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Franz St. Germaine walked through life as though it were a thick, pea-soup fog, a hollow man whose Hillworth Sounds consisted solely of crosswords containing things like "14 down: synonym for agony," and repasted tracts from Marx. The Hillworth Polecats did runs up and down the field and did crunches and he let Burford claim shoulder injury and let Warne do the moves and the cheers all turned out to be way too Parkour. That was okay. He pasted a smile on his face and went to bed at night and got up every morning and was amazed at the fact that the earth still went around the Sun. Mimi Márquez said it best: the earth turns; the sun burns; but I die, without you.

Howl did what he could. Howl was a good roommate. Howl was actually a good friend; a calm, level-headed friend, someone willing to listen, someone willing to not say things as Franz went through the unusual shadow of depression, the energy-sapping hollow of something that wouldn't go away. Franz wasn't the type to moon over a girl, or Nice Guy wonder what had happened and why she'd left -- he knew why she'd left; she didn't feel the same about him, he'd guessed wrong. He'd come on too hard, too stupidly.

He'd messed up. His checkmate had lost him their battle. To save the village, he'd had to burn it (and to burn the village, he'd had to... burn it). Despite Dr. Cronje he'd found himself in a corner surreptitiously going through a box of matches, lighting them all, watching them burn down into fine powdery ash. Howl had caught him at that. Said not a word. He did not tell Dr. Cronje. Dr. Cronje thought he was doing well. The anti-psychotics were doing very well. He was doing well (he was not doing well).

He looked so sad that Jesse Alvarez had kindly shoved him in a locker, slammed the door shut and sang the first few lines of I'm not a perfect person!. "Do you feel better now?" he said. "Yes, thanks, that was great," said Franz. "Liar," said Jesse Alvarez, and left. (He also called him a cocksucker but that was beside the point. Everyone thought he and Howl were dating.)

Janice Fitzpatrick was a very specific song on his cellphone.

He was lying in bed, sleepless, staring up at the ceiling, Howl breathing in the bed close by when Emma Goldman broke in under his mattress where he kept his cell:

He wanted to say, "I reject the world's complacency -- "

Franz fumbled, rolled out of bed, hit the floor with a thud, grabbed his cellphone, yanked it out. Fingers slick, he flicked open the phone. He'd rehearsed in his head every apology that he would make instead of hello: I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Fitzpatrick. Janice, your friendship is more to me than anything else I feel. Janice, let me be your friend and I won't want for anything for the rest of my life. (Janice, please marry me.) Janice, I will grovel on my knees in front of you, I will eat mud for you, I know a man has to eat a peck of dirt in his lifetime but I'll eat mine all at once for your forgiveness, do you know that --

There was a pause as they listened to each other breathing. Her familiar scratchy, intensely beautiful power alto.

"I'm at the gate."

Then she hung up.

Howl obediently (helpfully) said nothing even as Franz unsilently pulled on his trousers, pulled on his singlet, didn't worry about his shirt even if it was the dead of winter and snowing outside. Didn't worry about shoes (who needed shoes). It was eleven degrees outside. He managed to creep down the hallway with his heart in the depths of cardiac arrest. Ducked out the side door (key was hanging above the sill). Went out into the Destiny City winter in a singlet, courting Janice Fitzpatrick and pneumonia both, and ducked through the buildings of Hillworth until he ran down the path to the gate.

There was a figure there, in a winter coat, in a scarf.

He'd wanted to protest, but couldn't -- he was numb and mute as he shrugged on the coat, didn't do up the buttons. Probably couldn't. He wasn't a bodybuilder but Janice was rail-thin, they never would have buttoned. He kept staring at her like a man transfixed before the bones of some kind of saint (bones of saint holding a box), hands stuck in the pockets. He knew that his staring was stupid, but he couldn't bring himself to flick his eyes away. He was simply eyeballing her with the same kind of desperation that usually lead people to the Missed Connections segment of Craigstlist.

"It's fifteen full degrees colder than it was last winter," he said. "Tell that to the naysayers of global warming."

That was not: Janice, you are the only person I have ever actually loved. It wasn't 'Blagh argh blahbble snaffle gubble,' though, which had been his first inarticulate mental attempt. It still sounded fairly idiotic to his ears, though, he could just about hear Howl facepalm. Anyone would facepalm. Janice just continued giving him that same, clear-eyed, measured look, out there in the freezing cold.

"There's something I wanted," and his voice was calm, who'd have thought, "there's something I wanted to say. Before we say anything. If that's all right with you, Fitzpatrick."

Franz immediately recited, his words spilling out all over each other in ramble: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press -- " He stopped. His breath was wet and white in the freezing cold. "Hang on a second."

And he turned tail and ran.

He was gone for quite a long time. When he came back, he was lugging something, something heavy. She saw him -- a barefooted figure in her coat -- walk around the wide, granite driveway, pouring something out (was it paint?) in some kind of weird ritual figure. No driveway lights silhouetted him. It was too late at night. He was doing it so carefully, and it was massive, Nazca lines, some kind of liquid cornfield symbol. He stopped near the front of the gate, continued back, gave it symmetry. And then he put the can down and walked back.

