The arrest report reads “transient,” but context is important. Which meaning of this word is being affixed to the man I knew once when he was only a boy? He had pink cheeks then, and mild brown eyes. I remember looking into those eyes as I lay pinned to the floor of his living room by four other boys. They were laughing and I was screaming. They had managed to unsnap my jeans and tug the zipper down despite my thrashing hips.

I cried out his name, this boy who is now known as a transient to the police department in my hometown. He was the only one not trying to peel off my clothes. He sat in a chair with a bottle of Jim Beam, watching, a bemused smile on his face. Only moments before, the six of us had been passing the bottle around, luxuriating in forbidden swallows of warm whiskey on a winter night. We were barely out of middle school, but the boy’s father, a single parent, had left town for the weekend. And although my best friend hadn’t been able to sneak out of her house to join the party, it hadn’t occurred to me to be wary—I’d always just been one of the guys.

The others looked everywhere except my eyes, yet his stayed fixed on mine, even as my jeans slid down over my panties. “Please,” I said, and his smile disappeared. He stood. He smashed the bottle of whiskey, slicing open his hand, and flew at them. They scattered like mice.

I tore out of the house and across the yard, but he chased me down in the snow.

“Come back inside,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

I told him to leave me alone.

He said, “Where you gonna go, huh? It’s freezing. Get up.”

I told him I couldn’t get up. I pretended my ankle was broken. He sighed.

“Listen. Listen to me. I’m not going to let them hurt you.”

His room was in the basement, and he led me there. The walls were papered with pictures of bands we loved. All of us, because we were such good friends. I wept miserably, curled into a ball on his waterbed while he knelt beside me, looking helpless.

“I’m sorry,” he said, over and over. He’d wrapped his bloody hand haphazardly with something—a T-shirt, maybe. “Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, I’m sorry.”

One by one, they came down the stairs. Each time, he charged the landing, shouting them back, stabbing the air with his broken bottle. Their faces melted with sorrow. They were sobbing. They were sorry, desperately sorry. Couldn’t they just apologize?

“No,” he said. “Get the fuck away from her.” I fell asleep on his bed, and he slept on the floor.

In the morning, I slipped upstairs to find him staring at the wall where he’d smashed the bottle. He had a bucket of plaster and a putty knife, and I silently watched him repair the damage, and then I went home. We never talked about what happened. We were kids, and kids move on from things. I grew up and moved away.

Many years later, I awake from a dream where the two of us walk alone down a deserted school corridor. It’s not the first time I’ve dreamt of him, and I wonder again, Where is he? The quiet boy whose pale cheeks so easily flushed rose, the boy who now appeared to be nowhere. He doesn’t exist on social media. No one seems to know him anymore.

I slide my phone from beneath the pillow and type his name, searching by city and paging through useless results. Finally I stumble across a match—an arrest record from the summer before. He’s accused of public intoxication and resisting arrest. He’s accused of refusing to obey. That’s you, I think. Instead of an address, he is listed as transient.

Transient means without a home. My eyes burn with sudden tears. I’ve seen the others, their beaming faces pinned to Facebook profiles above carefully curated and unblemished histories. They are husbands, they are fathers. One even became a doctor.

There is no picture to accompany the arrest record. I close the browser and contemplate the possibilities of what his life has become. I contemplate possibilities and choices and meanings.

Transient means you don’t belong anywhere. Transient means temporary. Transient means fleeting. I think, You are none of these.

*