We climbed a hill, but the farther up we went, the more the traction under the wheels seemed to give, and it started to feel as if we were sinking. Wilson stopped, and we both stepped off the bike. The earth beneath my feet moved, as if there was nothing substantial below us, and I sank several inches in my Wellies.

“What’s wrong with the ground? What is this?” I thought maybe it was a quarry.

“It’s a strip mine.”

“What is that?”

“They blast away the earth to get to the coal instead of digging for it. It’s like tearing off the skin, the fat, and the muscle of the earth to get to the bone. Sometimes they take off whole mountaintops, explode them off, so they can get directly to the coal seam. Six hundred feet of mountain or more, and then they dump it all.”

There must have been thousands of acres here, all stripped bare, like a scar. Nothing would ever grow here again. It would be dead forever. Far away, I could see forests, a blue-green mirage moving like a sea of water, but here the earth was all the same pale brown. There was no sound. No birds. No movement of water. Nothing.

We walked up to the highest point on the empty hill and sat on the strange surface. I felt as if it might swallow me into its nothingness. This is what earth without trees would feel like: no texture, no substructure, no roots or connections to give it composition, no history, just a sense of collapsing. I had never been to a place so bleak.

“How is this allowed?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “All those beautiful trees. It makes me sick.”

I looked over at him, sitting in this vast empty world. “Did you kill our cat?”

“What?”

“Did you kill our cat, Mr. Franklin?”

“That’s a bit of a non sequitur.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It means it had nothing to do with what came before it. I didn’t kill your cat or anybody’s, ever. I’ve never hurt animals.”

“What have you done, that everybody is scared of you, the police know you, you have a record, and you’re only nineteen and have your own lawyer?”

“That’s what you’re thinking about?”

I waited, lifting the strange earth and letting it fall through my fingers.

“It wasn’t just one thing. It’s a long list of things. Do you want, like, a rap sheet?”

“Tell me the worst thing.”

“I can’t even say. Most people would say armed robbery or maybe one of the drug charges. I’ve done plenty of stupid things. But it’s some of the things I did when I was mad, so mad I couldn’t even think, wrecking things and people, that I feel worst about.”

“Why were you so mad?”