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  The word basically whispered around him. He pushed it out with his breath, let it drift and settle, breaking it down into syllables as if it appeared before him on a blackboard and its meaning was hidden in its lilt. Basically he was good. Basically he was young and there wasn’t but so much he could do basically about the hard ways of this world.

  Back in the kitchen, in a cabinet above the oven, he found Brandon’s daddy’s liquor cabinet and hauled an almost full bottle of Wild Turkey out to the garage and popped Cheetos into his mouth and chased them with slugs of whiskey chased with beer and tried not to think about the cries he heard, faster, louder, from inside the house.

  From that point on Pete remembered only snatches. He remembered being sick in the bushes outside of the garage, and he remembered Cozart finding him curled up beneath a bush by a spigot, which he had obviously turned on to wash the vomit from of his shirt and forgot to turn off. He did not remember Cozart scooping him up from the soggy bed of pinestraw and stripping off his shirt and loaning him his jean jacket, which he woke up wearing in bed the next morning along with damp jeans and muddy Wallabees. He did not remember anything about how he got home but one stray moment: Tysinger saying to Cozart, “Don’t let that wuss throw up in my car, man.”

  “He’s waiting on us,” Cozart said to Pete inside the Glam, and because he knew he had to face Tysinger sooner or later, Pete followed Cozart outside.

  “Hop in, fellows,” said Tysinger when they parted the crowd surrounding his car. “Let’s take a ride.”

  Pete thought of begging off, saying he had to get home, it was, after all, a weeknight, he had a curfew, but he knew Cozart would call him on it. That never stopped you before, asshole, he’d say, and it was almost worth going through with to see what Tysinger wanted, if he had any news or just wanted to be with people he did not have to lie to. In the latter Pete noted an intolerable irony: Tysinger desiring his company because he did not, for once this week, have to pretend, when every moment Pete had spent around Lee Tysinger had been an exercise in make-believe.

  “Wad us up a fat one,” Tysinger said to Cozart as he handed him a bag of dope. Cozart had claimed shotgun as usual. Pete would much rather recede into the plush backseat, where, when the eight track was cranked, he could not hear a word of what transpired in the cockpit. Tysinger had the worst taste in music of anyone Pete knew—he favored America, Seals & Crofts, Dan Fogelberg—but seemed more the type for Black Sabbath or Deep Purple. Now, in the quiet of the drive out of town and into the backroads, Pete wished for any kind of noise to seclude him from the conversation.

  “You mighty quiet back there, Edgecombe,” said Tysinger.

  Pete shrugged, but when he spotted Tysinger staring at him in the rearview, as if he could trap him there with his gaze, he said, “Let’s hear some tunes.”

  “Hey, let’s don’t,” said Tysinger.

  “Want me to fire this mother up?” said Cozart, oblivious to Tysinger’s dark mood, dipping the joint down his throat to seal the paper, holding it up to marvel at his stellar roll.

  “Wait until we get to the strawberry field,” said Tysinger. He switched his eyes to search out Pete in the rearview. “All I need now is to get fucking busted.”

  Pete settled into the seat, glad for the first time in weeks that he wasn’t stoned. He thought of passing on the joint, but this would be a first, and what excuse could he give? A sudden cold? Homework to do? Nothing he could come up with would cut it with Tysinger, who was sure to read his abstention as a betrayal.

  As soon as Tysinger hit the two-track leading to the strawberry field where they often went to get high, Cozart lit the joint. Pete smoked it in a silence he both welcomed and feared. Still he wished for music, any music, or Cozart’s idle trashtalk, or rain lashing the windows, but there was only the noise of smoke huffed in and out and outside the treefrogs chirping their grating song.

  “Get us a few beers out of the trunk,” said Tysinger, handing Cozart his keys. “And take a walk, Cozart. I got to talk to Pete for a minute.”

  Pete wished he had the beer in hand now before Tysinger said whatever it was he needed to say. And why would he say it to Pete? Cozart was there, too; he knew as much as Pete knew. One thing Pete knew even though he hated to admit it: Cozart was 100 percent Trent, a local boy who felt uncomfortable only around strangers. But they were all strangers to Pete. Once again he wished he’d passed on the joint, which was hard at work in the most fearsome corners of his psyche, concocting scenarios in which Tysinger found reason to blame Pete for things that were not his fault.

