Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor

and Cass came in to see what the matter was. I couldn’t tell her, didn’t know how, but it was enough, I think, for her to know that there was cause for laughter. She joined in, then grabbed me by my unabated hard-on, aimed it at the bathtub and set me free.
     
    This is not to say everything was okay, painless and sweet every moment thereafter, only that it was those things right then. And that we deserved them. We showered together,stood beneath the hot stream, took turns washing each other’s backs. We checked out of that awful, rundown place and started back a day early toward our shit town, which, it turned out, had let our absence pass largely unmarked.
    The world is not brimming over with grace, but it does have some.
     
    There’s no great conclusion to me and Cass. We were bound by something that could neither break us nor lift us up. It did not make us other or better than we were. Why should it have? I took her to senior prom, which was real nice, and we sometimes talked about loving each other or being in love, but we were using the words just to use them, like practicing for when we’d really need them sometime in the future. I knew she’d gone back to messing around on me and I never gave her grief about that. After I finished school I had less patience for her studying, and we sort of both started to move on, though I always said hello when I saw her now and again, at parties, usually, except for the quarter she spent in perfect seclusion, studying to retake the SATs and boost her score into the very top percentile, which she damn well did, not that I was surprised to learn it. Soon enough after that she was gone. We became ourselves, is what happened, and whenever I miss her I remind myself of that. But don’t think this is a story about true love gained and then lost forever, because it’s not like I think about Cass often, and many times even when I do I don’t miss her at all. I’m happy for wherever she’s got to, if it’s anyplace good.
    Joe Brown at first didn’t understand. He knew it was different between me and her, somehow, but his main concern was the fact that I would no longer tell him dirty stories about Cass McElroy’s sweet, sweet pussy that never got sore, or even say anything about my hot threeway.
    He kept on pestering me.
    I finally called him a fucking deviant to his face about it, one night in the sick grip of summer, when it’s so hot people are only living to find new ways to bring hate into the world. I thought of the weasel who had stood in our path, and put everything I’d had for that man onto Joe Brown, which wasn’t right, but it’s what happened. We had a fist fight, real serious too. Came out bruised, bloodied, and sore—more brothers than ever. Joe Brown might not have had a way with girls, but he lifted and he ran. He was strong. Whipped me, if the truth is to be told about it. A year later he said he had decided to enlist, and three months after they sent him over he was gone. He was in an unarmed Humvee, driving it, in fact, down a desert road and rolled right over an IED. We buried what they sent home.
    And Judge should have died the night his trailer’s electric hookup faltered and sparked a whole box of M-80s, which set off a thundering like a movie drive-by and sent the whole place up. He was spared on account of not being home, though the mother of the twin boys and one of the twins were there, both asleep, which further suggested that Judge had been playing at his version of family man before slipping out to get away with one more damn thing. The other boy,who had gone to have a sleepover at a friend’s house, now lives with his aunt’s family in Baltimore, and Judge lives to rave and spit for another season. He may outlast the rest of us yet.
    But I don’t want to finish on a down note, so since I didn’t tell the rest about how it turned out with Ma and my sister and the drugs, let me get back to that now.
    Ma found Kyra puking up all over