There are just a few weeks left before the first April Fool’s Day of my college career, and I’m scared as hell.

It’s not a milestone I ever expected to take much notice of, but here at Caverley University, pranks are practically a religion, and April Fool’s Day is bigger than Christmas.

Seriously, Caverley is known for two things: epic pranks and a top-notch film department, the latter of which is what prompted my arguably ill-advised decision to apply here in the first place.

Pranks were my least favorite part of high school. As far as I was concerned, they were just mean things people did to each other while claiming they were jokes. Like that made it okay.

Mostly, they involved destroying people’s stuff, covering their bodies with various uninvited substances, and picking them up and transporting them places against their will, which would legally constitute kidnapping if we weren’t all just expected to be cool about it for some reason.

I’m a small guy. I got carried around a lot.

Sure, sometimes pranks happened between people who genuinely liked each other, but that almost made it worse. It just showed how arbitrary and senseless the whole thing was. Trying to hurt someone you thought had it coming at least made sense. Trying to hurt someone you liked, when you could do something nice for them instead, just seemed like a colossal waste of effort.

But that was high school. And if I’ve learned one thing from my university education so far, it’s that my high school’s prank culture was fucking amateur.

The prank scene at Caverley isn’t just more of the same. It’s a whole other beast. There’s a code of ethics that everyone actually seems to take seriously, and a fierce sense of competition. Everyone wants to create the next big stir, the thing everyone’s talking about.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve witnessed such achievements as the engineering department swapping out the guts of the bell tower for a set that played “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Or the journalism department putting out a full newspaper announcing the election of dread Cthulu as chairman of the school board, and detailing in perfect journalistic prose the effects of his leadership on every aspect of campus life. There were several pages of memorials at the end for those students and faculty members who had so far plucked their eyes out in madness.

The theater department jumped in on that one too, and immediately organized a robed cult meeting in the quad, which did involve a guy seeming to rip out his eyes with some incredibly convincing makeup effects.

Then there was the time someone rigged a teacher’s desk to spit out condoms at random intervals all throughout a lecture, each time from a different hidden compartment.

Another person (probably, attribution is sketchy for both incidents) decorated a row of palm trees with Christmas tree lights, which looked perfectly normal and festive by daylight, and unmistakably like a row of ejaculating penises by night.

I’ll never look at the shape of palm trees the same again.

And the pranks I’ve witnessed firsthand are just the tip of an ancient iceberg.

There’s an entire hallway of the humanities building, nicknamed the Hall of Legends, that’s lined with laminated pictures of people performing various sex acts everywhere you could possibly imagine on campus and throughout Greek Row.

That particular tradition apparently started with two rival fraternities — no one can agree on which two — sneaking into each other’s houses with dates and then showing off the evidence to each other. From there, it spiraled into everyone making a show of getting it on in any and every place they weren’t technically supposed to.

Most of the pictures are wallet-sized, but the latest contributor to the collage gets to place a poster-sized copy of their image at the end of the hall, until the next contributor replaces it.

Currently, the picture in the place of pride is a panorama of two men and a woman at the top of the redwood tree in the north quad, circle-jerking (circle-fingering, in her case?) with their backs tied to the trunk.

Every time I walk down that hall, I have to guess at how long someone would spend looking at the pictures, if sex was old news to them.

Like, sure, yeah, that’s impressive, but I’ve totally done stuff like that. Who hasn’t, am I right, my fellow adults?

I have no idea if I’m pulling it off.

The redwood pic has been here for as long as I have, and I think people are kind of scared to try to top it. God only knows how they got the shot. There must have been a fourth conspirator, piloting a drone or something.

Even the exhibitionism here is staggeringly ambitious.

So, yeah, I admit it, I’ve been warming up to the idea of pranks in my time here. I’ve seen pranks bring people a strange amount of joy, and bring them together instead of pushing them apart. And once or twice, yeah, I’ve watched people high-five and whoop and whisper about the weird, wild, shocking thing that they made happen, and I’ve wished I were part of the moment.

Being scared on April Fool’s is nothing new for me, but this time, it’s not about what the pranksters might do to me. It’s about whether I can hold my own as one of them.

My hands are shaking when my entire dorm floor gathers together for a strategy session in the hallway, and Claire, one of the women from the unit right across from mine, on the ladies’ side of the hall, announces that, together, we’re going to win “legendary” status this year.

“Okay,” says Landon, my roommate. “Love the confidence. How?”

Claire’s roommate Val, steps out from behind her, and as usual, I try not to stare too hard.

Val is a singular presence. She’s short and petite, dwarfed by her own glasses and the loud, colorful overshirts she wears open like jackets.

She’s one of those short people whose energy alone seems to take up three times as much space as their body. I’m more than a little jealous. I’m almost as short as she is, and I feel like I live in power save mode half the time. More than jealous, though, I’m compelled, every time she bursts onto the scene. I want to bathe in her life force.

“Great question!” Val tells Landon, with a flurry of hand-claps. “We’re going to—”

“Val, I was going to give you a whole introduction and everything,” Claire complains.

“But I can just say it…”

“Well go on, then, say it.”

“Fine, I will!”

