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  “C’mon, dude. We all dip.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t go all pious on me. Like you don’t?” The guy sounds on edge, like he’s maybe taken from the cookie jar one too many times. Moch is quiet. There’s a quiet clicking sound of someone opening and closing a metallic lighter. Click click click. He breaks the silence. “You watching the divisional playoffs this weekend?”

  “Pass. Not a big fan of ass grabbers in spandex. Cash?”

  A ruffling noise and the sound of a zipper.

  “It’s all there.”

  “Chulo,” Moch mutters. “Only a total pendejo wouldn’t count.”

  “Where can I reach you?” the guy asks.

  “Nowhere. I’ll contact you.”

  “When?”

  “When I’m ready.”

  The guy leaves, the moonlight casting eerie shadows, fingers of blackness that stretch over snow-covered sagebrush and stones, zigzagging through the moonscape like phantoms.

  “Moch?” I whisper.

  “Who’s there?” I hear the cock of the hammer of a gun.

  “Moch, it’s Mike.”

  He scrambles off the concrete platform and finds me in the shadows. “What the—What are you doing here? Are you totally loca?”

  I turn on my flashlight. My jeans are soaked in blood. “What are you doing here?”

  “Joder. You’d be killed if anybody knew you were here. You want that?”

  “And you?”

  I stare at him and watch how anger has chiseled his face into something unrecognizable. But his face softens. “Mike, you’re bleeding all over the place.”

  He takes my hand in his and pulls me to my feet. I hobble beside him, leaning on him, and we hike through wet snow to get to our cars. “Moch—”

  He holds up his hand, shakes his head. “What do you think I do, fix up cars and sing ‘Greased Lightning’?”

  I drop my gaze and shake my head.

  “We’re not ten anymore. Things change. We changed.”

  “But this?” I think of everything Moch can be. Moch: baseball player. Moch: community reporter. Moch: drug dealer. Moch: dead. “This is . . . wrong.”

  “When I was a little kid, somebody forgot to tell me that I don’t count. I’ve lived here since I was two. I was a Cub Scout. But, you see, I don’t exist according to the nice people at the Social Security office. I’m a space taker, oxygen waster, persona non grata—”

  “Drug dealer.”

  “What am I s’posed to do? Break my back every day working in some kind of indentured servitude? You’re sitting pretty comfortable—heading to U-Dub next fall. You ever been to the Carson River? Seen the shantytown there? Open your eyes, Mike.”

  “So what do you do with the money? Some kind of college fund? A CDT?” I swallow back the fear that’s bubbling up inside me. I figured la Cordillera was just a thing he did to let off steam. Kind of like my gambling, a means to an end. But what’s Moch’s end?

  My breathing comes quicker. I wrap my arms around my chest, hoping Moch doesn’t see I’m shaking. “You’re such a cliché—poster boy for a life in a gang. You’re so—”

  “You got a better way to do things? Show me,” he says. “Joder, Mike.” He slams his hand on the hood of his car. “When are you going to see the world for what it really is?”

  “What is it?”

  “A dead end.” I can’t see Moch’s features in the shadows. But I can feel the tension, how his entire body bristles. He moves toward me. “Don’t come back here. Ever.”

  My breath stops in my esophagus and remains, like it’s frozen with the rest of my insides. Crystal-like ice particles have formed and closed my throat. I try to swallow, inhale, exhale, but everything feels cryogenic. I move toward my car door and open it, backing in, afraid to turn my back on somebody I thought I knew.

  I ease the door shut and lock it, leaning my head on the steering wheel, willing the air to reach my lungs.

  Moch steps away from the car and lights up a cigarette—the orange ember like a firefly in the blackness. He watches me back out as I clumsily reverse my way to the main road. Part of me knows the old Moch is there, making sure I get to the road okay. I can see the dwindling light of his cigarette, the outline of his body leaning against his car. I drive toward Carson trembling.

  Alone.

  Hopes of future lost in present.

  Chapter 9

  THERE ARE FOUR MISSED CALLS,

  the last one a little past midnight. He’s such a tool. I stare at the phone—the blinking missed calls—and listen to the voice mail.

