I don't know much about Jojo but I know I want to write her. Very frustrating considering I'm not properly introduced.

She wasn't what you would call bashful. In fact brash might be more appropriate. Maybe loud, boisterous, or even hoyden, according to the right whispering adults. Her words were not particularly nice or cruel, her actions neither wholly helpful nor hurtful. He didn't consider her a friend so much as a playmate, somebody with which to make believe during school hours and maybe sneak out with if the other neighborhood kids were organizing night games. They eyed him with ripe suspicion, but couldn't stand against her monocratic direction. She swept into mobs like a hurricane, pulled everyone around on strings, and left them spinning like tops. Of course very few held it against her, since the attitude that she lead their water-gun armies best and swung like pro baseball incarnate was shared across the student body of four school districts. Impressive considering his antics were only gossip in two.

True to the advent of their relationship, just like the girl that had marched up to him and demanded to play, she took the reins in nearly every situation and he was glad to let her have them. In a way she was his only ticket to interaction with other kids, who would rather crowd on the ground to eat than sit at a 24-person table if he occupied one seat. It wasn't that they were mean to him, per se. They didn't go out of their way to harass him. They just did their human best to keep him out of sight and out of mind. Individuals shuffled and coughed into groups of three when left without a pair during activities and masses in the hallways turned away as one with renewed interest in an exhausted topic. Eyes focused through him and the student body flowed around him like he was an oddly-placed but familiar piece of furniture.

No, it wasn't so much that anybody was crude to him. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they were. It was that he was nothing to everyone. Nothing but a strange rumor.

Jojo broke molds. Jojo held hands with giants and they squatted just for her. Jojo growled at the edge of canyons until the winds wisely carried her across. Jojo didn't exist in the world, the world existed around Jojo, and found itself putty under her surety of how it should be. One day she thrust him into a game and that was that. There was not another way to know her, for she was pioneer in the morning and dignitary at night and on the right day a rife whisper in a crowd. It was amazing.

Sometimes he thought that maybe she understood him better than he understood himself. When he got the eye it was because she sensed cowardice and occasionally he was dragged bodily off his bed if she didn't like the way his mouth drooped. He tried to be annoyed, tried to inject heart into harsh words, but couldn't bring himself to hate her like he wished he could. The way her eyes gleamed in the dust of a ballgame, the rough callus of her palm on his elbow, her full-body bark of laughter and assertive affection. None of those struck a chord black enough to inflame his resentment.

In that lack of hate there was something he felt for her, though he couldn't pin it down. It made him warm when she waved to him among the faceless sea of the hallway and kindled little fireworks in his skin where they touched. As a colorful relief against dull canvas it was like she was popping right out of life and harpooning his senses with her diamond eyes and sparkling smirk. He fell utterly dumb under her breath and voice and thought that maybe it was okay she was his entire world.

"What's happening to me?" he asked the guts of a chipmunk one day. "Am I sick?"

And though the guts didn't answer his hot face and tangible pulse spelled it out, and his panic blinded him to the wrong edge of his knife and he didn't feel a thing until later.

The front step was warm with hoarded daytime sun and his bandaged hand felt as far away as the cold moon above because she was here, gently emerging from the dark into a ray of lamplight from the front windows, shadows pooling beside her nose and eyes. She was smacking a stick against each picket in the fence and bobbing her head to the rhythm, oblivious to his silent gaze boring into the cement at his feet. He nearly choked on his heart when the clacking stopped and the front gate whined open. Sneakers shuffled against the rough front walk and stopped at the top of his vision.

"Sock?" She swung the stick, voice illustrating her furrowed brow. "Don't your parents usually make you go to bed at a god-awful time of day?"

The cut stung with sweat as he fiddled with the wrappings. "They're out late tonight."

She flicked the crooked tail of his hat, voice leaden with understanding. "Oh…" Her head and dangling ponytails appeared in his line of vision as she crouched on the ground. "Want to play? Jerry got a new glow in the dark frisbee and they're going out tonight."

