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In the fall, Max gets suspended for picking a fight over a maple leaf. His parents yell and scream and hit but he’s still back there, clutching at the leaf, ripping it, crumbling it in his hands until it is little bits of red nothing and it blows away in the wind. He doesn’t remember how it happened but some piece of shit said something and then he was gone, only coming back with sore, bloodied hands and a body shaking beneath him, gasping as adults pulled him off of them. He doesn’t even remember their face. He doesn’t care.
His eye is bruised and his vision is red and his nose drips blood into his mouth, metallic and acrid and sharp. Pita is standing over where Max has collapsed, clutching his nose in pain, legs unable to keep him up. He says something but Max can’t hear it beneath the roaring of what he thinks is the ocean in his ears. He feels like a shell.
In the winter, Max steps on a lake. Then, he stomps on it. Then, he jumps. And jumps. And jumps. And jumps, until the ice cracks. Until he slips under. Then, he breathes.
Breathing feels like being alive again, feels like fire in his veins, the kind of fire he can control, can direct. It feels like living, feels like running to go catch birds, like rolling down a hill, like kissing someone. It feels like dying, feels like losing it all, friends, family, his partner. He breathes and, for the first time since camp, he cries.
He wakes up, shivering, muscles locking up, laying just outside of the crack he made. His fingernails are bloody. So is the edge of the ice. He frowns and limps back into his house.
In the spring, Max thinks he can feel brambles growing in his lungs. They press and press and press against his chest, forcing his hand. He shoves vases to the floor, throws phones, rips up books with his teeth. Bruise after bruise, his body is discolored. Strike after strike, he smiles.
A tooth gets knocked out. The school counselor pretends to be worried, but she relents quickly. Max’s mouth feels bloody for days. He gets his hands bloody again too. Expelled this time, so he takes his final tests at another school, a school for bad kids. He doesn’t talk to anybody there. They don’t try to talk to him. He hits one of them anyway, just for fun.
In the summer, Max is finally free. Nikki and Neil greet him as he hops on the camp bus, the shitty smell of nature overpowering the smell of sweat as they get closer to the butt-fuck middle of nowhere. He hates it.
He gets off the bus last. Of course the three troublemakers were in the back, how else would they be able to start shit without Quartermaster threatening them or potentially deciding to drive the bus off a cliff?
He sees him. But he waits. Can’t have anyone ruining this for him. So it’s on that first night that he sneaks into the activities shed as David is putting away the last tennis racket from that morning.
“I missed you,” he says, surprised at how easily it comes spilling out of him. David looks surprised too. He smiles at him.
“I missed you too, Max.”