He came and sat beside her. Nephy skated past and Izzy saw her friend eye them from inside the cavern of her helmet before she did a kick flip that sent her braids flying and was gone.

“Hey,” Cyrus said. “What’s up?”

“Just watching,” Izzy said.

“You skate?”

She pulled up one leg of her jeans and showed him the Frankenstein scars on her ankle from where she’d shattered it, heard the tibia and fibula bones crackle like broken china on either side. The doctor had opened her up, inserted two metal rods and a screw. “Not anymore. What about you?” His body had an alertness to it, a quick muscularity, but he didn’t carry a board.

“Not like my brother, Ripper Joe over there.”

Joe skated past and gave her a cold look over the top of his sunglasses before executing a perfect darkslide.

“What do you do then?” Izzy asked Cyrus.

He laughed. His teeth flashed crooked and white with a few gold fillings she could see as he tilted his head back. “I listen to music. And I build things.”

“Like what?”

“Like places to live that I can escape to one day.” He laughed again. “You?”

“I listen to music and read law books alone in a trailer from which I hope to escape to a place you’ve built one day,” she said, surprising herself with the boldness. Well, if she couldn’t skate like a badass fiend anymore, she could at least speak her mind.

“Law books?”

“Yeah. It interests me.” Later she would explain the interest came from wanting to help kids like herself.

He stared straight ahead for a moment as if gathering his thoughts. Then he turned to her, took off his sunglasses, leveled his gaze with hers, and held out his hand. She shook it. His skin had the texture of firm warm fruit. “I’m Cyrus.”

“Izzy.”

“Your whole name?”

“Yes. Why?”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Dawn,” was all he said.

And then Seth skidded up, popped his skateboard into his hands, stood over them, blocking the sun.

“Look,” Seth said. “Two peas.”

◆◆◆

After Seth’s father died of lung cancer, Nephy moved into the ranch house and she and Seth married soon after. Now she ran a daycare facility out of the place. Plastic Halloween skeleton hands scrabbled their way out of the dirt next to wooden tombstones that read, “Died of Drain Bamage,” “Blow-Dried Hair in Bathtub,” and “Rest in Pieces.” Seth must have made them in his workshop. A rubber monster mask hung on the front door, a plastic skeleton with a plastic spider fastened to its pelvis hung on the doorknob, and a jack-o’-lantern moldered in the sun.

No one answered when Izzy knocked, so she went around back.

Skateboard wheels on hot cement had the dirty-sweet smell of creosote in the rain. Sounded kind of like rain, too. But, of course, no rain. Not here. Kids, some practically babies, others older, dropped into the empty bowl of the pool, popped ollies along the bank, and carved away.