Everybody said it was my mother threw acid on my face because I was born freak ugly from the start. But it was never her. It was one of her junkie boyfriends she had back then. The one called himself Uncle Danny. I was already six and not a baby anymore. And it wasn’t acid. It was cooking oil. The scars are from wet burns, not chemicals. Everybody just talks a lot of shit because everybody’s got nothing else to say. It’s just what they do. They only know whatever they know and it’s always less than they think. They talk a lot of shit about me and Maisie, but it’s never what they say.

Never.

I fell in love with Maisie Jones the first time I saw her lying on the floor in Eddie Waller’s garage, naked, legs splayed open like a broken pair of angel wings and her pussy glistening from the first three boys in line. I learned a long time before this it was better not to lay out any hope on girls who were pretty. I knew Uncle Danny cut me out of that world the first time a girl looked at my face like a car crash her mother was in. But Maisie … even if I didn’t know what it was, I knew she was made out of something else.

Early on I took to wearing baseball hats. They didn’t cover all that much of my ugliness, but they made it so I didn’t have to look people in the eye and vice versa. It’s probably better people don’t look each other in the eye so much anyway. You can see too much of what somebody’s thinking, and I’ve never seen much good come of that.

It might’ve been well enough to go around with just the burn, but by the time I was sixteen I was six-four and counting. With a body like a dump truck and a face like week-old roadkill you don’t belong in a world of pretty business. So I stayed away from school as much as I could get away with. I started going to the library. You could read more books there anyway, and you could read what you please. Nobody was trying to sell you ideas about what you’re supposed to be interested in or good at. It was a better education than school.

If I wasn’t in the library I’d walk around town at night or go off in the woods during the day. Sometimes there’d be animals and certainly plenty of birds. None of them cared about me one way or another. One day I found a fox suffering in a trap with a bloody foot. It was breathing fast and looked panicked when I came up on it. We studied each other a while and I knew it was too afraid of me to want me touching it. It was beautiful and pitiable. I didn’t know enough about animals to know if the foot would ever heal, but it was the first time I ever saw anything like myself in any other creature.

The only other foxes I ever saw were free and far away, keeping to their own. I had a feeling she’d try to defend herself if I tried to help her free. She was just a little thing in my estimation. And every time my eyes lay down on that clutch of metal jaw around it’s leg I felt an inexplicable rage fire through my blood.

I took a bottle of water out of my backpack and knelt down. Poured some on the trapped foot, then on the animal’s mouth. She lapped out with her tongue, scooping in as much as she could. After that I lay my hand over her neck and felt her wild breathing. Her throat vibrated with a low growl but I just kept my hand there, steady, not hard enough to hurt her, only enough to let her know I had the strength to break her neck should such a thing become necessary.

I didn’t know what I was doing. Neither did the fox.

The trap wasn’t all that hard to pull open. I got it off the animal’s foot and let it snap shut again. Then I poured more water on the bad foot and put the mouth of the bottle closer to her mouth and let her drink it all.

After that I backed away and sat against a tree. The fox lay a while longer but finally got up and tested all four of her legs. She didn’t put weight on the bad one but it seemed like she’d probably be okay. She limped away and never looked at me.

I got up and pulled up the spike and chain with the trap. I started whipping it against a tree. I whipped it harder every time, until I imagined the tree was Uncle Danny and the shitty little trap started to break up. It took a minute or two to get my breath back, and then I hung the chain on a tree branch with the broken pieces hanging down.

Pulling the knife out of my belt sheath, I carved a message on the side of the tree for whenever the trapper came to check. Never. Come. Back.

Who knows if it made any difference, but I never found another trapped animal in those woods after that.

Not so long after I turned sixteen I started drawing pictures. It happened because of June, the blonde lady who worked at the library.

It was a small library, but it didn’t seem that way back then. It felt like there were enough books with enough stories and ideas in them to keep a two hundred fifty pound shadow like me occupied forever. That’s how I found out another thing I don’t think they cared if I learned it in school. There was another pair of eyes in my brain that could see a thousand possible worlds other than the one I lived in.

June never bothered me. She even smiled a few times and did a passable job of not staring at my face. I never trusted she meant it because no one else who ever smiled at me meant it either so why should she? But one day when it was quiet she came over to the table where I was reading this book about a guy who murders an old lady and ends up getting caught after he falls in love with a religious whore.

