Never leave a message for someone you really want to reach. No, you keep phoning and phoning until someone picks up—out of anger or curiosity or fear—and then you blurt out whatever words will keep them on the line.

I rang Krissi’s mother twelve times before she picked up the phone, then, in a rush, said, “This is Libby Day, Ben Day’s little sister, do you remember Ben Day?”

I heard moist lips part with a puckery sound, then a thin voice murmured, “Yes, I remember Ben Day. What is this about, please?” Like I was a telemarketer.

“I’d like to talk to you or someone in your family about the charges your daughter Krissi made against Ben.”

“We don’t talk about that … what was your name, Lizzy? I’ve remarried, and I have very little contact with my previous family.”

“Do you know how I can reach Lou or Krissi Cates?”

She let out a sigh like a single puff of smoke. “Lou would be in some bar, somewhere in the state of Kansas, I’d guess. Krissi? Drive west on I-70, just past Columbia. Take a left into any of those strip clubs. Don’t call again.”

Ben DayJANUARY 2, 1985

12:51 P.M.

He took a piece of pink construction paper from Krissi’s bin, folded it in two, wrote on it, It’s Christmas Break and I’m Thinking of You—Guess Who? With a B at the bottom. She’d get a blast out of that. He thought about taking something from Krissi’s bin and transferring it to Libby’s but decided not to. Libby turning up with something nice would be suspicious. He wondered how big a joke he and his sisters were at school. The three girls shared one-and-a-half wardrobes, Michelle running around in his old sweaters, Debby wearing what she scrounged from Michelle, and Libby in what was left: patched-up boys’ blue jeans, soiled old baseball jerseys, cheap knit dresses that Debby’s belly had stretched out. That was the difference with Krissi. All her clothes had snap. Diondra, too, with her perfect jeans. If Diondra’s jeans were faded, it was because that was the latest style, if they had bleach splatters, it was because she’d bought them with bleach splatters. Diondra had a big allowance, she’d taken him shopping a few times, holding clothes up to him like he was a baby, telling him to smile. Telling him he could work it off, wink wink. He wasn’t sure if guys should let girls buy their clothes, wasn’t sure if it was cool or not. Mr. O’Malley, his homeroom teacher, always joked about new shirts his wife was making him wear, but Mr. O’Malley was married. Anyway. Diondra liked him in black and he didn’t have the money to buy anything. Fucking Diondra would have her way as usual.

That’s another reason it was cool to hang out with Krissi: She assumed he was cool because he was fifteen, and to her fifteen seemed extremely mature. She wasn’t like Diondra, who laughed at him at weird moments. He’d ask her, “What’s so funny?” and she’d just giggle through a closed mouth and sputter, “Nothing. You’re cute.” The first time they’d tried to have sex, he’d been so clumsy with the condom she’d started laughing and he’d lost his hard-on. The second time she’d grabbed the condom away from him and tossed it across the room, said screw it, and put him inside her.

Now he had a hard-on, just thinking about it. He was dropping the note in Krissi’s bin, his dick hard as hell, and in walked Mrs. Darksilver, the teacher for second grade.

“Hey Ben, watchoo doing here?” she smiled. She was in jeans and a sweater, penny loafers, and toddled toward him, carrying a bulletin board and a length of plaid ribbon.

He turned away from her, started toward the door back to the high school.

“Ah nothing, just wanted to drop something off in my sister’s bin.”

“Well, don’t run away, come give me a hug at least. Never see you anymore now that you’re the big high school man.”

She kept coming toward him, loafers padding on the concrete, that big pink grin on her face, with the bangs cut straight across. He’d had a crush on her as a kid, that sharp fringe of black hair. He turned completely away from her and tried to hobble toward the door, his dick still jammed up against his pant leg. But just as he was turning he could tell she knew what was going on. She dropped that smile and a disgusted, embarrassed grimace came across her whole face. She didn’t even say anything else, that’s how he knew that she’d seen it. She was looking at the bin he was in front of—Krissi Cates, not his sister.

He felt like an animal limping away, some wounded buck that needed to be put down. Just shoot. He had flashes of guns some-times, a barrel against his temple. In one of his notebooks, he’d written a quote by Nietzsche that he’d found while flipping through Bartlett’s one day, waiting for the football players to leave the building so he could clean:

It is always consoling to think of suicide;

it’s what gets one through many a bad night.

