Since he’d arrived an hour ago, the house had grown crowded with bodies running warm, the air filling up with colored light and the gaseous weight of a hundred bong rips. In the living room, an eschatology student mumblerapped over an EDM beat through speakers that had the gain turned up twice too high. In what had many years ago been a parlor and was now some kind of storage space-cum-gaming lounge, someone plinked an out-of-tune piano. Outside the paint-chipped bathroom door stood a line of chicniks with tiny baggies full of various crushed-up pills. They wore vintage jackets and high-waisted pants from consignment shops down the river valley, closer to the city. They were talking about their midterms and thinking about sex, or vice versa.

The weed smell came from upstairs, smoked on stained couches beneath the rafters, next to an open window to the roof, by heady bros philosophizing about their perception of different colors, on whether they could ever even know if their blues were the same. Interior design students lived here.

In the kitchen, Simon smoked a cigarette, ashed it onto a tray on the wobbly round hi-top with all the bottles of Smirnoff Whipped and cranberry juice on it. He had forgotten to take his little blue Asenapine pill this morning, which was why he knew what everyone here was thinking. Sometimes he would deliberately miss a dose on the morning of an Advanced Psychodynamics test, just in order to boost his performance on the practical sections, but he didn’t like to miss a dose by accident. Every time he did he started knowing things about people he ought not to. Feelings and thoughts and words and thoughts and feelings.

There were cracks in the plaster above the crooked cabinets. Someone jostled Simon on their way out to the hookah pit in the backyard. Someone else asked him for a drag of his cig, and he obliged them. Except for the bearded dragon in the terrarium on top of the fridge, he was the only one who kept staying in the kitchen for longer than it took to mix a drink. This room was a lung, filling and emptying with an organic rhythm. Which made Simon a foreign object, lodged in its bronchial tube. His binder felt tight beneath the black T-shirt he’d been wearing for two days, and was cutting into the space below his collarbones.

Another student named Aspen that he knew from his physics classes saw him, and she waved, and Simon waved back. He moved nearer to the sink, where a few macaroni noodles were rotting in the drain-trap. Aspen’s thoughts about Simon were warm and general, and then were gone, as she broke into a conversation about someone’s trip to Seoul and thought fondly of barbecue.

He hadn’t seen Tate here yet, annoying because Tate had invited him out in the first place. And he would have followed Tate to any party, as long as he didn’t have to show up first. But Simon had shown up first, he guessed, and now was overstimulated both by what was sensory and what was extra, his ratty Asic sneakers almost fastened to linoleum that was sticky with splashed alcohol and other fluids that he dared not speculate on. Maybe he would learn now not to fuck boys who were older and richer than he was. Boys who weren’t beholden to anyone’s timetables. Boys with fathers with names that meant things. Simon couldn’t hear his—

(Tate’s father worked for Netflix or HBO or something, something to do with international programming. He’d met Tate in Intro to Theoretical Perception during his second semester. The course was taught by an impossibly ancient and shriveled German professor who in his youth, depending on who you asked, had done remote viewing for either the French Resistance or the Vichy regime. But where Simon was a Psionic Arts major, taking the course to fulfill his requirements, Tate was a pure College-of-the-Dales studio art rat, who thought that a class in the PsiArts department would “unlock his potential for psychedelic painting,” or so he said. Still, he had a great smile, sitting across from Simon in that classroom housed on the top floor of an ivy-hung tower. It was more of a smirk really, shit-eating but self-aware about it.

All semester they’d locked eyes about twice a class period, Simon trying hard not to peer into Tate’s thoughts whenever it happened. But Tate’s thoughts were right there on the surface, vivid, and usually more interesting than the average student-of-the-Dales. Sometimes the thoughts were florid snatches of beat poetry, musings on how many bags of sand it would take to fill the room completely, sometimes abstract images, splotches of color not-yet-formed, but purer, somehow, than anything Simon would ever see Tate paint. Other times, when Simon locked eyes with him, his thoughts were indescribably filthy. And Simon would look away blushing, and Tate would see it, and he would smirk.

