“Really, Cath. You’ve never been?”

It’s Friday night, our parents are at the Philharmonic, and we’re chilling, post-pizza, in the den before my big sister goes to meet her soccer girls and I go upstairs to FaceTime Brain. Cath swirls pieces of uneaten crusts in the dregs of her ketchup supplement. She doesn’t give me her undivided attention like this anymore, so I talk fast.

“You being you, I can’t believe you’ve never been. It’s the coolest place. You’ve gotta go.”

She snarls her upper lip the way she’s done ever since she started running with her soccer teammates Brittney Platt and Darlena Prizzicotti two years ago. My sis and I were BFFs in elementary school, before junior high hit like a bomb and changed everything. Now there are galaxies between us: me, a lowly sophomore; she, a big-deal senior. But here I am, anyway, “imparting advice,” as Brain says I do, without being asked. Cath’s upper lip unsnarls.

“Okay, Stevie,” she says. “I want you to take me to Town Cliffs. Tomorrow.”

I’m waiting for her to punch me and say “Gotcha!” Instead, I give her The Squint, pretending to see inside her in order to detect hidden agendas. The technique always used to earn at least a grin. But not since Brit and Dar took her hostage.

“You could go by yourself,” I say and shrug, pretending it doesn’t matter to me at all.

She lays her hand on her heart and speaks in a cartoon voice. “Anything could happen to a poor, young defenseless girl like me up there in the—” She pauses for dramatic effect—“wilderness.”            

I will not be mocked. I stand up, ready to bolt, but she grabs my wrist and holds on.

“I’m not joking, Stephen. You go up there alone all the time, but I could get…you know.”

She’s saying she’d be fair game for an assault without a male companion. I’m no he-man, while Cath’s built brick-solid with legs tough as telephone poles and biceps big as tennis balls from weight-lifting. More likely, she would protect me.

“Well, Catherine Anne, why not go with—” I did the drama thing. “—the gurlllzzz?”

Her face looks a bit pained. I get a quick memory of how she looked that night last fall, when she knocked on my door to tell me about the argument she’d had with the squad about Taylor Swift. They said the singer empowered women. Cath said she was a phony who cared only about herself. I tried to be there for Cath, I did, but I can’t get over being bummed she chose them over me. But I’ve got Brain. His real name is Brian, but my dyslexic spelling fits him, ‘cause he’s smart as hell and reads all the computer books his parents buy him. He’s rich, too, but not a bit stuck up—he hangs with me, right?

Without him, I’d be a squad of one. In fact, that’s what I call myself when I head up to the cliffs after dinner, though I know it’s what my only friend would call drama. He hates drama. Sometimes I wish he cared a little less about terabytes and a bit more about tears. Cath’s breakdown the night of the fight had let me know she could never be a squad of one.

“Okay, then.” I slap the table. “Town Cliffs, it is!”

Her grin leeches up the side of her round, smooth cheeks—she has almost zero zits. I go for a half-squint before saying, “But no phones.”

Her lips scrunch into a serious twist. Her devotion to her iPhone is a zillion times stronger than mine. “Okay, brother-man.”

Like that, she’s gone, straight out the door. I had her attention for almost an hour. Amazing.

We meet in the yard around eleven. Normally, she works out on Saturdays with the Kick-Ass Tomboys, or KATS, which is what I call the squad behind their backs, not wanting my bony butt kicked. My sister looks her totally cool self in a yellow jersey, grey sweats, and pink and teal Altra trail-runners. Dad’s thermal pack is strapped across her chest.

“Lunch,” she says. “My contribution.”

I guess we’re going to stay a while. All right with me, since Brain is with his family at the Arc of Appalachia on a wildflower pilgrimage all weekend. Well, we’re going on one, too.

While we walk, she’s impressed when I name a bunch of new bloomers—trillium, snowdrop, bloodroot, Jack in the pulpit. Brain’s mom gave him a wildflower book, which he gave me. Passing stuff onto me has been his thing ever since eighth grade, when we’d been named lab partners by a science teacher who’d recognized us as fellow aliens. Brain assigns me things he believes my inferior but adequate brain can handle, including anything pertaining to Nature. His parents have no idea that, rather than soaking up wildflowers this weekend, he’ll be mentally building a supercomputer with which he plans to remove “virtual” from “virtual reality,” making it the only reality going forward, as he likes to say.

I believe the world is way too digital. He teases me for not only being analog but practically an animal, ’cause I’m such a nature geek. “A titmouse, maybe,” he says, naming a bird I’m sure he can’t identify but which sounds hilarious to him.

Cath brings me back. “Is that flower growing out of that rock?!”

I look where she’s pointing. “Yep. It’s a trillium growing from a tiny dirt pocket in the limestone.”

“Tough little dudes, aren’t they?” 

I nod and grin. “Like my sister.”

She shoves me so hard I would’ve fallen, except she catches me. She hates it when all people mention about her is her physical prowess.

“Sorry,” I say. “What I meant was, you’d grow anywhere you found yourself, too.”

