The very first time I saw Bill was outside BTI. He was standing beside a dented and rusted pickup truck, setting a case of beer into the waiting arms of seven-year-old Tate. There were few kids in our town, so I’d tried to make friends with the new boy, but he hardly looked up from his shoes, leaving school as soon as it was over, sometimes not even showing up for days. I was curious about the boy who still hadn’t spoken to me since moving to Whittier a few months before, and I’d followed him outside, hoping he’d want to make a snow fort with me.

His father’s voice shot across the parking lot, and I’d hesitated by the door, unsure. Bill Dunn was not a tall man like my own dad, but he was an angry one, and I remember how it shot off him like porcupine quills, sharp and needlelike and mostly directed at his small, stuttering dark-haired son. Tate wore a T-shirt, and his skinny arms had trembled with the weight and the cold, tightening around the case of beer that was slipping from his grip. When his father set a pair of work boots on top, the box fell from his arms, and Tate cried out. It thumped to the ground, breaking a bottle, which stained the snow at his feet a dark brown.

Goddamn you, Tate!

Tate’s whole body shook with the effort to respond. S . . . s . . . s . . . s—

It was all he could get out, and I remember how my eyes burned from his struggle. Then his father did something that made my seven-year-old self so angry I pounded my small fists into the metal stair railing. My hands hurt for days afterward.

He mocked him. S . . . s-orry, D . . . D-ad.

Tate’s head hung so low I wondered how he could breathe all crunched up like that. Then his father slapped him upside the head, and Tate tumbled backward, falling onto his bottom. I bit my bottom lip because I was crying and mad and filled with something I didn’t understand. Rage.