Skinsky in his backyard in June.
Skinsky in socks and shorts, aureolas flaring, squeaking across the grass to his trampoline and beginning a bounce. Skinsky working hard, curling his toes as he lands and gaining elevation. Skinsky at the height of the low branches on the big tree and rising. Skinsky landing, rebounding and flinging himself up to the summit of his bounce. Skinsky with a Skinsky’s-eye view of everything: roofs, trees, his backyard and his audience in it. Skinsky in back flip. Skinsky in front flip. Skinsky announcing he has one last trick and then Skinsky in descent, unfurling, making an X of his body and colliding cheek first with the trampoline’s fabric slap. Skinsky grunting one short syllable, “Ah!”, as he’s hurled up by the hiccup of springs. Skinsky bouncing to a standstill, dismounting and masking his face with both forearms. Skinsky on haunches in the shadows of friends as they crowd to see Skinsky in damage.
The crowd, from its depths, presses in, draping itself onto shoulders and backs. Skinsky whimpers but they ignore it. They bat aside his arm to touch him—his hands, his hair, the exposed parts of his neck. “Should I get some water?” someone says. “One of our fathers?” “Want to sit? Want to lie down?” Skinsky stares through the slit in his forearms at their faces. Some, deep in their features, look pleased. He whimpers once more to check. The friends nearest him frown and crunch their eyebrows. But towards the back, on the faces of the draped ones, the pleased look seems only to float nearer to the surface of their features, like something held under water and then freed.
Seeing this, Skinsky snorts, snotting on his forearms. He starts to guffaw. Then he stops guffawing to throw open the mask of his arms. And there’s his face-freckled, smooth, blotchy pink but unscraped. “No worries,” he says. “I practiced that shit.” Up go his shoulders, eyebrows and hands. Up goes his upper lip into a smile.
His friends back away, stepping off the grass onto pebbly cement as Skinsky makes his appeasing motion. From where they are they hear a new sound, a low drone from near the pool. Also a churning sound, a filter maybe, and the sound of insects—only a dozen or so of them, but suddenly everywhere, in everyone’s face. They swat and swat. They are parted suddenly by Skinsky who runs through them to dive into the pool. He rises and begins taking laps back and forth across the water.
Slowly, the friends of Skinsky begin to applaud. They whistle. The boy who, when Skinsky hit, turned to his neighbor and went “Oh snap!” notices a wetness in his eyes and shoulder-dabs it. A girl with late braces claps until her hands sting.
They clap, because Skinsky never fails.
“Fucking A,” someone says, “Skinsky, my heart.”
A girl holds her arms out in zombie posture. “Look at my hands. I can’t steady my hands.”
Skinsky’s friends feign concern: chests clutched, sighs noisy and significant. They pretend that relief is the reason their arms won’t stop trembling—a relief so heavy it makes them tired. That momentary feeling of world-balancing, score-settling—that was meant for someone else. They shoosh their giddy blood.
Gluck Auditorium, the first day of eighth grade. The beginning. Skinsky is up in the wires and hot lights while the principal paces the hardwood. He speaks of metaphorical mountains, the need to surmount them. Four hundred pairs of eyes roam upward to the hidden and burning Skinsky. Skinsky makes a name for himself this way. Ninth grade: Skinsky scaling the side of his house, ascending from door to window to balcony to gutter to satellite dish, standing triumphantly among the signals.
Skinsky in locked places. Skinsky in hiding, but never caught. Skinsky in feats of falling, feats of fighting, feats of risk. Skinsky in feats of fucking, they had heard—sensational, unimaginable acts. Skinsky at fifteen, kicking off from the cliff, splashing between the reef and the rocks and swimming to shore with no injury but a seashell cut on his pinky toe, trickling red. At sixteen, the trampoline, a birthday present from all of them, and Skinsky in flight.
A girl watches a dripping Skinsky cross the yard. She says, “You think he’s concussed?”
“No,” says a boy. He watches Skinsky, and his eyes, for half a second, go shiny. Skinsky waves and his smile disappears.
“A concussion?” says a third. “I don’t know about that. Maybe.”
