April

by ninety6tears

The last weekend before the Walk is when just about every young person in the country gets their yearly fix of misbehaving. Under the strict caution of his father, Ray Garraty usually stays out of it. But when he ends up impulsively spending his Friday night with a stranger he meets in town, he may be getting into far more trouble than he's used to. [AU]

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Teri Copley: How do you know when you're in love?

Bachelor #3: Oh, that's real easy. My socks get all soggy.

- The Dating Game

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Even in sepia print, the girl's eyes looked like they might have once caught like jewels in the slightest glow, turned her emotions against the air. The four corners of the poster-sized photograph seemed affected by her like a surface struck with lightning, all the more because of the sizzling edges of her fraying milkmaid braids crowning a skeletal, sunken face. She had looked into the lens as if through the photographer, to something behind him that was hunting the last of her.

There were several shots of Julie Bugliosi from a few days before; her cheeks had had a plumper shape, rising like cherries in a slight sunburn. This photo, shot in a flash just seconds after her win and seemingly catching her in some animal obliviousness, fell vaguely within the category of contraband, despite it being such a popular reprint that just about anyone had seen it at least once.

"Rinse?" said the hygienist, and Ray Garraty leaned. She let him swish the water around some before spitting it out, and wielded the floss around her fingers. He opened his mouth and got back to his gaping at Julie Bugliosi, her picture taped to the slanted ceiling between a decorative diagram of the American presidents and a serene photo of some flamingos bowing in front of a dusk sky.

"Doctor Miller should be with you in a few minutes. Do you care which color for your toothbrush?"

He shook his head, and then winced to see she'd handed him a purple one.

Later his father was waiting on the hood of the car, his eyes fixed blankly on the newspaper in his lap. Ray doubted he was actually reading it. He looked up to see him and his features rose out of the stony weight. "Ice cream?"

Sundaes after the dentist were a tradition from Ray's childhood. He felt reflexively opposed to how it comforted him to still get the offer. "They just gave me the fluoride," he said.

His father gave a cringe and an encouraging look. "Come on."

They ate their ice cream with the car pulled over next to the lake, the sun starting to creep down below the visors. The semi-domestic area was usually more quiet, but the momentum of this Friday evening heaved with self-importance, the highway fireworks already snapping an occasional distant boom and some loud college boys close by hanging in and out of a Cadillac. The movement was beginning, and Ray and his father sat together slouching inside of it, silently finishing their sundaes and saying nothing of it. It was a caged silence.

Finally Ray's dad said, "I don't think I could make that movie tonight."

He'd just finished up a couple of his busiest delivery days of the year; Ma had been in one of her nervous spells, so he'd only gotten a few hours of sleep before getting up to take Ray from school to his appointment. "Sure. I figured."

"You'll go by yourself?"

"I don't mind." Usually Dad might have preferred to keep an eye on him, but Ray thought with agitation that he was almost a man and it should've been none of his business.

"I'll give you some money."

A flare whistled across the sky; Ray felt his stroke of annoyance die. "I've still got a little left," he said.

His mother's mood was looking up around dinner time. Inside the enclosed light of their modest house, Ray's regard for his parents loosened into something warmer. He repeated something he'd heard in home room that morning that made his mom laugh, and he didn't understand why it was funny to her, but his father caught it with that tint of love in his eyes that seemed to belong only to men who could hide the smallest smile behind a beard. By the time Ray reminded his mother he was taking the bus somewhere his dad had forgotten what was out there this time of year, and didn't tense at the thought of it.

"Aren't you taking out that Tracy? She seemed nice enough."

Ray's father scoffed at her "enough," while Ray met his glance with a look that refrained an earlier correction. Tracy Suitor lived across town in a young women's housing unit that didn't suit her personality; she wasn't exactly his girlfriend, and she wasn't exactly nice, but he'd admitted to his dad that neither of those things bothered him and gotten the man's brand of teasing that flared up to scolding if it wasn't handled with the right kind of humility: Sounds very adult, Ray. I hope you're handling it like an adult?

"Tracy's going to some party. I don't know anyone there."

His mother's eyes went still for a second: they all knew what kind of party. Just as suddenly, she resumed collecting the dishes and said, "Don't be out too late, Ray."

He noted that the instructions weren't too specific as he was shrugging into his jacket. On his way out the door, wanting to save that glow of only minutes before, he did something he would usually only do if he wasn't going to see his family in a while: bending over, he kissed his mother on the cheek, said, "Love you, Ma," and then did the same, but wordlessly, for his father, who only looked at him with a preoccupied warmth.

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The bus was already rowdier than usual, but not too crowded. Ray picked his place next to a man reading a balled-up paperback in one hand, but everyone else was people his age, loud, not alone. With the last couple days before the Walk landing right on the weekend, it was bound to get frenzied. He would probably have to walk home.

The movie had been going for 20 minutes when he walked into the theater, and despite the dialogue humming over the blown-out speakers it held a chapel's whisper of refuge. Fifteen or so people were sprinkled throughout the seats which had at one point been oddly painted white, like powdering chairs, but were now mostly chipped down to a light wood; Ray picked the unoccupied row several up from the back and found a seat that hadn't had its cushion worn to a flat sack.

He found his mind wandering, but the film was fine. It hadn't been "post-chopped," as they said in the industry; the finished product had been delivered and inevitably trimmed down for appropriateness, but the filmmakers didn't have time to resubmit new footage. It was the way of the picture show, and if you didn't have the imagination to fill in the blanks after the obtrusive jump-cut, you settled for being the guy who was one row back and a few seats over from Ray, who gave a small scoff of agitation when one scene got black-barred about an hour in.

Further into the film, his neighbor got increasingly vocal. At first it was only a loose line of mumbles Ray couldn't have made out, but around the 90-minute mark, the film stuttered over another cut and he groaned, "Come on. Just show the damn movie!"

His words were just uncouth enough and the slide of them slurred by liquor, probably, and the rest of the audience glared in dutiful discomfort while Ray felt self-conscious just to be the nearest one to him. Only one was annoyed enough to say, "Yeah, yeah, keep it down," after he cursed again vaguely.

"Look, Scout," the young man said just below a holler, congenially confrontational: "I came here to watch Pacino. Didn't you?"

The man who'd aired his grievance turned back to facing the screen. There was a shift of shy amusement from a couple directions; one twenty-something far up on the right seating section said, "I did." The girl next to him soberly declared, "I came here to watch Pacino," almost at the same time.

"Hear, hear," said somebody else. "Now shut the shit up and watch it."

Ray couldn't help a snigger and he heard the young man behind falling into it with him, caught a glance at him sitting back in his seat as he muttered, "Sing it, Sam, it's the bullshit business," or something like that. But it was quiet after that.

The crowd was settled through to the end credits, and most of them got up to leave while the scrolling letters became white on black. Not knowing why, Ray tilted his glance over just enough to be heard and said, "You got a point. Could be an Oscar scene sitting on the cutting room floor."

He made a sneering sound of doubt. "Fuck that; 'cutting room floor.' I bet all the unseemly stuff gets taken home by the brass so they can jerk to it."

"Well, it'd be a hassle to burn it for one thing. Because of the nitrate. And you don't hear about a lot of fires happening at the committee buildings."

He seemed to have just now earned the young man's full attention; his manner of speaking slowed with the interest. "If it's so explosive, I bet that's what caused the fire at the Arabian."

"I never heard about that."

"It was my hometown."

"Where are you from?"

Not answering, he moved a couple seats over so he was right behind Ray, and held out to him what Ray realized was a flask and then took without really thinking about it. The newsreel had started up on the screen, interrupted with a propaganda spot (the same sturdy boot of the nation metaphor they'd been repeating since Ray was still playing with toys) and a Coke ad between some speculative filler about the Walk forecast.

The young man said, "I thought all this time they didn't make film like that anymore."

"Not in Public Arts. Safety film has been perfected for decades. The official explanation is that it's too pricey compared to the alternative, but that hasn't been true since the forties. There are just some people who suspect the real reason is that the dangers create the cover of a safety code; there are impromptu inspections to make sure theater managers are following all the nitrocellulose precautions, but really—"

"It's to keep the theaters on their toes. Make sure there's no banned material among those reels."

"So they say. Though maybe it only makes so much sense. Why not just have decency inspections?"

The man considered. "That's less people inclined to open theaters. And who would peddle the propaganda?"

Ray considered the risk of this conversation, silent for a short moment. The swig he'd taken from the flask was a strong brand, he hadn't had alcohol nearly enough times to know of what. He guessed this guy was older than him, but as in many other states there was no problem getting booze at the end of April, when you were heartily congratulated for being supple with a lift on the youth curfew and a number of other things. They wanted to let them all get something out of their system, it seemed, but there was something about the wry excitability of this man that felt like it was apart from all that.

Handing the flask back, he said, "I'm Ray Garraty."

"...Who told you this stuff, Garraty?"

"My father," he said, not sure why he felt a little foolish saying it. "He used to know a lot of people in film and broadcasting."

Their talk fell into a respite in the next moment, and the young man excused himself from the theater with only a cursory "Nice talking" a few minutes later. Ray decided not to stay for the 'B' feature after a few kids walked in, one of them a boy with his two hands in the pockets of a girl on either side of him. On the left was one with feathered hair going rusty red in the big screen's twisting light, tripping drunkenly at his side, giggling. The place had been repossessed.

