“Water.” The man in my lap shuddered and tried to sit up. His eyes opened, small and unfocused.

I tried to place his face, to remember his name. “You passed out, I guess. Don’t get up.” I supported his head on a tarp I found in a corner of the truck bed.

The man coughed again. “We were waiting for water.”

Most men looked the same, most men looked like boys I had gone to high school with, boys who would corner me in the hallway and ask for weed, who would be surprised when I didn’t want to go to their parties at the trailers of their deadbeat dads, at the bikers’ bar in town which never carded.

This man wasn’t one of those boys. I could recognize him now. He was someone who never talked to me, someone who went to school with animal shit on his boots—that kept you away from a social scene. He was from one of the farm communes where kids went to school late, if at all; where they were dragged out early, ostensibly to help with the sheep or the hogs or to follow the walnuts or blueberries, but really, just to keep the kids safe from the Man. The Machine. The ideas that were spread through the public schools.

I remembered he had dropped out forever at sixteen, or whenever we could. I had refused to drop out of school myself, still believing that I was meant for something else, something out of here. Believing that I would have to prepare, to be ready. I remembered when we were just kids, a woman had picked this boy up from school, from the class we were in together. She wore long skirts, wafting a scent that by then I already knew.

“The water truck was late,” the man said. He had sun-damaged skin—that aged you fast. His beard reminded me of the scruff on the side of the highway. “People were getting mad. Then the truck just turned around. The driver saw the crowd, how big and wild it was, and he just...backed up and left.”

“Nobody got any water?”

“Nobody.”

I rummaged around the bed of the truck—Lobo’s shit was still everywhere—until I found my stainless-steel water bottle. I unscrewed the top and raised the bottle to his lips. He drank, looking at me over the rim. He still wore his glasses. One lens was cracked; the other, missing.

“I’m Wylodine. Wil. Do you remember me?”

He finished drinking. His hand passing the bottle to me shook a little, but he said, “I do. I’m Dance. My folks were hippies.”

“I remember.”

“Wil?” Grayson said. “Hey, Wil? Where I am going?”