A hand clubbing me on the side of the head.
The grit of the linoleum under my hands and knees.
Stay down.
The smoke slipped out of me slowly.I blinked to clear my eyes, took another hit, and passed the joint back.
All three of them were looking at me now like I was something that had crawled out of their nightmares.I was, I guess.Old.Fucked up.My face.But something in the way they watched me told me they knew what had happened upstairs.Or suspected.
“Guess I’m a little out of practice,” I said and tried to smile.
The girls dissolved into laughter, and they got up, still laughing, and staggered away.One of them looked back, and whatever she saw, it made her laugh even harder.The guy examined me and then stood.He sounded like every twenty-year-old who thinks he’s made it when he said, “Aren’t you a little old for this?”
After the party swallowed them, I sat there, waiting for the weed to work.People moved around me.Voices blended together until it was all one voice.My face was hot.My eyes were dry, and I wanted to close them.
But somehow, I got myself upright.And, one hand on the wall, I made my way to the front of the house.When I stepped outside and the door shut behind me, it was like the night drank up the sounds of the party, and the sudden stillness was deep and pure.A dark, unfamiliar landscape stretched out ahead of me.The summer heat had eased, and the moon hung in a nimbus of humidity.I had a vague memory of parking down the road, walking under trees.So, the car was out there, somewhere, and I started down the porch steps.
I’d gone maybe a hundred yards, following the line of cars that stretched down the drive and out onto a county road, when I heard an uneven footstep break the stillness.Even buried under the shots, even under the haze of the weed, instincts took over.Maybe those guys had decided they wanted more.Maybe—like a surprising number of guys—they’d realized they liked it, having someone they could hurt, someone who couldn’t talk back.
But then the footfall came again, and a solitary shape emerged from between two cars.The moon lit him from behind, so at first, all I could see was blond hair that looked like ash in the night, one pale shoulder, a tiny jockstrap that sagged on one hip.Like the rest of the dumbass kids here, he was young—he had that lean look of guys who haven’t quite left adolescence behind.
And then he stumbled into one of the cars, put out a hand to brace himself on the window, and I saw the blood.He left a handprint of it on the glass.
“Hey,” I said.The word was rough in the silence.“Are you okay?”
He turned.And for one long, impossible moment, it was like looking in a mirror.Even under all the blood, shards of glass sparkled in the cuts and gashes, catching the moonlight.His eye was a red ruin.He stared at me, not seeing me, and took another step.And then he fell.
I dug out my phone and stumbled into a run.
2
The ambulance came, and people ran.
I sat with the kid on the grass, safely out of the way as cars and trucks sped off into the darkness.Frightened shouts, the screech of music as stereos blared to life and were then snapped off, the smell of hot oil and metal and rubber breaking up the cool quiet.The kid slept through all of it, his head pillowed on my shirt.The wounds still bled, but not badly enough to be life threatening, and I was afraid of making things worse if I tried to apply pressure with the glass still in there.There was his eye, too.The way the shadows fell, at least I didn’t have to look at it.Somehow, my vape was still in my pocket, so I sat there and hit it and watched everyone else’s night fall apart.The dark felt like a breath on my back.
When the paramedics got out of the ambulance, I flagged them down, and after that, my part was over.All except the waiting.I watched from a distance as they checked the kid out.There were two paramedics, each with a flashlight.I didn’t know either of them, and I wondered what that meant—were we far enough from Wahredua that someone else had responded?Or had I missed some new hires?One of them was a woman, and when she shone her light on the kid’s face, the beam trembled, and her body locked up.She did better than the man; his hand dropped, and he said, “Christ.”
I could have told them, but they figured it out themselves: there wasn’t much they could do.There wasn’t much anybody could do.
“What happened?”the guy shouted to me.
The night was quieter now, and it felt like it was just the four of us.
“He got hit in the face with some glass.”
“Yeah,” the woman said.“How?”
I shrugged and hit my vape again.
They got him on a stretcher and were loading him into the back of the ambulance when the cruisers arrived.The deputy who cornered me was a white guy, twentysomething, losing his hair and trying to make up for it with a neckbeard.His name tag said Burrows, and his khaki uniform had DORE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT on it.So, not that far from Wahredua after all.
“This your friend?”was his opening line.He might have said more, but that’s when he saw my face.In a book, somebody might say,He almost swallowed his tongue,like some kind of deep-throating bullshit.But it wasn’t like that, not really.It was like a word or a noise or something tried to get out, and then whatever it was, it got caught in hismouth.
The ambulance doors thudded shut in the night.
I shook my head.
“You do that to him?”
