The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Holly Goddard Jones Proof of God

From Epoch

When Simon turned sixteen, his father gave him his old car: a red ’88 Corvette, just four years off the showroom floor. Corvettes, his father insisted, were the only American vehicle worth a goddamn anymore — and made in Bowling Green, Kentucky, at that. Good for the local economy. Also, as a businessman and a local leader — pillar, he’d say sometimes, if he were shitfaced — looking like a success was important. “I’m a walking advertisement,” he’d tell Simon’s mother, who’d pretend she hadn’t heard the same bellowed proclamations two dozen times already. “Folks see me living high and know I must sell the good stuff.”

Good stuff it wasn’t. Jefferson Wells owned a small chain of furniture stores with locations in Kentucky and several surrounding states, and what he dealt in could only be called furniture by the most generous and perhaps naive of observers: chipboard entertainment centers with plastic veneers meant to mimic the look of wood grain; kitchen chairs with metal legs that would start to bow upon too many sittings. The name of the chain — Wells Brothers Furniture Company — was also crap. Simon’s father didn’t have a brother. He thought the name sounded old-fashioned, though — established — and so he put it on all of his stores in heavy Old West lettering. He told Simon that he might change the name to Wells and Son if Simon minded his p’s and q’s and got through a business degree at Western, and back then Simon had considered that more of a threat than an offer. He wanted to help the old man sell junk like he wanted a hole in the head.

A few weeks after Simon’s sixteenth birthday, some guys from his high school trashed the Corvette. He’d been driving it to school every day, feeling good: folks at Bowling Green High School paid attention when he walked down the hall now; heads turned. One day, a couple of seniors, football players, asked him if he wanted to go down the road to G. D. Ritzy’s with them after final bell, and Simon agreed, too dazed to do much more than nod and croak out a “yes.” This is how things change for a person, he’d thought, walking out BGHS’s big double doors with two of the most popular guys at school on either side of him, like bodyguards. He wished his father could see him. They rode in the Corvette with the windows down and the radio blaring Aerosmith; he wouldn’t remember the song later, not for sure, but it was one of the ones with Alicia Silverstone in the video, who was, Kevin Britt proclaimed in the car that day, “hotter than sin.”

They ate burgers and string fries, drank giant chocolate milk shakes in a dining room decorated with photos of fifties and sixties rock stars. Simon paid. The two older boys talked about Friday’s game and about Sheila Foster’s enormous tits. “Just wanna get my face between them,” Ray Hunter said, putting his hands out in front of him in a honking motion, shaking his face vigorously side to side, so that his considerable jowls trembled. They all laughed. When the food was eaten, Simon dropped Kevin and Ray off back at the high school, next to Kevin’s Pontiac Grand Am — a real clunker — and they raised hands to one another, made promises to do Ritzy’s again next week. Simon’s heart didn’t slow down until he pulled off Scottsville Road and down his family’s long, paved drive. He’d never been good at making friends. Being with those boys had been a joy and a torture all at once.

The next morning, his father woke him at 6:00 A.M. by flipping on the light switch. “Get up,” he said, and Simon did. He knew not to make his father say something twice.

He found him outside. The sun was just an ember several hills over, and fog clung to the cow pasture like sweat. His car was where he parked it, but it looked like a murder victim, destroyed and decomposing. Unrecognizable.

“Explain this,” his father said.

Simon look a few steps forward, then circled the car. None of the glass was broken, or even the headlights, but there were deep gashes in the paint on the doors, the hood, and the trunk. He’d discover later that the culprits had also pulled the old sugar-in-the-gas-tank trick, but what hurt the most — what embarrassed him to the point of nausea — was the graffiti slashed across the hood and trailing down both sides of the car: FAG, over and over again, like a curse. On the trunk door, just for variety: RICH FAG. He returned to his father’s side.

“Who did this?” his father said.

Simon shook his head.

His father slapped him, a hard blow that almost knocked him off balance. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “If this doesn’t beat all. Can’t you have anything nice?”

“It’s not my fault,” Simon said.

His father rubbed his lips and stared at the graffiti — that one word over and over, in purple paint, in white: BGHS school colors. He closed his eyes.

“They’re just jealous, is all,” Simon told his father. He looked at that word, the big one on the hood: FAG. The letters were sturdy and authoritative. “They don’t like seeing somebody have something they can’t.”

That seemed to relax his father a little, as Simon had hoped it would. “Well, that goes along with the territory, I guess,” he said. “Goddamn shame, though. I ain’t growing a fucking money tree back there.” He thumbed toward their property, fifty acres of farmland and woods with a small stream coursing through its center.

“No, sir,” Simon said.

“You may have to hitch a ride with your mother again for a while.”

Simon looked at the ground, rubbing his sore cheek. “Okay.”

They went back inside, where Simon’s mother was just putting breakfast on the table: bacon and fried eggs, home fries, sliced cantaloupe and tomato sprinkled in salt. Jefferson Wells liked to eat a roadhouse breakfast every day of the week, called cereal “bird food,” and suffered the occasional pain in his left arm that terrified Simon but also delighted him a little. They ate and didn’t speak, and Simon’s mother chattered cheerily between them, a monologue that required neither response nor acknowledgment. Nobody ever listened to her. When the meal was done, she cleared the dishes and started loading the dishwasher, humming to herself. Later in his life, when she was the only person he could count on to love him — when he realized that she was probably the only person who had ever loved him, period — he’d try to remember details about her, fond memories, things they could share and laugh about. There were devastatingly few. But he’d think about how she liked to sing as she cleaned or cooked, and he understood that she must have had some personality outside the bland housekeeper role she occupied as his father’s wife, because her repertoire was diverse and ever changing, old-fashioned, current: the Rolling Stones and R.E.M., Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash. She’d loved Simon and Garfunkel, and Simon was a grown man with too many bad choices behind him, like train cars, before he realized that he was almost certainly Paul Simon’s namesake — a fact his mother never confirmed and his father would have been furious to discover. One afternoon, when he was still a little kid too young to start school, she’d sung the “Bookends Theme” over and over as she hemmed pants, her voice plain, pleasant: a mother’s voice.

On this morning, though, she merely hummed, an empty, cheerful tune meant to soothe his father and reassure them all. Simon felt his father staring at him.

“You aren’t—” He paused, mashing a fried egg with his fork, the loose yolk running into his pile of home fries, neon and viscous. “You didn’t—” He cleared his throat. “—do anything to encourage this, did you?”

Simon knew to shake his head right away. But he thought about it. He was old enough to know what fag meant, just like the boys who’d vandalized the car knew. He wasn’t sure that he understood what being a fag meant, though — if it should be clear to him as hunger, if it meant that he had to feel only some things and never others — because all of that was mixed up and confused, what could excite or arouse him. None of it made sense.