Out under the yellow glow of the streetlights in the lot, there was a boy who seemed to be looking for something. It was only when he caught a muttered curse from him that Ray realized it was his neighbor from inside. He was scrutinizing the concrete under one of the sprays of wildflowers edging just into the cracked borders of the lot top—and Ray didn't mean to stare, but he couldn't have noticed before, that he had a prominent scar running down one cheek.

The young man looked over at him, his manners more sardonic at being observed.

"Did you lose something?" Ray asked.

"I lost my friend's house key, is all," he said. After a pause, Ray tried to help him look for a moment, while he explained, "I was sitting on the curb earlier...That's the only time I can think it would have fallen out."

A car's headlights swerved a blinding spotlight over them, and Ray caught a better impression of the young man's strongly laid features. He wasn't quite a mean size but there was a definite sturdiness to him, an impression his movements had already carried without the light but it was somehow the wrong energy for the dark-haired mask that didn't seem to want to twist into much expression.

In the moment when they were turning their eyes down from the lights, there was an unspoken agreement to give up on the key, but Ray wasn't inclined to walk away. "My name's Pete McVries," the man finally said.

They shook hands in the dark.

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"How is it you don't know your way back?" Ray asked.

"I came from the mall where my friends took the ride. I really don't know my way around." McVries stooped away from the light of the intersection to sip from his flask and put it smoothly away.

"You came all these hours to see them and they didn't go to the movies with you?"

"Nevermind, man."

"No, listen. I think you just have to make it past downtown and you'll start to know where you are. I don't know my way around where the students live, though. I mean generally I do, but not the street names."

"I'll just get a cab."

"Who are you shitting? You'll never get a cab."

A car horn blared a couple times at a parade of jaywalkers; a blond teen who was piggybacking on one of her girlfriends somehow slipped and spilled onto her back in the middle of the street, laughing. Two of her friends halfheartedly attempted to drag her up until one of the night police came and removed her more forcibly. She was ejected from his grasp as soon as they reached the sidewalk and a duo of boys in varsity jackets gave her loud cheering from the other side of the street.

"Why don't I just try to walk you?"

McVries shifted. "You're all right. It's got to be out of the way."

Ray thought of home, and pictured his father. If he'd managed to wake himself up he'd have asked their neighbor over to watch some of the coverage. Playing the enthusiasm, like a monkey with a music box. His mother would be doing God knows what with some hundred-yard stare. "I've got nothing better to do."

He led him up the block, past the parking garage where somebody's car stereo was drumming a base thud. "Can't wait to tell Sandy I lost his extra house key," McVries grumbled. "Maybe I'll be able to copy him one tomorrow."

"How'd you come to have friends in town?"

"My mom sent me to this stupid art camp here once," he explained tersely. "I actually wasn't supposed to stay in town this long, but what the hell. Nobody's really complaining."

There was an unexpected chill through the night, Ray noticed. It helped fill a silence.

"Is it always a long week here?"

"What?" Ray asked.

"Walk week."

Ray didn't answer for a moment. "Curfew's off ten days in advance. It's a bigger event when there's someone from our region."

"Yeah, sounds about like everywhere else."

The subject hounded them. After they had been walking about half an hour they passed a pub Ray had heard made really good burgers, and when he said so McVries thought they should stop and eat. McVries got started on a beer right away, ordering one for each of them, and when the bartender came back with them he asked, "What are you betting on?"

"What?"

The man indicated the chalkboard numbered one through a hundred, with a dotted assortment of magnets placed under them in columns. There were no names to put with the numbers yet.

Apathetic, or irritable at his own ignorance, McVries impatiently said, "I can't bet," which wasn't true; gambling on the Walk was a staggering industry that took full advantage of the underage leniency, if not in every state.

"It's an informal lucky number thing," Ray explained with his own rushed irritation. "All the downtown businesses hold a pool and whichever one's customers call the most correct bets wins some money for a big promotional party or something."

"I don't—" McVries waved his hand, pulled out, "Number five. How's that. Now my friend here wants to try a burger."

He paid for both of them, to which Ray tried to argue but he said that it was for the favor. The food was good but it left him wanting a proper glass of water. He didn't know why he kept drinking whatever McVries pushed at him. Pete was having to shout above the crowds to chat to him about a disappointing book he'd read on the way into town, when Ray noticed the clock.

"Shit," he said.

"What's wrong?"

"My parents are going to flip if I don't at least call home soon."

McVries started to get up. "You'll never get the payphone in here. We better get moving."

When their feet were crunching over the gravel in a narrow street outside, McVries asked, "What does your old man do anyway?"

"He makes deliveries. Mostly rented equipment."

"Like studio equipment?"

"Not that stuff anymore, but he did. You know how the government lends out resources to the media outlets that go above minimum decency standards."

"Artists can barely get funding without bending over for that shit," McVries said with the grim flippancy of butting into a familiar wall. "I know all about that."

"He was finally able to buy his own rig again, though, so he doesn't have to do that anymore."

There was a kind of sly quiet on Pete's end. He said, "I guess I got some intel of my own."

Ray looked around. "Yeah?"

"Only a rumor. And not thrilling maybe, but...I knew somebody once who was a back-out."

"Seriously?" More fascinated than he'd expected to be, he asked, "What was his name?"

"Her." Pete's voice slowed to the drawl of recollection. "Victoria Clease. It was the last year they ran the girls' walk, which feels like forever ago. I guess I was, what, nine? The last time I saw Vic would've been at a warehouse party last year. But back when this was going on, she was still my babysitter."

Aside from his other thoughts, he did the math: he'd initially guessed McVries to be around drinking age, but if he'd been that young during the last girls' year he wasn't that much older than Ray.

"I didn't really completely understand what was happening at the time, only that suddenly all these people in the neighborhood wanted to talk to her about it. But I got kinda kids-tabled over it like, I had the impression I wasn't supposed to ask her about it because it would be nosy. But that time last year, we shared a couple smokes outside of the party, and she got to talking about it. This isn't the point, but: did you know they had to do an exit interview, if they backed out?"

"What? No. Just the girls?"

"I guess we'd have to find a guy who's backed out to know that. She didn't. They didn't even tell her that until she made the phone call...She said they make you really nervous about it, somehow, like you're not sure if they're going to reject your request and make you show up anyway. They sent her a car that took her straight to the airport and to some place serving as headquarters. The place wasn't actually that far from here—the presidential library—and she was waiting there for almost an entire day just for this interview. They'd wheel out what looked like hospital food but couldn't answer any questions about the wait. She's sitting there with a few other girls who have been waiting even longer and getting more and more nervous; one of them, the one who had been there the longest, actually threw up her hands. She said, 'I need to go home and get some sleep,' and then she was at the marker two days later."

"Hell," he exclaimed numbly. "Hell. But they wouldn't actually reject anybody?"

"I don't think so, but who knows? Vic wouldn't know. She said the questions on the test were really weird, but the questions in the interview were just...uncomfortable. And it was like they were trying to catch her off guard. They'd ask her something really personal, something she'd never been asked, like the questions themselves she wouldn't repeat, and then switch back to something...personal but kind of predictable and standard for a psych eval—'Have you ever thought about how you would kill someone?'—that kind of thing. It was so all over the place, and she was so tired, anything she might have lied about didn't seem worth the effort."

"I don't imagine they made it clear to her what they wanted to know exactly."

"Records. That was the word; it was all 'for the records, dear.' That's how she put it to me." They were passing under a flickering streetlight that shuttered over Pete's considering look, mincing him into a vulnerability somehow. "Thing is, and I'm not sure how to say it, there was always something about that family that maybe never would've been safe under the spotlight. You understand?"

McVries couldn't possibly understand it like Ray did. Ray nodded.

"Not like there was something…political about it. After all, they raised a girl that took the test. But...a kind of recklessness? I didn't notice the aftershocks, when they were still our neighbors, but I think that year had some effect on them that never wore off. When I was a freshman, I remember hearing something about how her half-brother got hauled off by the squads. He was a radio DJ who got himself up shit creek for playing a bit of undesirable Joan Baez on some Sunday afternoon...Not recklessness maybe, but restlessness. Vic was fifteen when she almost got sent off to die in the Walk. I think it must have brought out something that was already there, but the part that gets me is, what she said. She said she always thought that if she had given the right answers, nothing would have ever happened to her brother...See, I always figured that kind of paranoia would make you really keep your head down. But maybe sometimes it does the opposite thing."

Reluctant, or too drowsily dumbstruck to say anything, Ray was silent for a moment. It was broken when McVries tugged at his arm, pointing at a white house up on their eleven with a circle of bustle and noise around it, young people going in and out of the lights of a party.

"What?" Ray asked.

"Come on."

McVries nudged him up the driveway where a boy was running from a girl wielding a water balloon, and he was the first to duck below the mostly rolled-up door into the garage. They passed several kids who were absorbed over a worn foosball table and went into a crowded kitchen just inside. McVries looked past the couple kissing next to the counter top and a small group of wallflower types and focused on the first guy to look up when he shouted, "Hey!"

