Graduation means different things to different people. Did I just blow your mind? Probably not. You probably knew that, because you’re a smart person. (I assume that stupid people don’t read—this, or anything else.)

Typical graduations come in three flavors, depending on how you felt about school. Either it’s a relief knowing that you don’t have to go back there anymore, or it’s an overwhelming achievement that will make everyone who knows you proud, or it’s a stepping stone to something else.

For Kyle, graduation was miserable all around. It was miserable even though he knew he’d be going to college, he knew he’d be studying music and going on to bigger and better things, but think of everything he left behind. Not just the Elk, he’d always kinda known in his heart of hearts that the Elk (Strings, Chords, whatever) was a shitty band, a garage band with nothing really going for it. But those guys… he kind of loved them. And by the time graduation had come around, he’d manage to completely alienate them.

“The band doesn’t suck!” Tommy kept trying to tell him.

“Tommy,” Kyle would reply, and then he’d just look at him, as though pleading with his eyes for Tommy to accept the truth that should have been obvious.

And Mickey. Mickey knew that it sucked. Mickey knew that he sucked. He’d accepted it. Kyle couldn’t help but feel guilty about that, too.

At prom, my sister had finally managed to convince him to have sex with her. It was one of those awkward moments where you get what you want and then real quickly you realize it has nothing to do with what you actually wanted. It wasn’t so much disappointing as… I don’t know, closure? They didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. At least, they thought they wouldn’t. But once they’d committed to silence, they both realized they weren’t on the same page. Their reasons for fucking each other were different and neither was doing it for the right ones. She was doing it to fulfill some, I don’t know, teenage dream? He was using her to rebound.

That was the other thing that sucked about graduation.

Now Declan’s graduation is kind of bittersweet. I guess that’s pretty much par for the course. It’s great to be getting out there, out into the world, he’s taking Raven with him to UNC-Trinity. He has one relatively (for a high school garage band) successful band under his belt by now, he’s confident he could have another if he decides that’s what he wants, if college rock bands are even a thing—

“They must be, right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” his girlfriend shrugs at him, “I don’t know from college.”

He will be leaving Jasper, of course, and Jasper’s graduation barely even registers on his radar. “Sweet,” he figures, “Got that high school diploma out of the way, that mean I can get a real job?” And the answer is yes, of course. Gotta have a real job if you’re gonna be raising a kid.

For Raven, it is an unqualified relief. Not so much graduation, I guess, that’s kind of just the cherry on top. By the time she actually walks across the stage, Raven has already turned 18. She’s flipped her old life the bird, showed it her cooch for the last time and now she’s shaking that ass extra hard so it knows she’s not coming back. Not that she’s moving that far. They’re spending their first year at college in the dorms, separate rooms obviously, because only gay couples get to live together on campus in college, but they’re on the same floor and they manage to break their way into the arrangement-cascade where everyone’s roommate has a significant other—or another bed to sleep on when they break up. That’s another story, though.

That’s as far as we’ve gotten. As far as you’ve gotten, anyway.

I, of course, have gotten further.

My graduation will be tense. I can’t say how yet, I can’t tell why. I can just feel it looming right now, looming with almost some kind of trepidation. Is that vague enough for you? There are some things that I know, some things I can sort of make out and derive. I know that Lucy will be happy. Not that that’s a real surprise, but fine, I’ll take it. I know that Isabella Millar will be a wreck.

And I feel some sense of urgency surrounding Trevor. Like I want to talk to him, need to talk him. But he won’t look me in the eye. He hates me. Sometime in the three years between the end of my freshman year and our graduation, Trevor will come to hate me. Does it have something to do with him being gay? Why does it always have to be that? Did I steal his boyfriend or something? Wow. Original. I don’t know. But there’s something else.

There’s something else and I’m not sure about it. I can’t quite get there, you know?

There’s something else, if I could only…

Childbirth can be dangerous. I feel like people forget that sometimes, you know? Someone says “I’m pregnant,” you tend to think one of two things: best case, “Congratulations! You’re going to have a baby!” Worst case, “Man, that sucks. How are you gonna take care of it? What are you gonna do?”

It’s like we’ve forgotten childbirth is a battlefield.

We remember the pain. Right? They keep playing it for comedy in movies and TV. But it’s all right, right? Get through the pain, there’s a brand new life on the other side of it.

Unless there’s not.

Most miscarriages happen in the first trimester. That’s why there’s starting to be this convention, I guess, that you don’t even announce until you’re two or three months in. Just in case, you know. That’s why my mom waited three weeks to tell Robert even after she was sure, and another two to tell me and my brother. Not that I didn’t know already. I am who I am, right?

But even finding out when I did, knowing even before she did, I was terrified. I was looking after baby Karen when I found out. I saw the act, then I saw the blood. Then I saw my brother, small, fragile, eyes closed, as the nurses washed him off.

I didn’t see my mother.

I knew what holes looked like, how to trace their contours, but I still didn’t know what they meant. Not seeing my mother—Well, maybe she’s ot that important, I tried reassuring myself. And maybe I could have convinced myself of that in any other context. But here now, washing my niece, reminding myself why I was the one in a position to ever need to wash her…

I looked into her eyes. She smiled. She knew nothing of my plight. She didn’t even know she was a motherless child.

I wasn’t in the room when Ellen Portnoy died in childbirth. She was seventeen. I saw it from the waiting room in pretty much real time and I was livid. Why show me this? Why show me now? I saw the light go out of her eyes and by the time Jasper came out of the room and brought the news, I was already in tears.