They watch Skinsky bait his dog with a tennis ball, the dog barking rhythmically and pitiably from the ledge. He chucks the ball deep into his backyard and dives under water again. He skims the bottom of the pool, his reflection rippling up. All around him, the friends of Skinsky see shimmering swaths of blue—the color of his aura, according to one girl, whose own is a buttery yellow. Prompted, they can feel it too, Skinsky’s blue aura. It feels light and misty, like dry ice. They have to wave their hands through it to see him.
He comes up for air. “Two minutes, twenty-six seconds” he yells, over the lapping of water. “Swear to God.” He pulls himself up onto the ledge and then kicks off backward, letting the force of his words hit while he’s submerged.
From above, the silence of watching. Skinsky breast strokes back and forth across the bottom of the pool. He reminds one girl, who stores the comment, of a pale and frantic frog. Frog-Skinsky jerks his torso suddenly up and heads for the surface. He breaches, and with him, out of the reverse splash, a long gasp of inhalation. He paddles furiously to the ledge and grabs it. “Three minutes!” His voice breaks, and he shouts again: “Three minutes. Swear on my grave. Swear on all our graves.”
“We believe you,” says one, after a long silence filled with lapping. “But do it again.” Skinsky pinches his nose and plunges back under. He counts one Mississippi, two Mississippi, until he reaches one hundred and eighty Mississippi, but when he surfaces to shout this, they are all gone.
July. Skinsky finds himself tanning in the sun for hours, sweating through different hats as he contemplates his burnish. At night he slathers aloe vera and sends e-mails. Mostly he is alone.
Sometimes he is joined by friends, grouped in threes and sixes. They hang out by his pool, eating snacks and saying little. They follow Skinsky into his house and in spasms of shivering browse his refrigerator. Some remember where the plates and cups and silverware are kept; some need reminding. His father brings lemonade and chips outside, silently wondering at the multitude of his son’s pack.
After an hour, the pack will become bored, and Skinsky will feel its attention on him, like a wet hand on his neck. The first time this happens, he will grab a foam surfboard from his garage, toss it onto the water and leap onto it. He will balance, perform a handstand as it sinks and water floods up his nose. The next time he feels the silence he will go for the board again, but something will stop him. He will go back to his chair and sit, his skin turning red and painful. Eventually he is alone again for his afternoons in the sun, which become afternoons in front of the TV, and his burned skin turns pale again.
One night Skinsky’s friends invite him to a party. They tell him to be ready at 9:30. At 9:00 they arrive. He is still in shorts and a t-shirt soaked with sweat from push-ups, but they pull him out anyway, tugging him down the stairs and out to the car, into which they squish, asses and laps and thighs all mashed together. The driver puts in a CD and plays it loud. Skinsky feels a finger drum on his hip, but he can’t tell who it belongs to.
They arrive at a wood, one-story house, with yellow blaring through the windows and bass rumbling the lawn. Skinsky has never been to this house before. When he comes through the front door he’s greeted by the lifted eyes of twenty or so familiar strangers. He readies himself to remember names. Tiny, all-colored bits of tissue paper drip from the walls, adhered with still wet glue. For a conversation starter, he considers asking if the party decorations are maliciously ruinous or merely accidentally so. When he finishes eyeing the room Skinsky notices that his friends have disappeared.
There is the sound of laughter from behind a closed door.
He hears someone say, “I don’t know man, I don’t know,” and then, “Alright, alright, alright, alright. We’ll ask him.”
Skinsky dances. He feels people watching him and tries not to let it affect his dancing. As he’s dancing, his elbow knocks into something that feels like an arm covered in shirt. He opens his eyes. A girl in pink flashes the most astoundingly white and symmetrical smile Skinsky has ever seen. He is paralyzed with indecision until the girl glides away and into another room. Skinsky feels a red cup pressed into his hands.
“This is blood,” a friend of Skinsky says, “You are a thirsty vampire. Scratch that, the thirstiest.”
Skinsky tries to bare his fangs. He drinks up.
“Skinsky, I bet you can’t drink all this alcohol,” another says, waggling a red cup at him.
Skinsky bets he can.
Soon the room is wobbly and Skinsky feels like a sickly vampire. A heart-shaped face calls out to him from across the room. He goes to it.
“You’re familiar,” Skinsky says. Through the backdoor he can see colored blotches, bodies in shiny, plastic coats.