There was a glance over from a young man who looked like a slightly chubby quarterback.

"Garraty needs to use the phone, alright?"

The guy turned to talk to somebody else, as Ray uncomfortably murmured to McVries, "I don't know anyone here."

"Now they think somebody knows you," McVries explained simply, and promptly enough a smiling girl came to wave them into the den.

"It's fine. Just yell at everyone to shut up if it's too loud in there."

The den's couch seated nine or so teenagers who didn't look up when they came straight for the phone. Ray sat on a big island of an ottoman next to the end table, picked up the receiver and quickly dialed home, trying to feel cavalier about it.

McVries had leaned into the corner right across from him, and as the yellow light of the house brought him for the first time into full focus, Ray looked at him. There was a hard set to him Ray still hadn't quite expected. It cast his amused glance at something one of the girls was doing into a cynical taste. That scar cracked down a handsome cheekbone. Ray wondered if girls wandered right into that dark edge, though his father had sternly told him once it wasn't true that women fall in love with rough, that that was something weak men believed.

McVries looked back at him, while he wondered if that had been one of his father's maxims based more on ideals than on truth. With the waiting over the phone line serving to make his attention look more idle, they just watched each other silently over two more rings, and then his dad picked up:

"Ray?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. I'm with somebody I met at the theater. He needed a hand with something."

His father had gauged him. "...You been drinking at all?"

"...A little," he admitted. "I don't think I like it that much."

His father scoffed, softened by his honesty, not that he could probably remember the last time his son had lied to him. He still had to say, "You know I don't like that."

"Most kids get to let loose this time of year. You're the only parent I know who makes such a big deal out of it."

There was a pause as his father got the message, which wasn't quite intended to be the disrespectful challenge it had sounded like. The couch kids made a small cacophony of laughter, and he asked, "Where are you?"

"Campus town."

"Oh, Ray, you'll never get home. You need me to come pick you up?"

"Dad, no. Come on."

As his father contemplated, Ray looked around, taking in the mirth around him with the same sense as usual, the feeling he was apart from it.

There was an unpleasant refrain in his mind, had been for moments now, of that word McVries had uttered about Vic Clease: "politics." It wasn't about "politics." Implying that politics in fact had anything to do with the Walk, which of course it did, but everyone talked around that fact. Adults, if they had children to fear for, were even more afraid of breaking the fiction of the most heroic slice of apple pie their kids could dream about, and kids got to a point where knowing any better made you the ultimate buzzkill.

But McVries had just put it out there, making himself the first person outside of Ray's home to ever intimate that the Walk had that kind of power. For Ray, who had spent a handful of years now privately pining for normalcy with a small but high-pressure resentment growing over his family's supposed enlightenment (and even sometimes contemplating with the most secret longing—as he suspected everyone did—the Prize) the feeling was not a comfort. That ignorance was youth, and had never been his.

But it left him with McVries, was the thing. He wasn't sure what to do about meeting someone like him.

"Let me make a deal with you," Dad was saying. "I'm about to go back to bed; your mother's exhausted. Let's agree that if come tomorrow morning neither of us can say when you came home, you're not in trouble."

"Sounds okay to me."

"...What about this guy?" There was a reluctant edge, like he didn't quite want to push this examination. "What school does he go to?"

Ray blinked into an embarrassed agitation. "Dad. I'm not trying to get one over on you so I can spend the night with a girl. Do you want me to put him on the phone?"

"So are you crashing somewhere?"

"...Am I in trouble or not?"

His dad sighed. "No. All right. I'll let you go."

It was only when Ray hung up that he realized his dad might not have necessarily been accusing him of lying about his current company. As for McVries, he was returning from another room with a can of beer. He hadn't gotten a drink to offer Ray, but there was an uneasy shifting quality to the night now, as if Ray had gotten his freedom and now he didn't know what to do with it.

"You got any more of what was in that flask?"

Surprised, McVries laughed and said, "Sure," taking it out of his jacket to hand it over. "Everything squared with your folks? Hey—easy, kid," he said when Ray took a deep draw, almost finishing it off.

He made a little cough, recapping the flask. "My curfew is breakfast."

"They did you all right, I guess." McVries hesitated. "You know, if you need to crash there's probably room where I'm staying…"

"I don't know," he said shyly.

"Hey, boys," declared a passing girl in a get-up with a noisy amount of fringe, "if you guess the color of my underwear you can see 'em."

"I know this game," McVries stage-handed to Ray, "and it's never white."

This left the girl to look expectantly at Ray for a moment. He looked her up and down, flustered. He stammered, "Is it your birthday?"

"What?" McVries exclaimed in an explosion of confused laughter, a look of levity breaking across his eyes. He had to get a hold of himself, gripping at Ray on the shoulder in his fit of half-words interrupted by snickering, finally pulling him along until they were headed out and back down the driveway.

Ray was beginning, "There was this girl I knew…" He was interrupted by another spill of sniggering. "And she said once she had a special pair of underwear just for her birthday."

"Well, that's nice," McVries said, doing politely matter-of-fact.

This time Ray caught it until they were both bent with aching laughter. They went on like that even as a member of the night patrol started approaching the house from a parked car.

"I guess you know all about the girls around here on account of Miss Birthday Suit," McVries joked.

"No, not me," he said in automatic modesty. "We've lived here since my dad almost got squaded, but I've never been much—"

"Shut the fuck up," McVries hissed, pulling him away to the closest breezing arms of a weeping willow. His tone had the pitch of everyone's fear getting itched. "How? What happened?"

Ray blinked, and felt for himself at the weak center of his spinning drunk thoughts, realizing what he'd just done.

"You gotta know that was a joke," he said, his voice a rasp over the sudden panic.

"Look, it's okay," McVries assured.

He batted off some motion of Pete's arm coming up to him. "How stupid are you? Nobody almost gets the squads. I was messing with you, I—" The trooper who'd been talking calmly to someone on the porch was now giving a glance back towards the yard and street, serving to squeeze onto the gut paranoia that was near to nausea now.

"Hey," McVries said, his tone softening. He tossed aside the beer can and pulled Ray in with an arm at his shoulders and walked them down to the sidewalk a few steps, to the relative black between the street lamps. Ray had gone so paralyzed with fear that he was tripped into a backwards walk, swimming with his eyes somewhere in the bed of the other boy's shoulder, until McVries used a hand at the back of his neck to steady him, make him listen. "It's okay. Nobody heard you."

"You did," he murmured blankly.

As if it were the most natural assumption, McVries said, "But I'm not going to tell anybody."

When Tracy had first let him, he'd entered her with his mouth gaping onto the pillow next to her neck and her body had been a yielding hearth of welcome that made his mind flail in pleasure. It got him crazy, addicted, but afterwards he sometimes felt he'd emptied himself too much, traded for a different kind of lonely. It amounted to nothing next to this thing snapping electrically between him and McVries, which was either the truth or the closest thing to it he would find, and he had wanted it so immediately with this near-stranger that he'd mindlessly forgotten it hadn't already been given.

He felt Pete's touch on the back of his neck like the tingle of sleep, like something elementally safe. The very moment his panic finished falling away, something else supplanted it, and he let out a sob.

"Shh." McVries murmured, "Alright. Alright," gripping his hands at Ray's shoulders just to hold him up through it.

"I really love my old man, you know," he struggled to say.

"Yeah," McVries said sensibly. "You talk about him like you really do."

"I used to think that I hated him sometimes. But when you're a stupid kid, see, you...you don't see that being angry and being good can go hand-in-hand. He used to drink, a lot, because he was mad and he got mad because he drank...used to run his mouth a lot when he was drunk, and he'd show up half gone that way at the office party."

He'd backed gradually out of Pete's hold, and now Pete stood waiting for the rest of this story with a pitying mutter of "Jesus." It held the same sentiment he'd been used to even when was too little to fully understand it: that family, the train wreck waiting to happen.

"I guess everyone knows how the blacklist works. My father got himself a good couple strikes after he started working too closely with the government. By the time you get one or two they start reaching out to people you know. Collecting information from somebody you thought was a friend, so he can collect a nice sum to put more food on the table. People can even call them up with tips or an offer to do some spying, if they have any reason to think someone's listed. The system's completely fair about it as far as I can tell; the case against you needs evidence. But Dad wasn't innocent and he was a drunk and a gambler and his own family wasn't exactly feeling protective back then."

He went silent as a student came by, singing something and flicking a weak lighter that set shafts of orange against the comfort of enclosed darkness.

"...We only got free of it cause this colleague of his bragged to another one that he was gonna sell him out; he didn't have the ammo on him just yet, but it would have only been a matter of time." He sniffed and wiped under his cheek. "We moved because that couldn't follow us, but now everyone we meet has to be a stranger. We have to play this part. He'd go nuts if he found out but just a couple times I took the test, to be on the safe side. I didn't this year cause I couldn't get the chance to go and pick up the test results in person and I know what I'd get if he caught it in the mail. Even though—"

"You could just back out."

