After school on Tuesdays, Aspen goes to the skate park.

She parks her car in the back corner of the rec center’s parking lot and hops the fence, swinging her legs in a wide arc so the metal doesn’t snag her jeans. Aspen doesn’t have to talk to anyone if she enters the park from the back. She can pretend she’s always been here, never coming and never going, just a constant, haunting presence that other skaters learn to skate around rather than with.

Once she reaches cement, Aspen drops her board and starts to warm up. Her brother Joey used to stretch; he’d roll his ankles, touch his toes, sit butterfly-style with the soles of his shoes pressed against each other. His best friend Pete used to make fun of him. Pete said the only thing you needed to warm up was a bowl or a blunt. Sometimes Joey would smoke with him, but he’d still stretch afterward. Aspen usually stretched with him. 

She doesn’t stretch anymore. 

She glances around the rest of the park. Pete’s over by the mini-ramp with four other guys who never left town after they graduated; Aspen avoids eye contact. Next to them by the rails are three girls—Roxanne, Maggie, and Yua—who are all around Aspen’s age. Aspen watches as Maggie tries to 50-50 down the rail, her board slipping and sending her to the pavement. Yua helps her up, then points out where Maggie’s feet are sliding off the board, ollieing up to show her. Maggie tries again and makes it halfway before tumbling to the ground. She laughs, her blond hair splayed across the pavement, and Yua and Roxanne laugh, too. Yua looks up and catches Aspen’s eye. She waves. 

Aspen waves back, then turns and skates to the other side of the park.

---

Aspen is eight years old. She’s on her way outside to play on the swing set, but Joey is on the floor, blocking the sliding glass door to their backyard with his brand-new skateboard in his lap.

“Can you move?” Aspen asks. “I wanna go outside.”

“In a minute.”

Joey’s fingers graze the rough stuff on top of the board. “Feel this,” he says. Aspen leans over and runs her hand down the length, like she’s petting a cat. It feels like the paper stick her mom uses to file her nails.

“Cool,” Aspen says.

“It’s called griptape. It’s what keeps your feet from falling off.”

“Cool.”

“That’s why you don’t put stickers on it,” Joey says. “You put stickers on the underside.”

This piques Aspen’s interest. “You can put stickers on it?”

“Yup,” Joey says. He flips the board over and spins one of the wheels with his finger. “I’m gonna learn how to do all kinds of tricks,” he says. “There’s a skate park by the rec center Mom says she’ll take me to.”

“Can I come?” Aspen hates when Joey leaves her behind.

“Mom said I had to be ten,” Joey says. “You’ve gotta wait just like I did.”

He gets up and moves away from the door, but Aspen isn’t interested in the swing set anymore.

---

Once Aspen is warmed up, she works on The Line.

It’s Joey’s line, in that it was his conception and also his white whale. He claimed it was the most technically difficult line possible without a ramp. That was impossible to prove, but Joey had done his research, and no one—not Joey, not Pete, not Aspen—had ever landed it.

The Line is four tricks: a shove-it kickflip, a backside tailslide into a kickflip, an inward heelflip, and a 50-50 into a boardslide. Pete used to argue that the second kickflip and the boardslide technically made it six tricks, but Joey said that if you didn’t put your foot on the ground in between, it was only four. Pete also argued that none of these tricks were really that difficult.

“If it’s so easy, you do it,” Joey would say, and Pete would hem and haw for a while before dropping his board. He would inevitably wipe out, usually on the kickflip after the tailslide. Sometimes he’d land that kickflip and get so excited he’d flub the inward heelflip, which Joey said was the whole point.

“The point is staying calm,” he’d say while Pete picked gravel out of his knees. (Served him right for not wearing knee pads.) “You can’t get too excited, or you mess up.”

“I think the point is looking sick and chill,” Pete would grumble, but he never fought Joey too hard on it. Hours later, he’d convince Joey to give up and freestyle with him, and Aspen would watch Joey’s brow unfurrow and his mouth crack open.

Now, Aspen drops her board. She pushes off and ollies up for the shove-it kickflip, but lands primo and falls over, elbows rough on concrete.

She gets up, flips her board, and tries again.

---

Aspen is ten years old. Her helmet is sky blue and slightly too small for her head. She’s standing with the toes of her light-up sneakers at the edge of the ramp, staring down at the bottom with her chin flat against her chest.

Joey is standing to her right, his board under his foot. He’s technically grounded from skating because his report card was so bad, but they told their mom they were going to Pete’s house and snuck their boards out anyway. Aspen can’t tell what’s making her more nervous: going down the ramp, or their mom finding out where they are.

“What if I fall?” she asks. “Will there be a lot of blood?”

“You’re not gonna fall,” Joey says. “Well, you might fall. But you’re not gonna bleed, don’t worry.”

“What if I do?” 

“You won’t.”

Joey rolls his board to the edge and adjusts it so only the back end is touching, both sets of wheels extending over the abyss. He nudges Aspen’s leg with his until she moves her foot to hold the back end of the board to the ground.

“What if I fall off the edge?” she asks.

“It’s not called the edge, it’s called the coping,” Joey says. “And don’t worry about that. Worrying makes you hesitate, and that’s what gets you into trouble.”

Aspen looks down again.

“Here,” Joey says. “Take your right foot and put it on the front bolts, then shift your weight so you fall forward. Keep your knees bent a little bit and keep your weight on the front leg until you reach the bottom, then even it out. Just ride back and forth until you run out of momentum, don’t worry about trying to get back on the deck.”

“That sounds hard, Joey.”

“It’s not, I promise.”

Joey takes his foot off the board. Aspen doesn’t move.

“If you try it, I’ll let you put stickers on my deck,” Joey says.

