The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Something Pretty, Something Beautiful by Eric Barnes

FROM Prairie Schooner

WE DIDN'T START breaking into houses to steal things. The four of us started breaking into houses simply to see what would happen.

By the time we were eighteen, we were still doing it because none of us had found any reason to stop.

"Now," Will Wilson whispers, waving me forward, then silently pushing me over the high windowsill of another house we've broken into in Tacoma.

When we were little kids, like eight or nine years old, my friend Teddy and I would walk home from Sherman Elementary together collecting bottle caps and Popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. We searched the grass and the sidewalks, under bus stop benches and around paper boxes, keeping what we found in secret pockets we made in the lining of our jackets. Teddy and I would walk home in the rain, racing the cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks along the narrow streams of water in the gutters; then days or weeks later, when it was dry, we searched for the butts and sticks in the stiff, matted mess around the sewer drains.

Teddy and I were best friends.

On rainy days back at Sherman, Teddy and I built dams during recess in the dirt near the long-jump pit. The rainwater ran through the pit in a shallow, foot-wide stream as it flowed along the far side of the schoolyard toward a big iron drain. Other kids came out to make dams too, but Teddy and me were always the first there, building the main dam, a tapering arc six inches high and five feet across, leaving the other kids to make small dams and beg us to release some water.

I remember being out there in my corduroys and nylon coat, wet like everyone else. None of us wearing raincoats. It's as if it rained so much no one bothered to fight it. Except Teddy. Teddy always wore one of those bright yellow slickers, curls of black hair bursting from beneath the yellow hood. Scraping more dirt toward the dam with his yellow rubber boots.

And as recess went on and our dam got to be seven and eight inches high at the front, now ten feet around, the kids below would always start their really loud yelling, wanting us to break our dam, to let the water rush down and wreck theirs. But Teddy and me always held out, even when one of the kids tried to kick a hole in our dam-one of the hyperactive kids, usually, the ones that every day had to go to the nurse's office to take their medication. The ones like Michael Coe, who we weren't friends with then and didn't ever want to have to talk to.

I had to push Coe away once, after he tried to kick at our dam. He was a low, heavy kid with a buzz cut and tight T-shirt. I knocked him into a small mud puddle, and he went into this frenzy, whipping himself in circles and screaming and his face turning red. Coe told on me, and the teacher made us put our desks together for a week, and that, we always said, is how we became friends. Although, really, that is how Coe started following Teddy and me to my house after school, showing up uninvited when me and my babysitter and Teddy were playing Wiffle bat baseball or eating bologna sandwiches. How, after a while, Coe started bringing his new friend Will Wilson over to my house.

But on those rainy days in the dirt, when the bell to end recess would finally ring, on those days Teddy would only then begin to smile, carefully moving to the very front of our big dam, the other kids now yelling happily and jumping up and down and Coe and the hyperactive ones turning in fast circles, flailing their bodies onto the hard, wet ground, the teachers a hundred yards away, screaming at us from the dry doorways, and Teddy with the tip of his round, brightly booted yellow foot, he'd make just a nick in the dirt of our dam and the water would begin to trickle out.

And Coe and the other hyper ones would be breaking their thin little dams even before the water had reached them, the water flowing faster through the now bigger break in ours, Teddy pacing back and forth, staring and watching and smiling.

And sometimes I thought I wanted to smash the wall of our dam, jump on it with my wet sneakers and let the water rush down. But I never did that to Teddy.

And I remember now a day when I looked past the kids around us, seeing some new kid leaning against the high chainlink fence, watching us all and smiling too. Smiling like Teddy was. Smiling like he understood something more. Although now, when I think of him, I think of Will Wilson in that first moment, and he had a lean face, older, eighteen, not eight.

Will Wilson did look young then, I know. He'd been just a child. But I can't remember that so well.

But I remember standing next to Teddy, so satisfied with him. Teddy, my best friend, dry beneath his coat, me wet and warm in the rain, both of us watching our dam in the schoolyard, smiling as it went through its slow self-destruction.

