"Okay, so it's got a few design flaws," Joby said irritably. "We don't all have professional tailors, Ben."

"Hey, I didn't mean-"

"I know," Joby said, glad they couldn't see his beet-red face. "I just . . . lost my head for a minute." Laura groaned, but Ben was good enough to laugh.

Ben led the way upstairs through the old water tower that was the restaurant's entrance, while Laura hung back, helping Joby negotiate the rough wooden steps. "I knew I should have come as a cowboy," he murmured, wondering why on earth he'd chosen a costume that left him half-blind with no peripheral vision.

At the top, Ben pulled the door open and they were drowned in deafening music, laughter, and shouted conversation. Joby's lack of peripheral vision became an even greater challenge as they sought a table in the bar amidst the crowd of giant butterflies, ghosts, clowns, fairies, witches, ghouls, and super-heroes. The place was a furnace, and Joby quickly discovered yet another of his costume's drawbacks. He was glad he'd worn nothing heavier than a black T-shirt underneath.

When the waitress came, Laura ordered coffee, Joby asked for grapefruit juice with a straw, ignoring the waitress's amused expression, and Ben ordered Glenlivet, up. At first, the party swirled indifferently around them, but soon, Joby and Laura's friends began to come around to ooh and ah their costumes. Ben's, of course, got all the top awards, as he was introduced to anyone and everyone in Taubolt. When Bridget and her husband came by, she dressed in green balloons as a giant bunch of grapes, and Drew decked out as a "cereal killer," wearing a robe festooned with empty cornflake boxes decorated with bloody bullet holes or stabbed with rubber knives and cleavers, she became the fourth person to ask Joby if he weren't awfully hot in there.

"You know, you're right," Joby said, surrendering at last. "I'm hot, and blind, and claustrophobic in this dumb thing." He pulled his arms from the jacket sleeves, lifted the fake torso off his shoulders, and emerged feeling rumpled, sweaty and drably out of uniform in his sodden black T-shirt. "Decapitation isn't all it's cracked up to be," he growled comically, setting his empty shell on the floor. "Now I can order a burger."

"It was kind of neat though, talking to a stuffed shirt," Bridget pouted.

"Breathing's even neater." Joby shrugged. "Next year, I'm a cowboy, for sure."

"Well, this isn't too well ventilated either," Drew said, turning to his wife and plucking at his robe. "How about we get some air out on the deck?"

They made their farewells and left, but, having taught school for three years, Joby knew half the families in Taubolt, and soon had a steady stream of visitors, whom Ben, and even Laura, hardly knew. This receiving line went on and on, until, eventually, during a lengthy conversation about scholarships between Joby and Bellindi's parents, Ben and Laura finally excused themselves to go dance. Some time later, when Joby had finally run dry of visitors, he sat sipping his third grapefruit juice, and wondering when, if ever, Ben and Laura would return.

Finally, he got up and went to the restaurant's dining room, which had been cleared for dancing, where he leaned against the doorjamb, buffeted by the music, and watched Ben and Laura utterly lost in all the fun they were having. They made a lovely couple, and Ben's costume alone would have justified the attention they were getting from people all around the dance floor. Joby saw himself reflected in the darkened windows beyond them, looking plain, he thought, and rather thin in his black pants and T-shirt. His hair was sticking up ridiculously from having pulled his costume off. He reached up to rake it back into place, wondering why no one had said anything all this time, and he suddenly felt tired-and utterly out of sync with the celebration around him. With a last glance at Ben and Laura, he went back to get his ill-conceived costume in the bar, then headed for the door carrying his empty torso under one arm.

As he started down the stairs, however, Laura's voice called out behind him, "Joby, where are you going?"

Oh, he thought, I've been noticed. "I'm just a little tired," he said without turning. "I told Gladys I'd help her with some things around the inn tomorrow. I think I'd better get some sleep." He turned to smile at her. "It's just three blocks. I can walk."

Ben came through the door to stand beside her.

"You weren't even going to say good-bye?" Laura asked incredulously.

"You two were dancing, and . . . I didn't want to interrupt."

"For God's sake, Joby," Laura said wearily. "I can't believe this."

"Hey! It looked like you were having fun!" he sputtered, acutely embarrassed. "I just didn't want-"

"Save it!" she snapped. "I wouldn't dream of compromising your pity party." She whirled around and went angrily back inside, leaving Ben there in his elegant costume, staring down at Joby with a glum look that fanned Joby's shame into anger.

"Congrats, Sir Benjamin," he sneered, "looks like clothes do make the man." He turned his back, and continued down the stairs.

