Gone, Gone, Gone by Hannah Moskowitz

learn to perform that kind of brilliant wordsmithing I demonstrated right there.
    I keep typing. If I stop to think, that’s when I start crying or otherwise get fucked.
    My animals escaped. We’ve found some—remember Sandwich? and Kremlin? I sent you pictures, you remember—and it’s hard and kind of scary. No one is giving up, so pray for them, okay? Hey, I wanted to apologize for always making fun of you when you prayed. Really, I thought it was cute the whole time, I just thought you liked being teased, I don’t know. I’m stupid. But it helped me sleep when you wished that I would. I mean prayed that I would.
    I hope school’sgoing okay. Did you get into that art class after all? I’ll come up there and bash some skulls together or something if you need. If that would help.
    I ran into your mother at the grocery store the other day. She had a bag of avocados, said she’d tell you hi from me next time you called, but I said she didn’t need to because you were still emailing, but I kind of hope she said hi for me anyway. Also, are we still emailing?
    Love,
    C
    I put my head down next to my keyboard. Kremlin wants to know what’s wrong.
    “I have a broken heart,” I tell her.
    She whines a little.
    I say, “Yeah, I know. I don’t like it either.”
    Cody . . .
    I’ve known Cody since I was six. We used to play together because we lived next door as toddlers, and even though he moved away before we were really aware of each other, our moms stayed friends so we saw each other a lot for those forced play dates, and eventually we begged for play dates every day. We were the exact same height when I was in first grade—like, tothe centimeter. We thought that was really cool. Of course, by the time we started hooking up, I was practically twice his size. But when I was six, we were perfectly matched and it was great.
    I’m not huge, though I guess I must look really tall next to the boys I keep . . . doing things with. I’m tall enough that people always tell me I should play basketball (though when you’re black, you only have to be like five foot ten before people start asking) but not the kind of freaky tall where I have to worry about how high doorways are. It’s not really a big deal, so it’s weird that it keeps being this thing that I think about, although usually I think about it in terms of Lio’s smallness rather than my largeness, and maybe that means something, but probably not, because it has nothing to do with Cody.
    Anyway, when Cody grew up, or I grew up and he stayed small, he turned into some kind of a big deal—a fantastic soccer player, a huge smile, a personality that seemed like it must have eaten bits of other people’s to get that big, like a very hungry caterpillar. He was so much more than alive. He always was.
    Our first kiss was in fourth grade for me and fifth grade for him, when we were playing hide-and-seek. I said if I found him in less than two minutes, I got to kiss him. I don’t remember what happened if I didn’t. But I found him in a minute and forty-two seconds, roughly, and he wasinside this old chest that holds all these old clothes that my grandmother draped all over herself before she died, and I pulled him out of the chest and he was shrouded in turquoise and gold and I kissed him.
    We waited until I turned fifteen because even we thought it was a little weird to have sex at fourteen, and he was sixteen and really not okay with having sex with a middle schooler, so that was the summer before ninth grade for me, and the summer before tenth grade for him, and he was almost sixteen, and that was our summer.
    It was so ours, that whole summer.
    It was awkward and difficult and painful at first, but he loved me and we were really gentle, and then it got good. Really good. It got closer to the movies than antiseptic health class told me it ever could.
    So fuck health class and fuck the preachy advice your parents give you, because sex didn’t ruin our