Before class, in the fifth week of that semester, on a dull Wednesday, while the room was still relatively empty, Tate sat next to Simon, and Simon could smell notes of expensive, leathery fragrance on Tate’s clothes.

“What am I thinking right now?” Tate said.

“Um?” Simon hated how high his voice still sounded, even in the memory of it.

Tate repeated the question, this time quieter, closer to Simon, his breath against Simon’s ear.

“It doesn’t really work that way for me.” Simon could have added, not when I’m medicated. I can hear everything when I’m off of them, but he didn’t. “Sometimes it’s thoughts, sometimes feelings.”

“You can’t do the whole astral projecting thing?”

Again, he could have said I wish I couldn’t, but getting into the meat of it all would have seemed like too much at the time.

“So look into my eyes. What am I thinking?”

Simon hesitated before he did it, worried he’d see something he didn’t want to. Instead, he saw in his periphery, like it was in the room, an oil painting of himself in profile, beautiful, but too soft, not sharp or angular enough. It wasn’t the way he wanted to be able to see himself, but still.

“Anyway, you want to go to La Catrina Friday?” Tate said. His eyes were blue but had a gunpowder quality. Explosive eyes. “They have bottomless margaritas.”

“I’m not twenty-one yet.”

“They don’t card.”

This time, still looking into Tate’s eyes, Simon said the thing he hadn’t wanted to say, the thing behind the thing. He felt naked all of a sudden, and there was no helping it. “You should know,” he said. “I just started testosterone. I’ll look different soon, and my voice won’t be like it is for long.”

“Even better,” Tate said, grinning. “I’m bi, you know?” Yet the portrait of Simon in Tate’s head stayed just as feminine as it had been.

And actually, if he really thought about it, Simon wasn’t even sure Tate had said he was bi out loud at all. There was this tension, sometimes, between what Simon remembered and what he thought he remembered. A therapist had told him once it was because of his cognitive hyperempathy, because he was always remembering what people felt and thought along with remembering what they said. Diagnoses were so clean, and even studying psionics made it seem like everything was settled science. But it was all so much squishier than that. Everything was.)

—phone buzzing over the noise of the party, could barely even hear his own thoughts, but he felt the text come in through his pocket. He picked the phone up, looked at it. His mother’s contact picture pinged, a vacation photo from when he was in middle school, happier times, on a South Carolina beach in her sunhat. The texts were on the same subject he had been getting and ignoring all afternoon and evening from her.

1:46 – Gracie are you coming home for christmas this year??

2:56 – ???

3:45 – Are you ignoring because of the name thing.

3:51 – We never here from you.

6:13 – Grace…

7:12 – It’s like we don’t even know you anymore.

And now this latest:

11:17 – This is Dad on Mom’s phone. Call when you can.

Simon started to respond but thought better of it, knew they couldn’t see whether he’d read the texts, whether or not he was replying. A perk of having phones from different companies. Instead, he texted Tate,

11:19 – hey lol still going to the party at the interior design house?

using the word going instead of coming to make it seem like he wasn’t already there.

After shoving his phone back into his jean pocket, Simon leaned against the kitchen counter and closed his eyes, trying to block out the flood of other people’s thoughts. Still no sign of Tate, neither voice nor body nor cogitation, and Simon wasn’t about to let his own perception leave the property, because who knew if it could even find its way back. He inhaled deeply to center himself, using the box breathing techniques one of his ex-therapists had taught him. Her name had been Sharon. She had thought most often of her beagle.

Upstairs, someone named Philip went out to the window, stepped outside onto the roof, sat on the shingles across from two horizontal students, who were tangled in a mess of hair and spit, the lips of each locked deeply into the lips of the other, and he sat there, that Philip, hitting his vape with great ceremony and looking out at the stars. He thought about dying for a while. Not about himself at first, just about dying in the abstract, and then, at some point, about himself, dying. Then he shook it off and climbed back in through the window and sat on one of the couches, and said of the bong, “Hey, bruv, pass that thing over here.”

