“I’m around the corner; want to take up with Extra and me and put some burgers on my grill?” Frank had made their being here right. If there were something going on between them, inviting Mary over to see the wife, daughter, bambino, and patio would not be in the offing. And inviting Blue wouldn’t be either.

“You live down this way?” Blue looked horrified.

“Sure do.”

“Nice area.”

Mary felt bad for the guy. He looked trapped. After a few more awkward pauses and a loop of non-sequiturs, they said their goodbyes.

Love grew better, she often thought, in hidden soil. She’d lost her virginity to the boy everyone said was gay. Yet Tim wouldn’t hang with gays. Trying to toughen up, he was a before-school smoker in the parking lot, usually solo. He had one friend, a girl. She came to Mary. Look, he likes you. Mary stared across the cafeteria, where this girl was pointing. He was sitting at a table by a window, earbuds dangling down, black knit cap on a warm day, skin glue white, bony everything—shoulders, arms, chest.

She didn’t want Tim, but she wasn’t afraid of him either. That was the main thing. They were sixteen. It hurt her, but not too much. Mostly, it was over with. It was his idea to keep on with it, trying to get it to feel a little more like what all the noise about it said it was. She’d gone along. They kept all of it secret. When she passed him in the parking lot before class, she put her hair behind her ears and looked down, their private hello. She felt more for him in that gesture than anywhere else they’d been.

3.   THE LAST LIGHTS OFF THE
BLACK WEST

There’d been five stories. All said pretty much the same thing. Apparently, repeating the same things—that was allowed. The pilot had crashed due to technical difficulties. That was, as far as it went, true. It was much better than the story Donovan went for first. Simple and likely, covering bases, that was the storyline these writers wanted. Will knew that much.

They’re not writers. How many times had one of his men said that? Will didn’t care to understand the distinctions. These writers, reporters, whatever you wanted to call them, wrote about what Will lived. That was true. Anything else was class and status. Neither affected him.

So the stories didn’t mention some things he would have mentioned if he’d been writing them. He would have said planes crashing into buildings had been a recent big event. He would have said this was a plane crash too. He would have said this crash might be related to someone trying to fix the big event of planes crashing into things they shouldn’t.