Jamal had only been hoping to distract Parter. Instead the small explosion tore most of the skin from the coach’s legs. Parter collapsed against the wall, knocking a scented candle from a shelf of trophies and into the lap of Toby Lott’s Bisonette singlet. The singlet ignited in a whoosh of crackling polyester, the fire leaped from the uniform to the Polaroids that papered the wall and in a second four decades’ worth of boys were alight.

Parter tried to escape. Jamal was too fast for him. He pushed the couch against Parter and pinned him to the burning wall. He felt Parter struggle, heard the big man scream for him to stop, stop please stop, but Jamal closed his eyes. He had no doubt that the man would kill him if their places were reversed.

The room filled with smoke and whispers and the shit stench of decay. Jamal held his breath.

A cluster of dull pops that sounded like firecrackers came from Parter’s jacket a few feet away and Jamal felt the couch first convulse and then go as still as a line when a fish slips free. Jamal rose, panting, and saw that the fire had reached Parter’s open, unblinking eyes.

“You still say I got no strength in my legs?” Jamal said, mostly to himself.

He looked toward the hallway and saw, somehow without surprise, that the hole was gone, the floor restored. Jesus.

He didn’t linger. The fire was real enough, and he smelled gasoline in his hair.

Outside, hurrying down the triple-wide’s steps, Jamal heard a strange chugging noise. He saw that the wall of the trailer was alight, burning just a few feet away from the generator.

That generator. Hadn’t it been leaking—

“Get down!” Bethany screamed from the door of the Water House, but it was too late. The shock wave of the explosion caught Jamal as he reached the ground and sent him flying through the night.

JOEL

The lights died, and the explosion knocked the triple-wide into the black camper. Like a capsizing ship, the camper tipped into the dirt, the shutters swinging closed and sending Clark—who had just lodged an arm over the Browder thing’s windpipe—rolling off of him and tumbling into the sudden inky dark.

Joel heard Clark strike something hard in the kitchen. She righted herself as Browder ran toward her. Joel grabbed for the deputy but caught nothing but air.

Between the damage to his skull, the blood lost from his ruined shoulder and now this canted floor, Joel felt hopelessly disorientated, jet-lagged, as if his mind had left his body in a safer, colder time zone. He wasn’t sure how he was still conscious. When Browder and Clark collided with the far wall, some cracked piece of Joel’s brain wondered what the queens with whom he’d gone to Tulum would say when they heard that Joel Whitley—the brooding boy with the chest and the black card and a drug dealer in every city—had run out his brief clock in a mildewed mobile home in the middle of nowhere.