Boyish

Audax, March 1989

Hyung always smells of pancakes. He doesn’t smell it himself and can’t explain why, but to your nose, your best friend is dark sugar and buttermilk tang. When he’s close, it’s sometimes too much. Hyung is diffident today as you blab about comics, but the new boy in class perks him up. Mr. Halford calls him “quite a catch,” but everyone knows he was expelled from the Catholic academy. Tendrils of California blonde hang like spider plant fronds over a blue bandana and fresh undercut. Front row girls lean in. Whisper. “Cash? Really?”
            “Hell yeah, baby.” Cash steps into a flex. “Cash Utley the Third.” His body has topography; tanned arms feature muscles like dunes, stomach collapses to flatland under vaulted ribs. Like one of the New Mutants, you think. Cash is unmistakably boyish but unmistakably pretty, and he makes you miserable about your own shape. You look to Hyung (gawping) and slump in your desk. Your bellydough presses its edge. You tuck fingertips in opposite armpits to hide puffy nipples and breasts. As if your body colluded with your bullies to exclude you from the boycommunity. Mr. Halford gives Cash the desk next to Hyung, and Cash comes with a glacierwhite pearly grin you imagine leaving Looney Tunes toothmarks in a Wonder bread PBJ. You yank your turtleneck over the bridge of your nose, hiding snaggled front teeth and fogging your glasses.
            Mr. Halford explains satellites, sketches orbits on the chalkboard. Terra’s Luna, Phobos, and Deimos, Saturn’s whole retinue. Janine asks if Earth could get a second moon and Mr. Halford laughs. “I think one’s plenty.” You eye construction paper cutouts of Hyperion and Tethys—moons no one knows—as Mr. Halford sticks Titan to the board. Blood running through your heart is a liquid scream. Home after school, you push a chair to the fridge and slide the white pages off, mowing a path through greasy dust thick as plush. Ur, Us, Ut—there it is: Utley, Cash Jr. Motherfucker’s for real. Sticking around. You will need to recalculate.
            Friday, you sit crisscross applesauce on your side of a battlefield, pushing plastic action figures deep into the high pile of avocado shag. You cherish your weekly sleepovers in the basement bedroom of this boy who lets you call him Hyung, your friend’s uninterrupted attention. When Hyung’s father yanks open the door, it sounds as if it’s about to come off its hinges. He barks two words—bedtime, now—and you scamper for supervised toothbrushing. Hyung’s father taps only the hot faucet, but you have sense to keep complaint to yourself. During the minute of prayer, you count to sixty, cold tile pressing a headache into your knees. You hobble down plywood steps, and Hyung’s father casts you into windowless dark, locking the lightswitch under a melamine shield. You count hippopotami till footfalls creak two floors up. You are frightened in the black interregnum so Hyung holds your hand. You so often pay a price for your softness, the way you shrink within rooms. But Hyung makes softness lovely. Being a shysoft sidekick is the most sense you’ve ever made to yourself.
            Hyung finally lets go, grinds the wheel of a lighter pulled from his sock. Smirk visible in the guttering, he winks. “Glow it up, kiddo.” You fumble in his Jansport, extract a bramble of holiday lights. Push their prongs into a socket, kneel in the rainbow, finger your favorite GI Joes into first positions. Hyung sits on the waterbed edge. “Tonight, let’s do it before.”
            You don’t fully grasp Hyung’s new fascination, but you love him intensely—how soldiers love, maybe—so you don’t mind doing a kindness for your friend. You lay on your stomach; Hyung climbs on top. Waterbed heat on your cheek draws a bead of sweat off your scalp. Hyung places his palms on the rough of your elbows—the only person you let touch your eczema. He is tender with you, the way older boys touch girls. Lovely. Through two sets of jammies, you feel Hyung stiffen in the cleft of your backside. You don’t love the touch of it there, but the idea of holding Hyung somewhere within you in a secret embrace feels right—closeness Cash cannot usurp. You smell maple, batter, butter, peppermint breath. In three counts of sixty, it’s over. You swing your feet to the floor; Hyung doesn’t get up. His eyes are wet pucks; sadness aggressive. He winces. “Let’s trade places.”
            When your best friend is frustrated with you, it hits your tummy like a rollercoaster drop, feels like something vital inside gone wrongly afloat. Looking at Hyung, your heart is a sloppy rope knot dragging off the bow of a drifting canoe. So you climb trembling onto your friend, shift your boyness to Hyung’s cleft. Like trying to fetch a plushie in the claw and crane game. The opposite of lovely. Hyung makes a smallquick noise like an RC car and starts sniffling. You apologize, ask if you did it wrong. Hyung wipes tears, snot. Says he’s sick. Going to sleep.

Hyung is sullen on the bus Monday but chatty with Cash in class. You wonder if Hyung might still be sick, but when you call after school to check, his father says, “Boy’s at the park with friends, Ttongkkochung,” which he’s explained is your Korean name. On the track in Wednesday phys-ed, instead of walking laps with you, Hyung runs up front with Cash. The boys trot on the balls of their feet with antelope strides, breathing in sync.
