Out of nowhere, his battered black car banked the corner, shadowing the curb like a whale underwater, swallowing up the light. A trash truck was in the road, jaws grinding, and the whale-black car had to wait behind it, stuck there for me to study, covered in dents and scrapes, engine running, windows up, music loud on the inside, I could just tell. A boy. One hand on the wheel, one arm stretched long across the blood-red leather seat-top like the branch of a tree. He bit his lip, stroked his jaw with the flat of his hand. Straightaway I wanted to be in that car with him. It pulled at me, the way you feel a tooth being pulled, not just there in your mouth, but also somehow dead center in the hub of the wheel of your stomach. I don’t think I could have looked away if I’d tried, like he was the target and I was the missile—preprogrammed, set on lock, already hurtling.

He stopped across the street, outside Mrs. Midler’s. Louder music, door slam, and the car dipped and sighed, missing him already as he climbed out, tall with black hair and dark clothes, a streak of ink against the blotting-paper day. He checked his watch. He stretched his arms over his head and then spread them wide, open-handed, filling the space around him, eating it up like he was hungry. He looked up at the house, touched his fingers to his mouth, a habit I would come to know so well, and that first time there was nothing else in the world suddenly, for me, only those fingers and that mouth, only him doing that. Fast and strong as a big cat he stepped onto the bonnet and then the roof of his car and took in the view, turning a slow circle, stretching again like you do after a long sleep, rolling his shoulders, arching his back. The early sun glowed warm on his skin, carved out in light and sharp shadows the wide slope of his shoulders, his collarbones, the hollows at the base of his throat. The noise of his weight on the metal sat low in the air like a gong. Wild. Unparalleled. Shining.

He jumped down and then climbed the flat front of Mrs. Midler’s house, blatant, lizard-quick, balancing on the narrow ledge of an upstairs window, moving with the casual elegance of the high wire, like he was inches from the ground, not two whole floors. This boy was not afraid of falling. And he wasn’t worried about getting caught either. I’d never seen anyone who cared less about that.