I.

I loved James’ room. An HDTV, a chest of drawers, a well-used PlayStation, a light blue desk, cherry wood floors and a full-sized bed. Beneath the desk, piles of books sat forgotten, and in the drawers, he’d hidden a wad of cash. Above the bed, there was a window. Its broken blinds chopped up sunlit views of a garden during the day, and at night, they let in just enough light to keep the boogeyman at bay.

It was a big room for a ten-year-old. James seemed even bigger sometimes, being older and bolder than I could ever be. But from the start, that place had nothing to be scared of. I’d hear my favorite show on when I walked in, or see a book I’d left there last week. Each time, I saw James, who saw me, as if we had known each other forever and would know each other always.

He used to cut my hair. Before him, I kept my hair ridiculously long, like a girl. The one time I tried to cut it myself, I ended up with nothing more than ugly black tufts peppering my scalp.

My mom just stared at me when she came home in the harsh light of dawn. With my hair being what it was and my face puffed up from a full night of crying, I must have looked especially ugly.

She parted her red lips.

“What are you doing up?” she said.

I started crying again. “I cut it,” I said. “I cut it all off.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“I'm so sorry, Mom. I'm sorry!”

She sighed, her face high above me and painted.

“Just go to your room, Riley,” she said.

James was different. He cut my hair like he had years of experience, or so it seemed to me, at the time. He concentrated on my head like it was a math problem, and he cut every strand of hair like his life depended on it.

We did it in his room. The first time was a weekend, a warm summer day. He had mirrors on his closet doors that always watched over us. James sat me down on his desk chair and rolled it over fast enough to make me laugh. Putting a towel around my neck, he asked me to stay very still, or he'd accidentally cut my ear off.

I closed my eyes. I didn't like staring at myself, and James didn't like me staring at him. I shut my eyes, but in my mind's eye, I pictured what he looked like, hovering around me.

Snip. Snip snip. Snip.

His fingers brushed my ears, startling me. He laughed at my reaction. I could almost see his smile, all teeth and scrunched eyes.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

It was the late afternoon and James had his blinds up, dying the darkness behind my eyelids from black to orange. It was easy to imagine the sun on James' dark brown hair, the way it glowed red and shone gold.

Snip snip snip.

He threaded his fingers through my hair, gentle and slow, and tugged at the ends to see if they were even. I squeezed my eyes, as steady as a statue, and maybe he was smiling at my efforts. Maybe he was too distracted to notice.

Snip.

“There!” he said. “All done.” He mussed my freshly-cut hair.

“Open your eyes, Riley.”

I opened my eyes.

There was James, looking at me in the mirror, and he smiled so proudly at what he'd accomplished that I looked at me too.

James was a giant. I seemed very tiny next to him: tiny nose, tiny eyes, and tiny hands. Maybe it was the age difference, or maybe it was my Asian mom. Either way, it didn’t matter when I was with James. He looked at me in a way no one else ever looked at me, as if he could magically dissolve all our differences with just his eyes and make me a giant too.

“You like it?” he said, nervously.

“Yeah,” I said. “I like it.”

He laughed, pumping his fist in the air. “See, I told you I could do it! Now you actually look like a boy.” He mussed my hair again, making me squint. “Next time your hair gets long, come over and I'll fix it right up, okay?”

At the time, I just nodded, laughing with him, reveling in the feel of cool air on the back of my neck.

Liam Becker and his daughter, Adrienne, met us at the front door of our new home, smiling. We had spent the day before moving everything out from our old apartment to the house. As often as I’d witnessed our things getting packed up, sealed off, and shipped away – Mom’s old books; cheap, plastic plates from Target; an acid green Hot Wheels car I had salvaged from a McDonalds Happy Meal – this move felt different. I saw it in the things we left behind: sparse winter clothes, pots and pans, the TV, pillows, sheets. We always left something when we moved, like reverse mementos, but this time, we packed as if preparing for a weekend trip to DC, which we did, once, with a man who told me we were in New York.

Mom walked up the driveway as I trailed behind. She let Liam sweep her up into a hug, and they kissed, their freshly-minted wedding rings glinting in the summer sun.

He and Adrienne had the same golden sheen in their hair, a lion with his cub. The girl faced me with her chin up: she was a year older than me, and she knew it. She said nothing. Liam scolded her for being unfriendly, and Mom pushed me forward, saying the same things. Anxious, feeling small, I nodded my head.

It was late morning in the early August of ’06, in Alexandria, Virginia. Mom and I were entering a new chapter in our lives. The happy resolution to our book of life-long misery, or so she had talked it up to be, at the time. She was twenty-five. I was waiting to turn eight.

“Welcome home,” Liam said.

Mom smiled, walking through the doorway and staring up at something I couldn’t see.

“Have I ever mentioned how much I love you?”

That night, I slept in a quiet, suburban house. The room was bare but for the mattress I lay on, a bedside table, and a lamp that looked like it’d been stolen from a motel. The moon filtered in through a chink in the curtains, bright like day. I listened to the crickets and those inexplicable, old house noises. The bed was soft and large, like what I imagined a cloud would feel like. I stared up at the ceiling, hoping that the monster in the closet wouldn’t murder me the moment I closed my eyes.

When I woke up to my second day in the Becker household, the four of us had breakfast in the kitchen. The white, tile floor gleamed in the morning sun, and the pockmarked fridge had photos of everyone but me.

“What are your plans for today?” Liam said. He was looking at me, but Adrienne answered.

“Harper’s mom’s taking us to the mall,” she said.

Liam frowned. Mom cut in before he could force me to speak too.

“Getting back to school things?”

Adrienne looked at her. Her spoon of Frosted Flakes and 2% milk was halfway to her mouth.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re nine now, aren’t you? Which grade is that?”

Adrienne scrunched her face. “Four.”

“Fourth grade.” Mom lifted her penciled-in eyebrows. “Scared?”

“No.”

“You’re not? Why?”

“School doesn’t scare me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t.”

“Is that an answer?”

“It’s not a question.”

“Adrienne.”

Liam looked at her. His eyebrows had squeezed so close together, they almost covered his eyes. Adrienne took a bite of cereal. “What?”

Mom shrugged. “Guess she’s got me there,” she said. She looked at Liam, a half-smile on her face – sharp to others, but soft enough now from where I was sitting.

“Smart kid.”

Liam must have heard her, but he didn’t meet her eyes. I saw the corners of her mouth turn down.

“Adrienne,” he said. “Apologize.”

Adrienne looked up at him.

“What?” she said.

“You heard me. Say sorry to your mother.”

Adrienne scoffed. Even then, she had the kind of scoff that could chip away at your soul. Her spoon pointed at Mom, dripping milk onto the table.

“She’s not my mother.”

“Adrienne,” Liam said. “We talked about this.”

She slammed her spoon down.

“No. You said you were marrying some bimbo!”

Liam shot up. I heard the sound of flesh meeting flesh, and I flinched, staring. Looking closer, I saw he had only hit the table.

“Adrienne!” he said. “You apologize to your mother right now!”

Adrienne stood up too, and she matched her father’s look. Their eyes were the same shade of green.

“No! You apologize to Mom!”

“Se-Young’s your mom now!”

Adrienne kicked her chair. I heard splinters and the crack of wood on linoleum; she’d broken it, for sure. I wanted to check, but in that moment, I couldn’t take my eyes off her and him.

The doorbell rang.

Everyone went still, as if posing for a sudden, unwanted picture. Of course, I had been frozen from the start.

“I’ll get it,” Adrienne said.

Mom spoke before Liam could.

“Riley can get it,” she said. For the first time that morning, she looked at me. “Riley?”

I glanced at my empty bowl. I had always been a fast eater, or maybe I just never ate that much.

“Okay,” I said.

The boy at the door was persistent. I put my bowl away first, and in the interval between then and meeting him, he pressed the stupid bell so many times I could barely hear the fight carrying on behind me.

I hurried forward.

The Beckers had a heavy door. It was framed by patterned glass that looked like melded pebbles, and through them, I tried to see who stood outside.

He rang the doorbell.

Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Dingdongdingdingdong.

I must have been frowning when I finally opened the door for him, though he would always argue otherwise.

James B. King. A boy with chestnut hair, a winning smile, and an ironic distaste for Burger King. I met him at a time where life had transformed into nothing short of a film – dramatic and surreal, like all those trailers for Casino Royale – and since there was in me nothing remotely similar to Daniel Craig, who else could I have been but dark, drawn heroine?

I stared.

He smiled. “Hi!” he said. “Are you Adrienne’s friend?”

I blinked. For various reasons, this offended me.

“No,” I said.

It was his turn to blink, surprise flickering in a way that made him seem more human. A little less like Bond, a little more like a kid I might have seen at my old school. I didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t seem to know either, but James had always been more daring than me.

“What’s your name?”

“Riley.”

“Riley,” he said.

I liked the way my name came out of his mouth, with a small smile, like he was tasting something sweet. He took me in, very obviously, from the hair that reached just past my shoulders to the toenails my mom and I had painted last week.

He stuck out a hand.

“I’m James! Nice to meet you.”

His hand was warm and a little sweaty, but still cleaner than mine, which had dirt stuck in underneath the nails. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until his fingers wrapped around my fingers, a feeling akin to being enveloped by the sun.

“You too,” I said, or I meant to say.

Right then, voices exploded behind me – one shrill, one booming. I couldn’t make out their words, much less mine.

James raised his eyebrows. We looked at each other, and I felt more shocked than he seemed. He scratched the back of his head.

“I’ll, uh, come back later?” he said.

“Okay.”

He waved goodbye, smiling with his whole face. I waved back and closing the heavy door, I wondered when I’d get to see him again.

I never met my dad. In a way, Liam was the only one I got to know. A few came and went before, but she only tried out marriage with him. I never understood why. The first time I saw him, I thought he’d come to kick us out of the apartment. I knew we were late on rent. They had sent an official-looking letter just the other day, and Mom had not stopped complaining since: didn’t they trust her? Had she ever flaked out on a payment? How could that son of a bitch do this to her?

Though it wouldn’t have been the first time.

She’d already had a ring on her finger when they walked in – modest, but extravagant to me. It was the kind of ring I’d seen in commercials and movies, something off a rich Bond girl, Sylvia Trench maybe. The man next to her, like magic, had somehow managed to pluck it out from the screen.

He didn’t look like much of a magician: thinning, blonde hair and a pointy nose. But I still gave him the same sort of status – a worker of miracles, transporting us from the edge of poverty to the green lawns of suburbia. He drove a car that smelled like pine and owned a briefcase.

The day we first met, he bought us dinner at the Warehouse. The super-white tablecloth and soft lighting felt like the setting of some cushy romance movie that left you crying in the end. I tried to cut my steak like I’d done it before, but he ended up doing it for me anyway.

“We’ll be family soon, son,” he said. He handed me my fork. “I know it’s sudden, and I’m terribly sorry for that. We agreed right off the bat – didn’t want to introduce a new person in your life if it wasn’t going to work out between us.”

I looked at my mom. She was fidgeting with her napkin. The diamond on her ring kept scratching at the plate, but she didn’t seem to notice. She met my eyes. A small nod.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I should say thanks to you.” Liam laughed. “You’re quite the smart cookie, the way Se-Young tells it. Knows you can take care of yourself – not like my daughter. I wouldn’t trust her home alone for a second.”

I took a bite of my steak. It was tough to eat, but delicious.

“Mm-hm.”

“What I’m trying to get at is…” He sighed. He looked at Mom, and she took his hand, smiling.

“I love her. And I hope that’s alright with you.”

She pulled him in for a kiss. Brief, but she still had to wipe some lipstick off his lips.

“He’s a good one, Riley,” she said. She looked at me. “So, I’m going to keep him for a while. Okay?”

I speared another cube of steak.

“Okay.”

They got married at the end of July, four months later. The wedding was small. I sat alone in one of the chapel’s pews, and on the other side, a few relatives had scattered themselves near the front. Not many could make it to the ceremony, Liam said. Not even Adrienne. We all had a quick bite to eat after – chicken with rice – then Mom dropped me off at the apartment.

“Mommy will be back on Tuesday,” she said. It was a Saturday. “There’s food in the fridge, but here’s some money just in case.”

She handed me a wrinkled envelope. I took it. Her face and hair still looked like a blushing bride. Radiant. She kissed the top of my head.

“I love you,” she said. “And remember – don’t open the door for anyone. Got it?”

I nodded.

“Got it.”

She smiled, and that made me smile. We hugged each other, then she kissed me again.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said.

I held the envelope in my hand. I felt radiant too. The whole place was mine for four days, and she always left me more than I needed. Maybe I would order pizza – a large with pepperoni and garlic sauce. Maybe I would skip school on Monday to buy the entire Harry Potter series at Borders.

“I love you,” I said.

Mom blew me a kiss as she closed the door behind her.

“Stuff like Tekken and Street Fighter is fun, but Mortal Kombat has a story, you know?”

“Tekken has a story.”

“Yeah, but.” James went forward and back on the swings. His fists were tight on the chains and his feet planted boldly on the seat. I was sitting next to him, dragging my feet on the mulch.

“Tekken doesn’t have a movie. Have you seen the Mortal Kombat movies?”

We were at the neighborhood playground. It was near dinnertime, so most of the other kids had already gone home. Our shirts were sticking to our backs after running around all day, playing games I’d never had the chance to play before. I was tired, but James looked like he could still conquer the world – or the blacktop, at least.

“No,” I said.

“What?”

James plopped down on the swing, making the whole set rattle. I held on, even as he stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“You’ve never seen Mortal Kombat?”

“No.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah, I forgot. You’re a girl.”

I bit my lip. Looking away, I kicked up some dirt.

“Shut up,” I said.

The week before, James asked me to be his friend. He was an only child, like I used to be, from the neighbors with the swimming pool. He came up to me while I was taking out the trash.

“Wanna be friends?” he said.

I froze as I held up the lid to the trashcan. What could I say? It was only a few days after I’d moved in, after all, but more than that, I’d never had a friend before.

When the stench from the trash got to be too much, he elaborated: “I’ve never seen a girl who dresses like a boy.”

I held on tighter to the swings, the chains creaking and pinching my fingers.

I did dress like a boy. At the playground, I was wearing a power rangers cut-off and basketball shorts. I didn’t have a lot of clothes to begin with. Kids like me didn’t have use for more than seven articles of clothing; seven was a magic number, Mom said. Of course, I still had to tie my hair up with Adrienne’s hairband, since I’d lost mine in the move. It was red and decorated with plastic cherries.

James sat still on the swings now, his feet resting on the mulch, his hair golden in the sun, his brown eyes looking at me.

It was because of this look that when he said I was a girl, when he said we should be friends, I could say nothing back.