What made the least sense to him was how yesterday had provoked this. He’d only taken those boys to the place they’d wanted to go, bought them some food, eaten with them, laughed with them. He hadn’t touched them or said anything risky. He’d hardly spoken at all. That they were able to pin him with this word, to see something in him that he hadn’t gotten sorted out for himself yet, that he hadn’t even known he was transmitting — well, it was humiliating. But it also made him afraid. He felt like a wounded animal in a house with a predator.

“Okay, then,” his father said, face wary. “See that you don’t.” Simon met Marty in one of his classes at WKU: his second go at College Algebra, actually. He wasn’t bad at math — wasn’t bad at anything he applied himself to — but college had been good to him, and as long as his father was willing to pay for it, he was willing to take the scenic route to a degree. At twenty-three, then, he was still eighteen credits short of graduating, and he’d be lucky to finish school with a 2.5 GPA. Like it mattered. His father would give him some token position with the stores whenever he finished, and Simon thought that they were both eager to postpone that day as long as possible.

Life, for the first time he could remember, was fine. He had a small apartment off College Drive, a generous food allowance, a nice car — a black Corvette, his high school graduation gift. Not a hand-me-down this time, either. He took twelve hours every semester, the full-time minimum, and always mixed in with his general ed classes something easy and interesting, like Intro to Drawing or Intro to Philosophy. The philosophy class was his favorite, the only class he scored an A in. He’d loved learning about Descartes, with his wild ideas about the world outside yourself, how everything you believe is real could just be the work of some evil genius or puppet master. He’d liked Descartes’ proof of God, too, though Simon himself had an idea that God was a fairy tale, that dead was dead. God must exist, this Descartes guy thought, because imperfect beings are incapable of imagining perfection. Bullshit, really. But Simon thought about his father sometimes — about how it felt to try to be the son his father wanted him to be, and how that effort made him love and hate all the more fiercely — and couldn’t help but wonder.

Marty was a freshman. He was a cool guy — good-looking in an accidental, unawares sort of way, easygoing, witty — the kind of person who wouldn’t have had anything to do with Simon a few years before but now gave him some respect because he was old enough to buy the beer and flush enough to pay for it more times than not. Gullible enough, too, Simon realized. But who gave a fuck? The money was his dad’s, the good times just as good. And despite all of that, he felt a real connection to Marty, felt that what they had was legitimate. A friendship. He knew that Marty’s mother was Mexican and barely spoke a lick of English, that Marty had been teased by other kids when he was little, called a spic and a wetback. “Words their daddies taught them,” Marty had said, and Simon commiserated, though his own father’s arsenal of derogatory terms and ethnic slurs was just short of breathtaking.

They started hanging out nights and on weekends. Marty had a dorm room in Pierce-Ford free on minority scholarship, but he’d crash at Simon’s place most nights after hours of drinking, or pot if they could arrange it; Marty always had those connections. They stayed up till dawn two or three nights a week, sipped beers — Natural Lights when they felt cheap and sloppy, Anchor Steam, Marty’s favorite, when they had a bottle of whiskey on hand. They’d try to remember the saying about mixing the two — “Liquor before beer, nothing to fear; beer before liquor, you’ve never been sicker” — but got the order screwed up half the time and usually ended up doing beer and shots all at once and getting sick anyway. They’d drink and play music; or drink and sit on the front porch of Simon’s building, watching the traffic; or drink and walk down to Mickey O’Shea’s on Cherry Street, where you could often catch a decent band for cheap on Fridays. Sometimes they’d get in the kitchen together and chef up a ridiculous meal that somehow tasted all right anyway, like the time when all they had was saltines and banana peppers and spicy mustard. They could be together and just be, that was the thing. No fake conversation, no showing off or showing up. Simon had never been good with other people, so for something like this to come along — well, it felt fated. Felt like a gift, a reward for suffering so much misery and bullshit in high school.

One morning, on a Thursday — late though, nearly lunchtime — Simon woke to the smell of cooking meat, the sizzling sounds of breakfast. He’d missed his morning class. Business Ethics, five times now, and he’d be lucky if the prof didn’t fail him. Marty was in the kitchen, standing over the stove. He was holding a big chunk of beef with a fork, and he laid it down carefully in the skillet, making the oil pop.

“What’s cooking?” Simon said.

“Supper.” Marty let the meat sit for just a few seconds, then he rotated it.

“Early for supper.” Simon watched the meat cook, his stomach clenching around the alcohol he’d put away last night before crashing: six beers and the four shots of Jose Cuervo he downed for Marty’s benefit. He hated tequila.

“We aren’t eating it now, dumbass.” Marty pulled the meat out of the skillet and set it on a pile of paper towels beside the sink. “I’m doing a roast. It won’t be ready until four or five.”

Simon went to the fridge and pulled out one of Marty’s bottled waters. He sipped, goosebumps making a trail between his shoulder blades. You know you’re hung over, he thought, when even water tastes like poison. “Maybe I’ll have an appetite by then.”

“Oh, you’ll eat it,” Marty said. “This is my mother’s roast.” He pulled ingredients out of a grocery bag on the counter: several spice containers and a package of bouillon cubes, red-skinned potatoes, a bag of baby carrots, one large white onion, and a bottle of red wine. “You’ve got nothing in this kitchen, man. I even had to buy a corkscrew.” He pulled that out of the bag, too, and waved it at Simon: a cheap one, the kind that looked like a pocketknife.

“I’m not much of a wine drinker,” Simon said.

“Thought you rich folks drank this shit every night.”

“Dad’s more of a beer man,” Simon told him.

“Well, you’re classy now,” Marty said.

Marty started rinsing the potatoes, peeling the onion. Simon had a crock pot, though he’d never once used it — his mother had bought it for him, along with a dozen other household items that had always been in his childhood home but seemed ridiculous in his apartment: a silverware tray; the fuzzy toilet scat cover and matching floor mat; coasters, designed to protect furniture much nicer than the crap sold by Jefferson Wells; a “While You Were Out” phone tablet. Marty piled ingredients into the crock pot, topping the mess off with half of the bottle of wine. “This is good stuff,” he said, taking a sip from the bottle. “Thought I’d splurge.” He offered the wine to Simon, who waved it off.

“Suit yourself,” Marty said. He turned the crock pot’s dial over to medium and set the lid on the top. “You’re gonna love me in about four or five hours, friend.”

Simon looked down at his water bottle. Shocked by that word, love, rising so suddenly and casually between them, he admitted the inevitable to himself: he already did.

The rest of the afternoon, they sat in the living room watching a movie on A&E, Superman, the smell of roast filling the apartment: rich, earthy. Love, Simon kept thinking, panicked, daring himself with the word the way he’d once climbed trees or taken spills on his skateboard. He knew that love came in all kinds of forms and degrees, even though he’d never been on the receiving end of much of it. His father loved him, he knew, in his way: a selfish sort of love, and limited — a love that asked for more than it could return. And his mother loved him, but she was a weak, ineffectual woman, and so her love, too, was weak and ineffectual.

