He sat in the back row in a jacket that smelled faintly like pennies. It was old Army surplus, sleeves a little long, cuffs shiny where hands had polished them by habit. He wore it in August and in December, in algebra and in English, collar up, hoodies under it when the cold wind came down the corridor. If you looked quick you’d think he was hiding; if you looked longer you’d see he just didn’t know where to put himself. Teachers called roll and never looked to the back. He answered to the first letter of his name like it was all he could afford.

I was the kind of kid who thought being seen was a craft. Band shirt, knuckles inked with a pen during study hall, dice in my pocket like pocket saints. I noticed him because he laughed once at a joke I made under my breath about how Beowulf reads like a raid brief. He laughed and then ducked like the laugh had been a mistake.

“What games?” I asked at lunch, because he had a notebook with dungeon maps drawn in pencil so soft you could smudge a hallway into a cavern with your thumb.

“PC,” he said, and named a few like passwords. “Tabletop. If there’s a manual, I read it.”

“Show up Friday,” I said, like I was offering him a key to a door I didn’t own. “We’ve got a slot.”

He did. He came to my basement with the jacket zipped to his throat and a backpack that clinked. We opened Doritos and cracked the cheap sodas that taste like metal and sugar. He took the fighter class because he said wizards had too much homework. He rolled criticals with a loose wrist and a flinch, as if the die might fly back and bite him. When he laughed the second time it was like hearing a train you forgot ran behind your house.

“My little brother plays,” he said at some point, when the pizza arrived and the box turned the air into a grease cloud. “Mostly with me. Not… not with others.”

“Then bring him,” I said, half reckless, half proud of myself for being the kind of person who brings.

He shook his head. “He wouldn’t,” he said. “He doesn’t like to be looked at.”

Which I understood in a way I didn’t want to admit.

We added him to our group chat. We pulled him into LAN nights and Saturday afternoons, the lazy long braid of high school time when you think the world will keep handing you hours like that forever. He was funny when he forgot to be afraid of it. He knew the names of all the guns and all the gods in a dozen game settings. He beat us at RTS by building ugly bases that worked. He listened to me talk about bands nobody liked and nodded like I was telling him about a continent he’d get to someday. I liked him. That’s the simple part. I liked the way he said my name like we had known each other a long time and had both done jail time in a foreign war.

So when he said, one afternoon under the bleachers where the light looks like water, “You guys smoke, right?” I said “Yeah” like people say yeah to a dare they planned to take anyway. He looked sideways and said, “Think I could try?”

I was stoked. That’s the word my memory makes me use, even now with the edges sanded. It felt like progress, like breaking the seal on a room where he’d been living alone. I figured a soft landing. We’d put a movie on, pass it around, watch him grin at nothing, hear him say “Oh” in that slow voice the first time the air filled up different. It would be a story we told him when he was less scared.

So after school we went to my buddy’s garage, the one with the couch nobody loved and the space heater that clicked. We put a towel under the door like amateurs. We queued up something with bad dialogue and good explosions. He held the thing like it might break and then he didn’t. He took it in and let it out and his shoulders, always up around his ears like he was waiting for a blow, settled an inch. He smiled. He said “Huh.”

I felt like a midwife of something gentle. I know better words now for what I thought I was doing, but none come without a flinch.

From there the slope wasn’t just slippery; it was greased. The jacket stayed but the person inside it began to move erratically, as if the sleeves had minds of their own. He loved manuals. He loved lists and back doors and exploits. He applied that love to anything you could order. This was before the law had a name for the places he went. He would show up with vials that looked like science fair projects, tabs he said were alphabet soup: letters and numbers, pretty colors, a seriousness in his eyes like this was a class he’d begged to take. He’d say, “It’s not illegal. Not yet,” like he’d found a cheat code that made him a citizen of a country where cause and effect had looser borders.

We were still kids. We didn’t have words like comorbidity or maladaptive, just “Dude, chill,” said too late. He fried himself. That’s how it felt from where I stood: a steady sizzle, corners burning black, the middle somehow still raw. He stopped coming to school with his backpack zipped, then stopped coming at all. In the space where he used to sit, the blinds rattled and the dust did what dust always does when nobody tells it otherwise. A guidance counselor asked me where he was with the kind of interest adults have when they’re going to forget your answer before you finish giving it.

