he says. "Did it?"

"We told each other. We found out we're both..." I literally stop talking right there. I'm not trying to get all dramatic, it's just that I can't see any good way of finishing that sentence.

He's quiet about the whole thing for a minute. Then he says, "I thought we already knew that."

"I guess we did," I say.

It's got to be the most useless conversation I've ever been a part of—I don't know what else to tell you. We're both kind of sitting there, a little sad, and more than a little confused about where to go next. I'm not moving an inch. I'm completely still. I don't want to be the one to say it, but at this point I guess that's just how it has to be. "What ever happened to going back to how things were before?"

"No, you're right, that's what we said." And just like that, he flips a switch, and he's back to all-business Thomas again. He lies down on the bench and I go over to spot for him.

We continue on with the workout, although I'm feeling quite a bit weaker than usual. Lexie opens the garage door a short time later, just as we're finishing.

"What the fuck got into you two?" she says. "You're choosing now to work out?"

"It's Thomas's fault," I say. "He made me."

"I didn't make you do shit," says Thomas.

She's looking back and forth between us like we're the two dumbest people she's ever laid eyes on. "Anyway, I'm out of here. My mom's probably thinking I'm dead or something."

"Want me to walk you to your car?" I say.

"I'm sure I can manage," she says. And then she's gone.

Thomas and I stack his weights neatly in the corner of the garage so his dad doesn't get pissed. We go into the kitchen, where I let him push his supplements on me.

"Here, drink this first," he says. He's handing me a full cup of water. "We're both dehydrated."

I take it from him and drink it down. "When does your dad get back?" I say.

"Tomorrow."

"Are you ready to start work?"

He nods. "I'm actually pretty excited about it."

"You were so sick of it by the end of last summer."

"I know," he says.

"What's old is new again," I say. Man, I am just full of the clever phrases lately.

"I'm sure I'll get sick of it again. But not now."

I help him get the place in order. I'm surprised there's not more cleaning up to do, though we do offload two full black trash bags into Thomas's trunk and heave the empty keg into the back seat.

Thomas goes into Alfred's room and says, "Freddie, if you don't get yourself the fuck up in five seconds I'm going to fucking end you."

Alfred takes the threat half-seriously, groaning and rolling on his side.

"Get up," Thomas shouts.

Alfred gets out of bed fully-clothed and heads straight to the bathroom without a word to either of us.

A few minutes later, we're all just sitting in the living room. Thomas looks over at his little brother. "Good party?"

Slowly, he gets this big grin on his face. "Yeah."

"If Dad finds out, you know we won't be doing that shit anymore, so I want you to keep an eye out for anything out of place. Anything he might notice."

Alfred nods.

I don't stay much longer because I plan to check in with my mom. I figure it wouldn't kill me to clean up a little over there, too. She can only do so much on her own. Anyway, I go back there, and she's fast asleep, so I'm just going around the house cleaning up as quietly as I can. Then I fall onto my bed and sleep for a good three hours.

I wake up and I still feel exhausted somehow. I don't know what the hell is making me so tired. Anyway, I can't seem to sleep anymore, so I go out into the living room because I can hear the TV. It's late in the afternoon and my mom is out there. I tell her I'm sorry for leaving the day before.

"I wasn't being fair," she says. She's being much kinder than I expected about the whole thing. "In two months you'll be gone," she says. "If I keep scaring you away like that, you might never come back."

"Stop it, Ma, of course I'll come back."

She motions me over and I sit on the edge of the couch where she's lying. She pulls me down into a hug. She's crying a little. "You have to promise," she says.

"I will, Mom."

"How often?"

"Between semesters, at least."

"More than that," she says.

"I don't know if I can," I say.

She lets me go. "There's an airport here and an airport there, Nikola."

"Yeah? And how am I going to pay for all those plane tickets, Ma?"

"I'll help you pay for them," she says.

"Yeah," I say.

"You know I'll help you pay for them, Niko."

"I know, Ma," I say. "I know. Thank you."

For an hour or two before bed I'm just on my phone flicking through social media and texting Lexie and Thomas in separate chats.

"Just let her say it," Lexie's saying. "Just smile and nod. It makes her feel good about herself."

"I just wish she would get real about things sometimes," I type back. "She can't afford that shit and she knows it."

"You know how I feel about the way she treats you," Thomas says. "It's not normal. You shouldn't have to deal with it."

"Not every mom can be like yours was," I type. My finger hovers above the send button. Then I send it.

Thirty seconds later, his reply shows up: "I was thinking about her today."

"She's never going to be what you want," says Lexie.

I reply to Thomas: "I think about her all the time."

"You were her favorite," he says.

"No," I say. "Alfred was."

"That's true."

He's calling me now. We do this sometimes.

"Hey," he says. He doesn't wait for me to answer. "Remember that time we got stuck in the bathroom? Remember, the door was stuck and we couldn't figure out what the fuck was wrong with it?"

"I remember," I say.

"What were we doing in there?"

"Filling water balloons," I say.

"Oh, fuck," he says. "How could I forget that part?"

Man, I can just picture the grin spreading across his face like he's right here in front of me. "You fell in the tub with all of them," I tell him. "We were shoving each other around because you got pissed about something, and you fell in, remember?"

"I was pissed because I was stuck in the bathroom," he says. "They fucking popped all over me, remember that?" He's laughing now. "I was fucking soaked. God, how long ago was that?"

"I think we were probably twelve or thirteen," I say. "Your mom was pissed too, remember? She was standing outside the whole time. She thought we were doing it on purpose. She kept yelling at us to unlock the door."

There's just the shortest pause after I bring up his mom. Thomas says, "And remember how she couldn't stop laughing once she figured out what was wrong? She said she was going to leave us in there forever."

"Yeah," I say. "She always saw the funny side of those things, in the end."

We're both really quiet for a while, after I say that. I'm lying there with my phone wedged between my ear and pillow, just listening to Thomas breathing.

"I wish you were here right now," he says.

"Yeah?" I say. "What for?"

"What do you mean what for? Fuck, dude, it's better when we talk about this stuff in person."

"I know," I say. "I wish I was there, too."

A couple minutes later, I say his name, just kind of softly. But I can already tell from the change in his breathing that he's asleep. I just leave the call on like that. I feel myself start to fade.

—

The next day, I'm just slaving away in the coffee shack. Traffic's been heavy, but I don't mind it. I haven't been thinking about too much in particular. During the slow periods I text back and forth with Lexie. She was pissed that I bailed on our conversation the night before. I didn't even realize I had until she brought it up the next morning. Anyway, she's over it now. She's saying how she and Madison are planning to go shopping after their shifts.

"You going to the mall?" I say.

"Yeah," she says. "Wanna come?"

"Sure."

"Need a ride?"

"Nah," I say. "I'll walk."

It's getting on towards three-thirty when Thomas roars up out of nowhere in that noisy Lexus and chirps to a stop in front of the order window. He turns off the engine. He's just looking at the menu for a second. "What the fuck's a sidewinder?"

"It's a medium roast mixed with a dark roast and cinnamon," I say.

"That sounds like a bullshit drink," he says.

"It is," I tell him. "I'll make you one."

Anyway, I make him the drink and we're just talking and laughing about nothing. I didn't turn on the window unit today because it wasn't hot enough. But now the heat is catching up with me and I'm leaning halfway out of the booth because the breeze outside feels nice.

A truck pulls in behind Thomas. I'm about to tell him he should move, but before I can the truck honks its horn. The guy behind the wheel looks pissed that we're even talking. This is the kind of behavior I was talking about. People need to chill sometimes. He honks a second time and gestures out his window to hurry up. Thomas stands up out of his car and goes back to the guy. I'm holding my breath. I seriously doubt this dude was expecting to be confronted.

"Fuck, man," Thomas yells into the guy's window. "Can't you tell when you're not wanted? Fuck off."

The guy banks his tires to the right and screeches away. He comes pretty close to clipping Thomas's car as he does so. Anyway, Thomas comes back over to me and I can barely handle my shit, I'm laughing so hard.

"Better not tell Marlon about that one," he says. Thomas has met my boss a few times. Marlon is a devout follower of the church of The Customer Is Always Right, and I think even Thomas has a sense of the grave infraction he's just committed.

"Jesus Christ," I say. "I'm throwing you under the bus if he ever finds out."

"Go right ahead. That guy was an ass. Feels so good to tell people off sometimes."

I close up ten minutes early because no one else shows up. I'm allowed to do that.

I get in Thomas's car and recline my seat. I settle into the heat as he drives us down Milwaukee towards the mall. His right hand is dangling from the bottom of the steering wheel and his arm is resting up on the windowsill. He turns up some rapper whose music I vaguely recognize. I know it sounds kind of dumb, but it's moments like these I look forward to all year, when I'm just stuck at a desk in school. It's especially true when the weather's shitty, but even when it's not, I'm just longing for these summer days when my work is done, and there's nothing on the agenda. If I'm honest, there's absolutely no one else in the world I want to be sitting next to more. My left hand rests on my knee. His right hand moves to the shifter, a couple inches away. The sun and the wind are just pouring in and the music pounds through my chest.

"Think they're here yet?" he says as he pulls into the complex.

I put on my sunglasses. "Doubt it. Park by J.C. Penney. There's always a ton of spots over there."

"Fuck off," he says. But he does what I say. He makes a hard right back onto the circuit. Thomas just loves steering his car around like it's a goddamn tractor. You could turn that wheel with your pinky if you wanted to. He'll place his palm up at twelve o'clock and just whip it around like it's nothing.

We drive halfway around the mall and park up on the second level by the front of the store. He turns off the engine. Some swallows are flying around making little noises here and there. The sun's beating down on us through the sunroof, so he closes it.

"Madison's not even off her shift until four-thirty," Thomas says.

"Lexie, too," I say.

He reclines his seat. He looks over at me. He's got his dad's Ray-Bans on. "Time to kill time," he says.
10

At the risk of sounding over the top, I feel like I'm sort of trapped between two worlds right now. That's not the way I want to feel in what should be a chill moment with Thomas. He's moved to a spot in the shade at the top of a grass embankment, and my god, it's just a beautiful summer day. I don't even know how to describe this day to you. Anyway, that's one world. The other is inside the mall. The girls are going to meet us by the food court in fifteen minutes. I don't ask him if he's ready to head inside. It's clear we both want to be out here.

The car smells like old dried-out leather and our seats are reclined a little. We're both on our phones, but we're not paying attention to them. I couldn't tell you what the hell is on my screen right now, even though I'm looking right at it.

Thomas sets his phone face-down on the center console. I look up at him. He's just looking back at me with these sad, dark eyes. His expression reminds me of somebody trying to call up some memory from a long time ago, if that makes any sense. I look down. His strong legs are really filling out those shorts. Black hair sprouts from his knees and gets thicker down toward his ankles. I guess what I'm trying to say, and what I'm slowly realizing as I feel this out, is that I'm completely fucking into him, and I have been for a long, long time. If we're talking about ways to explain away this shit, to pretend, to defer, then I'll let you know now: I'm out of options. I'm just too tired.

This is it. I look back up at him. His eyes have stayed fixed on my face this whole time. He's trying to read me.

I know I was just talking about the two worlds, but in this instant, that's wrong. There's only one. The desire pulling me toward him now isn't the kind of thing you can pretend away. It can't be reasoned with. I lean in and he meets me between the seats. Our lips crash into one another's, joined for the first time since that night in his room.

We're just clamoring for each other. That's the only way to describe it. We've got our hands all over each other, pulling, scraping, trying to get as close as possible.

I know I've said some shit about Thomas's car, but damn, that thing has a big back seat. I don't think I've ever paid attention to it before, but as we're climbing over those front seats and tumbling onto the rear cushion, I realize just how little is standing in the way of what's about to go down. We're lying across it, and I'm on top of him, kissing him pretty deeply, and he has both arms hooked around my neck, pulling me into him, and you know I couldn't fight that shit if I wanted to. He's tearing at my shirt, tugging it inside-out, up over my head. He reaches up and feels all over my chest. He unbuttons my pants and pulls them down to my knees. My underwear goes with them, and that's it. I'm out there, right in front of him. I kick off the rest of my clothes and pull his shorts and underwear down. I look at him. He's as hard as I am. Maybe harder. I take in the sight for as long as I can while he's pulling his own shirt up over his head. Then he comes back with that classic aggressiveness I know so well, dragging me towards him. He scoots himself down, grabs me at the waist and forces me deep inside his mouth. He's gagging and all that, and I keep trying to pull back a little, but he keeps pulling me back in. All that pleasure is heightened by the fact that the wet, soft warmth surrounding me is him. It's Thomas's mouth. No one else's. I try to warn him, but he doesn't seem to hear me. I let go in his mouth.

Slowly, finally, I feel that first wave start to fade. I pull back from him. His own jizz is all over his chest. Jesus Christ, I've never seen so much jizz come out of one person in my whole life.

We recover quickly. We're just peering out the wide-open windows, and I'm saying a silent prayer of thanks that no one saw what we were up to. I reach over the front seat and get some napkins from the glovebox to help him clean up. Then we're frantically putting our clothes back on. And then it's over.

We get settled back into the front seats. I spot the half-spent pack of cigarettes on the floor, by my shoe. I pick it up and turn it over a few times in my hand. I go to show it to him, but he's looking away, so I put it back in the glovebox. I grab my phone and just hold it in my lap. I look out my window. My god, this day. The leaves on the trees. They're just so incredibly green, fluttering in the breeze.

"Fuck, that was a new one," Thomas says.

Somehow, he still manages to catch me off guard, even now. I'm pretty fucking sure he's talking about the part where my dick was in his mouth. Jesus Christ. I don't know what to say back to him, so you know what? I don't say anything at all.

"Sooner or later, this shit was going to happen again—we knew that," he says. "How are we supposed to know it's what we want if we never let ourselves try it?"

We're both still kind of sweaty and breathing hard. I look him dead in the eyes and say, "Like we don't fucking know it's what we want."

He just scoffs and looks away. He's annoyed because he knows I'm right. But he's right, too, about what he said before. Of course this shit was going to happen again. My crazy brain was just counting down the days until I ran out of strength to resist. Maybe that part wasn't clear to me before, but it is now.

And you know what? Now that it's happened, it's almost like we opened a valve and released the pressure. I'm not really a fan of the analogy and I sure as hell wish it didn't apply to this situation, but it does. All that desire starts to feel manageable again. It turns back into something we can stow away, forget about for a while—just like those stupid cigarettes. We cool off for a few minutes, then close up Thomas's car and go into the strange wonderland that is Boise Towne Square Mall.

It doesn't take us long to find the girls. They're standing by the escalators, laughing and shoving each other around.

"What's so funny?" says Thomas.

"Lexie says Markham and Driggs got ticketed last night for indecent exposure."

"How?"

Madison can't stop laughing. "They were peeing into one of those big planters downtown on 9th."

I start picturing it and then I'm laughing, too. "How'd they get caught?"

"I guess the cop just showed up out of nowhere. Driggs said he couldn't cut it off mid-stream and he was scooting himself around the tree so the cop couldn't get a peek."

"Driggs thinks everyone wants his dick," says Lexie.

"So what's going to happen to them?" I say.

"It's just a fine. Nothing big," she says. "They didn't get them for being drunk. Just peeing outside."

"Damn," says Thomas, "pays to be white around here, huh?"

"You bet your ass it does," says Lexie. She always has a line ready. "So we're thinking Sephora, then Forever 21."

"And what do we get out of that?" I say.

She gives me an ice-cold glare, but she's smiling behind it, I can tell. "Twenty-One has a men's section."

"Yeah, a tiny one," I say. I reach out and grab her hand. I can feel Thomas's eyes on me. I lean in and kiss her. He edges a little closer to Madison.

What can I say? We're monsters.

Later on, we're just standing in a quiet corner of Sephora, him and me. Madison and Lexie are on the other side of the store. I'm spinning a black plastic tube of eyeliner between my fingers. "Think any of these would look good on me?"

He takes it from me and puts it back on the shelf. He seems pretty quiet and reserved, so I get bold and ask him what's up.

"Nothing," he says. "Remember that summer Mirrors came out?"

"Of course I remember."

"I was thinking about how we'd turn it up and just fucking scream those lyrics. We knew them all, front to back, man."

"It was the same summer as the water balloons."

"That long ago?"

"Yeah," I say. I've always been able to group together memories like that. Remind me of something that happened, anything, even if it's a long time ago, and I can name five other things that happened around the same time. And I can usually tell you the year, because at least one of those things will give me a clue.

Thomas is quiet for a minute. "We found out she was sick that fall," he says.

I nod. I remember everything. She was dead ten months later, at the end of the next summer. Even now, thinking about it, I feel this huge weight around it all. Everything surrounding that time just sinks down into it, becomes a part of that darkness.

Thomas has this strange, blank look on his face. He's just staring at the floor.

He's in a better mood by the time we leave the second store. There's no plan. We're just going around the mall in a pod, taking in the sights and sounds and smells. Everything is familiar. Nothing ever changes in this place. It's probably exactly what you're picturing if you think of any big, modern mall. It's gone through a few renovations since it was built and the latest concept is that everything is all white and minimal with wood accents here and there, just like a few dozen of the coffee shops around here. I'm telling you, it's all the same. If you want different in this dumb town, you have to hit up one of the last truly authentic places, like Flying M or Merritt's. You know the kind of places I'm talking about. I can count them on one hand.

The girls head to the bathroom and we're waiting outside the hall. There's a wooden bench next to us so we sit down. I'm just minding my own business when Thomas decides to lean over and whisper in my ear, "I can't believe your jizz is in my stomach right now."

I have this knee-jerk reaction where I turn and punch him in the shoulder, hard. Maybe a little too hard. I'm pissed that he said it. I'm pissed off that he thought it was an appropriate thing to say at this moment in time. Jesus Christ.

"What?" he says, all defensive. He's so weird sometimes.

I try to communicate. I try to explain to him exactly what I'm thinking. "You need to understand," I say. "If we're doing this—if we're actually going to fucking try and do both—" I cut myself off, because I can't quite think of how to say it. I take a breath. "I need to keep the two worlds separate." God, it sounds so stupid and over-the-top now that I've put it out there.

He's just looking at me for a minute. "Okay. I can do that."

The girls come back too soon. A thousand and one years would have been too soon.

Maybe Thomas decides in that moment that he also needs to separate the two worlds. Not just for me, but for himself. Because for the rest of that visit to the mall, he's acting like nothing ever happened between us. We're kind of paired off anyway, holding hands with our girlfriends like we're supposed to, and he leans in often and kisses her and she kisses him back. I'm doing all the same things with Lexie because we decided to relax our rules about PDA. Later on, as we're eating and talking about nothing, and even after that, when we're all walking around the park and the sun's getting low in the sky, things start to feel exactly the way they always did. As I'm getting close with Lexie beneath a tree, and he practically has Madison on his lap, I swear to you, there is not a single feeling of longing between Thomas and me. Not even a tiny, distant one.

Let me explain to you why we're both able to block it out so well, why Lexie's hand on my thigh is making me a little hard, why Thomas was able to not only get it up but finish the act with Madison the other night: It's because that's still a part of who we are. Until recently, it was the only life we led. And you know what? It served us well through that crazy swirl of events I'll call our collective high school experience. If Thomas Chu and Niko Savic rose to the top of that place, it's because they were both really good at one thing: playing the part. Sure, it's all over now, but hey, this is a vestige of that time. What more can I say about it?

We hang out with the girls until late. We all get high in the park. By the time I peel off from the group and head for home, I'm feeling pretty much back to normal. I'll admit that there was this one moment when we were pretty high and I looked at Thomas and he looked at me and it all came rushing back. I'm talking about that crazy time we had together in the car. In that instant, it really felt like he was remembering, too. I even wanted to believe that our brains were temporarily connected somehow, and on some level we were both back in his car again, just the two of us, reliving every second of it. But now that my mind is clear, I can tell it was all just a figment. Maybe he wasn't even thinking about us at all.

