We had a sleepover ritual where I’d bring over fifteen dollars and we’d walk to Subway for five dollar footlongs and a Sprite. This time he said he had a better way to spend the money and handed me a single flour tortilla from his otherwise empty fridge, damp from its own condensation.

A grade ahead of me but also held back a year, Gordy turned eighteen two years before me. He bought us each a bottle of Nyquil while I loitered near the Coinstar, smiling at the Albertson’s security guard I’d known since I was nine.

We had easy enough access to proper psychedelics, but this time chose to drink a bottle of cough syrup each: him for the novelty, me because he suggested it. Maybe if we both eat the poisoned dandelion he’ll let our torsos touch. Man I was so fucked up last night.

—-

Before marijuana was legalized and synonymous with Colorado, it was a three-per-day protocol for a good quarter of our student body. Lunch trips to an alley half a block from the campus grounds to circulate ditch blunts were as mandatory as pre-calc. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to take two deep inhales, wet their palms with Axe body spray, and run off to another extra-curricular.

The duplex Gordy shared with his single gay dad was five minutes from the school and quickly became an established second option. After a couple weeks of entertaining him with cruel, premeditated jokes about our teachers and peers, I was fully indoctrinated into these excursions. The first time we ever went just the two of us, he asked if I could fix the warped neckline of a haircut given to him at a party by a drunk person. He stood shirtless and barefoot on the linoleum of his windowless bathroom, the clipper’s too-short cable carving into his hunched shoulders, white and smooth, catching my glances in the mirror and holding.

He came to expect my footsteps two paces behind him. The first time he showed me the vacant ecstasy of huffing keyboard cleaner, he explained that we had to do it with dubstep playing loud cause it’s like huffing two keyboard cleaners at once. We both had deep baritones older than our age and our underwater belly-laughs made his CD tower quake. One time his dad stomped down the stairs to see what the hell was going on, but mostly he let us be. He’d often smoke weed with us too, excitedly chatting with me about artsy films my parents hadn’t heard of and showing me older Madonna records and explaining why Lady Gaga should be ashamed of herself. On top of the unspoken gay thing, I think he saw in me the power his son had over people and it brought him a certain pride.

—-

We cracked the Nyquil bottle’s safety seals and interlaced our arms like two pirate bridesmaids as we counted down our chugging. The word “chug” sounds like a synonym for “vomit” but in fact refers to the reverse. The callous in the back of my throat hadn’t yet been scored by years of keeping gross things down. I choked back the gagging, my body rejecting the blubbery poison like a pinball spring. I don’t think it was even cherry flavored.

—-

Though we’d had previous sleepovers where we shared intimate stories and even a bed, these often included other pork-bellied runaways passed out in a corner with their mouths open and pubes showing. These sleepovers were always under the dense, delirious fog of swag blunts rolled with the seeds undiscarded. They never involved a narcotic that would lead anywhere horny, let alone something with plausible deniability should he wake up horrified that he’d been intimate with his boy-sidekick. We’d get too high and lose the capacity for speech, either asleep or stoned silent. The DVD home-screen graphics restarting repeatedly for a movie that ended hours ago.

By then I’d secretly lost my virginity the previous summer to my middle school best friend, another bad boy who was held back a grade and would smoke cigarette ends out of the ashtray. After weeks of being ignored I called him from a 7-Eleven pay phone and he answered, recognizing my hey right away. He said actually he can’t talk right now, and he thinks I know why he can’t talk.

—-

The idea was for our arms to remain linked until the bottles were cleared. A no-homo impulse to get ahead of any accusations forced me to throw his arm away and theatrically clutch the kitchen counter with both hands. I did a little go on without me, pretending I couldn’t possibly stomach the last drops. He had a party talent for “opening his throat” and inhaling a beer or soda in maybe three seconds. He grinned at me and hoovered the remainder of his bottle, knowing that I’d follow along. This was our theater.

We stood in silence, nodding along to the understanding that we had to not throw it up if we wanted to feel anything. Within minutes he began violently heaving into the kitchen sink. I patted his back with a wooden hand, knowing that to derive a pleasant comfort from the touch of the gesture was creepy and pathetic and gay. He would throw up a lot though, almost for sport. Just one of his many stunts involving the disregard of his bodily integrity, Jackass wrapped in a studded belt. He’d launch himself into a stack of chairs or lie on the ground and have girls stand on his clenched abs. Once he drank a bottle of ipecac in the middle of class. I’d go wild for it.

Friends of mine somehow not under his spell would comment on how he’d do anything for attention. A girl did an impression of a lapdog - paws up and tongue out -  the one time I dared come to his defense. I deserved it.

—-

The come-up was gross and scary and not at all fun, a time-lapse of wounds opening and healing and peeling and crusting over and scarring. Like everything in the room was a hyper-detailed Spongebob jump-scare image, cartoonish yet vague. Like peering through a stranger’s grease-smeared bifocals: your vision going from thick obscurity to hyper-focused horror depending on how bad you strained your eyes. I was greeted with none of the pleasant comfort or euphoric discovery I’d come to expect from the first hour of acid or mushrooms. No waves of esoteric questions crashing lovingly against the mind’s beach. Just an antique freight train shedding layers of its own rust as it struggles to reach a comfortable cruising speed. A world of crunchy, flaky filo dough smelling of my own dried drool.

—-

The sad longing I held for Gordy wasn’t without merit. He’d regale me with stories of sleepover cuddle puddles and kissing contests with his punk friends at house parties and construction sites. I’d picture orgies of lost boys tense with bi-curious intrigue, photos of kisses on digital cameras uploaded to Myspace or not.

There was already a dialogue of boys kissing boys as an affirmation of comfort, confidence, a celebration of who cares. James Franco hadn’t yet given the internet the term gay bait but I still understood that these boys kissing one another in front of me were motivated by something I wasn’t. Still, the few out bisexual boys only dated and fucked girls, and any interaction with another boy that wasn’t before an audience of their drunken peers was treated as scandal.

I had seen photos of him kissing guys at Denver’s eighteen-and-under raves like Caffeine, high on molly, gripping a pacifier between two fingers like a cigarette holder and looking away from the camera. I didn’t have a great interest in photography but I’d bring a digital camera to school, mostly to take his photo. He’d hold his posture in a certain way, a silent suggestion that why don’t I go ahead and make it last longer. He’d imitate an album cover or grit his teeth in photos still featured on his Facebook today.

—-

But this time I snapped his picture in a candid and playful sort of way. A sexy, spontaneous thing to do that could maybe ignite the sexy spontaneous energy that was sorely missed from our previous sleepovers. I’d discerned by then that we hadn’t exactly ingested an aphrodisiac but remained firm on the agenda I’d so promised myself. It was early enough in my sexuality that I couldn’t even comprehend a concrete erotic benchmark for the night, just shaking a box stamped with a question mark and holding it up to my ear.

I tilted the back of the camera towards him as I always would and watched his drooping, still-nauseous expression fall before understanding why. The photo showed his face sagging in a way I never thought possible, the cruelty of the candidness and harsh contrast exacerbated by the cough syrup’s kaleidoscopic tessellation of bullshit.

“Do I always look like that?” he asked. I peered down, panicked. The pixels of my Nikon Coolpix rose from the screen, a topographical map of a fumble so unspeakable it might require the burning of sage, the switching of schools. The photo was a smear of chaos, of beauty besmirched and called in for questioning, something meant to be kept face-down and quickly glanced at no more than twice in a lifetime.

“No,” I said. “I think we’re just…so fucked up.” I deleted the picture, crossing my arms to show him the calm still blueness of the screen.