Old Town was the wealthiest area of Tacoma, an area that we sometimes drove through just to look at, to see it. And as I cross that sill into the darkness of this house in Old Town, I see the black shapes of unseen furniture, gray light from a window. Touch my feet to a wood floor, then carpet, feel around me the full and spreading silence, and even then I can't explain it, can only sense it and want it, but from that moment, like the first moment we ever entered a house, the break-in is about the violation itself, the entering of a space that isn't ours, that is protected not by guns or bars or even locks but by an assumption of safety. An assumption that we-with one easy motion-have taken hold of and destroyed.

And like most every time before, I now turn to Will Wilson, standing with him in the shadows of a wall, the two of us smiling as we think of the owners and their children upstairs asleep. Oblivious to it all.

When we were seventeen and eighteen, we'd wake up at Will Wilson's house. It was a house on an empty road between two neighborhoods, some unplanned midpoint between subdivisions. It was like a lot of places I remember in Tacoma, one of those forgotten roads lined by high fences and tall, overgrown bushes and lit just barely by intermittent streetlights. Sometimes there'd be a store, a corner store with faded advertisements for cigarette deals and inexpensive beer, and in a few places there'd be duplexes or old storefronts, doors that faced these forgotten roads, dark doorways that looked abandoned until you looked close and you saw something, mail in the mailbox or the flickering blue light of a TV behind a curtain or a tricycle pressed against the side of the building, and you realized that someone was home.

It was always damp in Will Wilson's house and it smelled bad, and you'd wake up on the thin hard carpet feeling sick and like you'd never slept at all. His stepdad was always teaching himself to play the guitar, this bright pink guitar he'd bought at a pawn shop and that he'd rigged up to run through the old console stereo that filled one wall of the living room, which was one of only a few rooms in that whole house, so a lot of the time I'd end up sleeping against that hard wooden stereo with the tan cloth over the speakers. I'd wake up hearing the feedback still ringing quietly from the speakers, my face against the floor and having to pee, feeling cold and wet in my jacket, wet maybe from the night before out in the rain or just wet from the air in the house, with the curtains pulled shut and the floor and couch almost damp when you touched them. I'd wake up in the silence, turning over and staring up at that gray ceiling sprayed rough with texture and mixed with the thousand glimmering bits of pink and green and gold, lying there feeling so gray through my body, hurting, and wanting to throw up, and staring up at that ceiling and now hearing the buzz from the speakers next to me and hearing the others sleeping in the room and remembering all that beer we'd drunk and the half gallon of gin and the dope his cousin's friend had had, because you couldn't not remember it, every drink and all that smoke now so deep in every part of your body, turned sick now and dying, and for me staring at that ceiling glimmering pink and green, I could remember every drink and every breath of smoke and would feel it still, wondering now if I was really sick or just stoned or drunk, all of it turning bad through the end of the night, that fight in your mind that you'd forgotten in the drinking and smoking and that had finally just sunk you, so you'd only known to drink more, drinking through the smoking hoping another drink would make you feel like you had when you'd started, that soft, warm moment of the first hit of the pot and the first sip of the first drink. But now it was lost, everything awful, and worn, and gone. And I'd sit up finally, among my sleeping friends, finding Will Wilson sitting up, on the couch, sipping a beer, staring at me, gray eyes in a leathered face, nodding at me like he'd never gone to sleep.

Bad things had happened. I'd feel my hand then and know we'd gone out and fought. Know we'd driven to each corner of Tacoma. I'd close my eyes and see dark figures tearing at each other, hidden faces in the black backyards of the houses we'd passed, faces turning gray as they ran in groups through the pale white light of empty parking lots.

And I'd blink my eyes and know there'd been a dream I'd just woken up from, that I couldn't quite remember, a dream of the hidden faces in groups, in backyards, roaming.

Bad things had happened. We'd started here and ended up here, on this floor, in the quiet of this small, forgotten, almost unidentifiable home.

"What happened?" I'd ask Will Wilson then, my mouth hurting just to speak.

And he'd sip beer. "Fuck you," he'd say, swallowing. "You know. You know what happened."

"Hung over," I'd say, and close my eyes, touch them lightly with one hand, then another, pain shooting through my eyes to the top of my head, my neck, the front of my chest.

"Fuck you," he'd say. "You were right there."