            When you catch up, your babyfine hair is plastered to your pate like showershed strands stuck to the tub’s highwater mark. Your feet are bleeding—with each crunching step, gravel works through the perforated soles of your sister Rhiannon’s hand-me-down shoes. Cash asks Hyung about Friday night baseball practice, and you yelp like a dachshund dropped off the top bunk. Hyung jogs backward, giving his face to you at last. His eyes are gnat-spastic, don’t settle into contact. “Forgot to tell you Dad let me sign up. Gotta bail on sleepovers a while. We are a little old for GI Joe, right?” You fight the urge to grab Hyung by his ringer tee collar and slap him, screaming how he’d made you give up your plushies and ponies and learn GI Joe. But you do not want to be replaced. So you say, “Hell, yeah,” slow to a walk, and let the boys run on.
            You sit in the bleachers whistling for Hyung and Cash at practices till Coach says you’re a distraction, sunflower seedhusks tumbling from the purse of his mouth. “Go do whatever cheerleaders do on days off.” You sneak back for the first game, creep into the dugout while the boys clap hands in a dour procession after a loss, slip a pouch of Big League Chew spangled with All-Star! stickersin the fold of Hyung’s glove. Later, Hyung calls, his voice straitjacket restrained. “Father saw the gum. Said it’d be rude to not give thanks.” You ask if Hyung’s mad at you. Your friend loosens some, invites you to a Saturday team get-together. “We trade baseball cards. You can watch.” Your words emerge slurred by nerves, smile-warped. SuremaybeSaturdayokaycool. You set the receiver in its cradle. You’ll study up. Like you did GI Joe and Batman. Win everyone over so Hyung won’t have to choose. Saturn has dozens of moons.
            You tag along to the mall with Rhiannon, who wants a carpeted towerhouse for Maybe, her broken-tailed rescue barn cat. You sneak over to Rollie’s Stash and blow a month of allowance on a stack of bright-colored wax packs. You tack on a price guide, point at the TV while the man in the Infantry cap rings you up. “Expos are my favorite, I think. Their outfits are sharp.” The man covers his mouth for a wet, popping growl—an impossible to disentangle demilaugh/demicough. “Poof,” he wheezes. So you vanish like a cloud.
            You read the articles in the guide and, Friday, hit the cineplex where Rhiannon’s friend Edgar’s an usher. He looks like Boy George beneath a red vest and cap—nuclear green eyeshadow and lipstick. When he kneels down for a hug, you see puddles of purpleblack-marigold bruise on both sides of his nose. Edgar’s girlpretty—different from Cash. Effortful, not accidental; the way Edgar assembles himself reminds you of the meticulousness you bring to studying Boy stuff to sidekick for Hyung. You find Rhiannon’s friend comforting. Edgar unclips stanchion ropes, curtseys as you pass on your way to sneak into rated-R Major League.
            In the morning, you skip up Cash’s drive as the boy’s father blows smoke rings and sips from a Blue Ribbon can. Hyung’s teammates crouch like catchers around three-ring binders debating the ratio of Topps for Upper Deck (3:1) and recounting midnight rounds of Punch-Out. Only Hyung says hello as you sidle up; then he gives your shoulder a pinch. “I didn’t invite you cos it was at Cash’s and all about sports.”
            You hoist over his head a card box mottled with crude mascot doodles. “I like baseball now,” you proclaim. Hyung raises a brow. “I do. I have a Ken Griffey rookie. I saw Major League.” The attention is immediate, complete; tough to parse and trust for its positivity. You are suddenly aware of uncovered belly where your shirt’s ridden up. A sixth-grader named Bradford says Major League seems rad. His praise is a sunpuddle between clouds. It’s a sugar rush watching your plan start to pay off—the all-marshmallow spoon you save for the end of every cereal bowl. It takes you over. “Radical,” you concur, taking a knee on oily macadam.
            “You get any ta-tas in Major League?” asks Collin.
            “No, none of . . . those.” Your arms stipple with goosepimples.
            “None of those. Something better? Punani?”
            You headcock like a chihuahua. Collin waggles his fingers, playing invisible keys. “Puss-ay,” he practically sings but may as well be speaking Greek. Riding the sugarkick, you take a guess at its meaning. “You see a guy’s crack and his butt jiggles when a rich lady hits it.”
            The silence is the long second between hiccups, waiting to see if you’re cured. You watch eye contact ricochet; when it gets to Hyung, the boy turns his back, walks off, and the team goes stiff with laughter that’s practically a scream. Cash points both middle fingers, spits the usual epithets. Dicklicker, fudgepacker, faggot: slurs that’ve dogged you since kindergarten, when your friends were girls, when you tried to comfort a crying Collin with a hug. Since Edgar, you don’t deny it—saying you’re not seems like saying “go bully someone who is.” But you don’t have a better response. Sometimes, you simply run.
            Halfway home, you stop in a sycamore thicket with a collapsing treehouse which was once the Batcave for you and Hyung. You loved being Hyung’s Robin; don’t know how he’ll handle its end. When boyfriends and girlfriends walk away, it’s called breaking up. There’s no word for the end of friendship. You drop your baseball cards in a ditch. Kick clods of dirt at them till your toes hurt, till you’ve given up hope Hyung is coming to comfort you with a hug.
            That night, Rhiannon takes you to the new Batman. There’s no Robin. The Joker scares you so much you have to walk out. At home, you watch Batman `66 and scour your yearbook. You uncap a Sharpie, scratch out Collin and Bradford, but can’t bring yourself to blot Hyung—your Batman for 20 percent of your life. There are no stories about Robin on his own. But maybe, you think, next year in middle school—if you forget the loveliness of shysoft and give yourself to a full summer of studying Boy—you can find your own Robin, and your peculiar discomfort will cease. You lick a thumb as your mother does to turn pages, use the yearbook as a catalog. Kevin Kim lives for sci-fi. Davin Kindle reads maps for fun. JyRon King stutters and lisps and is fatter than you. You would have to be Batman. You draw stars around JyRon’s chubby face.
