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by Kiersten White

She often wonders which is more anonymous: a big city with so many people to notice that no one notices anyone, or the empty countryside where no one lives.

Someone once told him that mixed-race kids are the cutest and he’s never been able to stop thinking about it. He’s not sure if that makes him racist.

Where a face should be, she finds blank, chipped emptiness. A statue. Maybe in its glory days a statue of a clown sitting at a piano filled people with delight, but seriously, what the fuck.

The sun creeps along, as the sun is wont to do. The occasional insect wanders across Mack’s legs, as insects are wont to do. Mack does nothing, as Mack is wont to do.

Ava plops down on the end of Mack’s cot. She’s sweat-stained and dirty and frankly glorious, as refreshing to see as the water was to drink.

a single scream careens through the park, echoing and being torn apart as it looks for purchase in their ears. In any ears.

Mack lies on her side, curls around her own emptiness, and falls into sleep like stepping off a ledge.

“Yeah, he was hot, that’s how he got away with being such a pretentious asshole. How do you think you’re going to get away with it?”

Mack doesn’t like what her heart does when she sees Ava. Or Brandon and LeGrand, to a lesser extent. Because she’s glad—god, she’s so glad—that they’re here. Which means it will hurt when they aren’t. And she can’t help them, can’t protect them, can’t do anything to keep them here.

She had taken herself and pushed who she had been, who she could have been, so far down, so deep, that it became super-compacted, a well of gravity pulling everything—happiness, sadness, joy, fear—into itself so she didn’t have to feel any of it. So she could walk around, go through the motions of living, a protective, cavernous shell around an impossibly heavy nuclear core.

Mack presses her lips against Ava’s. It’s her first kiss, and it’s soft and scared and hopeful, surrounded by darkness and suffused with it.

And if everyone is evil, then no one is, and he won’t wonder anymore if he’s a sinner.

She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for, but it’s going to be bad. She knows it will, because she was happy, and what right did she have to feel that way?

He is no longer haunted. Whatever Brandon saw broke him, and whatever LeGrand saw either gave him strength or broke him so completely he came out a new shape.

It’s an exclamation mark of blood, not an ellipsis. And certainly not a question mark. The story is ended.

He can give them that. Because he’s not just a thing. None of them are. He’s a person, like his grandma taught him to be. A kind person, and a good friend. He doesn’t want to live in a world where he’s a thing, or where he’s a bad friend, or where monsters are real.

Ava is so tired of being strong.