Xie confused, glancing through the window at Leni, who looks at her lap, hair hanging in her face. Her dad’s friends with Moore, okay, he would kill her if he knew what she was doing. She doesn’t have a family like yours, they’re not going to just smile and nod and pay for her fucking rice milk, they don’t even know she’s vegan, that she’s queer, they don’t want to know anything about her, and you want to walk around like everything is so hard for you, you suffer so much, everyone else is some clueless asshole, when you don’t even know what life is like for your so-called best friends, okay? I’m sorry, Xie stutters, I didn’t know— Because you never ask! she shouts. He looks at the pavement, shatter of glass from an accident on the white line. I’m sorry, he says. I’m just. I’m sorry. Not knowing how to explain it, how far away he feels, a feeling he doesn’t know how to fix. Jo rubs her wrist against her brow. Drops her arms at her sides. We love you, okay. Just. Don’t be such an ass. He looks at her. Yeah, he says. Okay. She takes his arm. Come on, you idiot. He climbs back in. Xie’s body weirdly sore, like he has been hit. All over. Leni turning the radio on, which for some reason is tuned to a country station but no one says anything, they just listen to Willie Nelson and Tim McGraw for ten minutes. Windows cracked. Parking at Leni’s favorite vegan diner. My treat, Jo says. He goes to the bathroom to wash his hands and the light is so dim he thinks he sees blood. Doesn’t. Does. Holding his fingers to his face. Panic beating a distant drum. Thinking: You’re fine. P. there to touch his palms, helmet bent to kiss them, there is all night ahead of them, still. So much to do. The girls are in the car with cashew milkshakes and fries and he eats, mechanically, while they play a game Leni invented called Who’s Fucking Who. A woman goes in with her Chihuahua under her arm. Definitely fucking, Jo says, and they laugh, Xie loudest of all. What does any of it mean. Try to see yourself from the outside. Are you. Just a person or a fucking clown?

The next two nights are dry; he drags himself through the woods in a trance, P. at his side: he thinks nothing, feels nothing. Hammer, nail, birch, bone. The pain comes later. Wrapping his hand at the kitchen sink in the morning, bubble of peroxide, Erik angling to look. What happened? I cut it, Xie says, pulling away. It’s fine. Erik watching him, knowing something. Not enough. In the evenings pulling out the deck of cards but Xie can’t hold them without shaking, he pretends he is tired, goes to wait in the attic for his father to fall asleep. The math is unrelenting: a night, an hour, even a dozen trees off means some of them might go unspiked and you don’t know. Where they will cut first. He rests in the woods. Cheek on the dirt. Shallow cradle in the earth, dug with his hands, just long enough to curl up in. Warmer down here. Hood pulled tight around his head. Such smells, toward morning, when the air gets thicker with dew, dense perfume: mineral, loam, feather, all varieties of shit, dead meat, skunk, flower, mushroom, mold. Missing the body. Does it miss him? You have to be willing. P. blows the leaves from his shoulder, settles over him, cutting out the sky. Heavy. Face against his. He can see, inside the dark hollows of his eyes, where the tiny fingernail-sized lacrymal bones should be, slim vertical ridges along which tears make their way to the surface of a face. The body has these bones, he has touched them many times, but the bones inside P.’s face are completely smooth. P.’s fingers sliding over the bridge of Xie’s nose, beneath his eye. Beloved. Don’t cry.