“We’re driving down here this morning and you’re not speaking to me, really. You’re all quiet … quiet that is, until we see Buju. Then suddenly you become yourself again. And I am sitting there dying, saying to you with my eyes, ‘Fire, you really don’t check for me the way you used to,’ and I began to feel so low … so angry … like everything we had was nothing. So I was feeling all this now, when you went to bathe today. And while I was in your room something happened—I accidentally knocked over your knapsack, some things fell out, and I saw the paper you were writing on last night … the one you didn’t want me to see. And it was like I started hearing this voice in my head. This voice telling me all kinda fuckery, and I started to get really paranoid … started to think you were writing things about me that you wanted to hide. Fire, I was carrying so much feelings that I couldn’t help myself, and before I knew it, I read it. And now I know about you and Sylvia. That was a fucked-up thing to do … I know. And I thought that I could live with it. But I can’t. Not after looking through those albums and seeing us as boys. I had to tell you, star. As I said, me and you are like blood. Fire, I know how you feel.”

“No you don’t,” Fire said, closing his eyes. “You don’t know how I feel.” There was no one word to describe what he was feeling—anger, sadness, shame, confusion.

“You must be really angry, now,” Ian said quietly.

What right do I have to anger? Fire thought. Haven’t I committed the same crime? I’m just as guilty as you.

“I know how you feel,” Ian said, reaching out to pat his hand.

Fire believed he didn’t deserve this, so he pulled his hand away. “No, you don’t.”

“I do,” Ian said, as he closed his eyes to fix Margaret’s face in his mind. “Believe me, dread. I do.”

Fire wanted to walk away and was asking his legs to try, but his thoughts were blocked by his swollen heart.

“Cry if you want,” Ian said to him. “Go ahead and cry.”

“It’s okay,” Fire said, unable to overcome for the moment the perception that he was soft. He sat with his head in his hands till his mind began to clear, then he walked away across the grass. And as he flashed his arms and legs to energize himself he found himself doing a silly dance. The sequence of events, he began to see, had turned comic. The cosmic joke was on him. Why did he think that he could look in Ian’s sketch pad without the same thing happening to him? What gave him the right?

From behind, he heard Ian crossing the distance between them.

“So we’re still friends then?”

“I guess we are,” Fire said. As he turned around he saw in Ian the boy who became his closest friend.