When they were younger, and their knees were taped up with band-aids, Tommy and Nick used to ride their bikes around town and have strangers try to guess their birthdays.

“It’s all in the face,” Tommy would say, propping an elbow on Nick’s shoulder and grinning. 

“C’mon,” Nick would add after shoving Tommy off, his dark eyes saucer wide. “Just a guess.” And when Tommy nodded and offered a bigger smile—slightly crooked and over bitten—the strangers would fold.

“Hmm,” they’d say to Tommy, and it was always Tommy they started with. He was taller than Nick back then, and louder too. His arms were all elbows, and his knees were scraped and scabbed clear of skin. They’d consider these details, and his hair too, which was only a few inches long—shaved down by his mother, who couldn’t afford a barbershop visit for all five of her growing boys.

“Hmm,” they’d say again after a long moment of contemplation, and then they’d look him in the eyes and guess.

“December,” said the woman at the park with a Labrador dog, “seventeenth?”

“August sixth,” replied the mailman.

The cashier at the ice cream shop guessed twice. “May second,” she said. “Wait, no, October twenty-first.”

“It’s June ninth,” said Nick’s younger sister, Kate, but she only knew because she had come to his birthday party earlier that summer and had screamed when Tommy smeared frosting in her hair.

Tommy shook his head with every guess but the latter. “Nope,” he’d say. “No, no, no.”

After cutting their losses, the strangers would turn to Nick, who smiled as they scanned him over, dimples forming in the divots of his round cheeks and blonde curls flopping over his eyes. Sunburnt from their days outside on their bicycles, his face was always flushed a gentle pink. You’re blushing, Tommy would snicker when he saw it, and then Nick’s ears would turn red, too.

“I don’t know,” some would say as they considered him. “This is hard.”

Nick smiled so wide his eyes creased. “Oh, you’ve got it,” he’d say. “You do. Just guess.”

“February,” said the woman at the dog park.

“Fourteenth,” finished the mailman.

The ice cream shop cashier’s lip quirked as she said it: “Valentine’s Day.”

“Ugh,” said Kate. “Bleh. His birthday’s on the kissing day.”

A beat of silence would pass, and then Nick would pump his fist in the air and cheer, “see! I told you you’d get it.”

“You’re pulling an old man’s leg, kid,” said the mailman when he heard this, and both boys shook their heads in unison and chorused:

“We’re not—it’s true!”

Then Nick smiled again, and Tommy poked at his cheek, dimpling the skin a third time with the pointed prodding of his index finger. “You see,” he’d say, “like a Renaissance painting.” 

At eleven, he didn’t know much about the Renaissance besides a brief unit in art class at school, where Ms. Davies had shown them the Mona Lisa and a handful of other famous paintings. He’d been more interested in drawing a spider on the corner of Nick’s paper than listening to the lecture, but when Ms. Davies said cherubs he glanced up in search of context for the unfamiliar word and was surprised to find that the figures in the picture their teacher was holding up looked familiar. With their round cheeks and little wings, they reminded him of Cupid, but then, as he leaned closer for a better look, he realized that they also shared a resemblance with Nick.

“They look like you,” he crooned into his friend’s ear, to which Nick responded by jabbing a sharp elbow into his side.

“They do not,” he said, cheeks flushed pink at the accusation. He’d continued to insist that it wasn’t true for the rest of the day, pinching Tommy whenever he brought the cherubs up. But then, sunburnt and giddy on summer heat and the surprise in the strangers’ eyes, he only grinned wider at the comparison.

Tommy nodded sagely. “I told you,” he said. “It’s all in the face.”

The radio in Nick’s kitchen was the size of a toaster, and it crackled when the voices came on. Something had gone haywire inside the speaker, making it jump and fizz with static; to hear it, one had to inch forward and breathe in time with the commentators, exhaling on the flickering pauses between their words.

Tommy had lost count of the number of times he’d yelled at Kate for sitting too close and not giving them space to listen. “Beat it,” he’d say. “It’s our turn.” And when she wouldn’t budge, he’d tug on her braids until she stood up in a huff to shout that she was going to tell her mom.