Then—shocker!—she steps up, leans in so close I can smell the wintergreen Altoid she popped between her lips a minute ago, and kisses my cheek. Just a peck, before backing off. Before I can react, she says perkily, “Thank you, Stevie. Now show me your favorite place.”

“No problemo, amigo.”

Lame-o. It’s my embarrassment about the kiss talking. Brain torches such talk. While vocabulary-building is, like, sacred to him, he means tech talk, not the emo words I prefer. I know if I heard myself (as I just did), I’d hear a pathetic little boy who wants to be anybody but himself. Quickly, I walk on. I can outrun anything.

Almost to the top of the cliff, with Cath panting behind me, I leave the trail and squeeze around a large bulging stone to follow what looks like a deer path right beside the limestone tower. I glance over my shoulder. When I first discovered this secret trail, I wondered whether coyotes, raccoons, or even skunks had made it. Finally, I figured out it had been carved by falling water.

A few more steps and we see what you can’t from the cliff above: a little cave—really just a low overhang of rock with a dirt floor beneath. But it’s big enough for at least two people.

Or one large black snake.

The day I found Bartholomew—coiled in the middle of the floor—he nearly scared the pee out of me. My guidebook had already taught me which snakes were poisonous, and it was easy to tell he wasn’t a copperhead or rattler. Still, I gave him space, only to come back and find him gone, never to be seen again. But I’m not about to tell my sister about Black Bart. I still talk to him sometimes and imagine him flicking his tongue as he listens to my bullshit problems.

“Welcome to The Pillbox,” I say.

Whenever I sit at the cave’s rear and squint, I feel like a German soldier high in a concrete bunker above Normandy Beach, firing a 60-caliber machine gun, killing at will—bullies, not troops. Stooping, we enter the low-ceilinged little room, where it’s ten degrees cooler. Cath sets down her pack, unzips it, and hands me a Ziplock baggie.

I close my eyes and sniff. “Bean, onion, and cheese taco?”

She nods. I grin.

“You won’t mind a little flatulence?”

She snorts. “Do I mind it at home?”

When she plunks herself down in the dirt, I’m impressed. Neither of the other KATs would set foot in a bat cave at Town Cliffs. I take a huge bite of my taco and grin open-mouthed at my big sister.

“What’d you bring for yourself?” I ask, voice garbled with spicy goo.

“I came to talk, not eat. But you go right ahead.”

I wonder what is so important that we had to come all the way up here to discuss. She lets me eat for another minute. Then:

“You’ve heard them arguing, right?”

“Uh huh.”

Since school started last fall, Dad’s gotten louder and louder, with Mom shouting, too: terrible, insulting things, the kind that get engraved on your heart. I’d put my pillow over my head and eventually conk out. When I mentioned it to Brain, he handed me earplugs. Now my sister is watching me. I keep my eyes straight ahead on the hawk flying up out of the valley.

“They weren’t at the Philharmonic last night, Stevie. They were with a divorce lawyer, figuring out how to divide things. Mom met me after school last week and took me for a drive in the country, where she told me everything. ‘You’re the oldest,’ all that crap.”

The taco squawks in my belly. I hope it’ll stay put. While I wait to see, she goes on.

“Dad’s taking a job in Homewood, Florida. Mom’s staying here, keeping her teaching job. And the house.”

“Selfish bastard.”

My dad is a loudmouth like those jerks who threatened me last year. I want my sweet mom to get as far away from him as she can.

“And, Stevie, he plans to take you with him.”

My whole body pulses and hums. I can’t leave Brain. Parts for the supercomputer he and I are building will arrive any day. You can’t do what we do, have what we have, on Zoom. I imagine his long pianist’s fingers handling screwdrivers, tweezers, clamps and saws, so much more alive than when he stares into a screen, erased by blue light.

“No fucking way!” Standing suddenly, I bump my head on the ceiling.

“Take it easy, dude.” She pats my arm. “Sit down.”

After I do, she goes on.

“I wanted to tell you here, where you feel safe, before Dad collars you for a ‘chat.’ He told Mom that he wants to teach you how to be a man. As if he has a clue! You’ve got to tell him there’s no way. You’ve got work to do here.”

I can’t look at her. She obviously means the thing that terrifies me. Before I get too worked up, she speaks.

“Remember when you announced at the dinner table about the guy in your class who’d started wearing girls’ clothes?”

I gulp guiltily.

“Lawrence Dershowitz. He told our homeroom teacher, Ms. Berg, and she told us he wanted to be called Leonora. Dad went off like a cherry bomb.”

She scrunches her face into our father’s angry mask, then growls, in an imitation of his voice: “‘Idiotic kids think they’re trans now! Remember when it was punk and Goth? Why didn’t me and my friends suddenly decide we were the opposite of what we’d been born? Because it’s bullshit, Stevie-boy, all bullshit.’”

Now she’s leaning into me. “Then you said, ‘So, Dad, nobody in your school ever attempted suicide?’ Then he shot back, like body count is a competition, ‘Three in my class actually pulled it off.”

I lean back her way, but she doesn’t budge. “And you asked if he ever found out why.”

She continues in Dad’s lower register. “Son, they had crazy ideas. They just couldn’t be satisfied.”

