I glanced over and watched him walk out the door. I could tell he understood something about the tattoo. And while I understood what the symbols were, he understood what they meant. To Kori.

“Memento was her favorite movie,” I said to cover.

Kori had lots of “boyfriends.” None of them were a secret. And none of them were very hard for her to forget.

She was a total guy about sex. A slut. I don’t think anyone, even Kori, would try to argue against the title. But she never used sex, like some girls at our school did. She never tried to get a guy or keep a guy or steal a guy with it. I think that’s why other girls just didn’t get her. For them, sex was always tied to something more.

I’ve done some things with guys. Things to get guys. And more things to keep guys. But the most extreme things I did weren’t with guys and weren’t about sex at all; they were the dares I did for Kori.

The very first dare—taking the cigarette Kori held out to me in eighth grade—I did to get her friendship. It could be argued that I did all the other dares to keep it. And it could also be argued that I was getting a tattoo for the very same reason.

But I preferred to think about it as filling the void without replacing it.

I picked out a pair of tattered black angel wings from the catalog and waited as the guy began preparing his workstation. He was wearing only a pair of jeans that hung on his very narrow hips with a wide black leather belt. His naked torso revealed a frail rib cage and skin covered in Seurat-like rust-toned tattoos. The dots making up his tatts matched the color of his freckles almost perfectly, so the artwork was thoroughly camouflaged unless you were close up.

An elaborate cross with angels and demons filling all the spaces decorated his back. If I blinked, it went back to being just freckles, like one of those crazy posters at the mall.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

As furious as I was at my mother, I knew better than to come home with a tattoo on display. I unbuttoned my jeans and rolled down the denim to where the skin turned white.

“Just above the timber line?” he asked, and I nodded, grimacing at his cavalier description. “Lie back on here, then.”

Looking very closely, I could make out a tattooed circle around the left side of his chest with a line slanting through his heart.

He caught me staring at it and said, “Just wanted to be up-front about it. You’d think it would scare girls off, but it’s kind of a chick magnet.” He laughed. Then: “Why do women always want what they can’t have?”