I wanted to join in, but I checked myself. There was so much pain between them, so many obstacles, so many walls they’d built up around the little boys they’d been. The brothers who loved each other. They needed to get there together.

A barge moved past us on the river, its deck crowded with crates. I shut my eyes, breathed in and out, memorized every sense impression. The raw, wet muck smell of the river. The cold wind. The sniffling of the boys beside me. It was one of those moments I’d want to be able to remember, years and years later. The little instants that turn us into who we are.

“You had something you wanted to talk about,” I said, twenty minutes later, when we picked ourselves up and brushed off our behinds and headed for the car.

“It’s nothing,” Connor said, wiping one eye. “Stupid bullshit, compared to this.”

“Is it about Sheffield?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell us,” Solomon said. “Even if we can’t punish Police Commissioner Bahrr for what he did, we can still stop the Shield if we know what he’s got planned.”

Connor and I made quick, furtive eye contact, but both of us promptly decided to leave it alone.

“I told him all about the Induction Ceremonies,” I said.

“There’s gonna be one last one,” Connor said. “The final prank, to close it all out. Sheffield’s own.”

“I thought you still had to go,” I said.

“I’ve been stringing him along, putting it off over and over. So much so that he’s mad at me now. Sheffield’s prank is the biggest and it’s got to be during the Halloween dance, which is why he can’t wait on me anymore. He’s going to burn down the old Greenport School.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

“Because that’s where all the weirdos hang out,” Solomon said. “Right? That’s who he’s been targeting with all this. The people who are different.”

Connor nodded. I hadn’t connected those dots. But Solomon had.

Jewel was religious; didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. Didn’t curse. So she made the people who did do these things extra uncomfortable.

Judy was Jewish. That was reason enough for lots of people to hate her.

The nerds and geeks, the suck-ups, targeted in the parking lot minefield.

Solomon, the crazy kid.

It tracked.

“Except that if it burns, so do the woods,” I said. “And so does half of Hudson.”

“He doesn’t care about that,” Connor said. “And he won’t even be getting his hands dirty. He’s got everybody on the team taking on a little piece of it. He says it’s to divide the guilt up, but really it’s because then everyone’s implicated.”

I thought for a moment.