Two boys were fifteen.

7:00 on New Year's Eve and Michael was eating some of his mom's homemade pumpkin pie when Brian appeared in the kitchen doorway. His interruptions had been welcome throughout the two-week Christmas break, which this year was very lacking in any childlike Christmas spirit. They'd made an idle errand of shopping for gifts together but had much more fun positioning the holiday gnomes in Mrs. Holland's front yard into suggestive positions afterwards, followed that night with a long walk back to Michael's house thickened out by a bottle of Smirnoff and their self-mockery of how immature they were being.

It had been the first Christmas Michael had spent being anxious to get back out of the house instead of ripping open presents with any kind of gusto. He imagined Brian had never particularly liked Christmas, and he seemed even more anxious than him when he showed up late on Christmas night with an invitation to go do something, anything. Michael had wondered if New Year's might go the same way.

Brian sat down, grabbing Michael's fork to sample the pie before saying, "So I'm supposed to go to this New Year's party with Bonnie."

"Who's Bonnie?"

"She lives next door. I don't know her very well, my mom pretty much talked me into it. But I don't think it will be that bad, it's at her uncle's house, and from what I know they're kind of well-off. Should be champagne glasses and confetti and all that shit."

Michael shot him a skeptical look.

"Yeah, I'm going to hate it."

"I don't know, Brian...I was just gonna stay at home with Mom and..."

"Watch the ball drop on TV?" Brian interjected, to the silence of Michael. "Lame."

Michael sighed, biting his lip.

"Come on, I need you."

Michael tried not to see that his mother's face fell a little as he went by her to change into a dress shirt.

They took a cab to go pick up Bonnie. She was brown-haired and wearing a pretty dress. She sat between the two of them in the back seat, easily conversing with them while the jokes and grins between them went right over her head (quite literally: she was petite). And then the small talk: "Their tree lights are fuckin' tacky." Bonnie started to sing along to the David Bowie on the radio in a somehow pleasantly piercing tone, nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years... It was only a five-minute drive to the neighborhood where all the houses were monstrous, grouped in huddles surrounding little lakes so that they looked like they were telling secrets to each other. The house they came to was white, the windows looking like bruises emerging from caky glittering snow that had fallen earlier that day.

Everyone was chatty and blinding in their dress jackets and pale cocktail dresses, swirling through the overwhelmingly bright home, holding bright green shooters of creme de menthe. Brian and Michael neither belonged nor stood out; there were other people their age, but it was by no means a high school party, as people were drunk but still able to stand.

"When did you stop believing in Santa Claus?" a girl was asking as they stood in a circle with Bonnie and a couple of her friends, but Michael and Brian only took to discussing this among the two of them when the girls tipped off on a group bathroom visit.

"My mom had to break it to me when I was old enough that you'd think I would have figured it out on my own," Michael was saying. Brian grinned at that in a secret sort of amusement. "What about you?"

"I was teensy," Brian said, taking a moment to feel like explaining it. "It was pretty easy to piece it all together when, you know, everybody else came back to school after break talking about getting everything they wanted, and...well, Santa didn't seem to know me that well. You know the mega box of Crayola crayons that has like 500 colors or some shit like that? Something that simple would have made me happy, but no. Just. Footballs and..." Brian blinked. "Not to mention it seemed like Santa was always breaking the bank a little more for all my cousins."

Some music was playing now, some swingy noise that ruffled all the high shoulders into a looser groove. As with any New Year's party, everyone seemed to mill about more and speak more loudly as the time ticked by. At 11:50 Michael turned his head to find Brian was gone, only to reappear a minute later pushing Michael's coat into his arms. A young man came by holding a dish of cheeses, one of which Brian grabbed, using the toothpick to tear his mouth into a certain smirk that the man tried to ignore, which was no matter because Brian was opening the door to the back patio and pushing between Michael's shoulders with his hand.

Brian's excuse for a coat was the Members Only jacket he hadn't removed from over his white shirt. Michael wondered why he didn't shiver as they went down the yard and close to the lake, sitting down automatically in a relatively snowless patch of ground.

"Nobody else is out here," Michael said. "Don't you think we're being rude?"

"Nobody's gonna notice, Mikey. Here—" The joint appeared from out of his pocket, rolled slim with much experience, lit within seconds and meeting his lips which were already breathing white with the chill in the air. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, but soon Michael was complaining about the cold so they turned to each other cross-legged and leaned their heads onto shoulders, escaping the cold in that isolated feeling of cozy half-sleep.

"My fucking parents," Brian suddenly grumbled, a thought that Michael knew would probably not be completed, even though he'd felt the comment coming on since that fucking conversation about Santa. "...I wish I could just hate them."

Michael nodded, rubbing one of his fingers against Brian's for a second as he took the joint. They fell quiet again. The distant, hinting melody of a jazz version of "My Favorite Things" was seeping from inside the house, crisping the air with too much sugar. Michael didn't know if it was an afterthought of what he'd been woozing over before, if it could have been some crazed thought provoked by the music, when Brian spoke again.

"Mikey."

"Hmm."

"I think you're the only thing I really love."

It took Michael a moment to be able to respond. "That's not true. Don't say that."

"No, really. I like a lot of things, and I care about a lot of things. Some people." Brian took the last drag. "Right now, I don't know...It feels good to love something."

Their foreheads knocked together like they always did; the lift of the few drags Michael had taken made him feel like his soul was toppling right into Brian's, like some other parts of them were loose and dancing happily outside of themselves. He almost had to steady himself, and he gripped his arms together tighter against the offending chill of the air. Brian opened his eyes. "You're still cold," he said quietly.

Michael nodded.

