CHAPTER 1

ON THOSE CHANCE TIMES WHEN IDID WAKE UP, I always had a boner. I’d look down, and there it was—nothing exceptional, but a fact nonetheless; I was a pervert at twelve. The sheets on my bed hadn’t been washed in a while and could’ve climbed down the ladder of my prehistoric bunk bed themselves, but I ignored that, rolled over, and stared out the window of my parents’ fourteenth-floor apartment. I lay on my back with my head hanging off the bed. There was a radiator equipped with a large cover below me, so my bed butted up to it rather than the wall, which allowed a good eighteen inches of space. You’d think the manufacturer would have had some kind of child restraint to prevent me from being able to crawl down and come out under the desk below my bed.

Or if I felt so motivated, I could stand there on top of the radiator, hands pressed against the panes of glass that prevented me from falling out; I think every kid fantasizes about standing on a ledge that high. Feeling the blood seeping to my head, my nose clogging up quickly—I had a crooked septum for a kid of my age—I rolled over onto my stomach and propped myself up on my elbows.

She wasn’t there. I rolled back and thought. She lived in one of the many windows across the way that was