“See if I care,” said Tommy, whose own mother had five sons and couldn’t get involved with every tiff and scuffle if she wanted to have any time in the day at all.

“We could have shared,” Nick would say as they watched her go.

Tommy would shrug. “Sure,” he would say. “But aren’t you glad we don’t have to?”

“In that case then,” Nick would laugh, “now I just have to get rid of you.”

Today, there was no getting rid of anyone.

As the radio crackled, four young men grouped close to keep from missing a second of the report. Tommy, tall and wiry now at nineteen, braced his hands on the kitchen counter as he leaned towards the box. The radio normally resided on top of a low bookshelf in the living room so Nick’s family could listen from the floor, but today it had been moved to the kitchen so as to be better for Tommy, Nick, and their friends to crowd around it. 

Beside Tommy, Sam fiddled with the volume knob. He turned it left, then right, toying with it in his anxious way. If the four years he had known Sam taught him anything, Tommy knew that this anxiety would linger the whole night. He also knew that at the end of it all, no matter what the lottery revealed, Sam would go on a run, just like he used to back in high school after a tenuous exam or faltering first date. No matter that it was the beginning of December and the sidewalks were slicked with ice. No matter that night had already fallen, casting the world outside the kitchen into shadows.

Tommy elbowed him in the side. “Knock it off, will you?” 

From Sam’s other side, someone coughed. “Take it easy, Thomas,” Harry said. Besides his mother, Harry was the only person who called Tommy by his full name. Harry wore slacks and collared shirts, even though it was evening, and Tommy was still wearing greasy coveralls from his shift at his uncle’s auto shop that afternoon. He creased one of his sleeve cuffs and offered Tommy a politician’s smile. “Sam’s just nervous,” he said. Sam, even though Harry called everyone else by their full names, was always just Sam.

“Aren’t we all?” sneered Tommy, but he pulled his elbow back and rested it on the linoleum countertop.  

“Shh,” said Nick. “God, it’s starting.”

At this warning, Harry leaned closer, and Sam withdrew a shaking hand from the dial. Tommy glanced up at Nick. A divot had formed between his eyebrows as he furrowed them, and his lips pressed together in a frown, erasing all traces of his dimples. Though they were partially shielded by the bulk of the radio, Tommy could see that his hands were white knuckled as he gripped the corner of the counter. 

“Hey,” he said, “366 days, right? That’s low chances for you coming up first.” It felt almost sacrilegious to Tommy that Valentine’s Day was included in the draft at all. That, alongside Christmas and New Year’s and whatever day turned out to be Easter next year. War had a morbid sense of irony.

“Right,” said Nick, but he didn’t look convinced.

They all zeroed in on the radio with bated breath as the broadcast began. Perspiration began to build, damp, beneath Tommy’s underarms. He picked his hands up off the counter and crossed them in front of his chest. Beside him, Sam closed his eyes.

Years later, Tommy would tell people that he felt a sense of ease wash over him as the men on the radio ran through their explanatory prelude to the draft. Like when a curtain falls in those theaters, he’d say, and then all the applause and shit dies out. You know how, for a second before they have to turn the lights on, it’s just quiet? He’d shake his head and rub his palm over the buzzed haircut he still wore even though he’d outgrown everything else from his childhood.

His jaw would set, then, and he’d say, I was ready for them to pull me first. I mean, really. I thought, ‘Vietnam, here I come.’ A laugh then—a high, breathy ha! that sounded staged, and if not that, then at least like it shouldn’t belong to man who looked like Tommy. But even though everything else he’d say would be a lie, that laugh was his.

The truth was that Tommy froze the moment the man on the radio cleared his throat to draw the first capsule. Later, he’d remember the man saying, here we go, as he pulled the number, but Harry would disagree and say the man started with a breath: ah. Sam would claim the man said nothing at all. What they would all agree on was the number. 158. September fourteenth.

“Shit,” breathed Sam, whose birthday was September fifteenth, only a few phonetics off.

“One down,” said Harry.

