“Belief”

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Brad is so tall he walks into spider webs. Sometimes, he kneels down in front of me and asks me to pick the sticky white thread out of his eyebrows and eyelashes. Other times, when I’m looking away, he’ll reach over and run the back of his hand down my cheek, smearing web on my skin. Today, it is summer. We are walking by the sharp green hedges bordering the Laundromat when I feel the rough pad of his fingers against the back of my neck, strands of spider silk gumming in my hair. “I’ll tell mom,” I say, but he is laughing. His shoulders are brown around the edges of his tank top, and there is a girl looking at him from the steps of the Post Office, but he doesn’t see her. I see her. She is drinking a Coke, leaning against the stomach of another boy who is pressing his face into her neck and doesn’t see the way his girlfriend is looking at my brother. “That girl’s looking at you,” I tell him. “What girl?” Brad says as he lights a cigarette. At the corner, he bumps into Johnny King, and Brad says something to him in a wash of