He thought back to that day — almost seven years ago, now — when those football players had vandalized his car, branded it: fag. When you were alone — a loner — you could put a memory like that and all of the insecurities that went along with it somewhere safe, deep within yourself; and you could build walls around it; and you could pretend it didn’t exist, at least most of the time. Other people complicated that. Marty made it impossible. Simon didn’t know what he was — what loving Marty might make him — but he sat on the couch with him all afternoon, their arms just a foot or so away from touching, and his heart stuttered in his chest, and his face and neck burned. In the movie, Superman was flying around the earth in reverse, fast laps meant to make time spin back so that he could save Lois Lane. “Hey, there’s a party tonight,” Marty said. “At the Sig Ep house. Keg passes are five bucks. You interested?”

“You know I’m not into that shit.”

Marty sighed and shook his head, and Simon sensed his frustration — a frustration that Marty had managed to keep in check most of the three months they’d been hanging out but still let surface on occasion. “Let me tell you something, man. Something nobody else is gonna care enough to say to you. This ain’t a fucking life, what you’re doing. This is pathetic.”

“You’re here, too,” Simon said. He wondered, not for the first lime, why.

“That’s the problem.” Marty turned the TV off, shifting on the couch so that he was facing Simon. “It’s easy to sit around and drink, and I’ve been letting you drag me down with you. But that’s done. Let’s go, all right? What do you say? Besides, motherfucker, I’m making you dinner.”

“All right,” Simon said. He looked at Marty’s profile — the dark eyes and hair, skin the color of pie crust, the too-big, crooked nose. And he understood two things: that he wouldn’t be able to go on much longer being with Marty this way, pretending brotherhood when he wanted something more; that Marty almost surely, certainly, didn’t feel the same way in return. Simon paid the keg fee for them both at the door. He would have done it anyway — that was how he and Marty usually worked — but he felt especially obligated since Marty had made dinner and bought all of the ingredients, including the fourteen-dollar bottle of wine. And Marty hadn’t exaggerated: the roast was incredible. They’d both eaten long and well, until Simon’s stomach went from hung-over-sick to food-sick. He would associate that feeling — fullness bordering on illness — with Marty long after. But at the party, as they started to wander around the Sig Ep house, he only thought of his father, who complained about indigestion a couple of evenings a week. Best thing a man can do, he’d tell Simon, mouth smiling but not his eyes, is pour a beer on top of it.

Simon decided to do just that. He took a plastic cup from the guy manning the door — a pathetic thing, really, not much bigger than a Dixie cup — and got into the keg line, which was at least fifteen deep.

Marty handed him his cup. “Fill me up, would you, buddy? I’m going to go mingle a little.”

Simon wasn’t surprised. He nodded.

“Don’t run off.” Marty smiled — all those white, straight teeth, with one crooked eye tooth to make him approachable — and raised a finger. “This is the night everything changes for you, friend.”

Simon laughed and turned toward the keg. The line was moving. “Get out of here.”

He hated parties. Hated the music — the mix of hip-hop and Nashville country whose only shared characteristic, far as Simon could tell, was their God-awfulness. Hated the look of a fraternity house — how a once-decent building could be transformed into a stinking hole that somehow still attracted the good-looking girls. Green, threadbare carpet, stained here and there with beer or urine or puke that had only been soaked up, not properly cleaned. Pictures of the fraternity members, framed by year, matted loosely and hanging askew over a fireplace. Maybe he hated the girls the most — not all girls, he didn’t hate women — just the ones who showed up to places like this one with their fake tans and oily mascara, their bellybutton piercings and side fat. The girls who got in free, cut to the front of the keg line without hearing boo from anyone, then complained all night about the taste of beer the whole time they were getting drunk off of it. Those girls.

So he noticed the girl in line ahead of him, the one with the brownish-blond hair — dishwater blond, his mother would’ve called her — who waited her turn instead of cutting ahead, which she easily could have done. She didn’t look any different than the rest of them; she had streaky highlights and heavy eyeliner, wore a bright yellow T-shirt that hit her mid-stomach and blue jeans cut low enough that you could see the sharp angles of her hipbones jutting out over the waistband. But she seemed different. Quieter, not so desperate to be on exhibit. Across the room, two drunk girls — they barely looked old enough for college — were touching each other’s faces and giggling, while a handful of frat boys tried to goad them into kissing.

“These keg parties suck,” Simon said, waving his little cup. He felt mortified as soon as the words came out of his mouth — what the hell possessed him to talk to this girl? — but she laughed, kindly, and shook her head up and down with enough exaggeration that Simon could tell she had been drinking.

“You got that right,” she said. Her voice had the pronounced lilt of a local, oddly comforting. The line moved again, and she took a step forward, but awkwardly, with her body half-turned toward him. He could sense her uncertainty, so similar to his own, and he could tell that she wanted to keep talking — was relieved to hear a friendly voice — but was unsure about his intentions, whether he’d meant to engage her or just tossed out a random observation for anyone within earshot. It touched him.

“Simon,” he said, nesting Marty’s cup in his own so that he could offer his hand. He was intoxicated by his own confidence.

“Fish,” she said, shaking it, and she blushed right away. “Well, Felicia’s really my name. But my nickname is Fish.”

“Who calls you that?” Simon said. He regretted it immediately, because the question came out disbelieving instead of charming, like he suspected she’d given herself the name. And the look on her face — the cute blush turning to scarlet, the line appearing suddenly and decisively between her eyebrows — told him that she had done exactly that. Reinvented herself.

“My friends,” she said. “My friends here call me that.”

“I like it,” Simon told her.

“Sure,” she said — sarcastically, Simon thought. She looked ready to turn around — they were almost to the keg now — when Marty returned, sipping from a bottle of Corona.

“Where did you get that?” Simon said.

Marty took another swig, a lime wedge sliding up the neck and down again. “Some guys,” he said, shrugging. He noticed Fish. “Who is this?” he said, looking at her and not Simon.

“Felicia,” she told him. Her cheeks were pink again, the smile back on her face. And Simon felt the shift in their attentions away from him, toward each other — monumental, it felt, disastrous, like the landscape around him was changing, the ground under his feet disappearing, sliding out beneath him.

She stepped out of line, and the keg was in front of him. He stared at the spout.

“Move it,” someone veiled from behind.

“Whoa,” the guy manning the keg said, putting his hand out like a goddamned police officer. “What’s this two-cup shit?”

“I paid for two glasses,” Simon said.

“All right,” the guy said, so self-important that Simon wanted to punch him. “This time, okay. Next time, maybe not.”