  “Just calling to make sure you haven’t been buried alive in a shallow grave in central Nevada because you got involved in some kind of Mafia scandal or have become the target of a federal investigation. That, and, um, sorry about Seth. We were just talking and, damn, that guy is good about getting information. I’m. So. Sorry. Really. I so owe you. It was like my brain-to-mouth filter had a glitch the other day. I’ve already called Seth to retract.” *beeeeep*

  I pull over to the shoulder of the road and when I feel like I can calm my voice, I call.

  “You pick now to return my call? Is this the beginning of what I anticipate to be a very painful payback for me opening my big old mouth?”

  “You said—I have it right here on my phone—‘I so owe you.’ Would you like me to play it back to you?”

  “It’s true. I do. I didn’t specify time of day for said payback.”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “I would never be sleeping at, uh, two in the morning. Why would you think I was sleeping?” He says this through an exaggerated yawn.

  “This is dumb. I’m sorry. I just—” My voice catches. Stupid stupid stupid.

  “Hey. Are you okay?”

  “Have you ever noticed you ask me that a lot?” I try to keep it light, keep the tears away.

  “Maybe because, it seems to me, you . . . aren’t.”

  “Do you happen to have some gauze and iodine at your house?”

  “Okay. Now I’m awake. And worried.”

  “I just kind of need company right now.”

  “With gauze and iodine? Like that’s normal.”

  “I’m a bookie. How’s that normal?”

  Silence.

  “Never mind,” I say.

  “Follow Ormsby until you run into what looks like a concrete water tower. I’ll wait for you outside.”

  “Your parents?”

  “I’m already on my way downstairs.”

  I drive around Ormsby until I see the gray cylindrical water tower–like house. I’ve driven by it before and never realized it was an actual house for actual people. Total postmodern Gothic. Enormous. My trailer house would look like a lawn ornament here.

  Wrought-iron gates open and Josh waves me in front of one of the garages; there are seven. He’s at my door and opening it by the time the car is off. He stares at the blood on my leg.

  “What did you do?” he says.

  “I fell on some broken glass,” I say. “Really.”

  He cocks his head to the side.

  “I snuck out. So I don’t really feel like going home to have Lillian patch me up. I’m not in the mood for an inquisition.”

  “Understood.” He pulls me up and wraps my arm around his shoulders. I can hardly put weight on my knee by now. Maybe I need to go see a doctor.

  We walk through a fifteen-foot-tall door. “Expecting Goliath?” I ask.

  “No,” Josh says. “Sasquatch.”

  I smile.

  The house is . . . weird. It’s a hollowed-out cylinder with a glass ceiling, so the courtyard feels totally open. One side is completely cemented and the side facing east is a hundred eighty degrees, floor-to-ceiling windows, with a view of the mountains. There’s a winding concrete stairway from the first floor to the second floor, hugging the inner circular wall. It doesn’t look like it’s been furnished yet—but I have a feeling that’s the point. Sleek-looking couches and odd-angled c
hairs are placed deliberately—no stained couch cushions in sight.

  It has the look of just-moved-in. Polished lemon-scented wood floors and some really beautiful floor tiles—not the kind you peel and paste like our bathroom floor linoleum.

  “Can you make it upstairs?”

  I hobble upstairs to Josh’s room—the only place in the house, from what I’ve seen, that looks like it could be inhabited by humans. In fact, too human. “Can you open a window?” I ask. “Just for a little air.” The whole male-adolescent stink really can be gross.

  Josh blushes. “Sorry. I wasn’t prepared for company.” He throws a blanket on his bed and says, “You probably should sit down, put your foot up on my chair.”

  I hoist my leg onto his chair.

  “I think I’ll have to cut your jeans off,” he says. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry if I bleed on your stuff.”

  Josh cuts my jeans off just above the knee, his fingers grazing my thigh. I wonder if I can attribute my light-headedness to blood loss at this point.

  “I think it’s more bark than bite,” he says, looking at the cut. He washes it with warm water, then pretty much dumps an iodine bottle on it, bandaging it up. After, he brings up an ice pack and cold pizza from the kitchen. It disappears within minutes along with Cokes and a bag of barbecue chips.

