“It’s okay,” he told me. So I let him kiss me. And even then, in that very moment, I knew that this was important. I knew that I would trace my whole life back to this moment, my finger bleeding, this boy’s beautiful and messed-up mouth on mine, a work of art between us. I knew it would probably fuck me up. And that was fine.

Once our mouths started hurting, we went back inside the house and got some bandages from the bathroom to fix me up as best we could. It probably needed stitches, but the cut was so exact that it felt like, with a little pressure, the skin would re-form, like nothing had happened. Zeke didn’t need anything, his blood already dried up, but he still put a little bandage on his finger. I wondered if this was a sign that, whatever happened this summer, I’d be the one with a scar.

Then we went back into the garage and placed our work of art on the copy machine. We closed the lid and then, hesitating for a second, we both pushed the button at the same time. The machine whirred, rumbled, and I thought that maybe all that would come out would be this curling black smoke, but no, it was just our picture, copied. Now we had two. It was already a little less special now, but maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. Maybe it doubled in power. Something had happened, that was all that mattered. We observed the copy, not quite the original, everything just a little blurry at the edges, a little more dreamlike. Nothing could be as perfect as the one we had made together, just the two of us. But it was okay. We just needed more of them.

“Ten copies?” Zeke said, and the machine hummed, time passed, and there were ten more copies.

“Maybe, like, ten more?” I offered, and Zeke nodded.

Ten more, and we felt the weight of the copies. It didn’t seem like enough.

“Fifty more?” he asked.

“A hundred, I think,” I replied.

“Yeah, okay,” he said.

“We can always make more, I guess,” I said, because, really, truly, I wanted a million of them now.

So we made a hundred more. We now had one hundred and twenty copies of this weird thing. It felt like alchemy, like all those brooms in Fantasia, like the world was finally big enough for the things that we cared about, that we’d make it ourselves.