Last night at Anastacia's party, muffled through a deer head mask, you tried to get my short attention (as you pocketed your flask) to tell me of the one you'd spotted who had gone and caught your eye. Yet you seemed loath of talkin' to him. I said, "Why don't you just try?" You weren't exactly the master of discretion with that mask coverin' your hair and your stained polo with the ad for Tom's Inspection & Repair.

I handed you a bag of crackers and you ate a few, then laid the bag down on the bushes dampened by an early fall dew. You scratched your nose up under your awkwardly lopside latex and plastic hood. Some guy asked how you were and you said it was going, that it was going good.

At midnight, standing in the walkway with Christine and not complacent, considering whether to approach the guy someone had greeted "Jason" — your eyes buggy and wide, staring up at the porch as deer eyelids did not blink — you tried to prep yourself. But Christine said, "Just do it, don't even stop and think."

But the thing was, you hid away much more than your face. You wondered could this "Jason" replace the pieces of your soul that you'd lost? It didn't seem worth takin' the chance, so you left it like a middle school dance, awkward for the distance: boys off to one side, boys on the other.

Still outside Anastacia's party, rumpled under a deer head mask, Christine and some girl who was with her, they were takin' you to task. They'd seen you watching him and could assure that he was not yet taken. Christine whined, "Tap him on the shoulder — if you wait you'll be mistaken." Your fingers, plaited, broke for the bottle as she jawed, "The change will do you good." You weren't hearin' that noise in your awkwardly lopside latex and plastic hood.

"See the thing is," you explained, "either they were never my friend or they'll be tearin' me apart at the end. It always goes down either way. So I'm gonna stay down here and hold my peace on the lawn." You would have been the spitting shot of a fawn had the age not shown so strongly in your gangly, cold-bitten fingers.