The Nix

1

SAMUEL WAS CRYING in his bedroom, quietly, so his mother wouldn’t hear. This was a small cry, just tiptoeing on the edge of actual crying, maybe a light whimpering along with the normal halted breathing and squished face. This was a Category 1 cry: a small, concealable, satisfying, purgative cry, usually only a welling of the eyes but lacking actual tears. A Category 2 cry was more of an emotional cry, triggered by feelings of embarrassment or shame or disappointment. This was why a Category 1 cry could be vaulted to a Category 2 simply by the presence of someone else: He felt embarrassed about crying, about being a crybaby, and this fact created a new kind of crying — that wet-faced, whimpering, snotty crying that’s not yet a full-throated Category 3, which involved larger raindrop-size tears and bouts of sniveling and convulsive breathing and a reflexive need to find a private hiding place immediately. A Category 4 was a weeping sobbing fit, whereas Category 5 was just unthinkable. His counselor at school had encouraged him to think of his crying in these terms, using categories like they do for hurricanes.

So that day he felt he needed to cry. He told his mother he was going to his room to read, which was not unusual. He spent most of his time alone in his room, reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books he bought from the bookmobile at school. He liked how the books looked on the shelves, all together like that, homogenous, with their white-and-red spines and titles like Lost on the Amazon, Journey to Stonehenge, Planet of the Dragons. He liked the books’ forking paths, and when he came to a particularly difficult decision, he would hold the page with his thumb and read ahead, verifying that it was an acceptable choice. The books had a clarity and symmetry to them that he found mostly absent in the real world. Sometimes he liked to imagine his life was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and that a happy story was just a matter of making the right choices. This seemed to give a structure to the sloppy and unpredictable world he found in most other contexts terrifying.

So he told his mother he was reading, but really he was having a nice little Category 1. He wasn’t sure why he was crying, just that something about being at home made him want to hide.

The house, he thought, had lately become unbearable.

The way the house seemed to trap everything inside it — the heat of the day, the smell of their own bodies. They were caught in a late-summer heat wave, and everything in Illinois was melting. Everything was burning up. The air was a thick glue. Candles sagged where they stood. Flowers could not be supported by their stems. Everything wilted. Everything drooped.

It was August 1988. In the years to follow, Samuel would look back on this month as the final month he had a mother. By the end of August, she’ll have disappeared. But he didn’t know that yet. All he knew was that he needed to cry for certain abstract reasons: It was hot, he was worried, his mother was acting weird.

So he went to his room. He was crying mostly to get it out of the way.

Only she heard him. In the extreme quiet, she could hear her son crying upstairs. She opened his door and said “Honey, are you okay?” and immediately he cried harder.

She knew in these moments not to say anything about the elevation in his crying or react to it in any way because acknowledging it just fed the crying in a terrible feedback loop that sometimes ended — on those days when he cried over and over again and she couldn’t help but let her exasperation show through — with a wet blubbering hyperventilating kid-size mess. So she said, as soothingly as possible, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Let’s go out, you and me,” which seemed to calm him enough to get his clothes changed and get him into the car with only minor, post-crying hiccups to deal with. That is, until they got to the restaurant and she saw they were having a “Buy Two Get One Free” deal on hamburgers and she said “Oh good. I’ll get you a hamburger. You want a hamburger, right?” and Samuel, who all along had his heart set on chicken nuggets with that mustardy dipping sauce, worried that he’d disappoint her if he didn’t go along with this new plan. So he nodded okay and stayed in the hot car while his mother fetched the burgers, and he tried to convince himself that he wanted a burger all along, but the more he thought about it, the more the burger seemed revolting — the stale bun and sour pickles and those uniformly cut maggot-size onions. Even before she returned with the burgers he was feeling a little sick and throw-uppy at the thought of having to eat one. And driving home he was trying to contain the crying that was almost certainly coming when his mother noticed his wet, sniveling nose and said “Sweetie? Is something wrong?” and all he managed to say was “I don’t want a burger!” before he was lost inside a crushing Category 3.

Faye said nothing. She turned the car around while he buried his face in the hot fabric of the passenger seat and wept.

Back home, they ate in silence. Samuel sat with his mother in the hot kitchen, slumped in his chair and chewing the last of his chicken pieces. The windows were open in hopes for a breeze that did not come. Fans blew hot air from here to there. They watched a housefly buzz overhead, spinning circles near the ceiling. It was the only sign of life in the room, this insect. It bumped into the wall, then the window screen, then suddenly, unprovoked, directly above their heads, it fell. It dropped dead right out of the air and landed on the kitchen table heavy as a marble.

They looked at the small black corpse between them and then at each other. Did that really happen? Samuel’s face was panicked. He was on the verge of crying again. He needed a distraction. The mother needed to intervene.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Faye said. “Fill your wagon. Bring nine of your favorite toys.”

“What?” he said, his huge frightened eyes already slick and liquided.

“Trust me. Do it.”

“Okay,” he said, and this proved an effective diversion for about fifteen minutes. It felt to Faye like this was her primary duty as a mother: to create diversions. Samuel would begin to cry and she would head it off. Why nine toys? Because Samuel was a meticulous and organized and anal sort of kid who did things like, for example, keep a Top Ten Toys shoe box under his bed. Mostly in the way of Star Wars action figures and Hot Wheels. He revised it occasionally, substituting one thing for another. But it was always there. At any given moment, he knew exactly what his ten favorite toys were.

So she asked him to pick nine toys because she was mildly curious: What would he abandon?

Samuel did not wonder why he was doing this. Why nine toys? And why were they bringing them outside? No, he had been given a task and he was going to complete it. He thought little of arbitrary rules.

That he was so easily tricked made her sad.

Faye yearned for him to be a little smarter. A little less easily duped. She hoped sometimes he would talk back more. She wanted him to have more fight, wanted him to be a sturdier thing. But he wasn’t. He heard a rule and he followed it. Bureaucratic little robot. She watched him count his toys, trying to decide between two versions of the same action figure — one Luke Skywalker with binoculars, and one Luke Skywalker with a lightsaber — and she thought she should be proud of him. Proud that he was such a mindful boy, such a sweet boy. But his sweetness came at a price, which was that he was delicate. He cried so easily. He was so stupidly fragile. He was like the skin of a grape. In response, she was sometimes too hard on him. She did not like how he went through life so scared of everything. She did not like to see her own failures reflected back at her so clearly.

“I’m done, Momma,” he said, and she counted eight toys in his wagon — he had left behind both Luke Skywalkers, it turned out. But only eight toys, not nine. He hadn’t followed her one simple instruction. And now she didn’t know what she wanted of him. She was angry when he blindly obeyed, but now also angry that he didn’t obey better. She felt unhinged.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Outside it was unimaginably still and sticky. No movement except the heat ripples coming off roofs and asphalt. They walked down the wide street that curved through their particular subdivision and branched occasionally into stubby cul-de-sacs. Ahead of them, the neighborhood was all crunchy yellow grass and garage doors and houses following identical plans: front door set way back, garage door pushed way forward, as if the house were trying to hide behind it.

Those smooth beige faceless garage doors — they seemed to capture something essential about the place, something about the suburbs’ loneliness, she thought. A big front porch brings you out into the world, but a garage door shuts you off from it.

How had she ended up here, of all places?

Her husband, that’s how. Henry had moved them to the house on Oakdale Lane, in this little city of Streamwood, one of Chicago’s many indistinct suburbs. This after a string of small two-bedroom apartments in various Midwestern agro-industrial outposts as Henry climbed the corporate ladder in his chosen field: prepackaged frozen meals. When they landed in Streamwood, Henry insisted it was their final move, scoring as he had a job good enough to stay for: associate vice president of R&D, Frozen Foods Division. The day they moved in, Faye said, “I guess this is it,” then turned to Samuel. “I guess this is where you’re going to be from.”

Streamwood, she thought now. No streams, no woods.

“The thing about garage doors…,” she said, and she turned around to find Samuel staring at the asphalt in front of him, concentrating hard on something. He hadn’t heard her.

“Never mind,” she said.

Samuel pulled the wagon, and its plastic wheels clacked on the street. Sometimes a pebble would lodge under one of the wheels and the wagon would stop moving and the jolt would almost knock him down. He felt, whenever this happened, like he was disappointing his mother. So he watched for any kind of debris and kicked away stones and pieces of mulch and bark, and when he kicked he was careful not to kick very hard for fear his shoe would get stubbed in a sidewalk crack and he’d go tumbling forward, tripping on nothing, just walking wrong, which he worried would also disappoint his mother. He was trying to keep up with her — since she might be disappointed if he fell behind and she had to wait for him — but he couldn’t go so fast that one of his eight toys might topple out of the wagon, which would be a clumsy thing she definitely would be disappointed by. So he had to achieve exactly the right pace to keep up with his mother but then slow down on the parts of the street that were cracked and uneven, and watch for debris and kick debris away without tripping, and if he could do all of this successfully then it might be a better day. He might salvage the day. He might be less of a disappointment. He might erase what happened earlier, which is that he was a giant stupid crybaby, again.

He felt bad about this now. He felt that he certainly could have eaten the burger, that he just psyched himself out, and if he would have given it a chance he was sure the burger would have been a perfectly acceptable dinner. He felt guilty about the whole thing. The way his mother turned the car around and fetched him chicken nuggets seemed to him now so heroic and good. Good in a way he never could be. He felt selfish. The way his crying let him get whatever he wanted even though that was not his intention at all. And he was trying to figure out a way to tell his mother that if it were up to him he’d never cry again and she’d never have to spend hours calming him down or pandering to his inconsiderate and thoughtless needs.

He wanted to say this. He was getting the words right in his head. His mother, meanwhile, was looking at the trees. One of the neighbor’s front-yard oaks. Like everything else, it was drooping and desiccated and sad, its branches listing to the ground. Leaves not really green but a scorched amber. There was no sound at all. No wind chimes, no birds, dogs were not barking, children were not laughing. His mother looked up at this tree. Samuel stopped and looked too.

She said, “Do you see it?”

Samuel didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing. “The tree?” he said.

“Up near the top branch. See?” She pointed. “All the way up. That leaf.”

He followed her finger and saw a single leaf that did not look quite like the others. It was green, thick, it stood straight up and it was flopping around like a fish, twisting as if there were a swirling wind. It was the only leaf on the tree that was doing this. The rest hung quietly in the dead air. There was no wind on the block, and yet this leaf was a maniac.

“Do you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a ghost.”

“It is?” he said.

“That leaf is haunted.”

“A leaf can be haunted?”

“Anything can be haunted. A ghost can live in a leaf as well as anywhere else.”

He watched the leaf spin around as if it were attached to a kite.

“Why is it doing that?” he said.

“That’s the spirit of a person,” she said. “My father told me about this. One of his old stories. From Norway, from when he was a kid. It’s someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He’s in between.”

Samuel had not considered this a possibility.

“He’s restless,” she said. “He wants to move on. Maybe he was a good person who did one really bad thing. Or maybe he did lots of bad things but felt very sorry about them. Maybe he didn’t want to do bad things, but he couldn’t stop himself.”

And at this, once again, Samuel cried. He felt his face crumple. The tears came so unstoppably quickly. Because he knew he did bad things over and over and over. Faye noticed and closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers hard at her temples and covered her face with her hand. He could tell this was about as much as she could tolerate today, how she’d met the limits of her patience, how the crying about bad things was itself another bad thing.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “why are you crying?”

He still wanted to tell her that what he desired more than anything else in the world was to stop crying. But he couldn’t say it. All he managed to do was to spit out something incoherent through the tears and mucus: “I don’t want to be a leaf!”

“Why on earth would you think that?” she said.

She took his hand and pulled him home and the only sound on the whole block was the clacking of the wagon wheels and his whimpering. She took him to his room and told him to put his toys away.

“And I told you to bring nine toys,” she said. “You brought eight. Next time try to pay more attention.” And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk, and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.

2

SAMUEL’S FATHER INSISTED that Sunday evenings be devoted to “family time,” and they’d have a mandatory dinner together, all of them sitting around the table while Henry tried valiantly to make conversation. They’d eat some of the packaged meals from his special office freezer, where the experimental and test-market foods were kept. These were usually more daring, more exotic — mango instead of baked apples, sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, sweet-and-sour pork instead of pork chops, or things that would not at first glance seem ideal for freezing: lobster rolls, say, or grilled cheese, or tuna melts.

“You know the interesting thing about frozen meals,” Henry said, “is that they weren’t popular until Swanson decided to call them ‘TV dinners.’ Frozen meals had been around for a decade when they changed the name to TV dinner and boom, sales exploded.”

“Mm-hm,” Faye said as she stared straight down into her chicken cordon bleu.

“It’s like people needed permission to eat in front of the television, you know? It’s like everyone wanted to eat in front of the TV already, but they were waiting for someone to endorse it.”

“That’s super fascinating,” Faye said in a tone that made him shut right up.

Then more silence before Henry asked what the family wanted to do tonight, and Faye suggesting he just go watch TV, and Henry asking if she wanted to join him, and Faye saying no, she had dishes to put away and cleaning to do and “you should go on ahead,” and Henry asking if she needed his help with the cleaning, and Faye saying no, he’d just get in the way, and Henry suggesting that maybe she should relax and he’d do the cleanup tonight, and Faye getting frustrated and standing up and saying “You don’t even know where anything goes,” and Henry looking at her hard and seeming like he was on the verge of saying something but then ultimately not saying it.

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

“May I be excused?” Samuel said.

Henry looked at him, wounded. “It’s family night,” he said.

“You’re excused,” Faye said, and Samuel leaped off the chair and scurried outside. He felt that familiar desire to go hide. He felt this way whenever the tension in the house seemed to gather up inside him. He hid in the woods, a tiny patch of woods that grew along a sad creek that ran behind their subdivision. A few short trees sprouting out of the mud. A pond that was at best waist-deep. A creek that collected all the subdivision’s runoff so the water had this colorful oily film after it rained. It was really pathetic, these woods, as far as nature goes. But the trees were thick enough to conceal him. When he was down here, he was invisible.

If anyone asked him what he was doing, he’d say “Playing,” which didn’t quite capture it. Could it really be called playing when he only sat there in the grass and mud, and hid in the leaves, and threw helicopter seeds into the air and watched them spin to the ground?

It was Samuel’s intention to come down to the creek and hide for a couple of hours, at least until bedtime. And he was searching for a spot, a convenient depression in the ground that would give him maximum coverage. A spot where, if he put a few dead branches over him, a few leaves, he would be hidden. And he was collecting the twigs and branches he’d use to cover himself, and he was beneath this one particular oak tree digging among the dead leaves and acorns on the ground, when something cracked above him. A snapping of branches, a creaking of the tree, and he looked up in time to see someone jump down from the tree and land hard on the ground behind him. A boy, no older than Samuel, who stood up and stared fiercely at him with eyes sharp and green and almost feline. He was not larger than Samuel, nor taller, nor in any way physically special except in the certain intangible way he filled up space. His body had a presence. He stepped closer. His face was thin and angular and smeared, on his cheeks and forehead, with blood.

Samuel dropped his twigs. He wanted to run. He told himself to run. The boy moved closer, and from behind his back he now produced a knife, a heavy silver butcher’s knife, the kind Samuel had seen his mother use when chopping things with bones.

Samuel began to cry.

Just stood there crying, rooted to the ground, waiting for whatever his fate was, succumbing to it. He vaulted right into a Category 3 slobbering wet helpless mess. He could feel his face constrict and his eyes bug out as if his skin were being stretched from behind. And the other boy stood directly before him now and Samuel could see the blood from close up, could see how it was still wet and shining in the sunlight and one drop dribbled down the boy’s cheek and under his chin and down his neck and under his shirt and Samuel didn’t even wonder where the blood came from so much as simply wail at the horrible fact of its presence. The boy had short reddish hair, eyes that seemed impenetrable and dead, freckles, something like an athlete’s sense of bodily control and self-possession and fluidity of movement as he slowly brought the knife over his head in the universal language for psychopathic murderous stabbing.

“This is what we call a successful ambush,” the kid said. “If we were at war, you’d be dead right now.”

And the cry Samuel let out summoned all his misery and channeled it in one wail, a great sad scream for help.

“Holy shit,” the kid said. “You are ugly when you’re crying.” He lowered the knife. “It’s all right. Look. Just kidding?”

But Samuel could not stop. The hysteria kept rolling over him.

“It’s okay,” the kid said. “No problem. You don’t have to talk.”

Samuel wiped his arm across his nose and came away with a long slick streak.

“Come with me,” the kid said. “I want to show you something.”

He led Samuel to the creek and then along the bank for several yards until he came to a place near the pond where a tree had tipped over, leaving a large depression between the roots and the earth.

“Look,” the kid said. He pointed to a spot where he’d smoothed out all the mud into a makeshift bowl. And inside the bowl were several animals: a few frogs, a snake, a fish.

“You see them?” he said. Samuel nodded. The snake, he could see now, was missing its head. The frogs had been slit open at the belly or stabbed in the back. There must have been eight or nine of them, all dead save for one, whose legs kicked, bicycling in the air. The fish were beheaded at the gills. They all rested in a bloody slime that gathered at the bottom of the bowl.

“I’m thinking about blow-torching them,” the kid said. “You know, with insect spray and a lighter?”

He pantomimed this: flicking the lighter, holding the spray up to it.

“Sit down,” he said. Samuel did as he was told, and the boy reached two fingers into the blood.

“We’re gonna have to toughen you up,” he said. He smeared the blood on Samuel’s face — two streaks under his eyes and one on his forehead.

“There,” he said. “Now you’re initiated.” He stabbed the knife into the mud so it stood straight up. “Now you’re really alive.”

3

THE SUN WAS SETTING, the day’s heat lifting, mosquitoes buzzing forth in squadrons from the woods as two boys emerged from the tree line, muddy and wet. They’d been walking across terrain Samuel had never seen before, taking him away from his own neighborhood and into this other one: Venetian Village, it was called. The boys’ faces were shiny and moist from where they’d used pond water to clean off the smears of animal blood. Though they were the same height, and the same age, and roughly the same build — which is to say short and eleven years old and tightly skinny, like ropes pulled to maximum tolerances — it was obvious to anyone seeing them that one of the boys was in charge. His name was Bishop Fall — he was the tree leaper, the ambusher, the animal killer. He was explaining to Samuel how he would someday be a five-star general in the United States Army.

“Duty, honor, country,” he said. “Taking the fight to the enemy. That’s my motto.”

“What fight?” said Samuel, who was looking around at the houses of Venetian Village, houses larger than any he had ever seen.

“Whatever fight there is,” Bishop said. “Hooah.”

He was going to join the army as an officer after military college, then become a major, then a colonel, then finally, someday, a five-star general.

“A five-star general has a higher security clearance than the president,” Bishop said. “I’m going to know all the secrets.”

“Will you tell me?” Samuel said.

“No. They’re classified.”

“But I won’t tell anyone.”

