I met Emma when I was nine and she was older. I was in the park playing snakes in the grass while mother was in getting her hair done. I crawled belly-down around trees and over paths while dog-walkers and baby-strollers clicked and rolled around me. I didn’t have any friends to play with — not in our city, where the people kept to themselves and smelled gray, like steel wool. There was nobody at my school I knew who could lie in the grass with me and not play guns.

I slithered around the park until my shirt was soaked clear through and I started to shiver. That’s when Emma said, “What a funny game.” She was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table nearby, leaning back on her arms like bridge struts to support herself. I didn’t say anything back. She had green eyes and she used them, always moving, always blinking. I remember her skin was green, too, and I remember that the sun came down through the trees and so everything was green. “I know a good game,” she said. She slipped off the table and landed awkwardly on her feet. She almost lost her balance and grinned. “Follow me,” she said.

I stood up and followed her like any other kid. She led me back into the trees, where all the other people’s sounds turned into antsteps and rain. She pushed deep into a band of bushes, letting the branches snap back into my face, showering me with dew. Then she stopped and faced me. She smiled like a girl and reached her hands above my head. She shook the branches she could reach and drenched me with morning drops. I didn’t complain much — I could have gotten any wetter — but I think I scowled. Emma answered it by withdrawing her hands. Clenched between them was a riot of green leaves, their angles and veins all in tangles and misunderstood shapes. She rolled the leaves in her fingers, making them dance until I almost believed that her fingers were the dead things and the leaves the living. Then se closed both hands as if she were praying, catching all the green behind her skin. She didn’t pray, though. She let her eyes go back and forth all over me. When I was about to chatter my teeth on purpose, she opened her hands like a butterfly’s wings. 

Standing on her palm was a tiny bird, a green sparrow with twigs for legs and the spear of a birch leaf for a beak. It was as perfect and delicate as an origami animal, and, at first, that’s what I thought it was.

“Teach me how to do that,” I said.

Emma blew a kiss over the bird and its feathers ruffled. Its head turned and I turned to stone, as if my next breath would frighten the creature away — of, if not the creature, then the quiet birthday feeling that had filled me up.

The bird picked at its plumage and cocked its head to one side. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Emma. I didn’t answer, still afraid to move. “Well?” she prompted.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said Emma. She sounded satisfied. She sent a ripple down her arms; when it reached her fingers, the bird took flight, leaving behind a small cloud of downy leaves. I tried to keep it in view, but I lost sight of it in the branches, or maybe it had turned into just leaves again. I didn’t think so, because I could still hear the small desperate flutter of its wings.

My neck went still from staring up. Emma tucked her fingers under my chin and pulled my gaze down into her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then slipped like a cat between two shrubs. Her passage let a wisp of light into our hiding place.

When mom finished getting her hair done she said I couldn’t take any leaves with me, and I had to drop two pocketfuls on the ground.

#

The next day, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but mother made me anyway. She took me to church, where I didn’t talk much to the other kids and she sang way louder than I did on the hymns. I told her a couple of times that I felt like throwing up, so she let me pass the sermon in the bathroom.

On the drive home, I listened to the rain and asked mother what miracles mean. She didn’t understand me, though, and said, “Something wonderful that you can’t explain.” That made me think of maths, which isn’t what she meant. 

I didn’t make it back to the park for almost two weeks. I missed three days of school during that time because I was sick. Mother took me to the doctor on a Friday, and after the checkup she had to go to the drug store, so I asked if I could go to the park while she shopped. “Don’t you want to look at the toys?” she asked. I told her I didn’t want to and she dropped me off next to the monkey bars.

Emma was sitting at the bottom of the little kids’ slide, kicking gravel with her bare feet. I didn’t say, Hi, and she didn’t look up. 

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be in school,” I said. She nodded and drew a plus sign with her big toe. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked. Instead of answering, she patted the slide beside her. I sat down. She smelled a bit like burning insulation, so I asked her if she was feeling all right. 

“I am,” she said. “What are you learning about in school?”

I squinted, trying to remember anything that might be more important than Emma. “We learned about Cortez last week,” I said.

“Tell me about Cortez,” said Emma.

I shrugged. “He killed a lot of people he shouldn’t have. He brought diseases from the old world and he wiped them out without his soldiers.”

“I like that story,” said Emma. “It’s sad.”

“I could tell you others,” I offered.

“I would appreciate that,” said Emma. “You don’t know how much.”

I wanted so badly to ask her how she had made the bird out of leaves, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth she would disappear, as she had from the bushes. 

She looked up from the equations in the sand toward the sound of a barking dog. I watched her eyes trace shapes around the figures of the dog and his owner, around the old couple reading on a blanket, around everyone else but me — she seemed to be using her stare to cut holes in the world, to section off the people she could see like cookies on a sheet.

Mother came and found me and said, “Come on.” Emma gave me a wave with the tips of her fingers. “Who’s your girlfriend?” mother asked after she closed the car door.

“Mom,” I said, and I rolled my eyes.

#

It was summer the first time I tried to kiss Emma. Mother had told me to stay in bed that night, to save my strength. She said I had mono, the kissing sickness, but I figured if I had a kissing sickness I ought to at least have my first kiss.

Mother was right that I didn’t have much strength, but I had enough to make it to the bus stop before service ended, and the only thing I felt wrong was a vibration in my legs every time I took a step, as though my bones were humming.

Somehow I knew she’d be waiting for me, and she was, waiting at least. She didn’t notice me, even when I coughed — I couldn’t help the coughing. She was standing out from under the canopy of trees, hands loosely at her sides, staring up at whichever stars she could see.

“There aren’t very many,” she said when I turned me head to follow her stare. With something as wide as the sky to focus on, her eyes were just about rolling from their sockets. Mine weren’t; I just locked onto the brightest I could see, called it Mars, and tried to catch it moving. 

“There are plenty,” I said. 

Emma nodded and made a smile I was sure was for me, though it was aimed toward infinity. “Would you like to see them?” she asked.

“They look just like the sun,” I said.

Her hand caught mine, fingers locking into fingers. “Don’t hold your breath,” she said. My bones stopped humming. The weight left my body; my blood seemed to run faster and freer. I looked down. The shadowed park was gaining a shape, like the horizon accepting a curve at the right distance. I could see the slide and the monkey bars and the bike path and they all drew closer together. I couldn’t help asking, “How do you do this?” Her answer was a grin.

We floated up through the grimy air, the buzz of artificial light below us, driving us further away. When we crossed out of the bed of smog it was as if a curtain had been torn away. The sky grew even larger. It was cold inside of me. Stars exploded into view like ants from a crumbling hill. My breathing slowed; it felt as if my lungs were freezing. Emma smiled and pointed with her free hand. Her lips moved, but I don’t remember any of what she said. I could tell that there was heat out there in the universe; I could practically see it, but I couldn’t feel the barest blush of it on my skin.

Emma took me down. I coughed when we re-entered the hanging exhalations of the city. When I could see the park and feel my lungs expanding, I tried to lean over and kiss her. She caught my face in her hand and turned both away. “Please don’t spend your innocence on me,” she said, and we fell the rest of the way.

#

While I was sick in bed I couldn’t visit her, not because mother told me not to, but because I could barely get my legs to hold my body up and balanced.

A new doctor told me new things, and mother said we could afford it, whatever it was. She heard a story on the news about asbestos being blamed for an outbreak of sickness in the area of the park, and she told me I couldn’t play there anymore. To make up for it, she bought me toys and books and video games. It was nice of her to do it, but I ran out of interest in them all. My bed became a swamp of plastic and paper. I wanted Emma to visit me, but she didn’t know where I lived, or even that I missed her. She must think I didn’t want to see her anymore, I thought. I wondered if she cared, or if her eyes just kept on slicing fractions off the world.

Then one day I almost didn’t wake up, mother told me, and I when I finally did it was in the hospital. It smelled of paint and varnish and gave me a headache. I figured I’d be able to go home that night — being so close to so many doctors should have done something to me. After dark, while the nurse turned my arm numb with her needles, mother asked me if I wanted her to stay the night. I told her I didn’t want to stay the night. She promised she’d come back first thing in the morning.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The nurses clipped back and forth in the hallway, and every couple of hours they returned to put medicine in my IV and cold hands on my face and chest. I tried watching TV. A game show almost put me to sleep —almost, but not quite. I was just beginning to see dreams in the drab colors of the screen when the show went all to static and a shadow fell over my bed.

