10

Eric marvels at the plastic jar of hot wings in our fridge. It’s big, like an economy-size pretzel-stick plastic jar. In fact, maybe that’s what it was at one point. I think so, then we had a barbecue and my dad filled the leftover jar with leftover wings and now it’s sitting in our fridge about half-empty. Me and my brother and my brother’s friends have all made assaults on it, but we haven’t come close to finishing it.

“Only a house full of guys has that,” Eric says. And except for when my brother’s girlfriend comes through or my dad’s girlfriend comes through or until recently, my girlfriend came through, that’s definitely what we are. (At least, I think my dad would call that woman his girlfriend. And I think that girl would probably say she’s my brother’s girlfriend, although my brother would probably identify her as “mah bitch” or “that cunt,” depending on which accent he feels like shouting in.)

We’re not sure where we’re going to, but the right thing to do right then seems to be to put a bunch of snacks in a backpack and walk out into the dark. We’re not sure where to, but before we go I throw on a hoodie. Eric doesn’t have a coat so I let him borrow one of mine. My brother has left a quarter-pack of cigarettes on the patio table in the backyard, he’s not even trying to hide his smoking from my dad anymore, so I snag it, and his lighter.

We ditch main roads and stick to side streets, which all have Native American names like Arapaho Peak and Native Crest, and come together to form subdivisions with names like Desert Pines and Mountain’s Edge At Tapatillo West. I dig into sandwiches we brought, the meal I’d ordinarily be eating right about this time in front of the three thirty Conan rerun. I offer one to Eric.

“No thanks,” he says, “I’m not hungry.”

When I finish the sandwich, I throw the plastic bag away in a big dumpster on the edge of a construction site where a big new house is going up.

“Creepy,” Eric says, “like, if I were a junkie who stumbled here from downtown, that’s exactly where I’d sleep.”

It is creepy, and being creeped out by it is actually kind of a nice change from being scared of this thing that’s after us and we don’t know what it is but we’re very sure it’s on our tail.

“Maybe he’s a guy from the Vatican,” Eric says, “and I’m supposed to be the Christ child or something, meant to bring about the apocalypse.”

“Maybe he’s from the government,” I say, “dispatched to bring you to Area 51, where they’ll run tests on you.”

“Maybe,” Eric says.

“But if we can imagine what it is, that probably statistically eliminates the possibility of that actually being what’s going on. Like, if we can imagine it, it can’t be real,” I say.

“Maybe,” Eric says.

I take out a cigarette.

“You smoke now?” Eric says.

“Not really,” I say, “it just seemed like the right thing to do. You want one?”

“No thanks,” Eric says. “At some point, I’m probably going to have to run.” And his certainty gives me the creeps more thoroughly than the imaginary junkie in the gutted model home.

But eventually it wears off a little bit and we get to talking about what’s happening on shows we both watch, whether the creators are staying true to what makes the shows so great or whether they’ve gone completely off the reservation, and we both got the Maxim issue with the girl who can phase through walls from our favorite show, Superlatives, even though we’d never, ever buy Maxim under normal circumstances, but some of the articles were surprisingly funny. And before long we’re sort of around Eric’s neighborhood and instead of turning back we drift towards his house, naturally enough and the whole thing not seeming particularly real. It’s, like, five thirty in the morning and just a little bit of daylight is chasing the desert hares off people’s lawns and as we’re walking up Eric’s front drive I hear the newspaper car coming around the corner. It’s a sound familiar to any kid who stays up late in the suburbs: since there are no actual paperboys anymore, some depressing cigarette-y dude in a station wagon rolls around the neighborhood at this hour and along with the sound of his car you hear the thunks of papers hitting people’s driveways, louder on Sunday mornings when the papers are stuffed with ads.

The paper guy still has his headlights on, and instead of orbiting the cul-de-sac for however long it takes to huck all the papers onto all the driveways and move on, the headlights freeze on us. The paper guy yells “STOP” and it isn’t the paper guy, we can’t see him with the glare from his headlights but it’s safe to assume it’s Mr. Who-the-Fuck-Ever, who works for the guy who works for the guy who works for the guy the church guy tipped off when I tipped him off about Eric, Mr. University. We aren’t sticking around to find out who’s on whose payroll. Eric was right, he has to run, and I shouldn’t have smoked that cigarette.

We take off. We run through the side gate. Eric bypasses the big blue recycle bin but me, dumb and unathletic, I catch it right in the stomach. I hear a car door slam behind me, and shoes running on the driveway. Eric’s up on the back fence, or back wall, big brown adobe bricks, with his foot slung over, reaching down to help me up. There’s no time to resent the implication that I can’t make it up and over myself but he’s probably right, I probably can’t, freshman year I would fake sick so I could not dress out in PE and read instead. When I’m up Eric hops down into the dry wash behind his house, a tributary of the one my brother and his friends chased us through. I remember being scared, but that was fun-scared. This is the real thing.

They say don’t look back but up on the wall with a view of the whole situation I can’t help but turn and see the dude tear-assing around the side of Eric’s house, and another thing I can’t help is thinking he looks a little bit like The Man, our unstoppable man in black, who may or may not be an actual human, who may be just a holographic entity. It’s him, down to the sunglasses (at five thirty in the morning) and the way he almost runs right into the swimming pool but instead of keeling over or raring back in a funny slapstick way, he just stops short like there was no obstacle there to be concerned about, he just decided to stop. And when we go over the fence he doesn’t appear to follow. We still run through the wash at full speed, but he doesn’t follow, which is almost kind of worse. I picture him standing in Eric’s backyard, waiting.

