"Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
--Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Last year, I would brush past her on the way to Algebra II and she would toss a look over her shoulder...cold. Like I was something she'd scraped off the bottom of her high-heeled shoe. Every day. Brush against her, inhale the light, airy, Tommy Girl cloud, and get that look. It was our pattern. Our little moment of connection.

But now we're juniors. And I have Chemistry at 'brush time' instead of Algebra. The look she gives me is different. Our shoulders connect for two seconds and her big brown eyes fill with ten thousand things. Secrets. Pleas. Compassion. Every day, in her eyes, I see myself lying in a pool of blood. And I see her horror. Her regrets. Her thinking that I may be a jerk, but I don't deserve to die. Not when I didn't know what I was getting into. Not when my father has done so much for them.

Her sainted concern makes me want to puke.

And her shoulder makes me hard.

It's almost a joke. Every guy at West Roswell but three wanted her last year. Now, it's every guy but one...and that's only because he's her brother. The equally sainted Max Evans. Michael Guerin and I both fell off the wagon. Left our human interests behind. God knows why. Liz and Maria were safe, weren't they? Safe and normal.

Yesterday, after basketball practice, a couple of the guys started wondering why Isabel the Ice Queen is now extra chummy with her brother's loser pal...why she clutches his hand as they walk through the patio at lunch or has her head on his shoulder as they scrunch into a booth at the CrashDown. The main consensus was that Guerin is a lucky sonofabitch.

He's not lucky. No one who falls for Isabel is. We're cursed. I guess he's more cursed than me--anyone with eyes can see he still wants Maria--but I'm perverse. I like to think he deserves the pain. Because he and Isabel and Max ruined us all. They're conquering us and invading us just as if they'd come down in a ship with their lasers a blazin'. They've healed us. They've hurt us. They've filled our heads. Liz, Maria, Alex, and me...we're not safe and normal now.

I never thought I would understand why Liz started acting like a freak last fall...why she looked right through me on our dates...why she dumped me outside the hospital before her grandma died. But it all makes sense now. Senseless sense...if there is such a thing.

Isabel brushes against my shoulder...her brown eyes flood...and I stumble. And I fall.

People laugh. Vickie Delaney turns her back, denying that she ever went all the way with me at the soap factory rave. Ron Jacobson says something about my "klutzy ass." The ground isn't all that hard...not as hard as the floor in the UFO Center. But the feeling of sympathetic eyes and the view down a tight, purple, tank top is worse than any gunshot wound.

"Are you okay, Kyle?"

Her lips are a deep pink...and shiny. Is she wearing thick gloss for Michael now? Because his ex-girlfriend has kissably moist lips, too? And why am I staring at her lips when the most gorgeous pair of breasts known to man and alien alike are floating in front of me? Why am I sitting on my ass, gawking at her, like a helpless moron?

Because I'm a loser.

"Yeah," I manage to mutter as I take her soft, offered hand and haul myself up. "Yeah, I'm tough."

"I know." She smiles, but the relief doesn't reach her stricken eyes. She looks like a scared little girl, clutching her books to her chest with both arms now that she's let my hand go.

"Are *you* okay?" I wonder, shifting the straps of my backpack so that my Chemistry book doesn't dig into my spine. It doesn't ease the pressure.

"Fine," she lies casually, tossing her head, as most of our audience drifts off to class.

Down the hall, I see Guerin. Leaning against a locker. Watching us. Further down, behind him, Alex Whitman is watching him watch us. And she knows it. And her face is so pale...and so gorgeous. So totally aware of three guys caught in her secrets and her orbit...and so totally lost on what to do about it.

Join the club, Isabel.

"I'd better get to class," she says, beginning to move past me. *I'm sorry*, she means.

"Me, too."

I brush against her.

Inhale the smell of her perfume.

And wait for this same time tomorrow.

June 2000.