Maxine.

The now eleven-year-old girl never thought that she would actually go by that name again. She used to argue that made her sound like a fancy businesswoman—it was bad enough with her blunt bob and bangs, but being called "Maxine" would have made her feel like she was just meant to wear a navy blue blazer and a pencil skirt to go along with it...

And yet, there she was.

Missing her own name more than ever.

Up until the very moment that she had met her first friend in the town (whom she had settled upon calling "Boy Max"), her vacation could only be described as one word: hell.

Her ideal summer wasn't in a small town in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't a smelly nowhere without a rich history, proper beach, or theme park (though here was a carnival that came for a week each year). She didn't at all want her time spent in a cramped-up house with her nasty Uncle George... and yet, that was the position she was in.

She hated staying there. "There" meant living in a house that smelled like a pungent, rotting combination of booze and old meat. She had even gotten to the point where she began to wonder if her uncle had killed anyone. She wouldn't at all be surprised if he had chopped someone up and his them in the floorboards— after all, he did seem like the type to shoot someone's brains out if they did so much as look at him funny.

She spent as much time away from the house as humanly possible. The moment her natural alarm (she wouldn't want to alert her uncle that she was awake by setting an actual one) buzzed off at around 5:00 in the morning, she'd pull herself out of bed and sneak out to the port, where she and Boy Max would meet each other.

He stopped going there a few days ago.

July 1. That was the date that 'Maxine Louise Anderson' would remember for the rest of her pathetic life.

That was the day that Boy Max had gone missing— the day she waited under the port for seven hours, and the day she knew that her best friend was never coming back.

Now it was July 4. While most people were barbecuing, waterboarding, and setting off obnoxiously loud fireworks (even though it was hardly even noon), Maxine was walking the sidewalks, ignoring society as much as humanly possible.

Her year-old Adida sneakers scuffed the ground. The canvas had gotten scratched up with marks and the laces black with accidental stepping on them. The chattering, shouting, and singing of families faded into an annoying ring.

Maxine had only had thing in mind: find out what happened to Boy Max.

Her curiosity was eating her alive.

A hideously green flyer (which looked like the paper had been scribbled all over in blinding highlighter) hung up on the lightpost of "Gilderoy Street," its sides fluttering up with a gust of wind that raced by. It was enough for the bottom-most (no longer glossy) piece of tape to lose its grip and, sure enough, it flew up and nearly made Maxine jump out of her skin.

"Oh, crap!" she shrieked, a hand shooting up cover her mouth the very moment she realized that she cursed... what else was she expected to do? Keep her peace as she thought that a giant green monster had shot out to grab her?

Her hand—the one that had not gone up to stifle her string of childish curses, that is—rested on her chest. Her heart raced. She could feel it thumping around in her rib cage, and all she wanted to do cry... after all, she was an emotional little girl who had lost her best friend—what else was expected of her? Her eyes began to sting. They welled up to the brink with tears. Her vision blurred into a bunch of boringly-colored blobs, but before she was able to let the tears fall, she managed to re-gather her senses.

The black-on-neon-green poster sill held the face of her best friend.

Boy Max.

In her ideal word, those two words would be scribbled out on the paper... but this wasn't at all her ideal world. Her friend wouldn't be missing otherwise. The boring name of "Max Partridge" (which was much less comforting than if she had seen the name "Boy Max") spelt out underneath the bold words of "Checkerberry Police Department."

Instead, the words— his name, per se— were thinly printed out on the poster. It was like two hands (or tongs, maybe) had come into either side of the words, and then squished them together because... well, who knows why? His portrait was right above the squished-up letters. It was his school photo, and from the fuzzy and pixelated image, she could see that gorgeous ankle and even more gorgeous smile... and on top of his portrait sat one big, fat, and far-too bolded word:

That cut her like a knife. It was as if it had suddenly become that much more real to her— it was almost like watching him die as she stood there without being any help at all.

She lost it.

Right there, in all of her overalled, scuffed-up, and sunburnt glory, she cried. Her body rattled with sobs. Her one friend— her one hope that this summer could be at all salvageable had dissipated right before her eyes. It stung...

Oh God... she thought. I must be so selfish. I'm thinking about me when I should be thinking about finding stupid Boy Max.

Her thought didn't at all help. She still cried, her hands becoming wet with the tears that fell rolled down her cheeks and further down to her chin, and she didn't at all notice the group of kids who had come to watch.

This was the difference between her and her hometown...

Here, in this miserable, dull, uneventful little town, the kids actually cared. At least, these ones did. She sobbed like an idiot. She was sure she looked like one, too. With the mucus-y snot that dribbled from out of her nose and how bloodshot her eyes had become, she looked like she had come right out of a temper tantrum... but the boys that stood in front of her didn't seem to care.

