‘Lucas, I need to tell you something,’ Jacqueline said, and there was an uneasy tenor to her voice. I turned my head, watching her face as she told me she’d been curious and had searched for my mother’s obituary online.

I knew well enough what she’d found. The nightmare from which I could never wake. My heart went stone cold, and I could barely breathe. ‘Did you find your answer?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

Pity. That’s what I saw in her eyes. I lay back, eyes stinging as I thought of the news articles she must have read. I wondered if she’d sifted through the facts to see my part. My guilt.

I braced, trying to come to terms with this. No one outside the Hellers and Dad knew the details. I’d never spoken of them with anyone. I couldn’t bear to even think about it – how could I speak of it?

Then I caught what she’d just said – that she’d talked to Charles.

‘What?’

‘Lucas, I’m sorry if I invaded your privacy –’

‘If? Why would you go talk to him? Weren’t the gory details in the news reports sickening enough for you? Or personal enough?’ I shot off the bed and pulled on my jeans, my voice like ice, like a razor, cutting into my skin. My wrists burned. I don’t know what I said to her and what I didn’t – the details I’d never uttered aloud. It didn’t matter. She knew them all.

I sat, head in my hands, struggling to breathe, reliving it – please, God, no –

A distant noise woke me, but I rolled back over, kicking off the sheet. I was hot, but too lazy to get up and turn on my ceiling fan. I lay on my side, staring out the window to the backyard, thinking about Yesenia, and the coming weekend. I would hold her hand. Kiss her, maybe, if I could get her alone. If she let me.

God, it was hot. I flopped on to my back. To be thirteen was to be a furnace. I burned off food and energy like a flame sucking down oxygen. You will eat us out of house and home by the time you’re fifteen! my mother said while watching me finish off the leftovers she’d intended to reheat for our dinner. We’d ordered takeout instead. She didn’t want all of hers, so I’d finished it, too.

I heard the noise again. Mom was probably up. She prowled around the house sometimes when Dad was gone, missing him. I should check on her … My clock read 4:11. Ugh. Four hours until I would see Yesenia. I could get up early, get to school early. Maybe I would catch her without all her giggling friends, and we could talk about … something. Like my upcoming game. Maybe she’d want to come watch me play sometime.

I turned just as someone leaned over me. Dad? But he was out of town.

Jerked from the bed, I stumbled. Something was stuffed into my mouth as I opened it to scream – I gagged and couldn’t make a sound or spit it out. I thrashed and kicked but couldn’t get loose. Couldn’t move my wrists. I was shoved to my knees at the foot of the bed, and then he was gone. I tried to stand up, run, grab my phone to dial 911, but I was stuck.

My wrists were tied. I strained to scrape the binding loose with my fingernails, but it was too tight. Plastic. It was plastic. I pulled against the restraint, but it didn’t budge. I tried to rotate my hands to see if I could swivel them free, or fold them and twist them free, like Houdini, but the plastic just cut into my wrists. My hands were too big. Mom said my hands and feet were like the big, floppy feet of a puppy that would be a ginormous dog.

From her room down the hall, my mother screamed. I froze. She called my name. ‘Landon!’ There was a crash and a thud and I struggled harder, not caring if it hurt. I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t tell her I was coming. My tongue shoved against the cloth in my mouth.

‘What did you do to him? What did you do to him? LANDON!’

There were more words, the sound of a slap – an open palm against bare skin, more screams, and I heard them all but they didn’t register because there was a buzzing in my ears and my blood swishing and my heart pounding. She was crying. ‘Oh, God. God. Don’t. No. No-no-no-no-no!’ Screaming. ‘NO! NO-NO-NO!’ Crying. ‘Landon …’ I yanked harder, pulling the bed with me, all the way to the door, my feet bracing against the floor, my legs straining. The bed ran into the dresser, wedged against the wall. I couldn’t feel my hands.

I couldn’t hear her any more. I couldn’t hear her. The rag in my mouth finally worked free. ‘Mom! MOM!’ I screamed. ‘DON’T TOUCH HER! MOM!’ My wrists were on fire. Why wasn’t I strong enough to break these stupid f**king plastic bands? I screamed until I was hoarse and kept screaming.

Gunshot.

I stopped breathing. My limbs shook. My chest quaked. I couldn’t hear anything beyond my heartbeat. My blood. My thick swallows. My useless sobs. ‘Mom … Mommy …’

I puked. Passed out. The sun came up. My wrists and arms were covered in blood. The zip-ties on my wrists were covered in blood. It was all brown, dried, itchy.

I called for my mother, but I’d screamed too much. A rasp came from my throat, nothing more. Useless. I was useless. Fucking, f**king, f**king useless.

You’re the man of the house while I’m gone. Take care of your mother.

‘Do you want me to leave?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

25

Landon

The number of people in my graduating class was forty-three.

That number could have easily been forty-two. I’d been one of the projected dropouts since the first day of high school. Before that, probably. In this town, there was no such thing as a fresh start; we carried our histories year to year like lists of impairments pinned to our shirts. The only reason I crossed that gym floor in a cap and gown was the man in the third row of the bleachers, sitting next to my father.

My classmates and I filed through the side door as our band – minus the senior members – played the processional. Seated in a matching cluster of royal blue, we fidgeted as Mrs Ingram, our esteemed principal, assured us of our bright and shiny futures. I knew she was full of shit, and so were her optimistic claims. I stared at the two vertical lines set between her eyes, permanent from decades of hostile glares at unacceptable students. Those lines made her graduation-speech grin look sinister.

Many of my brainwashed classmates – those who’d scored near-perfect grades since learning to print their names – thought they’d skip off to college in the fall and perform just as well, just as easily. Delusional dumbasses. My eighth-grade prep-school courses were more challenging than almost anything demanded of us here. Getting into a good school wasn’t winning the lottery. It was winning the right to work your ass off for the next four years.