When he had enough air to speak, he said, “You can’t come with me.” A part of him was thinking already that the only way for him to atone was to be done with her, but another part of him, the same part that had traded for the cross in the first place, knew he wasn’t going to do that. He had decided weeks ago, had made a deal, not just with Lee but with himself, that he would do what was necessary to be the boy walking next to Merrin Williams. Giving her up wouldn’t make him the good guy in this story. It was too late to be the good guy.

“Why not? He’s my friend, too,” she said, and Ig was at first surprised at her, then at himself, for not realizing that this was true.

“I don’t know what he’ll say. He might be mad at me. He might say stuff about-about a trade.” As soon as he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have said it.

“What trade?” He shook his head, but she asked again. “What did you trade?”

“You won’t be mad?”

“I don’t know. Tell me, and then we’ll see.”

“After I found your cross, I gave it to Lee so he could fix it. But then he was going to keep it, and I had to trade him to get it back. And the cherry bomb was what I traded.”

She furrowed her brow. “So?”

He stared helplessly into her face, willing her to understand, but she didn’t understand, so he said, “He was going to keep it so he’d have a way to meet you.”

For one moment longer, her eyes were clouded, uncomprehending. Then they cleared. She did not smile.

“You think you traded-” she started, then stopped. A moment later she started again. She was staring at him with a cool, ball-shriveling calm. “You think you traded for me, Ig? Is that how you think all this worked? And do you think if he had returned the cross to me instead of you, then Lee and I would be-” But she didn’t say that either, because to go any further would be to admit that she and Ig were together now, something they both understood but had not dared to say aloud. She started a third time. “Ig. I left it on the pew for you.”

“You left it-what?”

“I was bored. I was so bored. And I was sitting there imagining a hundred more mornings, roasting in the sun in that church, dying inside one Sunday at a time while Father Mould blabbed away about my sins. I needed something to look forward to. Some reason to be there. I didn’t just want to listen to some guy talk about sin. I wanted to do some myself. And then I saw you sitting there like a little priss, hanging on every word like it was all so interesting, and I knew Ig, I just knew-that fucking with your head would present me with hours of entertainment.”

AS IT HAPPENED, IN THE END Ig did go and see Lee Tourneau alone. When Merrin and Ig started back to the community center, to clean up the pizza boxes and the empty juice bottles, there came a peal of thunder that lasted for at least ten seconds, a low, steady rumble that was not so much heard as felt. It caused the bones in Ig’s body to shiver like tuning forks. Five minutes later the rain was clattering on the roof, so loudly he had to shout at Merrin to be heard over it, even when she was standing right next to him. It was so dark, the water coming down with such force, that it was difficult to see to the curb from the open doors. They had thought they might be able to bike to Lee’s, but Merrin’s father turned up to bring her home in his station wagon, and there was no opportunity to go anywhere together.

Terry had gotten his license two days before, passing the test on his first try, and the next day he drove Ig over to Lee Tourneau’s. The storm had split trees and unscrewed telephone poles from the soil, and Terry had to steer the Jaguar around torn branches and overturned mailboxes. It was as if some great subterranean explosion, some final, powerful detonation, had rattled the whole town and left Gideon in a state of ruin.

Harmon Gates was a tangle of suburban streets, houses painted citrus colors, attached two-car garages, the occasional backyard swimming pool. Lee’s mother, the nurse, a woman in her fifties, was outside the Tourneaus’ Queen Anne, pulling branches off her parked Cadillac, her mouth puckered in a look of irritation. Terry let Ig out, said to call home when he wanted a ride back.

Lee had a large bedroom in their finished basement. Lee’s mother walked Ig down and opened the door onto a cavernous gloom, in which the only light was the blue glow of a television. “You’ve got a visitor,” she said rather tonelessly.

She let Ig past her and closed the door behind him, so they could be alone.

Lee’s shirt was off, and he sat on the edge of his bed, clutching the frame. A Benson rerun was on the tube, although Lee had the volume turned all the way down, so it was just a source of light and moving figures. A bandage covered his left eye and was wrapped around and around his skull, swaddling much of his head. The shades were pulled down. He did not look directly at Ig or at the TV; his gaze pointed downward.

“Dark in here,” Ig said.

“The sunlight hurts my head,” Lee said.

“How’s your eye?”

“They don’t know.”

“Is there any chance-”

“They think I won’t lose all the vision in it.”

“That’s good.”

Lee sat there. Ig waited.

“You know everything?”

“I don’t care,” Ig said. “You pulled me out of the river. That’s all I need to know.”

Ig was not aware that Lee was weeping until he made a snuffling sound of pain. He cried like someone enduring a small act of sadism-a cigarette ground out on the back of the hand. Ig took a step closer and kicked over a stack of CDs, discs he had given him.

“You want those back?” Lee asked.

“No.”

“What then? You want your money? I don’t have it.”

“What money?”

“For the magazines I sold you. The ones I stole.” He said the last word with an almost luxuriant bitterness.

“No.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Because we’re friends.” Ig took another step closer and then cried out softly. Lee was weeping blood. It stained the bandage and dribbled down the side of his left cheek. Lee touched two fingers absentmindedly to his face. They came away red.

“Are you all right?” Ig asked.

“It hurts when I cry. I’ll have to learn how to stop feeling bad about things.” He breathed harshly, his shoulders rising and falling. “I should’ve told you. About everything. It was shitty, selling you those magazines. Lying to you about what they were for. After I got to know you better, I wanted to take it back, but it was too late. That’s not how friends treat friends.”

“We don’t want to start with that. I wish like hell I never gave you the cherry bomb.”

“Forget it,” Lee said. “I wanted it. I decided. You don’t got to worry about that. Just don’t make up your mind to hate me. I really need someone to still like me.”

He didn’t need to ask. The sight of the blood staining through the bandage made Ig’s knees weak. It took a great effort of will not to think how he had teased Lee with the cherry, talking about all the things they could blow up together with it. How he had worked to take Merrin away from Lee, who had walked into the water and pulled him out when he was drowning, a betrayal for which there could be no expiation.

He sat down beside Lee.

“She’ll tell you not to hang around me anymore,” Lee said.

“My mom? No. No, she’s glad I came to see you.”

“Not your mom. Merrin.”

“What are you talking about? She wanted to come with me. She’s worried about you.”

“Oh?” Lee quivered strangely, as if gripped by a chill. Then he said, “I know why this happened.”

“It was a shitty accident. That’s all.”

Lee shook his head. “It was to remind me.”

Ig was quiet, waiting, but Lee didn’t speak again.

“Remind you of what?” Ig asked.

Lee was struggling against tears. He wiped at the blood on his cheek with the back of one hand and left a long dark streak.