These things are not supposed to happen. Not anymore.

But they do.

So here I am, looking at this baby I’m supposed to be cleaning, not knowing if my mother is going to make it to my high school graduation. At least I’ll have a brother—but what will we do with him? One more mouth to feed, and with what?

I watch my mother grow. I watch her feed the danger inside her. I catch glimpses of what he’ll look like over the next few years. One time, I think I even see him at fifteen or something, playing fetch with my dad.

I see myself, too, by the way. Sometimes real far out—forty or fifty. I think I might’ve caught a glimpse of my retirement party. I don’t know. And I ask myself “Have I ever actually seen my mother? That far out? Anywhere near it?

“What’s got you down?” Declan asks me in the waiting room. On the whole, we’ve never had a lot of conversations and they’re awkward when we do.

I tell him my misgivings, not the visions themselves, but how “Nobody ever talks about the dangers.”

If this were a love story or a soapy costume show, this would be the part where he put his hand on me. My hand, my shoulder, my back, maybe even my face. Sometimes I get shots and I don’t know if they’re fantasies or what, of this friend of my brother’s and the things that I want him to do to me and it takes me a minute to remember “Oh, right, that’s Raven, that’s not me at all,” ‘cause it’s so easy to get us mixed up, and then I’m not confused anymore.

But he doesn’t put his hand on me, anywhere. Not now. His affection doesn’t require such physicalization.

Finally, about nine hours into my mother’s third labor, it comes to me. Not a single image or scene, but an avalanching montage of my mother and her new son. It crashes into me, a wave of sickening schmaltz lifting the doom off my shoulders and tossing it casually into the wind behind me. Like the Fatal Guide who sends me this shot only just made up his mind or realized he was running out of time to fuck with me on this.

My stepdad came out with a smile. “You want to be there, Kassie? When the baby comes out? Come on! You don’t have to look.”

I couldn’t help but remember the “being there” feeling of what happened to Ellen Portnoy. But I knew now there wasn’t anything to fear. Not here. Not now.
Not yet.

Declan was never not going to go to college.

Raven was. Not going to go, that is. It was something that hadn’t even occurred to her as an option. She didn’t think she had it in her, didn’t think it was worth it, didn’t bring it up until her guidance counselor did.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

It was Declan who turned her around. Was he doing it for selfish reasons? Was he doing it because he knew that he liked her and he wanted her to be smart like him because it would make him feel better? Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not here to judge (that part).

But I do know that he was good for her. Even when she was with Blake, Blake might have respected her, and if she gave her opinion, he respected that, but he never asked for it. Declan asked her opinion and advice every step of the way, treated future decisions like they were mutual and inclusive, even before they started dating, her being part of the band and all.

Am I sticking up for Declan because I have a crush on him? I don’t know, but I really can’t see any reason why I wouldn’t. Stick up for him, that is. Or have a crush.

The surprising one was Jasper. Jasper was going to go to college. His parents had gone to college. Our older sister had gone off to college three years earlier. But here Jasper was, saddled with a kid.

“You need to go to college because you have to be able to give your kid a good life,” Mom kept trying to tell him.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jasper shot back. “That’s four years I won’t be able to care for my kid at all—“

“You’ll have a support system—“

“And then what? What kind of job would I have? With a college degree? Fucking everyone has one of those, and hiring managers don’t care anymore. You know what they want? They want job experience.”

Jasper had been listening to other prospective dads at his dad-classes.

Looking back on his life, it should have been obvious to everyone—and I’m really not sure why it wasn’t—that college was never Jasper’s thing. I don’t know why they even thought he would get in. Academics never interested him. He was kind of a bum—no, that’s not true. When he did get into something, he really worked hard at it. Like, he might never have been the best musician, but he was really into actually being in a band, like the promotional side.

“You could do that for a business,” Mom suggested once. “But you’d probably have to go to business school.”

“I’ll take night classes.”

“And quit the band?”

Quit the band? Quit Angst?

It wasn’t something that Jasper had ever actually considered.

Declan hadn’t really considered it, either. Part of that was because he knew he was going to be going to college pretty close to home, and so was Raven, once she got all that straightened out. Trinity’s Field is a college town, so why not, right? Everyone did it.

And they’d hit a pretty good stride. They were playing some pretty decent gigs—not to mention winning that same aforementioned opening for SchadowFreud moment. So when it came time to really make decisions and Jasper came out with that part, Declan and Raven just looked at each other.

They had actually thought about it. No, that’s not quite true. They had talked about it, in bedroom fantasy terms, what would be like to hook up as musicians, just the two of them, strike out on their own, Raven and Declan. Declan and Raven? I always kind of resent it when the boy’s name automatically goes first, but you know…

They hadn’t really ever thought they would do it, though. They were lovers in a bubble and the bubble isn’t real, until it is.

“We should talk about this,” they agreed.

“Is this the end of Angst?” they all thought.

College is supposed to be a time of tectonic shift. You’re expected to take all your clothes off, all the way down, and try on new ones, and it’s surprising how many people find out they’ve been wearing the wrong bra. It’s a time we have for those people who go to set aside childish things and turn their dreams into magic or dust.

By the time Jasper would have gone to college, he had lost all his childish things on a bullshit gamble that hadn’t paid out. His dreams were deferred.

It’s not that I never wanted to fall in love.

Going into high school, and even in middle school, I didn’t really have a lot of really good role-models for being in love, for love that lasts. It’s one of the few things that I had in common with Isabella Millar. One of the many things that set me apart, attitude-wise, from Lucy.

