And where had Adrian been, anyway?

He’d been in hell. For him, hell wasn’t fire and brimstone, the smell of charred flesh, the gnashing of teeth. Hell was freezing Massachusetts winters and the fucking teachers who didn’t know jack shit about what they were talking about. Hell was the same horribly plain girls he fucked over and over again, more from boredom than from anything else. Hell was waking up and not knowing where the fuck he was, and worse: Not caring.

But now he was back in what had been heaven for so many years. There were memories in this little town that made his lips twitch reluctantly into a smile, one he only revealed to himself fleetingly in an empty room. Memories that went back to a time when he couldn’t string words together into coherent sentences, when his hair was a much lighter shade of blonde and happiness meant laying in a field of green grass in the middle of summer, watching the clouds shape and shift as he sucked on a rainbow popsicle.

Ha.

His mind fast-forwarded a couple years. Same field, different sky. This one was black and riddled with a million points of light, some bigger than others, that flickered just so and made him happy to be alive. There was a hand in his, and a girl telling him that she loved him. He didn’t understand the words, but he understood everything else. He understood fully the sensation of his hands shaking as he reached out to touch her, the hesitation, the anticipation. He understood the shape of her lips and her body and the way she giggled when he pulled up her dress...

And then there was this summer. He was no longer a little boy with a rainbow colored tongue, no longer a gangly, nervous fourteen-year old kid. He was a cynical motherfucker with a cigarette between his lips, smoke billowing out of his nostrils as he watched the final glimpses of sunlight dip beneath the horizon.

Everything here was so quaint and charming, he thought, as he took a long drag from the cigarette, mashing his feet into the soil so that there were blades of grass between his toes. It wasn’t forced, like back at school, where “quaint” was a pretty idea, prepackaged and sold at wholesale prices for the whole stupid fucking town to enjoy. Here, it was something genuine and concrete. Here, he could sit on the grass in his underwear watching the sunset and not feel ironic.

His mind felt strangely empty just now, even with all these thoughts swirling his head. Then, suddenly, as a stifling breeze blew through his hair and sent the grass rippling like waves, one memory in particular that he associated with this place popped into his brain and all at once it felt ridiculously heavy with the past . The morning he kissed Ian for the first time. He regretted it immensely.

In fact, he regretted everything.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Someone was now sitting beside him. He looked to his right and saw Sandy, smiling manically in his direction. He smiled back, strangely happy to see her. She was a gorgeous girl, he thought, though if memory served him right she had certainly changed quite a bit since the last time he’d seen her. Her curly blonde hair was now jet black and chin-length, bangs hung over her forehead like a fringed curtain. She wore a low cut dress that left little to the imagination, revealing every freckle on her milky white skin. Her eyeliner was smudged and her lipstick was faded, but she still looked amazing. No, this was definitely not the Sandy from a year ago, and certainly not the blonde pigtailed little girl that he used to play hide-and-seek with in his backyard way back when.

“Cover your fucking tits. They’re distracting.” Adrian flicked the half-finished cigarette a couple feet away and gave her a hug, squeezing her tightly against him.

“Don’t change the subject. Penny for your thoughts?”

“How are you, Sandy? My, you look lovely this evening.”

“Whatever, Adrian. I saw you come in today. You looked pissed the fuck off.”

Ah, yes. That morning his mother had asked him if he was gay. Quite nonchalantly, as if she were asking if he’d prefer cheese on his scrambled eggs that morning. He had been sitting in the backseat of the car, passively taking in the scenery as it gradually became his familiar hometown, so when the question was finally out there, it sort of hung in the air pathetically before it registered in his brain.

“What the fuck did you just ask me?”

“Don’t talk to your mother like that, son.”

“That’s Faggot Ass Son to you, daddy.”

“Yeah, well. That’s me,” he averted his eyes from her face to somewhere vague and unimportant in the distance, “Always pissed the fuck off.”

“You’ve changed,” said Sandy, after a beat.

“How so? Does the hair look that bad?” He ran his fingers roughly through the wavy blonde locks in an effort to make them look more disheveled.

Sandy giggled and shook her head. “No, no. In a good way. You seem older. More mature.”

They went quiet, and Adrian became incredibly aware of everything around him, the way the air felt, hot and electric and almost unnatural. He realized he needed another cigarette. And he wished Sandy would go.

“You should come tonight. To the playground, I mean. Everyone’ll be there.” There was this added weight to the word “everyone” that was so obvious it would take a fucking idiot not to have noticed. Adrian glanced at Sandy sideways, smirked, and said,

“And by everyone, you clearly mean Ian.”

“Well, who knows… You should come tonight. I mean, I can’t imagine you not there. You should come.”

“Yeah,” he gave her a lingering kiss on the cheek, “I should.” Then he stood, wiggled his toes to get the dirt and grass out from between them, and walked back into his house.