For the rest of the week, nothing happens between us. I talk to my mom quite a bit, when she's at home. Lately I've been stuck in a certain line of thinking. I've decided that she doesn't have a very good sense of reality. I've made up my mind that her relationship with the truth is a very shaky one. I guess it helps me understand the big picture of what's going on with her a little better. But then I had this moment on Wednesday when I was feeling extra resentful over the way she is, and I stopped (for one goddamn second of my life) to think about my own actions. I thought of this phrase: "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones." And then I decided that I'd better drop whatever stone I was holding and leave her alone.

"Nikola," she says on Friday night before her shift, "will you massage my shoulders? I'm sore from stocking shelves at the store."

I'm willing to bet she hasn't asked me to do that in at least five years. I even think for a minute that she's completely lost it, forgotten what year she's in and all that. But I go over to her anyway and I sit down on the couch, and she sits on the floor in front of me, and I massage her shoulders for quite a while until she tells me I can stop. The whole time, I'm just thinking about how nice it is when all the clutter and bullshit around us is cleared away, and I'm sitting here doing this simple action that shows how much I care about her. There's nothing else to it, no subtext, just the scene as described. Somehow, that dumb moment with my mom fills me with so much joy that I'm still riding the wave when I show up around nine in the evening at Thomas's house.

His dad is watching TV in the living room. I say hi and he asks me how I've been. I tell him I've been fine.

I find Thomas in his room at his desk.

"How was your chat with Papa Chu?" he asks.

"Short," I say.

It's got to be the least eventful Friday night of the summer so far. I'm mostly just on my phone and he stays at his desk, scrolling through some Rolling Stone articles.

I should say now that I deliberately fired off a few before I left home. I mean to say that I pleasured myself, and if you're thinking that I was picturing Thomas while I did it, you're wrong. I didn't let myself. I'm only telling you this to show you how committed I am to the cause—that being Thomas and me keeping our filthy hands off each other.

But that shit doesn't work. After we get ready for bed, Thomas and I rub one out together. I don't mean to be crude, or to make the situation sound more casual than it is. It just feels like the best phrase to use given the arrangement we've apparently settled on (yet another one of our stupid unspoken agreements), namely, a sort of middle ground. Half an hour later, we just can't seem to help ourselves and we do it again. That second time, we're lying side by side on his bed, and he's using his left hand and I'm using my right, and our other hands are between us. Just as we're both about to lose our shit, Thomas takes hold of my hand. He doesn't let go until we're done.
11

Thomas says something before we fall asleep that takes me by surprise. He kind of touches my shoulder before he says it. That's him letting me know he's serious. "I've been thinking about what my dad would do if he ever found out."

He put on one of his dad's old records earlier. Maybe that's why. It's Led Zeppelin. He flashed me the cover as he was putting it on, and it showed a painting of a man with this big bundle of sticks on his back. The music is playing softly. Anyway, I'm thinking about what Thomas is trying to say. This shit is coming up too often lately, where he'll say something and then I have to figure out where the hell he's going with it. "Has he ever said anything about it before?" I ask. "You know, about people like that?"

"A few times. He's still hitting up that Chinese Baptist church every Sunday, if that tells you anything."

"I thought he stopped going."

"He did, for a while. Now he's going again."

"So you're saying he's against it."

"I don't know what I'm saying, man. Fuck, it's like it's worse, somehow. He said something once, a few months ago." Thomas pauses. I can tell he's trying hard to remember. "Freddie and him and me, we were all having dinner. Freddie made some dumbass comment like, 'If I was gay, I'd probably be better at picking out shoes.' You know how that kid can't fucking shut up about his shoes. And then my dad just froze. He acted all weird and looked at Freddie and said, 'Gay isn't real.'"

The story stops dead. I'm not sure what my reaction is supposed to be. I look up at Thomas.

"Can you believe that?" he says. "I mean, it's the worst thing someone could say."

"I guess," I say. "It is Papa Chu though."

"I don't give a fuck who it is. Think about it, man. He's saying it's not real. He's saying this whole group of people, this whole identity some people have—it doesn't fucking exist."

Thomas is being irritating as hell right now. I was the one who told him not to use the 'F' word a few months back. And suddenly he's the champion of the cause? Fuck off. Anyway, I'm still not sure what to make of this stuff he's telling me. The thing I want to know is, why is he so concerned with what his dad would do if he found out? That's not part of any plan I'm aware of. I want to get to the bottom of it, so I ask him point-blank, "Are you thinking about telling him?"

He shoots me the definitive Thomas glare. "Are you fucking kidding me? Not in a million years."

"Then what's the problem?"

"Nothing," he says. "Jesus, dude, there's no problem." He's mad at me now, just like that. He's being such a little bitch, especially considering he's the one who brought all of this up.

"Okay then," I say.

He looks over. "No one can know about this. Ever. You're the only one who can know."

"Fine," I say.

"What?" he asks. He's super angry underneath, I can tell. "Were you fucking thinking of telling someone?"

"No."

"See?"

I look the other way. I even turn so my back is to him. I know that will bother him. I spend a long time like that, just staring into his open closet.

"What's wrong?" he finally asks. He sounds a little calmer now.

Fine, Thomas, I'll fucking be the one to say it. "I just want to know what that means for you and me."

"It doesn't mean anything," he says. "This thing we have going on—there's no way it could ever lead anywhere. You know that, right? It's not an option. It never was."

I'll tell you what I'm thinking right now. I'm thinking that I'd really like to know what makes him so inclined to say all of this shit out loud. It would be nice to understand why it's so goddamn necessary to put into words the things we both already know too well. This is another grade-A Thomas move, if I've ever seen one. He's got me right where he wants me. There's nothing I can say to argue. To tell you the truth, I don't even disagree with what he's saying. But what's the point of making everything so explicit? I swear, I'll never understand it.

We pretty much leave it at that. He falls asleep before I do, and I get pretty annoyed that he's lying there just snoozing away after a conversation like that. But soon I'm too tired to care.

At some point in the middle of the night, I'm woken up by his movement. He scoots over so he's right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, then turns on his side so he's facing me. Slowly, he reaches his arm around me. I feel the weight of his bicep settle across my chest. He pulls himself tight against my body, tips his head forward and his forehead comes to rest against my cheek. He hugs me so tight it's actually painful. And then he starts to cry. It's so quiet and soft that I never would have noticed if his whole body wasn't mashed up against mine. For a long time, Thomas has privately been the emotional one between us. No one is aware of that but me. I don't always know why he gets so worked up, but this time I'm fairly certain of the reason. It's enough to make me cry, too. I'm feeling his tears on my collarbone, and I'm thinking about everything we've been going through lately, and I just can't hold it in.

That's the thing about situations like this. We're all staring reality straight in the face. We know our limitations, but like a bunch of pathetic losers, we're still hoping for some other, impossible course of events to go down. The idea of Thomas and me, it's a really nice one. Thinking about it working out somehow...it just fills me with a kind of joy I've never experienced before. But each of us has plans, places we want to go. Jesus Christ, matching up those plans and those places with our legit relationships is hard enough. But the shit he and I have going on right here? This just can't happen, not in the long run. Tell me I'm wrong.

Those girls. I don't know what's going to happen with them. I'll be honest with you: When it comes to Lexie and me, I don't think either of us actually believes things are going to last. And I'm not just saying that because I'm hoping for an easy way out, either. She's a lot like me in some ways. She's pretty practical about things, sometimes even more than me. We'll talk about how it could work out, Skyping each day, or twice a week or whatever, and we'll both get this weird, doubtful tone in our voices, like we're fully aware of all the ways things could go south. Maybe you're thinking that means we don't care about each other. But we do. I've said a million times how patient Lexie is with me, and I'm sure I'll live to say it again. I can be a huge pain in the ass sometimes. But I'm not the only one who's made apologies since we've been together. Just like me, she constantly has a plan of her own, and it's led her into trouble more than once.

—

Saturdays in the summer: Let me tell you, there's no sweeter fruit. The way I plan out my life during the school year, I get used to a certain pace. I like things to be a little frantic at all times, and I fill out my schedule accordingly. I'm actually super into it. So I'm never quite prepared for the impossibly open-ended nature of days like this, each time they come.

You're probably thinking a coffee shop should be conducting business on the weekend, no matter how small it is. You'd be right about that. The reason I don't work weekends in the summer is because Marlon is of the opinion that a man of my years should have that particular time in his life freed up. So he works them for me. He did it last summer, too. He's a strange old dude, for sure, but he's always redeeming himself in one way or another. Last summer, I slowly learned the benefits of having those wide-open days. The thing is, I didn't realize what I'd learned until it was all over, which means Marlon taught me something without me even knowing it. I'm not exactly prepared to call him a mentor, but if I were, I guess I would call him a good one.

Thomas and I lie there talking for a while in bed, hands behind our heads. I'm sure he remembers what happened in the middle of the night just as well as I do, but we don't say anything about it. I also remember waking up some time later still in his arms. I don't know if it was truly his intention to hold me like that for half the night, but that's exactly what happened. Maybe we shouldn't have done it, but it just felt so unbelievably nice, and it was cold in the room because of the air conditioning, and I just couldn't find it in myself to push him off.

"Maybe I'll go away to school after all," he says.

"You better."

"Think you'd ever make it down?"

"Of course," I say. "As long as you make it up. You're the one with a car."

"Only if I take it with me," he says. "I'm hearing a lot of piston slap these days. Might be the death rattle."

"If I ever saw a car worth fixing, it's that one."

He looks over. "Think so?"

We get up and go out to the kitchen.

Alfred's eating cereal at the table. "You want to go with us to California this year?" he asks.

It takes me a second to realize he's talking to me. "Nah, that's your thing," I say. Every summer their family takes a weeklong trip over to San Francisco. I almost went with them the summer I was ten, and then again when I was twelve. But both times I backed out because my mom needed me to stay. I'm feeling a little weird about this sudden invite from Alfred. Obviously I'm way too old for that kind of thing. But secretly, I'd do it. Of course I would. I think it would be fun meeting his cousins, seeing what it feels like being the only white guy in the room, checking out a city I've only ever dreamed about, all of it with my best friend at my side. Those are the kind of touchy-feely thoughts that go on in my head sometimes.

"Give me the cereal, loser," says Thomas.

"Fuck you, too," says Alfred. He doesn't look up from his phone, just blindly scoots the box across the table.

"Excited for Capital this fall?" I say. He's headed in just as we're headed out.

"I already went to Borah for math," he says. "But yeah."

I remember those days, taking the lunch bus over from Fairmont. I almost didn't sign up for grade-ahead math, since Thomas was still going through all that stuff about his mom. But at the last minute I did. Every other day, I'd leave that junior high for my afternoon class. It never stopped feeling like I was leaving him behind.

"Borah sucks," says Thomas.

I doubt he really feels that way, deep down. It's all just rivalry bullshit anyway, and Thomas doesn't hold a grudge. Once he's playing college football, I'm pretty sure all this high school stuff will fade into the past. "When do you guys leave?" I say.

"Next weekend," Alfred says. "I wanted to drive but Dad says we're flying again."

Thomas is looking back and forth between us. He looks like he's about to say something, but then he just hunches over and eats his cereal. I pour myself a bowl.

An hour later, we're in Thomas's car just cruising around town. I tell him I need to stop by my place and he asks for how long. I tell him he can wait in the car and he looks relieved.

Thomas has always been uncomfortable around my mom. I think he's super put off by the way she lives her life. For a lot of my childhood, Thomas's house was the place I'd run to whenever shit wasn't good at my own. He was always the first to hear about it, my first point of contact. Things started getting messed up around age eleven, back when she was dating this guy I hated. He was a pretty angry guy. Several times during that period, I showed up at Thomas's front door on the verge of tears. I'd hold it in until he and I were alone.

But there was one time when his mom intercepted me. She pointed to a bruise on my arm, and when I shook my head she took hold of it and squeezed. I winced in pain and she said, "See? See?"

Then it was just her and me in the car. I'd never seen her so furious before...her fingers drumming nonstop on the rim of that same old leather steering wheel Thomas's hand now rests on. Anyway, we got over there and climbed the stairs and opened the front door and she just unleashed at my mom. It's not like they were ever more than acquaintances, but anyway, they never talked again after that.

Thomas pulls the car into a space under the carport at my apartment complex and I run up for a few minutes. I stick my head into my mom's room to see if she's up yet, but she's still asleep. I grab my phone charger and change my underwear and shirt.

So I get back out there and sit in my seat, and he doesn't start the car right away. He's just looking blankly through the windshield. "She relies on you quite a bit," he says.

"Yeah," I say. "I know."

"Have you thought about what she'll do when you're gone?"

"Of course I have."

"Think she'll be okay?"

I'm finding it hard to believe Thomas cares this much about my mom's wellbeing. He must have some other angle. "I guess I just won't know until the time comes," I say.

"I guess," he says.

He drives us downtown and we park all the way at the top of a garage, on the open deck. There are only a few other cars up there. We go over to the edge and climb up onto a concrete platform about three feet wide. There's nothing to block anyone from falling, no rail or anything. That's probably because no one's supposed to climb on top of it in the first place. We're sitting cross-legged, just kind of looking out at the buildings for a while. I bet it's ninety degrees out. Heat like this has never bothered me much.

Thomas dangles his legs over the edge. I tell him to stop, and to my surprise, he listens to me.

I only have one scar from that bad time I was telling you about. It's on my knee. It happened because that guy my mom was dating got drunk and I gave him some lip, and he threw me outside. I fell down the concrete steps because they're straight outside the front door, and got my knee pretty bad. Anyway, it's a little white gash about an inch long.

I'm only mentioning it because Thomas is looking at it now. We haven't talked about all that stuff in a while. Without saying anything, he reaches out. My shorts have ridden up and he touches my thigh, just above it. Then he grazes it just slightly with his thumb. It's the weirdest thing, what he's doing.

"Does it hurt?" he asks.

"Of course not. It's just a scar," I say.

"Oh yeah." He laughs a little. "Sorry." He takes his hand away.

We're just sitting there, not saying anything for a while. Some small birds—doves, maybe—are perched out at the edge of a nearby bank tower. I look between the buildings and make out the rooftops of heritage houses in the neighborhood to the north, where the rich kids live, and then up into Boise Heights and the surrounding foothills neighborhoods, where they're even richer.

Thomas climbs back down from the concrete ledge. I follow him. We're just messing around, chirping our shoes against the fresh gray surface. We find some shade under a metal overhang. There's eight or ten floors of fancy glass condos above us. But this spot we've found, it's deserted.

Thomas is grabbing my arm a little, squeezing my bicep. He tells me I'm getting bigger. I'm pretty sure he's just playing around. He's kind of getting up in my face, and I'm finding it difficult to shrug off the attention. He's always getting into these playful moods, but it's starting to feel different these days. I think we both know it. There's an instant where I freeze with my back to the polished concrete wall. It feels so nice and cool, shaded from the sun. And he comes right up to face me. He takes my hands in his and gets really close. I feel his heat and his sweat. I tuck my face into his neck.

"Not easy to resist," I hear him say. So typical of him, offering up some stupid fragment of a thought I can't quite pin down.

I lift my head. We're chest-to-chest, ear-to-ear, still holding hands. I'm looking over his shoulder, out at the low, flat buildings of West Downtown. Thomas is facing the wall, practically holding my body against it with his own. He could keep me trapped like this forever if he wanted to. I let one hand go and reach up between us. I'm just feeling his big chest through his shirt.

Don't ask me what it means to be in love with someone. I'm in no position to speak about that kind of thing. But I will tell you that this moment between Thomas and me isn't all about sex. In fact, I don't think he's completely hard. I'd be able to tell if he was. And I'm not either. You might be surprised to hear that, but it's true. I'm wondering what exactly Thomas meant when he said it's not easy to resist. Because at the particular moment he said it, I don't think he was talking about wanting sex. He said it himself a while ago, when we were first starting to figure all this out. He asked me when I first knew I had feelings for him—not when I realized I wanted his dick, but when I started having real, emotional feelings.

All I can say is, a shift occurs right in this moment. I'm going to change the way I treat this whole situation. No, I'm not going to come right out and tell Thomas I'm in love with him. But as far as my attitude and my behavior are concerned when we're alone like this, I'm done with pretending it's not true.

"I'm so glad we're together right now," I tell him.

He takes half a step back and looks me in the eyes.

I lean in and kiss him. I'm not aggressive about it. I lay my lips against his. It's like he knows what I'm up to, because he kisses back in the same exact way. He doesn't even open his mouth. He's just giving me these soft little kisses over and over. And then we part and walk slowly back to his car.
12

The girls come over that night. No one's touching anyone. We're all just lying in the grass looking up at the sky. We all got a little high earlier, but there wasn't much to go around and it's already wearing off. The sunset is fading to dark. Thomas's elderly neighbor still hasn't come back. Ever since his family took him away, his half of the duplex has sat silent and mostly in the dark, except for a lamp that comes on automatically in the evenings. I'm looking in through those dark windows now. The lamp lights up his living room in kind of a gloomy way. All I can see are a bunch of old books and magazines on shelves.

"How come no one calls it a spliff anymore?" Madison says to Lexie.

"They still do, as far as I know," Lexie says.

"Why don't you call it that?"

"Shit, Maddie, I don't know. I guess they call it that in Britain or something."

"Oh."

None of us is exactly dumb, but Lexie's the only one you'd go out of your way to call intelligent. Yeah, I know, we're all smart in different ways and all that bullshit, but Lexie is different. She and I will be talking about something sort of deep, and then she'll accidentally take it to a level I can't grasp. I say she does it accidentally because she's usually pretty careful about not making me feel stupid. Anyway, she's not with me for my brains. One bonus is that I don't make a habit of overthinking things. She likes that. She says it balances her out. She also likes that I'm a hard worker, and that I have a nice body. Not as nice as Thomas's, but still above average.

Madison is the dumbest, for sure. I'm not even saying she's that dumb, it's just that she doesn't think too deeply about anything. It's simply not a strength of hers. She's also easily the most kind and genuine person lying out on this lawn tonight. I'm tempted to say those two things go hand-in-hand.

"I'd move to the UK," Thomas says suddenly. "I could learn rugby."

"When?" says Madison.

"I don't know. After college."

"What would you do there?"

"Play rugby," he says.

Madison sighs. Her breathy voice is perfect for sighing. "I don't think I could ever live that far away."

"No one said you had to."

There's a pause. I realize Madison is sitting up. I'm not sure how long she's been that way.

"It would be nice," she says, "if you could at least pretend we'll still be together then. I'm tired of being the only one who thinks so." Then she stands up and walks away. She's going around the house toward the front yard.

Thomas gets up and goes after her.

"He'll make it right," I say. "She's always being so romantic about that stuff."

"She's not wrong," says Lexie.

"I know," I say. Suddenly I'm feeling nervous, and I don't know why.

"She's the normal one."

"That's true," I say. I try to laugh. "We're the ones who are strange."

"What do you mean?"

I lift my head off the grass and look at her. "I don't know. Just that we're not quite as romantic as her, that's all."

For a moment I'm worried she'll keep pressing me for whatever shitty, half-baked thought I'm trying to birth into the world. But she doesn't. She just lays her head back in the grass and stares up at the night sky.

—

I don't know what the hell Thomas says to Madison to make up for it in front of his house, but by the time Lexie and I come around to join them, they're just laughing and being all handsy and shit like that. They spend all day together on Sunday. They hang out every evening that week, too. Each day, Thomas waits to text me until late in the evening, after she's gone home. He doesn't say much about what they get up to, so don't ask me. I don't even want to guess. As for Lexie and me, we spend a lot of time getting baked after work, and then having a good time. Sometimes that means sex. Others it means just talking about crazy shit or taking a walk outside and looking at the scenery. It turns out to be a nice way to pass the week, if I do say so myself.