Here we have society and culture and narrative myths shoved down our throats telling us women are there to be loved, to find love, to find happiness. How could I not want that?

When my mom met Robert Eastwood, I was suspicious. We all were. Why wouldn’t we be? This was just some guy who wasn’t our dad. Not just a stranger—an intruder.

By then we’d already had some missteps. Imagine being thirteen years old in your underwear going into the kitchen in the early morning to find some stranger already there sneaking out the door. Imagine him looking at you. Imagine where on you he might look, and whether your mom would believe you. Her telling you why are you walking around in your underwear to begin with, and not responding when you ask in return why the guy was there at all.

Mom wasn’t perfect, but somewhere deep down we knew she deserved happiness. That was why the bar was so high, high enough that just buying us ice cream and smiling at our teenage achievements wasn’t going to cut it, and that was where Rob started off.

Turned out Mom had known him for a hot minute, longer than she’d even known Dad. Not well. I guess they went to high school together, whatever that means, but I do know more. I know he did something for her, something she appreciated, once. I can’t make out what. Maybe it’s too long ago, too far away for me to be able to make it out clearly, and maybe she doesn’t even remember herself. But she doesn’t have to. From memory, it’s slipped into myth and built palaces in her dreams, on her soul, so it really didn’t take long for her to fall (back) in love with him, once he realized she wasn’t really married anymore.

Getting us, her son and daughter, to fall in love with him, in our own way, was harder work, but seeing how it made her feel, how it made her move, how it changed her, helped, I guess. In a way. To an extent. I guess we were still pretty harsh towards him.

I think part of my suspicion, honestly, had to do with my ability, and the fact that for the longest time, he never really factored into any of my visions.

Was it because his future was uncertain? Looking back on it, that just doesn’t seem likely at all. He’s actually one of the most stable people I’ve ever known, let alone that anyone close to me has ever dated.

Another possibility is that what happened to him and my mother just wasn’t important enough for whatever power sends me these visions to care about. I don’t want to think that. Especially since my new baby brother came into the world, I don’t want to think that. But what else is there?

That “what else” is this: it’s possible that I am getting these visions for a reason. That I’m meant to know the future, in order to make it happen, or maybe in order to prevent it. I can’t imagine preventing some of the things I’ve seen, or even wanting to—or even wanting to have anything to do with them, some of them. But what if I’m being… what if I’m being prepared for something?

And what if, when I don’t get a vision, what if that means something, too? What if that means I was meant not to intervene, or to feel uncomfortable with not having seen it coming? I can’t help but wonder how my relationship with Rob would have progressed there at the beginning if I had known how things would turn out. More to the point, though, I have to question how our relationship would have been if I’d never had visions, if not having visions of him hadn’t made me suspicious.

Was there any reason why I had to be suspicious? Is it possible that my resistence, added to my brother’s, had some effect on the situation? Would things have been different for him? Would he have acted differently? Or would it have all been the same?

Whatever else is true, it made it clear to me I’m being used. It wasn’t something I’d ever really thought about before. But now I have to think. Now I have to dwell. Now I have to be a teenager and do what teenagers do best.

I have to brood.

*sigh*

I sometimes wonder how many times it’s actually happened. We can’t possibly have accurate statistics on it just from legal abortions and how many are actually born. And I suppose teens aren’t necessarily the only ones who do it. It’s one of those faint, idle thoughts that has me wishing (briefly, not seriously) that my psychic abilities were more developed, that I could see more clearly.

How many kids have actually been conceived in the back seats of cars?

I guess a more interesting question might be, how many have been conceived in the back seats of cars While They Were Moving? It’s not really the kind of thing that official statistics are made to keep track of. And I guess in a lot of circumstances (Most? I don’t know if I can say…) it would be hard to figure out just from asking people, because they might not actually know at what point, in which session, conception took place.

But we know that my niece was conceived in the back of a car because that was the only place that my brother had actually had sex with Ellen Portnoy.

And of course we knew he was the father. Mom tried to get them to agree to a DNA test, but I mean, we look at her now, and she’s totally like, the nose? The chin?

Poor kid.

I don’t mean that. She makes my brother look good. She’s adorable.

But she started out as… well…

“A mistake? How can you say that?” Ellen just didn’t quite get it. I don’t know where these girls come from, the ones who actually, genuinely think that their purpose in life has something to do with having babies, and the sooner the better. Like being mom is the end-all, be-all—I mean, don’t get me wrong, I look at my mom, and like, sure, motherhood is important, but there’s other stuff that she does, too. And if she hadn’t had us, well, I think if she hadn’t had us, she’d have had a pretty decent life. Still. She’d’ve still had a pretty decent life. That’s what I…

Jasper didn’t want a kid, of course. I’m not really convinced that it was what Ellen wanted, either, until it happened. I think that once she put it all together, missing her period, the tell-tale awkward sickness coming and going at weird times, I think she told herself that it was all okay. It was all gonna work out. I think that abortion is something that occurred to her, but not for long enough to really let it sink in. If she’d thought about it… No. No, once she got it in her head she was gonna be a mom, I don’t know, maybe she thought Here’s one way that I can get one over on my own mom. By becoming her. Some kind of endless cycle.

“Well, yeah, it was a mistake!” Jasper insisted. “You think I wanted to get you pregnant?” He didn’t mean it to be hurtful. He didn’t even realize that it would be or, once he knew that it was, why. Of course he didn’t want to get her pregnant! He didn’t want to get anyone pregnant! He was seventeen, he was still in high school and he was on his way to the top with his band.

