When I was a little kid, I had a friend much older than me. Peter, that was his name. He lived across the street. We ended up spending a lot of time together in the summers. He let me do things I wouldn’t have been old enough to do, get me into places I otherwise couldn’t have been. I’m not sure why he kept me around. The most I could offer was someone who wouldn’t tell him to be quiet no matter how much he talked. That must’ve been all he needed.

            Peter’s body may have been more developed than mine, but at heart he was around the same age. He loved doing things that he knew wouldn’t be approved of. The thing I liked the most about him, though, was that he never got caught, not even the time he had accidentally knocked a whole shelf of glasses over. The shattering was what I imagined a thunderbolt sounded like, hundreds of shards of glass breaking into pieces and scattering across the floor. I did hear a real thunderbolt eventually, one summer, but it wasn’t as loud as I thought it would be. I remember that summer because it was when my favourite store popped up.

            It was this VHS store that opened near our neighbourhood. It was exciting at the time – all the entertainment we could imagine, encased in a tiny box. The first time Peter and I passed by the store, I was amazed. The shelves weren’t filled with books, but plastic squares with colourful movie titles on their covers. The posters on the glass window advertised the stories being sold inside in giant, bolded text.

            I hurried inside the store, running my fingers across the spread of plastic VHS covers. I couldn’t reach the ones on the highest shelf, so I had to tilt my head to read the titles. The ceiling was blue and black and powdered with silver dots.

            Peter was somewhere on the other side of the shop. I went to get him because I wanted to ask him if we could buy one of the movies. He was off in a room with a curtain over it, so you couldn’t know what was inside. I only saw his back and the end of his elbow.

“Can we get something?” I pleaded. I held onto his arm and shook it until he turned around to meet my gaze.

“Not now,” he answered. “I didn’t bring any cash. Maybe later.”

The employee at the register gave Peter a look, the type that told us he was going to kick us out if we didn’t leave soon ourselves. Peter quickly moved away from the curtain, taking me with him. He shut the curtain right behind him, but for a second, I could see inside the room. One of the covers had a man with a long, broad nose not unlike Peter’s. His mouth was agape and his eyes were looking straight up at the blue speckled ceiling.

Peter dragged me towards the store’s exit, and though I protested, he didn’t let up. I told him that I wanted to watch one of those horror movies, the one with the rating that said only adults were allowed to watch. The cover showed a group of teens on a snowy mountain, with a plastic mask faded into the background stained with the overly bright crimson of movie blood. I hadn’t seen enough movies yet to know the countless cliches that were part of that VHS cover. All the parts of that movie that were bland and outdone seemed so enticing to me the first time.

“We’ll come back,” Peter assured me. “Or you can wait a few years and buy the thing yourself.”

“A few hundred years,” I muttered. Everything seemed to take so long to me. I think that the earliest few hours we can remember will always feel the longest. They only get shorter from there.

Peter’s favourite thing to do was sit by the riverbank around the evening. If anyone asked, he would say it was because that was when all the fireflies came out. That wasn’t true, of course. The real reason was because the local bar was on the other side of the river. Couples would go in and come out drunk, stumbling and slurring their words. Peter liked to watch them argue. He would hold me close to him and snicker at the young couples as they shouted. I liked it, not because I had the cruel glee that Peter did, but because when he put his arms over me, I felt warm.

“You were with my sister!” one woman had screamed. The man she was with wore imposing, black boots and a shiny belt. He kept his fingers in the loop of the belt, even when the woman pushed and shoved at him. Both of their eyes were looking elsewhere. If I had been close enough to them, I suspected I could’ve smelled the alcohol on their breaths.

It was with the couples that didn’t argue where Peter would pick up the rocks.

He started with skipping stones across the river, but if they stayed in one spot too long, he would hurl the pebbles at their heads. He detested the hugging, the kissing, and one well-placed stone would disrupt them. The river was tiny, but it was still a river, so the most the couples would ever do was hurl curses at Peter before running off. Sometimes Peter would hold his hands over my ears when the couples slinging insults and curses our way. Sometimes he didn’t bother.

“Try,” Peter told me once, handing me a small, disc-like stone. I tossed it in between my hands to get a sense of the weight.

“I can’t throw hard enough.” I threw with all my strength, and the arc of my toss didn’t even reach the end of the river, dropping into the lazily moving water instead. “And I don’t want to hurt them.”

“Hurt them? They’ll be fine,” Peter declared. “We’re doing them a favour, anyway. Think about it. None of the ones who go to that place on the regular stay together. If they walk out happy, they don’t come back. And if they come back, they won’t stay happy.”