Before we moved, Mom liked to watch the news on TV. Movies too, but only when she recognized a title – like old Bond movies, or When Harry Met Sally – holding me hostage on the couch as I pretended not to pay attention. After school, I made camp in the local library, and I would read the children’s books. On slow days, the kind old women with dry smiles let me on the computers, and I filled those days with free episodes of Spongebob Squarepants or The Fairy Oddparents.

I never played Tekken. I never watched Mortal Kombat. I never played tag with other kids or reached a point so high on the swings my butt hovered off the seat; I’d never believed, before him, I could feel a sensation so close to flying.

He looked at me, and with that one look, he seemed to both know all about this and not care.

He jumped up from the swings.

“C’mon, Riley,” he said. He held out his hand, smiling. “I want to show you something.”

He took me out of the playground, running. We climbed over the chain-linked fence. We could have gone around, but James said it was more fun that way, and despite how scary it seemed or how dirty the rusted, linked metal looked, I took his word for it. He helped me down once we got to the other side anyway, and before we crossed the patchy, grass field, he took my hand.

He brought me to the line of trees on the other side. Strange, yellowish flowers dotted the summer-green foliage. Stems reached out from their petals like they were alive, stringy and desperate. I breathed through my nose, hoping to look nonchalant but still sweating from the run. Despite their appearances, I could taste the flowers’ sweet scent on my tongue.

“Do you know what these are?” James said. He pointed to them, dragging me closer.

I shook my head. I had seen them around, along with all the other hundreds of flowers placed like artwork into the Virginian scenery: bluebells, which hung in packs like commiserating widows; dogwood, which actually smelled like wet dog in spring; dandelions, which had the power to grant you any wish; and buttercups, which reflected its yellow glow under your chin if your crush liked you back.

“No.”

James beamed at me.

“They’re honeysuckles! You can eat them – look.”

I stood in wonder as James plucked one of them out from the bush. He brought it to his mouth without hesitation and sucked out whatever nectar lay inside. He licked his lips, smiling at me.

“Want to try?”

“No.”

He laughed.

“But they’re really good!”

“Maybe next time.”

He shook his head, and I knew he’d ask me again when we came back to this playground; he’d ask me a million more times – whatever it took for me to say yes. But right then, he wasn’t going to push it. Instead, he reached over and put his wasted flower in my hair, fussing until it stayed.

“There,” he said. “Now you look like a girl.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Thank you.”

His hand lingered in my hair. He’d turned red, though I knew that was nothing compared to the heat I could feel in my own face. It was a warm day, and he was close, smelling of boy and dirt and honeysuckles. He had a mole just beside his left nostril and honey-yellow in his eyes.

I couldn’t move. He didn’t look like he wanted to move either, but of course, James had always been more daring than me.

He unfroze. I squeezed my eyes shut. In a moment, for a moment, I felt his lips on mine.

“What are you doing?”

We both froze. James looked around, and there was Adrienne, just a few feet away from us. He stepped away from me, frowning at her lone figure. His face was still pink.

“What do you want?”

Adrienne ignored him. She had been grounded for two weeks, or she was supposed to be. After screaming, sulking, then acting nice for a few days, Liam must have finally reduced her sentence.

“What are you guys doing?” She pointed at me. “James, did you just kiss him?”

She stopped in front of us. James crossed his arms, and so did she. They faced each other, these children, so close together that they would have been indistinguishable from a distance. I couldn’t breathe.

“What?” he said. “Him? You mean her, stupid.”

Adrienne paused for a moment, and then she laughed. “Oh my god,” she said. “You don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

Adrienne glanced over at me, as if daring me to say something. I could only stand there. A weird, buzzing noise – static from some unseen television – had started up in my ears, and I could barely hear her next words.

“Riley’s a boy.”

James didn’t even blink. He just gave her a look I’d never seen on him before. A dead stare – one so opposite from the James I knew that I felt a chill run through me.

“Go away, Adrienne,” he said.

Adrienne didn’t back down.

“It’s the truth!” she said. She turned to me. “Riley, tell him!”

I cried. I couldn’t help it. It started out small, but quickly turned ugly. The two kids with me acted as only kids could do. They stared shamelessly.

James pushed Adrienne.

“Now, look what you did!” he said. “You made her cry!”

“It’s not her, it’s him!”

I cried harder, covering my face as if that would hide anything.

“Stop crying!” Adrienne said. “Stop it!”

She shoved me, so hard I fell. James yelled and pushed her away from me, but she managed to grab my over-long hair, pulling at it as if she could take it all away, and maybe she’d just fought with Liam again, or maybe she couldn’t stand how much more attention James gave me instead of her, even then, but no matter what it was, no matter the fact that I would have been exposed soon enough anyway, I hated her for it and always would.

Before she stormed off, she threw her cherry hairband at me.

“You’re not a girl!” she said. “So stop acting like it.”

The day was just turning dark. Crickets were chirping, dogs barked to be let inside. In the distance, other children laughed, gathering what they could of the dying sunshine. I heard James crouch down next to me.

“Riley,” he said. “Are you okay?”

I rubbed my eyes, head bowed in my knees. “James,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m a boy. I’m sorry.”

“Riley.” He ran a hand over my wild hair, feet shifting on the grass. “Look at me.”

I hesitated, but after a few moments, I looked at him.

“I didn’t know,” he said. His face was still red, like the plastic cherries he held in his hand.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

James’ room smelled like him and potato chips. Sometimes I would smell like him too. When we fell asleep playing video games, or when it got too late. When I used the shampoo he used and wore his giant clothes. But today, it smelled like newspapers and washed hair. Instead of pixelated characters grunting and kicking, it sounded like scissors, summer, his smile and laugh.

I opened my eyes.

“So, what do you think?” he said.

I looked at him in the mirror.

“It’s great.”

“Just great?” James said. He unraveled the thick towel from my neck and mussed my hair. “Are you sure it’s not the best haircut you’ve ever, ever had?”

I rolled my eyes.

It was the last day of third grade. That September, James would go on to junior high and I’d be left alone at our school for the first time since I’d moved here.

I ran a hand through my new haircut.

“It’s the best one I’ve ever had,” I said. “Ever.”

“Even better than last year?”

“A lot better than last year.”

James mussed my hair. “Why do I feel like you’re making fun of me?” he said.

I looked away with a shrug, but he caught me smiling. Trampling over the newspapers, James grabbed my chair and started to spin it. I struggled to pull my legs in, trying and failing not to bite my tongue.

“James!” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut. “Stop!”

It would be two years until I could meet him outside the house to go to school again. Two years until we saw the same sunrise; two years until he saved me the window seat on the bus. Two years. No matter James said, it felt like we’d be apart forever.

He stopped the chair abruptly, and laughed when I tried to stand up. I stubbed my toe on a game controller and fell onto his bed, smashing a bag of potato chips.

“Stop laughing!” I took out the damaged bag, inspecting it. “Seriously.”

“You deserved it,” James said.

I got up to kick the game controller at him. Pain shot up my toes, and it must have showed because he started laughing again.

The first time we went to school together, I was exhausted from the night before. I’d spent most of it staring up at my ceiling, watching shadows.

James had showed me where the bus stop was; he told me to get there early, since the driver always arrived at least ten minutes before schedule. He’d even given me a tour of Clermont Elementary during its open house.

But what scared me the most about my new school wasn’t being late, or getting lost. What scared me, really haunted me, was the possibility that once we got on the bus, once we faced the gray rows of sleep-deprived kids, I would find an empty seat, sit down, slide over, and look up, only to watch him walk past to sit with someone else, or worse, by himself.

James started gathering up all the newspapers. I sat on the bed, watching with arms crossed.

“Your room’s a lot cleaner than usual.”

“Yeah,” James said. He picked up the game controller and put it back by the TV stand. “I needed space to cut your hair.”

“You’re like an adult now,” I said.

James sat down on the chair, looking at me.

“You’re more adult than I am, Riley.”

“Me?”

James laughed. “Yes, you. Who else?”

“But I’m still in elementary school,” I said. I frowned.

“And that’s a bad thing?”

I shrugged. James looked amused.

“Riley, you can cook,” he said. “My mom doesn’t even know how to cook.”

I sat up straight, smiling to myself. James laughed. He came to flop down on the bed, stretching out like an overgrown cat beside me. I patted his bared stomach, playing them like drums.

“You’re right; you’re no adult,” I said. He grabbed my hands. “Your mom told you to clean your room, right?”

James pulled me down to lie next him, his arm under my head.

“Yeah, yeah, like your room’s any better.”

Actually, it was. I left a lot of my things at James’, and I never had much stuff to begin with. I didn’t tell him this. Maybe it was normal to have things, and sometimes, James liked it better when I was normal.

“I thought your mom was in New York?”

James shrugged. “She is. But Dad spies on me for her.”

I laughed. I thought of James Bond. “Do they use special code words?”

“I would,” James said. He smiled. “Mom would be Big Mouth and Dad…Spy Commander.”

I poked his arm. “And what would you be? Dirty Boy?”

James pulled an angry look. He poked my face.

“That’s Dirty Man to you,” he said.

I smiled.

After James found out I was a boy, he avoided me for almost a month. It wasn’t that difficult for him, since I rarely ever left the house. I would lay in my room, reading, sleeping, or simply thinking. I would listen as, outside, Adrienne played with her friends.

One day, he spoke to me.

“Hey,” he said.

I was sitting out on our front steps. Liam had told me to spend time with Adrienne. She took one look at me as I came out the door and, turning around, she ushered her friends elsewhere.

“James,” I said. I tried to look up at him, but I couldn’t meet his eyes – they were shadowed by the afternoon sun behind him.

After a second, he sat down next to me.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

I stilled. For several heartbeats, I kept my mouth shut, afraid that I would cry otherwise. I’d always been stupid like that – getting emotional over the simplest things.

“It is your birthday, right?” James said.

I blinked, rubbing at my eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. I tried to sniff like I’d simply caught of a whiff of something nice. Honeysuckles, maybe. “How’d you know?”

“You told me.”

“And you remembered?”

“Of course I remembered.”

Again, this shocked me, enough to make me look at him. He wore a bit of a smile, the effect like a fading summer. I felt warm.

“Thank you,” I said.

My mom had forgotten my birthday. We didn’t always celebrate it, and to be fair, we didn’t celebrate hers, but I couldn’t remember a year when she had clean forgotten. On the day, as if on purpose, she went on a date with Liam. I told James about this. The next day, he brought me over for a haircut, along with my first-ever birthday card. It had been shaped into scissors, and inside, he wrote, “CUT-gratulations! Hope you have a HAIRY b-day!”

I stared at it. I didn’t even say thank you. James didn’t seem to care. He just mussed my hair, like he would always do from then on, and asked what I wanted to do that day.

I kept that card for a long time.

James and I walked past white, marble steps. The Washington Monument shimmered in the distance, lost to the blinding, blue sky. It was Independence Day just outside of DC. For the first time in my life, I was going to see fireworks in person.

James was freshly twelve, and me, soon to be ten. We’d been given free rein to wander, which seemed fitting, given the occasion.

We sat at a fountain and rested our bare feet in the water. The day was a sweltering kind of hot. Dozens of suburban families mingled lazily in the humid air – a mass of red, white, and blue. Everyone was waiting for the fireworks to start, but it would be hours yet. The clock still showed mid-afternoon.

“Where’s Adrienne?” James said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. With her friend, I think.”

James made a mean face.

“She keeps asking me about school stuff,” he said. “You know, if I’ve done my homework, if I know where my classes are.” He eyed a woman’s glass of lemonade. “God, I can’t stand her.”

“Have you done your homework?”

James smiled.

“Have you?”

“No.”

He laughed and started kicking his feet in the pool. I watched as the water rippled away from us, each miniature wave sparkling in the sun. After a while, he stopped.

“Is she still bothering you?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

I clasped my hands together. They were sticky with the ice cream we ate earlier. Adrienne ‘bumped’ into me and knocked most of mine away. She always did stuff like that, stuff that said she didn’t like me, that she never would. As if I needed the reminder. Carefully, I leaned forward to dip my hands in the water.

“I’m not lying,” I said.

James turned quiet. Dogs and other kids ran past us, crawling between, under, and over towering adults. I wondered how such furry animals could cope with the heat.

James smiled. He mussed my hair, and then tucked a lock of it behind my ear, like my mom did when she had the time.

“It’s getting long again,” he said. “You want to come over after this to fix it?”

“At night?”

“Yup.”

I shook my head. “I’m not allowed to.”

James laughed. He stood up in the pool, splashing forward before turning around to face me.

“Then I’ll steal you!” he said.

I laughed, even when he dragged me with him into the water. Afterwards, we marched back to where our families lay in the sea of pink people, our flip-flops quacking like rubber ducks.

Adrienne and her friend, Harper, approached James, making fun of his wet clothes. I slipped away as they started to argue, back to the where the Beckers had claimed their spot.

Liam was sitting on our American flag blanket with thin sunglasses in his white-gold hair. His eyes squinted as he tried to read a paperback. Mom had her shoes in the grass and her head on Liam’s leg. Her black sunglasses hid her eyes, so I thought she was sleeping, but as soon as I tried to sit by them, she frowned.

“Not on the blanket, Riley,” she said. “Wait until you’ve dried off.”

I paused.

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry.”

I sat down on the grass, near Mom’s sandals. James was talking to Adrienne’s friend, Harper. She had long, copper hair and blue braces. They looked uncomfortable, though they matched her starry, blue shirt. I wondered how she could speak with it in her mouth.

Looking away, I lay down, and I stared instead at the blank, cloudless sky. It burned my eyes. I closed them, and the heat traveled away – down my nose, around my chin, to my neck, my shirt, my shorts, my twiggy legs. I heard Adrienne through the crowd, and I heard James. He and that girl were talking about the Washington Monument, saying it looked like a pencil, Pinocchio’s nose, a penis.

I wondered if James found her beautiful, or if he would. Maybe he liked long hair, or braces; maybe it was her freckles. Maybe he liked the way she laughed too loud or her slight lisp, maybe he thought she wasn’t as mean as Adrienne.

I tightened my hands on the grass beneath me, pulling some out of the ground.

When the fireworks started, I almost missed them. I opened my eyes again, after what seemed like minutes, and the world had turned dark. I’d fallen asleep. I panicked for a moment, because I couldn’t hear anything, at first. I couldn’t see anyone. I must have slept through the whole event; they must have forgotten about me and left me here, all alone.

A small hand shook my shoulder.

“C’mon, Riley, wake up,” he said. “It’s starting!”

I rubbed my eyes. Sitting up, I saw the first shot of light whistle up through the balmy, night sky. At its zenith, it burst with a sound like heartbeats. The debris rained down after, every single spark beautiful, every moment breathtaking.

I looked down.

