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#1—Ring
It’s not a vow, it’s not a promise, it’s not a relationship; it’s a habit, like chewing on fingernails, the way they watch each other.
#2—Hero
What would it take, they both wonder, to cross the barriers of their different worlds?
Brendan remembers the way he stumbled into Jimmy better than he remembers his first kiss, his first date, his first time having sex; it is the first of firsts that matter to him.
#4—Box
The crowd was pressing in, in, as it oozed into the gym, and Jimmy, always struggling to be away, struggled into Brendan’s back.
#5—Run
Startled, Brendan shoved the other boy away and pushed off into the mass, blended into the crowd again; but he glanced back once, and knew that the look flashed between his eyes and those eyes was more than nothing.
#6—Hurricane
His world doesn’t turn upside down because he holds it anchored in place, but now there’s something, somebody, flitting around its edges—looking for the cracks in his glass walls.
#7—Wings
Brendan doesn’t want to fly: to be high in the skies is to be too far away from the world he knows.
#8—Cold
So all he does instead is watch as Jimmy weaves about outside of his own snow globe of a world.
#9—Red
If somebody ever chose a color to describe him, the real him, it would be white: bland and uniform.
#10—Drink
People say they drink to forget, but Brendan drinks so he can finally let go and let his mind wander over Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy.
Things can change, things will change, everything changes between the day Jimmy met Brendan and now—except, of course, the walls Brendan has flung up between them.
#12—Temptation
And this is what Jimmy wants: to run his hands through that carefully combed hair, to mar and scratch that perfect skin with his teeth and fingernails: to leave his mark.
#13—View
But he can’t, so he just watches instead from his place as Brendan charges about in his own world.
#14—Music
He watches, and he writes; he never speaks about them, so instead deep-staining black ink on blank whiteness blares out his thoughts.
#15—Silk
How soft is Brendan’s skin, Jimmy wonders, as soft as silk, smooth, easy to bruise?
#16—Cover
But he always tries to avoid Jimmy, avoid his stare, his watching, and Jimmy never makes an effort to move past this barrier.
#17—Promise
What was it about that look, flung between them, that fascinates him still and keeps him hanging?
#18—Dream
It leaves him dangling in a dream world, intangible and impossible; but he makes no effort to pull himself out, away.
#19—Candle
There’s a lot to write about in this dream world, and he’s happy with that; words mean something, don’t they?
#20—Talent
But as often as he presses his finger to the pages, the words will not leap out or solidify; they can never exist anywhere out of this dream world.
It’s a silence of meaningless words, a silence of stares and crossings and avoidance; it’s a silence of no communication.
#22—Journey
It’s a walk, it’s a journey, it’s a distance neither travels—not that they don’t want to.
#23—Fire
Will he burn, burn, shrivel up if he touches Jimmy, whose very presence envelops Brendan in heat?
#24—Strength
Will he imprint, mark, impress himself on Brendan, if they ever cross and touch?
#25—Mask
They both wonder, analyze and dissect, eyes watching each other behind glass and chasms.
“He’s weird,” his friends say, “always sitting by himself and writing in that notebook,” and Brendan agrees; but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to know what Jimmy thinks about, writes about, feels.
#27—Fall
Sometimes he dreams that he talks to Jimmy, that they have a conversation full of secrets and fantasies and he wakes up with longing so intense that it frightens him into sleeplessness.
#28—Forgotten
He tries to bury these dreams because he doesn’t want to think about them; and he tells himself he’s not a coward, he just doesn’t want to have to deal with snippets of a fantasy that are meaningless.
#29—Dance
That’s why it shocks him when he sees Jimmy at a dance, in a corner as always; but the strobing lights and the half shadows and the shifting faces and everything about the place reminds him of his dreams and he feels that longing again, except this time deep down he knows it can be more than that—if he’s not afraid.
#30—Body
Then he sees Jimmy pulled out onto the dance floor by a girl, he doesn’t know her name but he knows her from around; she’s quiet like Jimmy but she’s sweet and she smiles at him as she wraps her arm around his waist and they sway together and Jimmy actually smiles at her and they sway together, together, and…Brendan looks away, coughing to clear the sudden catch in his throat.