“National security. Sorry.”

“Please?”

“No way.”

Samuel nodded. “You’re going to be good at this.”

It turned out that Bishop would be joining Samuel in the sixth-grade class at the local public elementary school, having been recently expelled from his private school, Blessed Heart Academy, for, he said, “not taking any shit,” by which he meant listening to AC/DC on his Walkman and telling one of the nuns to “fuck off” and getting into fights with anyone who was willing, even high schoolers, even priests.

Blessed Heart Academy was a Catholic K–12 prep school that was really the only local option if you wanted your kids to go to one of the elite East Coast universities. All of the parents of Venetian Village sent their children there. Samuel had never been in Venetian Village before, but sometimes on his longer bike rides he passed the front gate, which was copper and ten feet tall. The homes here were large Roman-style villas with flat roofs of terra-cotta tile, circular driveways curving around dramatic fountains. Houses were separated from each other by a distance at least as great as a soccer field. A swimming pool in every backyard. Exotic sports cars in the driveways, or golf carts, or both. Samuel imagined who could possibly live here: television stars, professional baseball players. But Bishop said it was mostly “boring office people.”

“That guy,” Bishop said, pointing to one of the villas, “owns an insurance company. And that one,” he said, pointing to another, “he runs a bank or something.”

Venetian Village had nineteen single-family units, each of them a standardized three stories with six bedrooms, four full baths, three powder rooms, marble kitchen countertops, 500-bottle wine cellar, private interior elevator, tornado-grade impact glass, exercise room, four-car garage, all of them an identical 5,295 square feet that, due to a specially treated glue used in construction, smelled lightly of cinnamon. The exact sameness of the houses was actually a selling point for families worried about not having the nicest house on the block. Realtors often said that in Venetian Village you didn’t have to “keep up with the Joneses,” even though every family who lived in Venetian Village had been “the Joneses” in whatever neighborhood they’d come from. And hierarchies quietly emerged in other ways. Various backyard additions of gazebos or screened-in two-story lanais or even a lit Har-Tru clay-surfaced tennis court. Each house was built from exactly the same mold but was uniquely accessorized.

A backyard saltwater hot tub, for example, behind one of the villas that Bishop stopped in front of.

“This is where the headmaster of Blessed Heart lives,” Bishop said. “He’s a fat fuck.”

He made a show of grabbing his crotch and flipping his middle finger at the house, then grabbed a small rock that lay in the gutter.

“Watch this,” he said, and he flung the rock toward the headmaster’s house. It seemed to happen before either of them could even think about it. Suddenly this rock was in the air, and they watched it fly and everything seemed to slow down for a moment as both boys realized that the rock was definitely going to hit the house and there was nothing they could do about this fact. The rock flew through the red-orange sky and it was only a matter of gravity now, and time. The rock arced downward and narrowly missed the forest-green Jaguar in the headmaster’s driveway, striking the aluminum garage just beyond the Jaguar with a percussive, reverberative thunk. The boys looked at each other in elation and terror, the sound of rock on garage door seeming to them the loudest thing in the world.

“Holy shit!” said Bishop, and both of them, as if moved by the natural impulses of hunted animals, ran.

They ran down Via Veneto, the neighborhood’s lone street, which followed roughly the same curvature as a path that deer had made when this place was still a nature preserve, a path that ran between the small man-made pond to the north and a large drainage ditch to the south, these two bodies of water being enough to sustain a modest deer population even through the Illinois winter, a herd whose offspring still lingered in Venetian Village and terrorized various carefully tended flowering plants and gardens. The deer were so annoying that the residents of Venetian Village paid quarterly fees to a deer exterminator who left salt licks laced with poison on posts high enough for adult deer to reach (but, importantly, too high for any of the neighborhood’s twenty-five-pound-and-under dogs to accidentally ingest). The poison was not immediate but rather bioaccumulated in the deer’s body, so that when the animal’s death instincts kicked in, it tended to wander far away from its herd and die, conveniently, somewhere else. And so along with the standardized gondolier-themed mailboxes and front-yard water features, Venetian Village’s other major repeating architectural items were posts with salt licks on them and signs saying DANGER. POISON. KEEP AWAY in a very tactful and elegant serif typeface that could also be found on the Venetian Village official stationery.

The neighborhood should never have existed but for a loophole that was exploited by three Chicago investors. Before Venetian Village, there was the Milkweed Nature Preserve, named after the plant that grew in great abundance here and drew huge numbers of monarch butterflies in the summer. The city was looking for a private organization — preferably nonprofit and/or charitable — to tend the preserve and its various paths and general health and biodiversity. The covenants the city drafted stated that the buyer of the land could not develop the land, nor could the buyer sell the land to anyone who would develop it. But the agreement said nothing about whom that buyer (i.e., the second one) could sell the land to. So one of the business partners bought the land, then sold it to another of the partners, who quickly sold it to the third partner, who immediately formed an LLC with the other two guys and went to work knocking down the forest. They installed a thick copper fence around what was once the Milkweed Nature Preserve, and advertised to high-end Sotheby’s-style clients, one of their catchphrases being: “The intersection of luxury and nature.”

One of the three founding partners still lived in Venetian Village, a commodities trader with offices at both the Chicago Stock Exchange and Wall Street. His name was Gerald Fall. He was Bishop’s father.

Gerald Fall, the only person on the block, save for the two boys themselves, who saw the stone strike the headmaster’s house, who watched as Bishop and Samuel ran down the soft slope of the road toward the low end of Via Veneto’s terminating cul-de-sac, where he was standing in the driveway, the door of his black BMW open, his right foot already in the car, his left foot still on the driveway he’d had expensively done in high-gloss cobblestone. He was leaving when he spotted his son throw the rock at the headmaster’s house. The boys did not see him there until they were upon the driveway themselves, where they squeaked to a halt on the polished stone, the sound like basketball players on a gym floor. Bishop and his father considered each other for a moment.

“The headmaster’s sick,” the father said. “Why are you bothering him?”

“Sorry,” said Bishop.

“He’s very ill. He’s a sick man.”

“I know.”

“What if he’s sleeping and you just ruined it?”

“I’ll be sure to apologize.”

“You do that.”

“Where are you going?” Bishop asked.

“The airport. I’ll be at the New York apartment for a while.”

“Again?”

“Don’t bother your sister while I’m gone.” He looked at the boys’ feet, wet and dirty from the woods. “And don’t track mud in the house.”

With that, Bishop’s father dove fully into his car and shut the door hard and the engine purred to life and the BMW circled out of the driveway, its tires making this noise on the smooth stones like something screaming.

Inside, the Fall household had a formality that made Samuel not want to touch anything: bright white stone floors, chandeliers with crystal things hanging off of them, flowers in tall and thin and easily tippable glass vases, framed abstract artwork on the walls lit by recessed bulbs, a thick wooden display hutch with about two dozen snow globes inside it, the tops of tables buffed to a mirrorlike clarity, kitchen counters of white marble similarly shined, each room and hallway defined by a wide arch set atop Corinthian columns that were so intricately detailed at the top they looked like muskets that had backfired and been torn apart.

“This way,” Bishop said. He led them to a room that could only be called the “TV room” for the big-screen television that Samuel felt dwarfed by. It was taller than he was, and wider than his own wingspan. Below the television were strewn various cords and wires for video-game consoles stacked clumsily in a small cabinet. Game cartridges lay haphazardly about them like spent artillery shells.

“Do you like Metroid or Castlevania or Super Mario?” Bishop said.

“I don’t know.”

“I can save the princess in Super Mario without even dying. I’ve also beaten Mega Man, Double Dragon, and Kid Icarus.”

“It doesn’t matter what we play.”

“Yeah, that’s true. They’re all pretty much the same game. Same basic premise: Go right.”

He reached into the cabinet and produced an Atari all tangled in its own cords.

“I actually prefer the classics,” he said. “Games made before all the clichés were established. Galaga. Donkey Kong. Or Joust is one of my favorites, even though it’s weird.”

“I’ve never played it.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty weird. Ostriches and stuff. Pterodactyls. There’s also Centipede. And Pac-Man. You’ve played Pac-Man, right?”

“Yes!”

“Pretty fucking amazing, isn’t it? Here’s one.” Bishop grabbed a cartridge called Missile Command and jammed it into the Atari. “You watch me first, then you’ll know how to play.”

The point of Missile Command was to protect six cities from a ceaseless hail of ICBMs. When a missile landed on one of the six cities, it did so with an ugly plosive noise and a little splash that was probably supposed to be a mushroom cloud but looked more like a small pebble or frog breaking the surface of a still pond. The game’s sound track was mostly an eight-bit digital conversion of an air-raid horn. Bishop positioned his targeting reticule out in front of the incoming missiles and pressed his button and a small trace of light shot up from the ground and slowly climbed to the targeted spot, where it collided with a falling nuke. Bishop didn’t even lose a city until around level nine. Samuel lost track of levels eventually, so by the time the sky was packed with missile trails falling fast and thick, he had no idea how many boards had been conquered. Bishop’s face through all of this was utterly calm and fishlike and blank.

“Want to see me do it again?” Bishop said as the screen flashed GAME OVER.

“Did you win?”

“What do you mean, win?”

“Did you save all the cities?”

“You can’t save all the cities.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Annihilation is inevitable. The point is delaying it.”

“So people can escape?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Do it again.”

And so Bishop was onto level six or seven in his second game, and Samuel was watching Bishop’s face instead of the game — how his face was so focused and undisturbed, even while missiles crashed down around his cities, even while his hands jerked the controller this way and that — when, from outside the room, Samuel heard something else, something new.

It was music. Clean and clear and not at all like the scratchy and digitized sounds currently coming out of the television. Musical scales, a solo string instrument going up and down a scale.

“What’s that?”

“That’s my sister,” Bishop said. “Bethany. She’s practicing.”

“Practicing what?”

“Violin. She’s going to be a world-famous violinist. She’s really outstandingly good.”

“I’ll say!” Samuel blurted out maybe too enthusiastically, a bit out of proportion to the actual conversation. But he wanted Bishop to like him. He was trying to be agreeable. Bishop gave him a brief and curious look before staring forward again, blankly, onward to levels ten, eleven, while the music outside changed from a basic scale to real actual music, a soaring and densely noted solo that Samuel could not believe was coming from a person and not the radio.

“That’s really your sister?”

“Yep.”

“I want to see,” Samuel said.

“Wait. Watch this,” Bishop said as he annihilated two nukes at the same time with one shot.

“Just for one second,” Samuel said.

“But I haven’t even lost a city yet. This could the highest scoring game of Missile Command ever. You could be watching something historic.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Fine,” Bishop said. “Your loss.”

And Samuel left to find the source of the music. He followed the sounds through the main vaulted hallway, through the gleaming kitchen and to the back of the house, to an office where he slowly wrapped his nose around the frame of the door and peeked inside and saw, for the first time, Bishop’s sister.

They were twins.

Bethany had Bishop’s face, the same check-mark eyebrows, the same quiet intensity. She looked like an elven princess on the cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel: immortally young and beautiful and wise. The sharp angles of her cheeks and nose fit her better than they did Bishop. Whereas Bishop looked angry, she looked stately, statuesque. Her long and thick auburn hair, thin eyebrows crinkled in concentration, long neck and delicate arms and erect posture and the careful way she sat in a skirt, a kind of propriety and elegance and ladylike maturity that just killed Samuel. He loved the way she moved with her violin, the way the whole apparatus of her head and neck and torso seemed to glide with the movements of her bow. This was in sharp contrast to the kids in his school’s orchestra, who forced sound out of their instruments mechanically and abusively. Her playing was so effortless.

He didn’t know it then, but this would become his template for beauty for the rest of his life. Any girl he ever met from now on would be compared, in his head, to this girl.

She finished on a long note where she did that amazing thing where the bow kept moving back and forth and yet there was no break at all, just a prolonged, liquid sound. And she opened her eyes and looked directly at him, and they stared at each other for a terrifying moment until she brought the violin down into her lap and said, “Hi there.”

Samuel had never felt such uncomfortable longings before. This was the first time his body tingled like this: Cold sweat gummed up his armpits, his mouth suddenly seemed too small, his tongue all of a sudden huge and arid, a panicky sensation in his lungs as if he’d been holding his breath for too long, all of these things coalesced in his body as a kind of hyperawareness, a strange magnetic pull toward the object of his fancy that departed significantly from the way he tried to ignore or hide from most people.

The girl waited for him to say something, her hands in her lap, resting on her violin, her ankles crossed, those penetrating green eyes—

“I’m Bishop’s friend,” Samuel finally said. “I’m here with Bishop.”

“Okay.”

“Your brother?”

She smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“I heard you practicing. What are you practicing for?”

She looked at him quizzically for a moment. “To get the notes under my fingers,” she said. “I have a concert coming up. What did you think?”

“It was beautiful.”

She nodded and seemed to consider this. “The double-stops in the third movement are really hard to play in tune,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And the arpeggios on the third page are rough. Plus I have to play in tenths, which is weird.”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I’m falling all over it, that third movement. Stumbling the whole way.”

“It didn’t sound like that.”

“It’s like I’m a bird stapled to a chair.”

“Right,” Samuel said. He was not comfortable with this topic at all.

“I need to relax,” she said. “Especially in the second movement. There are these long melodic lines in the second movement, and if you play them with too much gusto it ruins the musicality of the whole piece. You have to be calm and serene, which is the last thing your body wants when you’re playing a solo.”

“Maybe you can, I don’t know, breathe?” Samuel said, because that’s what his mother told him during his uncontrollable Category 4s: Just breathe.

“You know what works?” she said. “I imagine my bow is a knife.” She held it up, the bow, and pointed it at him with false menace. “And then I imagine the violin is a stick of butter. Then I pretend I’m drawing the knife through the butter. It should feel like that.”

Samuel just nodded, helpless.

“How do you know my brother?” she said.

“He jumped out of a tree and scared me.”

“Oh,” she said, as if this made perfect sense. “He’s playing Missile Command right now, isn’t he?”

“How’d you know that?”

“He’s my brother. I can feel it.”

“Really?”

She held his stare for a moment, then giggled. “No. I can hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“The game. Listen. Can’t you hear it?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“You have to concentrate. Just listen. Close your eyes and listen.”

And so he did, and he began to hear the various sounds of the house separate themselves, break from one buzzy collective hum into individual details: the air conditioner working somewhere within the walls, the whoosh of air through vents, the wind outside brushing against the house, the refrigerator and freezer, and Samuel recognized these things and pushed them out of the way and felt his concentration extend back into the house and snake from room to room until, all at once, there it was, popping out of the silence, the faint and muffled air-raid sirens, missile explosions, the pew-pew sounds of rockets fired.

“I hear it,” he said. But when he opened his eyes Bethany was no longer looking at him. She had her face turned away, toward the big window that looked out onto the backyard and the forest beyond. Samuel followed her stare and saw, outside, through the twilight, at the tree line, maybe fifty feet away, a large adult deer. Light brown and spotted. Big black animal eyes. And as it moved, it hobbled and staggered, fell down and recovered and got up again and kept going, swaying and bucking.

“What’s wrong with it?” Samuel said.

“It’s eaten the salt.”

The deer’s front legs gave out again, and it pushed itself along on its belly. Then it recovered momentarily, only to twist and crane its neck so that it could move only in circles. Its eyes were wide and panicked. A pink foam dripped from its nose.

“This happens all the time,” Bethany said.

The deer turned toward the forest and made its way into the trees. They watched it go, tumbling forward, until they could no longer see it through the foliage. Then all was quiet, except for the faint sounds from the other end of the house: bombs dropping out of the sky and flattening whole cities.

4

AS THE SCHOOL YEAR BEGAN, this new thing started happening: Samuel would be sitting in class and taking faithful and meticulous notes about whatever Miss Bowles was teaching that moment — American history, multiplication, grammar — and sincerely thinking about the material and really trying to understand it and worrying that Miss Bowles could at any moment call on him and ask him pop-quiz questions about the material she’d just covered, which she often did, mocking those kids who answered incorrectly, suggesting for the next hour or so that perhaps they belonged in fifth grade rather than sixth, and Samuel paying attention closely and carefully and absolutely not letting his mind wander and not thinking about girls or doing anything regarding girls and yet this thing happened. It began as a kind of warmth, a tingle, like that feeling when someone is about to tickle you, that terrible anticipation. Then a sudden awareness of a body part that up until now was obscured, was among all those feelings that happened beneath what he paid attention to: the fabric on his shoulders, the fit of his socks, what his elbow was at any moment touching. Most of the time the body fades away. But lately, for no reason, more frequently than Samuel would like, his prick had become assertive. In class, at his desk, it would announce itself. It pushed against his jeans and then against the unforgiving metal underside of the school’s one-size-fits-all desk. And the problem here was that all this rising and swelling and pressing was mortifying, but also, in a purely physical way, it was really pleasant. He wanted it to go away, but then again, he also didn’t.

Did Miss Bowles know? Could she see it? That daily some of her boys went starry-eyed and glassy as their nervous systems took them somewhere else? If she did, she didn’t say anything. And she never called on any of the boys in such a state and demand they stand while giving their answers. This seemed, for Miss Bowles, unusually merciful.

Samuel looked at the clock: Ten minutes till recess. His pants felt too tight. He felt wedged into his seat. Then his mind flashed involuntarily with visions of girls, his mental inventory of images accidentally caught here and there: cleavage seen when a woman at the mall bent over; a snip of leg and crotch and inner thigh glimpsed as girls in class sat down; and now a new vision, Bethany, in her room, sitting up straight, knees together, in a light cotton dress, violin at her chin, looking at him, those green catlike eyes.

When the bell rang for recess he acted like there was something important in his desk that he couldn’t find. After everyone left the classroom, he stood up and maneuvered himself in such a way that, for anyone watching, would have looked like someone slowly hula-hooping without a Hula-Hoop.

The kids marched to the playground, marched with purpose and slow resolve even though they were by now surging with the energy that accumulates in an eleven-year-old body sitting rigidly still for hours under Miss Bowles’s imperious gaze. They marched in total silence, single file on the far-right side of the corridor past all the signs the faculty had helpfully taped to the white concrete walls, one or two of which promoted some kind of LEARNING IS FUN! message, while the rest attempted strict behavior management: KEEP HANDS AND FEET TO YOURSELF; QUIET VOICES ONLY; WALK, DON’T RUN; WAIT YOUR TURN; USE POLITE LANGUAGE; DON’T USE MORE TOILET PAPER THAN YOU NEED; EAT BEFORE TALKING; USE TABLE MANNERS; RESPECT PERSONAL SPACE; RAISE YOUR HAND; DO NOT SPEAK UNLESS CALLED ON; STAY IN LINE; APOLOGIZE WHEN NEEDED; FOLLOW DIRECTIONS; USE SOAP APPROPRIATELY.

