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“What is it?”

“A bunch of people dying. Real ones. There's this one part where some waiters bring out a screaming monkey to some people at a restaurant and stick it through a hole in the table, like from underneath so you can only see its head. Then the diners beat it to death with hammers and eat its brain right out of its skull.”

“Christ,” she said.

“It made me sick.”

“But you didn't turn it off.”

Dustin shook his head. He took another swig of beer. The stars were getting fuzzy around the edges, fat as snowflakes.

“Are you going to work there, like, forever?” Taz said.

“Where?”

“At the video store.”

He bristled. “Why not?”

Taz shrugged. “It's just that you were all set with college. UCLA.”

“That's just what I need. To hang out with a bunch of assholes in Calvin and Hobbes T-shirts.”

“They're not all like that.”

“I went to a party with Biesty, and everyone was doing beer bongs.”

“There are some cool people at UCLA.”

Dustin glared at her. “What the hell do you know about it?”

“I was
there,
remember? At the party.”

“You're sixteen!” he said.

She scowled, wringing some toxic water from her hair. Her T-shirt was stuck to her back, a shoal of pink. “Must be hard, being so old and mature.”

He stood up angrily, searching through his backpack to see if there was any beer left. She didn't know anything. Actually, growing older was a breeze; it was just a matter of getting in touch with your inner creep. When you were in high school, you had certain ideas about creepiness and the sorts of things you would never in a million years be caught doing. For example, getting drunk by yourself. Or watching
Faces of Death
all alone in a video store in the middle of the day. And then you were doing the thing, and you realized it was no big deal.

“Sometimes I wonder why I even come out here,” Taz said. It looked like she might start crying.

“Why do you?”

“I don't know. That night at the party . . . I have this idea, maybe, that we're kind of the same.”

“We're
not
the same.”

“No,” she said. “You're much more of an asshole.”

This wasn't a joke. She rummaged in the backpack and pulled
out a beer for herself. A shooting star flared over the poppy preserve to the west. Dustin had never thought about the word before, “poppy,” but being out in the desert did this to him. Words stood up from their sentences and waved at him. It was all the emptiness, with no TV around to distract him.

“When I first started doing shit,” Taz said quietly, “my parents sent me to this therapist, Dr. Feferman, who used to show me pictures of things, dead birds or people kneeling in graveyards or yelling at each other, whatever, and ask me which one described the way I felt. But none did.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She sipped her beer. “I don't know.”

Dustin felt something unspool inside him. He wondered if his face was the picture she was looking for. Surprisingly, this did not infuriate him. Another star streaked into oblivion, silent as a thought. He told Taz about how when he was little, he used to believe that meteor showers were things scientists used to clean off meteors. “I had this whole idea in my head about what they looked like. Sort of like a car wash, but with a conveyor belt.”

She laughed. “I had this thing about gold bullion. I heard the name somewhere, and all I knew is that my mom had bouillon cubes in the cupboard. I thought it was a kind of soup made out of gold. I used to look for it whenever we went out to eat, gold bullion, under the appetizers.” She frowned. “For years, I had this vision of a beautiful, expensive soup, totally delicious.”

Dustin chugged his beer, actual gulps. It enraged him that there was no such thing as gold soup. He would add this to his list of injustices.

“You shouldn't drink so much,” Taz said.

“So my mom tells me.”

“She knows about your drinking?”

He shrugged. “Like my parents are going to kick me out, a scarred-up cripple.” Dustin chucked the empty can with his left hand, awkward as a girl. “Anyway, it makes me itch less. It's medicinal.”

Just saying the word “itch” made his arm prickle all over. He scratched at his Jobst shirt, wishing he could dig into the flesh. Sometimes he had dreams of this sort: he scratched and scratched and scratched, until he'd dug through the skin and was scraping marvelously at bone.

“Can you take that thing off?” Taz said.

“My Jobst?”

“I could scratch you. If you want.”