He’d never actually kill himself. He didn’t want to be the tragic freak that girls cried over on the news, even though they never talked to him in real life. Somehow that seemed more pathetic than his life already was. Still, at night, when things were really bad and he felt the most trapped and dickless, it was a nice thought, getting into his mother’s gun cabinet (combination 5-12-69, his parents’ anniversary, now a joke), taking that nice metal weight in his hands, sliding some bullets into the chamber, just as easy as squirting toothpaste, pressing it against his temple, and immediately shooting. You’d have to immediately shoot, gun to temple, finger on trigger, or you might talk yourself out of it. It had to be one motion—and then you just drop to the ground like clothes falling off a hanger. Just … swoosh. On the floor, and you were someone else’s problem for a change.

He didn’t plan on doing any of that, but when he needed some release and he couldn’t jerk off, or he’d already jerked off and needed more release, that’s usually what he thought of. On the floor, sideways, like his body was just a pile of laundry waiting to be gathered up.

HE BUSTED THROUGH the doors and his dick went down, like just crossing into the high school emasculated him. Grabbed the bucket and rolled it back to the closet, washed his hands with hard Lava soap.

He headed down the stairwell and toward the back door as a pack of upperclassmen brushed past him toward the parking lot, his head feeling hot under the black hair, imagining what they were thinking—-freak, just like the coach—and they said nothing, didn’t even look at him, actually. Thirty seconds behind them, he banged open the doors, the sun against the snow a shocking white. If this was a video, now would be the guitar flare, the whammy bar … Bweeeerrrr!

Outside, the guys were piling into a truck and peeling out in loose, showy loops across the parking lot. And he was unchaining his bike, his head throbbing, a drip of blood falling on the handlebar. He smeared it up with a fingertip, swiped the fingertip across the trickle on his forehead and, without thinking, put the finger in his mouth, like it was a stray glob of jelly.

He needed some relief. Beer and maybe a joint, undo himself a little. The only place to try was Trey’s. Actually it wasn’t Trey’s place, Trey never said where he lived, but when Trey wasn’t at Diondra’s he most likely was at the Compound, down a long dirt road off Highway 41, surrounded by hedgeapples on both sides, and then came a big brush-hogged clearing, with a warehouse made of a hard, tin material. The whole thing rattled in the wind. In the winter, a generator hummed inside, just enough juice to run a bunch of spaceheaters and a TV with sketchy reception. Dozens of carpet samples sat in bright, smelly patches on the dirt floor and a few old ugly couches had been donated. People gathered smoking around the spaceheaters like they were actual bonfires. Everyone had beer—they just kept the cans sitting in the frost outside the door—and everyone had joints. Usually there was a 7-Eleven run at some point, whoever was flush would come back with a few dozen burritos, some microwaved, some still frozen. If they had extra, they jammed the burritos in the snow alongside the beer.

Ben had never been there without Diondra, it was her crowd, but where the fuck else was he going to go? Showing up with a broken forehead was sure to get him a grudging nod and a can of Beast. They might not be friendly—Trey was never exactly friendly—but it wasn’t in their code to turn anyone away. Ben was sure to be the youngest, although there’d been younger: once a couple had shown up with a little boy, naked except for a pair of jeans. While everyone got stoned, the kid sat silently sucking his thumb on the sofa, staring at Ben. Mostly though, people were twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, the age where they’d have gone to college if they hadn’t dropped out of high school. He’d stop by, and maybe they’d like him, and Diondra would stop calling him Tag (short for Tagalong) every time she took him there. They’d at least let him sit in the corner and drink a beer for a few hours.

Maybe it’d be smarter to go home, but fuck that.

THE WAREHOUSE WAS rattling when Ben finally pedaled up, the tin sides vibrating with a guitar riff inside. Sometimes guys brought amps with them, worked the whammy bar until everyone’s ears shrank to pinholes. Whoever was playing was pretty good—some Venom song, perfect for his mood. RumadumDUMrum! It was the noise of incoming horsemen, looters, and burners. The sound of chaos.

He let his bike fall over in the snow and worked his hands loose, cracked his neck. His head hurt now, a ringing sort of hurt, not as easy to ignore as a headache. He was hungry as shit. He’d ridden up and down the highway, trying to talk himself into making the turn for the warehouse. He needed a good story for the cut on his face, something that wouldn’t get him as much shit as awwww, baby fell off his bike. Now he daydreamed that Diondra or Trey would pull up just in time, escort him in, no biggie, everyone all smiles and liquor when he walked through the door.