Claire shoves Val to the center of the aisle. Val stumbles, and I lunge forward on instinct to steady her, before I realize that the two of them are just joking around, and Val is putting on a show.

Great, I’m off to a fantastic start today, understanding the normal people lines between seriousness and humor. I’m sure to be a fantastic asset to a legendary April Fool’s Day prank.

Val gently unhooks my hands from her shoulders and pats them, like, “thanks anyway,” and begins to pace the hall, making eye contact with everyone gathered around the edges.

“Okay, folks, I’ll get right to it!” Val shimmies, so that her outer shirt flutters without a breeze, her curly bobbed hair bounces, and her subtle but present cleavage jiggles under her tight gray tank top. “I’m not gonna lie, going legendary isn’t going to be easy. The way will be perilous, the obstacles formidable! And we all know what the biggest obstacle is. Right, Wes?”

She points at me with her whole hand, slapping the underside of it against her other palm for emphasis.

I take a moment to get over the fact that she didn’t have to ask my name, and then take my best guess.

“The fact that it’s all been done before?”

“Exactly!” says Val, which is even more of a pleasant surprise than the name thing.

It’s nice to know I’m not just lacking in imagination for the next big thing.

“Messing with the gym scoreboard? Done,” she says. “The vending machines? Done. The faculty lounge? Done. Every inch of this campus is already a storied, cum-spattered monument to laughter and adventure. So how do we not get lost in the noise?”

“By posting a really big picture in a prominent place?” I suggest, thinking of how things are done with the Hall of Legends.

“Nope,” says Val. “Anyone else?”

“Call in a celebrity ringer?” Landon jokes.

“Closer, but no!” says Val.

She rubs her palms together, waiting for any more ideas, and generally holding the moment before sharing her own.

“We’re going off campus!” she announces. “And I’m not talking about Greek Row. We’re going to…”

She waves for a few of our neighbors to step apart, clearing a stretch of blank, white wall. Then she whips out a miniature projector attached to her phone, and backs up to point it at the empty space.

“…City Hall!”

She taps her phone screen, projecting an image of Caverley City Hall, with its palatial white domes and its bronze statue of founder James Caverley.

“This April Fool’s Day,” says Val, “we’re going to take the game to the whole city! We’re going to give everyone a great big legendary reminder of what Caverley is synonymous with. And it’s not another rando rich guy named James from the seventeen hundreds.”

She swipes her screen, and the shaky image of the City Hall as it is gets replaced with a clearly photoshopped vision of what City Hall could look like.

The words “Caverley City Hall” have been slightly tweaked to read “Caverley Kicks Ass.” Which is still a little ambiguous on its own, but for clarity, she’s added a costume of our mascot, a wild-eyed possum, fitted over the statue of James Caverley.

“It’s us,” says Val. “We are Caverley.”

There are a few nervous chuckles along the hall, and a clap from Claire.

“I know, I know,” Val raises her hands. “Caverley students have put more elaborate messages on taller buildings. But only right here under our own noses. Or, occasionally, over at Norfitch.”

“Suck it, Finches!” Landon adds, referring to the mascot of our designated rival school.

Everyone laughs, but I don’t get it. Practically everyone who goes to Caverley also applied to Norfitch, and vice-versa. Rivalry is the ultimate arbitrary meanness. But whatever, that’s not what Val’s proposing anyway.

“The point is, Caverley pranks happen in a sandbox!” Val exclaims. “And what’s the point of it all? What are the pranks even for? Anyone?”

Landon shrugs next to me. “Breaking the tension?” he suggests. “Shaking off stress from school?”

Val teeters on her feet, twisting her shoulders around, shrugging without shrugging.

“Yeeeaaaaah… but no. Actually, no,” she says. “I mean, there are so many different ways to de-stress, right? And I’m sure pranks are it for someone, but what are the odds that everyone at Caverley finds it relaxing to put almost as much work into making wild shit happen as we do into schoolwork itself?”

No one has a ready response for this.

“No, if it was about stress relief, we’d have spas. We’d have counselors who are actually counselors. We’d have less fucking homework!” says Val. “There’s something else going on here. There are reasons why we’re supposed to do pranks, and they’re nothing to do with stress. So, I can think of two possibilities. Firstly, it’s awesome publicity for the school. Makes it look like all we do here is have fun and be smart, impressive badasses. Secondly, the same reason we’re supposed to do everything we do in school. Skills. Confidence. Discovery. Preparation for living in the world. We do pranks to teach ourselves, first hand, that we can do amazing things, hard things, things that have an effect that reaches beyond ourselves. Right?”

There are a few shouts of “Yeah!”, part joking, part serious.

“Yeah!” says Val. “And what’s the best thing we can do to prepare for the world? To represent our school to the world? We take the game out into the world! We take real risks in a real, rails-free space! Who’s with me?”

My stomach twinges when she mentions real risks.

At Caverley, campus security is literally forbidden to interfere in pranks without getting special approval from the dean. Pranks are that revered here. But out there, in the world, you can do jail time for misuse of spray paint.

I feel a little vindicated when most of our neighbors also pause for at least a second, but after the first few shouts of “Yeah!”, the rest spill over like dominoes, and some nervous little flutter in my stomach pulls me over too.

“Yeah!” I agree.

