Sage was going back to the others to get high. Most of them were older than me, and I didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t want to sit in a circle with them, passing a bong. I’d tried it once and spent the night struggling to shake away the floating feeling. I’d eaten toothpaste and slapped myself across the face, so that I could feel like my two feet were on the ground. I liked drinking better. The way it started in my body rather than in my head, that warm feeling rippling from the center of my chest outward. Abbey’s mayonnaise jar was under the merry-go-round; I unscrewed the blue lid, took another long drink. It made me shudder, and my eyes teared. I rolled the jar back. I tried to stop thinking about Wilson and Barbie Man, that Wilson might have gone up there. I leaned back and looked up to the night sky streaked with clouds, the few stranded stars. The air was warm.

“Well, Gallagher, shouldn’t you be at home watching The Brady Bunch or something?” The voice came out of nowhere. I jumped from the merry-go-round and toppled back down. I was drunk, and Jack Griffith was standing in front of me.

“Jesus,” I said. “You scared me.” He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. His hair had gotten longer. “You forgot. We don’t have a TV. Shouldn’t you be at home calculating algorithms?”

Jack laughed. “Beer?” He held two bottles, one extended toward me.

“Yeah.”

He sat beside me on the edge of the merry-go-round. I looked at our feet on the worn dirt. We circled slowly. I took a swig from the bottle of beer.

Jack was one of the few people who had spent time in our house when my father was there. He and Thomas used to spend weeks creating elaborate mazelike obstacle courses with paper-towel rolls and uncooked spaghetti, which they rolled marbles across.

“So what’s up?”

“With me?” How would I even start to explain my life in the last two weeks. “Nothing. You?”

“Working mostly, tarring driveways with a guy down in Chesterbrook.”

“Oh.” I had never thought about Jack having a job.

“How’s Thomas?” he asked. It felt awkward, like he should know because they had been friends for so long. We both pushed the earth with our feet. Someone in the distance screamed, and there was a burst of laughter from the field.

“The same, I guess. He doesn’t have a job. You know, with swimming and all.”