Asher and Jane were both from South Crown. I went home with Asher for Thanksgiving and we drove past the towers of oak ribbing the hill that opened up into those Toyota-lined streets of suburbia. Here, on these streets, in this house, my friend Asher had grown up like a character straight out of some indie movie—with a blind cat, faded clothes from American Apparel and constant existential angst expressed as wry, dry humour. In high school, back when he was still trying to tell himself his fascination with the male form was just anthropological and self-reflective in nature, Asher had been madly in love with Jane. They were friends, but he never had a shot with her because she had always had a steady boyfriend sixth grade onwards. Being one of the chosen ones, it was Jane, and not some blonde cheerleader, who ruled South Crown High School as an irresistible Manic Pixie Dream Girl, even before that was a thing.

After that Thanksgiving, we became quite the tight threesome. I loved that the two of them were crazy and fucked up, and so good-looking and cool that their friendship felt like a prize I had won. To them, I suppose I was both novel and comforting, interesting and only very slightly exotic—never, ever discomfitingly so—because I talked like them and dressed like them and ate like them and thought like them. So I flitted around at their edges, a member by association. Cool enough to be cool, but not on my own.

Thomas tried very hard to ape them, to join in. But he didn’t have their intrinsic magnetism, that je ne sais quoi which guided them like a godmother. He came from a family of solid, stocky, down-home white folk, indistinguishable from their neighbours or stereotype, while Jane was both adopted and one-fourth Korean and Asher’s parents went through just the right amount of silent, civil fighting after their upper-middle-class divorce. Even their bodies seemed to have decided their fate for them: built to be tall and lean, built to carry the fashions of the time, every time. Asher and Jane could never eat themselves into any shape other than the one in power, while Thomas could never morph his body away from a propensity towards the robust, no matter how much he worked out or threw up in the bathroom after meals.

The three of us would pour vodka (the kind that is expensive but comes in cheap, old medicine bottles) into our morning cups of coffee and take it from there. Asher was in the midst of a tumultuous break-up with his first boyfriend. They got into raging fights that sometimes devolved into physical violence. But that mostly just consisted of two skinny boys taking awkward, half-hearted swipes at each other, so it was kind of funny, really.