The fan will be easy to replace, and Zef can manage the first aid for his dad's legs, but the prosthetics CPU? He'll need the same kind used in all the models from that generation. That's needle in a haystack shit.

Plus, he needs to get all this figured out before dawn, when he's gotta get back to the city, to his horror-movie job, to the killer maniac with weird eating habits.

Can't do it all on his own. So, reluctantly, he goes next door.

Leo sits in the camp chair just outside his trailer, full lips wrapped around the neck of a half-drunk beer. His sleek, black hair is tied in a topknot, shirt open to combat the summer heat. A trickle of sweat runs down the gutter of his chest.

Once upon a time, Zef would imagine licking it off.

Only, there was a catch. A snag. Because Zef used to have a big, fat crush on Leo. But then Leo turned out to be the sort of cis gay who, when Zef came out, defaulted to one of two modes: pity or awkward discomfort.

Zef didn't know which he hated more. The pity sucked. It came from a 'sorry you'll never be a real man' place, and fuck that.

The awkward discomfort sucked harder. It was linked to Zef's dumb, childhood crush. Leo seemed to live in fear that the trans guy next-door was going to hamstring him into having sex or else label him transphobic. It stung. Zef didn't want anyone's pity fuck, and his existence shouldn't have felt like a threat to Leo's homosexuality anyway.

Most of all, Zef didn't need cis gay validation.

But did a bitty, petty part of him fantasise about a glorious return to the bayou post-transition, looking sexy and cis-passing and turning Leo's head anyway?

Regrettably. Yeah.

Leo looks up at his approach and— there it is— the awkward smile.

"Hey, Zef. Thought you moved to the city?"

"Yeah. Missed the smell of bog water." He tries to sound casual and just sounds nervous. "Look, I hate asking favours, but...Dad's in a bad way." Leo stands up, but Zef puts out a hand to stop him. "He'll be all right. I just wanted to ask if you had any antibiotics lying around just in case?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, wait here a minute."

Leo goes into his trailer and emerges again, tossing Zef a bottle, pills rattling inside. The label reads 'Amoxicillin 250mg. Take 3 times per day.'

Zef pockets them and gives Leo a sheepish look. "Thanks. I can pay you back later."

"Ah, forget it, Zef. We're practically family, ain't we?"

Zef's throat tightens, the memory of Ollie lodged there. He can see the name on Leo's lips, too. The frayed, live wire—the broken connection between them—crackles with all that remains unsaid.

Leo sighs. "Should visit him, shouldn't we?"

The offer surprises him, but Zef says, "Yeah. Sounds good."

They pick some wildflowers along the way. Little bundles of periwinkle phlox and some copper irises growing around the wooded edge of the bayou. Leo leads the way to the bank where he keeps his old canoe, and they pile in. Every time, Zef thinks it's gonna start spouting leaks, but every time, it holds. They grab paddles and slip between the trees, water whispering against the canoe's flanks. The bloated moon, near-full, reflects off the water enough they don't need a flashlight.

It's not far to paddle. They wanted to make sure it was near enough to see from the banks, no matter what.

The tupelo tree they chose for Ollie rises out of the water tall and tapering, thick around the roots. A knot in those roots forms a little alcove, large enough to get a hand inside. Zef puts the flowers in there—a blooming heart. Carved into the bark beneath, it reads simply:

Oliver Dawson

2133-2158

Crocodile Smile

The last bit Leo insisted upon. "He always said that. Stop those crocodile tears, crocodile's are always smiling." It never sat right with Zef, for a couple reasons.

First, Zef had saved Ollie from a gator when they were little. And yeah, gators and crocs weren't the same exact thing, but there were still toothy scars on Ollie's arm until the day he died.

The second, because in the end, Ollie's crocodile tears had been the thing that got him.

Deep in that tree knot is the magnet. The little duck holding the heart. It used to pin notes to the fridge. Leftover lasagna for you, or Remember to pick up bread, we're out, or simply, Love you. Messages traded between people whose schedules crossed irregularly.

The last thing that magnet held was Ollie's suicide note.