            “Jesus, Audax,” gasps Rhiannon, kicking your yearbook away. “Have some chill.” You didn’t hear her come in. She cracks a Jolt, bends to your level, takes your face in soda-cold hands. Kisses your forehead the way your mom used to do. “The wrong people’ll kill you for that shit.” Maybe peeks at you from behind her, purring louder than the TV. She shows you her belly, patchy with whorls of luxurious fluff. But when you move to pet her, she hisses and darts under the couch. “Don’t take it personal. She came up with Maine Coon toms. She may never feel safe.”

Audie, October 1991

You can’t quit tonguing your new front teeth—alien artifacts suddenly present and perfect, futuristically smooth. In mesh shorts on pebbly ground, back to the fieldhouse, you screw your mouth around, pluck yellow from a dandelion, enjoy balmy October. Part of you can’t help thinking Cash did you a favor busting your teeth out. You watch your gym class play football. Crashing, shouting faggot, laughing a different laugh for each other than for you. You want nothing of the scrum and tumble, but there’s a cold war between boys and girls which means these are your people by default. You crawl to toss back a fumble. Collin yells, “You throw like a sissy, Audass.”
            “Is your name really Audass?” asks a voice from behind. You periscope the fieldhouse corner to a boy with a royal blue wrist cast sketching X-Men’s Psylocke. “Audax. My dad’s idea.” The boy gnaws a toothpick like a jawbreaker. “His hero. Wrote about horses.” Maddox introduces himself, declares fathers and team sports awful inventions. At the bell, Maddox asks you to hang after school, and you have to invent a cut grass allergy to explain your watery eyes and sniffles that sound like strawbubbles blown in milk.
            When you get back from Maddox’s, your mom, Sela, and Rhiannon are drunk on the floor. Legs bear-splayed, empty sixer of B&J between them. Rhiannon chugs a glass gallon of blush; condensation drops on mauve leggings look like little bruises. Sela ups the volume on Peter Jennings. The new Supreme Court justice is approved.
            For a week now, this thing has been happening. You know it’s to do with a man called Clarence. A lady told something he did and grown-ups became strange—Sela and the Valvoline man, the guys at the comic shop when you came with Rhiannon, women and men teachers now keep apart. Sometimes Maybe stalks circles in moonlight—tail down, humming a throatnoise that isn’t a purr. Grownups have been like this. No one told you what Clarence did, and you’re scared to ask—the words sexual harassment embarrass you. One late-show host chuckled about Pepsi and pubic hair. Another donned a Zorro mask, went leg-up on a chair. “Long Dong Silver would have you walk his plank!” Sela threw the remote into the wall.
            You are quiet a while, watching Sela and Rhiannon glare at a skeletal man on TV drawling into a Price Is Right mic. “Ms. Hill was a mediocre girl prone to hysterics. Even if Judge Thomas had Penthouse sent to his desk, it don’t mean he harassed anyone.”
            Rhiannon swigs the bottle. “Sure look out for their own.”
            “Boys’ll be boys.” Sela laughs, but there are tears. You muster the guts to ask if you can sleep over Friday with Maddox. “Who could possibly give a shit?”
            Bedtime, Sela enters your room and plucks Johnny Tremain from your hands. She squares herself to apologize. “That wasn’t about you. It’s hard today for women to not be mad. We stand up to bullies, no one believes us, and shitty men put the bullies in charge. Shitty men help other shitty men be shitty.” You nod. You understand bullies. You finally ask what Clarence did.
            “Forget it.”
            “But I don’t want to be a shitty man.”
            “Just neverforget girls are people like you. Golden Rule, kiddo.”
            “I won’t. I feel more like a girl, anyways.”
            Sela sighs. Pets your pimply cheek with the back of a patchouli-oiled hand. “Jesus. One crisis at a time, please. Mama’s maxed out.”

You arrive with Rhiannon’s She-Ra sleeping bag and are gobsmacked when a girl in argyle socks opens Maddox’s door. In Math, you get headaches from staring at her without turning your head. A white flash of terror like a dodgeball to your nose knocks you out of time for a moment. “Maddie’s stuck in a cave. I’m Marisol.” You dodge her eyes, examine her chin dimple and yellow barrette, miss the hand she extends to shake till she’s taking it back.
            On the dirty pine floor of Maddox’s bedroom, he makes Mario a full-body ordeal. He ducks to avoid fireballs, meerkats his back for jumps, wrings the controller till it sounds like Styrofoam. He says shit a lot, hello after he dies, and then hands over player one. You pass the first hour this way, Marisol watching from a papasan chair. You almost forget she’s there, but then she squeals during a spectacular death. You yank slack from the cord, offer her next; her eyes flash, chapped lips split as she grins. Maddox cuts in—it’s not really her thing—and snatches the paddle. But Marisol winks at you (winks!) and returns to a wrinkled Sports Illustrated.
            At 9:45, she explains she needs to wait on the porch for her dad. Maddox pauses the game, straddles her, spends fifteen minutes kissing, squeezing her breasts through her sweater. You feel strange stealing his turn, are undecided so long you have to stick with sitting still. You look up to the two of them without turning your head and see Marisol’s iguana green eyes open, unblinking.
