The first time I met Kayla, she offered me Midol. It was sweet of her, but I wouldn’t have my first period for a couple more months. It never even occurred to me at the time to think how she might be thinking about things like that.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to talk about Kayla Shaw and what she meant to me.

In grade school, Kayla had been the perfect tomboy. She climbed trees, she got in schoolyard fights, she played wargames with strategy and finesse, and could beat pretty much all of the boys at any physical activities. But the summer before sixth grade, her parents pulled her aside and told her she had to be a lady now. The reason was because she had just told them she’d had her first period.

When I got mine, it was unpleasant. It was scary, I guess it was scary mainly in the way that growing up is scary, or falling in lvoe, or when you wake up and realize that one day it’ll all be over. So it was scary, but there was a sense of wonder to it, I guess, this spiritual… I don’t know, it’s lame and I’m crazy. There was shame to it, too, but the one thing I don’t remember feeling was betrayal.

That was what it was like for Kayla, though. “It’s like, back in elementary,” she confided in me during one awkward sleepover at my place, “I knew who I was, everything my body did made sense to me, more or less. I mean I was jealous, obviously, with the whole penis thing” (this didn’t seem obvious to me, but sure, fine) “but even that, like, I don’t know, there was a place for that.”

“Did your parents not tell you?” I prodded. “Your mom?”

“They weren’t expecting it that soon. Mom got hers pretty late, figured I would, too. Maybe I get it from dad’s side, I don’t know. I was really erratic, too. Well… still am.”

“Don’t they have, like, pills for that, or something?”

“They don’t always work that well.”

We tried talking about boys, too. One day—pretty early on—Trevor came to sit with us at lunch. I’m not gonna lie, I always thought Trevor was kind of cute. Sweet, too. He was a good listener and he gave pretty good advice, too. He was a bit of a nerd, but far be it from me, right?

It didn’t even really occur to me to have a crush on him, though, until later, after Kayla blurted out “He is gay, isn’t he?”

I didn’t know where to put that. “What? Trevor???” I frowned at her, thinking she was joking and I’d called her on it and won. Realizing she’d been serious, I muttered “No,” like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Oh,” she said. “I just thought…” But what she’d thought, she’d said already.

Some psychic I am, right?

Later on, it came out that Trevor “had a crush” on Kayla. This was awkward for me, even though, I mean, it wasn’t really a serious thing, what I had. Or maybe it was, but it didn’t like keep me up at night fantasizing or anything. I didn’t “think about Trevor like that,” but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel possessive. I got totally jealous once I heard. Some psychic I am. Able to read my sibling’s social life like the open book I’m writing, but my own? Ha ha ha ha ha fuck me, right?

“He keeps looking at me,” Kayla complained. “Not even really, like, I don’t know. And now other people are looking at me. Like I’m a work of art. Like I’m a character.”

“Do you feel the same way about him?” I asked her.

“Who? Trevor???” she spat. They were friends—we all were, more or less- but this whole thing was making her very uncomfortable. “I don’t believe he even feels that way about me,” said Kayla. “Not really. I think he just wants to.”

“Because you think he’s gay?”

She hesitated. “Yeah, probably.” After a moment, “You don’t?”

I shifted uncomfortably. We’d never really talked about stuff like this before. Personal stuff. Intimate stuff. Stuff girlfriends talk about.

“Do you feel that way about him?” she asked me.

“Who, me?” I answered truthfully, confused, “I don’t know.” Then I went on the offensive again. “Do you feel that way about anyone else?”

She looked away quickly enough that I knew she was lying when she said “Oh, I don’t know.”

We never really did talk about any girly stuff like that. We never really talked about anything important, except my weird thing that I do. She was my best friend all through middle school, but two weeks from the end of eighth grade, she ran away from home (left me a note so I’d know she didn’t just disappear) and that was the last that anyone heard from Kayla Shaw.

I still miss her. Sometimes. I guess. But I don’t know if I can say how. And it was just one more example of the uselessness of this “power” or whatever it is that I have, that I haven’t been able to find her.

I guarantee that you’ve known Isabella Millar. If you’re a guy, it’s possible that you didn’t know—or still don’t—that the person you knew was Isabella Millar. But you knew her. If only by name.

