Someone set Walmart on fire. Kind of a sophisticated operation, evidently. Walked through, dribbled gasoline from concealed containers up and down every aisle, trailed it out the door, dropped a lit cigarette onto it. Fwoosh. Attention, Walmart associates, code orange in aisles one through fifty.

We live close enough that the smell of burning drifted in through the open windows. Lots of smoke, but not so much damage once it was all under control. No one injured.

Still, it was serious, now. The police were all over it.

Walmart, they cared about. Jewel Gomez, not so much.

Another one of Sheffield’s Induction Ceremonies; it had to be. The whole football team knew about this. Knew who did it. Was protecting them. And things were escalating. Getting scarier.

The day after Walmart, I phoned Connor from his driveway. I was still angry at him, but I hoped maybe I could talk some sense into him. Get him to help stop all this before someone got seriously hurt.

“Hey,” he said, just like that, with no exclamation mark. Normally, he’s superhappy to answer a call from me.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m outside. We need to talk.”

He didn’t answer right away. “Door’s open,” he finally said. “I’m in the basement.”

I went inside and walked down the hall, and I had a moment, opening the basement door, when the mildew-and-cinnamon smell of it transported me briefly back in time, to childhood, to Solomon and me standing at the top of the stairs and daring each other to descend to the darkness.

But I was a grown-up now, and I was alone. And the broken bulb at the bottom of the stairs had been replaced. So I didn’t think about Solomon, didn’t spend even a second getting sad over where he might be, because I was on a mission, I had to stay focused, and I didn’t let myself feel the slightest bit of fear following the sound of clanking metal to where I knew I’d find Connor.

His basement had a better weight room than most actual gyms. Connor didn’t like lifting, but he wanted to please his dad, spot for him, be bros.

And there he was, shirtless and sweaty, on the rowing machine. Resistance set so high I probably couldn’t have pulled it a single inch.

“Hey,” he grunted, when he got to the end of his set.

“I know you don’t want to talk about this,” I said. “But someone just tried to burn down Walmart. Was that you guys?”

He frowned, looked at his hands. They were patterned with the checkerboard imprint of the machine’s metal handles.

“Jesus Christ, Connor. People could have been hurt. You could have—”

“Look. I want to talk. But it has nothing to do with any of that.”

I sat down on the floor. There was real pain on his face.