  “You get off?”

  “Sure,” said Pete.

  “‘Sure,’” Tysinger repeated, not kindly. “You always say that. ‘Sure.’ ‘Sure thing.’ You ever disagree with people?”

  “When there’s a reason to.”

  “Ever tell someone to fuck off?”

  Sure, Pete felt like saying, but instead he said, “I guess I’m more the laid-back type.”

  “That’s good, Pete. Smart.”

  The trunk slammed. Cozart appeared at the window bearing sweaty cans of Stroh’s. As Cozart passed the beers to Tysinger, he stuck his head farther in the window to bum a cigarette from Pete. Pete felt Cozart’s stare as he extracted a cigarette from the pack, but he avoided looking at him.

  “Go take a whiz, cuz,” Tysinger told him. When Cozart was out of earshot he handed Pete a beer, swiveled around , slung his arm over the headrest, and said, “Talk to your brother lately?”

  Pete pointed a finger at his chest and said, “My brother?”

  “Yeah. Your brother, man. I ain’t got a brother.”

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t trust the motherfucker, that’s what about him.”

  “What do you need to trust him for, Lee? He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  Tysinger seemed offended that Pete called him by his first name, which only teachers and family ever used. In the darkness Pete thought he could make out a creeping redness blotting his pale face, overtaking the wispy goatee and sideburns faint as lint blown up by the wind.

  “He was there that night. Earlier on, before I picked you and Cozart up and went back over there.”

  “Danny?”

  “How many brothers you got, Edgecombe?”

  “My brother doesn’t go to keg parties.”

  “He went to one. How do you know who was there before you got there anyhow? You calling me a liar?”

  “Lots of people were over there, right? What are you worried about him for?”

  “Because I don’t trust his ass, that’s why”

  “Well, you don’t need to worry about Danny. He doesn’t know shit. And if he did know something he wouldn’t talk.”

  Somehow this lie seemed worse than that moment that had haunted Pete for near a week, the moment that came back to him dismembered, in stray and ever more horrifying detail, along with the word basically.

  The word did not apply to Danny. His goodness, his strength, was so unquestionable that to consider its basis felt like a sacrilege.

  “He best not, if he knows what’s good for him. I play football with the boy, and I can take him out for the season in practice tomorrow. I been in classes with him. Thinks he’s smarter than everybody else.”

  Surely I’m no threat, Pete thought. That he had succeeded as passing himself off as one of the boys should have provided some consolation, but it only made him feel worthless.

  Instead he took a swallow of beer and shrugged. “What do you want me to say, Lee?”

  “I want you to tell your brother that I know all about his cock-sucking parties with that faggot Pierce.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, man. You bound to know your brother’s a fucking queer.”

  Pete felt his throat rusting shut. He shivered as the sweat dripped icily down his sides. Of course he’d suspected it, but he’d never actually let himself consider it. He was always looking for a way to d
isprove it. Danny kept him guessing. He dated, he talked on the phone with girls, but it never went further than a couple of dates. Back when Pete used to brag to him about the girls he’d lured into the woods, Danny would go silent, seem almost pissed off. Pete thought he was only being prudish.

  It explained a lot about the way his brother acted, especially in the last year, when everything between them had grown more tense. But you couldn’t tell it by looking at him, listening to him—he didn’t walk gay, or sound effeminate—and though Pete knew you didn’t have to “act” gay to be gay, he’d never known anyone gay except for Brandon Pierce, who he hardly knew at all and who Tysinger was telling him was his brother’s lover.

  What fucking difference does it make? he wanted to say to Tysinger, but instead he just sat there, staring out the window and the red tip of Cozart’s smoke, moving in the dark.

  “You’re kidding me,” Tysinger said. “You mean you didn’t know?”

  “Of course I know. What I don’t know is why that makes him any more likely to talk.”

  “Because he’s a homo, too. If anybody’s going to talk, it’d be your brother.”

  Pete tried and failed to tune out the decrescendo of treefrog song so that he might hear, in the distant space above the trees, the helicopter arriving to airlift him to safety.