“She should get an abortion, though, right?” was what he asked the band.

Raven and Declan looked at each other. “It really is her decision,” Raven said.

“Well, shit,” said Jasper. “Here I’m about to be on the line for, like, what eighteen years of—eighteen years! I’m not even fucking eighteen years old, I’m on the line for eighteen years of taking care of some kid I squirted out in the backseat just ‘cause—God Dammit!” And he kicked something. It was like a little basket or something, I can’t really see it clearly. It wasn’t a speaker, but they were still upset.

“Hey, hey!” Declan shouted him down. “What are you doing? You’re gonna break something!”

“Everything’s already broken,” my brother lamented.

He wasn’t wrong. Nothing was ever going to be the same again for him.

There was a weird set of mixed reactions. For Ellen, obviously there was an enormous contingent of people (of both traditional genders and of all ages) who treated her with contempt. She was expecting that part.

What she wasn’t expecting—and what really freaked me the fuck out—was just how many people, especially girls her own age, started treating her with reverence. It was this weird thing, seeing someone, someone you knew, someone pretty much your own age, carring around a child—especially if you yourself had not ever had sex. But even if you had, I mean, this is a new life growing, right?

There weren’t a lot of those people, but there were enough to make things really fucking weird.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. I mean, there is. I mean, seriously, guys. It’s not (just) about biology, although I guess that might be a factor, too, mainly it’s about that’s not how our society is set up. It’s fucking weird to have someone who is in high school being pregnant, and then actually having the kid? Raising it?

Maybe shit should be different. Maybe we should be able to account for this. Maybe everything really is upside down, I mean there was a time if you hadn’t had a kid yet by the time you were like early twenties at the latest, you weren’t likely to, ever. Right? Maybe we’re going about this shit all wrong. Maybe we should be letting the teens have sex, have kids, before going off to college, let the grandparents raise them, which would be fair since their parents had raised their kids in this happy-go-lucky perfect-like society. Right?

But even if that was possible, that’s not the way things are. If you have a kid, you are an adult, automatically, that’s how this shit works. And adults have responsibilities. High school just isn’t a place for folks who have other responsibilities. It just isn’t set up for that.

I guess I’m one to talk, but the fact of the matter is, despite my brother’s baby-momma advertising it like it’s some grand affair, great fun, folks just shouldn’t get pregnant in the backseats of their cars or trucks or minivans, not until they’re settled. Not until they’re on their way to having a career—especially if they wanna be rockstars, right? If there is such a thing as forever-love, ’til death do you part, you don’t want it in high school. It’s not a good idea. Especially if you’re a rockstar. So don’t do it. Don’t do what they did. I love my niece, she’s one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a mistake.

Anastasia Borgia. You might have heard of her. If you’re really into metal, at least. She was the secondary lead singer (or “female vocalist”) of Acid Monsoon back when they first started, until she broke up with Caspar June—consider yourself officially foreshadowed.

After that, she went off and started her own band, SchadowFreud. It was basically just a knock-off of the Monsoon, but they lasted long enough that they were able to be Jasper’s first feal concert when he was a freshman and Aly was a senior and my first real concert when I was a freshman and Jasper was a senior.

Aly went because Kyle was actually performing. The Elk (Elk Chords? Elk Strings? whatever they were calling themselves that week) had beat out several other bands, including the fledgling Angst (Spoilers, I guess?) to open for SchadowFreud at this thing.

It was kind of the crowning achievement of Kyle’s high school career, if you think about it. But did he care? Please. He was too cool to care. Tommy cared. Mickey cared, like, a lot. Mickey had the biggest crush on Anastasia ever since Monsoon—the kind of crush that fat nerds get on powerful but damaged female celebrities?

But Kyle didn’t have stars in his eyes. The arrangement was that the amateur opener got to hang backstage with the “real” band and while Anastasia’s indulgence and old-school condescension was perfect for Mickey, Kyle expected something more real.

No. Not “expected”. Not from Anastasia. He knew better than that. But it was what he wanted. It was always what he wanted: authenticy; authentic emotion and empathy and worthiness.

I think that was the real reason why he stopped making music. Tommy was just there for the chicks. You know that, right? Maple there had been something else at some point—some greater ambition, at least. But no. Now—well, it wasn’t even chicks, plural. Or maybe it was, I don’t know. But one chick in particular stood up: my sister. He knew he’d knocked her up. He knew that part wasn’t an issue anymore, but still. It haunted him. The thought of something so monumental, and belonging to him, at least in part. The thought that it could conceivably… well, that was it, wasn’t it?

Was that love? Was it love that tied Tommy to Aly, any more than it tied Aly to Kyle? Who’s to say? But one thing it did do was spoil Tommy for any other chick who got to nail him at a concert.

That time the Elk opened for SchadowFreud, that was when Angst got to go, too. Declan told himself it was ‘cause it was the honorable thing to do when you’d lost that kind of competition.

“Dude,” Jasper interjected, “it’s a concert. You know? It’s SchadowFreud. We don’t need excuses. We want to go.”

Declan wasn’t sure he did want to go, though, just them.

It was basically right after Raven and Blake had started dating, and he felt like a failure, between that and the competition.

