Fern Hoebeek is in the kitchen, humming along to some middle-of-the-road tune on the radio. “Oh, hi, Nate,” she says, seeing him at the screen door even before he knocks.

“Is Dodge here?” he asks.

“Come on in,” she says. She slaps her hands together and a cloud of flour rises before her, as if she just made something disappear. “I thought he was with you.”

Nate enters the kitchen. “Nope. I slept in.”

They both have the same instinct. They head into the living room to look down at the shore. Trick is making a sand castle for baby Hilton, who kicks it over as soon as Trick turns out another perfect turret. This is followed by Hilly laughing himself silly as Trick rolls around in a fit of pretend tears. Nate smiles, glad that Trick has a brother who finds him irresistible.

The motorboat is gone.

“Probably just tooling around,” says Mrs. H., heading back to her dough. Nate stares at the lake. He wonders how much Mrs. H. knows about what her eldest son gets up to. He has a feeling he knows where Dodge is today. He notices out of the side of his eye the binoculars on the windowsill. He picks them up, adjusts the setting. And there’s the boat, just taking off from Picnic Island. Nate puts down the binoculars. Interesting.

Dodge greets him with a head nod from twenty yards out. He’s waited too long to tilt the motor to keep the prop off the bottom. Nate’s stomach churns; the water gets shallow fast. He’s about to yell a warning when Dodge heads to the back and leisurely tilts the motor, not a moment too soon. Nate wades out to grab the towrope and guide the boat to shore.

When they’re clear of the beach and the ears of younger brothers, Nate finally speaks.

“So?”

“So what?”

“Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

Dodge has on his what, me? smile, but it’s a weak variant of it and it fades pretty quickly. “Yeah,” he says. “I did it.”

“And?”

Dodge stops and looks at him, his eyebrows pinched together as if he has detected some hint of doubt in his friend’s one-word question. “I’m alive, right?” He holds his hands out to his sides, as if to say, “Look at me, I’m perfect, aren’t I?”

“No prob,” he says, but his eyes say different. Then he walks away, up toward the camp.

“Hey,” says Nate. “Wait up.”

He’d jumped. He’d jumped off the jumping cliff from the very top for the first time, or so he said. And he’d done it alone, without Nate.

“Why?” Nate asks.

“Because I didn’t want your negative vibes ruining my chances,” says Dodge. He stares right into Nate’s eyes, daring him to challenge what he’s said. There is cruelty in him, thinks Nate. He shakes away this alien thought.

Nate smiles. “You totally chickened out,” he says.

Dodge’s frown deepens. “Take that back,” he says, quiet and deadly serious.

“You did, too,” says Nate, doing a little dance. “The great D. H. chickened out.”

Then Dodge is on him, his shirtfront in Dodge’s fist and his face right up against Nate’s. “If I said I did it, I did it. Got that?”

The smile flies from Nate’s face, as if it had landed there by mistake and had business far, far away. He grabs his friend’s fist and forcefully releases it from his shirt, throwing it down. Then he smooths out the front of his shirt with his palms. “Got it,” he says. “And if you’d killed yourself out there without me spotting for you? What about that?”

A slow grin sneaks across Dodge’s face. “If I killed myself out there, then you wouldn’t have been any use anyway,” he says.

Nate doesn’t nod. Go find a corner and read a book, he thinks. Put some new line on your fishing rod, chop some firewood. He starts off toward his camp.

“Nate.”

He turns. The smirk has gone from Dodge’s face, replaced by something Nate hasn’t seen much of before: fear.

“I almost hit,” he says, his voice cracking a bit.

Nate walks back to him. “At the bottom?”

Dodge swallows, hard. Nods. Then glances down toward his aqua socks. The heel of his right foot is bleeding. That close.

Nate nods solemnly, aware of what Dodge just gave up — entrusted to him. The moment extends between them, full of half a lifetime of knowing each other. There is no need to say more. Nate nods again, then turns for home.

“Five at the swim raft,” Dodge shouts after him, his voice cheery, as if what just happened between them was already washed clear of his memory. “Bring your Doominator,” he says. “Some zombies are going to wish they’d never died!”

Nate smiles.

He woke up with the memory still turning over in his head. There was something wrong with it. Not something wrong with the memory, which was crystal clear, but with the whole thing. What? he wonders. His arms are buried under two comforters and a sleeping bag. Outside, the wind is still buffeting the camp. He’s left the door open to the front room, but there’s not much warmth from the woodstove. He should get up and deal with that, but for a moment he waits and thinks. He pulls his arms out from under and rests his head in the cradle of his hands on the pillow.

The boat. The Hoebeeks’ boat had been pulled ashore at the picnic side of the island. That’s where he’d seen Dodge leave from. So if he jumped, like he said, then how did he get back to the west side? He would have had to swim clear around the island, and that was one hell of a long swim.

Nate shook his head. He’d lied. Dodge had lied to him. He hadn’t jumped. And when Nate called him on it, he had made up a story to make it seem real — so real there was even a bloody heel. He’d even dared to show signs of weakness — fear. What was most important was that Nate took him at his word. What must it be like to live like that, having to always be this person you made up?

Nate climbed out of bed and made his way into the front room, where the only light came from the cracks around the door edges of the Ashley. They’d need to buy new gaskets. He’d have to start a list. You had to keep up with the camp or it would run away on you.

It was warmer here than in his bedroom, but not much. He would feed the fire in a minute, but all he wanted to do right now was stand perfectly still and listen to the storm howling outside. He had almost given in to it. Back at the Hoebeeks’ he’d almost quit on himself. Quit on everything. Allowed himself to be sucked down into the white nightmare. Now he was here in his rightful place and the wind and snow had no hold on him. He felt, for the first time since he’d arrived, a feeling of peacefulness. He sat and let it be — Nathaniel Crow alone in the eye of the storm.

He added wood to the fire, watched it catch, then closed the lid.

Awkward in the dark, he found his tattered old bathrobe, slipped it on, shoved his stocking feet into a pair of gum boots, and opened the door to the sunroom. The cabin was warm enough; the sunroom was pretty well as cold as the night. He opened the outside door — had to push hard to do it and then feel it leap from his hand when the wind caught it. Snap! He stepped out onto the stoop, carpeted with a smooth fleece of newly fallen snow that squeaked under his boots. He’d cleared the stoop down to the wooden deck before he went to bed, and here it was thick enough with snow that it blocked the door.

From over the eastern rim of the hill the moon glowed. He hadn’t seen the moon in days. He stood in the cold, taking a pee off the stoop into fresh snow that had obliterated the yellow stains left by the men who had taken over the camp. He craned his head toward the heavens. So many stars. With his eyes half closed he carried the shine of them back to his bed.

“That one’s George,” says Dodge. “George Star.”

“Yeah? So where’s Ringo.”

Dodge cuffs him. “Be serious. George is part of the constellation Ram.”

“You mean like Aries?”

“No, you goof, as in the Ram truck. You see those two stars there? Those are the headlights. And that one there is the gun rack, and those two little ones are the taillights.”

“Uh-huh. So who’s George?”

“He’s the brightest star of all, there in the cab: the driver.”

Nate woke again, startled. He’d heard something. He held his breath, listened. Listened a long time before he realized that he was wrong; he’d heard the opposite of something.