  “So what do you want me to do, talk to him?”

  “I sure as hell do, and here’s what I want you to say. Tell him I got all kinds of shit on him won’t look too good to the people in charge of that scholarship he’s after. Coach Sutton told us the only reason he came out for the team is because he’s up for some scholarship. You think anybody takes him seriously? He’s the worst player on the team, and I’m including three-hundred-pound Butterbean Steadman there. Tell your brother if he wants his scholarship he’ll keep his mouth shut.”

  Pete felt sick, more from the thought of Danny keeping his mouth shut about a boy he called his friend beaten to death by a so-called friend of Pete’s than the fact that whatever Tysinger asked him to do he would do. He was already doing it, and it seemed too late to stop himself. Yet for his brother, nothing was too late. For despite what Tysinger was telling him, parts of which might well be true, Danny had nothing at all to do with Brandon Pierce’s death. Had he known the first thing about it he would have come forward by now, no matter what it would have cost him, because even though Pete knew his brother wanted more than anything to leave this town, knew that this desire was the single thing out of all the things they used to have in common they still shared, he was too honest, too good to sacrifice Brandon Pierce to his escape.

  “Think you can deliver the message?”

  As much as Pete wanted to tell Tysinger to fuck off, he heard himself saying what Tysinger wanted to hear. “Sure.” Hiding from Tysinger’s gaze behind his upturned beer, Pete convinced himself that there was time still to right this wrong, to talk to his brother and find out the truth.

  3

  DANIEL WAS NEVER in a hurry to get to school. He hated the preschool scene, which involved various cliques segregated in areas of the parking lot, gossiping and smoking and watching some couple-of-the-month make out on the hood of a Camaro. When Pete managed to harangue Daniel into leaving early enough for Pete to sneak away with his stoner friends to the woods behind the football stadium for his pre-homeroom joint, Daniel sat in the car listening to the radio, reading, or finishing up his homework. Pete rarely rode with him anymore—he caught a ride with Cozart or Stuart Romine or someone else from the neighborhood—so Daniel was surprised when Pete announced that Thursday morning in October that he was driving today. Pete never wanted to drive. Daniel thought this the one area of his little brother’s life where the boy showed a little self-control.

  Something was up, but Daniel wasn’t about to ask. He would wait all day for Pete to talk if it came to that, though it had been years—two or three, maybe—since he had spent a whole day with his brother. In fact, barring family-mandatory events like meals or Christmas morning, Daniel had not spent much more than a few hours in his brother’s presence. He believed Pete hated him. He did not hate Pete, though he was ashamed of him.

  Not because of how his brother looked—everyone dressed like mill hands that year, a standard uniform of workshirts, jeans, boots. And it was not because of his various habits—half the people in their high school smoked pot and drank. (Daniel liked to get high himself, though only occasionally, and never with anyone who might report back to his brother.) It wasn’t because of the people Pete hung out with, some of whom were scum. What shamed Daniel about his brother was how smart he was and how early and easily he’d surrendered his intelligence to something black and brooding and fiercely coddled inside of him. He had given up already, and he was only seventeen, and even though Daniel felt like giving up himself at times, he kept himself convinced that the things that were making him miserable would not last.

  When Pete missed the turn off for school, Daniel said, “Let me guess. Out of rolling papers?”

  “We’re taking the day off,” Pete said.

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and you, bro.”

  “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’ve got a trig test. And even if I didn’t have a trig test, I would go to school.”

  “Why? Don’t you ever feel like taking a day off?”

  “Yeah, Pete, I do. Like every other day. But you know what? I figured out that you can’t always get what you want.”

  “Like the Stones say,” he said. The Stones were Pete’s favorite band. He had this adolescent boy’s crush on Jagger and Richard going strong. He plastered his walls with Stones posters, all the band members in these tight velvet hiphuggers and Jagger in his white jumpsuit, and of course it never occurred to him or any of his friends that papering your walls with pictures of guys in frilly Elizabethan bell-sleeved shirts and overstuffed crotches was anything but normal. If Daniel had pointed this out, Pete would have called him a fucking square. He would claim he was a fan, that’s all. He was pretty fanatical. Daniel preferred the Beatles, always had, but Pete had all the Stones albums and knew all the words to obscure songs like “Sway” on Sticky Fingers, and once when he was twelve, he snuck off to a Stones concert in Charlotte when he was supposed to be at a Boy Scout Jamboree. Of course he got caught. He always got caught.