We come out a couple blocks away from Eric’s house. We pant in the alley, me more so than Eric, who is in surprisingly good shape. I spit.

“What kind…” pant pant pant “of college admissions officer…” pant pant pant “fucking chases you through your backyard?”

“You don’t get it,” Eric says. “I’m REALLY smart.”

We laugh, and have to start thinking about something to do today besides go to school or be at home. We are trying to figure out what time the mall opens when both our phones start vibrating. Nobody would text-message either of us at five-ish in the morning. We would, but both of us are in each other’s presence. Christine? We take out our phones.

The text messages are credited to UNAVAILABLE. They say, COME QUIETLY.

We are under the bleachers at our rival high school. Going to our own school seemed like asking for trouble: it’s a place we’re known to frequent. Going to our rival high school seemed like the perfect way to throw him off the scent. Sitting on the bleachers seemed too visible so we’re underneath them. No one is making out under here, nine thirty on a Saturday morning.

“My brother got in a fight with some Catholic-school kids here once, he said.”

“Why here? This isn’t the Catholic school and it isn’t our school, either.”

“Neutral location.”

“Oh.”

“Nobody probably ever said ‘neutral location’ and he just called it that later. He wants to be a samurai for the mafia or something. If the mafia ever starts hiring samurai I think that would be his dream job.”

“Do you think if you had paid him, to like, assault me, he would’ve done it?” Eric says.

“I did think about it,” I say. “I honestly thought about paying my brother. And his friends to … uhm.”

Eric is quiet for a second.

“But not really,” I say, not wanting to hear his reaction. “I didn’t actually intend to do it or pull the money out of an ATM or anything. It was just one of those things you think about when you’re really angry.”

“That’s it,” Eric says.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“We need to find an ATM,” Eric says.

“Show us the money,” my brother says.

“Show! Us! The! Money!” his buddy Jake screams, cackling, and never looking away from my dad’s office computer where he is watching a video of someone having sex with a pregnant lady.

Eric knew they’d ask to see the money up front, so we have it in the gym bag my grandma gave me two years ago with my initials stitched into it. I don’t go to the gym, or participate in any athletics, so the only use my gym bag has gotten is the time Eric and I filled it with my dad’s weights and threw it off our deck. We were settling a debate about gravity that had to do with whether or not Steam-punk Praetoreous could realistically toss a half-ton proton charge off the deck of an airship before it exploded. (We wanted to be believable. It was the only way we could hope to change the way people think about proton charges and airships.) Other than that it has gathered dust in my closet, until now, the time Eric and I pay my brother and his psycho friends to beat on a guy my dad’s age who may or may not be from the government but is definitely after us. Eric, and me for being with him.

“Who is this guy?” my brother asks.

“It’s a long story,” I say, “but basically, he’s—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eric says. “All that matters is he needs to get got.”

Eric rips open the gym bag, revealing a very skeptical bank teller’s drawer full of one-dollar bills. Enough one-dollar bills to make that bank teller look hard at the couple of haggard-looking teenage boys who are asking to be handed their entire savings accounts in one-dollar bills, but not enough to make her not give us the money.

Eric’s idea is to make my brother and his friends feel like hired muscle in a movie. They are hired muscle, not movie-quality, but except for a couple of scoffs and a “Who does this kid think he is?” from my brother, the idea is working. Where else do people have duffel bags full of cash? Where else do they say “get got”? We are tickling a very specific spot on my brother’s and his friends’ teenage lizard brains right now.

“Alright,” my brother says. “But we do this our way.” Which is a stupid movie thing to say, but paying people to hurt other people is a stupid movie thing to do, so here we are.

We call The Man on the number he gave Eric. Eric tells him he wants to turn himself in. Gives him directions to a cul-de-sac that’s a ways away from my house, up against the mountains, still mostly under construction.

We don’t bring Eric. We decide that would be a little like bringing the kid to the kidnappers. And though it never gets said between us, one night not very long ago these guys did what they’re about to do, except to Eric. If he wants a pass I can’t blame him and he doesn’t have to say it. But I’m going along, the project manager, to make sure they don’t get distracted by drug scores or drunk girls or who knows, someone else to go wild on.

I have to tell them not to dress like the guys from A Clockwork Orange.

“But we get to do this our way!” my brother says as they’re loading implements of fuck-you-up into the trunk of Alan’s Altima. Two baseball bats: one wood, one aluminum. A samurai sword my brother got at the mall. A couple golf clubs. A coat hanger.

I tell them the masks will make them more conspicuous, and the suspenders will make it hard to run, if that becomes a thing that needs to happen. What I really want to say is don’t, like, enjoy this so much.

“Let them,” Eric says. “Whatever it takes.”

So half an hour later I’m in the backseat of the Altima squished between Alan and Tits, who, because none of them have the actual masks from A Clockwork Orange, are wearing the faces of a Power Ranger and Dora the Explorer, respectively. My brother is driving and Jake is riding shotgun.

“Five-oh!” Jake says as a cop car passes us in the other lane.

“Fuck ’em,” my brother says, Eric’s movie magic having worked on everybody, or maybe this is how they always talk.

“They can’t touch us,” Tits says. “We’re untouchable.”

“Touch my dick,” Alan says, which is closer to how I imagine they talk normally. Jake and my brother had a twenty-minute argument about what music to play in the car on the way there, so we’re about five minutes behind schedule. They decided on the Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels soundtrack. My brother makes up the lost five minutes by flooring it in a way Alan doesn’t like, this being his mom’s car.