He put his cup under the spout, flipped the nozzle, and watched the beer trickle out, slowly filling his tiny glass. He filled Marty’s, too, and when he stood, the inevitable: Marty and Felicia were gone. He got out of the line and found an empty corner to stand in.

“Two-fistin’ it,” a guy said, stumbling past him. He gave Simon a shaky thumbs-up. “Right on.”

Simon looked down: his glass. Marty’s glass. He sipped from one, then the other. In no time, the beer was gone. The young girls were kissing now as a group of boys cheered them on. Their movements were exaggerated, grotesque — heads swaying back and forth more than seemed necessary or even sexy, tongues flicking out at one another between kisses. He held the empty plastic cups in his hands and looked at the keg line, which was deeper than ever. Fucking ridiculous. And Marty, nowhere to be seen. He tossed the cups behind a recliner and left.

He stopped by Greenwood Liquors on his way back to the apartment, bought a bottle of Bushmills, and woke up to Marty’s voice: “Hot, man.”

Simon was sweating. He thrashed under the covers, feeling close to suffocating. His alarm blinked a single-number time, five or six A.M., he couldn’t make it out, and he saw the empty Bushmills bottle on his nightstand.

“What?” he rasped.

“She was fucking hot,” Marty said. “Goddamn.”

I’m going to die, Simon thought. He needed to vomit, but he wouldn’t — couldn’t. He was going to drown in his own chest, with the taste of old whiskey and red meat in his throat. He was going to die.

At some point — then or later, he didn’t know — he was rolled over, so that his chin hung over the edge of the bed.

Daylight. He blinked, eyes gummy and itchy. When the world came back into focus, he saw red: a pasta pot on the floor, last night’s dinner a churned mess inside of it. He closed his eyes, sure that he was going to puke again.

The only person who’d ever know the facts of what happened three nights later in Felicia’s dorm room — the facts, though not actually the truths behind them — was Simon’s father. Simon had known that his father would have the power and smarts to help him, but he’d also sensed, on a level he didn’t even care to acknowledge, that his father would understand. Would forgive him and maybe even support him, in a way he couldn’t have done had Simon confessed to something else. Telling him the sequence of events ended up being the easy part; Simon could think of it all like some story he was making up, or the plot of a movie, and just cling to the chronology when no other connections sufficed: We were bored, had nothing better going on. Marty told me that she was easy, that he could get me laid. We’d talked about maybe driving out on Windsor Road, where they’re clearing land to build that new subdivision, and do a campfire or something. Marty put his sleeping bag in the trunk of my car, and I threw in a couple of blankets, and we just went.

The truths, though — those he kept to himself. He couldn’t explain to his father what it felt like to wake up Friday afternoon, after the party, and listen to Marty tease him about getting drunk and sick and how Simon was lucky that Marty was home in time to roll his dumb, plastered ass over. What it felt like to listen as Marty gave him every sick fucking detail about his night with Felicia: “We went to her room, and Jesus, dude, I didn’t even have to play nice. She didn’t put on CDs or burn incense or any of that dumb shit girls do when they’re trying to talk themselves into it. She was out of her shirt before the door closed all the way.”

And he could never, never tell his father the next part of the conversation — how his face must’ve given some of what he was feeling away, because Marty looked at him strangely, and Simon was sure that Marty had finally figured out how he felt about him, that there was a side to their friendship he’d been ignorant about all this time. So when Marty spoke — when he asked Simon, “Have you ever been laid, man?” — Simon was so shocked that he shook his head no, which was the truth. He hadn’t.

“Jesus,” Marty had said. “Goddamn, I’m sorry. I’ve been a jerk.”

“It’s no big deal.” He turned on the TV, but Marty shut it off again.

“No, it is a big deal.” He put a hand on Simon’s knee. “We’re gonna fix you up, though. You don’t worry about it.”

Simon felt like crying: his head howled, his stomach was rotten, and he just plain hurt, inside-out. He’d been lulled by the contentment of the last few months — tricked into thinking that his life could be different and better — and now he was in hell. “Please, just leave it alone.”

Marty got quiet then, but Simon knew that the conversation wasn’t over. So he felt no surprise when Marty approached him Monday afternoon, looking like he’d thought hard and reached a difficult decision. “Felicia,” he said. “Felicia’ll do it.”

“Do what?” Of course he knew.

“She’ll fuck you.”

Simon tried to laugh. “What the hell? Did you ask her?”

Marty shook his head. “No, but if we go over there, she’ll do it. We just gotta get her a little drunk first, but she won’t need much convincing.”

“You’re crazy,” Simon said.

“No, I owe you,” Marty told him. “You’ve been good to me. Let me do this for you, okay? It ain’t that big a deal. That’s the first thing you need to realize. You’ve got this shit built up so big in your head that you’re paralyzed.”

“It’s not really like that,” Simon said.

Marty picked up his cell phone. “Trust me.” He flipped the receiver open, scrolled through his number list, and looked at Simon, lifting his eyebrows. Not getting laid — that was one thing: Marty could understand that, could even commiserate. But not wanting to: that was something else. He nodded to Marty.

“This time tomorrow,” Marty said, smiling, “you’ll be a stud.”

Marty tried calling her about four, but her roommate told him she was out running or something, he’d tell his father early the next morning, weeping, on the edge of hysterics. This was later, after, and the streetlights to his father’s house had all been on their yellow caution sequence, as if none of the regular rules applied at such an ungodly hour. Then she had to meet some guys about a group project, wouldn’t be back till late. Marty said that we should just hang out a while, surprise her later on. So we went down to the corner store and got some beers, then hung out at the house for a while.

They bought tequila, too, and a bottle of peppermint schnapps that was on the bargain rack, plus some of those prepackaged watermelon-flavored shots that cost one dollar apiece and came packaged like test tubes. They drank. Simon didn’t want to. Since Friday morning he’d been in horrible shape — throwing up every couple of hours, feeling a kind of trembling ache that reminded him of the flu but was hideously worse, like comparing a gunshot to a bee sting. Friday night he was just about convinced that he needed to be in the hospital — he almost certainly had alcohol poisoning — but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, knowing that his father would find out and push him with a million different questions and scoldings. So he’d lain in bed and suffered, and by Saturday night he was able to choke down a bowl of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars without getting sick. By Sunday, he fell dizzy and weak, but close to normal, otherwise. Except for the depression. He’d been sad in his life lots of times, but this was different. This was nothingness: a total vacuum of hope. He’d awakened in the middle of the night, at one point — Friday or Saturday, they blended together — and thought about killing himself. The idea was a relief but little more, and if he could have reached out and pressed a button and had it done, he would have. He didn’t have the motivation for anything else.

He drank Monday night because he felt weighed down by inevitability, and he didn’t know another way to disconnect from what was about to happen. He wasn’t going to be able to have sex with that girl, he was sure — not with Marty watching or hanging out in the hallway outside her room, maybe not at all. Even if he could, though, what would doing it accomplish? Marty wanted this for him — had gone out of his way to arrange it — and that hurt more than an outright rejection would have.