Her voice was making him lightheaded. He closed his eyes tight in case the world tried to spin out from under him. "N-no…"

Rough hands snatched his bandaged hand away, and when he opened his eyes she was picking at the loose ends of the wrapping with a disapproving frown.

"Did you do this yourself?"

"Yes…?"

"Ugh," she sighed heavily, his wrist in one hand and the stick in the other. "Show me where the stuff is."

She pulled him off the step and inside the empty house, following his guiding finger but always in the lead. Boards creaked and groaned under their combined weight and one too many times he stumbled against flat ground, preoccupied with all the blood rushing to his head at once.

"Sock." Silence. She snapped her fingers, voice harder. "Sock. Is this the box?"

He blinked at the large tupperware container in her lap. She sat beside the sink's gaping innards, lips pursed. "Yeah."

She prized the lid off, rummaging through Band-Aids and cotton balls with all the seriousness of a very grim and very clumsy surgeon. A roll of bandages, tape, a bottle of antibiotic cream, and a handful of flat white things shaped like barbells clattered to the linoleum.

"This," she held up a barbell, "is a butterfly bandage. You put it over your cut to pull the skin together." His blank stare was interrupted as she poked his nose with it. "Try it."

Worried he might disappoint, he pushed it back. "Can't you…?"

"No silly," she puffed, forcing it into his cupped palm, "you've got to fix yourself. I won't always be here."

The buzz of super-efficient flourescent lightbulbs filled his head as he picked the backing off the bandage. From his spot on the toilet seat her scuffed knees were overt with marks of mingled pink-gray skirmishes and home runs, and they flexed with telling impatience. Although he stuck the bandage on without any problem she took issue with his speed and did the rest of of the job for him, narrating the entire process of applying the cream and gauze and tape, stopping to guide his tense hand when she felt he required special understanding.

"I thought you said you wouldn't do it for me." Goosebumps scattered across his arm as her sigh brushed across skin.

"Yeah, well," she grumbled, "maybe once you're not so slow. There's nothing wrong with a little help." Muscles constricted around a whine as she released his hand, imbued with the phantoms of her dusty fingers and the pasty ointment. "You'll do it yourself next time."

The room swung as he jumped to his feet, eyes trained on her profile outside the bathroom door. "Wait," he said, knowing it was late in the evening but unwilling to be alone again. More specifically, devoid of her. One problem: he didn't have an excuse. "Uh… Where are you going?"

A raised eyebrow. "Home." She searched his face, throwing a witful smirk over her shoulder as she walked beyond his sight. He trailed her into the front hall, rubbing the neat bandage on his hand, imagining the warmth of her skin.

"I'll be here at ten o'clock sharp tomorrow." The stick was waiting for her on the front step. She kicked it into her grasp and waved it like a sword. "Since you're hurt and we're going to play kingdom you can be the damsel in distress. Then nobody'll fight over it."

"Okay," he agreed, knowing his input wouldn't matter either way. There she was whisking the reins around again.

The porchlight melted off her form as she returned to the gate, snapping it shut behind her without so much as a goodbye, stick finding the picket's rhythm again. They didn't need farewells, just her promise. He fell to the front step again, golden light from the open door spilling over his back and shadow dripping across his face. Her echo disappeared into the distance and silence stifled the air in its wake. Overhead the moon's weak light bore down on his shoulders like a cape and reminded his pulse to calm again.

He chewed his lip, assaulted with her dizzying smile. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that it wouldn't crucify him on the spot if he wasn't careful. He knew she was so much more than that—she was fierce and competitive and unflappable as a brick wall, but his stomach swam only with snippets of their clothes brushing and when she laughed at his antics. Deep down he knew exactly what was wrong, but that didn't mean he had to acknowledge it. No, he would probably just sweat too much around her and trip over something and get hurt again and need her help with the bandages…

Except she said he would have to apply them himself the next time. In fact if he even dared to ask she would probably throw all the stuff at his head and yell good luck, if anything. Blinking the thought out of his eyes he held the bandage to his nose again.

Dust and ointment. Jojo.

Stifling a morose groan he shook his head, throat twisted up and dry.

If only he was simply sick…