The morning after I put Paige to bed in the shed I woke to find her gone. For two days, it rained and I never saw her. She’d slip out. I didn’t know why she wanted to be out in the rain, but she did. When the skies finally cleared—sometime around four in the morning, because I’d gone to sleep to the sound of heavy rain thumping the roof and woke to Frick watching TV loudly in the living room—Tyson, JP, and I planned to take canoes out onto the river, which was high and moved fast. I left home early in the morning. Frick had taken two Ambien and finally gone to sleep and Mom said not to stay out late, that she was leaving for a big grocery shop and was going to bring back a surprise for dinner. Before I met up with JP and Tyson down by the river, the van with the film crew had stopped me and asked if they could get footage of me walking down the road, hands in my pockets, and I told them for sixty bucks they could film a few of us canoeing, but they said they were on schedule, had to be somewhere. I was pretty sure they filmed me walking anyway.

In the sun, JP, Tyson, and I paddled against the river for a few hours, and JP and I poked Tyson’s canoe with our paddles, and we laughed while he kept his balance in the vast river that was our blood. We canoed past all the land that the state owned until we finally arrived at the marshy islands that have always been our traditional hunting grounds.

We pulled the canoes on land and the earth sucked our feet. We walked inland for forty minutes, away from all the black ash trees, searching for less muck.

“There,” JP said, pointing to dry ground. “That looks good.”

The fire blazed. JP pulled some beers out from his backpack. He dropped one on the ground and handed it to Tyson.

“Gee, thanks,” Tyson said.

“You don’t want it?” JP said. “Give it back then.”

Tyson tapped the top of his beer and cracked it open.

“That’s what I thought.”

I took a sip and grimaced. “‘I don’t always drink piss, but when I do, it’s High Gravity.’”

“Shut up,” JP said. “It’s the best I could do. My brother left these in his room. We could ask Paige to buy us some, but she might drink them all.”

“That shit ain’t funny,” I said, and before he could say sorry I finished the beer. “The bottom of the can is as good as the whole thing.”

“‘Some days,’” JP said, adopting Thomas’s voice from Smoke Signals, “‘it’s a good day to die. And some days, it’s a good day to have High Gravity.’”

“‘Thomas,’” I said, “‘you are so full of shit.’”