Ezra and Benji couldn’t have been cut from more separate molds.
Ezra was graceful despite his averageness: normal in height and build, full-faced and quick to smile. He had beautiful teeth and even more beautiful eyes of a clear, mischievous gray. His fingers were long. He had a propensity for pushing them back through his hair, working through knots that never looked particularly tangled in the first place. He was chameleonic. There was no social situation Ezra didn’t know how to fold himself neatly and impressively into—yet the only people he never seemed capable of charming were his own family (a mother and a father and two twin brothers and a live-in nanny who’d aged with the children), all of whom he’d left behind in a fit of frustration the year before graduating high school. “I don’t need them,” he boasted from the hood of his Honda Civic, where he sat with his feet pressed against the front bumper. “They probably don’t even realize I’m gone. Fuck ‘em.”
Benji, on the other hand, was too tall and too lanky and knocked into everything with bony elbows and crooked knees. He was socially awkward around anyone he wasn’t intimately familiar with, and even then, he tended to recoil into himself. He stuttered violently when he felt unsure, which was often. He was an only child, loved dearly by his parents and a slew of elderly, smokey-breathed aunts. Benji worked himself to the quick to pass classes, to find a job, to hopefully make it into a decent program at a second- or third-choice college. He had a compromised immune system and fell ill more often than anyone he knew. He was prone to swampy bouts of jealousy. He feared authority and the consequences that followed breaking rules. He floundered.
They were unlikely friends—but that was exactly what they were, in an Almost-Jock and Almost-Nerd, make-believe sort of way, like something scripted for television. The freshman year of high school was formative for them, when a coincidental pairing during biology brought them roaring into one another’s stratosphere. Their lab conversation had been strained at best (“I think this is where we’re supposed to make the cut,” Ezra tried lazily as he prodded the tip of a scalpel into a frog’s abdomen, to which Benji countered, “No, transverse m-m-means … means horizontal, so it should go like this,” to which Ezra joked, “You must cut open a lot of things in your free time, huh?” to which Benji responded with unimpeachable silence).
Their camaraderie was an inevitability. One day they were struggling through a dissection, the next Ezra was changing seats at his lunch tables so he could sit back-to-back with Benji (“You got a quarter? I’ll pay you back,” Ezra swore for countless afternoons when he claimed he’d forgotten to bring a lunch), the next they were slumming in the same corner of the library during study hall. They started walking home together when they realized they lived two blocks away. Ezra began crashing at Benji’s over the weekend. They navigated the woods on Benji’s property during holidays, uncovering secret animal dens and shortcuts to classmates’ houses. They shared answers on homework assignments. Ezra stopped going home Sunday nights, because home, strangely, turned into a spare bedroom and a closet scantily filled with several sets of clothing—some his, some gifted by Benji’s parents—that began to smell more like Tide and less like Gain.
“You can’t stay here forever,” Benji tried to tell Ezra once early into sophomore year. He’d been sitting at the desk in the spare bedroom, picking at a thread that was spinning loose from the sleeve of his sweater—a bad habit that reared its head every time Benji edged the line of confrontation. “You gotta go home eventually. Your parents probably miss you.”
“No they don’t,” was Ezra’s simple, quick response. He shook the hair out of his face, made eyes at himself in a wall mirror, rocking the chair he sat in backward. “I hate going home. When I leave here, it’s gonna be because I’m moving on.”
“Moving on? Moving where?”
Chair legs clunked dully on carpet. “I dunno. Montana. Nevada. West.”
“West?” The idea felt ludicrous, archaic, cliché. Benji couldn’t so much as fathom forever-leaving Indiana, much less the cloistered streets of their neighborhood.
“Yeah,” Ezra boasted. “Maybe to Los Angeles.” He swung sideways and collapsed backward off the chair and into a starfish-sprawl across the nearby mattress. “That’s where everybody goes, right? You know how it is. Go to Hollywood, make something of yourself.”
But to Benji, Ezra already was something.
