Because It’s Yours (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: FICTION)

In fiction, our winner is Susan Bartolme, for her piece “Because It’s Yours.”

This year’s fiction judge was Dantiel W. Moniz. Of the short story, she writes: “A tender and biting depiction of girlhood and the itchiness of assuming a self through the perceived gaze of others. Full of embodied, sensory details I could feel the imprint of afterward, buzzing in my chest.”

What inspired “Because It’s Yours”?

I’ve always been interested in the perspectives and experiences of pubescent teenagers. It’s not only a time of shocking internal change but also external change: suddenly, the world expects maturity out of you. At the same time, within that interaction, the world exposes itself. It was in this muddy, awkward, and vulnerable place that I wanted to write a story, a story that teases that childhood innocence and the inevitable loss of it. Individual circumstance, too, complicates the story. Some children grow up too quickly. Some stay children too long. Some like the change. Some do not.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing this piece?

This was a revision of my final workshop story as a grad student. So here I am, one year later, reading all the great feedback and starting the revision process, and then I pivot big: I start rewriting the entire thing in the first person.

That may seem elemental, but as an “emerging writer” it’s important, because it was challenging and risky for me to revise in that way. It took way more time and it was hard—I’ve never written in the voice of a teenager before. That choice, of course, allowed me to dig into my main character’s internal “ick” more openly for readers. It also made the story more energetic and interesting to read.

Who are you reading right now, and who informs your work?

I just finished Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night and loved it. This month, I’m reading V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. I’m a designer by day and moved to Amsterdam this year, so I’ve been studying polder design and construction in the book, Sea of Land: The Polder as an Experimental Atlas of Dutch Landscape Architecture. My hope is to nerd-out and really impress a neighbor one glorious, rainless afternoon. Preferably by a canal.

As I write my first novel, I am slowly rereading every Toni Morrison novel that I read as a teenager. When I feel lost, confused, undeserving, or uninspired, I specifically flip through Song of Solomon and Tar Baby.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

What helped me was finding two kind people to read my drafts. They don’t have to be writers, just two people you trust and that enjoy reading fiction. For me, it’s two family members. They help me in two big ways: they give me an audience to write to, which keeps my writing honest and focused, and they give me deadlines.

What projects are you working on now? Where is your writing headed?

My first novel!

*

I slide it open and there are different people hanging. Thin-threaded, beautiful people, quickly sewn into being. Light, odorless. Like steam.

I am young and stupid, they say, but I know that when I wear these things, I do not become them. They’re just cheap fabric, 98% polyester and 2% elastic. But still.

I will be prettier today. In this skirt, faking silk, I will be classier today. In this fuzzy black dress, I will show off a new softness.

When I borrow my older sister’s clothes, I borrow her older, high-school cool. I borrow that raise-your-hand-more-at-school confidence. Today, I’ll be in class and say, “I think I got it,” or, “But isn’t that problematic?”

Or I won’t raise my hand at all. Eyelids all lazy and nonchalant, hanging curtains halfway shut. I’ll part my lips slightly like my bottom lip just weighs too much. I’ll be so heavy today—and light, too.

This is the one. This off-the-shoulder purple cotton top. It slips off the hanger and crumples into my backpack below. I am better already. I am bolder now, quicker. At lunch, when my best friend Erika talks shit, I will talk back some better shit and everyone will laugh, Dr.-Pepper-through-the-nose laugh, with pains in their left sides. Dee, the new girl, will say to me, “That was clean, Sammy,” meaning it was smooth, even though we told her already that saying “clean” sounds corny, but nothing shakes the new girl, and we keep adopting her ways, ironically.

Of course, in my older sister’s clothes, I am always bigger than me, and I wear the world more than it wears me.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t.”

“Why are you on my side of the closet?”

“I’m not.”

“I literally see you, Sammy, right now.” Shuffling to the right, to my side. “What were you doing?”

She’s leaning in too close. I push her.

“I didn’t take anything,” I’m screaming.

But there’s the backpack. Right there. On the floor by her side. It’s open, my beautiful person visible, fanning out for me.

My big sister pushes me back, hard. She’s a goes-to-the-gym strong. I land on my side of the closet. Wrinkled, old fabrics. Thick, rough, pungent. Like dry skin.

“Cute shirt.”

Nobody knows how to dress in April. Is it cold or is it warm today? It changes. We live in a coastal desert, they say, with freezing, dewy mornings evaporating into hot, dry afternoons that yellow the grass. We sweat inside our pants, then. So we negotiate, wearing shorts and heavy-hooded sweatshirts that we tie around our waists at midday.