It was Emma. She padded into the room so silently that I thought she might be floating. She put her finger to her lips and made my smile stay quiet. She sat on the bed next to my shoulder and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see that her eyes were still, her pupils at rest on my face. I hoped I looked as strong as mother had taken to telling me I was.

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered. “I still like the sad stories.”

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “Do you remember when I took you to see the stars?” She asked it as though I could forget, as though it had been nothing more than an idle conversation on a drearily normal day. I told her that, of course, I remembered. “I spent my innocence on worlds you can’t believe — neither could I, when I came to them, but I learned to. I learned everything about them. I have to apologize because I’m grateful to you for your open eyes. Your innocence is gone, and now you have no excuse for ignorance, but you have given me surprise. I have hoped for ages that I could find something that would build an unfamiliar expression on my face, a disquieting, perfect sensation in my nerves. I don’t think I ever will.” She was smiling as she said this and there were two tears on her face in symmetry. “But I do not discount the pleasure, and the envy, of seeing that wonderment on another person’s face.”

I opened my mouth to ask her things I didn’t need answers for. I think I mostly just wanted her to hear my voice. She put a warm hand over my mouth and went on. “I’m sorry for what I stole from you.” She withdrew her hand.

“It’s all right,” I said. My head was throbbing from the hospital smell and my gut had gone cold as a fist in winter. Emma smiled at me and got up to leave. I reached out a hand to stop her and, though I only brushed the fabric of her jeans, I succeeded. “Will you kiss me?” I asked, and two more perfect tears spilled over her lashes. She leaned over my body. Her dark hair fell in light waves over my face. She whispered something that I didn’t catch  — it sounded like a name from a history book — and then she touched my lips with hers. She tasted like ozone, hot and important. She smelled like a tree, like the breeze of a bird’s passing. She felt like fire, so hot I can barely write it, and it stayed with me long after she had slipped out of my room. I don’t think I’ll feel anything like that again.

“Sing somethin’ beautiful,” said Bents. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted up. His throat kept moving in waves, as though he were drinking something straight from the ceiling. He looked a bit like a hamster at its drink bottle. 

He buzzed a chord on his acoustic and we all jumped in with him on the chorus for Awesome God, except we kept our eyes open. 

Youth group on summer Sunday nights was a tradition in my family. All five of us good little boys — I was smack dab in the middle — looked forward to that day we could stride in the double glass doors with the rest of the high schoolers. High schoolers sometimes went to Dairy Queen; high schoolers sometimes talked about sex. It was a rite of passage for my brothers and me, akin to getting our first pocketknife at age seven, or helping dad in the garden at age ten.
So far, I wasn’t too impressed. It was fun and all, and I had the answers to all the hard questions, having grown up in a church in which the answers never change. 

We guys in the group were all at that certain age and the oscillating pitches of our voices soon tired Bents of the singing; the girls just couldn’t hold a tune if their salvation depended on it. Putting down his guitar, Bents had us count off into groups of three. I was the kid who, when it came to his turn to sound off, held up the correct number of fingers and said, Two million, at which nobody laughed. Gravol and Carne were the other Two Millioners. Gravol had just started coming a couple weeks before. He was boisterous and he had big ears. The girls all loved him. 

I had known Carne since the tragedy of arson at our pre-school brought us together in the east side park; our parents muttered and turned up their noses at the sight of the school’s sharp ribs while we mixed ash and dirt and water and smeared it on our faces. I may have eaten some. 

I had always had a crush on Carne, but never acted on it. I used to get in these epic debates with myself, rationalizing my affection for this girl with whom I sang in the children’s choir, played in the Little League, and represented Grand Fenwick in the seventh grade Nation Fair. The debates would go like this: 

“Carne sure is cute.” 

“I’ll give you that one. She is cute. But is she beautiful?” 

“Define beauty.” 

“Beauty is that which endures.” 

“She’s awfully cute.” 

“Yes, but does she have the staying power of, say, Pamela Anderson?” 

I often lost against myself. I don’t think Carne knew I was so fixated on her. She never let on, anyway; not even when she started leaving youth group in the company of Jenkins, the Dude With No First Name. He may not have had a first name, but he sure had first bragging rights for just about anything that mattered. He was the first in his grade to get his license, the first to go all the way with a girl, the first to ace the final in auto, and the first to run down the suicide hill.

The suicide hill was not a clever name given to a bit of local geography, as make out point or lover’s leap were; it was a clever name given to an historic bit of natural landscaping that was stained with cultural significance, the blood of the ancients, and the sweat of rodeo promoters. It was a near vertical drop that went from some patient lady’s back yard to the shallow river two hundred feet below. The natives used to send their young men down it, mounted on sure-footed horses, as a rite of manhood; at least, that’s what they told us in third grade, and fourth, and at a big assembly in seventh. Now the natives had to fight against PETA for the right to run their burliest men down it, mounted on sure-footed steeds, as a rite of closure for the yearly stampede. It wasn’t that big a deal, Jenkins bragged after he had run it on his own two legs. You just pick your feet up, and when you set them down, you’re almost done.

“What are we playing?” I asked Bents.

He came around to each group with a faint grin and a bag of water balloons. Carne whined, and said she didn’t want to get wet. Bents put into her hand a single deflated pink balloon and then moved on to the next group.

“Extra long Bible study tonight, Bents?” I asked. 

When every group had a balloon, Bents cleared his throat.

“So, we’ve got the Creation festival coming up in a few weeks. Those of you who came to church this morning heard pastor Lyle mention that we’ve already gone into the red on our budget this year. So we’re going to have an auction.”

“Five bucks for the blue one,” Gravol said, pointing at another group’s balloon.

“Please be quiet, Gravol. The church is receiving donations from a number of places, but I thought it would be good if we could help out, you know, since we’ll be benefiting from the proceeds. So we’re going to play a game called Trade It Up. You’ll each go out into the town with your single water balloon and the way it works is this: you stop at a house.” He pantomimed. “You knock. You ask the nice lady or man if they have something just a tiny bit more valuable that they would be willing to trade you for your water balloon. If they don’t, then be polite and move on. But if they do give you something — like, say, a nice pen, for instance — then you take that and move on to another house and do it again. The goal is to get what you think is the most valuable thing.”

“That’s lame,” said some guy from the blue balloon group. “Who would trade anything for a water balloon in the first place?”

“You might be surprised what people are willing to get rid of,” said Bents. He sat down on the floor, wrapping his arm around the neck of his guitar as though it were his wife. He stroked its strings. “Now I’ll stay here and keep the doors unlocked. Maybe I’ll go get some donuts or something. Does every team have a watch? We meet back here at nine-thirty. Shoo.”

Some groups had cars, and enthusiasm, and piled in with whoops and hollers. Gravol, Carne, and I slid our easy hands into our pockets and strolled down the street. It was a warm evening. I thought about Bents strumming lightly on his guitar and it seemed like the perfect soundtrack. 

“Where should we go first?” asked Carne. Gravol shrugged and I copied him.

“The Hilarys live three blocks down or so,” I said. “They gave me a hundred bucks for graduating the eighth grade.”

“Worth a shot,” said Carne. We ambled along in our flip-flops, catching bits of gravel on our toes and launching them ahead like bullets.

“You guys doing anything for the fourth this year?” I asked as we segued onto the sidewalk.

“There’s a party at the lake,” said Carne. “Jenkins asked me to go with him.”

“You going?”

“Probably.”

“What about you, Gravol?”

He acted as though he were about to sneeze, but caught it right before he did. “I haven’t decided yet. My family usually does something.”

“Quiet evening at home?” I asked.

“I have a big family.”

Carne and Gravol were on either side of me. I tried to slow down my pace, to fall in behind them — I always feel more comfortable in the back — but they slowed down with me. We still had a couple of blocks to go.

“Last year,” I said. “I went to some guy’s party.”

