Wasn’t till that evening that George and Hector found him at the firebreak at the edge of their housing tract. Drunk on the three sixteen ouncers he’d grabbed from the fridge, head spinning from the smokes he’d bummed off a high school kid, telling George and Hector that Timo is dead. He’s gonna kill that little fucking faggot. He tells them all the way home.

He doesn’t tell them that he cried. And he doesn’t tell them why he cried.

He doesn’t tell them that reaching to pull his cup out of his athletic supporter, being told to put his hand down his shorts like that, made him think of his father.

– I’m gonna kill that fucking faggot.

George is sitting on the ground, turning his bike’s front wheel in his lap, tucking the innertube back up inside the tire.

– Where’d you see him?

Hector is picking up tools.

– Over by their house.

– Was he fucking around or headed home?

– He was headed toward Fernando’s pad.

George is using a screwdriver to flip the edge of the tire back inside the wheel rim. He stops.

– Fernando’s?

– Yeah.

George goes back to work.

– Shit.

Paul is on his bike. He’s already ridden it to the corner and back twice, Andy trailing him on foot both ways, saying nothing.

– So fucking what, he’s going to his brother’s; I’m still gonna kill him.

Hector shakes his head.

– Fine, man, go pedal over there and kill him. Not like Fernando won’t be home. Not like Ramon didn’t get out of Santa Rita last month. You see him since he got out?

– Fuck him.

– Looks like all he did in there was eat and pump iron.

Paul limps his wrist.

– And take it in the ass.

Hector turns away.

– I’m just saying, you know, you don’t want to mess with Fernando and Ramon.

George has slipped the wheel back onto his bike’s front forks. With a crescent wrench he gradually tightens the nuts on either side of the wheel, giving it a spin after each turn of the wrench to be certain that it stays true.

– When’d Timo move out of his folks’?

Hector has pulled out a nearly full pack of Marlboro Reds. He takes one for himself and hands the pack around.

– Don’t know. My sister says he got in a fight with his mom and hit her in the stomach and his dad threw him out. Like, dragged him out the front door and threw him and a bunch of his shit on the lawn. So now he’s at Fernando’s.

The others are quiet as they each take a smoke from the pack.

George takes out a Bic sheathed in the stainless steel and turquoise case he bought at the Devil’s Workshop head shop last summer. They all bum a light.

Hector takes the pack back and looks at Paul.

– And that’s all. He’s over there with his brothers. You ride over there and fuck him up, they’re gonna kill you.

Paul bites the filter of his cigarette and gets back on his bike.

– Fuck ’em. I’ll fucking kill those faggots if they let me take ’em one on one. Only way they can take me is if they gang up.

– Well, shit, man, that’s what they fucking do.

George gives the wheel a final spin and packs the last of his tools away.

– Doesn’t matter what they do. We got to go over there. They got Andy’s bike.

And that’s when they look around and realize that Andy’s gone.

Andy was cool till Hector mentioned Alexandra and they all stopped talking.

Andy stopped talking because the thought of Alexandra always shuts him up. Shuts him up and makes his face hot so that he has to turn away. What sucks is that George and Paul stopped talking, too. Like they didn’t want to accidentally say something in front of Hector about the sudden curves that have broken out over Alexandra’s body. It’d be bad enough if Hector knew Andy was thinking about her that way. If he knew George and Paul had started checking her out, he’d have flipped. Pulled out the length of bicycle chain he keeps stuffed in his pocket, wrapped it around his fist and started swinging at his best friends.

Not that they really have to worry. Hector hasn’t noticed the looks that follow Alexandra down the street. Hector still sees the same little girl he’s always seen. But Andy’s always seen her different, always seen how pretty she is. Not that she knows anything about it. Or anything about him.

But she knows about Timo.

Why couldn’t it just be the damn bike?

Thinking about Timo on his bike, that sucks. That made him start thinking about ways of hurting Timo. Started a riot in his head. Dreams of finding Timo on his bike and pushing him off it and into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

Another imaginary murder skidding across his brain. Leaving him wondering what the fuck is wrong with him. Why does he think about shit like that?

Which is stupid, because it’s really his own fault the bike got stolen in the first place. If he’d not been so stupid, if he’d just locked up the bike, that piece of shit bike, Timo wouldn’t be on it right now. Not Timo’s fucking fault that he found an unlocked bike lying around. You don’t blame a guy for picking up the five dollar bill you let fall out of your pocket. So what if Timo’s never missed an opportunity to casually run him into a wall in the corridors at school? So what if Timo shouts choke every time he swings the bat in PE softball games? Lots of kids do that. Man, kids have been doing that shit to Andy since his first day of kindergarten. Since the first time he started getting noticed and people started talking about how smart he is. If he can’t put up with that shit by now, what’s the point? He pictures using one of the nicked and scarred aluminum PE bats to cave in Timo’s forehead.

And repeats his mantra: ImsuchadildoImsuchadildoImsuchadildo.

The secret formula that halts the violence in his head. Most of the time.

But Alexandra.

Andy understands why she knows that Timo had been kicked out. She knows for the same reason that Andy knows many of the details of her life: because she likes Timo. God! Bad enough he catches Paul and George looking at her. Just now, after he’s been looking at her for years. That’s bad enough. And it’s fucking gross. Bad enough that Timo might like her. But that she likes him back?

Isn’t anything his? Isn’t there one fucking thing that is worthless enough that he can have it to himself? His own pair of jeans that aren’t George’s hand me downs? His own smokes that aren’t bummed from someone else? A crap pair of Cheetahs sneakers because his folks won’t get him Pumas because he’s just gonna grow out of them anyway? His water spotted books that come from some library sale of shit that’s not good enough for the shelves anymore? The girl that no one else notices because she’s quiet and scrawny and he’s the only one who sees how pretty she is? His own piece of shit bike that his dad cobbled together from old Schwinn and Huffy parts that he salvaged from garage sales? Can’t he at least have that? A bike that everyone makes fun of? Can’t he have that without having to worry about someone fucking jerking it away from him and not giving it back till it’s broken and used up and all the fun has been taken out of it because it’s just one more fucking reminder of what a dildo he is?

Fucking Timo!

The pictures come again, and he does nothing to try and stop them.

Fucking Andy!

George rides hard, trying to find his brother.

Sometimes? Sometimes, man, he just wishes he didn’t have a brother at all. How much easier would that make life?

Fifteen years since the little shit was born, and he’s been underfoot every single day of every single year. Always such a baby. Such a crybaby. From the moment Mom came home from the hospital with him he was crying. God! The years of sharing a room with him after he was too old to sleep in mom and dad’s room but before dad put in the attic room, was there anything worse than that? Six years old and the kid was always waking up with nightmares, crying.