But in the mornings, our bare legs suffer. Us with shaved legs, especially, shiver in the over air-conditioned classrooms. We rub our palms against our calves to calm the goosebumps springing back up our leg hairs prematurely. Hair stumps like weeds refusing to die.

The teacher can’t change the thermostat.

“It’s locked,” she says, tapping the clear plastic case surrounding it. “I called the public school board yesterday to get someone out here. No one has a key. But listen, everyone, it’ll warm up in here eventually, so let’s focus now.”

The teacher is cold, too. All class period she paces back and forth with her arms crossed tightly beneath her tight little breasts, covered only by a thin, light gray, three-quarter-length sleeve cardigan.

I’ve already pulled off my sweater and wrapped my bare legs up like a burrito. My arms are cold, but that’s fine; I hold myself. The guy that sits next to me complimented the shirt I have on underneath.

“Cute shirt,” he said.

I smiled at him and mouthed Thanks.

Just a basic, forced faded vintage tee with a splatter of triangles printed on the front. I grabbed it from my sister’s side quickly this morning. I was fast.

Now, I sit up straighter. Now, I raise my hand and become a voice.

“Excuse me,” I tell the teacher, “but it’s bullshit how the school puts our group in these cheap portable buildings with windows that can’t even open. If the windows opened, we could at least let out the air conditioning. It’s warmer outside than in here. It’s especially hard for you because you have to teach us, and you’re super cold, and it’s obvious that you’re not wearing enough.”

“You’re right, Sammy,” the teacher says. “It is difficult to teach like this.”

By lunchtime, it’s like the cold never was. The sun sears us. But not everything defrosts as quickly as skin, and when we sit down on the outdoor lunch tables the metal benches ice our ass and thighs. I rewrap my sweater, hanging it lower.

My best friend, Erika, tears the plastic from a steaming pizza roll she bought. When she gets it open, she nips at the top of the dough to let out the heat.

“Sammy.” She looks at me, chewing on dough. “That top looks good on you.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘ That top looks good on you.’”

“Do you like their music?” The new girl, Dee, is here with us.

“Who’s music?”

“Pink Floyd. It’s a band.” She points her finger under my tits. “It’s literally written on your shirt.”

I have to pull out my shirt to see.

“My brother’s obsessed with super old music,” Dee says. “That’s how I know them.” I nod. Super old.

I’m upset, and I’m not sure why.

Erika said: That top looks good on you. Meaning, that top looks good on you. Like, that kind of shirt looks good on you. Like, shit tops look good on shit people.

She basically said: Sammy, that trash looks good on you.

In middle school, we play with our mouths. At each other. On each other. Tongues flipping saliva and smoke. We talk, we talk, we talk.

We used to run. In elementary school, we raced across fields and courts, passing balls between us. We forgot our own faces, then.

Now we have lunch. We do lunch. I lean forward and take a bite.

“Careful!” Erika yells.

I gasp, spitting out a hunk of steaming pizza roll. “Why is that so hot?”

“They’re always hot like that though, stupid.”

“Fuck!” I yell out, and the word feels so good. Bite the lower lip to start, click the tongue to finish. I yell it again, harder.

I’m in a pink chiffon top I scooped from my sister’s drawer today. The loose, low cut collar sags forward, exposing my nipples sometimes. I have to hold it back every time I pick something up, palm pressed against my chest like I’m reciting the pledge of allegiance.

We stopped eating lunch facing the table yesterday. We spin around now, leaning back and propping up our feet on the table bench behind us. The new girl, Dee, started doing this last week, and now we all eat our food over our laps. I have to be careful not to squirt any of the red taco packet sauce for my microwave burrito onto the shirt. This is how my sister finds out, always—from the stains.

Erika is in the middle of telling a very funny joke about bats. Her jokes are less about what you say and more about how you say it, I learned. I always think words correctly but speak them wrong.

Erika’s joke gets interrupted. Someone across the quad is screaming, frantic and dramatic, like a performance.

We need to duck down, get under the tables. We need to cover our heads with our backpacks and textbooks, with whatever.

The birds. They are shitting on us. There’s a flock of seagulls swarming overhead, scanning our tables and the floor for food while they bombard us with their milky crap. There are so many of them today. And they are early. Half the student body is still eating. Usually they wait until most of us are gone before scavenging. But also sometimes they don’t wait. We must be vigilant of their shit. Always.

