We met in July. I was sleeping on the hood of my dad’s red camaro in a parking lot. You were drinking Horchata from a white Styrofoam cup and stopped to snap a photo of me on your 2-dollar disposable camera. It was those plastic clicks of you winding the small yellow camera that woke me, and when I sprung up, I was too stunned to even whip you the finger. You were too stunned to stop yourself from taking the picture. In the photograph you showed me weeks later, I am wide-eyed and angry with stringy dark hair crisscrossing my forehead and cheeks, in a dirty red t-shirt with a green T-Rex snarling from the sticky fabric, making an almost identical expression of vicious shock as me.

“I’m Oriolle,” you said in terror, instead of apologizing.

“Okay,” I frowned and rolled my eyes. “Go stalk somebody else!” I hopped off the hood of the car, scratching my leg on a loose shard of metal on the fender.

“FUCK!”

“Are you okay?” you said, swiftly tucking your camera into your pocket and kneeling down to where I was now keeled over on the concrete. I squeezed the flesh around the wound like hell to spite my goddamn leg, and thin swerving trails of red made their way down my shin.

“Ow, NO! Duh!”

“Hold up,” you said, whipping a bandaid from your back pocket, apparently my new fucking nurse.

“Well that’ll help…”I grumbled, but stopped as you smoothed the little bandaid over my skin and patted my knee, sighing like you had just saved my life or something, even though my leg still looked like horror hospital.

“Feel better?”

I stared at the bandaid, and then at you.

“Who are you even?”

“I told you: Oriolle.”

“Okay, awesome.” I said, getting to work on wiping off the blood from my leg with the bottom of my shirt.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Why? You wanna label my photo or something?” I glared, pushing my bangs back off my face.

“Sorry about that.”

“Why were you taking my picture, huh?”

“You were making neat shadows in your car. It looked like your shadow was sitting in the driver’s seat. I just thought it would be a cool picture.”

“You an artist or something?” I said, still glaring.

“Not really.”

“Oh right, you’re in the emergency medical team,”

“Hey, stop being so mean. Just tell me your name.”

I sized you up. You had choppy black hair with bangs that covered almost all of your eyes, and a gray t-shirt, and jeans with that stupid camera sticking from the ripped pocket, and red Chucks. No mustache. Which was good. But I still didn’t talk to strangers.

“I’m not telling you my name.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s creepy.”

“Okay.”

You were the kind of boy whose voice came out in an oddly articulate slur, the kind of boy that was strangely bold for how weird and introverted you looked. Your natural state had your lips pursed and your eyes mostly covered. Posture like shit. But your torso curved inward sort of, like you were constantly leaning against an invisible wall.

I looked down at my watch. “SHIT. I’m late. You made me late!”

“Where are you going?”

“I was gonna meet my friends.” I said, quickly sliding into the driver’s seat of my car and starting the ignition. It growled like a coughing and pissed off old man, but these days, it was a relief to hear it start at all.

“Can I come with?” you asked, and sat down in the passenger side without even waiting for an answer.

“Um, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Then tell me your name.”

“Ugh, jeez.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s Isabelle, now leave!”

You smiled behind your dirty bangs and got out of the car. I watched you in my rearview mirror while you stood there, shitty posture, wrapped in thick ribbons of fuel exhaust, in the middle of a WalMart parking lot.

I lived in a piece of junk city. A piece of junk, like my dad’s car, like our cramped apartment, like everything I saw and everything I felt I was. But back then, teenage summers were almost pleasantly slow and suffocating. Even with the sun, and the crowds, and the noise. But when it was too much, I found ways to escape the heat and dirt at nights with the kids I knew, smoking cigarettes below the underpass or counting flickering airplane lights instead of stars. There was something very clean about the night, especially when you just focus on the sky, and not the factories or expressways or neon signs all around. Night was my favorite. Night was different.

I ran into you again at a dollar store one night, where me and my friends were examining various plastic neon toys but really just taking shelter from the rain. You waved, but that was all, and I only scrunched my nose at you. And that night I felt bad because, one, I forgot to babysit my sister and my mom couldn’t go out and got super pissed, and two, because I still had your bandaid on my knee. Sometimes I wished I wasn’t such a bitch. Or at least waved back at you.

