I’ve got a good bleary-eyed stare going, gazing at the Freddy Vs. Jason poster on the back of my door, thinking (not for the first time) about the sexual symbolism of Jason’s machete wedged between Freddy’s claws. The comforting profiles of my boyfriends are whipped against the wall, replaced with the one face I want to see the least right now. He thrusts his phone screen forward, so that I see it before I see his face, calm but magenta. Nova cuddles closer to me on the bed, like she’s sheltering a scared animal. I think it adds nicely to the drama of the moment.
	“What does this mean?” He asks, crossing my bedroom in a single stride. He wiggles the phone in my direction. Everything looks so fancy on his bright iPhone screen. The picture I sent him looks even better than it did on the computer. It’s a crying anime girl with blue fairy wings, holding her knees to her chest. Over the top, in a cursive font, I wrote, “ITS OVER”, and then underneath, “IM BRAKING UP WITH YOU.”
	“Did you just use a meme to break up with me?”
	“I made it, Matthew.” I wish I was crying. “I made it to express how sad this makes me. That girl is me. I’m sad.”
	“It has a watermark. It says it’s from memefactory.” He taps at his phone with his thumb to wake it back up.
	“Yeah I used like, a maker, but I found the picture. I wrote the text.” I try to muster up a sniffle, but my nose is actually pretty clear, so it just kinda comes off as a huffy sniff. Nova, ever loyal, pats my foot anyway.
	“I can tell you wrote the text. Why? Why are you breaking up with me? Why via meme?”
	“I think that’s just an image macro. I wouldn’t call it a meme, exactly.” Nova offers helpfully.
	“It’s just time. It’s time to break up.” I brush my bangs out of my eyes. Matt’s so handsome when he’s pissed off. He was pissed off when we first met. He’s been pissed off pretty often since then, too. His eyebrows are perfect. It makes me wish it wasn’t time to break up. But it was.
	“What does that mean? Why is it time? Answer me like a human.”
	Matthew and me have been dating for nine months and three weeks. It’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had, beating out my old record by nine months, two weeks, six days, and twenty-two hours: a record I’d managed to hold on to from second grade ‘til tenth. (To be fair, second grade me had an unfair advantage: he was okay with dating girls.) For all intents and purposes, he seems like my dream guy: he has a car (his own, not one he borrows from his parents) and he’s pretty okay looking and he’s a senior which makes all of my girl friends insane with jealousy, plus he has a job and a debit card so he buys me Taco Bell pretty much whenever I ask for it. There’s a perfect logic to our love. And yet.
	“I just feel it. It’s time for us to break up. You’re gonna be leaving for college after this year, anyway. I want to be free and open for new opportunities. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I just know we’re done.” I shake my head, and my bangs fall back into my eyes.
	Matt pushes a hard stream of air out of his lips. I’m gonna miss those lips. Not so much for kissing, which got real boring real fast, but the other stuff sure was fun. “Did you like, watch a show where someone breaks up recently or something?”
	“No.” It was a song, and the instrumental outro makes me cry. “It doesn’t matter.”
	“You do this, Jamie. You get these vague ideas and you don’t think about where they come from or what the results will be, and you just act on them. Have you thought this through at all?”
	“Yes.” I thought it through all day at school. Except during lunch, when Nova and Sally and me went to the library to watch the next episode of the show we’ve been chipping away at one episode at a time on the only streaming site that hasn’t been blocked yet. Everyone needs a break some times.
	“I’m giving you this one chance. I don’t want you to come whining to me later saying you made a mistake. Actually think about it. Do you want to break up with me?”
	“I do.”
	“You didn’t think about it.”
	“I don’t have to.”
	“I’m asking you to.”
	“No.”
	We hold one another’s gaze for a minute. He really looks exactly how you’d want an ex-boyfriend to look: a little scruffy but still pretty okay looking. Nova’s chubby cheeks wobble as she juggles her wide-eyed look of suspense between my face and Matt’s. Finally, he lets out his breath. “Nyalright. I guess. We’re broken up, then. …Just…Jamie, don’t forget—“
	“Don’t, Matt. It’s over. We have to move on.” I push my eyes down into Nova’s comfy-cool arm squish.
	“Jamie. Don’t forget you still owe me forty-five bucks.”
	I don’t look up. I hear the sound of the door latching behind him, and then the pad of his shoes on the carpet as he walks down the hall. Nova strokes my back in a way that’s sort of annoying, but I don’t really want to ask her to stop. Instead, I ask, “Did he cry?”


	I think a lot of people make some issues kinda black and white in a way that doesn’t really represent the truth. Like my mom and her “if you lie, you go to hell” thing. Maybe if you lie, but you have a good reason to, you’re okay? Or like, if you lie, but you don’t want to and you feel bad? There’s so much space between “if you lie” and “you go to hell.” The same thing with soul mates. People make it “soul mates exist” or “soul mates don’t exist.” So what is a soul mate, then? Can I say soul mates exist for 100% sure, but define soul mates however I want?
	Nova is my soul mate. We’re in love and we always have been and we always will be. But also it’s not romantic at all. I define “soul mate” as exactly what me and Nova are. Exactly. So I don’t have to make her clarify when she breaks the long silence with “Do you have any bleach left?”
	“Nah. Maybe I should cut it?” I fiddle with my long fringe. I’ve been going for a femmer thing since Matt and I started dating, kinda trying to push that bottom/top contrast. Maybe a new look is what I need to reassert my independence.
	“Don’t cut it; it’s so cute.” Nova has a build kinda like a rubber ducky: close to the ground, all butt and boobs and tummy, with the chubby ducky lips to match. Today’s lipstick is a bright jewel blue. Her eye shadow’s most of the way sweated off, but you can still see the june bug green smears up against her eyebrows. I think if I were  girl, I’d do my make up like hers, just kinda drawing a new face up on top of my own, with big liquid eyeliner spirals and stars on my cheeks. We already kind of have the same haircut: long and shaggy in front, short in the back.
	We’re lying on my bed, me under the covers like a loser and her on her belly, her arms hanging down. I think she’s playing on her phone. My blanket smells bad but I kinda like it. It smells like my bed. I can’t actually think of a time it’s been washed. Gross.
	“How about you rearrange your room?” She clucks. We both look around. There’s not really much to rearrange; it’s full to bursting with flotsam, but as far as furniture all I have is my bed, my night stand, and one book shelf. My bed sticks out into the middle of the room like a big buck tooth. I like being able to shove things under it from three different directions, but it might be nice to have it up against the wall. There might actually be some space to sit on the floor then. The girls’ bedroom is bigger—I think it’s supposed to be the master bedroom—but it’s still full of Willa’s crap. I’ve thought a few times about trading, but it just seems like so much of an effort. Plus I’m pretty sure mom thinks Willa’s coming back any day now. That’d be an awkward conversation.
	I crawl over her big squishy butt, to the floor, where I kick a bunch of crap out of the way until I have a space up against the wall to sit. Properly braced, I put my feet up against the foot of the bed frame and give a very sincere push. It doesn’t budge.
	“Move your fat ass.”
	“Bitch I’ll kill you,” she mutters, but she gets up anyway, stumbling over her tangled-up skirt. She gets herself into a kind of similar position up by the head of the bed. We’re such a well-oiled bed-moving machine, it’s kind of a shame it only takes one good push from her and then one okay push from me to get it flush with the wall. It thunks nicely when it collides.
	“Cheese and mice,” she blasphemes. It’s not that bad. I mean, it pretty much fits in with the rest of my room. “Is that…? Those are mushrooms. There are mushrooms growing under the bed. Oh my Lord. You definitely have mesothelioma.”
	“What exactly is mesothelioma?” I poke a weird puff ball with the toe of my sock and it disintegrates.
	“That’s when you breathe in old cumsock mushrooms and then you have mushrooms in your lungs. Like the baby in The Series of Unfortunate Events.”
	“What kinda fuck-ass children’s books has a baby full of cumshrooms? Why would you read that?” I push myself up on to my hands and knees. It’s just a twin bed, so even if the entire underside is a chaos of mold and carcinogens, it’s got a manageable acreage. Plus, even just eyeing the surface, I can see a few treasures buried in there. It’s definitely worthwhile to stir it up a little.
	“Oh, God.” I pull at a bit of red fabric hanging out near the edge. It crackles as it unsticks from the crap around it. “This was Matt’s shirt. I stole it. He was so mad.” It smelled so good when I first stole it. I don’t really wanna get close enough to smell it now, though.
