In the middle of the night, someone had spread a bucket of tar on the pavement of the student parking lot, then sprinkled a sackful of broken bottles on it, and nails and screws and other random, sharp metal things, so that in the morning when people started pulling in, their tires all got shredded. By the time I pulled up for school, the parking lot was closed and there was a line of tow trucks trying to figure out how to get everyone’s car to safety so the tires could be changed.

I took pictures. People’s faces. More than one person was crying. Everyone was somber. They looked at each other with suspicion; with fear. This wasn’t some little prank. This was destructive, aggressive—scary.

The student parking lot. Whoever did this knew that the people who came first would get it the worst. So it had been set up to target the nerds, the good students.

I thought of the ultramarine swastikas. Marcy Brockelmeyer’s house, vandalized. And now this. They couldn’t be unrelated. Something was up. Someone was responsible.

Solomon was picking up pennies from the train tracks, when I got there at four o’clock. He must have laid them down on the rails the night before, to be run over by a freight train, because they were huge and flat and thin—lopsided metal ovals.

“I call them trained pennies,” he said, holding one out to me. “Get it? Trained? Like they got run over by a train?”

“Awesome,” I said, taking it. It was still hot from the autumn sun on the rails. He’d called me up, the night before. From a bar. One a.m., and my seventeen-year-old best friend was hanging out in a bar. But at least he’d called.

I wanted to see him, because I had something to say to him. Something he wasn’t going to like. I had to convince him to get help. Because at this point, with his aunt having reported him missing, it was just a matter of time before someone put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Come with me, son”—or someone from Child Protective Services recognized him, which was pretty likely in a town as small as ours. And I didn’t think Solomon would respond well to “Come with me, son.”

But I had to work up my courage to get to all that. “What do you do with your trained pennies?” I asked.

“It’s a kind of currency,” he said. “Certain transactions, you can’t use regular money for.”

“So you use these.”

He nodded.

You see my dilemma, with shit like this. I had a lot of questions, but ask too many of them and he might pick up on my skepticism, or think that I was trying to diagnose him. Which, yeah, I kind of was. “What kind of transactions?”