To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school. How to contort themselves to the school’s rigid rules. Take, for example, bathroom breaks. No subject was more highly managed than the students’ various excreta. Getting a bathroom pass was an elaborate ritual whereby Miss Bowles would — if you asked really nicely and convinced her that it was, indeed, an emergency and not some ploy to get out of class to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol or do drugs — fill out this bathroom pass about the length of the Constitution. She’d write down your name and the time of your departure (down to the very second) and, horrifyingly, the nature of your visit (i.e., number one or number two), and then she’d ask you to read the hall pass aloud, which listed your “Rights and Restrictions,” primarily among them that you could leave class for no more than two minutes and that while gone you assented to walk only on the right side of the corridor and go directly to the nearest bathroom and not say a word to anyone and not run in the halls and not be disruptive whatsoever and do nothing illegal while in the bathroom. Then you had to sign the hall pass and wait while Miss Bowles explained to you that you had signed a contract and there were severe penalties for people who broke contracts. Most of the time the kids would listen to her wide-eyed and panicked and doing that uncomfortable pee dance because they were already on the clock and the more Miss Bowles talked about contract law the more of their precious two minutes she cut into, such that when they finally got to the hall they had maybe ninety seconds to get to the bathroom and do their business and get back to class, all without running, which was impossible.

Plus you were only allowed two bathroom passes per week.

Then there was the rule about the water fountain: after students returned from recess they could only drink from the water fountain for three seconds each—this was probably meant to teach them about cooperation and selflessness — but of course the kids were panting and exhausted after a frenzied recess letting off all their stored-up angst, and there was a heat wave, and they were rarely allowed bathroom breaks, so the only water these sweaty and sunburned and overheated kids got all day came at the water fountain for these three seconds. This was a perverse double whammy for the students, because if they ran off their energy at recess, they would be parched and exhausted for the rest of the day, whereas if they didn’t run around during recess, they’d feel so hyperactive in the late afternoon that they’d almost certainly get in some behavior-related trouble. So mostly the students played hard at recess, then gulped as much water as they could during their tiny three-second interval. And by the end of the day they were desolate, dehydrated lumps, which was actually how Miss Bowles preferred it.

So she stood over them and loudly counted out their time and each kid popped up at three, their chins dripping, not even close to enough water on this hot and humid and terrible Midwest day.

“This is bullshit,” Bishop said to Samuel as they waited in line. “Watch this.”

And when it was Bishop’s turn he leaned over the fountain, pressed the button, and drank while making direct eye contact with Miss Bowles, who said, “One. Two. Three.” Then when Bishop did not stop drinking, she said “Three” again, more pointedly, then when Bishop still did not stop she said, “You’re done now. Next!” And then it became clear that Bishop was not going to stop drinking until he was good and ready, and it appeared to most of the kids in line that Bishop wasn’t even drinking anymore so much as letting the water run coolly over his lips, still looking directly at Miss Bowles as she finally realized this wasn’t a matter of the new kid not knowing the rules but rather a direct challenge to her authority. And she responded to the confrontation by gathering herself into a rigid hands-on-hips, chin-jutting-out kind of posture and her voice dropped an octave as she said, “Bishop. You will stop drinking. Now.”

He stared at her with this bored, lifeless expression that was just so incredible and daring, and the kids in line were already bug-eyed and giggling dementedly because Bishop was about two seconds away from a paddling. Anyone who so blatantly disregarded the rules got paddled.

The paddle was famous.

It hung on the office wall of their principal, the school’s chief disciplinarian, the unfortunately named Laurence Large, a short and oddly-shaped man who carried his weight almost entirely from the waist up — his legs were skinny and frail while his upper body ballooned. He looked like an egg standing on toothpicks. One wondered how his ankles and shinbones didn’t snap. His paddle was made from a single three-inch-thick slab of wood, was about as wide as two pieces of notebook paper put together, and had about a dozen small holes drilled into it. For aerodynamics, the kids hypothesized. So he could swing it faster.

His paddlings were legendary for their force, for the technique required to generate enough power to, for example, shatter Brand Beaumonde’s glasses, which was a historical fact that lived on as oral history among the members of the sixth-grade class, that Large struck Beaumonde’s ass so hard the shock wave traveled up through the poor boy’s body and cracked his high-prescription lenses. Comparisons were made to professional tennis players uncoiling 140-mph serves, how Large could transfer his weight in such a way to deliver a devastating — and athletically unlikely — blow. Sure, occasionally a parent might complain about the principal’s retrograde punishment system, but since a paddling was the ultimate misbehavior prevention and deterrent, it was, for the most part, pretty rare. Certainly not frequent enough to spur any PTO campaigns. The absolute fact of assured backside annihilation was enough to keep even the rowdiest children in a more or less calm and low-decibel and narcotized fearful stupor for the whole of the school day. (That they went into spasms of wild hyperactivity as soon as they got home was something parents sometimes grumbled about to teachers, who quietly nodded their heads and thought: Not my problem.)

Every teacher had a unique point at which rebelliousness would no longer be tolerated. For Miss Bowles, that moment came after twelve seconds. For twelve seconds Bishop was at the water fountain. For twelve seconds he stared at Miss Bowles as she demanded he move along until finally she yanked Bishop by his shirt, physically grabbed him near the neck and with a stitch-tearing noise pulled him momentarily up off the ground before marching him toward the terrifying office of Principal Large.

What typically happened when a kid came back from a paddling is that somewhere between ten and twenty minutes after being sent away there would be a knock on the classroom door and Miss Bowles would open it and there would be Principal Large with his big hand on the back of some crimson-faced, snotty, sniveling kid. The faces of the recently paddled were always the same: wet and grim, eyes rubbed red, runny-nosed, defeated. There was no more rebellion in them, no more bravado. Even the loudest, most attention-seeking boys looked in this moment like they wanted to curl up under their desks and die. Then Large would say “I think this one is ready to rejoin the class” and Miss Bowles would say “I hope he’s learned his lesson,” and even students as young as eleven were sophisticated enough to know that this bit of dialogue was all theater, that the adults were not talking to each other but rather to the whole lot of them, the easily grasped subtext being: Don’t step out of line or you’re next. The kid would then be allowed to return to his seat, where his secondary punishment would begin, since his ass would be throbbing and bright red and tender as an open wound all over, and so sitting on the school’s hard plastic chairs brought a sharp pain that felt, they said, like being paddled again. And so the kid would sit there in misery and cry and Miss Bowles would say “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Do you have something to add to our discussion?” and the kid would shake his head no in this pathetic, broken, miserable way and the whole class knew that Miss Bowles wanted to draw everyone’s attention to his crying as a way to shame him more. In public. In front of his friends. There was a ruthlessness in Miss Bowles that the genderless blue sweaters she wore just barely contained.

That day they were all waiting for Bishop to return. They were excited. They were eager to accept him, after this initiation. Now he’d know what they’d been through. He was one of them. So they waited, ready to welcome Bishop back and forgive him for crying. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and finally right at the eighteen-minute mark came the inevitable knock on the door. And Miss Bowles made a big show of saying “Who could that be?” before putting the chalk onto the blackboard tray and striding to the door and opening it. And there they were, Bishop and Principal Large, and she was shocked, and the whole class was shocked, to see that not only was Bishop not crying, but he was also visibly smiling. He looked happy. Large’s hand was not on Bishop’s back. In fact, the principal was an odd two to three feet away from Bishop, as if the boy had some contagious disease. Miss Bowles stared at Principal Large for a moment, and Large did not stick to his usual script about Bishop being ready to rejoin the class, but only said, in a kind of distant way that soldiers sometimes talk about war: “Here. Take him.”

And Bishop walked to his desk and every kid in the class watched him go and sit down, jumping into his seat and landing hard on his butt and looking up fiercely as if to challenge anyone to try to hurt him.

It was a moment that lived in the heart of every sixth grader who saw it. One of their own had taken the worst of the adult world and come out victorious. Nobody ever fucked with Bishop Fall after that.

5

SAMUEL’S MOTHER told him about the Nix. Another of her father’s ghosts. The scariest one. The Nix, she said, was a spirit of the water who flew up and down the coastline looking for children, especially adventurous children out walking alone. When it found one, the Nix would appear to the child as a large white horse. Unsaddled, but friendly and tame. It bowed down as low as a horse was able, so the kid could leap onto it.

At first the children were afraid, but, ultimately, how could they refuse? Their very own horse! They jumped on and when it stood up again they were eight feet off the ground and they were delighted — nothing this big had ever minded them before. They became bold. They would kick at the horse to go faster, and so it broke into a light trot, and the more the kids loved it, the faster the horse would go.

Then they wanted other people to see them.

They wanted their friends to stare with envy at this brand-new horse. Their horse.

It always went like this. The kids who were victims of the Nix always felt, at first, fear. Then luck. Then possession. Then pride. Then terror. They’d kick at the horse to go faster until it was in a full gallop, the kids hanging on to its neck. It was the best thing that had ever happened to them. They’d never felt so important, so full of pleasure. And only at this point — at the pinnacle of speed and joy, when they felt most in control of the horse, when they felt the most ownership of it, when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride — would the horse veer off the road that led to town and gallop toward the cliffs overlooking the sea. It ran full bore toward that great drop into the violent churning water below. And the kids screamed and yanked back on the horse’s mane and cried and wailed but nothing mattered. The horse leaped off the cliff and dropped. The children clung to its neck even as they fell, and if they weren’t bashed to death on the rocks, they drowned in the frigid water.

This was a story Faye had heard from her father. All her ghost stories came from Grandpa Frank, who was a tall and thin and intensely withdrawn man with a perplexing accent. Most people found him intimidating in his silence, but Samuel always thought it was a relief. Whenever they visited him in Iowa on those rare Thanksgivings or Christmases, the family would sit around the table eating and not saying a word. It was hard to have a conversation when it was met only with a nod of his head, a dismissive “Hm.” Mostly they ate their turkey until Grandpa Frank was finished eating and left to watch television in the other room.

The only time Grandpa Frank was ever really animated was when he told them stories of the old country — old myths, old legends, old tales about ghosts he’d heard growing up where he’d grown up, in far-north Norway, in a little fishing village in the arctic that he left when he was eighteen. When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don’t trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”

Samuel didn’t understand.

“The Nix doesn’t appear as a horse anymore,” she said. They were in the kitchen hoping for a break in the heat wave that now seemed endless, sitting there reading with the refrigerator door wide open and a fan blowing the cold air onto them, drinking ice water, glasses sweating wet circles on the table. “The Nix used to appear as a horse,” she said, “but that was in the old days.”

“What does it look like now?”

“It’s different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it’s someone you think you love.”

Samuel still did not understand.

“People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,” she said. “They love each other because it’s easy. Or because they’re used to it. Or because they’ve given up. Or because they’re scared. People can be a Nix for each other.”

She sipped her water, then pressed the cold glass to her forehead. She closed her eyes. It was a long, tedious Saturday afternoon. Henry had gone into the office after another one of their fights, this one on the issue of dirty dishes. Their late-seventies-era avocado-colored dishwasher had finally stopped working this week, and not once had Henry volunteered to clean the growing pile of plates and bowls and cookware and glasses that had overrun the sink and much of the counter. Samuel suspected his mother was intentionally letting the pile get out of hand — maybe even contributing to it more than usual, using several pots for a meal that probably required only one — as a kind of test. Would Henry notice? Would he help? That he did neither of these things was something she extrapolated great meaning from.

“It’s like home ec class all over again,” she told him when the pile finally became unbearable.

“What are you talking about?” Henry said.

“Just like in high school. You go have fun while I cook and clean. Nothing’s changed. In twenty years, absolutely nothing has changed.”

Henry washed all the dishes, then claimed urgent weekend duties at the office, leaving Faye and Samuel alone, together, again. They sat in the kitchen and read from their respective books. Incomprehensible poetry for her. Choose Your Own Adventure for him.

“I knew a girl named Margaret in high school,” Faye said. “Margaret was a very bright and witty girl. And in school she fell in love with a boy named Jules. A handsome boy who could do anything. Everyone was jealous of her. But it turns out Jules was her Nix.”

“Why? What happened?”

She set her glass in the puddle it had made on the wood. “He disappeared,” she said. “She got stranded, never left town. I hear she’s still there, working as a cashier at her dad’s pharmacy.”

“Why did he do that?”

“That’s what a Nix does.”

“She couldn’t tell?”

“It’s difficult to see. But a good rule to remember is that anyone you fall in love with before you’re an adult is probably a Nix.”

“Anyone?”

“Probably anyone.”

“When did you meet Dad?”

“In school,” she said. “We were seventeen.”

Faye stared into the yellow haze of the day. The refrigerator chugged and hummed and clicked and all at once, with a brief final electrical zap, it quit. And the light went out. And the countertop digital clock radio died. And Faye looked around and said, “We blew a fuse.” Which meant of course that Samuel had to flip the breaker, because the breaker box was in the basement and his mother refused to go into the basement.

The flashlight was heavy and solid in his hand, its aluminum handle dimpled, its big round rubberized face an appropriate size for striking something violently in a pinch. His mother didn’t go into the basement because the basement was where the house spirit lived. At least that was the story, another one from his grandfather: house spirits that inhabit basements and haunt you your entire life. His mother said she’d encountered one as a child and gotten spooked. She never liked basements after that.

But she insisted that her house spirit appeared only to her, only she was haunted, and Samuel was perfectly safe. He could go into the basement unharmed.

He began to cry. A soft and light whimper, because either there was a cruel ghost living in the basement watching him at this very moment or his mother was a little crazy. He shuffled his feet along the concrete floor and kept his attention narrowly focused on the beam of light in front of him. He tried to be blind to everything but that circle of light. And when he finally did see the fuse box on the other side of the room, he shut his eyes and walked as straight as he could. He shuffled forward and stuck the flashlight out in front of him and continued in this manner until he felt the flashlight’s face bump into the wall. He opened his eyes. There was the fuse box. He threw the breaker and the basement lights came alive. He looked behind him and saw nothing. Nothing but the ordinary basement junk. He stayed a moment to collect himself, to stop crying. He sat on the floor. It was so much cooler down here.

6

IN THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS of the school year, Bishop and Samuel fell into an easy alliance. Bishop would do whatever he wanted, and Samuel would follow. These were simple roles for the both of them. They never even discussed or acknowledged it, but fell into their positions like coins falling into their slots in a vending machine.

They’d meet in the woods for war games near the pond. Bishop always had a scenario ready for their games. They fought Charlie in Vietnam, the Nazis in World War II, the Confederacy in the Civil War, the British in the Revolutionary War, the Indians in the French and Indian War. And with the exception of their one confused attempt to play War of 1812, the wars always had a clear objective, and they were always the good guys, and their enemies were always bad, and the two of them always won.

Or if they weren’t playing war, they’d play video games at Bishop’s house, which was Samuel’s preference because then he might run into Bethany, whom he loved. Though he probably wouldn’t have called it “love” just yet. It was rather a state of heightened attention and agitation that manifested itself physically as a smaller vocal dynamic range (he had a tendency to shut down and become penitent in her presence even though he did not mean to or want to) and an intense desire to touch her clothes, between his thumb and forefinger, lightly. Bishop’s sister exhilarated him and terrified him. But she usually ignored them. Bethany seemed unaware of her influence. She practiced her scales, listened to music, closed her door. She traveled to various music festivals and competitions, where she won solo violin ribbons and trophies that eventually went up on her bedroom wall, along with her various posters of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and a small collection of those porcelain masks representing comedy and tragedy. Dried flowers too, from her many recitals, when afterward she was given big bouquets of roses that she carefully dried and then affixed to her wall, above her bed, an efflorescence of pastel greens and pinks that exactly matched her bedspread and curtains and wallpaper color scheme. It was such a girl’s room.

Samuel knew this bedroom because he had, two or three times, spied on it from a safe position outside, in the woods. He left his house right after sunset, under a deepening violet sky, came down to the creek, and made his muddy way through the woods, behind the houses of Venetian Village, past the gardens where roses and violets were closing up for the night, behind the odorous dog kennels and greenhouses that smelled of sulfur and phosphorous, behind the house of the headmaster of Blessed Heart Academy, who could sometimes be found this time of night relaxing in his custom-built outdoor saltwater Jacuzzi, and Samuel would move cautiously and slowly and watch out not to step on twigs or piles of dead leaves while he kept one eye on the headmaster, who from this distance looked like an indistinct white blobby thing, the many parts of him — belly and chin and underarms — notable only for their heavy sag. And on around the block, through the woods, down to the street’s stubby end, where Samuel took a position among the tree roots behind the Fall house, perhaps ten feet from where the lawn met the forest, dressed entirely in black, with a black hood pulled down to within an inch of the ground so that the only bits of body that he showed the world were his eyes.

And there he watched.

The yellow-orange glow of lights, shadows of people as they migrated through the house. And when Bethany appeared within the frame of her bedroom window, a bolt of anxiety cracked in his belly. He pressed into the ground harder. She wore a thin cotton dress, which is what she always wore, always a little classier than anyone else, like she was returning from a fancy restaurant or church. The way the dress lightly swung as she walked, and then the way it so softly came to rest against her body when she stopped moving, gliding back down to her skin, like watching feathers fall elegantly through the air. Samuel could drown in that fabric, happily.

All he wanted was to see her. Just a confirmation that she did, in fact, exist. That’s all he needed, and, upon seeing her, he would soon leave, long before she changed clothes and he could be accused of doing something dishonorable. Just this one thing — seeing Bethany and sharing this quiet, private moment with her — could calm him, get him through another week. That she attended Blessed Heart and not the public school, that she spent so much time in her room and so much time traveling, struck Samuel as unfair and unjust. The girls the other boys loved were always present, right there in front of them in class, right there next to them in the cafeteria. That Bethany was so inaccessible meant, to Samuel, in his head, that he was justified in occasionally spying on her. He was owed.

Then one day he was at their house when she walked right into the TV room while Bishop played Nintendo and collapsed into the same extra-large beanbag chair Samuel was at that moment sitting in. She sat in such a way that a small portion of her shoulder pressed against a small portion of his shoulder. And suddenly he felt that all the meaning in the world was concentrated in those few square inches.

“I’m bored,” she said. She wore a yellow sundress. Samuel could smell her shampoo, rich with honey and lemon and vanilla. He held himself still, afraid that if he moved she might leave.

“Want a turn?” Bishop said, shoving the controller toward her.

“No.”

“Want to play hide-and-seek?”

“No.”

“Kick the can? Red rover?”

“How could we play red rover?”

“Just throwing out ideas here. Brainstorming. Spitballing.”

“I don’t want to play red rover.”

“Hopscotch? Tiddlywinks?”

“Now you’re being stupid.”

Samuel felt his shoulder sweating where Bethany’s shoulder pressed into him. He was so rigid it hurt.

“Or those weird games girls play,” Bishop said, “where they fold up pieces of paper to find out who you’re going to marry and how many babies you’ll have.”

“I do not want to do that.”

“Don’t you want to know how many babies you’ll have? Eleven babies. That’s my guess.”

“Shut up.”

“We could play dare.”