"I think he knows it's not that simple. Maybe it's not as simple as me doing it for him either. And the thing is in some ways things got better for us. He doesn't touch the bottle anymore. My mother has these terrible days, but he's been really good to her. But I sometimes hate it because…" In a sudden gale of pain, his voice croaked for a moment. "When I was a kid and he'd pick me up, it was like flying right to the top of a Ferris wheel. He's six foot seven and built like brick, and they made him shut up. He was fucking Superman, Pete, and they shut him down."

"Yeah," McVries said in understanding.

"Some day they'll find something on him. They only need one little thing and they'll find it, and it won't even matter that much cause he's been miserable for most of his life."

"...Do you think he sees it that way?"

"...I don't know."

The night stood between them, settling the fever of their new proximity. Ray was beginning to feel a little embarrassed.

After the moment seemed to have passed, he put in a few steps down the sidewalk saying, "Keep on this way."

McVries took up the same pace with his hands in his jacket pockets.

"Sorry," Ray said. "That was fucked up."

McVries said, "You're so sweet."

"Shut up," he groaned. They laughed a fragile couple notes into the wind.

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Outside of the frat house on Broadmoor there was a man who had a girl against a tree trunk. She kept trying to wriggle away. "Come on, baby," he was saying. "You gave it up before."

McVries made a tutting noise. "Someone didn't read the fine ass fine print."

The guy was right around the size to be bigger than Ray but smaller than McVries. "Really?" Ray said disapprovingly.

With a short sidelong glance, McVries shifted himself, then put up his fingers to make a shrill whistle. The man looked over to receive. There was nothing to get but Pete's eyes on him as he slowed his stroll.

The girl had a friend. "Come on, Sarah," she said, seemingly coming out of the sticky unease that had made her frozen in the landscape before, and took Sarah by the arm to lead her down the sidewalk while she was pulling her top back in place.

When they'd gotten clear of the fraternity crowd the girls dropped looking like they just happened to be walking next to the guy who'd spoken up. Sarah turned around enough to say, "Thanks."

McVries asked, "You want us to walk you somewhere?"

The other girl looked intrigued. "We're just a few blocks up in this direction. Thanks, honey."

Ray said, "You can walk up ahead if you want, we'll be one jump back."

With a tinge of puzzlement they both turned again and picked up their step for a couple yards ahead, far enough not to hear McVries mildly saying, "You blew it, man. They would have partied with us."

"That wasn't why I wanted to help."

"So?" His voice took on a smirk. "Are you being a faithful man, Ray?"

"It's not that," he said, though when the possibility had been implied he had thought for a second of Tracy. Her womanly noises, the mocking sparkle to her laughter. Feeling uncertain suddenly, he scratched his arm. "You didn't really get to your point earlier, did you?"

"What?"

"The intel. Your back-out girl."

"Oh, that's right. My point, the thing that really surprised me, was when Vic said that even then there were some rumors. Like I said, there was a rotation in the waiting room of these girls who had nothing to do but talk to each other, and there was already some talk then about it possibly being the last year. Like maybe that had something to do with them doing the interviews, you know?"

It held some interest. Nobody knew for sure why they'd cancelled the girls' event. "'Lack of interest,'" he quoted.

"So they say."

"It's true that it racked up less profit and less viewers."

"Yeah, but not by a huge amount. And what does the Major care?" Dropping out of playing their rhetorical tune, he confided, "You see, there was no real answer for them either, but around all those administrative buildings with the bored filing clerks and those Walkers hanging out all day, the rumor was that they might have to stop it because they weren't getting enough girls."

He could only give a grim smile of disbelief.

"Not like they couldn't get a couple hundred girls, mind you. They got thousands. But they hone down the boys from the majority of the eligible population; nobody seems to know by what standards, but they have their pick of whatever qualities they're looking for. Seemed like it wasn't that way with the girls. I wondered if they're just not as good for the exciting bits. They show less rivalry, or it's not as easy to tell, or like Vic thought, they want the same things as with the boys but it's got to look good..."

"Some of those girls were vicious, though," he remembered, from one time he'd watched at a friend's house. "Sure, they picked out special outfits sometimes and got the bridal hairdos for the big day, but then...there was that one girl who got a ticket for interference after she put a hairpin through this other girl's eye..."

"I remember hearing about that. It was her thumb."

"Her thumb?"

"Yeah, some news outlet liked the idea of it being a hairpin, but eyewitnesses said she used her thumb."

"...Well. And people said later that when they'd walked through Caribou those two had looked like bosom buddies."

"Maybe the Major had his disappointments. Nobody would get the real explanation if that was the case. It was harder to find what he was looking for, whatever it was. They need that huge pool of candidates. But the girls just don't bite as much. They averaged a lower backout rate, remember, but there were never nearly as many taking the test. Maybe that 'lack of interest' makes it harder to contain somehow. They like to keep it mysterious."

He had considered before that the Bugliosi photo could never have been as widely circulated if it had been of one of the winning boys. Winners get insulated privacy as a rule (seemingly whether they want it or not, a contradiction of the prize that Ray's father had targeted on more than one tirade) so the second they're the last one standing, any new souvenirs or intelligence related to them is taboo. But there had always been a strange offhandedness surrounding the girls' Walk, like none of the extremes of it counted as much.

It was possible, maybe, that the relative boredom with it made the authorities underestimate it, so that they eventually had to drop it as a priority. Too much mediation for something that wasn't inspiring the right amount of mania. But that stuff about girls not even taking the test as often was its own question.

Up ahead, Sarah and her friend had drawn closer together, their arms resting across each other's backs. It wouldn't surprise him if they'd only known each other a matter of weeks. He stared forward at them, and the question came from a grey cloud in his mind. "What do they know that we don't?"

McVries made a rough sigh and said, "Nothing special." There was something old and bitter in the words.

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Around midnight they waved to the girls going up the white brick path to a ladies' dorm, and less than twenty minutes later, after McVries started recognizing the rounded intersections, he pointed to a line of condos and said, "Right there."

There was a reluctance puncturing Pete's swagger as they came to a stop outside. "Everything alright?" Ray asked.

"I don't want to go up yet," he said without explanation, and interrupted Ray's puzzlement by adding, "You really can stay here. It's late already. I'm sure there's a free couch."

Ray took a seat on a nearby bench next to him and asked who all lived there; it was a bunch of roommates, mostly students but a couple working kids who, like Pete, weren't likely to ever get that diploma. Pete asked about Ray's education, encouraged his immodesty about it when he said he'd be likely to graduate with a decent record. Intermittently, he checked for the glow of the second apartment on the block, as if he was waiting for those lights to go off, but Ray didn't ask. After some time Ray realized they had managed not to talk about the Walk but to chew up some mundane subjects with a different kind of ease. He felt strange about how much of a relief that was.

Finally, when it seemed he'd finally forgotten to keep checking, McVries looked up and said, "Come on."

By then there was only one lamp on inside the lower level. He led Ray back to the fire stairs that were kept down, and put a finger to his lips as they gingerly climbed rickety step after step. Ray wondered if he was dreading some flack about that house key. On the second floor he went to the window that was already cracked open and slid it up to climb through.

"I was sleeping in Sandy's room but they moved me in here after it was obvious Kev never really comes home from his girlfriend's place. The lock on the door is broken though." Pete's voice was low; he padded over to the end of the small room to pull the door all the way shut, but then said above a whisper, "Hey, I'm really tired," and Ray only realized he was talking to someone standing out in the hall when he heard a young woman's slightly laughing voice.

She managed to edge her way through the door and Pete's resigned air was lit up as he flipped the light switch on, revealing also a light-eyed brunette with only half the buttons done up on the boy's shirt she was wearing. She smiled towards Ray but that was her only greeting, before she stopped before the slabs of color Ray only now noticed propped against the lower wall next to the closet. She picked up one of the paintings unceremoniously displayed there next to a portfolio case that must have contained a couple more. As Ray's eyes adjusted, the impressionistic blocks of blues of the nearest one looked more like a suggestion of neon landscape. "Paul said you meant all of them," she said, looking at that one.

"Whatever you want," McVries said, apathetically motioning. "You liked the clock tower too, right?"

She lingered as if expecting him to make more of a game of it, but he rushed her out.

"Take a couple. Go on." He plied one of the canvases under her free arm and gave a tickling motion with his knuckle at her back to chase her out the door, the motion more playful then he appeared to feel.

When she was gone and he'd finally shut the door, Ray asked, "You did these?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm caught out."

Smiling, Ray almost moved to get a closer look but felt like the general trait of Pete's was somehow off limits. "Looks like you're really good is all."

"I think I was," he gave him, and then changed the subject, so that Ray felt his glance all the more drawn to the oil strokes, like he'd just discovered someone's eyes were a completely different color than he'd originally thought.

The young woman—or some other young woman—was downstairs being someone's girlfriend with carrying moans. This came to be the only evidence of other residents, and after a while even that sound died out as meanwhile the two of them went through Kev's magazines, mumbling whatever conversation came to mind. It might have been two in the morning, which was an earlier quiet than Ray had expected, getting a sense from the occasional noise coming through the window crevice that the world was still churning its riot outside.

Their sharing of the full bed was incidentally splayed. Ray had been tired enough to not really notice their talk dying off before his eyelids started tugging, and with Pete's head lounging on the opposite side from him, he only now looked up to see the older boy looked to be out. Ray stretched over to swat the light switch off and had his eyes closed for a moment before McVries spoke, the sound somehow not really taking him by surprise.