Aspen turns to look at him. “Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash?”

“Whatever you want.”

Aspen turns back around. Ever so slowly, she moves her right foot to the front of the board and leans forward. Her stomach lurches.

---

Aspen can’t land the heelflip.

She should be proud of herself—usually it’s the tailslide that trips her up. Today, she’s landing that just fine, but she’s been flubbing the heelflip for almost half an hour. While that’s far from the most time Joey ever spent trying to land The Line, Aspen’s knees are aching, and her palms are scuffed from catching herself on the pavement. She didn’t bring her pads today. Her mom used to yell at her and Joey to grab their pads before they left. Aspen can’t remember the last time she told her mom she was going to the park. She can’t remember the last time her mom yelled her name without also yelling Joey’s.

“Aspen!”

Aspen jumps and wheels around. It’s Yua, yelling at her from the ramp. Aspen holds her hand over her eyes to see Yua better.

“Yeah?”

“Come here a second!”

Aspen drops her board and skates over. She wants to be annoyed at the interruption, but really, she’s grateful for the break.

“Hey,” she says once she’s closer. “What’s up?”

Yua looks beautiful, like always. She’s tall, taller even than Aspen, and she’s wearing a black t-shirt and cargo shorts. Her long black hair is in two braids, and there’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead that she wipes away with the back of her hand.

“You looked good over there,” Yua says, and Aspen feels her face flush.

“Thanks,” she almost whispers.

“What were you doing?”

For a moment, Aspen considers explaining The Line. Maybe if she asked, Yua would help her with it. Yua was the better skater. If anyone could do it, it would be her.

“Just fooling around,” Aspen says. “I was trying…I kept wiping out on an inward heelflip, whatever.”

“It looked dope, whatever it was,” Yua says. “We were gonna try some stuff on the ramp, and I know you do a lot of inverts. Wanna help us out?”

Aspen does do a lot of inverts, mostly because they feel less scary to her than aerials.

“I’m not sure how much help I would be,” she says. “Inverts are pretty simple.”

“I can’t ever land them,” Maggie pipes up. “I get scared I’ll crush my fingers.”

“That’s not the issue,” Aspen says. “The issue is getting your whole weight directly over your hand. You’re gonna land too low on the ramp to crush your fingers.”

Yua gestures dramatically towards the ramp. “You wanna give us a demonstration?”

Aspen rolls her eyes good-naturedly—or at least what she hopes is good-naturedly—and reaches out to Yua. “Can I borrow your pads? I left mine at home.”

Yua grins, stripping her elbow and knee pads from her limbs. Aspen slips them on, feeling Yua’s sweat on her sweat, and tries to act natural as she heads for the ramp. She ignores the pull of her muscles as she climbs the ladder, her board tucked under one arm. When she reaches the top, she drops it to her feet, hooking the back wheels under the edge of the coping.

Aspen takes a deep breath, then puts her front foot on her front bolts and leans forward, her stomach lurching as she drops in. The wind blows her ponytail off her shoulder as she skates across the flat bottom and up the opposite vert. When she reaches the top, she grabs the coping with one hand and the deck of her board with the other, her wheels pointing to the sky. She holds it for just a second before letting her feet fall underneath her, letting go of the coping just as her front wheels hit the ramp.

When she reaches the other side, she pulls her board up with one hand and lands with both feet on the deck. Despite this being her thousandth invert, her heart is pounding, and she presses her hand to her chest, feeling it pulse through the fabric of her T-shirt.

Yua, Roxanne, and Maggie are all clapping. Aspen holds her board up with two hands, like it’s a trophy, waiting for her heart to slow before she climbs back down.

---

Aspen is twelve years old. She’s trying out her new board while her brother and Pete compete in a two-man freestyle competition. Aspen watches from the rails, where she’s waiting her turn behind three older kids. When they skate away, she drops her board and ollies up to try a nosegrind, but her front truck misses the rail and she goes crashing down.

“You okay?” she hears Joey yell from across the park. She sits up and adjusts her helmet. “I’m fine,” she yells back, but Joey comes to check on her anyway.

“You sure? You bleeding?”

“No,” she says, but she hasn’t checked. She kind of doesn’t want to know. “I just missed the rail. Can I come freestyle with you guys?”

Joey shakes his head. “Not until you nail this. I know you can do it.”

Aspen stands up and walks over to pick up her board.

“I’m not very good at this,” she says off-handedly.

“But you’ll get better,” Joey says. “Probably.”

Aspen gives him a look. “Probably,” she says, matching his tone.

He rolls his eyes at her. “You’ll never know if you don’t try,” he says.

“Isn’t that what Mom said to you about math?” Aspen asks. Joey’s face gets dark.

“Shut the fuck up,” he says. “This is different.”

“How?”

“It’s skating. It’s more important.”

“More important than math?”

Joey glares at her, and she shuts up. 

“Keep going until you get it right,” he says. 

Aspen pops her board into her hand. “I’m telling Mom you said fuck.”

She’s not, and they both know it.

---

Aspen climbs down the ladder, strips off the borrowed pads, then shakes off Yua and the other girls.

“You sure you don’t wanna show us again?” Yua asks when Aspen says she needs to go.

“Nah,” Aspen says. “It’d take forever to pass your pads back and forth.”

“I don’t mind,” Yua says. “We can share if you want.”

 “I have to get back,” Aspen says. “I wanna get more practice in before it gets dark.”

Yua rolls her board under her foot. “Is it a line?” she asks. “How many tricks?”

Six, Aspen thinks, but out loud she says, “Four. But they’re pretty hard. Joey and Pete can’t get it, either.”

The look of pity on Yua’s face is brief, but Aspen still catches it. She knows to look for it—has seen all its variations. Two years later, the looks are shorter, but still there.