  “Your room’s as big as my trailer,” I say. I lean back and stare up at his ceiling—the only place in the house that doesn’t look like an HGTV makeover room. It’s covered in newspaper clippings, torn pages from books, comic strips, a hodgepodge of movie tickets, raffle tickets. I like looking up there—as if every mystery about Josh could be revealed if I just had the time to read through it all.

  Josh lies down next to me and starts to point things out on his virtual tour of delinquency: “That newspaper clipping—front-page news about a hole drilled in downtown Boston.” Josh grins. “My friends and I did it. All we needed were traffic cones and orange vests, and we rented the drill. And that”—he points to Saint Frances High School—“was my sweetest good-bye. It was determined that I was unfit for such an esteemed academy so, on parents’ day, I streamed porn into the Sunday-mass TVs.”

  “That?” I point to a depilatory cream, hoping it doesn’t have to do with some model he dated.

  “Ahhh . . . that cream was sweet. I put hair-removal cream in the lacrosse team’s shampoo bottles—picture day.”

  His ceiling is a collage of his schools and why he got kicked out of each one. He tells his stories like a warrior who has returned from battle. “My last shot of getting into a quote-unquote ‘good college’ is Northwestern, because that’s where my dad went. Dad is overly generous with his alumni association checks. The physics lab in the engineering college is named after him: the James Michael Ellison Physics Lab.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s huge.”

  “It’s only a plaque,” Josh says. “Kind of shabby looking, too.”

  “Not the college. You. Your collage of delinquency.”

  Josh smiles.

  “Why do you do it, though?” I ask. “What’s the point?”

  “I’ve formed my own antibullshit division.”

  “This oughta be good,” I say, and close my eyes. “I’m listening. I just kind of need to close my eyes a second.”

  Josh has a smile in his voice. “It started with the depilatory cream. There’s some freak thing about guys needing to haze each other so they can be friends. Fine if you’re a tool and want to buy into it. But the hazing included one of my best friends, Maria. They held her down and shaved her head. As you’ve witnessed, I’m not a particularly effective badass, so I formed my antibullshit division that day. But it doesn’t stop at school. Look around this place.”

  I don’t have the energy to look around and am glad Josh keeps talking.

  “My mom thinks it’s nice we live in a catalog. In the entrance, we have an umbrella stand—with umbrellas with ivory handles. Ivory as in elephant tusks, endangered-animal poaching, and whatnot.”

  I shrug. “Well, not the most Greenpeace-friendly household.”

  He laughs. “How much does it rain in Nevada?”

  “Not umbrellas-with-ivory-handles much.”

  I feel Josh get up from the bed, and I miss the warmth by my side. He strides around the room, pulling brand-name clothes from his closet, tossing them to the floor with Turkish rug–dealer flair. “Everything my family does is for show, with just the right amount of political activism to give us the good Ellison name. It’s like the adult version of high school: say the right things, join the right clubs, and you’re in. It’s just bullshit. So when I make an entire team go bald in patchy spots, inciting an asbestos and other toxic elements investigation in the locker room that costs the school thousands and thousands of dollars, it’s like getting back at the establishment, just nailing them where they’re vulnerable. It makes them more human,” Josh says. “And it makes everybody else feel a little less lame, I guess. Maybe I’m just trying to level the playing field.” Josh looks at me. “Like why you did what you did to Nim.”

  “Nah,” I say. “That wasn’t leveling the playing field. That was revenge.”

  “There was more to it than revenge.”

  He’s right. But I’m doing fine, just getting through today to get to tomorrow. I’ll go to college soon and leave it all behind. I’m not into the causes—Lillian is.

  I sit up, my entire body screaming for sleep. “So on a mission to end the bullshit, huh? It sounds pretty heroic. I suppose I can forgive you for leaking my story to Seth, then.”

  “Michal, you have no idea how lame I felt today.”

  I shrug. I’m almost dizzy from tiredness and look at my watch. “It’s late. So late. I just got comfy and warm and . . . tomorrow’s gonna be a nightmare.”