Isabella Millar was the It-girl in grade school, the one whose parents threw all the parties and invited everyone, or at least everyone who mattered, and that put the whole school in disarray, but it also meant she got invited to everything, just in case that was a factor.

In grade school, that was fine. We were petty, but we weren’t terribly self-conscious about being petty. Everything was life-and-death all the time, but that was no big deal.

Isabella Millar, though, was the girl who continued to be better than everyone else long after we graduated to sixth grade. She was the first girl with hips, let alone mosquito-bite pecs, and she wasn’t afraid of them like we were. You know this girl. If you’ve been paying attention, you can probably name a dozen of her.

But that’s not what makes an Isabella Millar.

You have to hate this girl. Even if you’re her friend, she really leaves you with no other choice, with her bland perfection. Even if you call her out, you know that it’s not because of anything she can help, you’re just jealous. A jealous bitch, which is way worse than being Isabella Millar, you just don’t get to rub everyone’s faces in it all the time.

But what really makes Isabella Millar Isabella Millar isn’t how many people she’s whipped and slathered and ground into jealousy, it’s the fact that all that’s a façade. A farce. A beauty pageant. Isabella Millar is not perfect—if she was, she wouldn’t really be Isabella Millar. She’d be a bitch.

It happens around seventh grade: one day, she comes to school different. She’s drab, she’s dour, she’s down. Her parents are getting a divorce. Oh. Suddenly, the perfection of the last seven years is shoved into the fluorescents, punching its pastiness and its pores. Those parties weren’t charity. They were a cry for help. Or no, a distraction: see? See how happy we are! You should be jealous of us because of how much happier we are than you! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

And even Isabella Millar fell for it. She believed the lie. Her parents wouldn’t lie to their little angel (both her parents are lawyers, so).

For some of us, the revelation of our parents’ imperfection, of their fragility, comes in digestible waves and stages, but then some of us wake up one day to find our home destroyed and Vesuvius itself a smoking ruin.

I can’t stand to see her like this. I know I hate her—I’m supposed to, anyway—but she was my friend once, or I thought she was, and now she’s not who I know her as, so of course I’m gonna go to her, even if I didn’t see this coming…

Why didn’t I see this coming? Why does my power discriminate? Is it because Isabella is somehow immune? No, she’s appeared before, I know she has. But I know the answer. Isabella Millar is not going to be important in my life, long-term. That’s it, isn’t it?

I don’t care.

I approach her at her locker. I’m not going to say I’m sorry, I tell myself. There’s too much opportunity for snark. Instead, I ask, “Do you wanna hang out?”

She isn’t really taken by surprise, but she is suspicious. It’s been too long, I guess. Or has it? “No, thanks.” At least she’s civil. “Maybe some other time.”

And she does take me up on that. Later.

I guess people aren’t usually as unpleasant as we make them out to be, you know? Everyone has a life and a life is enormous and multidimensional—Picasso couldn’t paint every angle of it. I try to think about that when people talk about bullies, and I try to point it out to boys when they look at girls like Isabella and think they see perfection. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s all the eye gets. Anything else, it should have to work for.

Do you ever imagine what it would be like to live in a world without pain? I bet you have. In fact, at times when you aren’t in pain, I bet you have trouble even imagining it, just like how when you’re sick, it’s hard to remember or imagine a time when you didn’t feel heavy and drowsy, when your nose wasn’t stuffed up. You try to imagine future conversations with the guy (or girl, I guess) that you like and you can’t imagine actually feeling well.

Have you ever tried to imagine what it would be like to lose a limb? A pane of glass crashing through bone, shredding through flesh right there on your arm—do you imagine pain? I don’t. I can picture the sensation maybe like a papercut and I know, intellectually, damn that’s gotta hurt, and it creeps me out even to the point of wincing, but can I really conjure up the pain? It isn’t there. Not for me.

“Stop it,” Declan instructs his band-mate, the one he’s in love witht, the one with the girlfriend who’s bad for her, the one who’s sitting across from him picking at the flesh of her cuticles with a needle. “Hey,” he says.

She looks away, puts the needle carefully in the pen-case she brought to this session.

