“Wade?” Bobby says.

Wade Wellman. He’s changed, too.

Once he was a skinny, good-looking kid. He always wore the best clothes he could afford or shoplift. His hair was gelled and slicked to perfection. He was baby-faced and wide-eyed, and nobody ever suspected him of anything until they got to know him.

Now he’s thick with muscle, and the formerly perfect face has a long scar running through a scraggly beard. He wears cheap denim and his hair looks like it was cut with a hedge trimmer. His eyes are dark and shadowed.

But Bobby remembers the smile. It’s the same smirk he always wore whenever he got away with something: the kid with a pocketful of stolen candy, all the test answers from the teacher’s desk, and someone else’s lunch money.

“Hey, Hog,” he says. “Good to see you.”

Bobby lowers the knife, but he doesn’t put it down. It’s not possible. It’s simply not possible. Wade — Wade cannot be here. Bobby heard from the prosecutor’s office. The prison. This isn’t like a bureaucracy getting your address wrong, this is life and death here, they said —

And yet here he is.

Wade Wellman was the leader of the West Side Warriors. A born con artist. Lying was like breathing to him. He didn’t know what happened to your bike. Sure, you asked him to watch it, and yes, it was right there — but how could you insinuate that Wade had something to do with its sudden disappearance?

People threatened to kick the crap out of Wade Wellman maybe twice a day, but nobody ever laid a hand on him. He would start talking, and before too long, anger would turn to confusion, and while his enemies were trying to puzzle out what he’d said, Wade would smile and walk away.

Or Wade would call on his gang. Troy liked to wear X-Ray Specs he ordered out of a comic book. Whenever he saw a girl, he’d reach down his pants, pretended he could see her naked. If anyone pointed out that the things didn’t really work, he’d laugh and say, “So what? My dick still works.” Mike stole Ritalin out of the other kids’ lockers and sold it to the bikers at the Crow Inn. Derek broke into cars at night and stole whatever was in the glove box or on the seats.

And there was Bobby. Hog. He was big and intimidating, even if it was fat, not muscle.

Wade watched Boyz n the Hood about a thousand times, so he suggested they call themselves the West Side Warriors. He treated them like people. Like friends. Then he used them like tools.

They stole. They had fake IDs. They sold cheap weed. They only qualified as a gang by Middleton standards. It wasn’t like they were doing drive-by shootings.

It’s not like anyone died.

Well, not until the end, anyway.