to tear. He and Mom had gone to Myrtle Beach a thousand times in that car, back when it was just the two of them.
“Michael? Why’re you sad?” Patrick asked, leaning over Michael’s shoulder and peering at his expression with growing dread in his voice.
God, he sees everything. Control yourself.
“I’m not, pfff,” Michael said, and turned toward the guardrail.
The falling darkness beyond the railing: a sheer downhill slope, mohawked clear of trees in the middle where power lines were strung, dense Bellow-sounding woodlands surrounding the empty lane on both sides.
It looked like a path off the edge of the known world. Like a void, waiting to swallow him.
No. No. I’ve done worse, Michael told himself. That ride had been when he was thirteen, and the bike had been his birthday present. In his pickup, Ron had taken Michael to the top of a mountain-bike trail in the city park. “Well go ’head,” he’d said, and seemed a thousand miles tall, his smell like sweat and strong coffee, the sun glinting the gem of his championship football ring. But the trail was nasty, snarled with roots. “Your mother and I worked hard for this bike. If you think we got money layin’ around, you can go on back to dreamin’,” Ron said, seeing Michael’s hesitation. “Do you know what hard work is, Michael-boy?”
“I—”
“Oh, did I know you’d pull this shit. You ain’t sittin’ on your ass with your damn video games all day while your mother and I work. A boy should want to ride his bike. Don’t you think that’s what real boys want?” Ron was a bomb. Yes, he was a bomb, and that was the first time Michael lit him. But when Michael’s tears threatened—tears a real boy would never have, he thought—Ron said softly, “’Course, maybe the problem is, this boy’s really becoming a man.” The hairy hand Ron placed on Michael’s shoulder had felt amazing, like everything that was powerful and mysterious and special about grown-ups. How easy it is to believe in kindness when you are young and your world has not yet ended. So Michael rode the trail.
He spent the rest of his birthday in the emergency room, his collarbone broken in two places.
But that was before, Michael told himself. Back when I still thought he was safe. Before I realized I had to, like, take scary things and use them.
This wasn’t a suicide run. This was a hill made of Awesome and Getaway.
Michael lifted Patrick into the kid’s seat mounted on the back of the bike. God, he felt so small.
“We’re gonna hafta go purty fast,” Michael said. “Sooo guess who gets to control our headlights?”
Michael demonstrated, turning the flashlight on behind the binoculars, so that a single beam entered the back of the binocs and twin pipes of bright shot out the front.
Patrick smiled a little, in awe. He put the orange toy gun into his pocket, took the light and binoculars from Michael.
The riders—Michael did not see Rulon among them—reached the Volvo, dismounting and searching the car in the light of their headlamps. Michael got shakily onto his own bike. He was toeing silently forward when Patrick screamed:
“Wait! Michael! Ultraman! I forgotted him!”
One of the riders shouted, “Oh Lord! There! The side of the road!”
“I got him in my pocket,” Michael lied.
And he pushed off.
The mountain whooshed.
One instant they were on flat; the next, the world tilted up in a misty punch of snow. The drop was far steeper than it had looked, and the snowstorm thick enough to blind. But Michael focused desperately on the adrenaline-sick pulse hammering in his throat—
And he twisted around the crawling Bellow, leaning into his turn, and it felt that he was leaning onto air just firm enough to hold him gently up.
He smiled without realizing it. Yes-yes, this was chuckling at gravity. This was, in the depths of insanity and wrong, perfectly right.
Exhilaration.
Freedom.
Control.
“Left-left-left!” he said breathlessly, and Patrick shot light upon a Bellow emerging from the woods.
“Reach fer the skyyyyy!” Patrick cried in his cowboy voice.
The Bellow screamed and fell and sledded down the mountain on its back.
“Nice shootin’, Tex!” Michael heard himself say, and his brother laughed, clapping happily on his back. And Michael remembered joy.
Now came the first four-wheeler, following, flying over the guardrail.
Its headlight hung wildly among the treetops to their left, then landed down in the snow.
Michael hooked the bike into the tree line. Here the moonlight faded, so the forest was a maze of shadow. A hundred trees seemed