Chapter 13: Thanksgiving (Patreon)

In 1996 you could still walk all the way to the gate.

I'd forgotten that, and it hit me when we got there. No security line, not really—a metal detector, a bored guy with a wand—and then you just walked down the concourse with everybody else, past the newsstands and the shoe-shine stand and the TGI Friday's, all the way to the window where the plane would pull in, and stood there with your face against the glass and waited. Like a person. Like it was the most normal thing in the world to stand at the end of a jetway watching the door for somebody you loved.

We were early, of course. Dad had wanted to leave at noon for a 3:40 flight; I'd made it eleven. Tatum, who'd brought the Cherokee because eight people and their luggage weren't going to fit in one car, showed up at our house at ten-thirty with a poster-board sign she'd made with Martha the night before. It said WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA in big glittery letters. Under it, smaller, WESTIN HILLS ALL-STARS. Under that, in Martha's handwriting, smaller still, (the hamsters say hi).

"That's a lot of glitter," I said.

"It's an airport," said Tatum. "You have to be seen."

Sid had come too. She hadn't said she was coming. She was just in the Cherokee's front seat at ten-thirty with her hands in her jacket pockets, and when I looked at her she said, "I want to meet them," and that was all.

So there we were at Gate 74 at 3:20 on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving: Dad with his car keys, very calm; Tatum with the sign, very loud; Sid with her hands in her pockets, very quiet; Martha, let out of school early for the occasion, wearing her WCTV 27 Certified Producer card on a lanyard for reasons nobody understood; and me, six feet of somebody I could no longer divide into two people, with my face practically against the glass.

The plane pulled in at 3:52, a United 737, white with the blue stripe. I watched it all the way in from the runway, and when the jetway rolled out and kissed the door, my heart did something I'd last felt in a C-17 coming down at Bagram—the hollow, lurching finally when the wheels touch.

The businessmen came off first. They always do: briefcases, garment bags, checking their watches. Then a family with three little kids and a car seat. Then an old woman with a cane and a flight attendant at her elbow.

Then Kincaid.

He came out of the jetway like a player coming out of the tunnel into a stadium, enormous, in a too-small Cleveland Browns jacket, carrying three bags that weren't his. He stopped dead at the end of it and looked around the gate with his mouth open, and then he saw the sign, and Tatum holding it over her head and jumping up and down, and me, and his face did what it had done in the rec room in Ohio, when the factory-installed scowl came all the way apart.

"MEEKS," Kincaid bellowed across the gate, loud enough that a businessman dropped his newspaper.

Then they were all coming. Taryn, in a leather jacket she was very clearly allowed to wear now, with a streak of electric blue in her hair. Phillip, pale and thin and blinking at the light, carrying a long, narrow wooden box under his arm like it was made of glass. Jennifer, pushing her sunglasses up on her head the second she saw the sign, already talking to nobody and everybody. Joey, holding his backpack straps with both hands. Dr. Gordon, second to last, pushing Will in an airline wheelchair, Will in a Cleveland Indians cap with his glasses crooked, both of them looking like men who'd survived something, which they had: four and a half hours on a plane with Kincaid.

Last of all came Kristen.

She came out of the jetway slowly, like she wasn't sure she was allowed. Blonde, in a mint-green cardigan, her hair down. Smaller than I remembered, and pinker, and awake, so awake, every part of her face alive and looking around the gate at everything at once. Over the cardigan, much too big, the shoulders halfway down her arms and RANDY on the name tag in white label-maker tape, crooked, over her heart, she wore a green Bradley Video vest. She saw me, and she stopped walking.

I don't remember crossing the gate. I remember Tatum saying "Oh my God" behind me, and Martha saying "Why does she have your VEST," and Dad saying "Martha." Then I was in front of her and she was looking up at me, and I didn't know what to do with my hands. Again. Still. All of me, every version, standing at the end of a jetway with no idea what to do with our hands.

"Hi," Kristen said.

"Hi."

"You're really tall."

"I keep hearing that."

"In the rec room I was drugged. I thought maybe I was remembering wrong." She looked me up and down. "I wasn't remembering wrong." She reached up without asking and pushed my hair out of my eyes with one finger, like moving a curtain. "And your hair's in your face. You look like a rock star. A sad one." She frowned. "Why do you smell like a candy cane?"

"Long story," I said. "Hi, Popsicle Kris."

Her face did what it had done on the gurney, the thing that had once been the best thing ever to happen to somebody I used to share a head with. She put her arms around my middle, because that was as high as she could reach, pressed her face into my flannel shirt, and held on. I put my arms around her without thinking. I didn't have to think. I knew exactly how; I'd always known. I just hadn't had the hands.

"I saw the clouds," she said into my shirt. "From above."

"Yeah?"

"They look like snow. From above. Like a whole field of snow." She didn't let go. "Nobody told me."

Behind us Kincaid said loudly, to the entire gate, "Okay, are we gonna stand here, or is somebody gonna show me the OCEAN," and Dr. Gordon said "Roland" in the voice of a man who had said Roland about four hundred times since Columbus.

Gus had filled the pool.

He'd said he would, and he had. When our two cars pulled into the Woodsboro Motor Lodge at six-thirty in the dark, he was standing beside it in his suspenders with his toothpick, and the pool was full and blue and lit from underneath, glowing in the November night like a postcard from 1962, with steam coming off it.

"Heated," Gus said before anybody could ask. "Got the heater fixed. Eight hundred bucks." He took the toothpick out. "Worth it."

Kincaid was in it in about ninety seconds, fully clothed, Browns jacket and all. He walked straight across the parking lot from the Cherokee, past Gus, past the NO VACANCY sign lit for the first time since August, and fell in backward with his arms out, like falling into a bed, with a splash that reached Dr. Gordon's shoes.

"ROLAND."

"IT'S WARM," Kincaid shouted, surfacing, delighted. "IT'S NOVEMBER AND IT'S WARM."

Taryn followed about thirty seconds later. Then Jennifer, shrieking. Then Phillip, carefully—he set his wooden box on a deck chair, took off his shoes and socks and folded them, then simply stepped off the edge and went under like a stone. Then Joey, who stood on the edge a long time and then did a cannonball so perfect that Gus put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Will sat at the edge of the pool in his wheelchair in the steam, laughing so hard he cried. Dr. Gordon lowered himself onto a deck chair beside him with the face of a man who'd signed his name eleven hundred times, put his head in his hands, and after a minute started laughing too.

Kristen didn't go in. She sat on the end of a chaise longue in my vest with her knees pulled up, watching them, and I sat down next to her.

"They've never done this," she said softly. "Any of them. Swum somewhere at night. Just because." She watched Kincaid try to throw Taryn and get thrown instead. "Kincaid's grandma doesn't have a car. Taryn's parents put her in Westin Hills when she was fourteen and visited twice. Will hasn't been in a pool since the—" She stopped. "Since before the chair."