“I don’t want to play dare.”

“What’s dare?” Samuel said.

“It’s truth or dare without the bullshit,” Bishop said.

“I want to go somewhere,” Bethany said. “For absolutely no reason. I want to go somewhere just for the point of being there and not here.”

“The park?” Bishop said. “The beach? Egypt?”

“For no other reason than to be at a place for no reason.”

“Oh,” Bishop said, “you want to go to the mall.”

“Yes,” she said. “The mall. Yes I do.”

“I’m going to the mall!” Samuel said.

“Our parents won’t take us to the mall,” Bethany said. “They say it’s cheap and vulgar.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing those clothes,” Bishop said, puffing his chest out and doing his best impression of his father.

“I’m going to the mall tomorrow,” Samuel said. “With my mom. We have to buy a new dishwasher. I’ll get you something. What do you want?”

Bethany thought about it. She looked toward the ceiling and tapped her finger on her cheekbone and thought about it hard and long before saying, “Surprise me.”

And all that night and into the following day, Samuel thought about what he could buy for Bethany. What gift would capture everything he needed to let her know? The gift needed to distill his feelings for her, give her in one small package a quick potent shot of his love and commitment and total helpless devotion.

So he knew the gift’s parameters, but he could not see the gift itself. Somewhere in the mall’s million billion shelves, the perfect gift almost certainly waited for him. But what was it?

In the car, Samuel was quiet and his mother was agitated. She always got like this on their trips to the mall. She loathed the mall, and so her critiques of what she called “suburban mall culture” grew severe and brutal whenever she actually had to go there.

They navigated out of the subdivision, onto the wider arterial road that looked like any arterial road in any American suburb: a franchise hall of mirrors. This is what you get in the suburbs, his mother said, the satisfaction of small desires. The getting of things you didn’t even know you wanted. An even larger grocery store. A fourth lane. A bigger, better parking lot. A new sandwich shop or video-rental store. A McDonald’s slightly closer than the other McDonald’s. A McDonald’s next door to a Burger King, across the street from a Hardee’s, in the same lot as a Steak ’n Shake and a Bonanza and a Ponderosa all-you-can-eat smorgasbord thing. What you get, in other words, is choice.

Or, rather, the illusion of choice, she said, all these restaurants offering substantially the same menu, some slight variation on potatoes and beef. Like at the grocery store, when she stood in the pasta aisle looking at the eighteen different brands of spaghetti. She couldn’t understand. “Why do we need eighteen spaghettis?” she said. Samuel shrugged. “Exactly,” she said. Why did we need twenty different coffees? Why did we need so many shampoos? It was easy to forget when looking at the chaos of the cereal aisle that all these hundreds of options were actually one option.

At the mall — the tremendous, bright, vast, air-conditioned cathedral of a mall — they were looking at dishwashers, but Faye was distracted by various other home appliances: something that made it easier to store leftover food; something that made it easier to grind it up; something that prevented food from sticking to the pan; something that made it easier to freeze food; something that made it easier to warm it up again. When she looked at each item she clucked a surprised Huh! and inspected it, turned it over in her hand, read the box, and said, “I wonder who thought of this?” She was wary around these things, suspicious that someone else had created a need in her or had identified a need she didn’t know she had. In the home-and-garden section it was a self-propelled lawn mower that got her attention, bright and macho-big and fantastically shiny red. “I never even thought I’d have a lawn,” she said, “and yet I suddenly want this very badly. Is that wrong?”

“No, it’s not wrong,” she said later, in one of the mall’s other kitchen stores, picking up the conversation as if she’d never stopped talking. “There’s nothing wrong with it at all. But, I don’t know. I feel like…” She paused, held some white plastic object in her hand, stared at it, some device that achieved perfectly julienned vegetables. “Doesn’t it seem absurd? That I can just buy this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is this really me?” she said, staring at the thing cupped in her hand. “The real me? Is this who I’ve become?”

“Can I have some money?” Samuel said.

“For what?”

Samuel shrugged.

“Don’t just buy something to buy it. For the point of buying something.”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t have to buy something, is my point. Nobody really needs any of this stuff.”

She reached into her purse and produced a ten-dollar bill. “Meet me back here in an hour.”

He gripped the money in his hand and marched off into the mall’s blazing white light. The place was unknowably large. It was like a big, breathing animal. The sound of a child or children somewhere distant yelling or crying became part of the omnidirectional din: Samuel had no idea where it was coming from, where the child was, whether the child was happy or sad. It was simply a disconnected audio fact. It was inconceivable that there were not enough stores at the mall, but someone decided there needed to be even more, thus the small stand-alone kiosks that occupied the middle of every thoroughfare, selling specialized and sometimes gimmicky merchandise: little toy helicopters that the salesman demonstrated by flying them over the crowd’s worried heads; key chains with your name laser-engraved onto them; special hair-curler things Samuel couldn’t begin to understand; sausages in gift boxes; blocks of glass that appeared to have 3-D holograms inside; a special girdle that made you look thinner than you really were; hats embroidered with personalized messages while you waited; T-shirts laser-printed with your own photographs. With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise: that here you would find everything you needed. Even seemingly esoteric things could be found here. Teeth whitening, for example, seemed like an unlikely mall purchase. Or Swedish massage. Or a piano. And yet you could find them all here. The mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream up your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.

Trying to find the perfect gift in the mall was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book when the choices were absent. He had to guess which page to turn to. The happy ending was out there somewhere, hidden.

Samuel walked by the candle store and breathed one or two lungfuls of its cinnamon odor. The nail salon gave him a momentary toxic headache. The candy store’s plastic bins of jawbreakers called to him, but he resisted. The mall’s music mixed with the music coming from each of the stores, the effect being like a car going into and out of radio coverage. Songs faded in, faded out. Earlier they were playing something happily Motown. Now they were playing “The Twist.” Chubby Checker. One of his mother’s least-favorite songs — a fact Samuel didn’t know how he knew. And he was considering the music and listening to the music coming out of the stores and he actually saw the music store across the food court before the idea finally struck, and he couldn’t believe it had taken him this long to come to it.

Music.

Bethany was a musician. He ran to the store and felt embarrassed that in all this time he’d been asking himself what he could give her without asking himself what she might actually want. And this felt egotistical and selfish and definitely something he’d have to work on personally some other time, when he didn’t have to find the perfect gift in like ten minutes.

So he ran into the store and was briefly disheartened when he saw that all the popular cassette tapes were around twelve dollars and thus outside his budget. But this despair did not last long because at the back of the store he spotted a bin labeled “Classical Music” and, below that, “Half Off,” which felt like providence. The cassettes here were six bucks and one of them — he was sure of it — was the perfect gift.

But as Samuel rifled through the clacking, disordered chaos of the clearance bin, he encountered a fundamental problem: He didn’t know any of this music. He didn’t know what Bethany would like, what she already owned. He didn’t even know what was good. Some of the names were familiar — Beethoven, Mozart — but most were not. Some were unpronounceably foreign. And he was about to go with one of the famous names he’d heard before — Stravinsky, though he couldn’t remember why he knew it — when he decided that if he’d heard of Stravinsky, then Bethany almost assuredly already owned every Stravinsky recording and was probably by now bored with them, and so he resolved to find something more modern, interesting, new, something that advertised his fascinating tastes and showed how he was different and independent and didn’t follow the herd like everyone else. So he picked out the ten most interesting-looking covers. Nothing with the portrait of the composer, nothing with an old painting or a photograph of a stuffy-looking orchestra, nothing with a conductor holding a baton. He went for the conceptual stuff: splashy colors, abstract geometric shapes, psychedelic spirals. He brought them to the counter and piled them in front of the cashier and asked, “Which of these would no one ever buy?”

The cashier, a sensitive-looking thirtysomething assistant-manager guy with a ponytail, did not act like this was an odd question but rather looked through the cassettes dutifully and then, with an air of authority that made Samuel trust him, picked one and shook it and said, “This one. No one ever buys this one.”

Samuel put down his ten dollars and the cashier wrapped the cassette in a bag.

“This is really modern stuff,” the cashier said. “Really out there.”

“Good,” Samuel said.

“It’s the same piece recorded ten different times. Like, really weird stuff. You like this?”

“Very much.”

“Okay,” he said. He gave him his change and Samuel still had about four bucks left. He ran to the candy store. The perfect gift swung wildly in its bag and battered the back of his legs and his mouth puckered in anticipation of the jawbreaker he was going to buy and his head bounced to the mall’s music and his eyes fluttered with daydreams where he made the right choice every time and all his adventures had the very best and happiest endings.

7

BISHOP FALL WAS A BULLY, but not an obvious bully. He did not prey on the weak. He left them alone, the skinny boys, the awkward girls. He wanted nothing easy. It was the strong and confident and self-possessed and powerful who drew his attention.

During the school year’s first pep rally, Bishop took an interest in Andy Berg, resident champion of all things brutal, only member of the sixth-grade class to achieve dark growths of leg and underarm hair, local terrorizer of the small and shrill. It was the gym teacher who first started calling him “Iceberg.” Or, sometimes, just “the Berg.” Because of his size (colossal), speed (slow), and the way he moved (unstoppably). The Berg was your typical grade-school bully: vastly bigger and stronger than anyone else in class, and transparently externalizing some raging inner demons about his stunted mental abilities, which were the only things stunted about him. The rest of his body was on some kind of genetic sprint to adulthood. He was now, in sixth grade, taller than the female teachers. Heavier, too. His body was not one of those destined for athletic greatness. He was simply going to be thick. A torso shaped like a beer keg. Arms like beef flanks.

The pep rally began as it usually did, with grades one through six sitting in the bleachers of the odd-smelling rubber-floored gymnasium, watching assistant principal Terry Fluster (who, by the way, was dressed as a six-foot-tall red-and-white eagle, the school’s mascot) lead them through a series of cheers, beginning, as always, with: Eagles! Don’t do drugs!

Then Principal Large shushed them and gave his typical inaugural spiel about his expectations for behavior and his zero-tolerance, no-shit-taking teaching philosophy, during which the students stopped paying attention and stared narcoleptically at their shoes, save for the first graders, who were hearing this for the first time and were, naturally, terrified.

The pep rally concluded with Mr. Fluster’s usual: Let’s go, Eagles! Let’s go, Eagles!

And the students yelled and clapped along with him at a level that was roughly one-quarter of the assistant principal’s enthusiasm, still loud enough to mask Andy Berg’s individual cheer, which was audible only to the several people standing around him, Samuel and Bishop included: Kim’s a faggot! Kim’s a faggot!

Directed of course at poor Kim Wigley, standing two paces to the Berg’s left, by all accounts the easiest boy to make fun of in the entire sixth-grade class, one of those kids suffering through every prepubescent disaster there was: thick snowy dandruff, aggressive braces, chronic impetigo, extreme nearsightedness, severe allergies to nuts and pollen, destabilizing ear infections, facial eczema, bimonthly pinkeye, warts, asthma, even an occurrence of head lice in the second grade that no one ever let him forget. Plus he was all of about forty pounds soaking wet. Plus he had a girl’s first name.

In these moments, Samuel knew the “right” thing to do would be to defend Kim and stop the bullying and stand up to the giant Andy Berg because bullies back down when they encounter resistance according to the brochures they were given in health class once a year. This was, everyone knew, a big fat lie. Because last year Brand Beaumonde actually did stand up to the Berg for the constant scorn directed toward Brand’s bulletproof-thick eyeglasses, stood up to him right in the middle of the lunchroom and said “Shut up your big mouth you big jerk!” in a spasm of nervous agitation. And the Berg did indeed back down and left him alone the rest of the school day and everyone who witnessed it was jubilant because maybe they were safe now and maybe the pamphlets were right and this great sense of optimism pervaded the school and Brand was a minor hero until the Berg found him on his way home that day and beat him up so savagely that the police actually got involved and interviewed Brand’s friends who, by now, had learned an important lesson: to keep their fucking mouths shut. Bullies do not back down.

The big rumor about the Berg this year — one propagated by the Berg himself — was that he was, by all accounts, the first member of the sixth-grade class to have sex. With a girl. With, he said, a former babysitter who, quote, can’t get enough of my dick. This of course was unverifiable. Either the high-school girl in question or her interest in the Berg’s anatomy, unverifiable but also unchallenged. Nobody in the locker room within earshot of the Berg’s boasting was willing to risk personal injury by stating the obvious: There was no way a high-school girl would be interested in a sixth grader unless she was mentally disturbed, wicked ugly, or emotionally broken. Or all three of these things. There was just no way.

And yet.

There was something in the way the Berg spoke about sex that made the boys wonder. It was the specificity of the details. The exact and totally unglamorous particulars. That’s what gave the boys pause, kept them up at night wondering and sometimes falling into private rages that maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he really was banging a high schooler, and if this was true it was the only proof they needed that the world was unjust and that God did not exist. Or if God did exist, God must hate them, for nobody in the school deserved sex less than Andy fucking Berg. Every gym class they endured it, how he had to smoke one of his dad’s cigars to cover the smell of pussy, how he wasn’t getting laid this week because the girl was on the rag, how one time when he blew his load, the condom he was wearing exploded because he was just that horny. These visions gave the boys nightmares, these and the larger tragedy that the repellent Andy Berg was having robust sex while most of them had only very recently had “the talk” with their parents and the whole idea of sex with a girl still seemed terrifying and gross.

It might have been the way the Berg taunted Kim at the pep rally that prompted Bishop to act. He would have thought it was too easy, too obvious — the way Kim didn’t fight back, how his passive and slumped-over body revealed his hundred percent acceptance of the hierarchies at work here. Kim stood there reflexively prepared to be bullied. The shooting-fish-in-a-barrel nature of this probably outraged Bishop’s odd sense of justice, his soldier’s desire to protect the weak and innocent via disproportionate violence.

As all the students filed out of the gymnasium, Bishop tapped the Berg on the shoulder. “I heard a rumor about you,” he said.

The Berg looked down at him, annoyed. “Yeah? What.”

“That you’ve had sex.”

“You better fucking believe it.”

“It’s true, then, the rumor.”

“I get so much pussy you don’t even know how much.”

Samuel trailed carefully behind them. He was not usually comfortable being this close to the Berg, but with Bishop between them he felt safe. Bishop’s personality tended to direct all attention to him. It was as if Bishop blocked Samuel from view.

“Okay,” Bishop said, “I have something for you.”

“What.”

“It’s something for people who are a little more mature. Such as yourself.”

“What is it.”

“I don’t want to say right now. Someone might hear. And this is very juicy, really illegal stuff we’re talking about.”

“What the fuck are you saying?”

Bishop rolled his eyes and looked around as if to check if anyone was eavesdropping before leaning closer to the Berg and beckoning him with his fingers to lean down so that his giant head wasn’t so far away and Bishop whispered, “Pornography.”

“No way!”

“Quiet down.”

“You’ve got porn?”

“A massive stash.”

“Seriously?”

“I’ve been trying to decide who here is grown-up enough to see it.”

“Rad!” the Berg said, roused. Because for kids his age, for kids hitting adolescence in the eighties, in those days before the internet, before the web made pornography easily accessible and therefore banal, for this last generation of boys for whom porn was primarily a physical object, possessing pornography was like having a superpower. One that made you immediately legitimate and popular among the other boys. This happened roughly once per semester, some obscure boy locating his father’s collection of dirty magazines and suddenly finding himself elevated socially for as long as he didn’t get in trouble, which might take a day to several months, depending on the constitution of the boy. The ones who were transparently desperate and begging for attention and craving to be liked tended to steal the whole pile in exchange for a one-time flash of celebrity, bright stars who burned out in a day when their fathers noticed the disappearance of all their pornography and put two and two together. Other boys, the ones with more impulse control and less desperation for approval, were more judicious in their porn approaches. They might remove only one magazine from the pile, say the second or third from the bottom, an edition that had presumably been perused, enjoyed, digested, and abandoned. They brought that one magazine to school and let everyone look through it before replacing it in the pile a week or two later, then removing another edition from near the bottom, and then repeating the pattern. These boys maintained a consistent popularity for, sometimes, months before a teacher noticed a group of boys sitting still in a huddle on the playground and came to investigate, because when grade-school boys weren’t running around like spazzes it meant something was definitely wrong.

It was always temporary, in other words, the boys’ access to porn. Which was why it so piqued the Berg’s interest.

“Where is it?” he said.

“Most of these kids would freak out,” Bishop said. “They wouldn’t understand what they’re looking at.”

“Let me see it.”

“You, on the other hand. I think you could handle it.”

“Damn right.”

“Okay, meet me after school. After everyone’s left the building. At the stairwell behind the cafeteria, by the loading dock. I’ll show you where I hide it.”

The Berg agreed, then pushed his way out of the gymnasium. Samuel tapped Bishop on the shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he said.

Bishop smiled. “I’m taking the fight to the enemy.”

Later that day, after the final bell, after the buses had come and gone and the building had emptied, Bishop and Samuel waited behind the school, that part of the school not visible from the road, all concrete and asphalt. It had the look of a regional high-volume shipping facility, industrial and mechanical and automated and apocalyptic. There were massive air-conditioning units whose fans spun inside aluminum shells crusted and emblackened with sooty exhaust, roaring like a squadron of attack helicopters readying for, but never quite managing, takeoff. There were scraps of paper and cardboard blown by the wind into corners and crevices. There was the industrial trash compactor: solid metal, the size of a dump truck, painted that forest-green color typical of waste-disposal vehicles, covered all over with a scum of sticky trash residue.

Just next to the loading dock was a stairwell that led down to a basement door nobody ever used. Nobody even knew where it led. The stairwell was enclosed on one side by the concrete wall of the loading dock, on the other by tall unclimbable vertical bars. There was also a gate at the top of the stairs. This stairwell was a riddle for anyone who bothered thinking about it long enough. The bars obviously communicated a desire to keep people out, except that even if the gate were locked it would be a simple matter to leap down into the stairwell from the loading dock above it. But the basement door at the bottom of the stairs was one of those that opened only from the inside and didn’t even have an exterior handle. So the only real function of the gate was to trap people in, which seemed at least architecturally odd and at most an extreme hazard in the event of fire. Anyway, the amount of dirt and dead leaves and thrown-away plastic wrappers and cigarette butts in the stairwell indicated that it hadn’t been used in years.

They waited for the Berg here, Samuel feeling scared and nervous about this whole thing, about what Bishop planned to do, which was to lock Andy Berg in the stairwell and leave him there all night.

“I really don’t think we should be doing this,” he told Bishop, who was at the bottom of the stairwell hiding a black plastic bag he had produced from his backpack, burying it under the leaves and dirt and debris.

“Relax,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

“But what if it isn’t?” said Samuel, who was right on the cusp of a Category 2 just thinking about the ways Andy Berg could get them back for what seemed like a pretty stupid trick.

“Let’s just go right now,” Samuel said, “before he gets here. No harm done.”

“I need you to do your job. What’s your job?”

