how could i leave josh behind?

I think about it a lot, how it all happened, how we came to be here. It's not like I have anything else to do in the dull ebb of this place. Even the days here feel like a technicality, as if they don't actually mark time. As if they have no function, except to help keep up the illusion that this is a real town, and that we still count as real people now that we live inside it.

I don't know why I'm so preoccupied with going over my memories, getting them exactly right. My story won't save anyone else. No one else will ever know it. Or if they do, that will mean it's too late for them too.

Because I have to assume that this is it for me, for life. More of the same nowhere, with everything that makes it seem like somewhere just an empty gesture. A fraud. Because even if I could find a way out, how could I leave Josh behind? He'd never agree to escape with me.

After all, he's the one who chose this world for us.

we'd never seen them before

It was blue, the night, though dusk should have been over and done with, and we were already at least half-drunk. I should have pried the flask away from Josh half an hour before. He was barely sixteen and not much for pacing himself, at anything. But we'd been talking — about the future, which usually seemed too sickening to contemplate, since I was eight days from the age where foster care implodes with a pop — and though Mitch and Emma were actually kinder than otherwise, and wouldn't want to spew me out on the street, they were reminding me on a frequent basis that I should explore my options, make arrangements, think about my next steps. The whole thought of where and what next felt like a giant blowing-apart, unthinkably steep and wide and high all at the same time. I was suffering from a kind of omnidirectional vertigo that must be what the helium feels inside a balloon as somebody leans in with a lit cigarette.

So we kept wandering, and the night colored blue all over us like it wanted to steal our shapes and paint us into being part of it forever. It was almost comforting, and better than being at home, where no one was waiting for us. Mitch and Emma were on vacation and they'd told me to take good care of my foster brother — which I thought I was, in my way — and to not trash the house, which they said half-kidding, almost trusting me. And even almost-trust shows how lucky we were to have them, and for six unbroken years at that, after the various dicey pseudo-homes Josh and I'd both cycled through before we found each other. I'd make sure that Mitch and Emma found their house pristine, cleaner than they'd ever seen it before. If we drank or smoked, we'd keep it outside in the dark, and there would be no spilled scotch on the sofa or burns scored into the carpet.

I couldn't imagine what next, though I knew what Mitch and Emma had in mind: a group home for ex–foster kids, clear across the state. A lousy job and community college classes at night. They wanted me to have a decent life, as long as it was far away from Josh. There were programs for kids like me; the state would help with my tuition.

And I said yes, yes, but privately I kept hoping I could come up with something else. A different what-next, one good enough that I could bring Josh with me without destroying him. That was the goal: to hold on to my unexpected brother, the one who'd lurched into my heart out of nowhere when I was already twelve, without that being a cruel and stupid and careless thing to do.

But I couldn't see how to pull that off on minimum wage, and I didn't have a realistic prospect of earning more than that. Should I run off to the city and try desperately to make it as something-or-other? I wasn't deluded enough to think that would work. So Josh and I didn't like to say it, not directly, but we both knew we'd have to separate.

Mitch and Emma had said, to our faces, that our relationship had an unhealthy intensity. That it was compensatory, a punch in the teeth to all we'd lost. And they loved Josh, had even started the process of adopting him. Legally, he was too young to leave the system. If they knew we were hoping to live together as soon as we could figure out some way to do it, they'd do anything to stop us. Maybe even forbid me from visiting. Josh wouldn't turn eighteen for two whole years. Neither of us was willing to face that long without the other.

That's why, even drunk, Josh was getting restless. Twitchy with a conversation that kept reminding us of all the ways we could blast apart. If you let yourself feel how empty the sky is, you know you're always falling into an enormous hole. An oubliette, I think is the right word: a place for things meant to be forgotten. Even starlight forgets the brutal fusion it came from by the time it reaches the Earth, because the sky is just that fathomless.

"Kezzer," Josh said, with an odd waver in his step, "let's go see if there's anybody at the gorge."

It was edging toward midnight and our flask was almost empty. I said okay.

We swung by Carly's Pizza first — it was the worst pizza in town, with strange gummy cheese, but it was also close by and open — and bought slices.

"You and your sister partying hard tonight?" the college boy at the counter asked me. Sandy-haired and smug and too dumb to deserve the education he was getting, or at least that's what I assumed — though at the same time I knew it was my own vile mood talking, and he might not deserve my contempt at all. Even so, I wasn't about to reply with more than a snort.

But Josh grinned, even though the joke was getting old — that strangers can never look at us without saying you and your sister to me, or you and your brother to Josh. Josh's glitter eyeliner and long hair layered in three colors are enough to make him a girl to them, or my bowler hat and straight body are enough to make me a boy. Either way, it seems people take us for necessarily two of the same, and most often we play along.

At least they always understand at a glance that we're family and not just friends, even though we don't look alike so much. That, I appreciate.

"Raging," Josh said, and draped his torso sideways over a stool with such a blast of sex appeal that the boy gawked. He looked to me like the type who'd be horrified if he realized he was ogling another guy. "What time are you off, anyway?"

Not that we'd ever show, but the counter boy started scribbling down an address on the edge of a paper plate, trying to sell us on meeting him at a party in an hour. We got free sodas out of it and Josh doubled up laughing as soon as we were through the door.

It was Friday night, it was lush buzzing June, and only a week into summer break. I'd just graduated, along with the rest of the senior class. The gorge's rim should have been thick with kids we knew. I'd been expecting that our friends Lexi and Xand would be there, at least, though maybe Lexi was out of town and I'd forgotten, and Xand wouldn't come looking for us without her.

But there was no candlelight staggered by the tree trunks, no visible slices of sequins or denim. It was silent apart from the rattle of the bugs, and it was blue and banded violet where the gorge opened into midnight, and our faces went a blending-in blue again as we walked along chewing our pizza. Josh stopped and nuzzled his cheek, kittenish, into my shoulder,...