Mom and Liam were sitting on their blanket just in front of us, arms around each other. Adrienne and Harper were a few feet away. Harper had her phone out, taking pictures of the fireworks, and Adrienne was petting someone’s dog. She pointed at the sky.

I looked at James.

He smiled back.

“Look, Riley!” he said. He pointed at the sky too. “Isn’t it cool?”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked back up. “It is.”

James’ fingers were tangled in the grass. As we stared up at the sky, I lay my hand over them. A million bursts of colors, impossibly mesmerizing, so quick it was a waste even to blink. I watched, James holding my hand back, oohing with the crowd.

I had my first cigarette when I was eleven. I was no stranger to them. Our apartment had always smelled of Mom’s cigarette smoke, hers or her boyfriend’s. The stench clung to me even when I left the place, separating me from other kids who knew, by instinct, what it meant.

It was Valentine’s Day.

I was in sixth grade, James in eighth. On the first day of school, he invited me over to his lunch table, and for all of sixth grade, I ate with eighth-graders, cool ones, who learned to listen when I spoke and laugh when James laughed.

It was exhilarating.

On Valentine’s Day, by pure coincidence a Saturday, we had planned to watch Friday the 13th. It opened the day before, and James claimed he knew someone who could get us into the R-rated film. It would be my first one ever, and James’ first time watching one in a theater. We spent the days leading up to it going through all the creepy trailers, swearing to each other we wouldn’t scream.

I let our plans slip on Friday. It was lunchtime. Everyone was talking about the movie; not because it was popular, but because someone, Nicolas, had claimed you would get cursed to be a virgin forever if you watched it on the opening night. I hadn’t said anything in a while, so I opened my mouth.

“James and I are seeing it tomorrow,” I said.

The table turned quiet, and I knew instantly that I had said something wrong. James’ friend, Caleb, laughed first.

“You’re hanging out with Riley on Valentine’s Day?” he said. He looked down the length of the table. We all looked guilty, as if caught, collectively, cheating on some final exam.

“No homo, right?”

Everyone burst out laughing, relieved. James laughed with them.

“Guys, he was joking,” he said.

I laughed too.

That Saturday night, Mom had a fight with Liam. She’d come home reeking of whiskey, driving a car no one had seen before. I joined her on the back porch. She had her long, Asian hair up in a messy bun. She was wearing her favorite, faux-leather jacket and fuzzy, pink slippers. Her cigarette smoke caught the lights from inside, turning yellow in the dark.

We sat together for a long time, not saying anything. When she did, she didn’t sound drunk. I smelled it on her, though: sharp, chemical, and smoky. Just like her.

“What do you think of your mom, Riley?” she said.

She spoke in Korean. It was our secret language, the thread that connected us to each other.

“What do you mean?” I said.

Her red lips curled up at the corners. She shook her head.

“Never mind.”

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. She glanced back at me over her shoulder, holding up the cigarette.

“You wanna try it?” she said.

I smiled. It was an old joke between us. I was supposed to say no, and we were supposed to laugh, but right then, I remembered I wasn’t even supposed to be there. It was a Saturday, and this time last week James had promised we would watch Friday the 13th together. I wasn’t supposed to see my mom fighting with Liam, again; I wasn’t supposed to see her cry.

“Yes,” I said.

Mom blinked. Without a word, or hesitation, she handed the cigarette to me. I held it between my fingers like I’d always seen her do and breathed like they breathed in movies.

I coughed out the bittersweet taste until my throat hurt, crying as she laughed.

Snip snip. Snip. Snip.

Rain fell like a million tiny pebbles. It smacked into the concrete outside, skidding to places far, far away.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

Thunder rolled over suburban, Virginia hills; over its empty, wet streets.

Snip snip.

I imagined the lightening that came before, yellow like clip-art.

Snip.

“Done!”

I opened my eyes.

James mussed my hair, and I grimaced, pushing him away. I was twelve, in seventh grade. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

“Now my cousins won’t try to braid your hair tomorrow,” James said. He put his tools away, tossing the towel into his laundry bin with the same sort of flair he’d had four years ago.

I rolled my eyes as I slowly spun around in his chair. “Still don’t wanna go.”

“Me neither.” James gathered up the newspapers on the floor, the sound louder than the storm outside. “But it’s Christmas. What can you do?”

“Get a cold. It’s what I did last year.”

James looked over at me. “No! I’ll be so bored.”

I smiled. “Adrienne’ll be there.”

“Fuck Adrienne.”

James said those big words now: fuck, bitch, dick. He was a high schooler – practically an adult. A mere seventh-grader like me was still stuck on the gateway words, like damn and shit. But I would graduate soon enough.

“My mom’s not going either.”

James had started stuffing the newspapers into a trash bag, the plastic straining at sharp corners, but he stood up at this. He stared at me.

“Why not?”

I shrugged, running fingers through my hair.

“She’s sick.”

James put down the trash bag. He crossed his arms, the forearms all veiny and fingertips red.

“Riley,” he said. “Your mom never comes over for Christmas.”

“Yeah. She’s sick a lot.”

After a moment, he picked up the bag again, stooping low to search for more paper. “It won’t kill her to drop by at least once.”

James didn’t know much about my mom. He only knew what everyone else knew: she was a gold digger, uneducated, alcoholic, a slut. Bad news. They pitied me for it, and maybe James did too.

“It’s not like anyone wants her there,” I said.

James straightened up again. He pushed his eyebrows down, a sceptic look. “Don’t you want her there?”

I scoffed. “I don’t even want to be there.”

“Riley,” he said. Abruptly, he came over to shake my chair, making my head wobble. “You have to come!”

I looked up at him, his face upside-down. He had a largish nose and thin lips, the bottom fuller than the top. They stuck out of his face, more prominent since he’d lost some weight. He played basketball now, forgoing potato chips in the name of diets and video games for practice.

“Is your mom making her mashed potatoes?”

“Yeah, she might.” James reached down to pat my stomach. “Looks like you need it.”

I shoved him off. “Shut up.”

He grabbed my hand, smiling.

“Where does the food even go?” he said. He reached for my stomach again, which, even after all these years, never lost its starved quality. Seeing the look in his eyes, I tried to back as far as I could into the chair.

“Because I swear you eat just as much as I do.”

“James –”

I was smiling before he touched me, and when he did, I fell to the floor, laughing. I kicked at him, but he was always relentless once he started. I managed to grab his pillow off the bed to defend myself, but that only gave him the opportunity to attack my armpits, and I tried to fend him off, but he only stopped once I’d laughed so much, it hurt.

He hugged me after, pillow and all.

“Good?” he said.

I coughed, still trying to breathe right. He hugged me tighter.

“So you’ll come tomorrow?”

When I didn’t say anything, he shook me a little, smiling with his voice just behind my ear.

“Riley?”

I smiled too.

The window was open, screen shut out against buzzing flies. I could hear the summer cicadas. The sunset had just bled out from the darkening sky, and I sat at my desk, reading by the light of my lamp.

I could hear them shouting.

In our house, my room was on the first floor. Mom and Liam’s was above mine. Directly above, and as if to make matters worse, they had left the door to their bedroom open. Adrienne wasn’t home, and I’d just come back. They probably didn’t know anyone else was there.

I cupped my hands over my ears.

“…not something you picked up off the streets, Liam, I’m a grown-ass woman!”

“You’re my wife!”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I have the right to know what you’re doing when you come back at four in the fucking morning!”

“The fuck do you think I’m doing? I’m with my friends!” A pause. Did they sense I was home? Did they care? “Don’t give me that look.”

“What look?”

“That high and fucking mighty thing you’ve got going on. The fuck do you know, Liam?”

“You’re really asking me that? Me?”

“No one else here, is there?”

Wasn’t there?

“Let me tell you something – you’re fucked up.”

“Took you long enough, Sherlock.”

Liam spoke over her. “But that doesn’t mean you have to keep fucking yourself up like this!”

“I’m not a child!”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You didn’t have to!”

“So you expect me to, what, stand by and do nothing while you destroy yourself?”

“If you could be so kind?”

I closed my book. Quietly, I climbed on my bed and opened the window screen. I didn’t bother to put on shoes. As the voices continued to get louder above me, I climbed out of the house and dropped into the backyard.

Cool dew soaked through my thin socks. The sun never quite reached this part of the backyard. I stood in cold shadow, breathing in the scents of wet soil and dry leaves.

“What am I to you, Liam? A baby? Charity case? Cause for the greater good? Well, surprise, surprise! No one gives a fuck if you take in a fuck-up like me!”

“You’re my wife!”

“So was she.”

I closed my eyes, clenching my hands into fists. I could imagine the look on Mom’s face right now – it was the same look she’d had on when she caught me drinking some of her whiskey one night. I was seven. Surely, I would die, or so I thought, but after I threw up on the kitchen floor, she simply handed me bleach, gloves, and a stack of napkins. Without a word, she watched as I scrubbed out every last speck of my own vomit.

I started walking.

James’ family, the Peters, kept their back door open. I entered like I always did, grabbing a cookie from the tin. They usually had one up for grabs on the kitchen island. I munched on this as I wandered up to his room.

At the doorway, I stopped. James lay on his bed, playing the latest Mortal Kombat with the utmost concentration, and it was like a mirage, after having gone so long without seeing him. He usually had practice, or was going to the arcade with friends, watching a movie with someone, studying for a final at so-and-so’s house. It was summer break now, officially, and maybe that meant a break for us too.

When he saw me, he smiled with his entire face.

II.

School let out early because of the snow. I listened to the soft, cold flakes. It was a quiet sound, a silent song. I tuned in because I didn’t have anything else to listen to, walking alone on the sidewalk path that marked the way home. Interestingly, the snow never reached the ground when you really looked. It disappeared just above the ugly cement, too precious to make contact.

I felt it on me, though. Just brushes, delicate, but with a bite.

It felt amazing that I would be a high school freshman at the end of the year. Amazing, because I didn’t know any other word for it. Confusing, bewildering. A maze of emotions. I was baffled by the transition, true enough, feeling stunned even though it was supposed to be such a good thing.

I blew hot air onto my hands, trapping, for a moment, the warmth against my face.

I would be going to the same school as James again. It had been two years since I’d sat with him in the cafeteria or met him at his locker for break. I wondered if he expected me to do those things again, in high school. I wondered if he’d be disappointed when I didn’t.

It was hard to think about, being a freshman. When James became one, there was no obvious difference, not at first. We just didn’t see each other as often. When he started dating Adrienne, I saw him even less.

Mom joked about it the other day. Cigarette in hand, a mug of coffee in another.

“Did the little bitch steal him from you again?” she said.

She shrugged, the same way I shrugged. She took a drag and blew the smoke out the window.

“Well, not like you can blame him.”

I stepped on a damp leaf, imagining the crunch I would have gotten if it’d been dry.

James was a sophomore, going on two years with Adrienne, two years on the Dean’s List, two years on the school basketball team – cocky because he had a reason to be. He always told me about the parties he got invited to and even more about the ones he actually attended. I always said congratulations, you’re officially popular. Congratulations, I’d say, you’re the best kind of stereotype.

What kind of stereotype was I?

James probably knew, but I was afraid to ask him. I’d always been afraid of him in a way. Before, and especially now.

I thought about before. About after. What was the word for that space in between?

Turning point?

But it wasn’t really a turn for me. It wasn’t that intentional.

I reached my front door and fumbled for the keys. They were in my backpack somewhere, or they were supposed to be. They weren’t. I blew on my hands again, white steam enveloping them like smoke. I searched through all the pockets in my backpack.

Nothing. Great. Mom probably lost hers and took mine.

In the cold, within the snow, I looked over at James’ house. It was dark. His dad worked until late and his mom was on a business trip. James himself could have been anywhere. Probably with Adrienne.

I wanted to see him, but this was nothing new. It never was, even before.

I thought of the turning point. It had been early last summer, too early for nice, sweltering, pool weather, but we were there anyway. School was over. We wanted to enjoy ourselves. We were talking about something, I forgot what, standing by the reclining chairs at the nearly empty pool. I took off my shirt, and so did James.

That was it.

Nothing special. Not really. It was like slowing down to look at a car crash that no one else could see.

At that moment, I saw James. His flat stomach, his wiry arms, his new Adam’s apple, his growing hair. The hair on his head was up and messy from taking off his shirt, his crooked nose and crooked smile catching the afternoon sun. I saw him as a person who was different from the one I knew before, someone who, at the same time, was so familiar.

That was it.

I blinked as a light turned on. It came from James’ room – a steady, yellowish light that shone through the snow flurries, as if melting a pathway towards me.

I stared at my front door, snow falling into my eyes.

It was cold. I was gay. I was scared of high school. I was starving. These were the thoughts running through my mind as I looked over at James' house, the two-story blur of wood and snow that actually looked a lot like mine.

Picking up my backpack, I headed for the light.

I opened my eyes to face the sunlight. Pool water stung my nostrils, and I tasted chlorine in my mouth. Standing, the blue water reached just past my nipples. I was three feet away from the deep end.

Music played from James’ laptop, and I heard James himself laughing somewhere behind me. I turned to look, but the water slowed me. By the time I got there, he’d stopped laughing and started kissing Adrienne.

I looked away.

James’ sixteenth birthday party was nothing special. Just a day at the pool. A day with music, pizza, friends, and girlfriend. When I asked James why I had been invited too, he stared at me.

“What do you mean why?” he said.

Adrienne wasn’t happy about it, but neither was I. There were only juniors here, or soon-to-be, and all these nerds talked about were the SAT, college applications, how many APs they were taking, etc. I stood in the crowded pool, all five feet five inches of me, wondering if anyone would notice if I drowned.

I waded my way over to the wall and clambered out.

All but one slice of pizza had been devoured by the adolescent partygoers. I took it, shooing off a lazy fly. Feeling lazy myself, I sat down in the shade, on those beach chairs that have more gaps than chair.

I took a bite of the Hawaiian – James’ favorite – and wished that I was holding a cigarette instead. I had a pack of Marlboros in my shorts, back in the locker room; nearly empty because I shared it with Jayden, a Hispanic guy in my civics class who could make the Grinch laugh his balls off.

I’d made it to the crust when someone started talking to me.

“Hey, is there any more pizza left?” she said.

I glanced at her. “No.”

People were playing chicken fight in the pool now. James had Adrienne on his shoulders. His old, black trunks with blue flowers – a negative of Patrick Star’s – ballooned up in the water. His arms, tanned with the sun, were around Adrienne, his hands on her thighs. Adrienne was a perfect match despite her gaudy-ass-fuck hot pink bikini, golden and beautiful on his shoulders. They faced what looked like another couple who, secretly, I hoped would win.

The girl sat down on the other side of the table.

“You’re James’ little brother, right?”

