Danny Aguirre

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The tow truck seat has a busted spring that finds the same spot in Nasser Khalil's lower back every single time, and at three in the morning in Houston that spot is the only thing left in the world. Sixty-three years of it. The dispatch radio hisses. The lazy eye drifts toward the window like it's looking for a way out, and honestly you understand the impulse, because you have been Nasser Khalil for a little under a minute and it is already enough. Dad bod slumped into a bucket seat built for a smaller man. Gray hair matted flat under a ballcap that isn't yours. Somewhere behind you, a Camry waits on the hook with a blown alternator and a driver who won't stop texting his insurance company. This is not a life. This is a shift, and the shift never ends, and you spun the wheel five hundred and sixty-one times before this to try to stop feeling exactly this specific kind of tired, and here you are again, tired in a new man's spine within sixty seconds of putting it on. You reach for the phone that isn't a phone, the site that isn't a site, and you spin, because whatever is waiting has to be better than this seat.

The fountain water is still moving when you land, green-lit, ordinary, and the coin has already left the thumb.

It goes down without turning once. The splash folds inward, small and wrong, like the pool swallowed instead of receiving, and you are kneeling at the tiled lip of it in a green T-shirt with a backpack strap still hooked over one shoulder, gray eyes on the water, waiting the half-second a wish takes to feel real.

The knee against the cold tile arrives first — young, unhurt, a knee that has never had a reason to complain — and it is such a relief that you almost laugh with someone else's mouth. Then the shirt. Cotton, thin, worn soft at the collar from washing, and it gives you a Tuesday: him pulling it over his head in a bedroom with band posters he stopped looking at years ago, jeans already on, the button cold against his stomach, backpack by the door with yesterday's granola bar still zipped in the front pocket. His mother's voice from the kitchen, something about the diner closing for good, how it's a shame, how nothing stays open in this town. He'd said uh-huh and meant nothing by it.

The backpack strap on his shoulder gives you a lecture hall — the laptop screen too bright, a professor's voice going soft and far away, the specific ache of trying to look awake when you didn't sleep, because you were up texting Marisol at midnight even though you weren't supposed to be texting Marisol anymore, six weeks post-breakup and neither of you had learned how to just stop. The jeans give you her passenger seat, her hand flat on your knee to still the bounce of it, laughing, saying you're gonna wear a hole in my floor mat, Danny. The sneakers give you the campus lawn, grass stains, a Frisbee he was bad at catching, sun on the back of his neck in a way this fountain light is not.

The fountain itself — green-glowing, dead mall around it, gates pulled down over Claire's and a Sbarro that hasn't served anyone in two years — gives you the thing underneath all of it: he comes here now because it's quiet and nobody from school does, and he can kneel at a fountain that used to be full of tourists and wishing children and now is full of nothing but him, and make the kind of wish you don't say out loud even to yourself. He'd been about to wish for her to text back. He doesn't drink much — twice a month, big nights, birthdays — hasn't touched a cigarette in his life, and something in his chest tonight had felt tight and wired anyway, heart running a little hot the way the doctor said to watch for, blood pressure a thing his mother worries about more than he does at eighteen. His right leg is already bouncing against the tile edge, has been the whole time, a motor that runs whether he's thinking about it or not.

There is a whole boy in you now — the fountain, the girl, the closed diner on the walk home, the town with one stoplight that turns red for nobody this late — and it is more than Nasser Khalil's back seat gave you in sixty years, let alone sixty seconds.

You look down at your hand. It's still curled the way it was when the coin left it, thumb up, empty, a young hand, unmarked, a little wet from the fountain's edge. You turn it over once, like checking it's really yours to look at.

"Okay," you say, to the water, to nobody. "That's new."

Behind your eyes, small and unhurried, the wheel is still spinning somewhere, and you are in no rush at all to stop it.