Dustin blushed. He tried to remember if there was any more beer hiding in the fridge. “We should head back.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

“No. I'm just supposed to keep it on all the time.”

Taz laughed. “Come on. You shower, right? I don't think ten minutes will matter.”

He could have refused to sit down with her, but he didn't. When he was still in the hospital, he often thought about what it would be like to have a girl touch him. The idea had seemed preposterous. Who would ever want to lay a finger on him? At the time, he couldn't even touch himself. In the night, haunted by dreams, he was his former, naked, unrepulsive self, girls from his past sucking him or riding him or fondling him in twos until he stained his sheets. Waking up was like the end of life, a loss that made him gasp. Now a girl wanted to scratch him, nothing more, and he couldn't move from fear.

“Could you, um, take it off yourself?”

Gingerly, Taz unzipped the arms of his Jobst shirt before
scrutch
ing open the Velcro that fastened around his chest. Dustin couldn't look at her. Her hair smelled like rotten eggs. There was a moment, after she'd slid the shirt down his arms, when he thought she was too horrified to speak.

“You can't even see them,” Taz said. “The scars.”

“It's nighttime.”

“The moon's pretty bright.” She looked away from him. “Anyway, I lied. You
can
see them.”

“So you're saying they're ugly,” Dustin said, trying to laugh.

“A little bit.”

She asked for his hand and then took off the Isotoner glove, peeling it inside out until all his burns were visible. If he were still in love with her, he could never have done this. Slowly, as if it were a doctor's order, she began to scratch him. She held his fingertips in one hand and raked her nails up and down his arm, all the way to the shoulder, digging hard enough that it hurt, leaving a trail of sting that lingered wonderfully until the nails returned. The relief was incredible. He could scratch himself raw, but it was like the difference between jerking off and getting laid. Taz moved up to
his chest and began to scratch him in circles, swirling her nails around, soothing a misery he'd forgotten was there. Dustin closed his eyes and tried not to think about how he looked, picturing himself as he used to be.

Later, he felt strangely bereft. It was only 10:45. She hadn't done anything, really, only scratched him, but it was like waking up from one of his dreams. The throb of loneliness surprised him. He knew she had to be home by midnight, her parents would find out where she was—still, he couldn't help wondering if she'd left before she had to. He couldn't blame her, that was the worst part. Would he have wanted to touch a girl who looked like him?

Dustin put on
The Searchers
to distract himself. Ethan was jabbing the dirt with his knife, having just found Lucy's ravaged body in the pass. Tonight he seemed less dumbly iconic than just plain dumb. Why didn't he go home and leave everyone alone? What the hell was his problem? And why, of all movies, had this become Dustin's favorite? He was just about to stop the VCR when someone knocked on the door, a gentle tap, as if Taz had decided to screw her parents and spend the night.

It was Jonas. Dustin couldn't hide his disappointment. He was holding a guitar, a bottom-of-the-line Yamaha. He handed the guitar to Dustin: the neck had been duct-taped, and there was something funny about the strings. It took Dustin a second to realize they'd been strung in reverse order, with the low E at the bottom.

“What is this?” he said. “A joke?”

“I had to tape it, because the glue wouldn't hold.”

Jonas stood by the bed, as if waiting for him to do something. Dustin looked at the soundboard, which had the words
TOXIC SHOCK SYNDROM
spray-painted on it. There must have been no room for the
E
. He strummed the strings to see if he could and the neck broke, springing up like a catapult.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, handing the thing back to Jonas. “Who sold you this piece of shit?”

Jonas held the broken guitar in his arms for a minute without moving. His lips were so chapped they looked like beef jerky. Cradling the instrument gently, as though it might wake up, he walked out of the room. Dustin overheard his father scolding him in the hallway.
What on earth was he doing, bringing a guitar into the house? Didn't he know better?
It was only then that
Dustin realized Jonas had brought the guitar to him as a gift. He felt a thickness in his throat. The feeling persisted until he remembered that Jonas didn't seem remorseful for ruining his life. Did he really think a guitar, one Dustin couldn't even fucking play, would help?