	Nova pulls on the edge of a black folder. There’s a cup stuck to it. She peels it off, taking a little bit of the folder with it. “So like…you’re sad you broke up with him?” Nova never really liked Matt. I don’t really blame her. I probably wouldn’t like him much either, if he weren’t my boyfriend.
	“I’m like…I’m sad it’s over, but it’s over.”
	She opens the folder and starts rustling through the papers tucked inside. “Hmm. Oh, remember when we printed out all these spells? I remember we did a love spell on someone…oh yeah, it was Yuki and Akira. It was back when we were way into Sora no Sky.”
	“Oh.” I stopped watching that show after it betrayed me, when Nova wore her homemade Yukira shirt to school and Sally said she liked it and they started hanging out. Sally’s really cool and funny and nice and she lets me use her body spray and I like her a lot but I hate that girl. Still, I know second-hand how it ended. I suck the inside of my cheek. “That did not work.”
	“It did not. To be fair, we were supposed to have a lock of their hair.” Nova thumbs through a few more. “Growth spell…oh I did that one on my boobs. That worked.”
	“Yeah I mean it was either the spell or the fact that everyone in your family is a boobmonster. Either way.” I give Matt’s shirt a few good shakes. Flakes of brown mystery flutter onto my lap.
	“Huh, here’s a spell for getting over a lost love.” She reads silently for a moment. “All we need’s one of his possessions and some fire. Wanna do this one?”
	“Do we…do we burn the possession?”
	“We do in fact burn the possession.”
	“Damn; rad. Do you think we should finish cleaning out under here first?”
	Nova presses her shiny blue lips together, staring the mess down from under her clumpy black eyeliner. “Umm. Nooo. I don’t.”

	Britecreek is the kind of town pop punk songs are always singing about, I think. People only really live here because they can’t afford to live any closer to Mooreville, where the good jobs are, or Blair, where the good school is. It’s the kind of place where any restaurant that isn’t a chain dies a pitiful, graceless death after a couple months. Like it attacks culture like white blood cells on an infection. There are two neighborhoods: the Woods, with all the two-story houses with actual yards; and the Creek, where all the houses are a bunch of copy-pasted shoe boxes and it’s a safe bet just about any bedroom’s gonna have a hole or two punched into the wall. Obviously, Nova and I live in the shit one.
	My backyard is a scrubby little patch of nothing. You can stand in the back door and easily toss stuff over our neighbor’s fence. Theoretically. There’s a tiny shed bursting at the seams with centipedes, a looped piece of crimped sheet metal that I guess passes as a fire pit, and though you can’t really tell from looking at it, a mass rat grave. I have the vaguest of memories of all five of us sitting out here at night, my dad losing his patience ‘cause Willa and me keep dropping hot dogs into the fire, Mom huddled up in a fold-out chair, chain-smoking. I don’t have a lot of memories of all three kids together, and basically none of my dad before he left.
	With me bouncing for warmth in my to’-up black Atreyu hoodie and Nova shuffling her hands in the belly pocket of her to’-up black Nightmare Before Christmas hoodie, we manage to get a few fistfuls of newspaper lit up. It smolders down in the cold ashes. It takes a lot of poking and prodding, but eventually we get the fire to spread to a few twigs and dead leaves we managed to gather up.
	“So I just throw the shirt in there?” I ask, once the fire maybe possibly looks like it won’t be put out with a powerful sigh.
	She has to grip the print-out in both hands to keep it steady in the wind. “Uhh. Yeah. It’s okay if it doesn’t burn all the way. The fire’s like, symbolic. As it burns you’re supposed to like, think about him, and then you say a spell.”
	I have to place the shirt down really gently near the fire. Then I take a stick and poke and prod it into the flames. The fire kind of just hangs out near the fabric, eventually crawling up over it, though it didn’t really appear to be burning.
	“Okay don’t talk for a minute, I’m thinking.”
	I think about when we met, in our photography elective my second semester of ninth grade. I knew from gossip that he was gay, and I guess he knew I was too, ‘cause he volunteered to help me figure out Photoshop when I was falling behind. He was really smooth and flirty at first. I kinda liked him best back then, when he was half in my head and half real. It didn’t really feel like it was real, like there’d actually be another gay guy in the world and like he’d actually want to date me. It felt like every other gay dude I’d ever met was already paired off. All two of them.
	I think about the first time we kissed really deep, in his basement, on the stinky couch. I thought that biting was more of a thing in make outs than it was. I ended up chomping his lip open before he held my shoulders at arm’s length and explained that blood is not a part of first base.
	I think about meeting his friends, and how much I didn’t like them.
	I think about how there was only really one CD in his car that I liked, and how I played it over and over and over. I think about all the boring fingers-sliding-on-strings music he tried to get me to like. All the two hour long movies I tried to get frisky during. The science fiction books he made me take home with me, even though I insisted I was illiterate.
	I think about the way the stubble on his chin and cheeks kind of gave me a rash on my face and neck.
	I think about how his voice kinda comes through his nose. I think about how his eyelashes are dark but straight. I think about how his feet hang over the edge of my bed when he lies down straight. I think about all the times I tried to use my latent mind control powers to make him give me his hoodies, but failed.
	“Okay. Gimme the spell.”
	It’s printed in an appropriate font: like skinny little witch finger bones. It’s a little harder to read, but going slow makes it sound cooler, so it’s fine.
	“Ez dabez Zaquiel. Swallow my love. Ez direz Zaquiel. Take my love. Dem erez Zaquiel. Replace my love. Ez dabez Zaquiel.”
	“Do it again.” Nova urges in an important-sounding whisper.
	I chant it two more times, feeling a little silly and also kind of bored. The shirt maybe looks as if it’ll show some damage if we put the fire out. Definitely at least enough damage to symbolically sever whatever ties it represents, especially if I dump it in the garbage after. After my last “Zaquiel”, we stand awkwardly around the fire, trying to give the spell a little more respect with our silence. The moment’s too perfect, though, and so it’s really not so much a choice I make as it is the natural progression of events: I toot.


	Back inside, Nova sits on my bed eating yesterday’s reheated buttery penne while I toil and sweat shoveling shit from under my bed into a trash bag. She alternates holding her fork and holding her tattered agenda, her other hand steadying the Tupperware that sits on the wide table of her thighs.
	“Did Mr. Gates give your class homework?”
	“Uhh. I dunno.” There’s a full bag of fiberfill in there. I’ve never sewn in my life but it seems like a waste to just throw it out.
	“You don’t know.”
	“Hey, I had a lot on my mind today. Remember? My first heartbreak? Remember that?”
	“Is your heart really broken?”
	Some flimsy paperback comics have been smashed into origami. Also they’re moist. I attempt to peel the pages apart, but they don’t so much rip as they just melt in my hands. “Well now I am. These cost me like, ten bucks an issue.”
	My mom gives her signature knock (none at all) before opening my bedroom door. Her gooey oil slick grey eyes pan from me, to my bed, to Nova. “Jamison, I told you to leave the door open when you have girls over.”
	“Right, Mom. Sorry.”
	“Hi Mrs. Radspeiler.” Nova chirps sweetly.
	“Hello, Junie.” Nova prickles slightly at the use of her “old” name, but she knows better than to hop on the rotting planks of my mom’s psyche. Nova’s been a big part of my life since elementary school, but Mom still kind of talks to her like she’s the cable guy or something. “It’s past dark. Do you need to call your parents to come pick you up?”
	I give her an apologetic half-smile. She starts shoving her crap back into her messenger bag. “Nah, I can walk. Thanks for having me over, Jamison. Mrs. Radspeiler.” She gives my mom a salute as she angles her hips to slide past her in the doorway. My mom watches her until she’s out of the hall.
	“Jamison if you can’t follow my rules then you won’t be able to have friends over when I’m not here.” Mom’s still in her Snoopy scrubs.
	“Sorry, Mom. I just forgot.”
	She worries at her puffy bottom lip for a moment, deciding whether or not she has the energy to pretend to discipline me. We both know she doesn’t. She sighs, setting to undoing her braid. “How was school?”
	“Good.”
	“Did anything interesting happen?”
	“Nope.” I pause to give her a chance to mention my rearranged room. She doesn’t take it. “How was work?”
	“Tiring.”
	“Anything interesting happen?”
	“Oh, not really.”
	It’s hard to tie the top flaps of these cheap trash bags without tearing them. I wish it wasn’t white; if my mom was aware of her surroundings, she might notice how much of the crap I’ve insisted she buy is straining to burst through the plastic. It probably wouldn’t go over well if she knew I was tossing four moldy shirts while I’m bitching about having to cycle through five.
	“Okay, dear. I love you.”