“You?” said Carne with a giggle.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That was when I was hanging out with Rusty.” Rusty’s name had faded out of use, recently. He had been caught smoking pot before school. He dropped out of the group and, eventually, wasted away to a sliver and blew away to Los Angeles with his mom. He and I had hung out for a year, throwing bags of sugar off of our town’s only overpass and rolling tires down cliffs into the lake, which didn’t seem too much of a sin to me, since I was one of the honor students who had been volunteered to keep the shore clean.

The three of us were walking lockstep. The padding of our feet on the oiled pavement sounded to me like the rhythm of a drum circle. I always fancied myself a storyteller, or a poet. I timed my first words so that the troches took their beat from us, but after that Carne fell out of sync and I got lost and plowed on.

“Rusty brought along a bottle full of gasoline, and another full of black powder. We waited until dark and then snuck into the alfalfa field of the guy’s neighbor. Ripped up a bunch of the junk. Then Rusty dug a little hole to put the bomb in. Wanted a bigger blast radius, or something. Like when you cup your fist around a firecracker instead of leaving your palm open.”

“I’ve never done that,” said Gravol.

“Well it hurts less if you leave it open. Then he ran a couple leads back across the field and plugged them into the car battery. Most of the other guys were drunk and weren’t expecting it. The thing was dim; I barely saw the explosion, but man, I felt it. Like an artificial chest compression. That was something else. I turned and ran as soon as it happened, because I was scared the farmer was going to come find us. Halfway to the car, I turned, and saw Rusty staring at me like I let him down. I was probably wearing some dumb outfit or something. He liked to tell me to be mature, to grow up. I think that’s why he hung out with me. He walked to the car in the time it took between the farmer’s lights coming on and his door opening. Then we drove off and read about it in the paper on Wednesday.”

“Grow up, Bird,” Gravol said. I laughed with him.

“I felt like praying for those poor drunk people. Couldn’t go to sleep that night until I did, actually.”

“I never heard about it,” said Carne, folding her arms across her breast as though cold. I was hot from my words, about ready to take my shirt off when a cool breeze tickled the hair on my arms.

“I would have told you,” I said, bumping into her shoulder with mine. “But you lost my phone number.”

The Hilarys had a stone footpath that wound across their lot-size lawn. We tramped straight for the door, our rhythm going all to pot. At the porch, I reached for the bell, but Gravol got there first. 

Mister Hilary answered, doubled over and panting. 

“Uh. You okay, mister Hilary?” asked Carne. He looked up and grinned. He smelled like sweat in an airtight room. 

“Just fine. What can I do for you kids?”

“Bents has got us on this game,” I said. “We’re trying to upset the balance of the economy. We want to trade you this for something a bit more valuable.”

Gravol held up the balloon. He had rolled most of the rubber around its small opening. It looked like a miniature condom.

“It’s a balloon,” said Gravol. Mister Hilary laughed, or he might have just been breathing heavily. He invited us in and offered us something to drink. Carne and I declined, but Gravol took a proffered soda. Something more valuable, mister Hilary muttered, digging through a hall closet.

He raised his voice. “Sorry things are kind of a mess. Hillary is away for a bit, which means I get to be lazy with the house work.”

“I thought she sounded real nice this morning,” said Carne. Missus Hilary was the choir’s leading soloist and, going by weight, three-quarters of the soprano section.

“Yeah, thanks,” said mister Hilary. “Ah. Here we go.” He gave us a tennis ball, took the balloon, shook his head, and grinned us right out the door.

We went to the next couple of houses on the block. Gravol kept smiling and laughing to himself as though remembering a joke only he had thought was funny. We traded the tennis ball for a pound bag of candy, and the candy for an old copy of Stratego. It was missing a couple of the red pieces.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” said Carne. “Let’s go to doctor Bar’s.”

I shrugged into a nod and turned down a block toward the comparatively rich side of town. 

“Bargain hunting?” said Gravol, now a few steps behind me. Carne was at my left, her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.

“Shut up,” she said. Then, to me, “You weren’t in church this morning.”

“I slept in,” I said. I had stayed up way too late the night before. I’d already outed my sin of incendiaries, though, so I decided she didn’t need to hear about how I’d discovered a message board on the net that was full of stolen passwords to members-only porn sites. It makes it hard to sleep, the thought of getting so much for free. And I wasn’t about to mention it to Gravol. For all I knew, the guy would cop the best ones right out from under me.

Carne pulled in the first half of a sigh.

“What is it?” I said.

“Can I tell you something, if you promise to keep it private?”

At the end, she would probably hug me. “Sure. It’s story time. Why not.”

“I can’t tell Bents or Clara. Last week, I—” She kept the sound of the letter coming, a single long note, while behind it her mind worked to produce an entire melody. “I was taking a shower after practice,” she went on. “Mom and dad weren’t home, yet, and I was just going to watch TV until I fell asleep. I didn’t lock the door when I got home. And when I got out of the shower— my— my boyfriend was there.”

“Jenkins?” I asked.

“God, no. I broke up with him a month ago. But he, my boyfriend, you wouldn’t know him, he brought me some flowers.”

“That was nice of him.”

“Well, parts of flowers at least. It was sweet, yeah. Yeah, it was.” I glanced sideways. She was opening and closing her mouth. I thought she might be fumbling for a metaphor. She finally settled on:

“It was like getting struck by lightning. You know what I mean?”

“An explosion.”

“Yeah, yeah that’s kind of how it was. So I turned on the TV, kinda low. He gave me the flowers. And there were soap operas on. I left it on. And he tried— well, he tried hard. And it’s summer, you know. You know how it gets hot in your house with the windows open all day and the sweat is practically telling you it wants to evaporate. Even after the shower, it was just all— I don’t know. Urgent, I guess. And when you’re naked— don’t look at me like that. I know you like getting naked. You and the guys went skinny dipping on the hike last year.”

“That wasn’t me,” I said. “I was the one that screamed and ran, remember? Anyways. Go on.”

“I’ve heard this one before,” said Gravol. Carne shot him an evil look over her shoulder.

“It was nice, being open in the air. It was warm enough to be a layer of clothes; it wasn’t bad at all. To move and not feel your clothes pulling against you.” She trailed off, then, and pulled her hands out of her pockets. She crossed them over her chest, gripping each shoulder with its opposite fist. 

“Keep going,” I stammered. Her mouth fell open and wide at the corners; it took a few seconds for the laugh to come.

“You little sicko,” she said, and punched me in the kidney. Then she tilted her head as if listening to a particularly good poem, or the school fight song. “It was nice. It’s summer, you know.”

“Yeah. Um. Are you going to get pregnant?”

Gravol snorted. “No,” he said.

“Shut up,” said Carne. “I’m not scared,” she told me, which is funny, because she ended up a bug hunter. I’ll get to that later. “But I broke up with him,” she went on. “He didn’t call.”

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” said Gravol, equidistant from Carne and me, now. We were a triangle crossing the quiet street. Doctor Bar had a house built like a geodesic dome, assembled from larger triangles, the skeleton on the outside. We stopped at the end of his driveway.

“Is that the door?”

“No. I think that is.”

We took a gamble and knocked. Maxine, the doctor’s wife, answered.

“Hi there, kids. What’s up?” We explained the game to her. “Wait here,” she said, and closed the door behind her. Gravol leaned against the wall and rolled his shoulders.

“She’s kinda hot,” he said.

I laughed. “That cinches it. We’re all going to hell.” We had only painted pictures of some lake of fire to imagine. And I’m sure we all saw ourselves dancing on the beach, listening to something stupid and infectious on the radio, telling ghost stories and roasting wieners over the liquid heat. Hell was no threat; hell was nothing more than pigment on canvas, and not even that in the brain. Even we were more.

“Here you go,” said Maxine. “We’ve had this thing around for years.” She was struggling not to bend over with the weight of a dinosaur computer. I jumped forward to take it from her.

“Have any games on it?” asked Gravol. Maxine laughed and dusted her hands against each other. 

“I’m not sure. It was my husband’s, but I haven’t seen him use it for years.”

“It’s just a word processor,” I said, trying to fit its bulk under my arm and nearly dropping it. 

“Here,” said Carne, offering Maxine the battered copy of Stratego.

“Oh, no thanks, honey. I think we’ve already got that one in one of the kids’ rooms.”

We thanked her and left.

“Need any help?” Gravol asked me at the end of the driveway. 

“Sure.” We adjusted the machine between us, each grabbing a couple corners. My hands were starting to sweat. 

