The first time someone kissed me it didn’t really count.

I’m in the closet at the back of the band room, sophomore year of high school, and this annoying girl, Krissy or Kristy or something, has followed me in to grab the music stands, and she’s especially giggly and flighty and nervous for some reason, brushing up against me, and then suddenly the lights switch off and she grabs me and I realize it’s a setup, she got someone to stay out there and flip the switch: and in the sudden gloom she grabs me and crushes her lips against mine. And all I can think of in this moment is Bradley, this cute sweet transfer student who a month before had found out I also liked weird old music, so he corners me after band one day to talk about it with me. He loves old music, strange music, loves making weird cross-genre mix tapes, and he plays some for me out of the half-dozen he keeps in his backpack, which is also filled with loose-leaf sheets of staff paper scribbled with notes because oh, he also composes, too, and he’s impossibly cute and I’m so flustered, embarrassed, because as obvious as his interest seems now, back then it’s not even possible for me to consider it. I never once think that he might be like me because I’ve never met anyone like me. We spend hours in the practice room and make plans to hang out again and then the next day in the hall some kid from the varsity team shoves him to the ground, hard, sends his books flying. Calls him a faggot. I’m paralyzed, half a hallway away, frozen while I watch Bradley say something from the ground, a denial, maybe, and the jock is saying something back, evidence, maybe, but I can’t hear because my pulse is pounding in my ears. I’m too afraid, ashamed, cowardly to go help him, to say anything at all, risk the ugly spotlight of the jock’s face turning on me, too, because he’s clearly making a thing of this, drawing a line. Not in our school. I imagine a chalk outline around Bradley, red graffiti. A queer died here. I can’t move, not even when he finishes collecting his things, gets up, and walks away, taunts at his back, walks down the hall towards me, and now I can move but only to turn away, face flushed and heart galloping, and I can’t look at him and I don’t know if he sees me there as he passes by. But he isn’t at school the next day and the week after I hear he’s transferred somewhere else, and I never see him again. And now in the dark closet as this dumb girl’s lips push against mine all I can think is that it should have been Bradley, my first kiss should have been him, and now I’ve fucked it up, lost it, failed him and myself and even this girl, whose eyes I can’t meet either as I pull away and brush past her out of the closet and past snickering faces to the door outside, changed, maybe, or maybe not. Her hair was in the way, after all, long straight blonde strands of it tasting like strawberry conditioner, so our lips didn’t really even touch, let alone tongues. Was that a kiss? Did it count? Who knows. I don’t feel like it should, and anyway I don’t feel any different except maybe worse, somewhere deep down, even less experienced and less ready and less sure of who I’m supposed to be. I drop out of band not long after that. I’ve always liked listening to music more than playing it, anyway, and I like to listen alone.

I plunged into a pool of steaming hot water, instantly immersed, choking. My scrabbling hand found something slimy but solid and pushed against it. My face broke the surface and I gasped, slipping, struggling to my feet. Water came to my waist. I wiped rank muck off my face, blinked burning eyes open, tried to catch my breath.

It was utterly dark. All I could hear was splashing water.

“Niko?” I shouted.

Nothing.

I shrugged off my pack, zipped it open with blind, shaking fingers while struggling to keep it above the waterline, and fumbled around inside. My hand closed on a plastic tube. Glowstick. I pulled it out and snapped it, shook it, frantic.

A dim red glow began to bring the world back, a breath at a time. Churning water was everywhere, white and frothy. Steam swayed. A few steps away a sheer angled shaft climbed back up, lined in oozing black gunk and coursing fluid. The one we’d slid down, presumably. Turning all the way around, the edges of my dim circle of light suggested level hallways, flooded, leading off into darkness in three directions.

No sign of Niko.

Something dark and coiling swirled in the water: my rope. I grabbed for it and reeled it in. One end was still attached to my waist. At the end of the other, my shiny grappling hook trailed tangled green streamers.

I searched the frothing surface, but saw no sign of a second grapple, or a second rope.