“That’s one of my favorites,” she said.

She made me think of that fox that time in the woods, being a slender animal too easy to break. I was trying to keep from looking at her face.

“Yeah. It’s good.” I looked down and waited for her to go.

“You think he should’ve killed that old lady?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“No?”

I shook it again. I could feel her eyes on the melted half of my face and my neck felt hot.

“You don’t think she had it coming?” the librarian pressed.

“Yeah, maybe. Just wasn’t his choice to make.” I looked at her without thinking about it. The smile was up in her eyes so I decided to trust it. By then I’d read a hundred or so books, but I never talked to anyone about anything I read. It almost seemed like it rearranged the book in my mind. “He’s kind of a weakling, I think. Fuckin’ drama queen, if you ask me.”

I had to pause and apologize for the cuss but June looked more interested in what I thought about that book.

“So you think he’s overreacting to his experience?”

I frowned. “I dunno. I just know he doesn’t have the constitution to be a criminal. He screws up left and right, and the girl…all that religious stuff of hers isn’t gonna help either one of ‘em. People like that…they won’t last another seven years.”

“You don’t think she’ll be there for him?” she asked.

“Would you?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

I spent a lot time looking at June’s face after that. She was the only person I knew who looked back without flinching. I felt her looking at my eyes more than my face. After a while, I decided she was pretty even if her prettiness was mostly hidden behind the awkward way she carried herself. But she talked to me like she never thought there was anything wrong with my brain, and that made her seem prettier in a way I could never explain.

We sat and talked about a lot of the books I went there to read. I started to sit on the other corner of the table so she had to sit on my good side. It seemed like the least I could do. We talked about that book where a guy is sitting in a slaughterhouse basement while airplanes bomb the city where he’s being held prisoner. For a while I was just reading ancient stories. I think those were my favorites. The complications were easier to recognize in my real life, whatever that was.

One day I was reading about the guy who fell in love with himself while this girl who loved him wasted away until there was nothing left of her but her own echo. It wasn’t like it was that great a story, and I certainly didn’t have a lot of room for a guy so pretty he falls in love with himself. As far as I was concerned the story was all about the girl, and she was the reason I started crying.

The next thing I knew June was sitting down beside me. She put her hand on my arm and asked if I was okay. I flinched when she touched me but she didn’t take her hand away.

“It’s nothing. Just a stupid story.”

She sighed. With her hand on my arm it felt like I sighed too. She looked at the book lain open on the table where I’d been reading. We sat like that a while. No one came in. It was just us like it usually was that late in the day.

“I fell in love with a boy like him too. Long time ago. I even wasted away like I was nothing…like the girl in the book.”

“You’re not like her at all.” I couldn’t help looking at her. I didn’t understand how so many people had so many wrong ideas about what they are. Being as much of nothing right and everything wrong as I was, I figured I’d already seen what people were like on the fringes of themselves.

“Maybe not now. Not so much as I used to. But you’re nothing like him, either.”

“That’s not it,” I told her. “I’m her, not him. I’m already wasted away but I never got to fall in love with anybody.”

As soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t.

“Oh William.”

She probably didn’t know that everyone who called me anything either called me Willy or Monster. But she was sitting on the good side and I started to feel better about crying in front of her. I didn’t remember ever crying before. They said I didn’t even cry over the thing with Uncle Danny. I just remember screaming and feeling this rage that went shooting off in every direction.

I felt a different kind of rage sitting there with June’s hand on my arm and her leaning down with her forehead against my shoulder. It was like a soft rage. I think it was the discovery of a loneliness so bone deep even dying wouldn’t wipe it off. I suddenly realized I was okay with it. Loneliness was the companion that kept me standing up inside myself. I started to feel sorry for June. Even though she had a wedding ring, it was easy to see how lonely she was and I think it was something she didn’t know how to do.

“William.”

She whispered it this time and I put my arm around her shoulder. It was even harder to touch than be touched. Something I didn’t know how to do without breaking something.

I knew June didn’t love me. Not like Echo loved Narcissus. But I told her I loved her anyway even though I didn’t. She said my name again and then I made her promise to tell me if anyone ever did anything bad to her so I could break them.

