﻿IT STARTS AT A HORRIBLY BORING PARTY.
It's the beginning-of-the-school-year cocktail party for rising seniors to mingle with their teachers—a Redwood Academy tradition. They chat with you like you're an adult for one night and then they act like it never happened and go back to treating you like a fourteen-year-old during the year; unless, of course, you get in trouble, and then it's you should know better, you're almost an adult.
None of this has happened to you yet, but standing there in your silk-poly dress, your hair up in a chignon your mother had to help you with, you sense it the way you know when it's going to storm.
You're supposed to know better, but better than what, exactly? You're not so sure about that. Yet.
There are a few new students here, transfers in for senior year. Billy's talking to one of them now, listening in that intense way he does, like every word you're saying is so important. He's badly in need of a haircut, and his curls are poking out from behind his ears. His suit is a little too small—he had a growth spurt last summer—and between that and his standard dishevelment and nervousness he looks very out of place. It's incredibly charming. He doesn't look at you, but he stretches out his arm to invite you over, like he somehow just knew you were there.
He slips his arm around your waist when you get close. "This is my girlfriend," he says to the new student.
You turn your eyes away from Billy and see the new student for the first time. He's shorter, with golden skin and dark eyes, and the kind of easy smile you've tried to practice in the mirror. He isn't wearing a full suit, just a shirt, pants, and vest that fit him perfectly, and he's still laughing a little at whatever Billy, your Billy, said before he introduced you.
"Hi," he says. "I'm Enzo." He shakes your hand and glances down at the space between your thumb and your wrist. "Are you an artist?"
There's a splotch of paint there that you forgot to try to get off before you came. You and Billy, you don't see the paint anymore. "Some days I like to pretend I am," you say.
"I'm like that but with just, generally being a human," Enzo says.
His eyes have this sparkle you can't explain.
You love Billy deeply, intensely, permanently.
But you did not love him instantly, and right now, his arm around you, your eyes on someone else, you feel yourself starting to sweat.
You run into Enzo again at the tail end of the first week of school. You're in the library during your free period, eating an almond butter and honey sandwich and drinking an iced chai, reading Eliot for AP English, when whatever class he's in comes in as a group and splits up to scour the shelves. Enzo ends up near you and makes his eyes sparkle and says, "Hey, you."
You're surprised he remembers you. "Looking for something?"
"Philosophy. We have to pick a writer for a semester-long project."
You point. "Philosophy's over there."
But instead he sits down at your table, across from you, not too close. "What are you reading?" he says.
You show him. "Prufrock."
He sighs. "I used to love that, but a teacher at my old school totally ruined it for me."
"Ew, how?"
"I'm not going to ruin it for you!"
"No, now you have to."
"She said the whole thing was about some guy who can't get it up anymore," Enzo says. "She said most literature is about that and Prufrock is a prime example."
You stare down at the book, at a poem you no longer want to read. "So, it's all just a metaphor for that?"
"According to her, at least."
I groan. "I hate men. I hate men's insistence that we hear about their dicks. Have them, whatever, let them hang out, just don't drag me into it."
"I still don't know why she told us that," Enzo says. "Let us believe it's about what we want it to be about. Who's that hurting?"
"You're in philosophy?"
"Yeah. We didn't have it at my old school. Any recommendations?"
"Avoid the existentialists. They're depressing."
He laughs. "What do they believe?"
"That nothing you do has any inherent value. Nothing means anything, so doing something bad is the same as doing something good, on like, a cosmic scale. All value is what we attach to it."
No one has ever looked at you so closely when you speak.
"That is depressing," he says.
"I told you."
"Or," he says. "I guess it could be freeing, right?"
You feel the tips of your fingers tingle.
"I mean," he says, "if nothing means anything, we don't ever have to read about impotent men again. We'll decide what the great books are."
"I saw that boy from the party again," you tell Billy that night, after you've polished off omelets made with whatever you could find in his fridge. You're lounging on his bed while he reorganizes his closet. Billy is one of seven kids, smack dab in the middle of three brothers and three sisters, which means his parents have their hands too full to be concerned with things like whether or not their seventeen-year-old is having sex with his steady girlfriend. Your mom took you to the doctor to get on birth control. Everyone knows you two are real.
"Which one?" he says, from within the shirts.
"Enzo."
"Oh, yeah." Billy pulls out a hanger. "He's in my government class. Do you hate this? Nana got it for me."
"It's a sweater."
"So?"
"You're not supposed to hang sweaters."
