Chapter 18

“Nipples.”

“What?”

“Darker,” I said.

“I don’t get it.”

I composed myself. “It’s okay…your spit.”

Thinking about Angel’s spit, I was decomposing again. Decomposing was the word I used for feeling frazzled back then, after learning the definition of composure.

“Mr. Mann,” our English teacher, Miss Madden once said. “Please, show some composure.”

“What does that mean?” I’d stopped playing air guitar to the soundtrack of the film we’d been watching to ask.

She’d sent me out into the hallway with a dictionary and a piece of paper to write the definition one hundred times.

The trumpet’s metal was warm and damp from Angel holding it against his bare torso so tight.

“How do you do it, again?” I put the part of the instrument that had touched Angel’s lips up to mine and fingered the key that had been against his nipple. I was kind of obsessed with the word—nipple—and the actual thing. Another effect of puberty.

Angel made his sputter again. “Like that.”