Dee, the new girl, doesn’t seem to know what’s going on. She’s not moving. She told us last week that her last school had an indoor cafeteria. She’s not used to this.

“Dee!” Erika yells. She is already beneath the table bench. Her laugh splays out all around her like palm leaves. “You’re going to get hit!”

I watch her, Dee, as she leans back and props her elbows up on the table behind her. I think about, as I watch her, how perfectly curved she looks. Like a Lay’s potato chip.

“Let’s see,” Dee says. “Let’s see if I get shit on today.”

The seagulls continue squawking overhead. Somebody mumbles, “My mom says it’s good luck when a bird shits on you.”

Erika and I became friends in the beginning of fifth grade after realizing we walk almost the same route home from school every day. Three years later, we’re still walking it, but from middle school. The path home is longer now, and we have to pass through our old elementary school on the way to pick up my little brother. Erika doesn’t mind because it’s only five minutes more, and since she is an only child, she tries to have a sibling through me.

We found a shortcut recently. A low wall that cuts through the housing track faster. Today, I tell Erika to stop before we hop over.

I usually wait to do this. But my sister is skipping work, or dance class, or something, today. She will be home studying when I get there.

I open my backpack and pull out a mud-red shirt. It’s an ugly, crap shirt, like all of my stuff. I changed out of it in the school bathroom stall this morning. An eighth grader saw. She was very slowly slicing liquid black ink over her eyelid, staring at me through the mirror with just one eye open, like she was winking at me.

“You good?” Erika asks me, tying her hair up. I crouch down by the wall.

“Cover me.”

I change the shirts quickly. Then we jump the wall. “That was your sister’s shirt,” Erika says.

I keep walking. “No. It’s mine.”

After a moment, she adds, “I wish I had a sister.”

I snort. “No you don’t, stupid.”

Erika stops. I’m a few steps ahead before I realize and turn around.

“You know, Sammy, you act like your life is so difficult, but you’re the one making it that way.”

“Um, okay,” I say. She keeps talking.

It’s too hot to stand here. The tall, skinny palm trees on this street provide no shade. There’s nothing blocking the sun beating through our bare naked, cloudless sky. My feet itch.

Beside us, there is a big man in a gray van. The windows are down, and he is leaning back in the passenger seat. But he is awake.

His look reminds me of people’s faces when they watch skaters launch off those tall banks, like with excitement, anticipation, and a little fear.

But Erika and I are not doing anything. We’re just standing here, hanging. “You’re not even listening to me!”

I point out the man to Erika with my eyes.

We move. She says don’t look back. Then a car door cracks open. We take off running.

We’re out of breath when we stop, three blocks later. The van is nowhere. We aren’t even sure if that car door opening was from the same car. We laugh with our whole bodies, realizing that.

Eventually, we walk forward. I am still laughing. Erika tells me to stop talking about it.

She doesn’t like the words I’m using. Or something about the way I say it. Too ripe in the mouth. Too much pulp. She’s making a big deal out of nothing.

We get quiet when we step into our old elementary school. We always do.

In this place, we wear our growth shyly, like those prizes for participation. Chins lowered, slightly embarrassed, thumbing the straps of the big backpacks that were given to us.

This used to be my playground. This used to be mine.

I run through it when I dream, still, like an unconscious holding.

I am not a genius, but I know the word nostalgia, that warm sadness playing tag with the mystery of change. We don’t put stickers on our faces anymore. We don’t run when a bell rings. No one dares blow a whistle to retrieve us.

My little brother is on the swings waiting for me, dragging his toes back and forth through the sand.

I don’t want to walk all the way across the field to get him. I yell out his name. I yell it again and again, but he doesn’t look up. Erika says she’ll run over to him. I tell her no, don’t, he can hear us. There’s nobody else around. We can hear the iron chains on his swing creaking.

“He is pretending not to hear me,” I say.

Erika tries calling out his name. Of course he looks up, making a face like he just got born.

The vice principal pulls me into his office because my shirt straps are too skinny. I’m wearing a shiny, metallic-blue spaghetti strap I dug out from the bottom of my sister’s laundry basket. I watched her undress and drop it a week ago. Just need to be patient, like that. Wait for things to be dropped and buried and forgotten.

The vice principal presses two greasy fingers onto my left and right shoulders over each strap.

“Too thin,” he sighs, shaking his head.