It felt like Brian was going to whisper a secret as he leaned his head over to the side of his face, but then Brian blew a ghust of hot air into his ear that felt loud and warm and charged through his whole body, guarding him against the cold for only a short moment. The unexpected sensation made his breath stop as he let out a new kind of shudder.

Inside, people were cheering as it struck midnight. It was starting to snow. As if to return the favor by lulling Brian back to a warmer high, Michael started to hum along to the music.

when the dog bites, when the bee stings...

On a Saturday two boys were sixteen.

Brian had a part-time job as a bellboy at the local Hilton and had scored a free evening in a room for the two of them as a bonus for taking some overtime hours (Michael definitely did not ask why the young manager seemed to particularly favor him above the other employees). It was four in the morning and empty booze bottles were strewn about, an open window beaconing the steady song of traffic as Michael lay with his head on the wrong side of one of the beds, sleeping on and off with his hair abstracted in disarray.

Something got knocked over, and Michael's eyes blinked open. The shape of Brian, shirtless and wearing jeans he often ended up passing out in, murked its way into his sleepy vision. "Brian?"

He was standing in the open area where the suite had a couple couches and a coffee table, unzipping his fly, a hand straying up briefly to rub his face with what Michael immediately perceived to be a drunken kind of disquietude. He pushed himself out of bed, mumbling, "Brian...What the hell are you doing?"

Michael didn't know if Brian was sleepwalking, just helplessly drunk, or both. He touched his arm.

Brian weakly shoved Michael away with an agitated pout, slurring, "I gotta take a piss."

Michael laughed. "The bathroom's this way." He went again for his arm, accepted this time, and gently directed him past the beds and to the bathroom, not bothering to torture their eyes by flipping on the light before he steadied Brian in front of the toilet, flipped up the seat, and hobbled back to the doorway while Brian did his business.

It had been a fun evening, but something had seemed askew in how Brian was acting, and now he was helplessly inebriated to the point of defenseless release of whatever was punching up inside him. Michael figured he wouldn't be getting any more sleep when Brian pulled his pants back up and then slipped past him, heading straight to the small balcony outside the opposite end of the room. Michael followed and found Brian leaning against the balcony railing, staring down at the unremarkable view of the parking lot, a heavy and still look to his face. He stood by his side, waiting. So much time seemed to pass in silence that Brian was probably a touch less drunk when he nonsensically muttered, "My head's fulla rocks."

Michael looked at Brian, whose face was unchanged. "What?"

"I told him I wanted to enter the pool tournament at the pub," Brian said, sinking onto his elbows. "He said... 'You must have rocks for brains, thinking you could win something like that.'"

Michael shook his head. "He's so full of shit."

"He wouldn't even lend me the money for the entry fee. My next paycheck doesn't make the deadline.'" Brian's lips looked like they were fighting a useless battle to climb to a smirk, eventually collapsing to the same drowsy frown. Even when he was happy, that little self-assuring grin Michael had known when he first met Brian was stretching up to an arrogant grimace, the genuine fragile confidence being frozen forcefully into that cocky swagger that Michael had had to get used to.

His figure was also building up. A couple years back his growth spurt had left him almost rail-thin and the subject of a very brief and solely verbal phase of bullying, but now with some muscle in the arms he was built like Bruce Lee, lean and beautiful, and Michael's nerves had tightened at those first swimming feelings of jealousy to notice that his were no longer the only admiring eyes on his best friend.

Michael reached over and clutched Brian's wrist, and felt the usual relief that his friend didn't recoil; no matter how much Brian seemed braced to hate the entire world in order to protect himself from collapsing, he never snapped it off on Michael. Brian's head had turned away, and it was surprising when he turned his head and looked at Michael, his eyes suddenly open and shining, devoid of that constant squint, an image of him that anyone who knew him later in life would never be able to imagine, and that anyone who knew him now would later forget, except for Michael.

Sometimes, when they were talking or they embraced, often after they pushed their lips together ever so briefly, Brian would be possessed, fleetingly, to give Michael a kind of asking look. Like he wanted to know, Is this enough. And Michael would always be laughing along some high, too giddy and swarmed by the drugs or the music or even just Brian's smell to find it in himself to say anything other than yes.

At first it was subtle in a way that was nothing like anything else Brian ever did; but it had been burning, challenging, demanding on that weekend when Brian smiled and eagerly pushed Michael onto his back, his fingers fading from the magazine photo and then pushing their way down Michael's fly, the moment conjoining with the blinding light coming through his bedroom window to create a burst of release somewhere in Michael's chest that felt like a good kind of sobbing.

His bedroom door had opened and crashed that look out of Brian's eyes, and that was the evening Brian had come home to his parents screaming at each other and took refuge alone in the garage with a pack of cigarettes. Brian didn't see it when his father angrily grabbed a Southern Comfort bottle by the neck and smashed it into pieces against the edge of the kitchen counter, but late at night he wanted something to eat and one of the shards cut deep into his foot, leaving a nasty scar that would make Michael grimace even years later.

"I think you need stitches," he said.

Brian dared to lift the cloth up off his foot and examine the bleeding gash. "Go get some super glue out of the hardware closet."

"Are you fucking kidding?"

"I'm not gonna ask my parents to take me to the goddamn hospital."

Then they were seventeen: Brian called Michael from the phone next to his bed when he could hear his mother sobbing in the next room. There was a cringed, watery noise in his voice Michael had never heard before. Brian came over to Michael's, managing to have composed himself to a dull melancholy. They put on crap movies, sat numb in front of the TV. After Debbie went to bed Brian rested his head on Michael's chest.

His eyes said to Michael a thousand words of gratitude, but that pendulum of possibility had expired into colder certainties; they had asked their last of Michael that was anything other than "Stay with me." And still, Michael would always say yes.