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“Where’s your sleeping bag?” I asked Win as I searched the floor of the garage.

Win took a look around. “Whoops.”

I laughed. “You forgot your sleeping bag? That’s pathetic,” I said.

He shrugged. “Got an extra?”

I shook my head. “Only the one my dad used in the army. You don’t want that one. We’ll have to go pick yours up.”

“Nah,” he said. “Let’s just go to the Super Wal-Mart. I’ll buy one. It’ll be faster.”

“Win, it takes as long to drive to Huntington as it does to get to your house,” I said.

“Just go ask your mom if we can borrow the car,” he said.

After persuading Mom that we really were going to Wal-Mart instead of heading off to find an after-graduation kegger, she gave us the keys. We found ourselves back on the road, the moon high overhead as we shot down the driveway and headed up the hill toward town.

“Seriously, Win,” I said. “Your house is closer.”

“I don’t want to go back to my house,” he said deliberately. I couldn’t say I blamed him. We curved around past a cluster of mobile homes topped by satellite dishes, each with a chained-up dog or aboveground pool in the yard.

We took I-64 into Huntington and pulled into the parking lot, where a few cars and faces I recognized from school were already cruising the loop from the Sno-Cone Hut to the turnaround here at the Supercenter. We found a spot close to the door and passed into the buzzing glare of twenty-four-hour fluorescent lights.

Win bought the lightest-weight bag we could find, and we were back in the car and headed for the freeway by eleven forty-five.

“Let’s take the old highway back,” Win said.

“Dude, we need to get back and crash. You’re the one who decided we’re leaving at eight tomorrow,” I said.

“Just do it,” he said.

I sighed and turned on my blinker, easing around the back of the strip mall to where the highway lay, forgotten. “Whatever.”

The warm night air whipped through the open windows as we sped down the empty road. We passed the ball fields where Win and I had played Little League the three summers my dad coached our team. We passed the fancy neighborhood Win’s family had moved from after somebody built a newer crop of minimansions
closer to Hurricane. We passed the high school, the lights above the stadium now dark, though the outline of the tent on the football field was still visible in the moonlight.

“Pull in here,” Win ordered as we reached the turnoff for the city park. I did. The lot was empty and quiet, the smell of chlorine heavy in the humid air.

“How many hours do you think we spent here?” Win said.

“Most of every summer,” I admitted. Win and I had spent a few days a week here, swimming in the tiny public pool, staring at hot lifeguards as we got older, and eating greasy cheeseburgers from the concession stand.

“Is that the gazebo you built?” he asked, pointing toward the picnic shelter I’d built near the playground as my Eagle project.

“Yeah,” I said.

He smiled. “After your house, I’ll miss this place most.”

“Why are you acting like you’re shipping out with the foreign legion? We’ll be back in two months, tops.”

He didn’t respond immediately, just kind of waved his arm around outside the window, feeling the air, the place. “Yeah,” he said. “We’d better get some sleep.”

Neither of us slept much. I was too keyed up, and Win kept dredging up dumb old stories from the pool or elementary school. But we stumbled into the kitchen the next morning at seven, ate the pancakes Mom made, and geared up. Even though I should have felt wiped, I was buzzing with excitement that we were finally leaving.

In our driveway Win turned to me. “Ready to get this out of your system?” The imitation of his father was too accurate to be funny.

My parents hugged us both, with Mom crying enough for two
sets of parents. That didn’t surprise me. Win was as close to a second son as she’d ever get, and I’d heard her mutter more than once what she’d do with him if he were hers to raise. Plus, Mom cried at everything. Mormon commercials, makeover shows, birthday cards.

What shocked me was that Win had tears in his eyes as well.

Win and I approached our bikes. He looked at his appraisingly. “Let’s see what this old pony can do!” He threw a leg over the top tube and mounted up.

I hugged my mom again, gave my dad a nod, and hopped onto my bike. Win was waiting on me, riding his brakes so he barely inched forward on the downhill. A second later we were rolling down the driveway side by side.

“Did you pack the sandwiches I made you?” Mom shouted down as we neared the road.

