That summer, the one before our eighth grade year, the year of the world’s first artificial heart transplant—latex gloves, silver scissors, a man’s open chest cavity—we watched a doctor fit a synthetic replacement for-the-time-being heart, weighing in at approximately two lbs, while I crammed Cheetos in my mouth from Bailey’s kitchen, standing on the scuffed gold line that separated the linoleum from the living room carpet, talking with my mouth full, I said this is another thing just like space where all astronaut suits are sized to men so that women have to be uncomfortable in zero gravity, but Ashley said men make better trial guinea pigs because of the first trial, what with the apple and the talking snake, which shut me up, and that summer Tyler’s mom fished in her purse for a light, only coming up with sweaty one dollar bills fit for vending machine snacks, where our mom’s had lipstick canisters rubbed down to the plastic casing, she had orange pill bottles she unscrewed, and threw back; if she wasn’t handing a pile of tablets to Tyler, before he even needed them, from her closed fist into his open palm, and no matter which house we loitered, the heat hung over us like a dense netting, and state prosecutors stated there should be a more aggressive investigation of the intruder theory in JonBenét Ramsey’s murder proving to us again, that homes are wholesome and streets are gruesome, which made us wonder if we should use the buddy system when we walked home underneath streetlights, soaked and sticky and carrying pool noodles—the idea caused us to dampen temporary tattoos in the crease above our hip bones with suntan oil and bake until the only pale part of us was paw prints or palm trees or petals, a way to identify our bodies, and calm our collective anxieties that were (sometimes) actually thrills—a man might want us so magnetically as to climb through a basement window and strangle the blue of us to the surface, no matter none of us had basements, we all had windows and first stories, which made our fathers smoke more cigarettes and pace the kitchens they so often left for more work, bickered with our moms about the hours we stayed out, checked our necks for our communion crosses, showed us how to hold our house keys between our fingers so they pointed out, and told us not to depend on assistance from strangers, if anyone crawled alongside us and yelled from their car window on our walks home, to run into the band of trees on the edge of the neighborhood—the same summer Tyler had bruises on his face, but he had no daddy so we didn’t know where they came from, no brothers either, right after the spring semester where every boy tried to break Ashley’s red sex bracelet, too afraid to snap the blue or black, and instead of the boy’s getting the desired lap dance that red sex bracelet implied their constant snapping left blemishes on her wrist the size of silver dollars which we thought were good luck anyway, the purple proving we were chosen, and that summer we went to the mall, assembling three to the aisle, making it hard for anyone to pass, our arms hooked at the elbow; bought mist spray that looked like actual wet gold, and purple glitter gloss we shared, scented exactly like a blueberry dry erase marker, Bailey swiping the pillowy brush along her thin lips in the civilized way, and Ashley and I kissing it onto one another, tinting our lips like drowned girls, popping and smacking between each peck because we were practicing for Tyler (but we would never admit it), and that summer, in the afternoons, we shared a bag of cheddar and sour cream chips on the loveseat in Bailey’s bonus room, watching Jawbreaker and reruns of Dawson’s Creek, yelled down to her folks that yes, we would like a turkey sandwich, that summer we talked about stealing Bailey’s sister’s Hello Kitty gel pens, watched the long tooth of Tyler’s pyro flame flick, how he ran his hand in waves through the bluest part—while he sat in the window seat and we lounged around, scratched at our belly buttons until dead skin like salt came up, our limbs flailed over one another in a hot pile, jean shorts unbuttoned by two and folded over so the band of our bikinis showed—our triangle tops covering nothing, we were all collarbone, and sometimes Bailey juggled a soccer ball; that summer Tyler gave one-word answers to our Would You Rather Questions: would you rather be covered in tentacles or covered in tongues, Ashley and I asked while hanging off the couch, our legs against the back, and our heads upside down, so that all the blood rushed—we ate push-up plastic popsicles we’d stolen from Bailey’s garage freezer, letting whatever color coat our tongues (usually blue); to Tyler we must have tasted the exact same, which isn’t what we hoped (I don’t think), and that same summer Tyler left us sometimes to hang out with the McElveen brothers, who Tyler’s mom made clear she didn’t like, but she loooooved us she said, side-hugging our waists which we measured in the morning by shoelace circumference, her fingers between each rib slot, and sometimes I thought she was the only adult who would touch me that summer, but the McElveen brothers were almost of age, all carbon copies of the sons in Tim the Tool Man Taylor’s family, who swept long bangs back by flicking their heads to the side and pretended to work on cars in their driveway—we couldn’t see them from the bonus room window, but we liked to walk by their house with our jump ropes, or Razor scooters, or