Will had wheeled himself to the very edge and was looking at the water. Kincaid surfaced in front of him and said something, and Will shook his head, and Kincaid said something else and held up his arms. Will hesitated. Then he took off his glasses, folded them, and set them in his lap, and Kincaid lifted him out of the chair gently, the way he'd lifted him onto the mats in the rec room in Ohio, and walked down the pool steps with Will in his arms into the warm blue water, and let go.

Will floated on his back in the steam with his eyes closed.

"Oh," Kristen said, very soft, and her hand found mine on the chaise longue and held on.

By the office door, Gus took out his toothpick, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and said to nobody, "Best eight hundred bucks I ever spent."

At 4:55 on Wednesday morning, Sidney Prescott knocked on our front door.

She was in sweats, running shoes, and a fleece, hair back, and looked like she hadn't slept and didn't care. Tatum was behind her in the driveway in a neon pink windbreaker, stretching very loudly.

"Tatum told me," Sid said. "About Thursday. The show." She didn't look away. "About the voice."

"Sid—"

"She said you said her name. On TV. Billy's mom." Her jaw set. "I'm not going to ask you how you knew. I'm done asking you how you know things. I'm just going to believe you this time." She took a breath that steamed in the dark. "Five a.m.," Sid said. "You said."

"I did say."

"So." She held out her hands. "Teach."

I'd planned it, of course. Three miles to start, slow, at a pace where you could talk, the way Gloria told me to start and the way the Army starts you, because the first week isn't about fitness, it's about showing up. I'd told them that on the phone and told them to eat a banana, and Tatum had eaten two.

We ran down our street in the dark, Sid on my left, quiet, her breath steaming, and Tatum on my right, not quiet at all, and at the corner of Elm and Turner a voice out of the dark yelled "MEEKS."

Kincaid stood under the streetlight in the Browns jacket, which he'd dried overnight on the motel heater and which now smelled like chlorine and burnt dust, and next to him, in black, her blue streak tied back, was Taryn.

"Doc said we could," Kincaid said before I could ask. "Said as long as we were back by seven and didn't get killed." He fell in beside Tatum. "Where we running?"

"How did you even find us?"

"Kristen told us your route," Taryn said. "Like, a month ago. In the dayroom. She talks about you constantly." She jogged a few steps. "Constantly, Meeks."

Tatum looked at me over Kincaid's shoulder, and her eyebrows went all the way up.

We ran. On the creek path behind the middle school there's a waist-high concrete wall by the four-square courts, which I'd been going over every morning for two weeks, and I went over it now without breaking stride, one hand down, feet swinging through, and landed running.

Silence behind me.

Then Taryn went over it. She'd never seen it done in her life, and she did it on the first try, cleaner than me, without even putting her whole hand down, landed running, and looked back at me over her shoulder with pure, smug, switchblade delight. Then Kincaid tried, and went more or less into it and then over it in a direction nobody intended, and lay on the far side on the grass making a noise like a deflating raft, laughing. Sid stopped and studied the wall. She backed up ten feet, ran at it, put her hand down, swung, caught her foot, stumbled, and didn't fall, and went back and did it again, and the second time she landed running.

Tatum went around it.

"I have standing," she said when I looked at her. "I'm the one who almost got killed in a garage. I don't have to jump over things. I can walk around things. Like a person."

By the time we got back to the Motor Lodge at the end of the loop, at six-fifteen with the sky going gray in the east, there were more of us. Jennifer had come out of her room at the sound of Kincaid yelling and joined in at the motel in pajama pants and a sweatshirt, complaining the whole way. Phillip had come out after her and fallen in silently at the back and kept up without a word. Joey had been waiting at the pool fence with his shoes already tied. And Will was at the parking-lot gate in his chair, in a jacket and a blanket, with Dr. Gordon's wristwatch in his hand and a notebook on his knee.

"Twenty-six forty-one," Will called as I came in. "Sidney, twenty-six forty-three. Tatum, twenty-seven flat. Kincaid, twenty-seven oh-four, disappointing, Kincaid." He looked up from the notebook, grinning. "I'm the coach. Dr. Gordon said I could be the coach."

Kristen came last. She'd come out of the motel when she heard us all go by, in my vest over her pajamas and sneakers with no socks. She couldn't run three miles—she'd never run anywhere in her life except away from something in a dream—but she ran the last half mile, red-faced and gasping, and Will clicked the watch when she came through the gate and wrote it down very seriously.

"Kristen Parker," he announced. "Did it."

She collapsed on a deck chair by the steaming pool, laughing and wheezing.

Sid stood at the fence with her hands on her knees, breathing hard, looking at the pool and at seven kids from a psychiatric hospital in Ohio sprawled around it in the gray light, steaming and laughing. Kincaid lay flat on his back on the concrete with his arms out. Jennifer complained that her lungs were on fire. Phillip sat very straight with his eyes closed. Joey took off his shoes to put his feet in the warm water.

"They were in it too," Sid said to me, under her breath. "Weren't they. Like us. Something happened to them."

"Something happened to them," I said.

She watched them a while longer. "Okay," Sidney said. And then, to herself more than to me, I think: "Okay."

I'd promised Kristen the ocean, a good one, so on Wednesday afternoon I took them to Goat Rock.

It's about forty minutes up the coast from Woodsboro, where the Russian River meets the Pacific: a big black sea stack standing in the surf like a sleeping animal, a long beach of coarse gray sand, the river mouth, and harbor seals hauled out on the sandbar in a long, lumpy line like sausages. In November it's cold and windy and gray and almost empty, the waves come in huge and loud and white, the whole place smells of salt and cold and kelp, and it's the best beach in the world. I'll fight anybody about it.

We parked at the top. The kids piled out of Dad's car and Tatum's Cherokee—Tatum in her neon pink windbreaker with the disposable camera already around her neck, Sid behind her in a fleece with the hood up—and we all stood at the top of the path and looked, and for once nobody had anything to say. The ocean went out to the edge of the world, gray and white and moving. The wind came off it into our faces, and its sound was everywhere, a huge, slow, breathing roar, like something alive.

Kristen walked down the path ahead of everybody, across the sand, past the driftwood and the high-tide line of kelp and shells, all the way to where the sand went dark and wet, and stopped there. A big wave came in, white and fast, sliding up the sand toward her in a long sheet of foam, and she didn't move. It went over her sneakers and ankles, ice-cold, and she gasped and laughed and still didn't move.

I came and stood next to her. The wave went back out, sucking the sand from under our feet.

"It's so loud," she said finally.

"Yeah."

"Nobody told me it was so loud." She was crying a little and didn't seem to notice. "On TV it's just... it's blue. Nobody told me it's loud."

Another wave came in over our shoes. She took my hand, and neither of us said anything about it.

Behind us, Joey had walked down to the water too. He stood a little way off, alone in the wind with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the ocean.

"It's nice out," Joey said, out loud, to the Pacific Ocean.