Well... At least one of them didn't.

"You look like you came out of a crack circle," the one clad in all light washed denim prodded. This was the one with the dorky grin, chubby cheeks, and gelled-down hair (that of which had been flattened heavily to the right side his scalp... he had fallen victim to getting his hair combed by his mother). His dressing style was thankfully much better; at least, it was more believable that he had come up with it. He wore denim-on-denim, everything quite baggy—so much to the point that it could probably fall off at any given moment.

Maxine sniffled, both from the runny, mucus-y snot running down her nose and the something that smelled like cigarettes.

"A what?" she blinked, her voice full of phlegm and choked-up tears.

"A crack circle," the boy repeated. His nonchalant shrug indicated that he had talked about the subject many times before, and even if Maxine hadn't asked for further expansion for her understanding of the subject, he continued on anyway. "It's basically where a bunch of hippies come together and then get really high off of— hey! What the fuck!"

Maxine's jaw dropped... she had never heard someone so willingly let out such a highly-rated swear—much less, without even caring that he had done so.

"Tommy! Shut up!" the other boy hissed. When he yanked his elbow away from the other boy, it was clear that he had given him a harsh nudge... that made more sense. "You can't just tell someone about a crack circle!"

"Does it have something to do with drugs?" Maxine asked. Her eyes were a little puffy at this point, but the supposed humor of the two kids' minds had cheered her up just a tad bit. Both of the boys seemed to be just as surprised at her reply as the girl had been when they first showed up... Maxine caught on quickly, and immediately sought out to defend herself. "It just talks about crack, and apparently, my uncle—not the one who lives here—used to do it all the time."

The two boys' faces fell... but the one supposedly called 'Tommy' was quick to have his lips turn right back up into a smile.

"That's so cool," Tommy said with a goofy snicker, his lips curling into an even wider smile (to the point that it was a grin) as he re-adjusted his denim... Well, everything. He noticed her stare and felt compelled to defend himself. "And if you're wondering why this stuff is so big on me and smells like shit, it's because it's my dumb brother's. He said that if I didn't tell mom about him and Monika making out in the back of my dad's truck, he'd sneak me out of that sucky Fourth of July party."

Maxine blinked a couple of times. For someone who was so young—or at least, looked so young—he was unbelievably mature for his age... experience-wise, that is. His jokes were far from it ("Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he was a dumb motherfucker!" If he wanted to make that even punnier, he'd say 'a dumb motherclucker,' but he seemed far too dumb to remember to do so).

"Okay, that's... cool I guess," the girl said. She received two entirely different reactions from the boys—Tommy grinned at her before looking over to the other one, who looked like Maxine had said the most horrible thing in the entire world. "But what are you two even doing here? Why the hell would you sneak out of a party?"

Tommy shrugged a little bit.

"Because it's just twelve hours of dancing to Italian music and barbecuing with old people who pretend like they know me," he said plainly. What he was referring to was his extended family—cousins, aunts, uncles, great aunts and great uncles—and how they all seemed to know him while he stood there like a complete and total idiot. He didn't recognize any of them... and naturally, he came to the conclusion that they didn't actually know him and pretended like they did—just so they'd have something to talk about with his mom.

"Shut up!" his friend said, giving him a harsh nudge that nearly made him wheeze. The boy, who was dressed sharply in a button-up shirt tucked in so tight that it probably gave him a wedgie, was far from entertained with Tommy's behavior. He turned to Maxine with an animated sigh (it could have been overly-exaggerated, although telling from how 'over it' the boy was, that probably wasn't the case). "Ignore him. I'm John, by the way."

"Yeah, but all of the kids at school call him Johnny Idiot," Tommy added nonchalantly, and of course, that earned him yet another nudge.

"Dude, seriously, shut the fuck up," John(ny) murmured under his breath before flashing Maxine a smile, which was clearly full of panic and discomfort. "My last name is Idott... that's the only reason why they call me that."

"And because you're stupid."

"Dude!"

Sure enough, they were both in a nudging-battle all over again, throwing slurs and eff-bombs wherever they saw fit. Maxine was clearly fed up with it. While she would never admit it out loud, as these boys seemed like they'd be her one chance at making new friends, she wanted to grab the both of their heads and slam them together. Thankfully, though, she was much more polite than that... more or less.

"Guys, can you just shut up and tell me why you wanted to come over here?" she asked with a frustrated sigh. "Honestly."

That final word was all but a murmur, but both Johnny and Tommy exchanged a knowing glance.

She was frustrated.

Johnny knew what was good for him and decided to give a direct answer, although before he could do so much as open his mouth to speak, Tommy made it a point to interrupt.