“Why do you do that?” Declan asks sincerely.

“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. Because she doesn’t. She doesn’t know. She had some idea, but ideas count for shit. You can’t even copyright them.

Some day, they’ll talk about this. Some day, she’ll tell him about her past and her relationship to pain and how, in the fucked-up way of abused minds, piercing her own skin makes her feel safe, like nailbiters taking control or anorexics taking ownership of their own bodies.

“It’s my pain,” she’ll tell him, “my choice.” But she’s not there yet.

Then there’s Lucy McDermott.

I haven’t talked a lot about Lucy. Trust me, I’ll get there. She gets lost in the shuffle a bit when it comes to middle school—the early years, at least. Between Kayle and Trevor and Isabella, Lucy wasn’t exactly at the top of my friends list, but I actually probably enjoyed her the most. Trevor was a boy and Isabella was a bitch and Kayla—I mean, I liked her, but she could be a bit of a downer. Lucy seemed fun, first and foremost.

Kinda makes you wonder.

One day, I had her over—I think Kayla was there, too, but not really there, at least not when I walked in on Lucy in our bathroom with a razorblade. Her cuts were shallow and entirely the wrong place to be killing herself, or even pretending to, so that’s a plus, but it still freaked me the fuck out. How had I not seen it coming?

“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping the razor-blade, mortified. “I thought I—“

What? That she’d locked the door? Because obviously that was a huge priority for me, right?

“Why do you do it?” It wasn’t until way later that I worked up the courage to ask her, and when I did, I can’t tell you how disappointed I was.

“I’m in love with your brother,” she confessed to me, and then spent the better part of five minutes expanding on that certain je ne sais quoi of Jasper Llywelyn. “But does he even see me?” she concluded with a mope. “I mean, does he even know who I am?”

There was nothing original about Lucy’s pain. It wasn’t fundamental or the stuff of great drama or tragedy. It was her pain, but it wasn’t unique.

Does that make it less painful? Does knowing other people have more pain make the pain go away?

“You’re all so…” She can’t even express it. Not in words. Not out loud. She’s jealous of our pain. She feels left out. She’s sensed all of our secrets for a while now and desperately wanted a secret of her own. Something that could bind her to us.

That is the true meaning of Angst. A sense that there isn’t enough pain in the world. You have to make some extra for yourself. It’s a phantom pain in limbs that are still there but feel like they shouldn’t be. Why can’t we get over it? Because there is nothing to get over.

Kyle was ambitious. Not all rock-stars are. Well, all rock-stars, maybe. But not all artists.

Ambition was the only way he ever could have done what he did. But that didn’t mean he had tunnel-vision. Maybe life would have been easier for him if he had. Then again, it’s hard to really make good art if you’re too-too focused.

ERIN: Mr. Niedermeyer.

Kyle walked into her office. Ms. Kelly. Erin. Erin Kelly, who was a new teacher that year, fresh out of the teaching program at the local college, who’d taken a shine to Kyle at the beginning of this, his senior, year.

Kyle had taken quite a shine to Ms. Kelly, too.

KYLE: Miss Kelly.

ERIN: Please, sit down.

It was easier for her if he wasn’t pacing the room.

ERIN: Is there something I can help you with? (sensing her own trap) Something school-related?

KYLE: I have been wondering about college.

ERIN: You haven’t made a decision yet?

KYLE: Can you really blame me?

They were alone right now, but they still needed to be careful.

ERIN: I’m sure I can. You’re a brilliant young man. Brilliant young men go to college.

KYLE: It’s expensive.

ERIN: Only if you’re not wily enough to handle the loans.

KYLE: How are you handling yours?

It was always tacky to bring up the subject of educational finance, and she should have known better.

ERIN: I hardly think that’s an appropriate question, young man.

KYLE: I think it’s pretty pertinent, considering.

ERIN: Considering what, exactly?

She shouldn’t have asked that. She knew the answer to it. She knew it, he knew it, all of the cards on the table.

KYLE: I have options, Miss Kelly. I don’t have to go to school.

ERIN: You’re not referring to your band, are you?

It wasn’t fair of her to put it that way, but then again, none of this was fair. Not anymore.

