"But now am found"

Toby found her first.

Jess forgets that, later. He learns the way her head fits in the crook of his neck and everything she was before doesn't matter. But without Toby, she wouldn't even be around. Jess would never get to memorize the pattern of lines on her palm, or hear the little sigh she makes when she thinks no one's listening.

So Toby can't help feeling cheated, but he can't think of a way to remind Jess without sounding jealous, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Keira is his sister's friend. Not her best friend, but she was at his house all the time last summer, mouth stained red with popsicles out of the freezer. Once he left the room, with them still standing barefoot and giggling on the kitchen floor, he wondered what they were talking about. Boys, probably, though not about him in a way other than "who's your weird brother?"

He could imagine his sister's face, eyes rolled skyward and cheeks flushed as she laughed. It was Keira he had trouble picturing. What was she saying in that hushed, bright voice, making Iris laugh so hard that she had to gasp for air? He knew what she looked like - he could see her when he blinked, her outline in white against a dark curtain, a silhouette or a film negative. Red hair loose over bare shoulders, a thin dress stitched with flowers, rings on her fingers, and beads around her ankles. But though he's tried, all he can picture in her mind or her dress is mist.

Most of his sister's friends are skinny and fake-tanned. They wear glitter on their nails and shirts that dip low at the neck. They chew gum and their laughs are shrill. Instead of looking sexy they remind him of ten-year-olds when they try to dress up. Keira, from the start, looks older than his sister; sometimes even older than Toby. She follows his sister through the sliding-glass door and she's not making a sound. She looks straight at him, not sideways or shy, but like she knows what he's thinking and has heard it before.

At times he woke up to the sound of water on his window. Once it was Keira, with a garden hose. Toby pulled back the blinds and saw her through the glossy spill of water, all her colors bleeding at the edges. He thought she was smiling, but it was hard to say. Her mouth was a red smear behind the droplets.

Other days it was the sprinkler, shushing on the glass before arching away. Every time it hit, he woke up a little more. He heard the trill of his sister's voice, always asking questions. Then the low swell of Keira's answers, back and forth like it were a song.

He'd make up some excuse to go outside and talk to Iris, then stay lounging in a chair on the lawn. With his eyes closed he could still feel the sun on his eyelids, the darkness turned a faint orange. Once in a while he'd lift his face from the towel and look at Keira. As his sister leapt back and forth over the sprinkler - chasing it, shrieking when it caught her - Keira stayed still. She kept a hand low on her hip, elbow crooked, the line of her legs smooth and imperious. She let the water rain on her, but would not move for it.

One day she turned and caught him looking. She smiled, teeth showing, but her sunglasses covered half her face and it made him uneasy. She looked almost like a wolf without the glint of her eyes to soften her smile. As she strode toward him, the ties of her bathing suit swayed at her chest. He swallowed hard and felt his stomach twist: he wasn't ready for this.

Keira leaned down and ran the palm of her hand across his face. He tried to watch the chipped polish on her fingernails and not the bead of water, or sweat, that rolled down the line of her neck. She smelled like sunscreen. He gave up and closed his eyes.

"You have a print on your cheek," she said.

She looked at the terry cloth pattern and when her hand left his skin, the place where she'd touched him felt branded.

A week before school started, he and Jess went with them to the swimming pool. She hadn't caught Jess's eye yet, or Toby likes to think so. Certainly she wasn't looking at Jess. (Toby should know, he didn't take his eyes off of her.) They went down the sidewalk in pairs - Jess and Iris running far ahead, he and Keira straggling behind.

His sister had a crush on Jess once, when they'd first got to school and she was two years behind them. She was a little kid then, as Jess told him - "Cute, but sort of strange." By that night she'd moved past it, though a small vicious part of Toby hoped the tables would turn. It filled him with guilty pleasure to imagine Jess stumbling around after Iris - "Cute enough," she'd say, "but a little bland."

Of course, things didn't go this way. At the time he could write the small-minded wish off to a sense of cosmic justice, his sister finally winning out. But that's a lie. He wanted to see Jess after failing, just once: in nine years, it's never so much as flickered across his face.