Anyway, it's Friday now. Madison and her parents got an early start over to Idaho Falls for the weekend. They left this morning. I'll be dropping Thomas and his dad and brother off at the airport tomorrow. Lexie must have sensed that I'm wanting to hang out with Thomas before he leaves, because she makes dinner plans with her parents downtown and doesn't invite me.

I eat dinner at home and tell my mom to have a good shift. I'm walking down Cole Road in the heat and the cars are roaring by, and I'm just thinking about how fast the season's slipping away. By the time Thomas gets back, we'll be a month in. That's halfway, since I'll be leaving for school early. I'm doing some kind of international student orientation at UBC. It takes place the first week of August.

Thomas meets me at the front door. It's been a long time since that shit happened.

"My dad's such a fucking bitch," he says. He walks out past me. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

I ask him what's wrong but he doesn't answer me. We get in his car and he starts driving that way he does when he's in a mood. It always makes me feel anxious. "I can't believe I have to spend a whole week with him," he says. "It's going to be hell."

"Are you going to fucking tell me what's wrong?" I say. I'm getting annoyed at him. He practically goes missing for six whole days and this is how he greets me?

"He says U-Dub is too expensive."

"I thought they were giving you a lot."

"They are," he says. "More than BSU, that's for sure. But it costs a lot more to go there. The difference is still pretty big."

"And he doesn't want to pay?"

"He says it's all about return on investment. He says I'd be paying more for the same outcome. I tried to explain all the benefits of going away for school but he only cares about the fucking bottom line. Jesus, I don't know why I'm surprised."

I pause. At least his crazy-ass driving has calmed down a little. "So what are you going to do?"

"I don't know." He's reached that point I know so well, where his anger tips toward sadness. Believe me, this is textbook behavior for him. "I have no idea what I'm going to do," he says.

I figure I'll try and cheer him up. I say, "Damn, your week with Madison really made you want to leave this place." Then I laugh to show him I'm only joking.

"Fuck off, man," he says. He's smiling. "It has nothing to do with her. I always wanted to go. You know that."

I didn't know that, because he hasn't always wanted to go—not for sure, anyway. But I don't want to argue with him about it now.

"Fuck, dude, all this bullshit with my dad is making it more appealing than ever."

"Whatever fucking gets you up there," I say.

He likes that. He glances over and punches me in the shoulder. "So why the fuck does a guy like you want me up there so bad, anyway?"

"We've already talked about it," I say.

"I know, man." He grabs my knee and shakes it. "I know, I know."

Basically everything immediately south of Boise is full-on desert. Thomas takes a road called Orchard as far south as it goes, then turns on another called Pleasant Valley. That road becomes dirt after a while, at which point it just chills, stretching like a long thin snake out into nothing but sand and rock and sagebrush. I can talk some shit about the landscape south of town, but we do have some really nice memories out here. Last summer, Thomas and I went hiking around and found this narrow ravine with a creek at the bottom. We hung out down there together, dunking ourselves in that little stream until it got so late we could barely see our way back out.

Right now, these rolling, brush-covered plains are so beautiful I can hardly believe it. I'm thinking a lot about my plan. I guess I've got a lot of feelings for him deep down, and if I don't start showing them...well, I don't want to be the reason we miss some hidden opportunity both of us is either too stupid or too afraid to see. His elbow is on the center armrest. I sort of link my arm with his and take his hand in mine. He jerks just a tiny bit as I do it, but then he relaxes again. He's just driving along through the desert with one hand at twelve o'clock and the other holding mine. He's getting some calluses on his fingers and palms from working in the shop. I'm feeling the roughness now. It's the greatest fucking thing.

So we reach a spot I've never been to before, at the base of a rock hill. The roar of the engine dies away. It gets quiet really fast out here. I hear a killdeer doing his thing, but that's it. Nothing else.

The sun is getting low, but I bet it's still over ninety degrees out. I brought along a water bottle and I share it with him. We're just sitting up there on that big rock, facing west, watching the sun go down. The sunset isn't all that pretty since there are no clouds in the sky, but I still like it.

"Pretty fucking romantic, huh?" he says.

"Yeah," I say. I don't laugh or anything. I want him to know that I'm taking the moment seriously.

And then you know what he does? He takes my hand. He holds on to it tight. You're probably thinking it's not that big of a deal considering all the stuff we've done leading up to this. I don't mean to undermine all that. That shit was hot as hell and we both know it. This is just a different kind of moment, him taking me out here, the gesture beneath it all. I don't care if you believe me or not, but this is a bigger deal to me than anything that came before it, and that's all there is to say.

Thomas turns and says, "I'll miss you when I'm gone."

"It's just a week," I say.

"I know."

Maybe he means later, when we both go off to school. Maybe he's thinking of a time when he's in his new dorm, making all kinds of new friends, and I've become someone he knows from somewhere else, someone from his past. I look over at him. I look at his perfect nose and sad eyes. I watch his jet-black hair move around a little in the hot breeze. "We've been friends since we were just little kids," I say. "How the fuck did we not know?"

"We knew," he says. His voice is low and rough. "We just weren't ready for all this."

I'll give credit where it's due—he's right. He keeps reminding me, over and over, just how long we've spent knowing.

"I shouldn't have fucked her," he says.

"Doesn't make any difference."

"Yes it does."

"So what?" I say. "It's done now."

"We did it again," he says. "Wednesday night. We've done it three times now."

"I figured you had," I say. I really did. It's not a surprise to me.

"Giving her that kind of attention, it doesn't feel right to me. Feels like I shouldn't be doing it to her." He pauses. He's thinking really hard about something. Then he says, "Feels like it's meant for someone else."

It would be easy to claim that I've never thought about it before now. But if there's one thing I've learned in the past few weeks, it's that I can't always trust myself to report honestly about these things. I'm sure the thought of him doing that to me has crossed my mind. Even if it was just a flash. Or multiple flashes. But now I'm really letting myself picture it. The thing is, I'm not afraid to be bold. If I'm not clear about what I want right now, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. I say, "Who's it meant for?"

He's gripping my hand so tight it's starting to hurt. "Someone."

We watch the sun dip below the horizon. There's some kind of strange energy in the air.

We take our time hiking back down to his car. There's no rush. We've got all the time in the world. We get back to his house around ten-thirty, and his plane doesn't leave until almost noon the next day.

Nothing happens right away. We're lying on his bed talking.

"I think your dad will come around," I say.

"I know. He just wants to remind me who's in charge first."

"If not, let me talk to him."

"That's not the worst idea," he says. "He'll never say it out loud, but I know he's proud of you. So proud he'll listen to whatever you have to say."

"Proud of me for what?"

"Are you kidding?" Thomas rolls flat on his back and lays a hand on his chest. His eyes are just following that ceiling fan around. "I was whining a while back about somebody calling me a chink, and you know what he told me? He said, 'True success is only achieved in the face of adversity.' And then he told me to take you for example. You know he's always wishing I got your grades."

I'm just kind of looking at him. "Yeah? And what kind of adversity have I faced?"

Thomas gives me a look. "Come on, man."

I know what he's getting at. I've got nothing to say about it. "He's proud of you, too. Even if you don't get my grades."

Thomas rolls his eyes. "Yeah, yeah."

I'm sort of propped against his headboard with my knees tucked to my chest. I keep glancing down at him but he's not looking back at me. "You know why I want you up there, right? Besides getting out of town?"

He gives me one quick glance. "Yeah."

"Everyone says your first year of college is this crazy time. New adventures and all that. I know we'll each have our own lives." I lean against him a little. "I just want you closer to me. Even if we don't end up seeing each other more often, I want to know you're down there in that big new city doing your thing, living that new life, and maybe even thinking of me every once in a while."

He nudges me with his shoulder. "Damn, I was planning on forgetting you."

"Fuck off," I say.

"Hey, I want it too." He scoots up so he's sitting next to me. "And I want to be able to look back and remember what a complete shitshow this summer was."

"Jesus Christ," I say. I'm laughing a little.

"We're just making it up as we go along," he says.

I like that he said it. It's a clever phrase, coming from him. It sounds like yet another one of those lines I would come across in a book from Ms. Nolan. Anyway, we're both quiet for a while after that. Slowly, he puts his arm around me. I kind of settle into him.

He clears his throat. "So, I was wondering..." His voice has changed. "Were we trying to tell each other something earlier?"

"When?"

"Out in the desert."

"Oh," I say. I get this sudden rush. "Yeah, I guess we were."

"Don't you think it would hurt?"

"I've heard it does."

"Aren't you scared?"

"Yeah."

"And you still want it?"

"Yeah," I say.

He breaks loose from my arms and gets up. I ask him what he's doing and he says he's thinking about it. You should see the way he's pacing back and forth. It's like something from a movie. "Things are moving pretty fast," he says.

"I know," I say. He's exactly right. Everything's moving fast. Most of all, the summer, this special window of time we share—it's just blazing by.

He stops and looks straight at me. "You're sure?"

I've talked before about the way I am. I've told you I like to act quickly—that I don't like taking too long to think something over, in case I find some way of talking myself out of it. Well, I guess this is another one of those times, if you want to reduce it down to its simplest form. I'm not afraid. Just watch me—I'll do anything, try anything, not to let a particular moment pass me by.

I only hesitate because I'm trying to put into words what I felt up on that rock. I've got to build my case. "I'm just thinking about being up in Vancouver, living my new life..." I start saying. I'm talking really slow so I don't say the wrong thing. "What if I stop and think of you, and think of what you could have given me, and know that I can't have it anymore because that time in our lives is over?" I'm reaching out for him. I can't stop myself. "I think it would be the most empty feeling in the world."

He understands me then. He's convinced by my words. What happens next is something I'll hold close to my heart forever. So close that revealing every detail would feel like a betrayal. (Who's the dramatic one now?) I will say that he is more tender, more caring than I ever could have anticipated. The lotion on his dresser is his idea. It's a good one. I'm nervous and not really thinking clearly about that stuff, so I'm grateful he knows what he's doing. He puts me in a comfortable position. He moves in cautiously, asking many times if I'm okay. That instant he opens me up for the first time makes a perfect imprint on my memory, one I'm certain I'll be able to recall at will for the rest of my life. He's quick to back off when I have trouble relaxing and feel like the pain is going to tear me apart. But then, slowly, the pain goes away, and things get good. Really good.

Everything seems to align that night. The time and the place. What each of us desires from the other. Even our release. Let me tell you now, while the idea still seems profound: If we really are making it up as we go along, then it's truly a miracle when the outcome is as good as this.
13

The house is quiet the next morning. I think everyone is sleeping in. Thomas held me for most of the night. We're parted now, but the second he wakes up he sort of reaches for me, so I slip back into his arms. We're bare-chested. I can feel him through his underwear, pressing against my hip. Just like that, we're both settling into the reality of what's come to pass. I'm telling you, there's no more pretending, no more attempts to explain away what we've done.

"Are you doing okay?" he asks.

"Yeah."

He squeezes me a little. "Just making sure."

"Who knew you could be so caring?" I say.

"What are you talking about? I'm super caring. Always have been," he says. "Shit, dude, I'm the fucking provider."

I laugh.

He kisses my neck. "Nikola," he says in a voice so soft it's breaking in and out. "Last night was good, right?"

"Yeah," I say. Don't ask me why I'm suddenly fighting off the urge to cry. "It was really good, Thomas."

—

An hour later, we're all sitting around the kitchen table having breakfast. Even Thomas's dad sits with us, which he basically never does. He's served us all this crab congee from the night before that he reheated. It's pretty good. He and I make eye contact and he smiles. Then he looks at Thomas.

"If you want to go to Washington, send them an email now. Say you will go."

Thomas looks up. "What?"

"I'm telling you to email the school in Washington now. It's rude that you have taken this long to decide."

Thomas doesn't say a word. Our bowls and spoons clatter as he bumps the table getting up. He goes straight back to his room. He brings his laptop out and scoots his bowl aside. For the next few minutes he's just furiously typing, backspacing, checking everything over. Then he takes a breath, holds it in, hits send. Classic Thomas, all about that drama. "I'll tell BSU later," he says.

"You will tell them now," says his dad. "They will give your space to someone else."

Thomas scowls and goes back to typing. When he's done, we're all just looking at each other.

"Congratulations," I say.

"Yeah," says Alfred. "Congratulations."

Thomas looks at his Dad. "Why did you change your mind?"

His dad blinks once and says, "Your mom would say go to Washington." Slowly, he gets up, takes his empty bowl over to the sink and starts rinsing it. He's quietly humming to himself.

It's a big deal for Thomas's dad to bring up his mom like that. The whole moment feels so joyful and significant that I can't wipe this stupid grin off my face to save my life. I guess I have my own private reasons to be happy about it, but we're all pretty excited. It's times like these when I feel almost like a member of the family. Almost. I find myself really wishing I was getting on that plane with them. But like I told Alfred before, that's their thing. It's not something I'm a part of.

In another hour, Thomas steers the old Lexus up the ramp to the departures deck at the airport. I'm sitting in the back seat next to Alfred. We all get out and I help them lift their bags from the trunk. I give them hugs and Thomas holds onto me for an extra half-second before letting go.

"She's yours for the week," he says. He's talking about the car.

"I'll just park it at home."

"You better not," he says. "Come on, show her a good time."

I laugh. I'm waving as they go through the sliding doors. I sit down in the driver's seat. I don't drive very often these days, so it all feels strange at first. I pull the shifter back a few clicks and the car rolls slowly forward. I take the center lane down off the deck toward Vista Avenue. And then it's just another bright, hot, wide-open day.

I drive downtown. I don't really have a plan. I figure I'll call Lexie, since she'll take my mind off being alone. But I don't do it right away. I manage to steal a free parking spot by the library, and then I'm just walking north on 8th. I'm passing beside some of the arts district buildings when I remember an old hangout spot from a few summers ago. It's this forgotten fountain with six spitting cats all lined up in a row. The whole thing is wedged between two of the buildings off 9th. Thomas and I used to sit on the stone ledge next to it and trail our fingers through the cool water while we talked about whatever came to mind.

Anyway, I find it, and I'm sitting in the secret little shaded place beneath some overgrown plants, doing that finger-trailing thing for quite a while. Jesus Christ, I bet I'm sitting there for the better part of an hour. The cats are just spitting away. At some point I look at my phone. It's ninety-six degrees out. I'm not planning to go home anytime soon, so I walk down to a corner gas station and buy myself the biggest sports drink I can find. I don't even look at the label.

Anyway, I never end up calling Lexie. I spend all afternoon just joy-riding alone in Thomas's car. It's his domain. It smells like him. And besides, I'm getting kind of an unexpected thrill from putting my hands on that wheel. I hit up every place you can think of: Meridian, Kuna, Nampa, Caldwell. I swing back up through Middleton, Star, Eagle. Those are all suburbs to the south and west of this town. I bet I went a hundred miles. It's only as I go to fill the tank that I remember why I don't own one of these things. That shit is not cheap, let me tell you.

I get home around four and my mom's still asleep. I'm just sitting there on the couch minding my own goddamn business, looking at my phone or some shit. I've got my back to the hallway.

Her scream cuts through the still air: "Where is he?"

I jump about a foot off that couch. She's just screaming and screaming. She's right behind me. I'm on my feet. I'm looking her dead in the eyes, but she's not there. I do what I'm supposed to. I keep my distance until I've assessed that she's not violent. I think she's coming to. She notices me in a flash. I go over to her.

"Where is he?" She grips my arm. "Where is he?" She's repeating the question over and over.

"He's gone," I say. "He's gone forever, Mom. Remember? He was gone a long time ago."

She's standing still and quiet as she recognizes her surroundings. She breaks down into this long, howling kind of sob. Her back is against the wall and she slowly slides down. She sits crumpled on the floor.

I sit down next to her and rub her back. "It's okay," I say. "It's okay, it's okay."

If you were to come across a situation where a kid was getting his helpless ass beaten by some piece-of-shit grown man, what would you do? I bet you'd help the kid. I would. But there's another thing I would do, in addition to that. I would find that kid's mom, and I'd ask her to show me her own bruises before they faded away. I've come to believe a mother has a basic instinct to protect her kid. If she's a good one, she'll turn in the offending man. That's what mine did. But I'm here to tell you this: From the first blue and red flickering lights in my bedroom window that night, to the final police interview a week later, my mom kept her long-sleeved turtlenecks in heavy rotation. At the time, I believed I was the only one. That's what I told the cops. But as you get older, you get wise to this kind of thing. Six years ago, she valued herself too little to report her own victimhood. That's the long and short of it. And six years later, she's still suffering.

You want to know what men do? They accuse women of being too sensitive, of being crazy and hysterical, when most of the time it's the hysteria of men that's behind all of this madness—hysteria caused by their own dumb, endless list of insecurities. I don't believe myself to be particularly woke about the matter, but I've lived enough of a life to understand how this society works. I've read enough to have gained some vocabulary. And besides, if I ever start forgetting which of the sexes still has all the power in this world, which one gets to run around doing whatever the hell it wants at the expense of the other, I just go to the nearest mirror, and I take a good, hard look.

I guess it should come as no surprise that I'm feeling pretty guilty as I'm texting Lexie later that night. She asks me if anything's wrong and I tell her no. Something about Thomas being six hundred miles away is making me feel that guilt now more than ever. It's like, now that he's been removed completely from the situation, I'm left standing alone, vulnerable, hyper-aware of all this shit I've done.

I'm just self-medicating now, dragging out all the usual excuses. I'm still young. How am I supposed to know what I want? Maybe I am hurting someone, but not in any way I haven't been hurt before by someone else. These are the things I tell myself, and I'll be the first to admit it's a bunch of grade-A bullshit.

I don't know what the hell Lexie and I are doing. We hang out the next day and smoke up in her room. It's taking a little more these days for me to have a good time. Lexie says that's normal. But Jesus, it's like the annual hemp festival in here. I don't know how the hell her parents don't notice. Maybe they don't care. I've never bothered to ask about it.

"Name a song," says Lexie.

I think about it and say, "Mirrors."

"Are you talking about the JT one?"

I nod.

"I haven't thought about that one in a while." She's slowly rolling her head back and forth on her pillow. She's super into the way it feels, you can tell. "I never liked it that much."

"I did," I say. "It's his best one."

"I didn't know we were speaking in terms of his entire catalogue."

"We are."

"I always liked that What Goes Around song," she says.

"It's a good one," I say. "But it's no Mirrors."

I'm just lying really still on her bed when I realize it. I'm sore down there. I'm sore where Thomas went inside me. I rarely visit the dark side of being high, and this isn't exactly one of those moments, but I will say that my insobriety is not helping the situation one bit. I feel that soreness like a presence. It kind of starts to get a mind of its own, and then it spreads, pulsing, radiating waves up into my chest. I tell Lexie I have to get outside and she's sympathetic about it. I've gotten anxious one or two times before, and she's been really good about calming me down.

We're walking around her neighborhood. I can still tell I'm sore if I focus on it, but it feels far away now, and my attention span isn't long enough to hang onto it. Lexie's neighborhood went up in the nineties. It's called Bayhill and it's just south of the school. It's a dumb name because there aren't any bays around here, just a small river and a bunch of mountains and desert. It used to be known as kind of a rich-kids' neighborhood, but the houses are getting older now and there's nothing all that special about them. Anyway, we go to Milwaukee Park, which is just an extra cluster of old baseball diamonds adjacent to the school grounds. Lexie says we should go walk closer to the school and I tell her I'd rather stab myself in the eye than set foot anywhere near that place. So we're just messing around, ducking in and out of old rusty dugouts. We go into one that's shaded by a maple tree and it's sort of cool and dark in there, so we rest for a while on the bench. Lexie climbs on top of me. I lay my head down on the worn, greasy wood. She's kind of riding me a little through her jeans. We're just playing. I look up at the ceiling and see all kinds of messages etched into the paint. A lot of them are names and years like "Andrew Furlough '98" and shit like that. But I'm looking in this one corner where a string of words stands out a little bolder than the others, and I tilt my head so I can read it better, and it says the following: "It's all just a game." And I'm wondering if someone was writing about baseball, reminding people not to get too worked up or act unsportspersonlike or whatever. But something about the phrasing makes it seem a little more big-picture than that. Everything we're doing, all of life, it's just a game. I like it. It kind of reminds me of what Thomas said the other night.