He didn’t want to come, but she asked him to and he didn’t want to turn her down; after all, she is the only one who talks to him in class without a wary fear, as if he will suddenly snap at her, and he appreciates, likes her for that.
#32—Farewells
“Come dance with me,” she says, shy sweet smile, and he follows her out onto the dance floor and watches as she takes his hands and places them on her waist and places hers on his shoulder; and he wonders if he could make them fit, his hands and hers and on each others body, make them feel like they were meant to be—but he knows he can’t so he doesn’t.
#33—World
Jimmy wishes that this could be his world: dancing with a girl who likes and understands him, a world he could exist in and not on the edge of.
#34—Formal
“I’m not—I can’t—” he begins to try and tell her about how the palm of her hand doesn’t quite fit the curve of his shoulder, but she places a finger on his lips and she says, “I know.”
#35—Fever
“Who is she?” she asks, and he says, “Nobody,” but his eyes say otherwise and he knows she catches the glimpse of want and hunger as he blinks.
“Hey Brendan,” his friend says, “wanna make a bet?” and it is the night after the dance and he feels exhausted, drained, and he feels he needs something to make him forget this so he says, “Sure, what is it?”
#37—Lies
“Go steal that notebook from DeFazio, and we’ll see how long it’ll take for him to ask for it back, if he ever does…You’re not scared, are you?”; he says, “No way.”
#38—Forever
It is over in a flash; he walks up to Jimmy, the closest they have ever been since they first met; he grabs the notebook out of surprisingly unresisting hands and he walks away, and he feels Jimmy’s eyes on him but he doesn’t dare to look back and meet that gaze.
#39—Overwhelmed
It is a role reversal: now Brendan watches Jimmy, who tries to avoid the former, and Brendan doesn’t know what changed but something has, and he can’t go back, and somehow he doesn’t think he wants to.
#40—Whisper
“He won’t ask for it back”; “He’ll ask by the end of the week, watch”; “Maybe he’ll just try to steal it back”; and meanwhile Brendan sits by himself and gets to know the shadow boy by thumbing through his notebook.
Brendan surprises himself when he doesn’t shy away from the things he reads in those pages: things about himself, himself and Jimmy: for once, he does not want to run away, because he is tired, because deep down he wants this, because he can’t—so he waits.
#42—Talk
“I want you to give me that notebook back; it’s mine,” Jimmy says, and he says back, “Then come to my house and get it, after school.”
#43—Search
“Are you lying to me?”; “Why the hell would I lie about where I keep your notebook? Come to my house, you’ll see.”
#44—Hope
He waits because he knew from the moment he saw Jimmy and the girl that if he didn’t move, if he didn’t try to step past these walls, he would always be trapped inside them and even the shadow that flitted around the edges and was the only one out there would one day be gone.
#45—Eclipse
And he knows he can’t blame Jimmy for cracking those glass walls, because the cracks were always there and Jimmy was the only one who saw them; the ink spiraling through his notebook is testament to that.
#46—Gravity
Jimmy may not have cracked those glass walls but Brendan wonders if he could maybe help tear them down, send them crashing to the ground.
#47—Highway
He walks home and instead of letting Jimmy lag three feet behind him he stops, turns around and says, “Walk beside me like a normal person, would you?”
#48—Unknown
He holds out the notebook; “I read this,” he says, “I read what you said about me,” and Jimmy starts and stares, half-defiant and half-afraid until Brendan says, “So it was always more than nothing to you, too, wasn’t it?”
#49—Lock
So Jimmy says, “Yeah, but you never really gave it a chance to be more than nothing,” and Brendan counters with, “Oh, and you really made a big effort, too, didn’t you?” and the other boy is silent.
#50—Breathe
Then he walks forward, closer until the only thing that separates them is the notebook he clutches in his hands; and even that falls away when he lets it drop and kisses Jimmy on the lips, soft and hesitant; he pulls away and only has a second to think, “Am I doing the right thing, will this work, will he—” and breathe before Jimmy takes his step forward and molds his mouth to his, hand on his shoulder—and it is a perfect fit.