Simon looked around. He was alone. For just once tonight there was no one in the—

(That whole first date at the Mexican restaurant, if that’s how you would even classify it, Simon told himself he wasn’t going to get involved with Tate. He’d had to keep telling himself that, because Tate was a very pretty boy, and because the margaritas were loaded to the rim with Jose Cuervo, and because when the server had tried to card Simon, Tate had slipped him a fifty so casually that it looked like he’d been doing it every day for a million years.

“She’ll have a margarita too,” Tate had said of Simon, then after the server left had emoted, “Oh, my God. I didn’t even realize I didn’t use he, I’m so sorry, did I fuck up?” Meaning, did I ruin my chances?

“No, no, it’s fine.” Simon ignored the twist in his stomach, the feeling of his guts dropping out of him. Tate really was a very pretty boy. And when the server came with the margaritas and said, “Here, you go, miss,” Tate said back, too loud, “It’s sir, actually,” and the server malfunctioned and said something like, “Sorry, mi— sir,” (or had he said, “man?”) and, “Our special today is the chicken flautas dinner.”

Simon felt himself sink lower into his seat and downed his margarita and asked for another. The light was so yellow in here, the walls painted so bright, the pillars on the corners so sturdy, like it was built to withstand an earthquake.

“So you said you can read people’s feelings,” Tate said once they’d ordered. “Is that normal for psychics?”

“Psionics,” Simon corrected.

People were always calling him a psychic, but those were different. Psychics were roadside attractions, tourist traps in Woodstock or Salem or other new-agey towns. And they were usually just faking it anyway. The field was called Psionic Arts, but it was really a natural science, mixed with philosophy and occult theory and more than a hint of quantum physics.

Simon continued: “And I can read people’s thoughts. But normal doesn’t really mean anything for us, you know? A lot of people have psionic capabilities, it’s just about knowing how to access them.” And here it came, words lubricated by half-priced tequila. “Plus, a touch of mental illness doesn’t hurt your chances.”

He didn’t like to mention the mental stuff. People tended to get weird about it, even weirder than the psionic stuff. Psionics were sexy. A lot of actors and politicians were psionics. But the mental stuff always made people act conflicted, like they’d suddenly placed Simon in a different category of person and didn’t know how to deal with the fact that he wasn’t raving about AI propaganda or something on a subway platform. Or else they discounted the rest of him because of it. 

[Like his mother, last Thanksgiving, saying: “Oh, she thinks she’s a boy. It’s just one of her delusions.”]

Yet Tate was unfazed.

“Oh, no way,” he said. For the first time, he seemed excited, as though a layer of skin had been peeled away. Then the layer went up again, like it had never come down in the first place. “What do you have?”

“Cognitive hyperempathy disorder with episodes of surrealization. But I’m under treatment.”

“Right on. I have depression, so I don’t completely get it, but. You know. I get it. What do you even take for that, Prozac?”

“Abilify. And Lamictal.” Simon had hated the Lamictal, which gave him spasms in his face that made him stand out when he just wanted to blend in. “And without the meds, I can.”

“Can what?”

“Read people’s feelings. It’s just the thoughts when I’m medicated, and even then only echoes of thoughts. But I get people’s feelings, thoughts, everything when I’m unmedicated. It’s kind of intense.”

“I was medicated for a while, SSRIs. But they diminished me, you know? I can’t make things under those conditions.” Tate finished his drink, only making eye contact with Simon briefly and then darting his gaze away. Behind the bluster, Tate felt nervous, which Simon actually thought was kind of cute, all things considered. “So you’ve got, like, a lot going on, huh? Like, medicinally speaking?”

“The most.”

“And you came here for the PsiArts program, or,”

“I wanted to go to Brown, but they wouldn’t let me in.” He had gotten into Brown actually, but they didn’t give him enough in scholarships. Tate was paying ticket price. He didn’t have to read Tate’s mind to know that. “Plus,” Simon continued, “most people who go to the Brown PsiArts program end up working for the CIA anyway,” which was only kind of a joke. The truth was, Simon never wanted the weight of that kind of power. He was scared of it.

