The barista narrowed her eyes. "Weren't you here yesterday?"

  I didn't know what was worse: that Natalie, the pretty barista, barely remembered me, or that there was no where else in Six Mile River to take Lily. Unless we went to Tim Horton's. And there was no way we were going there.

  I said I was indeed at Beans the day before. "Good memory," I said.

  "Let me guess," the barista said wryly, "iced cap?"

  "Well, yeah," I said, feeling me. I turned to Lily. "What would you like?"

  "I'll have the same," she said brightly.

  We found a table near the window and sat down. She was wearing a Gabby's Dollhouse sweatshirt over a buttoned skirt that hit her midthigh, leggings, and loafers with white socks.

  "I like your sweater," I said.

  "It's supposed to be ironic," she said, "but maybe I just look like a weirdo." She gnced up at me. "I like your sweater."

  I thanked her. The day was unseasonably cold. That morning, I pulled on a navy cable knit sweater my grandma had knit a year ago, one of her final projects before she passed. Talon told me once that this particur sweater made my eyes look incredible. (Incredible, I'd repeated to myself ter.)

  Conversation was a bit stilted at first, but Lily was kind and giggly. She touched my sneakers with her loafers a lot. But the Sunday afternoon bustle made it difficult to hear each other. She suggested we take our drinks and head somewhere.

  "Mom's working right now and my Dad'll be sleeping," she said. "So—we could always go back to my pce for a bit?"

  "That sounds great," I said.

  We bundled against the chill, pulling on coats and scarves, and walked the twenty minutes or so to her pce. We chatted about our childhoods. Lily confided that she and her parents used to attend our church. She understood if I didn't remember her but I cut her off, smiling—I actually did remember, now that she said it. Lily and I shared a look and she said that her dad stopped believing in God after something bad happened to him. She wasn't sure how she felt. Honestly, I wasn't sure, either, but I didn't want to say it out loud.

  "Um, Ryan? Just one thing," Lily said. "My pce is on this block."

  "I remember," I said, "from st week."

  "It's just—it's not the nicest? My dad used to drive a truck, um, when I was younger. But he got in an accident. And he has really terrible nerve damage so he's on painkillers all the time and anxiety medication and he sleeps a lot. He can't work at all. My mom, she—she pnned on being a housewife which, like, good for her, right? But she didn't have much in the way of, you know, schooling, so—"

  I could see she was anxious about this. I pced a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

  "—so she couldn't get, like, a good job. We had to move and now we live here and it's fine. It's home. But I just don't want you to think—"

  "I won't think anything," I said, "Nothing bad, I mean. I'm happy to see where you live."

  We let ourselves in to her small duplex. Yes, it was old and the wn was unkempt and three uneven splotches dotted the wall in the living room where someone—Lily's mom?—tried to patch up a hole but left it unpainted, that monotone grey of drywall. There was the faint smell of cigarette smoke, as though someone mostly smoked outside but occasionally indulged near a window. A brown leather ottomon was tucked beneath the front window; an overflowing box sat atop it, filled with stacks of papers and yellow folders, haphazardly organized. But it wasn't some terrible pce. Lily held a finger to her lips and brought me to her room.

  It was much brighter and cozier in here. She had a watercolor painting of—who was it? Virginia Woolf. A Taylor Swift poster. Books overflowing on a tiny bookshelf that had been hand painted turquoise. Small succulents and fairy lights and a colorful pink and purple quilt on her bed.

  "Wow," I said, "your room is amazing."

  "Really?" She looked relieved.

  "Really."

  I sat down in her pink and white desk chair and swivelled. What would Marty do right now? I gnced at Lily, who was watching me.

  "What are you majoring in again?" she said. "When you start university?"

  "Biochemistry," I said. "I pn to go to medical school."

  "That's cool," she said, "I've never actually known anyone who wants to be a doctor. It seems like something people say on TV, but not in real life, I guess."

  I smiled. I'd wanted to be a doctor for so long, it felt a part of me, like the birthmark on my left thigh or the marrow in my bones. "What about you?"

  "Journalism," she said. "I was thinking about Creative Writing, but—Mom would kill me. After what happened with her and my dad, I think she wants me to be financially stable."

  "Where are you going?"