“Want to show me?” Yua asks. “I’m sure no one’s seen you try it in a while.”

Aspen and Pete stopped speaking almost a year ago. After the police wound down the investigation, they had nothing left to say to each other. 

“Maybe later,” Aspen says. “Thanks.”

Yua nods, and Aspen skates back over to the other side of the park. She goes immediately into the shove-it kickflip and flubs it.

---

Aspen is fourteen years old, and there are other girls at the skatepark. She’s been watching them for the last half hour; they don’t seem like new skaters. They know how to ollie and grind and kickflip. But she’s never seen them before, and she’s trying to figure out how that’s possible.

“Joey,” she says.

“In a minute,” Joey says from over by the rails. “I’m trying to land a shove-it kickflip.”

“Oh my god, just call it a varial like everyone else,” Pete moans from a few feet away.

“But it’s not,” Joey says. “If it was a varial you’d be turning the board with your hand.”

“But everyone calls it a varial!”

“But that’s not what it is!”

“Joey!”

He turns to look at her. “What?”

“There are girls over there.”

Joey skates over and squints into the sun. “Okay,” he says, “girls spotted. So?”

“I’ve never seen other girls here. Where did they come from?”

“The south side of town, probably,” Pete says. “That park just closed.”

“Really?” Aspen asks. The blond girl is pushing the black-haired girl around with her feet straddling two boards. “Why?”

“I think the city just couldn’t pay to fix it anymore,” Pete says. “It was hella unsafe. Massive splits and cracks and shit. Those girls probably go to Centennial.” That was the neighboring high school in town.

 “I don’t get what the big deal is,” Joey says. “It’s not like we’re here to make friends.”

“Maybe I am,” Aspen says. “Most people are.”

“Not us,” Joey says, and Pete rolls his eyes.

“Right,” Pete says. “We’re here to do the impossible.”

“Exactly.”

“I meant make skating boring,” Pete says. “That kind of impossible.”

Joey flips him off.

Aspen glances back at the other girls. “I’m going to go say hello.”

Joey groans. “Fine,” he says. “Waste your time.”

“It’ll take ten minutes,” Aspen says, and she shoves off across the park.

There are three girls, all about her age. They’re easily the loudest people at the park; for a moment, Aspen considers riding away. She spends so much time with Joey that she rarely talks to girls at school. But these girls are skaters. Maybe this will be easier.

“Hi!” one of the girls yells over at her. Aspen freezes, her board still under her feet.

“Hi,” she says, too quiet for them to hear.

The girl skates over. She has bouncy, curly brown hair and brown skin. “I’m Roxanne,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“She probably goes to North,” the blond girl says, skating over to join them.

“Do you go to North?” Roxanne asks. “This is Maggie.”

Aspen opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.

“Guys, give her some breathing room,” the black-haired girl says. She has her board in her hand instead of under her feet. “I’m Yua,” she says. “What’s your name?”

“Aspen,” Aspen says. “I do go to North.”

“Thought so,” Roxanne says. “We go to Centennial, but that park just closed. Do you skate here a lot?”

Aspen nods. “With my brother,” she says.

“Oh, that’s cute,” Maggie says. “Where is he?”

Aspen points at Joey and Pete. She expects them to be skating, but only Pete has his board on the ground. Joey is just watching her, board in hand. When she points, he waves her over.

“I think he wants me to come back,” Aspen says.

“You could skate with us,” Yua says. “We don’t bite, I promise.”

“I should get back,” Aspen says. “I’ll see you guys around.”

Aspen skates back over to Joey. He’s giving her a look she can’t quite decipher.

“Do they go to Centennial?”

Aspen nods. “They seem nice,” she says. “They asked me to skate with them.”

“You won’t get good if you skate with them,” Joey says. “They won’t take it as seriously as we do.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

Joey drops his board. “Come on,” he says. “Try The Line again. I think if I watch someone else do it, I’ll figure out where I’m messing up.”

Aspen flubs the inward heelflip. Joey narrows his eyes.

“Try again,” he says.

---

The streetlights kick on, which is when Aspen realizes she hasn’t been able to see cracks in the pavement for the last half hour. That’s probably why she’s been wiping out. 

She glances around the park, taking stock of who’s still there. There are some kids by the ramp getting picked up by their parents, three of them piling into a minivan, helmets and pads still on. There are some kids a bit older than Aspen freestyling, although they look like they’re about to call it quits and go smoke, based on the way their pads are half off. Yua and the others are sitting in the grass with their boards in their laps. Aspen can’t tell if they’re taking a break or waiting for a ride.

She grits her teeth, pushes off, wipes out on the boardslide, and nearly screams. It’s the closest she’s been in months. Her legs ache as she stands up, and she pops her board into her hand. There are still traces of Pinkie Pie on the deck. 

The other three girls have stood up. Yua seems to be leaning in the direction of the ramp, but Maggie and Roxanne are heading toward the gap in the fence. Or maybe Aspen just wants them to be.

She flubs, flubs, and flubs again. She lands primo—the long side of her board hitting the ground—and falls over, scraping her face on the cement. She should’ve worn pads. She should’ve brought gauze. Her legs feel like they’re going to fall off.

She picks herself up and assesses the damage. There are tears in her jeans that weren’t there this morning. Her palms sting. It’s completely dark now. The older boys have disappeared, and the kids have been picked up. Even Yua and the others seem to be gone.

Aspen drops her board and pushes off. Shove-it kickflip. Backside tailslide. Kickflip. Inward heelflip. 50-50. 

A deafening crack.

The first thing Aspen realizes is she’s on her back. Her head doesn’t hurt, which means she must’ve fallen ass-first. She processes as she lies there, remembering the slip, the fall, the crash. Her board is at her feet, upside-down, wheels still spinning.