And I'd still have my eyes in my hand, pressing just that bit harder, the pain going white, with the other hand finding a Valium in the pocket of my jeans, slipping it across my lips, biting it once before swallowing it down.

And I'd be nodding now. Saying, "Right," realizing my face was damp too, like the carpet and my jacket and the insides of my jeans, and I'd know that I was damp from this house we were in and from the rain we'd run through and from the sweat of all that we'd done. "Yes," I'd say. "Yes, you're right."

Coe's low, heavy body is moving so gracefully in the dark, silently bouncing on couches, stretching out easily on carpets, walking quietly across dining room tables. He is trying to circle the room without stepping on the floor, hiking up his badly fitting jeans as he noiselessly leaps from a piano bench to a radiator to a TV on a rolling stand that he uses to pull himself three feet before the cord goes tight. And only when he seems on the verge of thrashing about and finally making noise does Will Wilson step in front of him and grab his face at the jaw, shake it: No.

Often the four of us don't speak at all. We just move our lips or point.

The guy was still smiling as I broke his first finger. My hand already holding his thick, wet hair, pulling his head back and another finger back, and I was pulling him to the ground, the side of his head smacking loud against the sidewalk, the second finger breaking easily in my hand.

When I was a child, one night I watched my dad lean over the kitchen sink, washing blood from his swollen face as I stood near my babysitter. There's nothing you can't do in a fight, Brian, he said to me quietly, his voice slowed and heavy. Long hair in his blue eyes. Pushing his fingers along the thin lines leading to his lips. Twenty-two years old. Maybe twenty-three. You just want to win, Brian. You just want to hurt him.

I was hitting this guy in the face now, striking his nose, his eye, his cheek. We were in front of a mini-market near school, and it was raining, hard, after school and this guy, eighteen, he'd pushed Teddy hard into a door, being cool in front of his friends, this guy from school who'd tried to push Teddy around a few times that week, and today I'd told him to fuck off, and he'd turned to me, smiling, leaning close and pointing his finger in my face, smiling down at me, a foot or more taller.

"Fucker," I said quietly, feeling the light rain against my lips as I spoke. Breathing steadily, finding a rhythm between my words and motions. Feeling all that anger, feeling it run through my chest and arms and hands.

And I turned slightly as I swung, seeing Teddy standing near the window of the store. Watching.

And the guy's friends, they hadn't moved.

Will Wilson had shown up. Standing near Teddy. Not smiling, just watching. He carefully sat down. Cross-legged on the wet sidewalk. Watching.

The guy rolled away from me, standing and turning and trying to find me, his right eye covered with blood and the left side of his face bleeding too, his twisted hand wiping at his good eye, and when he saw me he came at me. Not wildly. Moving forward, saying, "No," and breathing hard. Swinging straight and almost hitting me again. "No."

I hit him in the throat and he leaned over. I moved to my left. Watching him gag. I kicked him in the chest.

"Don't ever," I said. Spitting blood from my lips. Tasting blood in my throat. "Don't ever fuck with my friend."

Teddy had stepped forward. Standing on the curb, a few feet away. Watching.

The guy's nose poured red and yellow. He sat up. I knocked him onto his back.

My hands were wet with spit and blood and rain.

I was tired. I was mad.

The guy looked toward his friends, three of them standing on the sidewalk. He stared at them for a moment but didn't ask for help. Didn't expect them to do anything.

I hit him in the ear. His face hit the street. He was laid out on his side. In a moment, he asked dully, "Why won't you stop?"

I was tired. I was mad. I didn't know why exactly.

Will Wilson stood up now. I turned to look at him, and behind him, in the window of the store, I could see my reflection. Hair so wet in the rain. Hair that hung straight past my eyes.

Will Wilson was standing. It was time to go.

The guy was screaming, blood and spit spraying across the street.

I walked to the curb and kneeled at a puddle, rinsing my hands in the cool rainwater. Two fingers on my right hand were numb and bent. I turned my face to the sky, let the rain run down my eyes and neck. Wiped the water away before again rinsing my hands in the puddle. Again wiping at my face before the three of us met up with Coe and we all walked home, fourteen, and none of us had a car.