I looked back at her, my helmet blocking part of my vision. I could see only her arm, held out to us as we slipped away from her. “Got ’em, Mom. Thanks.”

“Watch out for roadkill, travelers,” my dad shouted.

“And we’ll try to avoid becoming roadkill,” I joked. My mom immediately started crying harder.

“I hear sun-dried possum is quite the delicacy,” Win said.

We reached the bottom of the driveway and tapped the hand brakes lightly. The bikes, each loaded with about forty pounds’ worth of gear, took a little longer to slow on the incline.

“Make sure you look both ways,” Win said. “Your mommy’s still watching.”

I laughed, released the brakes, and cranked hard on my pedal, merging onto the sycamore-lined road.

The sub I’d wolfed down in the commons sat heavy in my stomach as I raced across campus to my one o’clock: English 102. I ducked into the computer lab on the first floor of Skiles Hall. That morning I’d already endured a chemistry class and a physics lecture, both professors apparently intent on scaring the crap out of us. But I was glad for the distraction. It saved me from replaying the conversations with Ward and my folks in my head like I had been doing all weekend. Obsessing about these discussions inevitably led to me obsessively worrying about Win. Ward’s suggestion that something had happened to him sent my mind through all sorts of scenarios. It wasn’t likely Win had been hit by a truck or anything. Somebody would have called. Win had his
driver’s license on him, and if he’d been hit it would have been just a matter of time before they found his ID. But it also didn’t make sense that he hadn’t contacted home. Or at least me. Somewhere in my mind a voice told me that Win would have called me at least. It wasn’t necessarily Win’s nature to think about the other guy, but at some point I figured he’d realize that he’d probably left a bit of a mess back here and would at least let me know he was okay.

But any logic I tried to project onto Win seemed to bounce right off him. And when I thought back to the final moments of our ride together on that pass in the Cascades, nothing made sense. I could easily imagine him tangled up with his bike at the bottom of one of those steep curves we rode. I could imagine him ending up there by accident, or even on purpose. The latter possibility freaked me out most of all. I’m sure people with less to worry about had done themselves in. But I could also picture him riding south down the Washington coast, a beach to his right and a crosswind trying to push him into traffic.

Still, I held out some hope that he’d contact me, which was why I’d been obsessively checking my e-mail since Ward left on Thursday afternoon. If I knew Win like I thought I did, he’d probably duck into a public library and send off some smart-ass message. And when I thought of that, and the fact that he was probably out there having fun while I dealt with this mess and the life I was supposed to be living, it really started to piss me off.

I’d been alternating between bouts of fear and rage like this. And everybody kept telling me how much fun I was going to have in college, how much freedom I’d have. I was starting to believe that I’d used up my lifetime quota of both on the trip this
summer. Starting to wonder if I was too young to get an ulcer.

I signed on quickly to the network, using the new user name and password I’d been issued during orientation. I bypassed the new school account they’d given me and went straight to my old e-mail. But there was nothing new waiting in my in-box since I checked it last night. Just to be thorough, I returned to the Georgia Tech home page, clicked the student mail account link, and entered my user name and password again. I scrolled quickly through the junk the university sent out—past the reminder about the extra days off around Labor Day coming up, past the notice that the fitness center pool hours had changed, past an invitation to a meeting from the Outdoor Club, whose information sheet I’d signed during orientation last week. The fourth message made me sit up a little taller. I clicked on the sender’s name: wcoggans.

Win had figured out my e-mail address at school? Maybe he was sending it to this account because he figured the other one was, what, being monitored?

But when I opened the e-mail and saw the full address, the weight that seemed to have lifted just slightly at the hope of having heard from Win, of having some proof that he was alive, and maybe even something I could hand over to the FBI guy so he could find him and stop bothering me, descended to my stomach and threatened to displace that sandwich.

The message was from [email protected].

Great.

Win’s
father
had my address. Probably an easy bit of information for him to pick up, given his resources, but I hadn’t even bothered to give it to my mom yet. The message was brief.

