Once upon a time, a 13 year old snarl-ball and tangle headed, horse-loving nerd with chewed up sneakers, and paint-caked bellbottoms was minding her own business when a bleached 14 year old, wannabe musician in a Dead Kennedys shirt with a mouth that could talk the pants off a mannequin in a department store (even at that age) hit her up for lunch money.

Again, and again, and again, and again.

Whether it was out of survival or that intangible, indescribable thing, or both, the two became friends.

One day on his birthday, she punched him, multiple times, because feelings weren't something she did or understood.

Him being...him in the making, liked it, more than both of them thought he would.

They claimed to be "JUST FRIENDS" as they rode the school bus back and forth, through Mexico City. They called each other every day, and made excuses to stay after school to engage in minor, possibly major, acts of delinquency; then there was the matter of a little guitar recital.

Until one day she left, and he stayed. Over the expensive and extensive long-distance conversations, they realized...what had been fucking obvious to everyone else.

So they tried. And tried. And tried.

Until they couldn't.

She got angry.

He went down some dark places.

She fought. He wrote.

They unspooled as parallel scripts, the gypsy and the cowboy, playing games of emotional hop-scotch every so often.

Years later, sick of it all, he put on his massive pair of shiny, silver spurs and showed up knocking at her wagon wheels, parked thousands of miles away.

Annoyed at his presumptiveness, and thinking he might be back for lunch money, she tried to punch him again.

But he wasn't of course. And she couldn't of course.

The rest, as they say, is literature.

Registry