“Kid’s gotta learn.” Trace shakes his head as he comes back to us. Sage makes a sad face at him. “Hey, when I was his age, if I’d come down here with my little baby board? Skaters would’ve kicked the shit out of me and dropped my ass in the river with a couple bricks in my Underoos. We’re going easy on him.” He drives each word home with his forefinger: “Little kids. Skate. In. Their driveways. Everybody knows that.” He literally throws his board and jumps on it. “Probably the most attention he’ll get all day, anyway.”

Seven

IT’S LATE. AND there’s a sound in my room.

It starts—a tiny tick-tick—when I’m in bed reading A Clockwork Orange. The book’s insane, told in some made-up language, one you can almost understand but not quite, and it’s all just so damned Kincaid that I won’t let myself put it down, as if it could be some kind of instruction manual for him, complete with diagrams.

Tick-tickatick. Coming from my closet, where the door stands partially open. Mouse in the wall; wouldn’t be the first place we’ve lived that had them. Why do these things only happen at night? I bear down on every sentence, ignoring the words I don’t know and grabbing on to the ones I do until meaning rises to the top, the whole thing weirdly like deciphering Shakespeare. An image forms: guys hanging out in a milk bar—I guess people drink milk for fun in this world. Droogs looking for a fight, hoodies who wear bowlers.

A flurry of ticks; the thing is in here, with me, not in the wall. I set the book down, go to the closet doorway, turn on the light, and peer inside.

Nothing. Some clothes on hangers, a high shelf, empty except for a single shoebox with my leopard-prints inside. A stain on the carpet in the back corner that I hadn’t noticed before, like some kid stashed their science project on mold in here a little too long.

I catch it from the corner of my eye as I turn. From this angle, it looks like dead skin, a big flake peeling from the wall.

I stare, and it takes shape. A pair of wings, antennae. A sepia-toned moth, lying flat against white paint, basking in the glow of the bulb.

Its frothy wings have two dark dots on them, like slightly off-kilter eyes. A disguise, I’ve read, to fool predators, make them think they’re looking at the face of a bigger animal. A scrap of face on my wall, staring back, waiting to see what I’ll do.