The other half lies a few feet away.

---

Aspen is sixteen years old. She’s lying on the couch in her living room, headphones in, watching skating videos on her phone. Joey and her mother are screaming at each other.

Joey’s never liked school. He thinks it’s boring and dumb, and he’s not good at it. He wants to compete in the X Games and become a professional skateboarder. Their mom says skateboarders don’t make any money, but Joey says that’s not true, that Tony Hawk bought a house when he was his age, that skateboarding is in the Olympics now. Joey’s only getting older, and he’s done waiting around.

Joey can’t drop out without parental consent until he’s eighteen, and he’s young for his class. He won’t turn eighteen until after graduation. Their mom won’t sign the form. She wants him to get his diploma.

“I’ll just fail, then!” he screams. Aspen turns up the volume on her phone, watching a video of a guy land a Christ Air.

“You wouldn’t if you just tried, Joey!” their mom yells back. “Why won’t you try?”

“This shit doesn’t matter!” Joey’s face is red, and his eyes are bulging out of his skull. “Why won’t you let me do what I’m good at!”

“Because there’s more to life than skateboarding!” their mom yells.

Joey balls his hands into fists and heads towards the door. “I’m going out.”

“Like hell you are.”

Joey slams the door behind him. Their mom grabs a pillow from the couch and screams into it. The video stopped playing a while ago, but Aspen didn’t notice.

“I can’t with him,” her mom says. “I can’t fucking…I’m sorry, Aspen.”

Aspen just nods.

“You know I’m right, right?” her mom says. “He can’t leave school. He needs to graduate.”

Aspen nods again.

“I can’t get through to him,” her mom says. “I don’t speak skateboarding. He needs to hear it from someone who understands.”

Aspen takes out her earbuds. “I’ll talk to him when he gets home,” she says, although she doubts Joey will listen. Aspen’s heard his argument a million times–his best case scenario is summer school. At worst, he’ll have to repeat senior year. To Joey, all of it is wasted time. It’s his best years slipping away.

Aspen’s mom takes a few deep breaths, then heads towards the stairs. “I’m going to bed,” she says. “You’ll stay up until Joey gets back?”

Aspen stays up as long as she can, going through playlist after playlist of X Games supercuts, but eventually she falls asleep on the couch.

Joey never comes home.

---

Aspen is still on her back, staring up at the streetlights. They’re making her eyes water. She squints until the bulbs blur in her vision and her eyes stop stinging. She does not sit up. She does not look at Joey’s board. If she doesn’t look at it, it isn’t broken. It’s still there, whole, waiting for her. It can still land The Line.

She doesn’t realize she’s crying until a tear makes its way into her ear canal. She sits up, wipes her eyes, and switches her view from the sky to the ground. She thinks she might live here now, at the skate park, until her body decays on the pavement, unable to compost into the earth beneath it.

“Aspen?”

She looks up. Yua is standing in front of her, one braid undone, blocking the light from shining into Aspen’s eyes. She’s so tall, Aspen thinks, and then immediately looks back down at the ground.

“Hi,” she says, her voice hoarse.

“Are you okay?”

Aspen rubs at her eyes again, feeling small and young and fragile. “Yeah,” she says. “I wiped pretty hard, that’s all.”

Yua’s silent for a moment, and then Aspen hears a very quiet “oh, no.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “It was an old board. It was bound to break sooner or later.”

She feels Yua sit next to her on the concrete. Aspen is still crying, but she’s trying not to let Yua see. She can’t tell how successful she is. It’s possible Yua is pretending not to notice.

“Do you know why he left?” Yua asks after a moment. 

Aspen freezes. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Yua says, but she doesn’t sound sorry. “We’ve just always wondered.”

Aspen looks over at her, shocked. “Is that what this is?” she asks. “You came over here so you guys could laugh later about what a loser my brother was?”

Yua’s eyes widen. “No!” she says. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I was trying to make conversation. If you wanted to talk about it.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay.”

Yua doesn’t get up. Aspen doesn’t move for the board. There’s another beat of silence.

“He was flunking out of school,” Aspen says. “He wanted to go pro, but our mom wouldn’t let him drop out.”

“So he ran away instead?”

“Yeah.”

“And you haven’t heard from him since?”

“No,” Aspen says. “There was an investigation, but they couldn’t find him. They think he’s dead.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

Aspen buries her head in her knees.

“Right,” she hears Yua say. “Sorry. Stupid question.”

They’re quiet for another moment.

“Do you like skateboarding?” Yua asks.

“What the fuck?” Aspen whips her head up, more surprised than angry. “Of course I do, Jesus Christ.”

“Do you?” Yua asks. “Because you never skate with us, even when we ask.”

“I’m usually working on The Line.”

“Those four tricks from earlier?” Yua asks.

Aspen bites her lip. “It’s six, kind of,” she says. “Joey said it was the hardest line in skateboarding. He could never land it. I’ve never landed it.”

“Is that all you’ve done since he left?” Yua asks. “Worked on that line?”

“Well,” Aspen says, thinking. Surely she’s done something else. Surely she’s fucked around on ramps or tried to break her consecutive kickflip record or something else. “Yeah,” she says, finally. “I guess.”

Yua’s quiet for a moment, then asks, “What would happen if you landed it?”

“I don’t know,” Aspen says.

“Would you keep skating?”

“I don’t know.”

Yua hums. “What are the tricks?”

“A shove-it kickflip…”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a varial, but Joey called it a shove-it kickflip. Because if it was a varial, you’d turn the board with your hand.”

Yua nods.