“You’re so interesting,” Tate said, thinking of a lot of things, of charcoal and oil and the Scorsese movie he’d just seen, but mostly of fucking. “I’d love to paint you sometime.”

That was a year and a half ago, and it was autumn now at the party, and six months ago in spring, Tate had said while they were both naked, crowded up against the wall in his squeaky dorm bed, “I wish you wouldn’t read me like you do, it’s like I can’t hide from you,” and he had not meant it in a good way, and Simon had said, “I’m sorry,” and Tate, “We should open this thing up to other people, I think I have too much love to give for just one person,” and Simon, “I know,” even though he didn’t think that what Tate said about love was even true, and silence, and staring at the square-tiled ceiling lit by LED light strips while Radiohead played on the bluetooth speaker, and Simon, “I can work with that.”)

—kitchen.

Simon was staring at his phone. Simon was staring at the unread message notification on his phone. Simon was pulling down the display from the top of his phone to see the unread message notification on his phone which was sent by his father from his mother’s phone and said 

11:26 – Love you, kiddo.

Pain from his fingers, sudden, the cigarette having burned all the way to the nub. He dropped it, then stomped it out on the linoleum, flapping his hand as he did until the pain stopped. Then he threw the burnt-out butt away. The thoughts were so loud at this party, and there were so many of them. He couldn’t remember the last time the thoughts had been this loud. He felt as though he was losing himself in the drumbeat thrum of bad EDM, in the pulse of the house. He went back to his phone and started to scroll through social media, but that was worse. Those apps always turned his phone into a roiling hotbox of rage and desperation and fear. He didn’t know why he always thought they would make him feel better.

Someone came into the kitchen again, but Simon barely noticed her until she was right up next to him. The girl from his physics classes, Aspen, saying something that was almost incomprehensible over the music. She’d cut her hair short since the last time they’d had a class together, dyed it lavender, and he could see a tattoo of a bleeding dagger on her forearm. Before he came to college, he’d always been under the impression that tattoos were for junkies and dropouts. But that was Sterling, Pennsylvania, and this was here. Here, she looked cool. She was cool. Simon didn’t know what to do with himself in the face of her overwhelming coolness.

“What?” he shouted.

“A few of us were going to [unintelligible! unintelligible]’s DJ-ing!”

“Oh! Wow!” His volume screamed excitement, but he couldn’t make his face match it. 

His phone buzzed. Tate: 

11:28 – ya, hahah, got sidetracked at Lely’s, 

who was the new person Tate was fucking, another art student, also cool, also with tattoos, but Lely had black hair, not lavender. They didn’t like Simon very much. It wasn’t anything they said to him, just the general way their face looked when he was around, as though they were smelling something not quite unpleasant, but perplexing, like the hints of sadness that get left behind in the grate-holes of a public washing machine.

“Do [unintelligible] with us?” Aspen shouted back.

“Sorry, I have to get home to my medications.”

“Oh!” Aspen nodded, wide eyes, wide smile. “I meditate too, it’s so cool that you meditate!”

 She meant it. She meant everything she said.

(“I always score really high in something called deathsense,” he said to Tate when they were in the woods, walking through the woods while high on mushrooms, which was probably not a good idea for Simon’s neurotype, but he didn’t really care. “I score high in a lot of areas, but deathsense is the highest for me.”

“Other areas being?”

“Astral Projection. Futurevision.” He had been nervous about the mushrooms before doing them, to be honest. Before coming to the Dales, he hadn’t even smoked weed ever. Now he liked drugs that felt like family, and even some that felt like strangers. Though he didn’t do the really bad ones, the ones that could really ruin you. He’d seen too much of that back home.

“What about hyperempathy? Is that an area?”

“Not really. The hyperempathy kind of helps with all of them, I guess. But when you get down to it, the line’s pretty blurry between psionics and psychiatrics anyway.”

The tree branches were moving even when the wind was not blowing. Simon felt close to the trees in a way that almost broke his heart. They looked like fingerbones. He felt like he could have approached one and it would have opened up its bark and enveloped him and held him until he was its marrow, and then he would become either sober or dead. He knew he had to be careful with these thoughts, especially on mushrooms. Yet it was surprising how little the shrooms affected him, how closely the things people described when they were on them mirrored the things he felt all the time.

