Atlanta sees a rusted can of motor oil. Before she rounds the corner and heads behind the garage, she kicks that can—it clangs and skips across the blistery, cracked asphalt—just to let them know someone’s coming.

Not that they’ll probably give much of a shit. She heads out back, finds three boys from her school standing around the far end of a big green dumpster, its sides pocked with cankers of rust.

She knows them. Rather, she knows of them.

The tall one with the smashed-flat nose, that’s Jonesy—a.k.a. Gordon Jones. The prick next to him is Virgil. Virgil’s a juicer, the muscles of his upper torso looking like bulging balloon animals lashed together with ropy tendons. She’s not real sure of his last name. Erlenmeyer. Erlenbacher. Something. The one hanging back behind the other two is Chomp-Chomp, his first and last name lost to her. He’s average in every way. His hair is so sandy brown it blends in with the dirt lot behind the garage. One exception is his teeth: kid’s got a wall of horse teeth shoved unceremoniously in his mouth. Big, flat biters in a too-small jaw.

They’re not alone.

They’ve got a pudgy Latino kid held in the dumpster. Dressed well, this kid. Blue shirt buttoned tight to the neck. Hair slicked back like he’s a gangster or a preacher’s son. Jonesy’s hemming him in with a flat-bladed shovel like the one Atlanta’s mother uses to edge out her flower beds. Atlanta can see something sitting at the edge of the shovel.

A turd-curl of dog shit, by the looks of it.

The three boys—not boys, not really, given that they’re all seventeen or eighteen years old, but boys because they’re acting like mean little shits—stand and give her a real hard look.

“Hey,” Jonesy says. He nods. Grins. Shrugs as if to say, Yeah, what of it?

The Latino kid—she thinks she’s seen him at school, too. She figures him to be a sophomore, maybe a year below her. He gives her a look like he’s not sure if she’s friend or foe. He’s got a cut across his brow, a line of blood running down the margins of his round, mocha-colored Charlie Brown head.

Virgil gives Jonesy a sharp elbow in the ribs. Jonesy waves him off and says, “Like the police say, nothing to see here. Move along.”

“That kid okay?” she asks, lifting an eyebrow.

Jonesy nods a vigorous, almost comical nod. “He’s great. We’re just playing a game.”

She looks to the kid in the dumpster. “Are you okay?” The gentlest shake of a head. No.

Again Virgil elbows Jonesy, but Jonesy retorts: “Fuckin’ quit it.”

“Looks to me like you’re trying to make that kid eat a shovel of crap,” she says.