It was what he'd said in a living room on Elm Street, in the sun, after a dream demon burned. I don't think he knew he'd said it twice.

Then Kincaid ran into the ocean.

Nobody told him to, and nobody could have told him not to. He took off his Browns jacket and sneakers, threw them in a pile, ran down the beach in his jeans and T-shirt yelling something with no words in it, and hit the first wave at full speed, the way he'd hit the motel pool.

The Pacific at Goat Rock in the last week of November is fifty-two degrees. Theo knew that number. He'd done cold-water training once, in a lake in Georgia in March, where the instructor said the cold isn't real, it's just information, and Theo found out about four seconds in that the instructor was a liar. Kincaid found out in about one. He came back out of the wave like he'd been fired from it, straight up, arms out, mouth in a perfect O, making a sound like a teakettle that had seen God.

"COLD," Kincaid screamed at the whole coast of California. "IT'S SO COLD. WHY IS IT COLD. IT'S CALIFORNIA."

Jennifer laughed so hard she fell down in the sand.

"Northern California," I called. "It comes down from Alaska."

"NOBODY SAID ALASKA."

He stayed in, though. That's Kincaid. He stood up to his knees in the freezing surf with his teeth chattering, glaring at the ocean like it had insulted his grandmother, and didn't come out. Then Joey walked calmly down the beach, took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his jeans, waded in next to him, and stood there up to his shins in silence, looking out at the sea stack.

"Show-off," Kincaid said through his teeth.

Joey didn't say anything, but he was smiling.

After that it was a contest. It didn't start as one; it just became one, the way things do when you put enough seventeen-year-old boys near a stupid idea. Who could stand in the water longest: Kincaid. Joey. Phillip, who rolled up his pants with great precision, walked in, and stood with his eyes closed like he was meditating, or like he'd decided to die with dignity. And me, because there's a part of every man that will walk into fifty-two-degree water to prove a point to a handful of teenage boys, and it turns out it's the same part in both my lives.

Will judged from the top of the beach. Kincaid and I had carried him down the path between us in his chair, which wasn't built for sand, then just carried him the last fifty yards and put him on a blanket by a driftwood log with a thermos of cocoa, Tatum's disposable camera, and Dr. Gordon's watch, which had become his permanent property.

"Phillip, one minute," Will called. "Joey, one-thirty. Kincaid, one-forty, still screaming. Randy, two minutes."

Two minutes in fifty-two-degree water. The cold isn't real; it's just information. Lots of information, all of it bad. Around forty seconds my feet had stopped being feet and become two distant rumors at the end of my legs.

At two-thirty Phillip opened his eyes, said very calmly, "I can't feel anything below the knee," and walked out.

At two-forty there was a splash next to me, and Tatum Riley walked into the Pacific Ocean in her rolled-up jeans, gasped like she'd been shot, and planted her feet.

"What are you doing," I said.

"Riley women," said Tatum through teeth already chattering, "do not lose. To boys. At anything." She glared at the horizon. "Will. Start my clock."

"Tatum Riley," Will called, delighted, writing it down. "Late entry."

She lasted fifty-one seconds. Then she said a word I'm not allowed to say on public access, turned around, and ran up the beach. Sid, who'd been sitting on the log with her hood up watching us all like the dumbest people she'd ever met, met her halfway with a towel, wrapped her in it, and raised one eyebrow. Tatum said "Don't." Sid said "I didn't say anything." Tatum said "You said it with your FACE."

At three minutes Kincaid made a noise like a walrus, yelled "FORFEIT," and ran up the beach toward the cocoa, and that left me and Joey, side by side up to our shins in the Pacific, not looking at each other.

"Joey," I said through my teeth at three-fifteen. "You're a little kid. I'm a grown man. You don't have to do this."

Joey turned his head and looked at me. Then he looked down at the water, and back up at me, and very slowly, with the calm of a kid who'd once screamed a dream demon through three walls, sat down. In the ocean. Up to his chest. A wave came in over his shoulders, and he didn't move.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. You win. You WIN." I turned and walked out of the Pacific Ocean on two feet I couldn't feel, while seven kids from Ohio, Tatum, and a girl who'd once been Ghostface's main target screamed with laughter at the top of the beach.

Joey stayed in another minute just to make the point. Then he stood up, soaking and blue-lipped, and walked out, and on the blanket Will held up the watch and announced, "Joey Crusel. Four minutes, twelve seconds. Undisputed champion of the Pacific Ocean," and Joey silently raised both arms over his head like a boxer.

The rest of the afternoon was nothing, which was the point.

Taryn, Jennifer, and Tatum buried Kincaid in the sand up to his neck, with his permission, and built him a sand body on top with enormous sand muscles, a sand six-pack, and a sand Browns logo. Tatum was in charge of the six-pack and took it very seriously; she said she'd seen a lot of six-packs and had a standard. Kincaid said "Hey" from inside the sand, and Tatum said "Hold still, I'm sculpting," and then took nine pictures of it and used up most of the roll.

Phillip found a long piece of driftwood, bleached and twisted like a bone, sat on a log, and started carving it with a pocketknife Dr. Gordon pretended not to see. By the time we left it had a face.

Sid sat on a log with Kristen for a long while. I didn't hear most of it, and I wasn't supposed to. I was at the waterline with Joey, trying to skip flat stones in surf that kept eating them, and every so often I'd look up the beach and they'd still be there side by side on the bleached log, Sid with her hood down now, Kristen with her knees pulled up, both looking at the water and talking low, the way you talk to somebody you've just met and already know. Two girls who'd been the one the story wanted. Two girls nobody believed. I don't know what they said. Later, on the drive home, looking out the Cherokee's window at the dark, Kristen told me exactly one thing about it.

"She asked me if you were always like this," Kristen said.

"Like what?"

"Like you know something's coming, and you're already standing in front of it." She was quiet a while. "I said yes."

"What did she say?"

"She said, me too." Kristen looked at me in the dark. "And then she said, that's why I'm learning to run."

A seagull swooped in from behind and stole half of Will's turkey sandwich straight out of his hand. Will was so outraged he chased it about four feet in his chair before the wheels sank into the sand, and then sat there yelling "THIEF" at the sky while Joey laughed so hard he had to lie down.

We played Frisbee on the hard wet sand by the waterline, a huge, chaotic, nine-person game with no rules and no teams. I discovered Randy's body could now catch a Frisbee, which it never could before. Tatum discovered she could throw one exactly where she wanted every time and became unbearable about it. Sid didn't play at first. She sat on the log beside Phillip with her knees up, watching, until the Frisbee skidded across the sand right to her feet, and she picked it up, considered it, stood, and threw a long, flat, perfect throw all the way to Kincaid at the waterline, and then she was in, running and laughing, her hair coming loose in the wind.

I watched her run. I watched all of them run. I stood in the wet sand with my feet still numb and the wind in my face, watching nine kids who'd each had something terrible happen to them in the last year chase a piece of plastic up and down a cold beach in November, yelling, and thought: this. The training and the books and the spear and the five a.m. runs were all for this.