I blinked, surprised. I looked at her again. She had short, brown hair and large, brown eyes, which made her seem younger than she was, or at least too young to be wearing that strapless bikini. It didn’t fit her well either; too much skin spilled over the sides.

I shook my head. “No, I’m not.”

She cocked her head. “You’re not?” she said. “I thought you were.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“I don’t mean biologically or anything.” She waved her hand, dismissing this. Her fingernails were white. “Obviously.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Okay,” I said. I took a bite of crust.

She frowned, still confused. She wasn’t the only one. Why was she talking to me, anyway?

“Look, I’m Adrienne’s step-brother,” I said, swallowing. “James is my neighbor.”

She leaned back, face clearing. “Oooh,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Laughing, she said, “Sorry. Never would’ve guessed. But, like, doesn’t that still make him your brother?”

“What?” I said. I finished my pizza crust. “How?”

She shrugged, smiling warmly. With her white nails, she pulled up one side of her drooping bikini top.

“Like a brother-in-law,” she said. “You know?”

The pizza soured in me, going so far as to dry my throat. Now, I could do with some beer.

“They’re not married,” I said.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Shut up. You know what I mean.”

I did.

“Anyway, what’s your name?” she said.

I wanted her to go away. Shoo, fly. Fuck off. “Riley.”

“I’m Jessica,” she said. “You can call me Jess.”

“Okay.”

“How old are you, Riley?”

“Thirteen.”

I would be turning fourteen that September, but I didn’t feel the need to explain this to her. She giggled.

“God, you’re so young!” she said.

I tensed, skin crawling.

“I’m fourteen in two months.”

“I remember when I was fourteen.” She leaned forward on the table. I tried not to stare at her breasts. “I got into so much trouble that year.”

She looked at me with big eyes, smiling. I shrugged.

“Okay.”

Her smile faltered. She sighed.

“So young.”

I said nothing to this. After a moment of silence, Jess left to watch the chicken fight.

I stayed seated, breathing in the lingering smell of pizza. James always went straight for Hawaiian, but Adrienne preferred pepperoni, so they had argued on which kind to get. In the end, they settled on half Hawaiian, half pepperoni. I actually liked pepperoni, but I couldn’t see why Adrienne had a say in it at all.

Jess got pulled into the game, on top of some tall guy I had seen before, but never learned the name of. James and Adrienne, the reigning champions, cheered with everyone, ready for the challenge.

I couldn’t believe Adrienne was even here. Liam had grounded her for the week, again. She was failing math and English, and instead of riding on top of James’ shoulders, she was supposed to be in her room, working to improve her grades. Technically, I should have been grounded too, for the same reasons, but Liam never listened when she brought it up. Disciplining me was Mom’s job, which pretty much meant I could do whatever I wanted.

Adrienne gave Jess a nasty shove. The girl toppled off her partner’s shoulders, dropping into the pool with a sharp splash. Adrienne pumped her fist in the air, whooping.

My eyes stung, like I’d been the one abruptly thrown underwater. Not Jess, who had lost her top in the fall, who was now crying, who was trying to cover her tits with her hands.

I got up, finding my things. A crowd of people gathered around Jess, curious boys and protective girls. They paid me no attention as I slipped off into the bathroom. I changed in there, not looking at myself in the mirror. I tied up my damp hair, so it wouldn’t soak into my shirt.

My flip-flops quacked like ducks as I walked home.

Later in the year, fourteen

“It’s been a while since we hung out like this.”

I pushed through the doors of the movie theater, and maybe I made a face. Maybe he didn’t see.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

“You want some popcorn?”

James looked at the snack bar. We both eyed the endless slideshow of tasteless nachos, cardboard popcorn, and overpriced candy. I shook my head.

“No, I’m good. You?”

“Same.”

We went up to the bored usher, Rick Hart, who was a junior like James and the friend of a friend of a friend. They clapped each other on the shoulders like brothers.

James introduced me: “My neighbor,” he said. Rick looked me up and down, as if to say, really? This guy?

“Cool,” he said. “I’m Rick.”

“Riley.”

“You go to T.C. Williams, Riley?”

I frowned. Talking wasn’t my strong suit, especially when it came to James’ friends. I couldn’t see why he thought either of us would benefit from the exercise. I nodded.

“Cool,” he said. “What year?”

I took my time answering, as if I hadn’t really heard the question. “Ninth.”

“Freshman,” Rick said. There was relish in his voice, that small smirk all upper graders knew by instinct. “How’re you liking the school?”

I sighed. Hands in my pockets, I turned towards James.

“Is this an interrogation?” I said. “C’mon. We’re gonna be late for the movie.”

A pause. Rick wanted to sock me, I could see it in his face – customer service be damned – and he opened his mouth to say something probably along those lines. Abruptly, James put his arm around my shoulders. He laughed.

“Cute, isn’t he?” he said.

Rick paused. He looked between me and James. Visibly, he deflated, and I watched his anger go with something like disappointment.

“More like a piece of work,” he said.

“The young ones are all like that nowadays.”

A sly glance at James. “Isn’t Adrienne like that too?”

“She’s even worse.”

They laughed, and James slid his arm back off my shoulder. Rick took our tickets amiably enough after that, and James hung back for some more small talk. I hovered, trying not to stare. A few minutes later, they were clapping each other on the shoulders, saying their goodbyes.

“Enjoy your movie, jackass,” Rick called out as we were leaving.

I started to turn around, but James put his arm back around me.

“See you!” He smiled, but I could see the effort. With this faux-cheeriness, he said, “Excited for the movie?”

I looked at him, saying nothing. He knew it irritated me when he acted like this, like nothing was wrong. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he really didn’t think anything was wrong, which was almost more irritating. When we walked into the theater, I shrugged his arm off.

We were there to see Skyfall, which came out forever ago. It had good reviews, and even if it didn’t, it was James Bond. I never got around to watching it until now, mostly because I didn’t have anyone to watch it with. My friends would never do something so gay as going to the movies together, but it was different with James. He invited me, saying he hadn’t seen it either.

We sat down in the dark theater, just a few minutes into the previews. This late in the game, only a few people were dotted here and there on the rough, red chairs. We managed to find seats near the middle and not too far up front.

The trailer for some action movie was on. We turned off our phones in the light of cheesy lines and explosions. The previews moved on to rom coms, to some new Pixar, to more action movies, and I kept quiet, but occasionally James would lean over to say, “That one looks good,” or “Gotta be wasted to watch that.”

His voice tickled my ear.

When the message finally came on to silence our cell phones, I unclenched my hands.

James and I, we had watched plenty of movies together. Some at his place, some in this very same theater. Now, sitting in the rickety, cushioned chair, facing the flickering lights, I thanked the dark for hiding my trembling fingers.

Why had he asked me, instead of Adrienne? Instead of Rick, instead of anyone else, any one of his friends he studied with, went to parties with, played basketball with. For the first time in a long time, he chose me, and I felt happy. I felt ashamed for being happy.

His hand lay on the armrest. He was leaning onto my side, eyes fixed on the screen. I imagined I could feel the heat of him, his forearm and shoulder, through his December clothes. I imagined what it’d be like to peel them off. Maybe it’d be like peeling oranges – slowly, gently, so I wouldn’t pierce the skin. I’d dig my fingers in after, tearing it apart slice by slice, biting the sweet nectar, licking up the juice. Gobbling up the remains.

The movie lasted forever.

I couldn’t focus on anything. I was just gay enough to appreciate Daniel Craig – damn, that face – but other than that, nothing.

I peeked over at James. He, at least, was paying attention. Face forward, his crooked nose in profile. I could just see the curve of his lips.

How many people had he kissed with those lips? How many girls had he touched with those hands, large and possessive on my shoulder just minutes before. Adrienne accused him of cheating every other month, and as much as I hated her, I did agree he was a little too friendly with one too many girls. Then again, he was friendly with everyone. He was friendly with me.

I wanted to touch him. I wanted to cry.

He burst out laughing. James laughed with his whole body, jumping back in his seat like the punchline was more physical than not, and when he finally settled down, he caught me looking.

Damn that face.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

I looked away. Thankfully, he let it go. These sorts of things just slid off him, always; I loved that about him.

But a few minutes later, when I was finally beginning to follow the movie a little, James leaned towards me, whispering in my ear.

“You’ll have to tell me what’s up sooner or later.”

He leaned back without another word, leaving me frozen in my seat.

We watched the rest of the movie in silence.

Mom and I never did much for New Year’s. We would huddle up together on the couch, under blankets or towels, wearing socks and jackets and sweaters. If we had a TV, if the bills had been paid, New York would shine in the darkness; nameless, pink-cheeked people shivering in the cold with us.

The light shined bright in James’ room. A harsh, yellow glow, like the noon sun in clear, summer skies. I lay on the bed, trying not to stare at it.

“What happened to your lampshade?” I said.

James was lying on the floor. His cheeks were just as red as those of the windswept people in Manhattan, smiling on the screen. He turned his head to face the lamp, but seemed to regret it in the same instant.

“Dunno,” he said. He frowned heavily, like the Thinker.

Adrienne put down the bottle of Absolut, a clunk of glass on wood.

“You wore it to that Halloween party, remember?” she said. “To make a statement, you said.” She squinted at the TV screen. “What was it? Cliché making fun of clichés?”

James grabbed her bare foot. He pulled it closer to him so that she had to scoot forward a little, and he held it by his face, like his iPhone.

“Mm, that’s right,” he said. He kissed the inside of her ankle.

Dry throat, irritation, a seeping, exhausted sadness. Adrienne took another shot of vodka, and I held my hand out for the bottle. Wordlessly, she gave it to me.

I sat up on the bed to drink, appreciating the sear of vodka down my throat, past my heart, to my stomach. There wasn’t much left, so I finished it off, and I wondered what Liam would do when he noticed it was gone. Not much chance we would get into any trouble, like Adrienne said. He would probably blame it on Mom.

“Are we a cliché, Adrienne?” James said.

Adrienne looked down at him. She laughed. “What?”

He waved a hand around, then met my eyes.

“Next door neighbors, high school sweethearts, that whole shebang. You don’t think it’s cliché?”

Yes. Do you?

Adrienne took her foot away, nearly kicking him in the head. “What are you trying to say?”

He was still looking at me. “Are you happy with me?” he said. “Do I make you happy?”

Adrienne leaned forward. She took his face between her hands, and looking down, she said, “You’re an idiot.”

A kiss, I heard it more than saw it – her freakishly long hair hid their faces – and though I never wanted to see, I always forced myself to watch anyway, as if all this wasn’t torture enough.

“But I love you anyway,” she said. Her voice was quiet, a stage whisper.

“Love you too.”

More kisses, then she sat up, smiling, and he was looking at her now, smiling back. I wanted to hit her over the head with the empty bottle.

What was I doing here? I wasn’t supposed to be here; I didn’t fit in this picture of the two of them – the happy couple at New Year’s, together and drunk, professing their love in the bright light of night. I was the one outside, looking. I could barely sit straight, time shifting like someone was streaming a video of me from Mars, and what a shitty movie that would be, even without all that buffering.

“Guys, I think it’s starting,” Adrienne said. She was still whispering, like I wasn’t there, because she didn’t want me there. Who would?

“Ten!” they said.

Their heads already drawing closer.

“Nine!”

I covered my face with my fingers, peeking through the cracks.

“Eight!”

Couples on screen holding gloves.

“Seven! Six! Five!”

“Four,” I said.

It was all just a scary movie, a nightmare.

“Three!”

I would wake up from it someday.

“One!”

Shot after shot of men and women kissing, their lips bright red, smiling despite the cold, and within the shouts of happy new year! an old, graying man looked at his equally frail wife. Lowering his knit scarf, he mouthed the words, I love you.

I brought the rim of the bottle to my lips, biting the glass.

I turned fifteen on a beautiful, fall day. I started my sophomore year of high school just earlier that week, the day after Labor Day. I’d always thought it was funny, how everyone under nineteen used that day to jam pack all the laziness a single summer could never hope to hold. The lethargy always had a mournful air to it, though, and my birthday was no different.

My birthday was actually September 5th. With all the excitement over Labor Day and the stress over a new school year, people always seemed to forget this. By the weekend, Mom hadn’t mentioned it yet. None of them had. Not that it really mattered, though, at that point.

James always remembered. Ever since I turned nine, we celebrated my birthday the weekend after school started. That was what we were doing that Saturday: celebrating.

Pulp Fiction played on the screen. Vincent revived Mia with a shot of adrenaline to the heart, and James pressed the mute button. We were sitting on his bed, lounging with tepid beer and the quilt his great-grandmother had made once upon a time. It was stained with Cheeto-fingers and god only knew what else.

Sunset leaked through his twisted blinds.

“What did you say?”

I brought my knees up and wrapped my arms around them. There was a faded picture of a pink flower at eye-level.

“My parents. They’re getting divorced.”

James gaped at me.

“But why?” he said. “I mean, what happened? When did it happen?” He grabbed my arm. “Are you okay?”

I shook him off, like it wasn’t a big deal because it wasn’t. I was determined it wouldn’t be.

“Adrienne didn’t tell you anything?” I said.

“No.” James sighed. “You know how she is.”

I didn’t. Adrienne, to me, was nothing more than that thorn in my side. My bully step-sister, the one who flaunted her boyfriend in my face every chance she got. The feelings were mutual between us. Including the jealousy.

“You guys doing alright?” I said.

James gave me a weird look.

“We’re fine,” he said. “But more importantly, are you alright?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

James sighed. He leaned back against the wall, hugging one knee. “You guys are so alike sometimes, it’s scary.”

“Who?”

“You and Adrienne.”

I looked at him. He didn’t like the revulsion on my face.

“What?” I said.

“I’m serious!” James shifted, sitting cross-legged, closer to me. “You guys are like the same person sometimes. I don’t get why you hate each other so much.”

If only I could be Adrienne.

I shrugged and drank more of my beer.

“Because she’s a bitch,” I said.

“Like you’re a saint.”

James caught me smoking once, earlier that year. I’d stolen some from Mom, since it was only Jayden and me, and he said he’d rather run out into the highway butt-naked than get caught stealing from his parents. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. She and Liam were having one of their silent fights at the time.

We were smoking them just outside the school. James passed by with his friends, just far enough away that we could have pretended not to see each other. He looked at me though, and I looked at him.

He came over later that day, and he ransacked my room, trying to find them. I told him we’d smoked all of them already, which was a lie. I’d given them to Jayden, predicting what James would do beforehand. He told me if he ever saw me smoking again, he’d tell my mom.

I found this so funny, he stormed out, unable to get me to stop laughing.

I leaned back on James’ pillows, the quilt moving to show me a dark blue panel decorated with green vines.

“Why’re you with her, James?” I said.

He frowned. I’d never asked him that, though he had probably expected me to. Maybe it was the beer talking. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I like her,” he said.