“A shove-it kickflip,” Aspen says again, “a backside tailslide into a kickflip, an inward heelflip, and a 50-50 into a boardslide.” She’s been staring straight ahead, so she doesn’t realize Yua’s pulled out her phone until she glances over. Yua is typing intently.

“Are we sold on these directions?” Yua asks. “Has to be backside? Has to be inward?”

“What are you doing?” Aspen asks.

“Writing this down,” Yua says. “Is there any flexibility here?”

Aspen shakes her head. “Joey said the backside tailslide is harder,” she says. “So is the inward heelflip.”

Yua nods again. “Okay,” she says, putting her phone in her pocket. “Do you wanna get Taco Bell?”

Aspen’s brain turns to white noise. “Why would we get Taco Bell?”

“Because it’s dark,” Yua says. “And your board is broken. Do you have another board?”

“I have four other boards.”

“Good,” Yua says. “You can bring one on Saturday.”

Yua stands up. “You should also bring pads,” she says, “although I’m really not opposed to sharing.”

“What is happening right now?”

“We’re gonna go to Taco Bell,” Yua says. “And then on Saturday, we’re gonna work on The Line. And also do other things. Because I don’t know how you’ve only skated one line, unsuccessfully, for two years.”

“Why?”

Yua shrugs. “I’m sorry your brother disappeared.”

“I don’t want your pity.”

“I’m not giving it to you. I’m trying to land the hardest line in skateboarding.”

Aspen looks up again. The light from the streetlamp behind Yua is giving her an ethereal glow. Aspen’s stomach is growling.

Her palms are raw and bloody, but when Yua offers her a hand, she takes it.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Though they smelled like flowers and looked like flowers and the teachers in health class described how they would open up like flowers if they fell in love and were treated very nicely, I simply could not justify asking any girl in my class to the Junior Prom, which must have been devastating for them, since I was funny, and I was talented, and I had washboard abs and shimmering long dark hair plus could do cool tricks with cigarettes and was the exact type of kid everybody would expect to have a date to the prom, even be the king of the prom, but money was tight ever since eighth grade, when my dad got arrested for being a meth dealer (which wasn’t fair, because “meth dealer” is just as good of a job as any other job—in fact, meth dealers stimulate the economy) so in the end I decided it would be best for everyone if I just skipped the whole dance thing and spent the night getting high by myself in my basement instead.

I explained all of this to my best friend, Hollis, after school. I figured, if anybody understood what I was talking about, it would be Hollis—my main man, my right hand, the one who shotgunned beers and threw rocks at cats with me every day in the student parking lot. But, as soon as I finished talking, he rolled his eyes.

“Ronnie,” he said, “I want you to look at me when I tell you this. None of what you just said is true, and the fact that you believe it is disturbing. Nobody in their right mind would ever want to go with you to the dance because you smell like shit and your body’s shaped like a deflated football, plus everyone in school already knows that your father is not only a meth dealer, but a rapist and a thief, too. We’ve all seen it on the news. So don’t ever mention this prom king crap to me again because seriously, Ronnie, I have to deal with enough of everyone’s shit all day without you shoveling more onto the pile.”

Sometimes, I wondered if Hollis thought he was doing a good job at hiding his gayness, or if it was as obvious to him as it was to the rest of us. It wasn’t just the histrionic lectures; it was the blonde perm, the wispy arm hair, the way he trotted over sidewalk-puddles like a fancy horse to keep his sneakers dry instead of just walking through them. For a while, there was even a rumor going around that he wore mascara, which turned out to be untrue, but, really, it’s not hard to see how it got started. 

In middle school, my friends and I used to take him out to the playground and give him swirlies and wet willies and Indian rug burns until he was shrieking like the little bitch he was. But by junior year, Hollis and I had become a lot closer—not because I felt bad or had a change of heart or anything, but mostly because freshman year we had both tried out for the wrestling team.

It was obvious from the jump that Hollis wouldn’t make the cut. Every day, in the locker room, he would rip his shirt off and blind us all with his smooth, hairless chest which shone with the brilliance of one thousand suns, even when our only job was wiping down the mats.

“My body is like a fine sculpture,” he said. “It deserves to be admired.”

We all wanted badly to pound him, but over summer break his dad had somehow come into a windfall of cash from some shady business dealings in Canada, so he was now loaded and, thus, unbullyable.

Once, at practice, the two of us were assigned to spar. Instantly, I was worried for Hollis, poor shrimpy scarecrow Hollis who could barely complete a pushup, who broke a sweat carrying the water cooler from the locker room to the gym. But when we actually took to the mat, I quickly discovered the freakish power that was stored within his skinny little elbows. Before I knew it, I was pinned. 

Before the count of three, he hissed, “Hit me,” his breath a hot fog on my face.

“What?”

“Hit me, asshole!”

And he loosened his grip just enough for me to wind up and sock him in the face, like I’d wanted to do all along. The little shit flew off me and a huge cheer erupted from the crowd. As my teammates swarmed me, Hollis laid flat on his back, staring up at the fluorescent lights, jaw beginning to purple.

“Are you in love with me, or something?” I asked him after practice. He was texting, pretending not to listen. “Why’d you let me win?”

“I don’t care much for wrestling. My dad says it’s a sport for losers and homosexuals. The only reason I’m trying out is because I need a way to kill time until the driver picks me up at five.”

“Oh.” I thought for a minute. “Well, I’m trying out because my dad says I have to make the team or else he’ll light up a whole pack of cigarettes and put them out on my arms.”

I stepped back, hoping to see how much I’d rattled him, but Hollis didn’t even look up from his phone. “I’m glad I let you win, then.” He sniffed. “Those scars would make you look like a drug addict.”

In the end, neither of us wound up making the team, but it was okay, because the whole experience had set in motion something entirely more vital and precious: a brotherly bond so strong that it would not be broken, not even shaken, until the end of junior year, when Hollis discovered the truth about what had happened with his prom date.

