“Let’s hear it,” Marco says, so I get up and grab some batteries from the junk drawer and pop them into my Walkman, propping my headphones on the back of the sofa between Marco and me.

It’s an awesome mix of the musicians from Lourdes’s bedroom walls and spare, soulful ballads in Spanish from a deep-voiced lady singer. I close my eyes, trying to find the way back through the wardrobe to my day in Berkeley, but all of me, even my Las Pochas shirt, seems to want to stay right here.

At the end of a stunningly beautiful song, I feel a hand on my hand, a spark of starstuff. I look up and realize that Marco has been looking at me for a little while. And suddenly, I realize something: Marco is like me. A little of this, a little of that. Not one thing or the other, but maybe all of the above. I lace my fingers in his, his brown and my brown, my bitten nails and his polished the bright blue of his eyeliner.

I scoot closer so that our legs are touching and lean my head against his shoulder. I feel his head against mine, our hair crispy with hair spray, our hearts beating at the same sweet frequency.

“The Boy Is”

“The Boy Is”

Elsie Chapman

“Holly, wait—you’re really breaking up with me over the phone?”

It says a lot that the note of incredulity in Kyle’s voice leaves me satisfied instead of regretful.

“Yes, I guess I really am,” I say into my cell. I’m lying on my bed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars still on my ceiling that haven’t glowed in years. “At least it’s not over text, right?”

“Except that both are kind of shitty,” he says.

They are. But he deserves it. And I couldn’t find him after school to do it in person, spring break starts tomorrow, and it’s as good a time as any to stop being a jerk’s girlfriend.

“I heard about your list of tokens, Kyle. Seems you can now cross off yellow.”

The echoes of him and Dev and Ross laughing their asses off from down the hall this afternoon still ring in my ears, a tinnitus of shame. “Achievement unlocked, Kyle!” Dev had chortled with a gross kind of slyness. “Asian girlfriend, check!”