* * *
Jo drives him home. Xie carries the bike to the garage, past his father unloading tools from his truck. Hey, Erik says. What happened? Nothing, Xie replies, leaning the bike against the back wall of the garage. Erik looking at Jo. She shrugs. It was James, had to be. Leni scrubbing at the gravel with the toe of her boot. They threw stuff at him, too, she says, eyes wide. Erik dropping a wrench into a box, loud clatter of metal on metal. Wiping his hands on his jeans. You tell anyone? Xie’s jaw tight. Squatting on the step to stitch the long gash in the sidewall of the tire with a piece of dental floss. Finger slipping on the needle. He shakes his head, once. Goddamn it, Erik mutters. He goes inside. Jo and Leni exchange a glance. You want to come over later? Jo asks. Not tonight, Xie says. Okay, well, call us, she says, turning to take Leni’s arm as they walk back to the Jetta. Slow roll from the driveway. Inside the house his father’s voice rises, falls. Xie drops the needle, makes a knot in the floss. Erik comes back out, hand against the screen behind Xie. They’re giving you two options. You can transfer to another school in the district, or you can take a tutor for the semester until things settle down. I have to talk to the principal in the morning and let him know what you decide. Xie scrubs his palms against his thighs. Okay. Silence. Erik scratching the back of his skull. You want me to take a look at it? Jutting his chin toward the bike. No, it’s fine. A pause. You know I have to call your mother. Yep, Xie says. I don’t have a choice. I said okay, Xie replies, sharp. His father slams the screen. Xie on the step, arms around his knees. Rain pouring off the door of the garage. Water splashing the drive. Xie, his father calls. He drags himself inside. Takes the phone, pressing it against the cheek that Moore had smashed against the concrete; it doesn’t hurt anymore but he remembers how much it did, hairline fracture and a bruise that distorted half his face for weeks. Now they’re kicking you out of school? his mother is saying. Because of that stunt you pulled this summer? Xie quiet. Wrapping the phone cord around his wrist. Wrap. Unwrap. They’re not kicking me out, he says. Oh, okay, well, if your father didn’t think it was necessary to ask them to give you special treatment all the time that’s exactly what they would do. You can’t just keep running away from the consequences of your actions, Xie. I wasn’t trying to, he says. They don’t want me there, I don’t want to be there, why should I go? Because it’s good for you! she yelps. Not everything is about what you want. Think of all the money we’re spending, your father isn’t exactly wealthy, and we’ve worked very hard for what we have, very hard, Jerry is very supportive but he just doesn’t understand what’s going on with you and frankly neither do I. You don’t have to send anything, Xie says. Of course we do, what are you saying, how else do you expect to pay them back for all the damage you did? He hears the chatter of pills on the other end of the line, the sound of his mother arranging her nightly cornucopia of vitamins on a plate. They didn’t even live, she says. They all got shot or trapped or run over. I mean you didn’t really think any of it through, did you. Xie peels the cuticle away from his thumb. Do you need to talk to Dad again? No, she says, suddenly composed, satisfied with this proof of disaster, a disaster she’d predicted ever since he was young, predictions his father ignored. I love you, she says. But I need you to be good. Can you be good? Yes, Xie says. She hangs up.
* * *
He unwraps the cord from his wrist. His father’s hand at his back. I’ll make dinner in a minute, Xie says. Just going to take a walk. It’s raining, Erik says. I know. Slips out the back door. Trips over the back step. Curses. Hood up against the rain but he is soaked in a second. He walks into the backyard. The remains of summer’s strawberry and zucchini plants sunk in mud, surrounded by weeds, a mess. He unlatches the gate, slips down the narrow bank to the stream, which has swelled almost as high as the log that crosses it. He jogs over the log, careful of the moss, to the fence, higher than his head. NO TRESPASSING. He rolls back a flap of chain-link, his sleeve catching on the steel. He faces the trees. Breathes. The woods are a mile deep, two miles long, bound by the highway at the east, a local road at the west, the house at the south. To the north, in the clearing that used to be full of ash and oak, there is a field of wild grass. It’s not dark enough to see the light yet but it’s there. He doesn’t know where it comes from, some building in the clearing; he has never gone near it. He walks, arm out to touch the trunks as he passes. The wood is pure birch, Betula pendula, not native to the state, considered invasive in some places, crowding out slower-growing, longer-living species: trespassers, like him, creating a screen between Xie and the town, between Xie and everything else. A mile from any neighbor, twice that to the tiny downtown with its strip malls and craft shops and bars. He spent every day of his first summer here. Learned the names of the ferns, the flowers, the birds. Nuthatch. Barn swallow. Goldfinch. He had found his nest; he had wanted to disappear. Stupid. To think you could. He pauses at a trunk split in half by the last storm, its branches grazing the soil. The crown is still connected to the trunk by an arch of bark chalk-white on one side, bright yellow on the other, the sapwood and heartwood jaggedly exposed at the top of the break. He tugs a strip of bark from the wound and puts it in his mouth, chews. Finger deep in the cracked body of the tree, which is still alive, pumping the last of its sugars through the wood. A fox slides through the fallen crown, twitching the leaves aside. Weird nighttime eyes, rain combing its pelt close to its skinny haunches. Xie waits, bark bitter in his mouth, as the fox darts back into the brush. In its wake he sees something white in the juncture of two broken ferns; tiny bones, gently curved, with knobs like fists at either end: femurs. Picked clean. He puts them in the pocket of his hoodie. Walks home.
* * *
After dinner his father pulls a pack of cards from the sideboard Xie loves, teak with a satin finish that still shines. All their furniture is like this, simple, Danish, true vintage, inherited from Erik’s parents. His father shuffles, hands fast on the cards; he had paid for his wife’s engagement ring with the winnings from a single evening of poker. His mother used to say the ring would be his someday. An entire circle of diamonds. For the girl he was supposed to marry. He scoops up the dealt cards. More diamonds. His father frowning as he fans his hand. Shit, he murmurs. They won’t talk about the phone call, about school. Snap of plastic against the table. His thumb bleeding from where he pulled flesh away with the cuticle. Sucks it. Let him win. Pretend like you didn’t.
* * *
Up in the attic before bed. Putting the bones into the brass dish along with the others, six or seven dozen: femurs, vertebrae, ribs, some brown and brittle, others, like tonight’s, fresh, a pure dry white. He puts the dish at the head of the mattress, pulls the curtain over the window. The room turns to velvet. Softest black. For a while there isn’t anything in his head. The sound of the creek, the occasional cry of a whip-poor-will, a nightingale. Xie turns on his side. Puts his fingers in the dish. Imagine. A single white curve. The horizon of a skull against the velvet. How smooth it would be, if you put your mouth against it, drew your lips to the crest of the brow, tongued the deep sockets, inhaled the scent of the wafer-thin walls of the nasal cavity, more delicately, numerously chambered than a beating heart. Kissed each loose tooth. Licked the entire length of the jaw, slowly bit the arch of the cheek. You imagine everything, as the void peels away from the body bone by bone: skull, spine, clavicle, ribs, hips, thighs, knees, shins, feet, you go as slow as you can. Hands against every hollow, every curve. How quiet it would be. How quiet it is. Alone with it. You turn your mouth into the pillow. Lift your knee against the sheet. Your hips against its hips. Your mouth against its mouth. Whatever movement might be possible, without hurting it, you’d learn, you’d know, it would tell you, show you. How it fucks you. How you fuck it. Making sense of your own flesh. You spread your arm across the mattress but there is no body to embrace. There never will be. And you fall straight through the ceiling into sleep on this thought and even the velvet does not catch you, you just fall and fall.