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really pretty, even though the metal’s sort of greenish. I told her I wanted one too and she said that was lame but how about my lip. So we went back to Rite Aid to steal some safety pins, peroxide and a ring and now we’re on the sidewalk across from Del Taco. I can taste the peroxide bubbling on my gums and I wonder if it’s poisonous. It tastes like eggs and rust.
    She’s making me hold my lower lip out while she gets the pin ready; it makes it hard to talk so when I ask her about the guys sitting in the parking lot in front of 7-Eleven right across the street it comes out sounding like some retarded other language. She laughs and says “Hang on” and stabs the safety pin through the middle of my lip, fast. My head fills all the way up with the pain of it and my whole mouth tastes like liquid iron. I blink my eyes really hard so it won’t look like I’m crying while she screws the pin around trying to close it. Finally she does and it squinches my lip but only a little because we got the big kind. The bottom of it knocks against my chin. “Leave that in for a day or two and then we’ll put the ring in,” she says, and wipes her hands off on her jeans. “Now what were you trying to say?”
    “I was just wondering if you knew those guys” I say, swallowing blood, and point over to the 7-Eleven lot. There’s two of them with a pit bull there, both dressed like Tracy, patches and black pants and splotchy dirty brown T-shirts, which is why I think she might know them. The dog’s got two collars, one with rhinestones, one with spikes, and you can see its ribs.
    She looks over at them for a second and goes “Nah.” Sometimes Tracy lies about stuff like that but I can tell it’s true she doesn’t know them, and it’s obvious she doesn’t really want to. Which I think is kind of weird, in the same way as the smoking kids behind the auditorium: if you’re a person that looks different from everyone and you see someone who looks like you, to me that means you’d want to be friends or at least talk. But not Tracy.
    I’m curious about the guys, though, so I watch them. They’re both around Tracy’s age, and the really tall and skinny one with the stocking cap has this perfect face like someone in the movies, green-eyed and almost pretty like a girl’s. The dog is sitting down and so’s the other guy; he’s short and strong and he looks sort of jocky even though he’s got freckles and tattoos and dirty patches on his hoodie. The dog belongs to him, I can tell.
    I never saw anyone else who looked like Tracy and I can’t stop watching them.
    I’m still staring across the street when Tracy reaches over and flicks the safety pin in my lip, which hurts like shit. “Come on,” she says. “Come buy me a donut,” and even though there’s food left in her backpack from my house I follow her.
    That night and the next day and the next I keep trying to get Tracy to go to Del Taco instead of Benito’s hoping we’ll see those guys again across the street, but they don’t show up and after a couple days I forget. Something in me is different, though, just knowing they exist. To me it means there’s a whole bunch of people like her, which means the world is bigger than I knew. It means there’s something out there that’s not school or home or Brian but not Tracy either. It’s like Tracy, but it’s not exactly her. For some reason, that makes me feel a little more equal, like I could ask her questions without being scared that she’ll get mad. I don’t know why.
    Also I keep thinking about Brian’s room, how I found Tracy in there staring at his bed and crying, the way she held my hand beneath the 101 after I told her and looked at me like I was someone she’d known forever but hadn’t seen since we were little kids. The rest of the time she never holds my hand or even touches me but it felt really good that time she did and I keep wanting it again.
    One morning after rush hour when Tang’s Donut is