Above the angled roofs, the sky was washed with a darker blue. Daylight still clung to the distant, smudged outline of trees. Keira's hair was loose down her back, rough from days of salt water and heat. Toby walked close enough for it to brush his shoulder, curls swaying soft like waves lapping the shore. He listened to the pop of her sandals on the pavement, leaving wet footprints, and imagined her name like a murmur on the back of his heartbeat.

"Do you hear that?" she'd said. "The crickets. They make that sound with their wings. They're calling each other." She let her fingers brush his, but when he tried to take hold, Keira moved away. It didn't feel like a rebuke, though maybe it was one: he was too dizzy to tell.

When they got to the pool he sat on the edge, dangling his feet in. He was afraid to try and swim - he'd float, he thought; he was so light that he'd resurface in moments. When no one else was looking Keira slid up to him, still dripping, slick with chlorine. She laughed at their legs, how pale and strange they looked in the underwater lights. She brought her mouth to his jaw, his shoulder, his lips, but he can hardly call them kisses. There was no pressure or passion. They were the ghosts of such embraces, the touch of moths or spider webs.

She slid back into the water and away from him. Her hair floated in loose auburn coils, evanescent. He half-expected her to emerge with a mermaid's tail, but really she resembled a jellyfish - hair like tentacles, swelling and receding while she glided away.

Keira spent the night in his sister's room, but at dawn he woke to the warm curve of her body tucked under the comforter next to him. He breathed the powder smell of her neck as she said, "I'm cold." Soon he felt the rise and fall of her breathing while she slept, her feet crossed with his own. He couldn't go back to sleep.

It was the last time she came to his house. The weather grew even crisper and he thought of her, not with longing but doubt. She barely felt real. She was summer foam as it washed away, leaves starting to die, a fever dream.

School starts in the fall. Toby and Jess are seniors and it surprises Toby to learn that Keira is a sophomore like his sister. How could she have gone a year without catching his eye?

Every time he see her it's like she's shining, a fuzzed-out aura of light around her hair in the sun. She smiles at him when he walks by, and he can't understand why everyone isn't staring. He thinks about the vicious little line of her smile and chills run up his back. It's starting to get cold, but that's not why he's trembling.

It's two weeks into the year when Jess comes into English class and sits next to him, perched on the edge of a desk. Most of the time Jess smiles with his mouth closed, tilting his head down likes it's something secret. But right now he's grinning, teeth glinting like a lit match, cheekbones sharp under stretched skin. "Guess what?" he asks.

Toby leans back in his chair, as far as he can without letting go of the desk. He likes that feeling, knowing he's on the edge of falling but can still pull himself back to safety, that wavering moment, that contest with gravity. "What happened?"

"Your sister's friend - you know, the redhead? Yesterday, I saw her walking and I stopped to give her a ride," Jess's face is shining, broken out of the smooth mask he always keeps it in. It's like a glacier melting. "I don't know how, but I'd never noticed how pretty she was. Anyway, I have a date with her on Friday."

Keira's face isn't the first thing that comes to mind. He's got a roulette wheel spinning through it instead, the vague shapes of every girl Iris has brought over or gone into town with. Pretty redhead, pretty redhead, he thinks, and when it hits him, he laughs so hard his stomach hurts.

"What the hell," Jess says, mock-punching Toby in the shoulder, "she's not a bad catch, is she?"

"No," says Toby, "that's not why I laughed. I just - she's sort of young, isn't she?"

Jess shrugs. "She's not a little kid."

Later, Toby realizes that he never imagined telling Jess about what happened that summer. The memories are his. He doesn't want anyone else to have some reconstructed version of it in their heads, as if telling the story will drain all the life out of the real thing.

"Good luck then, man," Toby says and claps Jess on the back. He tries to mean it.

"Wait - what's her name again?" Jess looks sheepish, drawing his shoulders up and pressing his lips into a thin line.

The lie is out of Toby's mouth before he realizes it: "Kara, I think." He feels bad when Jess smiles again, when an anxious flush of pink rises in his cheeks, but he can't ignore the stab of pleasure in his chest, either.