“Home,” I said.

“Okay,” the counselor said, and we both nodded at the lie.

He didn’t graduate. Someone told me he’d withdrawn because a paper said his hand would not stop shaking. Another someone said he’d been seen at the public library at noon, teeth clicking like a typewriter. The story that got back to me was that he’d stumbled into a party and started laughing at the mirror and wouldn’t stop for two hours, and when somebody threw a blanket over it he cried like a child whose mother had put away his only toy.

We kept seeing each other because gravity is a habit. The games had gone meaner. He loved anything with a rush you could measure. He had a prescription he didn’t need that he treated like a paper well that wouldn’t run dry. He shredded the capsules with a credit card someone had folded into his wallet along with a photo of a baby he didn’t know. He talked faster: words lapped over themselves and drowned. I partook, a word that makes it sound ceremonial and not what it was: stupid. The powder burned. The room brightened. We laughed like we were on a stage with the lights too hot. I wish I hadn’t. That’s a wish that doesn’t change the past but still makes a small wind in my chest when I think it.

It escalated. It always does when the point is the escalation.

The morning that cut the line happened at his place, a one-story with a driveway oil shadow and blinds that never went up. I crashed on his couch after a night that had been all plot and no story. The air smelled like someone had tried to hide a fire in it. When I opened my eyes he and another friend were standing over me with a gas-station pipe that looked like it had been rescued from a gutter.

“What are you doing?” I said, stupid because I knew, because the shape of the thing names it.

“Cleaning the house,” he said. They both smiled. They had the kind of smiles you see in old cartoons when someone hears a pie cooling on a windowsill.

“Okay,” I said, and it was not okay, and I stood up and every part of me felt like an old battery, and I drove home with my hands dumb on the wheel while the world turned on too many lights. It was seven in the morning and it felt like midnight threw up. I slept in my car outside my own house for an hour because I didn’t trust any door.

After that I pulled away the way you pull your hand out of a dog’s mouth when it’s a game and then you realize the dog doesn’t know about games. I did not make a speech. I did not stage an intervention with sandwiches and handouts from a place with a logo. I just stopped answering, and when I saw the jacket in a hallway I turned into another one. If guilt were a color it would be the stain that blooming left on my ribs.

He found new people. There are always new people. They brought new things. Vyvanse gave way to the stuff you buy from men who count their money with their thumbs flatter than paper. He found a job at a place that sells things that lock and things that shoot. He wore his hair too short and called old men “sir” and rang up ammunition like it was just another cereal. Employee discount like a joke that wrote itself. He bought a thing you pump and called it protection. He lowered his voice when he said it, as if saying it quietly made it true.

He started doing the kind of errands that make the local news without his face getting caught in the frame. The stories were too easy to map: glass on the floor, clerk on the ground, a voice from behind a mask that came out wrong because the mouth behind it had forgotten how to match sound with shape. He used a getaway driver who didn’t know how to make left turns on green because there wasn’t a rule book for that. The town is full of light at night; you can drive under it and still be invisible if the light is the wrong kind. Somehow he never got caught, or if he did nobody I still talk to told me.

Other stories slunk out later like bruises under a long sleeve. What he looked at. Where his eyes went when nobody was in the room to say, “Stop.” The way he tried to erase himself with a magnet as if sin were stored on platters you could sweep. The accusations that stick to a person like burrs when they walk through every bad part of the field. I heard words I will not write here not because I am noble but because they taste like batteries when I try. People went to the police. The police shrugged in the way institutions shrug when the story is wrong in every direction at once. Nothing went anywhere. A nephew cried in a kitchen. I don’t know the truth. Sometimes not knowing is the only true part left.

I washed my hands of him, which is ridiculous because my hands are my hands and I bring them wherever I go. I told myself the sentence everyone tells themselves when the story turns dark: If not me, someone else. He would have found it. He was made of it. I didn’t hand him the road; I pointed to a view. This is probably true. It doesn’t help much. The brain keeps its little ledger in pencil and still won’t let you erase.