“What are you thinking right now?” Marty asked. Night had fallen, and they sat on the porch of Simon’s apartment house, passing the bottle of schnapps back and forth. The blankets and sleeping bag were in the trunk. A Durex Ultra-thin condom, one of Marty’s, was in his pocket.

“I don’t know,” Simon said.

“That’s okay.” Marty rocked his lawn chair back, tipped back the bottle at the same time. “I was a mess my first time. I was fourteen, and she was sixteen, lived one street over in my neighborhood. She was my sister’s friend.”

Despite himself, Simon felt a cold excitement. He sat very still, the blood pulsing in his temples and his groin, making his body — still feverish from his illness — thrum like a giant, beating heart.

“We’d been building up to it, you know. Second-base shit, but I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, of course. I was just grabbing her tits and trying to kiss her and grope her like they do in the movies.” He laughed, and a car passed by on the street ahead of them. “So when we finally got around to fucking, she pretty much took over. It was wild. And I wanted her all the time after that. It was like the first time you — I don’t know — eat a steak or smoke pot. It’s so good you don’t know why you waited so long to try it.”

“You didn’t wait that long,” Simon said.

“Nah.” Simon could hear the pride in that one syllable. “I’ve never been too patient.” Marty flipped his phone open and looked at the time. “It’s eleven, friend. She should be home by now. You ready to cruise?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Simon said, his skin burning.

Marty’s fingers grazed his arm in the dark. “Just chill out, okay? You’re gonna love this. She’s a real hellcat.”

Simon closed his eyes and focused on the sensation of Marty’s fingers. “Okay,” he whispered. This would be over in a few hours, no matter what happened. He clung to that.

Felicia’s room was on the seventh floor. Keough Hall was female-only, and male guests weren’t allowed up after eleven on week-nights, but Felicia had shown Marty that there was a back way you could access through the common laundry room. Simon was out of breath after two flights — the alcohol had hit him harder than usual, and he was lightheaded — but they couldn’t have used the elevator without getting spotted by the Rent-a-cop at the front desk. “Almost there,” Marty kept saying. He was small and fit — he’d walked on to the soccer team in August, then dropped out a month later — and he laughed the whole way up, never once needing to rest. “Save some energy, big guy.”

By the seventh floor, Simon realized that his left ear was ringing. He took a deep breath.

“No more stairs,” Marty said. “She’s just down the hall.”

“Give me a minute,” Simon told him.

Marty waited, and when Simon was feeling better — he must have looked a little better, too — Marty handed him the tequila bottle. “One to grow on,” he said. “And go wash your face.”

Simon took a long, shuddering drink, swallowing past the oily taste he hated. He handed the bottle back to Marty and went to the restroom, hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone. The bathroom was empty. He bent over the nearest sink and splashed water on his face, ran it through his short hair, took slow drinks of it by sticking his mouth right into the flow. He didn’t look in the mirror. He had his father’s face — the heavy eyebrows and full lower lip, the broad nose that made him — them — look slow and mean. He didn’t need to see that face right now.

In the hallway, Marty was holding the tequila bottle, now empty. “No worries,” Marty said, voice thick, like his tongue was too big for his mouth. “She’ll have something.”

She’ll just say no, Simon thought. His relief was instantaneous. Why had he assumed she wouldn’t? No booze, no chance.

“Ready, man?” Marty said.

Her door was heavy oak — decorated, like the other doors on this floor, with construction-paper clowns with googly eyes, two of them: STEPH in block letters on the left, FISH on the right. They’d forgotten about the roommate, he realized; there was no way this could go down the way Marty had envisioned it. Too many unconsidered factors. He knocked on Felicia’s door himself, three hard raps. He smiled at Marty. And after a pause — a bar of light appearing on the floor in front of them — the door opened. Felicia stood there, the room behind her empty. Simon could see that she had been sleeping.

“Marty?” She smiled in a confused way, looking from Marty to Simon and back again, loose ponytail swinging. She had on a tank top — no bra — and light cotton pajama pants with a drawstring waist. The pant legs were long, and Simon could see her finely shaped toes sticking out from beneath the material, nails a glossy bright blue. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Can we come inside?” Marty said.

She hesitated. Only for a second, but her eyes met Simon’s, and though she never stopped smiling — a confident, breezy, college girl’s smirk, the one she even knew to call upon in her half wakefulness — he sensed her unease, and shared it.

“Okay,” she said, and Simon also saw what Marty was too drunk to notice: the pretty blush on her cheeks, the naked hope. Whatever she’d told Marty about their night together — whatever she’d even told herself — she’d slept with him because she liked him and wanted him to like her back. She would do whatever Marty asked of her.

Marty gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and crossed the room in two good strides, plopping down on what had to be Felicia’s bed. The space was small, with identical desks and metal wall lamps, cheap chests of drawers — they could have come from the Wells Brothers showroom — and closets with no doors. Felicia’s bulletin board was covered, every inch, in photographs of bright, tanned girl faces, a collage interspersed here and there with cutouts offish — some real photographs, from magazines, some cartoons. There was a stuffed fish on her bed, too: fluffy and colorful, with a zippered pocket. Simon took a seat at the roommate’s desk.

“So what are you guys doing?” she asked again.

Marty shrugged. He got up from the bed and started wandering around the dorm room, checking the fridge, pulling up the corner of the roommate’s mattress. Then he grinned, grabbed the stuffed fish from the bed, and unzipped the front pocket, jamming his hand inside. He pulled out a baggie of weed and a package of rolling papers.

“Bingo,” he said.

Felicia grabbed at the bag, and Marty yanked it out of her reach. “Come on, give it back,” she said. “That’s got to last me until I get home again, and I don’t usually do it here, anyhow. The smoke detectors are really sensitive.”

“Let’s take off, then,” Marty said. “We thought about camping out over on Windsor, close to where that drive-in movie used to be.”

“I don’t know,” Felicia said, plopping down on the bed and pulling her legs up under her, Indian-style. “I have class at nine.”

Simon noticed Marty looking at him. “We’d have you back in plenty of time,” he said.

She laughed. “Are you crazy? It’s already midnight.”

Marty sat down beside her and leaned close, pushing her hair over so that he could kiss her neck. Simon’s chest tightened, his breath cut short and painful — but there was an impatience in this pain, too, a kind of reluctant desire that was more potent for being wrong, so clearly counter to everything Simon thought he’d discovered about himself. He watched, and Marty brushed his lips lightly against her skin, raised his chin, murmured something into the cup of her ear; Simon couldn’t make out what. Marty moved his hand to her stomach, working his thumb under the fabric of her tank top; from across the small room, Simon could see her chest expand with a quick breath, stomach withdrawing from Marty’s touch. She looked from Marty to Simon, eyebrows knitting together.

