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You don’t believe in omens, because you can’t tear an omen down for parts to see which gear makes it tick. You believe that if you have thirty-two dollars in your pocket, two packs of mint Orbit, and a half-disassembled cassette player that only plays through the left ear and only plays The Replacements, you are practically the king of this fucking world. Or, at the very least, the king of the parking lot behind the abandoned knitwear factory in Queens.
You’re sixteen. Your forehead is constantly slick with a thin layer of grease and motor oil, and Howard Stark talks to you exclusively in short, clipped sentences where the subject is always “you” and the verb is always “ruined everything again.”
And so you’re sitting on the hood of your beat-up 1978 Chevy Nova, which you bought from a junkyard for two hundred bucks and rebuilt right on your bedroom carpet while your parents were at some charity gala at the Met. The metal of the hood cools beneath your jeans with a quiet, tinny creak. November in New York feels like a wet cardboard box that someone stuffed a running vacuum cleaner into. The sky is gray as asphalt, the asphalt is gray as the sky, and caught between them is you, trying to spark a cigarette with a lighter that’s completely out of flint.
“If you flick that plastic piece of junk one more time, Stark, I’m going to develop a tic. Truly.”
You don’t even turn around, because you know that voice. It sounds like someone trying to speak very politely while holding a couple of rusty razor blades in their mouth.
Loki Laufeyson is perched on a chain-link fence. How he got up there with those endless, gangly legs of his is a mystery to the laws of gravity. He’s sixteen too, but he looks like he was raised in a Victorian crypt on a diet of gothic novels and other people's blood. He’s wearing an oversized dark green sweater—looks like he stole it from some homeless Irish professor—and it hangs off his collarbones like a duvet on a clothesline. Loki is in the other track at school, never turns in his gym credits because he has a “doctor's note for an existential crisis,” and absolutely every guy on the football team hates him because he knows how to smile in a way that makes them feel stupid without even understanding why.
“Do you have matches, Laufeyson?” you ask, tossing the lighter at the windshield. It bounces off with a plastic clack. “If not, shut your trap and let me suffer in peace.”
“I have matches,” Loki says, sliding down from the fence. He lands on half-bent knees completely silently, like a cat with foam rubber inside instead of bones. “But I’m not just giving them to you. Because smoking kills, Tony. And I want to be the only one who has a hand in your finale. Let’s just say it’s a matter of personal prestige.”
He steps closer. He smells of damp paper, cheap vending-machine cola, and something very distant and minty. He climbs onto the hood beside you, unceremoniously digging his sharp knee into your thigh.
You look at him from the side. He has a stupid nose—too long, with a slight bump—and messy black curls that he’s always trying to slick back with tap water in the school bathroom, but they still stick out in all directions like the feathers of a crazed blackbird. You think that if your life were a movie, some really slow, sappy acoustic guitar song would start playing right about now. But instead, the only sound coming from the half-open window of your Nova is a raspy, farting bass from a blown speaker, and the air smells like foul foam from the car wash next door.
“Fine,” you say. “What do you want? I’ve got three-quarters of a pack of Marlboros and a blueprint for a silencer I sketched during history class.”
“Keep the blueprint, I’m not helping you blow up the school restroom,” Loki says, reaching into his sweater pocket and pulling out a box. A plain cardboard matchbox where someone has drawn a crooked little skull with a black marker. “I want you to explain the stars to me.”
You blink.
“What? Laufeyson, have you been reading too much of your stupid Kafka again? I fix engines. If you want stars, go to Mr. Harper, he’s the one teaching astronomy to the seniors.”
“Harper thinks the universe is just a bunch of balls spinning around because they’re bored,” Loki strikes a match. The flash of sulfur briefly paints his face a venomous orange. He brings the flame to your cigarette, cupping it with his palm against the Brooklyn draft. His fingers are so close to your nose that you can see a blue stain under his thumb fingernail from a leaking gel pen. “He’s dense. All of them are dense, thinking that if they give a thing a name, they understand it. This is a “hood.” This is a “cigarette.” But you... when you look at a blueprint, you see how everything moves inside, don’t you? You know, those gears of yours.”
You take a drag. The bitter, cheap smoke burns your throat, and for a second it feels so good you just want to lie down right here on this rusty hood and stay there until the turn of the millennium.
“I see them,” you admit, exhaling the smoke right into Loki's face. He doesn’t even flinch, just narrows his eyes slightly. “They don’t just spin; they mesh together. If one stops, the whole system turns into a piece of dead shit. It’s called kinematic linkage.”