Years stack, bend a little in the middle like a shelf with too many paperbacks. I learned to sleep without leaving a light on everywhere I’d stood. I put my dice in a box and only take them out when someone asks the right way. I go to work and pay on time. I keep a plant alive. These are miracles, too small to deserve the name and yet.

Sometimes you think you’re done with a person and then the world reminds you that time isn’t a line; it’s a circle we trip over. I saw him once, years after the couch and the pipe and the grin that showed too much gum. He was at a gas station one town over where the pumps always print receipts with the ink half gone. He wore the jacket. Of course he wore the jacket. It was summer; the heat had melted the horizon. He was talking to the clerk like they were swapping baseball stats. He turned and saw me and his face did not change. If anything it got calmer, like I was a thing he’d already set on a shelf in his mind and dusted twice a year.

“What’s up,” he said, as if we’d just come out of sixth period.

“Not much,” I said, a phrase that makes any mouth sound empty.

We stood on the concrete in the scent of gas and hot rubber and the distant salt of the river. The jacket had frayed more. His eyes had slack in them like rope after a load is cut. He did not look happy and he did not look sad. He looked like a person who had chosen his weather.

“You still play?” he said.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Cool,” he said.

There was a moment I may have imagined where both of us saw the outline of what we could say: the very first time and the morning and the crimes and the maybe and the kids that weren’t ours to mention and the shadow where God should go if He were going to make an appearance. I could say “I’m sorry,” and he could say “Me too,” and the air would shiver like a tuned string. Then it passed. A car honked. The clerk dropped a roll of quarters and swore softly. He said, “Alright, man,” and I said, “Take it easy,” and we folded ourselves back into the lanes the world had painted for us.

What do you do with responsibility when it is real and also not yours? It’s like holding a mirror and a photograph at the same time and trying to see one through the other. If I could talk to my younger self, the one who turned the towel under the garage door and lit the cheap incense afterward to hide the smell, I don’t know what I would say that he would hear. Not “don’t,” because he would. Not “you’ll regret it,” because regret is a tide that comes later and he was surfing rivers. Maybe “Listen,” the way an old mechanic says it to a boy leaning under the hood. “Hear that? The noise under the other noise? That’s the thing that’s going to take you apart.”

I think about the jacket. The way he wore it like a shell. The way a shell can convince you the creature inside is protected when really it’s just carrying weight. In the stories we played, we were always hunting armor made of names: +1, +2, an enchantment that deflects. We wanted to be invulnerable in the places where we were already broken. We wanted to be strong enough to live through ourselves.

I learned to say sorry anyway. Not to him, because that road is closed and lined with all the reasons you don’t park. To the air. To the garage. To the couch that held us both. To the kid version of him who mapped dungeons with a pencil so soft you could smudge a hallway into a cavern. To the part of me that knew I was offering a key to a door that didn’t lock. When I say it, the room doesn’t brighten. No harp. But there’s less weight in the hinge of my shoulder, and sometimes that’s all a prayer gets you and it’s enough.

On some nights the group gets together again. The faces have lines now where they didn’t and the jokes have more gentleness in the middle. We roll, we tell the story with a dragon and a town and a choice. The dice clatter like rain on a tin roof. Somebody fails a save. Somebody else casts a light in a corridor and we all lean in. The map is inked in darker now, so it won’t blur. There’s a fighter with a dented shield. There’s a wizard who did the homework. There’s a rogue who doesn’t know where to put his hands. We make a plan, which is to say we argue and then we try anyway.

When we break for snacks, sometimes I stand in the doorway and look out at my little street with its repeating houses and the small lives inside them, and I think about the gas station and the jacket and the magnet passed over a drive like a hand over a fever. I let the night air in. I breathe. I count to ten, not for anger this time, but to feel the seconds line up obediently for once. Then I go back in and pick up the die and let it go.

The number is what it is. The story is what we make of it. The kid in the jacket sits down in the back of my head and watches without touching anything. Sometimes, when the light hits and I am kinder than I meant to be, I see him tilt his head and smile that small, surprised smile from the first Friday he came over, before we taught each other anything at all.