Mikasa cornered him at his mom's Christmas party. She was wearing a skirt that didn't quite cover her burly knees. Her own mother had lent her makeup for this occasion and had told her how grown-up she looked before the party.

"Huh-hu-hi, Eren," she said. It was only around Eren that she stuttered. Five minute conversations took fifteen. Apart from the stuttering, her words were soft and deliberately level, as though to make up for the sentence's initial rocky start.

"Hi, Mikasa," Eren said. "How're you?"

"Guh-guh-good," she said. "How are you?"

Her eyes seemed to shine. Eren was looking anywhere but the glare. The adults were talking and laughing in the next room over. Eren was seventeen, the closest thing to an adult that you could be.

"Doing okay," Eren said. "I still despise Mr. G's class."

Mikasa smiled, thankful that he'd remembered that they shared homeroom.

"Huh-how's your-" Mikasa rearranged things in her head. "-how's Reiner?"

"He's okay, too. He told me he saw you the other day?"

Mikasa looked up sharply so Eren did too.

"Mikasa," Eren said, "did Reiner say something to you?"

She held his gaze.

"Wait-" Eren said, taken aback. "Did he?"

"Nuh-nuh-not really. You- you aul-aul-already know that Reiner duh- d-doesn't like me, so it is not like he said an-anything new."

It was her genuine unwillingness to get Reiner in trouble that caused Eren to decide take a certain course of action that he knew he had to take for a very long time now. It was a relief, the decision, and it dampened the glare of Mikasa's sweet face just a little bit. He felt he could nearly look her in the eyes now. It felt like a large rock had been kicked down a hill and was out of his control now.

###

Eren had this dream. In the dream, he had no body. He was an observing pair of eyes. He observed a bedroom. Trophies shone on shelves. Dirty laundry was stuffed under the bed. It was a typical boy's bedroom, except a girl sat at the desk doing her homework.

Mikasa was hard at work. Her chin dipped up and down as though she were falling asleep or listening to music only she could hear. Eren looked over her shoulder. She had deviated from algebraic equations and was now drawing. On an empty sheet of paper, a sprawl of naked limbs and people that those limbs belonged to filled up every inch of the page. Raw with nudity, the page was hard to look at. Boys, girls. Upside-down, sideways, slotting into each other's spaces. A lot of them were smiling.

Then Eren noticed something awful about them. Mikasa had drawn them so that they were all being tortured on the inside. If you looked closely, their expressions were agonized. Their skin was sloughing off and their eyeballs were popping. If pictures had sound, Eren was sure that they would all be screaming at the top of their lungs.

Mikasa flipped the page. She began sketching again. Her pencil made deep divots in the paper like a brand being pressed into flesh. Eren's own face took shape. He felt himself appear on the page. Like all the others, he was made ugly by mind-rending pain.

Nooooooo, his face seemed to say.

Mikasa smiled down at him. She was terrifying and deranged and autonomous because she was beautiful.

The page flipped and there went Eren.

###

Eren woke up after everyone else had. He felt like he was going to puke before he had even peeled his eyes open.

"Yo, Eren. You gotta get up, man."

Reiner was standing above him in a daze of morning sun. Eren rolled over on the crummy bean-bag that had stuffing oozing out of its gut. With his foot, Reiner flipped Eren back over. Defeated, Eren groaned. The ceiling fan did nothing to help the heat.

"What?" Eren said.

Reiner told Eren that he had to drive Bertolt to work. Bert's car was still in the shop.

"Reiner, I'm still drunk."

"No, you're not, you're just hung-over. I don't know why you pre-gamed when you knew we were doing shots." Reiner threw him his keys. They landed in his lap.

"I'm not doing- why do I have to do it?"

"Why you here then?" Boys that Eren met last night were on their phones in the living room. They had a humming sort of danger to them, like they'd beat the shit out of you for no reason. Eren had thought they were okay last night but he now hated them.

Reiner patiently explained why only Eren could do it.

"Bert can find another ride," Eren said. He wished Reiner would stop talking to him so he could try and not throw up in peace. "I don't care."

"Reiner, why are you always having him over?" One of the boys said. He glanced away from his phone. His eyes were beady and sunken in, as though they'd hardened in the sun. He looked around; an appeal. "No- what? I'm serious, I'll say it to his face. He keeps talking about Bert, so I'll say it to his fucking face. I'm just honest."