"Hey, Garraty." His voice was cracked by drowsiness, but sober.

"...Yeah?"

There was a pause. "Nothing's gonna happen to your old man, alright?"

For a moment he couldn't speak. "Goodnight," he finally said. By then Pete was silent.

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In the morning Ray recovered from the disorienting surroundings only to realize McVries was nowhere to be seen. It was still dim outside but he thought he should get moving. It was only when he tiptoed out to find a pen and paper that he almost ran into McVries, who should have looked as fresh as a man who had just gotten up and showered but instead there was a raw look to him and the scant covering of the towel he held at his waist left him looking like a pale expanse that was barely bolstered by the fit planes. The impression made this sight of him a small shock initially, only for them both to laugh nervously and Ray to think it was anyone's zombie look of needing a strong coffee.

"Hey," he whispered as they shared a conspiring humor over the way they'd bumped blindly together, Pete's soaked and hunched head focused on him. "I need to get going. Are you…"

"What did you need?" Pete asked.

"I don't know if you'll still be here later…" He felt a little stupid, but he could never have just left. "I was just going to write down my address; if you want—"

"I have a book. In the side pocket of the big bag in there."

"Oh…"

"I'm borrowing clothes from downstairs. If you need to get going take the fire escape again? They didn't check in with the landlady about having company and—"

"Okay. Sure."

In the room he found an elegant but beat-up address book in the pocket and made himself the first name under 'G'. He waited a bit so he could make a more friendly exit, but after several minutes Pete seemed to be taking an oddly long time. Frowning at the clock, he finally decided he needed to go.

He was a little melancholy as he went down the stairs. Pete would have said something if he knew he didn't have time or reason to talk to him again before he left, surely?

By the time he'd made it to the breakfast table and was helping his mother do the dishes, the melancholy had sunk into sadness. McVries wasn't from here and he hadn't given him the impression of visiting often. At the moment he couldn't even feel much regret over losing those striking moments of commonality from the night before; in the daylight they now seemed some imagined constellation his mind had used to connect an evening of drunkenly disjointed sentiments.

"When's that new friend of yours leaving town?" his father asked as he rinsed out his coffee cup.

"I don't know," he answered neutrally.

After a relatively calm hesitation, his dad said, "I might have Cal from across the street over tonight."

He realized it was two nights away from the Walk. They would announce the couple hundred names again as it rolled over to midnight, crossing off any who'd backed out, along with some trivia that had nothing to do with anything. Ray guessed he'd watch it with varied interest while his father kept up the neighborly act.

He suddenly thought of those girls waiting on hooks in some office hall of the presidential library. He thought of the ones who didn't back out early enough to remain anonymous, and whether any of that was really as easy as it had always looked. He thought about McVries, his voice surrounding the details, pinning into Ray some permanent association. He tried not to think of him as a friend. It had been too long since he'd kept a good one.

He got a call from Tracy that night: friendly but rushed, her roommate laughing about something in the background. She wanted to let him know, promising implications attached, that she'd secured a car for Wednesday night. They were going to the four-dollar concert at her uncle's tavern and he suspected they wouldn't be staying the whole time. She asked him what he was doing for the rest of the weekend but then became distracted, hanging up after she seemed to have forgotten she'd asked.

Left to the quiet of the office which held the only phone they owned, he felt her voice had sounded strange, like it was higher than he'd remembered. His complex attraction to her had been rooted in how much more clarity she seemed to possess for not smiling all the damn time, like so many of the girls at his school, but it now seemed clearer that she didn't labor under the same facts as him.

One knock at the door came in time for his mother to serve dinner to the three of them as well as the neighbor, but Ray didn't leave his room where he was reading until she stopped at the door to urge him out. They ate in front of the TV while he tuned out the small talk through the preliminary announcements and propos, and Ray's father heard the second knock on the door when he was getting up to bring the dishes into the kitchen. Ray heard some polite talk just outside, his father's timbre carrying above another voice, and even when he heard footsteps following his father inside he didn't look up until his dad was at the threshold and saying, "You've got a guest, Ray."

He looked up and saw McVries.

"Oh. Hello," his mother said.

McVries looked uncertain, and more real somehow, standing in the living room that had adopted the ghosts of his family's previous dwelling. He almost seemed reluctant to look at Ray but when he did they smiled at each other.

"Mom, this is Pete," Ray said.

"Something smells good," McVries said.

"That'll be the tarts," she said, now rising to go get them out of the oven, "and thank you very much."

"Come over to watch the names, huh?" Cal asked. Pete barely reacted to him with a nod before coming to take the other side of the smaller couch Ray was lounging on, and they seemed to both consider their friendliness adequate.

Pete launched into a complaint about a prank his friends had tried to get him involved in, which gave Ray a silly little soar of pride to see him here. As they got to talking Ray thought there was still a strange diffidence to his presence, like someone who'd been too sick to really go out but couldn't bear to stay home. He felt helpless before this unarticulated vulnerability, even unsettled by it, as boys his age knew to feel around the guys who could clearly pack a punch: you didn't go digging for the bone. He wanted to, though.

"Jim, please don't use those as coasters," his mother pleaded. "They're so pretty and I wouldn't want—"

"Isn't that what Ray made 'em for?" His father winked at him, and Ray wondered if he should be embarrassed.

"No, they're for the candlesticks and those porcelain angels and things." She looked to Ray.

"Don't make me take sides, Mom," he said, and Dad's laughter rumbled.

"What, this?" Pete asked, holding up one of the smaller doilies that his mother had stacked into the handcrafted holder he'd made during his boy scouting years. There was an odd dismay on his face. "You made this?...Is it like macramé?"

"It's called tatting," Ray said matter-of-factly, while he couldn't get out of the truth of it, adding in dry defense, "and it's the most durable way to make lace."

Pete fell into purely shocked laughter at this, earning a careful near-glare from Ray's dad, until he kept turning the white thing over under his glance, muttering, "How about that. How about it, Garraty. How long does it take to make one of these?"

His softened mood didn't seem to last. They were only to number six on renaming the Walkers. The whole ordeal sometimes aired for three hours, but it was no surprise it became one of the bigger events. Before the Walk was the only time viewers were really guaranteed any footage or photos or information besides the check marks; actual coverage during usually consisted of some fanatical camper sobbing excitedly to a cameraman about something that had just happened in front of them.

No live interviews or anything, though, with the name announcements. Ray supposed the actual Walkers didn't watch anything. They had other things to take care of.

Somewhere around the 24th name, Pete's agitation got so obvious that Ray elbowed him gently. "Hey."

"Hmm?"

"You want to go outside?"

Pete accepted and they went out to the back deck, which may have once been nice, several years before the Garraty family moved in, but now suggested how little they had to keep up the appearances that weren't crucial. Ray's mother kept a little garden up front and his dad had painted their name on the mailbox with a cheery filigree, but back here was a slab of poorly treated rotting wood.

You couldn't tell much in the dark, though. The two of them stood against the banister, McVries stooped low with his arms rested there. He didn't have as much to say tonight, but he eventually asked, "Where are you from again?"

"Androscoggin County," he said. "Maine."

"Do you miss it?"

There had been a childhood friend Ray would like to think would still be a friend if they hadn't moved, but some aspect of that intensity had made him all the more reluctant to write or call. There had been friends of the family he was sure his parents only sent the occasional greeting card. Even their extended family had withdrawn various forms of support over the years.

He finally answered, "It seemed quieter there. I miss that."

Some small animal rustled through the yard. It was cool enough for Ray to be aware of the warmth emanating from Pete's shoulders where their pair of crossed arms nearly touched.

"How much longer you think you'll be in town?"

The back sliding door squeaked an interruption as Ray's father came out. He shut the door behind him, and Ray looked past him to see that Cal had left. Some vague instinct tightened over him, as both he and Pete turned to face him.

Strangely, it was at this moment that Ray noticed the flash of pale threads against the dark of Pete's profile and realized he was still feeling that doily between his fingers for some reason.

"Peter McVries," his father said. "I didn't remember your name from the lottery drawing. Congratulations."

Ray's breathing froze.

McVries looked back at his father with an unmoving resignation. "Thank you, sir."

"Keeping a low profile for the weekend?" Light and friendly. Jim Garraty had become a very good actor over the past several years.

"Something like that."

"Well. I think you should get a move on. We've had a long day and..."

"Sure. No, thanks for having me."

McVries recognized the banishment. He didn't really look at Ray even as he turned to face him, and with his father gone back inside Ray saw the light between the jostled blinds move over an unreadable stillness he almost didn't believe had a name or could be known.

McVries was bunching his hand into his pocket, the lace with it. He said, "I'll see you around."

Ray could only stand there.

Pete went back through the house, and Ray stayed outside a moment. At his first motion to go back inside, the movement swayed something sick inside of him and he thought for sure he was going to vomit. Finally knowing he wouldn't, he managed to go inside after his dad.

His father was kissing his mother on the temple when he came into the kitchen and then immediately turned to him to say, "Ray, I still didn't see what you did with my toolbox."

Mom hadn't been looking up at the TV. "Let me just show you," he replied, a little breathless.