Why didn't he realize it right way, that Jess was talking about Keira? He know why. She was never really his, but it's still too strange to imagine her belonging to someone else.

When he walks past her, he looks down, thinking she won't be smiling at him anymore. He wonders if she looks at Jess the same way she looked at him. Maybe there's something wrong with my eyes, Toby realizes - maybe she's not shining, after all.

Instead of ignoring him, Keira lifts her chin toward him and says. "So I hear you've forgotten my name." She looks angry for a moment, but soon her face breaks into a coy smile: Toby's not sure if he's ever felt so relieved. "Kara? Really? Close but no cigar."

"Of course I know your name," he laughs. He can't help leaning in close to her, hoping to catch the scent of her hair that he can't quite remember. She sounds like she's flirting, but she and Jess have been together for a month. Toby's managed to avoid hanging around them. He hasn't had a real conversation with Jess in forever.

"Jess called me Kara for a few days before I had the heart to correct him," says Keira. She sits in the grass and leans her back against a tree, closing her eyes and tilting her head skyward. When he sits next to her, he feels like he's breaking some unspoken rule; he's careful to leave space between them. "That's what you told him my name was."

"He must've heard it wrong. I said "Keira". I wouldn't forget that," says Toby. He feels the grass bending next to his hand, then the pressure of her small fingers between his. It's broad daylight, the middle of lunch, people everywhere. He hasn't been this way in a while - not happy, exactly, but calm, like everything's in the right place.

"Won't Jess get mad?" He asks. He regrets it as soon as her eyes flash dark and narrow; it's as if she'd slapped him. She pulls her hand away and his palm feels cold.

"I'm not going to let him decide what I'm allowed to do." she says. "He likes me more than I like him. It's mean, but it's the truth."

"I know," he says, though he hadn't. "I know, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

She stands up, brushing grass from her jeans. "It's fine. It's not your fault. It's my problem."

With those words he feels freed, cleaned of all the mistakes he's made. Keira leans to kiss him on the cheek and walks away without saying goodbye.

Toby drives Jess home from school that day- his car is in the shop and they live too far to walk. Jess sits in the passenger seat and rattles on about taking Keira to the carnival. Toby hopes Jess won't notice how tight his hands are on the wheel, the knuckles gone white. He runs a red light just to make him shut up.

"So I - oh, shit! Man, pay attention, are you trying to get hit?" Jess is shaken, he can tell - his skin is waxy pale and his hand shakes where he leans it against the window. But he's still smiling. He's still glowing. Toby feels disappointed, then sick with himself. How far would he go to mess things up beyond repair? He realizes that he wouldn't mind if Keira didn't come back to him. He just can't stand her being so close, all the time, and not being allowed to touch her.

The days are getting shorter: the sun is already growing dim at the horizon, the sky is still tinged pale yellow; above their heads it's gray, almost colorless. Toby glances over at Jess. The profile of his face is smudged with light, indistinct, and the half Toby can see is cast into shadow. Below his ear is the tiny white scar that Toby gave him four years ago, a cut from Toby's cheap watch during a match of football. They'd kept playing, though Jess was dripping blood. Jess won, three to zero. Toby's not sure if he can really see the scar or if he's just memorized where it is.

"What?" Jess asks. He hasn't turned his head. Before Toby can answer, he says - "Look, tell me straight, okay? Do I talk about Keira too much?"

Toby pulls up to the curb in front of Jess's house. It's small and white, but it seemed bigger when he was a kid, spending half his nights on Jess's bedroom floor. Jess used to say he was afraid of the dark, though Toby thought his mother was the scary thing; Jess would hear his mother crying in the kitchen and crawl into Toby's sleeping bag. It took a long time to get to sleep with Jess breathing on his neck.

"Yeah," Toby answers, "she's all you've talked about for a month." He tries to leave it at that, to ignore the way Jess's face crumbles, but he can't. "But hey, I don't blame you - she's amazing."

Jess smiles again, but it looks thin, pasted on. Toby feels like he's being studied. "Well," says Jess, "thanks for the ride." Toby nods, but Jess has already scrambled out and shut the door. The fallen leaves are yellow under his feet, wet with afternoon rain.

