There are two boys in an attic, and one boy has a knife. It’s a little one, not much longer than either boy’s pinky. The boy with the knife has short black hair and thick glasses. He is pointing the knife at the short boy, his long blond hair and thin glasses. 

It might not be clear to you at first, but these boys are good friends. They have known each other since sixth grade, when they sat at the same lunch table, when the boy with the knife taught the short boy how to swear. On weekends they sit by the river together, throw pebbles at the water bugs. Last week they saw an eagle, watched it drown in the water under the weight of a fish it could not let go. Its wings beat faster and faster against the surface of the water until one wing dipped below, suddenly too weak to come back up, and then all that was left was a patch of choppy water. Neither boy spoke as the bird struggled, only continued to toss pebbles as they watched. 

The short boy’s mother thinks the boy with thick glasses is in love with him, but he does not agree. Where she sees romantic interest he sees only the intense, abrasive affection he has come to know as natural among boys. He’s always watching you, she says, and it’s true, he is, when they are together he never looks away. He is jealous, she says, of your partner, and this is true too. He has been distrustful since they started dating, never wants to leave them both alone. What she does not understand is that all the boys he is close to are like this — it is simply the way in which they are friends, simply what it looks like when boys are this close.

It has not happened, before this moment, that the boy with thick glasses has pulled a knife on him, but the short boy is in some ways unsurprised. This too is what happens when boys are this close. What has happened here is this: the boy with thick glasses showed up at his house, and brought the short boy upstairs to watch k-dramas. After an hour the short boy got up to go downstairs to his room, and the thick glasses boy brought out the knife. 

Sit down, he said, and gestured to the chair where the short boy had been sitting. We’re not done yet.

On other occasions, the boy with the knife has had other ways of keeping the short boy with him. He has a way of holding his arm that is too painful to refuse, he has cut the short boy’s pants away with scissors. The short boy, for his part, is used to this. It is better, in fact, than the friends he had when he was younger, who used to take him to their basements to beat him up. He wants, on some level, to stay with the thick glasses boy anyway. It can be fun to stay with a person so difficult to predict.

The boy with thick glasses did his best not to laugh along with the short boy when he pulled out the knife. He was, after all, serious. The short boy would not leave, not halfway through their show.

No really, he had said, I have homework. I know this is a joke.

The boy with the knife is unsure now if the knife was a joke. He hadn’t planned it, necessarily, although the knife was new, and he had wanted the short boy to see it. He has the urge, still, to laugh, because he is nervous, maybe, or because the short boy is so calm, just sitting in his chair, watching the TV. The short boy, he knows, belongs to him. He thinks this not because he is possessive, but because it is true. If he did not, the knife never would have worked — the short boy would have been too busy watching the point to go back to their show. There is a trust between them that the boy with the knife is not truly a danger, even as there is an unwillingness to test it, to get up from the chair and walk away.

He remembers, at least he thinks, the exact moment that the short boy became his. They were thirteen then, not yet inseparable — new enough friends, still, that there was a politeness between them. It was a half day at school, and all their other friends had gone home already, but the two of them had stayed, a plan between them to sneak into a favorite teacher’s classroom. Most likely the plan had been the boy with thick glasses’, but he was no longer certain.

It was easy to avoid the adults still in the building — there was a door in one of the janitor’s closets that led to the boiler room. No one bothered to check there when they were looking for students to hurry out of the building. The hard part was knowing when to come back out.

The two boys sat close together in the dark of the boiler room, listened to the rattle of the old furnace behind them, the occasional footsteps that marked the world overhead. The boy with thick glasses could feel the sweat drip down the short boy’s arms. After a while, the footsteps above them stopped, but neither of them moved. 

You know, said the boy with thick glasses, for a while there, I closed my eyes. 

It is easy, the boy with thick glasses knows, to hurt the short boy. The short boy, he knows, will not fight back. He adjusts his grip on the knife. His hand is sweaty. On the TV, a businesswoman tells herself that she is not in love. She looks her love interest in the face and she does not smile. She kicks at him instead, a sharp jab in each shin. Immediately, she is embarrassed. The love interest looks calm and checks his phone. His fingernails, the short boy notices, are perfectly clean. He glances at his own fingernails, which he bit short just this morning. The boy with thick glasses coughs, and he quickly looks back up.