	“Love you too, Mom. Can you close the door on your way out?” She turns and fades into the darkness of the hall without even touching the door. If Nova were here to laugh, I’d probably whisper some insults after her. I love my Mommy but she drives me fucking nuts. With a theatrical sigh, I unfold my legs and shove myself to my tingly half-asleep feet. The door’s too light to slam properly, but I manage to make a big puff of wind twirl some loose papers around on the floor, which kind of makes me feel better.
	Silence kind of depresses me. I think my ear buds are on my side table. Pulling up my music app on my phone, I reach out to feel for them.
	My hand grips something furry and cold.
	After a microsecond of panic, I calm myself with a strong exhale.
	It looks like some kinda way off-brand dollar store Furby. A little bigger than a tennis ball, it’s just a puff of grayish fluff with beady little eyes, nubby horns, and a wide rictus full of oversized teeth. It doesn’t really look like a toy, but I don’t know what else it could be.
	“Meep,” it squeaks, letting its very wet and very flexible tongue loll out of its mouth.
	Not a toy.
	I’ve never seen a chinchilla in real life. Maybe they look super different than they do in photos. Like maybe their horns just don’t photograph well. That’s stupid. This is not a chinchilla.
	It lifts weightlessly into the air like a dust bunny, drifting at a harmless speed up to my shoulder, where it perches. I can feel its fur on my cheek. It’s kind of nice, but not nice enough to make me forget the teeth. Still, I can’t help but untense slightly when it nuzzles into my neck, purring sweetly.
	“What are you?” I ask it, because why not.
	“Mehp.”
	I wiggle my shoulder slightly. It doesn’t appear to have any feet or any real means of gripping, but it stays put. Assured that it’s not going anywhere, I walk carefully down the short hall, past the family room, into the kitchen. Mom’s at the counter, spooning cottage cheese into a bowl. She looks up at me as I enter, unsmiling.
	“Mom? What is this?” I point to where the little thingy sits on my shoulder.
	“What?”
	“This,” I point harder.
	Mom squints at my neck. “Honey it just looks like a zit. Is it itchy?”
	It takes me a second to realize she’s not saying that the apple-sized puffball with teeth is indistinguishable from a run-of-the-mill zit, and instead that she just doesn’t see it. I gape emptily at her.
	“Just don’t pick at it. It’ll be fine.”
	“…Okay, Mom, thanks. I won’t.”
	I’ve always kind of figured I’d go insane eventually. To be honest, sometimes I fantasize about it: a beautiful, tragic Edward Scissorhands meets Fight Club breakdown that would make everyone realize how much better they should’ve treated me, and also I wouldn’t have to go to school anymore. I definitely thought it’d be a bit more impressive than affectionate dust balls. I don’t even know if I want to blog about this.
	Back in my room, Fluffyfriend flutters gracefully to my bed. Hesitantly, I stick my fingers out to pet it; they slide right through like there’s nothing there, though when I pull them out, they’re so cold I think that they’re wet for a second. Apparently it can touch me but I can’t touch it. That sounds about right, for a figment of my newfound madness.
	Snapchat takes forever to load on our home wi-fi. I suppose there’s no rush; Fluffyfriend seems quite satisfied, contentedly licking its fur. I wonder if it has a hard time grooming its back, what with it not having a neck and all. Once I finally get to the actual camera, it shows up on the screen just fine. I even scroll through a few filters. It appears in sepia. Surrounded by glitter. Behind a big green “HUMP DAY” with little camels walking across the bottom. It doesn’t really matter, so I just go ahead and snap that one.
	Fluffyfriend murps happily, snuggling down into my sheets like a bird. Its face tears in two, showing me the very bottom of its innards and the way its teeth nearly meet around the inner circumference of its head, as it yawns. Aside from the lack of internal organs, it’s really no scarier than when a cat yawns. It’s not exactly cool, but as far as hallucinations go, I guess it could be worse.
	My screen lights up.
	See, this is how I know Nova and I are soul mates. A regular friend, you take a picture of something that definitely isn’t real, they respond with “what?” or maybe not at all. A soul mate gets a picture of an entity entirely made up in your own head and responds “the fucks that furby thing and why is it so excited its Wednesday it doesnt even look like it has a job.”

	Like I said, half the people in Britecreek only live there so they can send their kids to St. Resistance up in Blair. They brag a lot about being the only school in the world fully run under the governance of the Church of the Enemies of Temptation, but like, big deal. Of course they’re the only one. It’s a nothing little denomination with like, fifteen churches spread across Ohio and West Virginia and one in Mozambique, for some reason. Even then, I don’t really understand the big deal about all the different denominations. I think the whole tiff is about the Enemies thinking some parts of the story are focused on too much and some too little, but it’s the same story. I don’t know why anyone would put up with living in Britecreek just to make sure their kids were raised in a religion that’s just barely perceptibly different than the ones that have schools everywhere.
	Britecreek has two token public schools: Martin and Britecreek High. Martin’s really an elementary and a middle school, but it’s all one building, so nobody really bothers to refer to it as “Martin Elementary” or “Martin Middle” the way the principals want us to. They have the kindergarteners through the eighth graders, so of course when there’s any tax money to go around, it goes straight to them. A lot of kids just start doing online school once they hit ninth grade. So even though the school’s  a piddly little one story where a third of the classes are in freezing cold trailers off to the side, there’s really not much of an issue of crowding. I don’t even have a locker buddy; that’s why Nova and I always meet by my locker instead of hers, where her buddy always spends the entire break trying to get her clarinet case to fit because her parents are too cheap to just pay the five dollar band room locker rental, I guess.
	Nova sticks her finger (her left one, I note,) in Fluffyfriend’s face. It doesn’t do anything to avoid her, but it doesn’t seem interested in snuggling up to her the way it does with me. Gingerly, she tries to touch the fur on top of its…headbody, but just like when I try, her hand sinks through. She sniffs her fingers cautiously.
	“It’s like a baby Digimon.” She says in a hushed, reverent tone. “And it’s just…following you around?”
	“Yeah. It slept on my pillow last night. I can’t touch it so like…I can’t shove it in a box or anything. I mean it seems harmless?” I shrug. Fluffyfriend lifts with my shoulder. I can’t figure out the physics of this thing.
	“Well. What’d we do yesterday. We moved your bed—maybe we like, released some mold spores that are making us hallucinate?”
	“Yeah but we’re having the same hallucination so that’s weird.”
	“It happens. Like wasn’t the, uh, the Salem witch trials because of bread mold or something? Or like, what about that thing where all the men in a town suddenly think someone’s trying to steal their penis?”
	“What?”
	“But we also did that spell.  On haunted house shows, houses always get ghosts or demons or whatever because somebody in the house did black magic.” I admit that maybe I’m a little entertained by the whole thing, but it bugs me how Nova suggests this with a giddy grin. I doubt she’d be this excited if it was her who was being haunted by the ghost of a koosh ball.
	Before I can voice my irritation, Sally is brought to us by the traffic of the hall like a dead leaf on a stream. She swerves out of the flow of people, right up against Nova so that their arms touch.
	“Hey sexies.”
	“Hey, yourself.” It’s kinda hard to tell under all the makeup, but Nova maybe blushes.
	I’m already annoyed, and this slovenly display of admiration for anyone other than me certainly doesn’t help. I don’t even feel bad when I snap, “Excuse us, Sally, but we’re kind of having a private conversation right now.”
	The smile drops from her eyes. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She looks to Nova, and I’m devastated to see my very best friend give the same expression to Sally as I give to her when my mom is acting like a tool. “Just, uh, lemme know if there’s anything I can help with, okay?”
	Nova grabs the hem of her skirt to hold her in place before she can turn to leave. If she weren’t wearing pants under it, she’d be flashing the whole hallway. “Ignore Jamie; it’s his time of the month. Actually, we did have a question: would you recognize a demon if you saw one?”
	I squish my lips together in protest, but Nova doesn’t even look at me.
	“Like a drawing or like in real life or something?” She tucks the one little piece of hair that’s long enough behind her ear.
	“A real one.”
	“Hm. No, I don’t think so…but isn’t that kind of a demon thing? Shape shifting?”
	“Like, a demon could make itself look cute and harmless so that it could get close to someone, you mean?” Finally, Nova makes eye contact with me, but when she sees my expression she looks away.
	“I guess. I’m gonna admit that I’m not that well-versed in demonology. Why, did you guys see a demon?” Wide-eyed, she gazes from Nova’s face to mine. Her eyes slide right over my shoulder.
	“Maybe. I don’t think Jamie wants to talk about it.” I’m gonna kick Nova’s fat ass later.