Kristen came and stood next to me, panting, red-cheeked, her hair everywhere. She'd been running too, badly, all elbows, but running, and she was shivering.

"You're cold," I said.

"I'm from Ohio," she said through chattering teeth. "I'm not cold. This is spring in Ohio."

She was shivering so hard her words came out in pieces. I took off my gray Woodsboro High hoodie and held it out, and she looked at it, then at me, and took it and pulled it on over the cardigan and the vest. It came down to her knees and the sleeves went six inches past her hands, and she stood there on the beach at Goat Rock swallowed by my sweatshirt like a kid in a sleeping bag, just her face sticking out, pink from the wind, grinning at me, and I felt my ears go hot.

"You're blushing," Kristen said, delighted.

"It's the wind."

"It's not the wind."

"It's very windy, Kris."

From twenty feet away, Tatum, holding the Frisbee, yelled, "OH MY GOD, HE GAVE HER HIS SWEATSHIRT. SID. SID, LOOK, HE GAVE HER HIS SWEATSHIRT." Sid, next to her, said nothing but was smiling and shaking her head. Jennifer started making kissing noises, Taryn threw a handful of wet sand at Jennifer, and then it was a sand fight, nine people, no teams, no rules. Nobody won, and everybody had sand in their ears for the rest of the day.

At five the sun went down into the fog, and we all sat on the logs at the top of the beach in a row, wet and sandy and freezing, passing the last of the cocoa down the line in the thermos lid, and watched it go.

"I've never done this," Will said finally, softly, to the ocean. "Any of this. A beach. A Frisbee. A seagull." He looked at his half-eaten sandwich. "I'm seventeen. And I've never just... done something stupid. With friends. For no reason."

Down the line, Kincaid put his arm around Will's shoulders without a word. Taryn put her head on Kincaid's shoulder. Jennifer leaned on Taryn. Phillip, on the end, very carefully leaned on Jennifer. Joey leaned on me, and Kristen in my sweatshirt leaned on me from the other side, and Sid and Tatum, at the end of the log, leaned on each other, and we sat there like that, a row of idiots on a log, until it got dark.

Thanksgiving was a war.

I mean that as a compliment. I've seen real logistics—moving a battalion with its trucks and food and fuel across a desert in the right order on the right day—and my mother would have made a hell of a supply sergeant.

She'd been up since four. There were two turkeys, one in our oven and one in the Prescotts', because Neil Prescott had volunteered, and because he'd been looking for any way to say thank you for two months and this was the first thing anybody had let him do. Dad was on his famous stuffing, with Italian sausage and apples and too much sage, from a recipe his mother had written on an index card in 1958 that was now too stained to read, which didn't matter, because he'd known it by heart for thirty years. Martha was on rolls, from a tube, which she popped against the edge of the counter with a professional snap. I was on potatoes.

Every potato in Sonoma County. Mom hadn't been kidding. Two twenty-pound bags of russets sat on the kitchen floor, and I'd been peeling since seven at the sink with a peeler and a bucket, and by eleven my hands were raw and I'd done maybe thirty pounds with ten to go, and I'd never been happier in my life.

The Ohio kids arrived at noon in a herd, with Dr. Gordon behind them carrying a Safeway pie he was clearly ashamed of. They came in the front door into the smell—turkey and sage and butter, and cinnamon from a pie in the oven—and stopped in a bunch in the front hall, the way you stop at the edge of a pool when you're not sure how cold it is.

My mother came out of the kitchen in an apron, with flour on her face and a wooden spoon in her hand, and looked at them. Seven kids in their nicest clothes, which weren't very nice: Kincaid in a dress shirt clearly borrowed from Dr. Gordon, sleeves four inches too short; Taryn with her blue streak, a black dress, and combat boots; Jennifer in lipstick; Will in his chair in a clip-on tie; Phillip holding his long wooden box; Joey; and Kristen at the back in the mint cardigan and a skirt with, of course, the vest over both.

"Well," my mother said. "Hi. I'm Diane." She looked at each of them in turn and said every name—Kincaid, Taryn, Jennifer, Will, Phillip, Joey. She'd had me write them on an index card the night before, with descriptions, and she'd memorized it the way Ms. Ruiz had memorized the yearbook. "Welcome. Wipe your feet. There's a game on in the living room. Mr. Meeks will explain the Lions to you if you ask him, so don't ask him."

Then she looked at the back, at Kristen, at the vest. Something small and complicated happened in my mother's face as she took it in: the green polyester, the crooked name tag that said RANDY in white label-maker tape. I knew without looking that she knew exactly where my vest was. She did my laundry. She'd seen it on the hook on the back of my closet door every day for two months, including that morning. She didn't say anything about it.

"And you're Kristen," my mother said.

"Yes, ma'am," said Kristen, very small.

"Your Kristen," my mother said to me, without looking at me.

"Mom."

"Come here, sweetheart." My mother held out her arms, flour, wooden spoon, and all. "Let me look at you. I've been hearing about you for two months."

Kristen went without hesitating, straight down the front hall into my mother's arms, and my mother held her, flour on her cardigan and all, eyes closed, the way she'd held me on the lawn in September.

"Thank you for keeping him on the phone," my mother said into Kristen's hair, so softly I almost didn't hear it. "All those nights."

"He kept me on the phone," Kristen said.

"I know, sweetheart. I know."

Phillip found me in the kitchen at one, at the sink with the potato peeler.

He didn't say anything. He held out the long wooden box: pine, with brass hinges, hand-sanded smooth as glass. He'd carried it from Ohio on his lap. He'd carried it to the pool and set it on a deck chair before he got in. He'd carried it on the run at five in the morning, I realized—that was why he'd been at the back.

"For you," Phillip said.

I dried my hands on a dish towel and opened it, and it was a marionette. About two feet long, carved from some pale wood, basswood maybe, painted and strung, with a wooden control bar wrapped in its strings: a tall, skinny boy with big ears, a bad haircut, and a wide, goofy, electrocuted grin, in a carved and painted red-and-black flannel shirt. Over it, a little green vest made of real felt, with a tiny white rectangle on the chest that said RANDY. And in his right hand, carved from a single piece of dark wood, painted gray, with tiny buttons picked out in silver and one dot of red at the top for the LED, a remote control.

I stood in my mother's kitchen with a potato peeler in my back pocket and stared at it.

"From the dream," Phillip said. "The other one. The one with the remote. Not you. Him." He shifted his weight. "I don't know why. I just... I kept thinking about him. On the stairs. In the bell tower. When I was walking up the strings, and I couldn't stop, and everything was the story, and then he was there, and he pressed pause." He looked at the marionette. "I wanted to make him. So he'd be somewhere. I don't know. It's stupid."

"It's not stupid," I said. My voice wasn't working right.

"Is he—" Phillip hesitated. "Kristen said he's... gone? That you said he's gone?"