rollerblade in the street and gawk at the oldest McElveen brother who was suspended that spring for something so ominous all we could do was feed rumors about it like telephone, and I thought he got head beneath the football bleachers, but Ashley said it was grades because her older brother was friends with him, in what we thought that summer was a gang, but they were just blonde white boys with fists like the rest of them, and when Tyler waved at her and not me, I felt the flame of our science class Bunsen burner grow in my throat until I had to swallow it down, which is why that same summer, I started taking a shortcut home from Dominion Park that put me right out front of Tyler’s house in the dusk to stare at his mom leveraging the home phone between her shoulder and ear, pacing their kitchen, but he was never there, only sometimes she would turn and look towards the dark shadow of hallway where his yearbook photos were taped into painted wooden frames from TJ Maxx, so I paced there with her, kicking rocks across the sidewalk cracks until I got through three, then turned around to go again and imagined smoothing down Tyler’s front cowlick while Ashley watched, and that summer I tied and re-tied the perfect bows of my string bikini, made sure all the boys watched even when their eyes burned from chlorine, and when the rest of the walk was past the Jehovah’s Witness hall where women in skirts milled out front, and the gas station on the corner: men posted-up with slurpees, menthols behind their ears who whistled at me trudging home wet and sugar high, the constant drip of my ponytail down my spine until the whole of me cooled, beyond them I listened for footsteps, and watched a snake unhook its jaw to strike a rabbit, thought about the authentic pink rabbit’s foot on my key ring, a quick comfort, until goose pimples caused me to sprint, the same reaction when I watched the brothers’ fatten their cheeks with Grizzly can brown tar and spit into the plastic cups in their center console—that summer we weren’t old enough to drive, but we could ride, play chicken on Carpenter Pond Road and stick our arms out the windows, do the wave motion in the breeze with our hands while the boys recited flight attendant speak, keep all arms and legs inside the moving vehicle at all times, and after the youngest McElveen brother asked me that spring, in the bus seat opposite mine (an outside seat), if I wanted to come over and smoke what was in his Altoids container, he snapped my black bracelet clean off and grinned, said now I owed him, but Ashley made a deal with him by feeling through the zipper of his pants, teased each tiny tooth with her hands, said he tasted bitter when she returned to the driveway from the shadow of his garage where I could see a lawn mower handle and a rake edge and some white painter’s buckets but never heard the door to inside open, and for the rest of that summer when she got out of the pool her teeth chattered, and her hand (when I held it) was clammier like an undercurrent of nerves had forced its way to her skin; that summer I didn’t try to comfort her because it wasn’t like she disappeared, though she did— for a few seconds into the depths of that garage with a water bottom basketball goal, and the dirt-mint-dip-taste of a McElveen boy, but nothing more than the bracelets said, she didn’t even have marks on her neck like Bailey sometimes left on Tyler after hours because they lived closest and she had easy access, and my whole walk home I would be forced to imagine how hard I’d have to suck to make blood vessels burst, to make a real hickey flower, but none of the neighborhood boys arched over me at the locker bay in school, or said “talk dirty to me” with their mouths full of bologna sandwiches, so did they want me, and that summer I still left notes for my mother on the kitchen counter explaining where I was, right next to the ant traps she laid—honeyed goop, white plastic octagons with doors on all sides, a poison they might take back to their queen, she claimed, and I couldn’t very well write in the note that I was on a boy’s neck, although I had been in his mouth, practicing tonsil hockey—he never seemed like the limit, only a shared burning, nothing to be called a slut over, although I liked the sound of the word, how it was always over-enunciated, and how whenever we passed the McElveen’s and one of the brothers whispered it, wiped forehead sweat on the edge of his wife beater, Ashley put her fingers through mine, skated backwards in front of me, until we were out of eyeshot and on a clear path to Tyler’s yard, where we wouldn’t stop, but ride on to Bailey’s and Never Have I Ever—that summer we imagined ourselves transplanted to another life, in another suburbia, where we could brush off marks like moles or freckles or hickeys or bruises or tattoos to be claimed by our families in case of emergency, that summer we waited for the street lamps to engage.

And in that life Tyler doesn’t die by the autumn, bruised where they inserted treatment, his body touched and prodded by adults with latex gloves, silver scissors, intravenous chemotherapy, and for a while we see him as a person, not for-the-time-being filler, his mom said he wanted to be a mechanic; we had never asked—a fantasy we built of liking him, while the fantasies of us were always vanishing off stage and returning as warning stories, with no before only because—his mouth purple only from our shared gloss, from only always choosing us.