“So you can tell when people die?” Tate said. This was winter, just before they’d opened things up. A year or so after the restaurant. Neither of them were wearing gloves, but Tate had been avoiding touching Simon’s hands as little hairs started to grow onto the backs of them. He often asked Simon to shave his facial hair, which had just started coming in. He wouldn’t kiss Simon otherwise.

“It’s more when people are thinking about it, or close to it. I can really feel when people are about to. Then the moment happens and I don’t feel anything after.”

Tate thought for a while. “Sounds difficult.”

[It was. In fourth grade, Simon had correctly predicted the car accident that killed his math teacher. He’d written an essay about it, but the English teacher hadn’t flagged anything to the administration until Mr Fiorino had died courtesy of a steering column through his chest. In the same parent-teacher conference that placed Simon in counseling for the first time of many after, Ms Kunz sat distraught, her eyes wet, mascara running down her inexperienced face. “I should have taken this more seriously,” she sobbed.

“How could you have known?” Simon’s father said. He handed her a tissue, and quietly felt her sadness well up deep inside him.

Simon had been sitting in the desk behind his father, next to his mother, who was still in scrubs from work. Simon’s long hair was rail-straight and went behind the back of the chair, his pink, sparkly Sketchers glinting in the sunlight. His shirt said PRINCESS, and it had a sparkly crown on it. He felt his father feel Ms Kunz’ sadness, but said nothing, never even mentioned it to his father. But he and his father never really said many things out loud to each other, anyway.]

“It is,” Simon said. This felt wrong. The trees felt wrong. The cold felt wrong. This conversation never happened here. It happened earlier, right? They hadn’t been doing this thing, which was ostensibly a relationship, but which Tate wouldn’t say was a relationship, for this long before Simon told Tate about the deathsense. Had they been?

“Did we have this conversation here?” Simon asked.

“No. We had it here.” The forest melted away, and their clothes melted off until they were talking in the dark of Tate’s dorm room again, the double room Tate had shared with a classics student named Kevin, who was constantly somewhere else, but always left the smell of his sweat behind. There was a Velvet Underground poster on the wall above them. The Warhol banana one. Andy Warhol, it said.

“Right,” Simon said. “It was only a month or so after the restaurant. I wouldn’t have waited until we took mushrooms to tell you.”

Simon’s memory of Tate thought for a moment, then said, “You do kind of tend to overshare.”)

“Are you alright? You just went somewhere else.” Aspen was still looking at him, concerned. Usually, when people were concerned, there were a lot of other emotions combined with the concern, like confusion, or shame, or worst, disgust, but Aspen was just feeling concern, which Simon didn’t mind. 

The music had shifted somewhat, to a mellower dreampop jam. In the other room, the eschatology student had been kicked off the mic. He’d said a slur in his rap that was not for him to say and was being escorted from the premises. He was saying more slurs on the way out the door.

“Free speech, motherfuckers!” he was shouting between slurs as he was being hoisted bodily onto the yard by two massive rugby players. People were cheering at his removal. “I have freedom of speech!” 

His emotions were caked inside him like layers of paint on a jeep. There was rage, sure, and under the rage, a layer of void, of which people who were not Simon might get glimpses, and only glimpses. But Simon knew that beneath the void was fear, metastasizing through his bones. Fear of what, even Simon couldn’t say, but he hated knowing it was there. He wished he could have just hated the eschatology student. It would have been easier that way.

“Yeah, I tend to do that,” Simon said.

Aspen let a little bit of silence slacken before she chimed, “Hey, you’re PsiArts, right? It’s crazy what they do to you guys over there. Like, this is all hard enough without having to get graded on people’s thoughts all the time.”

(Most of the therapists he’d been to in Sterling had been faith-based, which meant non-denominational Protestant. Which meant Baptist. His mother wasn’t Pentecostal anymore, and only really went to church on Christmas, but she’d been raised Pentecostal enough that she didn’t trust an office without a cross in it.