“This has got to be worth a couple hundred dollars, right?” said Carne. “We ought to go back.”

“I sure as hell don’t want to lug this thing around longer than I have to,” I said. “But it’s only worth about fifteen, my friend.”

“We could get my car,” offered Gravol. “I only live a couple blocks from the church.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “What’s a couple blocks, anyway. Besides, we haven’t heard your story yet, Grav.” My theory is that summer pollen lames me up a bit more than normal. I’ve got bags of evidence. Think back on what you have heard; I guarantee you that the bits that drip with gum-thick fondness and idealism were written at evening, with the window open and the smell of cut grass in my hair.

“Don’t call me that,” said Gravol. “That’s what my mom used to call me.”

“She’s dead?” Tact decreases as lameness increases.

“No, asshole. She’s in Seattle.”

I felt a sick thrill at the forbidden insult rush my ribcage. I grinned.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, loosening his grip on the word processor and sticking me with the extra weight. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t see much of her, anyway. An arm here, a leg there.”

“You close to your dad?” I asked.

“Now, that’s the interesting answer.” We turned a corner. Carne was in the lead, hands in her back pockets again. I watched her legs move, more than a little mesmerized. “Not really close to him. But he taught me a lot of stuff.”

“What does he do?”

“Drink beer. Oh, and he’s a mechanic.”

“How do you, how you say, drink beer?” It was a strain and Gravol’s smile looked about as tired as my sense of humor felt.

“I do a lot of stuff to get happy. It’s called hedonism,” he said.

“Learn something new every day,” I said.

“I haven’t really tried drugs, because they’re so damn expensive, but I’ll go for pretty much everything else. Food, girls, being on stage— it all works the first time, and then a little less the second, and even less the third time, but by that time it’s a habit and it keeps going on, even though I stopped being happy a long time ago. But there is one thing that works.”

“Lift up a bit on your end,” I said. “What’s that?” I added.

“When I was twelve,” he said, “my dad taught me how to change the oil in his car. An old Honda. I’ve always loved how he taught me. He slid me under the car on a scrap of cardboard. I was skinny enough to fit clear under without putting the thing up on ramps. Then he told me to look for a bolt. I found quite a few, so I asked him which one I was supposed to twist, and which way I was supposed to twist it. He told me to look for the only one that could hold oil in. Use my freaking head. So I spotted the one at the base of the oil tank, like it would have been any of the other ones. I was a pretty stupid kid,” he confided.

“Glad to see you’ve grown out of it,” Carne tossed over her shoulder.

Gravol went on. “It was great. Dad had just run the car around the block, testing the lug nuts or something. He gave me the ratchet wrench and I went to town. Felt like fifteen minutes unscrewing that thing. Dad kept grumbling at me to go faster. The bolt started turning loosely in its well, but it wouldn’t come out. I told dad; he said the threads were probably stripped. A tiny trickle of oil was licking around the body of the bolt; most of it was dripping onto my wrist, and from there into the pan. It smelled kinda good. Solid and real and heavy, like dirt. Dad told me to get rid of the wrench. Just grab the bolt in both hands and pull on it while twisting, try and get the threads seated again. My fingers were slippery. My finger nails were too long; when I pulled, they hurt.

“Took another five minutes of me pulling until I felt resistance and then twisting. Then, suddenly, the thing popped out like a bottle rocket and there was oil gushing everywhere. Stupid kid me had both his hands right under the stream— but I didn’t move them. I didn’t even say, I got it, for a few seconds. The oil was warm and thick; it felt like blood pumping over my hands. I flexed my fingers in it and played with the splash patterns in the steaming pan.

“That’s the car I got when I turned sixteen. Probably should get that bolt replaced, but I kept pulling it out the same way, and pounding it in with a rubber mallet when I was done.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Carne. We were at the church’s front doors. None of the other groups had come back, yet. We trooped inside and plopped the word processor down on the foyer floor. Gravol went to the bathroom to wash his hands; I poked through the kitchen for anything other than water to drink. Found a two liter of 7-up. I brought it and three glasses out. 

Bents was sitting on the floor next to Carne.

“How’d you guys do?” he asked.

“All right,” I said. Then, holding up the bottle, “Can we drink this?”

“Yup.”

I poured three glasses. Gravol came over, drying his hands on his pants. He sat down as far away from Carne as he could and still be one corner of a recognizable shape and took a glass from me. Carne sipped hers, staring out the glass doors at the sky brushing down from light blue to dark.

One by one, the other groups barged in, singing and holding their prizes aloft. When the pile of booty was finished, we had the word processor, a mountain bike, a box of cigars, our old copy of Stratego, and a giant inflatable stegosaurus. 

“All right,” said Bents, swigging the last of the soda straight from the bottle. “Let’s total up the values. I’ll take the winning team out for ice cream.”

“Hang on a sec,” said Gravol. He bounded up and out the door. We argued about whether smoking was a sin until he pulled up in front of the doors in an old gray Honda. It sputtered when he turned it off.

“One last trade, Bents,” he said, yanking open both of the double doors as though he were a movie star arriving on the scene at the crescendo in the sound track. “I’ll take that computer; you can sell off my car.”

“Are you sure, Gravol?”

“Come on. It’s only worth a couple hundred dollars, now. I’m happy to. I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at writing,” he said. “I’ll need some help carrying that beast home, though.” I volunteered.

After ice cream that night, I never really spoke to Gravol again. He was in a class with me, sophomore year, and we had to do a presentation together, but he acted as though he didn’t remember ever stringing two original words together with me, much less having told me his story.

I never got together with Carne, though I did kiss her once. We were both drunk at a post-Prom party, and she even let me cop a feel. Her breasts were saggy; that was a couple years after she had the baby. She had gotten pregnant after all, and I never knew who the father was, but I’ve never been a smart kid.

After graduation, I didn’t hear a thing about her, until I got a twice-forwarded message from my mom. It was originally from Carne’s mom, a plea for prayers for her daughter’s peace as she was on her last few days of fighting against AIDS. One night, soon after I read that, I walked home smelling like whiskey and thought I would call her up. I got her number from my mother, whose hobby it is to keep in touch with people.

Carne sounded as weak as I expected.

“Hey, Bird,” she said. “It’s been a while.” And we chatted. My focus was nowhere, and she sounded medicated, so I doubt the conversation would have made much sense to anyone listening in. She told me about how she started hunting bugs in college, and now I can’t get the image out of my head of her running across a meadow with a butterfly net held like a club in both fists. She explained that she had learned from her gay friends that there was a whole subculture devoted to sleeping with people who were infected with STDs. She paid good money to fuck three men who were HIV positive. The first two left her with nothing more than sore legs in the morning. The third one had gotten her infected.

“Why in God’s lengthy name would you do that?” I think I screamed it at her, but she was already giving me the answer, so she probably didn’t notice.

“I’m not scared. I wasn’t scared anymore. I could do anything I wanted, and I’d never have to worry that I’d get more than I was ready for.”

“Aren’t you scared of dying?”

“Not while my redeemer liveth,” she said, and hummed. “I’d fuck you so hard if you were here right now.” I hung up on her. She died a week later.

Gravol didn’t even make it that long. He committed suicide at the end of senior year. The memorial service was held at the church. We raised money for his dad by raffling off tickets to swing a sledgehammer at the old Honda, which had served the youth group well for a couple of years, though we always got headaches when we rode in it.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Guess,” I said. I pulled off my hiking boots, scattering grass seeds over the doormat. The boots were only a couple of weeks old, not yet broken in. My feet were covered in hot spots, some of them already turning into blisters. I peeled off my socks and rubbed the red skin underneath.

“Don’t leave your shit in the middle of the floor this time,” said Marshal. He was sitting at the table, flipping through a sporting equipment catalogue. Since he was being so free with his language, I knew mom wasn’t around.

“Where’d mom go?” 

“Fuck if I know.” I would have bet he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

I balled up my socks and tossed them into the laundry room, then kicked my shoes into the closet. There wasn’t much room for them. I owned two pair: my hiking boots and my school shoes. Until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even have the boots. The rest of the closet was for Marshal’s football shoes, soccer cleats, white Sketchers, black Sketchers, and ski boots. Mom had started keeping all her shoes in her room.

