The next day, they decided to try and get snowballs again. Bailey would not be there two days in a row, and Nate never got to eat his snowball since it spilled and melted into the parking lot gravel. Jared had not allowed him to stick around and get another once he finally broke him and Bailey apart.

So they were here to get another snowball. Although Nate suspected that Jared just really wanted to see Sarah.

Unfortunately, Bailey hung around the snowball stand more than they anticipated. For the second day in a row, he was sprawled across a picnic table, except this time with a head of bright pink hair.

The world shifted on its axis.

He was the same boy as yesterday. He had on one of his loose tank tops with the arms cut out. It covered none of his chest when he leaned forward, nipple piercings glinting under the bright noon sun. The only difference was that his hair was pink, and band-aids littered his knees and cheek, covering the scrapes from yesterday’s scuffle.

The candy-pink locks cast a rosy glow across his face, making him look softer and more vibrant than usual. His big, brown eyes seemed larger, and his cupid’s bow lips looked fuller. It was like spring when cherry trees bloomed overnight, and suddenly, the world felt full of warmth and life.

“You come back for more, limp dick?” Bailey called when he spotted them. He did not sit on the bench today either. No, he had to sit on top of the table, leaning back on his elbows, as comfortable as he would be on his couch at home, one leg crossed over the other, so that his little shorts rode up even further.

He was the type of person to smirk all self-satisfied like that while he called people limp dick. Jesus. Nate wanted to grab him by the scrawny shoulders and shake him. Except, as Nate had discovered yesterday, he was not so scrawny anymore. Muscle gain aside, Bailey had put on a little weight that made him softer in the face and around the belly, as well.

Sarah looked between them with a wary expression on her face. In that moment she seemed like a saloon owner ready to duck under the counter for her shotgun in case the two of them decided to have a stand-off in the middle of her establishment. But Nate was frozen in place, halfway through a step that straddled the tiny white picket fence circling the snowball stand’s tables and fake beach.

Bailey’s toes, bare on either side of the thong of his flip-flops, were painted hot pink to match his hair.

“You okay, man?” Jared muttered from behind him. It was his dumbass moping about how Sarah didn’t even acknowledge him yesterday that brought them here again, but there was a snowball's chance in hell that Jared was going to ask her out with her brother here. Already the trip here was a lost cause at best and grounds for another fight at worst.

“Maybe we should go to the froyo place instead, yeah?” Jared offered.

He had been beside Nate through thick and thin and knew better than anyone else that neither he nor Bailey would back down from each other. So, when Nate retracted his foot and took a full step back, his jaw dropped.

“Yeah, let’s go somewhere else,” Nate grumbled. He spun on his heel and marched back towards the parking lot. Jared scrambled to follow in his wake.

Usually, he loved having Bailey’s attention on him, his chest growing tight and vision narrowing in anticipation of a fight. It was like being in the boxing ring, but even better. And he had never really stopped to think about why. He had always just chalked it up to the fact that Bailey irritated him. But he was not so out of touch with himself that he couldn’t realize what he just felt was hardly irritation, but interest.

This winter had been when he first allowed himself to mess around with a guy for real, to untangle some of the feelings and fantasies he’d shoving into the back of his brain to deal with later since high school. Nothing really got untangled. He was beginning to think that it was impossible to do that—life and people were just messy—but he did start to appreciate the male form with less innocence more often. And somehow those signals were getting crossed with his magnetism to Bailey.

Or, he realized with terror, maybe those signals had never been separated. Maybe his magnetism to Bailey had always been one and the same with his attraction to men. A while back, he’d made the same connection to why he enjoyed boxing—the physicality of it, the dancing around each other, the adrenaline—and eventually decided that banging his head into the wall wondering if his love of boxing was less than innocent didn’t do him any good. It did not really matter in the end. He could still box with the women he found attractive and not have a mental breakdown, so he ended up shrugging the worries away.

But Bailey was a different story. The other boy’s eyes bore a hole in the back of Nate’s neck. Nate could tell by how his hair prickled and stood on end. But he told himself he would not turn around and look.