*
It was supposed to be a joke, something that Ezra fixated on temporarily but ultimately moved on from when he became enamored by some sports team or incoming college acceptance letters. But as sophomore year turned to junior, Ezra’s conviction hadn’t changed. “I’m going west,” he promised to not just Benji, but Benji’s parents, their classmates, their teachers.
And to his credit, Ezra put in the effort to formulate the semblance of a plan, shoddy and hole-pocked though it was. “I have a friend,” Ezra explained to anyone who would listen. “Isabelle Moreau—she moved out there in like, fourth grade. We still talk, practically all the time. She said I can crash with her while I get my shit together. Her parents are totally cool with it.”
He couldn’t explain why, but Benji felt certain these people he’d never heard of before somehow weren’t as on board as Ezra claimed. Not everyone had as laidback, welcoming parents as Benji did, mothers and fathers who were permissive enough to let friends become surrogate family members without so much as second-guessing the decision. That sort of thing didn’t ordinarily happen—especially not cross-country and cross-decade.
Ezra was foolishly insistent, though, or else he was blindly naïve. “I swear,” he pledged over a particularly chatter-filled dinner. “It wasn’t even my idea. Izzy was the one who suggested it when I told her about wanting to move.”
Benji’s mother eyed him scrupulously. “How well do you even know them?” she asked, her empty fork poised prongs-up near her cheek. “You haven’t seen them in years. Are you sure they’re good people? That you’ll be safe with them?” Benji was so thrilled that someone else was questioning Ezra’s conviction as much as he’d been that he dropped his knife.
“Are you certain they’re fine with it?” Benji’s father asked. Benji, who had stooped to snatch his silverware as inconspicuously as possible, knocked his shoulder against the table, sending the dishes wobble-clacking. His father was put off for only a beat before he continued, “This—this Izzy, she could just be saying that without asking them.”
With mutual agreement, Benji’s parents supplied the line Benji was sure Ezra must have dreaded: “We’d like to talk to them first.”
“Sure,” Ezra agreed nonetheless. Benji resurfaced in time to glimpse that charming smile that left him weak, firing off endorphins and stomach bile inside him simultaneously. He swore he could read Ezra’s silent panic, could map out the plans he must have been making to course-correct the situation. Benji skewered a forkful of roast and chewed, but it felt like leather between his molars. They ground together, but not forcibly enough to drown out Ezra’s sure-footed, “Not a problem.”
*
By junior year, it was rare that Ezra insisted he needed to go back to his house—his actual house—and even rarer that he asked Benji to accompany him. “I need to find some things,” Ezra said vaguely. “You can help carry them back home, if you want.” Home, of course, being Benji’s place.
Benji smoothed a hand along the back of his neck and agreed sheepishly, though the idea of Ezra’s family always left him uneasy. They were supercilious and hook-nosed and intimidating. In the smattering of times he’d encountered Ezra’s family, he’d never once seen any of their foreheads crease or wrinkle, like they’d trained their faces to remain devoid of expression. Once, Benji caught Ezra patting his brow surreptitiously, a scar of a childhood wrapped up in vanity (“That eyebrow crease, y’know?” Ezra offered with a sad sort of smile. “Gotta stop ‘em from sticking”).
It took several rounds of pounding on the door before someone answered. One of Ezra’s brothers cracked the door open just enough to hiss through it, “Go away.”
“Let me in,” Ezra demanded. He jammed an elbow into the gap, prizing the door open.
“Mom said not to—”
“I don’t care what she said,” Ezra huffed, and he stormed through the threshold. “C’mon Benji,” was tacked on as an afterthought, but Benji didn’t move, stood sculpture-still under the clear gray stare of someone who looked hauntingly like Ezra but wasn’t.
The brother relented and let the door swing wide. “You might as well come—” he said, looking disapprovingly at Benji, but Benji shook his head, a fast refusal. He tried not to peer inside, to stare at the baroque staircase Ezra swept up, the ornamental crown molding and fleur-de-lis backsplash of the accent wall facing him, to source out where an eerie glint of light came from, refracted as if through crystal. He heard a shout from within, and Ezra’s voice rise above it, crowing something angry but undecipherable, and Benji spun from the door altogether. Ezra’s brother must have as well, though in the opposite direction because the door clapped shut.