Tommy said nothing. Instead, he looked at Nick, who was staring at the radio like his life depended on it. Pink flushed his cheeks in a mask of youth, and for a moment Tommy was back at the ice cream shop in the heat of July, wheedling the cashier to guess their birthdays. Eight years later, and the face could still give it all away. 

The man on the radio read the next two picks aloud. April twenty-fourth. December thirtieth. Harry shrugged off his jacket and draped it over his forearm. Tommy looked up at the ceiling and watched as a moth bumped against the overhead light, its translucent wings knocking against the glass. Sam said, “Who do you bet is first?” and the radio crackled its reply:

“February fourteenth.”

The man didn’t pause for long before continuing with the other 362 draws, but the breath he took before calling out the next one felt like it stretched for an eternity. The moth shifted, casting its wings in silhouettes against the fluorescence. Tommy blinked at it once, and then away. Something moved in his periphery, and he turned to find Kate standing in the doorway, one hand cupped over her mouth. Their gazes met, and she shook her head, though how she had heard from across the room, Tommy wasn’t sure. Nick’s expression mirrored his sister’s as he pressed the back of his hand to his lips and stared unblinking at the radio.

Harry spoke first. “Nick, I—”

“No,” said Nick, his voice soft and gentle like he was wishing someone goodnight, “it’s not your fault.”

“He was talking fast.” Sam leaned forward to reach for the dial again. “Maybe we heard him wrong?”

Kate said: “No, I don’t think so.”

Tommy said nothing at all.

Kate walked over to them, and he looked away as she threw her arms around Nick and buried her face in his chest. When she started to cry, Nick rested a steadying hand on her back and pulled her tight. The moth on the ceiling clinked against the light, but it sounded like radio static to Tommy’s ears. He watched as it tried to edge towards the brightness, and thought that, if the bulbs weren’t covered, it would fry itself trying. 

The man on the radio continued in a numbing blur. Harry, born on April twenty-seventh, was pick seventy-four. Sam’s September fifteenth was called on draw one-hundred-thirteen. Tommy’s own birthday came after what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than a generous handful of minutes.

“June ninth,” said the man on the radio. Number 335. Tommy watched the moth tap against the glass cover and didn’t meet his friends’ eyes.

“Well,” said Harry as the radio man listed the final numbers, the days none of them were lucky enough to have been born on, “that’s that then.”

Nick said: “I, um,” but then he trailed off, unable to finish the rest of the statement.

“I need to go.” Sam turned away.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Harry said, and then, to Nick: “Where’s your dad keep his liquor?”

Tommy, who had spent half of his elementary and middle school years at Nick’s house to stay out of his mother’s hair, could have answered that question without a moment’s hesitation. The number of times he’d seen Nick’s father open the cabinet to pour himself a whiskey exceeded what he deemed a healthy level of alcohol consumption. He and Nick had snuck in there, too, when they were fourteen, before they learned that it was easier to steal alcohol from the chaos of Tommy’s house. 

He opened his mouth but stopped himself before he could respond. He didn’t want to turn away from the moth and its futile quest for light. He couldn’t let his friends see his relief at his own fortune—335—or his guilt at their lack of the same.

It was Kate who answered instead. “Above the fridge,” she said, her voice muffled by her brother’s shirt, “in the cabinet.”

“And glasses?”

“I’ve got them,” said Nick, and Tommy glanced away from the moth and watched as his friend swung the cabinet above the radio open. Across the room, bottles rattled with the uneven sloshing of liquid, and Harry whistled low between his teeth.

“Oh, this will do.”

“How deep are we filling them?”

“For you?” Harry asked, and as Nick turned away from the cabinet, Tommy noticed the hard set of his jaw, the redness in his eyes, and the glistening tracks on his cheeks. Harry returned and settled an armload of clanking bottles on the counter. “For you?” he repeated with a wry smile. “All the way.”

They got him good and drunk after that.

When Tommy was twelve, his family forgot his birthday.

That year, summer came early in a wave of heat, and the muggy humidity had Tommy and his brothers begging their mother for the shaved haircuts they so often detested. The razor buzzed like a bumblebee. Their mother’s hand was warm and slick with sweat as she braced it on their necks to hold their heads still.

