THAT EVENING, as soon as I was able to break away from my father, I grabbed my skateboard and headed down to the pool hall. The wind felt particularly good against my face as I sped along the sidewalk, my mind jumping ahead to my impending first day of work. I wondered what it would be like working with Giorgio Rivera. The mere idea gave me a flutter in my belly.

Assistant.

I wasn’t sure what the position would entail, but the title seemed personal. Would I be working closely with the man himself? And why did he want me, anyway? Surely he had better candidates than an eighteen-year-old punk skater with no job experience. Even my father had said lots of men would kill to be in my position, and from what little I knew about the nature of Rivera’s business, I was afraid the word kill might not be an exaggeration.

I couldn’t tell Theo all of that stuff, though. He was my best friend, but even best friends had limits. I would have to be careful not to confide too much, especially when I’d had a few beers too many and he flashed that irresistible smile.

When I arrived at the pool hall, I flipped my board up with the toe of my shoe, tucked it under my arm, and pushed through the door. Theo was waiting, as I knew he would be. He already spent more time at the pool hall than he did at home, and now that school was out, he’d practically be living here.

I approached his table, trying to look as cool and aloof as he did in his Sex Pistols t-shirt and beachy blond hair that fell in waves to his shoulders.

“Santorini…” he said, exaggerating my name with an extra syllable as he so loved to do. He ran a hand through his hair and grinned.

“I told you I’m not a fucking magician.” I leaned my board against the wall behind Theo’s table and headed to the bar to get a soda.

Theo caught up with me just as I was ordering. “Hold up on that soda, Miss Martha” he told the woman behind the counter, using his cool voice that made all the girls (and me) swoon. Then he turned to me as if to speak, but he froze for a few tense seconds, caught up in staring at my face. I knew what he was up to, especially when his gaze lingered a little too long on the soft area beneath my eye.

Last weekend I had shown up at the pool hall with a black eye and a busted lip. I normally laid low when I had injuries, but Theo had called and begged me to come out, so I’d swallowed my pride and pulled my baseball cap down as low as I could without bumping into things.

I’d hoped no one would notice the condition of my face, but of course Theo had. I could see it in the softening of his expression when he got a glimpse of the damage.

He had never said anything, but I knew it bothered him a lot. The way he’d kept glancing over at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention almost had me regretting my decision to go out, but the night had passed in a drunken blur, and the elephant in the room remained unacknowledged.

Tonight he thought he was being sneaky, but I knew he was checking for damage. I also knew he could see the faint yellow tinge beneath my eye where the bruise had not completely faded.

“Beer’s on me,” he said, pulling his trusty fake ID from his pocket. “And let’s forget about girls tonight. It’s just me and you and all the beer we can drink, birthday boy. Compliments of my rich aunt from Pasadena.” He waved a crisp hundred-dollar bill under my nose.

“Thanks,” I said, an intense warmth unfurling in my heart. Theo was willing to give up girls for me? I couldn’t believe my good fortune, even if it was only for one night.

Theo wasn’t attracted to me in the way I was to him, but I wasn’t above basking in the extra attention or entertaining a harmless little fantasy that it was more for him, too. It was easy without the constant parade of girls. That night he barely even looked at them, and his usual lewd comments were conspicuously absent.

“Did the asshole get you anything for your birthday this year?” he asked, using his favorite pet name for my dad.

“Nah,” I said, trying to play it off like it didn’t bother me. “I’m too old for birthday parties and presents.”

“So you didn’t get that new skate deck you wanted?”

I squinted my eyes, confused, trying to remember which deck he was talking about.

“The one with the grim reaper,” he said. “Remember we saw it at the mall?”

“Ohhh, the one I couldn’t shut up about. Jesus, that was last summer. How did you remember that?”

“I pay attention, Pete. You can’t slip anything past me.” He tapped his index finger on his temple and winked. “This mind is like a steel trap.”

“Yeah, right. Keep smoking all that weed and you’ll have a mind like Swiss cheese.”

“So you’ve said.” Theo laughed, but it was a distant kind of laugh, as if he wasn’t really in the conversation anymore. He started fidgeting with his beer bottle and glancing around the room.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You got something on your mind?”

“Hang on a sec.” He pushed out of his chair and disappeared down the hall.

When he returned, he had a skate deck tucked under his arm. A large red ribbon hung from it, slightly crushed and half unraveled. He handed it over to me with a shy smile, something I had never seen on the self-proclaimed ladies man.

My mouth went slack as I took the deck from him and studied the painted image on the back— a black-cloaked figure holding a bleeding heart in its skeleton hands. It was the same badass deck I had salivated over for months.

