Chapter 40

Joel wavedto Daniel in his rearview mirror as they began their two-man caravan. Then he punched the middle button on his satellite radio console, switching from indie music to BBC World Service. Might as well sneak in a news fix while he could.

"…told BBC Radio 4's Today program the UK was already in a third wave of infections and at least three-quarters of cases were the variant identified in India."

Fuck. It didn't take a Ph.D. in epidemiology to notice the pattern of virus spread. Whatever happened in the UK always happened here a month later.

Joel stretched his jaw and rubbed the masseter muscle under his right cheekbone, where that familiar spot of tension was already forming. Was the pandemic rebooting itself? If cases rose after Daniel went back to Omaha, how long before he could return? Maybe this time together was just the eye of the hurricane.

With a hard tap, he switched to the 80s-music station. Erasure's "A Little Respect" had just started. He left it there, since this song had always been a source of strength. For once, a little nostalgia wouldn't hurt.

When the song ended, he hit the console's rewind button to play it again. Then again, and again, until he arrived at Mom's.

As he turned onto her driveway, Joel switched off the music and rolled down his windows to let the cicada chorus wash over him in stereo—mostly the rare-ish septendecula, just like the previous emergence, and the emergence before that, and so on.

The house appeared suspended in time, its exterior still scrupulously neat. He parked in front of the garage. Daniel's pickup rumbled up behind him, its engine an understated bass line to the cicadas' high-pitched serenade.

The truck stopped and fell silent, but Daniel stayed in the driver's seat.

No need to rush him through this awful moment. Joel got out and went over to the roses climbing the trellis beside the garage door.

He caressed a cluster of pale-pink New Dawn blossoms. Their potent fragrance made Mom feel so alive, so here, it might as well have been tear gas for the effect it had on his eyes. They filled to the point of drowning, but he wouldn't blink. If the tears reached his cheeks, they'd trigger a positive feedback loop and then they might never stop. He had to be strong for Daniel now, and for Ella later.

A quick inspection of the roses showed no signs of Japanese beetle damage, which would've thrilled Mom. It took her son becoming an entomologist to convince her of the harms of pesticides, but she'd never stopped complaining about Popillia japonica.

Behind him, Daniel's door creaked open, then shut, and there came the soft crunch of boots on gravel—one step, then another, then no more.

"You okay?" Joel asked without looking at him. The moment felt balanced on a knife's edge.

"You're standing right where I first saw you," Daniel said, "thirty-four years ago today." He walked past the garage and stopped at the edge of the backyard.

It had changed a lot since 1987. Flower gardens had replaced most of the lawn, there was no longer a fence to keep in a dog, and the baby cherry trees had grown up, grown old, and died, replaced by shade-tolerant hybrid-musk shrub roses.

He went to Daniel and laid a soft hand on his back. "That's where you last saw your father, isn't it? When we were leaving for the bike trail?"

Daniel shook his head. "I didn't even look at him then. I just walked away." The corner of his mouth twitched down, then back into place, faster than a blink. "Last time I even acknowledged Dad was in the van as we were coming up your driveway. I was bitching about having to go to work with him."

Strange they'd never discussed the odd stroke of fortune that had brought them together. Maybe there was a reason Daniel had never broached the subject. Maybe he was ready now. "Why did you have to?"

"It was a condition of Mom letting me stay with him for the summer—that he'd keep an eye on me."

"Why all the supervision? You got suspended for fighting, but who would you fight with while sitting alone at your dad's house?"

"Mom wasn't worried about me fighting." Daniel gave a gruff laugh. "She was worried I'd sneak off and blow some random stranger with AIDS."

Yikes.

"So she suspected you were queer. That Jesus camp you mentioned—was it a conversion-therapy place?"

"Probably. I never went, thank God."

"What gave her the idea? Did she walk in on you with a guy, like my mother did with me and our exchange student?"