  "University of Toronto."

  "Damn, Beaumont," I said. "Impressive."

  "And," she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder, "I got a schorship." She grinned, showing off the pink bands of her braces. "I mean, thank God."

  "Holy shit," I said. "Canada's top school and a schorship? What can't you do?"

  She ughed lightly and blushed. She fiddled with her skirt. "So, you're going to California, then? When? August?"

  "Yeah, I guess so," I said. "I don't think it's fully hit me. But yeah, I'll have to renew my passport, sign up for a dorm. All that."

  "Anything else on your to-do list before you leave?"

  I looked up at her. Her face was different, more serious, more—seductive?

  Stall, I thought. And then, Why would you stall? Talon's face popped up in my mind but I pushed it away. Say something cool, I told myself.

  "There's a few things," I said.

  "Maybe you can come here and tell me?" she said.

  I sat down on the bed next to her. She turned toward me.

  "Definitely want to get better at making out," I said.

  "Really? I thought you were pretty good."

  I licked my lips. "So are you. But practice makes perfect, right?" I hesitated and then put my hand just above her knee, on the scratchy material of her leggings. She immediately put her hand over mine. "What's on your list?"

  She held up her index finger on her other hand. "More making out, for sure." She held up her middle finger. "Hand stuff? I've done a bit but—" her cheeks went a bit pink and she raised her ring finger. "I'd like to try, um, oral and then—you know."

  Hand stuff, oral, I thought, desperately flicking in my mind for things I'd read and seen and heard. Forums. Porn. Marty. Fingers go inside of her—how hard could it be? In porn, you couldn't see exactly what they were doing, but I'd seen plenty of guys with two, three, four fingers inside. But what if I couldn't find the clit? How was I supposed to move my tongue?

  I nodded, trying to py it cool. "That's on my list, too."

  "You're eighteen, right?" she said.

  "I am."

  "Me, too," she said. "And I feel super me that I'm a virgin. By some standards. Scratch that. Every standard."

  I squeezed her leg gently. "So am I. I haven't done much at all. Not even hand stuff."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah," I said, shrugging.

  "Your dad and everything…"

  I nodded, grateful for the excuse. Sure, it was part of it but not all of it. "Exactly."

  She turned. "Can I—?"

  Stall, I thought again.

  "What about your dad?" I said. "Will he be upset if we're in here with the door closed?"

  She shook her head. "He won't even know. Believe me." She checked her phone. "He sets his arm for four so he's up when Mom gets off. So we have a good hour."

  "Right," I said. "Do you have gum? Coffee breath."

  "Oh!" She stood up, rummaged through a desk drawer, and came back. "Here. Cinnamon. I'll have some, too."

  While we chewed, she fiddled with her iPhone and a small teal desk speaker she had and a pylist began pying softly. We spat our gum after a couple minutes and returned to her bed, this time climbing on top of her duvet and sinking into her pillows. I id back and she put her hand on my chest. We turned to each other and both of us hesitated, smiling nervously, before we leaned forward and began making out.

  Growing up I felt like my body was pying a trick on me or God was punishing me for a transgression I didn't remember I committed. Miraculously, I felt like I moved through puberty retively unscathed. I started getting tall before I could fear I wouldn't. And it wasn't as though I always felt handsome, it just seemed that nothing had gone disastrously wrong with my appearance.

  But it was the other, subtler parts of my development that caused anxiety.

  I felt that the nuances of some of my senses were blunted or completely missing. With girls' appearances, it was as though I was color blind. Casey and Rob and Marty and Talon seemed to have crushes on the right girls, but I couldn't see why Isabel C. was considered cute but Ashley MacKinnon wasn't. And then, as though I was also cking taste buds, my body didn't respond like theirs. My stomach didn't flutter, my chest didn't get tight, there wasn't that warmth sent to my groin and then, a few years ter, blood and an erection I was mortified to have. It wasn't like that for me. And in the same breath I didn't understand what they were missing with the boys in our css. As early as grade one or two I saw that Dhruv Bhandari was magnetic. His thick eyebrows and stylish hair, his asymmetrical smile that went higher on his left side, giving him a roguish grin. When we reached high school, the way his gym shorts hit around his thighs. Logan Wacwski's legs when he ran for P.E. and noticing the rounded shape of his butt. Casey's dad was an embarrassing reminder that my body was wired wrong. He had a shaved head and a trim beard, but it was his body I noticed: his hands and forearms and shoulders. Sometimes he'd come back to Casey's house sweaty from a jog and my eyes would track the sweat dripping down his neck to his chest.

