See me.

Please. See me.

Gabriel catches me staring and smiles before I can look away.

James once said that “precipice” was his favorite word and now I know why.

I’m on the edge of something. On the edge and I want to fall. I want to fall so badly.

Gabriel’s dark clothes are covered in glow-in-the-dark stars that reflect in the mirrors on my own. I’m night, he tells me. You can be my light.

These are the things I learn about Gabriel: For minimum wage plus tips, he delivers balloons for parties, bar mitzvahs, and weddings. I have to wear this awful red jumpsuit, he says. And you haven’t lived until you’ve had to get into a crowded subway car with three dozen balloons. But it’s cool. No one is sad or angry when you’re bringing them balloons.

He tells me he used to get good grades, and he used to live in the city, and he used to be a gymnast, and he used to pretend to have a girlfriend. But then his father was killed by some random guy on the F train. Gabriel quit school. He quit the gym. He quit the pretend girlfriend. His mom moved them to the Bronx where they live in a one-bedroom apartment over a smoke shop.

Gabriel decided then that if he had to work to support his mom and little sister, if he had to sleep in a converted closet, he was going to do whatever things he could to make himself happy.

As he’s talking, I realize I want to be one of those things.

One of his things.

I told Gabriel I live on the Upper West Side, which isn’t a lie, but James says I should have made up something more exotic.

I told Gabriel I’m only sixteen, and he laughed and said, Age is only a number. He just turned eighteen, anyhow.

I told him I’d write him a song.

I told him I’d never been kissed, although I can’t tell that to anyone anymore.

A kiss should be so simple. Lips against lips.

A fulfillment of the promise I made to myself when I was twelve.

A new promise created.

After Becky and Andy went on their second date, she told me how he’d kissed her in the lobby of the movie theater.

An older woman standing in the bookstore aisle next to us had smiled. Becky didn’t care who heard her. She didn’t have to.

Gabriel and I hid in the shadows created by the fog and the lights of the dance floor. We weren’t hiding from ourselves, but from the world, and everyone who might hate us for it.

Our kiss was a secret we didn’t want to keep.

But we had no choice.

As I’m getting ready for bed, a star falls out of my shirt and onto the floor. I place it under my pillow.

I wish. I wish.

I’m too busy wishing to sleep.

When I was ten, I taught myself to play guitar upside down like Paul McCartney plays bass with the strings reversed and everything, because I’m useless doing anything right-handed. My dad asked why I couldn’t play something “manly” like the trumpet and join marching band. I told him I hated football, and he never asked again.