Paul takes a step back.

– Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t realize I was talking to your dad here.

George pulls on his favorite cutoffs.

– Fuck you, man.

He grabs his smokes and lighter and shades and walks out.

– Do whatever you want, take whatever you want.

Paul stands alone in the room.

Fucking George. No joke, the guy can get like infected with his dad sometimes. Not that that should be a big deal. They all make jokes about how uptight Mr. Whelan is, but he’s far and away the coolest dad any of them know. George doesn’t know how good he has it, how easy.

He looks at the shirts, picks up the one from the Blue Oyster Cult show last December. He unfolds the shirt and looks at the front, the ankh and the reaper in a night sky, the tour dates listed down the back.

George loves his shirts, doesn’t mean he has to be a dick about it. Knows how much it sucks to go home after staying out all night.

You OK? Everything all right? I wish you would call if you’re going to stay out all night. Something is going to happen one night and I won’t even know to be worried or to look for you. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call. Even if you need a ride. Especially if you need a ride. Don’t ever get in a car with a drunk driver. If you’ve been drinking that’s one thing, but don’t get in a car with someone who’s been drinking themselves.

George can’t lend him one cocksucking shirt so he doesn’t have to deal with that? They been friends how long? Jesus. Just ever since The Fight, that’s all.

It happened a couple days after Paul and his family moved into the neighborhood. George was the local hero, eight years old, wearing jeans and boots and a pearl button shirt like his dad. What a fag he looked like. And coming on all cowboy tough, giving Paul shit about the hippie stuff his mom found for him at the Salvation Army store.

They fought for so long the kids watching started to cry. They were so scared one of them was gonna kill the other one. They beat the living shit out of each other. Went on for hours. Seemed that way. Anyway, didn’t stop till Mr. Whelan drove home and saw them punching each other on the Phelps’ front lawn. Pulled to the curb and came over and got a handful of their hair in each hand and yanked them apart.

That was a great fucking fight, man.

Next day they ran into each other on the sidewalk and talked about it and showed each other their bruises and scrapes and scabby knuckles.

He crams the shirt back in the drawer. Fuck this, man. Got cash on hand. Go down to Galaxy Records and buy a brand new shirt. Get that black Ozzy T with the red jersey sleeves. Yeah, man, cut the sleeves off, that’ll look cool as hell.

He climbs into his shredded jeans and the dirty T and pulls on Jeff’s Harley cap.

– George!

He heads down the stairs to the kitchen.

– George, let’s cruise over to Galaxy, check out some tunes, there’s a shirt I like on the wall over there.

Andy walks around the empty house.

It’s after twelve. The thermometer on the back porch is hitting ninety. Mom and dad left for work first thing. Who knows when George and Paul and Hector took off.

He goes to the bathroom and brushes his teeth and fills a plastic cup with water from the tap and drinks it standing at the sink. He looks at himself in the mirror. Skin and bones and greasy, tangled hair. Mostly bones and hair. No wonder no girls like him.

Paul says he’d do better if he was bigger. Chicks dig muscles, he says, and flexes. Chicks like Paul OK, dig his muscles, until they get to know him. Then they get scared of his temper.

Hector says Andy needs to be himself. Chicks don’t dig him when he’s being himself, then fuck them anyway, he says. Chicks used to be into Hector, until he went punk and started wearing the mohawk last year. There are a couple that are still into him, funky ones with tons of black eye shadow and black nail polish and shit.

George says he just needs to be cool, not dig the chicks too much. Just do your own thing and they’ll come around. And it works for him. Like most things work for George. He’s the one chicks come around to talk to, trailing a couple friends. Paul and Hector get the friends. Andy gets told to go home.

That’s what it’s like being the little brother.

He’s made out twice in his life so far. Both times with girls that were older than him. Both times at parties where everyone was drunk and stoned. Both times they found out he was at least a year younger and ignored him after and told their friends it didn’t happen.