Hollis took his prom date very seriously. Every day that March, as green things sprang up from the gutters, Hollis and I would discuss who he was going to ask to the dance, and when, and how. Somewhere along the line, his sissy bitchiness had solidified into an insatiable lust for women—and the incredible thing was, the women lusted back. That spring, he was deciding between Ashley Brown, a field hockey player, Maddie Matlock, a brainy sadist who could dissect a fetal pig in five minutes, and Chrissy Santoro, the hottest girl in school, to be the one to finally take his virginity. Chrissy seemed like the most promising option, since she had, in Hollis’s words, “a mind-blowing, heart-stopping, knock-em-dead body and would fuck whatever crossed her path.”

Chrissy wasn’t coy about it, either. She bragged constantly about how she could make any guy, even grown-up guys, even teachers, do just about anything she wanted. In the sixth grade, she was famous for trading hand jobs for Abercrombie & Fitch and Pinkberry gift cards, which didn’t even make sense, because her dad was a plastic surgeon and could have bought her anything she wanted at the mall. Her mom was super hot, too, a model who used to be her dad’s patient. She was trying to make Chrissy into a model, just like her. Every Thursday, she would pick Chrissy up early to get her picture taken at the mall. I saw Chrissy in a newspaper ad for Discount Shoe Warehouse, once. She was standing in a field of flowers, all smiley and blonde and innocent. This could be you! 35% Off Sneakers!

Hollis and I were fascinated. The two of us had a game: whenever we saw a piece of garbage in the street, we’d pick it up and chase each other around with it, crying “Would Chrissy fuck it? Would Chrissy fuck it?” Then, when we got bored, Hollis would smoke and describe the filthy, depraved things he would do to Chrissy’s body if he ever got his hands on it.

“I’d ravage that shit like the last piece of fruit in an off-season orchard. Like a fuckin’ vagabond. Like a wild animal.”

I thought Hollis was the greatest poet I knew; I thought his words deserved to be preserved in art galleries and history books to be studied by future generations. Somehow, everything he did seemed to exude “cool”: He was allowed to stay out as late as he wanted and his parents didn’t care. His father let him smoke cigarettes and even cigars. Once, he broke into his mom’s liquor cabinet and drank an entire bottle of wine, and it wasn’t even his mom who found him on the living room floor in the morning; it was his dad’s secretary.

With all this in mind, it was no surprise he already knew exactly what he wanted to do after graduation, too. 

“I wanna start my own detective agency and crack open a bunch of cold cases,” he said. “Y’know, solving mysteries, and stuff.”

“That’s stupid.” I sniffed. “Are there even any mysteries left to solve?”

“Back in the 70s, this couple in Houston were boning in their car when some lunatic killed them and scattered a bunch of cut-up golf balls around their bodies. To this day, nobody knows why. That’s just one example. There’s probably a million cases like that in the past five years alone.”

I paused. “Y’know, that actually sounds pretty cool.”

“I know it’s cool. I don’t need you to tell me.”

And at that moment, I hated him more than anything, because I knew he really didn’t need me to.

---

Two weeks before the dance, Hollis was invited to a party at Chrissy’s house.

“You should come, Ronnie,” he told me that day in the parking lot. “This could be your chance to finally land a date.”

I turned him down, because one—I didn’t need to land a date; two—I didn’t want to go to some party with a bunch of lame jerkoffs I barely knew; and three—I had church the next morning, and my mom got really pissed when I “didn’t make God my number one priority.” Growing up, if I so much as whistled or kicked the back of a pew during church, she would drag me out to the parking lot and shout loud enough for everyone to hear: “Do you want God to keep your father in jail forever? Is that what you want, Ronnie? Huh? Is it? Huh? Huh???” But in fact, the day my dad was first taken away in a cop car, it was my mom who had taken the Lord’s name in vain by shouting “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! You bastard d-bags!” at the city’s finest, so if there was anybody God was punishing, it was probably her, though I never said anything like that out loud; in fact, I barely even thought it in my head, because I knew if she ever caught wind, I would never hear the end of it.

But when the day of the party actually arrived, and the TV stopped working, and we ran out of beer, and my mom threw her ashtray on the floor and started crying, I decided that maybe the party didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all. I took the bus all the way out to the edge of town, watching the houses grow increasingly more expensive outside the window. When I arrived at Chrissy’s parents’ plastic surgery mansion, kids were already dumping cans of beer into the swimming pool and stabbing the trampoline with jimmy knives.

“Where’s Hollis?” I asked the first person I saw.

“Isn’t that the kid who wears mascara?” he said, and I snapped back “No, that isn’t true, and it doesn’t even make sense; if Hollis wore mascara, his eyelashes would be black, but Hollis has blonde eyelashes, and you would know that if you even looked at him for half of one second, jerkoff.”

Another person chimed in, “I think I saw Hollis talking to Chrissy earlier.”

“Chrissy? What was he talking to Chrissy about?”

They paused, then started to snicker, and in that moment I realized that I really really really needed a beer. So I went into the kitchen and grabbed one from the cooler, but you’d have to be a maniac to stop at just one beer, so I grabbed another, and then after that I decided to go back for a seltzer, plus a whiskey lemonade and a couple shots to top it off, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I was the blinding, radiant, unstoppable, never-gonna-burn-out star of this party. I climbed onto the roof and did a jackknife into the beer-pool and all the onlookers got so excited they started dancing, and I got out and joined in too, and apparently our dance moves were so inspiring that pretty soon the whole entire party was dancing, including Chrissy Santoro herself, who was dressed sort of like a street walker.

She leaned in so close to me I could smell the puke on her breath: “I like your dancing!”