“Skip,” Marty said, loud enough this time that Simon could hear.

She sighed in an exaggerated way, leaning away from him, back against her cinderblock wall. “I can’t camp, guys. If I miss my Psych class again my grade’s going to drop by a letter.”

Simon felt his chest loosen, his forehead cool. His relief was so powerful that it flooded him like adrenaline, and maybe that’s what it was: a high, the high of realizing he had a way out. He stood. “Let’s go. Marty. She’s right. It’s late.” He added: “We could camp for real this weekend. Maybe drive out to Dale Hollow or something.”

“I’d be up for that,” Felicia said.

“Goddamn.” Marty waved his arms in an exasperated way. “Seems like the harder I try to have a good time, the harder people make it. You two belong with each other.” He rose and started for the door, a show that Simon knew to take for what it was: just bravado. Marty was always making grand exits, grand pronouncements. Especially when he was drunk. Last month, when they were drinking at Mickey O’Shea’s and listening to the Friday band — Hard Knox, they were called, a name that Marty had declared was “straight-up retarded” — he’d waited for a pause between songs, a lull after the clapping, to yell in the bar-quiet, “Christ, you suck!” Most guys doing that would have gotten their asses beat. Marty got some cheers, a high-five, and a halfhearted retort from the lead singer: “Not cool, man. Grow up.”

It was conviction, Simon decided. Even the conviction to be a drunk asshole got you further than none at all.

“Wait,” Felicia said now, rising before Marty could swing open her door. She picked up the baggie, dangled it between her thumb and forefinger. “Don’t run off. I can’t camp, okay? But you guys can hang out here for a little while.”

Marty motioned to the ceiling. “What about the smoke detector?”

She waved him back into the room, to her bed. He relented, smiling, and once he was seated, Felicia began a series of operations that had the air of ritual, oft-repeated and perfected: she went to the windows and turned the handles, pushing them out and open; then she unplugged a box fan that was propped up on her roommate’s dresser and moved it to the windowsill, replugging it and cranking it on its highest setting, air blowing outside. She grabbed an aerosol can of air freshener, sprayed a little near her door, and sat it on the floor by her bed where she could grab it in a hurry.

“That’s worked in the past,” she said finally. “I usually do this at my friend’s apartment or at the park, but we should be okay here.”

“You sure?” Simon said. That beautiful feeling of relief from before had dissipated. The air freshener, some generic floral scent, sat heavy in the air and metallic on his tongue: mockingly cheerful, nauseating.

Felicia nodded, already smoothing a rolling paper out on some kind of monster textbook, shaking out a neat mound of bud, working the joint between her fingers and thumb and sealing the edge with her saliva. She twisted the ends expertly, a useless sort of grace that Simon couldn’t help but admire. His father looked this way when he was operating the standard shift on a car, his mother when she was peeling potatoes or taste-testing a pot of her vegetable soup. And Simon himself could handle a batting cage like a major leaguer, his swings as fast and uniform as crochet stitches.

Felicia leaned close to the fan, lighting the joint. She puffed it twice, the way rich men tasted cigars in the movies, and exhaled into the blades — her hum made staccato, the funny robot-sound Simon remembered from his childhood.

“Don’t hog,” Marty said, taking the joint and Felicia’s spot near the fan. Then Simon had his turn, and he got a bit of pleasure from the intimacy of sharing this with Marty, their lips on the same soft twist of paper, the same smoke in their chests. He finally exhaled, lightheaded. This seemed like a potent enough batch, which didn’t surprise him: rich girls always got their hands on the good stuff, paying too much for it and not even knowing the difference. They were scoring from friends of their parents, not rednecks and black kids. No visits to bum-fucked Egypt to buy from a pregnant teenager, no drives down to the housing projects, where you were more likely to get approached about a rock than a dime-bag. And Felicia had money, he could tell. It wasn’t a matter of how he’d seen her dressed, either — the labels and nonsense, the dainty diamond earrings — and it wasn’t her room, which was no more impressive on Felicia’s side than on her roommate’s. The same Target bedclothes, rumpled and overdue for a wash. Similar posters and makeup cases, shower caddies and rubber flip-flops. Similar Nike tennis shoes lining the closet floors: an old pair with some wear still in them, a newer pair for going to class. I’ve measured my life in tennis shoes, Simon thought then, remembering some poem he’d read in lit class.

No, it was something else. She had the manner of a girl who’d been denied nothing, whose rebellions were safe because they were sanctioned and contained and easily remedied, even if the worst happened. Her parents would have been the type to say, “If you drink too much, give us a call. You won’t get in trouble. If you’re going to have sex, let us take you to the doctor. You won’t get in trouble.”

Three hits, a fourth, a fifth. He was feeling it. “Really, though, this stuff is fascinating,” Felicia was saying, hand on the giant textbook. “I’m thinking of changing majors.”

“Fascinating,” Marty echoed.

It went on like this for a while, and then there was a second joint, and Simon was feeling tired, blurry. He faded out for a moment, and when he found his focus again, Felicia was on the bed with Marty on top of her, pajamas down around her knees, Marty between her hips. Music was playing lowly, some female-wailing stuff that Simon didn’t recognize or much care for, and Marty’s quick breaths were easily audible above the brash acoustic guitar chords. His head bobbed above her. Her fingers curled loosely in his dark hair. As Simon watched, Marty leaned down and lifted her tank top over her head, and she curled her shoulders up to make it easier for him, breasts so small that they barely stirred with the motion.

Marty finished, lifted his head, and saw Simon watching them. Simon’s terror was instant but dulled — out-of-body. He felt himself slowly turning to the window, focusing on it. He had been looking that way all along. He’d been sleeping.

“Hey,” Marty said. “Your turn.”

This was the part he’d try to explain to his father — how nobody ever just lost everything, or crashed, or went screaming over an edge. No, you nickeled-and-dimed your way there, you took a step and felt the ground solid beneath you and then thought another was safe enough, or maybe somebody was pushing you the whole way, little pushes, the kind that felt more like reassurances than actual pressure.

He managed to get the rubber on, and Marty was pulling him over before Felicia fully registered the change, before she had a chance to replace her clothes or otherwise react. She grabbed at her sheet, not saying no, just making a low moaning sound that could have been fear but seemed less potent somehow: unnnnnh. Her breath quickened, yet still she didn’t say anything. Simon waited for her to stop him, to ask what the hell was going on, but her eyes flitted from his to Marty’s and back again, frightened but resigned, as if she knew that all of this had been decided beforehand and her vote was futile against the majority’s.

He was inside her when she started to cry.

“No,” she managed now. “Off. Get him off me, Marty, please, get him off me.”

Simon felt Marty’s hand on his lower back, intimate as a kiss would have been. “She’s just wigging,” he said. “Hurry up.”