The lights? The noise? Sorry—“music”. It should have been wonderful. It was wonderful, just tainted. They’d met up outside. Jasper had come with Aly, but Tommy had brought Blake and Raven as well as his little brother, so Declan was forced to bear witness to the two recent love-birds flirting in the back, pretending they weren’t holding hands, and it was just a blessing Declan wasn’t driving yet so he couldn’t accidentally lock eyes with Raven in the rear-view and know for sure whether or not she knew what she was doing to him.

I stayed home for that concert. I remember thinking I should be jealous, my siblings get to go out together and here I am I have to stay here, sulking, in my middle school purgatory.

But what did I have to be jealous about? I’d already experienced the main highlights of this night, how Aly would finally give up on Kyle and find some biker in his late twenties, how Tommy would get two different girls to (not completely) satisfy him behidnd the port-o-potty, how Mickey would take just the right combination of drugs to end up in his underwear on top of the roof of the stage by the end of the night, staring up at the sky and talking about angels on floating inslands; and then of course Kyle’s diartribe against Anastasia when they met, which was not entirely lacking in poetry. I also experienced Raven and Blake sneaking off to second base for the first time; how Declan didn’t see it, but figured it must have been going on and got caught up in a conversation about life, the universe and everything (the topic, not the Book, though that did come up) with a girl he wasn’t attracted to who lived the other side of the state or something and who he figured he’d probably never see again after tonight and therefore, strangely, did not want to kiss.

What did I have to be jealous about?

Well, by then I’d already gotten some glimpses of what my own first concert would look like. I gotta say, it looks a lot different from the other side, pieces falling together. This time we’d come full circle. Angst, with a slightly different roster, was the band opening for SchadowFreud, who were more successful now. They didn’t get the same back-stage access to Anastasia, but Pan, the new drummer, did have a run-in with her in the parking lot. She was not doing well. I remember even seeing her on-stage, being disappointed.

I never liked live music. I never really saw the point. You can’t actually hear the lyrics, the singing is usually off, especially towards the end because the singer is tired. And you can’t even really hang out with your friends if you can’t talk to each other. But I guess maybe that’s part of the appeal? Isn’t it? Words can get in the way. If your friendship is strong, maybe you don’t really need them. Maybe you can just… I don’t know.

I didn’t have those kinds of friends by the time I went to my first concert. Not anymore. Lucy was off gallivanting, trying her best to become one of those girls Tommy used to sleep with—Jasper was on his way to doing the same thing, to being that guy. Or at least he had been. Isabella came, too. I don’t know why. She was wearing too much of the wrong kind of make-up and stood out like a stubbed toe on a stage at the ballet. To me, at least. Maybe she looked goth, maybe that was what other people thought. No, not Goth, she wasn’t… maybe emo? That was a thing. But no, not in that dress. I don’t know. She didn’t look like herself. “What are you even doing here?” I asked her.

Instead of answering, she gave me a Look, then walked away, and I got a brief vision of her doing some kind of shady deal. Great. So now she was either a drug lord or a spy. I reminded myself that I so didn’t care.

But then there was Trevor, wasn’t there? Now he was excited, poor thing, not knowing how much he was made fun of for betraying enthusiasm. Low key, though, of course—you didn’t want to be too avid when mocking someone else’s gusto, I mean, really!

Trevor was there for the celebrity. “I got to see SchadowFreud in concert!” he told strangers for months. He waited in line for an Anastasia signature and got it on his underwear. Not his ass, of course, that would wash off—no, his actual tighty-whities.

But it wasn’t Trevor I was there with. Trevor wasn’t technically there with anyone. But I was.

Angus George had been sitting near me. I’d seen myself at this concert, so I knew it was coming, but hadn’t wanted to go it alone. “You wanna go out sometime?” he asked me, and then brought up the thing.

They weren’t exactly the first words he’d said to me, but they might as well have been. They felt like it. “Sure,” I told him, feeling all the wrong emotions. It wasn’t until later that I thought to say “Oh, right, so my brother’s in a band that’s playing there, so yea, I was gonna go anyway.” I believe this is what they call playing it cool, which is level 1 of playing hard-to-get. I didn’t get past level 1 much, not if I was trying.

So I was there with him, kind of, holding one elbow with my other hand, classic lack-of-confidence stance. We tried dancing, but he wasn’t much of a dancer. Then there was a mosh-pit. It started off as, you know, a spontaneous thing: an actual fight. Actually, kind of an actual fight over me. Someone looking at me funny. Someone who looked…

No, maybe that was later, a vision of a different moshpit. I don’t know. At one of these things, I saw someone out of the corner of my eye that I swore looked like Kayla, but it was a guy in the middle of a moshpit. Even so, I could’ve sworn she—he?—stoppedand looked at me, recognition in the eyes, just long enough to get pummeled.

I had my first kiss that night. Nothing fancy. Tongue, but only shallow. I thought it was nice. I went for a while, enjoying it before it all went to shit.

Afterwards, I went and got a coke at the bar. “You know,” said a familiar voice behind me, “in Western Europe, you could’ve gotten a real drink.

I turned and looked at him. It was Kyle. “I’m fourteen,” I reminded him.

“You’d be surprised,” he countered.

It was weird seeing him again outside of school after so long, like walking in on your parents naked.

“Having fun?” he asked.

“Yeah, lots,” I lied.

“Your brother’s getting pretty good,” he told me.

I knew that part, although I didn’t entirely agree, so I gave a little half-hearted smile.

Probably deciding he shouldn’t be talking to me anyway, he picked up his drink, raised it briefly in my direction in a gesture of respect and left.

