Raindrops strike the lake hard, like pebbles. It’s queer, the rippling and swaying rhythm. A wall of raindrops rushes upon the mild waves of the lake, peppering the waves, so that it looks like machine-gun bullets. Marya runs barefoot along the beach and seems not to mind that a splinter of glass has cut her toe. It’s her big toe, she reasons, hilarious as always, it has lots of blood to lose.

“That liar Bonnie,” Marya complains to the boys, “she said she wasn’t in any hurry to leave, now she and what’s-his-name are gone.”

“Oh that fuck-face, don’t give a shit about him, honey,” Lester says.

“I don’t. Or Bonnie either. But she promised me a ride home and—”

“It isn’t time yet for anybody to go home,” Bob Bannerman says.

Someone has opened the trunk of Lester’s car, and now the boys are fooling around with the tools: a hammer, a monkey wrench, a clipping shears, a coil of wire, a box of spikes. “What the hell are you doing!” Lester screams. “That stuff’s my brother’s! That stuff’s my fucking brother’s, he’ll knock the shit out of me!”

“Nobody’s hurting anything, for Christ’s sake,” Kyle says laughing, “don’t piss your pants or anything—”

One of the boys is trying to hammer a spike into the top of a picnic table but the blows are so hard the tabletop splits.

Marya, they are calling, where’s Marya? She has run into the girls’ bathhouse to be sick. Vomiting into one of the toilets, leaning against the wooden seat. Oh dear God the stench is almost unbearable.

“Where’s fuck-face Marya?”

“Ain’t-I-hot-shit Marya! Where’s she hiding?”

Suddenly lights shine through the trees—red lights, revolving swiftly, the state troopers, it must be—so they scramble off in a panic, running to the cars, but Lester has to gather up his brother’s tools and in the commotion Kyle’s transistor radio is knocked to the ground (or is it thrown down?—it’s so badly damaged, Kyle discovers afterward)—and a tall leggy beery-breathed boy named Jerry, from Mt. Horne, is dragging Marya along saying, C’mon, c’mon honey! c’mon! no matter that the gravel in the parking lot hurts her bare feet and she’s whimpering in pain.

Then the lights are gone. Maybe they hadn’t ever been there—maybe somebody was playing a trick on them—

Hey you guys listen, the fucking po-lice, y’know what they do: turn their lights off! turn their siren off! Lester whispers. Then they wait for you and get you!