Before he’d begun to realize he was a boy, conversations with those therapists had been much easier. His cognitive hyperempathy was a problem, sure, but one of the therapists even said Jesus may have been a cognitive hyperempath, not that things ended super well for him. Besides, all the therapists loved to say that plenty of people lived full, fulfilling lives with Cluster-D psionic disorders. Just a few years before Simon started high school, a psionic kid from Sterling had graduated valedictorian and gone to some prestigious college, and he was working at the Pentagon now. No one knew exactly what he did at the Pentagon, but they assumed he was doing some pretty great things.

[Simon knew there were other stories about him, the Pentagon kid, whispered or mumbled through tissues in other therapists’ offices by all the girls he’d dated in Sterling. He was good at getting people to do what he wanted, apparently.]

But in late high school, when Simon had finally figured his boy-ness out and asked his sixth therapist, the one with the candy pink desk and the chest full of plush toys for kids way younger than him, would she please sign off on a treatment plan so that he could take hormones, she’d said, “Oh, Grace. God doesn’t want that for you. Besides, hormones are self-harm, really, if you think about it. No one can be a different person on the inside.”

Then, thinking of the brisket slow-cooking in her crockpot at home, she’d handed Simon a pamphlet called “Gender Confusion and You,” which he’d then hidden from his mother before throwing it into the outside bin on trash night that week, less than an hour before pickup.

After that the seventh therapist, who was all the way out in Pittsburgh, with the fern-green walls and the turtle shell glasses, and a COEXIST bumper sticker on her car, but still a cross on her windowsill, said, “I’m not sure it’s even legal to prescribe those anymore. We should really treat the hyperempathy first,” and he’d said, “I’ve been treating the hyperempathy for years. This is separate from that,” and she’d said, “Have you thought about joining a sport?”)

“I don’t know,” Simon said to Aspen, “It’s ok, I guess. I don’t even know what else I’d—”

(That was his senior year, the year four kids in his high school died of overdoses, and he was the only one who knew that only one of those deaths had been on accident, and that one of the three who had died on purpose had been buried under a headstone that said her name was Jason even though her name was really Eve.

That was when he started thinking about dying too. Not about himself at first, just about dying in the abstract, and then, at some point, about himself, dying. The next year, when he was putting in applications to schools, he snuck one out to College-of-the-Dales, and didn’t tell his parents until he was accepted, and didn’t tell them he was going until he got the aid package.

His mother was skeptical, scowled a little, raised her eyebrows. He’d waited until she was running late for her nursing shift to have the conversation, so he couldn’t really blame her for being a little miffed. She was worried most that the scholarship only covered three-quarters tuition, which was still the same cost as a state school would be with no scholarships at all. To him it was better than staying in Sterling, which would have been fatal. He’d take the loans, he decided. But he never stopped thinking about it. Dying.

When he told his father about getting into the Dales, his father smiled, which he didn’t often do. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

“But you never really said that,” Simon said to the memory of his father.

“No,” the memory replied. “But I felt it.”)

—study.”

“You look like you could use some air.” Aspen touched his shoulder, and began to direct him, and he went with her toward the front door.

“Oh.”

“No it’s not bad, you just kind of,”

“Glitched?”

“Yeah. Glitched.”

They walked through the hall and stepped onto the porch together, where the beer-drinkers were congregated. The air out here was warm, too warm for October, which everyone out here was trying very hard not to think about. In the side yard, the eschatology student was flinging mulch at the upstairs window of the house, still shouting about free speech.

“Go home!” called one of the beer-drinkers while the others laughed. “Go make a podcast about it!”

Aspen went with Simon to the other side of the porch, where there hung a flimsy swing with rusty chains facing the street.

He sat, staring out but not looking at anything. “I’m going to check out soon, I think. It’s all just getting to be too much. Just too much.”

“Okay.”

“Could you sit with me for a while?”