Daniel raised both eyebrows. "I need to hear that story some time."

"You just heard it. I think Mom was more pissed that we'd been smoking." He brushed his fingertips over Daniel's sleeve. "What happened?"

Daniel looked behind them, up the driveway.

"My sister won't be here for at least two hours. We have time to talk."

"So you want to hear our origin story." Daniel took off his faded Rockies baseball cap and ruffled his hair. "C'mon."

They headed for the wrought-iron bench in the middle of the rose garden, but Daniel started talking before they arrived. "My junior year, there was a new kid at school, this freshman who'd moved from Denver. He was kinda Goth—eyeliner, Cure shirts, pretty much kept to himself. Which meant he got bullied, especially by some of my football teammates."

Joel sat beside him, an uneasy tickle in his stomach.

"One day I come in late for homeroom and the kid's waiting at my locker, with nobody else around. He says he noticed I was the only one who didn't laugh when my friends were giving him shit. He wants to make a deal."

"What kind of deal?"

"A protection racket, I guess? He would pay me to make my friends stop beating him up. First he offers money, and I say no. You can't put a price on belonging, not in a small town like that. So then he offers drugs. He still had connections in the city.

"Now that I couldn't resist. Cops had cracked down on local dealers. My friends and I hadn't gotten high in months. I did the social-capital math in my head and figured if my friends got pissed at me for defending this guy, I could pacify them with weed."

"Solid analysis," Joel said. Being mega-popular sure was complicated. Good thing he'd never had that problem.

"So the next time some of my teammates start harassing this kid, I stand up for him. One of our linebackers doesn't back down, so I punch him, and it starts this huge fight. That's why I got suspended."

"Aww, my mercenary white knight." Joel curled his arm inside Daniel's. "I can't believe you've never told me this story."

"I'm not done. Being suspended meant I wasn't at school to look out for the Goth kid. My teammates started in on him, saying they'd stop if he told them what our arrangement was. I guess the kid was scared of being busted for dealing, so he told everyone I'd been protecting him in exchange for sex. ‘Blowjobs against bullies,' the scandal was called. People already thought he was gay because he was different, so he probably figured he had nothing to lose."

Well, that story had taken a turn. "That's so fucked up."

"The war on drugs made people do strange things." Daniel tilted his head. "And now marijuana is totally legal in Colorado. Even my hometown has a dispensary, gets a lot of business from Kansas."

Something didn't add up. "If your mom thought you were gay based on what this kid said, why didn't you just tell her the truth?"

"I did, but that made it worse, because she only half-believed me. She thought I was a gay stoner." Daniel raised his arms to encompass the yard. "And that's how I ended up here."

The cicadas' song swelled at this, as if performing a movie score.

Daniel sat forward and stared intently at the house. Joel followed his gaze to the kitchen window, where the long, thin leaves of Mom's spider plant were faintly visible.

"I hoped me and Dad would get along so well that summer—and he'd like me so much—that he'd let me live with him for my last year of high school. Of course that's not how custody works, but I thought we could be…"

"A family?"

Daniel nodded. "It was so good that first week. We went fishing and hiking and roller skating, and he even took me to Hersheypark. We rode the SooperDooperLooper five times."

"Cool."

"But then he changed. I thought he was sick of me, but it turned out he was just sick." He bent his head, and a lock of silver hair fell forward to hide his eyes. "I never thanked him for giving us a chance."

Joel put a hand to his aching chest. "Daniel…"

"Sometimes I still replay those last few days in my mind. I keep trying to think myself into that reality, the one where I saw the signs and he didn't die."

"I get it. Like if you just imagine hard enough, that alternate universe will open a door you can walk through, and then you can live there." Joel had created so many of those universes in his own head—mostly ones in which he and Daniel had a lifetime together.

"I might've noticed what he was going through, if only I hadn't been so mired in what I was going through."