"Oh." He takes it off the hanger immediately, and you feel a tenderness towards him that makes it hard to stay still. You've been with Billy for almost three years. There have been rough patches, but this isn't one of them.
"I don't hate it," you say, and he smiles at you. It's so easy with him, so comfortable, and he makes you laugh in the car and makes you scream in bed and wraps his arms all the way around you when you're cold. You've thought since you were fifteen that you'll probably marry him, and when school or your family or life gets too hectic, you cling to that thought like a life preserver. There is a future here.
"I like him," Billy says abruptly.
"Enzo?"
"Yeah. He did some kind of big grandstanding thing in government class that totally threw Mr. Purino off his game. I think he's a socialist. Enzo, not Mr. Purino."
"I like him too," you say.
Billy and Enzo become friends. Not best friends, maybe not even close friends, but Enzo easily folds into Billy's friend group. You're only peripherally a part of it—it's mostly guys, and aside from Billy you generally prefer the company of girls, so you're closer with your tennis friends and some of the girls from drama club—but on the days you sit with Billy's friends at lunch, Enzo is there, passionately enraged about someone else's problems, covering his face with his hands and laughing at himself when he gets too intense and then telling hysterical jokes without cracking a smile. Billy watches him with reverence. All the boys do.
You do too.
Billy's birthday is at the beginning of November, and you're at the mall shopping for him and a little for you when you run into Enzo at the Smoothie King.
"Getting my mom a present for her birthday," he says, showing you a silver bracelet and a few charms.
"When's her birthday?"
"Next week. The fourth."
That's Billy's birthday. It feels so inexplicably strange, that you're tied to him in this innocuous way. Or that Billy is. But it feels like you.
"Can you help me find something for Billy?" you ask.
He remembers a video game Billy had mentioned, and you go to the store together and spend a while leafing through the one-dollar games, trying to find the one that looks the worst. Enzo wins with a game about dressing multicolor kittens. You get Billy his present and you're ready to go home, but it's started pouring rain outside and the bus stop is a block away.
"Let me drive you," Enzo says, let me like you'd be doing him a favor.
You think about Billy on the drive, his dimples and his curls and the way he never stands up straight, and about the year that you went to Six Flags for his birthday and got the roller coaster picture you still have on your nightstand.
"I'm not really into birthdays," Enzo says, out of nowhere.
"You just got your mother this gorgeous piece of jewelry."
"Yeah, I like my mother. I don't like birthdays."
"Who doesn't like birthdays?"
He shrugs, flicking on his turn signal. "They're a bullshit holiday."
"They're… literally the one holiday that wasn't made up by the greeting card industry," you say. "They're the holiday that you're born into. You bring it to the world instead of having it foisted on you. How is that bullshit?"
"It's also the only holiday that's just about one person," Enzo says. He slows down to meet traffic ahead. "What's going on here?"
You crane your head to see around the side view mirror. "Looks like an accident."
"Damn. I should have gone the other way."
You cross your legs and take a deep breath. You can smell his cologne, something with pepper and wood. You try not to look at the perfect curve of his ear and the spray of stubble across his cheek. By chance you know he's younger than Billy, younger than you, but he looks more grown up than either of you.
"Birthdays aren't just about one person," you say.
"I guess you could say they're about the mom too, but no one ever gives her any credit. So yeah, it's not like a real holiday where everyone's happy and coming together, it's like… woohoo, this day is exciting for exactly one person, congrats. That's not a holiday."
"Okay, but what if it's not one person?" you say. "Billy and your mom have the same birthday. Maybe it's like… celebrating the cosmic connection between everyone who happened to be born on that same day."
"You believe in that stuff? Cosmic connections?"
"I don't know. I think some people are drawn together for reasons they can't explain."
"I do too," he says. "People usually think I'm crazy."
He's not looking at the road anymore. There's no need to; the traffic isn't moving.
"To be fair," you say, "you do say some crazy shit sometimes."
"It's not what I say," he says. "It's just the way I say it."
"No. You catch people off-guard."
"I just say what they're thinking," he says, and you can see it right on the rim of his perfect, barely chapped lips. The urge he has to say exactly what you're thinking.
But he doesn't move towards you, and he doesn't say anything, and you reach for the door handle.
"What are you doing?" he says.
"If I don't get home soon my mom will worry."
"So text her, tell her we're behind—"
"I'm just going to walk to the bus stop."
"It's pouring."
You get out anyway. The rain's coming down in sheets, and within a few steps you're soaked to the bone. The paper bag holding Billy's present comes apart in pieces in your hands.