Shutting my eyes, I tried to sort through the confusion of the sliding fall. We had tumbled, together at first, my hands grabbing for Niko’s slime-drenched shirt, the sodden edges of his pack. But there was nothing to get a grip on. After those first few moments all I could feel was my own tangled rope, the pasty mulch sliding past me. I assumed I’d gotten ahead of him, or behind.

But what if I hadn’t? What if he’d managed to stop himself again behind me, wedged himself into another kink in the tunnel?

Or what if the tunnel had split, somewhere up there?

I didn’t want to think about the third possibility, but I spent a few grim minutes duck-walking through the water, old rescue swim lessons running through my head, feeling my hands through the muck beneath the churning surface. I found nothing solid. No backpack, no rope. No body.

He wasn’t here. I was alone.

Everything in my pack was soaked. I threw out a waterlogged sandwich and watched it drift in the churning current before suddenly sinking beneath the foam, as someone hungry underneath had grabbed it. I’d lost a crampon in the fall, and couldn’t find it, so I took the other one off and put it back in my pack. The red light from the glowstick turned everything the same shades. Black and blood.

I had no idea if the gun would still work, and was seized by a thick fear now of firing it down here—of how far that sound would carry and what it might attract—but I slipped it into my belt anyway. It still didn’t make me feel safe but I tried to pretend it did.

My flashlight wouldn’t turn on, even with fresh batteries. “Water resistant,” according to the package, but I imagined it had been subjected to an environment outside factory test conditions. I strapped it to the top of my pack anyway, hoping it might dry out and be useful again. I had a dozen waterproof glowsticks, so I wasn’t immediately worried about light.

But a countdown’s started, hasn’t it? Tick, tock, tick.

I stared up the shaft we’d tumbled down for a long time, considering. Climbing back up—without a rope, with only one crampon, without someone helping me—seemed impossible. I tried to picture Niko somewhere up there, struggling to pull himself back up, handhold by slippery handhold. If he made it to the top, he’d throw another rope down to me.

Wouldn’t he?

I waited a long time, as long as I could stand it. It might have only been a couple hours, maybe even less. But it grew more and more maddening to simply stand there, soaked through, bathed in steam and sweat, doing nothing. Wondering if he was trying to find me. Wondering if he’d left me behind. Wondering if he was drowning or lost, somewhere in this maze.

I thought about what he’d said to me, what I’d said to him. But I couldn’t get a grip on it. The words kept slipping away. I couldn’t process them. Not then.

At last I decided to move. If he was somewhere up there, he’d have to take care of himself. If he was somewhere down here, maybe I could find him. And wasn’t I just saying it would be silly to make it all the way down and not explore?

Maybe there were still answers down here. Or another way out.

I took my keys and gouged a crude arrow into the shitty paint of one hallway, drywall dust spilling out. Breadcrumbs, to find my way back. Or show Niko where I’d gone, if he was somewhere down here too, or came looking for me.

And if something else comes looking, you’re pointing it straight at you.

But there was nothing to be done about that. I picked a flooded hallway and started pushing my way forward through the hot, sluggish water.

I wandered. I’m not sure for how long. The black water’s surface smoothed once I moved away from the turbulence at the bottom of the shaft, swallowed up the glowstick’s dim red light. There were no longer any curious features or unusual architecture, just an irregular grid of junctions. The infrequent side rooms were always empty. Sometimes the floor or ceiling sloped up or down, not always in sync; so the water level would drift from ankle-deep to above my waist, and the ceiling from claustrophically low to beyond the reach of my light. The halls trended wider and narrower, too, in unpredictable rhythms. I worried for a while about stepping into a pit I couldn’t see and dunking myself again, but there weren’t any. Nor were there stairs, up or down, or even light fixtures. Only hallways, branching, recombining, endless.

The air stayed steamy, and while the water cooled as I moved farther from the hot inlet stream it was still uncomfortably warm. I felt hot and clammy, thick-headed. Mist swirled in the air, sculpting the dim red light into strange shapes and shadows.

I kept gouging arrows into the wall with a key, kept moving. If I kept moving I wouldn’t have to stop, wouldn’t have to think.

Walking takes almost no thinking at all.