She lifted her head off my shoulder. Her eyes were full of wet and looked like glass. She could see both sides of my face now but she kept trained on my eyes. Her hand moved from my arm to my thigh. Her fingers pressed into the meat inside my leg high up close to my crotch. Everything inside me turned into smoke. It was like someone was touching my life behind my body.

My cock inflated. It happened fast and went hard as a tree in my pants. June felt it, and just when I thought she was going recoil she dropped her hand over the lump. She didn’t look at my face now. She just kept tracing her fingers over the shape of my bulge.

When she pulled on my zipper she looked at me again and leaned closer. I turned so she only had the good side. Her hand fumbled around until it got inside my shorts and curled around my shaft. Seemed like it barely made it all the way around but she started doing this thing where she was squeezing and stroking at the same time and it felt immense.

My own heart became a total stranger. It seemed like there was a whole library of things I should’ve been saying to June but I couldn’t speak. I felt stupid just gasping like I was. She had me overpowered and I never wanted to feel anything else.

The way her hand kept moving over my skin made it feel like it was made out of something else. Something better. Something that wasn’t me, half melted and full of hate and anger. Her lips were on my ear and the rush of her breath came in deafening pulses. My head went back and I heard the scrape of her chair legs on the floor as she shuffled closer. I wanted her to take my cock out and stroke me in the open air but didn’t dare say a word to shatter the moment.

Her chair scraped again, hand moving faster on my shank and her lips were back on my ear again.

“Someone important is going to love you like Echo.”

As if to say, it’s not me but somebody you’re going to love back and I’m just here to keep you walking the same earth you’re going to find her on and until that day keep that heart beating with love under all the layers of rage ….

Then I heard my own chair scraping the floor and my feet shooting out while pure feeling without a shape shot off through my cock and spattered June’s hand and the inside of my pants with mud.

I sat there breathless and couldn’t look at June. She kept her hand in my pants a little longer, just calmly caressing me. Then it withdrew. She got up after a while and walked away without another word. The sound of her steps across the floor was slow and somehow fragile.

A few days later I went back. I was reading a book about these two guys that meet on the street in a big city and become so close they’re like lovers except they never fuck. One of them can’t anyway because he’s too sick. But the story wasn’t about that. I think it was just about the formlessness of love but I’m only guessing about that.

June came over and leaned against the table. “They made a movie out of that one, you know.”

“I can see the movie just fine in my head.”

“Those are the best of all.”

The library was empty, as it was most times, and there was about a half hour before it closed. June left for a minute and when she came back, she took the book out of my hands and led me by the hand around behind the main desk into a room behind. There was a desk and chair, and a table in the middle piled with stacks of books.

“William, could you help me move these books off the table into those boxes?”

It didn’t take long. Books are just as light as paper. And when I got the last of them moved off the table, June sat on top of it and lifted her dress up around her thighs. She started unbuttoning the front of her dress. She pulled it off her shoulders one arm at time and then took off her bra. Her breasts were pale except for a few freckles. Her nipples were a kind of pale brown and hard.

“Come closer, William. Come touch me.”

I looked around, suspicious of I don’t know what.

“It’s okay. I locked the door. We’re closing a little early tonight.”

I got hard already. This wasn’t anything I was used to. I went up close to the table and June had to open her legs wider to fit me in between. She took my hands and put them on her breasts. They felt so warm and soft I was afraid. I didn’t know if they were beautiful breasts, but I knew they were beautiful enough just for being breasts.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.

“I know, William. What would you say if I told you you’re the gentlest person I’ve ever known?”

“I’m not gentle.”

She sighed and her breasts moved against my hands like they were alive.

“You’re gentle now,” she said. “So gentle, even though you could break me in half if you wanted to.”

“But I don’t want to. I’d never do that.”

“I know. That’s what makes you so gentle. Touch me like you want me to touch you.”

My hands moved then. Her breasts had seemed bigger until I touched them. They practically disappeared under my hands except her flesh kept moving with my grip while I felt them, testing them with my fingers. Every time I think I squeezed a little too hard June would gasp and I’d back off.

“I won’t break,” she said. “Your hands feel so nice.”

