South of Collin’s house, back in David’s basement, instead of heading home, Tyler decided to stay. Tyler was a hardcore kid who hated all melody. People liked him for his deadpan humor and the general quietude that implied wisdom, but were also scared of him because he seemed to experience the world as static: everything around him carried the same weight, which was no weight at all. He was detached and unreadable, almost clinically pale, with always-buzzed blond hair and rotating band shirts he’d stopped accumulating in ninth grade (now: Circle Jerks). Had he lived in a larger town, he would have worried about looking like a nazi, but the punk scene here wasn’t big enough to draw these distinctions. He wore headphones constantly but responded to cues as if there were nothing playing; his ambience was sub-two-minute thrashers one after the other after the other, death metal, and Dopesmoker. His peers compensated around him by overacting, laughing loudly at his presumed jokes to prove they were worthy, but few engaged him directly, which he was fine with; in many ways he had the air of a sociopath, a veil drawn. He was left to himself. He was not on our radar yet.

For a while Tyler played videogames with the volume turned down low—an enormous TV was one of the perks of David’s basement. He kept his earbuds in, and together the two pieces of equipment formed a layered blanket of sound, a kind of sonic lake in which he floated. After a couple of hours he put the controller aside and stretched, let his body slide from the beleaguered vinyl couch onto the carpet. He stared at the ceiling. The level immediately above him was empty, and the level above that held David, asleep. Tyler absently tapped at his phone to change the music; the time signature changed.