            After Maddox walks her out, he returns with sodas and says to pick a two-player. “Twenty bucks she’ll jack me off before Christmas, bro.” His words rest in your stomach like unroasted chestnuts—same feeling as when Rhiannon caught you tweezing bills from your UNICEF collection box. “Mari’s got friends.” Maddox clacks his Crush to yours. “We’ll get yousome ass.”
            You are quiet too long again. You need to say something—watching your face, Maddox appears about to crack up and you’re not sure which boylaugh it will be. “I have a girlfriend,” you declare, surprising yourself. “Maxx. She goes to Catholic school.”
            Maxx isn’t short for Maxine, but the extra x is essential—that much is sure. Saturday, you find a brunette with a side-part on the color page of Rhiannon’s yearbook. She crinkle-eye smiles in tweed and a tie, white stockings, dirty cherryred Keds. You match the face to a grayscale portrait, carefully trim both pics to fit wallet polyurethane, and prop it on your desk. You set a four-color pen to pink and, in your most baroque script (circlet halos for i and j), write a mash note from her to you. You fold it into itself, draw a heart, pause a moment, and then write Audie inside.
            I knew you were special the second I saw you trying on shoes. I was sad because my rabbit Starla died, but I could tell right away you were smart, funny, and kind. Not one of the boys. I let you look up my skirt. It wasn’t harassment. I can’t wait to jack you off.
            The second letter comes easier. Maxx sounds more like Maxx when you don’t crib from Maddox or locker room boys, let her just speak in your voice. Quickly, so quickly, crafting these letters is like building cozy two-story Lego Idea Book homes. It takes the weekend for you to name the feeling but, when you do, you call it joy.
            Monday, you have a layer of folded-note sediment in your bag to casually spill in front of Maddox. “Silly me,” you say, unfurling one you marked, and read till Maddox interrupts asking for pics. You tear open wallet Velcro. (You can’t believe how good you are at deception.) Maddox rubs his thigh, declares Maxx hot, immediately loses interest. You sadly pack her away. You’d thought you’d get to read more. It takes you till the bell to name the feeling but, when you do, you call it longing. You miss her life in your mouth.
            A month later, on Maddox’s porch, fat flakes of snow settle like blackflies in your hair. Maddox throws the door open but blocks it, feet shoulder-width, hand on his hip. He stretches his other arm to you, fist clenched with a two-finger beak he hummingbird hovers under your nose. “Smell,” he commands. It’s lowmusk lemonsweat, a locker room smell. You huff twice, find you like it, ask what it is. “Pussay,” Maddox practically sings and remains rooted in place, blocking ingress till you give up a high five. “You owe me twenty bucks.”
            You watch TGIF. Eat Neapolitan pizza. You roll yours into a cone to keep grease from dribbling onto your crotch. Maddox lets his slice dangle, spatters his sweats, eats with his left hand and stops between bites to sniff his right. “She was slick as a Slip `n Slide, bro.” You don’t know what to do with boytalk like this. Maybe because you learned words from Rhiannon and Sela it seems extraterrestrial. “Slid right in. Didn’t even unzip her goofy-ass pants.”
            Mari sits next to you in Math now. Shares tiles of violet candy with you, leans over the aisle to whisper dad jokes. What did Zero say to Eight? How can you get warm in a freezing room? You chew your lips to keep your tittering quiet, hide your delight as if you were in church. Nice belt. Go to a corner, they’re 90 degrees. You’d complimented Mari’s pumpkin corduroy bellbottoms today. Vintage, she’d proudly explained. You confessed a wish they made boyclothes like that and she blushed. “You’re tiny. Try them sometime. Bet you’d fit.” From Maddox or Cash it would’ve been an insult, but it was lovely from her. Maddox repeats the Slip `n Slide line, holds his hand out, and you shrink. Knowing how Mari smells feels like reading her diary. “Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this. Also, we didn’t bet.”
            Maddox laughs in terrier yips. “Jealous. You know you owe me.” You attend to your slice, stay mum too long. Maddox pulls his face to a scowl. “I’m so close to done with your shit, you pansy prude.” A core-crucial piece of you comes unconnected—a chest-hollow looseness that reminds you of Hyung. The years between friendships had been only you and Rhiannon and Sela, had had a playground-after-recess feel. So, when Maddox insists, “I shoulda called Collin tonight—he’s the man,” your heart is a frayed rope knot at the end of an empty tetherball line, knocking in wind against a galvanized pole.
            “I got to third with Maxx.”
            When you speak Boyish, you must force words out phonetically. “I fingerblasted her pussay,” you practically sing. You think of Maxx’s last note. She got watercolors, tried to paint a self-portrait that came out looking like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. You’ve longsince quit putting lascivious words in her mouth. She’s simply a girl and you like living in her as she speaks. Maddox doesn’t deserve the privilege of hearing her stories, but you don’t want your friend to choose between you and another boy, so you tell the tale of the first time you touched one another, how you crept one by one up the frog-fasteners of Maxx’s favorite side-closure skirt. You force a rakish smirk, borrow a scene from TV. “Went out the window to the woods when her parents came home.” Maddox punches your shoulder. Asks how many fingers you got in. You hold your hand like a sacred heart statue.
