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  “Will do.” I hoisted myself back onto my bike seat and put my foot to the pedal before I stopped myself. “Hey, Ears. Do you know about anyone called Ishango or something like that?”

  Ears’s eyes widened, and he started to move his head from side to side before the sergeant stepped in front of him and pointed down the road. “I said move!” he ordered.

  Yipes. I put a big grin on my face and said, “Thank you, sir. Good luck with that coyote.” And I rode off, though not before I shot Ears a sly wink.

  As I went on my way, I thought about Maggie’s dog and that mad bear. Maybe the animals were pissed that we’d come back to their homestead. But Maggie’s dog was with her family the whole time, and that didn’t explain why she kept launching herself into the cage bars. Ouch. I wondered whether I’d see Maggie at practice so I could talk to her about it. I was surprised to see her at the previous one. In the meantime, I stuck to well-traveled streets for the rest of the way to school just in case. I could do without encountering a batshit-crazy coyote in an alley.

  When I arrived in the locker room, everyone got quiet. In my head, I heard Charlie exclaim, “Crickets!” As I walked to my locker, Tico gave me a fist bump.

  “Welcome back, buddy,” he said softly. “Now we can get started for real.”

  I opened my locker and retrieved my pads.

  “Hey, Conners,” came a gruff voice behind me: Jimmy Dubnar, an offensive lineman and one of a handful of black players on the team. He was enormous—six foot four and probably more than three hundred pounds—yet wasn’t even our biggest lineman. That was Sammy Justice, who had to be six eight and liked to be called “Two Tons of Justice.”

  “QBs don’t wear pads at practice,” Jimmy said. “Here. Coach told me to give this to you.”

  He flung me the green quarterback jersey. Aiden Cole, also wearing a green jersey over his slight frame, watched me pull it on.

  “Don’t worry,” Jimmy said, leaning into my ear. “Luke was a good running back, but everyone knows he’s a jackass. Even his own mom could see that. That play where we let the D-line through, I swear, we thought it was a screen.”

  I sat on the bench and tied on my cleats.

  “This should be Cole’s position,” I muttered back to Jimmy.

  “Don’t even start,” Jimmy scoffed. “Cole’s a baby who only got the QB spot because his daddy made a big contribution for the new scoreboard. My nana throws a tighter spiral.”

  The large lineman turned to the group and banged his fist against his locker.

  “Listen up! Y’all saw what Conners did out here. That was some serious shit. And I’m talkin’ ’bout his play on the field, not what happened in the locker room. He’s the genuine article, and if anybody in here has a problem with him, you can go through me. I don’t want to see any more ‘accidental’ hits on him on the field, and I swear to the baby Jesus that there won’t be any more off the field, either, or I’m gonna take care of it. Unless Conners decides to put you in the hospital, too. Got it?”

  Everyone in the room nodded.

  I gave Jimmy a fist bump, and he muttered, “Keep throwing the ball straight and running past people, and we’ll be good.”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  Maybe things would turn out all right after all.

  CHAPTER 14

  Maggie

  WE SHOWED UP at the mortuary early in the morning as always so we wouldn’t overlap with any funerals or viewings. Mr. Marsh met us with a rolling steel table, and Mom and I unloaded Nerf’s and Tiger’s bodies from the van and placed them atop it. As Mr. Marsh rolled the cart with the dogs away, he told us to return in an hour. Human cremation can take up to two hours, but neither of these bodies weighed more than thirty pounds. My assumption was that he would cremate the dogs together.

  Mom took me across the street to Lydia’s Diner, and we ordered breakfast. It was our cremation tradition, though this was the first time we had eaten at the diner since we’d returned to town.

  The way cremation works, in case you’re curious, is the dogs are put onto a big grate, and Mr. Marsh turns on the incinerators. It gets close to two thousand degrees in there, so the animals don’t burn so much as vaporize in the high heat. You may think of cremated remains as ashes, but nope, not really. Most of the ashes get sucked up into air filters, and what’s left are bone fragments and whatever small amount of ash falls through the grate onto a slide. That all goes into a big blender and gets pulverized.