I snorted softly and drank some more. The can was almost empty.

“Because she’s pretty?”

My friends flipped once, when they found out I was related, in a sense, to the Adrienne Becker. She and James were the high school sweethearts people saw in movies: beautiful, powerful, and cute with enough drama to make them interesting.

Matt, the potthead, said, “But you’re Asian.”

We all laughed.

James took a sip of his beer too. He grimaced at the taste.

“Do you really think I’m that shallow?” he said.

I scoffed.

On the TV, Vincent strolled out of the bathroom, freezing at the man before him. Bruce Willis shot his shotgun.

“That’s cold, Riley,” James said.

“Did I hurt your feelings?”

James just looked at me, staring until I looked back. Half his face was golden, glowing with shafts of sunlight. It brought out the lighter shades in his brown eyes: the amber, the bronze, the milk chocolate, and almost-yellow.

I wanted to kiss him.

He smiled. Reaching over, he brushed a few wispy strands of hair out of my face, tucking them behind my ear like he used to. He tugged lightly at the end of my ponytail.

“When’s the last time you got a haircut?” he said.

I crushed the empty can in my hand. I was blushing, but he might not have known why. Maybe he thought it was the beer.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Hm.”

James put his beer on the windowsill. It didn’t sound nearly as empty as mine. He got off the bed, passing by his TV screen. On it, Marsellus cried as the male shop owner raped him.

He rummaged for something in his drawers. I waited him out, turning the volume back up on the TV. The age-old movie could only hold my attention for so long before curiosity got the better of me.

“What are you doing?” I said.

James looked back at me. He grinned as he straightened up, a familiar pair of scissors in one hand, an old, electric razor in the other.

“Giving you a haircut!” he said.

I let this sink in for a few seconds. The last time James gave me a haircut, I was still in middle school. It was sometime before the turning point, when I could look at James and see, maybe, a brother. I rolled my eyes.

“Thanks,” I said. I threw my crushed beer can towards the door, aiming for his bin. I missed. “But no.”

James laughed. “Come on,” he said. “I swear I’m not drunk.”

“I know you’re not.” I got up to put the can in its rightful place. It fell into the basket with a dull thunk. “I just don’t want a haircut.”

“You used to love it when we were little,” James said.

I sat back on the edge of his bed, looking at him.

“Well, we’re not little anymore.”

James seemed to take this seriously for a moment. Before I could do anything about it, he put down his tools and jumped back on the bed, pulling out my hairtie, ruffling my hair, laughing as I tried to push him away.

“C’mon, I know you want it!” he said.

“No, I don’t!”

“Yes, you do!”

James lay on the bed, laughing, and I couldn’t help laughing with him. After a while, he coughed a little, and the room went silent but for the movie. I could tell James was still grinning, though, even when he said, “So, are you going to move?”

I looked up at his ceiling. It was an off-white with ornate borders near the corners, and a stain above our heads that actually did look a lot like Jesus.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What about school?”

“What about it?”

“It’s not like you can transfer in the middle of the school year.”

I shrugged, as much as you could while lying down.

“I don’t know.”

We fell quiet. A sudden series of gunshot sounds told me the movie had reached the diner scene. James wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Are you sure you don’t want that haircut?” he said.

“I’m not a kid, James,” I said.

He laughed a little. The movie ended, but neither of us moved to turn the TV off. We just laid there, while the sun sank into dusk, and I heard him breathe, sleeping or pretending to be asleep, thinking or pretending to be thinking, his hand resting next to mine.

My room was smaller than James’, but bigger than any of the others I’d had before. My mom liked to travel, even when she didn’t need to. She got bored easily, like a toddler, and when one area’s bars or men would tire her out, she’d come home with a sudden severance pay, or with pecuniary gifts from her boyfriend, or donations from her friends, or a combination of them all, then we would pick up our lives, her and I, and move on.

We shared this secret, like accomplices, but I forgot about it sometimes. When she kissed Liam goodbye in the mornings, or made love to him at night, when I passed James in the school hallways, or remembered the feel of his fingers in my hair. I forgot.

I looked at my mom now, sitting on my bed with smudged eyeliner and frizz in her hair, the smell of alcohol stronger than her perfume. I remembered. The night, this room, held our secret, and for old times’ sake, we peeked at it, as if to make sure it was still there.

“I never wanted it to be this way, you know,” she said. She was holding my hand, palm-up, like she was trying to read it.

“I know, Mom,” I said.

“And you grew to be so big,” she said.

I hadn’t.

“You’re already in high school, aren’t you?” She ran her fingers through my hair. “Oh, my smart boy. My smart, handsome boy.”

I was neither of those things.

“Mommy’s sorry. I just never grew up. It’s not my fault. It’s your father’s fault, and your grandparents’ faults. I was stupid. I wasn’t ready to have you, but when I did…”

She met my eyes. I got the distinct impression that I was looking at a mirage, at a painting of what my mom could have been, or more likely, what she actually was.

“I should have given you up,” she said. She was crying, her make-up running. “Mommy’s sorry.”

I squeezed her hand. It was veined, calloused, thin, a young woman’s.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She kissed my hand, staining it red.

“I love you,” she said.

I rubbed at one of her small, watery eyes. I tried to smile.

“I love you too,” I said.

Everything was different when I was in high school. It wasn't hell on earth, neither was it the prime of my life. If anything, it was a void. I passed through like any extra on a TV show, except, my time in high school wouldn't have even been worth getting on the screen. Other people have stories. I have small snippets. Flashes. It was different, like I said. I was indifferent.

     What happened on the first day of high school? You'd think I would remember something like that. I remember the first day of high school for Hannah Montana and her best friend, Lily, on the show I used to watch every now and then (and secretly, all the time). Miley had eyes only for the whole place, the new environment, and of course, the boys. Everyone was bigger, they said, which I guess was true for me too.

     Seniors look like adults. Everything is crowded and gray-blue, not white and spacious like on TV. The lockers were small. In middle school, we would take tours of the high school, field trips to a place ten minutes away, walking distance. Us eight-graders would compare the length of the freshman lockers to the width of our hands and note, with excitement and despair, that they were not so different.

     The place was big, then. I couldn't find anything, not when I went with my family during the open house, at least. My mom kept expecting me, somehow, to know where I was going just because I'd be going there, as if I could imbibe all the knowledge taught (and not taught) in the place, just by being there.

     Once school actually starts, it's all easy. You go to class, you learn, just as you had always done, ever since you can remember. People might say high school was hard, but it wasn't for me. I might have lamented the move our family made from a two-story home, complete with deck, to a small, dingy apartment that had your average, smoking, screaming, and fire-setting neighbors. It was difficult, I guess, having to face my family in such close-quarters, to not have a functioning lock on my door.

     But that was the brunt of it. I had people to sit with at lunch, and even when I didn't, I knew how to handle it. I made a friend or two in P.E. – my brief brush with the anime otaku crowd, even though I didn't realize it at the time. I had my best friend from middle school. I only had one or two classes with her and a lunch, but it was something. I got by.

     I did orchestra. It was never one of those things I thought was important, really. To me, it was just a class I had always taken, ever since fourth grade. Looking back on it, though, I guess it shaped my experience greatly, as much as my experience could have been shaped. I met my best friend for six years (the last year or so might have been questionable) there. I only hung out with friends of friends from orchestra. Most of the activities I did outside of academia and home were concerts or orchestra field trips or activities fairs. Not that it ever defined me, or I thought it didn't. I wonder who I was then, to think that this major aspect of my life really had little to do with me.

     I remember the locker room. It was never creepy, like in horror movies, or incredibly awkward, both of which I feared. The first time I undressed in front of ten other girls, it felt completely normal. What I hated was the smell. The compacted stench of thirty different girls' perfumes and the undercurrent of BO, it was wretched and made me sneeze. I had to borrow a uniform all the time, because I was forgetful, even then.

     I remember some girls talking about how they shaved their legs in that class, which seemed so ridiculously intimate to me then. One of them said how it was difficult to get around the ankles, which I didn't get, and around the knees, which I didn't get either. My BFF also talked about that once, when we were sitting in the hallway, eating lunch. She confided in me that she got hair on her knees, and she acted like it was so weird that when she asked me if I was the same, I said no.

     One time, we were in P.E, and the gay guy that everyone seemed to like and know, and one of the only people I could talk to in gym class, wasn't there. We were supposed to be walking around the track. I was by myself, trying to see if I could walk straight while closing my eyes. It couldn't have been, but I remember the skies being gray that time, that it was raining. A teacher eventually came over to ask if I was okay.

     They tended to do that.

     There are other things I could say about high school. When I tried joining the art club in my senior year, because I didn't have a lot of extracurriculars. When I went to Korea. When I joined a national history competition with an exhaustive project on Dorothea Dix, whom you've probably never heard of. When I played with my orchestra in the White House and thought that the time I spent there, during Christmastime with my eventual crush, would be the closest I would ever get to a date.

     I could tell you about all the hours I spent for the National Honor Society, the Science Honor Society, the French Honor Society, the Math Honor Society, the English Honor Society, and the History Honor Society, which actually changed its name to something I never bothered to remember. It's funny. When I list it out like that, it's like I actually did something in high school. Honestly, it always felt like one big joke. Some kind of hoax, telling all of us that this was everything you needed to prepare you for the life 'out there'.

     It was insignificant to me then, and it's even more now.

     There was this air vent in this one hallway on the second floor ceiling of the school. It always blew hot air, a godsend during the winter.

     One day, it snowed. We didn't have to go to school, and that's why I went. The school was empty, filled only with snow, up to the very tops of these tables people would sit at for lunch, on nice days. People had drawn a gigantic dick into the football field, and I laughed when I saw it, from the bleachers. I took a picture.

     I made snowmen there, in the field, singing a little as I played by myself. Walking around, I felt what I thought would be bravery, but what turned out to be fear.

     I ran in the track that surrounded the field, once or twice, by myself and with my mom. I closed my eyes once as I ran, because it was the morning and I had done it before. I ran bodily into a trash can, staining my favorite jacket with coffee, a scent newer to me then, than it is now.

     There was this red-haired boy who used to be in one of my science classes, and incidentally, in debate when I joined. He was pear-shaped and jovial, in his looks, anyway. He always drank iced coffee in the mornings, and it made his breath smell horrible. By that point, I had built a prejudice against coffee.

     It always seemed to be the popular, more adult-like kids that drank coffee. Walking in with them in the mornings, like the actual adults, as if they didn't receive allowances from their parents and never got grounded. Not that either of those things ever happened to me.

     There was this girl, once. She kissed her boyfriend in the hall, and I thought she looked so adultish then. It wasn't a make-out, slobbery, teenage kind of kiss, it was a woman and a man's smack on the lips, just a greeting between two lovers.

     They seemed so far away.

     I went to the same high school as my crush from elementary school. If I had ever loved a man, I guess I loved him. At the very least, he shaped me, which is wild because we barely knew each other. His older sister was my sister's best friend, and that's how I fell for him. Through second-hand stories. Love is really something so unpredictable, alive. Twenty-one years and I've loved many people, but I've never fallen in love. To trust someone so completely, even if the opportunity presented itself – which, in its barest form, I guess it has – is just not possible for me. Well, it's possible. Anything is possible. It would just be difficult.

     And to be honest, I hate writing romance. Yet, I can never stay away. My romance stories, to me, seem volatile, or flat, or too disturbing, just never right. They're too emotional. I can't look at them from the outside in and find what I'd done wrong. But that's what fiction is for, isn't it? What writing is for. To lie to yourself, to everyone about who you are or who you want to be. Only by sifting through all those lies, can you really see the truth.

     And the truth is, I want to fall in love. I want Prince Charming or tall, dark, and handsome, or Mr. Hipster to walk right into my life someday and tell me what I want to hear. I'm sure this isn't too revolutionary of an idea. But I feel like that everyday, I think of it every time I wake up in the morning. There's an emptiness, just waiting to be filled, but by what? Shame. Regret. Jealousy. Bitterness. If love ever does come for me, I hope this emotional well won't be too filled up by then.

     And a lot of the times, I weirdly wish that I was gay. I know I've been influenced not only by what I read, but by my company. But I don't know. I've tried, emotionally. And I'm tired of trying. But what happens when I stop trying? Do I move forward, or backwards? Left, or right? Into love or out of it. I wish I knew. I wish I didn't have a headache, maybe I could think clearly about this then. Maybe I could stop being so tired, then.

     I want to touch. More than anything, I want to touch. Hair, neck, legs, the space between. I want to know. If I'll be touched back.

     But that's the extent of it. Does that count? It's not like in the books. I don't feel electricity, a spark. I feel longing. As if there's nothing else that can relieve all of this uncertainty that I feel everywhere, all the time. Like one touch can siphon it all away. Or more than one touch, many. A hug that lasts forever.

     Maybe I stare. When I can get away with it. But when we're together, it's not like the planets align and I feel peace on earth or reach the zenith of happiness. I feel awkward. I take the first opportunity to leave. But the instant I do, I wish I hadn't.

     Why am I like this? Life sucks, sometimes. When I want her here with me.

     And then we reach further complications. Because I'm leaving, we're separating, just months from now. Graduation. What's more, college graduation. My entire life, and this is no exaggeration, has been funneling down to this point. The first person in my family to graduate college. Me. Just little old me.

     So, what am I supposed to do now? Now, I push through to the end. To the finish line. But after? I start living life for me, I suppose. I start doing what I want to do.

     But then, what have I been doing for all this time?

     I want to love, that's true. I want to love my job. My life, myself. Someone else. That's a big goal, though. Much bigger than finishing college.

     I know who I am, or I guess, what I am. The balance between hating myself and liking myself has very much resolved itself, by this point. I want to look outward now. I want to see how other people work, how life works. I want to see people's faces when my words reach their ears or hearts, or just simply, their minds. I want the world. No, I want a world with me in it. Is that so much to ask?

     I guess I'll find out.

When I wake up, it's always the same. Lying there in the silence behind my eyelids, on the edge of a dream. What happened, in all those hours, sometimes just minutes, between sleeping and waking? I don't remember. I just feel warm tiredness, heavy sadness. I want to remember. My thoughts lead me, though, to other thoughts. Unwanted memories, unwanted dreams. I see flashes of flesh. I listen to silent whispers. Closing my eyes tighter, I think of the small space next to me in my twin-sized bed, of the body that isn't there. My heart beats loud, without sound. Can my friend hear it, from just next door? Can she hear it, from the space just beneath my floor.

     My house-mate thunders downstairs for breakfast. My stomach grumbles. I hug the blankets that aren't as warm as a person, and in the kitchen, I hear her voice.

     I get up.

I’ll let you in on a secret, if you promise not to tell.

Promise?

Okay.

