“I like your haircut,” said Viv.
“Thanks.”
“Looks like it hurts.”
Someone snickered. The room went electric with cruel energy as the other students bit back laughter. Viv was always calling herself brutally honest, but she was more concerned with being brutal than with being honest. Kane was in no mood.
“No, Vivian, getting a haircut doesn’t usually hurt unless, like yourself, your head is neck-deep up your own ass.”
“Mr. Montgomery!”
And with that, Kane’s triumphant return to high school ended in its own fiery crash.
Before he knew it, he was outside the school, in the back court. Alone. Finally.
The first thing he did was shake himself out. Anxiety swirled in his chest as a breeze pulled loose garbage and leaves into a small whirlpool. Dizzy, he dropped onto a flaking picnic table, and soon his journal was in his hands. He recorded the strange events of the day before and the morning, messy and meandering and full of embellishment.
There is something unreal about everything, and I have proof, he wrote, so why do I feel like I’m making it all up? Why do I have to feel like the crazy one, when it’s the world that’s wrong?
Kane tapped his boots on the bench, wondering if it was a mistake to look for answers to who he was by coming to school. He was the least of himself here, and on purpose. Kane’s exclusion was one he’d cultivated over years, withdrawing from a world he’d always felt wrong in.
It wasn’t due to being gay, or who he was, but instead how he came to be. Kane had been outed pretty young by his eccentricities. Maybe a more astute child would have tried harder to rein themselves in, but Kane was the last to know he was gay and therefore powerless to deny it once he was finally told. He only found out as the other boys began to evade him in elementary school. Sleepover and birthday party invitations dried up. Teachers became overkind, which secured his shame. He became marked. A curiosity placed in the limbo between the worlds of boys and girls.
The limbo yawned wider every year, and no one yet had dared to join him. Alone, Kane felt himself warping into someone who didn’t trust anyone. Sometimes he would get messages through the limbo—people reaching out to him through unsigned notes or anonymous emails saying they wished they were out, too—but it was hard to tell which were real. Most of the time, they were pranks from the same sleepovers he wasn’t invited to anymore. More than once the conversations got shared throughout the school. Eventually Kane stopped responding.
Statistically, Kane knew he wasn’t the only gay person at Amity Regional, but he had been marked in a way that made it risky for others to associate with him. That’s what curiosities do: they draw the eye. No one else wanted to be the focus of the eyes that scrutinized Kane. No one wanted to share his limbo with only him as company. They watched from afar, and Kane made himself at home within his habit of hiding.
People left him alone, which he liked. Not anymore, though. Vivian’s comments would be the first of many as Kane’s classmates remembered him—and how little they liked him.
In the back court, Kane once again sensed he was being watched. This time it was worse than homeroom because it was not the eyes of a crowd, but the stare of a predator.
Kane looked up.
Twenty yards toward the forest, slashed into the brightening day, stood the shadowy figure of the boy he’d seen that morning. He did not approach. He just stared, the gaze from his eyes radiating such intensity that Kane’s bones hummed with the urge to run.
Upon reflex Kane ventured a small wave, which the boy did not return. Instead, he pointed at the journal. Where nothing had been before, a photo jutted from the seams where the pages met. Plucking it out, it showed four pairs of shoes from above. Four people standing in a tight circle, their toes almost touching.
In the photo he recognized his own boots and what he remembered were Ursula’s running shoes, but the two other were anonymous: a pair of white ankles in straight-boy sneakers and a pair of gray sandals on brown feet.
Something flashed in Kane’s memory, like a far-off lighthouse whisking its beam across black waters, there and gone before he could tread toward it.
When Kane looked back up the boy was gone. Now—inches from where Kane sat—stood Ursula.
“Jesus!” Kane snapped the journal closed over the photo.
“You came,” she grinned. She had a hat over her curls, and she wore a neon green windbreaker. Her frostiness from the morning had thawed, but timidity still rounded her posture as she rocked on her feet. Kane looked around. The boy was for sure gone. Scared off when he saw her coming, maybe? How was everyone so able to sneak up on him? Was he that oblivious?
“You wanted to talk?” Ursula asked.
“Yeah.” Kane was prepared this time. “Where did I get my fish?”
Ursula stopped rocking. “Your what?”
“My fish. Where did I get him?”
There it was, the flash of deceit in Ursula’s eyes as she looked away.
“I have no idea what fish you’re talking about.”
Kane tore open his bag, dug out the photos, and slapped them down on the table. The one of Ursula holding the fish in the pouch of water was right on top.
“You’re lying.”
Ursula’s face went from pink to red to gray. She attempted to smooth out her expression, but there was no saving this. She’d been caught and she knew it. Her stiff posture relaxed, and a hint of a smile brushed her lips. Was she relieved?
“Okay. Fine,” she said, acting defeated. “I won him at the Amity Agricultural Fair this summer in one of those ring-toss games, and I named him Peter, but my brothers kept on trying to play with him so you offered to take custody. And you renamed him Rasputin after the mystical adviser to the Tsar of Russia, which I thought was kind of gruesome because of where his body was found—the mystical adviser, not the fish—but you told me that this sort of overbearing behavior was going to cost me visitation rights, and—”
“We were friends?”
Ursula was silent for so long that her breathing blended into the simmering cicada song. Then: “We’re still friends, I hope.”
Simple, earnest words. They plunked into Kane one by one, like bits of sea glass. They sank into his depths and glimmered at him from his shadows, hinting and unknowable. The truth was deep within him and well beyond his reach.
He needed to know more. Everything.
“For how long?”
“Umm. I guess since third grade when I asked to borrow your comb on picture day and you told everyone I had fleas from the pound or something, which turned into this whole thing about me and dogs, and then your dad made you come over to my house and apologize. Been friends ever since. Except I guess part of seventh grade because you went through this pretty intense goth phase and started doing tarot card readings, which my dad thought was Satan worship, and we got into this big fight and you cursed me.”