KYLE: If we win this competition, we could be touring with SchadowFreud. That’s big money. Money’s always better than debt.

ERIN: Has your band even decided on a name yet?

They hadn’t. She knew they hadn’t. It wasn’t the sort of thing that she was supposed to know, but she knew it, and he knew she knew it and now she could use it against him.

ERIN: Look, I don’t recommend college for everyone. But with a mind like yours, you could do great things. Amazing things.

KYLE: I don’t need to go to college to do that.

ERIN: College would help.

KYLE: Is that why you want me to leave?

Long pause.

KYLE: You’ve heard us play. You know we can make it. We’ve got what it takes.

If anyone has, she reminded herself, it’s them, with the faith of intimate relations.

ERIN: If that’s what you want, you can always defer admission. Do college later.

She could tell by the flair of his nostrils he was gritting his teeth at this, so she decided to play her last hand.

ERIN: But you realize that whether you’re going to college or going on tour, you’re still leaving.

And there it was. He flexed his hand and cracked his knuckles like he always did when he was about to play his guitar.

KYLE: Is there a reason for me not to?

Ms. Kelly—Erin—sighed.

ERIN: No.

That was it then.

ERIN: No, there isn’t.

He didn’t seem to have anything else left to say.

ERIN: Well, it seems like you’ve got it all figured out.

KYLE: I guess so.

ERIN: Yeah.

It seemed to Erin Kelly that day, talking to a boy she shouldn’t have been talking to that way, that their impasse had come to a head. There was a finality to gridlock, Zeno’s paradox shattered in the sheer entropy of time marching on towards the end of the schoolyear. But she couldn’t bring herself to decide that it was a good finality, a finality she was comfortable with. It would be many years before she would be able to reconcile with what had passed between them.

All right, I lied. I said I was fine, after my dad left. Or at least I implied that I’d had a healthy reaction, and compared to my brother and sister, I guess that’s probably true, but that’s not the whole story and I’d be lying if I let you think it was. I was devastated—of course I was, what girl wouldn’t be, once her dad left? Not just left her mother but her? Of course I was. It just took me a while to realize because of how my brain had been rewiring itself. And when it did come, it came in a form that took me a while to associate with my father, or with grief, even though it shouldn’t have.

Of course it was a guy.

It’s not like you think, though—well, no, it was, just not… yet. Not like that. It was later, seventh grade, middle of middle school. I’d been having visions for a while about the man I was going to marry—I mean, not marry, maybe, I don’t know. I haven’t seen that part. But in some of them, it feels like I’m married to him. I guess. The only trouble is, I never see his face. I mean, that’s not the only trouble, of course—there’s also the fact that I’m having goddamn premonitions in the first place, and not all of them are rice and tinsel.

I couldn’t see his face, though, and that was a problem—although I could see his hair.

“What’s wrong with gingers?” Kayla couldn’t help but ask, being a redhead herself.

“Well, nothing, if you’re a girl,” I assured her. “But on guys, it’s just, I don’t know…” I was prejudiced. I’ll admit it. Even at the time, I knew it was wrong, and even at the time I knew there’d be a time when I’d know it was wrong, I just wasn’t there yet, it just seemed weird.

It seemed even weirder, though, when I actually met the guy. He flew under my radar for a while—I had a tendency (I’m sure you’ll understand) to instantly notice any guy in my general vicinity who had that particular hair color, but Angus George must’ve felt the same way about read-headed males I did, because his hair was jet-black when I met him, giving that much more levity to his freckled skin, whcih I guess should’ve been a dead giveaway, too. It wasn’t till I’d known him a couple of weeks, talked to him, wondered if his low-key aggression was his awkward-goth way of flirting with me, that I noticed his scalp bleeding. Not that it really was, but his roots were coming in and their shade of red was terrifying. Especially to me.

“Are you a ginger?” I blurted out, out of the blue.

“No!” he said, defensive even though I soon discovred he’d never heard the term—how could he never have heard it before, if he was one? Instantly, of course, my attitide softened toward him. I started talking to him, started to convince myself that yes, he was the one for me, not just any ginger, but my ginger, the clove I would grind up to add spice to the recipe of my existence as I saw it. Never mind that he was so damaged, never mind he identified as a thug, he would be my thug, the Angus of my angst and I would shape him into something better.

