outside of his three T-shirts and a blue argyle sweater, where she can see it, where his father sloshing his coffee into a travel mug can see it. He watches his parents not watch him, drive away in their separate, oversize pollution machines. His father slinging a briefcase stitched together from an endangered species, his mother meandering out to buy hunks of dead animal for supper before barricading herself with paint, paintbrushes and canvasses big as sails, small as stamps, in her studio in her fashionable yoga pants, made by tiny brown children for less than a nickel a day.
Because the Friday right after the horrific Thursday, he fought to see the principal to tell him about his skateboard thrown in the river. The dead boy had to scramble up the fortress wall of secretaries and vice-principals. The principal straightened his tie, rolled forward his chair, jingled the keys in his pocket, said, —If they purloined your skateboard when you were all off school property, there’s nothing I can do. That would be more of a matter for the police. The principal clearing his throat emphatically to indicate the matter was Closed.
Because the dead boy ran into his English teacher at the Pita Pit after talking to the principal, in her black clothes punctuated with her own white, chalky handprints, her face splotchy white and pink. The only teacher who ever says anything like, —That attitude smells worse than poo, when someone says The Glass Menagerie’s a gay play. He told her about the principal, and she said, — He really said that to you? You’ve got to get out of this deadbeat school.
Her eyelids and pinked lips twitched.
Because the dead boy and Ginger wrestled into scorching sex in the dead grass, hot enough to start a grass fire, their bodies flaring in the dark, in the middle of a February chinook, the smell of chinook wind and Ginger in his nose, Bed Head shampoo, blue wool sweater the dead boy pulled up over Ginger’s head, Ginger’s sweaty silky ribcage, flowery fabric softener from all six of their shirts, Ginger’s tongue pushing bright as a meteor into the dead boy’s, Ginger’s nipples, the warm salt of him, behind a tombstone that said, Lél Somogyi Gone But Never Forgotten 1987–2004. Ginger’s torso naked and slick, dead grass and twigs sticking to his skin. Afterward, the dead boy accidentally on purpose pulling over his head Ginger’s blue sweater in the dark, and Ginger was so sweaty and hot he forgot the sweater, tugging on his other shirts and his jacket in a rush because he was late for home. The next morning in the hallway, Ginger’s fingers sticking in his girlfriend’s tangled hair, stroking, while they prodded their way through the waves of students pushing, bumping and clanging lockers around them, the dead boy wading toward them as though by pure cosmic coincidence, Ginger hovering over a tangle in his girlfriend’s hair, and not catching the dead boy’s eye, not for a second even though they had agreed last week that occasional eye contact was not completely verboten, they could kiss and fuck with their eyes, no one could tell if they just fucked with their eyes. Ginger’s irises radiating aurora borealis from Hershey Kiss brown into caterpillar green, a hazel colour meant for kissing. Their bodies’ protons and electrons zinging across the shortening space between them; Ginger staring at the top of his girlfriend’s head. The dead boy and Ginger, each of them a sun, each of them a planet in orbital thrall to a sun, the dead boy hugging himself, suddenly cold, in Ginger’s blue knit sweater. The body slam of Ginger twisting away from the dead boy, not a single eyekiss, like the dead boy was already dead. Though not a surprise: Ginger frozen subzero like he always was in the days following a cemetery date.
Because on Friday, Valentine’s Day, an envelope with the dead boy’s name on it was slipped into his locker, just a corner of it peeping out from the metal crack between the locker’s metal frame and the locker door, and when he pulled it out and ripped it open starting at the crumpled corner, he found a card — a painting of a bowl of fruit, circled by a ballpoint-pen heart. Inside, scrawled in more ballpoint, Happy Valentine’s Day Faggot. Love, G. Calling him faggot was Ginger’s idea of a joke. An exhausted, pathetic joke.
Because Ginger’s girlfriend hissed at him, she is such a dyke-in-training and she doesn’t even know it, so he hissed back and he was doomed. Once, a long time ago, he overheard her playing a waltz on the piano in the band room. He had to fight not to cry, the song tugged at him so.
Because he scraped himself down the crowded walls of the cafeteria, past a jughead accompanied by a jughead parasite who said, —Out of my way, homo, as they chewed their way into the middle of the cafeteria lineup.
Because on his walk to school this morning—he’s a dead man —a cat pads across the dead boy’s path with a grey and yellow bird in its mouth, stepping into human boot steps pressed into the ice and snow, neat, like a dog carrying a newspaper.
Because today, tromping his way to school through mushy cigarette butts, a lost comb in the muck, waiting at this intersection as the cars slop by exhaling exhaust that burns his eyes, his phone chirps, Ginger: i cant hang out wit u any more this time its 4 real …I want my locket back
Ginger will never change.
Because the crosswalk light shines its red eye, refuses to blink into green, cars spitting gravelly snow, one slap to his face after another on this Monday that refuses to start and refuses to end, he has to stand and stand, waiting for the light beside the brick wall spray-painted Ava is a muff muncher. Ginger wants the locket back, the only thing Ginger’s ever given him, the only thing that keeps the dead boy going through all the days of Ginger pretending he doesn’t exist. Monday. He can’t bear it. He turns and tromps back home, ignoring cars, his frozen rubber soles scuffing iced concrete. The wind slathering cold, his exposed throat, the locket a hunk of metal pounding against his sternum, the chain winding winding round his neck.
Because he can’t bear it.
He can’t bear any of it. It will never get better.
Because he wants to be in charge of his own ending.
Tuesday
Faraday
Until Faraday settles into her desk and the news about Patrick Furey whacks her between the eyes, all she can think about is the tuft of evil frizz above her ear that day, what a toolshed her brother George M. is, hiding her straightening iron and not giving it back no matter how much she shrieks, and how she’s finally going to buy that brocade bag with the medieval unicorn tapestried on the side and the humongous silver clasp (also unicorn-shaped) after school, and if someone else has already bought that perfect bag, and the metal shelf where it normally sits is empty dust in the shape of the bag instead of crammed with the delicious bulk of the bag itself, she will kill herself. She will.
She swings through the school bathroom door into the swirl of flushing toilets, gushing faucets and girls tit to shoulder at the mirrors lacquering on mascara and lip gloss, the smells of perfume and deodorant and freshly washed hair poofing into the air, and she tries to clamp down that frizz with another barrette, brushes on another lick or two of mascara. She tries to prepare for this day: how to not spill on herself, or have a menstrual calamity, or call her Teacher Advisor her homeroom teacher like she did last week like some junior high school loser. When she drops into her desk, the barrette clipped crooked and poking at her scalp so hard she’s seeing a galaxy of stars, a boy at the back of the class neighs at her and his posse all laugh. She hooks her unicorn pen out of her unicorn pencil case and clicks it once just as her Teacher Advisor Mrs. Mochinski rattles out the announcements in her tin-can voice, — Yearbook club meeting in roooooom 210, graduation committee meeting at 3:15 in the band roooooom, math club meeting tomorrow at lunch in compuuuuuuter lab 14, and Madison, the girl who sits behind Faraday, not a friend of Faraday and her unicorns, taps Faraday on the shoulder and whispers, — Patrick Furey’s dead. That’s why he’s not here for a second day in a row. Look!
Faraday whips around in the direction of Patrick Furey’s desk, her hair fanning out in the sudden wind, Patrick Furey’s desk empty, Madison sucking on the corner of her cellphone, already murmuring to Jennifer next to her. Madison tucking the cellphone into the