Benji admittedly knew very little about Ezra’s home life. They hardly talked about his family and what was so terrible about it; when they had in the past, it was always in platitudes. My mom’s never around, my dad’s checked out, or The most attention I ever got was when that shit went down in sixth grade (though Benji never elaborated on what, precisely, that meant), or Imagine being raised by a nanny. Our parents couldn’t tell the twins apart half the time, bet they still can’t. Benji couldn’t fathom living in a house where his presence felt obsolete, where his family was so disengaged. Ezra thrived under the attention of Benji’s parents. To think, if his own parents had been around—
The door opened. Ezra bowled through the doorway so brusquely that the force of his emergence nearly knocked Benji from the stoop. He had a gym bag with him, halfway zipped, the sleeve of something emerald-colored spilling out. “What if I asked you to leave with me?” Ezra asked.
Benji knew a redirection when he saw one, understood fully the way Ezra already wanted to forget what happened inside. “I don’t know. I-I guess I’d say yes.” Ezra’s silence was as good as calling Benji’s bluff.
*
“I don’t think we should be going back this far,” Benji muttered, but still he found himself sliding between the pricker bush brambles that designated the separation of his backyard from a lot owner who had a reputation for being aggressive with trespassers. The weather was warming, summer—and graduation—hurtling nearer. Benji stumbled over a root, toppled against a nest of gnarled branches, hissed when one snagged the delicate skin of his forearm, tearing at flesh like it was made of age-thinned mesh. Cranberry-colored lines marred cream.
“You’re a wet sock,” Ezra countered and foraged on ahead of him, brash, belligerent. A twist of paper was pinched between his fingers. Ezra brought it to his lips, inhaled, puffed out smoke that disappeared among trees and left only a faint odor. “The wettest and the sockiest. We’re not even all that far back yet. Quit raining on my carnival.”
Benji swiped the back of one hand beneath his nose. It felt like it had been running, but his hand came away dry. “Y-your parade?”
“What? Absolutely not. I said what I said. My carnival. You’re drowning my carousel with your negativity.” He continued to stalk through the foliage, his shoulders hitching as arms swept out bravely to clear the way ahead of him: the Gaston to Benji’s LeFou. Benji imagined the stupid, self-assured grin Ezra must have been wearing. Imagined Ezra’s perfect teeth and sharp dimples and the lazy curl of a single lock of hair that never stayed tucked behind an ear. He thought of the way clusters of girls giggled whenever Ezra passed them in the school hallways. “Besides,” Ezra went on nonchalantly, “it’s not much further on. You’ll live.”
Benji’s lower lip puckered. “You’re sure?”
“That you’ll live? Or that it’s close?” He paused a moment. Benji halted too, just short of knocking into Ezra’s back, felt the space between them grow static. “I just brought Mimi back here a couple nights ago.” When Ezra began to move again, it was with a quick glance over his shoulder. He looked haughty, Benji decided. He looked proud.
“You’re b-bringing girls over?” Benji wrapped his scraped-up arm around his midsection, like he was trying to squeeze the stutter out of himself. “Like, at night? D-do Mom and Dad know?”
Ezra’s neck disappeared inside the bowl of a shrug. Benji watched his shoulder blades form hills against the back of his t-shirt. “Probably not. Don’t go telling them. I think they’re already kinda mad at me as it is, what with the whole—you know, leaving thing. They don’t need to be thinking I’m some sort of—of—vagabond on top of it all.”
“But isn’t that exactly w-w-what—”
“No, wrong word. Some miscreant, I meant.”

Benji stumbled over a fallen branch, barely recovering himself in time to argue, “They’re not wrong. You are.” Another puff of smoke plumed around Ezra and charted the course ahead of them.