We had both known at the time that I would never get it, because I never got anything new, and after a while I had locked it away in my mind with all of the other fantasies that would never come true. Right along with the fantasy that Theo would ever see me as more than a friend.

“This is too much, Theo.” I ran my index finger lovingly over the image.

He leaned casually against the wall. “I told you. Rich aunt in Pasadena.”

“Why did she send you money? Did she die or something?”

“Yeah,” Theo said. “She was my mom’s sister. She had a lot of cash and no kids to leave it to, so she split it up between her nieces and nephews.”

“Does that mean you’re rich now?”

Theo laughed. “I only got five thousand dollars, but hey… I had to get my buddy a birthday present. And you know exactly how much I spent on that deck.” He shrugged. “It was nothing.”

“It’s not nothing to me.” Tears threatened to fill my eyes, but I willed them away. “Thanks, Theo. You have no idea what this means to me.”

I got up out of my seat and propped the deck against the wall behind our table. Then I threw my arms around Theo’s neck, relishing the feel of his body against mine for the first time in our long friendship.

“Whoa, whoa,” he said quietly, but he didn’t fight the hug. Instead, he brought his hands up to pat me awkwardly on the back. I could tell he was trying to keep a respectable distance, but when I squeezed harder, I could have sworn he leaned his body into mine. Just a little.

I released him and took my seat again, but I couldn’t stop smiling. I chugged my beer in an attempt to get back to where we had been before, to the easy friendship we’d always enjoyed, but a fuzzy feeling had spread through my body and made it nearly impossible to act normal.

A part of me was afraid Theo was going to notice and decide the gift had been a bad idea, but he didn’t seem to be recoiling from me. Not even when my enamored gaze kept sliding over him.

After a couple of hours, we were both buzzing from the beer, and my bladder had reached overflow status. I got up from my chair, giving away my condition with a slight stumble.

“Gotta take a piss,” I said, pushing past him and into the hallway.

The single-stall bathroom was empty and, as usual, smelled of stale pee and urinal cakes. I relieved myself, then stood in front of the mirror for a long time.

The temperature in the pool hall was always a bit too high for comfort, and dark tendrils of hair had stuck themselves to my damp forehead and the sides of my neck just above the collar of my t-shirt. I fluffed my hair a little to dry it, then smoothed it back down again. The yellowed bruise beneath my eye made it impossible to look entirely put-together.

“Fuck,” I told my reflection. “Why does he have to like girls?”

I might have talked to myself longer, but someone knocked on the bathroom door, bringing me back to my senses. I straightened my hair and unlocked the door.

Theo cornered me as I emerged from the bathroom. “Hey, what took you so long? I was about to send in a search party.”

“I was trying to dry my hair,” I said. “It’s fucking hot in this place, and I’m all sweaty.”

“Are you?” He leaned into me, a little unsteady on his feet, and pushed my hair back from my forehead. Then he dragged the pad of his thumb gently across the yellowed bruise beneath my eye. “Why don’t you stay at my house tonight? My mom’s working nights at the hospital now. She won’t be home until eight-thirty in the morning.” When I didn’t answer, he added, “I know you want to.”

His tone was unmistakably suggestive, and it was the first time he had ever given any indication that he understood how I felt about him. Was he aware of the inappropriate thoughts I had when I watched him make out with girls in the darkened corners of the pool hall?

In our four years of friendship, he had never once let on that he knew. Had never once asked me why I didn’t try to pick up girls. Now he was making comments that sounded less like acknowledgment and more like innuendo.

“Are you—” I mustered my courage and looked into his eyes. “Are you flirting with me?”

He laughed. “Of course not. I’m just saying…” He glanced back down the empty hall, making sure we were alone, then stepped in closer until the toes of his sneakers bumped mine. “I told you it was just you and me tonight, Pete. It’s your birthday. I want to do whatever makes you happy.”

“Whatever makes me happy?” I asked, feeling stupid and confused.

“Yeah. Come on, let’s go party at my place.”

I was trembling as I hefted my skateboard and new deck into the backseat of Theo’s Trans-Am and climbed inside. Thankfully, he popped in a cassette of ACDC and cranked the volume, making conversation unnecessary. I don’t think I could have formed a complete sentence.

When we stumbled into his darkened kitchen, he backed me against the refrigerator and gave me my very first kiss. He tasted of beer and cigarettes, and his lips were soft, but he didn’t kiss me the way I’d seen him kiss girls. It was hesitant, and the one time he tried to deepen the kiss, I pulled back.

Theo let out a small, uncomfortable laugh and headed to his bedroom. I followed.

There were no more kisses and no tender touches. We simply got undressed and stared awkwardly at each other for a moment. Then I noticed the posters on his walls. Cindy Crawford, Christina Applegate, and a whole slew of Playboy centerfolds. If I could have teleported, I would have been gone already.

