“Why do your brothers call you Doc?” asked Will.

“Because I’ve always sewn them up with dental floss whenever they came home gashed up,” Jonah said. “Those medical textbooks are how I learned to draw real people. Studying anatomy.” With an image locked in his mind of Jonah with a loop of dental floss in his teeth bending over his grimacing brother’s split eyebrow, for the first time in his life Will wished he’d had siblings.

“Is that how you’re getting out of Thunder Bay?” Will said.

At this, Jonah grew shy. “Yeah, maybe. I’m going to fall back on medicine if my pro skateboard career doesn’t work out,” he said with his usual smirk.

It took only a few days in Jonah’s Inside before Will decided he preferred it to his own. Here nobody was watching you, and the most ghastly horror films elicited only laughter and glee, and the Black Lagoon did not reign. It was during this time Will noticed water-swollen porno magazines nestled beside the upstairs toilet. The hairstyles of the women were huge and souffléd, and upon their orangey faces he found an exact replica of his mother’s Black Lagoon look—as if they’d all been struck by some great, unknowable terror. Will realized then with horror that penises were Outside and vaginas were Inside, and the import of these connections sent him lunging from the bathroom.

The boys rush-ordered a fingerprinting kit and practiced on themselves, applying latent powder with the impossibly fluffy brush, lifting the print with tape and fixing it to a backing card, pausing only so Jonah could occasionally wipe his mouth with his sleeve after his kiss with Angela. She’d said she would surrender the drawing only if they both French-kissed her in her hospital bed for a count of thirty seconds each. “I want to be fair,” she’d said, which Will hoped was more than evidence of her charitability. Angela removed her feeding tube, and after Will sufficiently coaxed him, Jonah went first, tucking his bangs behind his ears, as he brought his lips to hers, Angela wide-eyed. The sight of his two friends mouth-locked was both unbearable and dazzling for Will to behold. When Will’s turn came, it was like his face ollied down twenty stairs and landed in a tub of warm oil. Jonah had lasted only twenty-five seconds before pulling away, but Will couldn’t venture how long his kiss was. He could still taste the flavor of her mouth, acidic, apricot-like, the best thing the Outside had offered so far.

One night, they were fingerprinting Marcus’s grid when Enoch came over to their worktable after an hour of grunting beneath his barbells. “Why’re you tools putting makeup on that map?” he said, breathing hard, toweling his face with a shirt.

“It’s not a …,” Will said, before locking eyes with Jonah.

“ ’Cept it doesn’t have any fucking street names on it,” Enoch continued. “Some map. But looks like the harborfront, to me. That’s the only part of this shit-pile town built in a grid.”

14

September arrived the following week and demanded their begrudging return to school. The boys claimed the rearmost desks, where they whispered about the map they’d yet to decipher and the byzantine skateboard tricks they would someday master. Their new teacher, Mrs. Gustavson, wore a beach-worth of shell jewelry, smiled emptily, and spouted in a sugary voice lots of his mother’s words, like creativity, gifted, and self-esteem. Will trusted her about as far as his mother could go for a jog.

In the first week, when Will was picking up an exercise he’d narrowly passed from her desk, he said, “Thanks Mom,” instantly scorching himself with embarrassment.

At recess, Mrs. Gustavson asked him to stay behind. “I couldn’t help but notice what you said there,” she said.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Will. “Old habit.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m quite flattered,” she said, pausing as if something was sinking in other than the death knell of boredom and the senseless squander of recess time.

“You know, Will,” she continued, “I must confess something to you. I’m a great admirer of your mother’s work. And your father’s, of course. But I saw The Sky in Here when I was in university, and it made an indelible impression on me,” she said, as though they were sharing some great secret.

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Really?” she said, shocked. “But you must be very close?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, she’s modest, I’m sure. But I know some people who will be very pleased to hear Diane Cardiel is safe and sound and back living in Thunder Bay. She must love having a bright, creative fellow like you around the house,” she said, smiling falsely, and Will bristled. Jonah had more creativity in his right leg than all the students at his school combined, and though she was brand new, Mrs. Gustavson already acted as if he wasn’t there.

“Is this over yet?” Will said, wounding her visibly, before racing outside to find Jonah.

Now that they were in the seventh grade, their classmates talked of group trips to the roller rink and declared doomed loves in bubble-lettered notes and three-party phone calls. None mentioned how last year’s grade eights had disappeared like planes into the clouds of high school, an ascendancy death-like in its impenetrability. Happily, the mysteries of what to wear and say and when to put your arm around a girl and how to properly manage a vagina were of zero relevance to Will and Jonah, who were content with the mystery of Marcus and how, exactly, one could possibly ollie over a fire hydrant.

To endure the flavorless hours, the boys reacquired the necessary talent of kill-switching their minds, slowing their pulses, holing up in private mental dens. They perfected a communication exclusive to their eyebrows, while lazily doodling skateboard graphics and complex ramp arrangements on their velcro-flapped binders. In class they were cheetahs napping, borderline catatonic, preparing for the bell’s merciful peal.

At lunch they shunned the cafeteria to go skateboarding off school property. These days Will could manage the occasional weak ollie—the trick’s true alchemy still outpacing his understanding. There in the parking lot of the grocery store that still delivered his mother’s food, Will drank a throat-searing two-liter carton of iced tea while Jonah practiced heelflips, landing again and again on his sideways board, folding his feet in half and pouring himself to the oily ground.

“You always get the same thing,” said Jonah, “ice tea and salt-and-vinegar chips.”

“I know what I like,” said Will, though the truth was the towering neon of the grocery shelves and the sheer glut of choice they presented baffled him. While they ate, some high-school-age hockey players shouted “Skater fags!” from a gunning pickup truck, almost obligatorily, kept at bay only by the fearsome legend of the Turtle Brothers. Rather than the designer sweatshirts and safety pin–tapered jeans of their peers, the boys donned the flannel button-ups and work pants that abounded in Thunder Bay’s thrift stores. The pants were constructed with thick polyester that survived their worst spills and were cheap to replace when they didn’t. At school, hockey players had started to sneak up behind Will to yank his pants down, so they both wore webbed belts cinched tight around their bruised hips, even though Jonah was never subjected to the indignity.

After school, with the map folded deep in Jonah’s backpack, the two ventured downtown, into the crannies of the city that no upright citizen had reason to frequent: loading bays, alleys, abandoned industrial buildings, check-cashing places, the parking lots of windowless strip clubs, closed gas stations, and listless strip malls. The concrete and the bustle brought forth new memories of days spent careening around Toronto with his mother, the glint of subways, the towering buildings, his hand caught warm in hers.