“I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Thanks for letting me know.” Marshal took a Sharpie and circled something in the catalogue. Then he took a Post-It and used it to mark the page. That night, he would leave the thing on mom’s bedside table. A week later, a package would arrive. 

In two years, he would be old enough to get his own credit card. My guess was he wouldn’t bother signing up for it, or wouldn’t need to if mom kept it up.

I undressed in the bathroom I shared with Marshal. Like the closet, the sink was overcrowded with his products, leaving just a small square of porcelain for my deodorant and razor. Until a couple of weeks ago, I would get angry every morning, not only at having to share a bathroom with my twin but at having my share valued around ten percent, if that. Just one of those little things that start the day out on the wrong foot, like rolling over in bed and realizing a power outage has reset your clock, or being rattled awake at three in the morning because your brother snores like Moses.

Like I said, until a couple of weeks ago, my days were full of those kinds of wrong feet. Then, something happened that made me feel as if I had lowered both to the starting line, wrong and right, and every day since had started out all right. 

I stepped into the shower and cranked open both taps, relishing the quick — and quickly replaced — stab of cold from the water that had been sitting in the pipes. As always, I was amazed at how much dirt sluiced around my feet, and at how dark it was, like charcoal, at first, then lightening to the color of caramel before going invisible. I hadn’t been sent far that day, but the layer of grime was as thick as ever. Most of it came from the cave, from its close walls coated in ancient dust.

Every day since that Saturday when I had sort of run away from home, I had gone to the cave. I had gone down on my hands and knees, like a pilgrim, and scraped forward into the tight, cool path inside the rock. Crossing the threshold was like going to bed late in summer with the windows open and the sprinklers on outside. It was peace, held tight to the bosom of the mountain. It was old peace, with air that hadn’t moved for centuries. 

More importantly, it was mine. Something possessed me when I first laid eyes on the cave’s small, pursed mouth, something like what my fourth grade teacher had tried to instill in us when she dressed us up in buckskin and had us blaze Lewis’ and Clark’s trail across a deserted park. I didn’t have a flag, but I planted a twig of blooming forsythia at the threshold to mark it, and took note of the trees and boulders around so I could find my way back. 

But, for a second there as I ducked my head into the hole for the first time, I thought maybe I had gotten myself all excited for nothing. There was light coming from the other side, maybe twenty feet in. A short tunnel, hardly worth naming, much less discovering. I sat back on my heels. 

As soon as I let my focus slip from the cave to the backdrop of the hillside surrounding it, my temples began to throb. The ache pushed toward my sinuses, making my eyes feel as if they were about to pop out of their sockets with every beat of my heart. The last time I had felt a pain so sudden and specific it had been at an amusement park, watching a movie that was supposed to be in 3D. I had burned the tops of my ears, playing too hard in the sun, and it hurt to wear the special glasses, so I just watched the show with them off. Images that my brain knew were supposed to fit together had divided like cells across a screen too big for me to take in all at once. 

I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my thumbs, igniting puffs of color as I dug in harder. The pain faded, and so did the colors.

When I reopened my eyes, it all made sense. The headache came back, of course, because there’s a long path between sense and understanding, but I could see why it had come on.

The cave opened up into the side of the mountain like a belly button. The skin of the hillside was smooth and flat behind it, occasionally spotted by boulders, but with no gullies, no channels to cut through behind the cave’s throat. It opened up right into the heart, or bowels, of the mountain. There was no way light should be filtering into the other end of the tunnel, not unless it was being reflected, or descending through a hole in its ceiling.

That’s what I mean by making sense of the situation: I was clueless, knew it, and was getting closer to a migraine by the second. Sense wasn’t enough to cure what ailed me. Understanding was at the point of light in the cave’s throat. I leaned forward, took a deep breath, felt the cool ancient peace work on my headache like medicine, and disappeared into the ground.

#

Marshal and I never shared much in the way of interests. That summer, while I explored my cave, he sat on the couch playing Madden. We excelled in different areas at school, he in history and current world problems, me in geology. We played different sports; he liked them all except badminton, and I liked badminton. I think it was the silent N that did it for me.

Despite all that, our circles of friends overlapped almost completely. It was kind of hard for them not to, in a school the size of ours where even I could be the second ranked birdhound, but it’s still worth noting that when we went out to hang with friends, we almost always went together. 

After a month or so of spending my days on the far side of the cave, the carnival came to town. For three nights, we didn’t do much more than dine on elephant ears and puke up our guts after long runs on The Zipper. 

If there was one common point between Marshal’s friends and mine it was Carlotta Hernandez. She was at the center of the overlapping rings, the star which we all orbited. That metaphor works especially well for me, because the girl had gravity. Not like mass — though she called herself a “chub” all the time, for no good reason I could ever see — but that she drew intangible things like attention, admiration, and lust to her without effort, by some dint of the natural world. 

That summer, a lot of my friends were out of town. They were visiting one half of their parents or the other, counseling at camp, working on their grandpa’s farm, that sort of thing. Not Carlotta, though; she had two babies to take care of — a cousin and a sister — not to mention the other, older children, and a house to help keep clean and stocked while her parents worked. The carnival was her chance to relax, to let loose, to get the smell of baby poop off her hands and replace it with the stink of sweat, old candy, and beer.

On the last night of the carnival, there were about a dozen of us altogether. It was getting close to midnight, and the barkers were putting out flags in the lines to mark when the ride would shut down. A few of us were waiting for The Zipper; I wasn’t going to ride, but I stood in line to bullshit with Carlotta and a couple of others, including Marshal. The barker dropped the flag right in front of us and shrugged as an apology.

As soon as the barker turned his back, Marshal picked up the cloth flag and threw it over his shoulder. It landed further back in the line, where someone else picked it up. A flash of white fabric, like a gull catching bread in midair, and the flag was gone again. 

“He’s gonna remember what you look like,” I said. 

“Screw him. This is the last chance for me ‘n Carly.” All weekend long, Carlotta had been promising to ride The Zipper with him, only to chicken out every time it was her turn. Even then, more than fifteen minutes back in the line with a dozen people in front of us, her eyes were wide with apprehension. She kept tilting her head back to watch the ride as it spun and bucked.

If you’ve never ridden The Zipper, here’s what you’re missing: Imagine a chainsaw. The chain whips around the long, narrow blade. Pretend that there are tiny people nestled in every tooth of the chain. Now start those teeth spinning as if they were themselves little buzz-saws. Pretty bad, huh? And that’s not even considering that the whole contraption is flipping end over end, as if being juggled.

I couldn’t blame Carlotta for being nervous, especially since the rotation of the two-person cabins was entirely dependent on the sadism or masochism of its occupants, who could shift their weight forward and back to send the little metal box whirring like a pinwheel. Marshal wasn’t one to much mind throwing his weight around.

The closer we got to the front of the line, the harder she gripped Marshal’s hand, and the louder she laughed at everyone’s jokes. She had a shrill laugh, a banshee sort of keening, which I only just caught myself from mentioning to her. It wasn’t very pleasant, to be honest; easy, sure, but not very nice. 

It was almost a relief when they reached the entrance gate. The barker eyed them suspiciously, but didn’t bust them, even though Marshal gave him a big ol’ toothy grin.

“In you go,” the barker said in a voice with so little enthusiasm it made me wonder if he had ever had any. He yanked open the green metal grille that held the passengers in their coffin-sized cabin during the ride. The hinges made a sound like nails on a chalkboard only wish they could.

“I dunno,” said Carlotta.

“Come on,” said Marshal. “We’re the last ones. He’s tired. He’ll go easy.”

“Get in or clear out,” said the barker. “I’ve got to close up.”

At those words, the rest of the group behind us kind of disintegrated. The line stretching behind us snapped in a dozen places, coalescing again in as many pockets, thin conversations running like at the end of a long party.

I was about to offer Carlotta a word of encouragement — her young cousins and nieces and nephews would hold her in reverence when she told them about braving The Mighty Zipper — when she shook out her long hair, as if clearing out cobwebs, and punched Marshal in the upper arm. “You throw us around and I’ll kill you,” she said.

Once they were seated, the barker slammed the grille shut and pinned it in place with a bent piece of steel no larger than my thumb. That was the only part that made me nervous.

