She abruptly ran out of steam and sighed. The bacon sizzled and smoked. The girl dropped the bag and her shoes on the linoleum and crossed to the stove. She turned the bacon with tongs while the three men stared at the window, the clock, the tabletop.

She turned around, hands on hips, then retrieved her stuff. She walked the long way around the table and kissed Mikey on the top of his head, then clonked him over the skull, right on the kissed spot, with a dull clatter of stilettos on bone.

“Ow! Fuck!”

“Tell your brother to call me.” The hinges of the screen door screamed in protest as she banged through. “And you owe me a new pillow!”

The silence settled around everything but the spit of bacon grease.

“That bitch needs to chill.” Byron stared after her on her barefoot way down the sidewalk.

“Nah. She’s okay.” Mikey rubbed his sore head and winced. “My brother’s kind of a dick.” He brought the bacon to the table on a paper towel.

Breakfast was almost-burnt bacon and beer and a splash of orange juice from the bottom of the carton, split three ways into red plastic cups.

The scant discussion turned to how nice it would be to have some weed to soothe their hangovers. Mikey and Byron both had reasons why none of their money could go toward a trip to the house on the corner.

Roy hated weed. The lightness that other people seemed to feel when they smoked was lost on him. The woozy high rose up in him like helium, stretching him like a balloon, but with no lift, only pull and itch and worry that something would bust.

At the table with his new friends, he struggled for the right tone. He didn’t want it. He couldn’t afford it. And if he didn’t help them, they might make him leave. “I mean, it’s totally fine with me if you guys do. I don’t have any problem with it. I just don’t . . . it doesn’t . . . I just can’t.”

“It’s cool. No problem,” Byron said. But it wasn’t true. His voice was thick with a disappointed problem.

“Hey”—Mikey looked at Roy—“have you got a gun?”

Roy felt all the blood speed away from his head as if he were doing it on purpose. Because he absolutely would do it on purpose. He would happily drain his head like an oil pan, if he could. Anything to unplug the idea of having a gun, touching a gun. He’d do just about anything to hold the door against the memory of the roar that went with a pulled trigger, the gasp and gurgle through a bullet-torn neck.