I didn’t want to say he was right, but in the moment I couldn’t think of anything to prove him wrong. I had to hope there was some kind of love there, in that bar.

It must’ve been because he was older, but when I looked at Peter, I wanted to experience that love myself, even experience it with him. It was a sick, childish thing. That was it.

A few weeks later, after I had already gone to bed, I woke up to the sound of someone’s knuckles banging against my window. Outside, in the dark, was a figure wearing a black hoodie and plastic Halloween wolf mask. I screamed, louder than I thought ever good, the way the kids in town that Peter called girly did.

“Woah,” stammered the figure, “don’t panic. It’s Peter. It’s me!” He removed the mask from his face to reveal the boy I was familiar with. By the time I stopped screaming, he had laid down flat on the ground under the window to avoid being seen, waiting for my parents to rush in. They never did.

After a couple minutes, he stood up again and I unlocked the window. The sky had just started to shift in anticipation of the night, the blackness dripping down from the top of the clouds and spilling onto the ground. I can’t remember if I even knew what stars really were at that age. I only know I liked them, and I wanted to catch and jar them like butterflies.

“Why’d you do that?” I cried. It was the only thing I could manage to get out from under the rapid pumps of my still-adrenalized heart.

“You wanted that scary movie, right? The one from the new shop?” Peter shrugged his shoulders. “No harm in preparing.”
            I giggled. “What are you doing here?” It was a small town, and so any instance of a kid getting caught sneaking out of the house was spread to everyone’s ears. All the times I had heard about it, people were sneaking out to meet girlfriends or best friends and take them for midnight joyrides in their parents’ car. It made a little, hidden part of me happy that Peter was doing that for me.

Peter waited for me outside while I got out of my pajamas. Even though it wasn’t raining, I threw on my raincoat, one decorated bright blue and yellow around the sleeves. I wasn’t thinking – the countless times my mother had told me never to open the door to anyone in the middle of the night meant nothing. I unlocked the door and slipped into the night with Peter while my parents slept a few rooms over.

He took me to the VHS store. I was surprised it was still open so late, although this time there was a different employee standing at the desk. Peter told me to go find the movie I wanted; he strode up to the clerk there and flashed a card in front of him. When the employee saw it, they both moved to the curtained area from before. Peter walked in and, a few seconds later, walked out holding a tape box that he stuffed into his jacket pocket before I could see the cover.

“You found your movie?” he asked. I nodded, pointing to it on the shelf. Peter stood over me, engulfing me in his shadow, reaching up and slotting the film out of its spot. He hid both the tapes from my view when he paid for them, dumping them into a wrinkled plastic bag that the employee supplied him. On the way back, I saw the card he had used at the store. It was a fake ID, one with his name and face but an age five years older than he really was. The whole trip had done me in – I was almost falling asleep in Peter’s car. At some point, he hoisted me up onto his shoulders, and I fell asleep before he dropped me into my bed.

A few days later, Peter presented me with our purchases. He had taken the effort to wrap mine up in black paper and tie it with dark green ribbons. I undid the knot of the ribbons carefully, but didn’t afford such grace with the paper, digging my fingers into the folds and tearing it off as fast as I could.

“The tape!” I raved. It was the first time I had been able to see the entire cover close up. I could examine, in impossibly close detail, the teens on the mountain and the serial killer in the background. I didn’t bother asking about the fake ID, or what Peter had bought for himself. It didn’t seem important to me then, compared to getting the movie I had so desperately wanted to buy.

Looking back on it, the movie was boring, but as a child all I needed was the shock of the killer shoving a cleaver through someone’s head. The fake blood spilled all over the ground, but I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t flinch when Peter turned the lights off and tried to scare me. I stared straight at the screen, my eyes wide and lit up white by the TV.

Afterwards, Peter told me to go to bed. He would go home soon, after cleaning up. I tried to fall asleep, but I was still hungry. I hadn’t eaten while watching the movie.

I crept out of my bedroom and saw Peter, watching a different VHS. It had to be the one he had gotten from the store, from the section curtained off to me. It was full of sounds, an airy guttural type of growl that sounded ecstatic. I peeked around the door. There were two naked people on the screen, moving into each other. They didn’t look like the couples at the bar. They seemed more done-up, less messy. I couldn’t help but stare. This must’ve been the love that Peter talked about. I didn’t want it, not like that.

After he turned the video off, I put myself back in bed and faced away from the open hallway.