I urge you to extend your full cooperation to my associate Mr. Ward. In spite of recent inconsistencies, I’ve always maintained that you are an honorable young man. I’ve every reason to believe you want this scenario to draw quietly to its conclusion, as I do. If not, I can certainly help you to find additional motivation.

That was it. No greeting. No signature. No apology for springing an FBI agent on me during my first week of college. No demonstration of concern for Win.

It was this that surprised me least.

Automatically I hit the reply button and placed my fingers on the keyboard. But then I stopped. I never knew what to say to Mr. Coggans, and that certainly hadn’t changed now. I’d deal with this later.

I logged out, jumped up from the machine, and bolted from the room and up the stairs to room 214.

“Welcome to a brand-new state of mind,” Dr. Flynn Lenoir said from the front of the classroom as I walked in and took the last empty seat in the second row. “Welcome to an odyssey of literature, truth, and the human spirit.” He beamed at us, bushy black hair sticking out at odd angles. He popped his smudged glasses back up to the bridge of a round nose.

A few seats over a kid raised a tentative hand. “Is this English Lit 102?”

“Some may call it that,” he said, “but I prefer to think of it as my mission field.” He leaned forward on the lectern. “Tech is
a fine institution, and you should all count yourselves lucky to be here. But over the past twelve years”—he paused to look around the room, studying faces that I’m pretty sure were as bewildered as mine—“I’ve come to realize that we’ve a dangerous tendency in higher education, particularly at schools as specialized as this one, to turn out … well … somewhat one-sided individuals.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d be pretty sure this guy was angling to piss off the math-science nerd contingent. Even though technically I was one of them, I liked his style already. After my first two classes it was sort of refreshing.

“So I’ve made it my life’s work to lead the science-minded down the path of true enlightenment. This course is not just a hoop you must jump through in order to get back to your ‘real’ coursework. This course is absolutely, vitally necessary. For if the best scientific minds in the world have no sense of beauty, art, purpose, or truth, then we are all lost,” he boomed.

I glanced around the room. Half my classmates looked as clueless as I felt. The other half were already flipping madly through the course bulletin, searching for other sections of English they could switch to.

“But,” he shouted, “before we can delve into the mysteries of human nature and universal truth, we must know who our fellow travelers are.”

He acted as if we were supposed to know what that meant. After too long a pause for a school with a supposed entrance requirement of a combined ACT score of 29, a girl in the front row hazarded a translation.

“You want us to introduce ourselves?”

“No, my dear, I want you to introduce one another. Please find a partner. You will have ten minutes to get to know each other, asking as many questions as possible. At the end of that time you will be asked to deliver a brief introduction. Over the course of the next two classes—while the less adventurous in our midst fall away from the pursuit of truth in favor of safer English courses—we’ll get to know one another.”

He paused and looked around the room at the students poring over the class schedule. He rolled his eyes. “Questions?”

There were a million I could think of:
Why are we doing this? Where’s the syllabus? How’d you end up with a name like Flynn Lenoir
? But nobody said a word.

“Then, please make a new acquaintance,” he said, and left the room.

There were a few beats of silence, but then the place erupted.

“This guy’s nuts.”

“I’ve heard he’s really good.”

“Is he allowed to just leave us in here like this?”

“Did you check out that tie?”

“Anybody know if Technical Writing is full? I’ve heard that’s easy.”

Eventually a handful of folks began settling down, digging out notebooks, and finding partners. I realized that on this day, the first of my college career, I was acutely aware of Win’s absence. The concern and anger I’d had for him since I learned he was AWOL were now replaced by something else. Panic. Win had been my partner in stuff like this for the last decade.

“Got a partner yet?” a girl in front of me asked. I tried to speak but couldn’t. There were no girls like this back in Hurricane. Girls at home had dirty-brown hair or fake blond. Nothing like the long black hair this girl had pulled into a loose ponytail. Girls at home wore makeup like war paint, their faces always a shade or two darker than their necks. But this girl didn’t seem to have a trace of anything on her face, and her skin—arms, neck, all of it that I could see without overtly checking her out—glowed with the same even brown. And you’d never find eyes that deep back home. Never.