Here’s the secret: I’m a monster. In every way, of course, but the literal. I wasn’t born like regular people, into a happy home, surrounded by wholesome people, at exactly the right time. I’m the result of an experiment concocted out of short-lived lies.

I’m like Frankenstein’s Creature. I’m probably more grotesque. He was stitched together out of dead people, a pitiful being abandoned by his Creator from birth. I took the blood of living people, and unlike the Creature, I keep on taking as I grow.

What is it like to live like this? As a monster, as a demon, as a bitch?

That’s a secret too.

To My Sister

I’m twenty-one today. My friends and I are going out to drink, although we’ve been out to drink before. It feels special today. Flashing my ID like the police in the movies, stepping into the dark stuffed air like an emancipated woman, remembering how I had passed for twenty-six once at a club, with my sister, three years ago. It’s electrifying. I feel drunk already on how much I’ve grown.

We head over to the bar. We’re armed with our order, having an hour crystallizing them the day before. Sarah’s rum and coke. Karen’s screwdriver. I’m long island iced tea. The bartender barely blinks at our approach, having seen people like us before. “What would you like?” he says.

Neither of my friends answer. We hadn’t planned for who would go first. The sudden silence solidifies in my throat, poking at my skin, making it hard to breathe. I step forward. The bar seems abnormally high, like normal tables do when you’re five. He looks at me. “Long island iced tea,” I say, my voice loud.

“Alright. Would you like to open up a tab?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Yes.”

I fumble with my purse, trying to find my credit card. He looks on from somewhere up above. I finally manage to hand it over. He takes it with a smile and walks away. I look over at my friends.

“I did it,” I say.

They ambush me. Karen puts an arm around my shoulders, and Sarah claps a hand on my back. They congratulate me, we talk, we laugh, we joke like I had just walked through fire and lived.

What I can’t tell them is how I wish I wasn’t here right now. How I wish that the arm around me and the congratulations in my ears weren’t theirs but someone else’s.

My sister is eight years older than me. Like a parent, she has always been my role model. She fights against the people who picks on her, she speaks up when she’s wronged, she never gives up on what she wants, and she’s pretty.

I love her. I can never be like her.

What’s bizarre, though, is that my sister looks up to me. She says I’m smart. In her eyes, I’m a hard worker. I’m mature. But, Unnie, these are qualities that you’ve given me. They coat me, uncomfortable, sticky, like the drink that spills on me as I dance.

I remember when you told me your secret. We were sitting on my bed, everyone else asleep. The lamp was giving off orange light. My hands were holding each other. The pillow was at my back, and the blanket was covering my legs, but I can’t recall your face. We must not have been looking at each other.

When you told me, I didn’t know what to say. I don’t remember if I said anything. What I do remember is how I felt.

Nothing. Nothing, except crippling guilt for feeling nothing.

I’m only a monster, I can say. I wasn’t made to feel things like sympathy. At the time, I must have at least acted the emotion well, for you say you love me now.

I’m not your sister, I want to say. I’m stupid, I’m lazy, I’m a child, now and forever.

I won’t say it. As uncomfortable as this sheen of lies is, I’d rather you lap up false happiness than look at me with sober eyes.

To My Brother

I sit down at one of the tables, my third glass of long island iced tea in hand. I feel nauseous. I made a fool of myself, as I always do when I dance drunk, but being drunk, I didn’t care. I would still be up there if I could, but I wasn’t made for physical exertion. I’m sweating, dizzy and tired.

“Hey!”

Someone sits down next to me. I look over at him, happy. “Hi!” I say back.

He has dirty blond hair, a round nose, and blue eyes. He’s fit in the way college guys tend to be, smiling at me in the way none of them ever do. That smile tickles my brain, whispering to me, telling me that he and I have met somewhere before.

“What’s up?” he says.

“Oh, you know. Resting.” I take a sip of my drink. “I was dancing.”

He laughs. “Yeah, I saw.”

I frown. “I like dancing.”

“I could tell.”

“Do you like dancing?”

“No, I’m not much of a dancer.”

“Shame.”

“Why’s that a shame?”

“I don’t know.” I look at him again. He’s still smiling, that patronizing amusement every sober person seems to have. I sit up straighter. “Who are you? You look familiar.”

He’s frowning now. Serves him right. “Kyle,” he says. “I’m in your creative writing class.”

“Kyle!” I yell out, triumphant.

“Yeah.”

It’s the middle of the semester. I take another sip of my drink, trying to slide over this sticky moment. “What’s up, Kyle?”

“Nothing much.” He smiles again, cold now. “Just wanted to come over and say hi. Actually, I should get back to my friends.” He gets up. “See you in class.”

“Yeah, see you.”

He leaves. I gulp down the rest of my drink. That didn’t go well. But does it really matter? I wipe my mouth, looking back over to where my friends are. After all, I barely know the guy.

He’s a good writer, though. I scowl at myself. It’s difficult to tell what exactly I feel for people like him. Love? Hate? Maybe respect. Yes, that’s it. Respect. But it bites, you know, when someone whom you respect does not respect you.

My brother is also a good writer. He’s two years younger than me; tall, smart, meticulous, good-natured. When we were little, people mistook us for twins. Now, people mistake him as the older sibling. We both know it’s not just the height.

He and I are friends. I love my sister, but she was a tyrannous time bomb when we were children. Around her, we learned to never talk back. Our parents were more lax, but only because they were never around. He and I stuck close together to prevent insanity. We were equals then, telling each other everything with no regard to age, to gender, to height. We tell each other a lot of things now too.

I told him, for example, when I had my first drink, when I got my first tattoo, when I went on my first date, when I received my first A in college.

But there are also a lot of things I will never tell him. I’ll never tell him, for example, how I used to wish he had no friends, so that I could feel better about having so little. I’ll never tell him how I used to hate the way Mom praised him for every little thing, just because he was the youngest. I’ll never tell him how much I despised him for losing weight just like my sister, making me the fat child. I’ll never tell him how much I resented him for being able to write so well.

Can you imagine how sweet it felt for me when he stopped making friends in middle school? When his grades dropped in high school, when he gained weight again after graduation? When he stopped writing?

Sometimes, when I think about the boy he was, I look at myself and imagine his lost happiness driving into me like staples. Friends? Ka-chunk. There they are, in my chest. Grades? Ka-chunk. There they shine, on my forehead. Skinny? Ka-chunk. There it goes, from my stomach. Writing? Ka-chunk. There it lies, on my hand.

Help me, I want to say. I’m bleeding.

To My Mother

The night is winding down. The club is near-empty, and Karen is watching over Sarah as she vomits in the bathroom. Lightweight. I walk out for some fresh air, sucking in the soft glow of yellow light. The starry strings form a ceiling above me, breathtaking but blinding, hiding the blue night's actual stars from me, a billion cosmic secrets. It smells like cigarettes.

I stumble into a table, sit down. Laughing at myself, I ignore the grime, the germs, and I drop my head onto the metal surface. Cold. The sensation is wonderful because I’m hot. My lips, my mouth, the inside of my ears are buzzing, numb, and that’s wonderful too. I try humming something.

My mom is sitting in the driver’s seat, turning the wheel as she looks for a parking space. She hums a tuneless note, high, vague, happy-sounding. I see myself reaching over to poke her arm, deliberately annoying her. If I poke her, she could get distracted and we could crash, we could run someone over. But she’s humming.

She’s smiling and she’s humming; she’s somewhere else. She’s not the mother in the car, at the Costco parking lot, here with me. She’s the woman singing karaoke in the basement of our house, surrounded by her friends; her high voice – a bird’s voice – vibrating but true, herself swaying softly as she ignores the words that flash on the screen. She’s the woman buying designer clothes with money from her part-time job, the woman marrying a man for his humor, his good looks, his sociability. She’s the woman traveling all over the continental US, the woman eating an entire watermelon by herself.

She remembers her Korean, knows her English. During the week, she drives her children to soccer games, basketball practices, school events, she knows what goes on in their lives. She talks with them, they talk with her. She is important. Relevant.

I poke her. She stops humming.

To My Father

Dad, did you know? You are a pitiful man. You know what it’s like to have a deadbeat father, a runaway mother, the ghost of a brother. You have a half-sister too, just like me. The pain must have been unspeakably blinding, when Uncle died in that bike accident. He was your caretaker, your role model, your friend. It must hurt, to have your son remind you of him. It must have cut deep, every time that son put his T-shirt over his nose, so that he wouldn’t have to smell your cloud of cigarettes.

When you visited last Thanksgiving, we went to pick you up. You stumbled out of the Uber car, stomping towards us, arms raised. You crushed us to your chest. I could not believe my nose. But then you slurred your words, you talked too loudly, and I was left with no other choice.

You know, I drink now too. One time, I was lying on the floor of my living room. I was exhausted, more than ready to sleep. But I don’t have to describe something like that to you. You’ve done that before, haven't you? Fallen asleep, drunk, in the middle of our living room. That motivated me to get up. To brush myself off. To go to the bathroom.

“I’m not like my dad,” I kept on saying. “I don’t want to be like my dad.”

I cried, my head tucked into my friend’s lap.

But did you know? I’m an easy crier. I was a sniffling, sobbing mess when I watched Titanic in theaters, and even after all this time, I still cry when I read The Half-Blood Prince. You’re a crier too; I’ve seen you at it. You cry in sad movies, in sad times.

Do you remember that day when we watched movies together? I was going through a movie phase, and you were too. I told you my favorite actor was Leonardo DiCaprio. We talked about one of his movies, The Departed. We sat side-by-side while we watched a different crime movie, with Jake Gyllenhaal.

You’re such a know-it-all, like me, even though what we know is sometimes wrong. You also randomly check my Facebook sometimes, commenting, “I love you! I miss you, my pretty daughter!” no matter what I post there.

“I love you too!” I should say. Because I do.

Dad, one night, you made me wake up. The room was dark, the house was loud. I got out of bed and creaked the door open, to hear better, even though I could already hear well enough.

Mom was begging, probably on her knees. You were shouting about something in Korean. Something crashed. I guessed you’d flipped over the living room table.

My sister’s door creaked open too. Our wide, white eyes caught each other from across the blue space of the hallway. She sneaked over into my room and closed the door. The sound of your yelling, of a bird's trembling voice, softened just slightly.

“Don’t go downstairs,” my sister said.

I nodded.

“Just go back to bed.”

I nodded again.

She grabbed me by the wrist. “And don’t tell anyone about this.”

I nearly jumped, chilled more by her touch than by whatever was going on downstairs. “Okay,” I squeaked.

She let go of me. “Good night, I love you,” she said.

She left without waiting for a reply. Crying, she told me many years later, was something you do alone.

Many more years later, I'm here, with two of my friends. We're drunk, blinking at each other in the silence of 3AM. It's the first night of my life as a grown-ass adult, in most every sense of the word. What have I accomplished? The sidewalk is dark; fuzzy compared to the clear, white stars – the innumerable grains of salt that someone had been careless enough to spill across the skies. As the night goes on, those stars will dissolve into black waters that extend both light years away from me and all the way into me. For now, I see my friends, feel their warmth, hear the way we snort and giggle at sex jokes and at nothing. What is there to be proud of? Have I become a better person, any less of a monster?

You tell me.

You see, it was a Friday. On Fridays, my buddies and I head straight for the bar after clocking out. After hours and hours of standing around, feeling our brains decompose while keeping that fucking grin on our face, we felt that yeah, we deserved it. That's retail for you. Either the job kills you, or your methods of coping will.

That Friday, I met a girl. I'm talking long legs, decent rack, and red smile. She was goddamn beautiful. We talked over some drinks, laughed at some jokes, then we were fucking on her bed, though for the life of me I couldn't tell you who convinced who. In the morning, we looked at each other again and realized something.

Hey, aren't you...?

Oh god, you're...

Sean Choi.

Naomi Dawson.

Naomi Dawson. I hadn't heard that name in years. Fuck, I hadn't given two shits about the girl in almost a decade.

It's been a while, she said.

I took a sip of my coffee; it burned my tongue. Yeah, I replied. Yeah, it's been a long time.

How have you been?

I put my coffee down. Ah, I'm alright. Just another college grad working retail, you know.

Oh. She drank from her coffee, gulping it down silently like it wasn't just boiling hot two seconds ago.

What about you? I said. How've you been holding up?

I've been okay.

That's good.

Yeah, she said. It's okay.

I thought she was talking about the coffee. I brought up how hot it was, and then we went off on a tangent about coffee, of all things. Soon enough, I was walking back out the door, her phone number tucked into my pocket, dropping promises into the air that we'd meet up again.

Yeah fucking right.

Naomi and I were childhood friends. “Friends” is what I would call it, since we hung out, ate lunch, talked. It started when we were ten. I woke up the day after Halloween, punch-drunk from too much candy, and my mom started gushing to me about how Mr. and Mrs. Dawson's baby got run over yesterday.

“Oh my,” she kept on saying. “Oh my, that poor child.”

That was all they ever said – my mom, my friends, fuck, even the teachers. “Poor Naomi.” “Poor baby.” “Poor dear.” But the thing was, Naomi never acted like a dear. Never caught in the headlights, frozen in the spotlight, only moving as she'd always moved: on and on.

I got curious.

See, Naomi didn't have friends. Even if she was the lone-wolf type, the shy, small-voice type, going through four years of grade school without forming one friend was pretty fucking hard to do. It took work. I managed to mangle all the efforts of that work and become her only friend. It was hard and frustrating, but I kept at it. I kept at it and continued going at it until that blistering day in June when we graduated and she vanished from my life.

Well, fuck her, I thought. Fuck her and all her talks, all our talks. Fuck her wild, witch's laugh, fuck every ounce of food she'd ever weaseled out of me, fuck the way she said fuck, all soft, drawn-out and hesitant. Fuck her.

I was never going to see her again, especially not after that goddamn Friday night. At least, that's what I told myself, but there was something about her. Even now, I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I felt guilty. Maybe I was waiting for an apology. All I know is that every following Friday she'd text me, always these same two words:

Come over.

And I came over.

After a few weeks, I decided that Naomi had a nice bed. We lay on that bed every time I came over, watching her nice, HD TV. It was comfortable. It was nice. At the end of six weeks, though, I felt like the bed could have swallowed me up whole, and Naomi wouldn't have spared even the blink of a goddamn eye. So that sixth night, we weren't watching the TV. It was late. If we started a movie, we'd fall asleep before we could finish it, or that's what I said.

We were just sitting together, finally, side-by-side, in a silence that we had been warding off for too long now, a thin barrier that had reached its breaking point.

I spoke first.

Why'd you drop off the face of the Earth after we graduated? I said.

She stared, frowning at the blank TV like it was actually on. Then she wasn't anymore. She looked down at her hands, her face as blank as the goddamn TV.

It started with a fight, she said.

A fight?

