Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

I’d never been this close to a boy. I knew there had to be a moment, some signal, that regular people could sense in order to go from being people who didn’t kiss to being people who kissed.

“I want to be an artist,” he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.

Everything he said, no matter how innocuous, sounded like he wanted to make out with me.

So for the next week, we sat at the table in my kitchen, drinking flavored instant coffee, and he drew his comics and I wrote my weird girl detective novel in my notebook, and occasionally we would brush our legs against each other, the slightest friction making my armpits sweat like crazy. We were sixteen. How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it?

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

I’d never been, but my brothers were there all the time with their girlfriends, with all those popular, effortless kids who did whatever they wanted. I didn’t hate them. I didn’t want to be them. But I had always been curious about how you could live a life where you never worried about repercussions, never considered that the thing you did rippled out into the world. That part seemed pretty great.