The girl smiles her astounding smile. “Want to come outside?” she says. Skinsky does. Suddenly he is cold, and he is pulling his shorts down over his knees. He can hear voices but is unable to put a face to a voice. Indecipherable sentences pass back and forth over his head. When his stomach feels partially settled, he tries looking around. Faces of his friends are intermingled with the faces of the familiar strangers. Eyes dart to his and look away. Past the clustering of fabric Skinsky sees a rope ladder dangling down from the roof. He follows it to where it’s tied to a rain gutter. Propped or resting around the patio, other strange objects: a hula-hoop, ski boots, a pellet gun, boxing gloves, juice boxes, band-aids.
He hears someone say, “You know how a cat always lands on its feet?”
Skinsky feels anxiety pulse in his stomach.
Someone says, “I feel like I have some idea, but I would like to see.”
“Call me…Catman,” says Skinsky. He takes a giant step to the rope ladder, but then he feels woozy and stumbles, the ground rushing up at him. A hand takes his shoulder, steadying him. Another, arriving after the point is moot, grabs his elbow. They “Woaahh,” like he’s a horse that needs slowing.
Someone says “I think we overshot it. Let’s put him away.”
When Skinsky wakes up he’s on a couch. His face is stuck to the leather. When he pulls free he sees that it’s morning. Two boys he doesn’t recognize are drinking orange juice at a table behind him.
“You’re Skinsky?” one says, wiping his lips.
“I’m me,” Skinsky says.
The boy makes a thumbs-up sign and then inverts it.
“You,” he says, “are lame.”
Skinsky waits on the driveway for his father to pick him up.
“Friend’s forgot about you?” his father says.
Skinsky says nothing. His father changes the topic to a movie neither of them has seen. Just before they pull into the driveway, Skinsky decides to call it quits.
His presence, over the next week, dries up. He becomes scarce, a rare metal. He is seen at the drive-thru, driving off. He is misidentified at restaurants, at shoe stores—even in the mountains once, which turned out to be nothing but the shadow of a deer eating some leaves. An alleged Skinsky at the movie theatre proves to be a thirteen-year-old, freakishly tall and hormone-addled, leaping from seat to seat during a matinee. Skinsky is at no one’s house, in no one’s backyard, in no one’s photographs. But the friends of Skinsky have summer school, secret projects, brothers and sisters to care for. They have parents and occasionally grandparents to appease.
More weeks pass. It is still July—a hot, wide-open July they have to squint at. The friends of Skinsky feel summer passing from them, over them, diverting around them like redirected water. Their lives, they notice, have become flat and risk-less. Their bodies, sensitive and underused. They investigate various ways of undoing this. They are slightly less careful when crossing the street. They dream plans of visiting travel advisory countries. One night they all play the fainting game. They awake, dizzy and elated, but the feeling fades.
They make a pilgrimage to the roll-over bump at the intersection across from the movie theatre. They are piled into two cars. One will go first and drive over the spot of pavement that triggers the green light. The next will come hurtling down the street and hit the bump, go off the bump into the air. From this will come something definitive: a rope snap, the sudden sound of breaking free. They will feel, in their stomachs, the hard lump of anxiety dissolving into liquid. They will exorcize the spirit of Skinsky.
But they flub it—the red light turning green before they expect and the lead driver making a sudden, confused right turn; the hind car braking abruptly and careening up onto the sidewalk, where it sits, panic lights blinking, as the friends of Skinsky unload.
“What the fuck was that?” says the driver of the lead car. “I trigger it. I trigger it.”
“Already triggered,” say two or three of the passengers.
“Where’s Skinsky?” says a boy nursing a bloody nose. “Where is that guy?”
He’s at home. They find him there. They knock on his front door and are let in by his mother, who intuits their purpose and tells them that he is in the den, “doing his thing.” In walks one. In walks another. Some claim the lead. The leaders lead on into the den. He’s on the couch, watching TV.  He has a blanket pulled up to his chin and he’s putting his lips out for a straw.
They stare at Skinsky, reduced, looking saturated, puffy, funneling kernels of popcorn into his mouth with one hand. He’s watching Japanese cartoons. The characters have spiky hair and big, elliptical eyes filled nearly entirely with white. The subtitles are in English. The story involves a mythical sword split into pieces and the good and evil warriors in search of it.
The foremost leader finds the illuminated power button and shuts off the TV. He looks back to the group, suddenly unsure. Skinsky turns the TV back on with the remote. He slides his arm back under the blanket. He draws the edge over his nose so just his eyes peek out.
