This was where I went too far. I knew it; I just couldn’t help myself. The tingle in my spine was back. I could see him through my lens, his face angry and embarrassed, and his body . . . His body was covered in shadow-spiders—fat, oily, gruesome creatures. Their spiky bodies and pincer jaws dripping with poison. They swarmed his face, poured into and out of his mouth.

Irrational hatred, uncontrollable anger. That’s what I read.

I took his picture.

He took another step forward, and stumbled again. Everyone laughed, and that made him holler into the darkness.

“You think you’re so fucking smart,” he said, and picked up a big red jug of kerosene. “So much better than any of us. But you’re no different. You’ll burn just like anything else.” He uncapped the kerosene. A couple people gasped. Someone else laughed.

“Chill, bro,” said a voice from the far side of the fire, and Bobby told them to shut the fuck up. Which they did.

You think people are decent. You think, Okay, maybe they’re idiots or macho jerks or they’ve got a chip on their shoulders because of whatever they’ve been through, but at the core, underneath it all, they’re decent. They’ll come through in a crisis.

But they aren’t. Not all of them.

Bobby splashed kerosene into the fire and onto the sand in front of me. It sizzled and burned there. I opened my mouth to say something smart, but of course I couldn’t. All my words were gone. No one had my back. He could set me on fire and none of them would lift a finger to stop him.

Fear paralyzed me.

But fear also made me remember. Opened something inside me. A bridge, to the last time I felt so afraid.

Twelve years old. Going to see Solomon. Summer twilight; the air smelled like someone cooking pork chops. Ringing his doorbell—Connor’s doorbell. Getting no answer. Going around back, calling his name up to the treehouse. Still no answer.

Climbing up.

Seeing Solomon.

Little twelve-year-old Solomon turned around, startled by my arrival. Caught. Horrified. Frightened. His mouth a wide dark circle of terror. And then . . . I fell.

I don’t know how long we stood there, Bobby and me and the jug of kerosene. It couldn’t have been too long. The flames of the bonfire were frozen in time. Sheffield’s eyes had never been so big. His face was wide open, taking this all in. What Bobby did, what I did. I couldn’t be sure what I saw there on Sheffield’s face, but it was pretty damn close to pride. Like he’d engineered this moment, and it was turning out better than anything he could have imagined.

That was Sheffield’s thing. Controlling people. Manipulating them. He liked to be the boss. I saw it, and I shivered.