AMERICAN BOYFRIEND

tattoo

he can't remember when, exactly. these things become so hard to remember. maybe it's been always. maybe a year ago, or yesterday. maybe while he was asleep, or staring at the ceiling, or brushing his teeth, or while driving to the grocery store with him in the back seat. maybe it had been creeping up on him, gradually, slowly, like death, or the plague, or winter around trees full with leaves. one day you are yourself and the next day you are in love and these two people are nothing alike.

kai couldn't remember the day, but he could remember the moments that lead up to—something like an emotional suicide. or a premeditated murder. God's only mistake on the blueprint of his life.

it had happened somewhere in the space and time between him meeting geo in fourth grade, when his teeth were crooked-straight and split apart like the red sea in the middle; when he was taller than kai and when kai was taller than him and then they were the same height, only half an inch apart, a full inch on good days. when his father had become a statue-man and geo's mother a ghost-woman, with alzheimer's acting as a demon, possessing their spirits. together they had watched them breathe alive, fade, begin to disappear.

when snow had fallen for the first time ever in their side of california, they had lost their mutual minds together, practically intertwined by the same pink brain tissue and video games and songs and the swings in the park by kai's house. it had barely even touched the ground, almost floated in the air, melted on their tongues, and geo had brought a jar out, running up and down the street, trying to collect it, save it, for the moment.

when geo had tried to hang himself in eighth grade his older sister's bathrobe belt—kai remembered how the little trickle of blood that had dropped from his mouth was redder than red, and the way his brown eyes rolled around in his head. how kai had loved him so much, before and then, that he felt like he was bleeding too, everywhere and anywhere blood existed. like a million knives piercing through his skin and his heart.

you can say i love you with your mouth closed. kai knows this best of all. he had a mastered it, in the form of late car rides and not changing the station and paying the check and holding doors and watching movies he didn't like and hugging always, every time, a little longer, a little harder. so maybe when he'd pull away he'd hear it: i love you. he could say it without words, and it would make sense.

kai knows a lot about geo's hands. all the faint brown lines down the middle—how they come together at the center. if he cut them open, water and blood would come out. maybe. probably just blood and alison's perfume, carried around in little red cells.

thinking about alison made kai want to kill himself. or at the very least, bend his bones until he was her, slender and sweet with all ten feet of her straight black hair, and the septum piercing that jostled whenever she wrinkled her nose, and the tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the letter "g" in clear, pure ink. geo has one, too. an "a" with a rose around it. roses. geo didn't even like them. he had always preferred white magnolias.

• • •

"i can't believe she let me choose flowers. i never hear about guys picking flowers," geo says, walking swiftly through the warm, yellow-lighted aisles in the greenhouse of an outdoor supermarket. kai sees only the top of his head, curls slicked down and pointed in all directions, before he disappears again.

"well, nothing about this is exactly conventional, is it?" kai asks him. geo's smile is quick and wide, open then closed. kai sees it only before it's gone, when he meets him in the third aisle.

"my mother says i should get her bougainvillea. i don't even know what they look like. i don't even know what they are," he says, rubbing his hands over packets of seeds and bouquets and the white shelves holding them. leaving his  mark in places that would soon forget him. kai wishes he could, too.