I rolled my eyes. If I smoked, I’d’ve lit a cigarette here. As it was, I just sipped my coke, sat back, rocked back and forth and wondered how many times a person could lose and then find yourself.

Did I forget to talk about Rake? Or Blaven? Maybe that’s because of how cliché it was, how deploringly high school. On some level, anyway. From a certain point of view.

No, that’s a lie. There’s only one perspective that makes it cliché, and that belongs to Declan Murphy, who stood outside it, and jealousy knows no clichés, doesn’t acknowledge them, and besides, what teenage boy ever recognized his own cliché and owned it?

There is something familiar about it, though, I guess. Predictable? About the damaged former lesbian child of abuse falling for the powerful-seeming yet sensitive black kid on the drums. Kid? I guess that depends how you look at it, whether he acted more like a kid than other black men his age, or whether he was more mature. We need more words for shit like this. Or maybe fewer.

It was Declan’s own fault, really. If fault is what you want to call it. If it hadn’t been for Angst, there’s no way Blake Morrissey and Raven would’ve hooked up, or even looked at each other. I guess I can’t really say that for sure, seen as how I can only see four dimensions and not past that into the multiverse of infinite bullshit, but I mean, come on. Seriously? Blake didn’t even particularly talk to her much outside practice as it was. Was it because he was black? Might’ve been because she was white. Or because she was a girl, and he was a boy and she knew what that meant and knew that he knew.

But keeping out of her way and giving her space even though he was always right there turned out to be a great tactic for “reeling her in”, as it were. Why? Was it because he came off as the strong, silent type? Was it because she was damaged by a particular view of masculinity? Was it because her recent bout of lesbianism had left her craving the exact fucking opposite? No. I think she was just being bombarded by subtle nudges from Declan, who wouldn’t just come out and make a move, and between that and Jasper’s overpowering everything, she just enjoyed the quiet, a chance to take the initiative, to open herself up.

It took Declan a long time to process the idea that a) he had done this to himself, b)she needed to be with Blake so she’d appreciate him when she got there, c) get over yourself she’s a person she makes her own decisions, and maybe tack on d) it doesn’t fucking matter it’s in the past anyway.

And it’s not that there was anything wrong with Blake. There was plenty of talk all through the relationship and long after (and still) about how of course it was never gonna work out, they werre from “different worlds” (bullshit) give me a fucking—they were different people!

They were incompatible. Mix the black and the white, you don’t get stripes, you get endless shades of gray, depending on proportions.

Once she was with Blake, she became like a completely different person. Not while other people were around, though. She was still herself until she was with him, alone. He was her escape from all the fucking shit, her opportunity to be the one in control so she could test out different versions of who she was, who she could be, who she wanted to be, and who she’d never want to be in public.

“Kinda bullshit is this?” Blake finally asked. That day, in a fit of pique (haven’t you always wanted to say that?) she’d seized him in the hall and tossed him (another cliché) into an oversized broom-closet, where there was a bench that was too small, too shallow, for both of them, but still she straddled him, gripping the back of his neck like a vampire in a tango. “Nuh-uh,” said Blake. This was the last straw. “The fuck off me, girl!”

“I thought you liked this.” Not confused. Not yet. She was still this other girl. This predatory Raven.

“Ashley!” he scolded, and it was the first time he’d used her real name like that.

He was holding her now. Her arms? Her face? I can’t tell because she isn’t even sure herself. “Ashley, girl, you gotta wake up.”

But she couldn’t. She knew somewhere down deep she was inside a dream within a dream but she’d forgotten there even was a real world. A real Raven.

Ashley for sure wasn’t there.

But how could Blake know that?

“You’re losing it,” he concluded. “What, is this some game to you? Is that what I am? Some toy? Why you gotta act this way?” She was crying now—that told him he was getting through to her. “You white girls—you think you can just…” He couldn’t put it into words, quite. The manipulations. The racial playground. The Old South aesthetics of a white woman’s nubian fantasy, and what it might do to him.

OK. So maybe race was a factor. But the driving force was this… misunderstanding? Except they weren’t just not getting each other. It was her.

I don’t want to point fingers. If things had been different… Things are never different, though. They just weren’t good for each other. She wasn’t ready, and he… She just wasn’t right for him. And he couldn’t handle her. He wasn’t equiped.

Declan, though…

He wasn’t there yet. There are conditions, especially for… well, for people like Raven. It’s not a matter of deserving. It’s more preparation. Fortification. Like an actor preparing for a role, building up the energy they need to live in that other world in a way that’s believable to an audience.

She needed the fortifications. Not walls against a hostile world but stores of fuel to propel her through it. And like a good audience, he needed to be primed, lulled and led into the right mood. Given girls like Stella as warm-up opening acts to reframe his mind. He needed to be her road, beaten and then paved and leading in the right direction. He wanted to be that road. Her road.

Goddammit, does that metaphor even make any sense?

For all I know, they’re not even really destined for each other. For all I know…

I mean, holy shit, they met in high school, right? What are the odds?

Maybe they’re not perfect for each other. Maybe they’re not even good for each other—they never were.

But they’re what they’ve got.

And yes, this is the fan fiction entry, in the slash category—although, does it count as fanfiction if it really happened? Better question, maybe: does it count as actually having happened if it’s never talked about, to the point that neither party is even really sure a week later if it actually did?

I don’t think either of them are actually gay. I mean, I know them both—one of them I’ve known for a very long time, and I am so sure that isn’t gay, and I’m not just saying that. One time doesn’t make you gay. Does it? One time is an experiment. It’s a fluke. It’s not something to get all worked up about.

