But then, thirteen and enter Joe. Fourteen and a half, exit Joe.

Interim: I started losing my hair, got a bald patch, but I parted my hair over it. Stopped talking back. No one could believe it. Stopped talking. Sometimes I wouldn’t go to school. I’d go up the castle or wander the fields, ears open for the sound of the Merc’s engine. No words. Never any words. Even now, here. The silence spread to Peter, neither one of us saying anything to one another, to anyone. But he knew, I don’t know why I’m so sure. The vicar asking me once if Peter was all right. “He’s having bad dreams. He woke his mother. You would tell me…”

A loss of control. Black dream hurtling toward something final, that was how it felt, the last days of Joe. Something final coming. But I woke up in time. Joe went out and didn’t come back. One day, two. A week. A month.

“He won’t come back, Andy.”

I shook my head. Peter couldn’t know for certain.

A winter spent biting my nails to the quick, cutting school to hang round the traveler camp or busing into Swindon. Spring made me a believer, bringing small flowers, rain, and rage. Rage made me vicious, sent me wild, climbing buildings and trees, at their apex I wanted to rattle the earth. No one was in my mind, there was no room for anything but rage. Rage taking me out to raves, into the backs of cars with boys, me and my rage. Only, I lost Peter. The rage took up Peter’s space and when it was finally sapped, I looked around me and he was gone. There in body, as I took up my old place next to him at the desk in class, the same old Peter with a book in his hand and his effortless A grades, but with the door firmly closed, even the secret doors that only I knew about.

Outwardly, I accepted it. I took what was going. But I resented Peter, his withdrawal from me, his retreat into a fantasy of the halcyon future in which I played no part, the way he seemed to shy from me as though I were not only contaminated but dangerous. Gross insult upon a grievous injury.