“Yeah!” Val repeats, pumping her fist in the air. “So, I’m going to need you,” she points at Landon, “to get your hands on a mascot costume. I need you,” she points at another guy farther down the hall, “to figure out how to mod it for the statue. I need all the hands I can get to help me cut out the plywood additions to the sign.”

My tension eases. That’s where I’ll be, doing the behind-the-scenes bulk busywork. There’s no way I can get in trouble for doing just that.

“And you, Wes,” Val points squarely at me. “I need you to help me figure out how to rig a lighting setup up there, so that people can actually see what we’ve done.”

“Just figure it out?” I ask.

“And set it up, of course,” Val says brightly.

My stomach twists back up, cramming itself all the way up into my ribcage.

“We’ll be the perfect team!” says Val. “I’ll get us in, set up the broad strokes, you give it a polish-up, and next thing you know, we’re riding off into the sunrise of destiny! Legends!”

I know she’s joking. But who could say no to an image like that?

#

On the night of the prank, I’m almost late to meet Val in the quad, because I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to wear to break into City Hall. I resisted the urge to go full ninja, but I did pick out my darkest jeans and gray t-shirt, and I tucked an old COVID mask and a pair of winter gloves into my pocket, just in case.

Val shows up with an only slightly more muted outer shirt than usual, with kittens printed all over it. It might only be a coincidence that it’s less colorful than her sea creatures one, or her musical instruments one, or her weed leaves one.

She’s still way more prepared than I am. Her backpack is full of precisely, mathematically folded sheets of plywood, rolls of duct tape, and a scary comprehensive set of burglar’s tools, which she goes over piece by piece like she thinks it will comfort me somehow.

All I have is a few strings of LEDs in our school colors and a cheap power bank, so I volunteer to carry her second bag, with the modified mascot costume.

“Excited?” she asks, when she notices me restlessly wringing the handles as we walk.

“Sure, excited,” I say. “That’s… plausible.”

Val laughs, and the shaky feeling in my chest grows warmer.

“Hey,” she stops on the sidewalk ahead of me, whips around, and holds out her hands.

I place mine in them, and she squeezes.

“Am I totally torturing you with this?” she asks.

“No, I can handle it,” I say immediately.

“Do you want to handle it?”

“Yeah, I swear.”

“Then would you breathe for me for a sec?” she asks.

“Sure, okay.”

I close my eyes and try to ignore the warmth seeping its way up to my cheeks. Nothing makes you feel more like an adult than being told to breathe. But she’s probably right. The sooner I squash the jitters, the better.

“Calm down,” I murmur to myself on a nice, slow exhale. “Calm down calm down calm down.”

“Not what I had in mind,” says Val.

I open my eyes and raise a brow.

“I mean, if it works for you, great,” she says. “Does it? Work for you?”

“I guess, sort of?” I answer. “Why, what do you do to calm down?”

“I don’t,” says Val. “I’ve never been able to calm down. I just try to choose what kind of not calm to be. I mean, scared and excited feel almost the same in your body. Way closer than calm. Makes it easier to switch between them.”

It sounds ridiculous at first, but less so, the longer I think about it.

I’m not sure I even want to be the kind of excited that feels this intense. I take nighttime cold medicine on Christmas Eve so that I can sleep, because even though I’m nineteen years old, my excitement gets that distracting.

But still, it’s better than being scared, so I try.

“I’m excited,” I say on another slow exhale, because I’m not sure exactly how else I’m supposed to tell my brain what to feel. “This is awesome, it’s amazing, it’s so cool, I can’t wait.”

I keep muttering, and it… kind of works.

Because for fuck’s sake, this is so cool. This is the kind of night I’m going to be talking about for the rest of my life.

“Better?” Val asks.

“Yeah, actually.” I’m still breathing fast and shallow, but I’m almost convinced that it’s not a bad thing.

“Good,” she says. “Because I need you to keep watch while I pick the lock.”

She doesn’t, really. It’s so late at night, and the street is so deserted, that we can walk right up to the front doors of City Hall, two intimidating slabs of wrought iron and bulletproof glass, and once we’re there, it takes Val about ninety seconds to get them open. Twenty of those seconds go to finding the right tools in her kit, and the rest might be her stalling to make sure she can get a few jokes in first.

“Yes, you like that, don’t you?” she whispers to the lock when she identifies the perfectly sized pick and slips it inside. “No shame in using the right tool for the job, even if you have to order it from a naughty website. It’s better than making do with a hairbrush— I mean hairpin.”

She smirks up at me, and turns the handle.

“Step where I step,” she directs, charting an arcing course leftward from the door, and squeezing around the side of the metal detectors. “I checked the place out last week.”

“You get scarier the more I know about you,” I tell her.

“Makes you glad we’re on the same side, doesn’t it?”

She’s laughing, but she’s not wrong.

Beckoning me over, she wedges a sturdy metal ruler between the doors of one of the four main elevators.

“It takes keycard access to get them started from here,” Val explains. “But there should be maintenance access ladders inside.”

“Should be?” I repeat the obvious part of this sentence.

“I couldn’t exactly sneak into an elevator shaft during a daytime visit,” she says. “How about we have a look before we assume that they’ve decided to toss the international building code out the window?”

