August 1953

The quiet had been bothering Ennis. He felt titled–there was no other way about it. His world had been hornets with Jack, and the silence felt like the mean bastards dropping one by one. The first one was a relief. The last? Made him wonder what poison was eventually going to work its way into his lungs.

It was another month before Ennis saw Jack again.

"Friend, you look like you seen a ghost. I know I been gone, but it ain't been that long."

Ennis whipped his head over in Jack's direction to an easy smile, the words that had been rattling around his brain like an earthquake suddenly quieting. He wanted to be angry, but all that seemed to surface was the stillness of Jack's body. He had his hat on.

You ain't bow-legged and making me nauseous just lookin' at you. "You been gone long enough."

A sigh. "Ok, Ennis."

Ennis looked at the brunette. Jack squinted at him in his usual way, but his eyebrows were drawn together like the tule that mama had scrunched together for Jenny's ballet tutu three years ago. Ennis didn't think a face should do that.

"That it?"

Jack launched from his fencepost, sputtering and jut-jawed. "Listen here, Ennis del Mar, and you better listen damn good." Jack stalked toward him, all clunky strides that looked so foreign on his long lines. Like a blind rattler, Ennis thought. "I rush out here the first chance I get, 'cause my mama's been spinning me tales that a blonde boy with my hat said he'd been looking for me. And I don't know many blonde boys with my hat, especially who'd have the nerve to act like I was the one who deserved all this flack." Jack's finger connected square to his sternum. "Because, you see friend, if anyone's got a right to figure how you've gone on figuring, it's me. But I thought, hell, he don't know what he's saying. Didn't know it at all. And so I decided to keep on throwing my ball at that god damned wall. You reckon?"

Ennis didn't like how Jack was taller. He hated being talked down to like this; never from his daddy, and certainly not from Jack fuckin' Twist. "Not my fault you're a right square peg."

Up this close, Ennis swore steam came out of Jack's flared nostrils. "Figured you wouldn't." He paused to scrape dirt from his nail, cuticles suddenly holding all the mysteries of the universe that Ennis couldn't seem to give him. "No, but it is your fault that you've been acting like such a mean sonofabitch. Throwin' you a bone hurts, Ennis, cause the wall and the ball and the whole damn house is on fire and I can't help but keep going. I keep on touching that fire like I ain't got nothing on me to burn. Now I'm the first to say I don't got much sense, but you tell me how you reckon that."

"How many times am I gonna have to reckon your bullshit, you git?" Ennis looked down at his shin as a rock struck it from the heel of Jack's boot as he turned away, hands on his hips and face to the sun.

Jack seemed to exhale the weight of the world as his shoulders fell impossibly lower. "Hell," he scoffed. "Meanest heifer I ever met."

Silence settled thick and stuffy between them. Ennis wanted to be mad. Hell, he was already halfway there. Who was Jack anyway, calling him a heifer like he was some damn woman. He wanted to shove Jack back, because nobody wagged a finger at Ennis del Mar like he wasn't no more than a misbehaving bitch. He sighed. His insides didn't feel like they could rot any more.

"I've got water."

"Pardon?"

"I said I've got water. For your uh," Ennis' cheeks flamed, "for your burning house." He didn't know why he just didn't shut up then. Maybe he was weak, like his daddy always said. Or maybe, he reckoned, he was tired of feeling like anything he said to Jack ended up as rank as what he retched up from his clamped gut.

"I'm lost, Ennis."

Ennis eyeballed the ground as if it had the answer. "Me too, bud."

Later, Ennis would marvel at how a persons' whole expression could just melt into something else, but for now, he tensed as Jack moved towards him with far more tenderness than his worn-out person deserved. Later, he'd think about how a feather-light touch on his shoulder made him want to shed his skin and run far, far away. For now, he simply fell back into Jack's open palm.

"An 'I'm sorry' might be a good place to start."

He paused again, the words heavy with the weight of distance and time. "I'm sorry, Jack. I'm so sorry." He wasn't crying, but the way his words crumbled made him feel like he'd shed buckets.

Jack watched him with knitted brows and a sad lilt to his lips. "I don't know how you can keep so much anger inside of you, friend. I really don't."
The problem was, Ennis didn't either. It was ugly and black and stormy, but it was so easy, too.

The rot was simple to ignore if you just never looked at it.

"You don't have to say nothing to that, but figure you can make me a promise?"

Anything. Always. "Maybe."

Jack and Jenny must have learned the same eyebrow trick, because Ennis felt well and truly kicked every time it was aimed at him. "Can we promise not to tell each other something without knowing what it means? Whatever it is, just know that you really want to say what you're sayin'. Do you gather?"

More than anything, Ennis did. He was tired of hurting, himself and Jack both. "Yeah. I gather."

Jack's smile almost made Ennis' earlier attempt at following Jack's burning house metaphor trail worth the embarrassment. He held his hand to Ennis, pinky extended. "What's this?"

"A pinky promise. My mama says no promise is really unbreakable until you touch pinkies with the other person."

"Why not just a 'cross your heart and hope to die?'"

There was that look again, rippling over Jack's features like a linen in the wind. "Because I don't hope to die."

"Ok." Ennis nodded. It was all he could do to look like he understood.

Jack touched his pinky to Ennis', the action sending a jolt up through Ennis' arm. If he hadn't known any better, he'd have thought he was having a heart attack. But he did. Sometimes, the electricity was just there. Like the breeze and the birds and the beetle, it just was, and that being swathed Ennis in a comfort no blanket ever could.

Later, as Ennis thought about melting faces and touches that carried a spark, he felt himself smiling. It wasn't his normal thin-lipped one–this one split his face wide open, a gaping valley left in the wake of the feelings that formed it. Jack was back. What was more, Jack was still his friend. For the first time since the moon had first rose full on the night he visited Jack's house, Ennis fell to the pull of sleep without trouble, sky blue threads weaving his dreams with the promise that, come tomorrow, Jack might still be there, bouncing his ankle and smiling to put the sun to shame.

Jack fuckin' Twist.