There was something about the way he said it that made Eren want to puke. To the laughter and jeering of the others, Eren cupped a hand over his mouth and rushed out of Reiner's small apartment to the backyard. The grass was drying up in the wakeful sun and in dire need of a trim. It reached Eren's elbows as he went on his hands and knees and gagged. Nothing came up. The backyard was shared between all the other apartments. Balconies overlooked them. At least nobody's laughing at me anymore, Eren thought and then wasn't too sure of that thought; for a second, he thought that he saw a lot of people up on the balconies, all watching him. There was an abnormal amount of people on those tiny balconies, crammed along there as though the apartments that they came from had run out room. But then Eren raised his head and saw only Reiner. I'm still drunk, he thought. Reiner was sweeping back Eren's hair from his dribbling chin and telling him to go inside before the neighbors saw, with an absolutely expressionless face. It was like Reiner had made up his mind beforehand to keep a face of stone.

Eren spit in the grass and got up and hit Reiner in the nose. Reiner recoiled and Eren ran off past the side of the apartment complex and out to the driveway.

"Eren!" Eren heard Reiner bellow, and saw him lumbering after him, cupping his nose. Eren turned around at the edge of the driveway and jangled his car keys as bait, laughing. Reiner understood the game, but didn't want to play. "Eren-!"

Eren took off running down the street. He was still barefoot so he was thankful for the shadows of the oaks in Reiner's neighborhood. It was so hot out that the sidewalk burned like an iron. As Eren passed the cars parked along the street, they began to rise into the air. Like great gleaming trouts that had gone belly-up dead, they floated. Without any gravity or friction, their wheels spun indefinitely. The bodies of the cars rotated this way and that, freed from the dignity of physics. If Eren were to push on one of their bumpers, they would be sent flying, he was sure. Reiner was charging after him. Now, whenever Reiner passed a floating car, it dropped to the ground. Impacts shook the road and cracked the asphalt. The suspensions of the cars rocked and snapped, trying to reduce the damage. Headlights shattered and tires deflated. Reiner kept chasing Eren, undeterred.

They ran to a park. No one was around this early in the morning. Cornered at the swings, Eren held out his palms for mercy. "Wait, Reiner, come on, I give-" But now Reiner was into the game now and he tackled Eren to the mulch. He pinned Eren's shoulders. Eren saw that he had a wad of drying blood up his nose.

"Come on, Eren, what happened?" Reiner said. "Try and get up, see? It's easy."

Reiner didn't let him up. He just kept pushing the bone of Eren's shoulders into the ground.

"Get off," Eren huffed.

"You wanted to be this way, so now you have to deal with the consequences," Reiner said lightly. "Do you know what I have to deal with every time you act like this? Although it didn't really cross my mind until now. I'm not really someone who keeps tallies. My mind is usually pretty empty. But I just realized that I have to deal with a lot when it's you acting up."

For whatever reason, this was a position that Eren's body rejected viscerally. A shudder ran through his core. Sweat soaked his white cotton tee in an instant. He felt, as clearly as if he were Reiner himself, Reiner's knee on his back, and Reiner's flat palms on his shoulders.

"Get off," Eren repeated, squirming. Reiner got off, and Eren finally threw up at the corner of the swing set.

"Bert's gonna be late for work," Reiner said, later, in a conversational tone, while Eren swished his mouth out at the water fountains.

###

The YMCA gym was sparsely populated with mostly old people, which was why Eren went there. There was no chance that he'd run into someone from school. He worked his body without much thought, only wanting to rip apart muscle fiber and then regenerate it. After an hour of doing this, Eren was done.

"What's up with you today? You seemed kind of angry," Armin said.

They were sitting on the bench, catching their breath after the last set of using minimal weight. Eren panted, intending to answer him once he was less winded. Armin looked at him sideways.

"Whenever you're noticeably in a bad mood, Reiner is involved," he said. "Otherwise, your moods are kind of undetectable to others. Or, at least, I can't really tell. I feel like you think you're some open book, but you're really not."

Did Reiner pull out stronger emotions from him? Eren wondered.

"I don't know," he said.

"Come on!" Armin pleaded.

Eren and Armin had met because they were the only two kids from their school that went to the Y. They had a lot in common. They had both been struck by the sudden desire to work out when they entered high school. They both had the same body types. Not an once of fat, but also not much muscle. And Armin's was that of a girls, like his. Because his dad was a doctor, Eren knew more about weight training than Armin did so he had taught Armin what he knew, awkwardly and clumsily, with very generalized coaching, because of their unique circumstance. In return, Armin advised him on other things. Armin was incredibly interested in Eren and Reiner, and followed Eren's life the way you would your favorite protagonist. It was sort of flattering.

"Well," Eren said, trying to suppress the urge to embellish in front of Armin. "I didn't know that Reiner had dated two other people- girls- until recently."

"How did you not know that?" Armin said. "I knew that."