Val has made a gap between the doors wide enough to wedge herself into, and she braces her foot and back against opposite sides to pry it wider.

I help, and soon enough, we’re standing together in the silent, unlit box of the elevator.

Val pauses, standing very close in front of me. She opens her mouth, and for a moment I’m expecting something other than words. Then she points upward and says, “Give me a boost.”

“Right.”

I lace my fingers into a step on top of my knee, like I’ve seen people do but never done before. It’s harder than it looks, even with how petite Val is, but with a lot of fumbling and wobbling, we’re eventually able to prop her up high enough to pull herself through the ceiling hatch.

She plants her feet on either side of the hatch from on top, reaches down for my hands, and pulls me upward with a flex of her thighs.

I can’t do more than two pull-ups on my best day, but I refuse to drop myself, once Val has placed my grip neatly on the edges of the hatch. I swing my legs and pull and wriggle until finally, I’m lying on the elevator roof at her feet.

Naturally, after this one extraordinary feat of athletics, my muscles absolutely refuse to keep up with Val’s during the three story climb straight upward.

“You okay?” she asks, poking her head back into the shaft minutes after she’s already pried open the upper doors.

I’m still clinging to the seemingly endless row of ladder rungs built into the wall of the shaft.

“I’m great!” I shout up to her. “Wouldn’t want the experience to be over too quickly!”

“Hang on,” she says.

“I’m hanging.”

“Just… wait.” Her head disappears from the doors above me. “I think I found an executive call button!” she shouts. “Want to go for a ride?”

“Wouldn’t that, you know, crush me?” I ask, aiming for casual.

“I mean, not if you jump on and off at the right time,” she says.

I don’t know if I’m more interested in getting the chance to shake my arms out, or in showing Val that I can manage to jump on and off a platform. I take a breath, squash the echoes of a million childhood safety lessons in my head, and nod.

“Yeah, okay, press it.”

“Here goes,” says Val.

She’s right about whatever button she’s found. The elevator churns into motion below me. It catches up with me in seconds, making my progress feel all that much more pitiful.

Blinking away mental images of ending up like a gingerbread cookie under a rolling pin, I jump backwards off the ladder and land, not on my feet, but more or less safely on the elevator roof.

I burst into manic laughter and run my hands all over my own uninjured body as the elevator carries me effortlessly upward. But I’m not out of the woods yet. I’m headed all the way to the top of the shaft, on the top of the elevator, and I have no idea if there’s going to be enough clearance between the two for me to, you know, live.

I roll onto my stomach and try to stand, ready to jump through the doors to Val at the first opportunity, or maybe down the hatch into the elevator itself.

The bag with the costume snags on something as I stand. I tug on it, not thinking much of it, until I realize that it’s tugging back. And it’s going to win.

The corner of the tote bag is bunched up between the elevator and the wall of the shaft. I grab for the costume itself and pull, but the leg of it is already being dragged down, and it tears away in my hand.

“Oh, shit, shit, shit,” I’m muttering frantically to myself as I process the fact that it’s gone, and get myself ready to jump.

Val has her arms spread to catch and steady me.

“Hell yeah, you did it!” she says, giving me a congratulatory hug, complete with a pat on the back. “What’s wrong? Does something hurt?”

“I’m so sorry,” I start. “Everything happened really fast….”

#

Val makes extra sure I’m really okay, before proceeding to address the loss of the costume. But when it hits her, it hits her hard.

She storms up the roof access steps and picks her way through the lock like she’s half convinced the costume will have reconstituted itself on the other side, through sheer force of destiny.

It hasn’t, of course.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck me, what are we going to do?” she paces back and forth on the stone roof, tugging on her hair.

“We still have the sign,” I point out.

“It’s not enough!” she exclaims. “Without the possum, people might not even believe it was us! It could have been anyone with city spirit! A high school, a minor league sports team, whoever. And even if they know, it’s not… I mean, it’s okay, but it’s not legendary!”

“We got all the way up here,” I say, hunting for any shred I can find of the excitement she came in here with. “We took the game off campus, into the real world! So the plan didn’t go off without a hitch. What plan does? That’s just proof we took a big swing. We took a risk. And we can still mostly pull it off. We could still—”

“We could have sex!” Val finishes my sentence in not at all the way I was planning when I started it.

I laugh weakly, trying to take this in good humor like the joke it has to be, like it doesn’t have any effect on me.

Val’s got her hands clasped together, wide eyes fixed on mine like I’m the discovery of the century.

“Oh….” My throat makes a weird clicking sound when I try to use it. “I… uh…”

“Shit.” Val claps her still-clasped hands over her mouth. “Shit, I’m so sorry, I just said that like it was no big deal, didn’t I? Like you were just going to say, ‘yeah, of course, let’s fuck for clout’ after thinking about it for two seconds. If you’re not into it… fuck, just forget I said anything, okay?”

“No, no, it’s not that I’m not into… can we sit down?”

#

Val sits at the edge of the roof, near an alley, away from the empty street out front. She dangles her legs over the edge in a way that makes me nervous, even though she doesn’t seem to be.

I sit sideways, crosslegged, with my back against some kind of HVAC unit, facing her.

