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It sucked. Like I said, the book was hard and didn’t have a plot, and at first it seemed as if the whole thing was nothing more than some uppity egghead spouting off about what he thought was essential for life, offering his opinions on every goddamn thing, as if anybody else could be paid to give a shit what he said. Not exactly a page-turner. In fact, it bored me so far off my ass every time I picked it up that I would’ve rather gone to the dentist and had my teeth drilled without novocaine than bother with the rest. But I didn’t want to tell Orlando that, because he’d said it was one of his favorites, and I was worried he wouldn’t want to be friends anymore when he realized I didn’t like it or understand it.

I didn’t know what to do. But when he asked me about it at school, I said I hadn’t had time to read it because of junior peewee practice and homework and stuff, although I’d always finished my assignments in class and never had a minute of homework in my life. Yeah, I lied to his face to cover for myself, and I did it more than once, and each time I did, I knew it was a totally shitty thing to do to a friend. He seemed to buy it, though, and let it drop until football season ended. But he started up again in mid-November, asking me if I’d read it and if I liked it and what I thought and all these other questions, and I told him we should talk about it after Thanksgiving break, because I was still just getting into it.

That bought me more time, but after Thanksgiving break I stalled him again, and it wasn’t until months later, after I’d read most of the
detective books, that I’d finally tried
Walden
again and had better luck. But by then it was too late. I’d already clobbered Ms. Wither-spoon, got suspended, and been banned from speaking to Orlando about the book or anything else.

I’d always felt bad about that, really bad, and I still did. Since my suspension, I’d read the book closely, over and over, and made dozens of trips to the library to learn as much about Thoreau as I could. Shit, I probably knew enough about Thoreau to fill twenty book reports by now, but mostly it just seemed like wasted effort: I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what
Walden
was about, and I still had that feeling—like Orlando had given me a gift, and I’d given him the finger.

But Orlando was no dummy, and if he’d figured out what I’d done, then I didn’t know how the hell I’d patch it up with him. I guess I was banking on getting my chance at the first official football practice: he’d get all stuttered up trying to explain what’d happened at tryouts, and I’d cut him off all cool and shit, and tell him I knew he never would’ve pasted me like that if Razor hadn’t put him over a barrel, that it just wasn’t like him, and that I’d figured it all out and didn’t blame him and still wanted to be friends. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized a hell of a lot more was riding on the case than I’d expected. It wasn’t just to stick up for grandma and the other old-timers, or to save Neecey from the danger she’d put herself in through her own idiot choices, as if that weren’t enough. No, it was to clear Orlando’s name, too, and it was my job to come through for all of us.

I was wet
, cut up, covered in mud, and for some reason shivering, and while only a few minutes could’ve passed, it seemed as if I’d been loitering in Orlando’s backyard for a long time now with nothing to show for it. But I’d gotten the grip on myself that I needed, so I was okay with the delay and the misdemeanor. I still didn’t know what time it was, but I knew where to find the reservoir—just a couple hundred yards away, down the gently sloping grass to my left.

SIXTEEN

At the bottom of the hill the ground dropped another
four or five feet straight down, just before the banks of the lake bed. On my right, there were wooden steps leading from Orlando’s backyard to the shoreline, but I positioned myself at the edge of the drop and jumped. My feet made a muffled slap as I landed and the backs of my heels sank an inch or so into dense, wet ground.

Everything was quiet on the shore; even the tiny ripples licking the grit and pebbles at my feet hardly made a sound. The breeze was much higher in the canopy now, so the air down here was moist and perfectly still, just like the water, and the reservoir stretched out smooth and sparkling before me like a small captured sky. I’d never seen the reservoir at night before, and the play of moon and starlight flickering on the surface made it seem larger than it was in the daytime, as if there were somehow more to see in the dark.