  “Like a smoothie,” Jordan said when I explained it to him a couple years back.

  “Needs yogurt,” I responded. Sometimes I don’t know why I humor that guy.

  Anyway, this explains why cremated six-foot-tall people fit into an urn the size of a genie lamp. There isn’t much left. And if you touch the stuff—which, yes, I have—it’s not like the fine powder you shovel out of your fireplace but closer to the texture of sand.

  “Earth to Margaret,” Mom said.

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking images of incinerated dogs from my mind.

  She nodded to the waitress hovering over our table—a young, tired-looking woman whom I thought I recognized as having been a senior when I was a freshman. Her name tag said D’Arcy. Right. She aimed a patient smile my way, her pen poised over her little notepad.

  “California omelet, please,” I said. “And coffee.”

  “We don’t have avocados,” D’Arcy said in a monotone. “We’ve got them ordered, but all the trucks have to go through the military now.”

  “Okay. How about just whatever kind of veggie omelet you can make?”

  “Will do,” she said, and left us to return a moment later to fill our coffee mugs. I added two creams and poured in a quick stream of white sugar from the glass container on the table.

  “Where are you this morning?” Mom asked. “You’ve been in la-la land since you woke up.”

  “La-la land is Los Angeles,” I replied. “I haven’t been in Los Angeles.”

  She glared at me.

  “I was up at four in the morning, you know,” I added.

  “I told you to go back to bed. I could’ve handled the dogs on my own.”

  “It’s Nerf,” I said. “I wanted to be here.”

  “Do you want to keep him? They’re going to mix the ashes.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine that having a jar of Nerf-and-other-dog sand on my bookshelf would comfort me much.

  “Are you doing all right otherwise?” Mom asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said, though I should have said that I had a lump in my breast and something weird in my shoulder and that I was terrified. I couldn’t do it.

  “What are you not telling me?” she said, sipping her coffee, which she drank black.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Is it about a boy?”

  “What?” I laughed. “No. This is the farthest thing from being about a boy.” I mean, there was a boy who I was hoping would make a move already, but those thoughts were relatively fun.

  “So there’s something.”

  “Maybe I’m just not adjusting well to being home.”

  “If that were the problem, then you wouldn’t have refused to tell me,” Mom said.

  “Wait,” I said. “If I don’t answer, I’m hiding something, and if I do, that’s evidence that I’m lying?” I lifted my coffee cup and held it in my hands, which always seem to be cold.

  “I know you, Maggie. I know that if you’re hiding something, it’ll be significant. You’d been begging to come home since we left, so, no, that’s not it.”

  I took a long, slow sip.

  “Okay, I’ll guess,” Mom said. “You’re upset we can’t leave. You’ve turned into one of those teenage political activists, and you want to tell me how unconstitutional it is.”

  “It is unconstitutional,” I said. “I’ve thought about that.”

  “How?” she said, smiling. She was challenging me.

  “Freedom of assembly. I think there’s something
implicit in the First Amendment that says we can assemble where we want.”

  “Objection,” Mom said. “We still have the freedom to assemble. We can all go to the roadblock and protest. I don’t think they’ll shoot us.”

  “How come no one has protested, then?” I countered. “Is it because everyone’s afraid of what will happen?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe because this town looks better than it has for years? We’re all happy to be home. Think about our office. I was expecting it to be trashed and for looters to have taken all the ketamine.”

  Ketamine was an animal tranquilizer that some folks use as a party drug. Mom kept her stock in a padlocked cabinet. When we had returned to the office, it was untouched.

  “I swear,” I said, “if they don’t get cell phones working again soon, I’ll go stand in front of a tank.”

  “Well, you’re right,” Mom said. “It’s not constitutional as per the Privileges and Immunities Clause.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There’s this lawyer who hangs out at the Savannah Grill.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been leaving every night to carry on with some lawyer at a bar.”

  “All right, I won’t tell you,” she said with a wink.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Bud Winkle.”

  “Bud Winkle? You’re dating Bud Winkle?”