            Before bed, Maddox has something to show you. He wasn’t sure you’d be cool till now and sets the TV to channel 83. You hear a woman in pain. The picture is frantic psychedelia—shattered faces in ice blue and white plowed over and through by a tideroll of neon zebra stripes.
            “Watch a while. It starts to make sense.”
            You see her in parts, this woman—who isn’t in pain. Your first pair of breasts are photonegative colors, attached to a headless torso, changing shape like clouds as they drift cross-screen. Tapered legs lock at the ankle around a gyrating waist, viridian lips and charcoal teeth encircle the white hole of an open mouth. You lay on the floor, Maddox in bed, both watching this exploded sex. For a moment, the image is stable. The woman’s hair is in pigtails like Mari wears. You remember her scent. Want Maddox to change the channel, but don’t ask, don’t look away. You don’t want your erection, but it’s there and it hurts. You reach down to squeeze the ache and your first orgasm comes like a sneeze. Then a gnaw in your gut, your chest, your head; a need to apologize, but you can’t figure to whom.
            Maddox’s mom finds you up around two. Bathroom light nagged her awake. You had gone and rubbed till it happened again; got too guiltknotted to leave. You tell her you’re sick. Wait with her for Sela in the kitchen. Braless and groggy, she slumps over tea. You see dark nipples down her pajama top, feel new stiffness. A Time issue on the table shows Clarence in profile. “I’m sorry,” you say. She says it’s okay. “Please don’t forgive me,” you insist.

Thanksgiving weekend, Mari takes your hand and Maddox’s and walks tall through the dank of her aunt’s basement, parting an ostentation of peacocking teens with cascades of plasticky hair. You stress over whether or when to unbraid your fingers from hers as she introduces her boys to her tween cousin Pedrito. He stands on a stool behind a chestnut wetbar; pets a razor-shaped cornsilk mustache. He sucks a cigarillo, spits maricon when you ask for a bottled Colada like Mari’s. Maddox rolls his eyes. “Whatcha got to put hair on my shaft?”
            Pedrito flicks soggy tobacco flakes with his tongue, revealing pink gaps of lost baby teeth. He pours maplebrown into a Dixie from a bottle with a label like a crumbling scab. “Jefe, meet 151.” Maddox quaffs and coughs till a pedicle of spit from his lip hits the floor. He shoots a second, and minutes after the three of you settle into a leather settee he’s asleep.
            Marisol fetches Coladas two at a time. You decant yours under the table into the Dixie. Giddybuzzed after her third, Mari puts her hand on your thigh. When she retracts it, her touch leaves a skinecho like cinnamon VapoRub. She leans in and pours words into your ear. “You know what’s odd?” Her face stays close, breath hotsweet garden soil. Rubyflushed, glassy, squinteyed, smiling. “Numbers not divisible by two.” She licks her lips looking at you, and woozybold, you tilt into her to see if maybe, but she rocks away. “Whoa, boy. Didn’t you just break new ground with your girlfriend?” How she bends the word fills your stomach with ash. Mari puts fingers to your lips. “Don’t kiss and tell. It’s gross.” All you can think of is your memory of Mari’s smell—how you held it within you with electric blue breasts and kellygreen labia; how you didn’t want to, but couldn’t not use it to milk yourself. Your eyes sprout kudzu-like tearvines. You realize you’re drunk, slap your own mouth to keep from bleating a sob. “No, wait—Maxx,” you gasp, “I made it all up.”
            “Jesus, Audie, that’s worse. What is wrong with boys?”
            You slide to the floor like a silk handkerchief, immediately incomprehensible through mucus and tears. Mari’s face has a grapefruit twist as you weep; she swivels her head checking who else is witnessing your sudden, utter dissolution.
            “I’m so sorry. I lied because of his fingers. Maddox made me smell. I felt like Clarence.”
            Mari asks what the fuck you’re talking about, then fades paperwhite—tearfilm descends over her eyes like the pull-down of leaded glass windows as she figures it out. You see you’ve hurt her and clarify, “I didn’t mean it that way. You smelled good. I wish I smelled like that.” You know you’ve miscalculated before Mari stands, toppling you with a corduroy knee to the chin.
            Your memories of the rest of the night are self-contained scenes like stray marbles lolling on a warped floor: Mari breaking her thumb in a shaggy jab that bloodies Maddox’s nose; Collin and Cash spitting beery gobs like comets; Pedrito waving a Yankee-blue Easton aluminum. You know when Maddox comes to, when he sees Mari in school, they’ll both treat you as if you’re invisible as a new moon. The thought makes you queasy, but it’s worse thinking of Maxx. You couldn’t explain if asked, but you know you can’t return to her and will miss her the most. More even than the friendship of Maddox. Maxx felt true.
            You drag Maddox through road-shoulder snow like a broken soldier, arms around each other’s necks. The weight of him is almost too much to move forward when you hear the siren peal. Standing frozen, your shadows are blent: a single distended beast dancing at the center of a strobing red glow like a scrambled channel.

Dax, November 1996

You’re less comfortable in a dress than you expected. You clench a fist, crack knuckles against your fishnet-wrapped thigh. Your bicep-high vinyl glove creaks. Emerald nods from the stage but is too busy tuning to sit with you. You pick the placket of the borrowed pink babydoll and shift your genitals around in your overtight underwear pouch for the fiftieth time. The issue with this kinderwhore getup isn’t the dress but the mess of your testicles and sloppy cock.
