What they told the police, as the two of them stood on the porch, their heads hammering from the alcohol they had been drinking all night, was that they had been walking to go visit some friends and maybe watch a video when a black van pulled up beside them. There was a man and a woman in the front of the van, wearing all black, covered in tattoos. They asked Billy and Brooke to join them, and when Billy asked where they were going, the man said, “To the edge.” And then the back door opened and another man, also wearing all black, jumped out and grabbed Brooke and pulled her into the van. Billy jumped in to save her, and someone in the front knocked him out. They knocked out Brooke, too.

When they woke up, they were at this abandoned house, one they’d never seen before, far from civilization, out in the woods. There were candles everywhere, and the walls were covered in these strange posters that had these menacing hands. The three people, who called themselves the fugitives, were listening to strange, satanic music, and were doing all manner of drugs. They made Brooke and Billy do drugs, like they, I don’t know, shoved them up their noses or blew smoke into their faces? It wasn’t entirely clear. And the intensity of these drugs made Brooke and Billy pass out again. And when they woke up in the morning, the three people were gone. And so Billy and Brooke walked all the way home, constantly worried that the fugitives would come back for them. Each of them had brought a copy of the poster home with them, for evidence.

I learned all of this from the triplets, who recounted the entire thing to me and my mom over lunch that afternoon. And my mom, to her credit, said, “Oh god, they made it up, right?” and my brothers told us what had really happened, since they had actually been at the abandoned house that night and had the sense to get back home in time to avoid having the cops search for them. They didn’t even hesitate in the telling, however it might incriminate them, because my mom knew all this and worse about her sons, but she also knew that they were the most invincible children in the entire state.