"No," he said, pulling on a worn leather jacket. "I just have to do some work, that's all. You gotta do things yourself, you know, if you want to get them right. Go to bed."

I did.

And Thursday, at dinner, he finished the apple pie my mother had made especially for him, and said, "It's getting to be an epidemic, a real d.a.m.ned shame."

"What, dear?" Mother said.

"Another kid killed himself today."

Mother poured another cup of coffee.

Dad turned to me. "His name was Muldoon, or something like that. Did you know him, Craig?"

I went right to my room. I went right to my bed. I laid down and I stared at the ceiling until I couldn't see it anymore; then I stared at the dark until I fell asleep and dreamed about Mike Muldane hiding in the shed.

I went to school on Friday, but I didn't go to cla.s.ses. I didn't give a d.a.m.n. They could hang me for all I care; I just didn't go.

I found a place near the track to sit in the sun. It was cool, still April, and I was beginning to wish I'd worn something else besides my denim jacket. The gym cla.s.ses were out, though, and those who saw me either nodded or looked away-the word was still around that I had copped a plea to stay in, and I had a feeling that maybe only Pelletti cared about my reasons.

At lunch, just when I was growing tired of sitting alone and trying to figure out what kind of idiot Muldane was to take himself like that, Jeanne walked up. She was dressed in black, her red hair pulled tight into a ponytail that make her face look a hundred years older. She had been crying. She still was, but there weren't any tears left.

I started to get up, feeling worse than I had when my father dropped the bomb, but she waved me down again. And stared. Tilting her head from one side to the other until I couldn't take it anymore.

"What's the matter? Did I grow another head or something?"

"What did you say to him, Craig?" she asked. "What did you say to him?"

"What?"

I did get up then, but she backed away quickly.

"He was fine until he talked to you. He was-"

"Jesus Christ, Jeanne!" I said, practically yelling. "Are you trying to tell me I made him kill himself?"

She didn't answer, not in words. She only stared a minute longer, turned, and ran away. I started after her, but she buried herself in a group of her girlfriends and, with looks back that would have fried me if wishes were real, they hustled her inside.

I got so excited, so upset, so angry, I could feel the blood in my face, bulging my eyeb.a.l.l.s and making my temples pound. I took another step toward the school, then spun around and started running, found myself on the track going around and around and around until I was sweating so much I was freezing. My legs locked on me, the green started to blur, and I dropped and leaned against a bench where the team sat during breaks in practice.

By then I figured she was just crazy with grief. She'd been going with Mike since seventh grade just about, and she was just crazy, that's all.

The bench jumped, then, as someone sat hard on the other end. I looked up, and it was Tony. He was cleaning his gla.s.ses with a fold of his gray sweatshirt, and with his long nose and long chin, his straight-back hair, and squinty eyes, he looked like a heron surveying the swamp for a lost meal.

"Bad news, huh?" he said.

"Tell me about it."

"He ... he ever say anything to you?"

I scrambled up from the ground to sit beside him. "Tony, I swear to G.o.d, he never said a word! The last time ..." I cleared my throat. I cleared it again. "The last time I saw him was at tryouts on Tuesday."

"You talked to him, though."

"On Tuesday, sure. But he wouldn't talk to me after. He was p.i.s.sed because-"

I stopped. Tony didn't believe me, I could see it when he put on his gla.s.ses and examined me, head to toe and back again. He didn't believe me.

"Tony, what's-"

"I gotta go, man," he said. "I can't afford to cut cla.s.ses like you." He was a couple of steps away before he looked back at me and frowned. "And look," he warned, "stop calling the house, huh? I feel bad enough. You're just making it worse."

And he was gone before I could stop him. Just like Jeanne. An accusation, an exit, and I was alone on the track, staring at the school and wondering what was going on. Two people had practically accused me of murder to my face. Two friends. Two of the only friends I had left in the world.

I didn't care about the deal; I left the school grounds and went for a walk. A long walk. That took me in and out of places I had grown up in, played ball in, smoked secret cigarettes in all my life.