They met so long ago, Zef hardly remembers it. It was before they moved to the bayou, back when Matthias still ran the solar farm. It had been a cold dessert night when he found two boys sheltering under one of the panels in a single sleeping bag.

Matthias took them in, because of course he did. Ollie became Zef's shadow. So timid he made Zef look brazen. So quiet, Zef looked loud. He came out of his shell a bit at a time. When Zef daydreamed aloud about the adventures he would one day embark upon, Ollie would say, "Can I come with you?"

They were family, but not brothers. There wasn't a word for it.

Ollie and Leo avoided the topic of their folks, but Zef gathered from the breadcrumbs of detail scattered throughout one conversation or another that both mom and dad had been addicts. Too many work performance enhancers could do that.

Then Matthias lost the solar farm. Bought two trailers in the sticks with the meagre money left to him and took a job at a cybernetics factory. That's where he got recruited, with promises of a healthy retirement and enough credits to put all three of his misfit gremlin kids through school.

They weren't calling it a war back then. But Matthias got deployed for days at a time, so Zef, Leo and Ollie were on their own a lot. Matthias wired over money for food. Zef spent more time doing odd fixer jobs for cash than going to class. Child Support Services labelled anyone in their income category a lost cause. Children of military? No exception. The enemy combatants of this war were corporations, not enemy nations. Nobody could bleat about misappropriation of their tax dollars. They funded the war every time they bought themselves a new gadget.

So Zef and Ollie fished through scrapyards like buzzards and picked up any old job that paid. They built blanket forts in Zef's trailer and watched trashy net series late into the night. Most nights, Ollie slept in Zef's trailer, his asthmatic snores soothing in their familiarity.

Those were the rose-tinted memories, the ones Zef tries to focus on. But these memories were gems plucked from a dumpster of rotten things. He also remembered grifters who got him to fix scavenged cars and sped off in them without paying, laughing and calling him 'dumb bitch.' Leaving food he couldn't afford at the cash register. Experiencing puberty amongst men who didn't share his parts, who tried their best, but didn't understand why some days, Zef couldn't get dressed without crying.

And then there was Ollie. Waking from nightmares and sobbing himself to sleep. Nails bitten to the quick 'til they bled. The sound of a car backfiring could fuck him up for hours. He white-knuckled his way through each and every day.

One night, Zef couldn't hear Ollie's snores and asked if he couldn't sleep because of the heat. It was a humid summer, the sheets sticking to their sweaty limbs like damp paper towel. Ollie said, "Naw, it isn't that." Despite the heat, he rolled closer and asked Zef if he'd ever kissed anyone, if he wanted to try. Just for practice, he said.

As first kisses went, there was nothing wrong with it. It would take another decade and then some for Zef to recognize the real reason he laid their frozen, petrified. He told Ollie the next day that they shouldn't. They'd get in trouble. What if it wrecked their friendship?

It wasn't a lie. He meant it at the time. But with the power of hindsight and a net's-worth of education, he now had a word for that unease.

Dysphoria.

Their friendship withstood that test, and each era of Zef's life after. The cap wars of his childhood. The desperate confusion of his teens. The studious fugue state of university in his early-twenties.

Then Zef found the words for how he'd always felt. Transgender. Gay.

At the same time, Ollie found a job he said was going to change their lives.

Things looked good for a bit.

Then Ollie quit taking Zef's calls. Matthias would ask if Zef had seen Ollie lately. Leo said he'd been jumpy. One day, he came home with a black eye. Zef, miles away in the city, felt helpless to find out what the matter was. Ollie used to tell him everything.

March break, he went back to the bayou. Ollie was there. Sort of. Zef didn't recognize him, twenty pounds skinnier with scars he wouldn't talk about. Ollie didn't recognize Zef, either, with shorter hair, different clothes, a different name.

During that break, Zef returned from the grocery store to a note on the fridge. It read:

Don't go in the bedroom. Don't let Leo in either.

Don't waste money on a funeral. I'm not worth it.

I'm sorry. I couldn't do it anymore.

I'm losing my mind. I couldn't lose you too.

Love, your Ollie