(Fast forward) That’s me, Nicholas Haven. Watch this, Sara! This is where the crowd goes wild for my whole run. (Fast forward)

I caught glimpses: boys with their shirts off, their chests like his, bony and smooth.

I tried to distract him. Offered to take off my uniform if he’d turn off the TV.

No way, you look good in that dress. You look pure.

I’m not pure, I said. I lost my innocence in the King’s Hotel.

Don’t make me laugh, he said.

I sat on his lap, lifted his shirt, bit a hickey, a red mark to add to his temporary scars.

You don’t look like a nymphomaniac, he said.

Oh, and what do I look like?

He pushed the white bangs from my forehead, traced the lines of my face.

An Ice Queen.

Neighborhood boys came by to cop speed. Scotty, this one kid, he probably wasn’t even thirteen. He’d cut slits in his eyebrows. That was Nicholas’s trademark, back in his champion days. Scotty’s jeans sagged just like Nicholas’s, but Nicholas wasn’t trying; he was just skinny because speed takes away your appetite. Scotty stared wide-eyed at Nicholas, as if he wasn’t sure he deserved to be in the same room.

Hey, Scotty, I asked, when Nicholas was in the bathroom, do you know some guy named Luce?

The guy across the street? Yeah, I know him.

What’s he like?

He’s a fag, Scotty said. As if that was the end of the conversation. As if that was all he needed to say.

Well, what’s going on over there? Why are all those women—

Nicholas came out of the bathroom.

Who’s a fag? he asked, yanking Scotty’s skateboard viciously.

Luce.

Luce, Nicholas scoffed, that guy’s a poseur. He’s a puff.

Around his admirers, Nicholas was more affectionate. He’d put his hand up my top; he’d hold me in his arms. But now he shunned me because I’d committed the sin of asking Scotty about the one place he did not want me to go.

What was the big deal? It made no sense to me. Nicholas could talk for hours about his former days as a dropout vandalist renegade. Pissing on cop cars, throwing headbangers through the plate-glass windows of department stores. He could listen to songs where the only words were kill destroy kill and fuck society. But when it came to me, or the Blue House, he had this sudden obsession with purity.

You guys, just tell me what’s going on over there. I won’t—

Hey, Scotty, you want me to re-grip your board?

Yeee-ah! Scotty gushed.

That way you can move faster, Nicholas said.

Yeah, Scotty said dreamily, that way I can really speed.