So I kept massaging her breasts while my cock strained against my pants. June touched me through my clothes, fingers tracing the shape of my cock through them. It felt like she was discovering something she already knew was there. Something new but familiar. I felt weak – like my body was about to turn into glass and shatter all over the floor – but I squeezed her nipples hard so she wouldn’t notice. She gasped and bit her bottom lip. I never saw a woman smile and bite her lip at the same time. I wanted to die and come back as something as beautiful as that.

“Don’t you want to kiss me, William?”

I nodded.

“Kiss me, baby.”

Only my mother ever called me that before and that was only when she was coming out of a fresh nod. You there, baby? Did you hide Mama’s cigarettes again?

I almost recoiled but June reached up and put her hand on the back of my head. She pulled me in and we put our lips together. It was only later on I’d stop to wonder if she’d ever kissed a thing as ugly as me. Her mouth opened so I opened mine, too. Her tongue swirled in along with a hot rush of breath and my heart exploded.

When I kissed June back there was this foreign sensation like we were having a conversation. Like we were still talking about some book that meant nothing more than something better to talk about than the weather.

Everything inside my pants was dripping and hard. And we kissed. We kissed like we were made for it. Born to it. Slaves to the juncture of one mouth to another. I forgot to keep feeling her breasts and wrapped my arms around her. She felt so small and so alive. She made me think about that fox that time and how beautiful things can be so easily crushed.

Whenever I got angry I broke things. My strength always controlled me. But when I was kissing June I was overcome with this strange awareness of every cell. I held her so nothing could ever get in where she was but so she knew she get out.

She reached for one of my wrists. Her hand couldn’t wrap around it all the way but she brought it between us and shoved it under her dress. I touched her through her panties. She felt like summer. The most humid days that wilt everything. She whimpered and gasped in my mouth when I ground my fat fingers over the tender flesh under that sodden fabric. I just grabbed onto the crotch of them and pulled until they ripped away from her body. They landed on the floor somewhere behind me when I shoved my hand back under her dress and fingered those wet folds of silky skin.

I reared up and pulled her dress higher with my other hand. I wanted to look at her pussy and see my fingers pushing at her lips and grinding over her pearl. I wanted to watch my finger slip inside her and distort the shape of her slit.

It struck me how a woman’s pussy is like a scar, too, in a way. But a beautiful scar. As if a flower was like a scar. Everything was wet like flowing honey and velvet. That’s when I realized everything that isn’t female is doomed to be something else, and never something as good.

When my finger went inside her she started squirming on the table. Her hands fluttered in between us to get my pants open. My cock fell into both of her hands. She felt me all over. My granite shank and balls.

“God, William, just fuck me.”

I couldn’t talk and breathe at the same time. I had that dying part down by now, but a long way to go to the coming back as something beautiful part.

My finger slid back from her pussy. My body arched forward, following the way she was pulling my cock toward her hole. It looked small and delicate, even if there was a wild ferocity about it too. The dome of my cock stretched her all out of proportion when she plugged me into the mouth of her pussy. I started pushing in and this sound came out of her throat that sounded like somebody else. I had to look at her face to make sure it was still her.

I watched her eyes the whole time my cock was grinding inside her. It was harder than I thought it would be. She had never been made to be fucked by a monster. I felt bad for her despite this look she had like there was all this poison suddenly leaving her body.

I was holding my hand in the air because my finger was smeared with her syrup and I didn’t want to touch her and get her messy. She grabbed my wrist and brought my hand to her mouth. Then she sucked on my wet finger while my cock went deeper. Her glasses were crooked and her pussy almost felt like another hand.

My ass started to shuffle back and forth, driving my cock in and out of June in long strokes. Everything was just a wet, slippery scraping sensation. Her heels started banging against my ass so I kept going along with the pace it seemed like she wanted.

She spat my finger out of her mouth and started huffing to breathe. Her eyes were on me but she wasn’t afraid. I just kept stroking my cock into her body, and it wasn’t long before the table was scaping along the floor. I kept fucking until the table came up to the wall and stopped. June rocked her hips and fucked back at me. I started touching her breasts again and she fucked back even harder.

We both started to sweat and she felt like she was rippling violently inside her pussy. The ripples went through my cock like we were part of the same body. Everything suddenly went hotter and wetter and there was cum pouring out of me deep into June.