            It doesn’t help that all your friends at this party are in the band. Or that you’re absolutely not imagining stares and sniggers. You’ve developed a sixth sense for boygaze; the cobwebby zing of it sticks to your nape. In a hackeysack circle, bare-chested Collin and Cash point, laugh, and spit. The sound of them is, at least, drowned out by the ragged roar of Emmy’s guitar—strummed through distortion till it’s melodic Velcro. You want to not care what they think; the anti-camouflage of goth was, after all, what drew you in. But for all the practice you get in chains and makeup, you haven’t learned to dismiss the laughter of boys. Hoping a smokestack puff comes off roguish, you light a menthol off a clove, but a hiss in your ear startles you and you bounce in place like a foxkit.
            “I think you’re so brave.”
            Bradford’s voice has dropped since `89 and a pinkribbon keloid like dripped candlewax now bisects his eyebrow and orbit. He helps himself to a seat. “Bum me a smoke?” You tap your box and it opens to the side like a drawer. “The hell am I about to smoke?”
            “Kamel.” You hit the K like a pickax on flint. “With a K. Brand new. Side-slide, backpack resistant, premarked green-tipped lucky for wishes. Just missing a Crackerjack toy. What a time to be alive.” Bradford claps as if amused but offers only one syllable: Ha. Even with the wound, he’s beautiful. He huffs out a cloud. “Audax is funny and brave—what a time to be alive.”
            You haven’t spent time with a boy since Maddox, since Emerald and Jessie rescued you from your first panic attack in seventh-grade lunch, covering your body with theirs, screaming for the nurse. For four years, your friends have been girls—which mattered less and more than you initially thought. As puberty began to grotesquely reshape you, it’s felt like living abroad. The locals speak fluent English but only with you, preferring their own tongue at home.

At the diner postshow with the band, you excuse yourself to the restroom, move with coltish steps in new platform boots. You pin your dress hem to your chest with your chin for a piss, rest your forehead against the Sharpie-tagged wall. Condensation from plumbing drips on your neck. You need a moment away from adrenalized Emmy. Her affection sometimes repels. You can’t quite puzzle out why. Trying gives you low-grade panicfever like a capsaicin on your brain.
            The way she takes your hand and then shoves you on as if she wants to be dragged like you’re walking a dog. The way she surrenders, hands up, as if to cops, when deciding what diner, which movie, which CD. How she says, “Swing your dick around, babes, I follow my man.” All this sits in your gut like a bezoar. You open doors, buy roses, pull out chairs. Emmy seems to want this. You’re surprised by the complexity of pushing someone to a table, confused by how close to get—other boyfriends intuit these things. For you, it’s GI Joe and baseball. It’s learning the half-Windsor from a ditto Scotch-taped to the locker room wall.
            You black the places your lips show pink. Try to shake off brain capsaicin and Emmy, but when you open the door, she’s there by the payphones in her thrifted cheerleader kit, apple-cheeked with an impish brow-tilt and grin. When she looks at you this way, it’s like watching a doctor mallet-smash your patellar tendon and waiting in vain for a little kick. You smile back (remembering to involve your eyes), start to speak, but are stoppered by the thrust of her tongue—a lethargic, ineluctable force. You’d been studying history the night she taught you how to make her come and, since, she only kisses like she’s already finished—like a Molasses Disaster. Emmy pins you hip-on-groin to the wall. Widens cartoonish eyes lacquered in pink faerie glitter. “I made a decision today. I want you inside me. Eleven-eleven.” She bites her lip. “We’re ready.”
            Your heart pings like a parked engine. You smile again (forget your eyes); ask what’s eleven-eleven. “Saturday, silly. November eleventh. I’m Mom-bonding Friday: massage, mani-pedi, facial. Girly-girl shit to shine us up pretty—” you interrupt to say that sounds lovely and Emmy says, “Jesus. Shut up. I’m trying to say I want to get fucked. I’ll still be shiny in the morning. We’ll go at 11:11. Kinda stardusty, right?”
            Emmy tacks on another disaster kiss, grabs your crotch and frowns. She tippytoes into your ear. “Catch up, ramen noodle—I’m wet just thinking about it.” Emmy do-si-dos till she’s the one on the wall, reels you in with the arachnid kneecrook of an outstretched leg. Thigh up, a shock of bubble-colored cotton is visible under her skirt. “Gimme your hand. Feel.” A woman leaving the ladies room librarian-clears her throat. You ask what if someone else sees. “Jesus H—sometimes a girl just wants to get taken.” She drops her leg. “Ani, Jessie, Tara? We’ll be last.” Emmy grips your arm like a bindle, claps your hand on her wrist like a slap bracelet. She puts a hand to the small of your back, shoves till you walk ahead of her to the booth, stomping her high-tops through the march.
            Later, fresh from the shower, you’re plagued by an erection you can’t ignore. It’s easier without her. You can keep from overthinking it, just let it happen, let it not be a big deal. You take the band picture from under your mattress, kneel before it, and pull on yourself.
            Emmy screams into her mic, strange desperation on her face, as if afraid she won’t make it to the next lyric. Faded gold lipstick, velvety pink visible tonguetip. Stippling of sweat on her almost-flat chest. The dun of her upper thighs under the fringe of cut denim is footsole pale. You get into a rhythm, let your gaze ricochet. Gilded lips, tongue tip, sweaty tits, thighwhite, and just out of sight . . . What you wish when you can’t fend off the thought is not to be inside Emmy but within. Have your own gilded lips, tongue tip, sweaty tits, thighwhite, and—quick as it comes, the thought shamepits your gut, withers you in your fist. You crawl into bed unfulfilled.

