high school cheerleading squads. A girl fell from a pyramid of cheerleaders and two of them caught her before she hit the floor. Another falling girl was caught. It was only beautiful kids who people mourned. When one of them died the way his sister did, everyone came out with tears and good words. In fact, they kept talking for weeks and wouldn’t shut up. It was okay to talk about the pretty ones—it was even a pleasure. Everybody wanted a piece of a death like that.
The teapot made a banshee noise. Craig and his mom rattled spoons in their cups of instant coffee. They were talking low-voiced beneath the gospel music and TV. Lyle heard snatches of their conversation. He heard her say, “Pray that boy doesn’t go crazy on us next,” and, “He ain’t a bad one clear through. He has his merit points.”
His eyes pinched when she said he wasn’t bad. When she was soft, he loved her in a way he couldn’t at other times. But her softness angered him, too, because he disliked it that he cared. For a moment he wanted to tell her that he wished he could do what she wanted him to. Back when he was in youth group, in the mountains—before he “set Jesus on the shelf,” as she put it—she had been warm toward him, and he had been part of things.
That night he left the apartment after his brother and mom went to bed. His night legs were coming into him, and he had a fierce need to run. The air smelled of wet dirt, as if the ground nearby had been freshly turned. Flying rain stung his face. He loped along the tracks downtown, holding his folded, sharp-pointed umbrella in one hand. The tracks rose onto an embankment, and he walked on the ties, between window ledges close enough to leap onto. In one building, a man made rows of bread dough on a table, tattoos of red ropes looping his arms, a stiff cone of beard. The man sang with the stereo, and Lyle heard the edges of his furious song. A few minutes later, in a phone booth outside of the A&W, he searched his pockets for change, then turned over his sister’s photograph, smelled the peppermint ink from the candy cane pen, and dialed the number.
The woman who picked up wanted to know who this was and what he wanted. When he heard himself breathing into the phone, he moved the mouthpiece to his chin, wanting to explain that he was one of the good kids—from the mountains, raised Christian. A Mexican mother would like hearing that.
She asked again who he was and he told her his name.
“Liar?” she said. “This is Liar?”
He corrected her, and she pronounced his name as if the word was hard to get her mouth around: “Li-ar,” she said.
“No. Lyle. Lyle.”
Rosa got on the phone. “Can you come out?” he said.
“It’s too late,” she whispered. “Usually my parents are asleep by now, but they’re letting my little sister stay up and watch this stupid movie. Can you meet me tomorrow night? I have ballet in the afternoon, but we could meet at Levi’s at ten, if that’s not too late. Good. My parents usually go to sleep at nine thirty.”
“You’re up on Chambers? What’s your last name?”
“Larios,” she said. “What’s your number?”
He gave it to her and asked what grade she was in. “Ninth,” she said—two years younger, but she seemed his age. When he hung up he found the name in the phone book, matching the number with the address, 87 Skyline.
He walked the two miles of boulevard from downtown and tramped up Chambers. The streetlights tapered in the distance above, where the road met sky. As he crested the hill, he unbuttoned his jacket for the wind to cool him and turned onto Skyline. Houses rested on stilts. He glimpsed the city in the spaces between them.
At Rosa’s house, he stepped along a raised walkway to the back deck. The city spread shimmering below him. In the first window he saw Rosa, cross-legged on her bed in a bathrobe, reading a book in her lap. When she turned to lift a mug from the night table, her robe, tied at the waist, pulled against her body. As she read she made expressions of frustration and disgust. Stuffed animals lay at her headboard. A poster of black-haired men hung on the wall above. The Cure. He had never heard of them. She reached the book to the floor—a man on the cover fitted a ring onto a woman’s finger—and turned off the light; he ducked and leaned against the wall for a moment.
He crept along the railing and saw the family in the living room. He crouched down. City lights quaked like outlying fires in the sliding glass window. They probably couldn’t see him past their own reflections. A five-year-old girl jumped on a small trampoline. Mr. Larios lay sleeping on the couch in a tie and glasses, frowning, his arms pressed to his chest as if he were holding onto something tightly in his dream. His wife, a bulky woman with a large brown face, sat on the carpet before a stack of files. The little girl spoke words Lyle couldn’t hear. Mrs. Larios tapped a finger to her lips to shush the girl. When the girl spoke again, Mr. Larios opened his eyes. “Why can’t you shut her up!” he yelled. He sat up and bowed his head into his hands, then smoothed his hair. From the coffee table he lifted a glass, gold liquid in the bottom of it, and drank. Mrs. Larios spoke to him, looking apologetic. He drained his glass and went into the kitchen.
When the little girl screamed, Mrs. Larios got up, saw where her daughter was pointing, and shrieked at Lyle. He rushed off the slippery deck, nearly falling twice, and ran to the road. A little girl’s bike with training wheels lay on the sidewalk. He swung himself onto the pink seat and pushed forward. When the woman burst out of her front door shouting, “Go look in your own weendow!” he peddled faster, his knees jerking awkwardly. He glided onto the steep main road and raced down the hill. The city lights through the trees shook with his kicking heart.
By the time the ground flattened, his head was ringing numb with cold, his inner ears aching. He was worried they might have called the police, and stopped a half block before the boulevard, where a chain-link fence looked over the slough by his apartment building. He heaved the bike into the air and it crashed into the water. He touched the railing. A handlebar and its sparkling red tassel reached above the surface. He giggled. The mood was starting in him. He had been spitting out the lithium for days. The deadening stuff was leaking out of him. Anytime that he or his sister got keyed up or excited about anything, his mom and brother called it a mental “event.” But he would let it happen this time. Anyway, he could handle it. The mood came and went throughout the day. All that most people noticed was that he was in a sharp, giddy state.
He jogged to the apartment and went in. It was chilly. It always smelled vaguely of beets and carrots, especially now with the dinner smells settled. His brother’s rubber boots stood at one end of the couch. Lyle placed them on the deck. Facing the slough below, the boots seemed to belong to some invisible man, standing there musing.
In his bedroom he removed three of his sister’s pipe bombs from under his mattress, and the thin roll of duct tape she used. He placed the pipes in the inside pocket of his jacket, where they fit snugly—the three of them somehow humorous, like joke cigars—the duct tape going into one of the jacket’s large waist pockets.
His mom yelled from her bedroom across the hall, and he walked over to check on her. She lay on her side, with her head bent toward her raised knees, mumbling. “Mom, are you asleep?” he whispered. “Mom.” Two night-lights burned. On the bedside table, the windowsill, and the small bookcase, glass angels were arranged in vigilant flocks. They flickered in the blue light, seeming to stir, as if alerted to his presence.
He went back to his room and hung his jacket in the closet, then waited unsleeping through the hours. As the wild mood rose in him, the need for rest would lessen even more in the coming days. All he wanted was to get through the school day and find his way back to the night.
The next afternoon he hurried home along the boulevard, weaving through traffic in the rain a couple of times, tracking cars over his shoulder, veering one way and the other, forcing them to brake and observe him. He skipped to the sidewalk and slowed to a walk in front of the new brick library. An enormous window gleamed back winter trees, a dark sky, and kids who stood in circles, many of them yelling, screaming, laughing. They were a few years younger than he was. He passed between them and stood on the corner watching, to see what they were about.
Some