Samuel frowned and touched the bulky metal padlock he was currently hiding in his pocket. “When he gets to the bottom of the steps, close the gate.”

“Quietly close the gate,” Bishop said.

“Right. So he doesn’t notice.”

“I’ll give you the signal and you’ll close the gate.”

“What’s the signal?”

“I’ll give you a look pregnant with meaning.”

“A what?”

“A real bug-eyed look. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Okay.”

“And after the gate is closed?”

“I lock it,” Samuel said.

“That’s the essential part of the mission.”

“I know.”

“The very most important part.”

“If I lock it, then he can’t get out and beat us up.”

“You have to think like a soldier here. You have to be focused on your part of the operation.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t hear you?”

Samuel kicked at the ground. “I said hooah.”

“That’s better.”

It was warm and wetly humid, the shadows lengthening and the light a deep orange. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, those great Midwestern clouds like floating avalanches, which meant an evening of thundershowers and heat lightning. The wind blew roughly through the trees. A tang of electricity and ozone in the air. Bishop finished arranging the bag at the bottom of the stairs. Samuel practiced closing the gate without making it squeak. Eventually they climbed up onto the loading dock and waited, Bishop checking and rechecking the contents of his backpack, Samuel fingering the ridges of the heavy padlock in his pocket.

“Hey, Bish?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened in the principal’s office?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you went for a paddling. What happened in there?”

Bishop stopped fussing with his backpack for a moment. He looked at Samuel, then away, off into the distance. He assumed a certain manner Samuel had begun to recognize, where his body seemed coiled and tightened and his eyes turned to slits and his eyebrows wrinkled into check marks. A posture of defiance, a look Samuel had seen before: with the principal, and Miss Bowles, and Mr. Fall, and when Bishop threw that rock at the headmaster’s house. It was a fierceness and hardness usually foreign to eleven-year-olds.

But it dissolved just as quickly, as Andy Berg rounded the corner of the building, lumbering in his big stupid way, shuffling along, dragging his toes like his feet were too far away from his tiny brain, as if his body were too large for his nervous system to handle.

“He’s here,” Bishop said. “Get ready.”

The Berg wore his usual uniform of black sweatpants, generic white sneakers, and a T-shirt with something juvenilely funny written on it, this time “Where’s the Beef?” He was the only male in the class not made fun of for wearing imitation off-brand shoes. His giant size and proclivity to violence gave him a free pass, fashion-wise. The only acknowledgment he made to current tastes was the rattail he grew, a hairstyle that was en vogue with roughly a quarter of the boys in the class. A proper rattail was achieved when a boy cut his hair short but left a spot in the very middle of the back of his head to grow wildly away. The Berg had so far achieved a frizzy black curly rope that extended several inches down his neck and back. He approached the loading dock, where the two boys sat, elevated, slightly above him, cross-legged.

“You came,” Bishop said.

“Let’s see it, fag.”

“First tell me you’re not going to freak out.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“A lot of kids freak out. They’re not mature enough. This is hard-core stuff.”

“I can handle it.”

“Oh can you?” Bishop said. His tone was playful and sarcastic. That tone where you can’t decide if he’s having fun with you or insulting you. That tone that makes you feel like you’re one or two steps behind him. The understanding of this registered on the Berg’s face — he hesitated, unsure of himself. He was not accustomed to kids showing any kind of spirit or spine.

“Okay, let’s say you can handle it,” Bishop continued. “Let’s say you’re not going to freak out. Nothing you haven’t seen before, am I right?”

The Berg nodded.

“Because you see it all the time, right? That high schooler you’re banging?”

“What about her?”

“I’m wondering why you’re so eager right now when you have a girl whenever you want her. Why do you need the porn?”

“I don’t need it.”

“And yet here you are.”

“You don’t even have it. You’re lying.”

“Makes me think maybe there’s something you’re not telling us. Maybe the girl’s ugly. Maybe she doesn’t exist.”

“Fuck you. Are you gonna show me this shit or not?”

“Okay, I’ll let you see one picture. And if you don’t freak out, I’ll let you see the rest.”

Bishop rummaged in his backpack for a moment before pulling out a page from a magazine, folded several times, one ragged edge where it had been torn free. He handed it — carefully, slowly — to the Berg, who snatched it, annoyed at Bishop’s manner, his theatricality. The Berg unfolded it, and even before it was fully undone his eyes seemed to open wider, his lips very slightly parted, and his face melted from its usual barbaric severity to a kind of giddiness.

“Whoa,” he said. “Oh yes.”

Samuel could not see the image that delighted the Berg so much. He could only see the back of the page, which appeared to be an advertisement for some kind of brown liquor.

“That is awesome,” the Berg said. He looked like a puppy staring at your food.

“It’s good,” Bishop said, “but I wouldn’t call it awesome. Actually it’s pretty par for the course. Even a little droll, if you ask me.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Irrelevant. Would you like to see more?”

“Fuck yeah.”

“And you’re not going to tell anyone?”

“Where is it?”

“You need to promise. You won’t tell.”

“Fine, I promise.”

“Say it with feeling.”

“Just show me.”

Bishop raised his hands in an I-give-up gesture, then pointed at the stairwell below him. “Down there,” he said. “I keep them down there, hidden in the dirt, bottom of the stairs.”

The Berg dropped the page he was looking at and opened the gate to the stairwell and rushed down. Bishop looked at Samuel and nodded: the signal.

Samuel leaped off the loading dock down to the spot where the Berg had been standing. He walked over to the gate and very slowly shut it, just as they had practiced. He could see the Berg at the bottom of the stairs, his long horrible rattail, the fat expanse of his back as he huddled down and swept away the dirt and leaves and discovered the plastic bag that Bishop had planted there.

“In here? In the bag?” the Berg said.

“Yep. That’s it.”

When the gate shut, it did so with a small and trivial click. Samuel slipped the heavy padlock between the bars and closed it. The snap made by the lock’s internal metal mechanism felt substantial and satisfying. It felt final. Irrevocable. They had done it. There was no going back.

A few feet away, fluttering in the wind, was the page Bishop had given the Berg. It spun in the eddies the breeze made around the loading dock, folding over itself at the creases made when it was pressed into eighths. Samuel grabbed it. Opened it. And the immediate impression the photo gave, before all its shapes resolved themselves into recognizable human forms, the dominant textural feature, the thing that seemed to define the photo and would later be pretty much the only thing Samuel remembered about it, was hair. Loads of dark, curly hair. Around the girl’s head, a jet-black cascade that looked physically heavy and difficult to bear, hair in tight curls that reached all the way down to the dirt she sat on, the flesh of her butt smooshing out beneath her like bread dough, one arm behind her and supporting herself with her elbow in the dirt, the other hand reaching down to her crotch, opening herself up with two fingers in a gesture that looked like an upside-down peace sign, revealing this plump and mysterious bright-red spot amid another outbreak of dark black hair, hair that was thick and curly where it almost reached her belly button, but became wispy inside her pimpled thighs, where the hair resembled the desolate attempts teenagers make at mustaches and beards, hair that kept creeping down beneath her to the spot where she contacted the ground, where she sat in some anonymous tropical forest scene, Samuel seeing this and trying to gather all of it simultaneously and trying to make sense of it and trying to enjoy it the way Andy Berg seemed to enjoy it but achieving only this abstract sense of curiosity combined with maybe a mild revulsion or horror that the adult world seemed be a terrible, appalling place.

He folded the page into small squares. He was trying to forcibly forget what he’d just seen when, from the bottom of the stairwell, the Berg suddenly boomed: “What the fuck?”

And at that moment a bright white flash popped. Bishop held a Polaroid camera, and it buzzed and clicked and ejected a white square of film.

“What the fuck!” the Berg said again. Samuel climbed the ladder onto the loading dock and ran to the edge where Bishop stood overlooking the Berg and flapping the photo and laughing. The Berg had several pictures around him, presumably having upended the bag and let them all flutter out. And almost all of them, Samuel could see now, were close-ups of large, erect penises. Adult penises. Adult and very manly and horribly engorged and darkly empurpled and some of them dribbling and wet. Penises, some of them from glossy magazines, some actual real Polaroid pictures, whitely lit, softly focused, close-up anonymous disembodied cocks emerging from shadows or from beneath the folds of someone’s sagging belly flesh.

“What the fuck!” Andy Berg could not seem to find any other words but these. “What in the fuck?”

“See? I knew it,” Bishop said. “You’re freaking out.”

“What the fuck is this?”

“You’re not quite mature enough.”

“I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“You’re not quite there yet, developmentally speaking.”

The Berg took the stairs two at a time. He was so big and he moved so destructively that it seemed impossible to contain him. Had they really trusted a stupid little padlock to keep them safe? Samuel imagined it snapping in half. He imagined the Berg erupting out of his cage like an insane circus animal. Samuel took a step back and stood behind Bishop, put a hand on Bishop’s shoulder. The Berg ran to the top of the stairs and reached his arm forward to push open the gate. Only the gate did not budge. And the force of the Berg’s huge momentum met the solid metal gate, and the only givable thing between them — the Berg’s arm — gave.

His wrist bent back and his shoulder torqued wildly with this crunching, snapping sound, this horrible liquid pop. And the Berg bounced backward and landed hard on the stairs and slid down a few of them until he came to rest near the bottom, clutching his arm, moaning, crying. The gate vibrated against the lock.

“Oh my god,” the Berg wailed. “My arm!”

“Let’s go,” Samuel said.

“Wait,” Bishop said. “One more thing.”

He walked along the edge of the loading dock until he was just above the Berg, roughly six feet over him.

“See, what I’m going to do now,” Bishop said over the Berg’s feeble crying, “is I’m going to take a leak, and you’re not going to do anything about it. And you’re not going to fuck with anybody ever again. Because I’ve got this photo.” Bishop waved the Polaroid at him. “You should see it. There you are with all that faggot porn. You want this photo to show up in every locker in school? Taped under every desk? Slipped into every single textbook?”

The Berg looked at him and, for a moment, the actual sixth-grade mind that was trapped in his giant adult body broke through, and he looked astonished and hurt and pathetic and sad. Like an animal stunned in disbelief at having just been kicked.

“No,” he spat out through the crying.

“Then I expect you’ll start behaving,” Bishop said. “No more picking on Kim. No more picking on anyone.”

Bishop undid his belt and unzipped his pants and pulled down his underwear and released a long strong jet of urine right at Andy Berg, who wailed and turned around to hide from it and screamed. He curled up while Bishop splattered onto his back and shirt and rattail.

Then the two boys gathered their things and left. They didn’t speak at all until they parted ways, at the spot where Bishop cut through the woods to Venetian Village and Samuel continued the other way to his own home. Bishop rapped him lightly on the arm and said “Be all you can be, soldier,” then dashed away.

That night, the heat wave finally broke. Samuel sat at his bedroom window and watched the thunderstorm drench the whole outside world. The trees in the backyard whipped violently and the sky flashed with lightning. He imagined Andy Berg out in the storm, still trapped, soaking wet. He imagined him shivering and cold and injured and alone.

In the morning, the air had that chilly first feeling of autumn. Andy Berg was not in school. The rumor was that he hadn’t come home last night. The police were called. Parents and neighbors went out looking. He was finally located in the morning, wet and sick, in the stairwell behind the school. Now he was in the hospital. Nobody mentioned anything about the Polaroids.

Samuel guessed the Berg had caught a cold, maybe the flu, from the rain. But Bishop had another theory. “He’d have to get rid of the porn, right?” he said at recess that day. “I mean, he wouldn’t want to be found with those pictures.”

“Yeah,” Samuel said. “But how?”

They sat on the swings not swinging, watching a game of tag under way across the playground, a game that included Kim Wigley, which was rare, as Kim tended to avoid recess, or really any public space with a high Berg-bullying potential. Now he played in unself-conscious joy and delight.

“The Berg’s in the hospital now,” Bishop said. “Probably poisoned, I think.”

“Poisoned how?”

“He ate them. The photos. That’s how he got rid of them.”

Samuel tried to imagine eating a Polaroid picture. Chewing that hard plastic. Swallowing those sharp, heavy corners.

“He ate them?” he said.

“Absolutely.”

Across the playground, Kim glanced at them and offered Bishop a feeble wave. Bishop waved back. Then he laughed and said “Hooah” and ran over to join the game, actually almost skipped over there, barely even touching the ground as he went.

8

THE BLESSED HEART ACADEMY HEADMASTER could be seen lately taking short, plodding walks along Venetian Village’s lone street, usually around sunset, shuffling his great heft carefully and gingerly, as if his legs could, at any moment, shatter. The cane he walked with was a recent acquisition, and the headmaster seemed to enjoy how regal it made him look. It was actually pretty incredible how his stooped body and painful-looking limp could be improved so much by the simple addition of a cane. Now he seemed nobly impaired. Like a war hero. The cane’s shaft was made of oak and stained to a rich ebony. A pearl handle was attached to the top by a pewter collar etched with patterns of fleur-de-lis. Neighbors were relieved at the addition of the cane because it made the headmaster’s pain not quite so visibly obvious, and so they did not feel required to ask him how he felt, and thus they did not have to endure yet another conversation about the Sickness. This was a topic that had frankly run itself dry in the last six months. The headmaster had by now told all his neighbors about the Sickness, the mysterious affliction that no doctor could diagnose and no medicine could cure. The symptoms were well-known up and down the block: tightness in his chest; shallow breathing; profuse sweating; uncontrollable salivation; abdominal cramps; blurry vision; fatigue; lethargy; general allover weakness; headache; dizziness; loss of appetite; slow heartbeat; and an odd involuntary twitching and rippling of the muscles just under his skin that he would horribly show to neighbors if it flared up while they were talking. The spells came either in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night, lasting roughly four to six hours before magically ceasing on their own. He was shockingly candid and personal about the details of his condition. He spoke in that manner of people experiencing catastrophic illness, how the illness eclipsed previous gentlemanly notions of modesty and privacy. He told people how confusing it was, priority-wise, when he needed to vomit and diarrhea at the same time. The neighbors nodded and smiled tightly and tried not to betray how awful this was to listen to, because their children — and indeed all the children of Venetian Village — attended Blessed Heart Academy, and it was widely known that the headmaster could pull some serious strings. One phone call from him to the dean of admissions at Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Stanford could improve a child’s chances by about a thousand percent. Everyone knew this, so they suffered the headmaster’s long and vivid descriptions of medical procedures and bodily effluence because they thought of it as a kind of investment in their child’s education and future. So yes, they knew about his many trips to various expensive specialists, allergists, oncologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, his MRIs and CT scans and unpleasant organ biopsies. He made the same joke every time about how the best money he’d spent so far was on his cane. (It was, as canes go, breathtakingly beautiful, the neighbors had to agree.) He maintained that the best medicine was being active and outdoors, thus his evening walks and twice-daily soaks — once in the morning, once at night — in his backyard saltwater hot tub, which he said was one of the few joys left in his life.

Some of the less charitable neighbors insisted privately that the reason for his evening walks wasn’t health but the opportunity to complain for an hour like the goddamn sympathy-seeking tyrant he really was. They would not tell this to anyone else, maybe a spouse but that’s it, because they knew how selfish and insensitive and callous it sounded, that the headmaster was genuinely sick with a mysterious illness that caused a terrific amount of pain and mental anguish, and yet they were the ones who felt like victims, they were the ones who felt aggrieved, because they were forced to listen to it. And sometimes on these nights they felt under siege, attending to the headmaster for sixty tedious minutes before getting rid of him and retiring to their entertainment rooms to try to squeeze some enjoyment out of what was left of the evening. They turned on the television and saw some news story about another goddamn humanitarian crisis, another goddamn civil war in some godforsaken place, and saw images of wounded people or starving children and felt a bright, bitter anger at the children for invading and ruining the only moments of relaxation and “me time” the neighbors had all day. The neighbors would get a little indignant here, about how their own lives were hard too, and yet nobody heard them complaining about it. Everyone had problems — why couldn’t they just quietly deal with them? On their own? With a bit of self-respect? Why did they have to get everyone else involved? It’s not like the neighbors could do anything. It’s not like civil wars were their fault.

Of course, they would never say this out loud. And the headmaster never suspected they thought this. But some of his most proximate neighbors had taken to leaving the lights off and sitting around in the dusky darkness until they saw him pass by. Others arranged early dinners out at restaurants at prime headmaster-walking times. Certain homes down the block had perfected a system of total avoidance, which was why the headmaster sometimes made it all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac and knocked on the Fall household door and asked to come in for some coffee, which was what happened the first time Samuel was allowed to spend the night at Bishop’s house.

His first sleepover. Samuel’s dad drove him and was plainly stunned when they pulled up to Venetian Village’s large front copper gates.

“Your friend lives here?” he said. Samuel nodded.

The security guard at the gate asked to see Henry’s license, asked him to fill out a form, sign a waiver, and explain the nature of his visit.

“We’re not going to the White House,” he told the guard. It was not a joke. There was venom in his voice.

“Do you have any collateral?” the guard asked.

“What?”

“You have not been preapproved, so I’ll need some collateral. To insure against damages or violations.”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“It’s policy. Do you have a credit card?”

“I’m not going to give you my credit card.”

“It’s only temporary. Like I said, for collateral purposes.”

“I’m just dropping off my son.”

“You’re leaving your son? Okay, that will do.”

“For what?”

“For collateral.”

The guard actually followed them in a golf cart, and Henry delivered Samuel to the Fall house with a brief hug, said “Be good” and “Call me if you need me,” and then glared pure hatred at the security guard as he got back into his car. Samuel watched as both his father and the golf cart disappeared up Via Veneto. He held his backpack, which contained some overnight clothes and, at the bottom, the cassette tape he’d bought at the mall for Bethany.

Tonight he would give her the present.

They were all there — Bishop, Bethany, their parents — they were all waiting, in the same room, which Samuel had never seen before, all of them inhabiting the same space at the same time. And another person too, at the piano, Samuel recognized him: the headmaster. The same headmaster who had expelled Bishop from Blessed Heart Academy now sat taking up all the space on the bench in front of the family’s Bösendorfer baby grand.

“Hi there,” Samuel said, to nobody in particular, to the aggregate mass of them.

“So you’re the friend from the new school?” the headmaster said.

Samuel nodded.

“It’s good to see he’s fitting in,” the headmaster said. This remark was made about Bishop, but it was made to Bishop’s father. Bishop sat in an upholstered antique wooden chair and looked small. It was as if the headmaster’s large presence had colonized the room. He was one of those men whose body exactly matched his disposition. His voice was big. His body was big. He sat bigly, his legs far apart and his chest puffed out.

Bishop inhabited the farthest seat from the headmaster, arms crossed, feet under him, a tight little angry ball. He leaned so far back in his chair it seemed he wanted to physically dissolve into it. Bethany sat nearer the piano, perfectly upright, as she always did, on the edge of her chair, ankles crossed, hands in her lap.

“Back to it!” the headmaster said. He swiveled to face the piano and placed a hand on the keys. “Now don’t cheat.”