He walks to a drawer behind his desk, opens it, pulls out a clean, oversized physical ed t-shirt, and throws it to me.

He must see the disgust on my face, because he says, “You can tie it up in the back, if you want, the way you girls sometimes do during PE period.”

My sister’s dirty top was so moist with sweat that I’m not even that upset about changing. It was one of her dance workout tops, I realize now. At lunch, Erika ties the bottom of the shirt into a knot that resembles a rose. Dee appears wearing the same PE shirt. She shakes her head.

“They did a raid today,” she says.

Erika offers to tie the back for her, the same way as mine. I turn around and show it off, excited to match with her.

“No. Thanks.” Dee sits down, leaning forward on her knees. “I was caught for midriff, and that vice principal guy tried putting his fingers on my stomach to measure the gap.”

I say, “I bet you liked it.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘I bet you liked it.’”

No one is laughing. I said it wrong.

Dee continues, shaking her head. “I had to, like, back away.”

“Gross,” Erika says.

“Gross,” I say also, nodding my head.

Dee wears that same oversized, baggy PE t-shirt every day for two more weeks. In protest against misogyny, she announces. Then one day, two sixth grade girls walk out of their PE period with the shirts still on.

“You started a fashion trend!” Erika tells her, ecstatic. The next day Dee stops wearing it.

“It got boring,” she says when we ask.

If anyone ever asks me, I won’t lie: I’ll say he touched me, too. And he groped me, I’ll add, all over. He did everything, everything you’re imagining. There will be so much commotion over it. Every word I say will matter.

“What’s there to do around here?”

Dee asks me and Erika this after school the next day. It’s the first time she’s hinted at hanging out after school.

“We’re going to Rite Aid,” I say.

“What’s at Rite Aid?”

“Ice cream, makeup, lotions.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Neither do we.”

We pause.

“There’s a Del Taco nearby that has one dollar burritos,” Erika says.

“That’s true,” I agree. “It does.”

“Doesn’t every Del Taco have that?” Dee asks.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We pause again.

All around us, people are leaving. Those with after school activities, like music or soccer, jump into cars and vans waiting idle in the pick up lane. Those just going home make their way to cars parked further down the street, banging on windows to unlock the door. Those just eager to leave and able to on their own escape on foot, bikes, or skateboards. Others, like us, loiter in small, scattered groups in front of the empty front office, ready for anything except home.

Friends leaving pass by me, Erika, and Dee without stopping. They don’t say Goodbye or What’s up, not even with their faces. But they see us. Everyone sees us, I realize. Opening car doors or slapping down skateboards as if each exit were a performance. For Dee. For me, though, now, because I’m here too.

“We know someone that has pot,” I say.

“Is it my older brother?” Dee asks immediately, and then laughs, just once. Erika and I look at each other.

“I mean, maybe?” Erika says. “Is your brother my old math tutor?”

The way Erika says it makes us laugh. We are all laughing together, as one group. A friend acquaintance unlocking her bike nearby sees us. If she comes over and asks us why we’re all laughing I’ll say, “Inside joke.”

A car pulls in and honks once. Dee sucks air between her teeth.

“So, my apartment complex has a pool and jacuzzi that I haven’t used yet. Do you want to come over and try it out?”

“Like, now?” Erika asks.

“Yeah, like now. My ride is here.”

“I have to pick up my little brother,” I say.

“I don’t have a bathing suit with me,” Erika says, inching toward the car.

“I have extra,” Dee says. “You can borrow one.”

“I have to go pick up my little brother.”

“I’ll give you the address, Sammy.” They get into the car and drive off.

I’m alone. My friend acquaintance rolls her little-girl, sparkly pink bike toward me, smiling. I walk away like I don’t see her.

I make my little brother walk fast. He’s bouncing a basketball as he walks. I tell him if it hits his foot, it’ll roll into the street and a car will kill him.

We’re in the driveway when I realize I forgot to change out of my sister’s shirt. I quickly pull mine out from my backpack and pull it on, over my sister’s shirt. It’ll be fine. I just need to grab my bathing suit and go.

But it’s not fine. My sister notices immediately. “What’s that poking out the sides of your shirt?”

“Nothing,” I say. I try to walk past her.

But she grabs the back of my backpack and pulls me. “Take it off—take it off now!”

I slip my arms out of the straps. I run into the bathroom, the one room in this house that locks. I manage to slam the door shut and lock it in her face.

