Gabe broke the antennas off cars. A lot of punks did too, but only Gabe did it for a reason, which was the same reason he signed his name like a lunatic: Gabe was all about static. Static was something Gabe loved, maybe the one thing, and he wanted to spread it everywhere. So he broke the antennas off cars so that there would be more static in the world, more snow, white noise, burble and hiss and the freeowzzz of AM with no signal. Sometimes Gabe would drive around in his beater car, the bass on his crappy stereo turned all the way up the way the wannabe gangstas did it, but he would be blasting white noise, pure white snowy static that blanketed everything around him and fuzzed out the ragged edges of his brain.

Gabe also dressed as static. He had arrived at school one Halloween — well, the day before Halloween — dressed as snow, all black and white tiny dots all over himself. The next day, which was actually Halloween, he dressed as a preppy, or his best impression of one anyway, which wasn’t very good but was very funny. And then he started dressing like static all the time, different versions of static: paisley tie striped pants plaid shirt purple jester hat static. The kinds of clothes that make you blink and rub your eyes, but it doesn’t help.

Gabe once turned in an essay in English class that was all just pounded keys on his computer, just five pages of gobbledygook scattery fjkaljf svn sjdfskjfljv kslkjfask;f bjs jsklj vaskl v nonsense. He got an F, of course, but also a wry grin from his teacher, who knew he was smarter than this and was very dissapointed in him young man. For the next paper, Gabe pounded out more nonsense, but this time

some of it was aligned left,

some of it centered,

some of it aligned right,

but none of it justified, and the fonts kept changing. It was another F, and this time a long session with his guidance counselor, at whom he chirped like a confused bird, interrupting sentences about very serious and your future and you can do better and what are you trying to prove.

Gabe wasn’t trying to prove anything. He was just trying to spread static.

There was a call home, but Gabe’s parents didn’t have any good ideas either, and so Gabe went on failing and buzzing and fuzzing and staticking until one day Sine Wave arrived.

Sine Wave was a New Girl, and New Girls are always interesting, even to the king of static, and especially if they look like Sine Wave. She was sinuous and pure, perfect grace and perfect swerves and oh so clean and slippery. Totally impenetrable, too. Gabe decided to throw his full static regalia at her, and so he cornered her in the hall, waving his arms and fingers all spooky jiggly at her and squawking and kicking and even frothing a little. She put her hand to her mouth and laughed a high arcing musical laugh, but it wasn’t mean, it was just saying, yeah, you’re doing this crazy waving thing at me and it’s really pretty entertaining and you’ve made me smile and thanks. But it didn’t shake her, not at all, not the least little bit, and so the shakes bounced back instead and Gabe was all shook, hopping away holding one ankle and chirping "Vagabond! Mercedes! Lunar speculum cadaver math!" because he couldn’t think of anything else.

Sine Wave made friends quickly, although she seemed immune to everything, like none of them really touched her. She kept her perfect purity all the time, too, that scary smooth grace that never wavered. She seemed to exist above everyone, outside of them, like a laser beam in space just ignoring the lumpy asteroids passing by. But she always smiled at Gabe when she saw him, and when she did he would strike some crazy pose or do a rhythmless jig or sing a non-song, and she would smile some more.

One day at lunch, Gabe was standing on a bench reciting the words of the Pledge of Allegience in strange orders, "I pledge flag to allegience to, the one God nation, I indivisible pledge, allegience States of indivisible flag of I pledge." Mostly everyone ignored him, drinking their juice boxes and chattering their gossipy high school chatter, but suddenly there was Sine Wave grabbing Gabe’s tie, pulling him off the bench, and dragging him casually away. It was perfect too, all one smooth delicious motion in complete harmony, total grace, as Gabe lurched and gabbled behind, until they were around the side of the building to a place where no one ever went. Then Sine Wave turned to face Gabe, a hand on her hip, and asked, "What is your deal?"

"What?" Gabe asked.