“He’s not the one for you,” Kayla kept telling me, though. She was my best friend, still, and I trusted her judgment, but only to a point. Only with my head, my gut—my chest and especially like my midriff liked this guy so much, thought I did anyway, knew what to do with him—

“He’s not the one for you, though.”

I knew she was right. He wasn’t Mr. Right, but he was Mr. Right-on-top-of-me—not literally, you perv. I was like twelve, maybe fourteen by the end of it, and still convinced I was not my sister. He was right there, target practice, even after Kayla wasn’t.

I don’t know if my father leaving had anything to do with my stuff with Angus, but it sure feels better having someone else to blame, and why shouldn’t I? Especially when that someone else is my piece of shit father who skipped out right when I was hitting puberty and needing him most to show me what an idiot looks like.

All the Llywelyn children reacted differently to our father leaving. I thank whatever power I have that I didn’t have the immediate reaction to go out and get pregnant like my sister did. I could have. And wouldn’t that have been a story. But it wasn’t my way. Out of all of us, I guess I had the healthiest reaction, locking myself in my room for days and weeks, reading and trying to come to grips with the new reality.

My brother has never had my introspection.

Both my older siblings always needed outside validation of some kind or other. They needed people to talk to, friends that they could pretend they were close with. Problem was, they also didn’t know how to actually talk about it. Aly got herself pregnant.

Jasper started doing drugs.

I might be over-simplifying here, for the sake of the narrative as I saw it. To be honest, Jasper’s kind of always been the kind of kid who would grow up to do drugs. You didn’t have to be psychic. You could just tell. I’m sorry to put it like that, but there’s a certain kind of prankster-jokester mesh that you just know is going to be trouble—first and foremost for himself.

Part of me wishes I could blame Tommy for this one, too. It would make my life so much easier if it was just one guy fucking up all of my characters, you know? But Tommy wasn’t anywhere nearby, wasn’t even part of the equation.

The guy who chained my brother to the gateway was a guy called Pete, and Jasper never saw him again, ‘cept maybe in passing. He was passing through. Not sure why. Their age. He shared his joint with them. That’s the fundamental difference between smoking cigarettes and smoking pot. Smokers ask “You got a light?” or even “You got a cigarette?” Pot-smokers ask “Hey, man, you wanna smoke up?” and then they exhale and usually cough, in my experience.

He’d already smoked a bit—tobacco is the real gateway drug. How many junkies are there out there who didn’t start on nicotine? That’s the one that teaches you about chemical dependency. But pot was the kicker for him. Not because of the fictitious addiction, but because of the danger of it. What would happen if he got caught.

Marijuana is easy to justify. There aren’t a lot of physical drawbacks—can’t OD, not “physically addictive, whatever that means, and studies show it might actually cure cancer. Not to mention a cultural message of “it’s not like other drugs” that competes with legal definitions.

But once you’re on that path…

I know that my brother wouldn’t have gone any farther if our dad hadn’t bailed. I know it ‘cause I’ve seen it, sort of, but more importantly, I know because I know Declan. I know their relationship. I know that Declan, underneath his carefully cultivated fuck-you-I’m-a-rockstar exterior, is highly disciplined. He would’ve rolled his eyes and peer-pressured him out of it. And Jasper would’ve gone with that, too; he respected Declan, his opinion of him was important. That’s probably why he didn’t tell him what he was doing, that he was “experimenting” with trying to “open his mind, man!”

Declan found out anyway, of course. People who do drugs tend to get stupid—sometimes hilariously so, but sometimes it’s inconvenient for your band-mates when they have to wait for you for two hours, trying to practice around your shitty “lead” guitar and wondering if this means you’ll be like this when you start booking gigs (if you ever start booking gigs, at this rate) and then when you do finally stumble in, blood-shot, bleary, almost bloated, you act like it’s no big deal.