"I thought he was gay. Not bisexual. He told me he was gay."

Armin analyzed this with apparent relish. While Eren let the thoughts bounce around in the other boy's head, he watched an old guy, two benches over, put an obscene amount of weight on his bar. If he were to drop the bar on his neck, the guy would definitely be dead, because neither Eren nor Armin could lift that, not even working together.

"Maybe he just wanted to talk intimately with someone, without the stress of being sexually attracted to them. And maybe he could only do that with a girl. But-" Armin held up a finger. "-no girl would want to be friends without an actual relationship. How weird would that be? Imagine, the star-quarterback approaching you to be just friends."

"Wait, this is Reiner we're talking about," Eren said. "And you're saying he cares about that sort of stuff?"

"You know him better than me," Armin said. "Does he?"

Armin got up to go refill his water bottle. Eren thought to himself. The booming of the A/C and the clinking of weights echoed around the gym. The shouts and rubber skidding of shoes on linoleum as a basketball game went on in the room over. Armin returned.

"I think he does, actually," Eren said. He could tell that Armin was secretly jubilant that his theory was right. "And you only knew that because you were interested in the girls Reiner dated."

"Duh! Reiner's an enigma himself, just like you, so I have to keep track of who was close to him," Armin said. "As your friend, I'm obligated to do this."

"Oh. I thought it was because you had a crush on both of them."

Armin sniffed. "Of course not." He got his water bottle and sweat rag and put it in his bag.

"But-"

"Eren," Armin interrupted. "Can I guess your type? Real quick?"

Eren blushed. "What?"

"Incredibly brawny, tall, and busty. Like Hercules."

They walked out of the gym. The sunlight was a relief and it warmed their stiffened, spent cells that had been blasted by the air conditioning for the past hour.

"You literally only have one case study," Eren said as they crossed the parking lot. "You're just describing Reiner."

Armin gave him a rather sly look that Eren didn't like.

###

Today they had a school pep rally. The boy's football team had a huge game coming up and they really needed the support and encouragement of the school. The girl's football team was there too. Who knew if they had an upcoming match. Pep rallies reminded Eren a bit of a dead whale carcass that had been washed up on shore and feasted on by teeming swarms of numerous scavenging organisms. Eren himself was only here to support Reiner, and because he couldn't find a good enough excuse to get out of it.

After the cheerleaders did their thing- with their tiny promising skirts and their disappointing school-mandated mesh shorts stowed underneath- and the band did their thing- the deep throbbing wails and bellows of school spirit- it was time for the two football captains, boy and girl, to face off in a game show questionnaire: how well do you know your rival?

The captain of the Homos (homo as in homo-sapiens, not homosexuals, you're so gay, nah, you're projecting, there's no way they'll actually let us name it that, but why shouldn't they? are they homophobic or something?), Reiner Braun took the floor and the first question.

"What college does your rival want to attend?"

Reiner put on his most baffled face. He gaped in a stupor at the girl's football team captain, Mikasa Ackerman. "You're going to college? Really?"

The bleachers shook with laughter. A loud buzzer blared; wrong. Eren flipped his hoodie up and felt at his chest. A vacuum opened up a painful cavity of emptiness inside it, a pocket of internal dead space.

The next question was for Mikasa.

"What is your rival's favorite subject in school?"

"Physical education," Mikasa said into the microphone. Since she wasn't speaking to Eren, her voice was a smooth transmission, like quiet water flowing in a dark underground pool.

The buzzer dinged; correct. Reiner and Mikasa shifted in their bulky shoulder pads. Reiner cracked a smile at her and said something that the microphone didn't pick up. Mikasa didn't react. Eren felt the collapse in his chest intensify.

"Does your rival prefer cats or dogs?"

Reiner's smile made his face into something else. He answered what everyone wanted him to answer.

"A dog. Definitely dogs," he said. "You're a dog person, right?"

The buzzer sounded angrily, but the crowd drowned it out. It was the right answer to them. A group of snickering seniors three rows below Eren quoted SpongeBob SquarePants. One said in a squealing falsetto, "is your rival a boy or a girl?" The other one said, his voice low and dumb, "pass." The joke was that Mikasa looked like a man.

"Hey," Eren said. But they were just far enough away from Eren so that whatever he tried to say to them would seem like it was intended for someone else. He got up. Backpacks and assemblages of legs blocked his way. Everyone was laughing at whatever Reiner just said. Everyone got their fill. A teacher tried to sit Eren back down.

"Is your rival-?" It was Mikasa's turn to answer. She opened her mouth and saw Eren in the bleachers.