But there wasn’t. There wasn’t anything vast or mysterious about it, and it wasn’t the small captured sky that it appeared to be, or the earth’s eye, like Thoreau said. In fact, it wasn’t even a reservoir. I’d looked it up. A reservoir was a man-made lake, or a deposit of fresh
potable water (I’d looked up
potable
, too), which was used to serve the purposes of a community. But this wasn’t either of those, because it wasn’t man-made, and it wasn’t potable because the salt minerals in the water made it unfit to drink. So, when you got right to it, it wasn’t a reservoir at all. It was just a large pond or a small lake encircled by big hilly lawns with pricey houses at the top.

It hit me that Thoreau might’ve cared about that, because he was a stickler for words and names and stuff, and he’d put a lot of effort into figuring out why the pond was called Walden while he was there. I knew people used the wrong names for things all the time because they were too stupid to know better or just said what everybody else said or really didn’t give a shit one way or the other. Not a major news flash. But I somehow got the feeling that if Thoreau had been from these parts instead of Concord, Massachusetts, he never would’ve tried to investigate the names or nature of things or to live deep and suck the marrow out of life, not here anyway, because all he would’ve been left with was a salty taste in his mouth and not a damn thing to write about. No, if he were with me now and saw this place today, Thoreau wouldn’t conduct any experiments or build any cabins or plant any bean fields, but run the other way as fast as he could and never look back. Because today the reservoir was just like the kids who lived by it—spoiled through and through.

But it was still water, and because I was sweaty and dirty, my skin was mud-caked and rank, my clothes were filthy, my ass was damp and itchy, there was only one answer for all of it: I was going in.

I took off my clothes and sneakers, laid them on a rock, and dove into the reservoir’s warm black water. My cuts stung a little as I went underneath, but they were getting cleaned out and the pain didn’t last long. I hit a few chilly spots as the water got deeper and had the taste of salt and silt in my mouth. When I came up, I breaststroked for a while, gliding silently along the surface toward the center, then I turned onto my back and pedaled my feet. I was out alone after dark, far later than I was allowed to be or had ever been before,
skinny-dipping off somebody else’s property under the clearest of star-and moonlit skies. I had a case to crack, a sibling to save, and maybe some demons to wrestle, but there was nothing and nobody on my back for a change. And if anybody wanted to say that was wrong, then they could go ahead and say it, because it sure as hell didn’t feel wrong to me.

I swam back to the shore, and as I rose up out of the reservoir, I felt water rushing down my skin, mud squishing between my toes, and saw the black-on-black shadow of myself breaking up in ripples. I went over to the rock, got dressed, and reapplied the bug spray. I couldn’t find the screwdriver or the penlight, so I wrote them off. I teased my hair in case there was any gel left in it, and took a quick inventory: me, my cut-off ninja shorts and sleeveless shirt, house keys, bug spray, a mission to complete, a plan to complete it, and about damn time that I did it. That was all I had and all I needed. I was a detective on a case; nothing else mattered.

With the reservoir on my left, the banks on my right, the half-moon and its reflection brightening my way, getting to Darren’s couldn’t have been easier. The shore itself was a mixture of sand, fine pebbles, and mud that dampened the sound of my footsteps; the downward drop at the bank’s edge provided cover from the houses up the lawns to my right; and the bug spray protected me from the few clouds of mosquitoes lingering here and there, hoping for a late-night snack.

I was flying solo through the darkness—sleek, undercover, low to the ground—just like I’d thought I would, which meant at least some of this was going exactly to plan,
my
plan. Now I only had to get to Darren’s property, come up through the bushes and trees in his backyard, find a good place to conceal myself, maybe in the evergreens and flower bushes by the pool, watch undetected for the right moment, get the drop on Neecey and save the day.