“You’re on drugs,” my brother’s friend tells him, and when he’s through tryikng to deny it, Declan lies and says “Well, I just wish you’d invited me.” But maybe it isn’t a lie, because Declan does wish that Jasper had come to him, had trusted him as a friend (let him talk him out of it), even if there wasn’t anything else that he could do other than just, I don’t know, listen. The usual. Like they were just shootin’ the shit.

Declan would do drugs eventually, of course, he was a rock-star, but when he did, he would do it for about the same reasons that Kyle did when he did them, which turned out to be the same reasons why my brother thought and pretended he was doing them.

He needed to experiment. He had to know, he figured. How the fuck can you ever expect to be a great artist if you don’t know, if you haven’t experienced, if you haven’t been…

“Don’t do it, man,” Jasper would tell his friend, then, too late, after he’d already taken it. “Don’t go down that road,” and he would remind him of the intervention Declan and the others had to throw for him, finally, keeping it secret from our mom.

“I’m okay,” Declan will tell him, addressing the neon snake snatching at fireflies with its tongue, across the room. “This isn’t like that, this is…”

I’ve never done drugs, myself. Not any of the ones that matter, anyway.

I’ve never had to. Not knowing people like these.

My sister was already in love with Kyle Niedermeyer. I use the term loosely, of course—the way she did. She’d had a crush on him since their freshman year and it had only gotten worse for her the more she realized he just wasn’t interested.

I think it might be that she was coming on too strong. Kyle liked a challenge—not romantically, per se, but intellectually. Someone stimulating. Someone he could argue with. Aly was not that person. She would argue, but over stupid stuff. The big questions, she’d just shrug and assume they were beyond her.

Then when Dad left, things got worse still. I guess Aly always had kind of a daddy issue—don’t we all?—or maybe just abandonment fears from the thing with her mom, that then transferred over pretty damn smoothly.

I don’t want to say that my sister was only after attention. I don’t think attention was the goal. It’s not like she adventised (much), she wasn’t extraordinarily theatrical or bombastic. She just wanted affection. Dad had never really been good at that, but having him there was still better than nothing and once he left—well, what’s a teenage girl to do when her dad leaves and her crush won’t go for her?

She turned to his best friend. Not Mickey—hell no, she wouldn’t touch Mickey for all the weed in Portland. But Tommy was easy enough to wrap around her finger. What with his own insecurities, a lot of them bound up with the knowledge that not only were both his brother and his best friend far more talented than he was, but they would probably get along better with each other that they did with him, and then where would he be?

Or maybe none of that actually mattered to him. I guess it doesn’t have to matter to a teenage boy why he chooses to sleep with a girl—it probably doesn’t even matter to the girl. Most girls, anyway. Or some, at least. Most guys.

Just like it wouldn’t really have mattered to him, in that moment of being seduced, that it wasn’t really him she wanted. Later, of course, sure. Later everything mattered much more. But in the moment, all there was, was flesh and the hormones that steered it.

What really mattered, later on, was that Aly got pregnant.

I remember seeing the look on Jasper’s face when he found out. I already knew, of course. I’d had front-row seats, like it or not, to the main event at a preview before it even opened, but I got to see on Jasper’s face the awkward revelation that our sister had been having sex, how his brain rewired itself, in the way teenagers’ brains have a way of doing, to drag and drop his image of his sister from the folder marked “fellow-virgins” to a locked folder of “prophets of the bedroom”. He didn’t want to imagine the event, of course (not that there’d been much to it, to be frank), but yet he coveted the imagery with morbid fascination.

Mom wasn’t surprised. She was furious, of course—“God dammit, Aly,” she sighed. But she wasn’t surprised. “What are you gonna do now? We can barely afford—“ She groaned aloud in frustration.

“I’ll get a job,” Aly promised. “He’ll probably get a job…”

“Was it Kyle?” Mom knew about that particular crush, because she paid attention, but had never actually realized Kyle didn’t share the feelings.

“Tommy,” Aly corrected, and I’ve rarely heard two syllables contain so much conflicting emotion.

“Well, I hope you’re fucking satisfied,” Mom sighed as she gathered up the plates to put them into the sink. As if those words meant a damn thing.