You dress to impress for your first boy sleepover in years: vinyl shorts, Cheshire tights, spit-shined twenty-eye Docs. You spin Ziggy Stardust and shave off your eyebrows, apply a bar of black grease paint like Blade Runner’s Pris, flytrap fringe your eyes with silver mascara. You don’t look to yourself like any man or woman you’ve seen. Perfect, you think.
            Bradford doesn’t mask his awe at your bedroom—four walls of posters, magazine clippings, dot-matrix pics painstakingly filled-in with highlighter. He runs a clammy hand down the four-by-six-foot poster of a longhair: shirtless, half bent, sweating in leathers, monomaniacally working his Fender tremolo arm. It sounds like squeegee on glass. You watch from bed. Toggle the blacklight when Ford has adjusted. Everything white phosphoresces, colored-in grayscales glow. Ford doesn’t fight jawdrop. Mouth a cavern, lips plump and violet, preternaturally even teeth are radioactive slabs. “What a time to be alive.”
            For the next four hours, everything’s the best version of itself. Ford’s not allowed soda at home, so Mello Yello’s citrusy fizzgrit sugarbite tastes new to you. Ford backhands a chindribble and drags at a Kamel. Says, “I never smoke indoors.” You admit it’s exquisite. Without wind or chill, tobacco smells of raisins and suede; smoke is peppered metal. Ford grinds his hips, dances to the bloodpump disco percussion of Nine Inch Nails. He’s not allowed secular music. When the fuck you like an animal chorus hits, you hear Ford’s real, polysyllabic laugh for the first time: raw jubilation, a toddler dropped in a coin-op rocketship. You laugh back; you both trade like table tennis till Rhiannon punches your common wall.
            Emmy pages at the tick of 11:11 (t–36:00:00). You call from the closet so you don’t have to turn down KMFDM on Ford. Emmy elides syllables, skids over words, talks you through what she calls her Deflowering Outfit. She stops for breath only when desperate—panicked gulps that sound like sliding doors. “So almost Cher’s second red dress with knockoff Louis strappies and like you’re gonna live your Twin Peaks dream sticking your cock in a prom queen.”
            You stay mum too long, so Emmy presses. “I like you in denim and Chucks. Why get done up as characters for—” Liaison is too adult. “Forthis ordeal?” You know you’ve miscalculated before you hear her breathslide—a glass door thrown with abandon. “Rich coming from someone who wears more makeup than me. Maybe I wanna feel like the girl for once?” She hangs up on you, which makes you angrier than it makes people on TV, feels like hot fingertips pressing out from behind your forehead. Ford has fresh cigarettes pressed in his lips when you come out of the closet. You kneel before him, take one, tug the cover from the common wall vent. You extract the shared honeybear bong. Bubble it once, pass it up. Coughing out tongues of cotton-thick smoke, Ford asks, “Girlfriend, who needs bitches? You’re the world’s coolest.”

You crash Emmy’s morning art class at 11:10 (t–24:01:17) to make amends. You drop a strange bouquet you skipped early classes to build—circus peanuts, black sprayroses, Djarum cloves—topped by a homemade envelope reading Wait till the tick of the clock. Inside is a doodle of faces on a pillow, arms entwined, bodies ensconced in black silk that becomes a murder of crows becomes hearts. I’m sorry, it says, and you are.
            She forgives you with a song over lunch. Forgiving is Emmy’s favorite part, and lately you give her so much to forgive. After Styrofoam plates of pizza, she plays her acoustic. I’ll sing for you if you want me to. I’ll give to you. It’s a chance I’ll have to take. When she’s finished, you share a disaster kiss, and—heads down, as if sharing prayer—you’re linked by a tendril of spit.
            That night (t–06:36:47), you can’t sleep. You scrub your face to new flesh, brush your false front teeth till your gums bleed and Listerine rinse for nerveburn. You steal Sela’s Rumple Minze, tug a velour blanket onto the roof, and swaddle up in the snow. You pull a shot, draw crisp air down the shaft of a menthol. Breath is peroxide in paper cuts, a radiant cleancold nimbus of sting in your lungs that feels like truth, like consciousness trimmed to the quick. You feel almost safe from brain capsaicin panicfever here and try sorting yourself again.
            You understand Emmy’s intensity. She’s wanted tomorrow for years—since you came to post-panic in the nurse’s office and Emmy was reading you The Little Prince. Turning your back now seems cruel. Rhiannon confessed her first time (VW Rabbit, soused on Boone’s), Jessie told you hers (Thanksgiving, attic, uncle). What right do you have to unilaterally retreat and fuck up this fairy tale Emmy’s wrought herself? You look for the moon but can’t find it. Think of the time Jessie asked what’d happen if it were knocked from the Earth. Mr. Halford scratched his chin. “It would become just an asteroid, I think. Drift into the sun. I do not think we’d survive.”
            You suck smoke till cherrycrackle, till you get chillglow again in your throat. Chase it with a peppermint bolt that trickles to a polarwhite gutpuddle. Head-light and hollow, skin taut and half-numb, you are a neon pink nebula trapped in a boyshell. This too feels true. You choose to let tomorrow happen, let it not be a big deal. A kindness for a friend. What does it cost you to let Emmy write her story? Most boys would be thrilled. You flick your butt to the gutter, crawl inside, hum her forgiveness song. I go along just because I’m lazy. I go along to be with you.
