Wild Awake

goes ba-ka-ka-ta-ba-ka-ta on the drums,” until Skunk picks me up, moves the synth out of the way, sets me down on the workbench, and kisses me with his hands in my hair. “Love-bison,” I say, but he can’t hear because my mouth is smothered in kisses.
    When I leave, Skunk gives me a little black book with yellowing pages. I read it on the bus ride home. It starts, “The Way that can be experienced is not true; the world that can be constructed is not real.” I flip it over. The cover says Tao te Ching . By the time I get home, I’ve read the whole thing twice. I send Skunk a text I THINK MY BRAIN IS ON FIRE, and he texts back IT PROBABLY IS, and I text back THE WAY IS A LIMITLESS VESSEL, and he texts back USED BY THE SELF, IT IS NOT FILLED BY THE WORLD, and I text back IT CANNOT BE CUT, KNOTTED, DIMMED OR STILLED, and he texts back ITS DEPTHS ARE HIDDEN, UBIQUITOUS AND ETERNAL . we keep texting lines back and forth until we’ve texted practically the whole Tao te Ching , then Skunk calls and says, “I miss you already, Crazy Girl,” and I get off the bus, cross the street, catch a bus in the opposite direction, go right back to his house, and kidnap him for an expedition to the Chinese bakery before his aunt and uncle get home from work.
    That night, Lukas finally texts back after I’ve already sent him a million texts asking when we’re going to practice now that I’ve fixed my synth. I go over there for dinner, and Petra’s made potato-and-cheese pierogi. She comments on my outfit, which is somewhat more daring than what I usually wear, and I tell her now that our band is famous, I need to look the part. Lukas still looks the same, but that’s because he’s the drummer and drummers are never fully in the spotlight, it’s kind of a rule of drumming. He doesn’t say much during dinner, just picks at his pierogi. Lukas’s parents and I do most of the talking.
    “Where are your parents now?” says Petra.
    “Paraguay,” I tell her, “taking care of sea tortoises.”
    “I thought Paraguay was landlocked,” says Lukas.
    I lean forward confidentially.
    “Not anymore.”
    We go downstairs to jam, and Lukas goes straight to his drum kit and sits. I look at him expectantly. “Don’t you want to smoke first?”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    “Seems like you already did.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Why are you acting so weird?”
    “I’m not.”
    “You haven’t been the same ever since you found out about your sister.”
    “I’m not the same. How could I be the same?”
    He picks up his drumsticks and starts playing, and even though I try again and again to catch his eye, he won’t look up. Something about that scares me. I stand there with my fingers hovering over the keys of my synth.
    “Lukas?” I say.
    He stops drumming. “What?”
    A dozen possible things-to-say swim nervously around the edges of my brain. A few weeks ago, Lukas knew everything about me, and now there are so many things he doesn’t know, and so many things I don’t know about him. It’s scary how a friendship can change like that, so fast, so completely. It’s like walking past your old elementary school the week after graduation: The swings and slides and buildings are the same, but suddenly, incomprehensibly, the place doesn’t belong to you anymore, and you don’t belong to it.
    I want to tell him about Sukey’s rooftop, and the fact that I now have a boyfriend, and that I’ve found the perfect person for Goth Girl to date.
    I want to tell Lukas all this, but the way he’s glaring at me over his drum kit—annoyed, impatient, sick of my bullshit—I feel small and queasy and not very illuminated at all.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, and he gives me a quick, embarrassed shrug, and for the rest of the jam session we don’t make eye contact again.
    The next day, Skunk and I are exchanging lustful embraces on the floor in the radio temple, and when I shimmy out of my jeans he notices the scabs on my knees. He springs up with a look of alarm and pulls my legs onto his lap to inspect them.
    “What happened?”
    I yawn and try to pull him back down to kiss me. “Oh, nothing.”
    “No, seriously.”
    He runs his fingers over the scabbed parts, touching the bits of gravel I never managed to pick out. Some people have such warm hands. Skunk’s feel like old pillowcases fresh out of the dryer. “I fell off my bike.”
    “When?”
    “Like a week ago.”
    “What were you doing?”
    I give him a mischievous grin.