We reach the cul-de-sac, which Eric picked based on his total knowledge of the neighborhood. Completely dark, no streetlights yet in the cul-de-sac itself, just some light leaking in from the street that leads to it, and the moonlight, and these red lights up on the mountains that are TV antennas. The red lights are so planes know the antennas are there and don’t crash into them. They’ve been there as long as I can remember and when I was a kid and I asked my dad what they were and he told me, I imagined on the back of every red light a TV was glowing, showing what that antenna was broadcasting.

Everyone is trying hard to be businesslike, but can’t help bailing from the car guffawing because somebody farted, and everyone agrees it’s Jake except Jake. They get their game faces back on. My brother pops the trunk. Alan picks up the aluminum bat; Tits, the wooden one. Jake, two golf clubs, one in each hand. My brother, his sword. My brother puts on a Phantom of the Opera half-mask that disguises his identity, like, not at all, and Jake puts on a full Boba Fett helmet I’m actually pretty jealous of. They all adjust their suspenders. They cackle. I don’t have a mask or suspenders or a weapon, just my phone, and I’m supposed to call Eric when it’s over.

We have about four minutes until The Man is supposed to meet Eric, and Eric alone, here. We have ditched the car up the road, out of sight, and we hoof it into the dark cul-de-sac. Everybody takes up positions in the dark half-built homes. I follow my brother, thinking about Eric’s imaginary junkie as we duck through planks and blue plastic tarps.

“This is gonna be fun,” my brother says. “I guarantee.” We sneak behind a dumpster. My brother peeks out around it, I slide down so I’m sitting in the dirt, facing away from the cul-de-sac where The Man is supposed to pull up any minute. I am looking up at the mountains. My brother recites rap lyrics about snitches and what happens to them until there’s the sound of a car pulling up and headlights chase rabbits out of the half-homes whose skeletons you can see just for a second. My brother whistles. A car door opens and shuts.

I should get visual, I think, in the movie terms we are all thinking in, I should have visual confirmation of what’s about to go down. But maybe audio will do. Maybe I’ll just sit here staring up at the red lights. That’s what I’ll do, I think, and I do, I stare up at the lights and I think, You find out your best friend can’t sleep and won’t ever have to and you expect it to open up this world of heaven-on-Earth amazingness and instead it opens up a world where you have to sic the people you hate the most on a guy you don’t know and get them to do what they would do to you given the right reasons or no reason at all, that is to say, kick your teeth in and laugh. I will stay focused on the lights, I think, and not the sound of bone on new pavement.

There’s more cackling and Jake yells, “Throw me the keys!” There’s the sound of keys. A man’s voice, low. My brother and his friends’ voices, loud and wanting to swing, but nobody has yet. The Man’s voice again. My brother and his friends, lower this time, more conversational, sounding less like they have a couple of golf clubs they’re about to bring down on dude’s head. The sound of a trunk opening. Alan, audible: “Hol-ee shit!” The Man’s voice, my brother’s voice, Jake’s voice, my brother’s voice. My brother and Jake’s voices, closer, like they walked away from everyone else for a war council.

“… their money back,” Jake is saying, “and the money we’d make just selling the shit ourselves! And think of how much we could still keep.”

“How do we know it’s real?” my brother says.

“Alan knows this shit. You’ve seen Alan’s mom. Fucked up. Alan knows pills, dude.”

“How about we just fuck him up and take it?” my brother says.

“Look at this guy,” Jake says. “I think he might be somebody.”

A moment, then the sound of something sliding out of the trunk, the trunk shutting, the man’s voice, the car keys, the car door, the car turning on and driving away.

Alan, again: “Hol-ee shit.”

My brother comes around the side of the dumpster and says, “Change of plans, fag.”

And that is how instead of assaulting this mystery guy and getting him to leave me and my friend alone, my brother and his psycho friends accepted, as payment for not fucking him up, a suitcase full of pharmaceutical tranquilizers, antipsychotics, and painkillers, hundreds of bottles with “Trial” written on the side, from the mystery guy. Who they said was really cool. Who they said didn’t seem fazed by their masks or weapons, and knew just what to offer. Who, they say on the way back to Jake’s house, cracking open bottles of pills, washing them down with whatever half-empty bottles of flat soda are rolling around the floor of the car, they should really invite to their parties because dude clearly has the hook-up. When we pull up to Jake’s house my brother says he’s sorry, but I gotta understand, right? Alan says he already can’t feel his face, so they’re in business, definitely in business.

I have to call Eric and tell him my fuck-up brother fucked up, and though we got a full refund, it’s still the case that neither of us can really go home.

We can’t go to Eric’s house and we can’t go to my house and we don’t really have much in the way of other friends to stay with, at least I don’t. But Eric does: Eric has those kids I saw him with in the pictures he sent me when he was trying to make me furious, Chrstine’s college buddies.

“Those kids in the pictures you sent me,” I say to Eric after we’ve dealt with the fact that my brother disappointed us, which isn’t really a surprise but is still a bummer because we thought we could use the enemy we know against the enemy we don’t, like in volume 3.4 of TimeBlaze where Dr. Praetoreous rallies the Hinterland Scourges to fight the malevolent Zethi Railroad Co. that threatens them both. I don’t say Christine’s friends because Christine’s name is still this big hot word between us.

“Those kids,” it will turn out, are Randy and Christopher and Benjamin and Chelsea 2 and Arthur and Larissa and Punk-as-Fuck Jess.

