The victim’s eyes kept widening. I remembered thinking blood beautiful when Neil had punched Alastair. Now, from Zepherelli, it looked horrible, poisonous. I turned away.

Zepherelli made a mewling noise, softer than a kitten’s. My heart felt like a hand curling into a fist. He whimpered again, and the fist clenched. “Neil,” I said. “He’s going to tattle on us. We’re going to get it.” I wondered if my parents would discover what we’d done. For the first time, I wanted to slap Neil.

A look spread across Neil’s face, one I’d never seen there. He bit his bottom lip, and his eyes glassed over. Then he shook his head. The glassiness left his eyes. “No,” he said. “He won’t tell. There’s things we can do.” He spoke as if Zepherelli weren’t lying beside us. “We’ll get him on our side. Help me.”

I didn’t know what to do. I gripped the flashlight until my palm hurt. Neil wiped dust from Zepherelli’s cheek. When their skins touched, Zepherelli trembled and sighed. Neil said, “Shhh,” like a mother comforting a baby. His left hand remained on the kid’s face. His right moved from Zepherelli’s chest, down his stomach, and started untying the sweatpants dyed green for Halloween. He squirmed a finger inside, then his entire hand.

“When I was little,” Neil said, “a man used to do this to me.” He spoke toward the empty air, as if his words were the lines of a play he’d just memorized. He pulled the front of Zepherelli’s pants down. The kid’s dick stuck straight out. I swung the flashlight beam across it.

“Sometimes I wanted to tell everyone what was going on. Then he’d do this to me again, and I knew how badly he really wanted it. He did it to some other kids, but I knew they didn’t matter as much to him, I was the only one whose photo he kept in his wallet. Every time he’d do it he’d roll up a five-dollar bill, brand-new so I could even hear it snap, and he’d slip it into the back pocket of my jeans or my baseball pants or whatever. It was like getting an allowance. I knew how much it meant to him, in a way, and after a while, it kept going further and further. There was no way I could tattle on him. I looked forward to it, for a while it was every week that summer, before the baseball games. It was great, he was waiting there, for me, like that was all he ever wanted.”

Neil’s voice sounded lower, older. It wasn’t spouting nasty words or giggling between sentences. Then Neil shut up and leaned beside Zepherelli.

Neil buried his head in the kid’s crotch. The dick disappeared in Neil’s mouth. I watched the spider arms bob as Neil hovered over him. I slid back. The flashlight flipped from my hand. Its column of white illuminated the apricot tree’s branches. Up there, a squirrel or something equally small and insignificant was scampering around. Already-dead fruit tumbled to the ground.

Stephen Zepherelli moaned. His breathing deepened. He didn’t sound scared anymore.

The shadow of Neil’s head lifted. “That feels nice, right?” The shadow moved back down, and I heard noises that sounded like a vampire sucking blood from a neck. I wanted to cry. I tried to fold myself into my dream of Charles and Caril Ann, those teenage fugitives. What would the blond murderess do in this situation, I wondered. Neil and I were nothing like them. I heard another chorus of “trick or treat”s, this time closer than before, maybe right there on the McCormicks’ doorstep. I thought of Neil’s mom, sleeping through it all. Where had she been when the man from Neil’s past had put his mouth on her son like this?

I lay on my back until the noises stopped. Neil retied Zepherelli’s sweat bottoms and handed him the dragon snout. “It’s okay.”

When Zepherelli stood, his eyes had resumed their normal luster. He was drooling. A comma-shaped trickle of blood had dried on his mouth. I got up, carefully pulled a splinter from his upper lip, and dabbed the blood with my black sleeve.

Neil patted the kid’s butt like a coach. “I’ll walk him home,” Neil said. He smiled at me, but he was looking over my shoulder, not at my face.

We tiptoed through the McCormick house. In Neil’s bedroom, I could see his tousled sheets, his schoolbooks, his baseball trophies. The scary record had ended, but the needle was stuck on the final groove. “Scratch, scratch, scratch,” Zepherelli said. I faked a laugh.

Neil’s mother was still sleeping. She snored louder than my father. I shone the flashlight on the bookshelves above her, making out titles like Monsters and Madmen, Ghoulish and Ghastly, All the Worst Ways to Die. Only days ago, I’d wanted to read those. Now I didn’t care.

“I know the direction home,” Stephen Zepherelli told Neil. He seemed anxious to lead the way. “I can show you where to go.”

We left the house. The cool air smelled like mosquito repellent, barbecue sauce, harmless little fires. When the air hit my face, I ripped my headpiece off. A single beady spider’s eye fell to the sidewalk. I bent to get it. In the weak street light, that eye stared back at me. I saw my reflection in its black glass. Instead of picking it up, I stood and ground it beneath my shoe.

“See you later, Stephen,” I said. It was the first time I’d said his name, and my voice cracked on the word. “And you too, Neil. Tomorrow.”

And I knew I would see him tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Neil had shown a part of himself I knew he’d shown no one else. I reckoned I had asked for it. Now I was bound to him.

Neil led Zepherelli down the block. I watched them shuffle through the dead leaves, moving farther away, until the shadows swallowed them up…

five

My brother spent most of his time alone, and sometimes I wondered if my mother and I were his only friends. No one accompanied Brian on his walks home from school. He never went to parties or special school functions like the homecoming dance or Christmas formal. When he did venture from the house, it was to attend the latest program at the Hutchinson Cosmosphere, a conglomerated space museum and planetarium, which I found boring. Still, I often joined him, driving him into Hutchinson to see whatever space film happened to be showing.

Although I never mentioned it, I felt sorry for Brian. One night, I’d picked up the telephone to hear teenagers giggling. “Is The Nightmare home?” one voice mocked. “Zit patrol,” another said. “We make house calls.” Laughter, click, a dial tone.

Brian still performed his nightly practice of trudging to the roof. I’d given that up long ago, and by then my father had stopped as well, preferring instead to drive away in his truck after fights. Even the ragged rooftop chair was gone. But night after night, about an hour after sunset, Brian would climb the ladder, binoculars bouncing from the strap around his neck.

I wouldn’t be around to watch his ritual much longer. I’d graduated, and Christmas 1987 marked my final week in Kansas. The night before the holiday, I sat in front of the antique mirror at my bedroom window and decided to procrastinate packing. I looked outside. The crisp combination of the moon and the back porch’s light allowed the normally obscure surroundings of our house to slide into focus. A group of rabbits, their fur thickened to adapt to winter, scampered around the evergreen trees that flanked our driveway.

For the first time, I wondered if I would miss Kansas. After eighteen years in Little River, I’d grown to despise it. My friend Breeze still lived in town, but she was already preoccupied with her husband and son. My other friends had all left for college, but chances were they’d return. I was certain of one thing: I didn’t want to stay here all my life.

I heard Brian above me, stomping to the roof. I remained at the window. In seconds his shadow cast its freakish proportion across our lawn. I could tell he was wearing his down coat, mittens, a stocking cap peaked with a fluffy ball, even the bulky earphones that pounded out his favorite spacey computerized music. This was Brian’s private time, his brand of monasticism, and watching him filled me with both embarrassment and guilt, as if I were viewing him in the shower: He lay on his back on the pebbled shingles, one leg crossed over the other, lazily twirling a foot in the air.