They went out into the far side of the garage, and as soon as his dad turned to face him with his thunderstruck expression, Ray got in, "I didn't know."

"You didn't. Tell me how you met this kid."

"I already told you. So what?" He could hear his own shaky dismay sounding too much like petulance, and didn't care. "He didn't say a damn thing about it."

"So what? So what?" he heckled dangerously. "You been following this guy around town, drinking and, God knows what else you were doing to impress him. All the things I do to look after you and your mother and keep your head straight and you bring this inside my goddamn house, Ray, our family is—"

"I didn't know!" Ray's voice broke. "Not that it's any concern to you, I can see."

"...Did you tell him anything about us?"

"No," Ray lied. "I just met him. What, you think he's a snitch? Is that the only thing you can think about? Who the hell would send a Walker to do that?"

His father's eyes were hard. "Whatever you think he is, you're not to see him again. However much longer you'd even get the chance."

He rose to this with the fact he hadn't yet realized: "But...I have to, I have to go talk to him right now."

"You're going up to bed and you're going to forget about him."

"Dad, it's the 31st."

"You just said yourself you just met this kid. How could you think there's the slightest chance you could change his mind?"

"Because he lied," he said heavily, simply. "He didn't want to be that person with me, he...he didn't want to brag. And look, he's in town alone. There's nobody around who's going to try to hand him a phone, believe me. I'm the only one."

"You listen to me right now. That boy? Does not give a shit about you. That's why he didn't tell you. He's done enough already and I don't want you around him."

"He can't do any worse than he's already done!" he shouted, and tried to settle his fervency. "...For Christ sake, Dad. He's got a family too."

Something was slowly quaking in his father.

"And I…" Ray sighed sickly. "I give a shit about him."

His father thought on it with his jaw clenching and unclenching. "...Alright. You go. But you promise me that the very second you can tell that there's nothing you can do, and no later than that, you come home."

He nodded, already headed inside for his shoes. He couldn't look behind him to see what his father looked like in his towering futility as he stayed there leaning into the side of the car.

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Somebody was revving the growl of an open convertible at the top of the road, taking some girls around the circle drive while they squealed like kids in bumper cars. There seemed to be an impossible percentage of the town outside, and there would be more when the announcements were over. He knew McVries had to have walked, and so he walked too all the way back to campus, hoping to catch up.

He made a run of it for a few blocks, finally slowing when he felt a profound pain in his chest. Some rain had started up, light but constant enough to dampen through clothes. He didn't seem to feel it like he should.

It was when he approached the edge of campus and saw one of the weeping willows outside the old library, much like the one by the crashed party, that he had to rest. He let his body drop to the curb and coiled in, his chest hitting his knees.

All that cynicism that had seemed backwardly trustworthy, the only genuine article in that smoky den room, some sense of reality popping together between them. This had all been for the benefit of Pete's insane little holiday from himself, the one that wouldn't be over until the soldier's aim swerved onto his body and choked it.

Ninety-nine boys, and the one rarely got out with much of anything intact. He had been lectured to death about it for as long as he could remember. He had envied the ability to buy into the lie, but at the same time a part of him had believed it just like anyone else, that they don't really go walking off and then never come home again, and that every death that happens anyway is some kind of anomaly—and it is, because you rarely know any of them. You don't know the kid whose newsworthy style of dying inspired a classmate's Halloween costume the following October. It's always just some name. Some photo that made somebody a fortune.

Suddenly he understood so painfully the anguish of his father all these years: his fear that Ray didn't get it, countered by his fear of the only thing that could make him understand.

That sound of the willow branchlets sighing indifferently. Pete pulling him in by a comforting arm, consoling his fear, his voice like a warm force in the dark. The hurt was fresh and horrid. Ray wondered if his heart was breaking.

About twenty minutes after he made himself get up and start walking again, he eventually found McVries.

He could've easily missed him if he hadn't sensed the stare coming his way from the yard of one of the old Victorian houses where no one seemed to ever be seen going in or out. Pete was slouching on a rusty swing set, looking through his lashes at him, seemingly trying to parse something. Ray's first resentful action was to stop and wait on the sidewalk for him to come over rather than go to him; when he eventually did, the more direct streetlight gave away some impression of a suppressed shock on Pete's face.

They looked at each other, Ray finding it somehow crucial to meet his eyes. Finally Pete said, "Well, I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

Ray made a pained little laugh. "Why—? How could—?"

All of the questions were trying to come out of him at once. Pete just shook his head.

"Did you mean a single fucking thing you said to me? Do you know...how you made me feel, any idea? You know?...Just, what about me when you met me made you think, I'm gonna take this little asshole for a spin. Fuck his head up and down."

"It wasn't like that."

Speaking in slow incredulous anger now, he said, "I know nothing about you and you know things about me—my family—that nobody knows."

"Look, I said nothing's gonna happen to your folks. And I was never laughing at you if that's what you're on about."

"But you lied."

"No," McVries corrected with a patient emphasis. "I never said I didn't take the test. I never said anything that wasn't true or that I'd never thought at least once before."

"Bullshit. Talking about the propaganda, and all the misinformation, and—Jesus Christ, is there even a Vic Clease!?"

"Yes. Hell, running into her probably helped put the idea in my head for all I know. Let it teach you a lesson, Garraty, cause next time it could really be somebody who's just feeling you out, but me, I don't have to be some cocksucking patriot to want the prize, man. Come on."

"But you're not like that," he protested, still somehow numb to that shift in reality. "You're not really that stupid. Tell me the reason you're still here instead of back home at a time like this is cause you know that backout's just a phone call away and your family doesn't have to worry."

"Actually, I would've gone home," McVries said matter-of-factly. "I would've gotten the train at sunup today. But I decided I preferred talking to you over my dad's harassment. So I'll just see them when all of this is over."

With a sort of whimpering snigger, Ray began to continue to walk with his hand going up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "What's wrong with them? Your family? Is that what all of this is about?"

"Don't go trying to analyze my shit now. My family's fine."

Ray was innerly searching the whole life and image of him, the questions that it wouldn't help to ask, and Pete's scar lit a crevice down the center of him. He could feel the other boy knowing that he was dying to ask. He forced himself to the mutually vulnerable, less easy center. "...Why did you start talking to me? And you know what I mean. In that way."

McVries was slowing the pace for both of them as they crossed onto the block with the basketball court inside a chain fence. He confessed, "My dad is one of the owners of a drive-in theater. He used to run the Arabian; he liked that job a lot better. Called the shots, made more money. When it burned down, he never talked about it. I think he had his anger and maybe even suspected that stuff you were talking about, but he never would have brought that home to me."

Up ahead under the awning of a closed hot dog stand a group of girls were playing some form of hopscotch while regularly passing a cigarette between them, and Pete stopped to face Ray.

"The fact that your old man just said those things to you...I just couldn't imagine what that was like. And I'd never met anyone who talked about them like you did. You were careful enough, at least up until that slip about the squads. But I could tell you were no cheerleader; I liked that, and I still like that. But...the Walk is ours, Ray. It's the one chance anybody gets—you can't see that?"

"It's horseshit," he shouted, and then pushed at McVries. "I want you to go into that phone booth over there and just think for a little bit about how tired you were last night, how you're going to have to get less sleep than the Walkers who are closer to the marker. Or about your parents. I don't care what. Just—"

"Hey, hey. Hey." One of the girls had strayed from the group and was eyeing Pete up and down, getting more excited. "You're one of them, aren't you? I saw your yearbook picture on TV. Yeah, I know, because of the scar."

Pete had rushed to put a conspiring finger to his lips, saying, "Keep it hush-hush, yeah?"

He used this playful veneer to chase her around the corner of the linked fence. Ray saw her mischievous galvanized energy in the subtle movements when she asked, "What do I get?" He saw her back crunch into the fence as McVries all but tossed her up against it, getting her in a straddle. She laughed against him. He saw Pete's tongue delve into her mouth as they breathed heavily together through Ray's frozen dismay.

The taste was brief and clumsy but sufficiently obscene. Pete put her to the ground and squeezed her ass so that she went running off with a little laugh. Ray was inexplicably certain that he was being taunted, and the thought was such a new rush of humiliation that he took a fast walk away, trying to get clear of McVries for a minute. McVries gave him a block or two before he caught up, and even then Ray was still at a stern march, and they didn't speak until they were back at the condominiums.

Ray felt every inch of himself was soaked to mush and would just melt away. He went through the front door this time when Pete didn't stop it, and after he stood shaking and dripping for a moment, he said, "Flip the light on." Pete obeyed with some reluctance.

So much for the bohemian soft revolution, if there had ever been such a thing: on top of the art student patchouli and smoke smell, the obvious aftermath of a party that had remained in a mess for days was strewn about. An empty plastic cup crunched under Ray's foot as he turned to get a look, his eyes finally falling on the colorful banner someone had painted and hung from a bookshelf:

"GO PETE GO. WALK THEM DOWN."

Struck with new disbelief, he shook his head while McVries had no defense he bothered with. "If I had just missed you this morning and left through the front…If some girl like that had just recognized you from the lottery drawing last night."

