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girls, and all girls didn’t like him. He was weird. All girls told him so. Even the ones he had sex with told him so, and the sex was mostly secret. They weren’t his girlfriends. Even Paula told him so, and she was his best friend.
    On the plus side, for the last year and change, all girls had liked to look at him. The soft pads of fat on his hips and belly had melted away, and his shoulders had spread themselves apart, until he was shaped like a triangle built out of hardened flesh. This made the girls forget that they’d called him Moosetard in middle school. Now they mostly called him William.
    He’d broken himself of the comfort of covering his lips in spit bubbles. All girls did not like that. He carried a secret penny in his mouth instead, liking the tang of the copper on his tongue. In middle school, he sometimes cried and punched his hands into walls or the faces or stomachs of his classmates. Football helped stop that. His therapist had delighted his father by suggesting it, saying contact sports were exceptional stress relief, though William couldn’t see what he had to be stressed about. His grades were perfect. Still, he had learned to save the internal pulse and heave for football, and now it felt good to feel it building up red inside him, to let it spend itself in the hard smashing of his body into other bodies. He won games, and his face was symmetrical in ways that pleased all girls, so sometimes he got to spend the rest in sex.
    Then he saw Bridget, this subset who mattered in a way all girls did not, and wanted her.
    He still wants her. He holds his angry body rigid in the Circle K minimart, staring at the kind of detergent she used to buy, hearing her say, It smells like the color green , in his head. He uses Arm & Hammer now, which smells like clean nothing. The smell of nothing is another way to never have her voice sound in his mind. There were five very bad months of external silence, and after that, he had to push the voice of Bridget that he still heard internally out of him, away entirely, banished. She has not existed in his thoughts, not for seven months now.
    Not until this moment, which makes sense, mathematically. He didn’t see it before because he’s not good at following the passage of time. When he’s in the lab, he’ll wind himself so deep into the helixes, unraveling the secret language of the viral RNA, then suddenly realize his body has become ravenous and desperate for a bathroom. But, seven months plus five months equals twelve, and twelve is a year.
    A year ago, today.
    Last night, Father Lewis came by the house again, for the first time in weeks. William wouldn’t let him in.
    He looked blandly at Father Lewis and said, “I am not up to having company,” even though Paula was there, sitting in plain sight on the sofa, reading case files.
    Paula told him to say it because these days, he is unable to tolerate people in the house that aren’t her. It is a social convention that should have driven the priest off, but Father Lewis only looked at William with his eyes all moist and said, “Anniversaries are hard, William. They can open up a wound that might feel closed, make it fresh again.”
    Now William connects this speech to the current date, and sees that Father Lewis was not making a random observation. He was being personal. But Father Lewis has shown up on the porch and said so many things over the last year, most of them not relevant.
    “You can always call me, if you want to talk,” the priest went on. “I understand your anger with God.” But William is no more angry with God than he is angry with unicorns. Neither was present at the accident.
    Policemen came to explain it to him, and the words they said were not words he could process. They were not words that he could hear. Eventually, he caught their meaning, and then William told it to himself this way: Bridget’s Saturn has no backseat anymore, and the backseat was where Twyla sat, strapped into her