Then, one afternoon, out of nowhere, Trevor asked me to top him, the way we had been doing it, which we now called fake fucking. He lay on his side. I spat in my palm and snuggled up to him. I was only up to his neck in height, but lying down, spooning, our heads met. I kissed his shoulders, made my way to his neck, where his hair ended, as some boys’ do, with the strands whittled down to a small half-inch tail at the nape. It was the part that shone like wheat-tips touched by sunlight, while the rest of his head, with its fuller hair, stayed dark brown. I flicked my tongue under it. How could such a hard-stitched boy possess something so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings? Between my lips, it was a bud sprouted from inside him, possible. This part is the good part of Trevor, I thought. Not the squirrel shooter. Not the one who axed up what was left of the shot-up park bench to splinters. The one who, in a fit of rage I can’t recall the cause of, shoved me into a snowbank on our walk back from the corner store. This part, this flick of hair, was what made him stop his truck in the middle of traffic to stare at a six-foot sunflower on the side of the road, his mouth slack. Who told me sunflowers were his favorite because they grew higher than people. Who ran his fingers so gently down their lengths I thought red blood pulsed inside the stalks.

But it was over before it began. Before my tip brushed his greased palm, he tensed, his back a wall. He pushed me back, sat up. “Fuck.” He stared straight ahead.

“I can’t. I just—I mean . . .” He spoke into the wall. “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t, man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—” He paused, wiped his nose. “It’s for you. Right?”

I pulled the covers to my chin.

I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong.

The rules, they were already inside us.

Soon the Super Nintendo was on. Trevor’s shoulders shook as he hammered away at the controller. “Hey. Hey, Little Dog,” he said after a while. Then, softly, still fixed on the game: “I’m sorry. Okay?”

On the screen, a tiny red Mario jumped from platform to platform. If Mario fell off, he would have to start the level over, from the beginning. This was also called dying.

* * *

—

The boy ran away from home one night. He ran with no plans. In his backpack were a bag of Cheerios taken out the box, a pair of socks, and two Goosebumps paperbacks. Although he could not read chapter books yet, he knew how far a story could take him, and holding these books meant there were at least two more worlds he could eventually step into. But because he was ten, he made it only to the playscape behind his elementary school twenty minutes away.

After sitting on the swings for a while in the dark, the creaking chain the only sound, he climbed one of the nearby maples. The leafy branches jostled around him as he climbed. Halfway up, he stopped and listened to the neighborhood, a pop song coming from an apartment window across the lot, traffic from the nearby freeway, a woman calling in a dog or a child.

Then the boy heard footsteps on dried leaves. He pulled his knees up close and hugged the trunk. He held still and stared down, cautious, through the bows, which were dusty and grey from the city’s smog. It was his grandmother. Motionless, she looked up, one eye open, searching. It was too dark to see him. She seemed so small, a misplaced doll, as she swayed, squinting.

“Little Dog,” she said in a whisper-shout. “You up there, Little Dog?” She craned her neck, then looked away, at the freeway in the distance. “Your mom. She not normal okay? She pain. She hurt. But she want you, she need us.” She stirred in place. The leaves crackled. “She love you, Little Dog. But she sick. Sick like me. In the brains.” She examined her hand, as if to make sure it still existed, then dropped it.

The boy, hearing this, pressed his lips to the cold bark to keep from crying.

She pain, the boy thought, mulling over her words. How can anyone be a feeling? The boy said nothing.

“You don’t need to be scared, Little Dog. You smarter than me.” Something crinkled. In her arms, held like a baby, was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. In her other hand was a Poland Spring water bottle filled with warm jasmine tea. She kept muttering to herself, “You don’t need to be scared. No need.”

Then she stopped and trained her eyes on him.

They watched each other between the shivered leaves. She blinked once. The branches clacked and clacked, then stopped.

* * *

—

Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?

Main Street was empty the night Trevor and I rode our bikes down the middle of the road, our tires swallowing the fat yellow lanes as we sped. It was seven p.m., which meant there were only five hours left of Thanksgiving Day. Our breaths smoked above us. With each inhale, the pungent wood fires made a bright note in my lungs. Trevor’s old man was back at the trailer, in front of the football game, eating TV dinners with bourbon and Diet Coke.

My reflection warped over the storefront glass as we rode. The stoplights blinked yellow and the only sound was the clicking spokes beneath us. We rode back and forth like that, and for a stupid moment it felt like that strip of concrete called Main Street was all we ever possessed, all that held us. Mist came down, diffracted the streetlights into huge, van Gogh orbs. Trevor, ahead of me, stood up on his bike, arms out on both sides, and shouted, “I’m flying! Hey, I’m flying!” His voice cracked as he mimicked the scene in Titanic where the girl stands at the bow of the ship. “I’m flying, Jack!” he shouted.

After a while Trevor stopped pedaling and let his bike slide to a stop, arms at his side.

“I’m starving.”

“Me too,” I said.

“There’s a gas station up there.” He pointed to a Shell station ahead of us. Surrounded by the vast night, it looked like a spaceship had crashed on the side of the street.

Inside, we watched two frozen egg-and-cheese sandwiches spin together in the microwave. The old white lady at the counter asked us where we were headed.

“Home,” Trevor said. “My mom’s stuck in traffic so just getting a snack before she comes for dinner.” The woman’s eyes flicked over me as she handed him the change. Trevor’s mom moved to Oklahoma with her boyfriend almost five years ago.

On the stoop of a dentist’s office, across the street from a shuttered Friendly’s, we unwrapped our sandwiches. Warm cellophane crinkled around our hands. We chewed, stared into the restaurant windows, where a poster of a sundae advertised a ghastly green “Colossal Leprechaun Mint Boat” from last March. I held my sandwich close, letting the steam blur my vision.

“Do you think we’ll still hang out when we’re a hundred?” I said without thinking.

He flung the wrapper, which caught the wind and blew back atop the bush beside him. Right away I regretted asking. Swallowing, he said, “People don’t live to a hundred.” He ripped open a packet of ketchup, squeezed a thin red line over my sandwich.

“True.” I nodded.

Then I heard the laughter. It came from a house on the street behind us.

The clear voices of children, two, maybe three, then a man’s—a father? They were playing in the backyard. Not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a tiny backyard in a shitty part of town. From their shrill cries, they were no older than six, an age where one could be ecstatic just by moving. They were little bells struck to singing, it seems, by air itself.

“That’s enough. That’s enough for tonight,” the man said, at which the voices immediately faded. The sound of a screen door slamming. The quiet flooded back. Trevor beside me, his head in his hands.

We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day—neither good nor bad, but something we passed through. I pedaled faster, I moved, briefly unmoored. Trevor, beside me, was singing the 50 Cent song.

His voice sounded oddly young, as if it had come back from a time before I met him. As if I could turn and find a boy with a denim jacket laundered by his mom, detergent wafting up and through his hair still blond above baby-plump cheeks, training wheels rattling on the pavement.

I joined him.

“Many men, many, many, many, many men.”

We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.

“Wish death ’pon me. Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me.”

In the blue living rooms we passed, the football game was dying down.

“Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.”

In the blue living rooms, some people won and some people lost.

In this way, autumn passed.

* * *