Teddy is standing at a window. With his curly hair turned gray in the darkness, his soft and round face turned pale by a streetlight outside, Teddy looks like an aging man. Some old guy at his window. With nothing to do but stare. For a while I'd thought Teddy stood at the windows because he was watching for the police. But one time he tells me he is just seeing what this family looks at during the day.

Will Wilson is going through cabinets, drawers, seeming to count the forgotten records and books.

Coe is rolling, on his side, across the couch.

And years later, when I find myself thinking about the break-ins, I know that what I liked most was watching the three of them in a house that was ours. I bounced soundlessly on chairs playing tag with Coe, stood next to Teddy staring out at the night, searched through closets and drawers with a smiling Will Wilson. But I now mostly remember watching through the shadows, seeing my three best friends doing a careful and silent nighttime dance.

Maybe because they're too small to park in or too far from the house, but the garages behind a lot of the houses in Tacoma's blocky, sprawling neighborhoods often stand unused, the swinging door left open, the small panes of the windows broken by neighborhood kids. And beginning in the middle of our senior year, Will Wilson, Coe, Teddy, and I had started burning these garages down. At two or three in the morning, we'd sneak along a dark alley with a can of gasoline, pouring it against the inside base of the wooden walls, making a big pool in the center of the smooth, concrete slab. Lighting the gas, the four of us throwing matches while watching the alley and the surrounding houses, the garage igniting in front of us like a huge gas oven, the walls burning with low flames, the pool in the center burning with flames three feet high.

We'd burned nine by the end of May. Six days from graduation, we burned another one. The next day, we made the newspaper, a small article about what fire officials believed was a pattern of arson. The police had been consulted. Officers on patrol in Tacoma's North End would be checking alleys.

We went out that night at two A.M. in our black sweatshirts and gloves and ski masks and found a garage on Cheyenne Street only ten blocks from the last garage we'd burned.

Will Wilson went to check if the house was dark.

"Shit," Teddy whispered to me in the dark. "Shit. This is serious. They've got to be watching, Brian. Fuck, Brian, fuck. This is serious, Brian."

"Well," I whispered. "Fuck. Well."

Will Wilson came back, matches in his hand. There were paint cans and a can of paint thinner in the garage. There was also a lawn chair, an old croquet set and a cardboard box full of books. We spread out the junk and books and some boards from the stairs, then poured thinner and gas over it all.

Coe was bouncing on his heels, circling in place.

Will Wilson held a book of matches out to Teddy and me but didn't look at us. We were all near the entrance, and Will Wilson lit a match and tossed it, then another, the gas catching. Teddy kept looking over his shoulder, glancing down the alley.

"Come on," Will Wilson said, still not looking at Teddy and me, just flicking matches across the floor, small blue fires now burning in four or five places.

And finally I took a match from Will Wilson. Lit it and threw it because Will Wilson wanted me to. But most of all I lit it because I wanted to be a part of this. I wanted to see what would happen.

Blue flames had spread across much of the floor. A small pool near the books ignited.

I lit and threw another match.

And Teddy was starting to go down the alley and Will Wilson turned quickly, grabbed him hard by the neck, pulling Teddy close to his face. "Come on," he said quietly and held up a lit match for Teddy.

The books were burning orange and red, the wood catching now. The plastic seat of the lawn chair burning bright, shining on Will Wilson's face and Teddy's face and sending a foul smell through the garage.

"Come on," Will Wilson said, and then smiled and took a high voice. Whining, "This is serious."

And Teddy did light a match and did throw it then, lighting another and another, tossing each into the already hot fire, the tiny match flames disappearing in the gold and growing light, but Teddy just stared at Will Wilson, not scared, not weak, just staring, Will Wilson holding him by the neck and not once looking at the fire behind him, whining over and over, "This is serious. This is serious"

And then a white police cruiser turned down the alley and hit its lights.

And Teddy's pool of gas was burning yellow, blue, and white.

We ran. Through alleys, across yards, over fences, and through hedges. Ducking behind houses, running along streets, trying to make our way toward a huge, wooded park where we could hide.

