We fell in love over Quentin Tarantino and a woman older than either of us, older than our parents. Justin and I were fifteen years old and convinced that life was about nothing more than our next hipster fix and our tragically cool exteriors.

His hand grazed mine as we watched those femme fatales in yellow leather attempt to kill one another; as their hearts beat with adrenaline, ours did too. Suddenly that song started and we both held our breath. Bang bang, that awful sound. In the silence between those words – they seemed to take a lifetime to burst from her lips - we fell together in a childish embrace. It was only when we looked at one another that we realized how lonely we felt after “the church bells rang.”

He kissed me for the first time over that soundtrack. He was all tongue, no hands. Even in our most intimate trysts he could make me feel alone. Despite his young age, Justin had already learned the art of isolation. I never felt colder inside than while listening to that song. We were only vaguely past puberty and we felt pressured into action by the bareness of what we expected from our lives. To paraphrase John Cusack in High Fidelity (a movie I loved, one Justin never learned to like), it takes a special kind of people to fear being alone forever at fifteen. We were that kind of people.

Despite holding hands desperately, like we could save one another from the dissonance we somehow knew was approaching, we were slipping from each other from step one, and not just because of his sweaty palms. He sang “Bang Bang” the following Monday to me by my locker in a camp falsetto, but somehow the magic of it, its compelling nature to fasten us together, was lost. A week after that, he made me a CD with “Bang Bang” as the first song, and “Red Skies at Night” by the Fixx (another song I can no longer hear) as the closer. He informed me that they were our songs. “Our” songs. All I can remember thinking is “Why didn’t anyone ask me?”

Still, we clung to one another, hoping to find some comfort against a dark world in one another, hoping that knowing another person’s body would guard against the dangers that lurked outside. Months later, after breaking into tears on the telephone when I realized his “sweetheart” wasn’t me, I played his playlist again. “Our” song. “Bang bang, my baby shot me down.” How true.