The other cabins were empty. As the machine ground into life I saw Carlotta sniff her hand, which had been gripping the oh-shit bar, and make a face. Metal and old vomit and sweat. I smelled it, too, or thought I could.

Then they were off, and I realized I was all alone, the leftovers from the line vanished from behind me and the barker, one hand on the machine’s simple controls, with his back to me.

I backed away, found a low metal railing to lean against and watched Carlotta and Marshal go around as best I could. It wasn’t easy; the old beast could still hit a pretty good clip, and all those wheels within wheels made it hard to keep my focus. I could hear them, though. Carlotta, anyway. Her high, thin laugh seemed to come from everywhere, so much like a scream that a few other carnival stragglers shot glances over their shoulders in her direction.

Even I, as accustomed to Carlotta’s laughter as I was, had trouble marking the cutoff between mirth and abject terror, especially when Marshal started their cabin rocking, then flipping end-over-end.

The banshee howl formed words, briefly: “Marshal, stop!” He didn’t.

After a few minutes, the barker brought the ride to a halt. The cabin’s hinges protested twice more, open and closed, and then Marshal and Carlotta were staggering toward me. Marshal had his arm around her neck. Neither could stop giggling, building off of each other, until Carlotta capped it off with one last, delighted screech, which brought the night to a close.

#

The first time I passed through the cave, it spit me out on the other side of the mountain.   It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, but I was all right once I recognized the foothills in the distance, the long cut off of the forest service road in the ridge to my left, and the stream in the valley below. I had entered the mountain on one side, crawled for twenty feet, and come out half a mile further. 

The first thing I did was spin on my heels and check on the cave from this side. Okay, that’s not quite true; the very first thing I did was enjoy the soft heat of the sun on the skin of my arms, but that was only for a fraction of a second. Bending down, I peered into the cave’s mouth.

There was nothing there. No, again I’m misspeaking. If there had been nothing, I would have been all right. What there was was dirt, and rock: a dead end that made the hole a small burrow instead of the entrance to a cave. 

For a panicked moment, I clawed at the dirt, but didn’t make an inch of progress. I had to face it; there was no cave. I calmed down once I remembered that I wasn’t far from home, and that I had been here — or nearby — dozens of times before. It was just that usually I had hiked the intervening distance. 

I was late getting home that day. Mom gave me the silent treatment for not being there to set the table, like I was supposed to. I only wish Marshal had followed her example.

The next day, I couldn’t wait to get back up onto the mountain, to find my cave and study it. I brought a notebook and a pen with me, and scribbled some thoughts that I’m sure, at the time, seemed relevant and profound. Then I crawled through again, the light at the end of the cave drawing me forward twenty-odd feet on my hands and knees.

This time, when I climbed to my feet on the other side I was dead lost. Nothing looked familiar. A steep bluff shot up to my left, and a thick stand of firs huddled in close in every other direction. I checked, just in case, but the cave’s mouth had sealed up again. No going back that way.

It took me most of the afternoon to get to the top of the bluff, picking my way up the side like a young mountain goat, unsure on its feet. Once I had gained the high ground, I was pretty much home free. There was my mountain, a couple miles in the distance, and the forest service road ran just a hundred feet past where I stood. I followed the road back home, but this time it was after dark before I made it in the front door. Mom wasn’t happy, and grounded me for the rest of the week. Marshal was ecstatic. I smelled beer on his breath.

When I was allowed out of the house again, I couldn’t help but plan another trip to my cave. This time, though, I was cautious, in case the cave spit me out even further from home. I packed a backpack with water, food, a compass, and a lighter. I took off early in the morning, hiked to my cave, and dove right in. 

This time, upon exiting, I was struck by a sense of familiarity, rather than the usual disorientation. I was at the top of a mountain; the cave had opened for me between a pair of granite boulders just below the summit. Sweet, cool wind brushed past me, in a hurry to go nowhere special. I scrambled to the top of one of the boulders and looked down.

There was my house, down at the base. Marshal was mowing the lawn. I could see him, but not clearly; he moved like a blob of mercury, sliding across the grass as one cohesive, unchanging shape. 

No point in wasting good preparation, I figured, so I turned around to look over the valley behind the mountain, planted myself in the lee of the stone, and busted out the food and water I had packed. In the silence, I thought maybe I ought to be terrified, in the same absent way that remembering a near-collision makes your mind race, but not your heart. There was no explanation for the cave’s behavior. I’ve never been one to get scared of the unknown, but jumping into it with no tether ought to at least have creeped me out a bit.

There was a big distance between knowing I should be scared and feeling it. Instead, I felt strong, accomplished, as if I were a subscriber to the ends justifying the means and it had turned out the universe was, too. I sat there, watching cloud shadows make two-dimensional shapes on the rocks, at peace. I guess partly because I hadn’t had to hike much at all, and so wasn’t tired out. Still, it’s one of the first moments that comes to mind whenever someone tells me to relax. 

As the sun dipped lower, I headed for home. It occurred to me, on the way down, that playing with my cave was the riskiest thing I had ever done, and, for no reason I could put to words just then, that made me very sad.

#

By the time the carnival season ended, mom had stopped caring when I stayed out so late on my hikes. I don’t think it was for any reason having to do with me, exactly; it was that Marshal had started staying out later and later with Carlotta, and mom figured if she wasn’t going to rag on Marshal, she couldn’t very well pick on me. That suited me fine. I spent less and less time around our few friends, and more time exploring. As if to quell even those small tremors of fear I had felt on the mountaintop, the cave never sent me further than a few miles from home. The furthest was ten, by my guess. 

Not that I was trying to turn into a recluse, of course. You know how habits start? Because they’re the easy thing to do. You don’t form a habit of difficult tasks; maybe you repeat them, consciously, until they become easy, but they don’t turn into habits until there’s so little resistance from your body that they go automatic. That’s how it was with the cave. It was so easy to slip into the ground, to come up someplace far away, to own all the sunlight, breeze, and birdsong for miles around.

I only realized that hiking had become a habit when Carlotta invited me to her birthday party, and I almost made an excuse to miss it. It was her sixteenth; I couldn’t just bow out. I said I would be there, and she sounded so pleased I didn’t want to hang up. We chatted for a while longer. Marshal was still asleep from the night before. We didn’t talk about him. Instead, we fell into the topic of her family and stayed there. Her youngest cousin, Jacob, was a precocious little thing of three, so she told me stories about him while I made a sandwich and a glass of milk and carried them out to the back porch.

Jacob had taught himself to tie a half-hitch. Jacob had said a bad word with such perfect timing Carlotta couldn’t help but laugh. Jacob had detuned their little upright piano so it sounded as if it were underwater. 

By the time my sandwich was gone, we were on to how Jacob had asked Carlotta what had happened to his mother, and Carlotta hadn’t been able to answer with anything like the truth, and how she could see so much of his father in him, and how scared that made her. I hadn’t known the dad — he had been four grades ahead of us in school — but I knew his reputation.

There was a long silence after her fear was out in the open. She was the one to break it. “I hate how I always tell you my problems.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, I mean I hate that you don’t tell me yours. It’s… weird, I guess. Like you’re not really a person.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We said our goodbyes, I said I was sorry, and that I would see her at her party. “I’m glad,” she said, but that was it.

#

Summer wound to a close. Our friends started reappearing in town, back from their summer jobs and vacations, each one of a them a little bit changed from the time and distance. I heard about them mostly through Marshal. “Damn! Trina lost her baby fat at the beach. Marty’s spending all his time on the phone with some chick he met in New York. Bree’s a stuck-up bitch, now, since her dad spoiled her the whole summer upstate.”

I was too far gone by then, too caught up in my habit. In the last week before school started up again, I spent almost every waking moment up in the mountains, sometimes leaving home before the sun was up and not coming back in until the moon was high or setting.

That Friday — the last weekday of freedom, thirteen days before Carlotta’s party — was the end of a week of light days. On Thursday, the cave cave sent me an easy six miles out, along the floor of the valley. I followed a stream back, enjoying the lively sound of clean water over sparkling stones. My reflection caught my attention now and again. I couldn’t help feeling a bit like Marshal must have on a good day, in the best shape of my life, slim and balanced. Not much muscle on my frame, not so you could see, but plenty on the inside. Strong heart and lungs. 

