It was the first time she had lied to her closest friends.
-1-
Xavier
NOW THAT HE LOCKS his door—even secures it with a bolt he bought at Home Depot and installed himself before anyone could stop him—Xavier can sleep, his descent into black nothingness steep and quick. It’s like falling into a vat of black soup. He lies down, he falls deep, and it is morning, too early, impossible to rise. He is making up for fifteen years of lying awake and waiting, worried about what his twin sister might do.
The day they find the body on the greenbelt begins with a tapping at his window. The tapping is forceful and insistent: it can only be Roma. Xavier tries to ignore it, to roll over and press his pillow around his ears. But she keeps rapping, tapping, as if she is a woodpecker, and this image, at least, makes him smile as he abandons sleep and moves into the day. Roma as a sharp-beaked bird, all spindly legs and claws, her head jutting back and forth endlessly.
He pulls open his blackout curtains. She is there, one hand on her hip, one raised to continue the endless knuckles-against-the-window barrage. Xavier stares at his sister, who begins talking, though he cannot hear her through the thick security glass. Xavier glances to the camera in the corner of his room. He unlatches the window and waits for the piercing alarm, but there is only Roma’s voice.
“…long enough,” she says. “Now the screen, little brother. Let’s go.”
Roma calls Xavier “little brother,” though she beat him into the world by only three minutes and twenty seconds. She also calls him “boy,” or “boi,” as if she is a rapper, when she’s just a fifteen-year-old girl, cruel and spoiled, deranged. Xavier hesitates.
“What?” says Roma.
“What are you doing?” says Xavier. “You turned off the alarm?”
She grins and shrugs, thinking he is calling her smart. She raises an eyebrow. “Open the screen or I’ll cut it,” she says.
He laughs. “Oh, you have a knife now?” he says. “You’re a full-on gangbanger now?”
“I don’t have a knife,” says Roma. She rummages in her miniature pink backpack and pulls out child scissors, holds them up triumphantly.
“I don’t care if you cut it,” says Xavier. He wants to shut the window, to go back to sleep, but he knows from experience that Roma will have her way. He opens the screen.
“Many thanks and happy returns,” says Roma, climbing nimbly inside. She stretches, exposing a belly ring. She’s wearing tight jeans and a midriff-baring top. Her makeup is a mess.
“Where were you?” says Xavier.
She crosses his room without answering.
“Roma,” says Xavier, “where have you been all night?”
She unlocks his door and steps through it. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she says. She slips the child scissors into her back pocket and is gone. Xavier shuts and locks the door. But there is no going back to sleep. The first day of summer has begun.
-2-
Bobcat
BOBCAT BIKES PAST HER apartment on his way to the pool, and then—compelled by a magnetic force—he veers into a parking space, locks his bike, and runs up the stairs. Outside apartment 5B, he pauses, honestly kind of scared.
（There could be someone in there with her.） （He should leave.）
（Something is wrong with him.） He knocks.
From the landing outside her door, he can see the condo complex pool where he works on weekends, not because he needs money but because he wants to be away from his house. His dad’s “Mr. Good Time” act and his mother’s face, her smile a frozen mask of effortful joy. The air around them is toxic. He only wants to breathe.
Lucy opens her apartment door. She wears pink pajamas and looks so beautiful he almost tells her so. “Robert?” she says, sleepily. Her eyes are unfocused, as if she is stoned. It scares him. “Are you high?” he asks.
Instead of answering, she takes his hand and pulls him inside.
Lucy’s apartment is an adult’s apartment: framed posters, a bowl of fruit, a neatly made bed with accent pillows, no socks on the floor. Bobcat looks around. Where is her laundry? Lucy is even neater than his mother and their housekeeper combined. Bobcat thinks of asking if she cleans her own apartment, or complimenting her on her countertops, which gleam and smell of lavender. But that would be weird.
There is no pot smell. Only the lavender counter spray, the smell of her sleep, and some kind of fruity lotion.
As soon as her door is locked behind them, she falls to her knees and takes him in her mouth.
（He stops talking.）
When, later, she says, “I’m sorry, did you ask me something?” He shakes his head.
（He wants to say, “I love you.”） （But that would be weird.）
-3-
Charlie
CHARLIE’S PHONE HAS TWELVE Snapchat messages before he even wakes up. Only one has words, and it’s from Amir. Charlie smiles, just thinking of Amir. They’ve been together about a month, only Charlie’s third relationship since coming out. Amir is more experienced but just as nervous, just as smitten, Charlie thinks. They’ve gone shopping three times at Flamingos Vintage, held hands under the table at Kerbey Lane once, and on the last day of school, Amir had come up behind Charlie at his locker and kissed his neck.
“Get a room!” said Van, who was on the basketball team with Amir.
“Only if you pay for it, brother!” cried Amir.
“Hot couple,” said Sophie, the girl with the locker next to Charlie’s.
Charlie had blushed, turning to smile at Sophie, and Amir had leaned down to kiss Charlie on the lips.
Heaven!
Amir’s message reads: HIIIII. WHAT SHOULD WE DO TONIGHT? MEET AT THE 7-ELEVEN FOR SNACKS AND THEN???
Charlie answers with an emoji of a cat in a party hat. He immediately wishes he hadn’t sent such a stupid emoji, but it’s already done. He gets up to shower and pee. In the shower, he thinks about how he should change his Snapchat avatar’s outfit. His avatar wears basketball shorts and Jordan 1s, but he’s more preppy now, less into sports gear. He loves the band Vampire Weekend and wants to copy the lead singer’s boarding school style—Birkenstocks and slim-fitting khaki pants. His mom is obsessed with seeming rich, so she was thrilled when he asked to buy some J.Crew and Abercrombie off eBay.
He hasn’t come out as bi to his mother officially, but he assumes she knows. Charlie’s mom doesn’t like to talk about uncomfortable topics, and Charlie figures that if she wants to keep his father a secret, he can keep his sex life a secret. It angers him; it’s bullshit. Charlie wishes he and his mom could just have a big cryfest and be real about things. It’s exhausting to live the way they do, his mom pretending she can afford things she can’t, Charlie pretending he is seeing his lifeguard friends when he is seeing Amir.
Xavier and Roma and Bobcat are fine, they are his everything, his best friends. But they’re kind of strange about Amir. They like him—he’s on the basketball team, after all, and leaving for Tech （Div I, full ride） at the end of the summer—but Charlie knows his being in love makes them feel uncomfortable. Maybe jealous? Nobody cares that he’s bi; it’s more that he has a lover and the rest of them don’t. Not yet. Not really. Unless you count Bobcat’s Lucy, which to be honest, Charlie doesn’t.