Fifteen minutes later, with two cops on foot behind us, the sirens of three cruisers screaming near us, Will Wilson and I were sprinting toward the park, Teddy and Coe probably already in there, the two of us crossing a brightly lit street, aiming for the low white wall that bordered the park, the park here sweeping in an arc a half-mile around, sloping a few hundred yards deep like a quilt of thick green trees and bushes, stretching three quarters of a mile uninterrupted to the waterfront. And as I ran across that pavement with a cop car skidding to a stop near me, both doors opening, two more men jumping out, I saw the glow of lights from the unseen mills and oil plants five miles away where right then my dad was working.

And I do remember wondering if the police would shoot an arsonist.

Will Wilson and I hit the low fence, stepping off, jumping, floating for that moment, silently flying into the park. We hit trees, then bushes, finally sliding across the wet, steep ground. We were a hundred feet down before I looked back. Another hundred and we stopped sliding, seeing the pinpoint of searchlights waving back and forth above us.

It only took twenty minutes to find the base of the Proctor Bridge, where Teddy and Coe were waiting.

We climbed up the dirt hillside, the bridge's heavy concrete supports stretching out over our heads, hearing all around us the low, numbing sound of the rain against the leaves. We reached the wide dirt ledge just below the surface of the bridge, the four of us sharing from a bottle of vodka that we had hidden there.

"God," Will Wilson said, "God." He somehow seemed so thin in the dark. A bare, hard person drinking next to me. "They were chasing us. Everywhere we went they were chasing us. And it was beautiful."

The four of us never called anything beautiful.

He told Teddy and Coe how the two of us split off from them, crossing through yards and over fences, and he was drinking and saying beautiful, and finally he sat down in the dirt and I realized Will Wilson was drunk.

And I watched him and I remembered how, when we were running, he'd split off from Coe and Teddy, touched my arm, pulled me with him. Taking the two of us down an alley he knew, toward a street we'd been on a hundred times.

A brightly lit street that led away from the park. Where the three police cars had been waiting.

Will Wilson hadn't made a mistake. He'd just tried to draw out the chase. To make it more dangerous for me and him.

Will Wilson was getting bored.

I watched him now. Even in the shadows under that bridge, I could see his eyes staring out behind half-closed lids. His usually hard face gone somehow soft. I don't think I'd ever seen him drunk. I'd seen him drink twice as much, but I'd never seen him drunk.

"It's coming to an end," he said slowly. "We'll get jobs. And sooner than you think, it'll all come to an end."

We hear the steps upstairs and my legs go blurry, then numb. I'm pulling in air as slowly as I can, turning left, seeing the door I can run through if the voice comes any closer.

"Colleen?" the voice says. "Colleen?"

Coe is crouched low on the floor. Teddy stands at the door. Will Wilson stands at the foot of the stairs.

But then it is quiet, a door upstairs closing. And I look at Will Wilson and he is smiling.

"Almost," he whispers. And he smiles even more.

Teddy and Coe are already starting to climb out the window, Will Wilson next. And as I turn to lower myself over the sill, I think about Will Wilson standing at the foot of those steps, Will Wilson like always starting to think of another way, another step, another thing we can do to find something more. And as I drop to the ground I glance back in the house and I see a woman sitting in the dark kitchen off the wide living room, her eyes barely white in the darkness of the house, staring at me as I still hold on to the frame, having watched the four of us wander through her first floor. Not saying a word, Colleen just a silhouette in a far corner chair.

Teddy had come by to pick me up. He wanted to go for a drive. The two of us used to go for drives a few times a week. We were thirteen and neither of us had a license, Teddy using his cousin's Volkswagen Bug as just me and him went driving around Tacoma.

As we'd turned fourteen, though, I was less interested in driving with Teddy, wanting instead to go by Will Wilson's house, wanting to see what he had going on. And Teddy always agreed.

We were eighteen now, and it was a few days before we all were going to graduate, then leave for summer jobs in Alaska.

We drove in Teddy's white Dodge Dart, the June night air swirling cool around us in the car.

And Teddy then quietly told me he was thinking about going to college when we got back from Alaska. Trying to get into Washington State University, in eastern Washington, three hundred miles away.

And as he told me this I nodded and was quiet.

