I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

2

Landon

Since kindergarten, I’d attended a small private school just outside DC. We wore uniforms: girls in white blouses with pearl buttons, pleated plaid skirts and cardigans, boys in starched white oxfords, pressed slacks and blazers. Our favourite teachers turned a blind eye to unauthorized scarves and coloured shoelaces and ignored ditched cardigans and jackets. The stricter instructors took up contraband items and rolled their eyes when we argued that hemp bracelets and glitter-coated headbands were expressions of individual freedom.

Victor Evans got suspended last spring when he refused to take off a Bottega Veneta dog collar, claiming that wearing it was his right under the First Amendment and wasn’t technically against the rules. Administration cracked down after that.

We all looked the same on the surface, but during the two weeks I was out of school I had altered completely beneath the skin – where changes count. I’d been tested and I had failed. I had made a promise that I didn’t keep. It didn’t matter if I was still outwardly identical. I was no longer one of them.

I was allowed to make up the work I’d missed, as though I’d been out with a severe case of flu, but the special considerations didn’t stop there. Teachers who’d challenged me before patted my shoulder and told me to take my time on new classwork. They granted unearned passing grades on crappily written essays, extra time on incomplete lab assignments, automatic do-over offers on bombed exams.

Then there were my peers – some who’d known me since we were five. All of them mumbled condolences, but they had no idea what to say after. No one asked for help on algebra homework or invited me over to play video games. The other guys didn’t shove my books off my desk when I wasn’t looking or hassle me when my favourite football team got their asses handed to them by the Redskins. Sex jokes cut off mid-sentence when I walked up.

Everyone watched me – in class, in the hallway, during assemblies, at lunch. They gossiped behind their hands, shook their heads, stared like I couldn’t see them doing it. As though I was a wax figure of my former self – lifelike, but creepy.

No one looked me in the eye. Like maybe having a dead mother was contagious.

One overly warm day, I rolled up my sleeves in Mr Ferguson’s US history class without thinking. I heard the telltale whispering, moving person to person, too late.

‘His wrists?’ Susie Gamin hissed before someone shushed her.

Tugging the sleeves back down and re-buttoning the cuffs made no difference. The words, unleashed, were an avalanche of tumbling boulders. Unstoppable.

The following day, I wore a watch with a thick band on my left wrist, even though it chafed my still-raw skin. I stacked silicone wristbands on my right, banned unconditionally by the principal the previous spring. These became part of my daily uniform.

No one made me take them off. No one mentioned them. But everybody stared, eager to catch a glimpse of what was underneath.

Things I stopped doing:

Hockey. I started playing when I was six, shortly after attending my first Capitals game with Dad. Mom wasn’t thrilled, but she tolerated it – maybe because it was a bonding point for Dad and me. Maybe because I loved playing so much. Though right-handed in every other situation, something happened when I laced my skates and took my left-wing position. Powering a puck to the goal, I was ambidextrous. Between breaths, I shifted positions to dig a puck from the corner or freaked out opponents by switching hands in the middle of a play, sinking goals before they could catch up. My select team didn’t win every time, but we’d made the finals last year. I began eighth grade certain this would be the year we’d take home the championship trophy. Like that was the most significant thing that could ever happen to me.

Participating in class. I didn’t raise my hand. I wasn’t ever called on. Pretty simple termination.

Sleeping. I still slept, sort of. But I woke up a lot. I had nightmares, but not obvious ones. Most often, I fell. Out of the sky. Off a building, a bridge, a cliff. Arms windmilling and legs kicking futilely. Sometimes, I dreamed about bears and sharks and carnivorous dinosaurs. Sometimes, I dreamed about drowning. One thing was constant: I was always alone.

LUCAS

On hot days, I missed having the beach right outside my door. Even if the air had been saturated with humidity and the sand had been grassy and irregular, the gulf had always been there, cool waves lapping against the shore like a come-hither murmur.

For the past three years, I’d lived four hours inland. If I had the desire to submerge myself in a body of water, I had two choices: the Hellers’ pool or the lake. There was little solitude to be found at either.

The lake was perpetually crowded with tourists and townies alike, and Carlie’s friends still hung out at the house almost daily, lounging in the pool’s deckchairs as they had all summer. The absolute last thing I needed was a gaggle of very underage girls trying to net my attention just because I was the only non-dad male in the vicinity. Cole had been the object of their interest all summer, much to his sister’s disgust. But he left two weeks ago to follow in his mom’s footsteps at Duke, and Caleb was only eleven – as young to all of them as they were to me.

They failed to perceive the correlation.

Growing progressively paler over the past few years made my ink stand out even more. I’d begun with the complex patterns that wrapped my wrists, and they’d become sleeves, primarily composed of my own designs. Combined with the pierced lip and the longish dark hair, I more closely resembled a guy who thrives on depressive music and darkness than the beach-dwelling adolescent I was when I first got the tattoos and piercings.

In high school I’d sported multiple piercings – an ear stud, a barbell through an eyebrow and a nipple ring – in addition to the lip ring. Dad hated them, and my small-town high-school principal alleged they were all signs of deviance and an antisocial disposition. I didn’t bother arguing.

Once I left home, I’d pulled them all out but the one through the edge of my lip – the most conspicuous one.

I figured Heller would ask me, Why leave that one? But he never did. Maybe he’d known the answer without me vocalizing it – that I was categorically messed up and far from concerned with fitting in. To ordinary people, my lip piercing indicated the opposite of approachability. It was a self-erected barrier, and it served as a warning that pain wouldn’t deter me – that I welcomed it, even.

Class had been in session for two weeks. Against my better judgement – what was left of it – I studied Jackie Wallace. Her brown hair fell in soft waves several inches past her shoulder, unless she twisted it into a knot with a hair tie or a clip or glossed it back into a ponytail that made her look Carlie’s age. She had large blue eyes – an unclouded wildflower blue. Brows that furrowed deeply when she was annoyed or concentrating, and arched in repose – which made me wonder what they did when she was surprised. Average height. Slim, but still curvy.