By the time we wander back near Lexie's house, I'm feeling pretty clear in the head. The only problem I'm having is that I'd kind of rather be alone right now. I've spent most of the day with Lexie, and for some reason, I'm just not into being around her at the moment. But clearly she's not feeling the same way, so I figure it's in my best interest and hers to keep a thought like that to myself.

"Let's take Thomas's car out," she says once it's in sight.

"Out where?"

"I don't know—anywhere you want to go."

"I don't want to go anywhere."

She gives me a look, and I know I'd better get enthusiastic about all this pretty quick. "What about your car?" I say.

"I don't want to go in my car. Thomas's car is more fun."

I don't know what the hell she's talking about. Maybe it's because she wants me to drive and feels weird about asking me to drive her own car, since I never have. "It's not good on gas," I say.

"It's fine, I'll pay," she says.

So we're headed south on Milwaukee. Where we're going is anyone's fucking guess. I'm sitting in Thomas's seat, and Lexie's sitting in mine. Thankfully, she's in a mood where she doesn't care to talk about much. She just turns up the radio and she's singing along to Ariana like nobody's listening. You really do have to love her for that.

Anyway, I'm just going through the motions, and before I know it I'm back out in that area south of the airport where Thomas and I went a couple days ago. All the windows are down and the warm air is just whipping through. I slow down and pull off to the side before the road turns to dirt. We're still a few miles from where Thomas and I ended up. I shut off the engine. There's endless flat brush plains all around us.

"So nice to get out of town," says Lexie.

I look at her. Jesus, I can't think of a single thing to say all of a sudden. I bet I have the dumbest look on my face.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

"Nothing," I say. And then it happens. My phone goes off.

"Is that Thomas?" she asks. "How's his trip going? Wait—let me pretend I'm you." She grabs my phone.

Of course it's Thomas. No word from him for a day and a half, and he chooses now to reach out? Jesus. I only saw his name, not what he'd written, and now she's looking real hard at the screen, like it's the most riveting goddamn thing she's ever seen. I realize suddenly that he could have written anything. My heart is in my throat. I'm sweating. We're in brand-new territory now, and Thomas might just be dumb enough to have said something that could fuck over this entire situation.

Goddamn, Lexie's probably studying that screen for only a second or two, but it feels about a thousand times longer than that. "Awww," she finally says, all long and drawn-out. She turns the screen towards me.

There's just one little blue bubble that says, "I miss you."

"Why do you guys have to be so cute?" she says.

I take the phone back into my sweaty hand. I type, "Just hanging out with Lexie. I miss you too." I hit send. I turn to Lexie and say, "It's too hot out here. Let's drive somewhere else and find some shade."

"Wait," she says. She looks all around her. "I like this spot."

"It's a hundred fucking degrees outside."

"No it's not," she says. "Feels more like ninety."

"It was figure of speech."

She reaches over and starts pulling my t-shirt up over my head. I'm not exactly fighting her or anything, but I'm not really helping her out, either. Anyway, she manages to get that thing off me in about ten seconds.

"Making me do all the work, I see," she says. Jesus, she sounds super turned on by that. She cups one of my pecs in her hand.

I look slowly over at her. I say, "Guess so," and I feel myself smile. She comes at me and starts kissing me in a really messy way. This is normally the part where some version of myself gets pretty into it and starts kissing her back. I swear to you, I'm searching all over for that person, and he's just not showing up. I pull back from her. It's not the kind of kissing I can pretend to be into when I'm not.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

"Nothing," I say. "Can you stop asking me that?" It feels like she's been asking me that all goddamn day.

"Sure," she says. "We can do something else." She looks deep into my eyes and says, "Why don't we get right down to business?" She puts her hand on my crotch, and my involuntary reaction is to grab her wrist. But I don't grab it hard, and I don't pull her hand away. Maybe I was going to, initially, but not now. I'm letting her feel me a little through my shorts. I'm a million miles away from getting hard. She's down there starting to do her thing, and I'm just glancing around the car. Every corner, every surface of it reminds me of him. I smell the air, and under all that dried-out leather and baked plastic and dirty carpet lies the faint but unmistakeable scent of his cologne. Maybe even a little bit of his sweat after practice. Jesus Christ, I'm telling you, it's all coming apart at the seams.

You know what I do next? I reach out kind of dumbly for the door handle, and I fucking extricate myself from the situation. I walk ten feet across that empty road. By the time I turn around, Lexie's standing on the other side of the car, looking at me over the roof. She's not moving.

"I'm sorry about that," I say.

"I'll ask you one more time," she says. "What's wrong, Niko?"

"I don't feel well," I say.

"Do you need me to drive?"

"I think so."

We swap places in the car. I put my shirt back on as Lexie moves the seat forward. And then we're just driving in silence.

A few minutes later, she turns to me. "Did you get too hot? We can find somewhere shady, like you said."

"I don't want to," I say.

"Well, what do you want to do, then?"

I look over at her. "I just need to be alone right now."
14

I wouldn't say Lexie got mad at me over what went down. But she did get pretty sad, which is probably worse. We got back to her house and said goodbye in sort of a distant way, and I drove Thomas's car home. Later that night, as I lay on my bed just looking up at the ceiling, I got this feeling I haven't had in a long time. I felt so uncertain of my next action, so afraid of what the fallout might be if I made one more wrong choice, that I literally couldn't move. Even the act of reaching for my phone seemed too risky, so I didn't do it. I don't know how long I went on like that, completely frozen in fear, but I do know that after a while I got pretty freaked out, and that turned into panic, and finally I yelled out a little bit and flipped over and punched my pillow many times until I calmed down.

I text him the next day, during the afternoon lull at work. I say, "Sorry for not talking yesterday."

"It's fine," he replies. "Didn't mean to interrupt your hangout with Lexie."

"How is the trip?"

For about five minutes, I don't get anything from him. Then he says: "Can I just call you?"

"Sure."

My phone rings immediately. I pick up and we're just kind of greeting each other and shooting the shit for a minute, and then it gets quiet, and I can hear him breathing in and out. And then he says this: "I can't stop thinking about you, Niko."

"I'm the same as I always was," I say. I lean my head out the serving window and I'm just taking in my surroundings, the greenest of greens and bluest of blues, and all that shit.

"I didn't know you could be this for me," he says.

"What's that mean?"

"I didn't know you could be this person."

"What person?"

"The person I can't stop thinking about."

I take a breath. I'm going to say it. Someone has to. "What about Madison? Have you thought about her?"

Thomas pauses. A long sigh crackles through. "Come on, man, why do you have to bring her up?"

"You know why."

Look, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, stirring up all this shit. I want this to be a nice phone call, where I get to listen to his voice and hear how he's taking to this big new place I can hardly imagine. But I'll tell you now, I just can't seem to let it go.

"Of course I've thought about her," he says. "How could I not?"

"Okay," I say. The call falls silent again. I can just about hear the buzzing of his thoughts on the other end.

"How's Lexie?" he says.

"Not good," I say. "She wanted to have some fun yesterday and I said no. I've never said no before."

"What the fuck did you do that for?"

"I don't know, man, I just—I couldn't." I pause. "We were in your car...and I guess everything was just sort of making me think of you...and I couldn't do it."

More silence. "I've been thinking of you, too," he finally says.

What a dumbass. I know that already. He fucking told me. "You're the one who said this could never lead anywhere, remember?"

"Yeah, I know," he says slowly. "That's been on my mind a lot."

I give him a moment, but he's not elaborating. "And?"

"And I just don't know how I feel, okay? I remember what I said. But that was before we..." He stops himself. "Come on, you let me put myself inside you, Niko. Jesus, dude, can you blame me for feeling a little different after that?"

Of course I don't blame him. He's not the only one who feels different. "I need to be honest," I say. "All of this stuff—how we keep trying to do both and all that...it's going to crash and burn. I don't know when, but I know it will."

"You're right," he says.

"Then why are we still doing it?"

"I don't know, dude," he says. "I don't know."

"We have to choose," I say. "We can't have both." Shit, I'm really trying to keep it together all of a sudden. "What do you want?"

"Come on, man, it's you and me. We tried to stop...but we couldn't. Clearly it's what I want."

"Then we know what we have to do."

"Yeah," he says. "Lying to her all this time—it's been tearing me apart."

I don't say anything else at this point. I decide I'm just going to let him figure out how to wrap up this conversation. Just leave everything in his hands. All of it.

"Tell you what," he says. "We've got Markham's camping thing this weekend. Let's put all of this on hold until that's over. Then we'll just fucking deal with it. How's that sound?"

I don't answer him right away. It's not like I owe him a punctual answer at this point—that much is for sure. He can wait. I'm thinking about it for a minute. I'm thinking that he's right. It would help to at least know when the hell I can expect this mess to be cleaned up, to have some kind of timeline in mind. "Next week, we're dealing with it," I say.

"That's right, dude," he says. "It's all about next week." He's sounding so goddamn eager that I want to throw up. "We'll take care of this shit. I promise."

We don't say much else. I try to get a sense of how he's liking life in the city, but he doesn't have much to tell me about it. He says he's been spending most of his time with his cousins in the next town over.

Before hanging up, he says, "Try texting a little more often."

"Fuck you," I say. "You try texting a little more often."

He laughs. We say goodbye.

The sun's just beating down on this dumb little booth. I'm thinking about Markham's birthday now. I had completely forgotten about it, even though I fully confirmed my attendance a month or two ago. That was before all of this. The timing isn't too great. That's all I have to say about it.

His dad, Lester Markham Senior, owns about eighty acres of undeveloped real estate land in the low, brown hills just north of the city. Markham's family has a lot of money—a fact I'm reminded of every year around this time. When we were all younger it meant swimming in the backyard pool, gaming on all the latest consoles, endless snacks and fancy door prizes. But for the last two years it's been this all-expenses-paid night of drinking in a tucked-away corner of the foothills. Jesus Christ, even now, in the middle of all this, I'm still looking forward to it. I guess if I weren't, it would make me sort of ungrateful.

Eventually, Lexie does get mad. It's because I don't make much of an effort to follow up on what happened. She spends part of the week not talking to me. The truth is that I can't work up the courage to discuss it. Who the hell knows what I might say? But by the time my shift is over on Friday, she's forgiven me, and we meet at her place and I make the whole thing up to her.

It's Saturday again, around four in the afternoon. I'm driving down the arrival lanes at the airport, kind of scanning all the people waiting. And then, from nowhere, Thomas leans out on one foot over the curb. He's using his carry-on as a counterweight. He has this big, dumb grin on his face. It doesn't hit me until that moment: Even at this busy airport in the honest light of day, I want him. This desire I'm feeling is probably the only thing in my life that's gotten less complicated over time, easier to place, more acute than ever. But his dad and brother are here, too. I have no choice but to fight those feelings off.

Thomas drives us home, and everything's gone back to the way it should be. I'm sitting in the back seat next to Alfred again. Thomas is arguing away with his dad about going up into the foothills tonight. His dad thinks he needs a night of rest after the trip and Thomas is just laying down his rebuttal in that low, husky voice of his: "There's no way I'm sitting out, Dad," he says. "There's just no way."

Anyway, we get back to the house and I help Thomas throw some shit together, and we head out to meet up with everyone else. They're all waiting for us in the Albertsons parking lot along Bogus Basin Road. Madison and Lexie are standing like boards up against Lexie's little car with their arms crossed, chatting quietly like they don't know anybody else. Garrett is there with the same girl from the party. They're both talking to Owen and that girl Chloe, who Owen's apparently left his girlfriend for, based on the way he's got his arm slung clear around her shoulder. Lexie tells me girls don't like to be held by guys like that. She says it's an act of aggressive possession at best, assault at worst. Markham and Driggs are chasing each other around the parking lot, yelling like idiots, occasionally going in for the tackle. That makes an even ten of us.

After heading into the store for some last-minute supplies, we divide up. Driggs drives this big old four-door Chevy truck that he inherited from his dad. The other two couples go with him. Thomas and me and the girls pile into Markham's blue 4Runner, which he got brand-new for his birthday last year. Madison gets claustrophobic, so she rides in the front seat next to Markham. I'm in the middle of the back seat, squeezed at the shoulders between Lexie and Thomas. I know. That's just the way the cards fall.

Anyway, we turn left onto a road called Cartwright and stay on it for quite a while. We pass by this large planned community out in the weeds called Hidden Springs, and then there's not much else around. Cartwright turns to dirt, like so many roads out here do. After bumping and lurching through a rough potion of it, we get to Markham's dad's land and the campsite that's nestled within.

It really is a nice little spot. There's no drinking water, so we packed in what we would need for the night. There's a flat area up on a hill where we park, and it descends into this little ravine clogged with bushes and small trees at the bottom. That's the spot I remember liking best from last year. There's a moment where I catch Thomas's eye, and he gives me a quick, crooked smile. And then I take Lexie's hand and she and I go down there. We go under the branches of this young tree, between a parting in the bushes and find a small runoff stream, still trickling along. It's the kind that will run dry by August. We sit down next to it, and she seems happy that I took her down here. I tell her about the previous year, how Thomas and Driggs both got really drunk around midnight, and we convinced them that we'd found a little family of raccoons living near a spot where the water pools, and that they were super tame and friendly. I tell her how, when the boys got close enough, we pushed them in. I really paint the picture for her, and she's laughing pretty hard.

We hear the distant thumping of music coming from one of the cars, along with some shouts and laughter.

She turns to me. "How about we don't get too crazy tonight?"

The water's making a really chill little trickling noise. "I don't know," I say slowly. "I was planning on getting pretty fucked up."

She smacks me on the shoulder. "Shut up."

We go back up there to rejoin the others. It's at her suggestion, not mine. When we get there, Thomas is practically humping the front fender of Markham's 4Runner. He has an oversized can of beer in his hand. "Damn, I really need to get my hands on one of these," is what he's saying. "This has the four-liter six, right?"

Markham shrugs. He's not the type to know what kind of engine is in his car. He's strutting around behind Thomas, acting all proud as if he paid for it himself, which he certainly did not. "You'll get there one day, dude," he says.

They're all holding drinks, so Lexie and I go around to the back of Markham's car. He meets us there and shows us the spread, eagerly offering Lexie a whisky-coke. Everybody knows it's her favorite by this point. She even lets him make it for her. Someone turns down the music and there's a strange moment of peace where the heat hasn't faded yet and people are only one or two drinks in, just standing around, sweating it out, rotating in and out of some shade cast by the cars and a single bent-up little tree. There's ten of us up here on this dry hill, each heading for new places and new adventures and all that shit in another month or two. Nobody's saying much during this in-between time. Personally, I'm sort of taken by the way these brown hills are turning golden in the late-day sun, as the ravines cutting between them slowly plunge into shadows. But maybe I'm the only one.

And then things pick up. It was just a matter of time. The music gets turned up again and more beers and mixed drinks get passed around. We dig into our provisions and the sun gets low in the sky. We're acting like little kids, playing this lawless game of tag that spills over the edge of the hill down into the ravine. You should see the way Thomas chases me. I run for this depression about a hundred feet down towards the creek, and then my foot catches on some tangled brush and I fall in the dirt. I roll onto my back and he's just towering over me, blanketing my whole body in his long shadow.

I'm inclined to say we have a moment. You'd think it would have happened earlier, when we were alone in his car on the way over, but it didn't. He's reaching his hand out to help me up, and I'm reminded of that night on Northview when he did the same, despite being completely shit-faced at the time. Back when we knew nothing. Damn, we've come a long way since that night. Anyway, the gesture wasn't lost on me then, just as it isn't now. We don't break our eye contact as he pulls me up. He has this look that he's giving me, and it says, "It's just you and me." And for a second, that's how it feels. But all the others are still around, and it looks like the game has ended, and the girls are slowly picking their way down the hill.

There's no fire ban, so Driggs brought five or six pieces of chopped wood along. We pair off with our proper partners and collect whatever additional fuel we can find, from big dead pieces of sagebrush to dried-out willow branches at the base of the ravine. Lexie and I gather some rocks together and start forming a vague circular pit, and then everybody brings their folding chairs around. I will say this: Once we get the fire going and the sun sets behind the hill, it's a chill little scene we've managed to pull together. We're all having a pretty fucking good time.

Maybe I'm sounding like a broken record. Maybe you're thinking you've heard all this before. But I'm here to tell you, it's different this time around. As the night moves along, as every last one of us continues to partake, and especially as the four of us sneak off to smoke this swollen joint Lexie rolled that morning, the ballad of Thomas and Niko is playing nonstop beneath it all. Once we're back in our chairs around the fire, I'm just watching the moon, and it's like, all these other people, all the shouts and the laughter and the innuendo—it's all just layers of static. If you start stripping those layers away, one by one, you get down to that steady current running below. I can even hear it now, if I listen really hard through the gaps in all this noise. It's just trickling away down there. And guess what? One look into Thomas's eyes tells me he can hear it too.

Sometimes when I get extra high like this, I have the sense that I could fall fairly deep down the rabbit hole if I wasn't the type to rein it in at the last minute. I always end up reining it in. Just tuning in to the antics going on around this campfire seems to do the trick. After relieving himself, Garrett returns with a powder-white cow skull that he's holding at the jaw. He lifts it up over his head and dances around. He's making some kind of tribal-sounding noise that he picked up from god knows where.

Lexie's voice grazes my ear as it passes: "You're appropriating."

Garrett keeps dancing. He says, "Don't even get me started on that." He's slurring up a storm.

Thomas gets up and steals the skull. He takes off running around the cars. Garrett goes after him, and I hear some muffled sounds of shouting and shoes scraping in the dirt fifty feet away. Thomas comes back victorious. He hugs the skull to his puffed chest, stands over the fire and says, "I am the king." Garrett slumps back in his chair.

"A gift for the man of the hour," Thomas says, presenting the skull to Markham.

"I said no gifts," says Markham, laughing. "But I'll take it."

Lexie and Madison go with Chloe and the girl from Borah to mix more drinks. I hear them laughing under the back door of Markham's car. The guys are going on about some baseball game that Thomas doesn't seem interested in. He's never been too into baseball. I look up at him. He's the only one standing. His face is distorted slightly through the heat and the smoke. Tiny red embers flick up into the night like fireflies. One settles on the tan sleeve of his letterman's jacket and he brushes it off.

For a second, he's looking at me, too. Then he looks back into the flames. "Hey there, Nikola," he says quietly. Thomas never uses my full name unless he means it.

The four of us share a tent that night. It's rated for up to six, so there's plenty of room. At first, Thomas tries sleeping alone out under the stars, but twenty minutes later, he joins us inside the tent. He lays his sleeping bag down on the opposite side from me. The girls sleep between us. I went to bed sort of drunk and I'm having trouble falling asleep, but I manage to fade in and out for a few hours.

At some point in the middle of the night, I hear Thomas get up, unzip the front of the tent and crawl outside. I sit up. The girls are fast asleep. I peer through the netting and see him crouched in the dirt, staring back at me. He's not moving. I know he can see me looking at him. The moon is super bright tonight. He stays really still like that for a few more seconds, then stands and walks away.

I wait about ten seconds, then go out after him. The air outside is fresh and cool. The fire is still smoldering over in our makeshift pit. I look around and spot him between the two cars. I go over to him and we walk a little ways down the dirt road together.

"I got too hot in there," Thomas says. He's keeping his voice really quiet. "Couldn't sleep."

"Me neither," I say.

