“Be careful with that shit.”
            His words materialized as tiny puffs, smoke mixing with the chilled condensation of a winter breath. Somehow his teeth were still white, straight, orthodontically perfect.
            I looked to the pills in my hand, floating and naked and untethered in my palm. Not in a baggie or a bottle, hinting at freedom or haste. If I squinted, they looked like Tic Tacs or baby teeth.
            “Yeah, yeah, okay.”
            I wasn’t about to take advice from a drug dealer. He was clearly not an economist, otherwise, he would have suggested I eat them like candy then come quickly back for more. Maybe he just didn’t want to kill me, which is an economic strategy in its own right. It was sort of sweet, I guess.
            Money exchanged hands, and I was unsure what to do with the pills. I could deposit them in my pocket where they would get lost in the folds or freefall onto a grimy bathroom floor when I pulled down my pants. For a second, tossing them all into my mouth seemed like the safest option. I bounced on my toes in the chill of the dank alley, the pills dancing in my wide-open palm, communion-style. From the outside, you’d be unsure who was offering and who was receiving.
            “You look good, Bri,” he said through clouds. He looked me up and down, not with a gawking sexual eye but pure observation. A scientist or an artist or an appraiser.
            I wondered if he would recognize me. I had known it was him the second I saw his gangly silhouette approaching me through the puddles of streetlights. It had been fifteen years, and while I had expanded and contracted and become more opaque in the intervening time, Parker looked nearly the same, hardly altered by the unforgiving hand of manhood.
            The silence between us was excruciating, the grievous pain of social inelegance. The possible responses pinged wildly through my head – play dumb, admit my instant recognition, act unfazed, walk away. He hesitated, his cigarette halfway to his open mouth, paused, an awkward position that could only signal interruption or waiting. I wished that I’d retained the weight I’d gained in college or chopped all my hair off, anything to make me unrecognizable from the last time I’d seen him.
            We began talking at the exact same moment so that our overlapping words came out garbled and inaudible.
            “Thank y—”
            “Sorry, I—”
            The bumbled start-stopping, making this encounter all the more intolerable. I hated when dealers tried to make conversation, tried to make our interaction anything more than transactional. If I hadn’t been going into this blind, the result of a referral from a friend of a friend, I wouldn’t have been caught so off-guard, but I hadn’t expected this ghost of my past to show up with my pills jiggling loosely in his hands. His hands were nice now, normal, adult, no chipped black nail polish or the silly tattoos we’d scrawl on each other with ball-point pen, markers of our fledgling romance or perceived ownership, as much as teenagers can manage to be harnessed by anybody.
            The last time I saw him all those years ago, my lips were still chapped from kissing him. I still wore the underwear from the night before, the black cotton panties with the tiny ribbon bow, and I was still sore where he had slipped his fingers beneath them. Nascent, green, like unripened fruit yanked early from the vine, I hadn’t yet built up calluses to a boy’s touch. I drank up the pain, each sting a reminder of his recent presence, physical evidence of my deflowering. His lips looked the same as before when he said goodbye, climbing through the sliding door of his family’s minivan when his father picked him up from church camp.
            “Bye, Bri.” Garbled, like his words were now, he could have said “baby” or “maybe” or “save me”. He moved his ass from the air and into the seat, graceless human movements, and slid the door closed behind him, ingraining the image of the long-haired, lanky teenager that would remain in my mind for the next fifteen years.
            I was always shocked when I saw present-day iterations of people I knew in the past, like I hadn’t expected the years since to have occurred for anyone else. I wished for my initial impressions to remain, their mistakes fossilized and immutable, as well as my perennial judgements. And yet, I wanted the benefit of the doubt that I denied them, the implicit understanding that a decade and a half could turn a person inside out.
            Where was Parker on this spectrum? Did he see me as a solid and immobile object, or did he see a vessel that had repeatedly been emptied and refilled?
            His hands were gentle where he held his cigarette, pressed between those lithe, tapered fingers, a piano player’s hands. I pictured them stretching to hit a B flat, and wondered how many other girls they’d been inside of since.
            “But for real, be careful.”
            Did he say that to all the girls he sold drugs to, or just the ones he knew were gullible? Was this a power-trip thing, like I didn’t know what I was doing?
            I should have just said thanks and walked away, tossed the pills into the gutter or under my tongue.
            “Do you still…” I couldn’t get the words out.
            His eyes were wide and dark, all pupils. His cigarette needed to be ashed, and his fingers twitched as the heat crawled towards them. “Still what?”
            “Go to church?”
            He laughed, turning from me and ashing, back to baseline. My question was either not a surprise or too ridiculous to be worth taking seriously.
            “Fuck no.”
            I wondered how that went, when he hung up his altar-boy garments for the last time, felt the final eucharist dissolving on his tongue, the conclusive and hollow genuflection. I couldn’t remember my last Mass, the last time I talked to God. It had to be in college sometime, I suppose. I guess when faith is on your own accord is when it disintegrates. I imagined it was the same for Parker.
            I gripped my hand tightly around the pills and shoved my balled fist into my pocket.
            “Well, that’s it. Thanks,” I said with finality, talking about the drugs, not his faith.
            He smiled halfway with one side of his mouth, the way I remembered from church camp. Across the top of the campfire, the flames licking his dimples, distorting his image in the rising heat. Moments later, he’d lead me into the darkness of the trees behind the lodge while the other campers sang off-key songs about redemption to an acoustic guitar. It made me want to kiss him now, the nostalgia and nervousness overwhelming, but he waved slowly with just the tips of his fingers and started down the alley away from me. “Sure thing,” shouted over his shoulder.
            This clearly meant more to me than to him, as it had before.
            As I walked away, clicking the pills between my fingers in my pocket, I wondered whether I’d see him in another fifteen years, when I needed a reminder of when I was innocent and passionate and reverent, or in a day or two, when I needed more drugs to feel those things in vain.