We were crossing along the waterfront at low tide, the wet and salty, heavy bay smell pouring through the windows. And the silence, not speaking, it was a kind of answer. Teddy, who'd never thought school was important, needed my encouragement to go to college. Teddy, who seemed bound to Tacoma and Will Wilson as deeply as me, needed my support to leave. Even to Seattle. Especially to eastern Washington. Teddy was trying to make a break. But that night I gave him nothing.

Teddy and I drove up McCarver Hill toward our small houses above Old Town, silently driving past the steplike rows of nice homes, the reflection of the yellow streetlights glowing on the hood, the reflection of a house window sometimes even shining on our windshield. McCarver Hill, which we'd ridden up on our bikes when we were ten years old, back then talking about being little kids, saying, do you remember that bush on that corner where we found that whole box of Popsicle sticks? Do you remember the day we skipped school and walked through that alley and then that alley to cross just an edge of the gulch, going to the waterfront with the sand and the rock crabs? Saying, do you remember the lady who lived in that house, who gave everyone the cocoa on snowy days? Do you remember that kid in the window of that house, how he'd smoke pot and stare, just stare out his window for hours, how he was there at the start of that walk and when we got back? Do you remember racing sticks down this hill in the rain, this very spot on this very block, me and you chasing boats, right here, right there, eight years old and passing through this place, me and you in a race at one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour?

But that night on McCarver Hill, I just stared at the road. And, still, said nothing to Teddy.

The car stopped in front of my house. The engine still running. I was about to open the door when Teddy said quietly, "Will Wilson was blowing up some old toaster this morning."

Teddy didn't talk for another moment. I held on to the door handle, thinking Teddy must have something more to say. Will Wilson was always blowing things up.

"And an old gas can," Teddy said quietly, "and this little black-and-white TV. Two M-8os each. He called me at six this morning. Said he was blowing stuff up. Told me to come over."

Teddy was leaning against his door, turned as if looking toward me but staring out the windshield toward my house. The light from the radio glowed above my knee.

"It's like I can't say no," Teddy said. "Going over there at six. I'd rather be in bed. But I can't say no."

I didn't say anything, just looked out the window. I could feel Teddy staring. Wanting me to agree.

"He was talking about break-ins and all," Teddy said, his voice loud now and awkward. "I don't know. It's like he's maybe pushing for something more. When we get back from Alaska."

I stared ahead, the intersection glowing pale yellow from a streetlight, the roads leading into it all lost in shadows. "Like what?" I asked.

"I don't know. He was just talking. All quiet like he gets. Taping M-8os to this toaster. He unscrewed the back of this TV. You should have seen that TV go."

"What was he saying, though?"

"Like, I don't know," Teddy said, turning the radio up slightly. "I love this song."

"Come on, Teddy," I said.

"Just more, you know? When we're in the house. Things he's thinking about for when we get back from Alaska. I don't know. He blew up an old wooden mailbox. It caught fire."

I sat in the car, staring at the shadows beyond the intersection. I knew Will Wilson was making decisions. Will Wilson was thinking, wishing.

Will Wilson was getting bored.

Teddy's face looked a little pained, talking now like he was answering a question. "More," he said, shrugging. "Just doing more. I'm not sure about it. Like, I don't know. He was saying stuff. While, like, he was blowing these things up. Six A.M."

I lowered my head. Saw my feet. "Come on, Teddy."

"Just saying," Teddy went on, but getting quiet now and his voice evening out, not struggling. "When we're in the house. Doing more. I'm not sure about it, Brian. Like, I don't know, Brian. Like waking people up."

The four of us leave the houses almost completely undisturbed. Even Coe is always careful to return furniture to its place. I think the owners woke up in the morning and never knew anything had happened, maybe wondered weeks or months later, How long has that lampshade been crooked? Is this where I left my shoes?

Teddy had been wrong. Will Wilson didn't want to wake people up when we got back from Alaska. Will Wilson didn't want to wait even that long.