In that moment, I got the coming back as something beautiful part. I knew it wasn’t going to last, but I would always know what it was and that it was a real thing.

June’s head was tossed back and shaking from side to side until her glasses fell off. Then there was this stillness. It felt like the library was made of glass. My cock stayed hard and inside June a while longer, but it finally relaxed and slipped free.

Later, when I was walking home I punched a car. The whole hood buckled in and the guy driving it stared at me like the monster I really am. I knew June couldn’t make me into something better even if she thought there was a chance.

I was just walking and thinking about everything that had happened. Everything I’d felt. The scent of June’s hair was in my head as deep as my own brain. Stepping out to cross a street, a car started out and hit me in the hip. It wasn’t hard. The guy behind the wheel just shrugged and said, “Hey I didn’t see you.”

Standing in front of his car they could see my face when I turned to them head on. The guy and his wife suddenly looked horrified.

Everyone was back in the shit and I screamed at him to watch where he was going. Then I raised my fist and brought it down on the hood of the car as hard as I could. When the metal sank in, the guy and his wife just gaped at me like some kind of mistake. I didn’t know there were kids in the back until they started crying.

I started running. I didn’t care about the driver or his wife, but I never wanted to scare any kids. In some other universe I might’ve been one of those kids in a car just like that, with a father driving us somewhere and mother who didn’t leave spent syringes on the coffee table. By the time I got home I was angry with June for making me feel like something I was never meant to be.

I went in the trailer and my mother was on the couch, just coming out of a fresh nod. “’Zat you, baby? D’jou hide Mama’s cigarettes again?

*

It was a week before I went back to the library. June wasn’t there and she never came back. There was a lady named Miriam with a face that made her look angry all the time. But she had a nice voice. She never sat with me, but after a while she’d tell me when new books came in, and I’d read them from beginning to end.

I started drawing people’s faces not long after that. It began with June, only because I didn’t want to forget what she looked like. After a while I started drawing attractive faces of people I saw. Always strangers. Miriam caught sight of my sketchbook one day and told me about a friend she had who taught art at the state university. She helped me research how to legally declare myself my own guardian. I quit school entirely, which was barely noticeable to anyone.

I passed all the tests for my equivalency and became an art major at the university by the time I was seventeen. I still took long walks in town at night so no one could see my face, and I started going down to the old, abandoned junk yard at the edge of town and practiced flipping cars. If they were rotted out enough I could flip them over onto the roof. The smart cars weren’t too hard to flip after a while.

Down at the junkyard I started drawing pictures of broken things. Cars rusted down to the shell. With some help from my professors, some of my drawings started to sell and they convinced me to start painting.

In August of my eighteenth year, there were parties going on at people’s houses all over town. All the people I would’ve graduated with if my face hadn’t melted off were celebrating. Some going off to college. Some just to work jobs that would anesthetize them some day.

I set out to walk through town and maybe listen to a few parties from a distance. I certainly didn’t have any intention of running into any of the kids I’d known before, and I sure didn’t count on running into anyone like Maisie Jones. After June and those crying kids I was done with all that. I even pretended there was a choice.

I was doing a pretty good job of keeping to the shadows when I ran into Chucky Lamont. He was smoking a joint by himself on the sidewalk diagonally across the street from Eddie Waller’s house. There was a party going on behind the house around a medium sized pit fire. The Wallers’ garage was all lit up too and there were voices coming out of it. There were cries and whoops the nature of which made me want to keep walking.

“Dude,” Chucky said when he saw me, as if I were hard to miss. “Where you been? Heard you were dead, man. Want some?”

I shook my head and he put the joint back to his lips. I wondered if he remembered spitting at me the last time we’d seen each other.

“Hey, man, you remember that…”

“No.”

“Okay, man, whatever.” He shrugged.

I thought about asking him what he was going to be doing now, but finally thought not to. I was ready to keep on going when a big, dope-laced grin crossed his face.

“Man, you gotta see this,” he said. “It’s gonna blow your mind. And if you want, she’ll even blow you.”

He was laughing all the way across the street. I don’t know why I followed him. There was nowhere else to go. Maybe being around people wouldn’t have been so bad for a change. But as soon as I thought it I realized I was wrong.