Theo pulled a box of condoms from beneath his mattress and cleared his throat to get my attention. “So how do we do this?”

I shrugged. “Do you have some Vaseline or hand lotion or something?” I knew from my own solo explorations that some sort of lubrication was in order, but that was all the direction I had to offer.

Theo grinned and retrieved a half empty jar of Vaseline from the drawer in his night stand.

I chanced a glance at his half hard dick, then at my own shy beginnings of an erection, and all I could feel was disappointment. In my fantasies, there were kisses, fevered gropes, and gasps of pleasure. At the very least, there had been raging hard-ons. I could get hard in seconds when I imagined having sex with Theo, but now that I was standing here in front of him, my desire had taken a rain check.

“What is it?” he asked.

I sat down on the bed and hid my face in my hands. “I don’t know, Theo. I guess I imagined my first time would be different. I know you don’t—” The words stuck in my throat, because it was hard on my ego to admit the truth out loud. I closed my eyes for a long moment until the courage to speak finally surfaced. “I know you’re just doing this to be nice to me, and that just makes me feel bad. I don’t want to be a charity case.”

He sat down beside me and nudged my bare knee with his. “I thought it would be kinda cool, you know? It doesn’t gross me out or anything.”

“That’s just it.” I sighed and fell back on the bed. “I need my first time to be with someone who actually wants me. Not being grossed out isn’t enough.”

Theo flopped down beside me and sighed. “So fags want romance or something? Is that it?”

I clenched my teeth at his words and reminded myself that this was Theo, my best friend. He may not have been the most sensitive of guys, but there was no malice or judgment behind his comment.

“I have no idea what fags want,” I admitted. “But I wouldn’t mind a little romance.”

“You want me to light some candles?”

“No, not candles, Theo.”

He reached out and ran a finger down my arm. “You want me to tell you I love you or something?”

“Fuck no,” I said a little too forcefully. “Jesus Christ, Theo, I don’t want you to lie to me. I just want some passion.”

Theo just sat still on the edge of the bed staring off into space, looking as lost as I felt. When I couldn’t take the silence anymore, I stood up and started pulling my clothes back on.

“Will you take me home?” I asked.

Theo snapped out of his daze. “Yeah, sure. Just let me get dressed.”

The ride home was excruciating. Theo didn’t turn any music on this time, and the silence was the thickest I’d ever felt. When he pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building, I had the door open before the car had even come to a complete stop.

I leaned over the seat and grabbed my skateboard, but I hesitated before grabbing the grim reaper deck. “You can take it back to the store and get a refund if you want. I know I don’t deserve it now.”

Theo actually glared at me. “What the fuck are you saying? You don’t want it?”

“No. I want it bad, Theo. But I just feel weird taking it now that you’re mad at me.”

Theo’s expression softened. “I’m not mad at you, Pete. I just feel—” He lit a cigarette with shaky fingers, then blew out a stream of smoke as his eyes locked onto mine. “I want you to have it, okay? It’s the only thing I really wanted to buy with that money. I’ll just end up blowing the rest.”

I nodded and retrieved the deck. “Thank you, Theo. It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten. You know that, right?”

“Whatever. Just enjoy it.” He gave a dismissive wave and took another drag from his cigarette. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Oh, wait. I forgot to tell you I got a job. I start tomorrow.”

“A job? Where?”

“The hotel where my father works.”

“That’s cool,” Theo said. “What are you, a bell boy or something?”

“No, nothing like that. The guy who owns the hotel hired me to be his assistant.”

“Assistant to the boss?” Theo asked, clearly shocked. “How did you rate a sweet job like that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. My dad took me over there today, and he hired me to be his assistant.”

“Did you have to fill out an application and do an interview and all that shit? Maybe I should apply.”

I frowned, realizing for the first time that I hadn’t had to do anything at all to get the job.

“Actually, we barely spoke. He gave me a glass of lemonade, and then he told me to report for work tomorrow morning.”

Theo stared at me with a confused expression. “No shit?”

“Yeah. No shit.”

Theo shook his head. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Pete. I’m serious about getting me a job. But tell your boss I’d rather have beer than lemonade for my interview.”

I laughed. “Will do.”

I slammed the door and headed up to our second-floor apartment, praying that my father would be passed out already. I was too hollowed out from my experience with Theo to deal with a belligerent drunk.

All I could think about was how awkward things had just become between me and my best friend. I hadn’t realized how dependent I had become on my innocent fantasies of him until they were gone.

Before, there had been the thrill of secret attraction and the fragile hope that something would grow between us. Now there was nothing but disillusionment and the sense that I was completely and utterly alone.