“Oh,” Ezra grumbled, finding a way to make the noise sound more like an entire complaint in its single syllable, “whose side are you on, anyway? The wettest of wet socks. You never cease to amaze me in the new depths you’ll sink to in order to rain on everything. Here—” He cut himself off, pushing the last remaining vestiges of a pricker barricade out of the way (How does he make it look so easy to break through them? Benji thought, even as another branch caught and pinched a hole in the front of his shirt).
Benji stepped into the clearing, let out a disappointed, “Oh.”
“What’s that mean? Oh?” Ezra took one more hit off the bud in his hand before pitching it to the ground, stamping it out. He pressed his knuckles to his hips, stepping closer to Benji, as if the change in perspective might offer some sort of insight into the other’s lack of enthusiasm. Benji’s expression didn’t change, even as Ezra exhaled smoke into his orbit.
Around them, the trees were cleared out in the shape of a rough circle. Gnarly shrubs lined the furthermost arc of a small patch of grass, big enough for six or seven people to sit cross-legged in. A log had been rolled off to one side to serve as a makeshift bench. There was a tin gardener’s box leaning up against it. Minor bits trash were tangled up in patted-down blades of grass: scraps of paper, a brightly colored torn-open packet with a centurion stamped across it, seven empty aluminum cans with bleached labels. The area was shadowy, breezy. Cool. How hadn’t he known this space existed, in all the years of their adventuring? How hadn’t he known about Mimi?
“I don’t know,” Benji said at length. “I don’t know what I-I-I was expecting. It’s not—”
“Wet. Sock.” Ezra strode toward the fallen log, sitting in the grass and leaning back against it, pulling the box into his lap. Fingers fiddled with the rusty latches holding it shut. It only took a moment of rifling through its contents once the lid was thrown back before Ezra brandished an emptied-out pill bottle, filled with recognizable little clusters. “C’mon. Sit. Smoke with me.”
*
Benji watched as if from a distance as Ezra circulated through a string of sort-of friends feeding into the start of senior year. He watched Mimi Benton slide in and out of Ezra’s focus, then Myra Roy cling wildly to a week’s worth of attention, then Reena—whose last name Benji didn’t know, because she wasn’t in their grade level, or maybe even their district—weave her way through the comings and goings of other girls. He watched as Ezra searched for something stable in the form of fleeting girlfriends, all the while claiming his heart had already settled down along the coast.
“Can you even afford a ticket to get out there?” Benji asked once, after a series of four days straight where Ezra hadn’t gone to work—a retail job he’d hardly interviewed for before it was handed to him at the end of summer. “Do you even have a job still?”
“I quit,” Ezra dismissed, repositioning his arm around Angela or Taryn or Shelly, Benji didn’t know. “I can’t keep it if I’m on the other half of the continent, can I?” and whoever the brunette was let out a laugh, her cheek sliding over Ezra’s collarbone. Benji wanted to shove her away. He wanted to build a wall between Ezra and the rest of the world, as if he could pin down Ezra’s fleeting interests and fend off the girls who threatened to ruin the relationship they’d constructed over the arc of high school. As if he could keep Ezra from leaving.
*
“So you really gonna come with me?”
“I hate planes. And-and-and I hate heights. You know that.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. You know how to drive, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I get motion sick.”
“They make shit for that. You can take something. Are you coming or not?”
“I applied for college out here. I was accepted. To North Bend.”
“Of course.” A beat. “Well, if you aren’t gonna come, are you at least gonna visit?
“I-I-I don’t know, Ezra, I thought this was a—was a-a-a joke. You leaving.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?”
“Hm.”
“Don’t be like that, Ezra. Stop. Ezra. Ezra, please.”
*
How stereotypical, to find someone else’s discarded clothes in Ezra’s room, an undershirt tailored to another body type, something pastel and thin. Attire left behind in a hurry, the remnants of a tryst Benji wasn’t supposed to know about.
“What are you doing in here?”