Joel wrapped his arms around him, staunching his own tears against Daniel's shoulder. "We were just kids. You didn't even know him well enough to know something was wrong."

"I did know something was wrong," Daniel rasped out. "But I thought that something was me."

"No, never." Joel hugged him tighter. "He was lucky to spend time with you before he died. And think of how it would've been if you hadn't come here and you'd heard about his death from a phone call. It might've been less traumatic, but then you never would've gotten to know each other. Plus, no SooperDooperLooper."

"I never thought about that. At least I have those memories." Daniel sighed. "That helps, believe it or not."

"Hey, if you need to know how a situation could've been worse, I'm your guy. Speaking of death, I hereby request that, ‘It could've been worse' be engraved on my headstone."

Daniel uttered a soft laugh, then drew in a long breath. "Sorry, this is your mother's house. I shouldn't make today all about something that happened to me long ago."

"Time has nothing to do with grief." Joel pressed closer to ease the ache inside. "I miss my mom as much right now as I did last summer. Maybe more, because I can't stop thinking how thrilled she'd be to see you again." Finally he let go and straightened Daniel's shirt where he'd smooshed it. "And then she'd congratulate herself for bringing us together."

Daniel gave that slow, easy grin Joel was already hooked on. "I wish I'd known her."

Yeah, that was Joel's fault too, for not holding onto Dan in 2004. But there was no going back, so he might as well focus on mending the future.

"Speaking of regrets about moms…"

Daniel stiffened. "No. I've blocked her number. I don't want my mother anywhere near you."

"Me specifically, or any boyfriend?"

"Yes." Daniel got up and went over to the Buff Beauty rosebush. "These roses are really striking. I've never seen an orange-and-white one."

"I call them the Creamsicle rose."

"What is a bouquet of them supposed to say?"

"Coincidentally, they get you one free change of subject." Joel stood and took a step toward him. "I appreciate you trying to protect me from your mom's toxicity. Just promise that if she ever opens the door, you won't slam it shut on my behalf?"

Daniel's grumble was his only answer.

"How about this, then: Promise you won't slam the door shut on my behalf without talking to me about it first."

"Hm." Daniel leaned over and sniffed a Buff Beauty blossom. "Okay. I can promise that." He pulled out his keys. "You ready to go inside?"

"I think so."

Together they walked back to the driveway, where Joel retrieved their bulging bags of food and drink from his car while Daniel fetched the packing supplies from his truck.

Inside the front door, Joel hurried over to the security pad and tapped in the code. Out of habit, he raised his eyes to the upper-level railing that overlooked the foyer, the one where she would appear, Evita-like, to proclaim him too skinny in that shirt and ask when he'd last had a real meal.

Daniel shut the door behind them, softening the cicada screams to a low hum. "Do you need a minute?"

Joel shook his head, because speaking meant breathing and breathing meant crying.

The kitchen was bright and spotless, as if Mom had been expecting them. He set the bags on the countertop and went to the spider plant still thriving in the window. "I should take her plants home so the neighbor can stop watering them."

"Your house could definitely use a bit of greenery," Daniel deadpanned as he handed him a soda.

Joel went to pull the can's tab, then set it down. "I think I need something stronger."

"Already?" Daniel looked at the kitchen clock, the one that made a different bird call on each hour. It was quarter to oriole, or 10:45.

"I need to…" Joel pointed at the ceiling. "So no, it's not too early."

"All righty, then." Daniel retrieved two beer bottles from the cooler. "You want me to come with?"

"Very much."

As they climbed the stairs, the force of gravity seemed to increase, so that each step was more of a battle than the one before.

Maybe he and Ella didn't have to sell the house. Maybe for now they could rent it out, fully furnished. That way he wouldn't have to see it empty.

Daniel put a hand on his back, and the stair climbing became easier.

The door to the master bedroom was closed. Joel pushed it open before he could talk himself out of it.