"And then what?" Pete muttered, going past him and into a small laundry room. He came back with what looked like a set of dry clothes for both of them; Ray couldn't comprehend this thoughtfulness in contrast to everything else, and stared dumbly at the ones he'd been handed while Pete took his jeans straight off and wriggled into a pair of blue sweatpants, not bothering with a shirt. Still trembling strangely, he changed into the thin sweats and t-shirt he'd been given as Pete offhandedly assured, "Nobody's here. They've all fucked off to God knows where."

He followed Pete upstairs and into the room still lined with the canvasses. He looked on them differently now, with helpless interest.

"How are you supposed to get the call?" he asked. As bleak as the rest of it was, he couldn't handle it if Pete was staying somewhere without a phone.

"My mom has the number. She'll relay whatever they say." Pete cocked an eyebrow. "You're going to feel awfully silly, aren't you, if it turns out I'm just a backup?"

"No, I'm not. And don't use that as an argument again."

"I figure right now my odds are one in 50, right? Could be worse," Pete teased dryly.

If he wasn't trying to save his life he'd want to kill him. "You Van Gogh types aren't too good at math, huh? You're not factoring in the guys who have already backed out. And your odds are shit, because nobody really wins."

"It's easy to feel that way when you don't have the guts to go through with it."

"You've heard of the ones that die soon after, right? The ones who completely lose their minds? If it's guts you've got, at least have the self-destructive clarity to go eat a gun on your own time rather than trick yourself into letting someone else do it for you."

Pete scoffed. "There's no pot of gold on the other side of that, kiddo, so that's not what I'm about and you can shut your trap about it...Shit. Like you know so much about waking up one day and feeling like something inside of you has just switched off. Go on and joke about it while you get your ace diploma. Yeah, maybe I'll be moaning into my pillow like a shell-shocked baby for the rest of my life, or maybe I'll actually see a point in everything when I don't have to break my back or numb my brain away for every dollar. When I know my family won't have to."

"I have to worry about my family every day, and you know why." He was shaking his head in fury. "I used to have a brother, you know. But I'm all they have left, and sometimes it's a relief that we don't have that other mouth to feed. But I don't line up to break their hearts chasing some...fucking suicidal fairy tale."

"But you did," McVries insisted, giving a small but emphatic shove to Ray's chest. "You've taken the test, and you said it yourself, that it's not as simple as you doing it for your father. Right?—"

"—I wish to hell I hadn't told you that. I only told you that because I thought I could trust you."

Ray was so defeated for the moment that he walked right away from Pete and sat heavily down on the bed. When he looked up, he seemed to have made some small puncture, and started in on the weak spot.

"Don't act like I'm the same as you. Don't act like you're any different than any of those cavemen who want some shallow shot at glory—the way you felt up that piece of ass back at the basketball court?"

"Really?...The way you watched?" Pete challenged, and something in Ray went still. Pete backed up into that more sober look from seconds before, feelingly insisting, "A lot of these guys who want in jerk off to the thought of everyone around them turning into humiliated pleaders—their girls promising to get them off four times a day, 'Oh baby, you can have me every which way just please don't go, please back out please'—or they know they can get that piece from the types who just get high off being someone's reason to want to keep walking, or being the last person they ever touch, convincing themselves it's life affirming when they're just using these tools to get off on death. Don't try to tell me I'm a part of that bullshit, Ray. Maybe I didn't tell you because I knew it would make you one of those pathetic sideline sobbers and would make a total heel out of me."

Ray felt an uncomfortable clutch on some old shame, long buried. "...I don't know how you mean that, but I'm not—"

"Oh, stop it," Pete snapped. "I didn't mean anything in particular, but you're not gonna give me that shit. You can be a righteous little prick about every other way I've done you, but don't give me that superior innocent crap."

His tongue was tied up; Pete's gavel of reasoning had suddenly, bizarrely, reminded him of his father, but that only worsened his sense of raw exposure. His arms crossed over his chest. Almost unthinkingly, he'd gotten up and started moving towards the door.

"No, come on," Pete said, ruefully soft now. "You're going to leave, I know, but don't leave over that."

He shook his head, probably looking like some inconsolable child. "I have to go. If I can't change your mind I just can't be here. My dad was right...I..."

Though he managed to do it at an almost cavalier pace, Pete was on that side of the room and had shut the bedroom door before Ray reached it, and then just went back over to sit on the bed. He stared at his hands. He looked lost now.

Ray figured that was the closest to pleading he was going to get, but it was a surprise. He was heavy on the spot, unable to move or think. When the other boy spoke it tugged hard on him, somewhere in his bones.

"Don't go, hey? Not yet. No one's here and I just...I need..." Pete's voice was cracking almost to a whisper. His hesitation dragged, and he still didn't look up. "I want to be with someone."

With no thought of what he was doing, Ray slowly took the few steps over to him. He didn't have to make up his mind what would happen next, because once he was a foot away Pete's hand reached up and tugged, blindly, at the bottom seam of Ray's shirt, just enough to force him in closer. He got Ray to sit down but turned into a slow lean onto the floor as Ray took the edge of the bed.

Ray floundered silently as he wound up with Pete's head almost in his lap, him lingering at his stomach as the muscular arms wrapped up behind him. Through accepting this baffling supplication he thought he could feel a heartbeat charging just a little too fast through the plain of Pete's chest as he reeled down there uncertainly, like he was building himself up for something. The moment seemed to pull on impossibly long, the room hushed to listen for their breathing as the rain was spitting outside.

"Garraty?" McVries mumbled, wanting something. But almost before he could be answered, he unwrapped his arms and pivoted his hands lower, and then Ray seethed in at the feeling of a touch caressing the lower inside of one of his thighs, and then Pete was leaning lower and nuzzling his mouth at the fabric there.

At the sounds of sharp breaths, Pete was encouraged rather than cautious, landing a bite that was just hard enough to make an impression through the cloth before it became a more declarative, very slow trail of nudging kisses that moved his mouth up farther and farther. Somehow Ray was so stilted through this that it was only at the trite conclusion that he realized with a flinch of humiliated pleasure that he was getting hard: Pete mouthed over it with his eyes closed while Ray's mind did a dipping back and falling out of his body, only present for the base feeling of the cloth moving softly where he mumbled his mouth and now pawed his hand against it.

"Garraty?" he muttered again, sounding brittle with reluctance this time but not stopping. The eyes were open now and looking up at him, his shoulder muscles tensing in noticeable shifts with his movements, or his nerves. Ray gulped, and reached up to touch the back of his head. Pete batted the touch away, replacing Ray's hand on the bed, but continued his exploration with his mouth, finally making cruder more suggestive work of it with his hands and looking up again in a question.

Trying to calm his own gasping, Ray finally managed, "Have you ever…?"

He laughed at this, the sound just slightly manic. "No. Haven't you ever wondered if you'd be any good at it? It's fun enough to have one of your own, so…"

Ray hadn't gotten any girl to do that, the thing this position was evoking, and he didn't know what it would bring out in him if it happened right now. He half hated Pete; it would be so easy to make it punishing, to use him.

But he had the sense that Pete was almost trying to provoke that. With uncertainty his hand went down to the skin of that shoulder, only for Pete to put the hand away again, allergically.

"Why...?"

"Just don't."

He wanted him to keep his hands on the bed, so Ray balled up the peach-colored blanket he was sitting on in both fists, breathing through his teeth, and did what only that insistence could have goaded him to do. He edged forward with his knees falling around the curve of Pete's ribs, and in the moment when that motion made him look up, Ray kissed him.

Pete flinched, but immediately got very still, letting it purse off at barely more than chaste. They were an inch apart, eyes searching the audacity of it. Ray did it again, the way he liked it done to him, firm and soft at the same time, and there was a small cracking noise like Pete remembering how to breathe. A parting, and then a third time, and they both seemed softly shocked by it when McVries was the one to very slowly roll his tongue into Ray's mouth. Some final stiffness broke from their shoulders as a greed for each other slipped in.

A hand came up to Ray's head, angling him as they both surrendered fully for a moment, and then Pete backed off with his eyes fixed intently to him, collected him up to push him all the way back onto the bed. When he wrapped over him his mouth brushed at Ray's hair and their erections rubbed together through their clothes, Ray's pants having hiked down enough that Pete pushed the last inches to free the thinner surface of his underwear. The evidence of mutual arousal threatened the last of Ray's reservations as they rutted and panted, knowing it was abandon, that McVries had been right: he wasn't free of that morbid fascination, of the pathetic desire to be enough for a dead man, or of the stupid fervent prayer that some fuck could possibly change his tune. He didn't know if Pete was capable of this outside of that rush of the nearness of decay, would never know.

He grabbed a hard handful of Pete's hair, and this touch Pete allowed with a groan, so he brought his mouth back to his and tried to touch him all over. But when he tried to reach for his groin, he was pushed back. Pete propped himself over him, and in a slow filthy way, filled his hand with a drip of spit while he used the other to tug down on Ray's briefs, provoking an expectant lurch deep inside of him.

Pete kissed him and kissed him, and when his wet touch slid perfectly over his cock Ray made a noise of ecstatic dismay.