  “Shhh!” she hissed. “For heaven’s sake.”

  “The Bud Winkle?”

  “Cut it out, Maggie. And anyway, we’re not dating.”

  “Have you kissed him?”

  “Don’t cross-examine me, Maggie.”

  “Oh, no, that’s Bud Winkle’s job.”

  Jesus. Bud Winkle.

  “He’s a very nice man, and you may find that his legal knowledge comes in handy regarding your concerns.”

  “‘Regarding my concerns.’ Great. Right now my main concern is that my mom is fooling around with Bud Effing Winkle.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments, and Mom arched her neck, looking toward the kitchen, hoping she’d be conversationally rescued by the arrival of our food. D’Arcy was behind the counter, chatting with the older woman at the cash register, not looking at the steaming plates sitting under the pass-through hot lamps.

  “Our food is right there,” Mom said.

  “Maybe Bud Winkle can sue them for bad service,” I said.

  “Would you cut it out?” she asked. She looked on the verge of tears. Okay, I’d back off. For now.

  “Anyway,” I said, “the point is why would we be cut off from the rest of the world if everything here is fine? Couldn’t we at least get cable? Shutting down the internet conforms to a certain fascist agenda, but how about intoxicating the masses with access to Netflix? Why can’t I watch reruns of The West Wing?”

  “Rachel’s husband has a ham radio, and he shares the news that way.”

  “Right—with other nutjobs spreading conspiracies from their underground bunkers.” I took another sip of my coffee, which had cooled considerably. This was not a pleasurable drink. In one of his emails at camp, Jordan said that when we returned to town, he’d make me coffee in a Chemex, whatever that was. “I mean, Mount Hope isn’t even big enough to merit a Starbucks. Why would we be worth cutting off?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Mom said. “I don’t know that we’re actually cut off. We’ll just have to be diligent.”

  D’Arcy finally showed up with a plate of melon and cottage cheese for Mom and a veggie omelet for me. It was mostly broccoli and Velveeta at the temperature of bathwater.

  “But I don’t actually believe that your sense of constitutional crisis is where your mind has been this morning. Come on, spill.”

  I took another drink of coffee, swished it around like mouthwash, and kept my eyes on my mom. She really was the most sympathetic, supportive person I knew. She deserved the truth.

  Eventually.

  “The homecoming dance is coming up, and no one has asked me,” I said.

  Her face relaxed just like that. I’d delivered her a traditional mother’s problem. Ahhhh.

  “Classes haven’t even started yet, so I’m not sure why you’re worried.”

  “People are around. I’m a junior. I should know.”

  “Why don’t you go with Jordan?”

  “He has to ask me.”

  “Well, ask him.”

  “Mom,” I said, and then stuffed a big bite of omelet into my mouth.

  “It’s the twenty-first century, Maggie. You’ve told me you don’t conform to antediluvian gender roles.”

  “It’s a ‘boy’s choice’ dance,” I said through a full mouth.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “I’m sorry. But, come on, no one designates a ‘boy’s choice’ dance. Almost every dance in history was a ‘boy’s choice’ dance.”

  I couldn’t hide my smile at my mom’s cussing. I’d have to be more convincing.

  “I just—what if he says no? We’ve been friends since kindergarten.”

  “That’s why you shouldn’t worry.”

  “Mom,” I said with a sigh, “you just don’t get it.” Now I actually was getting vexed about this. Why hadn’t Jordan asked me to the homecoming dance yet?

  He was fun and smart, and as much as I hated to admit to being swayed by such qualities, he was getting hotter. He could have had his pick of girls at school, though I never saw him dating anyone. Maybe he didn’t like girls. He wouldn’t be the first hunky guy to let down the ladies in this respect.