He glanced over his shoulder, anyway. Bailey was watching his retreat, sitting up straight with a befuddled frown. Their eyes connected for a brief second, long enough to drop Nate's heart into his stomach with a nauseating swoop. He looked away, heat crawling up his cheeks.

“Are you seriously okay?” Jared asked him again when they reached the car.

“Pink is a stupid hair color,” Nate spat as he wrenched open the passenger side door.

There was a moment of stunned silence. “To be honest, I think it looked pretty good on him.”

It looked great on him. Given how it made his skin glow, he looked like he should have been born with pink hair. Nate flopped into the passenger seat and rubbed a hand over his face with a sigh. “Whatever. I don’t feel like dealing with his bullshit today.”

Jared saw this as his opportunity to interject and initiate peace talks that might save the world from nuclear destruction. He climbed into the driver’s seat, shifted to face Nate, and donned a cringe-worthy, deliberate, neutral expression. “You should just talk to him one time instead of dumping out his snow cone and shit.”

Nate groaned.

“I’m serious. Aren’t you afraid of your blood pressure spiking all the time like this?”

“What am I, eighty? Besides, he’s the one who acts like a bitch all the time,” Nate groused.

Jared rolled his eyes. In all reality, they both started fights equally with one another. Bailey probably called him a cunt and a douche to his friends just as much as Nate called him a bitch and an asshole. Nate could not for the life of him remember who started the first battle or at what point their war began.

“You’re always telling me to ignore him and now you want me to go talk to him?” Nate asked.

“Or you can just try to ignore him,” Jared encouraged hopefully. “He’s only around for the summer.”

That sounded like a perfect plan. It was not like they were in school together anymore, so there was no reason for Nate to see his pink hair and the bold black lines of his fresh tattoo across the soft skin of his side. Then, maybe by the time he came home over winter break, he would have dyed his hair back to brown again. And everything would go back to normal.

Theoretically, avoiding Bailey was a great plan.

Practically, as he learned over the next couple of days, it was an impossibility. Everywhere he went, Bailey seemed to pop up. There would be a flash of pink hair ahead of him in the line of people waiting their turn to get around the person blocking the flow of customers through the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Nate took himself and his basket straight to the checkout lane and left.

Bailey’s car, a terrible beat-up old blue Camry, would be parked at one of the pumps at the gas station with the lowest prices, and Nate, who was borrowing his dad’s car under the condition that he filled up the tank, had to go to the more expensive down the road.

Nate’s own mother, who was still good friends with Bailey’s mother, brought him up at the dinner table.

“Rachel is so excited to have Bailey home for the summer, but he keeps spending more time at his dad’s place, apparently,” his mom sighed. “I’m glad you’re still living at home, Nate.”

Nate wished he had moved out already, but he needed to save for a little longer before getting a place on his own. Now that he had gotten his welding certification from the community college, he could get an actual job under his belt and enough money together to sign a lease. But he had promised his mom he would help her at her gym over the summer while her office girl was on maternity leave. Not ideal, but he appreciated the fact that neither of his parents was disappointed in the fact that he had decided not to get a degree, and he didn’t mind helping them out.

“Bailey comes home a lot of weekends, though, even during the semester, doesn’t he?” Nate asked. He knew, because they always seemed to run into each other at random times, although that had happened less this past year than the year before.

His mom gave him a funny look. “He used to, but three hours is too long to commute very often, and he got a part-time job this past year.” Then, because she could not help herself and had to say it every time Bailey came up, “I wish you boys would stop fighting so much. You aren’t in elementary school anymore.”

The funny thing was that they got along just fine back in elementary school. It was not until middle school that they started having problems.

In any case, they ran into each other constantly. Avoiding Bailey was a pipe dream. However, the number of times the universe made their paths cross over these past couple of days was a bit extreme. Nate wondered if, in the past, Bailey had ever seen him coming and swerved to avoid interaction before he noticed. Perhaps Nate was noticing him first more than ever before because of his shock of bright pink hair.

Then, finally, Nate ran into him in a situation where he could not just walk away.