Also, back then, I hated my home. I hated it so much I couldn’t even stand to be there too long because it actually started to hurt, like physically. I hated that it was so hot and the air was so heavy that it could wake up my asthma if I just inhaled too deeply. I hated that I had to share a room with my three sisters. I hated eating leftovers and I hated when there wasn’t even that in our wheezing brown refrigerator. I hated my mom’s new boyfriend Chris with the wifebeaters and goatee and I hated that my brothers used to sock each other till my little sisters cried. And I started going off by myself to space out and basically swear continuously in my head. Like, the back of the grade school by the metal garbage cans, or the far corner of the Laundromat next to those glass candy machines, or any refrigerated section of any grocery store, where I could open them icy metal doors, and the cold glass would lick my burning cheeks while I pretended to look through all the different Gatorade flavors.

The third time your stalker-ass found me again was at that one playground across from the movie theater, while I was listing insults for good old Chris in my head and crying my eyes out. You had another Horchata. And I was swaying real slow on a rusty swing, and you stood in front of me and looked at your feet.

“What?” I sniffed, wiping awkwardly at my eyes. “What do you want, man?”

You handed forward your Horchata. I didn’t even think of some gross comment to make about maybe you having germs or STDs, and snatched that Styrofoam cup so fast I spilled some of it on the woodchips. And while the slightly warm, grainy sweetness at the back of my throat made me cry harder, you kneeled down and looked up at me.

“Don’t cry, mami.” You said quietly, and grinned all crooked.

“You are…stalking me? Or what?” I wiped my cheek off with my sleeve.

You shook your head. I frowned, and then pushed back your bangs from your eyes with the side of my hand.

“Oriolle?” I sniffed. “Are you stalking me?”

We stared at each other for a long time, because your eyes were the lightest brown, and all the clouds were very still and heavy.

“I was going to the movies.” You said, pointing across the street without unlocking our eyes. “A girl crying by herself at a playground is pretty noticeable. And I recognized you. From the Walmart. And the dollar store.”

“Ah.” I said, releasing your forehead and handing back your Horchata.

“Want to go to the movies with me?” You asked, standing and rearranging your bangs so that they covered your eyes again.

I shook my head. You sat down on the swing next to me.

“I never see you, like, normal.” You said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Last time you were sleeping, and then mad, and now you’re crying. I never see you, like, just neutral or bored or whatever. Or happy.”

“I guess.”

“Would you go to the movies with me?”

We sat on the fire escape of your building instead, looking down at alleys and low swooping power lines and old women walking to the church with their candles. And I kept crying and drinking your Horchata and I told you about how I hated Chris because he lies to my mom and pretends my brothers don’t exist and looks at my sisters and me like porn magazines on the wall behind a cash register, and I also hate my mother for the way she kisses the top of his head the same way she kisses mine. When I was done you held my hand, but that was it. And the summer and sadness and the coolness of your hand somehow intertwined to make me fall asleep. When I woke up, you were sleeping too, and it was sprinkling rain, and your hand was still in mine.

“Oriolle?”

You twitched your nose and opened your eyes.

“Uh…what time is it?” You asked, sitting up and shaking your hair.

“Don’t know.”

You yawned and examined the almost invisible dampness on your arms. We watched some crying boy on the corner wearing a paper Burger King crown.

“Can I take your picture now or what?”

I frowned and rubbed at my eyes. “Do I look like I’ve been crying?”

“Not really.”

“Do I look okay?”

You nodded, pulled out that yellow disposable camera again.

We started meeting a lot. Like, when my sisters started yelling at each other or I caught my brother making out with some bitch in a busty tank top and stupid crooked pleated jean skirt or if I walked into the kitchen and Chris was there in a wifebeater leaning on the opened fridge door, with that arrogant frown like there was nothing I could do about him and my mom. I would walk to your apartment where you were sitting on your front step with an horchata and a clunky black walkman, like you were waiting for me.

“Where?” you would say, and I would go:

“The underpass”, “The empty lot”, “el restaurante en la esquina”, “el cine”, “outside the roller rink”, or, usually, “dondequiera.”

August was you. You, across from me at a dirty corner table at El Cielo Taqueria with a plastic bowl of stale tortilla chips. You, passenger side in my dad’s Camaro listening to cars drive over us on the freeway at night. You, taking apart small puffy dandelions sprouting from the weeds in the empty field behind the high school. You, cutting a mango with a knife on top of the orange plastic slide at the playground, and wiping the nectar into my hair, and letting me smack the side of your head and call you an asshole. You, lifting me by the hips over the fence to the YMCA, so we could swim in our clothes.