I didn't go home for supper, and I didn't call to tell them where I was.

At nine I found myself on Jeanne's porch, knocking on the door.

She almost slammed it in my face when she saw who it was, but there must have been something there that made her change her mind. She signaled me to wait, closed it partway, and returned a few minutes later with a sweater over her shoulders. Inside, I could hear the television blaring and her two sisters arguing about somebody's boyfriend.

"Walk?" I said, though my legs were starting to turn to rubber.

"Sure."

So we did. Our shoes loud on the sidewalk, our shadows vanishing under the trees that were just getting their new leaves. We didn't say anything for a long time, until we started our second turn around the block and I took her arm and stopped her.

"Jeanne, he was my best friend."

The fingers of one hand lay across her cheek, spread over to her mouth while she swallowed and looked away.

"He was. And I swear to G.o.d, the last thing I said to him was that we should find you and get some burgers. That's all." I was almost crying. I almost dropped to my knees. "Jesus, that's all, I swear."

She didn't look at me, but she took my arm and we started walking again. Around the corner. Up the street. Houses lighted and houses dark, and cats running in the alleys.

"He called me the night ... before," she said, her voice high and hoa.r.s.e. "He said ... he told me-Denton says I should take the big one because it ain't worth it anymore." A shudder nearly took the sweater from her shoulders. "Those were his exact words, Craig. His very same words."

I looked at her, stunned, and shook my head. "Jeanne, it wasn't me. You think I'd tell him to do ... to do what he did? You think I could do that to my best friend?" When she didn't answer right away, I almost hit her. "And even if I did, which I didn't, he wouldn't do it. You know him. You know him as long as I have. He wouldn't do it, Jeanne, he wouldn't!"

"He did," she whispered. "But he did, Craig."

The third time we got to her house I knew she believed me even though I hadn't said another word. She held my hands tight and she looked hard into my face, and suddenly she looked as frightened as I suddenly felt.

When she ran inside, I didn't try to stop her.

I only ran home, just in time to meet my father coming out the front door.

"I was going to look for you," he said.

"I was walking," I told him, pushing inside to hang up my coat. "I had to think, that's all. About Mike. Stuff."

"Your mother was worried. She wanted me to call the police. Thank G.o.d, Peggy doesn't pull stunts like this."

"I'm sorry."

"Tell her yourself. She's in the kitchen."

Which she was, and which I did; and though I told her I saw Jeanne, I didn't tell her what she said.

"Michael Muldane was a very sick boy," was all she said as she put cookies in the jar and plates in the dishwasher. "I think his little girlfriend isn't well, either. I accept your apology, and I don't want you to see her again."

"What?"

Father came to the doorway. "Don't argue, Craig. Just go to bed, please. You're upset, your mother's upset. We'll talk about it in the morning."

I didn't want to talk about it in the morning; I wanted to talk about it now. Right now. But there's no justice for a kid my age, no justice at all. You have to stand there, that's all, and take it like a man, and hope that tomorrow they'll forget all about it and leave you alone.

I was lucky that time. They did, until the next weekend, when Jeanne called me, in tears, nearly hysterical.

Dad, who had just come in from the shed, his briefcase under his arm, answered the phone, listened a minute, and handed me the receiver with a scowl. "Don't be long," he ordered. "She sounds drunk or something."

She wasn't drunk. She was terrified.

Tony was dead.

He had gone out for a drive in his father's new car and had plowed it head-on into a bus on the far side of town. The police weren't sure it was an accident at all.

Mike's funeral had been private, family only. Not Tony's. A bunch of us left school early on Tuesday and went to the cemetery to say good-bye. Jeanne was with me, holding on to my arm so tight it almost cramped. The girls were kind of crying, the guys trying to be like they were supposed to-brave and cool and only looking sad.

When a tear got away from me, Jeanne wiped it away and smiled.