"Gah-lee, someone started her period," Tommy joked, giving a grin as he held up a hand for John to high-five (he also gave John a glance to see if he was at all laughing... he wasn't). John could be described as only one thing: mortified. His eyes were wider than what could be deemed humanly possible—either that, or some invisible person was holding his eyelids open further than it could stretch on a regular basis.

Maxine was just confused. While she was an intelligent young girl, remarkably mature for her age, she was still blessed enough to escape the grasps of 'the talk,' and furthermore, have no idea what 'a period' was... well, other than a punctuation mark.

"What's that?" she asked, giving her head a little tilt to the side. Her hair moved right along with her, and while it was partially covered by the one, bright orange baseball cap that she could always call her own, it hugged right along the sides of her neck.

If Johnny hadn't been mortified beforehand, he absolutely was now...

And again. Tommy spoke up before Johnny could protest.

"Basically, it's this weird thing every month where girls die a little while they bleed out of—"

"Tommy, shut the fuck up! I'm serious!" Johnny let out an exasperated sigh. Maxine (or anyone who might have passed by, for that matter) could have sworn that he was plotting an entire murder just for the sake of getting the kid to keep his mouth shut. He drew his attention back to Maxine and gave a half-smile. It was one of those smiles, as if they were to say please don't say anything else—he's going to kill me otherwise.

Tommy had another idea... He gave Maxine a bit of a crazed, almost scary grin, and he immediately gave her a wink.

"Give me a kiss and I'll annoy the hell out of him for the rest of the day."

"What? No!" Maxine exclaimed. As if her point hadn't gotten across, she made the most disgusted face she could possibly make—her head pulled back, her eyes squeezed almost shut, and she stuck out her tongue. "There's no way in hell I'm going to kiss you—and only to annoy a kid that I could annoy all on my own, might I add!"

Johnny took this as his turn to annoy Tommy.

"Yeah," he nodded. "And besides. Who would even want to kiss you? Your breath smells like a cow's anus has been rotting out in the open for months on end."

"Johnny, what the fuck!" Tommy shrieked. "Why would you know what that smells like?"

"Because your breath smells just like it..."

Checkmate.

Johnny grinned and turned his attention back to Maxine, whose jaded expression was still no different. She just wanted answers.

"Anyway... we came over because we noticed you were—"

He was interrupted by Tommy pulling up his pants in the most exaggerated way possible. Both of the kids' eyes turned in his direction, and because he couldn't exactly see that (his eyes were screwed shut in a frustrated manner), he just spoke exactly what he thought and felt.

"Ah, shit! These pants are giving me a wedgie!" he hissed.

Maxine was beyond confused.

"I thought they were too big for you," she murmured under her breath. John gave her a pleading, disgusted, and quite uncomfortable look, almost as if to say 'please just go with it.' She got the gist.

"Just..." Johnny continued, rubbing the back of his neck just a little before shaking his head. He was trying to get over a mental barrier, meaning that he became twice as prone to tripping up over his own words and sounding like a complete idiot. "We came over because we saw you looking at Max's missing poster, and we are pretty good friends with him, too."

Maxine paused for a moment.

"You know Max?" she asked, her eyebrows furrowing a little with thought. She hadn't ever seen the two boys around before, and yet, they did seem like the type of people that Boy Max would hang around with. "He's... pretty cool, I guess."

"He's got this great sense of humor, too," Johnny said with a half-smile. "And the biggest collection out of all three of us. Combined. Even with his sister put—"

"Am I going to be the only one to acknowledge the fact that he's fucking dead?"

Shit.

A silence settled over the group. If it hadn't been a stranger, Maxine would have been more than prepared to wind up and punch Tommy square in that annoying mouth of his... but to her dismay, she hardly knew the kid. Perhaps it was just his way of coping with the fact that his friend was nowhere to be found.

"I mean, it's been three fucking days and there hasn't been any trace of him, so—"

"That doesn't mean he's dead, Tommy," Johnny gulped. "He probably got lost in the woods or... something."

The denial was almost impossible to ignore. Even Johnny himself had a twinge of an unexplainable sadness eating away at him just as the words escaped his mouth—and yet, even though it was more likely than not that his friend had gone missing, he was caught up in the labyrinth of denial. It was only one of the stages of grief.

"How would he have gotten lost in the woods? Last time I talked to him he said he knew the woods like the back of his hands."

"All of us do, but that doesn't mean we don't get lost every now and again."

"For three days?" Tommy snapped. Little did he know, the little girl sitting so close to him had balled her hands up at her sides, now at the point where she would no longer hesitate to hit the boy square in the jaw... it was becoming harder and harder for her to ignore the fact that he was practically ripping her entire world (which, at the moment, was composed entirely out of the hope that her friend could be alive) from under her feet. She hated it.