"What's she supposed to do, Joby?" Ben demanded, starting down the stairs after him. "Throw herself at you? You want to dance, ask her to dance! For God's sake, she's wanted you for twenty years now! When are you gonna make your damn move?"

Joby could hardly see straight for the fury and shame he felt. He hurried down the stairs, just wanting to be anywhere away. At the bottom of the stairs, he crossed the street and stalked out onto the starlit headlands, tossing his ridiculous costume into the grass. When he realized Ben was still following him, he turned and yelled, "Go back and dance!" then stumbled in the dark over the uneven path.

"You're acting like a twelve-year-old!" Ben yelled back. "I didn't proposition her, I just danced with her!" He'd caught up to Joby now. "If you wanna know the truth, I'm sick of watching you sit around endlessly sorting through your ridiculous insecurities while Laura just hangs out to dry. If you want her, take her, or-"

"Or what, Ben? . . . You'll take her?"

Anger chased a startled look across Ben's face in the dim light. "Maybe I will," he said, trying unsuccessfully to sound as if the idea surprised him. "God knows you've had your fifty million chances."

"My best old friend," Joby heard himself growl, as something inside him uncoiled with a snarl, propelling him forward to shove Ben hard.

"What the-Joby!" Ben yelped, stumbling onto his back in the grass.

A second later, Joby was on top of him, his fist plunging toward Ben's face as some saner part of him wailed in dismay, helpless to contain the fury that possessed him. One punch was all he got before Ben threw him off, and rolled to his feet.

"Wanna fight, huh?" Ben rasped, reaching down to hoist Joby off the ground and hurl him into a patch of blackberry vines beside the path. As Joby struggled to his feet, hardly noticing the thorns that gouged his arms and hands, Ben unfastened the broach at his shoulder and let his entangling cape fall away. Then he waded in toward Joby, silhouetted against the stars like an angry bear. Joby leapt back onto the path, and backed away, but Ben lunged forward, throwing a punch to Joby's stomach. Joby bent back, softening the blow, but lost his balance and fell again. As Ben threw himself on top of him, Joby kicked out with one leg, catching Ben in the chest, so that he fell to one side, allowing Joby to roll away.

"Son of a bitch," Ben grunted, rubbing his chest. Then he scrambled after Joby and grabbed his arm. Joby tried to pull away, but couldn't and turned to throw another punch with his free hand, but missed. For a time, they writhed together on the gravel path. Then Ben wrenched Joby's arm around and rolled them over so that Joby was pinned beneath him, facedown in the grass. Yanking the one arm back and up as if to break it off, Ben brought his other hand down on the back of Joby's head, apparently intent on grinding his face into the ground.

Joby cried out in pain.

Suddenly, the pressure on his head was gone. Ben let go of his arm, but remained astride his back, breathing raggedly. "What the fuck is wrong with you, Joby?" To his astonishment, Joby realized that Ben was crying. "I wanted to be everything you were once, you know that?" Ben said, clearly struggling to control his emotions. "Then . . . you just came apart. . . . What the hell happened, Joby? I tried to be there for you, but it was like you were buried in glass." He took a long shuddering breath, and was silent for a while, then stood up and stepped away. "What the hell are you hitting me for?"

Joby rolled over, cradling his aching arm, and lay on his back. "I don't know," he said at last. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I never have."

Ben said nothing, just sat roughly in the grass, staring up at the stars.

"Do you love her, Ben?"

"Maybe you can't figure out what's wrong with you because there is nothing wrong, under all that fear," Ben said, ignoring his question. "When you're good, you're great, Joby. The greatest person I ever met. Why can't you just relax and enjoy that?"

"Ben, do you love her?"

Ben turned to stare at him. "Yes."

It should have hurt him, should have rekindled his fury, but it wasn't even a surprise. Long before Ben had come back into their lives, Joby had known he was going to lose her, because, underneath the "whole new Joby" he'd plastered over himself since coming here, he could still find nothing bright enough to give her. Ben had always possessed brightness to spare. He and Laura were perfect for each other. They always had been. It was kismet. He was tired of fighting.

"Does she love you?" Joby asked.

"Not like she loves you." Ben watched him in the darkness for a time, then asked, "Do you love her, Joby?"

"Yes. . . . But-"

"Then love her," Ben cut him off. "Don't keep trying to spare her the risks. She's a big girl. She's been hurt plenty, and lived." He raised a hand to probe gently at his eye.

"I'm sorry I hit you," Joby said.

"Yeah, well . . ."

It took Joby a second to realize that Ben was laughing. "What are you laughing at?" he asked.