Yes, she said. A fight.

They had loved each other in the beginning. For many, many years they loved each other, and at the end of those years, they had a child. No one remembers the child's name or what it looked like – if it had been a girl or a boy, if it had been beautiful, like its mother, or warped, like its father. All we know is that Hawé had loved it, adored it just as your mother had adored you and my mother had adored me. Every day she suckled the child. She cradled it in her arms, kissed its unwrinkled forehead, and sung to it stories that no one else knew. Aerta watched his lover as she did this. He watched as she poured her love away from him and into this creature he soon wished had never been born.

He knew what must be done.

One night, in the midst of Hawé's slumber, he stole the child from her arms. The child, perhaps having recognized its father, did not cry. It simply lay in Aerta's arms, silent, blinking, innocent to its fate. Perhaps Aerta hesitated at this. Perhaps in the sudden shadow of a doubt he looked at those clear, thoughtless eyes and contemplated fully the weight of his actions. If he did, it was not enough. That night, Aerta held the child in his hands for the first and last time, and he swallowed it whole.

Wait, I interrupted.

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were expectant, like she'd been waiting for me to cut in right at this exact moment. The thought that I was playing into her weird game pissed me off, but not as much as it should have. Naomi tended to have that effect on me.

Yes? she said.

What the fuck are you talking about? I said. I asked you a question.

And this is my answer.

But –

She nudged my shoulder with hers, smiling at me gravely.

Just listen, she urged.

No, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her that I wouldn't just sit there and listen to her bullshit. It was fine when we were brats. She'd talk nonstop about aliens, superpowers, robots, the usual kind of kid crap that would sound like something more when coming out of her mouth. We weren't kids anymore, though. We were adults for god's sake, and adults didn't believe in shit like fairies.

But you see, Naomi had green eyes. Green like leaves in April rain, and I'm no twat poet so when I say shit like that, you know I mean it. They stared at me then, so big and full of water that they glistened, even in the gray dark.

Okay, I said. I'll listen.

Still smiling, she leaned her head on my shoulder and wrapped her damp fingers around my nicotine-stained hand.

Aerta ate his child, she continued. It was done, irrevocable, and the cry that Hawé let out at finding her arms empty the next morning bore through his already beaten heart. But it will all end soon, he told himself. Soon, Hawé will be mine once again.

Yet Hawé was the Being that ruled all beings. She watched over every plane in the universe, dipped her fingers into the swirls of stars and left behind trails of black holes, life-giving water, acid rain, and bipedal organisms. She was life and death and heaven and hell. That morning, she took one look at Aerta and knew what he had done.

Hatred as she had never known tore through her mind and aching breasts. “I banish you!” she screamed. “I banish you to the ends of the universe, where you shall never chance to look upon me again. There you shall bear the weight of all my children, you shall feel their feet shift and stomp on your back, you shall watch them grow while you decay in the filth of their waste, and you shall nourish them, knowing that they are the children of others and not yours.”

Aerta begged for mercy. “I love you,” he said.

“It is not enough,” Hawé replied.

It is said that even thousands of years after, in the dead of night, one could still hear Aerta begging, the cries tucked like secrets into the wind.

Naomi paused to grab her beer from the nightstand. She took a sip before offering it to me. I drank from it like I was watching someone else move my hands, open my mouth, and massage the liquid down my throat.

At one point in my life, I legitimately believed that Naomi was insane. Stories are stories, but you wouldn't have believed it from the way she talked. For her, mutant dolphins and hallucinogenic pencils were as real as you or me, and whenever I said they weren't, she would stop talking to me for hours, sometimes days. That night was different, though.

That night, she was speaking like the story was a fairytale. She moved her hands and paced herself, like her answer was a thoroughly memorized performance of a book she had read somewhere, sometime long ago.

Which meant that she was talking about that Halloween night, when her step-father turned his back for a second and let her baby sister step out into the road, about that random day, when her mother punished him by killing herself, as if it were all just a story. And I just didn't know what to do with that.

Naomi put away the beer and continued.

Just as Hawé promised, she bore many more children from many more men, and she sent them all to live on the wide expanse of Aerta's back. Aerta had no choice but to sustain them, to give them the water and the vegetation that would help them grow. Aerta resented Hawé for this, yet he could not stop loving her.

Every night, he sent his heart out into the skies, commanding Hawé to look at its brilliance, urging her to think of him, to return to him. Hawé's children looked upon this bright light, feeling its loneliness, and some began to join their hearts with his. After hundreds of years, the black darkness of the planet the children called Kaluhet bloomed every night with the beating lights of a billion stars and one cratered moon.

Yet the only answer Hawé ever gave was one more child, one more burden, one more wound.

And finally, Aerta ceased to endure. He did not wish to incur Hawé's wrath yet again, but neither could he sit back for hundreds, thousands of more years as her children breathed and ceased to breathe on his skin, in peace.

Painfully, he began to change. Blood ran in rivulets as he willed his skin to rip open in uneven seams. Brilliant, fertile land dried up, wrinkling into cracked ground as he denied moisture to those regions. His body arched into mountains, dipped to form valleys, trees and berries flourished in one place and shriveled up in another. Oozes of chemicals erupted from his broken skin, tainting, mutating once harmless plants and animals into things of poison and fear.

The world had changed. Aerta had changed. Yet, it was the Kaluhetians who had to choose how to live in this new environment. Would they live on harmoniously, as they had before? Or would they hunt, scavenge for land and knowledge, and betray each other in the name of survival?

Yes, it was their choice, Naomi said. But Aerta knew what they would choose.

Naomi never outright told me, but I knew her step-father never got around to doing that much fathering. His baby dead, his wife dead, a man can only take so much from life. If he didn't have Naomi, yeah, I would've gotten that. Naomi's mom died the summer after fifth grade, and the man disappeared too, in a way. That was when Naomi and I really started to hit it off, hanging out all the time 'cause she hated being at home. That summer, her stories were always about ghosts and zombies, creepy things that I swore were cool even if they kept me up at night.

I guess they lived like that, one fairy and one zombie together in a house as hush as a church. It was senior year of high school when I started to think that something was wrong. That something had changed. Naomi started skipping, which isn't like a fucking crime, but Naomi never skipped. She started sleeping in class. She'd show up looking like a goddamn corpse and refuse to talk to me.

She started to have bruises, cuts, small but gigantic on her usually perfect, acne-free skin. She'd just brush me off when I asked about them, and I figured if she didn't want to talk about it, that was her business.

But I was curious. Fuck it, I was worried. Naomi only had her father and me, and if one of us was a fucking deadbeat, then what was I supposed to do? I showed up to her house one day. She was skipping, so was I. I knocked, no one answered. Crouching down, sweating, I got the spare key out from under the mat, and I opened the door.

The rank stench of stale sweat and bitter, sour alcohol was warm, sticky, humid, but it all hit me like a cold, cement wall. I nearly gagged and stepped back outside. But Naomi was there, sitting on the floor. She was hugging her knees, not looking at me, even though she must have heard me knocking. She was looking at the couch, where, in the shadows, I could almost see something breathe.

Cans of beer, empty bottles of vodka, shards of exploded glass and glittering ash from upturned ashtrays. Everything reflected and shined in the light that spilled in through the door I'd left open behind me, everything except Naomi, her step-father, and me.

“Naomi,” I choked out.

“Not now, Sean,” she said. “Come back later.”

“I can't fucking come back later, Naomi...”

Silence.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“Last night,” she said, quietly so that I had to step closer to hear. “He told me he was dying. Cancer, he said. Isn't that unbelievable? A dream, maybe a nightmare. But this is how he chooses to cope!” She laughed, not her usual, cackling laugh. It was an adult's laugh. Bitter, like beer. “No, there's nothing you can do, Sean. There's nothing any of us can do.”

“Naomi.”

She looked at me. Finally, she looked at me.

Just go, she said.

What?

Just go, Sean.

I waited for her to say something else, anything else, but she just turned back to look at the couch. I remember the dust motes dancing between us, like a million laughing fairies.

Fine, I spit out.

I turned around and just went, slamming the door behind me.

Kaluhet became divided. Tribes formed. Towns formed. Villages, societies, civilizations, city-states, empires, countries formed and crumbled and reformed and crumbled again. Aerta watched on in savage satisfaction even as his body groaned, bones creaking and cracking, skin burning and melting.

The moon still hovered in the distance of the night skies, but stars slowly disappeared, lost in time, as the Kaluhetians fought, gloated, surrendered, and killed in a haze of red days.

Millions of cries joined together in lament over hundreds of years. Finally, finally, the sound reached the opposite ends of the universe, and Hawé shifted her ear towards the voices of her children.

“What is it, my loves?” she said, confused by the mixed sounds of triumph and loss. “What has happened in the place you call Kaluhet?”

“Mother!” they cried. “Hear us! We are the defeated, the ostracized, the starving, the weak. We were born on this cursed planet, destined to be slaves to the victorious, targets for the majority, entertainment for the fat, and nothing to the strong. We do not deserve our fate. Look, Mother, look at how we breathe! We are your children, just as they are your children! Why must we suffer like some lesser beings? Why must we live and die on our knees, reduced to nothing, knowing nothing but desperation and ridicule, right up until the very end? Mother, hear us. Look at us! Save us from this world that knows nothing but pain.”

Hawé listened to them in horror. Once again, Aerta had maimed her children. Once again, Aerta had betrayed her.

This time, she knew her punishment must be absolute.

“Aerta!” she called.

He gasped at this name, at hearing Hawé's voice. It filled him with such potent longing that the rivers, the rain, the oceans of Kaluhet stilled, every plant and hill straining to hear her words.

“Aerta,” she said again. “I punished you once, many years ago. You killed my child. I could not forgive you, I still have not forgiven you, yet you have added upon your sins by guiding the rest of my children into madness and self-loathing. Why? Why have you done this? I did love you, somewhere in this body of mine, I might still love you. But you have done this. You have done this, and I cannot forgive you.”

She looked down upon Aerta, the deformed, broken thing that she had loved so long ago. 

She hesitated. She was Hawé, the Being that ruled all, yet she hesitated.

But she knew what must be done.

“Goodbye, my once-love,” she said.

And so, the Kaluhetians received what they had wished for: an end to all things. In silence, they watched as trees everywhere began to dry up and crumble, as rivers and oceans disappeared as if they had never been. Fruits blackened and dropped like stones, flowers and leaves drifted away with the wind, and toxic fumes choked down their every breath.

Aerta was dying. Yet this brought neither salvation nor satisfaction because with his death, the Kaluhetians realized that they too would die. They realized that they had been living all this time because of him. They realized that they could not live without him. And they knew this realization – come too late – was their punishment for forcing Hawé's hand.

So they starved. Their throats burned for water. They killed each other, killed themselves, they waged feeble wars for the diminishing nutrients, and they pleaded for Hawé to bring him back. They did everything they could. But there was nothing that could be done.

Thus they lived on until the end of their days.

I waited a few seconds for her to start speaking again, for the part that came after the end. I waited so many long, silent seconds.

Naomi, I said, finally. Is this your answer?

Were you listening?

Yes, I said. I was listening.

Then you tell me.

I paused, mind blank. But it didn't matter that I couldn't think. It wasn't something I had to think about.

“You know,” I said. “It's not written in the stars or whatever that you have to suffer like your dad and your mom, or even your sister. You're alive. You're here right now, with me. I don't know what you've been doing for the last five years, but you can tell it to me straight, when you're ready. You don't have to hide behind your words, or all the shit you've been through, not anymore, because you're not some long lost story. You're a person. You have skin. You cuss and the way you laugh is fucking ridiculous. You've grown up to be a really hot broad, and you're a damn good kisser. You can be funny when you want to be. I know that you actually hate coffee, and unlike every other person on Earth, you like the smell of cigarettes. You're not dead, you're not a ghost, and you're not a fucking zombie. You're a living, breathing, human being. You don't have to go away. Not then, and definitely not now.”

Slowly, she took her hand out of mine. She looked at the TV, briefly, and then she sighed. Just an exhale, quiet even, in her usual way. But it was like I was seeing her breathe for the first time.

“Naomi?” I said.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “For keeping you here so late. You have work tomorrow, don't you? You really should start heading back.”

The sky was clear that night. It was the dead of winter, and the dry air was filled with nothing more than weak, wispy clouds and a bright, full moon. For some reason, though, I always remember hearing the rain then, hitting her window and trickling down the glass, quiet and loud, all at the same time.

“No,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the downpour. “It's too late. Do you mind if I just sleep over?”

She looked at me.

I wonder if she saw the same thing I did in that moment, if she smelled the same sour air of that day so long ago. But the way she looked at me was different from back then. That Friday night, I could see the green in her eyes.

“Okay,” she said, finally.

“Thank you.”

We lay down more comfortably on the bed, the blankets and pillows already warm. I reached out for her hand. She met me halfway, like she had wanted to hold onto me too, and like the bed, her pale, calloused fingers were warm already.

We fell asleep listening to each other breathe.

You see, it was a Friday. On Fridays, my buddies and I head straight for the bar after clocking out. After hours and hours of standing around, feeling our brains decompose while keeping that fucking grin on our face, we felt that yeah, we deserved it. That's retail for you. Either the job kills you, or your methods of coping will.

That Friday, I met a girl. I'm talking long legs, decent rack, and red smile. She was goddamn beautiful. We talked over some drinks, laughed at some jokes, then we were fucking on her bed, though for the life of me I couldn't tell you who convinced who. In the morning, we looked at each other again and realized something.

Hey, aren't you...?

Oh god, you're...

Sean Choi.

Naomi Dawson.

Naomi Dawson. I hadn't heard that name in years. Fuck, I hadn't given two shits about the girl in almost a decade.

It's been a while, she said.

I took a sip of my coffee; it burned my tongue. Yeah, I replied. Yeah, it's been a long time.

How have you been?

I put my coffee down. Ah, I'm alright. Just another college grad working retail, you know.

Oh. She drank from her coffee, gulping it down silently like it wasn't just boiling hot two seconds ago.

What about you? I said. How've you been holding up?

I've been okay.

That's good.

Yeah, she said. It's okay.

I thought she was talking about the coffee. I brought up how hot it was, and then we went off on a tangent about coffee, of all things. Soon enough, I was walking back out the door, her phone number tucked into my pocket, dropping promises into the air that we'd meet up again.

Yeah fucking right.

Naomi and I were childhood friends. “Friends” is what I would call it, since we hung out, ate lunch, talked. It started when we were ten. I woke up the day after Halloween, punch-drunk from too much candy, and my mom started gushing to me about how Mr. and Mrs. Dawson's baby got run over yesterday.

“Oh my,” she kept on saying. “Oh my, that poor child.”