Bethany turned her head away from the piano and looked directly at Samuel. His chest seized, her stare carried such voltage. He fought the urge to look away.

The headmaster pounded a single note on the piano, a strong, dark, low note that Samuel could feel in his body.

“That’s an A,” Bethany said.

“Correct!” the headmaster said. “Again.”

Another note, this time near the top of the keyboard, a delicate plink.

“That’s C,” Bethany said. She still stared at Samuel, expressionless.

“Right again!” the headmaster said. “Let’s make it more challenging.”

He hit three keys at once, and what came out was dissonant and ugly. It sounded like what an infant might do bashing the piano incoherently. Bethany’s stare seemed to disengage for a moment — it was as if her consciousness receded, the way her eyes went glassy and remote. But then she came back and said, “B flat, C, C sharp.”

“That’s amazing!” the headmaster said, clapping.

“Can I go?” Bishop said.

“I’m sorry?” his father said. “What was that?”

“Can I go?” Bishop said.

“Maybe if you learn to ask correctly.”

And here Bishop finally raised his head and met his father’s eyes. They held each other’s gaze like that for an uncomfortable few seconds. “May I please be excused?” Bishop said.

“Yes you may.”

In the game room it was clear Bishop did not want to talk. He jammed Missile Command into the Atari. He sat stone-faced and quiet while he shot rockets out of the air. Then Bishop grew agitated and said “Fuck this, let’s watch a movie,” and he started a film they’d seen several times before, about a group of teenagers who defend their town from a surprise Russian invasion. They were about twenty minutes into the movie when Bethany opened the door and slipped in.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Good.”

Samuel could not believe how much his stomach flopped whenever he saw her up close. Even now, when he felt seriously conflicted about his presence here, when Bishop transparently wanted to be alone and Samuel didn’t know what to do with himself and had been wondering if he should call his father and go back home, even through all this Samuel felt elated when Bethany entered the room. It was as if she erased every lesser thing. Samuel had to bat away his impulses to touch her, to muss up her hair or punch her in the arm or flick her earlobe or any of the other juvenile maneuvers boys do to terrorize the girls they love, maneuvers that were really meant to bring them into physical contact the only way they knew how: brutally, like little barbarians. But Samuel knew enough to know this was not a good long-term strategy, so he sat there heavy and still on his usual beanbag chair and hoped Bethany would sit next to him.

“He’s an asshole,” Bishop said. “A fat fucking asshole.”

“I know,” Bethany said.

“Why do they let him in the house?”

“Because he’s the headmaster. But also? Because he’s sick.”

“That’s ironic.”

“He wouldn’t be out walking around if he weren’t sick.”

“If there’s a word for that, it’s ironic.”

“You’re not listening,” Bethany said. “You wouldn’t see him if he weren’t sick.”

Bishop sat up and frowned at his sister. “Just what are you trying to say?”

Bethany stood there with her hands behind her back, chewing or biting the inside of her cheek the way she did when she was concentrating real hard. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her eyes were so fiercely green. She was wearing a yellow sundress that gradually turned white at the bottom.

“I’m pointing out a fact,” Bethany said. “If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t go for these walks, and then you wouldn’t have to see him.”

“I don’t think I like where this is going.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Samuel said.

“Nothing,” they said in twin-like unison.

The three of them watched the rest of the movie in an edgy silence, watched as the American teens successfully fought off the Russian aggressors, and the triumphant ending of the movie was not nearly as triumphant as it usually felt because the room was overflowing with some weird tension and unspoken conflict, and it felt to Samuel like he was back home having dinner with his parents while they were going through one of their moments, and when the movie finished the kids were told to get ready for bed, and so they washed up and brushed their teeth and changed into their pajamas and Samuel was led to the guest bedroom. And just before they were told to turn off their lights, Bethany softly knocked on the door and poked her head in his room and said, “Good night.”

“Good night,” he said.

She looked at him and lingered there a moment like she had something else to say.

“What were you doing?” Samuel said. “Earlier. With the piano.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Parlor tricks.”

“You were performing?”

“Sort of. I can hear things. People think it’s special. My parents like to show it off.”

“What things?”

“Notes, pitches, vibrations.”

“From the piano?”

“From everything. The piano is easiest because all the sounds have names. But really from everything.”

“What do you mean, from everything?”

“Every sound is actually many sounds put together,” she said. “Triads and harmonics. Tones and overtones.”

“I don’t get it.”

“A knock on the wall. A tap on a glass bottle. Birdsong. Tires on the street. The phone ringing. The dishwasher running. There’s music in everything.”

“You hear music from all that?”

“Our phone is a little sharp,” she said. “It’s awful, every time it rings.”

Samuel tapped on the wall, listening. “I only hear a thud.”

“There’s a lot more than a thud. Listen. Try to separate the sounds.” She knocked sharply on the doorframe. “There’s the sound made by the wood, but the wood is not a constant density, so it makes a few different pitches, very close together.” She knocked again. “Then there’s the sound of the glue, the surrounding wall, the hum of the air inside the wall.”

“You hear all that?”

“It’s there. You add it up and it sounds like a thud. It’s a very brown noise. Like if you melted all the colors in the crayon box, this is the sound you’d get.”

“I don’t hear any of that.”

“It’s harder to hear out in the world. A piano is tempered. A house is not.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Mostly it’s annoying.”

“Why?”

“Well, take birds. There’s this one bird, the tanager, that makes this sound like chip che-ri che-ri che-ri. Okay? It’s a summer bird.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t really hear the che-ri. What I hear is a third and a fifth, in A-flat major.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s a C gliding into an E flat, which is exactly what happens in this one Schubert solo, and also in a Berlioz symphony, and also in a Mozart concerto. So the bird starts singing and it ignites all these phrases in my head.”

“I wish I had that.”

“No. It’s terrible. It’s all crashing around in there.”

“But you have music in your brain. Mostly what I have is worry.”

She smiled. “I just want to be able to sleep in the morning,” she said. “But there’s this tanager right outside my window. I wish I could turn him off. Or turn my head off. One of the two.”

“I have something for you,” Samuel said. “A present.”

“You do?”

“Something from the mall.”

“The mall?” she said, confused. But her face brightened as she registered the connection. “Oh! The mall! Right.”

Samuel rummaged through his backpack and produced the cassette. It was shiny, still wrapped in tight plastic. It struck him now that it was such a small thing — about the size and weight of a deck of playing cards. Too small, he thought, to be as meaningful as he needed it to be. He was seized with panic about this, and so he handed it to her quickly, jammed it at her fast and hard, so he wouldn’t chicken out. “Here’s this,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s for you.”

She took the cassette in her hand.

“It’s from the mall,” he said.

In the daydreams he’d been having, Bethany would, at this moment, smile brightly and wrap her arms around him and express her disbelief and wonderment that he’d chosen such an exactly perfect gift, how he must understand her on a deep level and really get what’s going on in her head and have a similarly interesting and artistically fulfilling inner life himself. But the expression now forming on Bethany’s face was not that. The creases around her eyes and on her forehead — it was like how people squint when they’re trying to understand someone with a thick and frustrating accent.

“Do you know what this is?” she said.

“It’s really modern stuff,” he said, repeating the cashier at the mall. “It’s really out there.”

“I can’t believe they made a recording of this,” she said.

“They made ten recordings!” he said. “It’s the same piece recorded ten times.”

Bethany started laughing now. And it was a laugh that made him understand that, for reasons he was not aware of, he was an idiot. There was an essential bit of information he was missing.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“This piece,” she said, “it’s sort of a joke.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s all, well, it’s all silence,” she said. “The entire thing is just…silence.”

He stared at her, not really comprehending this.

“There are no notes in the score,” she said. “It was actually performed once. The pianist sat at the piano and did nothing.”

“How could he do nothing?”

“He just sat there counting the beats. And then he was done. That was the piece. I can’t believe they made a recording.”

“Ten recordings.”

“It was sort of a put-on. It’s very famous.”

“So this whole cassette,” he said, “is blank?”

“I guess that’s part of the joke.”

“Shit.”

“No, it’s great,” she said, clutching the tape against her chest. “Thank you. Really. It’s quite thoughtful.”

Quite thoughtful. Samuel kept thinking about the way she said this, long after she’d left and he’d turned out the lights and covered his whole body and head with blankets and curled up and lightly cried. How quickly his daydreams had given way to this merciless reality. He thought bitterly about his expectations for the night, and how everything had gone so very wrong. Bishop didn’t want him here. Bethany was indifferent. The gift was a failure. This was the price of hope, he realized, this shattering disappointment.

He must have fallen asleep like that, because he woke up hours later, under the covers, curled, hot and sweaty, in the darkness, as Bishop shook him and said, “Wake up. Let’s go.”

Samuel followed him groggily. Bishop told him to put on his shoes, told him to climb out the first-floor TV-room window. Samuel did all this in a half-awake stupor.

“Follow me,” Bishop said when they were outside, and they walked up Via Veneto’s gentle slope in the total darkness and silence of the night. It must have been two in the morning. Maybe three. Samuel wasn’t sure. There was such an odd stillness at this time — no sound, no wind, there was barely even weather. The only noises were the occasional click of a sprinkler head turning on, and the low groan of the headmaster’s hot tub. Automated, mechanical noises. Bishop walked with purpose, maybe even arrogance. This was a different walk than when they played war games in the woods, and Bishop hid behind trees and dove between bushes. Now he walked in plain view, right down the middle of the road.

“You’ll need these,” he said, and handed Samuel a pair of blue plastic gloves, the kind people use for gardening. The fit was loose — they must have been Bishop’s mother’s. The gloves came up to Samuel’s elbows, and each finger had an inch or so of floating empty space.

“Over here,” Bishop said, and he led them to a spot near the headmaster’s house where the lush, thick lawn met the wild forest. There stood a metal post, about as tall as the boys themselves, on top of which was a block of white salt, its surface smooth and spotted with brown specks. On top of the salt block was a copper disk. Bishop reached for the disk and pulled at it, trying to twist it off.

“Help me with this,” he said, and they yanked at the cap until it finally budged. Up close like this, breathing hard, Samuel could smell the feral animal scent coming from the contraption, but also something else, something like sulfur, that rotten-egg smell, coming from the salt itself. At this range, he could read the sign affixed halfway up the post: DANGER. POISON. KEEP AWAY.

“This is what kills the deer, isn’t it?” Samuel said.

“Grab your side.”

They slid the block off the post. It was surprisingly heavy and dense. They carried it toward the headmaster’s house.

“I don’t think I want to do this,” Samuel said.

“We’re almost there.”

They walked slowly, the big gray block between them, around the headmaster’s pool and up the two steps to the hot tub, which was steaming, gently circulating, a small light at the bottom shining blue.

“In there,” Bishop said, pointing his chin at the hot tub.

“I don’t think I want to.”

“On three,” he said, and they heaved forward, then back, once, twice, three times, and then let go. They tossed the block into the water, where it was swallowed with a splash, followed by a low thud as it landed at the bottom of the tub.

“Good job,” Bishop said. They watched the block come to rest down there, its image distorted by the shimmering water. “That’ll dissolve by morning,” Bishop said. “No one will know.”

“I want to go home,” Samuel said.

“Come on,” Bishop said, and taking him by the arm, they walked back down the street. When they reached the house, Bishop opened the TV-room window, then stopped.

“You want to know what happened in the principal’s office?” Bishop said. “Why I didn’t get spanked?”

Samuel was holding back tears, wiping his runny nose with the sleeve of his pajamas.

“It was actually really easy,” Bishop said. “The thing you have to understand is that everyone is afraid of something. As soon as you know what someone fears most, you can make them do whatever you want.”

“What did you do?”

“So he had his paddle, right? And he told me to bend over the table, right? So I took off my pants.”

“You did what?”

“I unbuckled my belt and took off my pants and my underwear and everything. I was naked from the waist down and then I said, ‘Here’s my ass. You want it?’ ”

Samuel stared at him. “Why would you do that?”

“I asked him if he liked my ass and wanted to touch it.”

“I don’t understand why you would do that.”

“He got pretty weird then.”

“Yeah.”

“He stared at me for a long time and then told me to put my clothes back on. Then he took me back to class. That was it. Easy!”

“How did you even think to do that?”

“Anyway,” Bishop said. “Thanks for your help tonight.” He climbed through the window. Samuel followed and padded through the dark house, returning to the guest bedroom, getting into bed, then getting out again and finding a bathroom and washing his hands three, four, five times. He could not decide if the burning sensation in his fingers was from the poison or if it was in his mind.

9

THE INVITATION APPEARED in the mailbox, in a square envelope of heavy, cream-colored paper. Samuel’s name was written on the front in very precise girl handwriting.

“What’s this?” Faye said. “Birthday invite?”

He looked at the envelope and then at his mother.

“Pizza party?” she said. “At the roller rink?”

“Stop it.”

“Who’s it from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should open it.”

Inside was an invitation printed on expensive card stock. It shimmered, as if flecks of silver had been added to the pulp. The writing looked like it was pressed in gold leaf, a swirling, swooping cursive that said:

Please join us at the Blessed Heart Academy Cathedral

as Bethany Fall performs

the Bruch Violin Concerto no. 1

Samuel had never been invited to anything in this manner: lavishly. At school, the invitations to birthday parties were generic, slipshod affairs, cheap thin cards with animals on them, or balloons. This invitation felt actually physically heavy. He handed it to his mother.

“Can we go?” he said.

She studied the invitation and frowned. “Who’s this Bethany?”

“A friend.”

“From school?”

“Sort of.”

“And you know her well enough to get invited to this?”

“Can we go? Please?”

“Do you even like classical music?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Since I don’t know.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Mom.”

“The Bruch Violin Concerto? Do you even know what that is?”

“Mom.”

“I’m just saying. Are you sure you can appreciate it?”

“It’s a very difficult piece and she’s been practicing for months.”

“And you know this how?”

Samuel then made an angry, abstract sound meant to convey his frustration and unwillingness to further discuss the matter of the girl, which came out something like “Gaarrgh!”

“Fine,” she said with a satisfied little grin. “We’ll go.”

The night of the concert she told him to dress nice. “Imagine it’s Easter,” she said. So he put on the fanciest things in his closet: a stiff and itchy white shirt; a black necktie bound noose-tight; black slacks that popped with static electricity when he moved; a shiny pair of dress shoes that he shoehorned himself into, so granite-hard they removed a layer of skin on his heel. He wondered why adults felt they needed to be at their most uncomfortable for their most cherished events.

The Blessed Heart Academy Cathedral was already buzzing when they arrived, people in suits and flowery dresses filing into the large arched doorway, the sounds of musicians practicing audible even from the parking lot. The cathedral was built to mimic the great churches of Europe, at about one-third scale.

Inside, a wide central aisle was flanked on both sides by pews made of heavy and thick and ornately carved wood, polished and shining wetly. Beyond the pews were stone columns with torches attached about fifteen feet above the crowd, each lit with glowing fires. Parents chatted with other parents, the men giving soft platonic kisses to the cheeks of women. Samuel watched them, these small pecks, and realized the men weren’t really kissing the women but instead miming a kissing action into the area around their necks. Samuel wondered if the women were disappointed about this — they’d been expecting a kiss and all they got was air.

They took their seats, studied the program. Bethany would not go on until the second half. The first half was all smaller works — minor chamber pieces and quick solos. It was clear Bethany’s piece was the showstopper. The big finale. Samuel’s feet bounced nervously on the soft, carpeted floor.

The lights dimmed and the musicians stopped their chaotic warm-ups and everyone took their seats and after a lengthy pause there came a sturdy note out of the woodwinds, then everyone else following it, tuning to that note, anchoring themselves to that spot, and something seemed to catch in his mother’s throat. She inhaled sharply, then put her hand on her chest.

“I used to do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“The tuning note. I was the oboe. That used to be me.”

“You played music? When?”

“Shh.”

And there it was, another secret his mother had kept. Her life was a fog to him; whatever happened before he came along was all mysterious, locked behind ambiguous shrugs and half answers and vague abstractions and aphorisms—“You’re too young,” she’d say. Or “You wouldn’t understand.” Or the particularly infuriating “I’ll tell you someday, when you’re older.” But occasionally some secret would crack free. So his mother was once a musician. He added it to the mental inventory: Things that Mom is. She’s a musician. What else? What other things didn’t he know about her? She had acres of secrets, it was obvious. He always felt there was something she wasn’t saying, something behind her bland partial attention. She often had that disassociated quality, like she was focusing on you with maybe one-third of herself, the rest devoted to whatever things she kept locked inside her head.

The biggest secret had slipped years earlier, when Samuel was young enough to be asking his parents ridiculous questions. (Have you ever been in a volcano? Have you ever seen an angel?) Or asking because he was still naïve enough to believe in stupendous things. (Can you breathe underwater? Can all reindeer fly?) Or asking because he was fishing for attention and praise. (How much do you love me? Am I the best child in the world?) Or asking because he wanted to be reassured of his place in the world. (Will you be my mom forever? Have you been married to anyone besides Dad?) Except when he asked this last question his mother straightened up and looked at him all tall and solemn and serious and said: “Actually…”

She never finished that sentence. He waited for her, but she stopped and thought about it and got that distant, bleak look on her face. “Actually what?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”

“You’ve been married before?”

“No.”

“Then what were you going to say?”

“Nothing.”

So Samuel asked his father: “Was Mom ever married to anyone else?”

“What?”

“I think she might have been married to someone else.”

“No, she wasn’t. Jesus. What are you talking about?”

Something had happened to her, Samuel was sure of it. Some profound thing that even now, years later, occupied her attention. It washed over her sometimes and she’d disengage from the world.

Meanwhile, there was a concert happening. High-school boys and girls playing important senior-year recitals, five- to ten-minute pieces that were right in the strike zone of each student’s ability. Loud clapping after every performance. Pleasant, easy, tonal music, mostly Mozart.

Then it was intermission. People stood and made their way elsewhere: outside, to smoke, or to a nearby buffet table, for cheese.

“How long did you play music?” Samuel asked.

His mother studied the program. She acted like she didn’t hear him. “This girl, your friend, how old is she?”

“My age,” he said. “She’s in my grade.”

“And she’s playing with these high schoolers?”

He nodded his head. “She’s really good.” And he felt this surge of pride just then, as if being in love with Bethany meant something important about him. As if he were rewarded for her accomplishments. He would never be a musical genius, but he could be a person a musical genius loved. Such were the spoils of love, he realized, that her success was also, by some odd refraction, his.

“Dad’s really good too,” Samuel added.

She looked at him, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. It’s just, you know, he’s really good. At his job.”

“That’s an odd thing to say.”

“It’s true. He’s very good.”

She stared at him a moment, mystified.

“Did you know,” she said, looking down at the program again, “that the composer of this piece never made any money from it?”

“Which piece?”

“The piece your friend is going to play. The guy who wrote it, Max Bruch, he never earned a penny.”

“Why not?”