By the time I reached the back side of my mountain, I was full enough of pride to float right to the top. It was a strange sensation, impossible to reproduce in any other way. The confidence that my body could handle whatever hit it. Sun, time, distance, whatever. 

I got home well before dinner, and took a shower. Marshal was in the living room, playing a video game, so I borrowed some of his free weights and then gave Carlotta a call to see what she was up to that evening. Busy with kids, it turned out, but I went to bed happy anyway.

Friday promised to be another lovely day of hiking, with a high sun shining through thin clouds, dappling the world like a careless painter. Reaching the easy slope at the base of the mountain, I pushed into the thin path I had stamped into the underbrush over my many trips. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a voice say: “Ow!” followed by a quick gasp, which didn’t seem to last long enough to have been of pain. It was lower-pitched, more like a breath. It had come from nearby, off to my right, somewhere in the wild juniper bushes. 

I held my own breath and tiptoed off the path. Thin, dry brambles whipped my bare arms, stinging. They must have cut more deeply than I thought, but I didn’t notice that until after. Right then, I just tried to ignore the itches they left behind so I could concentrate on moving quietly. 

Ten feet in, the vegetation was thick enough to conceal pretty much everything of the world beyond, but a bit short, so it only did so from my chest down. The voice had become two voices, each exhaling rapidly, but neither seeming to pause long enough to breathe in. They were nearby, but I couldn’t guess how close. I froze, because I sure as hell didn’t want to stumble right into the two of them. 

I heard Marshal’s voice say: “Yeah,” like victory. That’s when I turned and crashed back to the path. I didn’t care if they heard me. 

You know how, when you go indoors after a day spent under the brightest sun, your house seems dim and full of pockets of the dullest shades of red and blue? That’s how I saw the path ahead of me as I slouched ahead, up the first easy slope of the mountain. I doubt the world itself was any dimmer, but the embarrassed blood and the angry blood mixed behind my eyes, darkening everything by increasing degrees. 

Before I knew it, I was standing hang-dog in front of the cave. Suddenly, I felt too hot in my skin. I shrugged my pack off, unable to stand its weight for a moment longer. I slid headfirst into the welcoming dark and the cool, dead air. Something smelled like rain. The far end of the cave seemed to float like a promise, which only time or distance keeps from being fulfilled.

I pulled myself to the surface, taking a moment to catch my breath before checking my surroundings. My backpack lay on the ground right in front of me, collapsed and shapeless. I turned around. The cave’s mouth remained open. All it had done was turn me around. Some of the sick energy had lifted out of me, maybe leeched into the guts of the mountain. I sat with my legs crossed, my face into the wind.

That’s when I noticed that my arms had been cut by the undergrowth, and some time in between then and now I had pressed them against my shirt. Cross-hatched lines of blood stained my white T-shirt, overlapping like the teeth of a zipper.

#

On the morning of her birthday, Carlotta called around to cancel the party. She wasn’t feeling well, she said, and didn’t want to have a bunch of people over. We had spent hours at her house the day before, putting up decorations. By “we,” I mean “I.” Marshal was there to start with, but as soon as the scissors, tape, and glue came out, he was off to the convenience store to buy a pop. It took him hours to choose a flavor, I guess.

So, when Carlotta called it off, I offered to come and undecorate for her. Her entire family was out of town, visiting yet more relatives. Carlotta had volunteered to stay behind and sit the house. If I knew her family like I thought I did, they probably wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to tell her no parties, what with trying to shuffle all the various children into the minivan. Still, they wouldn’t appreciate coming back to a house full of streamers and balloons. With a trace of reluctance that even I picked up on, Carlotta agreed to let me help. 

I biked down the hill into town, getting a little sweaty in the process. At the time, I still believed a healthy musk held some sort of attractive power over the opposite sex, some sort of gravity I could harness. She answered the door in her pajama-bottoms, a gray sweatshirt, and big pink slippers. I hate to say it, but she looked awful. Her hair looked brittle, cracked at weird angles, and with no makeup her face looked as if it had lost all its depth and weight. 

“Where can I start?” I asked. 

“Whatever,” she said with the ghost of a smile. I could smell vomit on her breath. Hugging herself, she went into the living room. It was as clean as I had ever seen it, thanks to our efforts the day before. All the kids’ toys sorted and put into drawers, the carpet vacuumed, the dozens of family pictures dusted. There were still spots, origin unknown, staining the floor around the couch and coffee table, and the whole place smelled faintly of sulphur, but it might as well have been immaculate. Compared to how it usually was, it felt like another world, and not a bad one. 

Carlotta curled herself up on the couch, her face half-buried in a pillow, while I hauled a chair in from the dining room. I climbed up and started pulling out the pushpins that held the streamers in place. Point-by-point, they came loose and dangled limply, some held in place by more pins down the line. 

“Sorry you don’t get to have your party,” I said. “That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“I was looking forward to it.”

Pretty soon, a curtain of multicolored crepe paper hung between Carlotta and me. I kept on talking about nothing much, which was more than she had to say. In a long moment of silence, I considered bringing up some of my problems, like real people do, but they all started with Marshal. Instead, I talked about things we would both remember. That time when Mr. Beeheimer caught us gluing bugs to our desks. Or the year I sat behind her in English and we passed notes using our feet. Hiding from bullies inside the big tires at recess. The middle-school dance when I asked her for the last one, and she said all right because Marshal was out sneaking a cigarette. 

I retrieved the last few pushpins. The streamers slipped to the floor, puddling on the carpet. Carlotta was looking at me. I tried to read the expression in her eyes, but without something on her face to bolster it I couldn’t even begin to guess. Suddenly self-conscious, I fidgeted with the pins I had slipped into my pocket.

“This is one of those times,” she said. 

“Which times?”

Instead of answering, she sniffed loudly. I could hear junk in her sinuses. Stepping down off the chair, I set about gathering up the streamers. “You want to save them?” I asked.

Carlotta shook her head. 

When my back was to her, as I bent, wrapping my fingers in strips of every color, she said: “I should have gone with you,” as if she were second-guessed the answer she had picked on a quiz. It made me smile and shut up.

#

Call me oblivious, but I didn’t figure out Carlotta was pregnant until the second week of school. She and I weren’t in any classes together that semester, so I picked up on it through our circle of friends. I’ve got to stop putting myself in a good light like that; when I say I “picked up on it,” I mean that Dominic sat down at the table where we were eating lunch — Marshal, me, and a couple others — and said:

“Carly’s keeping it, man.”

“No, she ain’t,” Marshal snapped back, with no hesitation.

Dominic raised his hands. “Just what I heard from Heather. Shit, it’s not like they’ll notice around her house.”

“It ain’t even been a month,” said Marshal. “She’s faking.”

“Puked her guts up first period,” offered one of the other boys, in a so-what voice.

“Yeah, ‘cause she been sick!” Half of it came out in a squeak, Marshal’s voice cracking as his frustration climbed. It vanished too quickly into the other shouts and laughter of the lunch room. Silence should have descended. People would have paid attention. Instead, Dominic and the other boys just shrugged and set back to their food. “God,” said Marshal, exasperated. That’s what pushed me over the edge, that he had the audacity to be annoyed.

I leaned over the table and slapped him, open-palm, across the cheek. My finger nails caught above his lip, two of them leaving red, stick-thin lines. Startled, he pushed backward from the bench, landing on his tailbone. He had had a fork in his hand when I hit him, and had held onto it as he fell. With a snarl, he threw it overhand at my head. I twisted out of the way, but not fast enough. It must have been the tines that connected, because afterward I found two bloody streaks just beside my nose.

I launched myself right over the table, slipping on Marshal’s lunch tray, but at least hitting the floor right side up. By then, Marshal was on his feet. We didn’t circle, didn’t size each other up. There was no grace between us, not even the beautiful, animal ferocity that some folks show in a good, noble fight. We just fell on each other, swinging, kicking, biting, and none of it worth remembering beyond that he bruised my left eye, and I gave him a hell of a shiner on his right.

A varsity linebacker pulled us apart. “What the fuck? What the fuck!” Marshal kept repeating as we were separated. It started off as a question, but I don’t think that’s how it ended up. It sounded more as if he were trying to get the words to come out strong enough that he could beat me with them. I didn’t say anything. 