One night later, we were in a house in Old Town, the four of us standing against a wall in the living room, after hours of near silence under that bridge near the park, under there quietly drinking, and I was blurry now, and slowed and focused from all the drinking, watching the lights on the ceiling now, light from the bay that flickered up through the windows, white, white flashes in a room that was dim violet from a streetlight outside, and I think I knew it was different when I saw Will Wilson pull a bottle of bourbon from a liquor cabinet, take a drink, and we'd never drunk in a house, never stolen anything. Coe was smiling, drinking, and I was watching Will Wilson, in his gloves like we always wore, with a ski mask in his pocket this time, and passing the bourbon to me before he put the mask over his head.

"Let's just see what happens," Will Wilson said.

And I knew what would happen. Knew we would do anything. Knew we would not stop. I knew we had so lost ourselves to whatever was possible. And so I was watching Coe and Will Wilson move and I was drinking from the bourbon, and I looked around for Teddy. He was staring out a window. And for a moment I thought I'd stay with him. For a moment I thought I'd grab his arm, pull him with me, and we would run from here.

Because I knew I would do what Will Wilson wanted.

And because I knew I wanted it too.

I found Will Wilson and Coe on the second floor, already turning down a hall, at a door in their masks, Will Wilson turning the knob, and there would be chaos soon, and violence, and power and fear and anger, and I drank from the bourbon, still in my hand, drank again from the bourbon and heard the screaming.

Screaming downstairs. People screaming downstairs.

Will Wilson and Coe had gone in the room. But downstairs there were people screaming and alarms going off, and I looked back down the stairs, saw Teddy standing there now, looking up at me, and I was glad he was there, glad and I smiled, at Teddy, my friend, and I saw that a flame had sprung out from his hand, Teddy looking up at me, Teddy flicking matches toward the stairs, the steps going blue, then red, then gold.

He'd poured something on the stairs. He was lighting them on fire.

I could smell the smoke already, the flames climbing toward me, heat all across my body, Teddy disappearing from the foot of the steps, the downstairs turning gold, the smoke alarms screaming up at us, and I ran into the room with Will Wilson and Coe, could see out the window, see people outside, one last person running out of the first floor, and then I remembered someone should have been in this room. But there wasn't anyone except Will Wilson and Coe, which seemed strange, I thought, and I was drunk and confused and scared, but I couldn't help but think it, couldn't believe that Will Wilson had been wrong. There was supposed to be someone in here.

Smoke alarms were going off upstairs too now, all screaming together.

I turned to Will Wilson and Coe, standing in the dark, watching out the hall, Coe bouncing, and Will Wilson looking around now, out the window, toward the hall, saying something I couldn't hear in the noise of the alarms and the fire now spreading up the stairs.

"How do we get out?" Coe was saying, loudly, and he was bouncing up and down even harder.

Will Wilson turned to me, his eyes staring out of the mask. "Where the fuck is Ted?"

"I don't know," I was saying. "We have to get out," I was saying.

Will Wilson hit me, in the face, so hard and so fast, and I was on the floor and couldn't hear and couldn't see and couldn't breathe.

I could see him before I could hear anything, blurry and above me and his mouth moving and I'd never been hit so hard.

"Where the fuck is Ted?" Will Wilson was screaming.

I was talking, I thought, saying, "I don't know," but I couldn't hear my voice. Couldn't feel my mouth or lips.

"How do we get out?" Coe was yelling.

Will Wilson hit me again and it was white and black and gone and there was a smell then, I remember now, a smell of air and water and rain against my face. But in a moment I could see again and the smoke was in the room. The fire in the hall.

Will Wilson was gone.

"He left," Coe was saying, quietly or maybe I still couldn't hear. "Oh my god, he left."

The smoke was getting heavier. The flames had reached the hall. Coe was bouncing against the walls. "How do we get out?" he was saying. "How do we get out?"

I stood and felt the blood across my nose and mouth and my head spun and I threw up, fell down again. I crawled to the window and looked out. There were about five people in the street.

Coe was hitting the wall. Coe was spinning in place. "How?" he was screaming, "how?"

"We have to climb down," I tried to say, but I still couldn't hear my voice. "Okay, Coe? We climb and then we run."

Coe kept hitting the wall. I tried to stand but threw up again, my head spinning and my neck all sickly numb.

And then Coe started running. Through the smoke. Into the hall. Into the flames.

Trying to make it downstairs.