About a week later, just when Aly was coming around to the idea of an abortion, she miscarried. It was hard, even though having it would have been harder, but the damage had been done. She’d outed herself for nothing. Now not only did everyone at school who mattered know she was a slut, she knew that when push came to shove, she couldn’t really count on her stepmom to side with her if it meant any kind of inconvenience to her real kids.

Roger Llywelyn left his family.

It’s easier to think about it in the third person, think of him as a fictional character in a story I’m telling myself.

Roger Llywelyn abandoned his family when his youngest daughter was in middle school. It happened a week after she got her third period.

I knew it was going to happen. I didn’t know the details and I didn’t trust myself quite yet, but in the weeks leading up to it, I did get premonitions.

There were a couple different kinds. At first, I kept wondering where he was in the generalized visions that I was getting that I eventually realized were of after he was leaving. Then, sometimes I’d get flashes of him elsewhere, not with us, but too blurry to track him down. Those were upsetting enough, but at times…

You know how, when something bad happens, you find yourself forgetting about it? Like the proverbial phantom limb everyone talks about amputees getting? You wake up, turn around thinking your boyfriend will be there because it takes a minute to remember he died in a car crash three months ago. Sometimes, you even get it with dreams. It takes a minute to get out of it. So it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine the opposite. Just imagine waking up three weeks in a row thinking your dad isn’t there anymore, taking five minutes to remember that he is—maybe he even knocks on your door before going to work and you think He’s back! when he never really left. And then imagine that he did. After three weeks, the lie became the truth. Roger Llywelyn abandoned his family without a word, without a trace. He just didn’t come home one night.

His youngest daughter had known something was going to happen, but hadn’t brought it up, hadn’t wanted to. She didn’t really believe it and she was afraid that by bringing it up, she’d somehow put the idea in his head—no, no, she tried to tell herself, I just don’t want it in my head!

Life, after he left, after he disappeared, was different. I’d like to say it was the little things, like Mom not finding his razor in the sink after he used it, but I can’t even think of any “little things” because he was the primary breadwinner—the only breadwinner, for any practical purposes. Any money Mom made as a paralegal was extra. And to make matter worse—

“What do you mean, gone?” we all heard Mom on the phone with the bank. All our savings—he’d cleaned us out. Thanks, Dad. We had to move to a place that wasn’t big enough and at the same time, we all had to readjust everything we thought we’d known about our father.

There were no “little things” anymore.

I had it easy, considering. Was it harder on Jasper, the man of the house just starting high school, finding out his primary role model was a piece of shit after all, or was it harder on Aly, the half-sister, Cinderella to a mom who wasn’t hers, abandoned by a second parent? At least she wouldn’t be part of this make-believe family for long.

I knew how it was going to turn out. I didn’t trust it, still. I still couldn’t convince myself of the difference between prophecy and self-delusion, but would that have made any difference? Would I have been happier, knowing how it would all turn out?

It started the way sibling fights always start: with something stupid. I can’t even tell what, whether Declan was taking too long in the bathroom (ew) or Tommy used his toothbrush, or what. What I do know is that Tommy had finally stopped growing and Declan was catching up to him, so when it did devolve into the inevitable wrestling match it always had to be, Tommy still won, but he noticed that it was getting harder for him.

That’s why he brought up the band.

“What about my band?” said Declan.

“What about my band?” Tommy mocked in that voice all older brothers have to mock their youngers.

“Oh, yeah, well, what about your band, huh?” Declan countered.

Tommy p’shaw’d. “My band’s good, man, the Elk’s gonna be tking it all the way to the Eagle this year.”

The Grey Eagle is this venue in town that hosts the classic all-American Band-Battle Extravagonzo every year, and of spring.

“You’re not gettin’ the Eagle,” Declan scoffed back.

Tommy threw up his hands in a condescending “We’ll see, sugar,” except maybe with something stronger than sugar, and that was the end of it.

That’s what gave Declan the idea. “We need unity,” he said to the others at their next meet. They’d been practising, but not very well. Not very focused. Raven had a killer voice (when she used it) and was starting to sound okay on the bass; Blake on the drums was a natural, almost a no-brainer; and Declan? Well, he didn’t like to toot his own horn, but he knew what he was doing on the git-fiddle. Now, Jasper—I mean, don’t get me wrong. He got better. But he was never actually good at playing the guitar.