Chucky banged his fist on the garage door. Eddie Waller’s face popped up in the window. Then he disappeared just as fast and opened the door just long enough for me and Chucky to go inside. The air was dank with a blend of beer, sweat and human strain.

All I could see of Maisie were a pair of legs splayed out under the bare ass of a grunting man-boy still wearing a T shirt with his pants bunched around his ankles. His ass was pale and kept flexing to a spastic humping motion that looked like he was having a seizure. There was a threadbare square of carpet on the floor underneath them that was spotted with stains.

Two other guys were standing close enough to watch the fucking. They were both wearing T shirts and no pants, with hard cocks lifting their shirt hems. Two more were sitting on a beat-up couch. Neither of them was wearing pants either, but they were holding plastic cups of beer in one hand and their cocks in the other.

“Willy,” Eddie said, mercifully not pretending he was glad to see me. “Heard you were dead.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “How’d you hear about our little party?”

“Chucky.”

“Great idea to bring the freak in, Chuck.”

Chucky gave Eddie a bleary grin. “Aww, c’mon, Eddie. Don’t be like that. ‘Sides, it’ll be fun to watch him rip a hot chunk outta Maisie.”

The two laughed and nodded.

“Had any pussy lately?” Eddie asked, still laughing. “Or ever? Don’t worry, Maisie’ll get you off no problem.”

Obviously they assumed I’d be desperate enough to get in line just to fuck some strange girl on the floor while they laughed and talked shit about everybody but themselves. I probably was, but I had no intention of going through with any of it.

That’s when the guy on the floor started to cum. He arched his back and howled like he was getting his hair pulled.

“Way to fuck that bitch,” one of the guys on the couch laughed.

The second the one on the floor was done he jumped up and pumped his fists. There was a condom full of mud stuck to his dick. He raised one hand like he wanted to high-five somebody but nobody looked interested in high-fiving a guy with a condom full of mud stuck to his dick.

I cocked my head and looked down at Maisie before the next guy in line took the last guy’s place. Her skin looked to be shining with that kind of moisture whatever they call it before it qualifies as outright sweat. She looked like her breasts and thighs were too big for the rest of her. She had steel colored eyes that seemed to have no business in a girl with a complexion that dark, and a tangled mane of burnt brown hair fanning around her head as she looked off to the side, absently chewing on a fingernail.

She seemed like a tired wife listening to a husband she didn’t love anymore tell some lifeless story she’d stopped hearing a long time ago. Her eyes drifted up at me a second or two, noticing someone new had come to get in line, and then back to the distance she’d been staring into. I had my hat on so my face was in shadow, but my size didn’t seem to faze her in the least.

There was so much about her that was wrong and out of place I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so beautiful. I decided to hang out a while, but not to fuck her. I wanted to memorize her and draw everything that would be stuck to my brain later on.

One of the guys who’d been standing when I got in went down between her legs and pulled a rubber over his dick. I could tell they’d never seen each other before. The guy was grinning around at the rest of us while he sank his cock in Maisie’s pussy and started jabbing into her like she wasn’t even there. The two boys who’d been on top of her so far since I’d gone into the garage fucked like squirrels.

I studied Maisie, watching the fine bones of her face converge in the unlikeliest of ways, her breasts heaving to the jerky lunging of the boy between her legs, and wondered what she was getting out of it all. Maybe they were paying her, or giving her dope or alcohol. Maybe she was waiting for some kind of awakening, either hers or somebody else’s. Or maybe she was just another junkie.

She was surrounded by a veil of ether, letting those boys fuck her like she wasn’t there because she wasn’t. Her body was there, but the rest of her was walking around in some other dream. That’s when I started getting hard. The girl on the floor was me.

I kept watching her and the other guys in the garage started to disappear. My cock swelled with a burning need. I needed what she had. The weird peace inside her. Her face looked like mine felt when I was drawing. My cock was so hard Eddie started laughing.

“Looks like you better go next, freak, or you’re gonna bust your zipper.”

Chucky looked at the front of my pants and laughed maniacally for a long time. “Fuck, man, you’re gonna send that bitch to the hospital.”

Maisie just kept staring off to the side like she was waiting for a train.

“Shut the fuck up,” I told Chuck and Eddie.