We leave the road and make our way down to that little trickling stream. We stand at the edge of it, under a tree. Thomas faces me and takes me into his arms. I breathe out, feeling up and down his back with both hands. His white cotton t-shirt is still damp with sweat where it stretches around his shoulder blades. Everything feels so fucking right, I could cry.

"It was killing me earlier," he says, "waiting to hold you like this."

I kiss him. There's no stopping us at this point, I'm telling you. We get aggressive about it, feeling each other's faces and bodies, whimpering quietly as we do it. Thomas seems to reach a point where he can't take it anymore and drops to his knees. He undoes my belt and pulls my pants and underwear down. I'm just out there now, right up in his face. That warm, wet mouth surrounds me once again, and I hang onto a low branch to keep my balance. I'm facing back in the direction we came from, running my free hand through his thick black hair.

And then, from some shadowy place off to the right, Martin Driggs steps into view. The moon lights up his features. His pale blue eyes meet mine. I stumble back and almost fall into the water. I pull my pants up and fasten my belt. Thomas stands and wipes his mouth. He turns around to face Driggs and I come up beside him.

It's clear by the way Driggs is staring back at us that he saw everything. I don't think I've ever seen him more shocked in his life. He's not that drunk anymore, either.

Thomas takes my hand. It's a bold move—one I never would have called, not in a million years. He says, "What are you doing here, Martin?"

"Just taking a piss," Driggs says, recovering, standing his ground. "I followed the creek down here. You two maybe want to clear out?"

"Yeah, okay," Thomas says slowly. He's still gripping my hand, but his voice is shaking. "Yeah, we'll get out of here."
15

I won't say it's the absolute worst morning of my life, only because it sounds a little dramatic, and I tend to get pretty tired of superlatives after a while. But it's certainly up there. I hardly sleep the rest of the night. I don't think Thomas does either. I've never spent a night with him where he didn't snore at one point or another, and yet, for hours on end, it's silent as can be over on his side of the tent. I do fade a little from sheer exhaustion just as the sky starts to light up at dawn. Or anyway, that must be what happens, because I never see him leave the tent. I only notice he's gone after jerking awake from some kind of stressful half-dream. I figure at this point, getting any more sleep is hopeless, and one look at the sleeping girls in the early morning light is enough to drive me out of that tent pretty quick.

He's the only one outside. Everyone else is still asleep. He's crouched over by the fire pit, poking the ashes with a stick. He glances over his shoulder, makes eyes contact, then turns back to the ashes. I haven't seen him look quite this sad in a long time. I go over to him. I squat down on the opposite side of the pit.

"Probably best if we don't talk much this morning," he says under his breath. He has the blankest look on his face now. It's freaking me out. "Maybe you should go do your own thing."

"All right," I say. "Good idea."

I leave him alone. I stumble halfway down the hill and collapse on the ground, near the depression where I tripped and fell the evening before. I manage to pass out for an hour or so, until the sun rises and starts to bake me on the hillside, and I hear shouts and laughter coming from up above.

I spend most of the car ride back remembering, replaying the event over and over in my head. It would probably be a lot better for me to just stare out my window, stick my nose to the glass and try to think about other things. But I'm trapped in the middle again, so I don't have a window, just a compromised view out the windshield, where all I see is a little dirt road that twists and turns for eternity. I swear to you, the road seems about a thousand times longer than it did yesterday.

What I remember most was our sad retreat, slowly back up toward the camp, past the cars, quietly into our beds on opposite sides of the tent, where we should have fucking stayed all along. It wasn't just a retreat in the literal sense. It was also a retreat from our desires, from anything and everything we might have wanted from each other in that not-so-hidden little spot down by the creek. That's how much the whole thing scared us. We didn't say one word to each other the entire way back. He walked about ten feet ahead of me. Not once did he turn back to see if I was following him. I was terrified we might run into Driggs again at the top, by the tents, but we never did.

If you're wondering what could possibly be going through Thomas's mind right now, as his shoulder brushes uncomfortably against mine in the back seat of the car, I have no clue. I promise you, nothing in this entire world could be further from my knowledge. To be honest, I don't care, either. What I care about is how this is all going to play out. I wish I could say I knew Driggs well enough to have some idea what he might do, but I don't. Jesus, he must have been avoiding us as much as we were avoiding him this morning, because I barely remember seeing him at all. But there's no doubt his truck's still chugging along behind us, and that he's the one behind the wheel.

Against my other shoulder: Lexie. I don't dare turn to look at her, even though I feel her eyes on me a number of times. From that alone, she might be able to figure out something's wrong. She's just so smart, and good, and she deserves better. I'm trying to remind myself of the one good thing that will come from this: She's not going to be stuck with me anymore. She won't have me lying to her face every goddamn day of her life.

The rest of the ride back into town is sort of excruciating. My brain feels like it's boiling in its own fluids, I'm thinking over all of this so hard. We all spill out onto the surface of the parking lot, near the other cars. It's only eleven in the morning, but it's already hotter than hell.

I will say this: I've never given Martin Driggs enough credit for anything in his life. That one's on me. As it turns out, he handles the whole thing with more grace than I ever knew he was capable of. He gets out of his truck and waits for the right moment when everyone's distracted, moving their belongings and all that. He pulls us both aside. He's talking under his breath. "I won't say anything," he says. "But you two better figure this out soon, and start getting honest about it." He tosses his head toward Lexie and Madison. "Do it for them."

Thomas is standing there with his arms crossed. You can tell he's completely beside himself over the whole thing. "Don't worry, we're telling them today," he says.

Driggs looks surprised to hear it, but he doesn't say anything. He goes back over to his truck.

The girls haven't come over here yet. It's just Thomas and me. Thomas leans in and says, "Go home with Lexie. I'll go with Madison. It's time." And then he walks away from me without another word.

I've never known Thomas to break a promise in his life, so when he made one to me over the phone the other day, I had every reason to believe he would follow through with our plan. But I'm not ashamed to say I had a backup, in the event he turned out to be a lying sack of shit. I was fully prepared to go rogue and tell both girls myself. I know that this whole thing with Driggs is the nail in the coffin and all that. There's no question it's accelerated things. But the way Thomas is taking charge now, letting me know how it's going down...I guess I never should have doubted him.

It hits me now that we've arrived. This is what it feels like to come clean. The pieces are already in motion. For a few seconds, I get this feeling like I've pushed all the air out of my lungs and I'm sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool. I'm just standing there on the bottom. I can hear muffled voices at the surface, but I can't tell what anyone's saying. I take a step forward and feel the thick drag of water around me. It's the craziest thing. Then I get my shit together. Voices become clear again. I go over to Lexie. I ask for a ride. She looks happy to have me go with her, just as Madison is happy to go with Thomas. Jesus Christ, this already hurts so bad I can hardly stand it.

Don't ask me about the car ride. It's the most sickening twenty minutes of my life. I have no other choice but to put a face on, because I can't have Lexie thinking something major is wrong until she's safe at home. I don't want her to drive after what I'm about to tell her. There's this moment when we're crossing the bridge on Americana and she points out all these hot air balloons rising up out of the park, and I have to act cheery and full of wonder, and I'm just feeling like the biggest piece of shit who ever lived. When we finally do pull up close to the house, I tell her I want to stay in the car. She asks why and I say I need to talk to her about something.

"I guess I should stay too, then," she says. She sees I'm not smiling. She rolls down her window, then looks at me. "What is it?"

"We can't be together anymore," I say. "It's my fault."

She's not doing or saying much, at first. Her face hardly registers any emotion at all. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know what the hell to think. She focuses on one of my eyes, then the other, then back again. She moves around in her seat like she's trying to get comfortable. Then she holds really still. She's just staring out the windshield at the front of the house she grew up in. "What did you do?" she says.

I say it in the most simple terms I can come up with: "I slept with Thomas."

She backs away from me a little. "What is this?" she says. She looks super confused. "What are you doing right now?"

"I'm telling the truth."

It's taking longer than I expected for her to realize I'm serious. We look at each other, and suddenly I'm trying not to cry. She sure as hell knows what that looks like. I think that's when she finally accepts that I'm not kidding, that this isn't some messed-up joke I'm playing on her.

"I don't understand," she says. She seems so goddamn calm, only I know she's not.

"I'm so sorry, Lexie." I feel my voice starting to break. "I'm so, so sorry."

"I didn't ask for an apology, Niko. I said I don't understand. That means I need you to explain to me what the fuck you're talking about."

"Thomas and me—we've been together...in that way." I don't give her any details. I don't think it's fair to her, unless she really wants them.

She's looking out her window now. "You and Thomas," she says.

"Yeah."

She's shaking. I can't see her face, but I can tell she's starting to cry. She's got this way of crying that's completely silent. Slowly, she whispers the words, "What the fuck." She's saying them to herself.

I don't know how I'm still holding it together. Maybe I'm some kind of sociopath. I roll my window down. The world outside looks very far away.

Then I feel her eyes on the back of my head. "Why did you wait until now to say something?" she says. "What made you guys think that was okay, when you both have girlfriends?"

"We didn't think it was okay."

She's crying out loud now. "Well that's such a shitty thing to do, Niko."

I face forward. I don't say anything.

"How long—wait." She presses her hand to her mouth. Tears are dripping from one finger to the next. "It's been happening since before we were together, hasn't it?"

"No," I say immediately. "Of course not. Lexie, I swear to god, it just started happening."

"When?"

"A month ago."

She doesn't believe me at first, I can tell. Then I watch her start to think back. I know she's zeroing in on that last week of school, when everything got weird for a while. The beginning of the end. She's so smart, it's scary. It's all coming together in her mind, just as everything between us is falling apart.

"You need to go now," she says. She's facing forward again. Her eyes are closed and her face is completely soaked with tears.

"I know," I tell her. I open the door.

"Don't fucking talk to me. Don't text me—don't reach out in any way. If you haven't heard from me, it means I don't want to hear from you, understand?"

"Yeah." I pull my bag from the back seat and close the door. And then I don't look back.

—

We kept referring to it as a plan. Our plan to tell the girls—as if we had outlined some kind of procedure with multiple steps and safety nets and all that. Right up to this moment, I had gone so far as to envision us meeting up afterwards to debrief. But the crazy thing is, right now, he's the last person on earth I want to see. This moment in time, it doesn't involve him. What just went down was about Lexie and me—no one else. And guess what? Now she's gone, and she might never talk to me again. I've never felt this guilty in my whole life. Maybe some part of me was holding on to the tiny sliver of a chance that she would somehow take it in stride. Looking back now, I know that was impossible.

I have no idea where the hell I'm going. I'm exhausted. My backpack is sweaty against my back. Don't ask me why, but I just don't want to go home. So you know where I go? I go back to those stupid balloons she pointed out. I walk all the way back to Ann Morrison park, which takes over an hour, and by the time I get there, they've mostly all landed and are deflated and being packed away. It's a pretty big park, so I wander for a while toward its center, and I find a big tree with no one around, and I lie under it and go to sleep.

I wake up hours later with one strap of my backpack hooked around my arm. I mean it when I say I slept for hours. I got settled underneath this oak tree around one, and now my phone says it's after four. I have two texts from Thomas. One says, "It's done. Feeling pretty low. Not sure I want to talk right now. Just want to be alone." I can't tell you how relieved I am after reading it. Normally I wouldn't be, it's just that I had been feeling the exact same thing. The second text was sent ten minutes later, and it says, "Just let me know you're okay." He sent them almost two hours ago.

"I'm okay," I reply.

I promise you, I don't feel sorry for myself. Not even a little. I take full responsibility for every decision I've made that has led me to this point. Because that's exactly what they were—my decisions to make. But being able to acknowledge it doesn't help me feel any less alone.

Then I hear a voice. I look up, and you can throw me in the goddamn insane asylum if Owen isn't walking right towards me. "What are you doing under that tree, Savic?" he says.

I stand and brush myself off. "Not a lot," I say. "What are you doing here?" I'm trying to act casual. Boise's not a big city by any stretch, but you don't exactly expect to see people you know around every corner.

"My family's over there." He points behind him to some people gathered at the edge of a pond. "We come here on Sundays a lot, after church." He's just looking me up and down for a second. "Wow, dude. You still smell like the campfire."

Give me any of the other guys from school, and they would probably leave well enough alone. But that's just not how Owen operates. He's got this look on his face like he's trying to hide his concern. I know that look right when I see it.

"What's going on, man?" he says. He's laying the words down carefully, which has me feeling a little self-conscious. I'm sure he's dead-on about that campfire smell, not to mention all the other smells associated with sleeping outside and walking for miles and not taking a shower.

"Didn't feel like going home," I say.

"Everything okay?" he says. "You're not looking too good."

Somebody should give him a medal for getting right to the fucking heart of the matter. I take one look at him, and I'm starting to feel pretty bold about the whole thing. There's very little I have left to lose at this point. "Not really," I say.

"Let's talk about it then."

Jesus Christ, he doesn't miss a beat. "I'm not sure you want to hear about it."

"Of course I do."

I'll say it again: There's nothing to lose. Might as well lay it all down. So I take a breath and I say, "Thomas and I have been hooking up for about a month now. We finally told the girls today."

He takes a step or two back, he's so goddamn surprised. "You and Tommy Chu? Are you kidding me?"

"No."

"Come on, man, you've got to be kidding."

I just look at him. I'm pretty sure I look sad, and tired, and not at all in the mood to crack jokes.

His face changes. "Well, at least you told them. Didn't go on lying to them like some people would."

"Yeah."

"I'm not saying what happened was totally okay—if you think about it from the girls' perspective, I mean."

"I know."

"That's actually some messed up shit."

Jesus, he's really got me plunging back into the guilt and shame of it all. But that's exactly what I deserve. "I know," I repeat.

The whole moment feels surreal to me. I'm still not quite convinced I'm talking to Owen about this. And would you believe it if I said he's getting this huge grin on his face? I'm not sure I believe it, and I'm standing right in front of him. I can't imagine what has him smiling like that.

"You know there were rumors about you two," he says. "Don't worry, I didn't believe any of them."

I'm looking at the ground. "Maybe you should have."

I kid you not, his laugh sends about a dozen nearby geese honking and flying up into the air. "Now that's funny, dude. You know I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to. You guys have always had that way you act around each other—like you know all each other's secrets. It's goals, for sure."

"Shut up."

"I mean it, dude."

We both look at each other, then away. "Well," I say, "I wish we would've figured it out earlier."

"Just wasn't meant to be," he says. "As fucked up as it is, I'm sure the girls will forgive you one day."

"I hope so." I sit down with my back against the tree trunk. "Shouldn't you be with your family?"

Owen shrugs. "They're tired of me." He sits down in the grass. "Hey, so you know David's gay, right?"

"No," I say. David is his older brother. Honestly, I was wondering how the hell he was being so casual about all this. I know plenty of guys from school who would've turned and walked away the second the words came out of my mouth.

"Well he is. He's not exactly wide-open about it, but he doesn't mind if people know."

I nod. I'm looking out at a fountain in the distance. It's shooting water thirty feet in the air, and there's kind of a prism effect going on in the mist.

Owen pats me on the knee. "So when can we expect some little Thomases and Nikos running around, huh? Half babies can be real cute, if you didn't know."

"Shut up, dude," I say. "It's not like that."

"Oh yeah? What's it like, then?"

"I don't have a fucking clue, man," I say. "He doesn't either."

"Well my money's on you guys figuring it out. Any day of the week."

"Don't be so confident."

He doesn't say anything right away. I can't seem to tear my eyes away from that stupid fountain, and for a while he's staring at it too. He's probably trying to figure out what I find so goddamn fascinating about it.

"Hey, man," he says. "Thanks for telling me."

I look at him. "Sure."

"I know we were never that close in school. I always thought we could've been."

"Me too," I say. Maybe it's the truth, or maybe I'm just telling him what he wants to hear.

"I'm sure you'll figure this out. You're the guy who always figures it out. Everyone knows that about you. And, uh," he pauses. "Well, I think I speak for the rest of the guys when I say we're all expecting big things from you."

It's such an absurd thing, what he just told me. But I've reached a point where nothing can faze me. Not one thing. So I just look at him and say, "I'll try not to disappoint anyone."
16

My legs are pretty tired by the time I get close to home. I've just done so much goddamn walking. Maybe it was the three-hour nap I took in the middle of the day, but I'm having some trouble shaking this surreal feeling. I can hardly remember the end of my conversation with Owen, nor making up my mind to leave the park. I do remember specifically asking him not to tell anyone. If anything about our discussion offended him, it was that. He must not have liked the implication, because his response was to say I know him better than that. I really don't, but whatever. I end up feeling quite a bit of gratitude towards him by the time I'm entering my neighborhood. He's given me some peace of mind, which is something I'm a little short on at the moment.

My mom is up. She's looking pretty put together, even though it's still a long time before her shift starts. She's sitting up on the couch, watching one of her shows. She looks happy to see me, and even pauses her show to say hi. I lean down and kiss her on the top of her head. It's just a little thing I do when she seems like she'll be receptive to it. I can usually tell when she's having a good week, and I figure this must be one.

"What happened to you?" she says. She's talking about the way I smell and my appearance, which I'm sure has reached a new level of disheveled.

"I was camping with some friends," I say.

"Well, go clean yourself up."

"I will."

Her eyes catch mine before I go down the hall. "Are you doing okay, Niko?"

The fact that she's asking just makes me so happy, I could cry. "I'm doing fine, Mom."

I go and shower, then collapse on my bed. I'm lying there in nothing but a black pair of underwear. I spent plenty of time soaping up, getting myself clean and fresh, but after all that, I don't feel any different. I turn on my side and think about who in this world I could talk to, if I needed to talk to someone right at this moment. It turns out I don't know very many people. Not really. I think about my last year ever of high school, and this complete wreck of a half-season that has followed.

I guess I'm thinking about a lot. It's crazy to me just how messed up everything got. I keep trying to reason my way through it, but I get so overwhelmed so quickly that I have to back away, let it fade to static and tell myself everything will turn out all right. I did all this for him, but somehow he's still not someone I really want to see right now. I'm angry at him. I'm angry at both of us, for not even trying to imagine how it was all going to feel afterwards—how he and I would feel about each other. I want to believe it will work out. Life finds a way, and all that. But right now, it feels an awful lot like I've lost everything. That's what gets me crying. I start crying like I haven't in a long time. I'm crying because I might not talk to Lexie ever again. I'm crying because my friendship with Thomas Chu will never be the same, a fact that no longer seems exciting or good.

For over an hour, it seems like all I can do is cry. Everyone says you'll feel better if you let yourself do it, and you know what? Everyone's right. I get this strange sense of peace afterwards, even if I'm no less confused than before. Just fuck it all.

—

The next morning, I'm back in that little coffee shack like none of this bullshit even happened. Not a word from Thomas has showed up on my phone. That's fine—I haven't said a word to him, either. I can't speak for him, but here's what I'm thinking: We did a bad thing. We let it go on for too long, and now we're paying for it. It doesn't feel even remotely right to get together and celebrate anything. Shit, it hardly feels right to talk to each other. That's our punishment. We got exactly what we had coming.

I work my entire shift holding tight to this mindset, but by the end of it, I'm kind of longing to hear the familiar rumble of that old Lexus pulling into the lot. I'm wondering how it would be if he showed up, what the hell he might come up with to say to me. Personally, I wouldn't feel the need for us to say anything. I'd be happy just to see him smiling and waving from the driver's seat, shoulders bare and tanned brown. He could drive away after that and I wouldn't care. It would be enough just to know he's doing all right.

When I'm about halfway home, I make up my mind that if I'm so goddamn worried about him, I should just check in. So I send him a text that says, "Are you doing okay today?"

My phone starts buzzing, which scares the shit out of me for some reason. He's calling. I happen to be walking past an alley and I turn down it because the road I'm on is loud as hell. I pick up the call.

"Could you just come over?" is the first thing out of his mouth.

"Sure."