Eric has Randy’s number.

“Hey. Randy?” Eric says when Randy picks up. “Hello, it’s Eric,” Eric says. “My associate and I are in something of a pickle and I was wondering if you could provide invaluable assistance,” Eric says.

I look at him like, what is wrong with you?

“Really? Outstanding. We’re at the gas station at Ray and Ranch Circle. Yes. We’ll be here,” Eric says. “And we’ll buy you gas. And that won’t even begin to make up the debt.

“Alright, then,” Eric says, and hangs up.

I was looking through the gas-station magazines, but I give it up to glare at Eric.

“How I talk when I’m around them,” he explains.

While we wait for Randy I page through a gaming magazine’s E3 wrap-up and Eric buys Mountain Dew. I look at screenshots from a new World War II first-person shooter and think about me being dumb around everyone and smart around Eric and Eric being smart around me and smarter around Christine and even smarter around Christine’s friends. I expect that when these guys roll up, they will look like college professors, they will flash library cards, they will wear glasses, they may very well not arrive by car at all but instead pull up on a tandem version of one of those old-fashioned big-wheeled bicycles. But when Randy finally does pull up (in a car), Christopher in the passenger seat, they seem dumber than all of us. Randy isn’t wearing a shirt and Christopher isn’t wearing shoes.

“Fellows, this is Darren,” Eric says.

“Hey man,” says Randy.

“Oh, right,” Christopher says.

The “oh, right” seems like recognition, like one night after Eric was a part of their circle everyone was sitting around on the floor at somebody’s place and Christine, from where she lay with her head in Eric’s lap, got around to mentioning me like a crappy town where she met Eric and they escaped from it just in time. I think how good it is that Eric can be around these guys without Christine’s having to be there, because I am not ready to be in a room with both of them and act like everything’s cool.

I don’t know how to think of these kids, and I guess if I could they’d want to kill themselves or change because they’d be labelable.

These kids, I come to find out, love their full names. Christopher. Benjamin. Franklin.

And they talk in this way I can’t pin down, either, that sounds sarcastic but is actually sincere. Unless it is actually sarcastic.

I first notice this right after Randy and Christopher pick us up. We get on the freeway and get off by where the college is, and they take us to lunch at this place Cheba Hut, a weed-themed sandwich place which on the way there Christopher admits is “pretty lame but the sandwiches are really good,” and if he means it the sarcastic way it sounds like he means it then he thinks the weed theme is really good and the sandwiches are pretty lame but it turns out the weed theme is pretty lame and the sandwiches are really, really good. And I start to figure out that as much as it sounds like the things they say are sarcastic because of the simplicity of what they’re saying and their tone of voice, they actually really do unironically think that dancing is fun and local music is a good thing and so is making stuff, just things in general. And I wouldn’t expect college guys who consider themselves intelligent to say so many things that don’t have cynicism attached to them, but the sandwiches are only the first thing they’re right about.

Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

Eric’s sandwich has sauerkraut which goes with the sort of little-old-man image he seems to have built for himself and he pays for all of our lunches to thank Christopher and Randy for “coming to our aid in such a gallant fashion.” Christopher chuckles when Eric says this, toasting with his Styrofoam cup full of Mister Pibb, and Randy says “You’re the best” while picking lettuce off his toasted sub which on the menu is called The Dank. Eric makes them promise not to tell anyone our whereabouts, and tells them we’ll be “off your hands just as soon as we formulate a plan to spring ourselves from the situation in which we are currently embroiled,” and they do. They probably don’t think we’re in any more serious trouble than maybe having been caught with some of the product that’s depicted in murals all over the walls, spiraling organically out of Bob Marley’s hair, raining down from a UFO, being dreamed about by Hendrix in a thought bubble shaped like a marijuana leaf. Tony DiAvalo should be apprenticing at the feet of whatever burnout da Vinci painted the wall in here.

Then Christopher says something about how quiet I am, then after we’re done with lunch they take us back to their place, which they share with two other guys but it’s still really clean, and it’s theirs and it doesn’t smell bad in the least, and there are five couches in the living room because “people crash here a lot.”

Christopher is right, people do crash at their house a lot. Albert, one of the housemates, is in a band and they’re off on tour, but he offers up the house to other bands that come through town and they do the same for him, I guess, when he’s in their town. So Eric gets a couch and I get a couch and the other couches are split up at different times among members of Get Your Own Back, Tears In The Schoolyard, Andre The Client, and a singer-songwriter named Randall Coats. They’re almost all really nice guys. If they’re staying here it means Albert and his band are staying at their places in other states which means there are houses like this in a lot of towns all over the country, and I have to admit it’s kind of cool. But for a while I don’t want to.

A lot of time Eric forfeits his couch to these guys, since he doesn’t need a place to sleep.

“Someone is trying to kill us,” Eric says. “I mean, we don’t know that for sure. In fact, that’s probably the last thing he wants to do. At least to me.”

“That must give you a lot of comfort,” I say.

“Sorry,” Eric says. “But for the purposes of self-preservation, to trigger our deepest self-preservational instincts, we have to think of it like somebody’s trying to kill us.”

“So what you’re saying is, we shouldn’t just sit on the couch reading comics all day?” Because that’s what we’ve been doing since we got here: picking our way through the Preacher series, which Christopher says is his but we can totally read them if we want, in fact, we totally should.