"I think you've given me a black eye," Ben answered, like it were the punch line to a really good joke.

"I'm sorry," Joby said, wincing as he put weight on his arm, but Ben kept laughing. "Why is that so funny?" Joby asked.

"You don't remember how we met?" Ben grinned, getting to his feet. "Things do come full circle, don't they, Sir Joby?"

"Oh, God," Joby groaned, remembering their fight in grammar school. "Does this mean I have to knight you now?"

"Done that," Ben said, reaching down to help Joby up. "We'll have to think of some new ritual." He clapped a hand to Joby's shoulder, and asked, "We all right?"

"Better, I think," Joby said. "Look, Ben. I just want her to be happy. If she'll be happier with you-"

"No," Ben cut in quietly. "No more of this stupid deal-making. Can't we just follow our hearts and let her decide?"

"You're right," Joby said. He stuck out his hand. "Best of luck, Sir Benjamin."

"And to you, Sir Joby." Benjamin grinned. They shook on it, and headed back to the Crow's Nest, grabbing Ben's cape and Joby's discarded costume on the way.

When they returned, however, both Laura and her car were gone.

"She done flown d'coop," said Ben as they stood confounded on the sidewalk below the restaurant. "After all this, she may choose neither of us."

"Guess we'd better drive up and apologize, huh?" Joby said.

Ben shook his head. "It's got to be almost midnight. If she's gone home, she'll probably be asleep by now, and I, for one, have been slapped around enough for one night. A breather between fights might be in order for all of us."

"Well, I'll see you tomorrow, then?" Joby asked.

"You're going?" Ben protested. "I'm too wound up to go home yet. Let's hang out awhile." He grinned in the lamplight. "I heard some kind of drumming down on the beach when we were walking back. Wanna go see what that's about?"

Joby was exhausted, but he was also happy that Ben still wanted his company, so they headed toward the cliff tops, dropping Joby's costume in Ben's car along the way. A moment later, they were staring down at the sandy rivermouth. It was ablaze with bonfires and crowds of rowdy revelers.

"Now that looks like a real party!" Ben exclaimed, already trotting down the path that wound toward the beach. "Come on!"

People of all ages mingled in raucous celebration around crackling fires. Shouts and laughter merged with the hiss and roar of surf as people danced wildly to the beat of many drummers. Bizarre costumes appeared and vanished at the edges of the firelight. The air was thick with wood smoke and the smell of beer. This, Joby thought, was really Halloween!

Turning to find Ben gone, Joby looked around and spotted him at a distant fire handing cash to someone, and heading back with several bottles dangling from one hand.

"Here," Ben said, shoving a bottle into Joby's hand. "You need a beer."

"Thanks, but I don't really-"

"You need a beer!" Ben insisted. "Pinch your nose and cope, bro!"

Ben already had the top off his, and raised it to his mouth. Joby shrugged and followed suit. He wasn't going to argue with anything Ben asked of him tonight.

Having been no drinker since Lindwald's death, the buzz was considerable and quick. The drumbeat began to feel like something coming from inside him. The blur of dancing, laughing partiers grew increasingly dreamlike, and Joby liked the feeling.

25.

( The Morning After ) The cold came first, then the dampness. Joby opened his eyes and squinted into the too-bright fog around him. Where . . .? What? . . . He sat up, groaning at the sudden throbbing in his head, and realized he'd been passed out on the beach all night. Ben's velvet cloak was thrown over him like a blanket, and Ben, himself, lay sprawled in his fancy costume not far away, asleep on the sand. Like bums, Joby thought in disgust. What if his students had seen him like this?

He scanned the mist-shrouded beach, relieved to find no one else in sight. The cliff tops were completely lost in fog, which, he hoped, meant no one up in town could see him down here. Counting his blessings, he got unsteadily to his feet, hugging his bare arms and thinly clad torso against the chill, then suffered a whole new host of unpleasant protests from his head and stomach. Every ten or fifteen years, he decided, one really should get roaring drunk, if only to remember why it was such a bad idea.

As the jarring gong between his ears subsided, fragmentary memories of the previous night began trickling into focus, or as close to focus as ever seemed likely. To his distress, Joby vaguely recalled encountering several of his students at the margins of the firelight when he'd been very tanked. But the diaphanous, impossibly fantastic costumes he remembered them wearing led him to dismiss these memories as nothing but products of his ill-advised inebriation and an anxious conscience.