  “I’ll bring coffee.”

  Josh helps me downstairs. I’m still hobbling, but I don’t feel as bad as I did earlier. He walks me to my car, opens my door, and lays a towel on the bloody driver’s seat. “You okay to drive?”

  “Absolutely.” I inhale, exhale, shivering in the cold car. My car wheezes to life and I put the heater on max, my leg bobbing up and down, waiting for the heater to actually heat. “Thank you,” I say. “Antibullshit division and all.”

  “You’re as far from bullshit as they come.”

  I laugh. “Flattery on someone who’s lost a pint of blood will get you everywhere.”

  “I’m serious. You’re real.”

  “I don’t know how else to be.”

  “You know, I’ve been ‘the new guy’ five times in three years. Suckage Central for most, but I’ve always made a couple of friends, played a prank or two, coasted by. Here, I can tell, it’s gonna be different.”

  “What’s different?”

  “You.” He says it so matter-of-factly.

  Doesn’t he realize I’m drowning here? Treading water just to get by?

  “See you tomorrow, Josh Ellison.”

  “See you in a few hours, Michal Garcia.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and drive home in a haze of tiredness. I don’t even remember opening the front door and getting into bed, falling asleep in my clothes.

  Unexpected friendship in an antibullshit package.

  Chapter 10

  MY HEAD FEELS LIKE SOMEBODY

  ripped it off my neck, bowled it for ten frames, then put it back on. The snooze alarm goes off again, and I slam my hand onto the button, then pull myself out of bed and into the bathroom.

  I stand in the shower and muffle a scream when ice-cold pellets stream out of the eco-showerhead. Now is not the time to think about water conservation, so I get out, wrap a towel around me, and sit on the toilet until the entire bathroom is cloaked in steam. When I step back in, hot water streams over me.

  As crappy as I feel, as scared as I felt last night, it all feels okay now. I sit on the edge of the tub, water beading on my arms and legs, feeling weightless. My knee is bluish and swollen. But it doesn’
t look like I’ll need to amputate the leg. I wash it and wrap it in fresh gauze.

  “Hey, Mike!” Lillian bangs on the door. “You okay in there?”

  I nod, then think better of it because nodding feels like somebody’s taking a mallet to my frontal lobe.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah. I’m good.” I pick up my crumpled clothes and shove them to the bottom of the laundry basket. I’ll throw my jeans away later. Luckily I’m still the one in charge of laundry, so it’s not like Lillian will notice bloody clothes.

  A pot of coffee percolates in the kitchen. Lillian pushes a cup across the table, looking up from yesterday’s paper—the one she gets from the clinic. News is news, but it’s kind of weird that we’re always one day behind, like perma life lag.

  I cup the coffee mug in my hands, sipping down the bitter liquid. “Thanks for the coffee. I guess I slept in this morning.”

  She motions to the clock. “You’re running behind.” She puts a plate of half-cold scrambled eggs in front of me, burned toast on the side. “You were out late,” she says through the paper.

  I take a forkful of egg and just about gag on the congealed grease. I grab a piece of the charred toast, spreading it thick with butter and jelly, pushing the plate of eggs away. “Sorry.”

  Lillian watches me. “You do anything stupid last night?”

  I shrug. Witnessing a drug deal probably isn’t a smart thing to do. However, witnessing one and living is miraculous.

  Lillian does this thing where she raises one eyebrow, and it turns from an arc into a pointed gray triangle, as if an invisible string is about to yank it off her forehead and flap it around in the wind, marking the spot where all happy thoughts surrendered.

  “Just went out. With a friend.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Like what else?”

  “Like anything else that’s stupid? Other than sneaking out, which is totally unacceptable.” When Lillian’s angry, her accent sneaks up on her.

  “I’m not my mom.”

  Lillian nods.

  “Or you,” I say, pushing myself back from the table. “I’m gonna be late.” When I leave the room, Lillian’s turned to the weather page in the Nevada Appeal, and I want to scream at her because the weather does change from day to day—maybe nothing else, but the weather does.