“No. We want these guys to think everything’s cool, and we’re normal, and we want them to not mind having us around because having a place to go is the only thing that’s keeping us … well, ALIVE, if we’re going to think about it like we’re going to get killed. Which I said was a good idea.” He’s doing that more often now, sort of rambling, and where before he would talk for a long time but everything he said would be a new thought and you understood it was relevant even if you didn’t understand exactly what he meant, now he’ll talk and not everything means something. And it takes him a second to get back into his Preacher book, a second of just sort of staring off into space.

I wish I could say that that’s what’s bothering me, that someone is trying to kill us, or capture us, or whatever. It isn’t. It’s more that this place kind of seems like the scene of the crime, the crime being Eric and Christine. Or if not the actual physical scene of the crime, the criminals’ postcrime getaway flophouse where they brought their haul, spread all the money on the bed and fucked on it. Or any one of these couches for all I know. So Christopher forgive me if I’m a little quiet, it’s me still being angry about it and feeling like shit for still feeling angry because I guess if I’m being honest with myself it’s what I did when I was angry that brought us here.

All of the houses where Eric and I live are new, probably newer than either of us, but out here by the college everything’s about as old as it gets for the desert, meaning one-story houses from the fifties and sixties. It’s kind of cool, actually. Randy and Christopher’s house is mostly shaded from the street by a lemon tree that must be older than anything in our suburb, the movie theater, the Olive Garden, our high school, any of it. Before dinner our first night, Eric says something pretty important that I somehow hadn’t thought of up until this point:

“What are we going to tell our parents?”

“Well, my dad’s easy. Your parents actually give a shit. That might be more difficult.”

“Right.”

“The Man said he was from the college, right? When he met with your parents.”

“Yes.”

“Great,” I say. “He just gave us our out.”

I tell Eric to see if he can borrow Randy’s phone. Eric wants to know why I don’t just ask to borrow Randy’s phone. I tell Eric he’s in better with these kids. Eric says okay.

“Randy my good man,” says Eric, finding Randy in the kitchen, cooking: “Would you be so kind as to lend me your cellular telephone for a brief moment?”

Randy laughs. “Sure,” he says. “Don’t, like, call Asia.”

We take Randy’s phone and go out front since the house is kind of noisy because Randy and Christopher have a couple people over who are all in the living room playing Super Nintendo. My feet crunch on a carpet of leaves underneath the lemon tree. I dial Eric’s house phone. Eric looks at me, biting one of his knuckles without thinking about it.

“Hello … Mrs. Lederer? Hello! This is Albert Praetoreous from State. I believe you spoke to my colleague the other day…. Yes! That’s him. Yes. Well, as I’m sure Eric told you, some honors students from his school were visiting us today on an orientation field trip—What? He didn’t?… Yes, I suppose he can be a space cadet sometimes, but he’s also one bright little guy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Yes, well interestingly enough, I confided to the students today that we had two foreign scholars who were meant to attend a longer orientation program we often do in the spring, which is this week, and they were unfortunately not admitted to the country. Visa troubles…. I know. I know. I completely agree, it has had a chilling effect on international travel. Well, I was saying this, and Eric piped up and suggested that he and a Mr. Darren Bennett take the place of these scholars in the program…. Right, I had that reaction myself initially, but I actually cleared it with our dean of admissions here, and I said to Eric, if it’s alright with your parents … Yes! Of course. He’s right here.”

I hand Eric the phone. He gives me a panicked look. I wave at him like, “Just do it.” He puts the phone to his ear.

“Mom? Yeah. Yeah … I’m actually way ahead on homework. Yeah … It seems really good…. Next Wednesday. Yes … I’m really far ahead on homework. No. No, yeah, it’s okay. I’ll come back and get stuff. Clothes and things. Tomorrow. Okay … Okay. Love you. Bye.” He hangs up.

“Did they buy it?” I say.

“I think they bought it,” he says. “That was a pretty good adult impression.”

“Thanks,” I say. I would’ve killed it in Mr. Hendershaw’s “theater piece,” I think to myself. Then I think how, not that I ever wanted to, but how if that whole Theater Division thing were something I wanted to do someday, now I pretty much can’t, even though it’s only sophomore year. And if I wanted to do it in college, I probably wouldn’t, because I hadn’t done it in high school and I would be way behind everyone else in terms of experience. And then it’s weird to think that once I’m out of high school, that will have been high school. Like, the high school years, the ones everybody gets, those will have been mine, written in stone, unalterable forever. And I guess they haven’t been bad so far. I didn’t talk to anybody and then I made a best friend and then I fell in love and lost my virginity. Soon I’ll learn how to drive. Soon I will escape from the clutches of evil with a mutant best friend and we will return to those awkward halls triumphant.

Eric looks alternately thrilled and scared at going out on a big rebellious limb like this. He also looks very tired. I take the phone back from him and pick out another number on the speed dial.

“Hey, Dad?… Hey, I’m going to that college retreat thing…. The college retreat thing. The thing I told you about. In Tempe…. Like a week, I think…. Yep, I have my phone on me…. Okay, uhm, love you, too.”

I hang up. Eric now looks dumbfounded.

“That’s it?”

“All parents respect ‘college.’”

“I guess. How did you …?

“What?”

“How did you come from that?”

“I don’t know. How did you come from your parents?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” We emerge from the darkness of the lemon tree and the whole lawn crackles underneath us as we go back into the house.

