You who I imagine in a ski hat and camo cargo shorts, I gotta say thanks. You who had to of been lighting up that night, thank you. It must have been awful dark ducking between the limbs, the outstretched things that might have become other things if you had the chance to drag some hash before the headlights. Oh, the headlights! I know you, because I know me. Did you see them as I always do? Beacons slowly rolling in red and blue flashes that diffuse to purple in the suburban smog. Is that when you dropped him and started slapping chucks over the dog-shit-stained sidewalk? They say no dogs allowed at that park. They got a yellow sign with a golden-retriever silhouette and a red circle with a line slashed through. People bring their dogs all the time.

We didn’t bring dogs that day, but we brought mice. By “we,” I mean “me” as in a he and “her” as in a she. We were just friends. They don’t believe that always or else they set us up for rom-com dramatics, but sorry. Us friends had just bought the mice from some pet store and went to the park to set them savage. It was afternoon. Hot. Sticky. No lemonade for us. Too old for a stand, too young to buy the vodka to spike it. The swing set sat stupid and limp without children in its bucket seats. The grass was grown too high. Graffiti stained the brick wall that held our young backs covered in clothes from mall stores, clothes so thin our spines pressed in knobs. She said ouch when she sat against the wall of that park.

That park, huh? What a place for people like us, huh? Us kids. Just kids. We go to empty swing sets tattooed with graffiti to free red-eyed albino mice. We let loose snake lunch in the grown-high grass. Those mice sniffed their noses in the air. Their claws scattered over the rock. You know the rock? You must. You left him by it. It’s the rock with the fluorescent mushrooms, with the spray-painted kid words made of numbers to save time. 4ever. 2morrow. H8. It’s the rock with algebra expressing kid love. Susie + Johnny = Luv 4Ever. Are you Johnny? Are you Susie? And did it really last forever or just for 4ever? How do you shorten something that stands for always?

The mice had shit in their box. We thought they were scared maybe or are mice just gross? Did they think we were snake people? What kind of people keep snakes? Not us. We had on suede boots that originally cost ninety-nine bucks, but we got them on sale for eleven. She had glimmer shit on her eyes and mouth and I watched her put it on her cheeks, too. She applied it with a brush that I’d skimmed against my nose. It made an itch that I scratched for maybe two minutes. She applied this purple stuff that wasn’t purple but “plum,” in sharp circles and said the circles had to be sharp or she’d look like a whore. I grabbed her make-up bag and gutted out pink things, plastic things, goo and glamour things. I uncapped black tar and she said to brush it on my eyelashes. I did and they stuck in clumps that TV commercial ladies call spider legs. I got out red gloss and dabbed it in spots on my lips like she did and then I rubbed them raw together until the red dab had soaked in and my lips had changed and I’m a boy and I’ve changed from “boy.” We weren’t snake people.

What we were was sweating and sticky and cursing up at the big bloated sun that had turned the air queasy, and we did all that wearing those bargain boots and wearing her make-up. We bargained with the weather. She shed her flimsy cover-up thing and I took off my flimsy shirt thing. We let loose collar bones and our throats to the hot day, and the hot day extracted from our skin sweat beads that gathered and grouped into pit stains and I said “ew.” I said “ew” and I was a boy and that isn’t right, is it? That’s wrong isn’t it, Johnny? Susie?

We kicked the tall grass, kicked up our boots and blotted out that damn sun. We spit. We dry-humped in dry grass that cracked and snapped under our spine-filled backs like bones from something small, some critter shadowed then ended by a boot. And in the grass we wished for some grass and then I rolled over and cumulous clouds cast shadow.

And we never dry-humped. That was a lie. Sorry. I’m a boy and we didn’t dry hump. I’m sorry.

And that’s where you left him, so thanks. Thank you for that exact spot. Thank you for standing there the night before or the day before, or three days, a week, a month before. Thank you for being there before and dropping him where I set my hand that sun-saturated afternoon. Thanks for coming to the playground with your glass seashell. Oh, you know him like I know him. Below the clear glass he swirls in pink, yellow, and red. He ends in the bowl and twists up in a glass cone to the lips of boys. I imagine you a boy. Is that wrong? Girls smoke too, but he seems to be a boy for the boys. You left his hole full of soot stain. He was dirty when I lifted him up to the sun and sucked in my breath. Hidden treasure found. Look, Make-Up Girl. Look at this thing unearthed.

I named him then: Orphan.

And she laughed and asked about the pronoun of the thing. Boys name their bowls after girls. A boy’s bowl is a girl. But I found a him and I named him and he was mine. And it was he and he, my boy lips on his boy mouth sucking deep the smoke from smoldered herbs that make you all lightheaded and warped. Does “warped” have a negative connotation? It seems to, but to be “warped” in lightheadedness seems okay. Some people say to be a boy in the me sense of the term “boy” is to just be different. I don’t get that, though, because a lot of things are different from other things. Actually, everything’s different. But everything doesn’t drag everything through the streets until that everything is a snarled lump of dead, so does that mean I’m something different than different? I must be. Must be beyond different. Warped? Does “me” as a word have a negative connotation? I’m bad?

Those smoked up herbs, they make the world softer.

The swing set and the grass and the graffiti wall all softer. You must know. You know me like I know you, so I gotta say thanks for leaving me a him to smoke my weed from. Thank you for running from the police and leaving him behind. ’Cause its strange days. And the police with their tickets and court dates and jail-cell rooms and their flashing lights. Oh, the lights. Sometimes when I’m sucking on him deep and the world is at its softest, those lights pulse in my peripheral. And I know they’re coming with handcuffs and fines and community-service hours for the boys that aren’t “boys.” But us “boys,” we know. We know about coping mechanisms to deal with being “boys.” We know a softer place at the bottom of a bottle or a bowl. And then they come to take them away.

Sharpness.

Lucidity.

A focused world.

Where the wrong is clear and the bowls for boys are always girls. And I cry about the clarity sometimes, so sorry about that too.

But then I gotta say thanks, because you must get it. I gotta say thanks for leaving him for me. A him, a me. Thank you for the softness.

Story by Nick Sawatsky
Photography by Matteo Musci