“Are you depressed?” someone asks.
“I don’t think so,” he says, the sound muffled by knitted wool.
“Are you sure?”
He pulls the blanket away to sip his soda. “No,” he says. “No I’m not sure.”
There is a silence.
“You’re fine,” someone says, elongating the vowel in fine.
“Skinsky,” someone else says, “Today we took the bump at seventy-five. We took it. Have you ever seen anyone do that?”
“No, never,” he says. “That’s idiotic. Did you really?”
“No,” someone else says. “But nearly.”
His mom appears in the kitchen, parting the crowd to remove from the oven a tray of something covered in thick, white sauce. The smell of garlic fills the room and everyone momentarily loses his or her train of thought.
His mom goes “Mmm, doesn’t that smell amazing?” and the ones who know her first name nod politely. She bustles around the kitchen, running water in the sink, lining up the silverware in the drawers, sponging oven racks.
“I wish I could stay for dinner,” one says.
Skinsky’s mom clasps her hands and beams at him and he looks away.
“Do you guys want to stay for dinner?” says Skinsky.
“Um,” he says.
“We shouldn’t,” say the rest.
“Well, okay,” she says, over-agreeably. “Well me and this one here will just have to have it all for ourselves. And plus the mister of course. He’ll want some too.” She laughs intensely. She leaves.
“We’re sorry if your mom heard any of that,” someone says. “By the way.”
He stares at the cartoon. The battles rages. Pieces of the sword are everywhere, and hopes of reconstructing it look slim. Skinsky turns on his side, touching his nose to the cushion.
July. Endless July. Claustrophobia. Undirected longings. Within a week six of them are in Prague, staying with someone or other’s cousins. They send group e-mails littered with exclamation points. They return, listless. There is talk of jet lag. Two enroll in a German philosophy class at the junior college and abandon themselves to unfathomable texts. Three fall sick with something, possibly mono. Another almost chokes to death on a fruit cup, and they stop hanging out with a group of four, whom they never liked to begin with.
The group reels, recovers, finds itself on a peeling balcony one warm night. There is a moon halo, piercing the clouds. Several nod up at the sky occasionally, reaffirming the existence of the perfectly round light. Others talk, listen, or remain silent, doing neither. One, who is usually silent, tonight is talkative. Unsure where one goes once on a train of thought, he gets the idea to reminisce.
“Oh, Skinsky,” he says. “Oh how we miss a Skinsky. Oh how we miss a Skinsky missing a Skinsky. Oh how we miss. What was best about him? Was it his grace? His balance? I think it was his grace. But others will say his balance. I’m not sure it shall ever be settled. Did we take him for granted? Maybe. Did we abuse his trust? Perhaps.”
He goes on like this. He finds himself very far from his point. He decides to perform a feat. Then he is on the railing, a killing distance above the ground. The group turns to take him in. They take turns, taking him in. They say “What are you doing?” and “Are you drunk?” and “Do you know how high that is?”
Up on the railing, he looks for some way to extend his quest. A tree branch. A branch whose bristles he can barely see, bouncing in wind. This is a branch he could reach. Would Skinsky come this far and quit? Hasn’t he seen him the very same way, knees flexed, center of gravity hovering out over the fall? He tries to interpret the outward appearance of a Skinsky, and by this he hopes to draw inward the actions that certain postures imply.
He crouches, knees up by his face, arms straight out behind him gripping the railing. He lets himself pull against the tension in his arms. He sights the tree branch. There is a silence that sounds like waiting, and he leans out past the point of return, reaching for it.
August. They no longer talk, merely vocalize and wait. Physically, they are in peak health. But all day they brood. At night they sleep like lions, dreaming of elusive things. They talk only when moving between places of sitting or standing, on trips to the refrigerator or to retrieve an item, a bong, a board game, a toothbrush from someone’s car. And even then, to no response. Their statements shrivel in the air and slough downward like dead skin.
From nothing, one night, someone says, “What is it about that phrase?” He studies the ceiling. “Why is it the first phrase I want to say?”
Later another says, “I think it’s, you know, kitsch. It’s sap, it’s Hollywood. We’re indulging ourselves. We’re getting fat and stupid on this crap. I think we should get off this.”
“Death defying?” says the first, “Defying death? Is that the phrase? Or is it just the alliteration? Death ignoring? Death avoiding?”