The weed-themed sandwiches turn out to be the only meat we see in the week or so we’re staying with Christopher and Randy and their friends. Most everybody else and all the bands that come through the house are vegans. At first I think this is annoying, and I hear my brother in the back of my head saying “I hate fucking hippies.” But everybody being vegan means everybody cooks, because I guess there’s not enough good vegan food around, so everybody, the girls and the guys, all cook for each other. Five twenty-year-old people use their tiny kitchen seven or eight more times in a week than me and my dad and my brother use our enormous one. Maybe this week is an anomaly and they don’t usually make this much food this often, but it doesn’t seem like it. They seem to have their routine down pretty well. Eric doesn’t complain or seem to notice one way or the other: he’s eating less and less.

It gets pretty okay. The girls are cute and they all have projects they’re working on. Sometimes the bands are here to play an actual gig at an actual venue but sometimes they’re just playing at the house, which they don’t seem to think is any less real than an actual gig, and none of the kids who come to the show do either. And they all talk like Randy and Christopher and some of them are actually being sarcastic but a lot of them aren’t, and the girls are really nice, which I guess doesn’t necessarily mean they like you, but it’s nice when a cute girl in glasses who writes a sex column for the college paper is nice to you either way.

And kids do come to these house shows. And Randy and Christopher and James just let them in, and I’m sure if Albert were here he wouldn’t mind either; in fact, he’s probably in somebody’s house in Tulsa or Washington State right now and kids are showing up to pay the band two dollars so they can buy gas. The most kids come for this guy Randall Coats’ show, he just stands in the middle of the room, everybody sitting or standing around, and just him and his guitar, and his songs are a little sincere and a little saccharine for me but Eric leans over and says, “This would be good for the soundtrack,” and I guess it would. I actually listen and it actually would.

All the kids know all the words to his songs and Randall Coats seems really happy, and you’d think it would be weird after the “show” is over, we’re all still just here in the house, but it isn’t, he just bows and takes his guitar off and hands it to a kid who wants to know about his tuning and he starts talking to kids.

Later I’m smoking weed in the backyard with some kids I’ve just met and granted sometimes this place seems like the scene of the crime but for a minute after passing the joint to the left everything loses its crime-scene aspect and these kids make absolute and total sense to me, and Eric and I, if we can help it, will return here one day and stay forever where Chelsea 2 makes journals she sells online and Larissa is getting her picture taken in a yellow raincoat underneath a streetlight and everybody can cook. Of course the show is in the living room and of course the bikes are in the garage and I will meet these girls and their friends and chase them through the bookstore. Eric and I will sit together in the back row of a class on poverty and if I miss a class to fool around in the top bunk of some girl’s bed in a dorm Eric will have the notes and we will spend the afternoon picking apart burritos. We’ll inherit this house and run a campus magazine out of it. Illustrated by Darren Bennett Written by Eric Lederer.

One day in the living room I get woken up by the drummer from Andre The Client talking on his cell phone to someone who I guess from his tone of voice is his girlfriend back home. The sliding glass patio door is a big square of light. I don’t see Eric anywhere. I get up and bum around the house looking for him. While stepping over sleeping band members I think that it has been the same day for Eric since he was born, the same day since we met, the same day since he and Christine got together, the same day since I called the guy who works for The Man or who The Man works for on him, and it will be the same day when this whole thing comes to an end, reaches whatever conclusion it’s going to. My phone vibrates in my pocket. I have a text from Eric reading DON’T WORRY. BAD DAY. GOING TO THE DESERT.

When he gets back I want to ask him if he can maybe see down the barrel of his one long day and tell me how this all works out. Not like I think he’s psychic, but for him it’s all one unbroken day, and while I couldn’t tell you what’s going to happen to me twenty years from now in a span of time all broken up by sleep, I could probably tell you, based on how my day is going, how my night’s going to be. And since for him it’s all one unbroken day I want to hear from him how he thinks it might end.

When I wake up from a nap that afternoon he’s there in the living room and everybody from the band is gone. I remember there was something I wanted to ask him this morning but I don’t remember what. On the coffee table, Eric has smoothed out the wrinkled picture of the Thragnacian Containment Pylon from my front yard. He’s staring at the picture until he notices I’m awake. He smiles and says, I guess about the drawing, “We did a really good job.”

I agree with him and before I can say anything else he’s gone to take a shower to wash the desert off.

Aside from all the living-room shows, there are real shows too. The actual shows at actual venues are not much different than the living-room shows, it’s the same kids and some of their friends, except now there’s a raised platform and sometimes amplified sound. And when there’s amplifiers there’s usually more dancing. These kids really like dancing, in this sort-of-ironic-but-not way which is the same way they talk, the same way they do everything, sincere like sincerity is new, as surprised as I am to find out that they really mean it.

I don’t dance. Eric I’ve never even seen in the same room as dancing, with the exception of the time we went to an arcade and tried Dance Dance Revolution and waited for each other to admit that we hated it and were exhausted so we could go play the zombie-killing games.

Even the real venues aren’t what you would consider big concert spaces. Mostly we end up at this art gallery place downtown that also has shows in the back. It’s called Circumference. And at Circumference on this particular night we’re watching The Achievables, who are from Olympia, Washington, but before that the opening act is up. They’re called Ten Who Dared, even though there are only eight of them. Eric has a good point when he says he could understand calling your band that if there were like, four or five of you, but eight is so close to ten all the irony is lost. This seems like a pretty good observation, and I’m repeating it to Chelsea 2, not necessarily giving Eric full credit, when she says, “Have you seen them?”

“No,” I say, “not yet,” because maybe that will make it seem like I’ve been meaning to see them, trying really hard to see them, it’s just circumstances that have stood in my way.