It looked…normal. Heartbreakingly normal, like any moment she could sashay out of that walk-in closet, asking him which infinity scarf went best with whatever fabulous blouse she was wearing.

Joel strode forward, between the dresser and the neatly made bed. "This window. This is where I first saw you."

Daniel joined him, laying a light hand on his shoulder, but said nothing.

"You got out of your dad's van all slouch-y and sullen, way too cool to be here."

"I was just fronting."

"I still can't believe a guy like you even gave me the time of day."

"I needed a friend." Daniel kissed Joel's temple. "Also, it was way better than sweating to death in my dad's van."

Joel leaned into him for a pair of breaths, gathering strength. "Okay, let's check out my old room."

He led Daniel by the hand down the hall and into the place where they'd listened to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.

"It looks so different," Daniel said as they stepped into what was now a home gym. "Your CD shelf was there." He pointed to the wall where pulleys and resistance bands were mounted. "And you had more band posters than most music stores."

Joel went to the window. The glass seemed to quiver with cicada song.

He took a swig of beer and kept his eyes on the woods. He'd stared out this window so many times, the arrangement of the nearest trees was like a family photo in his head. Even now it was clear which ones had been there thirty-four years ago and which were newcomers.

His phone dinged with a text.

Ella

Arrrgh holiday traffic!!! Stuck on Jersey Turnpike near Newark. 4+ hours before I'm there. Sorry!

He read the message aloud to Daniel, then wrote back:

Cool that gives me time to steal all the best stuff

"Uh, Joel? You should see this."

Beneath the skylight, Daniel was peering down at a sealed cardboard box that sat on Mom's weight bench. He lifted two cream-colored envelopes.

No.

In Mom's handwriting, one read Joel and the other Ella. Both were labeled June 3, 2020.

"That's the day—" Joel forced out the words as he crossed the room. "The day she went into the hospital."

"Are these her final wishes, you think?"

Joel blinked hard to steady his spinning head. "No, she sent us funeral instructions and recorded her ethical will when she went back to work. A lot of healthcare people did. This letter must have been written when she was already sick." His throat held a sharp ache, as though squeezed by a slowly tightening fist. "There's no plants in here to water, so the neighbor wouldn't have found it. Mom didn't know it would take me almost a year to have the guts to come."

"You came as soon as you were ready."

"Did I?" He took the letter with his name on it. "I'm still not ready to read it." The envelope trembled in his hand. "But I have to, because Ella will read hers when she gets here."

"The letters were sitting on this box," Daniel said. "Maybe some of your stuff?"

Joel pointed to the Pets.com logo on the side. "Definitely an old box." He pulled out his keys, then used one to slice the yellowing tape that had likely sealed this carton for at least two decades. Finally he shoved back the box flaps.

Composition books.

His heart stuttered, then surged like a runner lurching for the finish line.

Daniel drew in a slow but audible breath. "Is that what I think it is?"

"Uh-huh." Joel reached out for the green comp book atop the left pile. "It's our journals."

"I never claimedto be an artist, dickhead," Joel said through his laughter.

"But the funny-the funniest part"—Daniel grabbed the edge of the weight bench they were sitting on, because it was either that or literally fall on the floor laughing—"is how you never get any better." He grabbed a square bright-blue diary from the scattered pile to his left and held it up. "Here you're six, and here you're twelve." He flourished the comp book in his right hand. "Two drawings of airplanes, yet they look almost exactly alike. Zero artistic development."

"But my bugs improved a lot." He passed a journal to Daniel over the box between them. "This was after we went to a flea circus for my eighth birthday."

Through his reading glasses, Daniel examined the two-page spread, in which an anatomically detailed flea was connected to…a wheelbarrow? "What is this?" He pointed to the vehicle.

"Chariot." Joel flipped to the preceding page. "See?"

They had races between two fleas, Ben and Hur. I don't know how the rinkleader could tell which one was which, but Hur won both times.

