The text that appeared on my battered and abused flip phone was garbled. As I moved my eye from letter to letter, the prior letter seemed to change. The effect was that I was left trying to interpret a cipher.

I couldn’t read the name, but I could see the little bubbled picture by the name. The process of moving my eye to that picture brought the text into alignment. Dean, inviting me over.

The flight path I took felt natural in the moment, but as I thought about the way I’d come, I noticed inconsistencies, or alarm bells sounded. Streets didn’t line up, landmarks weren’t in the right order. There was a butcher chain that was labeled ‘It’s fucking meat’, instead of its proper name, a reference to a joke I’d made with my friends, that we’d held onto and repeated every time we’d passed the place. A bank labeled ‘Bank’ and nothing more. More signs with gibberish letters, or images that they couldn’t seem to decide on, despite the fact the signs weren’t digital.

The sky had changed as I flew into it. Dean’s place was a five minute flight away, from our house at the southwestern corner of the city to the Towers, the expensive part of downtown, but even though it had been afternoon when I left the Pelham’s lawn, it was evening when I arrived at the penthouse.

The message on my phone, still flirting with the idea of being gibberish, warned me the doorman was a snitch. Dean had found out when he’d tried to duck out to do an extra patrol. His parents had been called, they’d called the Youth Guard, and the Youth Guard had harangued the PRT, even though the patrol had been unsanctioned.

Easier to fly in. To float up to the balcony, quiet as anything, and reach below the railing, seizing his ankles.

He didn’t jump. Instead, he dropped down to a squat, then shifted position again, lying flat on his belly.

I was there, just the upper half of my head visible above the base of the balcony, fingers at the edge now, decorative metal lattice and panels of glass stretching between the railing and the balcony itself. He was there too, his face inches from mine.

“I can sense you, even if it’s dampened,” he said.

There was moisture in my eyes. “What if I love you really, really hard? Will it get through the dampening?”

“You could try.”

I scrunched up my face, concentrating. I concentrated on every moment. Tender, trusting, hopeful, angry, mournful. The details that had stuck with me, like the clown nose stain on white briefs, the moments spent studying. The moments we’d been young and shortsighted, feeling parental pressures, feeling alone, and the resulting moments that had been so sweet in their loneliness because we’d been lonely together.