Benji spun, swung a knee into Ezra’s bed frame, dropped the tangle of cloth to the ground. “I-I-I—”
There was a steely look on Ezra’s face, a whole inquisition burgeoning inside him, an exploration that would map its way across Benji’s insecurities. What’s the deal? Benji could hear Ezra’s voice ripping through his thoughts. I’ve brought a dozen girls home. You’re never interested in any of them, you don’t care, but you somehow feel like you’re entitled to go through my shit? Are you looking for their leftovers? What are we, married?
In his haste to flee, Benji’s elbow went wide, nearly took out Ezra by the midsection. Ezra’s hand reached out automatically to steady Benji, a gesture completed a hundred times before, this time searing skin-on-skin. Had Benji imagined the look on his face, the force of his tone? “Dude,” Ezra said, “it’s okay,” or was that an echo ricocheting in Benji’s thoughts again, the hymn of a siren culling him to sea?
*
Benji didn’t even like smoking, truth be told. He did it because Ezra did, because it was the only way he could slip into Ezra’s peripheral without the never-ending flock of come-and-go friends Ezra surrounded himself with. He did it, Benji knew, because he craved the other’s attention like an adaptive drug, because he yearned for the closeness he felt slipping, and when it was just the two of them passing a bowl back and forth, the haze of comingling exhales trapped around them like ozone by leaves and branch-work, deep in the middle of the woods, he could finally get his fix.
They’d worn the shapes of their spread-eagle bodies into the grass so many times that the ground was threadbare, the winter of senior year freezing the spot barren. In the flicker of the past few weeks, Benji had learned to inhale deeply enough that the flower cupped in the bowl glowed bright red, and he’d learned how to stop his inhale before the drug could hit his lungs. He learned how to slow his breath so he didn’t have to pull from the bowl twice; he learned how to make it look as if he had anyway. He learned how to swallow down a cough that tried to run errant of his lungs. He learned that Ezra said stupid things sometimes, just for the sake of saying stupid things.
“What kind of accent do you think dirt would have?” Ezra asked on an exhale, and he stretched his arm out to close the distance between their bodies. There was too much grass—literal grass—clinging to the ground in clumps where limbs had yet to rub the earth raw, keeping them separated. “Like. Would we be able to compare it to something? Is dirt British? Or is it something totally new?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Benji countered, “dirt can’t talk.”
“I know that,” Ezra insisted, and flagged his fingers just short of making contact with Benji’s elbow. His eyes narrowed dramatically. Ezra stared at him in fixation until Benji grew uncomfortable and fidgeted. “Play along. Would it be all, ‘Cor, blimey guv’nor,’ or would it be a brand-new sound?” Ezra wagged his fingers again. “Oh! Or do you think it’s be regional? Dirt in Alabama has an Alabama accent?”
Benji wanted to touch Ezra’s hand. The realization came sharp and sudden. He wanted to feel the shape and measure of each long finger, find the callouses at each tip, the swell of each knuckle, the creases of life and love and health lines, the swirl and whorl of each print, to identify himself in them. Instead, he pressed the glass bowl flat against Ezra’s hand, trying to ignore the flicker of electricity that came with the pulse of contact. His throat tightened, an allergic reaction to friction. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“No,” Ezra protested, pushing himself upright, cradling the bowl so he could bring the spout to his mouth. He thumbed the dial of his lighter but didn’t spark it. “You know what? You’re ridiculous.”
Benji’s brow knit. It was true. Probably. He plucked a handful of the surviving grass from the ground near his hip. Watched Ezra light the residual flower, its struggle to glow. Followed Ezra’s movements as he upturned the bowl and tapped it empty at his side. Cashed out.
“You’re uptight.” The additional accusation came from nowhere, but it, too, was probably fair, and Benji didn’t have it in him to argue. “You’re dodgy and you’re uptight and you’re—look. Look, Benj. Are you coming or not? That’s really the root of this, isn’t it?”
“Er.” Benji scratched a finger behind his ear. “Is it? Come where?” He already knew the trajectory of the conversation, played dumb anyway.
“With me, you great giant—you. When I leave. Are you coming?”
