He parked his shitty car alongside the road; it was one his parents had given him because it still ran great except for the fact that anytime it hit seventy-five miles per hour it started rumbling and complaining as if it would explode. A perfect car for a moody teenage boy. Joe walked down the red dirt road underneath a canopy of trees. There were birds rustling the leaves, but they weren’t saying anything.

“If one of you tells me not to do it”—Joe paused to speak up toward the foliage—“I’ll stay.”

They said nothing a person could understand.

There were three notes in the glove compartment of his car. One, kind, addressed to his mother. Another, true and rude and angry, addressed to his friend Dustin, who was the only person in the world that he truly liked. Any time Joe was his true self in front of Dustin, he felt better. The final, grumpy and terse, addressed to his father.

“I’m going to die with Taki breath.”

If he had been able to laugh then, to hear how melodramatic his tone was, Joe would’ve gotten back in the car and driven home. Spent the drive sitting in the I-75 traffic backups around Flint, practicing telling his parents that he needed help.

The door was in the distance. There was no other blue like it in the world. It was saturated, deep, and maybe it was like a holographic X-Men trading card he’d had growing up. There were moments after he blinked when Joe felt sure he was seeing afterimages of the door. It was in front of itself, behind, sideways.

“I don’t want to be anything,” Joe whispered.

Each step was faster and faster. He heard his breath, kept resmelling the Takis, he was sweating, and there was dirt in the air. The door swung open.

There were people around it, an older Black woman who was writing in a journal, a guy wearing camo with a gun holstered to his side, and a middle-aged Black man who had taken his shoes off. He was leaning back, his head up to the sun, away from the door, and it was clear that the only thing he was aware of was the warmth.

Joe sprinted. He understood these people would want to talk to him, try to talk him out of things. No one wanted to see a teen die in front of them. And he felt a little guilty—as he ran the fastest he ever had in his life and blew past them into elsewhere—that they would see him pop out of existence.

The air was cooler. So many things were rich and golden, but somehow their shine didn’t make his eyes ache. The air smelled like cotton candy perfume, gasoline, and the weird cherry cookies his mom and grandma made at Easter. Somehow the combination wasn’t disgusting.