They both laughed again but they kept their mouths shut. The guy on top of Maisie started to cum, and the second he was finished he got off her as fast as he could. Chucky and Ed started pushing at me to go next, hoping to see a freak show. A brief argument flared up between them and the two other guys who expected to be next in line. They both jumped up off the couch with their cocks wagging like a pair of cartoon characters.

My hands were moving on their own to get my clothes off. I kept my hat on to hide as much of my face as I could. It was the only kindness I had to show the girl on the floor.

When I got down between her legs she finally took notice and looked up at me briefly.

“You’re a big one.”

It looked like she almost smiled but it was too faint and too quick to be clear.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “I guess.”

I tucked my balls up against her pussy with my cock lying on her belly. She looked down at it like she was thinking of how far up inside her it was going to go. Her hand came down and her fingers raked over the length. I let out some breath. June was the last one to touch me and I almost wished I was somewhere else but the heat of Maisie’s skin on the underbelly of my cock was making it so I couldn’t move.

Somebody’s hand whipped by my head and flipped my baseball hat off. The squirrels around us all laughed.

“Show Maisie what a handsome fucker you are,” Chucky snickered.

She saw me now and I turned my head so she couldn’t see it all. I wished I’d put my cock in her by then because now it was never about to happen.

“Look at me,” she said. Slowly, I turned my face full on toward her. She was smiling. “C’mere, baby. Closer.” I leaned down. “Turn your face that way.”

I did, giving her the bad side. It wasn’t like I had much to say what with the way she was breathing and making her body undulate softly against my dick.

“You’re actually really handsome,” she whispered so the others couldn’t hear. “It’s just scars is all. It’s not your real face. It’s not who you are.”

“You don’t know who I am.”

“I know you’re like me. I can tell.”

Then she put her hand on the back of my head and put her lips on the bad side of my face and kissed me. It was the first time anybody kissed my face since the thing and it was the first time I was ever afraid of anything. There was this little rush of her breath and the way her lips kind of squirmed and fluttered over the rough parts of my skin. It felt like some kind of a special thing someone like me only ever got by stealing. One of the squirrels made a cartoon retching sound.

I pushed up higher on my arms and looked at her from there. She smiled all the way up to her eyes. Then she rolled her body to the side and nodded down toward her ass and hip. There was a long, thick scar running over her haunch and down the back of her thigh.

“See? We’re the same,” she said.

I studied her scar a while. Then her face some more. I hunched down and put the bad side of my face up against the scar on her ass and hugged her body. I rubbed my scar against hers, just scraping the rough parts of our skin. She touched the top of my head and I heard a couple of the guys laugh.

“Hurry up and just fuck her,” somebody said.

Somebody else tossed a condom packet that landed on Maisie’s belly. I moved up and started to rip it open and she reached up and put her hand over mine, stopping me. She shook her head.

“You don’t have to.”

“Neither do you,” I told her.

“I know.” And then that fucking half a smile.

I tossed the packet aside. She reached down and wrapped her hand around my cock. She had bigger hands than June. Her fingers slid over my shank like she was reading braille, then curled around it and pushed me into her pussy. When I started to push inside her I saw this thing flash in her eyes like she was going to sleep and waking up at the same time. Her head arched back and she raised her legs. Looking down, I watched the way my cock peeled her lips apart and mashed inside her. She crooned something out of her throat. The sound lasted until I bottomed out.

Heat flushed around my cock as she looked up at me. I pulled back, almost all the way out of her, and pushed back in. She made that throat sound again, and just about every time I pulled and pushed back. Her body gripped me tight and she started to move with me. I started to forget there was anybody else there despite the brain-dead filth they were saying. Every time someone said freak or bitch the words just bounced off my back. They couldn’t get through.

Maisie was looking at my face like it was normal. Like I was someone she knew. There was a girl on the carpet now, not just the beautiful shell that was there before. The motion of our bodies seemed to merge into urgent, sweat-dripping synch. I’d never seen the ocean before, but the way her hips arched with mine made me think that’s what it would be like. The lathery slip and scrape of my cock inside her was making us breathless.

I lowered my head and sucked her nipples each in turn. Her fingers clawed through my hair in back. Without thinking how bad it was I moved up and kissed her. She kissed me back like the other half of my face didn’t even exist. Her tongue shoved into my mouth while her lips crawled over mine. Everything was nothing but this blue fire burning all around us. There were voices out beyond the flames but it was all just dead white noise.