━

By the time I started high school, Peter and I had stopped talking. He had moved out of town about a year prior, and we lost touch. Regardless, I didn’t forget him. I saw him when I passed by the VHS store and the bar. I saw him in the reflection of the thin, smooth rocks that dotted the dirt beds next to my school’s entrance. And of course, I saw him in the new Peter. A boy in my class that shared the name, that had shown up only a couple months after the Peter I knew had left. The universe needed balance, maybe.

He caught my attention from the moment I heard his name. I liked his voice, too. Soft but consistent, strong. That natural charisma the old Peter had, the one that let him convince a store clerk he was five years older than he really was. When he said something, it was believable, something I could dedicate myself to. No matter what it was.

It was easy, really, to think about Peter the way I ended up thinking about him.

One morning, I came into class early. I sharpened all my pencils and sat at my desk with a piece of paper I had kept perfectly crisp from the night before. I wrote my name on a sticky note, and then wrote it again on another sticky note because the letters were slanted in the first one.

I held the note and fastened it to the top of my paper. Lines of writing darted underneath, my attempt to get the thoughts swirling around my head into a final copy after the countless drafts that had run themselves through my head. It was the easiest way to say I don’t know you, but I so badly want to.

I sat alone at my desk, my only company the cartoon humans drawn on the verb conjugation posters. I liked it when the classroom was empty. It felt more intimate, being able to listen to each sound like a hushed laugh. That was what I wanted with him, to whisper to each other in a silent hallway.

The screech of chair legs against the tiled floor rang harshly as I got up. Other people had started to trickle in through the classroom doors. A part of me wanted one of those people to be him, walking into the classroom and sitting at the desk one ahead of me and to the right, just the two of us. Maybe I could’ve had the confidence to announce the contents of my writing to him right then. But he wasn’t there that morning.

I left the classroom and began my walk through the school hallways, clasping the letter close to my chest. When my right hand began to sweat from nervousness, I switched to the other. I tried to tell myself there was no reason to be nervous now, that I should save the butterflies for after he read the thing. I had tried to make it sound the way I spoke; the words might’ve been silent, but I wanted him to hear me talking when he read them. The locker labels on the wall beside me began to meld into each other, an accelerating pattern of letters and numbers that only ended in memories.

A80. A good amount of the lockers weren’t even being used right now. They were only vacant spaces. A lot of people decorated the inside of theirs with photos of friends or art or whatnot, but mine was mostly empty. Peter – the old one – would have made fun of me.

“Really?” I could hear him asking, “You have nothing to put in there?” I imagined looking up at him, even though by now we would’ve been similar heights. Seeing his face from below was how I remembered him, and now that he was gone, it would always be that way.

“I’ll find something eventually,” I would protest. “I just haven’t had a chance. It’ll come.”

A60. The words of the letter in my head were mixed now with echoes of Peter’s first words to me. What’s your favourite colour? It was just after we had been dismissed. When I said dark green, he folded me an olive-coloured origami frog. Eventually, I had thrown it out because I knew my Peter would have laughed at me if I had kept it. He would’ve laughed at me now, holding the letter and sweating. He would’ve laughed and never stopped.

A40. I had found Peter’s pencil case forgotten under a desk. I brought it to him in class, and we talked. I don’t really remember about what, just that I liked the sound of his voice and that he kept on folding those paper animals. The next day, I snuck into the back section of the art room and stole a stack of square paper so he wouldn’t have to keep ripping the bottom parts of rectangular sheets.

A20. Peter had made enough paper cranes to fill a little plastic container. I was there with him when he took them out to the creek near the bar and dropped them in, one by one, until there was a small flock of paper cranes floating down the water. It was silly. Peter left, but I stayed. I sat there, watching the bar, and picked up one of the stones on the ground. It was round and flat like a discus. I rotated it in my hands, and then, before I knew what I was doing, hurled it at one of the paper cranes on the water. I managed to sink three.

A16. This one was his. There was a small slit at the top, a gap between the locker frame and door. I unfolded my letter one last time, looking it over.

When I finished reading, I looked around to make sure nobody was watching. A rectangle of light was refracting off the black metal of a locker. It was emanating from a room across the hall. The door was nearly shut, like someone had tried to close it but stopped caring halfway through. A crudely drawn caterpillar was taped to the front, curling up from the bottom of the door and peering in through the window in the middle. I moved to the side and eyed the room through the crack.

Peter was stood near the corner of the room, slightly leaning on a nearby desk. My eyes darted past his face and to the shine of the bracelet that made faint jingles as his wrists moved. His hands were clamped around the waist of someone else. He held her the same way he did his paper animals. I wanted to step back, but at the same time longed to be closer. With their hands around each other, the pair looked like they were waltzing, the empty class a ballroom for them and them alone. I didn’t say anything because I was sure my voice was not the music they wanted to dance to.