As unpleasant as the thought of further motion was, Joby hoped that a short walk in the brisk salt air might dispel his hangover, at least a little. Seeing no reason to inflict consciousness on Ben as well, Joby wrapped the cloak around himself for warmth and left his friend to sleep as he wandered toward the shoreline.

The fog grew even denser as Joby neared the water, reducing everything around him to ghostly suggestions in sopping shades of gray. Feeble tendrils of pale smoke drifted from wide mounds of blackened ash where last night's bonfires had burned down. Already deflating in nascent decay, a jack-o'-lantern left lying in the sand stared blankly at the ocean from darkened, empty eyes. The surf was small and glassy now, flopping sluggishly onto the beach. It felt almost as if Taubolt had died in its sleep while Joby lay unconscious.

A low stack of rock had been left behind by the receding tide, its feet collared in limp brown seaweed. Joby crossed the hard, wet sand, climbed its barnacled face and sat down on top of it to stare out at the bay and think about his new detente with Ben.

Last night, he'd been ready simply to surrender Laura's affections. Somewhere along the way, it seemed, that had become his default response to any hint of failure. Let go. Walk away. In fact, he'd felt almost relieved to see his worst fears finally realized and have it over with at last. But this morning, things looked different. Surrender wouldn't do. Ben had told him that, and he'd been right.

Joby and his best and oldest friend loved the same woman. That wasn't anybody's fault. Laura was the other best and oldest friend that either of them had. She'd been the most magnificent girl either of them knew ever since the day she'd fallen from that tree while trying to be a knight. Even now, the memory brought a lump to Joby's throat and heat into his eyes. Who else should either of them love?

It had to be accepted. And sooner or later, one of them had to win her. Despite Ben's wry suggestion that she might choose neither of them after last night's foolishness, Joby knew it was the other way around. Laura loved them both-as much as they loved her. It must be killing her to have them both around again.

For all the "morning after" fog inside and outside of his head, Joby finally saw clearly that the only way such a mess could ever be cleanly resolved was for either himself or Ben to lose her, honestly and decisively, having truly done all he could to win her. Only then would nothing toxic be left dangling unresolved between them. As much as all the parts of him grown weary of defeat wished to lie down and flee the further pain, Joby was going to have to fight-for all their sakes.

Well out in the silvered bay, a seal was hunting. For some while, Joby had been watching idly as it thrust its head out of the water to look around, then disappeared beneath the surface for minutes at a time. Now, seeming to have finished its business, it surfaced and swam for shore, pushing little mounds of water before it as it zoomed just beneath the glassy surface toward a stretch of beach well down from where Joby huddled on his rock.

As it broke the surface, ten feet off shore, however, Joby gaped, surging to his feet in such a rush that he nearly toppled from the rock.

What had risen from the water was no seal, but his friend and former student, Ander, in a wetsuit. Joby's mind scrambled to explain as the boy began to wade toward shore, a large fish dangling from his hand, though Ander had no speargun, net, or knife.

The memory returned with shocking clarity. Joby had been ten years old, alone out on these very rocks at dawn, staring down at a half-naked boy in the frigid water who'd stared up at him in equal dismay before swimming off just like . . . It wasn't possible! No human being could swim like that! What he'd seen out there this morning had clearly been a seal, until . . .

Knee-deep in lapping water, Ander stopped to stretch like a man rising from bed, swinging his head around to whip the sodden hair out of his eyes. His face swung toward the rock where Joby stood. Their eyes met across the distance, and Ander froze in bald amazement. The fish fell from his fingers to float seaward, stunned or dead.

For a moment, they both stared. Then Ander donned his sunny, guileless smile and waved. Joby couldn't move. He might have laughed at the sheer audacity of such an attempt to play this off, but there was no laughter in him now.

Ander had already launched himself back into the water to swim, quite naturally this time, toward Joby's perch, as Joby waited, still motionless with shock. When he arrived, Ander stood, waist-deep, gazing up at Joby, and flashed another sunny smile.

"Hey, Joby. What's up?" Ander said, as if merely pleased to see him.

"You tell me."

Ander's smile vanished. "How long have you been up there?"

"Long enough," Joby said. "That was you fishing out there, wasn't it?"

Ander's shoulders slumped. He looked away from Joby.

"How's it done?" Joby asked, still hoping for some laughably obvious explanation he'd failed to think of. When Ander didn't answer, he said, more urgently, "Ander, please! I really need some answers. . . . Help me understand."

"I don't think you will," Ander said, looking trapped. "I'm not sure you can."

"Why won't anyone just tell me what's happening here?" Joby insisted, thinking immediately of Swami's trick out on the Garden Coast. "What harm could it do?"