"I thought flea circuses were only in cartoons." Daniel squinted at the picture. "They use actual fleas?"

"Yes, and before I knew what an entomologist was, my secret ambition was to be a flea-circus ringleader—or ‘rinkleader,' as I called it." Joel reached deep into his side of the box, avoiding Ella's stack of pink (and later, black) diaries. "Let's find 1987 before I chicken out."

Daniel examined eleven-year-old Joel's drawing of a pair of airplanes on a collision course in the sky. Passengers in both jets were waving to each other, their heads and arms sticking out of the windows.

The entry read:

03/27/82 9:02pm

Song stuck in my head: Find Another Fool by Quarterflash

Went on a field trip to the FAA in Virginia. Being an air traffic controller looks so BORING. No wonder they went on strike. I don't see why they can't just let planes fly around on their own. May the best plane win!

Someone was either a young smartass or had completely missed the point of the tour.

"Holy crap," Joel said.

Daniel looked up. "Did you find it?"

"This entry's from a few weeks after we met. I wrote an insanely detailed account of Fawn Hall's testimony at the Iran-Contra hearings."

"She was so pretty."

"Right? Probably why my account was so detailed."

Daniel thumbed through the pages of text and images in his hands. Even as a child, Joel had possessed an enviable devotion to documentation, and the results of that constancy was a knee-high stack of insights. No wonder Dr. Mendel had decided to keep her kids' journals.

"What made you decide to start writing these?" he asked Joel.

"When I was little, I wanted to do everything my sister did. When Ella found out I had a diary too, she told me, ‘Boys don't do diaries,' so I stopped for a while. But then my dad encouraged me to start again. He said if I wanted to be a scientist, I should learn to keep consistent records, and that contemporaneous accounts are the most accurate—especially for big events, because our memories of those are usually distorted." Joel flipped back through the comp book. "Okay. Here's our first day together." He scanned it silently for a moment, then held it out toward Daniel. "It's mortifying and requires a trigger warning."

"About my dad?"

"Your dad and my, um, effusiveness."

"Consider me warned." Daniel swapped the 1982 journal for the 1987 one, then started reading.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh 5/30/87 5:05pm aaaaaaaaaaahhhh

Head song: Underneath the Bunker R.E.M.

I met this guy Danny who might be my soulmate.

!!!!!

Daniel put a hand to his chest, his breath stolen by that final word. "Wow."

"Yeah. Insta-smitten. I was so young and innocent."

Wait, back up to the beginning.No. Fuck it. I'll go in order of what I'm thinking.

WE WALTZED.

He was IN MY ARMS.

Ok now the beginning. Mom called Lyle to kill the cicadas because grownups are STUPID even if they're doctors. I guess Lyle felt like he had to humor her, which was a mistake that may have ENDED HIS LIFE.

Daniel tightened his hold on the journal. This play-by-play might be more than he could handle today.

He plunged on regardless.

(I'm still stoned, so I don't know how well I can tell this story. It's a mishmash of moments buzzing through my head.)

Lyle's son was with him and at first I thought he might be a stuck-up asshole. But then Danny said he felt like an asshole (can't remember why) and I thought, hmm, would an asshole ever feel like an asshole, and if he did, would he admit it? It's like crazy people not knowing they're crazy because if they did, they wouldn't be crazy.

I shall call it The Asshole Paradox.

WE WALTZED.

His skin was so warm and smooth. I could have licked him head to toe without ever re-wetting my tongue.

So much for innocent.

Me and Danny hung out because Mom wanted us out of the way—especially me, because I was on the verge of convincing her not to kill the cicadas (it almost worked this time, and if it HAD worked Lyle would maybe be ALIVE but Danny and I would've never gotten to know each other).

"You were talking your mom out of killing the cicadas? Was this before Dad and I showed up?"

"After," Joel said. "It was two against one, me and your dad talking Mom out of it."