"He went somewhere," I said. "Somewhere good. I think. It looked like a video store."

Phillip nodded slowly, like that made perfect sense. Maybe it did; he'd been to some strange places. "Then this is for you," he said. "To keep. Since he's not here to."

He showed me how the strings worked. He tilted the control bar, and the little wooden boy came to life on the kitchen counter: lifted his head, raised his remote, pointed it at the oven. Pause. Then he dropped his arm, turned, and looked up at me with his big painted grin.

I took the control bar. I didn't know how to work it, and the little boy's head flopped sideways and his knees buckled.

"You'll learn," Phillip said, almost smiling, and went back out to the living room, where Dad was explaining the Detroit Lions to Kincaid, who had asked.

I stayed in the kitchen with the marionette a while longer. Then I took it upstairs and set it on the shelf over my desk, between Randy's VHS tapes and the unicorn notebook, sitting up with its remote in its lap and its painted grin facing the door.

On the roof of the hamster cage, where he was not supposed to be able to get, Maga-Z studied it, and then saluted it, just once. It was the only salute I ever saw him give that didn't look like a joke.

The phone rang at two-thirty while the turkeys were resting.

Mom answered in the kitchen, listened, then held the receiver out to me with her hand over the mouthpiece. "It's a Nancy," she said. "For you. And for—" she checked, "—everybody."

I put it on speaker. Dad's new phone had a speaker; he'd bought it in October, when the bill came, so that, he said, the whole family can enjoy Ohio.

"Happy Thanksgiving," said Nancy Thompson out of the little speaker into the kitchen, where everybody had come crowding in at her name. Her voice was tired and warm and a little tinny. "Is everybody there? Is everybody okay? Did Kincaid fall in anything?"

"The POOL," everybody said at once.

"Of course he did." She laughed. "Listen. I can't talk long, I've got a turkey breast in the oven that I'm almost certainly ruining. But somebody here wanted to say something."

The phone changed hands. A rustle, a heavy breath.

"Kid," said Donald Thompson.

I hadn't heard his voice since a pay phone at O'Hare. It sounded different—still rough, but clearer, like a window that had been cleaned.

"Lieutenant," I said.

"Don't." A sound that might have been a laugh. "Just Don. Listen. I'm not good at this. Nancy says I have to say it out loud, so I'm saying it out loud." A long pause; the kitchen had gone silent. "Twenty-three days. Since the junkyard. Not a drop. Not one." Another pause. "I just wanted you to know that. That's all. That's the whole thing."

"That's a lot, Don," I said.

"Yeah," said Donald Thompson. "Yeah, it is." The phone rustled. "Tell those kids I said happy Thanksgiving. Tell 'em to eat something green."

Then Nancy was back. "He's been practicing that for three days," she said, more softly. "Randy... thank you. For all of it. I still owe you a long phone call. A very long one. But not today." A pause. "Today, go eat."

"Happy Thanksgiving, Nancy."

"Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Meeks."

The line clicked. For a second nobody in the kitchen said anything. Then Jennifer said "Mr. Meeks" in a perfect imitation of Nancy's voice, Taryn snorted, everybody laughed, and my mother said, "Everybody OUT of my kitchen," and everybody went.

Dewey and Tatum came at three. Dewey wore a sport coat and tie and had clearly been dressed by somebody else. Tatum was in a dress, which I'd never seen her in, ever, in either set of memories, and her eyes dared anybody to say anything about it. Behind them, coming up the walk in a cream wool coat, heels, and sunglasses at three in the afternoon on Thanksgiving, carrying a bottle of wine and a store-bought pecan pie, was Gale Weathers.

My mother, in the doorway, looked at her, and Gale looked back, and there was a pause in which a great deal was said without anybody saying anything.

"Mrs. Meeks," Gale said finally, warmly. "Thank you so much for having me."

"Ms. Weathers," said my mother. She took the wine and the pie and did not say thank you. "Dinner's at four. Please don't film anything."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"Mm," said my mother, and went back into the kitchen holding the pecan pie slightly away from her body, like something that might go off.

Dewey stood on the porch with the expression of a man who knows exactly what everybody thinks of his girlfriend, has decided to love her anyway, and would appreciate it if nobody made a big deal.

"Randy," he said.

"Dewey."

"She's... she's really trying," Dewey said, low. "She wanted to come. She said she wanted to see the kids from Ohio. Not for a story. She promised me. Not for a story."

I looked past him into the living room, where Gale Weathers was already shaking Dr. Gordon's hand and making him laugh while looking over his shoulder at seven kids from Westin Hills with an expression that was very, very interested.

"Okay, Dewey," I said.

He didn't go in right away. He stayed on the porch a second longer and dropped his voice. "Burke went out to her last address on Friday morning. After your show. Santa Rosa, a duplex. Empty. Paid through December, cleaned out, not even a toothbrush." He shook his head. "She's in the wind. But her picture's on every desk from here to Sacramento now, and Burke's got a car on the Greyhound station every night, and one on the Prescotts' street. I asked for that one." He looked at me, and for a second he wasn't goofy Dewey at all; he was the deputy who'd been stabbed in the back on Stu's lawn and gotten up anyway. "She's not getting near Sid, Randy. Not on my watch."

"I know, Dewey."

He nodded once and went inside, and I heard him say "Gale, honey, come meet Dr. Gordon" in his regular voice, like nothing had happened.

There were seventeen people at the table. Martha had been exactly right, and she reminded everybody of it twice.

It was really two tables, the dining room table with both leaves in and a card table pushed against the end, one tablecloth over both so you couldn't tell, and seventeen chairs from four different houses. Will at the corner where his chair fit. My mother at the head like a general. Dad at the foot, carving. And me in the middle of one side, which turned out to be the worst seat in the house, because it put me at the exact center of a geometry I hadn't planned.

On my left: Kristen. Mom had put her there and then, after a second's thought, moved herself down one so she was on Kristen's other side—your Kristen is sitting next to me; she'd meant it. On my right: Sidney. Across from me: Tatum, Jennifer, and Taryn. At the far end, next to Dewey, wine glass in hand: Gale Weathers.

I didn't notice at first, because I was busy. Dad was carving, the potatoes I'd peeled were going around in a bowl the size of a hubcap, and Martha was explaining to Joey and Will at the corner, very seriously, in whispers, the names and personalities of four hamsters who were at that moment upstairs in a cage. Neil Prescott and Dr. Gordon had discovered they were both named Neil and were laughing about it with the relief of two men who'd been through hell and found somebody else at the table who understood. Kincaid was eating like he was trying to win a bet.

It started with Jennifer.

"Okay, so," she said cheerfully across the table, through a mouthful of stuffing. "Is it true you told Kristen she had pretty hands?"

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. "I didn't—"

"Because," Jennifer went on, "you told me I had a face for TV. On the phone. In front of everybody." She pointed her fork at Taryn. "And you told her she was trouble."