The problem was the overall sound. “We’re all doing different shit,” Declan clarified. “And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if that’s how we sound, we still gotta make it work.” Declan was not a big believer in the idea that a band should have a unified sound like a brand or a lable. Having a voice was important—limiting yourself to one was not, necessarily. “Take the Beatles,” he would point out. “Listen to I Wanna Hold Your Hand and then skip ahead to Across the Universe. Do those sound like the same band?” They don’t to me, but I’ll admit I don’t know much about music. “What about Yellow Submarine? That sound anything like those others? Anything like Helter Skelter?” Another band he liked to bring up was Acid Monsoon. “Sometimes they’re this hardcore heavy metal and then they’ll blend that into this Trip-Hoppy Jazz weirdness—and they’ll do it in the same song, like, ‘cause they just don’t give a fuck.”

Caspar June, Acid Monsoon’s front man and lead singer, disagrees with his judgment that this means they don’t have a unified sound, but whatever. That gave Declan a target.

And now his asshole older brother had just given him a goal.

“I wanna play the Eagle,” this high school freshman told the band he’d incited. “I wanna play the Eagle this year.” And after he’d explained to all these noobs what that entailed, he got them all to work.

“Hey, Deck-face,” his brother mocked him in the halls the next day, and once he had his attention, Tommy crouched down low and started flapping his arms and caw-cawing in a desperate screech.

But Declan just rolled his eyes. “Whatever, dude,” he said. “I’m going Elk-hunting.”

High school is a fucking nightmare.

Imagine taking dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of hormonal teens and locking them in a room together with adults who are instructed to teach. These kids don’t care. They have no investment.

Middle school is arguably worse.

These kids are stupid. Literally. Cognitive development stalls when the body has better shit to worry about. Like, uh, puberty? Why do you even try getting them to sit still and think? Put those bodies to work so they’ll know how to use them!

And how not to.

Maybe school is for some people. It should be for everyone, but come on—let’s be real. On a fundamental level, it doesn’t appeal to our baser instincts—tries to crush those baser drives under the weight of thousands of years of “Aren’t we better than this?”

What if we’re not?

What if we aren’t better than this?

What if we don’t have to be?

Why are you trying to push this?

There’s a boy at my school who’s in love with me. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he looks like. But I know him.

I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I can see inside his mind.

I know when he looks in the mirror. I know what he sees—I don’t see it, hair color or the shape of his eyes, but I know what he sees. I know what he looks at and how he feels about it.

Loathing.

I don’t know who this kid is, but I pity him, the way that he feels about himself, the way that he thinks—that he knows—other people feel about him. It’s inhuman. And all he wants is to connect…

But then he starts thinking of me and in his mind’s eye, I can see all of the things that he wants from me, specifically. Compassion? Of course, but that’s only the beginning. Compassion is not an endgame, it’s the boy’s way in. Compassion, he believes, is the hook—or at least whatever it is in the fish that makes it follow something shiny.

But I am not a fish, and this kid isn’t shiny. Not even enough that I know who he is. I have tried, looking around the cafeteria. Trying to see who looks me in the eye.

I assume that once I’ve looked him in the eye, I’ll know.

But maybe it doesn’t work like that.

Maybe I’ve seen him and I still don’t know.

The things he wants to do to me, the things he wants to do to other girls, to other human beings… What made him this way?

Did we do it, we, with our neglect? But thinking that way is succumbing to gaslighting, it’s the victim embracing the criminal, excusing the crime to blame it on fate. That’s not helpful.

But is it so helpful, then, to lay all the blame on him? From the sound of it, from the feel of it, he has been villified from every angle for a very long time. It’s hard to imagine him having survived this so long with so many people hating him—or even with the belief that they did. Can’t anything be done? Maybe our actions didn’t cause his outlook or desires, but could they stop them? Curb them? Is there nothing to be done?

I keep this self-loathing boy at the back of my mind as I sit with my girlfriends. Kayla knows that I know things, but I don’t want to tell her all I know. I don’t want to burden her. So I just sit and I let them talk and I wonder and wait for a clearer premonition of these terrible things.