We were quiet. My eggs were cold.

“And my notebook, too,” Fellis said. “The one Aunt Alice bought me.”

I wanted to feel bad for Fellis. Really, I did—he’d never told me that was what happened. Why would he? He’d made it out to be all about the money. But seeing how bad he treated Beth lit my temper and got me burning.

Beth picked up Fellis’s napkin and threw it away. She left the envelope in the garbage. She turned to say something but didn’t. Down the hallway, I expected her to slam her door, but she let it close with a gentle click.

Fellis rose and stood at the sink. “What did she expect?” he said, eating a strip of bacon. “She did all my homework for me throughout high school. Fucking bitch.”

I brought my plate to the sink. My hands shook and the fork on the plate rattled. I rinsed the plate and slid it under a dirty bowl. There was one piece of bacon left and I wanted to eat it, wanted to chew on it and release a primal rage, but Fellis took it before I could and he stuffed it into his mouth.

He smiled at me and I broke his fucking nose.

. . .

For four days—the air cold and moist and the sky continuously pale, the feeling of the first snow coming—I searched for porcupines along the sides of the rez roads. I’d not spoken to Fellis, and so each day I was on my own, hunting porcupine, searching the woods (one day was wasted on the bus route up to the methadone clinic). But on those days I was out looking I found nothing. Porcupines—dead or alive—were not easy to find. At night, tired of searching, I slept in the boiler room out back of Mom’s house. I went inside only to get food or to use the bathroom or to change my clothes. The phone on the kitchen table blinked red, but I never checked it, and I never heard the phone ring. The house was clean: the dishes were put away, the floors were swept except for what I dragged in, and the place smelled as if it had been aired out, the way houses do when nobody’s been using them.

Early each morning, right as the sun was coming up, I set off to look for porcupines to make some money. My body hurt from sleeping on the hard concrete in the boiler room, and as each day passed my bones felt closer to breaking. By the fourth morning—it was about 3:30 AM—I got up, went inside, and unplugged the phone. I slept on the couch, and when I woke up it was noon. The first thing that came to mind were the Steel Reserves. I said, Fuck that porcupine, told myself I wasn’t going to find it, and I switched my attention to those missing beers.

That afternoon I only found one, and the can was dented and smeared with dirt. I kept on through the woods, picking up kindling and cradling it, and I came to the river. It was high and scraped the bank as it flowed by. Under the darkening sky, the river looked black.