Their eyes locked. Pete's were fixed on him through his agony and they held an ache. "You're so sweet," he said to Ray's moans, through gritted wonder, like a marveling at some other lovelier world he could glimpse on but never enter, touching him, touching him, "you're so sweet. You're so fucking sweet."

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They were lying on their backs like they'd been blown onto them by a grenade when the ring of the phone carried from downstairs. Ray's heart started a rude knocking as Pete rushed down to answer it. He followed, finally slowing when he heard an impatient remark— "I don't know where Sandy is, I thought he was with you and Annie." He hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, like his legs had gone to water.

Pete was still on the phone and opening a bottle of soda when Ray rounded into the narrow kitchen after him. The phone bed Pete had carried from the stand to the counter was an old rotary type with silver accents on the surface that reminded Ray of a black Oldsmobile his grandfather had once owned. Ray lingered close, both of them leaning into the counter, and Pete gave him a knowing look over the words he was barely listening to; he was chiding him for being relieved.

Somehow lethargically motivated by that, Ray waited for him to give an irate conclusion to the conversation and set the bed down on the counter, nesting the receiver in and shoving it back. A moment clicked by over the old black bomb now set between them. Ray reached over and slowly slid the phone back towards Pete. Pete frowned at it, looking slightly out of breath, then bluntly pushed it away.

Ray said, "Pete—"

"No, we're not going to do this. Jesus, I knew this was gonna happen if—"

"Every minute that you don't back out makes it more likely you won't have the chance. You won't even know until your folks reach you—"

"Ray. I'm eighteen. Maybe if you were too you'd understand. Once I'm too old to try, I could regret it for the rest of my life."

As absurd as this thinking was, Ray could recognize it clearly in his face: he was picturing somebody in his family coming down with something bad, another financial calamity, the loveless dynamic of those frustrations and fears that came even during the inert peace that Ray knew all too well from his mother's worst days. Pete didn't even know what he'd ask for if he got it; he just thought he was battling for the magic button that could make all of this go away. It wasn't about the big miseries, but the small ones everyone tried to look away from because they couldn't be argued with. There was no reward he believed in except this.

"Pete," he said in the deepest exhaustion, knowing he'd heard it all. They both had. "You won't be alive to regret anything."

"And if I back out I'll be alive for what? Approved films, approved art, the government curriculum on what your goddamn shampoo smells like. It only gets worse as you get older, cause you feel yourself getting used, and used to it, but I guess you'd have me find some girl to pick flowers for. If she doesn't throw my heart into a trash fire we can punch out a couple hungry brats for ourselves and punish them for all of this. Is that what you're hoping for?...I'm not backing out, Garraty. I just have no trust for what feels real anymore."

Even as Ray looked down at the phone again, he knew the wall had gone up.

He didn't have anything else in him. There was so much more he could do, so many things worth laughing and crying over he could remind this wounded boy of, and so much indignity he could suffer to make him understand that he meant something to him. For someone's life, it should have been nothing at all to give him the tears and the begging, but he couldn't do it, not after everything Pete was taking and how much more would be ripped off of him in the attempt. If Pete could even concede his own self-destructiveness, Ray wasn't sure he knew how to be part of someone's reason for self-love. Not under this much weight and so little time and the distance between them. His father's anger had reformed into the gentle wisdom of their quiet household where anything you felt should have been right, but Ray had still missed some tenderness somewhere along the way. It was as much a detriment of pride as Pete's inability to see his own path. Without any sentiment reaching to meet him halfway, it was hopeless.

"I want it back," he said.

Pete blinked. "What?"

"You know." He walked back to the couch and found Pete's jacket where it had been left the night before and dug into the pockets.

"Hey, come on," Pete protested, coming after him after he found the bit of lace and snatching at it, trying to be playful about it. "You've got a dozen of them."

"What did you think it was gonna be? Some white knight token for good luck?"

He'd said it with such harsh sudden scrutiny that Pete's face fell. His torrent had begun.

"Because you're getting what you want, asshole. I'm not giving you that. I'm not going to run up to the Augusta crowds to try to catch you on the sidelines. I'm not going to hang onto the coverage waiting till they announce you died or are looking even worse than that. And let me tell you this: even if you do get in and make it, even if by some miracle you are actually the one to make it to the end without blowing too many fuses to remember who I even am, I don't care. You lose my number."

Pete looked struck, tried to cover and pull it into some condescending reasoning: "Ray—"

"I mean it. Prime or backup, I don't care; you get yourself to that marker, it's over. I don't ever want to see your face again."

Ray's chest hurt all the more with the words outside of him. Pete's eyes were searching dazedly over that doily he had clutched in his hand. Ray shoved it into the pocket of his sweatpants and went past him to where he'd kicked off his sneakers, and they said nothing while he put them on.

They had run out. It was only grief between them. When Ray's shoulder knocked into his on his rushed way to the door, Pete tried to reach for something, but he wriggled off like Pete could burn him. "No," he gasped, "no," and trudged outside without looking back.

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He paced around in a tense stupor, waiting till late became early to try to catch a bus, and he got home when the sky was beginning to lighten. The rain had stopped but his clothes were cold from the penetrating damp in the air. He felt drowned. The family room at home swam in his vision, and he froze when he saw his father sitting on the far side of the couch.

Jim was true to his word to his wife about the bottle but Ray had known for a while that he still snuck a cigarette away from home every once in a while, though he couldn't remember the last time his dad had smoked in the house. They had an ashtray for guests, and for the first time in maybe five years it had been knocked from its symmetrical display upon one of the doilies, on the end table with the fading finish.

Ray didn't know what to do when he stopped in front of the chair. "I guess I'm grounded?" It seemed like the most ridiculous thing to say. He couldn't imagine ever wanting to leave the house again.

His father put out the cigarette, his brow moving in surprise. "You think I waited up for you because you're in trouble?"

His head spun warily. He was exhausted almost to the point of collapse. "I should have left sooner," he said, expecting it to feel like the noble honest admission, but it brought an anguished swell with it, and he knew with detached horror that he was about to cry to his father.

"Hey, son," Dad whispered, "hey." He got up, and for the first time since Ray was probably about four, he found himself sobbing in his arms.

Ray let it beat itself out of him for as long as it needed to, finally moaning, "I can't watch. I can't do it. I don't even want to hear it."

"Then you won't," his dad assured simply. "I'll tell that shitbird Cal that something's wrong with the TV set."

"It's so stupid. I'm so stupid. I only just met him and I can't—"

"Listen, huh. Ray?" He held him back by the shoulders to look straight at him. "You're one in a million. You're a good boy. And I didn't want this for you, but the important thing for you to know, right now that neither of us can do fuck-all, is that nothing is wrong with you. Nothing."

Ray swallowed and looked back at his father. "I'm so tired."

"Yeah," he said. "I know. It may not seem like you can sleep but I think you'd better try."

"...I love you, Dad," he said, unthinkingly. He was numb to the words right then but he knew they were true. "When I wake up everything will still be the same."

"You won't be as tired." Dad felt through his hair and then let his his hand fall to his shoulder. "I can promise you that if it's the only thing...I love you, Ray. Go on and get some sleep."

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Ray dreamt of shadowy swarms overtaking the landscape of his life. His childhood haunts, appearing vaguely to him, all having an off-color impression at the moment he awoke to the still aching tension all over his body and drifted gradually back away from consciousness.

He'd had some idea he might sleep for days. Let the schoolteachers believe he'd caught a week's worth of hangover and frown over their usually so well-behaved student.

But his mother, not so aware that his affliction was anything other than one of his migraines, stirred him with a gentle rubbing on his shoulder when the light was gone outside. "Ray," she muttered, and he was trying to remember if he ever used to rest his head in her lap when she said, "your father had to go. He got one of those urgent calls into work. You know that overseer can be such a bully. But Jim seemed so worried about you—is everything alright?"

He closed his eyes and squeezed her hand briefly. It felt narrow and bony. "Sure, Mom."

There was the slightest hitch of hesitation, and she said, "That boy is outside."

His eyes froze on a point on the wall.

"I told him you weren't feeling well but he said he just wanted to see you before he left. I couldn't get him to come inside, though. Do you think…?"

He had moved from the bed faster than he could have told himself he wasn't going to do it, and he sure as hell wasn't going to hope. The moment McVries got the call they could send a helicopter for him no matter where he was. It somehow jostled what was left of his pained rage to know that the bastard was still brazenly present, still here, outside and inside. He could feel in his body how he easily could have slept into the weekdays with a coma's abandon, like his limbs were weeping, but he managed to amble in his worn socks across the carpet and across the cold floor and to the front door and into the dark.

The figure was trembling inward and out just like the inhale-exhale of the trees muttering all around the yard in the wind and the still falling rain, and it took the headlights swaying over from a passing Buick for him to see and believe it really was McVries, standing dumb as a scolded ghost. The weight of his breathing suggested an entire day's tripping through a maze to get to this very point, but his face seemed inwardly mesmerized, frozen slow to his reluctance, and for a moment Ray was also paralyzed. He saw the young man had his flask hanging from his left hand in a wink of light but only when the faint glow from inside caught him in a half-step forward did Ray's groggy heart beat up faster, and with a small moaning laugh he reached, to beckon, or to touch.

From Pete's right grasp there grew downward a dripping tangle of wildflowers.