You tried to kiss me when it was raining one time, while we stood under the ripped pink awning outside a gas station store. I was telling you about the time I stole a bunch of candy from that place, and you pulled me forward suddenly by the hem of my soaked t-shirt and kissed the side of my mouth. I shoved you back and you caught yourself from falling on your ass by grabbing the side of the brick wall and gave me the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.

“Oriolle?” I asked, instead of apologizing.

“That’s okay,” you said, wiping the side of your mouth.

We stared at each other for a long time.

“We’re falling in love, I bet,” you said.

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“That one time,” you said, and your bangs were sticking to your forehead from the rain. “When we were sitting under the red neon mermaid sign outside the bar.”

“...And?”

“Our shoulders were touching.”

“So?”

“And I could feel both our pulses for some reason. And they were…you know…in sync.”

I stared at you. “In sync.”

“Yes.”

I sighed and you stretched out your arms like white highbeams in the rain, and hugged me to your chest so the ends of my eyelashes just touched the soft curve of your collarbone. We stood there for a long time, very awkwardly hugging outside the gas station store.

When I woke up the next morning, it was because my sister Lourdes was shaking my shoulder like crazy, and the only reason I didn’t notice that her tears were landing on my face was because I thought I was still standing with you in the rain.

“Que paso?” I snapped up, and suddenly my mother was bolting past our room, into the living room, and the thump of her bare heels on the floor aligned strangely with my pulse. I grabbed Lourdes’ hand and ran after our mother, to the living room, where my brother was on the floor with Chris, swinging at him and crying, while Chris held him down with a hand on his chest and a fist around his black hair and shouted at my mother, shit in messy Spanish about my brother being an asshole, about how she should throw his ass out. My other sisters were shaking and sobbing, kneeling on the floor, staring from around the doorframe. My mother was yelling back in words so diluted by her crying, I could hardly understand any of it.

I noticed suddenly that I was already crying too, and my eyes met my brother’s while he thrust his shoulders back and forth trying to wrench out of Chris’ hands, gritting his teeth, and weeping harder than any of us. And then before my mind could catch up with my body, my feet were pounding on the floor because I was running at Chris and slipping myself in between their bodies and by some miracle Chris fell back on the ground. But only after I was thrashed across the cheek by his fist, not even really feeling the blow, just the cracked, rough surface of his hands like some sort of violent caress, a perverse bite by jagged flesh. Then, I was on the floor too, watching my blood slide off my chin, with my arms around my brother, my older brother, while he screamed off in Spanish at Chris, whose eyes were promising over and over that he was going to fuck me up. He stood, and looked at my mother, and spat on the ground, and left, and slammed the apartment door so fucking hard it practically fell off the hinge.

“So he’s gone.”

“Maybe. No se.”

We were sitting on your roof, watching the hot August sky sigh and sway in powder white and muted blue, a city summer morning. I had another one of your tiny white bandaids again, this time across my cheek and the swollen corner of my mouth. We had your walkman in between us, holding the thick black headphones between our heads, on full blast so we could both hear.

“Well I hope so.” You said.

“I know.”

You lay down on your back, and exhaled, bobbing your foot to the baseline of some song.

“What are you doing?”
“Lying down, man.” You smiled with your eyes closed, cause of the sun. I sighed and lay down next to you, watching a cloud float by as it stretched out its wispy, soft, white limbs in the wind.

“Not so bad.” I said.

“Very clean looking, I think.” You said, resting your arms in a sloping X across your stomach.

The cloud shifted like a person tilting its head, blushing in the thin pink sunlight.

“Yeah.” I said, and kissed your cheek. You laughed, and turned to face me, studying my face sort of. Then you slipped that clunky yellow camera out of your pocket.

“Puedo tomar una foto?”

“Fuck you, I look like shit,” I laughed.

“No, you look pretty mami.” You touched my wrist with just three fingertips, and grinned like that first day in my rearview mirror in the parking lot.

“Okay.” I said, and awkwardly smoothed down my hair while you raised the camera to your face.

“You still think we’re falling in love?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” You said, and took the picture.