down cleanly, easily, and we dance around some more—two people, victorious. Laughing.
Being with Flynt is strangely freeing. He’s different from everyone else I’ve ever met. Which makes me feel less completely and totally abnormal, less alien. I just didn’t know before that another person, let alone a boy, could make me feel this way.
I barely know anything about him, but he seems so familiar— as though I could flip through childhood photo albums and he’d be in every picture. Grinning. Swinging one-armed from trees in summer. Making three-armed snowmen in winter.
“All right,” he says, pulling some red mittens from the pockets of his coat. Paper scraps and pen caps and a small plastic blue owl tumble out with them. “What say you we move on to the next part of our tour?”
I nod. Flynt grabs the chair we’ve been chucking and returns it to its resting place, near the Dumpster, for the next trash can bowlers to use.
I have a sudden aching wish, lodged in the pit of my stomach, for Oren to be here right now. He would have gone crazy for this, he would have come up with some way to give the game stakes, to make it more competitive, he always did; he would have won; we would have had to give him back-scratches whenever he wanted them for two weeks. I wonder if he ever went trash can bowling, when he left, before he left for good.
The piece of paper I always keep in my shoe slides backward from my arch, burning itself into my heel.
That’s when I feel it: the urge , swelling in me like air being pumped into a balloon. I try to deflate it so Flynt won’t see—push with my hands against my head to hold it in, but I can’t. It’s too powerful; it hurts; it pushes back until my hands fly from my forehead and I walk toward the fallen trash cans, touch each of them—six—in case Oren ever touched them too. Six trash cans. Maybe I’ll inherit his cells, take them into my cells, and maybe some part of him will grow back there. Six chances. Three breaths at each can. Six chances for him to come back. Eighteen breaths. Eighteen chances to breathe him in.
Flynt hollers to get my attention. I’ve been standing in one spot, lost inside my head, and he’s yards and yards ahead of me now. I run ahead to him and he leads me on, farther into Neverland, the city of lost children.
“And this is where the junkies go to buy heroin, and the corner across the street is where the cokeheads go to buy cocaine, and this one over here is where they’ll sell you meth, if you’re really desperate,” Flynt explains. “It’s all very organized around here.”
Everything he tells me about the workings of Neverland makes me feel very small and young. The worst thing that ever happens in high school world is when people get caught at the mall cutting class, or smoking cigarettes behind the science labs—nothing could possibly be worse than detention, than being grounded and not allowed to go to one of Sarah Moreland’s infamous hook-up parties. No one thinks outside of the Carver bubble—how much worse things could get, or how much better.
Flynt steers me farther down the desolate-looking street. The few buildings still standing are window-cracked and look as though at some point they have all sustained major structural damage by fire.
Neverland is spread out like a dysfunctional maze where nothing quite connects back to itself or makes sense. It seems like the whole place was laid out by a group of people who lost interest halfway through its construction: the church without a steeple; the rusted-out birdbath that acts as a kind of community P.O. Box where messages are dropped and exchanged; the empty lot full of sinks and toilets and cracked metal tubes and parts known as “the bathhouse.” Flynt explains it is a common Neverland hookup spot.
Half the people we meet are other runaways. They squat mid-sidewalk and part like the Red Sea to let us through, like Flynt is Moses. Some raise their fists to him as we
Being with Flynt is strangely freeing. He’s different from everyone else I’ve ever met. Which makes me feel less completely and totally abnormal, less alien. I just didn’t know before that another person, let alone a boy, could make me feel this way.
I barely know anything about him, but he seems so familiar— as though I could flip through childhood photo albums and he’d be in every picture. Grinning. Swinging one-armed from trees in summer. Making three-armed snowmen in winter.
“All right,” he says, pulling some red mittens from the pockets of his coat. Paper scraps and pen caps and a small plastic blue owl tumble out with them. “What say you we move on to the next part of our tour?”
I nod. Flynt grabs the chair we’ve been chucking and returns it to its resting place, near the Dumpster, for the next trash can bowlers to use.
I have a sudden aching wish, lodged in the pit of my stomach, for Oren to be here right now. He would have gone crazy for this, he would have come up with some way to give the game stakes, to make it more competitive, he always did; he would have won; we would have had to give him back-scratches whenever he wanted them for two weeks. I wonder if he ever went trash can bowling, when he left, before he left for good.
The piece of paper I always keep in my shoe slides backward from my arch, burning itself into my heel.
That’s when I feel it: the urge , swelling in me like air being pumped into a balloon. I try to deflate it so Flynt won’t see—push with my hands against my head to hold it in, but I can’t. It’s too powerful; it hurts; it pushes back until my hands fly from my forehead and I walk toward the fallen trash cans, touch each of them—six—in case Oren ever touched them too. Six trash cans. Maybe I’ll inherit his cells, take them into my cells, and maybe some part of him will grow back there. Six chances. Three breaths at each can. Six chances for him to come back. Eighteen breaths. Eighteen chances to breathe him in.
Flynt hollers to get my attention. I’ve been standing in one spot, lost inside my head, and he’s yards and yards ahead of me now. I run ahead to him and he leads me on, farther into Neverland, the city of lost children.
“And this is where the junkies go to buy heroin, and the corner across the street is where the cokeheads go to buy cocaine, and this one over here is where they’ll sell you meth, if you’re really desperate,” Flynt explains. “It’s all very organized around here.”
Everything he tells me about the workings of Neverland makes me feel very small and young. The worst thing that ever happens in high school world is when people get caught at the mall cutting class, or smoking cigarettes behind the science labs—nothing could possibly be worse than detention, than being grounded and not allowed to go to one of Sarah Moreland’s infamous hook-up parties. No one thinks outside of the Carver bubble—how much worse things could get, or how much better.
Flynt steers me farther down the desolate-looking street. The few buildings still standing are window-cracked and look as though at some point they have all sustained major structural damage by fire.
Neverland is spread out like a dysfunctional maze where nothing quite connects back to itself or makes sense. It seems like the whole place was laid out by a group of people who lost interest halfway through its construction: the church without a steeple; the rusted-out birdbath that acts as a kind of community P.O. Box where messages are dropped and exchanged; the empty lot full of sinks and toilets and cracked metal tubes and parts known as “the bathhouse.” Flynt explains it is a common Neverland hookup spot.
Half the people we meet are other runaways. They squat mid-sidewalk and part like the Red Sea to let us through, like Flynt is Moses. Some raise their fists to him as we
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