Maybe he was thinking he could make it to the door. Maybe he was afraid to climb. But probably he just wanted to find Will Wilson. To see how Will Wilson would finally make this work.

Once, in a house, I leave Will Wilson in a kitchen as he slowly makes his way through every drawer and cabinet, pass Coe in the dining room climbing across a fireplace mantel. I'm looking for Teddy and find him in the living room, a wide, tall room with windows open onto the bay and the bright ships and the lights of the neighborhoods all around us, and he is climbing up the windows, in bare feet with his toes just balanced on the thin frames of the windows, fifteen feet in the air now, and he is looking out of a skylight, his hands touching the panes of the glass, his face close to the frame.

"What are you doing?" I whisper, as loud I can.

I can see he is talking, but I can't hear him.

"What are you looking for?" I ask again.

He is talking, his fingers running along the edges of the skylight, his head turned upward, and I think I hear more the echo of his voice, coming back to me off that window, and I've never known if he knew I was there.

"Something pretty," Teddy whispers, "something beautiful."

I knew Coe would die. Like all of them. All of them would die.

I climbed out a window, dropping to a covered porch, then jumping to the ground. I turned to the now ten people in the street and they stared at me and I fell on the ground, dizzy still, vomiting again, and they hadn't moved.

But when they did, I stood and I ran. Down an alley, through yards, across parking lots, finally into the park, across it, finding my car on the other side.

I was already packed for Alaska. My clothes and tent and sleeping bag.

I was in Bellingham by dawn. I crossed the border into Canada on foot. Stole a car. Stole a truck. I rode three freight trains, riding blind first north, then east, then west again. I did not hitch a ride. Did not eat in restaurants. Did not sleep in any motels. I broke into grocery stores at night. And I'm sure no one ever knew I'd been there.

I rode the ferries as much as I could. Sometimes north, sometimes south. But I was on the Aleutians within two weeks.

Alaska is a very big place.

Within two years I was living in Arizona. Within three years I was out in New Hampshire. And that's a long way from Tacoma.

These things are not so hard to do.

Once, in a house, Coe almost breaks a dining room table, falling off of it onto Teddy, and when we get outside, six blocks away, walking quietly like we usually did, Teddy then turns on Coe, in one motion hitting him in the face, falling on him, hitting him still, and Will Wilson steps back and smiles, and I step back and watch, and Teddy is saying something to Coe as he hits him again, something about trying to be more careful, about not fucking up all the time, about thinking about what he was doing.

It was years before I managed to find an article about the fire. I drove to Tacoma just to read the stories. The only risk I ever took. Reading old newspapers in some cubicle in the bright light of a silent library.

Will Wilson had managed to live.

There were only two bodies in the house. Ted Selva. Michael Coe. Another kid had been seen climbing out of the house. When they identified the bodies a few days later, the police soon learned that the four kids ran as a group. That William Wilson and Brian Porter were gone.

Two cars from Tacoma were soon found near the Canadian border. There were stolen cars found farther north into Canada.

Both kids, the police said, had probably gone into Alaska.

And sitting there in the library, I was leaning back now, looking around, expecting to see Will Wilson in a cubicle near mine. Reading about the four of us. Leaning back in his chair too, looking around for me.

Michael Coe had died in the smoke, was found lying at the foot of the stairs.

Ted Selva appeared to have been beaten badly before he died. Four fingers snapped. A few ribs fractured. His chin and eye socket broken.

There was no manhunt. No detectives who ventured north. "Pretty soon," a policeman said, "they'll show up back here in Tacoma. Bragging about what they've done. Looking for a warm bed. They're half scared out of their minds right now, alone up in the woods somewhere. They'll come back home."

Will Wilson is out there. Living some life.

And driving through Tacoma after I left the library that day, I thought about how, when I got in my car after the fire, my backpack next to me, my money in my pocket, how even then I knew I wasn't just running from the police. I was running from Will Wilson, Coe, and Teddy. They were dead, I thought. But it didn't matter. I knew I had to run. Running from my three friends and the life we'd had, a life I would not have been able to end.

And now I'd spent five years forgetting.

But Will Wilson is still out there.

He could find me, I suppose.

Or maybe I could try to go find him.