Smoke billowed up from the bonfire, a cylinder of flame, warm and safe on that chilly beach. The fire lit up the faces of my fellow partygoers, almost all of them boys, and made them look feral and wild and exaggerated. Very Lord of the Flies. It occurred to me to be afraid. Maybe Sheffield had lured me here to be murdered.
“Put more wood on it!” someone yelled.
“There’s too much wood on it already,” someone else yelled. A buoy clanged, out on the Hudson River. Someone splashed kerosene, from a massive red metal jug.
“They’re animals,” Sheffield said, sitting down in the sand beside me. “Cavemen, at best.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your friends.”
He shrugged, sipped from a bottle of root beer. “Not sure about that.”
All the other boys were drinking actual beer. I wondered why he wasn’t. Maybe what Sheffield liked more than being drunk, was being in control.
“You’re not sure whether it’s not a nice thing to say, or you’re not sure whether they’re your friends?”
“The second one,” he said, and turned to look at them.
Most but not all of the football team was there.
It wouldn’t do, for photography—not with lighting like this, the dark of the night and the creepy shifting illumination of the bonfire. The sand was cold. I planted my hands in it, and shivered.
“So why are you hanging out with them?”
“Some of them are my friends,” he told me. He looked like he had more to say, but left it at that.
“What about Bobby Eckels?” I asked, pointing to him. He stood at the edge of the firelight, sharing a bottle of something stronger than beer with a friend. Watching me.
Sheffield laughed. “A bit of an idiot, isn’t he?”
“I have no idea.”
“He’s a bit of an idiot.”
“This is a great conversation.”
Sheffield laughed again. He laughed a lot, seemed like, but rarely because things were funny. More like because it bought him time—time to think of something to say. “Why the football team, Ash?”
“School spirit,” I said, because I had anticipated the question, and practiced my response. Nothing further; no expression on my face.
“Some of the guys were suspicious. You’re not the school spirit type. When was the last football game you went to?”
Answering his questions would only lead me further onto his turf. “I appreciate that other people appreciate it.”
He nodded his head, like a chess player whose opponent has made a particularly skilled move. I stood up, and raised my camera, and aimed it at Bobby. Sickly green flames swirled around him. He saw me, and his face broke into a snarl.
“You don’t like to get your picture taken,” I called to him, across the fire.
“I don’t,” he said, and even on just those two words I could hear how drunk he was.
“Why not?”
“Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“A fan of the team,” I said. “And a friend of Jewel’s.”
He lost his cool completely. His mouth went slack. His eyes widened. He took a step back.
“You used to be friends with Jewel,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
A couple other guys around the campfire had stopped talking, to better pay attention to us. I kept on.
“You ever go to her house?”
“Calm down,” Sheffield said to me, standing up. “Obviously Bobby is still very upset about what happened. Poor Jewel.”
“Where were you?” I asked. “When it happened?”
Sheffield put a patronizing hand on my shoulder and said, “Shhhh.”
Bobby breathed a little easier, with Sheffield coming to his rescue. So I raised my camera, and took a picture.
“And what happened, exactly?”
He made a choking noise in his throat, and I took another picture.
“Someone broke in,” I said. “Someone who knew her.”
“I . . . ,” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. I took two more pictures.
“Screw you,” he hollered, and he sounded like a little kid—but like a guilty little kid, one who’d gotten caught when they didn’t think they would. He took a step toward me, and stumbled, and fell to his knees. Everyone laughed.
This was where I went too far. I knew it; I just couldn’t help myself. The tingle in my spine was back. I could see him through my lens, his face angry and embarrassed, and his body . . . His body was covered in shadow-spiders—fat, oily, gruesome creatures. Their spiky bodies and pincer jaws dripping with poison. They swarmed his face, poured into and out of his mouth.
Irrational hatred, uncontrollable anger. That’s what I read.
I took his picture.
He took another step forward, and stumbled again. Everyone laughed, and that made him holler into the darkness.
“You think you’re so fucking smart,” he said, and picked up a big red jug of kerosene. “So much better than any of us. But you’re no different. You’ll burn just like anything else.” He uncapped the kerosene. A couple people gasped. Someone else laughed.
“Chill, bro,” said a voice from the far side of the fire, and Bobby told them to shut the fuck up. Which they did.
You think people are decent. You think, Okay, maybe they’re idiots or macho jerks or they’ve got a chip on their shoulders because of whatever they’ve been through, but at the core, underneath it all, they’re decent. They’ll come through in a crisis.
But they aren’t. Not all of them.
Bobby splashed kerosene into the fire and onto the sand in front of me. It sizzled and burned there. I opened my mouth to say something smart, but of course I couldn’t. All my words were gone. No one had my back. He could set me on fire and none of them would lift a finger to stop him.
Fear paralyzed me.
But fear also made me remember. Opened something inside me. A bridge, to the last time I felt so afraid.
Twelve years old. Going to see Solomon. Summer twilight; the air smelled like someone cooking pork chops. Ringing his doorbell—Connor’s doorbell. Getting no answer. Going around back, calling his name up to the treehouse. Still no answer.
Climbing up.
Seeing Solomon.
Little twelve-year-old Solomon turned around, startled by my arrival. Caught. Horrified. Frightened. His mouth a wide dark circle of terror. And then . . . I fell.
I don’t know how long we stood there, Bobby and me and the jug of kerosene. It couldn’t have been too long. The flames of the bonfire were frozen in time. Sheffield’s eyes had never been so big. His face was wide open, taking this all in. What Bobby did, what I did. I couldn’t be sure what I saw there on Sheffield’s face, but it was pretty damn close to pride. Like he’d engineered this moment, and it was turning out better than anything he could have imagined.
That was Sheffield’s thing. Controlling people. Manipulating them. He liked to be the boss. I saw it, and I shivered.
And then time sped up, again. And Bobby roared, an ugly inarticulate garble-sound of idiot rage, and he swung the jug.
Two people screamed.
And the jug—stopped. In midair. Midswing.
No one saw Solomon coming, or knew how long he’d been standing there. In the dark. Watching. Waiting.
Or had he just arrived, his timing perfect to reach out one strong arm and grab hold of Bobby and stop it? To take the kerosene jug out of his hand, and hurl it into the Hudson River? The splash sounded super–far away. A bell tolled, out on the river. Solomon stomped out where the sand was still burning in front of me.
“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand for mine. “Let’s get out of here.”