This was some Thursday night—Friday morning but functionally Thursday night—during the summer before Kenny McCormick's seventeenth birthday, slouched under the awning over the side entrance of the post office at the shitty end of Main. He wanted to put up his parka hood but couldn't, exactly. Fact was he already didn't look the way he supposed he best ought to for this sort of thing but whatever because the plausibility of him being "on his way to the convenience store" in case Barbrady drove by on his way back from Cartman's house—functionally Cartman's mom's house—was paramount.

It was real quiet, there on 3rd and Main that night.

Eventually a silver station wagon hesitated. Wyoming plate. Kenny, he kicked off the wall with his heel and straightened himself, watched the vehicle make a U onto the near side of the street, watched it slow to a trundle at the curb, window eked down halfway. He felt compulsively, nervously for the weight of his cell phone through the outside of his coat. He'd never stopped being nervous, probably wouldn't ever.

"D-do you need a ride son? It's late to be out here," the driver called. His voice trembled a bit as he spoke and Kenny smirked in spite of himself, the guy maybe late fifties, balding mousy hair.

"That'd be nice." He inclined his head, half-smiled. "I'm not really going anywhere though."

Kenny when he spoke to them, these guys, let his mouth stay slightly parted after he'd finished speaking, let his breath hover in the air.

"What's your name?"

"It's—" the corner of his mouth twitched in an imperceptible sneer "—Kyle."

"How old are you Kyle?"

"Eighteen." Kenny's lower lid flickered in annoyance at this half-assed bit of preemptive interrogation but his voice remained toneless. At how they always asked but didn't really care, but asked anyway just to have asked. "Why? Do I look too old to sate your pedophiliac urges?"

The driver looked taken aback, a flicker of offense taken, but offered an uncomfortable chuckle. He said "Wow, boy" and "Don't see a lot of your type where I live" and Kenny, before stepping off the curb, gave the street a dutiful but cursory scan for anyone who might be taking more than just a casual interest in their interaction but it was an appropriately ungodly hour and he could see no one at all.

—

He was mistaken though, Kenny, because there was a spectator, and a very intent one.

This was Kyle Broflovski, crumpled on his side against the corner of the rhinoplasty clinic a block down, upper body that extended beyond the brick wall obscured by a blue newspaper dispenser to the side of the clinic entrance. He peered through the legs of the metal receptacle, head cushioned against the sidewalk by a folded beanie. He wasn't allowed to drive and had therefore followed Kenny here on his bike, awkwardly so, as the town was so irksomely threadbare he'd had to wait for Kenny to turn every corner fully before closing the distance between them again.

Furthermore, Kyle had a look to him, one that Kenny would've known in a split second, just a hair of Kyle in the periphery of his vision and he would've known.

Maybe it was his clothes that were generally expensive but somehow never fit him right. Like those charcoal khakis with an unfortunate lengthwise gash in the left knee, purchased by Sheila on an anniversary in Madrid, that were thin-cut but barely skimmed his hips and hence too low in the crotch. Or perhaps more conspicuously a massive denim jacket he wore in the summer, the sleeves of which pooled thickly against the cuffs of his old Gore-Tex ski gloves that he'd cut the fingers off of with a pocket blade—effectively ruining their capacity for future wintertime use—while he and Stan had been lunching in an over-heated base lodge at Breckenridge, declaring to an appalled Kenny later that he was perfectly justified in devastating a two-hundred dollar pair of gloves because he just couldn't stand having to remove them one more time just to check his phone or unzip his fly to piss. It was perhaps a pillow of material spilling over the back of his jacket collar, an absurd green, that was the hood of his school baseball sweatshirt from freshman year. Even more likely, it was his coiling cinnamon hair which, though charming in its own right if not for the ocular cacophony that comprised the rest of his look, he was wise to rarely let escape from under a range of beanies, most of which were vexingly green but one of which was black, which the one he wore that night.

Kyle gave the station wagon a couple hundred feet, just enough to turn off Main and onto the unlit parkway. When they turned he followed, swiping the beanie off the ground and yanking it over his hair, on a bike he barely rode twice a year due to the town's nearly perpetual glacial conditions, his heart pounding painfully with trepidation.

—

"Use this," Kenny demanded, flinging a square foil packet over his shoulder. It was the only thing he'd bothered to say since he'd been picked up. His nerves had dulled, as they usually did, leaving him rather acutely tired.

"Right you are son."

"And for fuck's sake stop calling me 'son,'" he all but snapped, turning to eye the man over his shoulder, letting the incredulity show plain on his face. "Doesn't that make you feel weird?"

The guy looked down, embarrassed. "You're right kid," he mumbled. "I ah, don't have any children."

Kenny raised an eyebrow and turned his back on the guy to face the yet untouched motel bed. He slid his crewneck sweatshirt over his head and shot it in a ball at the window-side sofa. He kicked off his pants and tossed those too.

—

Kyle was certainly at that point thinking: Those retarded sprints for pre-season baseball practice actually did something, apparently.

Regardless, he felt he was bordering on cardiac arrest, lungs blown dry and quadriceps and adductors smoldering acidly, even the fronts of his calves burning and those fuckers never hurt, like, on anyone as far as he knew. Kyle pedaled standing up because it felt a bit more like running that way, plus it was allegedly faster, though the bike sometimes careened when he overstepped his rhythm. It was so dark on the road that if he lost sight of their taillight he'd quite likely be stranded until daybreak, which was unfortunate because people around here drove badly and fast, speed limit 75 with a customary 15 mph piss-town courtesy leeway. When the thick darkness finally swallowed the vehicle Kyle screamed a drawn Fuck! into the wind but pedaled on, just to the end of the parkway and then I'll go back, just to the end of the goddamn parkway.

He didn't need to.

About another mile out he coasted into the blue neon glow of a sign reading MOTEL. Amidst the cluster of cars in the lot he spotted the one, the silver station wagon with a Wyoming plate, its occupants departed but its engine still crackling in the cool night air.