	“Oh. Well, I know that the longer you let a demon…hang out or whatever, the stronger it gets. They get their energy from people, right? I don’t know what’s real and what’s TV.”
	“I don’t know what this ‘real’ thing you speak of us and I don’t want to know. I should get to class…I’m down in the 20s hall. Walk me?” She flashes a slice of white behind her shiny black lips.
	“Ooh la la, I’d love to, Miss November.” Sally flirts, hooking her elbow into Nova’s. It looks a little awkward, since Sally’s elbow is so much higher than Nova’s, but they seem dedicated to making it work.
	“Nova, jeez, you don’t have to worry about me so much.” They’re already walking away. Nova doesn’t bother to turn to give me a peace sign as she strolls merrily away from me and my demon.

	Between the soothing plink of rain on the metal roofs and the funny little guy sitting on my desk meeping and blehping and generally being distracting, I don’t really process a lot of information in any of my classes that day. I mean, less so than usual. Come eighth period, I’m feeling so dreamy-dazed that I don’t even have enough focus to make myself nervous over encountering Matt in the public speaking elective I took just to be with him, the one class we have together. Instead, I walk right up to where he sits at the front of class and plunk my butt down on top of his desk.
	He looks up from his conversation with the guy next to him with a grimace. “Move,” he grumbles, poking me in the thigh with the sharp end of his pencil.
	“Are you mad at me?” I pout, cocking my head.
	“No. I dunno. Get your ass off my outline.”
	I oblige, though I stand almost as close by where his knees stick out into the aisle. “I’m sorry if I broke your heart. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
	He sighs. Some of the anger in him seems to leak out, and he looks somewhat smaller. “I didn’t cry. I’m not mad, Jamie. If you don’t want to be with me anymore, that’s fine. I just wish you hadn’t done it via text.”
	“Meme.”
	“Okay.”
	“So it was a picture with text.”
	“Right. Look, we can talk later, okay?” The teacher’s moving up to the front of the class: our sign that we’re supposed to start getting to our desks and getting quiet. Normally I’d just wait until the teacher yelled at me specifically, but Mrs. LeMaster’s cool. I give Matt one weak smile before Fluffyfriend and I make our way to the back. I can hear Matt explaining the situation to his friend, along with the distinct lack of the phrase ”broke my heart.”

	Mom’s a member of the Enemies. So was her first husband, Ruby and Willa’s dad. After he died when she married my dad, my grandparents weren’t too happy that she married a non-member, but I guess they kept their mouths shut for a while. After they got divorced, she stopped going to church services; they gave her a pretty hard cold shoulder. It didn’t really matter to the rest of the congregation that he left her; divorcing and being divorced from are equal sins, I guess. But she still practices, just by herself. It seems kinda lonely to me.
	Ruby and Willa both went to St. Resistance. My grandparents paid their tuition. They wore the heavy skirts you have to buy specifically from the St. Resistance website and everything. A few years ago, when I was in eighth grade, my mom and my grandparents had some kind of big blow-up that she still won’t tell me the details of. Willa finished out her senior year, but with the money gone, I had to finish out public school in town. I think my mom feels bad that my sisters got to go to the “nice” school and I have to go to Britecreek, but I’m honestly glad. I’m not really a slacks kind of guy.
	Mom and Ruby are both a bit too serious about the whole “eternal damnation” thing for my tastes. There’s really only one choice for advice regarding accidental demon summoning: the family train wreck.
	Willa sounds half-asleep when she answers. “Nyhelyo?” She whimpers, mouth too close to the receiver so it sounds wet and breathy.
	“Dude are you asleep? It’s four in the afternoon.”
	“Put it on speaker.” Nova hisses, tugging at the elbow of my hoodie. She sits on the floor of her bedroom, letting me and Fluffyfriend have the whole queen bed to ourselves. I brush her hand away without looking at her.
	“Who is this?” Willa asks.
	“Jamie.”
	“Drummer Jamie or James from The Garage?” There’s a moist, crackly sound that I kind of hope is her rubbing her eye.
	“Your brother. Your precious only baby brother, Jamison Radspeiler.”
	“Mmm I have a brother with that name but ‘precious’ doesn’t really sound right. What do you want?” We haven’t spoken to each other since Mom’s birthday, four months ago. I believe the last word we exchanged was “turd.”
	“How much of that religious-y stuff d’you remember from school? Did y’all ever discuss demons? Like did you take any kind of Defense Against the Dark Arts class or what?”
	“Uhh. No. Why?”
	“I accidentally summoned a demon and I wanna know if that’s, like, a bad thing.” Nova glares at me. I know she thinks I’m a hypocrite but I’m totally not.
	“Right. Um. So are you actually buying into this angels and demons thing now? I thought you were smarter than that.”
	“No, I’m not.” I say defensively, then instantly feel bad. I really don’t think much about religion in general, but I don’t like Willa implying—or I guess saying—that it makes our mom dumb. “Just tell me what you know about exorcism.”
	“Exorcism. Uh. Oh! Y’know what? One of the religion teachers had a…I don’t know if it was his adopted kid or some kinda foreign exchange program, but he had a kid who already had like, the highest ordinance of religious...authority. I dunno. He was supposed to be some kinda prodigy thingy. The kid came in to guest speak for the class one time. The only thing I remember him saying is that he’s an exorcist, ‘cause it made me think of The Exorcist and I was like, ‘rad.’”
	“Alright.”
	“Like two years ago I was Facebook stalking some of my old friends, and I saw him on there. The exorcist kid. I don’t remember his name but I bet I could find him again.”
	“Oh that sounds perfect! Thank you so much!” Down below, Nova mouths “what?” a thousand times a second.
	“Don’t thank me. You owe me.”
	“Hey, is it weird that an exorcist has a Facebook page?” Nova stops mouthing.
	“I mean…I guess? I don’t know that many teenage exorcists, though.” I can hear her hand clamp over the receiver and the sound of muffled voices. What a skank she is. “Okay okay, I gotta go. I’ll text you.”
	I have to look at the screen to see that the phone call was ended.
	“Where’s this bitch get her manners from?” I ask Nova, gesturing aggressively to my phone.
	“Uhh. Couldn’t tell ya. Could I please sit on my own bed?”
	“No.”

	Nova’s family’s poverty is more the heartwarming, “we may not have much but we have each other” kinda poor. It probably helps that she has two parents and no siblings. She has an ancient game console and a little square TV in her room, and her family has a desktop computer out in the living room. Plus, unlike my mom, her parents are a part of the 99.99% of the population that can tell I’m gay from a glance, so there’s no open door policy. Obviously whenever at all doable we convene at Nova’s house rather than mine. The bus driver’s not really supposed to let us off at any stop but our own, but we’re two of the only kids who don’t regularly cuss her out or smoke crumpled joints in the back, so she looks the other way when I sneak off in Nova’s shadow.
	Out in Nova’s modest-but-cozy living room, we’re using her mom’s Facebook account to peep at our classmates. Both of us are a bit too cool to have any kind of mainstream social media, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting to be in on whatever drama goes down. The fact that we have to decipher it from vagueposts and the ebb and flow of relationship statuses just adds to the fun.
	“Dude.” I snap at Nova, crinkling my nose.
	“That’s your phone, moron.”
	I’m not used to my phone actually…ringing. Vibrating, I guess. Panicked, I slap it off the desk in my attempt to pick it up. It takes me a few tries at swiping to get it to actually accept the call.
	“Hi, is this Jamison?” A clear, polite voice asks.
	“Uh, yeah. Who’s this?”
	“This is Yosef Locke. Your sister gave me your number. She said you were in need of some assistance?” He has the speech patterns of an old person, but I can tell from his voice he’s around my age. Yosef.
	I remember some kind of manners, maybe just one manner, and say, “Hi.”
	“Hi.” He parrots back. “I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”
	“No, I just—uh, yeah, setting up a meeting sounds good. Do we—where? My house?”
	“Your house should be fine, if that works for you. I can meet as early as tomorrow morning, around nine. Would that work for you?”
	“Yeah, that sounds perfect,” I lie. “Uh, I can give you the address—hold on, lemme grab a pen.” Nova hands me one of the loose ballpoints on the desk. Once I actually have it in my hand, I realize I don’t need a pen to tell him my address. I mime writing down the meeting time, even though I don’t have any actual paper. I don’t know what I’m doing.
	“Okay, sounds great.” There’s a smile in his voice. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
	“Okay, take care. Bye. See you tomorrow. Okay.” He’s already hung up.