He picks up a brush and tries to run it through his hair, but it snags and pulls at his scalp. He gives up and leaves it in a tangle.

In the kitchen he finds some of last night’s fruit salad and sits at the table in his underwear. He studies the bowl and estimates how much more fruit is in it than was in his bowl last night. He remembers the total numbers of each type of fruit he had in his bowl because he counted them all and he multiplies that number based on his estimate and calculates the odds of selecting any particular type of fruit if he were to do it blindfolded.

He remembers catching his dad watching him pick through the fruit. Remembers the look on his dad’s face. He gets that look a lot, the where did this weird kid come from look.

It’s not like he’s trying to be different, like he wants to be weird. He just is. Not like it’s easy being this way. He’d rather be like George. He’d rather be like his dad. He’d rather be like anyone else. But he’s not. Because no one else is like him. No one else is this weird. And that’s just the weird stuff people know about. They don’t know about the stuff inside his head.

Dreams where soldiers attack their house and he sneaks around with a toy gun that shoots real bullets and he kills them all. Moments in the middle of the day where he’s by himself doing homework and suddenly sees himself with a knife, walking up behind some jock who picked on him in school and sticking it in his eye while he’s talking to his jock friends and then just going crazy and cutting them all up. Things inside his head that he doesn’t know where they come from and he can’t tell anyone because they scare him so much.

He looks into the bowl. Apples are the most likely. He closes his eyes and reaches into the bowl. Apple. He drops it back in the bowl and fishes out a strawberry.

He wishes George and Paul and Hector hadn’t taken off without him. Being alone sucks.

He finishes the fruit salad, washes the bowl, and rinses his hands and wipes them on a paper towel and uses it to blow his nose.

Making sure one more time that the guys aren’t lurking somewhere in the house waiting to ambush him and scare him shitless, he goes to the stereo and puts on Madman Across the Water, one of his mom’s favorites. He turns the volume up and goes to his room and takes out a fresh piece of graph paper.

He starts to draw a new map, ignoring the grid of lines this time, drawing jagged twisting lines, caves and tunnels and dead ends. A labyrinth with more monsters in it for the guys.

After a couple minutes he stops drawing and goes back in the drawer and finds the picture of Alexandra that was in Timo’s things. He looks at it, covering Te quiero, Timo with his thumb.

“Tiny Dancer” plays in the livingroom.

He pictures hitting Timo with a battle ax.

ImsuchadildoImsuchadildoImsuchadildo.

– Chester. Muchacho, it’s Geezer. Got a minute? Not bad, no complaints. Well, that’s a fucking lie, course I got complaints. Man ain’t got complaints ain’t alive. Man that can’t open his mouth to bitch is…the word? The word when someone’s out of it, asleep, knocked out, but forever? No, like that, but the other one. Someone gets hit by a hammer they go in a coma, but if the hammer hits you then you’re what? Comatose. That’s it. Man ain’t got something to bitch about, he must be comatose. Yeah, yeah, then he’d really have something to bitch about, just couldn’t, yeah. Hey, Chester, can we pass the fucking time later, I got something. A bond? Why the fuck else do I call you? Yes, a bond. A big fucking bond. Two big fucking bonds. Yeah, them. No, two. The little one is a minor, they released him to his parents. Too bad for him, what I hear he’d be better off staying in a cell. His old man’s gonna beat the shit out of him. That’s sure as hell what I’d do I was his dad. So his older brothers. Yeah, it’s a load. No. No. Tell you what, no, you just put it up. Fuck do I care that’s not the way you do business? That’s not my problem. You, no, you put up the bond. They’re not going anywhere. Only place they’re going is to do some work for me. They take off, we can talk. Till then, just bond their ass out of jail. Fuck do I care how you make money? I care about you bond the fucking Arroyos and tell them to get their asses over to my place. You worry about making money off some useless cocksucker out there who isn’t gonna have someone come in your office one night and hit you with a fucking hammer until you’re fucking comatose.