“Okay.” Aspen sat next to him on the swing. She smelled warm, like bergamot. Without even considering why he would do such a thing, he lay his head on her shoulder. Her thin fingers stroked his hair, and she started humming something, some little catch of a melody he’d heard once but couldn’t place. Her singing voice was deeper than her speaking one. The thoughts of others were still there in his mind, but quietened. He couldn’t tell what Aspen was thinking at all.

Upstairs, someone named Belinda was on three tabs of LSD. She was feeling the rough walls with her smooth hands. She had grown to believe there were invisible elves living in the walls, singing the house into existence. Simon closed his eyes and tried to tune all his thoughts into Aspen’s voice. He allowed himself to know finally that Tate had no intention of coming to the party, that he never really had in the first place.

(“I think I have hyperempathy, too,” Simon’s father said. Only his thick legs were visible from under the car. He was changing the oil, and the air was heavy with his odor. “I think life would have been easier for me if I’d ever gotten treatment.”

“It’s not too late.” Simon was sitting on the surface of the red tool bench, legs swinging beneath him. He was leaving for the Dales in a week. 

“I know.”

It was hot. Sticky. July. Fireworks going off overhead for the third weekend in a row. Someone mowing the lawn, somewhere down the street.

“I’m a boy, by the way. My name is Simon.”

“I know.”)

“I’m sorry he can’t love you,” Aspen had stopped singing, but was still touching Simon’s hair. “The art guy you’ve been thinking about. I don’t think he can love anyone, really. Some people just don’t have it in them.”

The moon was yellow and full in front of them. The eschatology student had moved on, gone to bring his mumblerap Armageddon elsewhere.

“Are people born without it, do you think?” He should have been surprised Aspen was like him, but he wasn’t. It was weird how much he wasn’t. “Or is everyone born with it, and then everything beats it out of them?”

“I mean, we were both born with it, right? It’s kind of hard to say either way when you were born with it. You’re too close to the thing. You’re practically inside it.”

(He could see the sunset from the garage, feel the warmth of its tangerine sigh. There were crickets outside, just audible through the suburban haze.

“But I never told you I was a boy. Not in person. I emailed it to you and Mom the week after I moved away. I was too afraid to text it.”

“I know. But I knew. How could I not?”

“We never even talked, that last time. It was silent, except for the sound of the oil dripping. Your grunts as you turned the cap.”

“Grunt.”

“You never told me you had it too.”

“I do. You know I do.”

“All you said to me was,”

“Hey, kiddo, pass me the combo wrench.”)

Inside, the whole mood of the party had downshifted, like the collective heartbeat of the building had slowed, like the house was breathing a little easier.

“I think people get hurt,” Aspen was saying. “And then they scab over. And they pick it and they pick it, just to remember what it’s like to bleed. And then it doesn’t heal. Until they let it.”

“Other people,” Simon half-joked, trying to claw himself back into himself. “Not us.”

“Sure. We’re exempt.”

“So.” Simon sat up again, pulling his head from Aspen’s shoulder. He stared out at the street, at the leaves dropping off of the trees on the other side. “Like, what do you even study?”

“Computer science.”

“Not PsiArts?”

“Fuck no, I’m not about to go work for the government.” Aspen stood, patted the paint chips from the porch swing off of her shorts, held out a hand to Simon. “You coming or going?”

He took it and rose to join her. The porch creaked under his step. Upstairs, the heady bros were talking about what the word genius even meant. “Haven’t decided yet.”

“Cool. Well, if you do,” but Aspen didn’t finish the sentence, just went back in, leaving the screen door open behind her.

Simon pulled out his phone, leaning against the porch railing with his forearms. He swiped the conversation with Tate out of existence, then blocked the number, even though he knew it wasn’t final, even though he knew he’d still unblock it again to text Tate, because Tate was still a very pretty boy. He thumbed over the conversation with his mother’s phone, stared at it for a while, at the name she still used for him that was not his name. Then he opened up the scroll of conversation with his father’s number, mostly short questions with one-word answers passed between them for so many years. Into the bubble, Simon typed I love you too, and without sending or deleting the message clicked the screen black, and walked back into the house.