By now, we’re both giggling but also shaking our heads sadly. “And Mom, good old Mom,” I say, “who usually never contradicts him at the table, spoke up.”

“Yeah.” Cath does Mom, speaking slooow for the brain-challenged. “‘They. Were. Unsuited. For This World, George.’ Which, amazingly, shut him down.”

My eyes and throat burn. For Lawrence Dershowitz? Or the kind woman who birthed me getting in the last word for a change? Then I remember how she stands up to the bully almost every night while I clamp my pillow over my head, too cowardly, passive, and privileged to leave my cozy bed and defend her. I am totally unprepared when she says, “So what about you, little brother?”

Her too-cheerful tone puts me on red alert. “What do you mean?”

“You’re different, too.”

I try for a straight face, but my upper lip twitches. “I’m not trans like Lawrence, if that’s what you’re implying.”

She shrugs. “That’s a word. You’re a person. You’re figuring out who you are, and you’ve been doing it all by yourself. Some people work out their issues on a soccer field. Man like you does it alone in a cave.”

Man. I tear up all over again.

“Here’s another word for you, little brother: non-binary.”

A chill sprints up my spine, making me feel like a snake has been loosed somewhere behind me—not gentle Bart but a Massasauga rattler—and that it’s crawling toward us, mouth open, fangs gleaming.

“Know what it means, Stevie?” she hisses.  

“Sort of.” The snake pauses, coiling. “No, I guess not.” We both laugh. When we stop, she goes on.

“Like trans people, nonbinaries don’t accept their gender assigned at birth—they’re something between male and female, a gender there’s no name for. Unlike transers, they’ve got to accept and get on with becoming what they really are.”

I stare straight ahead. If I even breathe too hard, the thing behind me will strike.

“Are you following me, bro? Enbies are people of all configurations. It has nothing to do with assignment or with the way they look. It’s not androgyny.”

My sister wears nothing but soccer and gym clothing. Sometimes I’ve heard rumors she and the KATS are lesbian, which is ridiculous. Brit and Dar date guys. So what if Cath never does? Now I’m hearing there’s a reason she doesn’t date. Who would understand my sister is neither male or female but both? And I’m . . . I’m . . .

“Your squad. They’re—”

“Allies who love me,” she finishes. “But you don’t have anyone to discuss your issues with.”

“I have a best friend,” I squeak-shout. “Remember?”

“A friend is not an ally. Friends can keep us closeted.”

Us. Looking at me sadly, she shakes her head.

“You’re whatever Brian tells you to be. I’m talking about your inside.”

Now I’m shaking a little. If the rattler’s still back there, he can have me. After a while, Cath says, in the voice of a bad commercial, “Inside are the nuts and caramel beneath the chocolate coating.”

Even totally fried as I am, I toss back: “The creamy center within the egg.”

When she cracks up, I do, too, then glance over my shoulder: no snake, no nothing. The cave’s empty, cool and damp. It feels like being on the edge of the deep innards of the earth, the molten center, with fire hot enough to evaporate a living thing, reduce it to microbes. Like life on the surface, which is also fluid, flowing, soft, molten. It kinda sounds like Brain’s techno talk, but totally fits what I’m feeling. Human beings fall out of love, divorce, and die without saying the most important things they need to say to the people they mean to love. I register something Cath said earlier: Allies who love me. I haven’t loved my sister, not really. I’ve wanted her to love and admire me. I brought her here today to impress her. I had no clue she’d tell me our life as we’ve known it is about to end—no, has ended already. She sighs.

“I don’t know what you are, Stevie. Only you know. No one else in the world can—”

“Assign your identity,” I interject.

She lets out her breath in a great whoosh. “Yessss.”

I think of Brain and his endless assignments for me. I’m usually not thrilled with completing them. But I like being around him, his intensity and the way his black hair falls into his blue eyes—and his eyelashes, longer than most girls’. How do you tell an ally what you need? But he’s not my ally; I’m his. Maybe I can find allies at a new school in a new state? Maybe it’s not running away if Dad makes me go? Before I fall too far into the Sinkhole of Doom, Cath grabs my arm.

“Is that water I’m hearing?”

I nod. “I’ve heard there’s a waterfall on down this trail. But I never looked for it after finding the cave.”

“I wanna see it.”

I don’t, but it’s an excuse to end the hardest conversation of my life. This time when I stand up, I’m careful not to hit my head. I’m so stiff I almost crash back to earth. All this reality has seriously screwed up my sense of gravity. Again, she has to steady me. Plus, she’s popped another Altoid. From now on, whenever I smell wintergreen, I’ll think of this April day when the earth swallowed me, the day our childhood ended, the day the unseen snake did not strike.

---

Ed Davis’s creative work has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals such as The Main Street Rag, Sky Island Journal, The Plenitudes, Wordrunner, Write Launch and Slippery Elm. His novel, The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014), won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. His collection of linked stories, Here Where We Stand: The Shawnee Springs Stories, will be released by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in spring of 2026 (available at pre-sale discount at https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/here-where-we-stand-ed-davis/)