“So…” she starts, with a heavy sigh, and then leaves the silence open.

“I…” I don’t know where to start, so I decide to get the big thing out of the way: “I’ve never done this before. Any of it.”

“Oh,” Val takes this in for a moment, then gives an oversized shrug. “Me neither, actually. I mean, I’ve done pranks. But the sex stuff… yeah, it’d be my first. Don’t make a big deal of it, okay?”

“Seriously?” I look her over, trying to reconcile this information with my image of her, or catch some sign that she’s making it up as a joke. I’m failing at both.

Val is a virgin?

I’ve never known anyone who could tell a dirty joke with such an aura of authority. She’s got this confidence, this willingness to try dicey stuff, that I can’t imagine having while I’ve got this cloud of virginity hanging over me, this looming possibility that I might yet miss a truly legendary part of the human experience that I really, really don’t want to miss.

Like, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t think I’d care all that much about never having been campus famous for the cleverness of my greatest prank, but never having found out for myself what it’s like to get intimate with a real person — that, I’d care about.

How does Val not think about that when she dangles her legs over a ledge forty feet in the air?

Not to mention, she’s just so uniquely cute. If she’s got any interest in getting laid, which I’ve always assumed she does based on her sense of humor, I find it hard to believe that she hasn’t gotten any decent offers yet.

“Do you really want your first time to be on the dirty stone roof of City Hall with some guy you’d never even kissed before?” I ask.

She shrugs, then smiles sideways at me. “It’d make a hell of a story, don’t you think?”

I shrug back. “Sure. Obviously. But…”

“But what?”

“But is that all it is?” I ask. “A story? I mean stories are great, but… the true ones always leave so much out. You go through a thing, and the parts you don’t tell people, even the parts you don’t remember, they’re still real. They happened. They matter. And I just….”

I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say. A piece of me is screaming from the sidelines to shut up, stop making this harder and more complicated that it needs to be, but I can’t seem to make myself listen.

I sigh.

“If we could get the mascot costume back right now, would you still want to do that with me?” I ask. “Like, I’d love to, believe me. But I don’t want to be the blisters on your fingers, from cutting out plywood letters. I don’t want to be the chore you have to do to get closer to some prize.”

Val is lacing her fingers together over and over in a million nervous patterns, like she’s getting yelled at from somewhere inside her head, too.

“Wes… would you think I was a creep if I said I came up with half the details of this whole stunt as an excuse to hang out with you?”

I laugh at the absurdity of this, but the look on her face stops me. “You what?”

“Yeah, I specifically picked something that you would have the necessary technical expertise to help me execute. I never expected to lose the costume, I wasn’t setting you up to fail, or anything. I wasn’t planning to try to talk you into getting on the Hall of Legends with me, I swear. But I wanted this to be the wild thing we pulled off together. Something that would tie us to each other, a story that only the two of us can tell, that we bring up every time we talk about being in college together. I want to remember Caverley as the time in my life when I did something crazy with you. So, if you tell me you don’t want to do this here, tonight, but you want to hang out later and see where it goes… I won’t lie, I’ll be disappointed about April Fool’s Day, but I would say yes. Does that answer your question?”

Hell yes it does.

“Would now be an okay moment to kiss you?” I ask.

Val breaks into the widest, most dazzling smile, and nods quickly.

I brush my fingers through her hair, which is just as fluffy as it looks, and lean forward. She leans to meet me.

I don’t know how to hold my face. Am I supposed to move my lips into, like, a kiss position, like people do in photos? Or is that corny? Do I take a deep breath? Do people hold their breath while kissing?

And what the hell is happening in my chest?

It’s like that moment when a pot breaks from a simmer into a boil. Something’s bubbling, expanding, and just when I feel like it’s about to spill over somehow, Val’s lips brush mine, trapping that impossibly expansive feeling inside me.

She starts tentatively, lightly pinching my lower lip between both of hers, then shifting to my top lip.

After a moment of frozen wonder, I loosen up and mirror the motion back to her. She opens her mouth a little wider when I do, and I want to dip my tongue inside, but I’m so scared of shattering the moment by moving too fast.

I run just the tip of my tongue along the inner side of her lower lip, along the outside of her teeth. She seals her lips around it and sucks it in to meet hers. We twirl them around each other for a moment, and I wonder if mine is as soft along its underside as hers is.

She puts her hands behind my neck, holding us steady while we play with soft skin and hard teeth.

I unfold my arms and try to be daring with my own hands. I reach under Val’s big, open overshirt, like I’ve always wanted to, and hold her around her waist. I can feel her warmth through the thin, clingy fabric of her tank top. It’s a heavenly contrast to the night breeze around us.

I’m breathing, I realize. I’m breathing so heavily, and so is she. Every new movement we try, brushing and linking our lips and tongues together, makes me want to try it again, and again, but even though it feels incredible, and I’m technically getting oxygen, I have to break away after a few moments. It’s just so much. But I don’t want to be farther away from her. I press my cheek against hers while I gasp for a breath that feels normal, and clasp my hands tighter around her back.

“Was that a first for you already?” Val asks, sounding as breathless as I am.

No point trying to hide it now. “Yeah.”

“Me too,” she says. “I mean, not counting a couple lame dares.”