“See?” Loki takes the cigarette from you. Right out of your fingers. Without asking. That’s his eternal thing—taking your stuff as if it always belonged to him and you were just temporarily holding it. He takes a small drag, immediately starts coughing, twisting his mouth comically, but stubbornly hands the cigarette back to you. “The stars are gears too. Just very big ones. And if we’re sitting here in Queens on a rusty car, and we’re both sixteen, it means some incredibly distant contraption in the constellation of Orion clicked exactly three degrees to the left. Do you get it?”
You look at him and feel something inside you—somewhere near the solar plexus, where normal people have an anatomical heart, but you probably have a little junction box—make a sharp, painful click.
This isn't the romance from the books your mother buys at airports. This isn't about “butterflies in your stomach.” Butterflies in your stomach are just a clinical symptom of food poisoning. This is something else. It’s the feeling that you’ve spent your whole life putting together a puzzle that had a picture of a pretty, glossy house on the box, but when you assemble the last three pieces, it turns out to be the blueprint for a nuclear bomb. And this guy in the green sweater is the only one who knows which wire to cut so it doesn’t blow up right now.
“You’re a moron, Laufeyson,” you say very quietly. “A rare, certified moron.”
“I know,” he smiles. His front teeth are a little crooked, one overlapping the other, and it makes his smile look completely... real. Free of his usual high-school arrogance. “But you’re still sitting here with me, not with the cheerleaders.”
“Cheerleaders screech too much,” you take the cigarette back, your fingers brushing his for a second. They are cold, like ice from a soda fountain. “And they smell like strawberry lip gloss. I hate strawberries.”
“And what do I smell like?” Loki tilts his head, his curls falling over his forehead, covering one eye.
You take one last drag and flick the butt down. It hits a puddle with a soft, hissing *pssst*.
“You smell like trouble with the cops, Laufeyson. And library dust.”
Loki says nothing. He just stares at you with his stupid green eyes, where New York is reflected upside down—little gray boxes of houses, crooked telephone poles, and striped smoke from the power plant chimney. And then he does something you completely don’t expect. Because Tony Stark always calculates the variables; Tony Stark always has an algorithm in his head.
Loki reaches out, grabs the collar of your greasy leather jacket, and yanks you toward him.
It turns out clumsy. Your teeth clash—painfully, leaving the metallic taste of blood on your tongue. Your nose bumps against his sharp cheekbone, and his curls get in your eyes. But his dry, chapped-from-the-November-wind lips press against yours.
It lasts maybe three seconds. There is the sound of a distant siren somewhere on Jamaica Avenue and the heavy, loud way Loki breathes right against your chin.
And then he pulls back just as abruptly as he moved in. A strange, pinkish flush creeps onto his cheeks—the first time in your life you’ve seen this deathly pale guy blush. He yanks the collar of his sweater up, burying his mouth all the way to his nose, and turns away toward the fence.
“Sorry,” he mutters from under the wool. His voice sounds muffled and somehow completely childlike. “That... that was a miscalculation...”
You sit on the hood, feeling a tiny, hot bead of blood swelling on your lower lip, and lick it away. You look at his hunched back, at those sharp shoulder blades pressing through the green knitwear, and realize that your 1978 Chevy Nova will never be just a car again. It is now the place where Loki Laufeyson broke your perfect coordinate system.
“Hey,” you nudge his shoulder. Loki doesn’t budge, just burrows his head deeper into his shoulders. “Laufeyson. Look at me.”
“No.”
“Look at me, or I’m starting the engine and ramming this fence to hell. With you on it.”
Loki slowly, millimeter by millimeter, turns his head. His eyes are angry, sharp; he’s clearly ready to spit out some long, complex insult like the ones he usually scribbles in the margins of his literature textbooks.
But you don’t let him say a word. You just reach out, grab the sleeve of his stupid sweater, and pull him right back to you. No algorithms this time. Gently this time, so that his cold nose tucks into your neck, and your fingers get tangled in his stupid curls that smell like rain and Queens.
“Your calculations are fine,” you whisper somewhere into his ear, feeling him finally stop freezing up and slowly, with a sigh, relax in your arms. “For a humanities major, they’re actually pretty good. It’s going to snow soon, let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you that stupid cherry pie at the 24-hour diner. I’ve got fourteen dollars left.”
Loki doesn’t answer, but his thin hand, blue veins showing on the wrist, tightly grips the pocket of your jacket. And you realize that Orion up there can spin wherever the hell it wants. You don’t give a single, solitary damn.