            You are fogheaded but too worked up to sleep. You kneel for the Polaroid, but it’s not where it usually lives. You go flat on your belly, blindpat under the bed: a shoebox of ponies, rubber-banded yearbooks, a stolen Time magazine. A taped-up UNICEF box. Drawstring Capezio bags of pink-scribbled looseleaf glowing under UV. You read till your eyes itch with saltwater heat.
            When you touch me, I feel like a real woman. I get that song now. I used to hate it. But now I understand and I’m not afraid or ashamed. When you smell of me, I know you don’t share my scent. You’re not Cash or Collin or Clarence, not Hyung or Maddox. Not all boys will be boys. I love you and feel in my body you love me.
            You know tomorrow can’t happen. It is a big deal. This once, you’ll do a kindness for you. And Emmy. Because you wouldn’t want that for her—her first time to be a favor from a pal. It’s too late to call (t–05:16:21), so you set an early alarm. Buzzy, worked up, relieved, you slip into your borrowed dress. Dance to Portishead’s “Glory Box” in the radiant navy predawn.

The daytime scene is David Lynch. You stay on the porch because you know if you let her in, you’ll surrender. Emmy shivers in the November wind, shoulders out in skin-tight crimson, toes clenched in wrong-sized stilettos, eyes running like black fireworks. You face her with no makeup for the first time in years. Her slap is a white shadow on your rubescent cheek. She peels out in her mom’s Mary Kay Cadillac blasting “Violet,” screaming faggot, flattening the mailbox.
            You call Ford. Say come when he can. “I don’t wanna be an asteroid.” When he arrives, an aura of diner radiates from his hair to nailbeds—griddle, bitter coffee, maple. He strips off his checks, stands barefoot in boxers. Lights up a clove. He holds his hand in the gusting forced air and whistles. “Must be eighty in here. Dad won’t nudge our dial past fifty-nine.” He sits next to you at the foot of the bed. “I’m gonna bask. Pretend it’s the beach.” He throws off his tee revealing comic book abs. “Girl, you gonna spill or do I get the 411 Monday from bitches?”
            You tell your friend everything like wringing a hot bloodsoaked towel till it’s a compress on your neck. Confession is the bodily opposite of panic. You let yourself cry till your field of vision’s a Vaselined windshield. Lay back, light a smoke to catch breath. “She used to like that I’m not like other boys, but I think she would’ve been happier with Collin or Cash.”
            Ford nods sagely. Moves by your side, sits parallel, puts a palm on your knee. Rests a heavy elbow in the hollow between rib and hip. You find you can’t sit up. “Ever hear the one about the horse? Coach makes us read this Rosenblum dude. A guy says you’re a horse, he’s a jerk. Three people say it? Conspiracy. Ten people say you’re a horse? Buy a saddle.” The suddenness with which you’re unzipped and in Ford’s hand has you gasping, fingers to lips, like Donna Reed.
            “I didn’t—I don’t,” you stammer. But your voice is shysoft and you wonder. Vampires can’t see themselves in a mirror, but it always seemed plain as day to boys what sort of creature you were. Maybe they weren’t wrong. Ford kisses your forehead, gives your shoulder a pinch. “I can tell you don’t mind.” Indeed, you have firmed in his grip. You feel yourself blush—you’re ashamed not to be wearing makeup. If you were going to lose your virginity, you would’ve preferred to look pretty. Ford lets out a giggly hiccup, points, says, “Your face.” He sniggers again and you prop up on your elbows. “Stop laughing,” you say, and Ford does. In the hush, your cigarettes snuff. Ford takes quiet as permission. “I’ll go slow.” He unbuttons you, tugs down pants. “Giddyap.”
            You allow Ford to take you into his mouth. It doesn’t feel bad but doesn’t feel good. Even when it’s Emmy, it’s never felt right. They manhandle you. Roughcrude tugs, like girls touch boys. You don’t like being touched by anyone in the mess of your genitals, which leaves nowhere you like being touched. Where you want to be touched doesn’t exist, but somehow you feel it—the opposite of phantom limb, an imaginary hollow that feels to you like truth. But in this moment, you clench yourself, try to enjoy Ford’s warmth.
            When Ford surfaces, air on your spitsodden skin goosepimples your thighs. You see him stroking himself and Ford sees you see. He smiles with dimples and a baleen wall of teeth. “Lemme hop on?” It seems to you only fair. Ford swings a leg over your face. Giddyap. He’s unctuous with something yolky, tastes of hard cheese and chanterelles. He jabs your uvula; blonde curls tickle your lips. You are immediately certain this is not what you want, who you are.
            You want Ford to stop but won’t push him away. Worry if you cry out, Ford will be mad or embarrassed. The thought turns your heart to driftwood. You start sobbing again which makes nose breathing hard. You cough on Ford. Strive to stay open. Do a kindness for a friend. Probably over in minutes. But Ford stops himself. Dismounts. Passes a napkin. “Blow your nose.” Strikes a match you share to light cigarettes.
            “I don’t think I’m gay.”
            “You don’t seem like a breeder.”
            “Very sure now.”
            “That day at the party. The way you are in the world. What are you?”
            The question is either too complicated or basic. You just smoke.
            “What do you want from me?”
            You reach for Ford’s hand. He slides it away.