Adam- 16

                                    

                                          
I come in late. 
                          
	"Sorry," I say. "Serena still practicing?" 
                          
	"She's got it," promises Megan.
                          
	"Really," I whisper.
                          
	"I know, right?" Evan whispers back. Harper is across the room. She gives us a suspicious eyebrow raise, but somehow, our joke makes it past joke airplane security, despite being a tall, bomb-shaped bottle of water that isn't up to flight protocol. The water is making fun of Serena. Sometimes, I think it might be the only thing that can quench Evan's unique comedic sensibilities. "You owe us an explanation for the lateness, by the way. We don't even have time now to stand around and thread our fingers through each other and pretend we're not here to see each other first and fight second."
	Chief says, but we are, and Adam's heart, stubborn thing that it is, insists, we are absolutely here to thread hands before we throw hands. I think I'm a little at odds with both sides of myself today. I don't know who that makes me. I'm not keen to find out. "My brother and I got into a bit of an argument. He started yelling at me for not being around, I told him that he's never been around, and he started shaking. Then I told him to stay out of my business."
                          
	"You're not capable of making yourself sound like the good guy, are you? Because you sound like an asshole," Evan says, incredulous.
                          
	"I am an asshole. What am I supposed to do?" I ask. "I can't tell him the truth."
	"Amanda's been edgy, too," Megan says.
                          
	"I'm de-e-e-finitely not here to hear about your plus ones," Evan says. 
                          
	"What do you want to hear about?" Megan asks.
                          
	"Given that what we're starting with is dead hamsters, I feel like we can work our way up," he says. "That is to say, there's plenty of room for improvement."
	Megan's lips purse. "You mean, I have plenty of room to tell you stories about my infinite number of other plus ones, or my many, many excursions involving roleplaying and cosplaying. Imagine it as what we do now, except everyone involved is even younger, and there's no reality to moderate how far we go off the rails. I'd love to tell you how many women the Siren Queen has seduced--" 
                          
	"Forget reminiscing. Maybe I could take a kiss for good luck," Evan says with a wink.
                          
	"Do you two know how to kiss with two people?" she asks, hands on her hips. 
                          
	"No," I say. "Let's do it. Let's do it right now."
	"PDA," yells Harper.
                          
	"Let's do it," I roar even louder, over Anthem, over my worry about my brother, over the sound of the fear rising in the pit of my own stomach. They block out everything. I expect this to be the enveloping feeling as we all lean in, the three of us so close that I think our faces might square up and evenly prevent each other from touching. It's not how things were supposed to be done, but this is our world now, and it's how we're going to do it. In a second, we reclaim normalcy. I reclaim all the shame, all the fear, and it is.
                          
	Evan headbutts me. Megan's thrown off. We do not get to lock lips. I think I get a bit of lip, but I'm not sure whose it is. The scent of them still lingers in the air, but I could have gotten that anywhere. My head pulses. My face burns.
                          
	It's bad.
                          
	"I guess that doesn't count?" Megan says.
                          
	"Nope. Absolutely not. Does not count at all," Evan says. 
                          
	"What are you doing?" asks Serena.
                          
	"Funny you should ask! Leaving," Evan hightails it for the portal. Flashing a set of finger guns back our way, he calls, unnecessarily loudly, "Get ready, Ser! Today is going to be the ride of your life." 
	It's bright out today. I'll take it as a good omen. The woods are trodden down where we've cut them. It's not warm enough or spring enough for plants to be coming out, far from it, but I can sense that around the corner, and here and there, there are glimpses of something to break the chill. I hate to admit it, but I'm excited to come this way in spring. I'm excited to come here afterwards, to hike through the places that thrilled and terrified us as humans instead of puppets. When nothing has any power over us, we will just be stupid teenagers, driven to danger only when we think we are in command of it.