Ahead and to the left of Parter, on the steps of the orange RV, Luke Evers lay in blood.

Parter glanced back at Jamal over his shoulder. “It was all just bad luck.”

Jamal cocked the hammer of the revolver and felt the gun tremble in his hand with a supple, satisfying clunk—why didn’t every black man in this state own a gun? Jamal wondered—and Parter froze at the sound.

“You ever notice the only brown kid here is light enough to be white?”

Parter swallowed.

Jamal shouted to the others. “We doing this or what?”

CLARK

She pressed herself to a corner of the black camper and trained her gun on the windows of the silver Airstream into which she was certain—ninety percent certain—she had seen Garrett Mason and his military-issued assault rifle flee earlier. Ninety-five percent certain. Ninety. It had been so hectic when the bullets had started flying a few minutes ago, young men had been running in every direction, but surely she wouldn’t have mistaken Mason making a break for the Airstream. In his pads and his helmet he couldn’t have been that hard to miss, could he?

“We doing this or what?” Jamal shouted.

Or had he been bolting for the green trailer?

Silver or green. Silver or green.

Nothing moved in either window.

Silver. She trained her gun on the Airstream and shouted, “Clear.”

KIMBRA

Kimbra took up a place by the camper’s door. She eased it open, taking in the trailer park, judged the distance to Luke’s orange RV and wondered for the first time if she weren’t making a colossal mistake. Hadn’t Luke come out here of his own accord? Hadn’t he had sense enough to know that nothing good came of boys like Mitchell Malacek or Garrett Mason (or, for that matter, their good friend, poor broken KT Staler)?

Too late. When Kimbra saw Luke struggle to rise again in his pool of blood she knew she couldn’t do anything but try to help him. Luke could be aloof, could be embarrassingly alone, but he didn’t deserve to die here.

And besides: Kimbra suspected that if it weren’t for all her plans and tricks over the summer Luke probably wouldn’t have been brought here in the first place.

“Good luck,” Joel said.

Without looking back, Kimbra said, “I think you need it more than me, man.”

A brief silence. The night held its breath. She tightened her grip on Browder’s knife, just in case any of the frightened boys she saw watching her from their windows suddenly decided they wanted to get in her way. Better safe than sorry.

Clark shouted, “Clear!”

Kimbra leaped to the ground outside. The moment she landed she heard a strange chugging noise, saw the lights of the trailer park go dark around her. Before the lights went down she saw it: the truck parked near the side of the black trailer, the truck full of blood, the truck full of bits of the beautiful boy she’d spent far too many years of her life hoping to fix.