Somewhere I started to become aware that my cock was pulling out nearly to the tip every time and shoving back into her living, blue-fire body with the kind of desperation I read about in books. But I was right there and feeling it, and Maisie was crying and throwing everything back at me. She started hugging my lunging body with her legs and fuck if there wasn’t this ocean of honey rippling inside her.

Someone howled and I think it was me. But there was another voice mixed in with the sound. A girl’s voice. Maisie’s voice. She was cumming and banging her heels against my ass. Some low rumble that felt like it was rattling my bones came out of my body when my cock burst and we looked at each other like there was nothing but silence everywhere.

We kept on kissing for a long time after. Sometime the silence started to fade back and someone was making that retching sound again.

“Hey, man, if you knew how many cocks she’s already had in that mouth tonight you wouldn’t…”

It was Eddie. I jumped up and grabbed him by the throat before he could finish.

“Whatever.”

I let him go. I didn’t want to. I wanted to school him on something basic.

The guy who thought he was next in line started to get down between Maisie’s legs but she told him she was done. He started to argue and then the others jumped in, too. I grabbed the first one by the neck and yanked him to his feet. Then I shoved him backward one-handed and he went all the way back onto the couch. The others circled around me puffing up like birds do when they want to look big.

I stepped under the work light hanging down from a rafter so they could all see my face. I was naked, ugly and towering over them all, looking each of them in the eye one at a time. One started to come forward but my arm shot out and I pointed a finger at his face and said, “No.”

Maisie went to the corner where her clothes were piled on the floor. Panties. Stretch jeans and a tank top. I stood between her and the others while she got dressed. A couple times I felt her holding onto my shoulder for balance. After she was done I got dressed and went to pull the door up. We walked out together and I pulled the door back down. There were voices hurling shit at the door behind us while we walked away.

We didn’t talk for a while but just kept walking. Maisie grabbed my hand and we walked like that.

“Where are we going?” she asked after a while.

I stopped suddenly. “Shit. I forgot my hat.”

She reached up and touched my face. “You don’t need it.”

We started walking again. “Ever been down the old junkyard?”

“You gonna be there?”

“Yup.”

“Then let’s go.”

She hugged on my arm the rest of the way. She never said a word about how long it took to get there on foot. I offered to carry her but she said she liked us walking like we were. I said so did I.

There was an old Cadillac that still had some paint left on it. I hammered my fist on it a few times just to flush out any animals that might’ve been holed up inside. The metal didn’t buckle in like that other car with the crying kids in the back. Even I couldn’t dent an old Caddy.

We sat side by side on the trunk and I told Maisie about those kids and how I could still hear them. She said it still bothered me because I was one of them. And so was she. I nodded. I told her about June and she told me about a hundred faceless vultures.

I put my arm around her and smelled her hair. There was still a little of Eddie’s garage there, but mostly shampoo and sweat.

“Can I draw you sometime?”

“Draw me?”

“Pictures and such.”

“Oh.” She didn’t say anything else and I took it to mean she thought it would be okay. Then after a while she said, “So you’re like an artist or something?”

I nodded. It felt good to have something else to be. I didn’t bother saying how artists are just a bunch of fakes, that there were beautiful things all over the place and the only thing artists do is show off something they saw somewhere and pretend to be responsible.

“You wanna draw me naked?”

I shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m a little afraid of that.”

“Baby, you can probably figure how many people seen me naked.”

“Not like I see it. If I showed somebody else what I see when I look at you … I dunno. I feel like I wanna have secrets with you.”

She hugged my arm tight and put her head on my shoulder. After a while we took our clothes off and put them on the roof of the car. She leaned back and I ate her pussy on the trunk. She came alive again, but not the same way she did back in Eddie’s garage. She held my head and kissed me back hard with her pussy.

After we fucked again, we lay back naked on the car. We talked a lot but there were long silences where it felt like we were still talking instead of tracing each other’s skin with our fingers and listening to the tree frogs. We pretended like all the junked cars were shining and new and that we owned all of them. We were still talking when the sun came up. I hadn’t talked that much to anyone since I used to talk to June about reading books. But this wasn’t like that. It was more like we were writing one.