That was the summer where she worked night shifts at the hospital, and when she came home each morning, she only had a few hours to sleep before her boys needed her attention. That was the summer when Jay, the youngest at four years old, broke his wrist trying to climb the tree in their backyard. It was the summer where the boys ate cereal for breakfast because their mom was still asleep when they woke up, and it was the only meal Tommy knew how to make by himself. It was the summer when the roof began to leak after a rainstorm and the summer when other things started to slip through the cracks: taco night and visits to Uncle Justin’s and fixing the window that Nick and Tommy accidentally broke with a baseball bat.

June ninth slipped away too.

That afternoon while his mother napped and his brothers wrestled in the backyard, Tommy went to Nick’s house and told him to pack a bag.

“Why?” asked Nick.

“We’re running away.”

Nick eyed the rucksack slung over Tommy’s shoulder. “How come?”

“We just are,” Tommy said. How else could he explain this to Nick, whose own birthday was so memorable that even a stranger in a grocery store could guess it just from looking at him? His parents threw him a party every year and invited half the grade. This year, Rebecca Dawnes had even slipped a note in his locker that said, in flowing cursive, Happy Birthday, Valentine! and asked him out to dinner.

He couldn’t explain any of that, not to Nick, so instead he turned and said over his shoulder: “You coming, or what?”

“Of course,” said Nick. “Just let me find my shoes.”

Later, as they trekked through the overgrown, abandoned lot across from Tommy’s house, Nick paused under the shade of an oak tree. “I almost forgot,” he said as he reached into his backpack to search for something. “Happy Birthday.”

The chocolate bar that he drew from his bag was warm and soft beneath the glistening foil, and it smeared across Tommy’s fingers as he peeled back the wrapper. They split the chocolate beneath the oak tree, and as they wiped their dirty fingers with the hems of their shirts, Tommy hated Nick more than he ever had in his life.

He crumpled the excess foil into a ball and turned away. The top of his scalp itched where his mom had nicked it with the razor the day before. His nose burned. The chocolate lay sweet on the back of his tongue.

Nick said, “Tommy?” 

Tommy said nothing, only wiped at his prickling eyes with the back of his wrist because Nick wouldn’t understand. How could he?

No one ever forgot Valentine’s Day.

In the morning, Nick leaned over and whispered, “C’mon, we’re leaving.”

“What?” said Tommy, wincing against the gray dawn light as he opened his eyes. A headache pounded in his temples. 

“Shh,” Nick said. “Quiet. Everyone’s still asleep.”

Tommy blinked. “What?” he asked again.

“I’m going to go start the car,” Nick said. “Five minutes.”

Tommy groaned and sat up. The room blurred for a dizzying moment and then righted. A quick scan of his surroundings revealed that they were in Nick’s living room, though he wasn’t sure when they had moved there from the kitchen. After the moth and the numbers, he didn’t remember much of how last night ended. 

He peeled himself off the couch and stepped carefully over Sam and Harry, who were sprawled across the floor beneath a shared blanket. Where the blanket had dislodged from his arm, Tommy could see Harry’s shirt sleeve and the careful crease still pressed into the cuff. 

“Tommy?” someone whispered, and he turned to find Kate blinking at him from her father’s overstuffed armchair. “Where’re you going?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Go back to sleep.”

Outside, his breath fogged from his lips like a cigarette tail, and he hugged his chest, wishing he had remembered a coat. His coveralls were wrinkled from sleep, and a wine stain the size of his fist had found its way onto the left sleeve.

By the time he walked down the driveway to Nick’s car, goosebumps had broken out across his skin, and he rubbed his hands across his forearms to keep them warm. “What’s going on?” He asked as he slid into the passenger seat. The words plumed from his mouth. 

“We’re leaving,” Nick said. He threw the car into drive and pulled out into the street without checking his mirrors.

“Where?” Tommy closed his eyes against the dull headache pounding in his temples. The word felt heavy and thick in his mouth.

Nick said, “You’ll see,” and then he turned the dial on the radio, filling the car with a percussional hum.