It felt so permanent this time, like his answer would fossilize. “Ezra,” Benji tried cautiously, but he was shot down before he could get anything more out, a hand waving in his direction.
“Your parents already said I couldn’t go.”
This was news. It froze Benji, just as much as the decisive choice of the word your. Benji was so used to Ezra referring to them as Mom, as Dad.
“I’m still going,” Ezra added in a rush. “And you should too. Otherwise, you’re just going to—your whole life is just going to be you making excuses. Because that’s what you do. If you cared enough, you would have just said yes. You could at least lie and pretend like you want to.” He pushed his fingers back through his hair, his curls dancing around his face. “Forget it.”
“That’s—that’s not f-fair, Ezra.”
“It’s the epitome of fair.” Benji wondered briefly where Ezra had pulled that word from—epitome—its roundness, its finality. “I would never ask you to do something that wasn’t fair. All I wanted was for you to say you’d be there, that you’d—that you’d visit, even. That’s all. You’re the one not being fair. You’re unrelenting.”
This wasn’t the pot speaking, Benji realized. It was something deeper. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Benji tried again.
“Of course, I do. I’m saying that you—” Ezra stabbed his finger into the space between them (Benji swore he felt it, subliminal, square between his ribs) “—are afraid. You’re full of … of cabbage and excuses. You think too much, but you never say any of what you’re thinking, and I can’t figure you out, because you’re just—you’re the most impossible thing I’ve ever—”
Ezra stopped himself, became full of motion instead, body twisting and stretching and closing the gap between them. At once and not at all, it felt like Ezra had climbed over-top him. Benji felt it, the static, the heat, the frustration, the move west, the fuzz of each individual hair that scaled Ezra’s arm. It was the first time in Benji’s life that something culminated, an action that felt so otherworldly and untouchable, a thing that never happened. His lungs withered. He forgot to breathe, or how to.
And then it was gone.
Ezra dropped the bowel into the gardener’s box that had been on Benji’s far side, then hefted his weight from the ground. The box lay open, the sound of Benji’s heartbeat ricocheting off its tin walls and echoing in the clearing. Ezra strode toward the gap in the pricker bushes, beating the branches wide enough to let him through. “Ever,” he went on, as if he’d never stopped, “had to deal with.”
*
There would come a day when Benji would follow Ezra out west, he knew. He didn’t know why he couldn’t just say it, but he felt it, some organic truth that existed inside him. He would follow Ezra around the coast he’d claim as his own, not quite understanding what appealed to Ezra about the heat, the hustle-and-bustle, the Hollywood aesthetic, but feigning to understand anyway. He would pretend to be happy for him, pretend that whatever success and joy Ezra was chasing was worth it, that he’d adjusted to the distance between them, that he’d found equal contentment in staying back in their little Indiana town. He’d pretend, because pretending was what Benji was good at.
He knew he had to tell Ezra as much. They were weeks shy of graduation (Ezra had passed his tickets on to Benji’s family, insisted he didn’t want his own present), after which it was only a matter of time until Ezra took off. He had to tell Ezra before then—because Ezra was right. Benji kept too much pent up too often, to the point where it started keeping him up throughout the night. After days of sharing no more words than it took to excuse himself from one room or pass into another, he knew the telling had to happen now.
He swung his legs over the edge of his bed, giving his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room, then trekked across the carpet to the door. It creaked on its hinges. Nuding open Ezra’s door open a sliver proved to be the far quieter task. “Ezra?” Benji hissed into the gap. A breeze tickled his nose. He pushed the door wider, smelled grass and rain and the bloom of early spring on a draft of air. The window must have been open. “Ezra?” he tried again. The whisper of curtains answered, the white noise of a computer monitor humming blankly. He pushed the door the rest of the way.
The blankets were drawn neatly over the mattress, corners tucked military tight. The shelves were empty of their scant belongings. The closet door stood open, half the outfits inside missing. Ezra’s graduation gown was wadded on the floor.
Benji stood at the room’s threshold, alone.