Much, much later, as he is being dropped off at his house, a third remarks, “This, this, this, this, this, is ending.”
They think of June. They think of school. They think of classes. They think of tests. They think of secret beer. They think of hallucinated sunsets. They think of homeroom. A word, a smell, the arrangement of food on a plate will tug them involuntarily among distant moments. They need a Skinsky to return them to the present. Never are they more fully where they are than when their hearts are out on a ledge with Skinsky. During sex, maybe. But no other time. Not discussing the day’s events with family. Not alone, scheming, or just sitting. Not with each other. Though sometimes, in glimpses—no, still no.
They visit Skinsky again. His mother watches them move through the house and into the backyard. Skinsky is sitting in a plastic chair, drinking from a red cup. The friends of Skinsky approach until they are arced around him in rows, like shark teeth.
“What?” he says.
Behind him the fence separates his house from his neighbor’s. Skinsky looks over his shoulder, then back at his friends, instinctually looking for an escape route. Skinsky stands, chair legs scraping, sending his dog hustling off.
“Forget if you think I’m doing any more tricks.” he says. “Forget it. I’m not your trick guy.”
“But Skinsky,” they say.
Skinsky shuts his eyes, holds them shut, and then opens them. “What?” he says.
A boy puts his hand on Skinsky’s shoulder.
“You are our guy,” he says. “You’re our guy.”
Skinsky sits down in his chair. He puts his palms on his knees, leans forward, and begins drawing deep breaths. He rubs his face with his hands. A few friends come forward and begin massaging his shoulders. He sits stiffly for a while, and then leans back into their grips. A girl comes forward and begins scratching his head with her nails. The others sit, or stand, staring out over the backyard.
“You’re the king,” they tell him. “The king of feats.”
They wait until dark in his living room, and then they go out to the trampoline carrying flashlights. Skinsky had no idea he had so many flashlights, so many D batteries. He sits on the lip of the trampoline, untying his shoes. The flashlights illuminate his hands, the laces, the spot of ground a few feet away where he tosses his keys. Some lights fragment off to hit distant trees, corners of darkness in his yard. But soon they move in unison.
Skinsky begins to bounce.
A girl in flower socks thinks it’s a little sad, bringing Skinsky back to this. But then she begins tracking him with her flashlight, the beam making him stand out big and only against the black. A boy shivering beneath two sweaters follows Skinsky with a flashlight heavy in his hand and begins matching his breaths to the squeak of the trampoline.
Skinsky throws his arms into the air, urging up his height. He comes down, the flashlights follow, and he rises again.
They watch him rapturously, lifting the faces of their flashlights to illuminate his body in concentric circles of dull yellow. His arms and shoulders are completely slack. His knees bend slightly as he hits and returns to the air. Some of them begin to jut their chins involuntarily as he lands in expectation of the leap.
Skinsky at the summit of his bounce. Skinsky imagining the swipe of lights across his chest and up and down his body as he bounces. Skinsky looking out to the pool, measuring the jump, feeling himself hitting the water and sinking, the sudden chill of it.  Skinsky all smiles, falling through the air, landing and propelling himself out. Skinsky sailing through the air, raising his legs in front of him and urging his body out. Skinsky in the air crossing the space above their heads, when the flashlights go off.
The friends of Skinsky hear a sound of soft against hard, and the sound of pain following it, a wordless, guttural revving of the lower throat. The revving opens up to a roar, a single sustained syllable that crests and then breaks over them, and gathers strength again. It is the sound of Skinsky in pain and they grit their teeth against it. They stand in the near black, backlit blue by the hue of the pool, staring at the fuzzy spot of night where Skinsky hit. It is impossible to make out anything but a faintly moving shape, a shape that could be a trick of their eyes, and a sound of their own struggles up from within them.
Still making the sound, they grip the grips of their flashlights, thumbs probing the rubbery buckle of each on-button. There is a click, and then another. And then, like a tiny city at dusk, the whole of them is illuminated from within. Their flashlights brighten a span of air above them, casting weak light on the trunk of a lemon tree some fifty feet back and the white tips of fence at the edge of the property. They move their lights along the top of the fence, and then pull their massive spotlight down over wet blades of grass, towards the spot of cement where Skinsky fell. The light passes over him, and he turns up his face to meet it.