But they’re boys. Boys get worked up about stuff. I guess girls do, too, but like, I don’t know. It’s different, I guess. I sure as hell wouldn’t get all worked up if the same thing happened with me and a girl. Actually that’s not true, probably. It would maybe depend on the girl? I don’t know.

It’s not like there wasn’t a girl involved. Her name was Stella (I’m not even joking) and she was such a groupie—one of their first. Imagine seeing your first set of real-life boobs in a room with like ten other people and knowing you were the one who made the girl take her top off.

Again, it’s a little bit different for girls. Even (and perhaps especially) when it’s a girl doing it.

It isn’t clear to me when this Stella character decided that she was going to seduce them. i get the feeling like maybe she couldn’t make up her mind? Like she knew she was horny and she knew she liked both of them, like they were both hot, and she figured why not, right? So she came up to both of them while they were talking together and just started gushing and probably figured one or the other would bow out eventually, but neither of them ever did. I’m sure there’s an urban dictionary entry comparing this kind of thing to a game of chicken. So she just went with it.

The real question I have is, why did they? What was going through the heads of these two straight white males at the time? Were they both just so focused on her they forgot they were competing? Or did either of them even think of it that way? Maybe one of them thought it was a competition and wanted to win and the other didn’t realize anyone’s style was getting cramped. That seems likely, but either way, once they got to the makeshift greenroom, the pants came off, the comparison became obvious and even if she didn’t care so much, any fraction of an inch difference would’ve mattered to them. That’s how boys are, right?

I’m pretty sure one of them was a virgin. Far as I know, at least. I don’t know. I don’t like to think of myself as keeping tabs. But I guess I am. I think he was. And if so, I’m sure he lost it to the girl. They took turns on her first—she picked, eenie meanie my knee moan. The other watched, entranced by the nearness of rubbing flesh and the look of his very dear friend.

How far they went, well… Let’s just say it was farther than either of them was comfortable with, at least to talk about, but it still left one of them with unwanted daydream thoughts he’d catch himself having about the girl he liked who was dating another guy. What if tehy were playing this all wrong? What if it didn’t need to be a rivalry?

But it’s not like he could ever propose something like that. Even later, even after they broke up, even once he was with her after all, it wasn’t something he could just admit to wanting, or even to having wanted. It was his deepest, darkest fantasy, not even to be with another guy, as such, but just to be… together. And maybe that’s not the kind of fantasy that should be taboo. It’s not like it’s poison—why should that fruit be forbidden?

Maybe it’s just different for boys.

Does anything much really happen to the average teen?

I mean, sure, stuff happens, stuff happens all the time. Stuff happens to everyone. People fall in love, people get sick (big difference there, right?). People go to school, learn stuff, get in fights, get in arguments. Is there anything everyone does? Sure. Puberty, I guess. Well, maybe not everyone. Breathing. Eating. The other side of eating. Sleeping. Using their heart—in the clinical sense: pumping blood through their veins. Not everyone actually “uses their heart”. Obviously.

What am I getting at?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to pull together everything that happened not just to me but my brother and my sister and all of their friends, like any of it had anything to do with anything else, and really I’m just making it up as I go. I’m not in middle school anymore. Truth is, it was pretty formative for me. I guess I’d like to say it is for everyone, but I can’t make that call. It’s too big of a statement. So am I trying to write something here with universal appeal? An appeal to the universe? I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe this is just for me.

Maybe it’s time for a recap, try to show where everyone is, with their respective agendas and arcs. There’s me (Kassandra Llywelyn), my brother Jasper, my sister Aly, and our mom, Nancy, although she’s not technically Aly’s mom, but she has raised her since she was like two. Our dad (dad to all us kids) left and none of us really know what. Sometimes I think I do, but… well, it’s the usual sob story, I guess. Except that I’m supposed to be psychic.

When Aly was a senior in high school, Jasper was a freshman and I just started middle school, so by the time I was a freshman, Jasper was a senior, and Aly was… well…

Aly was friends—kind of—with Tommy Murphy, who was Declan’s older brother, and Declan was Jasper’s best friend. Aly was only really friends with Tommy because Tommy was in a band with Mickey and Kyle Niedermeyer, and Aly had a crush on Kyle, mostly ‘cause he was a rock star in the making, but also ‘cause he was a pretty decent guy, I guess, as high school loser boys go. But he didn’t like her back. Turned out, he had a crush on one of his teachers, Erin Kelly. Actually more than a crush. So Aly went and slept with Tommy and got pregnant. She miscarried, though. I don’t know for sure what would’ve happened to her if she hadn’t, if she’d actually gone through with the pregnancy. Or, then again, maybe I do.

Jasper and Declan had a band, too. Their other two folks were Blake Morrissey on the drums and then this girl Raven, who Declan had a crush on. My brother didn’t like her—at least not in that way—probably because he was a pretty simple guy, for the most part, and Raven liked to wear her weirdness on her sleeve, even if she did then turn around and hide her face behind her hands. Declan’s crush on her was like most teenage boys’ crushes: a solid mix of half-baked attempts at romance and unintentional creepiness, fueling his self-hate. It didn’t help that she was always with someone else—first there was Christina, but not gonna lie, that shit was toxic; and then she fell in love, as much as anyone can at that age, with Blake. Did I ever get to that part? Well, I should’ve. I’m telling you now.