"I don't remember that."

"This is a contemporaneous account." Joel pointed his beer bottle at the journal. "If it says it happened, then that's what happened."

Huh. Daniel had forgotten plenty about that day, so how could he be sure about this? It had been really loud, what with all the cicadas. Maybe Daniel hadn't heard them talking or hadn't paid attention.

Or maybe Joel had wanted to believe he'd had more power than he did, so he could blame himself for Dad's death.

Enough psychoanalysis.

Then the bike trail! Danny said he was supposed to go to some Christian camp because he beat somebody up at school (or somebody beat him up, it wasn't clear), but it's bullshit because a) that camp sounds like a place that would make someone MORE violent and b) Danny is a really good guy despite being majorly gorgeous. Maybe hot people are nicer where he comes from.

"Hot people are not nicer where I come from," Daniel said. "For what it's worth."

Joel's handwriting grew sloppier.

My eyes feel googly.

Just checked the mirror and I am BLURRY.

(And yet I must continue. The words, they floweth faster than I can writeth them downeth.)

We smoked the rest of Gavin's hash and got pretty fucked up, but not too fucked up to walk to 7-11 for snacks (though by that point we would've crawled on knees and elbows through two miles of hornet nests for snacks). And then

Urrrgh this part is fuzzy. Need a Pepsi.

Stuff we talked about:

1. Divorce

2. Beverly Hills Cop

3. Something about a wildcat (Puma concolor, I assume, not Lynx rufus)

4. OHNOOOO SHIT I told him I'm gay.

5. Snack foods

Did I mention Danny is a perfect hybrid of Andrew Clark and John Bender?

"Who's that?" Daniel asked, showing him the page.

"The two cute guys from The Breakfast Club. You had this whole jock/broken-bad-boy vibe going. Irresistible."

Daniel's face warmed. "Thanks. By the way, you told me you weren't gay. Which was technically the truth."

"You sure?"

"Positive. That's not something I would misremember."

Joel scratched his beard, his brow furrowed. "Your version makes more sense. I can't imagine any boy in those days coming out to someone they'd just met. Not with words, at least." He brightened. "Maybe I was remembering the way I looked at you, which might as well have been an I'm Queer forehead tattoo."

"Now that's what I remembered."

Joel's gaze drifted down the page, and his smile faded. "You can skim the next part."

"I'm not skimming any of it." Daniel turned back to the journal.

His stepdad hit him. Or maybe beat him. Is there a difference? Hitting seems like a single strike, like lashing out in a moment of anger. Beating is a bunch of blows, cold-blooded, like you could've stopped yourself but didn't.

It had been both.

Either way, I would never forgive Mom or Dad if they did that to me. I hope Danny knows it's okay to hate Derek. I'll tell him someday.

This —> — is a drop of condensation from my Pepsi can, not a tear. I'm not crying.

Daniel's throat thickened. He swept his thumb over the wrinkled spot that was not one of Joel's tears. Then he cocked his head. "Who's Derek?"

"Your stepdad."

"Rodney."

"Oh. You sure?" Joel held up a hand. "Sorry, of course you know your stepdad's name. Where the fuck did I get Derek from? That's not even close."

So much for the accuracy of contemporaneous accounts.

WE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALTZED

Swan Swan H was the song. Why can't I have THAT stuck in my head instead of Underneath the Bunker? Maybe because this day has been APOCALYPTIC and we did kinda have a bunker for a few hours even though it wasn't underground. The meadow felt like a great spot to wait out the end of the world.

I need to lie down or I'll throw up stand up or I'll fall asleep.

What else what else WHAT ELSE?????

A list:

-During Fall On Me, we toasted the sky with our Slurpee cups.

-"If better comes to best."

-He was nice to Freckles, who licked his hand (lucky girl).

-Danny has personally castrated a

Phone's ringing! Don't want to answer.

Daniel closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them and read on.