“Thanks!” I shouted back. “Where’s Hollis?”

“What?”

“Hollis? Hollis Donaldson?”

“Oh. Who cares?”

“Weren’t you with him?”

“You seem more fun.” She paused. “Do you wanna see my pictures?”

“Uhm…”

“I got about a thousand pictures inside. All models have to have lots of pictures of themselves. Want me to show them to you?”

“Not really.”

“But they’re really good. I promise.” Her voice took on a frantic, almost desperate tone. “They’re just right upstairs in my room.”

“No one gives a shit about your pictures, Chrissy.”

Chrissy made a face. For a moment, she almost looked hurt.

Then, suddenly, she sprang forward like a crazed animal trying to bite off my nose, except instead of my nose she landed on my lips and started trying to stick her tongue in my mouth.

“What are you doing!” I said, shoving her off. Chrissy blinked at me. The bitch had the nerve to stand there and blink at me, like I was the crazy one.

“You don’t like me?” she said. “You don’t think I’m pretty?” In the watery pool-light, I saw a trail of snot gleaming a line down from her left nostril.

This is the chick that Hollis thinks is hot? I thought. This drugged-out slut-bag?

“Fuck you, Ronnie,” she said, as if she could read my mind. Though she slunk away, the rest of the night passed in a funk. I really did try to get back into the spirit of the party—dancing with other chicks, doing a keg stand—but that bitch’s skankiness had successfully managed to kill the mood.

Sometime toward the end of the night, some kid wanted to flip Mr. Santoro’s car over: “Who wants to tip the Benz???” he cried, and a mass of people rushed towards the driveway. I had to sit down because I thought I was going to be sick. My eyes pounded and my whole body trembled all over. I needed to find Hollis. That was what I was there for. How had this whole night gotten so off track?

I stumbled across the driveway: “Have you seen Hollis?” I asked. “Hollis Donaldson?” Everyone was too busy rocking the Benz to hear me. It tipped precariously, windshield trembling with every impact of the tires on the asphalt. Every tip, I thought, Surely it can’t go any further. Surely this is the one where it actually falls. But somehow, it never did.

“Hey, Ronnie!” one of the kids finally shouted, pointing to the back of the house. “I think I saw your boyfriend heading over there!”

Pitching towards the backyard, I wondered what horrible circumstances had led to Hollis ending up all alone at the end of the party. Maybe Chrissy had broken his heart. Maybe he was just overwhelmed, like I was. I imagined his tiny, skinny body hunched over in the dirt, slick with saliva and sweat, shaking beneath my touch. I quickened, scanning the bushes as I rounded the corner.

“Hollis? Are you alright?”

It was silent.

Then, I heard a distant giggle. I squinted, but it was too dark to see. “Hollis?”

Something squeaked, and finally, my eyes came into focus over the trampoline: two naked figures writhed and squirmed over the nylon, like worms in the dirt. Hollis’s blonde head was buried in Chrissy Santoro’s white thighs, fingers curling knots in his hair—“Fuck—I love you, I love you, I love you!” she gasped, and beneath the fat moon both bodies seemed to glow with a pale, unending aura, and it was at that very moment that the Benz finally tipped over on the driveway and the windshield shattered into an explosion of broken glass like thousands of stars on the pavement, and my stomach churned, and a wild cheer erupted from the crowd, and I stumbled away and puked my insides all over the dirt.

---

The rest of the week, I couldn’t stop shaking. Not even while sleeping, or drinking a beer, or smoking with Hollis behind the bleachers as he described to me the feeling of making a girl come.

“It’s every bit as good as they say, and more.” he said. “Like Christmas, your birthday, and Fourth of July all rolled into one. And then holding her in your arms afterwards—my God, man. Something just unlocks inside you. This perfect, primal clarity.”

I thought about this for a moment. “What if, instead of a girl, it was, like, a really feminine dude? Do you think it’d have the same effect?”

“That’s…completely different, Ronnie.”

“What about a really beautiful cross dresser?”

“You think you’re funny.”

I took a drag off my cigarette and tried to blow smoke in Hollis’s face without him noticing. He was really pissing me off lately, but I didn’t know why.

“I’m taking her to the mall to shop for the dance this weekend,” he said. “I didn’t think it was possible. A girl who says “Fuck” and knows how to shotgun a beer. I think I’m in love, Ronnie. Like, seriously in love.”

I say “Fuck,” I thought. I shotgun beers.

“Do my eyes look any bluer to you?” He tipped his head back. “Chrissy says she’s never seen eyes as blue as mine before. She says I should be a model, too. She took me up into her room and showed me these pictures—I mean, fuck, dude, that girl is really something. She says at her next shoot, her photographer is gonna pay her extra to—”

“Oh, who cares what that whore comes up with?”

Hollis sat upright. “What?”

“She’s a used-up slut, man,” I said. “That’s the only reason you wanted her in the first place. Why are you suddenly talking about her like she’s your girlfriend?”

“She was a used-up slut. Was. But I’m telling you, Ronnie, she’s changed. She’s going places. She’s going to be an actress.”

“Must not have changed that much,” I muttered.

“The hell are you talking about?”

“She kissed me, Hollis!” I said. “At the party. Like, an hour before she got together with you.”

“Oh.” Hollis slouched over. “Is that all?”

“…What?”

“Is that all you wanted to tell me? Because that, I already knew.”

“What?”

“Yep.”

“You knew?”

“Sure.”

“So then—how can you—” I paused. “Chrissy isn’t faithful!”

“Ronnie, faith’s got nothing to do with it. She wanted to examine her options before making her decision—her final decision—to go with the best. It’s simple biology. Happens all the time in other species.” Hollis smiled and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I hate to tell you, but this is all there is. Men and women. It’s the point of our existence. Maybe if you got any, you would understand that.”