	Nova is dead to me. Little Miss Goody Two-Boots won’t skip school to support me while I undergo the surely painful and traumatic ordeal of having a demon rent from my soul, because how could that possibly compare to the importance of one day of tenth grade?
	Luckily, I have enough notice to start faking sick the night before. When my mom barges in to ask why I’m still in bed at seven, she doesn’t give me as much guff as I usually get when I decide the morning of that I’m too unwell to leave my bed until after she leaves for work. I lay and listen as she moves about the house getting ready. When she slips back in to tell me she’s leaving, I do slow, asleep-but-not-yet-snoring breaths. I can hear the lock snap shut after she leaves.
	The place is crap. I can’t fix that in an hour. I shower and brush my teeth. I light a couple scented candles to try to make a chip in the poverty stank. I make a pot of coffee. I still have a half hour to kill.
	Meeting new people is hard for me in a way that I don’t think straight people could ever really get. There’s another thing people make black and white: you’re either in the closet or you’re out. Like you make one giant proclamation to the whole world all at once that you’re gay, and then it’s done and over. Even if people can kinda guess from the way I dress and talk and act, there’s always this big moment when I first very casually slip it into conversation, this second where their eyes move up and down as they reappraise me. Suddenly you can see their mind shuffling back through everything you’ve said and done, putting it in new contexts, like this whole time they thought they were talking to a human being, but no, it was a gay in disguise all along. I hate people patting themselves on the back for being “okay” with my existence. I hate the inherent pity. Of course, I hate the people who aren’t okay with it even more.
	I’m not super sure what any kind of organized group’s stance on homosexuality—gross word—is anymore. It would be dickish of me to assume that Yosef is gonna be dickish based on what very little I know about him. Plus his voice sounded nice.
	I sit, wearing jeans in my own damn house, and play on my phone while I wait for the doorbell to ring. I’m not sure if our doorbell works. I’ve become a bit accustomed to Fluffyfriend already; I wonder if I might end up missing him. I take a few pictures, just in case. I’m bored.
	When the doorbell finally rings—I guess it does work—I, thank the Lord, remember to blow out the candles on my way to the door. I don’t need the exorcist to think I’m trying to seduce him.
	He’s looking down when I open the door, shaking the water off of his umbrella. His eyes tilt up through his dark eyelashes and he smiles, mouth closed, before reaching out his hand, palm spread wide. I awkwardly shove my limp hand into his, letting him control the shake entirely. He’s not dressed like a The Exorcist; he’s wearing a way too big church camp T-shirt over a not quite as too big but still too big thermal.
	“Hi, Jamie,” He hums as he snaps his umbrella shut. “Thanks for having me.”
	“No, uh, thanks for coming. You can leave that wherever.” Inside, he slips his wet shoes off right away. He’s wearing blue and white striped socks. Cute. “I—I made coffee. Do you want some?”
	“Oh, that sounds awesome.” He gives me a second smile. I have two now. I think I’m gonna collect them. “With a lot of sugar, please. Oh, and—“ he cuts off as his eyes land on Fluffyfriend, who sits on the couch, looking very unthreatening.
	“Do you see him?” I ask urgently, grabbing Yosef’s forearm.
	“Yeah. Is that why you called?” As he takes a step closer, Fluffyfriend hisses, puffing up like a pissed off cat.
	“It’s a demon, right? I wasn’t sure but—“
	Yosef nods. “Yeah. A very small one. How long have you had it?”
	“Two days. It hasn’t—it hasn’t really done anything, but I thought…” Suddenly I feel like it was stupid to make him come all the way out here. Like I had called a professional exterminator to carry a spider outside for me or something.
	Like he sensed what I was thinking, Yosef gives me smile number three. “It was smart to get into contact with someone right away. Even small demons can get out of control if you don’t deal with them quickly.” His skin is such a warm color. I can’t imagine he even needs a coat in the winter. “Would you like me to go ahead and take care of it for you?”
	A few minutes ago, I almost didn’t want to be rid of Fluffyfriend. Now I’d stomp it myself for number four. “If you don’t mind,” I say coquettishly, like that’s not the whole reason he’s here.
	“Do you think I could have that coffee now?”
	“Oh yeah, sorry.” I bustle to the kitchen. None of our mugs are clean, so I have to pour his coffee into a plastic cup, which I think gives you cancer or something but it’s all I have. Half the stream of coffee sticks to the carafe as I pour it, dribbling all over the counter, and then I spill sugar on the floor. That seems like a problem for later, though. Kind of burning my hand, I carry it back to the living room.
	Yosef is sitting on the couch. Fluffyfriend is gone.
	“All done. Thank you.” He takes the cup. It doesn’t seem like it’s too hot for him at all.
	“Wow.” I don’t feel any less possessed than I did before. I thought I might feel a little lonely. I do, but not for Fluffyfriend. “You’re…super good at that.”
	“Aw, thank you.” Here’s number four. His teeth aren’t really straight or even, and they kinda make me wonder why people decided straight and even are what “good” teeth are. His nose crinkles as he takes a sip.
	“Is it not good?” I might cry.
	“No, it’s—it’s so good. I just like a lot of sugar in my coffee. Like, an unhealthy amount.” He takes another drink, and this time manages to control his expression. “So do you know how you got the demon?”
	“Uh, yeah. Don’t be mad, though.”
	“Why would I be mad?” He laughs, and my heart literally skips a beat. Literally. I didn’t know that was an actual, physical thing that could happen. It kinda hurts.
	“I don’t know…I think I accidentally summoned it. I did a stupid spell my friend printed off from Tumblr or something. We were just being silly. I guess that was pretty dumb.”
	“It’s not dumb. People do silly spells all the time. You could even say prayer is a kind of silly spell. It’s surprising that you were able to summon something, though, even accidentally. There’s something very attractive about your spirit.”
	Attractive. Attract-ive. Like spilled sugar attracts ants, not like sexy. He’s not saying I have a sexy spirit. A sexy spirit is not a thing.
	“You should be careful with the sorts of energy you draw toward yourself. I can tell already, you have the ability to bring so much positive energy and love to yourself and the people around you. But on the other hand, that makes it easy for you to bring problems to yourself without intending to.” He nods, like he’s conferring with himself, and then takes another big drink of his coffee. I can’t believe he’s not burning his mouth.
	“So you’re like…what are you?”
	His eyes make me think of precious metals being panned out of clear, cold streams. That’s a lamer thought than I’m accustomed to having. “What do you mean?”
	“Like, are you a…a pastor, or…?”
	His lids fall slightly. “Oh, like my title. Ehh…technically I’m something like a bishop, but all those churchy politics,” he shakes his head. “They don’t really matter.”
 	“So can you like, talk to God?” It sounds dumb as ass as soon as it falls off my tongue. I think I’d thank him for giggling if I got hit by a truck, but I don’t mind so much that he doesn’t laugh this time.
	“Anyone can talk to God. I’m no closer to them than you are.” It takes me a second to figure out that “them” means God. I’ve never had a major opinion on God being a gendered entity, but for the first time in my life, I realize how stupid it is to refer to God as a male.
	“But you have like…holy demon murdering powers. You have a Goddy job. And I’m.” I open my hands, gesturing to myself. “You know.”
	“I know?”
	“I watch Youtube compilations of just the death scenes from horror movies. I called my best friend the c-word yesterday. I…I’m gay.” I wait for his pupils to dilate, for his shoulders to tilt away from me. They don’t.
	“Well. Did you call them the c-word in a funny way, or mean?”
	“That’s debateable.”
	“Okay that maybe wasn’t so nice, but it doesn’t make you a bad person. Nobody’s really a bad person. Not to God, anyway.”
	“Not even for being gay?”
	He laughs, and it’s even better than the first time. I want to memorize his teeth. “Of course not. God loves love. God is love. That’s like asking if the ocean hates water.”
	I almost want to break him now. He’s like the most perfect house of cards I’ve ever seen and I’d love to watch him fall. “I third based my ex in the tool shed out behind a church.”
	“Again, not something I personally would do—“
	“I’m a bad person. For sure. I shoplifted eyeliner. I wrote omorashi Lord of the Rings slashfic. I anonymously cyberbullied a buncha my classmates back in junior high. I tried to dissect a fly with tweezers cuz I wanted to see what it looked like inside but I just mushed it all up and then I only rinsed the tweezers and I didn’t use soap or anything and I put them back in my mom’s makeup bag.”
	“You wrote what?”
	My face feels hot. I want to backtrack now, but there’s nowhere to go but forward. “You don’t know me at all. You don’t have me figured out. You can’t just blindly say I’m not a bad person.”
