birthday anymore, which was fine with Cole. For one thing, it made him less worried that the dreaded subjects of sex and adoption were going to be mentioned. And the thought that PW could relax and be himself around him made Cole glad—even proud.
He thought about how, on the road down, he’d started wishing the two of them could run away together. And there had been other days when he’d wished that everyone around them would go away so that he could have PW all to himself. When he was younger, he’d felt that way at different times about each of his parents: why couldn’t the one disappear and leave him alone with the other? And there’d been times when he’d wished they would both disappear. But his wish to be an orphan had always meant fun and excitement, great adventures in which he was the star, the darling of fascinating and admiring people. Never once had he pictured himself miserable, cast blindly among the shrieking, reeking, starving, heartless kids of Here Be Hope.
It occurred to Cole that, because of where they were, PW might be thinking about a time when his own parents were still alive and he was still a boy. It was always hard for Cole to imagine any grown-up as a child, except maybe Tracy. Then another wish came to him, the wish to have known PW—or at least to have known what he was like—when he was fourteen.
A reptile child, he’d called himself. Meaning what?
The nights were cold. After hiking all day they were both ready to bed down as soon as the first stars appeared. They lay side by side in their small dome tent. But long after PW had fallen asleep, Cole was still awake, his thoughts in tumultuous motion like the dance of the insects drawn to their campfire.
Alone, he could have—would have—rolled onto his stomach and massaged the tension away. But the fear that PW would wake and catch him in the act kept Cole lying as if at attention, rigid and filled with shame.
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing,” PW had told him, “if a person could masturbate once in a blue moon. But if you don’t fight it every time, it turns into a habit. That’s when it becomes a distraction from the Lord, and also more likely to lead to worse sin.”
Whenever he’d start to drift off, some change in PW’s breathing or posture would jerk Cole back to full consciousness. Once, he was shocked to realize he’d been thinking about his mother and PW together.
He knew it was wrong to have impure thoughts about Starlyn. He knew that dwelling on what he’d seen in the upstairs hallway was inviting sin. What could be said, then, about imagining his mother and PW in Starlyn and Mason’s place? Probably there didn’t exist a word bad enough to describe the kind of person who’d do such a thing. Add to this the guilt of betrayal—for he knew he could be accused of this, too: betraying his father, betraying Tracy.
Yet even as self-loathing clotted his throat, the idea stayed with him. His mother would have found at least a hundred things wrong with PW. The way he smiled all the time would have got on her nerves. The way he said things like “good eatin’.” A Jesus freak. A preacher with a manicure and a handgun—his mother would have made so much fun of him!
But in Cole’s fantasy Pastor Wyatt swept Serena Vining off her feet. And she would have done what Tracy had not been able to do: make him forget Delphina.
The man dropped to the earth like a bobcat that had been watching them approach. They barely had time to take him in—straightening up from the crouch in which he’d landed, dressed head to toe in cammies, his cap and dark beard and mirror shades hiding most of his face—when two other men entered the scene from behind trees, one stage left and one stage right, like actors at the same cue. Same costume.
Each of the men was over six feet tall, slightly hunch-backed, and rail thin. Brothers? The first people Cole and PW had run into who were toting rifles instead of backpacks.
The one who’d dropped from the tree had a broad fleshy nose that reminded Cole of one type of mushroom he’d noticed sprouting in the woods. Cole was fascinated to see himself reflected so clearly in the man’s shades. It was like watching a video on