It was Ella. Lyle's dead. He was probably already dead when they brought him down from the treetops in the crane bucket.

He died in my backyard. Maybe he didn't have to.

"Fuck." Daniel breathed in deep and held it. After thirty-four years, why did his own heart still go haywire—in some kind of cardiac sympathy—whenever he thought of Dad's death?

Ugh UTB is still playing in my head. Its cha-cha beat doesn't match this horrible day moment AT ALL.

I read once that ancient Greeks considered it a blessing from the gods to die quickly like Lyle did (they called it a bolt from Zeus, I think). I need to tell Danny that, too. I think it would help.

"I didn't know that," Daniel said. "And it does help."

"Underneath the bunker in the (can't make out this word but maybe "ya-a-aa-a-aard"). Cha-cha-cha!"

There. Had to get the end of that song out of my mind and onto the page. Maybe now my brain DJ will move on to "Flowers of Guatemala," which is slow and sad and appropriate.

Head's finally clearing, ever since I found out for sure about Lyle. Soon all of this is going to feel like a dream, like the weeks I spent with Gavin, whose eyes I can't remember anymore.

My brain will erase Danny, too, unless I write it all down. I have to hold him in my memory. He'll be happy and safe there.

Daniel's breath hitched. He pressed his lips together and kept reading.

What's the world-record shortest time to fall in love with someone? Cicadas pick a mate in a few minutes, but don't humans take a lot longer? I told Danny things I"d never told anyone and I think vice versa.

But it's about more than that. More than him and me.

When I was with him it felt like the world might be okay. Not just MY world, and not just today, but the whole world, always. There are still nukes and endangered species, but our generation might grow up to fix those things.

And if we don't, maybe we'll make the world a little better plus raise good kids who'll make it a little more better and then they'll raise good kids who'll make it a little more better and they'll raise good kids who'll

Oh hey.

There it is.

In my head.

"Flowers of Guatemala"

Now I'm

(This drop -> - isn't condensation.

Neither is this one -> -)

Closing this now because it's just going to get wetter.

"Joel…" He reached out without looking.

Joel took his hand. "I'm still so, so sorry, Daniel. May your dad's memory be a blessing."

"It has been." Daniel sniffled. "Every picture I take, there's a little bit of him in it. You know, when I was real young, he always supported my love of art. He and Mom saw it as a way into the world for me. It was one of the few things they agreed on."

"Speaking of art…" Joel reached out and turned the page of his journal. There was a drawing and a brief postscript:

PS: 5/31/87 3:04am: Just remembered Danny called the middle schoolers outside the 7-11 "skate dicks" and now I'm lying here in the dark laughing. SKATE DICKS!!!!!

I miss him already.

With blurry eyes Daniel examined the picture on the facing page. "Why is Abraham Lincoln strangling a small child?"

"That's us waltzing," Joel said. "Your top hat was an embellishment."

"I'm going to teach you how to draw."

"Why would you do that when my bad art is so entertaining?"

Daniel looked at him, and couldn't stop looking at him. "This part of the room, it's where your bed used to be."

Joel nodded, his eyes wary. "You're not suggesting we?—"

"No." Daniel lifted the box of journals between them and set it on the floor. "I just want to kiss you in the place where I first wanted to kiss you."

"Oh!" Joel looked surprised. "When we were listening to the Cure?"

"Yep."

"Was it because the song was called ‘The Kiss'?"

"I don't think that was the main reason."

"But you wanted to kiss me ten minutes after we met?"

Daniel hesitated. Had he really? Or had he been so full of confusion and despair he hadn't known what he wanted? Joel's journal entry confirmed they'd had an immediate connection, which until now Daniel had assumed he'd merely projected back and imagined, infusing their meeting with layers of meaning in hindsight.

"I knew I wanted something," he said finally, then brushed his lips over Joel's, the current between them as electric as ever. "Something to do with you."