“He was cheated. It was around World War I, and he was bankrupt, so he gave it to a couple of Americans who were supposed to send him the money, but they never did. The score disappeared for a long time, then ended up in the vault of J. P. Morgan.”

“Who’s that?”

“A banker. Industrialist. Financier.”

“A really rich guy.”

“Yes. From a long time ago.”

“He liked music?”

“He liked things,” she said. “It’s a classic story. The robber baron gets more stuff, the artist dies with nothing.”

“He didn’t die with nothing,” Samuel said.

“He was broke. He didn’t even have the score.”

“He had his memory of it.”

“His memory?”

“Yeah. He could still remember it. That’s something.”

“I’d rather have the money.”

“Why?”

“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“You’re young.”

The lights dimmed again, and people around them took their seats, and the buzz of small talk quieted, and everything went dark and silent and the whole cathedral seemed to distill itself into one small circle of light at the front of the altar — a spotlight illuminating an empty bit of floor.

“Here we go,” his mother whispered.

Everyone waited. It was agony. Five seconds, ten seconds. It was taking too long! Samuel wondered if someone had forgotten to tell Bethany she was on. Or if she’d left her violin at home. But then he heard the click of a door somewhere in front of him. Then footsteps, soft shoes on the hard floor. And finally there she was, Bethany, gliding into the light.

She wore a slim green dress and her hair had been done up and she looked, for the first time, tiny. Around all these adults and high schoolers, way up in front, it was as if Samuel’s normal scale was thrown off. Bethany now looked like a child. And he was worried for her. This was too much to ask, all this.

The audience politely clapped. Then Bethany put her violin under her chin. She stretched her neck and shoulders. And without a word, the orchestra began to play.

It started with a low thrum, like thunder very far away, a faint drumming from beyond the light. Samuel could feel it in his torso and fingertips. He was sweating. Bethany didn’t even have her music! She would do this from memory! What if she forgot? What if she blanked? He realized now how terrifying music is, how inevitable — the drums would keep driving forward, whether or not Bethany knew her part. And now, softly, the woodwinds came in — nothing dramatic, but three simple notes, each lower than the last, repeated. It wasn’t a melody; more like a preparation. Like they were readying the sanctuary for sound. Like these three notes performed the ritual necessary to be in the presence of music. It wasn’t the music yet but rather its leading edge.

Then Bethany straightened herself and placed her bow at the proper angle and it was clear something was about to happen. She was ready, the audience was ready. The woodwinds held a single long hovering note that gradually faded away, that sounded like taffy stretched to nothingness. And just as that note disappeared, just as it was swallowed by the darkness, a new note leaped from Bethany. It grew stronger and louder and then she was the only one speaking in that huge hall.

There was nothing more lonely than that sound.

Like all the heartbreak in someone’s long life gathered and distilled. It began low and moaned higher, slowly, a couple of steps up, a few steps back, and so on, like a dancer, whirling its way to the top of the scale, more quickly now, to announce, at the very peak, a kind of forsakenness, a desolation. The way Bethany bent that last note as she climbed into it — it sounded like a cry, like somebody crying. An old familiar noise, and Samuel felt himself falling into the note, gradually folding himself around it. And just when he thought she’d reached the top, another note came, even higher, a wisp of music, the barest edge of the bow meeting the thinnest string, just the finest sound: clean, noble, soft, a slight quiver from Bethany’s rolling finger, like the note itself were alive and pulsing. Alive, but dying, it seemed now, as the note diminished and decayed. And it didn’t sound like Bethany’s playing softened but rather like she was moving quickly away from them. Like she was being stolen. And wherever she went, they could not follow. She was a ghost passing into another realm.

Then the orchestra answered back, a full and deep barrel of sound, like they needed all the numbers they could muster to match this one tiny girl in her little green dress.

The concert passed in a kind of blur after that. Occasionally Samuel would be newly amazed by one of Bethany’s maneuvers: how she could play on two strings at once and make them both sound good; how she could play so many hundreds of notes perfectly from memory; how fast her fingers moved. It was inhuman, what she could do. By the middle of the second movement, Samuel had concluded there was no way he deserved her.

The audience went mad. They stood and cheered and gave Bethany bouquets of roses so large they impeded her balance. She carried them in both arms and was barely visible behind them, waving and curtseying.

“Everyone loves a prodigy,” his mother said, herself also standing and clapping. “Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we’re not special because we weren’t born with it, which is a great excuse.”

“She’s been practicing nonstop for months.”

“My dad always told me I was nothing special,” she said. “I guess I proved him right.”

Samuel stopped clapping and looked at his mother.

She rolled her eyes and patted him on the head. “Never mind. Forget I said that. Do you want to say hi to your friend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She’s busy.”

And indeed she was busy: surrounded by well-wishers, friends, family, her parents, various musicians congratulating her.

“You should at least tell her she did a good job,” Faye said. “Thank her for the invitation. It’s polite.”

“Plenty of people are telling her good job,” Samuel said. “Can we go?”

His mother shrugged. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

And they were on their way out of the hall, and they were moving slowly with the surge of people also leaving, Samuel brushing against hips and sport coats, when from behind him he heard his name. Bethany was calling his name. He turned and found her wrestling through the crowd to catch up to him, and when she finally did she leaned into him, her cheek to his, and he thought he was supposed to give her one of those fake-kiss things he saw all the adult men doing, until she brought her lips all the way to his ear and whispered, “Come over tonight. Sneak out.”

“Okay,” he said. That warmth on his face. He would have agreed to do anything she asked.

“There’s something I have to show you.”

“What is it?”

“The cassette you gave me? It’s not just silence. There’s something else.”

She pulled away. She no longer looked, as she had onstage, small. She had regained her normal Bethany proportions: elegant, sophisticated, womanly. She held his stare and smiled.

“You have to hear it,” she said. Then she dashed away, back to her parents and her throng of giddy admirers.

His mother looked at him suspiciously, but he ignored her. He walked right past her, out of the church and into the night, limping slightly in his rock-hard shoes.

That night he lay in bed waiting for the sounds of the house to disappear — his mother rattling around in the kitchen, his father watching television downstairs, then eventually the whoosh of his parents’ door opening as his mother went to bed. Then the television turning off with an electric chunk. The sound of water running, a toilet flushing. Then nothing. Waiting another twenty minutes to be sure, then opening his door, twisting and untwisting the knob slowly and tightly to avoid unwanted metallic clicks, walking lightly down the hall, stepping over the squeaky part of the hallway floor that Samuel could avoid even in total darkness, then down the stairs, placing his feet as close to the wall as he could, where there was less creaking danger, then taking a full ten minutes to open the front door — a small pull, a small tic, then silence, then another: tic—the door opening in fractions of an inch until the gap was finally wide enough to pass through.

And finally, once liberated, running! In the clean air, running down the block, toward the creek, into the woods that separated Venetian Village from everything else. His foot clomps and breathing were the only sounds in the whole big world, and when he felt afraid — of getting caught, of dangerous forest animals, of mad ax murderers, kidnappers, trolls, ghosts — he steeled his mind with the memory of Bethany’s warm, wet breath on his ear.

Her bedroom was dark when he arrived, her window closed. Samuel sat outside for several long minutes panting and sweating and watching, reassuring himself that all relevant parents were asleep and that no neighbors would see him creep through the backyard, which, when he finally did, he did so quickly, running on the tips of his shoes to avoid all ground sounds, then crouching below Bethany’s window and lightly tapping it with the pad of his index finger until, from out of the darkness, she appeared.

He could see only bits of her in the murky nighttime light: the angle of her nose, a toss of hair, collarbone, eye socket. She was a collection of parts floating in ink. She opened the window and he climbed in, rolling over the frame and wincing where the metal bit into his chest.

“Be quiet,” said someone who was not Bethany, who was elsewhere in the darkness. It was Bishop, Samuel realized after a moment of disequilibrium. Bishop was here, in the room, and Samuel was both disheartened and grateful for this. Because he didn’t know what he would do if he were alone with Bethany, but also he knew he wanted to do it, whatever it was. To be alone with her — he wanted it very badly.

“Hi, Bish,” Samuel said.

“We’re playing a game,” Bishop said. “It’s called Listen to Silence Until You’re Bored out of Your Mind.”

“Shut up,” Bethany said.

“It’s called Be Put to Sleep by Cassette-Tape Static.”

“It’s not static.”

“It’s all static.”

“It’s not only static,” she said. “There’s something else.”

“Says you.”

Samuel could not see them — the darkness in here was total. They were more like impressions in space, lighter shapes against the blackness. He tried to place himself in the geography of her room, constructing a map from memory: the bed, the dresser, the flowers on the wall. There were glow-in-the-dark stars dotting the ceiling, Samuel noticed, suddenly, for the first time. Then the sounds of fabric and footsteps and the bed’s quick squeak as Bethany probably sat down on it, near where Bishop seemed to be, near the cassette player, which she often listened to at night, alone, playing and rewinding and playing again the same few moments from some symphony, which Samuel knew because of all his spying.

“Come up here,” Bethany said. “You have to be close.” So he got up on the bed and moved slowly toward them and felt around clumsily and grabbed something cold and bony that was definitely a leg belonging to one of them, he didn’t know which.

“Listen,” she said. “Very closely.”

A click of the tape player, Bethany leaning back into the bed, the fabric folding around her, then static as that brief dead space at the beginning of the tape ended and the recording actually began.

“See?” Bishop said. “Nothing.”

“Wait for it.”

The sound was distant and muffled, like when a faucet is turned on somewhere in the house and there’s that rushing sound from hidden, far-off pipes.

“There,” Bethany said. “Do you hear it?”

Samuel shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “No,” he said.

“There it is,” she said. “Listen. It’s under the sound. You have to listen below it.”

“You are making no sense,” Bishop said.

“Ignore what you can hear and listen to the other stuff.”

“Listen to what?”

“To them,” she said. “The people, the audience, the room. You can hear them.”

Samuel strained to listen. He cocked his head toward the stereo and squinted — as if that would help — trying to pick out any kind of organized sound within the static: talking, coughing, breathing.

“I don’t hear anything,” Bishop said.

“You’re not concentrating.”

“Oh right. That’s the problem.”

“You have to focus.”

“Fine. I will now attempt to focus.”

They all listened to the hiss coming out of the speakers, Samuel feeling disappointed in himself that he also had not yet heard anything.

Bishop said, “This is me totally focused.”

“Will you shut up?”

“I have never been so focused as I am at this moment.”

“Please. Shut. Up.”

“Concentrate, you must,” he said. “Feel the force, you must.”

“You can go away, you know. Like, leave?”

“Happily,” Bishop said, scrambling away and leaping off the bed. “You two enjoy your nothing.”

The bedroom door opened and closed and they were alone, Samuel and Bethany, alone together, finally, terribly. He sat rock-still.

“Now listen,” she said.

“Okay.”

He pointed his face in the direction of the noise and leaned in. The static was not a high-pitched trebly noise but a deeper kind. It was like a microphone had been suspended above an empty stadium — the silence had a fullness to it, a roundness. It was a substantial quiet. It wasn’t just the sound of an empty room but rather like someone had gone to great lengths to manufacture nothingness. It had a created quality to it. It felt made.

“There they are,” Bethany whispered. “Listen.”

“The people?”

“They’re like ghosts in a graveyard,” she said. “You can’t hear them the normal way.”

“Describe it.”

“They sound worried. And confused. They think they’re being tricked.”

“You can hear all that?”

“Sure. It’s the stiffness of the sound. It’s like those really short, tight strings at the top of the piano. The ones that don’t vibrate. The white sounds. That’s what these people sound like. They’re like ice.”

Samuel tried to listen for something like that, some high-pitched buzz inside the droning, persistent static.

“But it changes,” she said. “Listen for the change.”

He kept listening, but all he could hear was how the sound sounded like other sounds: escaping air from a bicycle tire, the whir of a small fan, water running behind a closed door. He heard nothing original. Only his own mental library bouncing back at him.

“There,” she said. “The sound gets warmer. Do you hear it? Warmer and fuller. The sound gets bigger and blooms. They are beginning to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Maybe they’re not being tricked. Maybe they’re not being mocked. Maybe they’re not outsiders. They’re beginning to get it. That maybe they’re part of something. They’re beginning to realize they haven’t come here to listen to music. They’re beginning to realize that they are the music. They are themselves what they’ve come here to find. The thought is exhilarating to them. Can you hear it?”

“Yes,” Samuel lied. “They’re happy.”

“They are happy.”

And Samuel felt himself believing he really could hear this. The same kind of voluntary self-hallucination he felt when he convinced himself, at night, in bed, that there were intruders in the house, or ghosts, and every sound the house made validated this delusion. Or on those days he couldn’t bear to go to school and told himself he was sick until he really became sick, felt actually physically ill, and he would wonder how the nausea could be real if he created it in his mind. It was like that, this thing he was hearing. The sound of static really did get warmer the more he thought about it; it really did become a happy static. The sound seemed to broaden in his mind, open up, and burn.

Was this her secret, he wondered. That she simply wanted to hear what no one else could?

“I can hear it now,” he said. “You just have to chase it.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”

He felt her hand grasp his shoulder and squeeze, then felt her move closer to him, felt the vibrations and swells in the mattress, the slight creaks of the bed frame as she swiveled around and came into him. She was close. He could hear her breathing, smell her toothpastey breath. But more than that he could feel her nearby, how she seemed to displace the air, had some kind of electricity around her, how you can sense the closeness of another body, the presence of some kind of magnetism, her heartbeat throttled up, all this coming at him as an impression in space, a map his mind made, an intuition, and then finally as actual solid matter, the flesh of her face now close enough to comprehend.

They were, he realized, going to kiss.

Or, rather, she was going to kiss him. This was going to happen. All he had to do was not screw it up. But in that moment, in those few seconds between realizing she was going to kiss him and the actual kiss, there seemed to be so many ways to screw it up. He felt the pressing and unexpected need to clear his throat. And scratch the back of his neck, at that spot where his neck joined to the shoulder, which always itched when he was nervous. And he did not want to move into the kiss, as it was dark and he could accidentally knock teeth with Bethany. But then in his desire to avoid knocking teeth he felt himself maybe leaning back and overcompensating and he worried that Bethany might mistake his leaning away from her as a desire not to kiss and she might stop. And then there was the matter of breathing. As in: Do it? His first impulse was to hold his breath, but then he realized if she approached slowly enough or if they kissed long enough, he would eventually run out of air and be forced to breathe mid-kiss and expel his lungs in a big poof right into her face or mouth. All of these thoughts happening roughly simultaneously in that brief moment before the kiss, Samuel’s most rudimentary actions, his body’s most automatic functions — sitting straight, being still, breathing — now turned crazily difficult by the prospect of the kiss, which is why when the kiss actually did successfully commence, it felt like a miracle.

Mostly what Samuel felt during the kiss was relief that the kiss was happening. And also that Bethany’s lips felt dry and chapped. This odd detail. That Bethany had chapped lips. It surprised him. In his imagination of her, Bethany seemed elevated beyond stupid earthly concerns. She did not seem to be the kind of girl whose lips ever chapped.

On the way home that night, he was surprised that everything looked exactly the same as it did before, with absolutely no signs that the world had fundamentally, radically changed.

10

THE FIRST BOOK Samuel ever wrote was a Choose Your Own Adventure story called The Castle of No Return. It was twelve pages long. He illustrated it himself. Its premise: You are a brave knight fighting your way through a haunted castle to save a beautiful princess. Pretty standard fare, he knew. He was sure he’d read something similar in one of the many Choose Your Own Adventure books that filled his bedroom shelves. He really had tried to come up with a better, more original story. He sat cross-legged on his floor and stared at the books before him and eventually decided they represented the full range of human possibility, the entire narrative spectrum. There were no other stories that could be told. Every idea that came to him was either imitative or stupid. And his book could not be stupid. The stakes were too high. Every kid was writing a book in an all-class contest where the winning author would have the book read aloud by the teacher.

So The Castle of No Return was derivative. So be it. He hoped his classmates would not be tired of the old tropes just yet. He hoped they would be comforted by the familiarity of the tale like they were comforted by the old toys and blankets they sometimes hid in their backpacks.

The next problem was plot. He knew Choose Your Own Adventure books forked this way or that, then forked again, and then again, and that each story was in the end a unified narrative whole — many stories in one. But his first draft of The Castle of No Return resembled more of a straight line with six short dead ends, with choices that would cause little debate or consternation: Do you want to go left or do you want to go right? (If you go left you die!)

He hoped his classmates would forgive these shortcomings — the plagiarized setting, the lack of multiple cohesive plots — if he could find really interesting and creative and entertaining ways to die. Which he did. Samuel had a talent, it turned out, for killing his characters interestingly. In one possible ending involving a trapdoor and a bottomless pit, Samuel wrote: “You are falling, and you fall forever, and even after you close this book and eat dinner and go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow, you will still be falling”—which just totally blew his mind. And he used the ghost stories his mother told him, all those old Norwegian stories that terrified him. He wrote about a white horse that appeared suddenly, offering a ride, and if the reader decided to mount the horse, terrible death quickly followed. In another ending, the reader becomes a ghost trapped inside of a leaf, too bad to go to heaven, too good to go to hell.

He typed up the pages on his mother’s old typewriter, leaving room for illustrations, which he did in crayon and pen. He bound the book in cardboard and blue fabric and, using a ruler to achieve perfectly straight lines, he wrote “The Castle of No Return” on the cover.

And maybe it was the illustrations. Maybe it was the excellent blue binding. Or maybe — he left room in his mind for this possibility — maybe it was the writing itself, the creative deaths, the unity of his vision, that instead of “Prologue” he used the word “Prolegomenon,” which he found in a thesaurus and which he thought sounded awesome. He could not say for sure what swayed Miss Bowles, but swayed she was. He won. The Castle of No Return was read to the whole class and he sat at his desk trying not to burst.

It was the best thing he’d done in his life.

So when his mother came into his bedroom one morning and woke him and asked him, weirdly, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he still glowed with his literary victory, and so he said, quite sure of himself, “Novelist.”

The light outside was weakly blue. His eyes were still heavy and hazy.

“A novelist?” she said, smiling.

He nodded. Yes, a novelist. He had decided sometime in the night, as he relived his great success. How his classmates roared with pleasure when the princess was saved. Their gratitude, their love. Watching them navigate his story — surprised in the places he meant to surprise them, fooled in the places he meant to fool them — he felt like a god who knew all the answers to the big questions peering down at the mortals who did not. This was a feeling that could sustain him, that could fill him up. Being a novelist, he decided, would make people like him.

“Well,” said his mother, “then you should be a novelist.”

“Okay,” he said, bleary and half awake, still not quite comprehending how deeply strange this was, his mother fully dressed, carrying a suitcase, coming in here at dawn asking about his plans, his future plans, when she had never once asked about this before. But Samuel accepted it and went along with it, like how one accepts the premise of a strange dream whose strangeness only clarifies after it’s over.

“You write your books,” she said. “I’ll read them.”