"The good kind," Taryn said, not looking up from her plate. "He said the good kind."

"Right, the good kind." Jennifer nodded seriously. "And then Kristen said you told her—"

"I didn't say anything," said Kristen next to me, very quickly, going pink.

"Popsicle Kris," Taryn told her plate.

"Taryn!"

Across the table, Tatum Riley put down her fork.

"Wait," Tatum said. "Wait." She looked at Jennifer, then Taryn, then Kristen, then me, her eyes narrowing slowly like a cat's. "He told me he'd call me. About 'the next one.' He said he'd call me." She turned her head slowly to Sid. "Sid. Did he say anything to you?"

On my right, Sidney Prescott, who'd been eating and saying nothing at all, put down her fork too.

"He said I deserved nice," Sid told her plate, very calmly. "In his room. When I brought him a pie."

Our part of the table went quiet, a little bubble of silence in the middle of seventeen people, with me at the center like a man who'd only just noticed he was standing on a land mine. Five girls looked at me: Jennifer, delighted; Taryn, smirking; Tatum, eyes narrowed to slits; Sidney, calm and unreadable; and Kristen on my left, very pink, looking down at her plate and then up at me sideways through her hair with an expression I'd never seen on her, which I can only describe as betrayed, but also, honestly, a little bit impressed.

"I—" I said.

At the far end of the table Kincaid said to Dad, through a mouthful of turkey, "Mr. Meeks, can I have more of the sausage stuff," and Dad said, "Call me Ted," and passed it. At the corner Martha was telling Joey and Will, "...and San-D is the smallest, and she's the cuddliest, and she's my favorite, but don't tell the others," and Will said, "Do they do tricks?" and Martha said, "Do they do TRICKS," and Joey grinned. Dewey was telling Neil Prescott about a speed trap on the 101. Phillip was eating his green beans one at a time in a perfectly straight line. Nobody at the other end of the table had noticed a thing, except my mother.

Two seats down, on Kristen's other side, my mother was buttering a roll very slowly, with great attention to the roll, and the corner of her mouth was doing something it had last done, as far as I could remember, when Dad tried to assemble a crib.

And at the far end, Gale Weathers set down her wine glass and looked down the whole length of the table at me, at the five girls around me, at the bubble of silence, with the expression of a woman who'd walked into the best story of her career and promised her boyfriend she wouldn't write it.

"So," Gale said brightly into the silence, to the whole table, "which one of you is the girlfriend?"

All five of them looked at her, and then all five looked back at me.

"Potatoes," I said. "Has everybody had potatoes? I peeled all of them. Personally. Every single one." I picked up the hubcap-sized bowl. "Kristen? Potatoes?"

"Randy," said Kristen, in a voice I'd never heard her use, and then, against her will, she started to laugh. Then Jennifer was laughing, and Taryn, and Tatum, face in her hands, and even Sid put her fork down and her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders started to shake.

My mother finished buttering her roll. "He gets it from his father," she said to nobody, and took a bite.

At the foot of the table, Dad looked up from carving. "What?"

"Nothing, Ted," said my mother. "Carve."

After dinner, Sid found me in the kitchen.

Everybody else was in the living room. The second game was on, Dallas and Washington, and Kincaid and Dewey were arguing about it at a volume that rattled the china. Martha had brought the hamster cage down, which she'd been told not to do, and was giving a performance on the coffee table for Will, Joey, and Jennifer, who were screaming. Gale was on the couch next to Dr. Gordon, talking in a low, interested voice, and Dr. Gordon was being, I could tell even from the kitchen, very careful about what he said.

I was washing dishes; there were a lot of dishes. Sid picked up a dish towel and started drying next to me without a word, and we did that for a while—plates, glasses, the hubcap bowl.

"Randy," she said finally.

"Yeah."

She didn't go on right away. She dried a wine glass, turning it in the towel a lot longer than it needed.

"In September," she said. "Before. When you kept trying to tell me. About Billy. At school, and at the fountain, and in my kitchen, that night." She put the glass down. "You told me. Over and over. In every way you could. And I didn't listen. I didn't want to listen. And I got mad at you. I got so mad at you, after." She picked up another glass. Her hands weren't quite steady. "Because if you knew, then I should have known. And I didn't. I loved him and I didn't know. And it was easier to be mad at the person who did than to be mad at myself."

I turned off the water.

"I'm sorry," Sidney Prescott told the wine glass. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you. I'm sorry I got mad. I'm sorry it took me two months to say it." She finally looked at me, eyes wet. "I don't know how to say sorry. I've never been any good at it. My mom was good at it. I'm not."

She doesn't know how to say sorry yet, he'd said. She's working on it. She'd worked on it.

"You just did," I said. "That was pretty good."

She laughed, short and wet. Then she put down the glass and the towel, stepped forward, and hugged me, hard and short, face in my shoulder, the bad one, which hurt, which I didn't care about.

"You deserve nice," she said into my shoulder. "I meant it. When I said it. I still mean it."

"I know."

She let go, picked the towel back up, and dried the hubcap bowl, and from the living room Kincaid bellowed, "THE HAMSTER JUST OPENED THE CAGE," and Martha shouted, "MAGA-Z, NO, NOT IN FRONT OF THE GUESTS."

Dad and I talked about the money in the garage at seven, while everybody else was eating pie.

He'd gone out there on his own, like every morning, to look at his tools, and I'd followed him. I'd been waiting all week for him to say soon, and he hadn't, and the thing about Apple was that it had to be before Christmas, which was four weeks away.

"Okay," Dad said. He sat down on the old weight bench, my weight bench now, and folded his hands. "Tell me your terrible ideas."

I told him. I'd practiced. I didn't have Truth Assertion slotted, and I was never going to use it on my father—not ever, not about money—so I'd practiced the truth I could say: things I'd read, things anybody could read if they were the kind of kid who read the Wall Street Journal at the library, which as of two weeks ago I was.

"Apple," I said. "The computer company."

Dad stared at me. "Apple is dying, Randy. It's in the paper every week. They lost almost a billion dollars this year. They've had three CEOs in three years. Every computer in America runs Windows."

"I know."

"So why would you—"

"Because they're about to buy a company," I said. "A company called NeXT. Steve Jobs's company. The guy who started Apple. They're going to buy it and he's going to come back." I'd checked the date a dozen times in my head: December 20th. "There've been rumors in the trade papers. I've been reading. And when he comes back, they're going to make one thing. One really good thing. And then another one. And it's going to take a long time. Years. It might even go down first. It probably will go down first. A lot. But in ten years—"

"In ten years," Dad said slowly.

"In ten years you won't believe me."

Dad studied me. In the light of the single bulb over the workbench he looked older than he had in September, grayer at the temples. He'd been through a lot this fall. A son who knew things.

"And the other one?" he said.

"Amazon," I said. "A bookstore."

"A bookstore."

"An online bookstore. In Seattle. On the Internet. You order books from your computer, and they mail them to you."