"Janice," he said. "I have problems."

His eyes were alight. She'd never seen them like this. They were burning, feverish, his face held a manic, insane glow. He looked as though he'd been unlocked, some kind of key put in him and turned.

"In-depth psychological problems."

He was taking something out of his trouser pocket. It was a packet of matches.

"But my biggest problem to date, Emma Goldman."

He lit a handful of matches: held them up for her to see, the flickering little yellow flame in the midst of all that cold.

"Is that I have never ever loved, will love," (he was seventeen), "have loved, or plan to love, anybody but you."

Franz tossed the matchpile back.

Somehow he knew the exact careless trajectory that would see it through but not douse the flames: and the petrol trail immediately blazed, a little wiggly, blue at its ragged center. A gigantic, psychotic, pyromaniac heart. He fixed his hands around the freezing cold bars of the gate and stared at her, desperate, backlit by his completely ********> symbol of love, glaring in the pitch-black night.

He'd wrapped his hands around the bars of the gate, pressing himself to them. It would be so easy to reach out and clutch her hand around his bright, sparkling starseed, hold it in her fingers, be closer in death to him than she ever had in life. Take it out. He'd probably even welcome it, if it was coming from her. It would be warm; all starseeds were warm. He was looking at her as though she were the only thing worth looking at in the entire world, in the universe, in all of time and space. Lovesickness and hypothermia. And the massive, oil-fueled blaze behind him.

Then they were kissing through the bars like troubled inmates. The iron of the Hillworth gate was freezing -- if they'd stuck their tongues against it they would have been in trouble -- but they were only interested in each other, her chill fingers at his neck, her mouth against his through the gap in the rails. They were kissing. Franz was only dimly aware of this at first as Beethoven's 9th suddenly burst out in stereo inside his brain, but after that it was all there was. She was kissing him. He was kissing her. He learned her mouth in light brushstrokes, but then they dropped that and were kissing heatedly (it was really cold).

He took his fingers away from the bars, unrolling stiff joints to reach out and tangle a hand in her hair; kissing her. The air was filled with the reek of burning petrol. In some metaphorical way she really would always have his starseed in a vial by her bedside table. She could have had his heart in a vial by her bedside table only it was difficult to fit something fist-sized like that in a vial, also parents asked questions. They were kissing, frantically. He said, "I made a PowerPoint about you," and at this nonsequitur kept kissing her, and the fire kept burning.

"No," said Franz, and they locked mouths again -- their oxygen intake was probably not sufficient to keep them standing at this point. At least they'd had fifteen minutes of it, and no brain starvation. They were going to live. His hand was in her hair. They were as close as bars allowed, which was never close enough. "I thought you wanted to hang me à la lanterne, comrade, God I'm sorry. I'm sorry for screwing up the tournament." She was making the quiet noise of it's fine, but that didn't matter -- "I'm an a*****e. Take me back."

Janice had pretty emphatically taken him back, but he needed her yes -- and she gave it, in the form of another liplock. They really hadn't been physically intimate at all. He'd counted obsessively every time their fingers touched on a Pop-Tart. And the insane petrol heart kept stutteringly blazing, which was going to get him in trouble soon -- "s**t," he said against her lips, and started shrugging out of her jacket. "I shouldn't be seen at the scene of this crime unless you want to love me in juvie -- I love you, Janice Fitzpatrick." This had been communicated. "I will love you as long as the Cenozoic and Mesozoic epochs, until our love triggers an ice age. I will love you until the forseeable end of time."

He peeled open the box with numb fingers and looked inside. Franz's face immediately brightened when he pulled out one of the cookies: "Karl Marx," he said, in delight. "I can think of no bigger honour than getting to eat Karl Marx -- is that Socrates?" (Of course it was.) "Look, he even has his cup of hemlock. I can't eat a cookie that's not historically accurate. You know better than to base things off your Suetonius, don't you." (This sounded like a coy come-on, and only was to Franz St. Germaine and Janice Fitzpatrick.)

He closed the box and reached out to her, stroking her cheek with chill fingers. "Cliche accepted," he said. "Happily. Gratefully. Gracefully. Thank you. Ladle a cliche on me any time, Emma Goldman. Oh, my unprescribed non-world religion God, I love you."

They kissed, one last time. "I don't have anything for you," Franz was saying. "Except that I just set the driveway on fire. I would have set the front office, but there's not enough petrol and I'd have had to set about six fires at different points, and spark it off an electrical fire. Don't ask about that, I'm meant to use DBT to not think about that kind of thing."

"I'll call you for every reason, Emma." They kissed again. They were having difficulty not doing this. "I'll call you for no reason." Again. With extreme reluctance, Franz pulled away from the gate, still watching her. "I'll call you tomorrow, Emma Goldman. 'Tis a thousand years till then."

They watched each other for the longest time -- it seemed difficult to part, to get away from each other. Finally, coatless, Janice made her way off down into the street, and Franz started to sneak back to the dorms. He'd done this enough that his attempt was successful. Good thing he'd wiped his prints off the oilcan. When he fell into bed, he reeked of petrol (and love), and Howl Wickham said nothing.