"Shut up, you asshole!" Maxine snapped. "You can't just say someone's dead just because they're missing— someone's only dead if you find them that way!"

"Fine," Tommy murmured. "Believe whatever the hell you want— I'm just spitting out the facts. You can live in your little gay fantasy world where everyone sings kumbaya and holds hands, but I'm going to be the one who accepts the truth. You guys are retarded if you can't figure that out."

"Shut up."

There was an awkward silence. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that there was nothing else to say, or the fact that deep down in Johnny and Maxine's ten-year-old (and quite inexperienced) hearts, they knew that Tommy was right. He was gone.

Tommy shoved his hands in his pocket and frowned a little, biting the inside of his cheek as he kicked around a pebble just a little bit. It scuffed under his tennis shoe before tumbling away, and after letting out an elongated sigh, Tommy

"This is stupid," Tommy murmured under his breath, kicking another little pebble away. "I just made Johnny grow a pair so we could invite you to the arcade with us."

Maxine blinked a couple of times.

"What the fuck?" she asked. Normally, in her every-day dialogue, she wouldn't dare drop an 'eff-bomb.' It was like Lord Voldemort, although instead of a name, it was a swear word... but Tommy had said it so many times that it had to become natural at that point.

"Yeah," Johnny added on. "How the fuck do you even have the money? I thought you spent it all on maxi pads and tampons at the pharmacy... I mean, how else do you know what a period is?"

"Shut up, John! I only know about it because my mom complains about it every family dinner we have!"

"Whatever," Johnny said, unable to help but smile just a little bit... if he wasn't supposed to be mad at Tommy for bringing up such a dire subject, he would have been howling with laughter. "Just tell me how you're going to pay."

"Well, you know how my brother gave me his clothes?" Tommy asked, reaching back into the pockets (that seemed to be twice as big as his arms). He grinned as he flicked up the denim jacket just a little, as if to say 'this-is-exactly-what-I'm-talking-about.' After a moment of searching endlessly, his grin turned even more mischievous, like he had just committed a serious crime and walked away a free man. "He forgot his wallet in here."

At that very moment, he whipped out a fraying, cinnamon-colored wallet stuffed to the brim with quarters and crumpled-up dollar bills.

"Dude, you're not seriously—" Johnny started, although Tommy just shrugged it off like it was no big deal.

"It's fine, stop being a pussy," Tommy said with a small chuckle. "Plus, only I would get in trouble...if he ever finds out that is."

"What the fuck? That's so not true!" John exclaimed. "I feel like he'd punch me in the face, give me a wedgie, and then I'll end up rotting like that old sandwich in your second-grade backpack! There's no way in hell that I'm—"

"I'm down," Maxine said with a shrug. "If the loser left his wallet in his pants, then it's his problem. Not ours."

Tommy grinned.

"Sweet." His word was drawn-out and strewn with a chuckle, and he soon returned his gaze to John.

I told you so, he thought.

"You didn't think she'd wanna come with, but hey. Now she's the only one with enough balls to do it."

Johnny made it a point to flip the bird. While Maxine would normally gasp if she saw someone's middle finger pop up, she seemed to have gotten used to it all of the boyish swearing and cursing by now. She'd have to get used to it if they were friends.

"Choose to come or not, but just remember—if you don't come with, it just means I went on a date before you did. Maybe I'd get laid before you, too—but we all know that's gonna happen anyway."

It would have been predictable if Johnny had said he didn't at all care, but in reality, he did... and he actually verbalized it this time around.

"You wish you could get a date before me, but with your rotten cow breath, I could definitely get laid before you."

"What's 'getting laid?'" Maxine asked. She did have a certain maturity for having just turned eleven, although it was up until this moment that she was shielded by the sex jokes that just about every young boy would make (in this town, that is). She was legitimately curious... and she wished she wasn't.

If Tommy wasn't grinning before, he absolutely was now.

"Well basically, it's where a guy—like my brother—and a girl—like Monika—make out somewhere—like my dad's truck—and then end up fu—"

"Tommy, I swear to Jesus—just shut up! She doesn't want to hear about that... and even if she did, your breath would make her pass out before you could even finish!"

Tommy took that opportunity to make a dirty joke.

"Who'd finish first?"

He gave Maxine a purposely awkward and 'seductive' wink (it was more awkward than anything, since he couldn't exactly wink very well), and Johnny wanted to gag.

Johnny felt like he was being run over by an eighteen-wheeler with the word "embarrassment" slapped on the side of it.

"Shit, I should've known you'd take that the wrong way," Johnny murmured, grabbing onto Maxine and Tommy's arms before leading them off into the direction of the arcade. "Let's just go."