  And obviously Talon. My attraction to him started so early it seemed like some w of the universe. His shiny brown hair that, when it grazed my skin, made my throat tighten; how I knew his brown eyes as different colors depending on the context (green brought out the caramel; at dusk they looked rich and dark); how he didn't seem to notice his dark eyeshes or the fullness of his lips; when he focused hard, he chewed on his bottom lip and it made my stomach hurt. The few freckles on his nose—three on the left, one on the right—or how after his voice stopped cracking it settled into this deep register that caused my penis to throb depending on how close to me he was when he spoke. The feel of his hand on my arm when he found something funny. His scent. His fingers when he pyed piano, when he gripped the neck of a guitar. The eager look in his eyes and his open-mouthed smile when he was truly excited. When we ate chips, he'd lick the salt off his fingers, and it would have grossed me out if it was someone else but seeing his lips around his fingers did something to me. But I thought maybe that's what it was like with all best friends. Maybe you noticed those tiny little things. Yet whenever the word beauty came up, Talon's face would pop up in my mind like a Pavlovian response. As he grew up, seeing his shoulders fill out and the hair on his legs and lower stomach came in and—

  —and Dad's church. Dad standing in front of the congregation, arms stretched across the pulpit, looking rger than life and talking about sin and temptation and pleasing God. And those few sermons where we discussed that feelings for the same sex were persuasions from the Devil. But not to worry, because there was a way out from sin: disavow those urges. Confess. How God made man and woman to fit together and a reminder that there were two genders. And then when what happened with Cire at our church—

  Snap out of it, I thought, focusing on our mouths. I put a hand on Lily's waist and pulled her closer to me. She put her tongue tentatively in my mouth and I did the same. Was I doing it right? Did you just… put it in? I imagined Talon but—stop, I told myself, stop. Think of this like a lesson. Training. Besides, if I didn't try, how could I know for sure? I kissed Lily more firmly. Her lips were soft. So was her hair when it fell onto my face. She lowered my hand to her hip and then her butt. I ran my hand over it, feeling its plumpness, enjoying the way it curved beneath my fingers. I squeezed and this elicited a small moan from Lily. She lowered her weight on to me and her breasts pushed against my chest.

  This is good, I thought to myself, my other hand drifting to her ass. Just focus on the moment.

  She pushed her hips into mine. Both of our hearts sped up. She moved her hand to the bottom of my shirt and pushed it up, fingers roaming over my stomach and up to my chest. I shifted and moved one of my hands from her ass up to her chest, remembering she liked that.

  "Is this okay?" I said against her mouth.

  She nodded. "You can—should I take my sweater off?"

  "Yeah," I said, and I helped her pull it off. Her rge breasts hung impressively close to my face. She wasn't wearing a full bra—what was it called? A bralette. It was aquamarine, thin and cy. I could see her nipples through the gaps in the material.

  "You're really hot," she said, sounding shy.

  Was I?

  "So are you," I said, my hands drifting up to the thin band on her rib cage. What would Marty say? "Your tits are amazing."

  Ugh.

  But Lily smiled at me, flushed.

  Marty probably knew how to unhook her bra with one hand. Lily brought her hand to the front of my jeans where I was, thankfully, hard. All that friction and pressure and the images of body parts swarming at the front of my mind made it pretty easy. While she did that, I brought both hands up to her back—look, there wasn't a chance I was going to be able to do it with only one hand—and found the csp of her bralette. I undid it and slid it down, revealing her breasts.

  Lean forward and suck them, I thought, you did it before. With my hands gently on her back, I pulled her body closer to my face—

  Her arm bred. Both of us jumped.

  "Shit," she said. Her cheeks and lips were red. She held her sweater up to her bare chest. "My dad. He'll be waking up. I'm sorry."

  "Don't be," I said. I passed Lily her bra. "It's okay."

