Chapter 28

I know his body as intimately as I know my own. He has a small freckle on the inside of one butt-cheek, just under the fatty part that would fit so perfectly in the palm of my hand. There’s a scar low on his left hip where he got twisted up in the swing set outside of his elementary school—the chains of the swing caught in his shorts, pulling them down, then cut through his skin to leave behind a series of puckered red bumps. There’s also a crescent-shaped mark just above his right ankle where I pressed too hard with a pen while drawing a fake tattoo, and I spent a sleepless night worried he was going to die of ink poisoning before dawn. I know every freckle, every bump, every scar. I’m sure he knows me just as well. We’re tied so intimately together, like two halves of one whole, it’s no wonder I feel for him what I do