That was all they ever said – my mom, my friends, fuck, even the teachers. “Poor Naomi.” “Poor baby.” “Poor dear.” But the thing was, Naomi never acted like a dear. Never caught in the headlights, frozen in the spotlight, only moving as she'd always moved: on and on.

I got curious.

See, Naomi didn't have friends. Even if she was the lone-wolf type, the shy, small-voice type, going through four years of grade school without forming one friend was pretty fucking hard to do. It took work. I managed to mangle all the efforts of that work and become her only friend. It was hard and frustrating, but I kept at it. I kept at it and continued going at it until that blistering day in June when we graduated and she vanished from my life.

Well, fuck her, I thought. Fuck her and all her talks, all our talks. Fuck her wild, witch's laugh, fuck every ounce of food she'd ever weaseled out of me, fuck the way she said fuck, all soft, drawn-out and hesitant. Fuck her.

I was never going to see her again, especially not after that goddamn Friday night. At least, that's what I told myself, but there was something about her. Even now, I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I felt guilty. Maybe I was waiting for an apology. All I know is that every following Friday she'd text me, always these same two words:

Come over.

And I came over.

After a few weeks, I decided that Naomi had a nice bed. We laid on that bed every time I came over, watching her nice, HD TV. It was comfortable. It was nice. At the end of six weeks, though, I felt like the bed could have swallowed me up whole, and Naomi wouldn't have spared even the blink of a goddamn eye. So that sixth night, we weren't watching the TV. It was late. If we started a movie, we'd fall asleep before we could finish it, or that's what I said.

We were just sitting together, finally, side-by-side, in a silence that we had been warding off for too long now, a thin barrier that had reached its breaking point.

I spoke first.

Why'd you drop off the face of the Earth after we graduated? I said.

She stared, frowning at the blank TV like it was actually on. Then she wasn't anymore. She looked down at her hands, her face as blank as the goddamn TV.

It started with a fight, she said.

A fight?

Yes, she said. A fight.

They had loved each other in the beginning. For many, many years they loved each other, and at the end of those years, they had a child. No one remembers the child's name or what it looked like – if it had been a girl or a boy, if it had been beautiful, like its mother, or warped, like its father. All we know is that Hawé had loved it, adored it just as your mother had adored you and my mother had adored me. Every day she suckled the child. She cradled it in her arms, kissed its unwrinkled forehead, and sung to it stories that no one else knew. Aerta watched his lover as she did this. He watched as she poured her love away from him and into this creature he soon wished had never been born.

He knew what must be done.

One night, in the midst of Hawé's slumber, he stole the child from her arms. The child, perhaps having recognized its father, did not cry. It simply lay in Aerta's arms, silent, blinking, innocent to its fate. Perhaps Aerta hesitated at this. Perhaps in the sudden shadow of a doubt he looked at those clear, thoughtless eyes and contemplated fully the weight of his actions. If he did, it was not enough. That night, Aerta held the child in his hands for the first and last time, and he swallowed it whole.

Wait, I interrupted.

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were expectant, like she'd been waiting for me to cut in right at this exact moment. The thought that I was playing into her weird game pissed me off, but not as much as it should have. Naomi tended to have that effect on me.

Yes? she said.

What the fuck are you talking about? I said. I asked you a question.

And this is my answer.

But –

She nudged my shoulder with hers, smiling at me gravely.

Just listen, she urged.

No, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her that I wouldn't just sit there and listen to her bullshit. It was fine when we were brats. She'd talk nonstop about aliens, superpowers, robots, the usual kind of kid crap that would sound like something more when coming out of her mouth. We weren't kids anymore, though. We were adults for god's sake, and adults didn't believe in fairies.

But you see, Naomi had green eyes. Green like leaves in April rain, and I'm no twat poet so when I say shit like that, you know I mean it. They stared at me then, so big and full of water that they glistened, even in the gray dark.

Okay, I said. I'll listen.

Still smiling, she leaned her head on my shoulder and wrapped her damp fingers around my nicotine-stained hand.

Aerta ate his child, she continued. It was done, irrevocable, and the cry that Hawé let out at finding her arms empty the next morning bore through his already beaten heart. But it will all end soon, he told himself. Soon, Hawé will be mine once again.

Yet Hawé was the Being that ruled all beings. She watched over every plane in the universe, dipped her fingers into the swirls of stars and left behind trails of black holes, life-giving water, acid rain, and bipedal organisms. She was life and death and heaven and hell. That morning, she took one look at Aerta and knew what he had done.

Hatred as she had never known tore through her mind and aching breasts. “I banish you!” she screamed. “I banish you to the ends of the universe, where you shall never chance to look upon me again. There you shall bear the weight of all my children, you shall feel their feet shift and stomp on your back, you shall watch them grow while you decay in the filth of their waste, and you shall nourish them, knowing that they are the children of others and not yours.”

Aerta begged for mercy. “I love you,” he said.

“It is not enough,” Hawé replied.

It is said that even thousands of years after, in the dead of night, one could still hear Aerta begging, the cries tucked like secrets into the wind.

Naomi paused to grab her beer from the nightstand. She took a sip before offering it to me. I drank from it like I was watching someone else move my hands, open my mouth, and massage the liquid down my throat.

At one point in my life, I legitimately believed that Naomi was insane. Stories are stories, but you wouldn't have believed it from the way she talked. For her, mutant dolphins and hallucinogenic pencils were as real as you or me, and whenever I said they weren't, she would stop talking to me for hours, sometimes days. That night was different, though.

That night, she was speaking like the story was a fairytale. She moved her hands and paced herself, like her answer was a thoroughly memorized performance of a book she had read somewhere, sometime long ago.

Which meant that she was talking about that Halloween night, when her step-father turned his back for a second and let her baby sister step out into the road, about that random day, when her mother punished him by killing herself, as if it were all just a story. And I just didn't know what to do with that.

Naomi put away the beer and continued.

Just as Hawé promised, she bore many more children from many more men, and she sent them all to live on the wide expanse of Aerta's back. Aerta had no choice but to sustain them, to give them the water and the vegetation that would help them grow. Aerta resented Hawé for this, yet he could not stop loving her.

Every night, he sent his heart out into the skies, commanding Hawé to look at its brilliance, urging her to think of him, to return to him. Hawé's children looked upon this bright light, feeling its loneliness, and some began to join their hearts with his. After hundreds of years, the black darkness of the planet the children called Kaluhet bloomed every night with the beating lights of a billion stars and one cratered moon.

Yet the only answer Hawé ever gave was one more child, one more burden, one more wound.

And finally, Aerta ceased to endure. He did not wish to incur Hawé's wrath yet again, but neither could he sit back for hundreds, thousands of more years as her children breathed and ceased to breathe on his skin, in peace.

Painfully, he began to change. Blood ran in rivulets as he willed his skin to rip open in uneven seams. Brilliant, fertile land dried up, wrinkling into cracked ground as he denied moisture to those regions. His body arched into mountains, dipped to form valleys, trees and berries flourished in one place and shriveled up in another. Oozes of chemicals erupted from his broken skin, tainting, mutating once harmless plants and animals into things of poison and fear.

The world had changed. Aerta had changed. Yet, it was the Kaluhetians who had to choose how to live in this new environment. Would they live on harmoniously, as they had before? Or would they hunt, scavenge for land and knowledge, and betray each other in the name of survival?

Yes, it was their choice, Naomi said. But Aerta knew what they would choose.

Naomi never outright told me, but I knew her step-father never got around to doing that much fathering. His baby dead, his wife dead, a man can only take so much from life. If he didn't have Naomi, yeah, I would've gotten that. Naomi's mom died the summer after fifth grade, and the man disappeared too, in a way. That was when Naomi and I really started to hit it off, hanging out all the time 'cause she hated being at home. That summer, her stories were always about ghosts and zombies, creepy things that I swore were cool even if they kept me up at night.

I guess they lived like that, one fairy and one zombie together in a house as hush as a church. It was senior year of high school when I started to think that something was wrong. That something had changed. Naomi started skipping, which isn't like a fucking crime, but Naomi never skipped. She started sleeping in class. She'd show up looking like a goddamn corpse and refuse to talk to me.

She started to have bruises, cuts, small but gigantic on her usually perfect, acne-free skin. She'd just brush me off when I asked about them, and I figured if she didn't want to talk about it, that was her business.

But I was curious. Fuck it, I was worried. Naomi only had her father and me, and if one of us was a fucking deadbeat, then what was I supposed to do? I showed up to her house one day. She was skipping, so was I. I knocked, no one answered. Crouching down, sweating, I got the spare key out from under the mat, and I opened the door.

The rank stench of stale sweat and bitter, sour alcohol was warm, sticky, humid, but it all hit me like a cold, cement wall. I nearly gagged and stepped back outside. But Naomi was there, sitting on the floor. She was hugging her knees, not looking at me, even though she must have heard me knocking. She was looking at the couch, where, in the shadows, I could almost see something breathe.

Cans of beer, empty bottles of vodka, shards of exploded glass and glittering ash from upturned ashtrays. Everything reflected and shined in the light that spilled in through the door I'd left open behind me, everything except Naomi, her step-father, and me.

“Naomi,” I choked out.

“Not now, Sean,” she said. “Come back later.”

“I can't fucking come back later, Naomi...”

Silence.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“Last night,” she said, quietly so that I had to step closer to hear. “He told me he was dying. Cancer, he said. Isn't that unbelievable? A dream, maybe a nightmare. But this is how he chooses to cope!” She laughed, not her usual, cackling laugh. It was an adult's laugh. Bitter, like beer. “No, there's nothing you can do, Sean. There's nothing any of us can do.”

“Naomi.”

She looked at me. Finally, she looked at me.

Just go, she said.

What?

Just go, Sean.

I waited for her to say something else, anything else, but she just turned back to look at the couch. I remember the dust motes dancing between us, like a million laughing fairies.

Fine, I spit out.

I turned around and just went, slamming the door behind me.

Kaluhet became divided. Tribes formed. Towns formed. Villages, societies, civilizations, city-states, empires, countries formed and crumbled and reformed and crumbled again. Aerta watched on in savage satisfaction even as his body groaned, bones creaking and cracking, skin burning and melting.

The moon still hovered in the distance of the night skies, but stars slowly disappeared, lost in time, as the Kaluhetians fought, gloated, surrendered, and killed in a haze of red days.

Millions of cries joined together in lament over hundreds of years. Finally, finally, the sound reached the opposite ends of the universe, and Hawé shifted her ear towards the voices of her children.

“What is it, my loves?” she said, confused by the mixed sounds of triumph and loss. 

“What has happened in the place you call Kaluhet?”

“Mother!” they cried. “Hear us! We are the defeated, the ostracized, the starving, the weak. We were born on this cursed planet, destined to be slaves to the victorious, targets for the majority, entertainment for the fat, and nothing to the strong. We do not deserve our fate. Look, Mother, look at how we breathe! We are your children, just as they are your children! Why must we suffer like some lesser beings? Why must we live and die on our knees, reduced to nothing, knowing nothing but desperation and ridicule, right up until the very end? Mother, hear us. Look at us! Save us from this world that knows nothing but pain.”

Hawé listened to them in horror. Once again, Aerta had maimed her children. Once again, Aerta had betrayed her.

This time, she knew her punishment must be absolute.

“Aerta!” she called.

He gasped at this name, at hearing Hawé's voice. It filled him with such potent longing that the rivers, the rain, the oceans of Kaluhet stilled, every plant and hill straining to hear her words.

“Aerta,” she said again. “I punished you once, many years ago. You killed my child. I could not forgive you, I still have not forgiven you, yet you have added upon your sins by guiding the rest of my children into madness and self-loathing. Why? Why have you done this? I did love you, somewhere in this body of mine, I might still love you. But you have done this. You have done this, and I cannot forgive you.”

She looked down upon Aerta, the deformed, broken thing that she had loved so long ago. 

She hesitated. She was Hawé, the Being that ruled all, yet she hesitated.

But she knew what must be done.

“Goodbye, my once-love,” she said.

With that, the Kaluhetians received what they had wished for: an end to all things. In silence, they watched as trees everywhere began to dry up and crumble, as rivers and oceans disappeared as if they had never been. Fruits blackened and dropped like stones, flowers and leaves drifted away with the wind, and toxic fumes choked down their every breath.

Aerta was dying. Yet this brought neither salvation nor satisfaction because with his death, the Kaluhetians realized that they too would die. They realized that they had been living all this time because of him. They realized that they could not live without him. And they knew this realization – come too late – was their punishment for forcing Hawé's hand.

So they starved. Their throats burned for water. They killed each other, killed themselves, they waged feeble wars for the diminishing nutrients, and they pleaded for Hawé to bring him back. They did everything they could. But there was nothing that could be done.

Thus they lived on until the end of their days.

I waited a few seconds for her to start speaking again, for the part that came after the end. I waited so many long, silent seconds.

Naomi, I said, finally. Is this your answer?

Were you listening?

Yes, I said. I was listening.

Then you tell me.

I paused, mind blank. But it didn't matter that I couldn't think. It wasn't something I had to think about.

“You know,” I said. “It's not written in the stars or whatever that you have to suffer like your dad and your mom, or even your sister. You're alive. You're here right now, with me. I don't know what you've been doing for the last five years, but you can tell it to me straight, when you're ready. You don't have to hide behind your words, or all the shit you've been through, not anymore, because you're not some long lost story. You're a person. You have skin. You cuss and the way you laugh is fucking ridiculous. You've grown up to be a really hot broad, and you're a damn good kisser. You can be funny when you want to be. I know that you actually hate coffee, and unlike every other person on Earth, you like the smell of cigarettes. You're not dead, you're not a ghost, and you're not a fucking zombie. You're a living, breathing, human being. You don't have to go away. Not then, and definitely not now.”

Slowly, she took her hand out of mine. She looked at the TV, briefly, and then she sighed. Just an exhale, quiet even, in her usual way. But it was like I was seeing her breathe for the first time.

“Naomi?” I said.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “For keeping you here so late. You have work tomorrow, don't you? You really should start heading back.”

The sky was clear that night. It was the dead of winter, and the dry air was filled with nothing more than weak, wispy clouds and a bright, full moon. For some reason, though, I always remember hearing the rain then, hitting her window and trickling down the glass, quiet and loud, all at the same time.

“No,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the downpour. “It's too late. Do you mind if I just sleep over?”

She looked at me.

I wonder if she saw the same thing I did in that moment, if she smelled the same sour air of that day so long ago. But the way she looked at me was different from back then. That Friday night, I could see the green in her eyes.

“Okay,” she said, finally.

“Thank you.”

We lay down more comfortably on the bed, the blankets and pillows already warm. I reached out for her hand. She met me halfway, like she had wanted to hold onto me too, and like the bed, her pale, calloused fingers were warm already.

We fell asleep listening to each other breathe.