While the priest was talking, I started thinking-not about that shiny coffin with all the flowers on it that was supposed to hold Tony but how could it because he was probably right now running around the track; not about that, about me. How all of a sudden it seemed that every time I picked up the phone it was bad news. Somebody dead. A kid. And I thought about Jeanne and how scared she was, scared like me because kids aren't supposed to die like this. I know it happens, sure. I read the papers, I see the news, but not in this town. Not here. Not to people we know.

An epidemic, my father said.

And suddenly I went cold. Colder than the breeze that came at us from the tombstones.

Muldoon or something, he had said.

But he knew Mike. He'd known him for years, Mother fed him dinners and lunches, and he once even went on a vacation to the seash.o.r.e with us.

Muldoon or something.

That's when I thought I was starting to go crazy; that's when I put my arm around Jeanne and held her so tightly she looked up at me and frowned, felt me trembling and held me back. And when it was over and we were walking away, she asked me what was wrong, and I told her.

"So?" she said. "I don't understand."

Neither did I, but it wouldn't let go once it took hold. All day. All night. All the next day, even when Mother said a neighbor saw me walking Jeanne home after school and didn't she tell me not to see her again?

Last night ... last night was only a few hours ago.

I was lying on my bed, not undressed, just lying there with my hands behind my head and thinking about Jeanne and how Mike wouldn't mind if we got together or something; we'd been best friends, and Jeanne was ... she was special. Mike knew it. I knew it, and I didn't have to worry with her about what to say or how to act. When I got stupid, she told me; when I did something nice, she told me. Mike wouldn't care. Mike was dead, and G.o.d, I missed him.

Then I heard voices downstairs. Arguing. My mother and father in the kitchen, and Father suddenly telling her to quiet down or the boy would hear.

That was my signal. Whenever one of them said that, my ears got sensitive and I turned into a ghost, sneaking out of the room and into the hall, to the head of the stairs and down to the one I knew creaked when you breathed on it. All the lights were out, except over the kitchen table, and all I could see were moving shadows on the hall wall.

"I think," Father said, "it's much too soon. He isn't going to be able to take much more."

Mother was doing something at the stove. Probably baking another pie. "I don't like bad influences, dear."

"She's only a little girl."

"Big enough to cause trouble."

"I don't know. I-"

"Just get your coat, dear. And please watch the noise. I don't want to wake Peggy."

Father's voice changed. "An angel, you know that? G.o.d, I almost cry every time I look at her. She has so much to live for. Not like-"

"I know, dear, I know."

"And when I think about Craig, I could-"

"Your coat, dear. Please."

I backed away from the banister and watched the dark figure that was my father go to the closet and take out his leather jacket, walk back into the kitchen, and say something I couldn't hear. The back door opened, closed, and I sat there with my knees close to my chest, my head turning side to side like something had broken in my neck and I couldn't work it right anymore.

I couldn't really be sure what it was I heard, but it was the tone of their voices that frightened me. So controlled, so sure, and at the same time so threatening that I almost screamed.

Instead, and I don't know why because I was so scared, I crept down the rest of the steps and out the front door, then ran around the side of the house, back toward the shed.

A light was on.

I crouched beside the wall and hugged myself, my teeth chattering so loud I had to put a fist against my jaw to keep from biting my tongue in half.

Then I looked in the window.

Father had turned the chair around and was sitting in it, leaning forward a little and looking at the large wooden crate I had seen the week before. But it was black. So black the light didn't touch it, and when I stared at it long enough I could see right through it, into more blackness, solid dark; and Father was rocking a little now, and I could hear him grunting every so often, rocking, and grunting, shaking his head once and rocking even faster. Grunting. Then, suddenly, he was humming in a high quiet voice, like a song without words, without notes, a child's chant against the dark, driving away the demons until mommy or daddy could come in and save them.

A car drove down our street, its radio loud with rock music.

Humming. Chanting, Parting the black for more black, this time freckled with points of white light.

A window was open in a neighbor's house, and a telephone rang for almost a full minute before someone answered.

Chanting. Rocking. The points beginning to swirl into a dense white cloud whose light was swallowed by the black.