“You still got it on you.” He touched his own face to show where, and Raj wiped it off.

“Less than a week now.” Raj let out a long tired breath. “No more high school for me. What are you going to do with your life?”

“Don’t know. Thought I might like to be a park ranger or something.”

He climbed down from the tree and Raj followed. They meandered toward the river, idly plucking up the long grasses.

“Would you leave the state?” Raj said.

He shook his head. “Wouldn’t want to be too far from my pop. What about you?”

“I’ve applied to some places to study physics—Stanford or MIT.”

“Annie told me Barrington’s scared to have you in class because you know more than he does.”

“A lobotomized bullfrog knows more than he does. I’m hoping to turn him into an alcoholic with this slightly troubled frown I’ve perfected.” Raj demonstrated.

“What are me and Annie going to do without you?”

“Come with me.”

Lewis looked around at the brown, green, wet, spongy world. Earth: child of the sun. Sun begat Earth to learn how to go cold, to die. Sun fills the mouths of caves with its hoard of darkness, the minds of men with annihilation.

“Hello-o-o-o.” Raj had made a bullhorn of his hands, and was calling with a feigned echo into his ear. “Is anyone in the-e-ere?”

“I couldn’t imagine leaving.”

“That’s why you should leave,” Raj said. “I always feel like I’ve done everything wrong, messed everything up.”

“What have you messed up?”

“He shrugged. “I guess I just like the idea of coming back, being different. New and improved.”

“Don’t seem to me there’s anything wrong with you.”

Pressing his hand coyly to his cheek, Raj became a southern belle. “Why, that is so sweet of you to say, sir. Fact is, I’m so wrong, sir, I’m right.”

A gusty wind flung Lewis’s hair into his face as they got to the bluffs above the Missouri, eighty feet below. Brown broad river, its surface as grained and knotted as bark. A vast, gnarled, liquid tree set in the earth. Driftwood piled against the banks, dead wood, naked, agony of limbs. His brother had been found caught in the branches of a dead tree, dead fruit of the dead in the dead river. Lewis walked out to the jagged edge of the promontory.

“Lew,” Raj called. “You’ve got to watch out. Those edges aren’t solid.”

He turned back to his friend. His heels at the precipice, he closed his eyes, could hear the river below, and felt as if he were suspended above the earth.

“Lew,” Raj called gently. “The edge could give.”

He opened his eyes. “Raj, do you think about your mom and dad?”