"Randy, nobody is going to buy books on a computer. You can't even look at them. You can't flip through them." He shook his head. "Who would do that?"

"Everybody," I said. "Eventually. Everybody. Everything. Not just books. Everything." I took a breath. "They're going to sell stock in May. Eighteen dollars a share. I want to buy some. The day it opens. And then I don't want anybody to look at it. For five years. Ten. Don't look at it. Just leave it."

Dad didn't say anything for a long while. He looked at his tools, the wrenches in order on the pegboard, the coffee can of screws.

"You know what the guy at the bank's going to say," he said.

"That I'm seventeen and I'm an idiot."

"That I'm an idiot. For letting you." He rubbed his face. "Seven and a half thousand dollars, Randy. That's... that's a college fund. That's a car. That's—"

"It's eight plane tickets and a motel," I said. "It already was. Most of it's gone. There's about four thousand left."

He looked at me.

"I want to put two thousand in Apple," I said. "Before Christmas. And save the rest for May. And then I want to forget about it. And if I'm wrong, it's my money, and I lost it, and that's a lesson, and I'll have learned it." I swallowed. "But I'm not wrong, Dad."

He was quiet a while longer. Then he said, softly, the thing I hadn't expected.

"You weren't wrong about Billy."

I kept quiet.

"You weren't wrong about the girl in Ohio. You weren't wrong about that doctor, or the bones, or whatever happened in that hospital that you're never going to tell me about." Dad looked at me. "You weren't wrong about one damn thing since September. Not one." He stood up from the weight bench. "Monday. I'll take the morning off. We'll go see the guy at Dean Witter. I'm going to look like a fool, and you're going to let me."

"Thanks, Dad."

"Don't thank me." He went to the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob and looked back. "And Randy? If this works? If you're right?" His mouth twitched. "Buy your mother a new car. That Volvo's got a funny noise in the back suspension, ever since that week you came back from Ohio. Like somebody lifted it."

He went back inside, and I stayed out in the garage on the weight bench under the bulb for a good while after.

Tatum had the T-shirts.

She'd been waiting all day to show me. She'd been bursting. She brought them out at eight, after pie, in a cardboard box, and opened it on the coffee table in front of everybody like a game show host revealing a car. They were black, screen-printed in white in the jagged, scratchy font from the Survival Zone's front page, and on the front, in big letters, they said:

BE PREPARED.

And on the back, smaller:

YOU'RE NEVER READY.RANDY'S SURVIVAL ZONE

"My cousin's guy in Petaluma," Tatum said, holding one up. "Two hundred of them. Four bucks each to make. We sell them for fifteen. On the website. Mail order. You send a check, we send a shirt." She looked at me, eyes shining. "Randy, there are sixty thousand people on that site. If one percent of them buy a shirt—"

"That's six hundred shirts," said Will instantly.

"Six hundred shirts," Tatum agreed. "At eleven bucks profit each—"

"Six thousand six hundred dollars," said Will.

The whole room looked at Will.

"I'm good at math," Will said modestly. "I'm in a wheelchair. I had a lot of time."

"Executive producer," Tatum said, pointing at herself, to the whole room. "Business manager. I told you."

Everybody wanted one, and everybody got one. Kincaid put his on over the borrowed dress shirt. Jennifer tied hers at the waist. Joey wore his like a uniform. Martha put hers on over her Buckeyes sweatshirt and refused to take either one off for two days. Dr. Gordon held his up and studied it, then folded it very neatly, put it in his jacket pocket, and said, "I'm going to wear this to the next board meeting."

Kristen put hers on over the cardigan, under the vest, and looked at me across the coffee table. "Be prepared," she read upside down off her own chest.

"You're—" I said.

"—never ready," said seven kids from Westin Hills all at once, before I could finish, and then looked at each other, surprised, and laughed.

Gale Weathers, on the couch, didn't take a shirt. She sat with her wine watching all of us—the shirts and the hamsters and the seven kids and me—with the same expression she'd had at the table, very interested, and for just a second I saw her eyes go to my neck, to my collar, like she was looking for a light.

Then Dewey sat down next to her in his BE PREPARED shirt over his tie and said "Gale, look, it's my size," like a happy kid, and Gale looked at him, and her whole face changed for a second into something I'd never seen on it, and she said, "It's perfect, Dewey," and kissed him on the cheek.

I don't like Gale Weathers. I never have. But I'll give her that one.

They stayed four more days.

I'm not going to tell all of it. It was good; that's the main thing. They were four of the best days I've had in either life, and most of what happened in them wasn't anything, which was the point.

We ran every morning at five, Sid, Tatum, and seven kids from Ohio, with Will coaching from the motel gate and writing down times. On Saturday Sid beat me by eleven seconds and didn't say a word about it, but she smiled the whole way back to the motel. Kincaid fell in the pool every single day, clothed, on purpose. Gus fixed the NO in NO VACANCY and then turned it off again on Saturday, on purpose, because, he said, a motel ought to have room. On Friday night after closing Mr. Bradley let us all use the TV in the Bradley Video window, and we sat on the carpet and watched The Night He Came Home, and every one of the Ohio kids screamed at the jump scare at the closet, even Kincaid, especially Kincaid, and Joey, who'd never seen it, said at the end, under his breath, "He's still out there, isn't he," and I didn't answer.

On Saturday, Kristen and I walked the beach at Goat Rock again by ourselves at sunset, with the seals barking on the sandbar. We didn't say much. She held my hand. At one point she stopped and looked out at the water and said, without looking at me, "Are you still him? The one I talked to? On the phone, before?"

I thought about the kid on a couch in the sun saying it's our coat.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm still him. I'm just... all of him, now. Instead of half."

She thought about that, looking at me in the orange light with the wind in her hair. "Okay," Kristen said. "Good." She held my hand a little tighter, and we walked back.

Sunday at SFO it was eleven-thirty in the morning and gray, the gate crowded with people going home from Thanksgiving, and we'd already said everything there was to say.

Kincaid hugged me so hard my ribs creaked. Taryn punched me in the arm, hugged me, and punched me again. Jennifer kissed me on the cheek and said, "For the photo," and Tatum took a picture with a disposable camera, and Jennifer said, "Send it to me," and I said I would. Phillip shook my hand. Will saluted me from his chair, Maga-Z's salute, which he'd learned from Martha. Joey looked at me and then said out loud, very clearly, "Thank you, Randy," and walked down the jetway without looking back.

Dr. Gordon shook my hand and held on to it. "Randy. When you need something. Whatever it is. You call me."

"I will."

"I mean it. I owe you a great deal more than a plane ticket." He let go. "And Randy? Get some sleep. You look like hell."

"I keep hearing that."

Kristen was last, of course. She stood in front of me at the end of the jetway in the mint cardigan and the BE PREPARED shirt and my vest, which she hadn't taken off at any point in five days except to sleep, and possibly not then, and behind her a flight attendant was saying final boarding the way they do.