But he’d have to go in alone. He could see for miles across all that flat snow, and no cars were coming. He pushed the flap up with a boot and squeezed in, the guitar peel banging around the walls like a cornered animal. The guy playing the guitar, Ben had seen before. He claimed he was a roadie at one point with Van Halen but he was short on details of how anything really worked on the road. He glanced past Ben but didn’t register him, his eyes floating out to an imaginary crowd. Four guys and a girl, all with fried-out kinky hair, all older, passing around a joint, slouched around the carpet squares. They barely looked at him. The ugliest guy had his hands on the girl’s hips, she was stretched across him like a cat. Her nose was stunted and her face was red with acne sores and she seemed deeply stoned.

Ben walked across the space—there was a huge gap between the door and the carpet squares—and sat down on one thin green patch about four feet away from the group, kept his eyes sideways on them so he could give a nod. No one was eating, there’d be no food to scrounge. If he’d been Trey, he’d have given them a shake of his head and said, “Set me up with some of that, will ya?” and he’d be smoking with them at least.

The guitar player, Alex, was actually pretty decent. A guitar was another thing Ben wanted, a Floyd Rose Tremolo. He’d fucked around on one in Kansas City when he and Diondra had gone into a guitar store, and it felt OK, like something he could pick up. At least learn enough to play a few really kickass songs, come back here and make the warehouse shake. Everyone he knew had something they were good at, even if it was just being good at spending money, like Diondra. Whenever he told her things he wanted to learn, things he wanted to do, she laughed and said what he needed to do was get a decent paycheck.

“Groceries cost money, electricity costs money, you don’t even understand,” she’d say. Diondra paid a lot of the bills at her house since her parents were gone so much, that was true, but she paid the bills with her parents’ stinking money. Ben wasn’t sure being able to write a check was such an amazing thing. He wondered what time it was and wished he’d just gone over to her house and waited. Now he’d have to stay here and hour or so, so they wouldn’t think he was leaving because no one was talking to him. His pants were still damp from the bucket spill, and he could smell old tuna on the front of his shirt.

“Hey,” said the girl. “Hey kid.”

He looked up at her, the black hair falling over an eye.

“Shouldn’t you be in school or something?” she said, her words coming in dopey mounds. “Why are you here?”

“It’s break.”

“He says it’s break,” she told her boyfriend. The guy, mangy and sunk-cheeked, with an outline of a moustache, peered up at that.

“You know someone here?” the boyfriend asked him.

Ben gestured toward Alex. “I know him.”

“Hey Alex, you know this kid?”

Alex stopped the guitar, paused with both legs wide in a rocker pose and looked at Ben, hunched on the floor. Shook his head.

“Nah, man. I don’t hang out with middle schoolers.”

This was the sort of shit they always gave him. Ben had thought the new black hair would have helped, made him look less young. But guys just liked to fuck with him, or ignore him. It was something about the way he was built, or the way he walked, or something in his blood. He was always picked third to last in any team game—the afterthought boy who was grabbed right before the real shitballs. Guys seemed to know it instantly; they flirted with Diondra in front of him all the time. Like they knew his dick wilted a little bit when he entered a room. Well, fuck them, he was sick of it.

“Suck my dick,” Ben muttered.

“Wohhhh! The little guy is pissed!”

“Looks like he’s been in a fight,” the girl said.

“Dude, dude, you been in a fight?” The music had stopped entirely now. Alex had propped his guitar up against one icy wall and was smoking with the rest, grinning and bobbing his head. Their voices boomed up to the ceiling and echoed out, like fireworks.

Ben nodded.

“Yeah, who’d you fight?”

“No one you know.”

“Ah, I know pretty much everyone. Try me. Who was it, your little brother? You get beat up by your little brother?”

“Trey Teepano.”

“You lie,” Alex said. “Trey’d kick your ass.”

“You fought that crazy Indian mother fucker? Isn’t Trey part Indian?” said the boyfriend, ignoring Alex now.

“What the fuck that got to do with anything, Mike?” one of their friends asked. He sucked in some weed with a roach clip, the bright pink feather fluttering in the cold. The girl finished it off, cashed the joint, and snapped the roach clip back into her hair. One mousy curl tweaked out crookedly from her head.

“I hear he’s into some scary-ass shit,” Mike said. “Like serious, conjuring Satan shit.”

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