The door shakes and heaves from her banging. The knob shakes and rattles from her twisting. Nothing breaks or loosens. Gradually, only her heavy, angry breathing pushes against the door. It holds her weight as she slinks down onto the carpet.

“Open the door, Sammy. Open the door.” She is crying.

I ask her, “Are you crying?” She just cries more. So I ask her again, “Why are you crying so much?”

I wait for some time. I wait.

I’m trapped. I’m missing out on becoming best friends with Dee. I, too, could cry.

There’s a quiet tap tap tap at the milky glass window. I nudge it open, and my little brother is standing on a small plastic chair, gesturing for me to climb through. Quietly, I pull up the window as far as it goes and shimmy through it’s small, square hole. My little brother holds up my upper half and pulls. I’m surprised he is able to hold me. I bet he’s surprised too. I bet he’s proud of himself for helping me.

I tip over, hands first, onto the little chair and fall out of the window.

I give him a silent thumbs up. Then I take his bike and run out the side of the house with it.

Nobody chases me. Still, I peddle rapidly. My knees hit the low handlebars, but I ride it just fine.

I get lost on the way and have to backtrack about ten minutes. I stop by the Del Taco and order with the change I have in my pocket. Eventually, I get to Dee’s apartment complex. By the time I’ve reached there, I’ve sweat through both shirts, mine and my sister’s underneath. I pull mine off and wrap it around the handle bars.

There’s a main gate with a code to enter the complex, but it’s broken. A line of cars snake around the gate, stuck half way closed. I wait in line behind them, leaning on my little bike.

Inside, I cannot find the pool. I wander through a maze of winding cement paths and tiny lawns where leashed dogs are peeing. I go under staircases, through a cave-like, outdoor mailroom, past cats and potted plants lining doorways and balconies. Finally, panicking that I’m in the wrong apartment complex, I stop a woman coming down a flight of stairs and ask about a pool. The question seems to stress her out.

“Go straight from here, through the mail room, then you go right, keep going, then left right before you reach the parking lot. It’s right after that.”

I get lost after the mailroom, ask someone else, and then find it. The chlorine is so strong that I can almost follow my nose.

There is another door gate with a code, but this, too, is open.

Dee and Erika are in their bathing suits. I watch them, hiding behind a large sign dense with Pool Rules. They are laughing, splashing. Playing like two tigers at a zoo.

I’m at the edge of the pool before they notice me. “There you are!” Erika yells.

The sun is setting. Already, the air is cool.

Dee climbs out. She wraps herself up in a purple bath towel. “I have to go in. My dad needs my help tonight.”

There’s a pause. They are looking at me. I am a sad thing to look at. “You can stay longer if you’d like,” Dee offers. “Just leave whenever.”

Dee leaves. I remember that I never grabbed a bathing suit. I tell Erika that I couldn’t find mine, that’s why I took so long.

Erika is trying to turn on the switch for the jacuzzi jets. I can just put my legs in. “It turns off after twenty minutes,” she says, fingering the knob.

“I saw you,” I say, dripping my feet into the water. “I saw you and Dee. You two were making out.”

“What the hell?” Erika laughs.

Finally, weak blue lights and a few limp bubble streams strike out around my feet. Erika lowers herself into the water piece by piece. It’s almost scalding.

She asks me, in a little voice I could burn, “Do you think Dee likes me like that?”

“You a fucking lesbian now?”

“I can’t even tell if you’re joking or what.”

It’s close to 10:00 p.m. when I finally get home. My mom is in bed, under a blanket. Already she is drifting, her eyes closing.

“Erika’s mom dropped you off okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell her thank you for me.”

I slip in under the covers. Her room is so cold. She opens all the windows and blows two fans continuously at night. Still, her skin burns hot like a heating pad. I lean into it.

“You and your sister were fighting again,” she says, readjusting her position for me.

I nod my head into her chest. Her breasts are hers but also mine. Pillows, warm and malleable. Like clothes fresh out of the dryer.

“She works so hard, Sammy. She does so much.”

She will feel guilty when I say, “Momma, I don’t have anything to wear to school.” So I say that.

She sighs. “You want to sleep in here with me?” I cradle into her like a fly in honey.

The light turns on in the middle of the night. My mom is sitting up, checking the alarm clock.

“Was I kicking you?” I ask, embarrassed but smiling.

“No. It’s okay, honey. You were talking in your sleep.”

I roll closer to her, eyes fluttering, giddy. “What was I saying?”