	“I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?” I notice for the first time that his eyebrows are all drawn up under his bangs. He looks genuinely remorseful. “I didn’t mean to imply that…” he drifts off, because he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for, and I certainly can’t help him figure it out.
	“If you’re going to say you’re no better than me, you can’t brag about having me all figured out all in one step. If you think I’m a good person…” before I can say “you’re just going to be disappointed,” a tear slips over the rim of his bottom eyelid.
	“I’m sorry.” He repeats, placing his mug on the coffee table. “I should probably go.”
	“Well, wait—“
	“No, no, it’s okay.” He gives a mighty sniff, stands, and then manages to scrounge up a very pathetic smile. “Thanks for the coffee. Call me again if you have any more, uh, demon problems. If you want. Okay. Um.”
	He’s sliding on his shoes. “I—I think I—I don’t…” My diarrhea stream of words has gone dry. More tears are pouring out of his eyes, running over the scrunched corners of his tight lips. The moisture makes his eyes sparkle and glimmer like they’re lit from within.
	“Okay, it’s okay. Have a good day. I’m sorry. Okay bye.” The door clicks shut gently behind him. I press my palm to the scarred wood.
	“Fuck.”

	I text Nova. She responds, but with only one word, and it’s not a very nice one. I text Matt. He has his read receipts disabled, but I know his M.O.. I only have a few more numbers in my contacts, but I don’t really feel like it’s appropriate to vent to Sally or the disconnected line that used to lead to my dad.
	I wish I had a pet. I miss Fluffyfriend now. I should’ve just kept it. Maybe it could’ve eaten all the asshole energy in me and left me clean.
	The rain’s finally stopped, but there’s still no sun. All the light streaming through the windows is pale blue, dust-colored. I lay on the couch, the hard arm kind of hurting where it presses my temple, but I deserve it. My ribcage feels gapingly empty.
	I’ve never felt this way in my life before. It hurts. It makes me want to be mad at Yosef, like he should know better than to walk around smiling at dopes like me. I can’t believe after I went off on him about now knowing me, I can be so hypocritical as to be completely head-over-heels already. I put my mouth over where his was on the mug. It doesn’t taste like anything, but I pretend.
	Can I just call him to apologize? I feel like I don’t know what I would even say. “Sorry I yelled at you. I have impulse control problems that make me break up with probably the only guy who’ll ever have me; makes me act like a piece of shit to my best and only real friend; and makes me yell at super cute, super nice boys for having the audacity to give me a compliment. I promise, even though I do nothing but asshole things, I’m somehow not actually an asshole.”
	I can draw things to myself. He said that. Maybe I can draw him back to me.
	“Yosef.” I say, clasping my fists, like I’m catching and gathering energy. “Yosef Locke. Yoyo.” Okay, now he has to come back. God wouldn’t let me waste such a good nickname.
	Or maybe it’s not as straightforward as that. I sit up, trying to give the whole thing a bit more gravity.
	He also said I could call him back if I had any more demon problems. If I called a demon once without even meaning to…
	“Ez dabez.” I probably still have the print-out in my room somewhere, but I don’t feel like getting up. “Zaquiel. Ez…I don’t know.” I unclench my fists. “Come back. I need you again. I actually need you this time, though. For real.” The house is so quiet. I’m home alone all the time, but before noon it’s a different kind of quiet. “You can like…make deals and stuff, right? Like if I beat you in a fiddle contest or whatever? Or if I give you my first born son? I…don’t think it’s too likely I’ll be, uh, having kids, though. Just being real here. So, uh, I don’t know what I could give you, exactly, but I can tell you what I want. I want…” It’s harder to put into words than I thought. “I want to be loved. Romantically. I know Nova loves me and my mom loves me…in her own way, but I want to be loved for like. Who I am. Not because I’m someone’s son or because we grew up together or because I’m the only other gay guy in school. I want to be loved by someone who I love back. I want you to come back and then I can call Yosef to…well, Yosef and I can talk again, and then…you’ll make it so I’m loved. And in exchange…well, what do you want?”
	Nobody answers. Maybe I’m glad. My weird little prayer was kind of depressing and pathetic. And not very specific. Maybe I should go out back and get the fire started back up, maybe try to find that print-out and read the actual thing.
	My sads are kinda making me dizzy, so after I stand, I have to wobble for a minute before I can stumble my way to my bedroom. Not much light spills past the blanket I have clothespinned over the window. I click the lights on, and then stumble backwards.
	He’s laying on my bed. Big ram horns arc up out of his forehead, curling off to the side. His grin is full of fangs. He’s wearing Matt’s red shirt, singes and all.
	“What do I want?” He coos in a voice like shattered glass. “Hm, I think we can figure something out.”

	“Who are you?” I bark, grasping back into the hallway like someone’s gonna hand me a shotgun.
	“Um, you called me, sweetie.” He laughs, pushing himself up onto his butt. “Did you forget the two nights we slept together? Right here, in this bed? You snore, you know.” I can see his belly through the holes burnt through Matt’s old shirt. I recognize those fangs.
	“Fluffyfriend?” I squint.
	“You know, I really love that name, I do, but in case you were wondering, I usually go by ‘Zaquiel.’” He stands. He’s only a little taller than me, with sleek silver-blonde hair. I always thought of demons as having black hair. Is that racist?
	“You…look different.”
	“Mm do I? I guess that’d be because your second call was a lot stronger than your first. Thanks for that, by the way. I missed having, y’know, joints.” He wiggles his wrist back and forth, illustrating his point.
	“What…what do you want?”
	“Oh, let’s worry about that later. Let’s talk about what you want.” He takes a big step forward, ‘til we’re toe to toe. He smells like black pepper. “What was it? To be loved? Now, help me with this. Did you mean loved, or,” his hand lands on the small of my back and pulls me into him. The sudden movement catches me off balance, and I grab his waist to steady myself. “Loved?”
	“Um.” I feel my face about burst into flames, even though his body is so cold against mine. He doesn’t hold me in place as I take a healthy step back. “I meant more like…loved by Yosef.”
	He snorts, plopping back down on my bed. “Yosef. Cute name he’s got, innit? Gosh, what a little cutie he is. Right?” He tilts his head forward, maintaining firm eye contact with me. “Real angelface.”
	“You don’t like him?”
	“Well, sweetheart, he kinda exorcised me. That shit hurted. Oh, but don’t worry. I’m not mad at you. In fact, I’m so not mad at you, I’m gonna give you a super helpful piece of advice: forget about Angelface. You wanna be loved? Why not take the low road?” He flashes me a mouth full of pearly white needles.
	“What do you mean?”
	He hooks his fingers through my belt loop and pulls me down onto the bed, on top of him.

	IM SORRY IM SORRY IM SORRY IM SORRY PLZ COME OVER ASAP PLZ PLZ PLZ I REALY NEED YOUR HELP ILL LET YOU BUNCH ME IN THE FACE JUST COME OVER AFTER SHCOOL PLZ PLZ PLZ
	After my sixteenth text, Nova finally responds with an exasperated emoji and a “K.”
	“Texting your li’l girlfriend?” Zaquiel takes a break from chewing softly at my shoulder to ask. We’re sitting on the couch, not really watching a talk show.
	“Uh, yeah, it’s Nova.” I pull my sleeve back up to my neck. “She’s gonna come over in a minute.”
	“I like her. She’s like a black licorice marshmallow. Hey, are we in an open thing, or…?”
	“We’re not in a thing.”
	“We’re kind of in a thing.” He threads his fingers through mine. I should pull back, but Matt never wanted to hold hands, and it is a little nice. His nails are black and shiny, but there’s no little brush lines. “What should I do to make you fall for me? Should I change the way I look?”
	“No, that’s okay…” He’s really pretty. Boy band pretty. So pretty, it makes him look mean.
	“What do you like? I can be brown. I can crook up my teeth. I can do that doe-eyed thing. Want me to cry?” His bottom lip waggles, and with zero effort, tears start spilling out of his eyes in comically large dollops. “Look, I’m like an anime. Now do you love me?”
	“I, uh…there’s…Nova should really be here any second. I think I should wash my face.” I have to tug a bit to get my hand back.
	In the bathroom, I tilt my head up to check out my neck. He only got in one good hickey before I managed to gather together the strength of will to give a strong “no.” I did way worse stuff with Matt, but just kissing Zaquiel felt like the filthiest, most forbidden thing I’ve ever done. Maybe it was the forked tongue. Or the way I was able to kinda hold on to his horns to pull his mouth deeper against mine. I might be maybe a little to blame for his current interpretation of our relationship.