“Nick,” Tommy started, but his headache kept him from arguing further, and he leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window instead. The car rumbled around him; beneath him, the sound of tires on asphalt, the whir of an accelerating engine. Nick’s fingers tapped a staccato on the steering wheel. Outside the window, a string of houses awash in predawn gray blurred past. Nick didn’t have his headlights on, but it didn’t matter, because no one else was on the road this early in the morning. Tommy watched the silhouetted neighborhood pass through slit eyes, and then he blinked, and the world was blushing with pink. The houses were gone now, and fields of shorn, brittle wheat blurred by in their stead.

A yawn caught in his throat as he lifted his head. “Where are we?” And when Nick didn’t respond and his stomach gave a heaving lurch, he said, “Pull over. I think I’m gonna be sick.” 

“Huh?”

“Pull over.”

“Oh.” Nick’s voice was dazed. The fluttering beat of the blinker clicked on. Nick pulled to the shoulder and coasted for a long moment before depressing the brakes to stop.

“Ugh,” said Tommy, and he barely had time to open the door before he vomited. Bile burned sharp and acrid on his tongue. Wind lashed at his cheeks. He gagged and wiped a string of drool from his lips. 

“Sorry,” Nick said.

Tommy braced his hand on the door and leaned his head against his forearm. “Where are we going, Nick?”

Nick sighed through his teeth. “I’ll turn around. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you come.”

Tommy spat on the ground and watched the bubbles of saliva pop against the gravel highway shoulder. “That’s not what I said. I asked where we’re going.”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, are we going on a drive to watch the sunrise over a hay field? Or are we running so they can’t cart you off to war?”

Nick was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “I can’t stay here, Tommy.”

“Okay.” Tommy leaned back into the car and slammed the door shut behind him. “So where are we going?”

“Canada?” 

“Yeah.” Tommy rapped his knuckles on the dashboard. “You have a passport?”

“Or college.” Nick reached over and turned the radio down to an imperceptible hum. “Like Harry? How he’s studying business? He hardly drank anything last night; said he can dodge no problem.”

“Sure,” said Tommy.

Nick shook his head in time with the ticking of the turn signal. “We don’t even have to go that far, you know?” he said. “Just out of Kansas. My uncle has a cabin to the east, in Missouri. We could stay there, wait for it all to blow over.”

“Just pick a direction,” Tommy said. He thought of his twelfth birthday and the melted chocolate bar. How Nick had followed him doggedly through the brambles without question. “I’m with you.”

Nick shook his head. “Do you know what I saw when I looked over at you last night, Tommy?”

In the wheat field, the dark shadow of a crow swooped over the stunted stalks. 

“You were smiling.” Nick said, and the corvid landed in a patch of dirt. Its thick beak dug at the ground, scoring dark lines in the morning frost. “You were smiling. Big and all teeth, like it was your birthday or something. Ha.” He shook his head again, curls feathering his face. “And then you looked at me. You looked at me, and you said, Are you alright? And then you smiled again, and I had to leave the room because if I didn’t, I was sure I was going to punch you.”

The crow splayed its wings out wide, feathers spanning like fingers.

“I wanted to punch you,” Nick said. His gaze drifted up as he looked past Tommy to the bird and watched as it tucked its wings in tight and returned to scraping the ground. “Because you were smiling. Because your birthday was in June, and mine wasn’t.”

Tommy watched the bird out of the corner of his eye. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been there too.”

“And here?” Nick asked. “Have you been here?”

Tommy closed his eyes and tasted chocolate and idling exhaust on his lips. In the field, the crow gave up and took to the sky. The blinker clicked in the silence. 

“Yeah, I’ve been here.”

“And if I told you that I can’t do this either?”

Tommy thought of June and his chocolate stained hem. How, one hour into their journey, he had sat down on the ground sweat-soaked and thirsty, and how, after another stumbling walk back, Nick had elbowed him in the side and said, C’mon, you’re staying over tonight.

Tommy watched as the blot that was once a crow disappeared into the clouds.

“I’m with you,” he said. “Just tell me where we’re going.”