This is real, isn’t it?

I pushed the door shut behind me, and Conner turned off his game. It was one of those ones where you kill an enemy army. Nice.

“I got stopped by a cop.”

Conner laughed. “Shit. Did you get a ticket?”

“No. I talked him out of it.”

Keep it up, Jack.

And I could feel that business card in one pocket, the glasses in the other. And here was Conner, sitting all loose and comfortable in front of me, with one of his knees bent sideways on the mattress, propping an elbow on it. All of it, pulling me in different directions, tearing me apart.

No matter what, Conner Kirk never lost his composure. He was a kid who’d only break a sweat if he wanted to. And it would look cool when he did it.

I sat down on the desk chair, swiveled, and stretched my feet out on top of his bed.

The breath I exhaled made me slump down, deflate, relax. I was safe here.

It felt better just being in his room, smelling that Conner Kirk smell that made me know this was real. This was home.

Right?

“You okay?” Conner turned around on the bed and faced me. And I found myself staring at him, looking to see if there was some indication that things really weren’t okay. I couldn’t shake the idea that something was different about Conner.

“Uh. Yeah. Sorry about the weird phone call, dude.”

“You were, like, on another planet.”

“Yeah.” I could tell he really didn’t know anything about it—Marbury, Griffin, Ben. “Let’s go get something to eat, Con.”

“Dude. Jack.” Conner got one of those wide grins. “You reek. How long since you saw some deodorant?”

I don’t know, Con. Gee … Last time I took a shower was at Quinn Cahill’s firehouse. For all I know, that could have been a year ago.

“Sorry.”

“Jeez.” Conner let out a sigh and launched himself up from his bed. “I seriously don’t know how you’d ever make it through a day without me looking out for you. Here.”

Conner began pulling out clean clothes for me to wear. His stuff was always nicer, more expensive than mine. Not that I couldn’t have whatever I wanted. I guess I just never cared about price tags and labels.

He threw his clothes into my lap and pointed at the ice-block wall separating his room from his own personal bathroom. “Get in there. Rinse off. Wake up. Snap the fuck out of it, Jack. You have three minutes and then I’m going to come in and drag you naked into the street if you don’t get your shit together. Now. Come on.”

*   *   *

I’d kept those glasses and the cop’s card twisted up inside my dirty clothes. Conner was right. He was always right. I smelled like a locker room. Worse. I threw my clothes behind the seat in my truck, but stood there, looking at them for just a moment.

Wondering.

Conner and I had identical trucks. Things were like that with us. We’d known each other and been best friends since we were babies, and nothing would ever change those things. Or, at least, that’s what I hoped.

But ever since I broke that lens in Ben and Griffin’s garage, things had been changed, moved around, and that was scarier than anything I had ever seen since my whole fucked-up journey started, back on the night of Conner’s end-of-school party.

He drove.

I sat.

And I couldn’t help but look back, one time, to see if maybe there was a black Cadillac following us, or maybe if we had Freddie Horvath’s body tied up in the bed of Conner’s truck.

I hadn’t gotten away from anything.

We didn’t have to say the first word about where we were going. We always ate at the same places: Chinese food if we went to the mall, or Uncle Herb’s, a twenty-four-hour pancake diner, if we didn’t. And we weren’t going to the mall.

“Dude. Turn right up here,” I said.

Conner glanced at me, shrugged. “Why?”

“I want to go by this place where some kids I know live.”

“You don’t know anyone that I don’t know. And this is the crackhead part of town.” He laughed.

But Conner turned at the corner. We drove around the park. I looked up at the Little League light stanchion, saw our initials. “You remember when we climbed up there, Con?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.” Then he sounded a little perturbed, but it was just Conner. “You are tripping out on some shit today, aren’t you Jack? That doctor really did pop you some pills, didn’t he?”

I tried to laugh.

“Okay. Where am I going now?” he said.

“Here. This street. Forest Trail.”

Forest Trail Lane was a cul-de-sac of older homes that had been built twenty years ago. This was the only neighborhood in Glenbrook that had apartment buildings, too, and every kid in town knew that if you wanted weed or meth, you could find it here.

“Go slow.”

“Dude. What the fuck?”

Conner looked at me like he thought I was trying to score a rock or something. I lowered the window and put my arm out.

“Please, Con. Just go slow.”

Ben and Griffin’s house was at the end of the cul-de-sac; nice, tile roof, a gate on the side leading around to an old L-shaped swimming pool. I swam in it with them. So did Conner.

Just the way it was supposed to be.

Their station wagon was parked in the driveway. The back door on the driver’s side stood open and Griffin’s mom bent inside it, looping plastic Walmart bags onto her fingers.

“Stop here.”

Conner put on the brake. We sat in the middle of the turn and I watched Mrs. Goodrich as she closed the door on her car.

“You never been here before?” I said.

“You’re scaring me, Jack.”

I waved my arm. “Excuse me! Mrs. G?”

And Mrs. Goodrich turned and looked right at me.

Let me tell you something. You know how sometimes you’ll run into a person—at the mall, waiting in line for movie tickets, stuff like that—and you know you recognize the person? But then, when you make eye contact, you can plainly see that you’re a complete stranger to them. That’s exactly how Mrs. Goodrich looked at me. And there was no reason for it. Of course she knew who I was. She had to. I’d been over to that house plenty of times. I could tell you every detail about what was inside it.

She almost seemed angered, frightened, like she thought Conner and I were just a couple of punks who were screwing with her, or maybe we were going to rob her. She pushed the car door shut with a knee and turned toward her house, swinging her bags, ignoring me.

“Whoa.” Conner laughed. “Ladies’ man. What the fuck was that all about?”

I slumped down into the seat, put the window up.

I sighed. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

*   *   *

This is real.

I am sitting here in the front seat of my best friend’s car in the town I grew up in.

This is all real.

And nobody knows anything about me.

We hardly say another word on the way to the diner. Conner asks what that was all about again and I lie to him and say it was only a bad joke. I say the names again.

Ben.

Griffin.

My friend thinks I’m insane.

I want to ask him about the lens, the garage. I want to tell him about the glasses I left in my clothes, but I am afraid.

I am afraid of what Conner will think of me.

This is real.

Welcome home, Jack.

*   *   *

“You’re staring at me.”

“Huh?”

“You keep staring at me, Jack. It’s creeping me out.”

Conner never ate syrup on his pancakes. He liked to roll them up and eat them with his hands. There were things I could always count on, always wanted to count on. But sometimes things slipped away and then came back as something else, too.

I felt myself turning red, getting ready for another one of Conner’s Dude-you-are-so-gay jokes.

“Sorry.”

“Well, quit it.”

But I couldn’t. I saw something in his eyes. Something that wasn’t the same as before. So he kicked my foot under the table.