  “Okay, right. The Stones said everything first. Look, if you don’t turn around, I’m getting out at the next stoplight.”

  “Too bad we live in a town where there are only, like, three.”

  Daniel looked up at the highway, saw that they were headed west on 24, toward Fayetteville. The last stoplight was at least a quarter mile back in the opposite direction. For the next couple of miles he alternated between anger at being kidnapped by his little brother, disgust for allowing this to go on (for he knew that if he really wanted to, he could be sitting in his desk taking his trig test in a half-hour’s time), and relief for a day off. The last few days of school had been torture. He was glad for a break even though he felt guilty for missing class. Of course, Daniel was used to being torn. “On the one hand/on the other hand” was his favorite phrase. He spent most of his time weighing hands, discarding and taking on ballast to avoid a crash. He had not crashed yet. No one knew how close he’d come. Since his way of dealing with this division was to overachieve, everyone just thought he was driven. They didn’t have a clue. Pete sucked up all the energy. He was self-destructing and Daniel was self-improving and, though both behaviors were desperate and perhaps even pathological, Daniel understood why Pete’s symptoms would draw more spectators.

  “Okay, Pete,” Daniel said, “Obviously you’ve got something to talk to me about. You might as well say it so we can get it over with and I can make my trig test.”

  Pete looked over at him in that faux-innocent way he had when their parents caught him in the act. He was the worst liar, always had been. He lied a lot, too, big crazy lies. At the ocean he was almost eaten alive by a shark, but he’d befriended
this porpoise who chased the shark out to sea. He saw Eric Clapton in line at a Wendy’s in Raleigh.

  “Do I look like I’ve got something to talk to you about?”

  “It’s not really got much to do with the way you look,” said Daniel. “More the fact that the tardy bell just rang and we’re headed away from town.”

  “Fuck the tardy bell,” said Pete.

  Daniel faked a big laugh. “Yeah, man, fuck it, fuck that bell.”

  Pete laughed then, sincerely, and Daniel felt a little ashamed for mocking him. It didn’t make him feel, well, older, stronger, superior, which was how he almost always felt in his brother’s presence. Daniel thought Pete wanted him to feel that way around him. If he didn’t, why did he keep screwing up and why was he so angry and why didn’t he exercise any of those qualities that, when they were younger, made Daniel a little in awe of him? Daniel used to be jealous of his brother back then, for a lot of reasons. For one, Pete never had to prove himself to the guys in the neighborhood. They accepted him because he was—still was, Daniel had to admit—undeniably cool. Daniel had to work at cool, and he knew that cool was something you couldn’t work at. Put the slightest bit of effort into it and you’re suddenly and forever square

  Of course, Daniel reached the point eventually where he saw through cool, though there were still lots of times, like right then, when Daniel felt square and awkward around his brother.

  “Turn around, Pete.” Daniel tried to muster anger, but it felt like his anger respository had been depleted over the last week. He’d been angry at himself for days and was desperate enough to try any relief.

  “Nope. I’ve decided we need to spend some time together.”

  “I don’t have time to waste riding around with you all day.”

  “Well, I hear you, but see, to me, wasting time is not like some big sin. I think there’s way too much time, and I don’t really think it’s going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference to treat every moment like you’re going to croak in the next half-hour like preachers and counselors and coaches tell you to do. You know? I mean, there’s a lot of space in a day that you’re just not going to use. I mean you might have a book in your hand or you might be at your job or you might even be screwing some chick on the ground in the graveyard but your mind’s going to be off somewhere else and training your mind like you do a dog, heel, roll over, come back here, hey, that’s the one thing you can’t do to your mind, man, it won’t follow orders, it don’t come when called, so why not go ahead and waste a certain part of the day if you know it’s going to be wasted anyway, why not waste it with some flair, do it up, go for it.”