“Then it was even more of a first for me,” I say, laughing a little maniacally.

“Oh, are we making it a competition now?” Val laughs back at me.

“I guess so.”

The laughter chips away at whatever was suffocating me, and it feels easier to kiss her again now, with something like that casual lightness I always see between couples.

She kisses me the same way afterward, and we pass the gesture back and forth, pecking at each other with increasingly dramatic bobs of our heads, until the laughter takes over again.

“Okay, so,” Val sighs and wipes moisture from the corners of her eyes. “I’ve never invited someone to touch my breasts before. If I do that now, who is it more of a first for?”

My hands are so cold compared with her waist, and I’m not even touching her skin yet. I let go of her and rub them together, trying to prepare myself.

“Well, I’ve never done that before either, so….”

“Okay, okay, it’s a tie,” says Val. “Guess that means it’s not worth doing, right?”

She smirks. I blow on my hands and hover them out in front of me, waiting for her to say the word.

“Hmm….” Val keeps me waiting, and the tension is so distracting that I almost don’t notice her hands shaking, when she hooks her fingers into the neckline of her tank top and pulls it down, along with her bra.

Her breasts pop out, and there they are, whole and live and real, and right in front of me. They’re a little bigger than I would have guessed through her clothes, with crisply defined dark pink areolas. I have to remind myself not to shut my eyes. I haven’t walked into a private space by accident. I’m allowed to look.

“Go ahead,” she says, just a little breathless.

Slowly, I cup her breasts in my palms. I squeeze gently, learning the smooth, soft texture of them. I’m dancing around what I really want to do, and I’m not sure why, so I back up and allow my fingertips to converge on those dark, dramatic nipples. It’s hypnotic and deeply satisfying, the way they firm up as I handle them, like the world’s greatest fidget toy.

“Mmm,” Val sighs, first like a word, then like a reflex.

I drag my fingers over and over those nipples, trying to repeat exactly what gets the best sighs, just to hear them again.

Val pulls her legs up and away from the ledge, and I’m so ready to get between them, but then she pushes herself to her feet, tossing her arms out to the side for balance. Her breasts bounce with the motion, reminding me again that they’re alive, and sharing the same physical space as me.

“Come on,” she says, holding out a hand to me. “If we’re going for the Hall of Legends tonight, let’s go for it.”

#

Between Val’s hand and the HVAC unit behind me, I pull myself upright, managing not to knock either of us over the edge. But as Val soon reminds me, this won’t be my last chance to fall off a building tonight.

Quickly and silently, we follow the blueprint to clamp the plywood sheets in place, covering and altering some letters, and adding some of our own.

I’m standing on top of the big marble City Hall words, hanging the plywood from above, while Val, with her bra protectively back in place, stands on the narrow ledge in front of them, making sure everything lines up right. When she signals me, I hand her the strings of bright yellow and purple LEDs to run along the edge.

It’s nothing all that fancy, probably nothing Val couldn’t have rigged herself, which makes me all the more pleased that assigning me the job was just a ruse to get me involved in the first place. I don’t have to worry quite so much about my lighting prowess being underwhelming.

I plug in the strands and light them up.

Val backs up as far a she can on one corner of the ledge, so that she can see as much of the sign as possible, and bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.

“Oh my god, Wes, it’s excellent, you’ve gotta see this.”

She beckons excitedly, and I slide down the side of the rightmost L-turned-S, already dizzy from the high, narrow space.

“Don’t look down, look up,” Val says, holding my hand and pointing at the sign.

I gotta say, we did a nice job. I bet it looks even better from the ground, but even from here, it’s readable in the purple and yellow light.

I get a weird warm feeling, seeing it there.

Caverley does kick ass. A little. Sometimes.

Val squeezes my hand. “Are you ready?”

I glance out at the still vacant street, far below us. Someone could walk by at any moment, but it’s feeling less and less likely that they will.

I swallow to moisten my throat. “Yeah. You want to lie down?”

Val pauses for thought, then suggests, “You first? I’d kinda like to be the one moving while we figure out how to make everything, um, fit?”

“Sure, okay.” I adjust my mental image of what we’re attempting, while she backs up along the ledge to give me room. Mostly, I’m relieved she doesn’t want me to hold her in some acrobatic, gravity-defying, Instagram-style position.

Very carefully, I get down on my knees, then my ass, then my back, stretching out on this slab of rock maybe three feet wide. Once I’m in position, I feel a little more secure. It’s difficult to trip while you’re lying down.

I’m not scared, I’m excited, I remind myself, so that I can enjoy watching Val strip off her jeans and pop her breasts back out.

Other than that, she stays dressed, like most people featured in the Hall of Legends. For the pics taken on campus, it’s more of a fashion statement, making yourself look like you’re ready to run at any minute. For us, it might actually end up being the thing that keeps us out of jail.

I’d love to see more of Val’s body someday. I’d like to know every inch of her skin. But I’m going to get up close and personal with the parts that have most obsessed me, tonight, right now. It’s dizzying to think about, even more dizzying than the view over the railing-free ledge right beside us.

Val shakes out her hands, does a little hop on her feet like she’s psyching herself up, and then steps forward to straddle one of my legs and place her hands on the catch of my jeans.

