She always saw sat in him an icicle. She knew it was there, something raw and sharp, sitting linear from the top of his ribs, following through to  the curve of his spine. It sat almost silently and she did not know if anyone else saw it, but to her it was clear, as clear as it was transparent. It was in the way he stuttered and grasped for the flashlight, the way he turned when eyes were downcast; now and then it became so strong that it snuck into the corners of his words, holding and reaching to cling on to each singluar letter that he pronounced, sometimes spilling itself from him in pain, his arm jutting out to grasp. 

He held himself together amidst. When girls spoke it beat harder and rose, turning pale under the moon, the lining of the stars. The girl admired it so and termed him ‘the boy with frost-bite’. He was the middle way between two parallel lines that would not touch. He lay in the roadway, racing cars and you could of seen, like she did, the way they pumped through him, each muddling and aiming to get direction, his whole body one trying to reach for control, for the singular straight and narrow. He was a quiet storm but shaken none the less. And she knew he could love, how she could see it, she repeated it to herself that she was the witness of a hurricane falling to a rainbow. She pictured it, eyes opium struck orchids,  and in that glimmer their lines ran perpendicular to one another, together.