Each day, six classes: Numbers, Classifications, Letters, Names, Functions, and Deep Listening. All our parents wanted a nontraditional education or were otherwise indifferent and let us fall into the strange pedagogy, the same way they let their cigarettes burn out in stolen hotel ashtrays.

But we learned.

Numbers taught us how to steal. How to make things add up even when they didn’t. Eve pawned calculators from the storage closet. Nelly bashed the vending machine until it spit out enough quarters to buy us all lipstick—we wore Neon Orchid. Jessie coaxed a few sympathy dollars out of her father when she saw him on weekends. I took the remainders and invested, my mind toward the future.

We were made to understand the classifications into which we might fit. Keynesian. Figment. Daemon. Gas station attendant.

Jessie loved Letters. Calligraphy in bathroom stalls, on fogged windows, or traced out on my bare shoulders. Once, she set fire to the school’s front lawn—a series of scorched symbols only Nelly could decipher. It’s a curse, she said. Eve and I called it a love letter. It looked like this: ∆≈∆.

Eve was nameless until her fifth year. Her parents disagreed on a name until their disagreement segued into a kind of patience. They opted to wait for the right name to arrive. Nominal determinism was in vogue, and no parents, even ours—lazy, abstracted, churlish—could risk the wrong name. Eventually, Eve’s great aunt died and her name became available and irrefutable. But more than ten years later, she’d still refer to herself as namelessness. When Eve and I first kissed, she said I kissed the nameless part of her. When Nelly gashed a spiral into Eve’s knee with a fountain pen, Eve said it was the nameless part of her that bled. Jessie wrote letters addressed to no one, and Eve read them all. The class though, it didn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know.

Here’s an example of a function: Me⇒  Eve⇒  Nelly⇒  Jessie⇒  Eve⇒  Jessie⇒   f(X). And another function might be: Our parents⇒  the school⇒  my memory⇒  bruises⇒  f(neon orchid). I barely passed.

Imagine us on the carpeted floor of the auditorium, arranged in the shape of a plus-sign, our four faces glinting with sweat, our half-tamed acne, fingernails ragged and trembling. To listen deeply—we were instructed—was to hear from outside of yourself. Like the sea in a conch shell or a dopplering siren ricocheting through subsidized apartments. I wanted to hear through Nelly, because she’d disappeared during our last semester, and we heard from our parents that she’d married a cowboy in Montana. We knew it wasn’t true. She’d taken the remainder and ran. What could she hear, out there in the future?

When they called her name at graduation, Nelly did not appear. Eve cried on my shoulder; Jessie flicked a match. I only remember the applause, not the faces of our parents or what happened after.

Vincent James Perrone is a writer from Detroit. He’s the author of the poetry collection Starving Romantic and a contributor to the experimental fiction anthology Collected Voices in the Expanded Field. His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Split Lip, The Los Angeles Review, Action Spectacle, and Pithead Chapel. Vincent is currently based in Charlottesville, VA, where he is pursuing an MFA at the University of Virginia.