Even in the late-night privacy of his bedroom he refused to let himself cry, refused to grant Papa that one last satisfaction on top of everything the old man had already won. Henry couldn’t give in to the urge to creep upstairs, log on to the computer, and check if Michelle had written back. Too risky. It was as if the locked bedroom door was fighting just as hard to detain him as every last fiber of his circuitry was to keep the tears dammed behind his eyeballs. The strain of containment racked him with molar-clicking shivers, and now it seemed even his body had decided to goad him, too, by reacting in a way that suggested a subzero tundra, when in reality he was volcanic.

He flung himself into his desk chair, yanked a spiral notebook from his backpack, flipped past doodles of daggers, rattlesnakes, and fornicating skeletons alongside half-assed class notes to a clean sheet, and set out to draft a letter to Michelle by hand. He would type it up and shoot it out as soon as he quit trembling, as soon as he steadied himself to a point where he could withstand the sight of Papa.

The first pencil snapped in his grip, stabbing a neat sliver into the side of his finger. Something oddly reassuring about the sight of his blood, as if the crimson ribbon was confirmation of the lava he’d felt smoldering beneath his skin. As he rummaged for a pen, language detailing his proposal to elope didn’t run through his thoughts, only mental snapshots of their escape: smashing the window of a convertible Cadillac and hot-wiring its engine to life; the two of them tangled in the front seat while hurtling westward down a desert highway; the top down and a warm wind rinsing them of their pasts; a nickel-plated shotgun—raised, cocked, fired—blasting a buzzard out of a tangerine sky; their velocity reducing the whole world down to a golden smear, absolutely nothing able to stop or slow them, not until they went careening into the ocean, endless, shimmering, black.

But once he uncapped a ballpoint and set ink to page, just one word appeared in his ragged cursive, over and over along the first cyan line, then twice more on the second. He paused, huffed. He set out again, but still only motherfucker after motherfucker unraveled in a dense string of scribbles until the sheet, when held from a distance, resembled an oversized, rage-drunk bar code.