"Okay, see ya," he says, and then he fucking ends the call. Just like that.

I show up at the Chu household about fifteen minutes later. All it takes is a brief walk up that lush front lawn to get me feeling a little better. I have to use my spare key to open the front door. It looks like no one else is home. I go back to his bedroom and find him in bed with a pillow over his head. He lifts it, takes one look at me and lets it fall back over his face.

"The neighbor died," he says.

"Who?"

"The old man through the wall. He's dead. That's why he never came back."

"I'm sorry," I say.

"It's fine," he says. "None of us knew him that well."

I turn his desk chair around so it's facing the bed and sit down. "I had to unlock the door," I say.

"My dad probably thought everyone was out of the house this morning. I didn't tell him I was skipping work."

"Have you been in bed all day?"

"Mostly."

I wish I could see his expression. It's hard to get a read on things through that stupid pillow.

"How is everything?" he says.

"Shitty."

"Same here." Finally, he throws the pillow aside. He sits up and looks me in the eyes. "What was it like when you told her?"

Damn, he's really putting it to me point-blank. I wish I could give him a clear answer. I really do. It's just that I haven't been letting myself relive that particular moment—not even a little. It just hurts too much. I struggle for a minute before saying, "It felt like everything was coming through a filter."

He looks at me for a long time. "Did she cry?"

"Of course she cried."

"Madison cried a lot," he says. "It got so bad at one point, I started thinking none of this was worth it. I was just searching around for anything I could say to make it better."

"There's nothing you can say," I tell him.

He just shakes his head. Man, he's looking pretty sad. Quite a bit of time passes where neither of us says anything. He only speaks up when I shift in the chair and rest my feet on the bed.

"What happened with Driggs—that was fucked up."

"I know."

"It really made me stop and think about things," he says.

"Yeah," I say. "Me too."

"We've been incredibly reckless with this whole thing. We acted like we could get away with anything. We thought we were untouchable."

I don't know what the hell he wants me to say. I agree. We behaved recklessly, and we shouldn't have. But it's all over now.

"After you told Lexie," he continues slowly, "did you ask her not to tell anyone else?"

"Of course I didn't—don't tell me you said that shit to Madison."

He pauses. "No."

"I can't believe you think it would be appropriate to ask anything of them, after what we've done."

"I don't."

I'm looking at him now. I'm trying to understand. "Why are you bringing it up?"

"I just don't want everyone finding out."

Jesus Christ, he's out of his mind. I'm feeling pretty defiant by this point, so I say, "Yeah, well, I told Owen already, so good luck with that."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"He found me in the park yesterday, after I was with Lexie. He kept asking what was wrong, so I just told him. I didn't know what else to do."

Thomas is looking at me like he doesn't know me. "You could've kept your mouth shut, for one thing."

I turn away. I'm just looking out his small bedroom window. "I needed to talk to somebody, bad. Besides, he said he wouldn't tell."

"Niko, listen, we can't just go telling people like that."

He's making a show of being patient with me, which irritates me more than you can believe. "Why not?"

"Are you even listening to yourself? Jesus, dude, anyone could find out."

"Like anyone gives a fuck, in this day and age." I'm practically yelling at him now, I'm so annoyed. "Guess what, we're not in high school anymore. All that petty shit isn't going to matter when you're five hundred miles away from the place you grew up."

He glares at me, then says quietly, "My dad gives a fuck."

Here's the thing: Thomas doesn't look angry anymore. He looks scared. I want to tell him his dad will get over it, but the truth is, I'm not sure he will. I know even less about the guy's inner workings than Thomas does, which is to say, very little. I calm down, at least to the point that I'm not raising my voice anymore. I say, "We have to accept the reality of people finding out about us. We took that on the second we told the girls."

"I don't know what I took on," he says. "I just know I couldn't keep lying to Madison. Every day with her, every fucking second...it all turned into one big lie." He pauses. He's got this occupied look on his face, like he's trying to rationalize through the whole goddamn thing all over again. His dark eyes land back on me. "I couldn't stop this shit with you. I couldn't. No matter how hard I tried."

"Don't call it 'this shit'."

He looks down. "Sorry. You know that's not what I mean. I just don't understand why we have to be out in the open about it all of a sudden. I only wanted the girls to know. No one else."

"Oh come on," I say. "How many people do you think they're going to tell?"

"I don't know," he says. He looks up at me accusingly. "Maybe it's not them I should be worried about."

"Will you fucking get over it? I told one other person. You start living your life a certain way, and guess what? People end up finding out sooner or later. There's just no getting around it."

"I think you misunderstood what's going on here, Niko," he says. He's getting worked up. "You and I can't seem to stop touching each other's dicks. That's all we know. I guess to you that means we're both standing in the closet, just waiting for the right moment to come out. Well maybe that's who you are, but it's not me."

I can't remember the last time something he said filled me with so much anger. I'm getting so upset, I can't handle another minute in his bedroom. I stand up and take a few steps toward the door, just to make it crystal-clear to him that I'm on my way out. "You're out of your fucking mind, you know that? A completely different person called me from San Francisco last week. I don't know who the hell he was, but he's definitely not in this room right now."

"Come on—don't leave," he says.

I pause with my hand on the doorknob. I look right at him and say, "The night of the party, when you pulled me into your dad's room—remember that? You told me to say the word. Tell me you remember."

"I remember," he says. He's got the blanket pulled halfway up his face.

"Well I'm saying it now: I'm gay. And man, you lucked out, because if I wasn't, that shit you pulled on me at the beginning would have backfired so bad on you. Pinning me down...shoving your hand down my pants—"

"Stop it," he says. "Fucking shut your mouth." He's starting to cry.

"That night at the party, you told me who you were."

"Fuck you," he says through his tears. "I never said the word."

"It's doesn't matter if you say it. It's just a word. You're not into girls, the same way I'm not." I've been trying to put up a tough front, but I can feel the edges starting to fray now. There are tears in my eyes, too. My voice gets soft and low. "I can't believe you're fucking backing down now. After all this bullshit we put ourselves through."

He disappears completely beneath the blanket.

"Oh, nice," I say. "Go ahead, hide your face from me, just because you don't like the conversation. You're such a fucking coward." I'm pretty sure that will fish him out again, but it doesn't work. "You're better than this, Thomas," I say. "We've known each other too long for me to accept that this is the real you." And with that, I walk out the door. I hear the garage door opening, so I hurry out the front before I run into anyone. I set out for home.

Thomas calls me three times before I pick up.

"I don't want to be your boyfriend," is the first thing out of his mouth. I'm telling you, he's completely forgotten how to start a phone call.

"No one said anything about that."

There's nothing but silence on his end for a good ten seconds. I sit down in the grass. Don't ask me whose lawn I'm sitting on. I don't know.

He clears his throat. "I guess I'm saying it now."

"Okay."

"You want me to be your boyfriend."

"No I don't."

"Yes you do."

I swear, I'm inches away from ending the call. But you know what I do? I rein it in. I take a breath, and I ask him to explain himself.

"You'd say yes, if I asked you."

"So?"

"I don't want to be in a relationship when I go to college. Not with anybody, and that includes you." He pauses. "Maybe you most of all."

"What does that mean?"

"If I lose you, then I lose everything we have. All those years. Getting stuck in the bathroom together, singing along to JT, crying over my mom being gone—all of it, dude."

We both get quiet after he says that. Slowly, I'm starting to see his side of things. In true Thomas fashion, he's taken his sweet time arriving at what he meant to say all along. "You won't lose me," I say.

"I might," he says. "Us getting together right before college—is that really what you want?"

"I don't know," I say slowly. I decide I'd better make things clear. "But I do know I'm in love with you."

He starts to say something, but his voice gets caught in his throat. He starts again. "When Driggs found us the other night...remember what I did?"

I remember that moment and the feeling of his hand grabbing hold of mine so clearly, it's almost like he never let go. I tell him of course I do. He's quiet on the other end. That fucking silence between us keeps creeping back in. I don't normally mind it, but today it's freaking me out a little. "So what are we supposed to do?" I say.

"I wish I knew." He sighs. "I'm not ready to tell the whole world. I'm not ready to take that official step with you—the one that everybody just loves to latch onto and call the fucking greatest thing on earth." He pauses. "I don't know man...don't you ever feel like we already have each other?"

Believe me, there is such a thing as smoke-and-mirrors Thomas. I know that version of him well. But that's not who I'm talking to right now. He's saying these things because it's what he really feels. I know now that even if I do have a different way of looking at all this, it won't do either of us any good for me to try and get my way. So I say the only thing left to say: "Yeah...I do."

"I keep trying to do everything, all at once," he says. "I keep treating everything in my life like there's no time left, and I better just jump in headfirst. I've been doing that shit since my mom died. But you know what she would say. Come on, man, you know. She'd tell me there's all the time in the world."

"It's true," I tell him. "She would say that."

"I've got school coming up—and fuck, man, two-a-days start Wednesday, so I'll have to work evenings."

"I know."

"There's a lot going on in both our lives. A lot of changes about to happen."

"Yeah."

"Listen," he says. "I need to get my dad off my back. I think he knows I skipped work, so I better come up with a good excuse."

I doubt he's bullshitting me, since his dad gets cranky about those things. "Tell him you were hungover as fuck."

He laughs. "I'm sure that would go over well."

I tell him goodbye. After we hang up, I'm just sitting in the grass for a while. I lie back and look up at the sky. I think it's time to swallow my pride. Thomas is showing more maturity than I want to admit. He certainly didn't start things off that way, earlier in his room. But he got there eventually. There's nothing I can say to argue, to show him the right way of looking at things. It's clear his mind is already made up, and besides, I'm not too sure I'm the one who's right anymore.

But I keep getting this feeling in the pit of my stomach, and after thinking on it a while, I realize what's causing it. He's definitely right about one thing: I would have been his boyfriend. In a second. Maybe that shows I'm less mature than him, or maybe I'm just willing to trust that things will work out in the end. I trust him. Maybe I'm taking this as a sign that he doesn't trust me back.

People have a hard time trusting others. I've known that shit for a long time. You can hardly blame them. There's so much deceit going on in this world, it'll make you crazy if you let yourself think about it too much. A great example is this lady who's yelling at me to get off her grass right now. She doesn't trust that I'm only here to lie down and rest. So I employ the one decent option left at my disposal. I say sorry for bothering her, and I get up and leave. Because sometimes, that's all you can do.
17

It got to a point halfway through senior year where I was desperate to fill up a little free time, so I asked Ms. Nolan for another book to read, and she lent me a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I was pretty skeptical at first. The previous book she lent me was called Middlesex, and I was so moved by it that I just couldn't see how some crazy kids' book could measure up. Well, it didn't. But there is a scene in it that has stuck with me ever since.

It happens when Alice goes with this character called the Gryphon to visit another character called the Mock Turtle. This whole situation with the Mock Turtle is what I couldn't seem to get out of my head once I read it. First of all, the Gryphon tells Alice that the Mock Turtle is sad without having anything to be sad about which, believe me, I can relate to. Not much is said about the place the Mock Turtle lives, so I guess my imagination must have filled in the gaps. All it says is that he's sitting up on a little rocky ledge all alone, and I pictured that ledge along the shore of this endless gray sea, with these wisps of fog hanging low over the water. The water itself is still, just barely lapping at the edge. I didn't care very much for the back-and-forth that goes on between the Mock Turtle and Alice and the Gryphon, but I was straight-up struck by the way they leave him: all alone again in that vast quiet space, just singing sadly to himself for eternity. It occurred to me that he must be the most isolated character in the whole story, and suddenly I envied him. Who knows where the hell I got a feeling like that from—maybe I wasn't in a particularly good mood at the time. But I ended up holding onto that place I imagined for weeks, even months after I finished the book. Even now, I still feel this occasional longing for my own solitude in a vacant landscape next to a quiet gray sea. I don't know where you'd have to go to find a place like that in the real world. Maybe somewhere in the U.K., where Lewis Carroll—that's the author—is from. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if, like pretty much every other place in the book, it can't actually be found in reality.

Anyway, guess where I'm wishing I could be right now? It's not really that I'm feeling upset about anything. Truth be told, I'm not feeling much. I just want to be alone. After work, I borrow my mom's car and drive out into the desert. I shut off the engine and radio and sit up on the roof. The metal bows and pops beneath my weight. I stare out into the emptiness, listening to the sounds of the evening, trying to focus on the distant horizon and be present and all that. But it's just not doing it for me.

The sun gets low and I start driving home. I get a text from Thomas asking if I'll come over tonight before his schedule gets crazy. I drop off my mom's car. She's off work tonight, so I doubt she'll need it, but you never know with these things.

I'm walking quickly between my house and his, just to ensure that I have enough time with him. Dusk is turning to dark all around me. The warm wind kicks up and rustles the branches and leaves of the trees. It makes everything feel alive.

I enter the Chu household and find Alfred on the couch watching a movie. He nods his head as I pass. Damn, this kid is the king of silent greetings. I go into Thomas's room and close the door.

"What's up?" he says. He's at his desk, so I lie back on his bed and stare at the ceiling. He's reading about music again. He never quits with that stuff. One time he talked to me about rare time signatures for half an hour. Anyway, I lie on my back for a while, and he just keeps on reading, like it was all my idea to come over and interrupt his quiet evening alone. I prop myself up on my elbows and ask him to turn around. He spins slowly in his chair to face me.

"What's the plan?" I say.

"Just thought we could hang out. Things are going to get crazy tomorrow."

"I know."

He's just staring me up and down for a minute. "When the fuck did you get so tan?"

I shrug. "Just happened gradually, I guess."

"Jesus, dude."

"Nothing compared to you."

He laughs. "I know. I look like I've been working the fields."

He has this thin white t-shirt on. He's flexing a little. He knows I'm watching him. My god, he's looking huge tonight—and it's true, his skin is getting very dark. I think he's secretly proud of that complexion. His dad is always trying to get him to stay out of the sun, but he won't do it. I swear, by the time he gets up to Seattle, he won't look like anyone else around.

"When do you leave?" I ask.

"In a month, yesterday."

Somehow I had it in my head that he was staying in town a lot longer than me. But that's less than a week after I leave. I don't say anything, just roll over on my stomach. I bury my face in his blanket and sheets. I breathe in.

"These correspondence practices are shit, compared to the real thing," I hear him say. "I need to go up there and get practicing with the team. I'm dying down here."

I lift myself, crawl over and scoot up against his headboard. "I'm excited for you."

"Thanks."

"I'll find somewhere to stream the games."

"If you want," he says. He's doing his best to sound bored.

"Of course I do."

He's giving me the strangest look. I decide to take a page from his book and cover my face with a pillow. I feel him slowly climb onto the bed and crawl over to me. He grabs the pillow and pulls it aside. His face is about a foot away from mine. "What are you getting up to, Niko?"

"Hmm? Nothing."

He moves in a little closer. Our lips are just about touching. "Is it too soon?" he whispers.

"I don't know."

His palms rest on each side of my shoulders. I find myself sort of boxed in by his forearms and biceps. He's got one knee planted between my legs. I watch that beautiful face flush with blood, staring at me expectantly. The heat is coming off him in waves.

I swear to god, sometimes I still can't believe it's all real.

He moves in another inch and kisses me. He's all soft and tender about it, like he's taking his time remembering the way my lips feel against his. He pulls back. "Damn, you need to shave."

"Do I?"

He cocks his head to the side. He's thinking about it. "Nope." He moves in again, turning back into that playful, ferocious kid I grew up with. He's really letting me have it, getting his tongue involved and all that. He pulls my t-shirt up over my head, then removes his own. I always have to hold my breath for a second or two when he does that. I reach out and feel his chest. He straddles my waist and rides me a little bit. I ask him what he's up to and he says he's just playing around. I tell him he should slow down or I'll lose my shit.

The TV turns off in the living room. We freeze. There's not a lot to worry about, since Thomas's family doesn't mess around with closed doors as a rule, but still, we wait until he's shut in his room to be sure the coast is clear.

We strip down to nothing. I can't get enough of the sight of him naked. It's like it's all brand new to me, every single time. He returns to his position on top of me. I warn him again that he needs to back off or it won't last. He just laughs, scoots down and takes both of us in one hand. We barely fit in his grasp. He starts pleasuring both of us at the same time, just like he would pleasure himself alone. That shit only takes about ten seconds. At the end of it, I'm pretty lost in the afterglow. I realize slowly that I'm covered in both our jizz. He gives me a couple more small kisses and leaves to grab an old t-shirt. He insists on cleaning me up himself.

All night, we drift in and out of each other's arms. We wind up pretty close when my alarm goes off in the morning. I have to push him off of me.

"So early," he says. His voice is super deep and scratchy.

"I know." I'm just sitting on the edge of his bed for a minute. "I should probably shower before I go."

"Niko?"

I look over my shoulder at him.

"We need to be careful not to get too attached."

Instantly, I'm wishing he hadn't said it. Don't ask me why—I just don't believe it's something that needs to be said out loud. But this is Thomas we're talking about, after all.

"Shouldn't be a problem," I say, "with you being so busy and all that." I hope I don't sound bitter. I figure it's early enough that he'll probably just assume I'm tired. "Good luck at practice."

"Thanks," he says. He grabs his phone from the nightstand. "Two more hours of freedom."

"Use that shit wisely."

He smiles at me, throws his phone on the floor and pulls the blanket over his head.

—

Before I know it, it's the end of the week. Time just starts slipping away, even more than it already was. I go through a few days where I'm feeling anxious about that fact, but then I let it go. I'm spending most of my evenings going on runs or working out in my room. I even purchase my own personal vat of protein powder, which I hope to get through before I leave. I read a couple books Ms. Nolan recommended to me. Whatever time I have left over generally goes to Netflix or porn. And you know what? After a while, I start feeling content with the solitary lifestyle. Maybe it's because I know it's only temporary.

To my knowledge, Thomas only has one practice on Saturdays and nothing going on Sundays, so I'm all but certain I'll hear from him over the weekend. But I don't. Who knows what the hell his excuse might be. I guess he just didn't feel like talking. I text him Sunday night before bed asking about his weekend, and all he texts back is, "I squared things up with Madison."

I send him a couple question marks.

"Her and I talked yesterday. She reached out and we got coffee downtown. She's doing okay."

"Did she say much about the whole thing?"

There's a long pause, and then he says, "She said at least it was you, and not some other girl."

"Okay."

"She said Lexie and her have been pretty inseparable."

"I'm glad they have each other."

"You might expect her to drop you a line at some point."

"Lexie?"

"Yeah."

"Is that what Madison said?"

"No, that's just the impression I got."

—

That next week, on some bullshit Wednesday evening, I book my airline ticket. After the extra baggage fees and all that, it ends up being expensive as hell. But believe me, it's the best money I ever spent. It's literally my ticket out of here. I burn through an hour or two studying the flight times, the different gates and my route through the airport in Seattle during my layover. I read about customs and everything you're supposed to do and say, since I've never been out of the country before. I read over my study permit, which I applied for back when I first got my admission letter. I look through my passport, which is only about six months old, just checking to make sure it all looks the way it's supposed to. It's still early in the evening and I'm feeling fidgety, so I walk to the Ustick branch of the public library to print off the tickets. They don't even need to be printed, it just feels nice to put everything together in a folder. By the time I get back, my mom has already left for her shift. It's all right. I wasn't totally ready to tell her anyway. Still, I find myself wishing I had someone to share the moment with.

I wish Thomas hadn't said that thing about Lexie contacting me. Even as I read the words, I knew they probably weren't true, but I guess it still gave me a little hope that something might go down. Anyway, I think if she was going to reach out the same way Madison did to Thomas, she would have done it already. I know it's selfish of me to expect anything at all from her, but still, I can't help feeling a little jealous.