"Everyone around here is exactly boring except you. You’re a freak, you’ve got this whole ... squawking thing you do. What is it about?" Most people asked that kind of question like what they were actually saying is Your static is ridiculous and you should stop it, but Sine Wave asked like she wanted to know.

Gabe decided to be honest. "I like static," he said.

"You like static?" she asked. She looked at him like she was searching for something.

"Yeah," Gabe said. "In all its forms. I like what it does. I wanna spread it around."

"What’s good about static?" Sine Wave asked.

"Um ..." Gabe thought about it. It wasn’t something anyone had bothered to ask him before, and he’d never asked himself either. "I dunno," he said. "I just like it."

"Show me," Sine Wave said.

"Show you," Gabe said quietly to himself. Then he nodded. "Come on," he said.

Gabe led Sine Wave to his car. They got in, and he pumped up the static, and they started to drive, out of the parking lot, up a hill, down a hill, away from school. "Where are we going?" Sine Wave shouted over the thick fuzz of white noise.

"Roll down your window," Gabe said. She did, and he kept his window up, and as they pulled onto the freeway, the wind made a huge thuk-thuk-thuk-thuk pattern that bounced against the white noise. Then they pulled off the freeway and onto one of those long country roads that weaves in and out of the redwoods, and they zigged and zagged and thukked and hissed until finally Gabe pulled off the road, driving right out onto a field of grass and stopping. Gabe turned off the engine but left the radio running white noise. Out of the glovebox he pulled a pair of sunglasses with one green lense and one red one and handed it to Sine Wave, who put them on.

"Like this," Gabe said, and he put his seat all the way back and folded his arms behind his head.

So Sine Wave tried it, and it was actually kind of nice. The white noise dulled everything, and the glasses sharpened everything, so you were almost back where you started, except everything was reversed or tweaked or something. "Are you on drugs?" Sine Wave asked.

"No," Gabe said, a little hurt, like Sine Wave was reducing him down to some dope fiend symptomology, like she was not really listening to the static at all.

But then Sine Wave asked, "Would you like to be?" And Gabe broke into a huge grin.

"Sure," he said.

"Open your mouth and close your eyes and I’ll show you what I’m about," Sine Wave said. So he did, and he felt her sensuous perfect finger touching his tongue, and then something was left behind, and Gabe knew what it was. "We’re going to my place," she announced. "And hurry up. We gotta get there before the trip starts."

So Gabe pulled out of the grass field and gunned his tiny beater until it was vibrating with the effort, and they pulled up to Sine Wave’s big house just as the first streaks were beginning to fly off the bright objects outside. Sine Wave led Gabe inside and up the stairs and into a room that was thick with wires and cables and amplifiers and keyboards and computer monitors.

"Whoa," Gabe said.

Sine Wave went to one of the computers and began tapping away, and a thin pure stream of sound floated into the room from everywhere at once, a perfect note, absolute clarity and smoothness and grace. And then another note joined it, and then more notes, some that wobbled, others that grew and shrank, some that pulsed, others that grew fat and then skinny and then fat again, until the room was all a tangle of a thousand lines of sound in every direction, but all clean pure smooth graceful lines, and Gabe had never heard anything like it in his life. And he wanted to add to it, so he started to squawk and gabble and yelp, to make his hissy fuzzy sloppy staticky warbles all over it. But the amazing thing was that his noise seemed to fit, that no matter how he tried to clash, everything belonged. And Sine Wave was jumping from machine to machine, playing new noises off his noises, and he was jumping around the room, whooping and banging on things and hollering and scritching, and she was laughing her high smooth tinkly laugh. "This is amazing!" Sine Wave shouted. "You’re perfect!" Because Gabe broke open the weave of her perfect tones. He spread it out, punched through it, made it wild and unpredictable and thrumming and alive in a way she had never even thought of. And so she kissed him, no one had ever done that she kissed him, and he fell back onto her bed and they kissed in the whirl of the sound and the threads of it everywhere intersecting, and the static and the Sine Wave did a marvelous dance that didn’t end at all.