"I-I-I-I, d-d-d-" she said. She squared her padded shoulders and tried again. "I-I-" Her mouth snapped closed. She took a deep breath. "Um-I-I-I-I-"

Nobody was laughing anymore. It would've been messed up to laugh. Reiner reached over and pressed the buzzer. It dutifully sounded off the automated noise for a wrong answer. Everybody was laughing again.

Eren's face twisted from the pain in his chest. He sat back down. He was wearing Reiner's hoodie.

###

When Eren was a lot younger, he overheard his mother talking to Mikasa's mother over the phone. Mikasa, after tee ball practice, was approached by a couple of older girls and made to strip to her underwear in the field, after dark. The girls put their eyes on Mikasa's body and said things. Then, satisfied, they left, and Mikasa mentioned to her mother in passing a couple days later.

Eren could not remember if this had actually happened or if he had made it up, but his imagination replayed this scenario often, only it was him being made to strip in the tee ball field, with the chain link fence behind him, and the fading light, not yet dark enough for the big floodlights to come on, so they stared down, dark and as impassive as a cold, dead star. He slid his shorts past his knees and stepped out of them. He peeled down his boxers too. His shoes were already abandoned, lying on their sides, and his socks were crumpled up in them. He removed his shirt and there was nothing else to take off. His hands had no pockets to slink into so they clasped each other behind Eren's back.

The floodlights began to heat up, and for a second there was a thermal haze gathering at their faces, before the heat turned to light and they lit up the entire field.

###

Eren rode Reiner hard. He came up, then split himself and when Reiner jerked, it was the thump of a clutch moving to second gear, third gear, fourth, and the engine was rumbling, purring, deep. Eren gnashed his teeth, fighting it. His pores opened up in a drench of sweat. The friction was burning him up, unraveling pink petals till there was a picked clean stem.

"Feel good, huh?" Reiner panted.

Eren came and it was dry as the day.

"Don't feel good," Eren moaned. "Stop. Stop!"

Reiner stopped, and Eren slid off him. Reiner had yet to come. They got back into their clothes out of fear of Eren's mom returning. It felt like wearing wetsuits in this heat. Eren rested on his bed, setting the LED fairy lights around his room to a mildly hypnotic yellow. His parents weren't home. The sun was an impressionistic spot through the blinds.

"Let me know when you're good," Reiner said, flopping down in Eren's gaming chair. He booted up the PC and queued into a Call of Duty game.

"I'm done," Eren said, scrolling away on his phone. He was sleepy.

Reiner threw up his hands without turning away from the monitor.

"Not my fault you have stamina," Eren said. "Or that I'm on my period."

"You're not on your period," Reiner scoffed. "Or else it would look like I'm on my fucking period."

"Ew." Eren blazed through his for you page with the speed of someone who has seven hours a day spent on social media. He was following several people from school; they were all talking about the upcoming powder puff game. Sunspots and flitting light motes of their attention sparked to and fro before settling on it, as though it were some half-buried missile that could go nuclear at any second. After the pep rally, even whispers carried. He sat up and pressed record and turned the camera to his face. "Hey, Reiner."

Reiner grunted. Eren flicked through the different colors of lights around the room until he got attention.

"What?" Reiner said grumpily, still concentrating on the game. Eren flipped the camera.

"What are you going to do after high school?" Eren asked, in mimicry of a TikTok trend circulating.

"Probably going to play football. What else can I do? I'm too stupid for anything else."

Eren laughed. "True." Reiner died in his game and turned around, scowling when he saw the phone pointed at him.

Eren ended the recording. "Seriously, though. You're just going to play football your whole life?"

"I mean, yeah," Reiner said. He sat on the side of the bed. Eren put his arms around Reiner's waist and rested his head on Reiner's shoulder. "I don't want to," Reiner continued. "I already have a bad back."

"Poor baby," Eren said mockingly. "That's why I rode you."

"I'm going to end up one of those linebackers with fifty different types of brain damage and then you're going to be sorry."

"They should make football touch instead of tackle," Eren said.

"No guts, no glory. Besides, they already have that," Reiner said, "it's called the girl's team."

Eren slid his arms back, annoyed. Reiner grabbed his arms and put them back where they were; an apology. Eren flipped open TikTok again and began recording them; it was okay as long as you do this.

When the phone light hit Reiner's face, he was seized in the clutches of a wide smile. Eren smiled too. He finished off the TikTok.

Later, when he was editing it for posting, he noticed it. The camera had made them into something else. Reiner's face was twisting in on itself, following the beginnings of a spiral like an old ship capsizing. His teeth were punched in. His brow was monolithic. Eren's cheeks were rubbery like burn victim's shiny skin. His eyes were painted stones. They both were made ugly by mind-rending pain.