I’m like her, says the boy with thick glasses, and though he had planned to say it, the knife trembles anyway. I wouldn’t tell anyone else.

The woman on the screen turns her head, transfixed by the delicate pout of the love interest’s lips.

You’re gay? says the short boy. His gaze slips from the screen.

No! The boy with thick glasses had not anticipated this. The short boy, after all, is so much like him. It is hard to tell where one boy ends, where the other boy begins. They share a Facebook account, swap underwear, they walk to class together. The short boy has met his mother, he is not afraid of her dog.

On screen, the woman refuses to look at the love interest. She knows, deep down, that she will never tell him how she feels, that even if she did, she would, one day, no longer want him, that to know him, really, would ruin it all — seeing him pick the dirt out from his nail beds in the morning, watching him work the product out of his hair in the shower every night, his magic would be lost. She clasps her hands tightly to her knees, digs her nails into the fabric of her skirt. On some level, she knows that she is lying, that the dirty fingernails and product are not really what she is afraid of, but still she looks away. She is certain, now, she tells herself, that she is not in love.

The short boy is not looking at the screen. He is watching, now, the boy with thick glasses, trying hard to meet the eyes behind the two thick walls of glass.

Please, the boy with short hair says, please. You aren’t looking.

You can be gay, he says back, It’s not like I would care.

Neither boy is watching the knife. It sits there in the hand of the boy with thick glasses, an inch from the short boy’s chest. If they were watching, they would see in it what you see now — the vacuum tube flicker of the screen along its shining face, the woman and her love interest sharpened to a point. The thick glasses boy’s hand is sweaty, but he holds the knife still, his trembling fingers replaced now with a practiced grip.

Later tonight the boy with thick glasses will sneak out of his house. He will wriggle through a basement window into the dirt, take the long way around the house to avoid his mother’s window. The street outside will be dark — the lamp posts are spread far here — too dark to peek into the boy with yellow teeth’s window as he passes his house, to wave to all the other boys along the street, and though he knows he should be quiet, he will kick a stone down the pavement in front of him, chase its skittering path zig zag through the street all the way to the old railway bridge, where he will lose it in the gravel. He will stand on the bridge above the middle of the river, the knife warm, sleeping folded in his pocket, and when the mosquitoes land on his arms he will not try to stop them, he will watch their bellies swell and he will laugh as they tumble away, overfull. In the dark, the boy with thick glasses will pinch his nose, he will remove his glasses, he will shake his head slowly, realize, perhaps, that he should have picked a different show, that the romantic subtext was, perhaps, confusing, a distraction. He will realize he could pick no other show, could not have faked that first gasp of recognition. 

Now, though, the boy with thick glasses just presses the knife closer, finds, at last, resistance. The short boy is quiet suddenly, he looks at the boy with thick glasses, but he will not look back, he is looking only at the knife, at the spot it has depressed in the short boy’s shirt. 

Watch, faggot, he says.

The two boys silently face the screen. The woman, now, has left the love interest behind. It is raining outside, and she walks quickly beneath her black umbrella, gaze held straight ahead. She does not look at the bodies below the other umbrellas, does not look to see if they have clean nails, if their shoes are brown or black, if they have bruises on their shins. She catches one across the cheek with a spike on her umbrella, sees, from the corner of her eye, a brief stripe of red. She does not turn around, does not stop, does not allow herself to hear the voice beneath the other umbrella curse her name — she listens, instead, to the rain, the clack of her own footsteps on the concrete, and for a moment there is nothing else, no umbrella, no friends with bleeding cheeks. For a moment, she is not running away. On the street behind her, the umbrellas swarm together, lift their injured above their heads, a conveyor belt to safety. There will be, the boys know, no umbrellas left to save her. The water on the street is rising, but still she presses forward, each ankle dragging softly in the current.

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Jenny Fried is a trans writer living in North Carolina. Her work has appeared previously in Booth, Strange Horizons, Wigleaf, and other magazines. Find her online at https://jennnnnyyyyyy.github.io/