	I’m in the middle of soaping up my face when I hear a rapid pounding on the door. Usually Nova just busts in; she must be irritated that it’s locked. I sloppily wipe the face wash goo off with my wet hands, and then grab the towel to dry up as I jog to the living room. I don’t make it in time, though.
	Nova stares at me from the little square of linoleum that serves as a foyer. Zaquiel is holding onto one of her little baby hands in both of his. She bugs her eyes at me in a significant fashion.
	“Hi, Nova. Uh, this is Zaquiel.” I toss the towel onto the coffee table.
	“We’ve met.” He droops his eyelids flirtatiously. His eyelids are a bruised, smoky purple-gray. “I’m afraid I wasn’t quite myself, though.”
	“Uh, have we? Are you sure?” Her eyes flick up to his horns, then politely retract back to his face. “I feel like I would have remembered you.”
	“Ah, maybe if I…” With a cartoony pop, Zaquiel disappears. In his place, Fluffyfriend floats gently around Nova’s eye level. It—he—gives a nostalgic little “murp”, then reappears in his human shape. I can hear his bare feet thud as they hit the carpet.
	I’m glad Nova spends more time reading horror novels and watching anime than she does interacting with reality, or else this might have impacted her a little more intensely. Instead, she just scrunches up her chubby plum lips, eyebrows knit.
	“Oh. So you’re the demon. You’re a demon, right?” Her eyes twitch up to his horns again.
	“Nova, darling, you can look at my horns all you like.”
	“Uh, it’s actually ‘November.’ Jamie just calls me ‘Nova’ ‘cause he’s a lazy butthole.”
	“November. Now that suits you. November, would you like to touch my horns?” He ducks his head, like he’s waiting to be knighted by a queen.
	Behind Zaquiel’s back, I shake my head rapidly, but Nova’s too absorbed to notice. She reaches up and pinches the diameter of one horn with her thumb and forefinger, then slides her grip down to the sharp end, which she pushes into the pad of her fingertip. With both hands now, she grabs both around their thickest points and rubs the striations against her palms, making a soft but rough sound.
	“Okay, yeah, I think that’s enough.” I grab on to one of her studded pleather wrist bands and tug her arm back. To show her that I’m still being nice and apologetic, I give the back of her hand a tender smooch. She glares at me.
	“So. Yeah. A demon.”
	“You texted me that you’d, uh—“
	“Had me exorcised?” Zaquiel helps. “It’s okay, I’m over it. We’re good friends again. In fact, we’re a little more than good friends.” He grabs my hip and pulls me close to him. Reflexively, I rub at my neck to cover the hickey, which just draws Nova’s attention.
	“Yeah, I called him back. I, uh, didn’t…suuuper think it through.”
	“You don’t say.” Her eyes are still on where my neck is, exponentially conspicuously, still covered by my hand.
	“Don’t worry, Nova, I’ll win him over. Hey, you can help us think up our shipping name. Zamie? Jaquiel? Not Jaquiel, that makes it sound like his name is Jack.”
	“Hey, Zaquiel? Can Nova and me have just a second?”
	“To talk about me, you mean? Discuss strategies for getting rid of me? Again?” He’s still got his charming, it’s-all-cool smile on.
	“Aww, c’mon…c’mon, Zaquiel…Zaqi…”
	“Hey, that reminds me. Do you know the difference between lying and deceiving?” He doesn’t wait for me to try to summon up an answer. “The difference is that people who deceive think they’re better than people who lie. But guess what? It’s really the same thing. Just go ahead and call Angelface back over. I’d love to talk to him.” And with that, he blips cleanly out of existence.
	Nova and I are quiet together for a moment. She’s rubbing her hands together.
	“Zaqi, are you really gone, or are you just invisible?” The little liars-versus-deceivers speech has got me paranoid. I don’t really expect him to answer either way.
	“Why’d you call him back? Please tell me you weren’t doin’ some kinda incubus summoning thing.”
	“I thought he’d come back as a little puffball again.”
	“Oh you sick freak.”
	“Shut up, you know that’s not what I meant. I—wait how many of my texts did you read?”
	“All of them. Eventually. But they weren’t very informative. Catch me all the way up.” She moves toward the couch and plunks down.  I follow suit.
	“Okay so the exorcist—Yosef—came over this morning and I’m super duper forever and a day in love with him.”
	“Wow, that was fast. Super duper forever you say?”
	“Forever and a day. Look, I see a million billion people every day, and I’ve never fallen in love with anyone ever so hard.”
	“Not even Matt?”
	“Oh my God, of course not.”
	“Not even Zaquiel?” She lifts her eyebrows up in an incriminating manner, letting her eyes fall to my hickey. I clap my hand back over it, like she’ll forget she ever saw it if she’s not looking directly at it.
	“Okay shut up, I’ll get there.” I pause to give her a chance to interrupt, but she keeps her mouth closed, so I continue. “So he’s the love of my life and I’m not taking criticism on that. But I kinda…yelled at him until he cried. Save your questions for the end. So he left, ‘cause I’m a dick, and I just kinda figured the best way to apologize was to…get repossessed.” Her stony-faced lack of surprise at my dumbassitude is irritating me. “I thought, like…I could call him back over to exorcise him again and then while I had him, I could apologize and show him that I’m not actually a dick. Like I could…I dunno, make him lunch or something.”
	Nova raises her hand. I give her a little nod. “So you would prefer that this guy think you’re dangerously bipolar rather than just kind of a butthole?”
	“Okay your right to ask questions has now been revoked. So, uh, I did a kind of a spell, I guess—I just made it up—and…then I had Zaquiel.”
	“And then he sucked on your neck.”
	“Yes, then he sucked on my neck.”
	“Did you ask him to…not suck on your neck?”
	“Yes. Eventually. I mean he stopped when I told him to stop. And—and we didn’t do anything else, so don’t ask.” I really am being honest, but I would seem much more so if I weren’t purple-red. “We really didn’t.”
	“Sooo…I mean, it’s more difficult now, I guess, but can’t you still go through with your plan to call ‘the love of your life’ to take care of it?” She doesn’t do air quotes, but I still hear them in her voice. “I mean, if you want to. Do you still want to get rid of him?”
	“I…” I think I do. I did. I don’t want to say it out loud, but I want to get rid of him if there’s any chance of getting closer to Yosef. If not, it’d be nice to have a back-up. Definitely don’t want to say that out loud.
	“Okay, I feel like if you really did, you wouldn’t have paused for so long.”
	“I want to call Yosef, and I want to talk to him and have him tell me what he thinks. That’s what I want. Just like Zaqi said.” I nod, affirming more to myself than to Nova.
	“Gosh, if you don’t want him, maybe I should take him. Rowr.” She bites her pudgy bottom lip. Nova has nice lips. “Not really. Don’t actually, like…transfer him to me or anything.”
	“Damnit, Nova, if we’re both thinking with our dicks we’ll never get anything accomplished.”
	“Oh, speaking of dicks—“
	Suddenly, the space between us is occupied. The sudden shift in weight sends us both crashing into Zaquiel’s lap, bonking our head together. Luckily we both have choppy layered fringes to absorb the shock.
	“You rang?” He drawls, putting his hand on the back of our heads and ruffling our hair.
	“Were you listening? You said you wouldn’t.” I grumble, pushing myself free of his hand and his lap.
	“Actually, I didn’t. I definitely implied that I wouldn’t. That right there is ‘deceiving.’ I wasn’t listening, though.” He smiles sweetly. It makes cute little wrinkles under his eyes. He really is easy on the eyes, if maybe a little less so on the ears. “So you gonna call Yoyo?”
	Did I ever call him that out loud? I guess it’s kind of an obvious cutesy nickname, but I still don’t like that he knows it.
	“Um, yeah. No offense, Zaqi, it’s just…I don’t think keeping a demon around is that good of an idea. It’s nothing personal.”
	“I get that. But I’m still gonna change your mind. Maybe tonight.”
	“Um.” I look to Nova. She’s no help. “I think I’m gonna go ahead and call Yosef.”

	I probably shouldn’t, but I leave Nova to keep Zaqi entertained while I hole up in my bedroom. I don’t really trust Zaqi to actually keep from eavesdropping unless someone I actually trust keeps their eyes on him. I redial the most recent call in my phone.
	“Hello, thank you for calling; this is Yosef Locke, how can I help you?”
	“Hi, Yosef. Um, it’s Jamie. From this morning.”
	“Oh, hi, Jamie. Is everything all right?” There’s a somewhat muted quality to his tone. He’s too sweet to be mad, but I can tell he’s still hurt.
	“Kind of? The demon is back. It’s my fault, not yours. Do you think we could meet up again to take care of it? You don’t have to go all the way to my house again. We can meet somewhere easier for you.” Nice. I’m doing much better.
