Casey and I met at Dragon Park. I was sitting in the cement tube under the bridge. My butt was damp with rainwater, and I looked up at her pink shorts and wild hair. Somehow she was even smaller than I was. How was she brave enough to speak?
She said, “What are you playing?”
She said, “Can I play?”
I pushed the pirate ship across the puddle, and she fired the cannons boom at the bad guys, invisible and real.
Before my mother realized I needed glasses, the world was cloud-like, and I stumbled through the playground in a clumsy haze, following Casey’s hair, a pile of leaves. I tried to ignore the splashing fountain and flashing cars so that I would not lose her.
We played house. I was husband and she was wife, and I set out the plastic chicken legs and bananas, and she poured actual tea that she’d begged off her mother into tea cups. “It’s an acquired taste,” Casey mimicked. I held the bitter liquid to my lips, trying to understand. She waltzed a miniature Dirt Devil around the carpet then peeled a sock from her foot and spit on it. “Help me with the dishes! I’ll go on strike again, I swear.”
Then we lay on the carpet with our shirts off, holding hands, playing sleep.
“Do you know what an overdose is?”
“No.”
“It’s when someone eats too many drugs and almost dies.” Casey barely remembered her father, the blues guitarist who hated sleeping, but she remembered this.
I pictured a body on the ground, arms and legs spread, circled by a crowd, music, and smoke.
“Let’s play overdose.” I don’t remember who said it.
She handed me a cup, and I performed the sign of the cross and said I love you and gulped the tea. I dropped the cup and crawled on my hands and knees, rolled onto my back, closed my eyes. I tried to stay as still as possible.
She pressed her lips against mine, saving me or saying goodbye.
When my mother came to pick me up, Casey and I stood at the top of the stairs in our pajamas. The window above the door was black. I heard the keys in my mother’s hand.
“Why can’t I sleep over?” I whispered.
“Why can’t he sleep over?” she yelled.
We wanted to know why we couldn’t be like other best friends. We wanted to know why we had to be different when we felt the same.
Sundays, my mother took us to church. Casey said her family didn’t believe in anything, but she liked the music and the rituals, the white robes and chalky incense swinging on a chain.
One Sunday, after the gospel, the priest told a story about an old married couple. Every morning, the husband made his wife a sandwich for lunch, no crust. They shared a long and happy life.
After the couple had been married for 50 years, the husband asked his wife if there was anything she wanted to know about him but had never asked.
“Actually, yes,” she said. “How come you always cut the crusts off my sandwich? I love the crust.”
He asked why she hadn’t said anything sooner.
“I figured if you wanted them so badly, you could have them.”
“I hate crust,” he said. “I ate them so you wouldn’t have to.”
The congregation laughed, and the priest said the story was about sacrifice. My mother said communication. The priest said God sacrificed his son to save us all, and we should sacrifice for others, whether they were our family or not.
After mass, my mother drove us to the discount grocery store across the river, next to the old factories, where girls barely older than Casey used to sew jeans, and sometimes the girls’ hair got caught in the machines and sometimes the girls died.
The cement warehouse smelled sour with spoiled milk and beef. My mother bought giant sacks of potatoes and cases of juice boxes and, if we were good, if neither of us cried or bled, she got us candy, whatever we wanted, which wasn’t much because we saw siblings crawling on empty carts and knew we were lucky. Our mothers didn’t beat us as theirs did. We didn’t know physical hunger. Our fathers ran away, but we had each other.
One day at school, Casey spilled glue all over her desk, and the teacher yelled, “Time out!” and led her to the hallway. I followed.
“What now?” the teacher said.
“I want to be in timeout, too.”
“Fine. Fifteen minutes.”
I stood next to Casey, facing the cool cement.
“My mom says it.”
“What?”
“Fuck.”
“Fuck.” Like throwing a rock.
Casey was Madeline, she was Max from Where the Wild Things Are, dancing in the woods and howling at the moon. Sometimes she got quiet like Charlie Brown.
When the girls had an idea and the boys had a different idea, they pulled our arms to opposite sides of the playground, and I caught the blurry football falling from the sky and sprinted and crashed into the defenders between us.
We were seven, we were eight, every year spinning faster, winter-summer, winter-summer. I still played with Casey when my teammates called me gay. They pointed at her, sitting with my mother, and asked if I loved her then. The librarian said Casey and I were going to get married one day. The magazines told us that to become artists we needed to move to New York and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and never die.
Our limbs stretched and darkened with hair like twins in a cloudy womb. When Casey was busy, I walked the aisles of the library, breathing in the metal shelves and plastic book covers, all the dust trapped in all the pages. I liked stories that cracked me open like an atlas. I wanted someone beautiful to trace my insides with their finger.