Thomas and I text back and forth a little on Thursday night. Then he calls me. I tell him all about buying the ticket and it's clear he's trying to work up some excitement for me. He just sounds so fucking tired. He says football practices are going well, but they're insanely rigorous, and he can barely stand up by the time his half-shift at work ends in the evening. Personally, I think it sounds like a horseshit way to live, but it seems to suit him well enough.

When my phone goes off the next evening around six o'clock, I fully expect a text from him. But that's not what I get. Instead, Lexie's name shows up, and you'd better believe I'm surprised. Jesus Christ, I could wake up with a third arm and I wouldn't be this surprised.

"Hey Niko," it says. Then another comes in that reads, "How are you?"

"I'm okay," I say back.

"I've had a lot of time to think about things."

"Okay."

"I'm still not completely over it."

"I know."

"But I wanted to check in."

"Okay."

That's all she says. I'm sitting there at my little desk with my phone clutched tight in my hands. She's not saying anything else, and soon I'm feeling pretty goddamn inclined to throw it out the window. Instead I type, "Can we meet?" and hit send.

It takes her another minute to get back to me. "Yeah. I'll come by?"

"I'll meet you outside."

So I'm just kind of slumped at the bottom of those concrete steps for a while, until finally her little car rattles up into the visitor spot. She doesn't look all that unhappy behind the wheel, which gets me feeling hopeful. Just seeing her face again is enough. That's all I need. She gets out and gives me the shortest hug I think we've ever shared. She asks if I want to go for a walk. Instead of leaving the apartment complex, we venture deeper in, all the way to the back fence, which we climb over. There's a little dirt lane that goes along the canal behind it. She's already familiar with this spot because I've brought her here a few times. As for me, I've been coming here on my own since I was five years old.

We walk twenty or thirty feet down the lane to the bridge, which is just a big old rusty pipe about a foot in diameter spanning the canal. The water is drifting by low and slow beneath us. I bet I've crossed it a thousand times—maybe more. There are a couple small shade trees on the other side, lined up against the back of an old warehouse.

Anyway, we get settled in the grass between them with our backs against the cinderblock wall, and I decide I should let her be the one to steer the conversation. At first she's just watching the water. Then she turns to me.

"For a while, I was so mad at you, because of how dumb you must've thought I was."

"I never thought you were dumb."

She sighs. "I just couldn't see it any other way. I kept thinking how you must've known you could get away with it, because I wasn't smart enough to find out."

"I didn't think I could get away with it," I say. "I was terrified you were going to find out. Every fucking second."

"But I didn't." She looks over. "You had to tell me."

I don't know what to say. I just give her a single nod.

"It's not my fault I didn't know."

"Of course it isn't."

"It's not my fucking job to be a detective. It was yours not to fuck around."

I look down. I keep my voice low and quiet. "I know. I'm so sorry, Lexie. For everything."

"You'd better be."

I look over at her. She doesn't look mad, but she's not smiling, either.

"Anyway," she says, "Madison made it sound like you and Thomas aren't exactly running into each other's arms."

"No," I say quickly. "It didn't turn out that way."

"That surprised me."

I pause, then say, "He never wanted to replace her with me."

She's just studying me now. I get intimidated pretty fast when she looks at me that way. "And what did you want?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Jesus, Niko, of course it matters."

I look away from her. I just can't handle it. "I never thought he would replace you. I swear, I never thought of it that way."

"But what did you want?"

"I don't know." I wedge my heel against a crumbled piece of concrete and kick. It rolls down the grassy slope and splashes into the water. "He said he's worried it might ruin our friendship. Now I'm thinking maybe he's right."

"Niko."

I look right at her. Her eyes are telling me I'd better answer the question she asked instead of one I made up. "I wanted him," I say. "Obviously. I still do. I want him so bad, it hurts—and I know he wants me, too. There's this powerful, raw feeling pulling us together. It's all just so messed up because we're...I don't know, we've got all these years behind us, pretending it wasn't there...and I know exactly what's going on with him—he's scared."

"Of course he is."

"Well, I wish he wasn't."

"Come on, Niko, we're all a little scared." She pauses. "You know Madison was scared to death of losing him. She even told me a few times, before any of this came up. A lot of people break up around this time."

"I know."

She takes off her flip-flops and grips the grass with her toes. "Look, I know you and I weren't destined to be together forever, even before all this."

I give her kind of a sad look.

She bumps her shoulder into mine and says, "It's okay. It's probably for the best. We had some fun while it lasted." She rests her head against the concrete. "I'm not mad anymore. I'm really not. It's just that I really liked you, Niko." She starts tearing up. "I thought you were the sexiest guy I'd ever seen, and so kind, and smart."

"Smart enough," I say.

She laughs a little, through her tears. "I wasn't thinking too much about the future, to be honest. I just knew I wanted you now." She hides her face, which just about kills me. She wipes her eyes, then finally looks at me again. "And now I can't have you anymore."

"Lexie."

She leans her head on my shoulder and takes my hand in hers. "I need to ask something of you—to make up for all this."

"Anything."

"If I get pissed again, and I don't want to talk, you have to respect that."

"Of course."

"But there's another thing, on top of that. I don't know how shit's going to play out on the east coast. I hear people can be cold over there. If I ever need a friend—if I need someone to call, you have to be there for me, any time, day or night."

I smile at her. I'm just so goddamn relieved at what she's saying. I'm telling you, she's too good to me. She's always been that way.
18

Just like that, a wave of the magic wand and there's only two weeks left. I fly out on August 4th, a Sunday morning that will look just like this one. No need for a meteorologist to predict the weather around here. Sunny, hot, dry, repeat. Yesterday was a rest day for Thomas, so I didn't bother him much. Toward the end of the day we did start texting each other quite a bit, which amounted to a barrage of old inside jokes and stupid emojis that doesn't bear repeating here. But it left me missing him like crazy, in kind of a preemptive way, and I fell asleep in a pretty emotional state.

Now that a new day has dawned, I jump back in and ask what he's up to.

"Not sure," he says.

"Can I get a ride to the airport?"

He sends me about fifty question marks.

"I mean on the 4th. My mom says she can't. She asked if you could."

"What the fuck, don't scare me like that dude," he says. "Sure."

"Thanks."

"Fucked up that your mom doesn't want to be there though."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Nothing dude."

I go pour myself some cereal. I'm doing everything as quietly as I can so I don't disturb my mom. As I eat, I sit there and watch some dumb shit on my phone. When I'm done, I text him again. "So can you hang out today?"

An entire hour later, he says, "I don't know, man. My dad has me helping clean the house. It's boring as fuck."

"Let me know if you want help."

He doesn't say anything back, which honestly doesn't bother me all that much. An hour or two later, I go on a run. I shower and then start thinking about what I'm going to pack, when the time comes. Early in the afternoon, I get another surprise text. This one is from none other than the OG herself, Ms. Nolan. It's written sort of like an email, which people her age just love to do for some reason.

"Hello, Niko," it says. "I hope you've been having a great summer. I figured I would try and catch you before you leave for the Great White North. Time got away from me, and now I find myself heading down to Nevada to visit my mother tomorrow morning. I'll be staying there for a couple of weeks. Is there any chance you're free for dinner at my house tonight? If so, let me know and I'll text you my address. I hope to hear from you."

I spend a couple minutes thinking about what to say, partly because it seems like such a bizarre thing to do all of a sudden—visiting a teacher at their home, eating a meal with them, the whole thing. Obviously I'm going to say yes. I just don't want my response to sound like complete trash.

"Hi Ms. Nolan," I type. "Yes, I'm free for dinner at your house tonight. Please let me know what time and where to be. I'll look forward to it."

She sounds happy in her reply. And just like that, I've got some evening plans that I couldn't have predicted in a million years. You should see me, standing in front of the mirror deciding what to wear, thinking about what kind of smart or clever conversations we might end up having. Anyway, you can bet I shut that shit down fast. Going into a situation with particular expectations in mind always seems to get me into trouble.

She lives in this small, well-kept house in kind of a shabby neighborhood off Maple Grove. It takes me about half an hour to walk there. I ring the doorbell and when she opens the door, she smiles in a very genuine way, tells me she's missed me and gives me a long hug. I'm pretty taken aback by that. As always, she's super quick with her movements. I see her brown eyes scan the street over my shoulder.

"Where's your car?" she asks.

I'm still feeling a little nervous, so all I do is shrug.

She invites me in. "Did you walk here?"

"Yeah."

"Do you live nearby?"

"Just off Cole, near Fairview."

"That's not close at all. I could've picked you up."

The way I see it, I'd definitely rather walk than ride in a teacher's car. Just taking my first steps into her home is strange enough. A car ride sounds to me like some next-level shit.

Her house is simple and functional. She has a lot of books, and not so many pictures of family or anything like that. She's got a couple of cats, too, which makes me feel more at ease. My mom and I had a black one named Wilbur for a few years, but he ran away when I was ten. I've always liked cats quite a bit.

I have a theory about what happened to Wilbur. He used to follow me far out along the banks of that canal. I think he set out on his own one day and got about as far away as he'd ever been. Then I think he stopped, glanced back in the direction he came from, and right then and there, decided he was never going back. That's all anyone has to do.

Ms. Nolan is being such a good host that I'm feeling kind of undeserving of the whole situation. She has me sit at her small kitchen table, then sets down two bowls of salad with arugula and some other stuff in it. I'm really glad I ended up reading a few of the books she had recommended. It turns out we have quite a bit to say to each other. Soon I'm feeling completely comfortable, since it feels exactly like all of our old discussions in her classroom after school. I'm ashamed to say I hardly pay attention to the main course. Once we're done eating, she starts asking a few of the hard-hitting questions: how I'm feeling about going away, if I'm doing okay at home, all that. I knew this shit would happen sooner or later, and I came prepared. With Ms. Nolan, honesty is always the best policy. I give her the rundown on my home life, then end by saying I'm feeling nothing but excitement about leaving for school.

"That's great to hear." She pauses, then says, "I hope you and Thomas find a way to stay close."

It's the first she's brought him up, and for some reason it's pretty jarring hearing her say his name. I can't help but feel a little suspicious, like she somehow knows everything.

"We'll be okay," I say.

"It's quite a bond the two of you have. Friendships like that are rare."

There's this short pause where I'm looking down at the table, sort of in agony. It's the kind of feeling I'm not always so good at hiding, and she's especially good at picking up on.

"Everything okay with you two?" she asks.

I look up at her. "Yeah, we're all right. Just a hard time for us."

"I'm sure it is."

I realize it's too late to abandon ship. It's like I'm pulling some kind of ripcord each time I say this shit out loud. I truly long for a time when I can bring it up like it's no big deal. But if anyone is worth telling, it's Ms. Nolan. "Thomas and I started getting closer than regular friends do. Don't worry, we ended things with the girls over it, so that shit's all over—that stuff, I mean. It's all over." I take a breath.

She just keeps gently nodding and smiling at me, like I'm telling her my weekend plans.

"Anyway," I continue slowly, "we got closer than we've ever been. We really care about each other. But he says he doesn't want to be my boyfriend. Not right now, anyway."

"Maybe that's for the best."

I'm kind of surprised she's being so blunt. I'm not sure what to say. "Yeah...maybe."

"It's the kind of scenario most of us only dream about—falling in love with your best friend and finding out the feeling's mutual."

"I know."

"There's a lot of energy behind that."

I sigh. "It really feels that way."

"If it's meant to be, it'll sustain itself. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," I say. But the truth is that I don't know anything about it. All I can do is hope she's right.

It feels like she can really sense my pain. Those kind eyes of hers are sort of full of concern. "I don't want you to go thinking you'll lose him, if you let it rest for now," she says. "In my experience, that's not how relationships work."

I'm tempted to ask her what exactly her experience is. I don't know anything about her life—not really. I just know how she feels about things, which is only part of what makes up a whole person, if you think about it. But I don't ask her. I just try and listen. If what she says is true, if relationships really can be put on hold, then maybe this won't be the last chance I get.

I don't stay too late. It's probably around eight o'clock when she mentions how early her flight is the next morning, and anyway, I was raised to know better than to outstay my welcome. But I do ask her one more thing before I go, since I've been having so much trouble putting it out of my mind. "How would you take it," I say slowly, "if someone told you they were expecting big things from you?"

Ms. Nolan gives me this crooked little smile I've only ever seen a few times since I've known her. "Just between you and me," she says, "I'd tell them to go fuck themselves."

Man, she gets quite a laugh out of me when she says that.

Later on, I'm just minding my own business, walking east on Fairview and chasing a pretty long shadow, when I get a text from Thomas. It's like clockwork, I'm telling you. It's amazing how I can go days at a time barely talking to anyone, and then suddenly I can't get a moment alone.

"I'm sorry for not texting you back earlier," he says. "I really wanna see you tonight."

The apology is the part that surprises me. I honestly hadn't taken any offense. "It's fine," I say. "I want to see you too."

So I get to his place and find him in his room, as usual, in the middle of his bed with his arms and legs spread out like he's ready to make a snow angel. He's got the stereo turned up and some kind of ethereal eighties-sounding music completely fills the room. His football shit is strewn around everywhere, just plastered in grass stains. I know for a fact he heard me come in, but he's pretending he didn't, just lying there with his eyes closed. Jesus Christ, he's the weirdest person sometimes. I ask him what the music is and he says, "It's Deep Breakfast," as if I'm supposed to know what the hell that shit is.

He gets up and turns it off. "Sorry for ghosting you earlier."

I shrug.

He looks at me for one or two seconds. "You want to go somewhere?"

"A drive?"

"I was thinking we'd walk somewhere."

"Sure."

We start walking without any thought to where we're headed. That's a quintessential aspect of our friendship, right there. Most of the time it turns out we had the same destination in mind anyway. Tonight is no different. We say very little as we journey west, skimming the edge of the school grounds before passing it by completely. The sun is down by the time we get to McMillan. The unlit vastness of the nature reserve spreads before us like the great rift. There's a second where I'm leaning against the wooden fence, feeling like if I enter the void that lies beyond it, I might never come back out again. I'm not messing with you—that actually feels like a real possibility.

So when Thomas starts leading the way towards the entrance, I actually hesitate for half a second before following him. Let's be real—I'm only pretending I have any scrap of real agency left. The truth is that tonight, I would follow him anywhere. We wind between the brush, then follow a side trail that drops steeply between a dense pocket of small trees. We reemerge into the black night near some cattails and tall grass at the edge of the water. I look up into the cloudless sky and realize there's no moon. He disappears into the black just a few feet in front of me. The sound of his feet crunching along the gravel path is the only way for me to know he's there. I follow him farther in. We make our way into the marsh on a small wooden footbridge and stop where it forks. I watch the outlines of his form as he sits, and I sit next to him below the rail, right next to the edge of the water. His phone's flashlight bursts to life like a tiny sun. He sets it face-up on the wood and our surroundings glow in dim white light. He pulls that infamous metal flask from absolutely nowhere and offers it to me.

The flask is heavy, filled to the cap. I take three full swigs, hand it back and immediately roll onto my side. I had too much. I'm going to throw up in the water. It takes all of my will just to keep it down. Slowly, the urge passes. I look up at him. His face is lit starkly from below. The ridges of his jaw and cheekbones are cast in harsh light. The wells of his eyes swim in shadows. Just like that, he's turned into a beautiful ghost.

"You okay?" he asks me. His used-up voice is reduced to a rasp as he tries to keep it low.

I nod.

He spends some quality time with the flask, then closes it and lays it beside his phone. We lie down beside each other across the wooden planks. He turns off the light and we stare up at the stars. It's all we seem to do these days.

"I had a dream we got old together," he says.

I think about the words. My mind rearranges them until they mean nothing. I feel his hand brush against mine in the darkness. Our fingers interlock. The warmth of all that whisky spreads through my chest. "I'm afraid we're going to lose each other," I say, "and then that won't happen."

"What won't happen?"

"Us getting old together."

"Is that what you want?"

I roll my head to the side and barely make out the soft ridge of his nose. "Do you?"

He pauses. "I don't know. It was just in my dream." He won't let go of my hand.

"Say we can be together," I tell him.

"No," he says.

I hear him lift himself. Gradually, he surrounds me. His palm thuds against the wood near my shoulder. He suspends himself over me for a few seconds before letting part of his weight rest on top of me. He's breathing hard. His cheek rests against mine.

"Thomas."

"What?"

"Call me your boyfriend. Promise me you won't fuck anyone else. We'll save ourselves for each other while we're apart."

"No."

He's got me locked in with his body. I can barely move. He's hard against me now. He breathes out in a shudder and kisses my neck.

"Why not?" I hear myself ask.

"I'm afraid we'll lose each other if we do that."

I hook my arms up around his broad back and squeeze. "I promise you, we won't."

He scoffs. "Don't fucking make promises like that, dude." He rises up to his knees. He's still straddling me as he sips off the old flask. "Besides, that's not the only reason, and you know it."

"Give me another, then."

"I told you I want to do it alone," he says. "I'll finally be playing for a big team up there. Come on, man, you know how long I've wanted this. I don't want any distractions. Sorry to say it, but that includes you."

"So what are we doing?" I ask, clamped between his bulking thighs, just broadcasting the question into the night like it's meant for all the other wild creatures lurking in this place, and not just him.

"I want to take you again," he says.

"Then do it."

"We don't have anything to make it comfortable."

"Give me the flask."

"Niko."

"Give it to me."

I feel the cold metal rest against my palm. What I do is, I take three more long swigs, just like before—maybe even a little more than before, and I give it back to him. I don't get sick this time. I wait about ten more seconds, and then I tell him, "You can have me."

I feel him tugging down my pants. I hear his breathing. He pauses for a moment to take a drink or two of his own. And then he comes back to me. I guess I'm already pretty trashed because the pain feels blunt and removed somehow, like it's being described to me by a quiet voice in my ears. That's where the pain gathers—my ears. They start to burn and pulsate, full of blood. He pauses when, despite all that friction, little by little, he's put himself all the way inside. He's so close to my face that I can see his eyes clearly in the night. They're asking if I'm okay. I let my eyes answer back.

He makes these small movements, in and out, but that voice telling me about the pain—it isn't so quiet anymore. I reach up and grab the bulk of his arm. "It hurts too much," I say.

"It's okay," he says. "I'm already there."

He whimpers and I feel him let go inside me. I reach down and let go all over myself.

After, we're just sitting there in the pitch black on the wooden planks of the bridge. Our clothes are back on. His finger slowly traces a circle over and over on my knee.

"Remember when we looked in a mirror?" he asks.

"What?"

"We looked in a mirror together, for a long time, remember that? We were ten or twelve."

"Oh yeah."

"We kept saying how we looked so different from each other. Our eyes...our skin...our hair."

"Yeah."

"Do we still?"

"I don't know."

"Why did we look so different?"

I spend a minute thinking about what the hell he's trying to ask me. I can't guess how many additional sips of whisky he's managed to sneak in the dark, but one thing is clear: He's at least as trashed as I am. "We just did," I say.

"Other people think we look different from each other."

"That's true."

"Well, I don't think so anymore."

"Me neither."

"I bet if we looked in a mirror now, we'd look the same as each other. You'd look like me. And I'd look like you."

"I bet we would."

A slow, heavy wind slips down into the bowl of the reserve and surrounds us both.

"Where are all the fucking mosquitos?" he says.

"I don't know. Must be a dead year."

"I'm so fucking tired," he says. "Might as well stay here all night." His voice is slurring. "Niko?"

"What?"

"I don't want you to leave, if I stay here all night."

"I won't."

"You'll stay with me?"

I feel myself tipping to the side. His big shoulder catches me, and I sink into his warmth. He puts his arm around me. "Yeah, Thomas, I'll stay with you."
19

I really hate being hungover at work. Trust me, I'll avoid it at almost any cost. And yet here I am, propped against the edge of the serving window in a beat-up pair of sunglasses, sipping water, doing all I can to fight off these waves of nausea...so I guess that's just some bullshit life throws at you from time to time.