A tall, rectangular hedgerow vaulted up from the edge of the drop-off on my right and marched in a thick rigid column up the
grassy slope, while a finger of bushy shoreline poked ten or fifteen yards into the reservoir to my left. I’d finally reached the edge of Darren’s property. I crept along the bushes and shrubs sprouting on the peninsula, staying low, keeping quiet, and wishing I knew more about nighttime sounds. The breeze was still high up in the treetops, swishing away; there were some crickets too, but further off so they weren’t a menace; there were mournful twitters of what could’ve been sparrows or ravens or bats; the faint lapping of the reservoir shifting in its bed; a few spiked voices and the barely audible throb of a bass line wafting down from the party; the distant squelch of a frog or two; and this other sound that went
plunk
, then
slap
, very softly from somewhere around the bend. All the other sounds were more or less accounted for, but I didn’t recognize that last one and had to make my mind up about it fast, because I was heading that way, and
had
to go that way, because I’d left myself no other route to carry out my plan. And if I was doing anything at this point, I was sticking to my plan.

I stopped where I was, squatted on my haunches, pricked up my ears, and listened again. There it was, but this time it was more of a
plip
than a
plunk
, followed by
slap-slap
. It wasn’t coming from the dock at the bottom of Darren’s property, because although the dock was made of wood planks, it was solid and moored, and there wasn’t enough movement in the reservoir for the water to rise up and touch it. It could’ve been a small boat tied to the dock, but I didn’t know if Darren even had one, and if he did, it would make more of a
tunk
or
thud than a plip
, so that wasn’t it either. Besides, that wouldn’t explain the
slap
sound. So my best guess was a fish: a tiny fish jumping or thrashing around in the shallows as it swam, or maybe a bigger fish that had accidentally beached itself and was flopping around, struggling to get free.

I heard the slaps again, with no
plunk
or
plip
this time. Yeah, a fish, definitely—that was its tail smacking against the shore as it tried to save itself from suffocating. What kind of fish could it be,
though, if the reservoir had traces of salt in it? Jesus, I sure as hell didn’t know the answer to that. What if it was something else? Christ. It was a fish, that’s all there was to it, a hearty fish, something that was tough enough to live and breathe almost anywhere, ate whatever the hell it happened to find, and was making that sound again now—
slap, plip, slap
. Fuck it. I was gonna turn that corner, walk down the peninsula, find the fish, and throw it back so it would live to see a better day. I stood up. I was going. It was only a fish, or an eel, or a poisonous water snake—
aw, fuck!
Screw it. I had to go. I turned the corner anyway.

I saw what it was and stopped dead in my tracks.

It wasn’t a fish, or an eel, or a snake. It was a
girl
. A girl maybe fifteen yards away wearing what looked like flat open-toed sandals or flip-flops; a few rubber and sparkly anklets at the bottommost V of each calf; a short, tight patterned skirt of either stretchy cotton or some other clingy material; a tube top and a button-down blouse, the latter of which had the sleeves cut off, the collar up, and was open all the way but tied at the waist; and she was sitting on a big gray rock, hunched over with her arms stiff and straight, bracelets on her wrists, rings on her fingers, her palms pressed next to her knees, head down, black hair covering her face, surrounded by distant shadows and drenched in moonlight, as if she’d just stepped out of a dream, or a music video.

No, it sure as hell wasn’t any scaly fish, slimy eel, or snake, although I would’ve been more relieved to find myself in a pit of water moccasins, alligators, crocodiles, and great white sharks at feeding time than to come across this. Because bumping into Stacy Sanders at night on the shores of the reservoir—the two of us all alone with the view, the dark, and ourselves—was definitely
not
part of my plan.

She must not have heard me, because she didn’t look up, so I covered my mouth, tried to keep my eyes from popping out of my head, crept back around the bushes at the peninsula’s tip as quickly and
quietly as I could, squatted down again, and tried to catch my breath. I wouldn’t call it panic, but my palms were sweating, my stomach was gone, I might’ve been hyperventilating, and my mouth felt like I’d just finished a seven-course meal of nothing but paste. Shit, this was terrible, truly fucking terrible. Well, seeing Stacy wasn’t all that terrible, but what it meant for my plan was.