Toby has known Jess for - he does the math in his head - nine years longer than Keira. He's never counted the time before, and though it's hard to remember when Jess wasn't around, it's still strange to realize how long they've been friends. What are the odds that a fight or a move or the simple drift of time didn't separate them? What are the odds that Jess is right here on this street at dusk and not some dusty relic of elementary school, the odds they'd ever met in the first place?

But he's willing to risk all that for some redhead with pretty eyes and a hungry smile. He laughs, then realizes how sad laughter sounds when there's no one to join in.

He and Jess are friends because their third-grade teacher sat them together. Jess had moved from Denver and hated this state and everything in it.

"It's so flat." he's said, scowling. "Everyone talks fast. And most of the kids in this school are either stupid or ugly." Jess had paused, aware for the first time that he might be offending the kid he had to spend all year sitting with. "But you're not so bad, I guess. You can read and all, plus your face is alright, except your nose is a bit crooked."

"Oh," Toby had said, flattered, "Thank you."

It's hard to say if they were really friends that year. Toby's mother found out from the women she worked with about Jess's "Home Life" (that's the way they'd say it, like it had capitals and quotation marks.) Toby can guess what these sordid issues were, like the Absences of a Father Figure and his mother being A Bit of a Drunk. After that Toby's mom was always inviting Jess over. Toby would come home to find Jess sitting on the living-room couch, furious, having been coerced into a play date.

They spent so much time pretending to be friends that, when Toby's mother backed off, they kept going to each other's houses. His mom still looked a little nervous about letting him go to Jess's, but she'd calmed down by then: none of her goodwill projects lasted for long, not even the people. And Jess's mother spent most of her time in her bedroom when they were around, rolling cars across the dining room table or digging holes in the backyard.

Sometime in junior high they fell in with the future footballer crowd. Toby's family had a big house on the nice end of town and by the time he got to high school he was driving a Camaro; Jess's looks made up for the stuff he didn't have. Toby went in for tennis rather than football, and his handful of girlfriends were more grudge and eyeliner than polo shirts and blonde hair.

But people knew who they were and that they tended to come in a pair. So when people see Toby alone, they ask where Jess is. Rather than admit that he knows exactly where Jess is (the pizza parlor downtown, with Keira, sharing a coke with no ice since she hates ice) he lies, every time. "I don't know," he shrugs, like he can send it all sliding off his shoulders that easily.

It's not as if he's worked to get her. It just happened. But now that he's got it, it's terrifying to imagine letting go. He feels like his whole life is a chair leaning backward, and he's one false move from falling. The odds are already against him: it's a million to one that he's even here. Why take any more chances?

He sits in his parked car, thinks all of this, and knows that if Keira came to him tomorrow, he'd say yes. Jesus. He leans against the steering wheel and tries to laugh, but no sound comes out.

Toby starts to paw through his memories, as if they were a film, accurate enough to hold some vital hint or clue. (A clue to what? He's not even sure what the mystery is.) He thinks of Iris laughing that morning, Keira's watery smile through his window, Jess's grin in English class.

Was she already thinking about him, that night at the pool when he'd been so dizzy he couldn't imagine her eyes on anyone else? Has she told Jess that story, laughing, reducing it to some silly fling or, even worse, a mistake? And that afternoon under the tree. The warmth of her hand: how lightly she took it, Jess's puppy-eyed, stumbling devotion. Whirling up whole histories in the palm of her hand, crushing them just as easily.

A few days later, she's at his house. "Iris isn't here," Toby says when he answers the door. She laughs, but there's no mercy in it, just a razor-edged humor that leaves him cut open. "Are you okay? Did something happen with Jess?"

"No," Keira answers. "That's the problem."

She stares at him for a second. "It's the way you look at me." she says, "Did you know that? Jess looks at me like he loves me, and other boys have looked at me like they want me. Some girls look like they hate me and some like they're scared and most people, plenty of people, don't look at me at all." Keira looks at Toby and shakes her head. "But you don't look like anything. I have no idea what you're thinking. That's why I like you. It's nice," she says. "It really is."