  But, no, he liked girls, I could tell. He liked me. He just needed to act already. Well, maybe sometime when he wasn’t being chased by a bear or concussed by teammates. This hadn’t been the most romantic stretch …

  I’d always liked Jordan, but the nuclear disaster deepened my feelings. I had plenty of friends in the evacuation camp, and we hung out and had fun. I even went on a couple of dates with Jerry Eiger—he’d asked me to watch the Star Wars prequels with him on his tablet, for some reason—but nothing happened. (Jar Jar Binks didn’t exactly put me in the mood.) In the meantime, Jordan and I were communicating solely through the written word, sending each other emails that conveyed so much more than everyday conversations. These exchanges felt honest, meaningful, intimate. I couldn’t wait to be in the physical presence of this person who was opening his sweet soul to me.

  “It’s time,” Mom said, tapping her watch. She dug a twenty out of her pocket, left it on the table, and said good-bye to everyone as we walked out.

  We crossed back to the mortuary and met Mr. Marsh at the basement door.

  “I have a question for you,” he said as he handed Mom a clear plastic bag. “Do you know what these are?”

  Inside were a couple of small pieces of what looked like metal. They were silver and round, each the size of a breath mint.

  “They wouldn’t go through the cremulator. It kept jamming up.”

  “What are they?” I asked Mom.

  She shook her head. “No idea.”

  I inspected them more closely. Each was like a mini octopus, with multiple thin wire tentacles extending from a tiny silver disk. It wasn’t a microchip, which my mom would have recognized, anyway. There were two, one for each cremated dog.

  Was this thing in Nerf?

  How did it get there … and why?

  CHAPTER 15

  Jordan

  MAGGIE CAME BY in the evening saying she wanted to hang out, so there we were, reclining in my backyard under a pergola that had been unstable before we left but now was in tip-top shape, painted white and illuminated by strings of lights that looked like large antique lightbulbs. I appreciated Maggie’s initiative in coming by. I appreciated her being there even more. She wore shorts and sandals and a striped blue-and-white shirt. Her hair, which usually hung down to the middle of her back, was pulled up into some kind of complicated braid. She looked good. Smelled good, too.

  “I can’t see the stars,” she said.

  “Should I turn off t
he lights?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I got up and unplugged them, making the yard completely dark aside from the square of light illuminated by the kitchen window.

  I lowered myself back onto the lounge chair and stared up, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the low light. The pergola broke up the view into long rectangles, but soon I could see dense packs of stars. Mount Hope was small, and my neighborhood—if you could call it that—was nothing more than seven or eight homes in a cluster, with farmland spreading out behind them like a fan. There were no streetlights or businesses to light up the sky and ruin the starscape.

  “I learned a lot of constellations while we were in the camp,” I said. “I wasn’t sleeping well there.”

  “What’s that one?” she said, pointing to a bright dot to the west.

  “That’s not a star,” I said. “That’s Mars.”

  “It doesn’t look red to me.”

  “Me neither.”

  We stared and said nothing. It was quiet—so quiet that it was strange. Maggie’s puzzled expression indicated that she’d noticed it, too.

  “Where are the crickets?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, then paused to listen again. “You’re right. That’s weird.” I considered going in to tell Charlie this strange bit of news, given our whole crickets thing, then thought better of it. This was where I wanted to be.

  “Maybe radiation killed them?” she said.

  “Doubtful,” I said. “You know how they say cockroaches will survive a nuclear bomb? I bet crickets are the same way. I mean, are they much different?”

  “Well, yes, Jordan, crickets are different from cockroaches,” she scoffed. “That’s like saying dogs are the same as cats.”

  “Well, I bet radiation would have a similar effect on dogs and cats,” I said. “So there.”

  Maggie gave me the side-eye, then pondered the matter. “You may be right.”

  “I may be crazy,” I returned. “It’s weird either way.”

  We lay still a bit longer. The garden stretched back a good fifty yards before it hit the forest, which loomed large and dark against the sky. When we were little, Maggie and I used to play in the forest all the time. We each had a tree fort—or, really, just trees that we claimed for ourselves and called forts. Mine had a branch bent at a right angle just below another branch; I used to sit there and act like it was my control room. One broken limb stuck out like a joystick, and I used it to fire my “guns” at her. Maggie would climb up her tree and throw spiny chestnuts down at me. One got lodged in the crotch of my pants, and I howled as if she’d done some real damage.