I reach down to help her open them and pull my cock out into the night air. I worry for a moment about what I’m going to have to show her — I’ve been vacillating back and forth between nervous shrinkage and almost painful overexcitement the whole time we’ve been here, but the moment I feel her fingers on my bare skin, the excited side firmly takes over.

She holds me in both hands, almost too gently, running her hands all over every side.

“I guess it would be another first-for-first tie if I tasted it, huh?” she asks.

“Don’t let that stop you,” I say, and feel myself beginning to drip with anticipation.

Is that gross? Is it hot? It feels ridiculous to ask her.

She leans her head down and licks me, tentatively, starting from the base. First, it’s just the very tip of her tongue, tickling its way around. Then I can feel the soft, flat surface of it, and then suckling kisses along the sides of my shaft.

Is she teasing me or stalling? Is she afraid to—

Her mouth closes around the head, wet and warm. Her tongue is pressed right to where that dribble of precum just was, and after a moment of thoughtful lapping, she seems to decide she doesn’t mind.

She works her way deeper, tapping me with the edges of teeth a couple times, but quickly adjusting when she hears the fright in my breath. Her lips almost reach the base, and for a split second, I can feel the back of her throat. There’s an instant convulsion back there, pushing me away, and I think she’s going to spit me out, but she retreats only halfway and quickly gathers her composure.

With a little more experimentation, she finds a rhythm, sucking on just the head. Her lips are folded inward, protecting me from her teeth as she holds my shaft firmly between them, like the grip of a padded vice.

It’s kinda weird, but not bad.

Maybe I’m not the most authoritative judge, what with the fact I have zero frame of reference, and I’m so wound up right now that I could probably hump a brick wall and call it good, but I don’t care. The biggest crush of my life has my dick in her mouth. If I’m not careful, I’m going to cum just thinking about it, and I might not even be able to think quick enough to warn her.

I’m about two seconds away from asking her to back off for a while, when she does. She lifts her head, and wraps my wet cock gently in one hand to shield it from the chill.

“Oh, that’s hard!” she exclaims, rubbing her jaw. “Not you, just… well, yeah, you’re also really hard. I didn’t know a body part could get that hard without actual bones. But I meant, holy fuck, that’s like doing pushups when you’ve never done pushups before. Who’d think sucking would be difficult? Guess I’ve got a lot of practice ahead of me.”

“Later?” I suggest, as she starts to lower her head again. “For now, could we try, um, you know, the other thing?”

While I still can.

“Oh, right,” says Val. “Yeah, of course. I’m getting to that.”

Her voice is blasé. Her posture is anything but. She clasps her hands together, squeezes her shoulders upward, and her face turns noticeably pinker.

How have I never noticed it before? How flustered she gets when a conversation takes a sexual turn, and she’s not completely at the wheel? Her swagger is a front, and now that I can see it, everything makes so much more sense.

How many desperately wanted opportunities has she talked her way out of before now?

How many times have I done the same?

Well, not this one.

We’re not going to run back into the separate, solitary mental cells we’ve built out of our virginity, just because we’re afraid to look like we don’t know what we’re doing. At least, I’m sure as hell not going to. And if that stupid Hall of Legends back at school is the motivation we both need to get the fuck over ourselves and fumble around with each other like the ignorant dorks we are, then so be it.

“Take your time,” I tell her, still dripping in her hand. “But how about getting a little closer, while you work up to it?”

She gives a big shrug and a small nod. “Okay.”

I reach out and touch her hands while she crawls forward to position herself, fully straddling my hips on the stone ledge. She’s still wearing her panties, but she reaches down and pushes them to one side, and now I can feel warm folds on my shaft. She makes a move like a thrust, dragging the folds along my length, mixing my dribbles of moisture with her own.

I lift my head to kiss her again, which seems to encourage her, and she thrusts a few more times.

“Okay, okay,” she gasps, more to herself than me, I think, “here goes….”

She lifts herself up on her knees, takes my cock in her hand, and swipes the head of it back and forth along the length of those folds, searching, I assume, for the opening.

When I picture sex, I usually picture myself laying a woman down on her back, and then — when she’s ready, of course — thrusting into her with an easy little hands-free hip movement, like they do in the movies. But if it’s this much of a task for Val to find the right spot on her own body, honestly, I’m glad I’m not the one in charge of looking for it.

After several false starts, where I can feel myself slip out and grind along the inner side of her hip, she finally pushes her way onto me, letting out startled little gasps all the way down. Tight, warm wetness envelops me from all sides, and I’m afraid to move in case I fall out again.

Val holds very still for a moment, breathing heavily, maybe out of the same fear, maybe just processing my presence in her body. Then, very tentatively, she bounces her hips up and down.

She gasps, and so do I, at the slick, sweet friction between our bodies.

I reach out to touch her where I can, along the outsides of her thighs.

She looks at me, questioningly, checking, and then bounces again, and again, a little quicker each time. Her next gasp becomes a moan, becomes a laugh, becomes a shout of, “We’re doing it!”

“Holy fuck, we’re doing it!” I shout even louder, and then cover my mouth.

“Here, get the picture!”

She reaches for her jeans on the marble behind her, and pulls out her phone.