	“It’s back? It shouldn’t be back.”
	“Yeah, I…” I didn’t think through how I’d tell him I got possessed a second time. “I made a mistake. I’m doing that a lot lately. This morning, snapping at you—that was a mistake. I’m really sorry. I feel really awful about it.”
	“Oh, don’t feel awful. If you feel awful than I’ll feel awful.” Too cute. “It’s okay. Really. Nobody likes to be judged. I should try harder to get to know people before I decide things about them.”
	“No—don’t change. At all. Keep thinking everyone is nice and wonderful. Please.”
	He laughs. “I don’t think everyone is nice and wonderful. But I do think you are.” I’m gonna have diarrhea.
	“So, um, c-could we try again? To exorcise the demon, I mean.”
	“Yeah, hon.” Okay for absolute certain he’s gay. Or some kinda not-straight. No straight teenage boy calls another teenage boy “hon” if they’re not open to smooches. “We can meet at your place again. It’s no trouble for me. I have some work to take care of tonight, but how about tomorrow afternoon?”
	“You sure work a lot, for a kid.” Is that judgy? I don’t mean it judgy. Sometimes people interpret things I say as judgy when I don’t mean it that way at all. Like when I told Nova she has chubber babboo cheeks like a widdle pudgy Pikachu. She didn’t like that.
	“I enjoy my work. I really do. And keep in mind, I don’t go to school.”
	“Really? Is that legal?” We’re chatting!
	“Yeah, I’m considered an apprentice to Father Locke, and I do a couple online lessons a week. I used to do more, but come high school a lot of the stuff they teach you in school isn’t particularly useful to religious leaders.”
	“It must be hard to make friends.”
	“Yeah….” I expected him to give me another interesting little factoid about himself, but he just trails off into silence. I should have know better than to make such a risky observation. While I’m desperately trying to think of a way to recover, he speaks up again. “So tomorrow…how does around three sound?”
	“Oh, wait. I forgot my mom’s off at noon on Saturdays. Would it be okay if we met at my place and then walked over to the park? It’s just a couple blocks away. It’s usually pretty empty.”
	“It doesn’t bother me if your mom is home.”
	“It…it bothers me.”
	“Alright, that’s fine.”
	“So…dress warm.” I’m so caring.
	“I always do. Alright. See you tomorrow, hon.” The close sound of nothing signifies that he’s hung up. I’m still gonna collect smiles, but I can collect hons, too. Hon. I’m a hon. I’m a sweet little guy. It’s weird how much falling in love makes you love yourself even more. I want to sit and marinate in ooey-gooey love, but I should probably go rescue Nova from Zaquiel.
	As I turn the bend in the hallway, Nova jumps back against the arm of the couch. Zaqi’s hands are extended, cupping nothing.
	“We weren’t doing anything. He just told me he’s never touched a boob before.”
	“Uh, so what? I’ve never touched a boob before, either.” As I round the couch, I see that Zaqi’s grinning again. I wonder if that makes his jaw hurt.
	“You don’t want to touch a boob.” She scowls, crossing her arms over her chest self-consciously. Even hidden, they feel like the biggest thing in the room right now.
	“I want to touch a boob.” I don’t, but I kinda don’t want Zaquiel to be the only one who’s touched her boobs. That’s too intimate. I want it to be not a big deal. I don’t think either of them thinks it’s a big deal, but I have to be sure.
	Exasperated, Nova stretches out her arms, leaving her chest open for the gropin’. With some trepidation, I extend one hand. I can only get the top half, but that’s plenty enough for me. I don’t wanna like…feel her nipple or anything. If she were to get anything akin to pleasure from this, I might have to kill us both.
	“Okay. That was nice. Thank you. I enjoy the boob of a female woman every now and again.” I was hoping my high from talking to Yosef would last longer than twenty seconds. “Zaqi, have you really not ever touched a boob?”
	“Oh, no, I have. I was just lying.”

	Nova leaves pretty soon after that. Things got kinda awkward. My mom’ll be home sometime before six, so I kinda have to get a certain discussion out of the way. Zaqi and I are sitting on the couch, watching sitcoms. He’s got my hand, rubbing the back with his thumb. At least if I give him my hand, he isn’t trying to get his hands up my shirt.
	“It’s getting dark so early now…” I mumble. It seems like an okay way to get conversation started.
	“Is it? It’s always kinda dim in Hell. We don’t have a sun or anything.” He shrugs. It makes the holes in his shirt rise up to his ribs. Maybe I should offer him one of my shirts?
	“Do you really live in Hell?”
	“Yeah, sweetie. Demons come from Hell. I’m a demon.” I kinda like it when he calls me “sweetie.” I’m not gonna tell him. Maybe he already knows.
	“Is Hell bad?”
	“Not for me, no. For mortals, ehh…it’s not so bad.”
	“Am I gonna go to Hell?”
	“Yeah, but you’re gonna live in a big mansion with me, and be my prince, and you can torture as many diddlers as you want and eat behemoth steaks and sleep in a teeny tiny little four poster bed so you can’t roll away from me.” He gives my hand a squeeze. My ears and neck feel a bit hot. I hope he can’t see.
	He kinda took the conversation in a different direction than I was intending. I cut straight to it. “So my mom’s gonna be home here soon, and she’s…not so cool with demons. Or, um, overnight guests. Can you maybe…make yourself invisible to her, like you did when you were Fluffyfriend, or…like…leave?”
	“Hmm. I could.” His hand spiders up my thigh. It doesn’t go any further, just sits there on top and scratches me like a dog. “I have a more fun idea, though.”
	With another cute little bloop, Zaquiel disappears. Again. In his place, a beautiful, slender white cat sits politely on the couch, its tail batting gently against the cushion. It looks up at me with Zaquiel’s cloud blue eyes, and blinks slowly.
	“Ohhh you’re so pretty. Oh you’re a pretty boy. Pretty pretty pretty boy. You wan pets?” The cat leans into my fingers when I stretch them out, rubbing its cheeks down the length of my pinkie. I know it’s Zaquiel still but some part of my brain can’t jive with that, and whatever part it is has jurisdiction over my speech centers. “Are you a pwetty? Are you a vewy pwetty? Yes I do think so. I think maybe you are, precious boopy boy.”
	Zaquiel—humanish Zaquiel—reappears. “Why can’t you talk to me like that all the time? Boopy boy.” He gives me a few neck scritchies. I can’t help but crane my neck up, letting his nails search deeper. “By the way, my cat shape is a girl. And best in show of the 2008 CFA International Cat Show, whose winners skew heavily toward male. Yup, I’m a perfect specimen of the Turkish Angora. Not that I’m bragging. So will that do?”
	“Uh, I don’t think my mom’d be okay with me keeping a cat, though. Maybe just do the invisible thing?”
	“Okay, well, how about instead, I just stay like this, horns and all? That’s what works for me. You can just tell your mom you summoned a demon with your rampant homosexuality.” He’s still scratching, but I’m not giving him the satisfaction of my purring anymore.
	“Fine. A cat is fine, too. I’m gonna tell her you’re outdoor potty-trained, though. Don’t make a liar out of me.”
	“Okay, but you’ll have to pick up my little tiny cat poops in the yard.” He beams, reaching up his second hand scratch pleasantly at my lymph nodes. I guess there’s no need to punish him by denying myself pleasure. I rumble in the back of my throat, closing my eyes and leaning in close. “I don’t actually poop. I mean I can if you want me to, but.”
	“No, I’m good. Thanks, though.” I know I should be discouraging physical contact, but it just feels so nice. You’d think having such cold hands would be unpleasant, but it feels soothing, and it leaves my skin tingling. After we figured out how to do dick stuff, Matt and I kinda made short work of all the other genres of touching. Maybe Zaquiel and I can just be cuddle buddies. Maybe my husband Yosef won’t mind. Although, I suppose I’ll just have Zaqi for another twenty-four hours or so. The thought makes me a little sad.
	“I usually try to be in my bedroom when my mom gets home.” The sound of the TV bothers her, so to avoid the awkwardness of her kindly asking me to remove myself from her sight, I just make myself invisible before I can even be noticed. I don’t mean it as a flirt, but I’m not that surprised when Zaqi curls up an eyebrow.
	“You’re inviting me into your bedroom?” He teases, standing. He grabs one of my hands in both of his and, with deliberately rolling hips, leads me backward, toward the hall. He’s skinnier than me but he has very soft, rounded hips. I’ve always thought of myself as being into manlier men but these past couple days have taught me the appeal of guys more my shape and size.