Simon did, no longer stimulated but sick to his stomach and moving against her, rubber tugging uncomfortably, dangling, but neither Felicia nor Marty seemed to know the difference. She was moaning again, a chilling sound, and Simon had decided that he just needed to stop, collapse on top of her — like Marty had done, with the final thrust, the hard exhalation — but out of nowhere her moans turned to shrieks, screams, and he and Marty were both trying to cover her month before they all got caught. He felt something pushed into his hand, the stuffed fish with the zippered pocket, and he held it to Felicia’s mouth, Marty’s hands pressed on top of his own, like men making a pact. “Felicia, come on, shut the fuck up,” Marty was saying when Simon pulled back, tugging his jeans over his hips and zipping his fly closed. He yanked off the rubber and stuffed it into his pocket before Marty could see that he’d wasted it, still thinking that way despite his panic, because all of this seemed disconnected from the kinds of anguish he was used to feeling. They’d figure this situation out — calm Felicia down, talk her out of reporting them to the R.A. or the god-forbid campus police — but then he’d have the rest of his life to contend with, the awkwardness with Marty, and maybe Marty wouldn’t want another thing to do with him. Felicia was thrashing, sheets working themselves into ropes beneath her, and her leg pistoned out, catching Simon square in the kneecap, pain quick and bright as a lightning flash.

Marty pulled back, removing the pillow, and she screamed. “Goddamn it,” he said, covering her mouth again, but she was bucking now, panicked, and Simon could see that Marty was going to lose hold of her. So he leaned down, holding his weight over her legs and midriff, heart rebounding in his chest like a boxer’s speed bag. “Jesus,” Marty grunted, trying to keep her head still under his hands. “Fish, get it together. I thought you were into it, you stupid—” She jerked, and he pushed the stuffed fish against her face. “Fuck.” He looked at Simon, his own face pale, the flesh under his eyes, always dusky, now heavy as graphite. “She’s having a fucking conniption,” he said breathlessly. “Fuck, fuck, I don’t know what to do, man.”

The rest happened very quickly. Simon would have trouble making sense of it later, because he’d remember Marty saying, “Shhh, honey,” and “Please, kid, we’re just gonna leave,” and “Calm down, calm down,” but she must have already been still by that time, and how long? He didn’t know. At some point he realized that there wasn’t any more tension in her legs, no resistance against him, and he said to Marty, “Hey, is she okay?” and Marty didn’t answer him. And Simon knew.

“Oh my God,” Simon said. He was sitting on the end of the cheap twin bed, and he thought her leg was maybe still under his hip, but he was so numb all over that he couldn’t be sure. It struck him that he should try slapping her cheeks or checking for a pulse — or CPR, maybe that was what they needed to do — and there was 911, too, and that was probably the smartest idea. Get an ambulance here. Put the whole thing into more capable hands. But that was all balanced by fear — for her safety, sure, but mostly for himself — an emotion so pure it was primal.

“Marty,” Simon found himself saying, voice cracking. “Marty, what if she’s dead?”

Marty threw the pillow on the bed and wiped his hand on his jeans. He stared at Felicia and then the door, holding a finger to his lips. Neither moved for a moment, waiting, the only sounds their hard breathing and the fast hum of the box fan.

“We’ve got to do something,” Simon said finally. “Right? Right?”

“Yeah,” Marty muttered. He was crying, visibly desperate, and Simon ached because there wasn’t an acceptable way for him to give comfort right now, or to take it. He ached, too, because this was Marty’s fault, all Marty’s fault, and it wasn’t fucking right for him to worry right now, for him to feel anything for a man whose concern for Simon only extended as far as Simon’s ability and willingness to keep him drunk. It wasn’t right. But Simon couldn’t change it.

“What do we do?” he asked Marty.

Marty started searching the room like he had hours before — pulling out drawers, checking the closet shelf — and Simon stood and backed toward the door, not sure what to ask, what to think. All at once Marty stopped, bent down, and grabbed the aerosol can of air freshener that Felicia had left on the floor. Before Simon could object, he stalked over to Felicia’s bed and sprayed her down with it, dousing her face and her crotch most heavily and using his free hand to wipe sweat off his forehead. The air was thick with the floral scent from before, pink-smelling and nauseating, and Simon wasn’t surprised when Marty turned and retched into a wastebasket.

“Oh God, what the hell.” Simon said, but he guessed he understood.

Marty came to him and shoved the can into his hand, and Simon looked at it stupidly. English Rose Garden, it said. There was a picture.

“Now you,” Marty told him, hand still on Simon’s.

He did it, he guessed, as much for himself as for Marty. He knew this was true when the time came to make it final, and he didn’t trust Marty not to bungle it. One of them would have to go get the car, which was parked a half mile up the way on University Drive, and pull it around for the other; that was the only way they stood a fighting chance of clearing the campus before the fire alarm engaged. The other had to stay here and make sure the fire caught, that the sprinklers couldn’t soak it too quickly, and Simon was already seeing how that could maybe be done. But they had to get on it.

He pressed the keys to his Corvette into Marty’s hand. “Get the car,” he said. “You remember where it is?”

Marty nodded, visibly relieved. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“Wait for me at the corner, okay? I’ll be there as soon as I can.” It occurred to him that Marty could take his keys and drive off, leaving Simon stranded, but he decided that he’d have to risk it.

“I’ll be there,” Marty said, and Simon hated the sudden bloom of hope on his face. Worse than that, he hated the tone of that I’ll be there, as if this were a favor and not simply his part. The whole time they’d known each other. Marty had managed to live off of Simon’s good graces and make it seem that Simon was the one owing. He was dismayed by his own stupidity.

But Marty chose then to grab Simon, to hug him, and Simon felt the press of Marty’s wet cheek against his neck. Simon hadn’t hugged a man before — couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched his own father, and only then for a hard handshake, or to have his back pummeled when a piece of food went down his windpipe — but he knew that this contact went on longer than it should have. Marty whispered thank you, still holding him, and Simon squeezed back fiercely, not wanting to let go but afraid not to be the first to pull back. So he did.

“I’ll be there,” Marty repeated, and in a second he was gone.

Simon pulled Felicia’s desk chair into the middle of the room, grabbed the roommate’s comforter, and worked as quickly as he could, bunching the material tight around the two sprinklers. He knotted loose spots with rolled-up towels, and the mass looked bloated and misshapen when he was finished, like a toadstool growing out of the ceiling, or a malignant mole. His shoulders ached when he jumped down, and he thought, absurdly, of Michelangelo.

He emptied the can of air freshener, spraying the textbook that Felicia had used for rolling joints — already that seemed like weeks ago — and placing it on the bed next to her feet. He tossed the empty can up there too, figuring it would explode when things got hot enough, help finish the job. He stayed as far from the body as he could, and only years later could he acknowledge that this wasn’t just nausea or guilt, an irrational fear of the dead — it was the fear that she wasn’t dead, that he’d get near enough to see her chest rise, and then what would he do? Could he stop what had been put into motion? Did he want to?