“They’re local,” she says, which, I have come to learn, is a good thing.

“Oh,” I say.

“Yeah, they’re really good,” she says. “You HAVE to dance.”

I am skeptical and sure that when they are done tuning up their instruments the six guys and two girls onstage will not be able to do what numerous DJs haven’t been able to make me do, which is dance. Well, okay, not numerous. That one DJ Mike at that one drama party that one time.

But when they start playing it’s not weird or obtuse or arty or difficult to get, it’s fun and simple and pretty catchy. And kids start dancing, and I guess it’s not really good dancing in the technical sense but they commit really hard to it and it doesn’t look intimidating. Chelsea 2 has her hair up in pigtails and as she moves around the ends of the pigtails bounce off her cheeks, and her cheeks have freckles, and when she grabs my hand and pulls me towards the center of the room where kids are bouncing up and down and side to side and girls are flipping their skirts around their ankles and laughing, I go with her and I feel like a retard and a spaz and all those other things but I sort of don’t give a shit, and I think of that one time with that one DJ when I didn’t dance, all those theater kids and Christine, and how different this is and how long ago that was except I guess it’s not that different because when the song is over and the singer says “Thank you, we’re Ten Who Dared and we’re from Cave Creek” and everybody cheers, someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn around and it’s Christine.

“I wanted to come say hi to you before it seemed, like brutally obvious that I wasn’t coming to say hi to you,” she says. “Besides, I miss you. Can we go talk somewhere?”

It’s kind of cold outside but I’m all sweaty from dancing or whatever you want to call it so it actually feels nice.

“So how’ve you been?” I say, the words sort of catching in my throat.

“Okay I guess,” she says. “I just really want to apologize for everything that happened with me and Eric. Everything just got fucked up so fast, and when he started acting really weird towards you … I mean, I couldn’t understand it. I can’t believe you’re still friends with him.”

“He has his reasons,” I say.

“Yeah, well. It’s good to see you guys. Even if you can’t, like, talk to me. Where is he, anyway? I saw him when I came in, but…”

“I think he’s smoking with Aaron and Paul by the fire exit.”

“Aw, neat. Those guys love him. Everybody loves him.”

“Yeah, it’s cool. Your friends are really nice.” I’ve run out of things to say, or anyway, say-able things, so I ask: “What about your theater friends?”

“Ugh, don’t get me started. Some friends. Mr. Hendershaw came up for review this year for what the administration refers to as some of his ‘questionable choices,’ and they had this town hall meeting, and NOBODY stood by him. Nobody he didn’t cast in absolutely every role they ever thought they deserved, which is nobody, of course, so everybody just, I don’t know, copped out, and so it doesn’t look like he’ll be coming back next year….”

She continues, and I don’t particularly care about the theater kids, but now I’m really glad I asked, because something slides into place for me, and I really want to go back inside. Not to get away from Christine, she’s fine, she can go or stay, it really doesn’t matter, but inside are the bands, and inside is Chelsea 2. It’s not like I like her, but I COULD like her, and I like what she represents. If I told her I liked her because she represents possibility, she’d probably hit me. But she does represent it, the same way Eric represents the fact that anything is possible.

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. It always sounded like a dumb cliché that escaped from a Disney movie, and it was the thing that I dismissed first when I started collecting what I figured were the opinions mature people have, that most everything is bullshit and you can’t trust anybody and there is no magic to be had. But these kids are older than I am, they go to college, and they don’t seem to think that everything is stupid, not everything. And Eric, whom I sold out over the girl standing next to me, proves that not only is everything not stupid but everything is possible, the world is movie-quality like we always hoped it was.

I am thinking of a good way to get back inside and enjoy the rest of the concert when red and blue lights start flashing down the street. This venue gets a lot of noise complaints. Some of the cops might even be the same ones that busted Christopher’s house earlier this week for a noise complaint, and that will be a pain in the ass. I’m thinking about going around the side of the building to tell Eric that if he’s smoking weed he should probably ditch it when out of the second cop car that pulls up steps a guy in a suit. The Man. When I see him I get the power of flight and use it to get around the side of the building before Christine even knows I’m gone.

Eric seems to know why I’m tear-assing toward him and his semicircle of weed smokers and without thinking about it he starts booking in the same direction three steps ahead of me. The smokers follow suit, thinking they know why we’re running and figuring they ought to too. I guess they’re right, there are cops here and for them the consequences of being caught in public with a joint and whatever else they have in their pockets might include spending the night at the police station, an embarrassing call to their parents if they’re in high school, a misdemeanor charge if they’re not. But their lives will continue and they’ll get to keep going to shows. Eric and I, who knows, but if we keep running and don’t stop and don’t get tripped up at least we get another day of running.

And we do keep running, really pretty good at it now, and the smokers break off after what they figure is a reasonably safe distance from the cops, and we must look incredibly paranoid to keep sprinting with nobody in blue chasing us. But we keep looking behind us and seeing The Man, always coming around the corner no matter how fast we run. Downtown is pretty barren tonight since there are no sporting events, and our feet are loud as shit among the skyscrapers. Eric’s breathing is loud too, raggedy, I guess maybe from smoking, but on top of that something sounds broken. He keeps running, though. I think like that Dance Dance Revolution game, we’re both waiting for the other to stop.

By the time we seem to have lost The Man we’re in what I guess you would call the barrio. I throw my hood up and sit in a bus shelter with a broken light.

Eric takes out his phone.