  If her dad was getting up, I needed to mentally prepare. Would he be pissed seeing a teenaged boy coming out of his daughter's room? As if she read my mind, Lily pulled me up. Quickly, she csped her bra, put on her Gabby sweatshirt.

  "Come on," she whispered, "let's go fast."

  Like bandits, we tiptoed, hunched, to her front door.

  "Bye, prom date," she said. "Oh! And thanks for the coffee."

  When I got home, Rachel was sitting at our kitchen table with two of her friends. Hilry and Sasha. The red-haired one, Hilry, was sitting at an impressively awkward angle on one of the chairs, her legs tucked beneath her like origami. Sasha was sucking down a rge bottle of iced tea, her gsses slipping down her nose. They were clustered around Rachel's ptop, an excel spreadsheet open.

  "Hey," I said, putting my school bag down on the counter.

  "Hi," Rachel said distractedly. Hilry and Sasha waved.

  I found a snack—another of Mom's cinnamon buns—and poured lukewarm coffee into a mug. Mom said I shouldn't have so much caffeine but I had no trouble sleeping. At least, I hadn't before Talon told me about his father. I stood behind Rachel, looking at her screen.

  I recognized many of the names in the left-hand column. Casey, Dhruv, Mason, Miles, Talon—guys from my grade. "What is this?" I said.

  "It's called Operation Triple Prom," Rachel said.

  "Catchy," I said dryly.

  "We want to—"

  "—go to prom three times, yeah, I got it." I scanned the document. They'd organized it by who they'd asked and who still needed to be approached. It looked like Sasha had a date, but not Hilry or Rachel yet. "How about you go twice? So you don't show up to mine."

  Rachel looked up at me, gring. "We're not going to hang out with you."

  "Why now?" I said. "Isn't this a bit te? Prom's five weeks away."

  "Desperation," Hilry said. "The guys who don't have a date will want to take someone."

  "We also just thought of it," Sasha said, "like two weeks ago."

  I sighed.

  When I got up to my room, I peered out my window. From that position, you could mostly only see the thick red arbutus tree that twisted up to my windowsill. But if I poked my head out a bit and looked right, I saw Talon's house. Brown stucco. Withering garden boxes on the righthand side. Stephen's truck. All the things I knew intimately, like my own home. I pulled my head back in and sat on my bed. I texted Talon but didn't hear back. He had, however, texted me in the morning like he promised.

  I grabbed my ptop and started Googling. Resources for childhood abuse. How to recognize signs (too te for that). Forums. Reddit posts. I clicked and read and clicked and read. I ate the cinnamon bun and downed my coffee. Maybe I could draft up an email and send it to Dad? The police? I ran a hand over my face, thinking of Talon. Would he forgive me? Did it matter? He said he could handle it. He said it was getting better. He said he just needed to make it to graduation.

  Then help him make it to grad, I thought. I pulled out my biology text. I started drafting up diagrams, formus, accessible fsh cards. This was a way I could help. I designed a few lesson pns: review, new information, mock quizzes. As I worked, my heart rate slowed. I found a flow state.

  Later that night, after dinner, I got a text from Talon. Mom ughed at how fast I grabbed my phone and then gnced at Dad. We were in our den, next to the firepce. The evening had become inexplicably chilly. The weather network was calling for a snowstorm, but we didn't believe it would happen. In May? No way. Rachel was in the chair, hair up in a high ponytail, madly texting. Mom and Dad sat on the couch, Dad with a Bible and a notepad, Mom with a novel. I was lying stomach-down on our carpet, fiddling with the biology review I'd created.

  "Who's that from?" Mom said to me, looking up over her paperback.

  "Just Talon," I said.

  "Ah," Mom said, sharing a knowing smile with Dad. They knew I'd went to Beans with Lily earlier.

  Via text, Talon expined that he napped throughout the afternoon and that was why he didn't get back to me earlier. I hoped that was the truth. He sent a picture of his copy of Dune, said he'd bring it to school tomorrow. And then Lily really did text me, so I tilted my screen to ensure my parents wouldn't be able to see.

  The next morning, I reached for my phone before anything else. I had three texts. I smiled, half asleep, gd Talon remembered, relieved to see his name on my screen.

  Talon: Ry

  Talon: look outside

  Talon: snow!