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