We slept all night by the water. The mosquitoes never came—a miracle by any measure, if you ask me. My neck and left shoulder are killing me, due to the six hours of drunken slumber spent on my side. The whole reason I stayed on my side was, it got cold after the first hour or two, so I kept an arm around him just as he kept one around me. That's about the only reason we didn't freeze our asses off.

Let me be honest with you for just a second: Last night sort of felt like an ending. From the curious chain of events that transpired to the crazy vibe of that entire pitch-black scene—all of it held this air of finality in my mind, especially as I reflected on it during my long walk to work. An ending to what, exactly, I don't fucking know. That's what I'm trying to figure out during my shift, which slows down so much by late-morning that I'm tempted to close up early, go home and sleep the whole thing off. Man, Marlon would just kill me if I did that. Maybe it's the hangover, but I'm feeling a little feverish, and the window unit seems to be having trouble keeping up with the heat outside. I lie down flat on the concrete floor, listening carefully in case any rogue vehicle happens to pull up to the window.

After a few minutes of studying the cobwebs that span the wood beams of the ceiling, I fish my phone from my pocket. There's a fresh text from Thomas that says, "I can't believe you stayed with me all night."

"You would've frozen to death if I didn't."

"Doubt it."

"What's up?"

"I want to know if you're okay after what we did."

"I'm fine."

"Did I hurt you too much?"

"I would've said so if you did."

"Okay. So you're good?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

He takes a long time typing his reply, which finally shows up as the following: "It's just that I would understand if you didn't want to do that anymore, seeing as I want to stay just friends. I know I can't have it all."

I think on it a minute. "I could've said no."

"Could you though?" He follows it up with a winking face.

"Shut the fuck up."

"We're good then?"

"We're good," I reply.

You want to know the truth, Thomas Chu? We're better than we've ever been. Last night, you were clear with me, open and honest, and whether or not I agree with you is beside the point. You'll get nothing but respect from me, for boldly knowing what it is you're after. You'll always have my respect, Thomas, no matter what becomes of us. I got a strange feeling back when we first started on our walk. I sensed that, for better or worse, a confirmation would soon arrive. And now, with a clearer mind, I realize what it was that came to an end last night: a hope that I'd be calling you mine in this new life I'll soon embark on. No boasting to newfound allies of my handsome, all-American football-star boyfriend just south of the border. No discovering the thrill and the agony of saving ourselves, our bodies, for some future moment in time when we could be alone together again.

Look, I know the image is overplayed, but I start thinking back on all that quiet hoping like a little flame that got weaker and weaker before suddenly going out. No quick hiss, not even a pencil-thin trail of smoke—just dark, silent and still.

Don't tell a soul, but I fall asleep for a whole hour on the cool concrete floor after that. I sleep so deeply that when I wake up, I'm confused, completely unaware of my surroundings. I'll never know if any customers showed up while I was out, but I guess if they did, it would rank pretty low on a list of all the bad things I've ever done.

On Tuesday morning, I wake up to a long text that Lexie sent the night before. It reads, "I wanted you to know that I'm leaving tomorrow. I'll be staying with my aunt and uncle in Philadelphia for ten days, then taking a train to New York. My mom thinks it would be a good idea for me to get out of here early, and I agree. I still catch myself thinking of you and me a lot. So many moments we shared no longer seem legitimate. Madison feels the same way about Thomas. She and I decided those memories have not become meaningless, they just mean something else now. If they are no longer comforting, at least they are educational. I don't mean that as a burn. I just want to be clear about the effects of what has happened. I will always care for you, Niko. Please do not reply to this text. I'll know you've read it, which is all I want from you right now. Best of luck on your adventure. I'm excited for my own. I promise to check in someday soon, from the other side. Until then."

I read it through three or four times. It's a good thing she specifically asked me not to reply, because I would have tried, selfishly, to comfort her. It wouldn't have worked, of course. It wouldn't have been anything she needed to hear. Because it's impossible now for me to make her feel better about what I've done. That is my greatest punishment of all.

Thomas asks me if I'll come over after work. I'm pretty surprised, since we've been seeing so little of each other during the week. Once I get over there, I witness first-hand just how much those two-a-days have been breaking him down. He looks kind of dreamily up at me as I enter. He's curled near the end of his bed in a near-fetal position with an overstuffed pillow beneath his head. There's a massive bruise on his arm and he's sipping on a faded water bottle.

"Did you skip work tonight?" I say.

He nods, then slowly closes his eyes.

I sit down noisily on his desk chair, straight across from him. "What's up?"

"Oh, not much. Just thought we could hang out, and...I don't know..." His voice sort of trails off.

"Maybe you just need to sleep."

He opens his eyes. "You don't know what I need."

I pause. "So you called me over just for that? Are you serious?"

He sits up. "What? No, dude. Of course not. Did it ever occur to you that I might just want you around?"

"I don't see why," I say.

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"I just don't know what we even talk about anymore."

He lies back down. "We talk about stuff."

"Not like we used to. The only thing keeping the conversation going now is reminiscing about old times."

He crosses his arms. "We used to talk about football. A lot. Even after you stopped playing. We never talk about it anymore. You don't even ask about my practices."

"That's because I don't like football anymore."

He looks offended right after I say it. I watch him think it over. Gradually, his face softens again. It's amazing how fast he gets over certain things. "All right dude, look." He heaves himself back up to a sitting position, tucks a foot under his leg. You can tell the whole motion goes completely against his will. "If you could say one thing to me right now, without worrying what I might think, what would it be?"

Ask and you shall receive, Thomas Chu. I decide I'd better go all in. I can already feel a wave of emotion starting to form, so I figure I should try and get the words out before it arrives. "I know I need to let go of us being together—I know that. But Thomas..." I look him dead in the eyes. "It's the hardest fucking thing I've ever had to do." Then you know what I do? I lean forward on the chair and bury my face in my hands. I hear him repeat my name a few times, but I stay frozen like that. The simple act of sitting up, of facing him and the world again—I just don't think I can do it.

I feel a thud through the floor as he climbs off the bed. He kneels down beside me, puts his arms around my shoulders and sinks his head into my neck. "Come on, man. You act like it's forever or something."

"I don't even...I don't know what the fuck that's supposed to mean." I'm really struggling to get the words out. "How do I know it's not?"

He sighs against me. "All I said was that I need to be alone at this point in my life. That's all it is, I swear. Why can't you trust me?"

"Why can't you trust me?" That's right, I turn his words back on him. "You know how I'd support you. And you know I'd leave you alone when you needed to be alone."

"It just wouldn't be a good fit. Not right now. I'm not ready for it."

Slowly, I lift my head out of my hands. He's just lightly kissing my neck. "Thomas," I say, my voice still shuddering, "you can't kiss me like that anymore, okay?"

I watch him stand up, then back away. He has the saddest look on his face. It's a look that tells me he knows exactly what he's giving up. Suddenly, he reaches over me and grabs his laptop from the desk. I'm just kind of hunkered there in the chair, wondering what the hell he could possibly be up to. He sits cross-legged in the middle of his bed with the computer in his lap. He's just typing away, keeping to himself like I've dropped off the earth or something.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm writing a contract."

"What for?"

"For us."

"What does it say?"

He doesn't answer. He spends another minute or two just hammering away, and by the end of it, I'm getting a little annoyed. Then he hands me his laptop.

The contract says: "I, Thomas Qingyu Chu, hereby promise to share a place of residence with Nikola Ivan Savic for the entire duration of the Summer of 2020." He's even left two empty lines below where we can sign it.

I look up at him. "I like this."

"Thought you would."

"You're serious?"

"Fuck, dude, how could I make it any more serious? Check it for errors. I can't have you backing out on some bullshit technicality."

I laugh, give it a once-over, then send it out to the printer in the hall. As I step back into his room with the paper, I say, "How's it going to work?"

"We'll get an apartment."

"In Boise, or up there?"

He shrugs. "We'll figure it out. I promise."

You'd better believe we both sign that shit. Then we print out a second copy and sign that one, too, so we each have our own. I fold mine and put it in my wallet for safekeeping.

I start losing him not long after. He manages to drag himself off the bed one more time to give me a hug. He hangs on for a little while. It's clear he's not quite ready to let me go. But he does anyway, and I take a slow, steady walk home, feeling pretty much on top of the world.

What can I say about the next few days? They come and go. I work, and I work out. I try to expand my mind by reading books. The sun blazes outside my window and everything's fine. My mom's being touchy as hell, but what else is new? She's just trying her best in this crazy world.

I've told you before that Thomas's mom died in the month of August. It happened on the 8th. Each year on that date, his family drops everything to mourn her death. I've heard all kinds of opinions about what a tradition like that is supposed to look like. A lot of people seem to have the idea that celebrating someone's life is better than continuing to be sad. Well, the Chu family doesn't see it that way. It's a pretty somber affair. Anyway, I've known all summer that I would be in Canada by the time the date rolled around. I had already made peace with the idea of not being included this year. So you can imagine my surprise when, on Saturday at noon, Thomas invites me over the next day to do the whole thing one more time around.

"It's not the 8th," I reply. "It's not even August yet."

"Does it matter?"

"I don't know."

"She would have wanted you there."

"Okay."

He tells me I can show up whenever I want. He says they're going to start things around ten in the morning. I figure it's best to give them some time to themselves, so I don't leave for their house until around ten-thirty.

I walk in on one of those scenes where you can immediately feel the weight of it all. The air is thick with grief. Alfred's stuffed himself into the corner of the couch. His eyes are red. Thomas is sitting upright on the middle cushion with his hands folded, looking solemnly at the floor. Their dad stands with his back to me, a hand against the wall for support. Everyone seems lost in thought. But slowly, they all turn to look at me. Thomas's dad motions for me to go over to the little area they have set up. It's just a card table with a large photo of her in the middle, propped in a wooden frame, surrounded by flowers picked from the yard. She planted the bulbs of some of them herself, not all that long ago. Four large red candles are lined up among the flowers. Three of them are lit. I grab up the matchbox, take one out, strike it, then light the last candle. I pause for a minute or two and look at the photograph. She's alone in it. It's an impromptu one they had done in a studio during a family shoot. Her eyes and her smile are so bright and healthy and full of life that for a second, it feels impossible that she's gone. "Thank you," I whisper to the photo.

This next part might seem a little weird, but you have to remember that I've done this for a few years now. I bow for a few seconds to show my respect. Then I say out loud, "When I first met you, I was a very small, very scared little kid. I don't think I even knew how scared of the world I was. But you knew." I clear my throat. "You held me in your arms once, like I was one of your own sons. It only happened one time, but I still remember. We were watching an old movie at night. I was really nervous as I approached you and looked up into your caring eyes. When I reached for you, you didn't even hesitate. You helped me onto your lap just like I had seen you do with Thomas and Alfred many times. You wrapped your arms around me and held me. I was seven years old. Maybe I was getting too big for that kind of thing, but I just wanted to know what it felt like." Slowly, I run my fingers along the edge of the frame. "Anyway, I'll never forget." I bow again. And then I completely lose it. I have to brace myself against the table to stay on my feet, I'm crying so hard. Then I feel someone's big arms surround me.

"It's all right," Thomas whispers in my ear. "It's okay."

I feel like I could sink so deep into his embrace, I might just disappear forever. I look at her face one more time. She looks so young in the photo—younger than I ever remember her being—and so much like him. I thank her one more time, just in my head this time. It's because of her that his arms surround me now.

After lunch, Thomas and Alfred and I are lying in the shade under the oak tree on the front lawn.

"It feels different every year," Thomas is saying. "Not any less sad. Just different."

"That's true," I say.

We're mostly just going on about nothing. Alfred stays quiet the whole time. Finally, Thomas punches him in the arm. "What's up, Freddie?"

"Not much," says Alfred.

Thomas sighs into the hot, dry breeze. "I can't wait to fucking get out of here."

I don't say anything back, but I swear to god I was just thinking the same thing.

"Don't rub it in," Alfred says.

"You're not ready to leave," says Thomas. "You're too young to feel the way we feel about it."

"Fuck you. I want to get out of here, too. When can I come visit?"

"Never," says Thomas.

Alfred scoffs. "You think I don't know anything about the world."

"Yeah? Then tell me what the fuck you know about the world."

I kid you not: Alfred sits up, looks back and forth between us and says, "Probably more than you want me to know."

I look at Thomas. He glances at his little brother and pauses for a second, casting a strange, blank look out at the street. Then he says slowly, "You don't know the half of it, Freddie."

"Thought so." And then, without another word, Alfred gets up off the grass and walks into the house.

I'm still looking at Thomas. "What the hell was all that about?"

"I'm not too sure." He's just drumming his fingers on his chest. "But if he does know about us, he'll never tell. That's just not his way."

Anyway, it's not like there's anything we can do about it now, so we just keep lying out there on our backs, staring up into the green glow of that tree. Suddenly—and don't ask me how—I'm not worried about a thing. Not one thing. And today could be any other summer day, from any other year of our lives.
20

A cross stands watch over this town. It actually looks kind of majestic up there on that flat rock if you don't think too much about the undertones. A lot of people have tried to have it taken down over the years. I get it. Better to represent none than only one, and all that. But here's the thing: You get up there and look at it really close, and what you see is a pathetic old metal structure, all rusty and beaten-in. And the side that faces the city is made of these narrow plastic panels that the light shines through, turned yellow and brittle by the sun. You'd think they would have bothered to bury a cable underground to power it, but instead a thin, droopy wire runs over from a nearby utility pole. The whole thing lights up okay at night, but there's always a stubborn fluorescent tube flickering and buzzing more than the rest.

Not everything holds up to close inspection, is what I'm trying to say. I bet that's true of most towering monuments to faith in this world—just to be fair to the old cross. I haven't seen any of the others yet, so I can't be too sure, but I do have plans to travel the world sometime. Maybe one day, I'll come back and let you know whether I was right or wrong.

Table Rock is the name of the place where the cross was put up. You can see the whole city from up there. You can stick around and watch the sun go down. It's a popular destination for locals and visitors alike, but still a fairly chill place for Thomas to take me on that last night. Anyway, that's what he does. Without telling me where we're going, he drives us up through all those old foothills neighborhoods. Neither one of us is saying much. Even when I catch on as to where we're headed, I stay quiet, because the silence just feels like part of the moment, and I don't want to mess it up.

He does look over at me quite a bit. He takes my hand for a few seconds at one point, then lets go. He's my best friend in the whole world. No matter what happens to us this fall, I don't think that will ever change.

We get up there and he parks the car. We walk over to the edge and sit with our legs dangling fifty feet over a sea of brush. The sun is low, but it's still hot as hell.

Thomas is laughing quietly to himself.

I look over at him. "What?"

"I don't know, man," he says, "I was just thinking." He takes in a long breath, lets it out. "I guess it's not such a dumb town after all."

"No," I say. "Not really."

We're both laughing now.

We sit there for a long time before he speaks up again. He stumbles at first, clears his throat. "I was thinking about what you used to tell me about my mom, after she died. How I'd see her again one day."

Immediately, I know what he's referring to. Let me make one thing clear right now: I don't have too many thoughts on the afterlife. Thomas's mom is the only person close to me who has ever passed away. At the time, I entered this sort of self-preservation mode where I just kept telling myself I would see her again, somewhere in the vast reaches of space and time. It was all I could do in order to keep moving from one moment to the next. Maybe you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, in the months after her death, when Thomas cried every night and reported feeling a pain worse than being ripped apart, I promised him the same thing. "You'll see her again," I kept hearing myself say. "I don't know how, or where it's going to be, but I promise you it'll happen." It was a belief I took on hastily, out of necessity, but in the years since, I've never bothered to replace it with something more logical. So I guess, if you want to get right down to the heart of the matter, it's still the way I feel.

"I remember that," I tell him.

He looks at me. "Is it weird that I sort of think of you and me the same way?"

I look back at him. I laugh a little. "Kind of."

"I just mean it like, no matter what happens, we'll see each other again."

"Hopefully before we're both dead," I say.

He punches me in the shoulder. "Stop acting like you don't get it."

"Fine, I get it," I say.

There's no doubt in my mind that Thomas and I will see each other again in this world—I mean, we're legally obligated to, according to the contract he wrote. But still, I'm having to place an awful lot of trust in something I don't quite understand in order to feel okay about everything. Separately, we'll meet new people, do brand new things, lead completely new lives. Little by little, we'll forget parts of who we are now. We'll take separate, sometimes divergent paths—that seems inevitable—as small aspects of where we come from cleave away, replaced with strange new appendages we can't even dream up now. I'm haunted by the possibility that one day I'll come back to this dumb town, the place that nurtured us back when we grew in parallel, and it won't feel like home anymore.

We leave sometime after dark. He drops me off at home. He says he'll be back in the morning to take me to the airport. We sleep in our own beds on that last night.

In the morning, I make kind of a big deal of moving all my stuff over by the front door, then throw it wide open, casting the whole living room in the harsh light of day. I'm a little worried that if I don't call attention to the whole situation of me leaving, my mom might actually pretend it isn't happening. I can just picture her offering me some stifled sendoff, the same as if I were getting groceries and coming back in an hour. I'm trying to let her know that this moment calls for something better than that.

To my surprise, she obliges. She comes over to me, pulls me into a hug and immediately starts crying. "You know I'd take you to the airport myself if I could, if I felt better," she says. "I'm just not feeling that well."

"I know you're not," I say. "And I know you would."

She hugs me harder. "I'll never understand how you've managed to build this life for yourself," she says. "But don't stop. Keep going."

I don't let her see it, but the words hit me hard. She's got all the hope in the world for me—that much is clear just from the look on her face. Somewhere deep inside, I've accepted that this thing about me, this secret I spent years keeping from myself as much as from anyone else—it's never going away. And one day, she will need to know. I hear Thomas's horn go off down below. Her face becomes smaller and smaller as she backs away from me, her hands held out, still embracing the invisible version of me who stayed behind. Today is not the day for her to know.

It's crazy to think this entire summer—maybe my whole life—has culminated to a twenty-minute car ride. The sun pours in as Thomas smiles to himself in a way that fills me with enough hope for us both. Let me tell you, he just tears down the freeway onramp. He's got that wild look in his eyes. We're doing over a hundred miles an hour by the time he backs off.

A strange thing happens after we exit the freeway and begin our final approach. I look at him and his eyes bore into mine for a second or two. And then he says, "Holy shit. I hope I didn't fuck this one up."

The words catch me off guard, for sure. I spend a while thinking about them, but I never ask him what they mean.

Look, I didn't want to end things with me walking through the automatic doors, taking that bold first step towards a new chapter in my life and all that bullshit. It's just so overdone, I could throw up. But there's this little moment right after I do so where I stop and look around the vast space housing all the ticketing agents, then glance back through the glass. His car hasn't moved an inch. He's giving me a quick wave. Suddenly, I can't think of anything else besides that memory of him and me in front of a mirror, just looking at each other's faces. I couldn't have given two shits the other night when he brought it up, but now I see: I'm the one waving from the car. He's the one standing inside, equipped with a year's worth of luggage. I grip the old leather steering wheel and pull away. I'm driving down the lane now, just picturing him waiting in line, dragging those two swollen bags up to the counter, being greeted by a thin man in a blue suit. The man looks over his ticket and confirms his name: Thomas Chu.

Or at least, that's the way I would write it. We all know who's name is really on the ticket. What I'm trying to say, and maybe what I've been getting at all this time, is that there's no limit to how close you can get to another person, if you're brave enough. Thomas and I have ventured closer to each other than most people ever will. It says a lot about the place we're coming from, and reveals almost nothing about where we're going. That second part really sucks.

It's a scary thing, constantly crossing into the unknown. But if you've learned anything about me at all, I hope it's that I follow through on what I set out to do. And when it comes time to step on that plane, I won't hesitate for a second.

END OF BOOK ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kid Boise was born and raised in Boise, Idaho. He now lives with his partner in Vancouver, British Columbia.
