Then she sees something that really bakes her lasagna: three students from her school. One of them is Charlie Russo, the weed smoker under the bleachers. Next to him: Carlos, another from the baseball team. And wandering away from those two: Maisey Bott. Atlanta knows Maisey. Shit, they’re in biochem class together. Or were before the school year ended. She’s a nice girl. Dumb as a bag of coconuts, but nice.

Maisey might be someone she needs to talk to.

“Still good?” Guy asks her.

“Yeah,” she lies.

Atlanta’s feet carry her forward with an irresistible gravity. As if she’s not moving forward but rather everything is moving toward her.

They find a space in the crowd right between the whites and Hispanics—as if the two of them form connective tissue between the two groups.

Her hands hold the plywood wall, a wall that stands about waist high. A splinter bites into the meat of her index finger and she pulls it away, a bead of blood already swelling up like a little red balloon.

Nobody’s in the ring right now. It’s between matches. The parched earth of the arena is scratched and furrowed from earlier fights. A few tumbleweeds of dog hair blow around in the faint breeze. The ground is stained dark in a few places. Or maybe Atlanta’s just imagining things.

Suddenly, commotion. Someone moves through the crowd at the far end, close to the skinheads: it’s a thick-necked white guy wearing a black wifebeater and showing off biceps that bulge with a pair of swollen swastika tats. The creature he hauls into the ring calls to mind the old adage of how dogs and their owners start to look like one another. His tawny pit bull’s bristling with fat and muscle, a beast wreathed in mean gristle. Around the dog’s neck is a rusted chain wrapped again and again, the ends trailing in the dirt. The dog’s got empty eyes and a muzzle marred with a mesh of pink scar lines.

Thick-Neck brings the beast to the far end of the arena, celebrated by the hoots and hollers of the skinheads.

The second dog comes into the arena. A brindled pit bull who enters and sits right away, its body making the shape of a pyramid—thick base, thin shoulders, tiny brick head. The dog seems happy. Mouth open. Pink tongue out. Panting in the heat, blissfully ignorant. Its handler—owner? trainer? torturer?—is a big black dude in a loose-hanging Chicago Bulls jersey and has one of those helmet-strap beards that looks like someone drew a line along his jaw with a permanent marker. He gets down, nuzzles the dog, gives it a few slaps on the haunches. The dog leans into the attention. The joy of a well-loved animal, ignorant to the boos of the skinheads nearby.

“That dog’s dead,” Guy says.

“What?”