Keira puts her arms around his neck and watches his face for a long time. He expects her to kiss him, closes his eyes, but she says, "No. Keep your eyes open."

On Tuesday he goes to Jess's house. They have a physics test that Toby has studied for and Jess hasn't. They sit at the table that they used to race cars on, little wind-up boxes that zipped off the end and onto the floor. If they landed face-up, some of them kept going.

Over a sea of papers, Jess says, "So Keira told me you used to have a thing for her."

The betrayal feels like a cold wave breaking over his back, a chill of fear rippling through his skin, but he can already tell what kind of game this is going to be. Toby hears the tight control in Jess's voice, and thinks of all the arguments they've had. Never a single scream or shouted insult. The moment they can't talk normally anymore, they get up and leave and don't speak until they've gotten over it.

Toby used to think it made sense. Now he wonders how many old wounds are still there, waiting to be reopened.

"Yeah," says Toby, "Yeah, we kinda did. Made out a few times. But it wasn't a big deal."

"Weird," Jess says, "She never mentioned any of that. Neither did you, come to think of it."

"I didn't want things to be awkward," he says. "I mean, Keira and I are still friends, and I didn't want you to think anything."

"Anything what? That you were fooling around with my girlfriend behind my back?" Jess slams the book in front of him shut. "Because you know, I hear that's what's happening."

"From who?"

"From her!" Jess slams a fist into the table and shoves his chair back as he stands. "She fucking told me! I told her I was in love with her and she goes, "Oh, you shouldn't be." And I was joking when I asked her if she was in love with you or something, and she said yes!" He starts pacing across the kitchen floor. Toby can hear grit crunching beneath his feet, dirt and sugar and salt.

"She's not in love with me," he says.

"No shit. She can't be in love with anyone. She's probably fucking half the school."

"Christ, we aren't doing anything-"

"I saw you holding hands in the middle of lunch! Did you really think nobody'd see?"

"But that was it! One other time she came to my house and fed me some bullshit about liking my eyes and I thought she'd kiss me, but she didn't."

"You would have kissed back, though. If she had."

"What do you expect?"

"Nothing better, from you! You act like you're happy for me and you lie about her name and you never tell me she used to like you?"

"It's not "used to"," Toby says.

"What are you-"

"She still does. She told me she liked the way I looked at her, more than the way you do and when she held my hand, I asked her if you'd be upset. She told me you like her more than she likes you."

Jess stops moving. "You win, then. She's yours just like everything else. That stupid slut is yours."

"What are - I don't have everything, you -"

"The big house and the nice car and the married rich parents and my girlfriend? What else do you want?" Jess kicks a cabinet shut, curls his hands into fists. "You've beat me in everything for my entire life. Every goddamn time you spent the night here, I was scared you were gonna run home and tell your parents about how fucked up my mom is and this little shit hole of a house. You've always been perfect. You were better at everything and smarter and the girls always liked you more, but one time, this one time, I get a girl who I think 'this is it, she's it!' and you took her from me."

"Yeah fucking right," Toby laughs, and the sound is so malicious that he scares himself - chills go up his spine, radiate to each end of his body. He should stop, he knows, he should get up and leave. He should be kicking himself for letting Keira get under his skin. He'd thought it sounded romantic in a sick way, like she was malaria, spinning up fever dreams, putting him in a haze. Now she seems more like a parasite: one that's hard to get rid of.

In the midst of all the things he should be doing, he says the one thing he can't take back: "Took her from you? What makes you think she was yours? You said it yourself, she's a slut. She never even liked you."

Something moves in the hallway. Toby thinks it's Jess's mother, maybe one of her boyfriends making a quick exit, but he realizes it's his reflection in the hall mirror. He's standing rigid in the middle of the kitchen, cheeks flushed red, his eyes dark as old bruises.

For a moment, he doesn't recognize himself. Not one of those bullshit revelations like you'd see in a movie, some guy stupid enough to need a mirror to realize how much he's changed. Instead, he's just taken aback, how long it took him to realize he was staring at himself. It's so startling that he grins and then he feels Jess stride forward and take hold of his shirt, pulling the fabric tight in his fists.