“It could be tapped,” I say.

Eric nods like, of course, then crosses the street and calls Christopher from a pay phone. Christopher is, I imagine, still at the show or maybe in the back of a paddywagon or maybe having his nuts shocked by mysterious government agents in order to get him to surrender our location, so Eric leaves a voicemail, something along the lines of we’re sorry we got them mixed up in our mess, we never meant to drag them down with us. It sounds overdramatic but we haven’t been home or at school in almost a week and we’re fugitives from some cipher with whole stores of really good drugs and we’re feeling pretty overdramatic, if you want to know the truth.

We walk south down side streets parallel to Central Avenue, not wanting to actually go down the well-lit main street. “I used to have T-ball down here,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” Eric says. “Were you good?”

“No,” I say, “terrible.”

Come to think of it the aluminum bat I had for T-ball got thrown in my brother’s trunk the night he and his friends were supposed to take care of our problem. I am sort of disgusted that something from my childhood was almost used to bludgeon somebody, but then I think how if it actually had been used to bludgeon somebody, I might be home in bed instead of walking down side streets parallel to Central Avenue, and Eric might be home, not in bed, listening to early music on the NPR affiliate or thinking about fractals. I feel a weird mix of emotions, none of which seem like they go together but they all get felt at the same time. I’m getting more of these lately.

Central terminates at the mountains. On the other side of the mountains is our neighborhood and lots of others. We hit a cul-de-sac and just keep walking. I remind myself that they’re not even technically big enough to be mountains, they’re really just hills we call “the mountains,” but it’s dark and past midnight and there could be coyotes and God knows what else up here, the homeless junkies who’ve been kicked out of their model homes, anything. But no one would think to look for us up here. So two unathletic boys stumble upwards in the middle of the night toward the big TV antennas with red lights on them that always meant home to me after coming back from vacation or summer camp.

“This is really scary,” Eric says. I’m glad he thinks so, too.

When we get to the top of the mountains or the hills or whatever they are, I am not surprised to see there are not actual TVs mounted on the antennas showing what they’re broadcasting. It is too bad the red lights are serving their purpose of keeping planes from flying too low: if they were low enough we could grab on to their bellies and get away.

“What if we left?” I say to Eric. “Like, drove away, or flew? Went to California?”

“No,” Eric says, right on top of me. “Running is just running. Let them come.”

With our neighborhoods spread out below us, most everything dark except for the orange streetlights wrapped in strands around blocks with mansions and blocks with normal houses and blocks with no houses at all yet, Eric tells me we’d better just stand and fight.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he says.

“Nah, I will. I will. But who are we fighting and what are we fighting them with?”

“I gotta show you something,” Eric says, and starts down the hill towards home.

It’s faster going downhill and by the time we get to the bottom the cuffs of my jeans are full of stickers and cactus needles. Nothing has stuck itself straight up into my shoe yet, which is good, but I’m looking forward to walking on pavement again at the bottom of the hill. There’s a fence and on the other side of it are construction sites that become neighborhoods farther along. We hop the fence and Eric veers right, towards more desert. We’re heading away from the hills, walking alongside civilization, houses on our left and more desert on our right.

There used to be desert behind my house, then they threw a band of highway a mile or two away in the desert and filled that space with houses, and that’s where Eric’s house is. Someday they’ll throw a highway to our right and fill the space we’re in now with houses. It’s just starting to get light on the very edge of the sky by the time we get to where I guess we’re going, which is the desert that’s behind Eric’s house right now and won’t be anymore someday. I followed him out here one day and caught him looking like Lord of the Flies. I know sort of where we are because of the fast-food signs I can see from here, the Sonic and the Wendy’s and the Exxon that go together near the freeway. My head does that thing where you had no idea where you were and everything’s a strange blur but then you see a landmark and that orients you and suddenly you can fit everything in your head.

Eric stops, looks around. “We can rest here for a while until it gets light.” He lies down with his back against something big and artificial, a dug-up drainpipe or something. I lean back against it as well and start trying to pick stickers and burrs out of my jeans but it’s dark and I can’t really see and I keep pricking myself, so after a while I just lay my head back and fall asleep.

Later the sun’s up almost completely and I sort of forget where I am and I really want to get the sun out of my eyes so I turn my head to the left. There’s some graffiti or something on the drainpipe near my shoulder. It’s this elaborate, bent fleur-de-lis: the banner of the Thragnacian Sentinels, who are charged with keeping a baby wormhole from devouring the universe in TimeBlaze. I didn’t know Eric did graffiti. But the symbol is kind of way too good and intricate to be graffiti. I think I must still be asleep but I’m pretty sure it’s broad daylight two miles out of town and I am dozing with my back against a Thragnacian Containment Pylon.

I stand up and turn around and the thing is so white in the sun my eyes hurt from looking at it. The pylon isn’t floating at a point in space emitting an invisible antimatter field that, in concert with all the other pylons, keeps the wormhole from tearing up more of the universe’s fabric, and even weirder, it isn’t sitting all flat and miniature and two-dimensional on a drawing pad on my desk, it’s out here full-size, inactive, and buried halfway in the sand. All its curves, all its insignia, all the design details I cribbed from the cover of a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles I got from the school library, they’re all here two miles from my house in the real world with breathing people and cars.

Beyond the pylon, farther into the desert, Eric is peeing behind a bush. When he turns around he sees me see the thing and the first thing I ask him is “How did you build it?”

“I didn’t,” he says, “I sort of thought it. I thought it.”