The vice principal suspended us both for a week, but decided that, rather than send us both home, he would keep Marshal on in-house detention, and let mom deal with me. He called her in. While we waited, the school nurse checked us out for sprains. My anger ran low, then died. I apologized, quietly, to the vice principal. My mouth almost kept going, almost said: “Sorry,” to Marshal, but I caught myself in time.

Mom had some words for me on the drive home. “How could you? He’s your brother.” But he hadn’t been my brother for a long time, not since dad died. Mom kept us together, confined us all in the same house, as if place could make family. Maybe it could, like with Carlotta and the dozen people that called themselves her family. I didn’t want to take the chance. Mom was the force that kept us together; it would have to be another that drove us apart.

#

Four days into my suspension, while mom was at work and Marshal was at school, I gave Carlotta’s house a call. One of her nieces answered, and told me that Carlotta was out shopping, but she’d call me back when she got home. I heard Carlotta’s voice, wordless, in amongst the background hiss, and then a loud crackling as the phone changed hands.

“Hello?” 

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Okay, today.” She sounded cautious. 

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” Casting the word out like a grapnel. It landed, but shakily.

“It’s all right.”

“And see if you had the time to listen to a problem I’m having.”

“I don’t have time–”

“I know it’s Marshal’s baby,” I said, trying to also make it sound as if I didn’t care that it was Marshal’s baby. “He bragged about it,” I lied. “And he’s the problem.” Silence on the other end of the line. “Can you come up?”

“Yeah, okay,” said Carlotta. It came out as a sigh. “Mom left me the car.”

She took her time, showing up forty minutes later, made-up and wearing her favorite jeans. I gave her a hug, which she returned, lightly. 

“Want to go for a walk?” 

“Okay,” she said. 

I took her along the path I had blazed all through that summer. We exchanged only a few words as we walked. I led the way, so I couldn’t see her face, but I thought — or imagined — I could hear her steps getting lighter the further up the mountain we went. 

I stopped just beside the sprig of forsythia I had planted as a marker, only a few feet away from my cave, and turned to look out over the town. Carlotta pulled up beside me, breathing hard. 

“You’re out of shape,” I teased. She punched me in the upper arm. 

We sat down on a granite shelf and breathed easily. The air was only a little colder and thinner there, but it was enough to notice. I took a long moment to order my thoughts.

“Don’t,” said Carlotta, as if she had been watching the gears in my head tick, though she had barely looked at me since we stopped climbing.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I want to share a secret with you.”

“I know you hate Marshal.”

“Yeah, that’s not a secret. Gimme a bit of credit.”

“So, what is it?”

“No, I have to show it to you. It’s a place.” I got to my feet and held out a hand to help her up. Then I led her past the bush and up to the cave’s mouth. “Through there,” I said.

“Gross.”

“It’s not very far. If you look in, you can see the light on the other side.”

She bent at the waist and peered in, like I said. “It’s straight down,” she said.

“Just an optical illusion. It’s actually pretty flat, and most of it’s rock. And on the other side, well–” I finished with a shrug and got down on my hands-and-knees. 

“That’s all right,” she said, taking a step back. 

“Sure,” I said. “You trust Marshal on The Zipper, but you don’t trust me enough to go twenty feet into a cave?” I made it sound as if my feelings were hurt, just as a joke, but I think she took it seriously. Muttering a weightless complaint, she crouched and moved like a spider behind me, hands and feet splayed out, into the hole. 

A few feet into the darkness, she giggled. “Like hiding in the big tires at recess,” she said. Her voice sounded as if her lips were right against my ear. A shiver ran up my spine. We kept going. 

“I wanna be that old again,” I said, and maybe she didn’t hear me. We were at the far side. I grabbed thick stand of cheat grass at the roots and pulled myself out into the spotty sunlight. The place I stood up in was unfamiliar, but a recognized a couple of the peaks nearby. Not far from home. A couple ridgelines at most.

I turned around to help Carlotta out and came face to face with a bare wall of rock. The cave was gone, had maybe disappeared the moment I left it. In the space of a single beat, my heart went to a dead run, pumping quick blood that burned against my suddenly frozen skin. “Carlotta?” I half-yelled, then gave it all up. “Carlotta!” I pounded on the rock, but only managed to cut holes in my fists. 

I knew better than to think the cave was still open behind the rock; it just took me a moment to realize. When I did, I scrambled up the hillside as fast as I could. It was a deceptive slope; I counted three false summits before I made it to the actual top. Breathless, I turned in circles. The nearest peak was more than a mile away. I must have gone around six or seven times before my darting eyes caught the shape of another person outlined at the top of the ridge nearest the town.

It was Carlotta, I was sure. The cave hadn’t sent her far, maybe hadn’t sent her anywhere at all.

“Are you OK?” I screamed, but the wind was against me, catching my words and force-feeding them back to me. I coughed, my throat suddenly bone-dry. In the space of an eye-blink she disappeared over the lip of the summit, the clarity of her motion swallowed by the thickness of the air, the waves of heat falling between us.

I started out at a dead run; I had to catch her, to explain what I could to her. But what had happened? What could I say? I slowed to catch my breath, and the realization hit me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me.

I took the rest of the hike home at an easier pace; head down, sure, and not looking up much from my feet, but unhurried.

When I finally made it home, the driveway was empty. It was after five o’clock; school was out, and mom should have been home from work. The house welcomed me with a puff of cold air as I opened the door.

Inside, I thought about giving Carlotta a call. As I reached for the phone, I saw that the message light was blinking on the answering machine. I pressed the play button.”

“Honey.” It was mom. “We’re at the emergency room. Marshal has appendicitis, and they think they’re going to have to operate.” She was just letting me know where they were, not asking me to come. Without thinking much about it, except to remember to lock the door behind me, I got on my bike and started down the hill.

I pedaled slowly at first, letting the revolutions of my legs drive the engine of my thoughts. They started with the times I had spent in the hospital when dad was dying. I turned down the slope into town, picking up speed. Dad had apologized to all of us, for whatever he could set his mind on at the time. The spokes on my wheels blurred to invisible. For the week after he died, we were like the center of a star, Marshal, mom, and me. Held together by a force much older than all of us added up. I kept my feet going steady, even as the slope lessened and flattened out; my thighs burned. I thought that maybe if I hit a bump in the road, I’d fly out into orbit, or past, maybe escaping the Earth altogether.

#

Marshal was already out of surgery when I got to the hospital. I asked for his room number at the nurse’s station, but didn’t really need to because mom was sitting on a bench outside his door. Her head was in her hands, and one foot bounced restlessly against the dirty tile floor. I gave her a hug almost before she realized I was there. 

“He okay?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “Bad infection.” 

“Can I go in?” 

She nodded, the same rate as her juggling foot, for just a moment. 

Marshal’s eyes were closed when I slipped inside, and the lights were off. A sliver of orange from a streetlamp outside slipped in between the room’s hanging blinds like a dagger through a ribcage. He still had his black eye, and I still had mine. I stood beside his bed for a long moment, with nothing at all on my mind. I think everything like intention had fled my mind the moment when I had turned and saw only the rock wall behind me instead of Carlotta. Since then, I had been operating by paths of least resistance, inventing reason after the fact, when imagination could win out fully.

Marshal opened his eyes long enough to turn them away from me. I sat down in an uncomfortable chair by his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, letting the words hang alone until even I started to think it was all I had to say. I had traveled so many miles, gone such a distance. Even though I ended up right back at home, I was so far away in another sense that the only force capable of acting on my body was my body itself, and the mind inside. Not mom’s desperate gravity, not Carlotta’s starlight, not the vacuum that dad had left behind. But which way should I propel myself? I took a deep breath.

“I told mom you didn’t cry when dad died.”

Marshal puffed out through his nose, scornful. “I showed her where you keep your porn.”

This was it. “I told everyone the last time you wet your bed.”

“I wish I hadn’t pulled you out of the creek, that time you were eight.”

“I laugh when you get tackled at practice.”

“I know you’ve had a crush on Carlotta since Kindergarten.”

We went on like that, back-and-forth with all the ammunition we had, heavy and light. At some point, the streetlamp burned out, and all that was left was our voices, separated by a gulf of nothingness, rumbling at each other like cannon-fire.