He started the fire with Felicia’s lighter, the one she’d passed around with the joint. And when the first blue-white flame burst forth, he ran, the flames fast and hot behind him, the fire more successful, more quick, than he realized it could be. He exited the room as quietly as he could, pulling the door tight with the faintest snick, and then he dashed across the hallway and toward the stairwell, praying that he could get there without a door opening, without crossing the path of some girl on her late-night bathroom break. Then he was in the stairwell and circling down, no longer trying to soften his footfalls but taking the steps two and three at a time, almost falling, regaining balance, picking up speed again. In a minute or two he reached ground level, sprinting down the hallway and back through the laundry room’s back entrance, into the night. He ran so hard that his thoughts stayed behind, for a little while, and he was filled with a beautiful energy and exhilaration — like he could lap the earth in reverse, spin time back, change everything.

Marty was waiting when he reached the corner, the Corvette’s engine humming smoothly in the stillness. The car was in motion before Simon could slam his door closed.

Two hours later, he waited for his father’s judgment.

“This Marty kid,” he said. “Will he keep his mouth shut?”

“I don’t know,” Simon said. He’d dropped Marty off in front of Pierce-Ford barely an hour ago. They’d passed fire trucks on the way, and Marty looked shocked when he saw them, as if he hadn’t really believed that Simon would finish what he’d started. As if the flashing lights and sirens were more proof than he could stomach.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” his father told him. “May be better if he squeals. If you keep your mouth shut and don’t give anything away. You say nobody saw you? Tell the truth, now.”

“Nobody,” Simon said.

“That’s good.” His father rose, started to pace their living room. “That’s good,” he repeated, rubbing his face.

“I used a condom,” Simon said.

“What did you do with it?”

“Put it in my pocket.”

His father stopped. “Still there?”

Simon nodded.

“We’ll burn it,” his father said. “And your clothes, too, while we’re at it.” Simon stripped down to his boxers and waited while his father went to the kitchen for a garbage bag. His father returned and held the bag open wide. “Anything else?”

“The lighter’s in my pocket with the rubber,” Simon said. He tossed the bundle in all at once.

His father looked in the bag. “Christ, kid. What a fucking mess.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.” And he was, though this sorry was much bigger than his father, or himself. A sorry he couldn’t really contemplate just yet, tired as he was, numb as he felt. But he’d feel it later, Simon was sure. For the rest of his life, he’d feel it.

“Well,” his father said. “A little late for sorries.” But he crossed the living room and kissed Simon’s forehead, holding Simon’s face roughly with his big hands, then rested his chin on Simon’s crown. “Your mother loves you,” he said.

Simon knew what his father meant. “I know.”

“Go to bed, son. I’ll take care of it.”

Simon did. He went upstairs to his childhood room — the one his mother kept dusted, just in case he decided to come home for a night or weekend. He climbed into his bed, and the sheets were fresh, because his mother changed them once a week whether the bed had been slept in or not. His body ached — from tonight or from the culmination of the last several nights he wasn’t sure, but the soft mattress was a blessing, as were the familiar shadows of his childhood room and the familiar beam of moonlight hitting the end of his bed. He felt safe here, which was ironic, because he’d never felt safe in this house, or loved.

In a few moments, as he was starting to doze, the light in the room changed, started to shift and rollick. Simon sat up and looked out the window: his father was back behind the house, building up a small fire. Flames were already glowing in the center of a neat teepee of wood, and when the last chunks were arranged to his father’s satisfaction, he stood, backed away a few feet, and shot a stream of lighter fluid over to the pile. It erupted, beautiful and startling, and Simon’s father began to empty the bag, giving each item time to char before adding the next one: the jeans first, then the boxers and shirt. He wadded the bag into a ball and threw that on last.

His father stood back to watch. The flames climbed higher, black smoke roiling at their apex, and as a breeze picked up outside, bits of ash drifted off on a current, down toward the cow pasture, where the new day’s fog was already starting to collect. The fire was a neat solution, and Simon knew that his father loved a neat solution. He’d known he could depend on that. He watched as his father crossed his arms, surveying his work and his property — the acreage, the far-off stream — like a king who had seen battle, fared well, and returned home to enjoy his spoils.

His car was vandalized a second time five years later.

He’d been at Mickey O’Shea’s all evening, alone. The trial was long enough ago — coming up on three years — that most people didn’t recognize him. Most people — even the angry ones who’d protested the day he was acquitted, marching with signs outside the courtroom, a hundred different photos of Felicia plastered everywhere, inescapable — wanted to move on at some point, to forget that bad things happened. Simon wanted to forget. But he came to this bar anyway, a few times a month, and thought about Marty, who’d called the police three days after Felicia’s death and confessed to everything.

For the good it did.

Simon left Mickey’s at one A.M. and started down Cherry Street to the gravel lot where he always parked the Corvette, remembering all of the times he’d cut this same path with Marty, both of them shitfaced but not bellowing idiots, usually just deep into some conversation about a movie or their folks or whether or not God was real. Marty believed in God. “Got to,” he’d told Simon one night. “What else is there?” And Simon, knowing he’d bothered Marty by suggesting that there wasn’t anything else, there was nothing, was happy that he could tell him about Descartes.

“Proof of God,” Marty had said. “I like it.”

“So do I,” Simon had told him.

He was glad he’d given Marty that — a gift, he thought now, something to carry him through difficult times. Marty had made a deal in the year after Felicia’s death, pleading guilty to rape and conspiracy to rape, plus manslaughter — a twenty to life sentence — in exchange for testifying against Simon in the big trial. Simon had done what his father had told him to do: Stick to the alibi and don’t waver, no matter what the police tell you, no matter what evidence they produce. As it turned out, despite some bluffs during the interrogation, they had nothing: no witnesses, no DNA, only Marty’s testimony, ever changing. In the end, Marty managed only to implicate himself.

Simon approached his car in the dark.

He felt the crunch of broken glass beneath his hiking boots and knew what had happened before he saw it: every window of the Corvette smashed, the headlights and taillights busted, cracks pounded into the black fiberglass with what could only have been a baseball bat, or perhaps even a mallet of some kind. No graffiti this time, but the message was just as plain as that long-ago FAG had been, just as accurate. He realized that whoever had done this could still be lurking somewhere nearby, holding the weapon, and he stood as still as possible, listening.

Nothing. There was nothing.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and opened it, the small screen glowing like a distress signal in the middle of so much darkness. He dialed his father’s number and waited, thinking, as he always did when despair wanted to settle on him, of Marty’s touch that night: the heat in his wet cheek, the only proof Simon had ever needed, the only higher power.