"You'll call," she said.

"Every night."

"You'll bring the hamsters. Next time."

"Next time."

"There's going to be a next time?"

"Yeah, Kris," I said. "There's going to be a next time."

She looked at me, and for a while she didn't say anything. She was holding her backpack strap with both hands the way Joey did, knuckles white, looking at me the way she'd looked at the ocean on Wednesday, like it was very big and very loud and nobody had told her, and I didn't understand what I was looking at.

Nobody would believe this about me, in either life. Theo Alvarez made it to twenty-six with exactly two girlfriends, if you were generous with the word: an eleventh-grader at the group home's school who dumped him by note, and a specialist from the motor pool at Fort Irwin who lasted three weeks and told him kindly that he was "a lot of talking for not a lot of doing." Randy Meeks made it to seventeen with exactly zero, plus a crush on Sidney Prescott the whole school knew about and a long, distinguished record of saying the wrong thing to every girl who'd ever talked to him. So the flirting—a face for TV; trouble, the good kind; Popsicle Kris—was just how I talked, the noise I made, the way a dog wags its tail. It had never once, in two lifetimes, worked. I'd sat at that Thanksgiving table with five girls comparing notes and honestly thought they were making fun of me.

It didn't occur to me. That's the truth. Standing at the end of the jetway with a girl in my vest looking up at me with white knuckles, it did not once occur to me what was about to happen.

"Randy," Kristen said, in a very small voice.

"Yeah?"

"There were a lot of girls at that table."

"I... yeah. Look, Kris, about that, I didn't mean—"

"Jennifer thinks you're cute. Taryn thinks you're cute, she'll never say it, but she does. Tatum drove you around for five days and looked at you like—" She stopped and swallowed. "And Sidney. Sidney Prescott. Who's been your—" She stopped again. "I'm from Ohio, Randy. I'm going back to Ohio. In, like, four minutes. And I'm scared that if I get on that plane, and I don't—"

She didn't finish. She went up on her toes, and I thought, the way it had gone in the dayroom at Westin Hills, oh, the cheek, okay, and turned my head a little, helpfully, to give her the cheek. She took my face in both hands, very fast, before she could change her mind, turned it back, and kissed me on the mouth.

It was quick and clumsy. Her nose bumped mine, she was shaking, and it lasted maybe one second, maybe two. It was the first kiss either of the people I used to be had ever gotten that meant anything, and every part of me that used to be separate stopped dead at the same moment, like a VCR with the plug pulled.

She let go and stepped back. Her face was bright red all the way to her hair, and her eyes were enormous. I stood there. I couldn't talk. My mouth was open, and my hands had stopped in the air at about shoulder height, like a man told to freeze by a police officer, and my ears were so hot I could feel them pulsing.

Kristen looked at my face, and at my hands in the air, and her own face went from terrified to astonished to, slowly, unbelievably, delighted.

"You didn't know," she said.

"I—"

"You didn't know. Oh my God. Randy. You flirted with me on the phone every night for two months." She put both hands over her mouth. "You flew across the country. You gave me your vest. And you didn't know?"

"I thought," I said, and my voice cracked, Randy's voice, mine, "I thought that was just how I talked."

Kristen Parker laughed—the real one, the beach one from Goat Rock, high and helpless, with tears coming out of her eyes—while behind her the flight attendant was saying Miss, this is final boarding, Miss in a voice with no patience left in it.

"That's not where the cheek is," Kristen said very seriously through the laughing. It was something I'd never told her—something he'd said, something she couldn't possibly have known—and the back of my neck went cold and then warm. Then she turned and ran down the jetway in my vest and didn't look back, because she knew that if she looked back she wouldn't go.

I stood there with my hands still in the air. Behind me at the window the silence was so complete you could hear the PA announcing a flight to Denver three gates over.

Then my sister said, in a voice of profound, cosmic disgust, "GROSS."

My father, next to her, was looking very carefully at the ceiling of San Francisco International Airport, like he'd noticed something extremely interesting about the light fixtures. Sid had her hand over her mouth and her shoulders were shaking; she was smiling behind it, I could see it in her eyes, the third time that week. And Tatum stood frozen, holding the disposable camera, and something small and complicated crossed her face and was gone. Then she lifted the camera, pointed it at me, my red face and my hands still in the air, and took a picture. Click.

"Executive producer's archive," Tatum said brightly. Too brightly. Then, lowering the camera, almost to herself: "Huh. Ohio told him."

I put my hands down slowly. I stood at the window and watched the plane push back, taxi out, turn onto the runway, and climb into the gray, into the clouds, which from above, somebody had told me, look like a whole field of snow.

Sunday night the house was very quiet.

The turkey was gone. The dishes were done. The extra chairs had gone back to the four houses they came from. Martha was on the living room floor in both her Buckeyes sweatshirt and her BE PREPARED shirt, with the hamster cage on the coffee table in front of her and San-D curled up asleep in her lap. Mom and Dad were on the couch, and I was on the floor in front of it with my back against Mom's knees, where I belonged.

The TV was on: America's Funniest Home Videos. A man fell off a trampoline into a pool, the audience howled, Dad laughed, and Mom swatted him. Then a commercial.

It started with music, bright and tinkly, like a music box. A kid's bedroom all in Christmas colors with snow falling outside the window. A little boy in pajamas running down the stairs on Christmas morning to a tree with presents under it, and under the tree, sitting up in a big red box with a cellophane window and a big green bow, a doll. A big doll, almost three feet tall. Red hair. Freckles. Big round blue eyes. A striped shirt in red and blue and yellow and green under little denim overalls, red sneakers, and a big wide friendly smile.

"Hi," the doll said, in a high, sweet, cheerful little voice. "I'm your friend to the end! Hi-de-ho!"

And a big, warm announcer's voice, a voice like Christmas morning, said: "This Christmas... he's BACK. The Good Guy doll, from Play Pals. Better than ever. Now with all-new sayings, all-new outfits, and all-new FUN. He'll be your friend... to the end."

The little boy hugged the doll. The doll's head turned a little toward the camera, the way those dolls' heads do.

"Good Guys," said the announcer. "Available at participating retailers. Batteries not included."

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I sat on the floor against my mother's knees and stared at the screen, and every muscle in my body went cold—colder than Morbing, colder than the Dark Spear, the cold of a man watching a car go through a red light toward somebody he loves.

Martha sat up. "Oh," she said. "Oh."

She was staring at the TV with her mouth open and her eyes big. The hamster in her lap had woken up and was looking at the TV too, and then up at Martha's face, like she could tell something was wrong.

"Mom," Martha said. "Mom. That's so cute. Did you see? With the overalls?" She turned around on the carpet, holding San-D, and looked up at the couch with an expression I hadn't seen on her since she was nine. "Mom. Dad. I know I'm too old. I know. But—"

"Martha," I said.

She didn't hear me, or she didn't listen.

"I want one," Martha said.