And, in my mind, I thought I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you tomorrow, I hate you next week, I hate you until I die and even then my ghost will hate you, I hate you until the sun collapses into a supermassive black hole and vacuums up the planet but even then, the death of all life on earth won’t be strong enough to stop my hate.

I didn’t say any of this to him. Sometimes, I wondered if Hollis understood the depth of his capacity to hurt me. I wondered if he knew just how much I thought about his words, how much space they took up in my brain, the hours I spent picking apart every line, every word, every contortion of his thin, white lips around the syllables.

After the party, I spent all Sunday on my bedroom floor, praying to God about things I didn’t usually pray about. I tried to picture the Lord’s face as my dad’s face—usually, that got me pretty fired up—but, the harder I thought about it, the less I remembered what my dad’s face actually looked like. Did he have a beard when the cops took him away? I could’ve sworn he did, and yet I also remembered him shaving every morning.

To make things worse, every time I closed my eyes, Chrissy’s trembling thighs appeared in my brain. I couldn’t imagine holding her in my arms as she shook, as Hollis described. In bed, I rubbed my crotch against my pillowcase and tried to imagine it as the skin of a woman, but I wasn’t consumed by hunger. Only paralyzing fear.

Would it be different if the pillowcase was warm and fleshy? Would something unlock inside me, something that I hadn’t known was there before but that would suddenly bring everything in my life into sharper focus, like Hollis said?

If my skin were softer, would Hollis think about me like he thought about Chrissy?

If I had made the wrestling team, become the prom king, or paid attention in biology, would Hollis have asked me to go to the mall instead?

All these questions built and pressed against my temples. Lightning bolts of pain shot through my skull. There was only one thing I could do, now.

That night, I pried open my window and stared up at the night sky. A gap in the clouds revealed one singular super-bright star, like a celestial eyeball, shining down on me. I clasped my hands together and prayed to it: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, even though I hadn’t even done anything wrong yet. In that moment, “wrong” felt less like a thing I could do and more like a thing that I was. An intrinsic and perpetual wrongness had somehow planted itself deep inside me, and no matter how hard I fought, I could never truly be clean of it.

I had no idea how normal people felt about stuff like this. Really, I had no idea how normal people felt at all.

---

On the day of the junior prom, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the school parking lot was full of people scraping ice off their cars. I rushed back to my apartment with my windbreaker over my ears. My key wouldn’t fit into the stupid, frozen lock, so I had to spend ten minutes warming it with my lighter.. The air was thick with anticipation. Would my plan work, or would it end in catastrophe? Somehow, both possibilities seemed equally threatening.

Inside the desk drawer in my room was a Bible and a collection of porno magazines. I leafed through them both. Once finished, I brushed my teeth, applied deodorant, tweezed my nose hairs, and searched the mirror for things in my eyes that I hadn’t noticed there before. Outside my window, my classmates were running down the street, posing for pictures. 

Shortly after 6, the doorbell rang. I felt nervous for some reason, even though there was nothing to be scared of. I mean, it wasn’t like I was breaking the law, or anything. Hollis would still have an awesome night out with Bradley F and Billy P and Charlie H and their girlfriends, and besides, if Chrissy was really this incredibly fuckable, if it was this easy to lead her astray, then wasn’t I just saving my best friend from a world of heartbreak down the line?

She showed up in pumps, hair teased, with bright pink lipstick and fishnet stockings that I recognized from the Teen section of Ross. The note I slipped into her locker specifically requested that she wear her hottest outfit, and boy, did she deliver.

“You’re full of shit, Ronnie,” she said cattily. “I knew you were just playing hard to get. You really wanted me all along, didn’t you? Tell me. Tell me how you really wanted me all along.”

I let her inside. Yes, I thought as we ascended the staircase, Yes yes yes, all of these yeses forming a great big loud jet-engine chorus of yeses that drowned out my every feeling and thought.

As Chrissy undressed, I sat on the bed and watched, unblinking. Her ass looked fantastic. Her tits looked spectacular. Her elbows were kind of freakishly sharp for a girl’s, which I liked. She leaned over, making her voice all breathy, like a telephone pornstar:

“Is it okay if I touch you?” 

I nodded and she plunged her hand down my pants, and it was great, and I really enjoyed it.

“Moan for me,” she commanded, and I started making animal noises.

“Ooh. Aah. Ohh.”

“Take your shirt off.”

I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and threw it on the floor. Chrissy paused.

“What are these marks on your arms and legs?” she asked, and I started to explain, “It’s because my dad said if I didn’t make the wrestling –” but then she said “Shhhh” and shoved her fingers in my mouth. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. I think it’s sexy.” And I thought the taste of her fingers, sour like old pennies and nail polish and dirt, might make me vomit, and she climbed into my lap, digging her knees deep into the soft sides of my thighs, and somewhere outside, a coyote howled, and a baby cried, and the moon shone bright and unrelenting, and my mother rang up a six pack of beers and a ribbed condom at the corner store with misery in her eyes, and my father did one hundred thousand push-ups inside his jail cell, and Hollis waited on the porch of the Santoro household with a bouquet of flowers, all handsome and clean in his cornflower blue suit, almost close enough to touch.

Hollis, I thought, can you hear me? 

“Tell me how good I make you feel.”

Hollis, you’ll never guess what I’m doing right now.

“…Jesus, your leg is shaking.”

Hollis, you wanna be a detective? I got a new mystery for you to figure out.

“Hang on, I’m almost there.”

Chrissy leaned in close and sighed into my ear. If I paid close attention as I grabbed her shoulders tight, I could feel her mascara brush against my cheek.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson