Carter shoves him away from Skylar. “Shut up, Jason.”

Jason turns on Carter. “You’re not the boss of me.” To Skylar he says, “You think you’re so smart. Even the cops don’t know what we know.”

Carter grabs the neck of Jason’s T-shirt and twists it until Jason chokes. “Shut up! Are you nuts or what?”

I start to ride away, but Skylar’s still standing there, watching them fight. Jason punches Carter, and Carter punches him back. They grab each other like wrestlers and grunt and strain and struggle until Jason’s face turns so red I think he’s dying of heatstroke. Cars go by without even slowing down. It’s like no one cares what’s going on here.

“Quit it!” I shout at them. “Quit it!”

The boys break apart. Their chests heave, they pant, their T-shirts are soaked with sweat. Jason’s nose is bleeding and Carter’s lip is cut. It scares me to see how much damage they’ve done to each other.

Without saying anything else to us, they jump on their bikes and coast downhill, heading back the way they came, toward Marie Drive. “Just keep your stupid mouths shut,” Carter yells over his shoulder. “No more cops!”

Skylar watches them through slitted eyes. “We should’ve let them kill each other,” she mutters to me. Turning her bike around, she prepares to push off.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re following them.”

“You’re crazy,” I say.

“I bet they know where the phone and purse are,” Skylar says. “If we follow them, we can tell Detective Klein. He’ll take us seriously then. Maybe we’ll even get a reward.”

This is a bad idea, one of the worst Skylar’s ever had. I stand there and watch her ride away. “Come back,” I yell after her. “Come back!”

Skylar keeps going, picking up speed as she races downhill. Once she gets an idea into her head, you can’t stop her. I’ll tell her what I think when I catch up with her. For now, there’s nothing to do but push off and ride after her. She’s my best friend. No matter how stupid she is, I can’t let her ride off alone. What if something happened to her? What if she never came back?

On Marie Drive, the little houses sit silently on their neatly mowed lawns, but no one is in sight. Somebody cuts the grass, somebody waters the flowers, somebody brings in the mail, but we never see them. They either work or stay inside all day. It’s like a science fiction movie where everyone has died of the plague or been killed by aliens from outer space.