I accept it and hold it up to catch the best action shot I can of her riding me with the modified “Caverley Kicks Ass” sign behind her.

“With you in it too,” she insists when she sees it, and passes the phone right back to me.

Maybe I’m already benefitting from a bit of the boosted confidence I’ve been waiting for non-virginity to bring me, because I don’t even think before shifting my shoulders to the side and dangling my head right over into the open air, so that I can smile upside-down at the camera on my second shot.

“Oh my god, it’s perfect!” Val says, gazing at it with the most adorable expression of joy, before setting down the phone and looking at me with the same expression. “How are you doing?” she asks.

I shift my upper body back to the safety of the ledge, and try to put my attention back here, now, not on what the Hall of Legends will look like a day from now.

“I’m… in shock,” I say. “I’m… this is crazy. This is crazy. I’m having sex. I’m having sex with the coolest person I know, on top of City Fucking Hall!”

“On top of Caverley Kicks Fucking Ass Hall,” Val corrects me, tossing joyful devil horns to the sky.

“I feel… I feel… like I’m at a weird angle, a little?”

“Oh, okay.” Val leans forward, resting her hands on either side of my face. “How’s this?”

I close my eyes, let myself get lost for a moment in the feeling of her sliding along me, with her whole body against mine.

“Better,” I sigh.

Val stays close, running her fingers along my neck, kissing my cheeks, my chest, always working her way back to my mouth.

She rocks her hips, constantly but slowly, so much more slowly than anything I do to myself on my own. I want more, even though the feeling is already almost unbearably intense. I reach for the soft outer curves of Val’s ass, searching for the leverage to influence the pace. She takes the hint and quickens the rhythm. More confident of our fit, she makes the strokes longer, too. There’s movement every second now. It’s still strange, still so alien compared with anything I’ve ever experienced, but it’s working, it’s building, this is happening, it’s fully happening, and oh shit, is it too soon? Is that bad?

Val’s face lights up as she watches mine. “Are you…? Is it…? Am I doing okay?”

“You’re….”

Amazing. Gorgeous. So fucking cool.

None of those words are discernable in the garbled moan that her long, steady strokes drag out of me just then, but I think she gets the idea. She grins and kisses me again, and rests her forearms along my shoulders, like she’s trying to hug me, but the stone beneath us is getting in the way.

Oh god, I’m still cumming. She’s stopped moving her hips, but I’m still moving, twitching, pulsing inside her. Stars swarm across my vision, like a concussion of pleasure instead of pain. The hair on my arms, maybe all over me, is standing on end, reaching out like a cat’s whiskers, to feel.

“Is there… is there anything I can do for you?” I ask Val, unsteadily, as soon as my breath starts to come back under my control.

She shrugs, looking shier than she has since we broached the subject of sex in the first place.

“Please,” I whisper.

“Okay.”

She nods cautiously and sits up on her knees, to allow my softening cock to slide out of her. Then she settles back down on top of my waist.

“Like this,” she instructs.

She reaches down, presses two fingers to her clit, and takes in a sharp breath.

Her hips and hand seem to have a silent conversation amongst themselves, deciding which will lead and which will follow. Her hand wins, mostly, but her hips chime in every so often, bucking for extra attention, and I feel a little less guilty for my own impatience.

I reach out to take over for her, and she drags her hand away to make room.

I do my best to imitate her demonstration, but it’s tricky from this angle. I’m approaching her clit from below instead of above, and twice she winces and pulls away from what I could swear was a soft touch. When I go even softer, her hips get restless.

“Show me again,” I say.

She returns her hand to the task, but on top of mine this time, and guides the motion.

“A little flatter, I think.” she adjusts the shape of my hand.

“You think?”

“I’m usually lying down,” she explains.

“Do you want to lie down?”

“No,” she says immediately. “No, please just keep going.”

I keep going, or at least, I keep lending her my hand as a toy so that she can keep going. I don’t mind. She’s panting, moaning, grinning to the sky, and I’m taking notes.

I don’t know whether it counts, exactly, as me making her cum, when she squeals and clutches my hand harder to her shivering pelvis. But so what? Val is shrieking with ecstasy on top of me, holding my hand, and this part’s not for the camera. No one else has a thing to say about how this went down.

“Oh god,” Val sighs and rests her upper body back down on mine. “Oh god, thank you, thank you for that.”

“Uh, likewise,” I snort.

#

We stumble carefully away from the ledge together, and Val manages to make the elevator carry us back down.

With our feet finally back on solid ground, we begin bumping shoulders playfully together, which is when things go wrong. I bump her a little too far to one side of the lobby, apparently toward something important, because it sets off a loud, aggressive beeping.

A panel on the wall lights up, demanding a code that we obviously don’t have, so we pick up our pace to a run. By the time the front door falls closed behind us, we can hear someone speaking from the panel, preparing to dispatch a security response.

My heart is pounding, sputtering along with what dregs of adrenaline are left in my body. Even though I’ve never been in any serious kind of trouble before, I know the thing to do now would be to scatter, but I’m clinging to Val’s hand as we run down the empty moonlit streets outside, and she’s clinging to mine.

If we get caught, we get caught together.

And hey, it sure would make the story even more legendary.

***

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