She hesitates. “I don’t know. You were moaning.” If she says another word, I’ll scream.

All summer, we swim in the deep end. Warm winds carry the light, salty moisture from the nearby ocean, eroding the iron gates.

Today, Dee suggests we stay after the pool closes at 9:00 p.m. She leans over and whispers to Erika.

“Let’s stay.”

“We won’t get in trouble?”

“What’s the worst anybody can do? Ask us to leave?”

Erika pauses, flicking water onto the pool’s curved cement edges. Her and Dee are in one their teeter totter moments again, each standing at different ends of a possible fight. I watch and wait to see who will give in first. No one fights with me anymore, which feels like I’m always losing.

Finally, as if explaining our circumstance and current lives fully, Dee says, “If we leave, we’re just going to sit around watching TV all night with my lonely dad.”

I agree silently, too scared to say out loud that I don’t have anywhere else to go. “Okay,” Erika says. “Let’s stay.”

We close the gate door all the way, locking it on the outside for maybe the first time ever. We twist on the jacuzzi jets. The blue underwater lights make wavy our pointy knees and elbows. No one comes to kick us out.

“You ever play with these?” Dee says, fingering a jet, jaw jutting out.

“Yeah,” I say, but she wasn’t asking me.

We play truth or dare but mostly truth, after getting tired of jumping into the freezing pool on every dare. With each truth we reveal the few small, shallow secrets left between us. Or at least they do.

We are completely wrinkled and bored, ready to go, when someone rattles the pool’s locked gate. We wait, holding our breaths.

But instead of a complex guard, a guy a few years older than us hops over the rail onto the cement, barefoot and shirtless. A bath towel is slung over his boxy shoulders. He plops down into the jacuzzi and spreads out his arms and legs like a grown man relaxing.

I duck further into the hot water, shielding the sagging bathing suit top I borrowed from Erika, one size too big for me. I stay at her house most nights, now, when I can.

“Brother,” Dee says, nodding as if wearing an old fashioned hat.

He nods his head at us, in the same funny way. Then lifts his eyebrows dramatically. “Dad went out.”

“What do you mean he went out.”

“I mean, he’s finally stopped feeling sorry for himself and is ready to have a life again.”

“Shut up. Really.”

“I’m serious. He went out. Said he’d be back late.” He smiles, winks at us. “I set him up on an app.”

“What?” Dee shouts.

I think, they’re definitely about to fight, and it’ll be a good one. But they don’t. They just smile, coyly, at each other. They’re like two prized athletes on opposite sides of the court, excited to compete with an equal.

“You’re insane.” Dee says finally. “You know it.”

Erika rises up from the water. Her body is steaming. “Your place is empty, then?”

I barely notice, later, when Erika and Dee slip away from the living room. I am too busy, anyways, laughing, singing, and moving my body in tandem with the weed and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. I’m in a playground inside of myself. It’s wild and thick, swinging me left and right, back and forth.

“Careful.”

Dee’s older brother is standing at the kitchen entrance. With one arm, he reaches for the white molding lining the passageway. He hangs there, his body below almost limp.

“You like old music?” I ask.

“I have a record player.”

“In your room?”

“Yeah.”

“Show me.”

Everything in his room is dark: the blanket, the walls, the posters, the clothes all over his floor. Even the lamp light is a dark, cool purple.

I throw myself onto his bed.

“You and Dee get along so good,” I groan.

“You have siblings?”

“My older sister goes to your school.” I say her name.

“Oh, I know her, kind of. I know of her. Wow, that’s your sister?”

“What’s that smell?” I ask.

“That’s my cat. Sorry. She was an outdoor cat, before. She keeps pissing everywhere. I think in protest.”

“You like it?”

He isn’t turning any music on. But him just standing here is enough, for now. Purple shadows flood his body’s indents. A shallow concave in the chest, two little ovals in the nose, a coin in the belly, two deep sockets in the face.

I roll off the bed and land at his feet.

“Woah, you okay?”

“She’s antsy.” I rise up in front of him. I didn’t realize, before, how short he is. “You should let her outside.”

“It’s not safe.”

“How do you know what’s safe?” I reach for his indents.

He pushes me away. I push him back. He barely moves. I try again, harder.

He tells me to stop. He doesn’t understand the rules. I tell him the rules. I tell him how to play. He’s yelling for his sister now. Why is he yelling?

Nobody understands the rules anymore. Nobody ever does.