My friends are… well, I don’t know, they’re not as important. I’m not as important, not to this story. Or maybe I am. I don’t know. Maybe we should be. Even if we didn’t follow in the footsteps of those first two little generations and start a band, we’re still… something. Important? Representative?

My first friend in middle school was Kayla Shaw. She was my best friend through eighth and then she left. Who else? I guess Angus—Angus George. I’ve had visions of a redheaded man I’d fall in love with, he seems to fit the bill. Seemed. But I guess there’s still plenty of redheads, whatever the fearmongers say.

I’ve talked about Lucy, poor Lucy, too good for the likes of us, too chipper, and Isabella—I don’t even know what to do with her. But have I talked about Treveor? I always kinda felt bad for Trevor, with a name like that, he never really stood a chance. But maybe I shouldn’t say too much. This is a recap, right? And Trevor’s main contributions I haven’t gotten to yet. None of us really got important until we got to high school (hell, even then…) so maybe I should just shut up. I don’t know what I’m doing anyway, right?

Up until now, I’m kind of self-conscious of how I’ve, I don’t know, grounded the story? I tried to make it seem like all this stuff was happening all at once, in the same year, but I just want to come out and say, no, it didn’t, right?

You know how you look back on stuff and sometimes your memories get jumbled all out of order? If you’ve never noticed, I guarantee you some of your memories are wrong. And I wanna show it that way, warts and all, as it were, first of all ‘cause it’s easier for me, I’ll be honest, but more importantly ‘cause that’s pretty much how I experienced a lot of it at the time. The way your memories get jumbled? That heppens to be all the time. Constantly. Except when it happens to me, it’s not just the memories.

It’s visions, too. The past and the future all cluttering up in the present.

“Have you ever had sex?” my brother asked his band-mate and best friend.

Declan was not prepared for this question. He knew the required response—“Yeah, sure, loads of times!”—but couldn’t bring himself to give it, which was why he scoffed and turned it around: “Have you?”

“Yeah, I did,” said Jasper.

Now, Jasper was, of course, not one to shy away from bragging, but there was something in his voice, something vulnerable that Declan wasn’t used to, coming from him. It made him curious, and as he teased out enough details to convince himself that Jasper wasn’t making the whole thing up, his curiosity turned anatomical—

I’m sorry, I really don’t want to have to talk about this part. Like, seriously, this part is grossing me out just thinking about it, thinking of having seen it—Seeing it was hard enough the first time. And you should be grossed out, too, listening to it, a girl describing her brother… doing things. It’s disgusting.

But it’s important to the story.

Is it, though? I keep thinking I can tell the story without it, that the plot will somehow fold itself around these events and make itself clear in spite of their absence.

No, no, it’s not about plot. It’s about… something. Character. Events. Leaving this out would be dishonest, not just because I would be leaving this part out, but because it’s maybe a part that would resonate. With somebody. Somebody not related to my brother. Because ew.

All right, so you remember that I said my brother had gotten a bit carried away with drugs in the wake of our father doing what our father did. Well, to think that he would just stop there isn’t just despicably naive, it’s oblivious. Jasper was a wannabe rockstar, and unlike some people in this story, he wasn’t in it for the art.

Yes, you heard me. He was in it for the chicks. Rock’n’roll (or whatever punk-metal indie hybrid they thought they were doing) leads to drugs leads to *holding her nose* sex. Ugh. I made it.

My brother started having sex. Well, once, at least, that first year. Her name was Gretchen Forbes and I really appreciate how plain she was, even though that was part of why it ended up happening. Jasper knew she was plain. Jasper wanted to hook up with Marjorie Robbins or Imogen Talbot or even Jemima Sidney, she seemed cool, but none of those girls really gave him the time of day. Gretchen would, though.

Now, I’m not saying that girls only give it up when they’re feeling insecure (although, in retrospect, a lot of that going on around here) but Gretchen was feeling particularly ugly that day, not just because of the zit that she just couldn’t seem to pop, but because of what Cat Jones (who was also having a bad day, but was also just in general kind of a bitch, which is ironic, but I digress) had said about her being fat. Now I, looking at Gretchen Forbes, would not have gone straight to “maybe cut down the string cheese diet”, but Gretchen was insecure and got caught up after school with the cool kids going to hear the band, and then ended up talking to Jasper after practice.

Jasper, meanwhile, had never consciously been flirted with, mostly because he’d just been kind of oblivious up to that point, but something about Gretchen just sort of tugging down her shirt to show just the barest edge of bra, the faintest hint of nipple, got him thinking “Oh my God she wants me this is not a drill!”

Do I have to describe the whole thing? Every touch? Every word? Every base? Do I have to? Isn’t it enough to say Gretchen Forbes, in an act of desperation and low self-esteem, found herself the most potent loser she could stand and did something she regretted for the rest of her life? Because yes, she was a virgin, and yes, she was fourteen and a freshman in high school and she had to live with the knowledge for the rest of her life that she was the kind of girl who had sex at fourteen and then didn’t again for like, what, eight years? Until she was almost out of college? Because of how ashamed she was.

Then again, at least she didn’t get pregnant.

And at least she didn’t have to watch that happen to her brother.

For a week, I couldn’t even look at him. For a month, I glared. I knew he knew I knew, but he didn’t know how I knew, so he ascribed it to magical powers. I laughed and laughed, until I remembered what it was that I knew and was laughing about.

Declan, meanwhile, pretended not to seethe in jealousy of his friend’s experience as he admired their one lone female band-mate from afar.