Their kiss was light and heartfelt. The sun poured in through the window and highlighted their warmth. I stood underneath the fluorescent light outside of the door.

He opened his eyes, and I ducked away as quietly as possible. I hurried toward the branch of the corridor and pressed my body against the corner, hiding myself from view. I couldn’t hear anyone come out to check, but I didn’t move from my spot. Instead, I began to sink down until I was sitting, my back against a locker and legs splayed out in front of me. 

I stared at the ceiling for a while before pulling out the letter and unfolding it, my eyes meeting a yellow sticky note. It was my name, with a strand of my hair settled on the note, a filament that stuck out on the cream-coloured paper. At a glance, it looked like the stroke of a pencil. A piece of my graphite, a piece of me.

Peter and the girl – whoever she was – were identical to those couples at the bar. Like the man with the belt and the screaming lady, stumbling out but doing it together. I thought about the two giggling and walking into the bar, exiting with disheveled hair and an argument filled with hugs and shouts. I wondered if, when I was younger, I would’ve watched Peter throw rocks at them. I wanted them to sink.

I got up from my spot on the ground and hurried to the bathroom. My confession was still in my hand. I was ashamed of it, so much so that I let it fall from my hands into the school sink and turned the faucet on, watching as the paper melted and leaving it a pile white mush in the sink basin.

I returned to the classroom; by now a few other people had settled into their desks, and the teacher stood in the front.  People before me had carved things into my desk – names, sayings, symbols. It was impossible to tell how old they were, though I knew a few were new because I hadn’t seen them at the start of the year. I ran my hands along the surface of the wood, my fingers imprinting into each rut, each line. In the silence, there were words ringing clear as day – conversations with him I had imagined so many times. I closed my eyes and listened.

What’s your favourite colour? 

You should know, he’d reply to me.

How?

Your favourite colour is dark green.

I know my favourite.

My favourite colour is also dark green,

…

but only because it reminds me of you.

━

In the years following, the VHS store closed down. A few months after that, a theatre was built in its place. Peter would have hated that theatre, all the rules they had about bringing snacks in and staying quiet and having to reserve a seat. I think, though, that he would’ve gone with me to see the first movie I saw there. It was a midnight screening of that horror movie that Peter had bought me the VHS of. They had remade it, for some reason, with different actors and better cameras. I hadn’t watched my own copy of the movie for years.

I went to the theatre alone. A lot of the employees there were the same people that had worked at the VHS store, but that night, I saw someone I hadn’t seen before. He couldn’t have been more than a couple years older than me, wearing the employee uniform of a too-small green polo that showed off the hair sprouting along his forearms. When I saw his nametag, my breath stopped in my throat. Peter.

I refused to look him in the eye, sliding over my handful of cash and shuffling into the theatre playing my film. I had watched the thing so many times when I was younger that I knew the dialogue of the first fifteen minutes by heart. They hadn’t changed much from the original. Even the way the actors spoke was similar. The theatre was full of vacant seats, and yet soon enough someone approached my spot and sat down.

“Mind if I sit here?” It was the employee from before. Peter, again and again and again. He was still wearing the green polo but had unpinned his nametag from his chest.

“Go ahead.” I had nothing to hold against him. I might have even wanted, just a little bit, for him to stay.

“I’m Peter,” he whispered. “My shift just ended.”

“I know.” There was a moment of silence. “Do you like this movie much?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard me or he hadn’t wanted to reply.

It was a corny sort of horror movie, and Peter wouldn’t stop talking to me throughout it. He was charming, had a way with his words that made me laugh. He jumped when the killer popped up and the characters screamed, but I didn’t. I had the scares memorized, down to the things the characters would say a scene before. Peter asked me how I never flinched. I shrugged and told him that I was hard to surprise. He placed his hand on my leg, and I didn’t stop him.

When the movie finished, we went to a back room. A sign read EMPLOYEES ONLY. I took off my clothes, and Peter followed suit. He was a good-looking man, but he wasn’t the type you saw in movies, of any kind. He could tell I was nervous, so he asked me if it was my first time. I told him, “No.” He didn’t pry.

He was gentle. We didn’t make any noise. After it was over, he held me in his arms for a few minutes. Soon enough, he stood, put back on his uniform, and urged me to do the same so he could lock up. I didn’t see him again.

I came to the movie theatre again a week later, in a group. We bought tickets for some romance film; I noticed that my horror movie was still airing. When the group wasn’t looking, I slipped into the theatre playing it.

This time, nobody sat beside me. I closed my eyes, hoping the movie would feel new, but it didn’t help. I already knew all the words.