“Okay.” He wanted to show his mother The Castle of No Return. He’d show her his drawing of the white horse. He’d show her that thing about the bottomless pit.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. And she was oddly formal about this, as if she’d privately practiced it many times. “I’m going away for a while. And I want you to be good while I’m gone.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to find someone,” she said. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”

“A friend?”

“I suppose,” she said. She put a cold palm on his cheek. “But you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to worry about anything. You don’t have to be so scared anymore. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Don’t be scared. Can you do that for me?”

“Is your friend missing?”

“Not really. We’ve just been apart for a long time.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes,” she said, and she paused, and she looked away from him, and her face crumpled.

“Mom?” he said.

“Sometimes you take a wrong turn,” she said. “Sometimes you get lost.”

Samuel started to cry. He did not know why he was crying. He tried to stop it.

She gathered him in her arms and said “You’re so sensitive” and rocked him and he pressed into her soft skin until his whimpering ceased and he wiped his nose.

“Why do you have to go now?” Samuel said.

“It’s just time, honey.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. She stared at the ceiling with this hopeless look on her face, then seemed to gather herself. “Have I ever told you about the ghost that looks like a rock?” she said.

“No.”

“My father told me about it. He said you could find it on beaches sometimes back home. It looks like a normal rock, like a little stone covered with green fuzz.”

“How can you tell it’s a ghost?”

“You can’t, unless you take it out to sea. If anyone takes it onto the ocean, it’ll get heavier the farther you travel from shore. And if you’re really far, the ghost will get so heavy it’ll sink your ship. They called it a drowning stone.”

“Why would it do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s angry. Maybe something bad happened to it. The point is, it gets too big for you to carry anymore. And the longer you try to carry it, the bigger and heavier it gets. Sometimes it can get inside you and it gets bigger and bigger until it’s too much. You can’t fight it anymore. You just…sink.” She stood up. “Do you understand?”

“I think so,” he said, nodding.

“You will,” she said. “I know you will. Just remember what I told you.”

“Don’t be scared anymore.”

“That’s right.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, held him close to her and seemed to breathe him in. “Now go back to sleep,” she said. “It’ll all be okay. Just remember: Don’t be scared.”

He heard her footsteps disappear down the hall. Heard her wrestling with the suitcase down the stairs. He heard the car start, the garage door open and close. He heard her drive away.

And Samuel tried to obey his mother. He tried to fall back asleep and not feel scared. But this unbearable panic rose up in him and so he got out of bed and ran to his parents’ room and found his father still sleeping, curled with his back to the room.

“Dad,” Samuel said, shaking him. “Wake up.”

Henry squinted at his son. “What do you want?” he said in a sleepy whisper. “What time is it?”

“Mom’s gone,” Samuel said.

Henry lifted a heavy head. “Huh?”

“Mom’s gone.”

His father looked at the empty side of the bed. “Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know. She drove away.”

“She drove?”

Samuel nodded.

“Okay,” Henry said, and he rubbed his eyes. “Go downstairs. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“She’s gone,” Samuel said.

“I got it. Please go downstairs.”

And Samuel waited in the kitchen for his father until he heard a crash from his parents’ bedroom. He ran upstairs and opened the door and saw his father standing straight and rigid with the reddest face Samuel had ever seen. Faye’s closet door was open, some of her clothes strewn on the floor.

But it wasn’t the clothes Samuel would remember best, nor the crash, nor the broken pieces of a small vase that had been hurled at the wall, apparently with great force. What he would remember clearly, even decades later, was that color on his father’s face: a deep crimson, and not just in the cheeks but all over — neck and forehead and down into his chest. A dangerous-looking color.

“She’s gone,” he said. “And her stuff, it’s all gone. Where did all her stuff go?”

“I saw her leaving with a suitcase,” Samuel said.

“Go to school,” his father said, not looking at him.

“But—”

“Don’t argue.”

“But—”

“Just go!”

Samuel didn’t know what it meant, that his mother was “gone.”

Gone where? Gone how far? When would she come back?

During the journey to school, Samuel felt himself far away from his surroundings, like he was looking at the world through binoculars turned backward — standing at the bus stop, getting on the bus, sitting and looking out the window and not really hearing any of the kids around him, focusing on a water spot on the window glass, the passing landscape beyond all blurry and whizzing indistinctly by. Samuel felt a gathering sense of dread, and narrowing his attention to something very small, like a water spot, seemed to keep the dread, for the moment, at bay. He just needed to get to school. He just needed to talk to Bishop, to tell Bishop what had happened. Bishop, he had decided, would keep him afloat. Bishop would know what to do.

Only Bishop wasn’t at school. Not at his locker. Not at his desk.

Gone.

Bishop was gone.

That word again: What did it mean? To be gone? Everyone was disappearing. Samuel sat in his chair examining the wood of his desk and didn’t even notice when Miss Bowles called his name, then again, then a third time, didn’t even notice the class nervously laughing at him, nor Miss Bowles walking up the row toward him, did not even notice when she stood directly above him waiting while the class chittered behind her. It wasn’t until she touched him, physically contacted his shoulder with her hand, that he flinched and broke away from what had become a really absorbing exercise in tracing wood grain with his eyes. And he wasn’t even mortified when Miss Bowles said “Good of you to come back to us” in her mocking way, to the class’s laughter. He didn’t even feel embarrassed. It was as if his misery overwhelmed everything else — all his normal worries were buried. Gone.

Example: At recess, he left. He simply marched away. He walked toward the most distant swing set and then walked on. He just didn’t stop. It had never occurred to him before that he could not stop. Everyone stopped. But in the face of his mother’s goneness, all the world’s normal rules fell away. If she could leave, why couldn’t he? So he did. He walked away and was surprised how easy it was. He walked along the sidewalk, didn’t even attempt to run or hide. He walked in plain view and nobody stopped him. Nobody said a word. He floated away. It was a whole new reality. Maybe, he thought, his mother also found it this easy. To go. What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.

He kept going. For hours he kept going, staring down at the sidewalk, thinking Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, repeating this until he finally reached the copper front gates of Venetian Village, then slipping between the bars and not even looking at the security window, just walking right on through, and if the guard saw him he didn’t say anything, and Samuel briefly wondered if in the middle of everything he hadn’t in fact turned invisible, such was the oddness of this total lack of reaction from the world, his breaking all the rules and the world completely not noticing. And he was thinking about this and walking Via Veneto’s smooth asphalt and cresting the neighborhood’s gentle hill when he looked down at the street’s terminating cul-de-sac and saw, in front of Bishop’s house, two police cars.

Samuel stopped walking. His immediate fear was that the police were looking for him. And in some way this was a relief. And a comfort. Because it meant that his disappearance mattered. He played the scene out in his head, the phone call from the school to his father, his father frantic with worry, calling the police, who would ask where Samuel might go, and his father telling them Bishop’s house! because his father knew about Bishop, had dropped him off here, and would remember this because he was a good and caring father who would not one day just leave.

Samuel felt devastated by this. What had he done to his father? The agony he must have caused. His father waiting at home, alone now, both his wife and son disappearing on the same day. And Samuel walked toward Bishop’s house, walked with haste: He would turn himself in, be driven home, be reunited with his father, who must have been sick with worry by now. It was, he knew, the right thing to do.

And he got as far as the headmaster’s house before noticing something that stopped him again. Around the small post that once contained the block of poisoned salt was a line of thin, bright yellow ribbon. It was wrapped around four small stakes in the ground, making a square containing the empty post. The ribbon had words on it, and even though it had been twisted and so some of the words were upside down and backward, the message was easy to comprehend: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.

Samuel glanced at the headmaster’s hot tub and saw more of the ribbon there too, surrounding the entire pool and deck area. And the scene in his head changed: The police were looking for him, but not because he’d ditched school.

So he ran. Into the forest. Down to the stream. Splashed along its banks and breathed in the damp leafy rot and ran in the wet sand, water bubbling up and squishing out of the ground wherever his shoes landed. The sun was blocked by the trees above him, the woods taking on that misty bluish color of midday shade. And he saw Bishop exactly where he expected him to be: in the large oak tree by the pond, up on the sturdy first branch, hiding, mostly obscured except for his feet, which Samuel saw only because he was looking for them. Bishop climbed down out of the tree, landing on the ground with a flutter of the surrounding leaves just as Samuel arrived.

“Hey, Bish,” he said.

“Hey.”

They eyed each other a moment, not knowing what to say.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Bishop said.

“I left.”

Bishop nodded.

“I just came from your house,” Samuel said. “The police were there.”

“I know.”

“What do they want?”

“No idea.”

“Is it about the headmaster?”

“Maybe.”

“The hot tub?”

“Could be.”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

Bishop smiled. “So many questions,” he said. “Let’s swim.”

He yanked off his shoes without untying them, pulled off his tube socks and threw them, inside out, on the ground. His belt buckle jingled as he undid it, then he pulled off his jeans and shirt and jumped toward the water trying as best he could to avoid sharp rocks and twigs, all flailing skinny legs and arms and underpants, which were gray-green camouflage briefs, about two sizes too big. When he made it to the pond he jumped off a tree stump and cannonballed in, broke the surface with a loud Whoop, then came back up and said “Let’s go, soldier!”

Samuel followed him, but carefully: Untying his shoes and putting them where they wouldn’t get wet. Pulling off his socks and stuffing them inside the shoes. Taking off and folding his jeans and shirt and placing them gently on top of the shoes. He was deliberate about this. He always was. When he reached the pond he didn’t jump in but rather waded, wincing as the cold grasped first his ankles, then knees, then waist, then the water reached his underwear and the chill spread.

“It’s easier if you jump in all at once,” Bishop said.

“I know,” Samuel said, “but I can’t.”

When finally the water reached his neck and the pain subsided, Bishop said, “Good. Okay. Here’s the scenario.” And he outlined the premise of the game they were to play. The year would be 1836. The place would be the Mexican borderlands. The epoch was the Texas Revolution. They were to be scouts in Davy Crockett’s army, spying on the enemy, caught behind Mexican lines. They had important information concerning the size of Santa Anna’s army, and now they needed to get it back to Crockett. The fate of the Alamo hung in the balance.

“But enemies are everywhere,” Bishop said, “and rations are low.”

His knowledge of American wars was thorough, impressive, and frightening. When he played war, he played it immersively. How many times had they killed each other around this pond? Hundreds of deaths, thousands of bullets, bullets sprayed along with the white spittle ejected from their mouths as they made the bullet sounds, the machine gun’s tch-tch-tch-tch. Ducking behind trees, yelling, “I got you!” The pond had become sacred to them, the grounds hallowed, the water holy. They felt a kind of formality here, like the feeling one has entering a cemetery, this being the site of their own many imaginary deaths.

“Someone’s coming,” Bishop said, pointing. “Mexican troops. If they catch us, they will torture us for information.”

“But we won’t tell,” Samuel said.

“No we won’t.”

“Because of our training.”

“That’s right.” Bishop had always insisted that members of the U.S. military underwent advanced and mysterious training that allowed them to resist, among other things, pain, fear, booby traps, and drowning. Samuel had wondered how anyone could be trained not to drown. Bishop said it was classified.

“Hide,” Bishop said. Then he dropped below the water. Samuel looked upstream to where he’d been pointing but saw nothing. He tried to imagine enemy troops advancing on their position, tried to call up the usual fear he felt during these games, tried to see the bad guys, which up until now was always very easy. To see them, the bad guys, whatever bad guys they were fighting that day — Soviet spies, the Vietcong, the redcoats, storm troopers — all they’d have to do was say it aloud and they were there, before them. Their imaginations melted into the real world. This was usually so simple that Samuel had never thought about it before, not until this moment, when it stopped working. He saw nothing, felt nothing.

Bishop popped out of the water to find Samuel staring at the trees.

“Hello? Soldier?” he said. “We’re gonna get caught?”

“It’s not working,” Samuel said.

“What’s not working?”

“My brain.”

“What’s wrong?” Bishop said.

His mind felt overwhelmed. All he could see was his mother, her absence. She was like a fog that obscured everything. He was not even able to pretend.

“My mom is gone,” he said, and even as he said it, he felt the crying come, the familiar throat constriction, the way his chin tightened and balled up like a rotten apple. Sometimes he hated himself so much.

“What do you mean, gone?” Bishop said.

“I don’t know.”

“She left?”

Samuel nodded.

“Is she coming back?”

He shrugged. He didn’t want to talk. Another word would make the crying start.

“So there’s a chance she won’t come back?” Bishop said.

Samuel nodded again.

“You know what?” he said. “You’re lucky. Seriously. I wish my parents would leave. You might not understand it now, but your mother’s done you a favor.”

Samuel looked at him helplessly. “How?” His throat felt like a hose with a knot in it.

“Because you get to be a man now,” Bishop said. “You’re free.”

Samuel did not respond. Just hung his head. Below him, he dug his bare feet into and out of the mud. This seemed to help.

“You don’t need your parents,” Bishop said. “You may not realize it now, but you don’t need anybody. This is an opportunity. This is your chance to become a different person, a new and better person.”

Samuel found a small, smooth stone on the bottom of the pond. He picked it up with his toes, then let it go.

“It’s like you’re going through training,” Bishop said. “Difficult training that will eventually make you stronger.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Samuel said. “This isn’t a game.”

“Sure it is,” Bishop said. “Everything is a game. And you have to decide whether you’re going to win or lose.”

“This is stupid.” Samuel made his way out of the pond, back to the tree where he’d organized his clothes. He sat down in the dirt and brought his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs and rocked slowly back and forth. At some point the crying had started. His nose was now running, his face squished, his lungs spasming.

Bishop followed him out. “Right now, I’d say you’re losing.”

“Shut up.”

“You have a losing quality about you at this moment.”

Bishop stood above him, closely, his dripping underpants sagging ridiculously between his legs. He tugged them up.

“You know what you need to do,” Bishop said. “You need to replace her.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not with another mother. With another woman.”

“Whatever.”

“You need to find a woman.”

“For what?”

“For what.” Bishop laughed. “A woman to, you know, to take advantage of. To take liberties with.”

“I don’t want that.”

“There are plenty who will let you.”

“That won’t help.”

“Sure it will.” He took a step closer, leaned down, and touched Samuel’s cheek with the palm of his hand. It was cold and damp, but also tender, soft. “You’ve never been with a girl, right?”

Samuel looked up at him, still hugging his own legs. He was beginning to shiver. “Have you?” he said.

Bishop laughed again. “I’ve done all sorts of things.”

“Like what?”

Bishop stood silent a moment, then withdrew his hand. He walked over to the tree and leaned against it, pulling up his soggy underpants. “There are lots of girls at school. You should ask one out.”

“That’s not going to help.”

“There’s got to be someone, right? Who are you in love with?”

“Nobody.”

“That’s not true. Tell me. There’s somebody. I already know who it is.”

“You do not.”

“I do too. You might as well say it.” Bishop took a few steps toward Samuel and put his hands on his hips, one leg out, a pose that was conqueror-triumphant. “It’s Bethany, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re in love with my sister.”

“No I’m not!” Samuel said. But he knew as he said it that it wasn’t convincing. He said it with too much urgency, too loudly, too much protest. He was not a good liar.

“You’re in love with her,” Bishop said. “You want to fuck her. I can tell these things.”

“You’re wrong.”

“It’s okay. Listen. You have my permission.”

Samuel stood up. “I should go home,” he said.

“Seriously, ask her out.”

“My dad is probably wondering where I am.”

“Don’t go,” Bishop said. He clutched Samuel’s shoulders, to stop him. “Please stay.”

“Why?”

“There’s something you need to see.”

“I should go.”

“It’ll only take a second.”

“What is it?”

“Close your eyes.”

“How can you show me something if I’m closing my eyes?”

“Trust me.”

Samuel blew a long loud breath meant to convey his impatience at all this. He closed his eyes. He felt Bishop let go of his shoulders. He heard the sounds of Bishop moving in front of him, a footfall, then another, something wet splatting on the ground.

“When you open your eyes,” Bishop said, “only open them a tiny bit. Like a squint.”

“Fine.”

“No more than a squint. Okay? Do it.”

He opened his eyes, only a fraction. At first there was nothing but indistinct smudges of light, the abstract brightness of the day. A blur of Bishop before him, a round pink blob. Samuel opened his eyes a little wider. Bishop stood there, a few feet away. He was, Samuel could now tell, naked. His underwear lay wetly at his feet. And Samuel’s gaze drifted to his crotch. This was involuntary. It happened all the time, in locker rooms, at urinals — any opportunity to compare his own body with the bodies of other boys: Who was bigger? Who was smaller? These questions seemed enormously important. So he looked. But where Bishop’s prick should have been, Samuel saw nothing. Bishop was leaning forward, canted at the waist. His legs were slightly bent at the knees in a sort of half bow or curtsy. He had hidden his prick, Samuel could now see. He’d tucked it between his legs so that all Samuel saw was a smooth, soft nothingness.

“This is what she looks like,” Bishop said. “My sister.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re twins. This is what she looks like.”

Samuel stared at Bishop’s body, his skinny torso, ribs showing through the skin, but rigid also, tense and solid. He stared at that triangle of skin between his legs.

“You can pretend I’m her,” Bishop said. He stepped toward Samuel and pressed his cheek to Samuel’s and whispered into his ear, “Just pretend.” Samuel felt Bishop’s hands on his waist, then felt them gently pulling down his underwear, felt the wet fabric plop against his feet, felt the tiny wobble of his own prick, withered by the cold.

“Pretend I’m Bethany.”

Then Bishop turned around and all Samuel could see was the small pale sweep of his shoulders and back. Bishop took both Samuel’s hands and guided them to his hips. He leaned forward, pressed himself against Samuel, who was having that feeling again, of dislocation, detachment, like at the bus stop this morning, as if he were seeing everything from a great distance. It looked absurd. It wasn’t even him, he thought, down there. Only an odd combination of parts that had never before been put together.

“Are you pretending?” Bishop said. “Is it working?”

Samuel didn’t answer. He was far away. Bishop pressed harder against him, then released, then again, finding a slow rhythm. Samuel felt like a statue, incapable of doing anything but holding this pose.

“Pretend I’m her,” Bishop said. “Make it happen. In your mind.”

Bishop pressed into him and Samuel felt that surge that happened so often in class, at his desk, that cascade of tension, that explosive nervous twitching warmth, then looking down, seeing himself rising and swelling, knowing that he should not be rising and swelling but doing it anyway, unstoppably, and how this seemed to clarify things, how it answered something important — about him, about what had happened to him this day — and being absolutely convinced suddenly that everyone knew what he was doing right now. His mother and father, his teachers, Bethany, the police. Samuel was sure this was true, and it would remain with him for years, the event of his mother’s departure locked in his mind with this moment in the woods, with Bishop, bonded in this way, pulsing against each other, Samuel not exactly liking it but not hating it either, thinking the whole time that his mother knew exactly what he was doing and she disapproved.

It was, he decided, the reason she had gone.