"You think it's funny?" Jess's face, taut with anger, is close enough that Toby can see his pupils, blown so large they look like ink spills. In the hallway is the washing machine he once made Jess sit on top of for an hour, counting every gold fleck in his eyes and making tally marks on a sheet of paper. When Jess did the same to him he'd expected Jess to win the contest, like he always did; Jess had more of everything.

But for once they were equal: seven each.

Toby's heart is beating double, sweat beading at the small of his back. He wants some kind of magic word to get out of this, something to erase every wrong move, forgiving his mistakes as easily as Keira had, that small kiss on his cheek. Jess saw that, he realizes. He can't think straight.

"Fuck you." Jess whispers. His voice is lethal, pulled tight and sharp-edged.

"I'm sorry." Toby gasps, "I-" Jess slams his back into the wall and the wind goes out of him. His head pulses; he feels like he's about to crumble to the floor.

"Fuck you!" Jess pulls back a fist, like he's about to swing. Thank God, Toby thinks, please, anything, just-

Jess lets go of him. He slides down the wall and watches from half-shut eyes while Jess punches the wall instead. His fist goes straight through the flimsy plaster, tearing a ragged hole next to the refrigerator. White flecks, paint and plaster, rain into Toby's hair. A white streak of dust lines Jess's arm and clings to the fine blonde hairs.

He looks down at Toby, wincing at his bleeding knuckles. Toby can't understand the look on his face. He's laughing, shaking his head like he can't believe it. "The one thing," he says, "the one thing I really wanted. All the other bullshit wasn't your fault, but the one thing I tried hard to keep, you fucked it up." Jess walks out, his shoulders still shaking with laughter. Toby realizes that, from here, the movement is identical to someone who's crying.

When the front door slams shut, he's left slumped over on the kitchen floor of a house that isn't even his own. Jess's mother peers out at him from her bedroom, bites her lip, and disappears again. It occurs to Toby that he doesn't know if Jess was talking about him or Keira.

It would be so much easier if he could call Keira a whore and be done with her. If he could see the way Jess can't meet his eye and convince himself that Jess is lost without him. If he could hold the small life he has left in his cupped palms and say, I'm happier without them.

But he still smiles when Keira walks past, still answers when she waves hello. Sometimes he turns in his seat to ask Jess a question or starts to dial his number before he remembers. He looks at what he has left and feels, for some ridiculous reason, surprised.

Keira calls him, early on a Sunday. When she says hello, he's still so tired that he doesn't know how to answer.

"Look," she says, "I'm sorry, okay? And don't say it's your fault-" He's taken aback; this is exactly what he was about to do. "because none of it would have happened without me." There's a silence. He tries to think bad things about her and remembers, instead, the constellation of of freckles on her shoulder, the way her mouth twisted when she was trying not to laugh. The little sigh she makes when she thinks no one is listening.

"Would you be okay," she says finally, "if we didn't see each other anymore?"

He says "yes" automatically. After he hangs up, he's surprised to find it's the truth.

A few hours later, he drives to Jess's house. When Jess opens the door, Toby expects him to slam it in his face. Instead he looks disappointed. "Oh," he says, "Shit, I thought you were her."

"Did you want it to be her?"

Jess's eyes flash dark and narrow. Toby realizes he can't expect answers to those questions anymore.

"Look, I - did you believe me? When I told you I was sorry?" Toby can't look at his face, so he glances down at Jess's hand, where the cut has healed into a pale pink line. Another scar, Toby thinks. Another one I know the story of. He gets the strange feeling that Keira is standing between them, that she's there on the porch, hand on her hip, vicious smile in place. Toby found her first, but that doesn't matter. Neither of them could keep hold of her for long.

Jess studies him, tenses his jaw like he did nine years ago, when he was the grubby kid on Toby's couch. Sizing him up like no one else has been able to do. "Maybe," he says. "But either way, you're still here, aren't you?"

And he steps aside to let Toby in the door.