On TV, John Wayne spat charismatically, on his way to kill his own niece. Dustin found the remote control and switched him off.

Jonas sat in the front seat of the truck, which was so tall he could only see the roofs of cars as they passed, like clouds from an airplane. Occasionally someone with a sunroof would drive by, a hole in the clouds. Jonas's backpack trembled at his feet. Among the items in his pack were a water bottle, a map of California, two bologna sandwiches, and a pack of cigarettes he'd stolen from his mother. He figured he might use the cigarettes as a way of extorting favors, since it seemed that people were often desperate to have them.

Another truck pulled beside them, trying to pass. It took a long time getting by, close enough to touch through the window. A sticker on its bumper said
WE HIRE ONLY SAFE AND COURTEOUS DRIVERS
.

“Fucking Freightliner,” Jonas's driver said. “He got a custom-curved bumper, that's how safe he is.” He glanced at Jonas and frowned. “Pardon the language.”

“Okay,” Jonas said.

The driver's face lit up. “Look her there.”

He pointed at a humongous miniature golf course to one side of the interstate, a sprawl of frosting green fairways crowned by waterfalls and windmills and a rainbow-colored dragon with smoke pluming out of its mouth. It looked like what a freeway might dream about eating for dessert. Behind it stood a giant castle with a banner draped between its turrets that read
GRAND OPENING
. “They just put that up. There's an arcade inside with video games. Everyone dresses like jesters and stuff, all middle-evil.”

“It's very beautiful,” Jonas said. He would have liked the world
much better if everything were in miniature, particularly if it were a series of elemental tests that involved no personal risk.

“You're a weird kid, you know that?”

“Thank you.”

The driver scowled. His face was a little bit like Jonas's father's, except that it was meatier and more crinkled and his beard seemed like part of his job rather than a sign of not having one. He looked like he'd have no trouble at all cutting a penny in half. Jonas had packed his backpack earlier that afternoon, worried that perhaps his dad would come home while he was making sandwiches. But he hadn't come home. No one had. After wrapping each sandwich in tinfoil, Jonas wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table. He tried to be brief but also to avoid contractions since it might be the last thing he ever wrote:

Dear family,

I have decided to leave and not return any time soon. I am sorry for blowing up the house and ruining Dustin's life. I know you want me never to have done this, but there is nothing I can think of that will fix it. I will write to you in exactly one year, August 3, 1987, so please don't worry about me getting killed or chopped into pieces unless there is nothing in your mailbox.

Love,

Jonas Ziller

This last part seemed a bit dramatic, but Jonas liked thinking about his family's faces when they read the “unless.” Before leaving, filled with a chewy, appealing sadness, he fed Mr. Leonard a piece of baloney and watched the old dog wolf it down whole. Then he strapped on his backpack and made the long trek to the freeway, sweating through his freshly washed Izod. It was close to an hour before the truck pulled over. The driver said he could take him as far as Ventura; Jonas had no destination in mind and in fact did not know where Ventura was. Since then the driver had made several attempts at conversation, seeming more angry and upset after each one. This was peculiar, since he really seemed to want to talk.

“Do you have any questions about being a truck driver?” the man asked now. The shadow of a giant daddy longlegs covered the dashboard, cast by a knot in the windshield where a rock had hit it.

“Like what?”

“Like how many gears this puppy has.”

“Not really,” Jonas said.

The driver leaned toward him, winking. “What if I told you it was thirteen speed, with three-point-three-six rear and a three-stage Jake? Do you know what that is? A Jake brake?”

Jonas shook his head. The man began to explain what a Jake brake was, pointing at some of the gauges on his dashboard, but Jonas found it difficult to listen. His stomach was grumbling too hard. He decided it was okay to have half a sandwich, since he hadn't eaten anything for lunch.