This tidy morsel of magic that Jonah had performed seemed almost another trap to test Will’s gullibility, another shaken pop can or match bomb, but Will couldn’t resist.

“What was that?” he said reverently, when Jonah button-hooked back.

“What?” said Jonah.

“What you just did.”

“That? It’s called an ollie.”

“But how do you make it jump like that?”

“I don’t really know,” he said, smoothing back his bangs. Will wondered if his brothers cut his hair like that, or if he did it himself. “It just works. I taught myself by reading Thrasher and watching Marcus. You jump and slide your front foot and it happens. I don’t even understand it. It’s better that way.”

“Do it again.”

As Jonah cracked off a series of identically lofty hops over manholes and storm drains, equal measures of recognition and rapture struck Will like sheet lightning. It was an act of such miraculousness that Will felt unworthy of it. Every dance performance and action movie and Destructivity Experiment he’d ever known seemed to be contained in this one gesture, this ollie. Will’s legs itched to try, but somehow he understood the sacrilege of asking for a turn on Jonah’s board. Plus, he had to take it easy on his heart.

“How long have you been … doing that?” Will asked.

“A few years. My brothers pitched in and bought me a board. Believe me, I’m not that good.”

“Looks like you were born on it.”

Jonah let go a rare laugh. His teeth were crooked, cool crooked. “My brothers were always shoulder-checking me, tripping me down, shoving snow in my face. You get good at staying on your feet.”

Then, as though to contradict him, a grinding sounded from beneath him, and Jonah was hurled to the half-frozen pavement with a naked thwack of palm and hip.

“Jonah!” Will said rushing to his side. “Can you hear me? Are you okay? Do you want an ambulance?”

“I’m fine, Will,” Jonah said through pain-gritted teeth while rolling over, then lifting himself incredibly into a sitting position on the ground. He kicked away the small pink stone that had thwarted his wheel.

“Don’t get up,” cautioned Will. “You may have a spinal. Or a concussion.”

“Chill out,” Jonah said, laughing, as Will was casting about for a phone booth.

Will fell silent as Jonah rose and they resumed walking, quietly loathing his mother and the Black Lagoon for so thoroughly screwing his understanding of what constituted a catastrophe.

“Why don’t you talk at school?” said Will, hoping Jonah wouldn’t stop talking all over again.

“They expect Indians not to,” he said. “So I don’t want to disappoint them. Talking only digs you deeper in that place. They handcuff you with your own words. You ever say anything that brought you good there?” Jonah asked.

Will remembered describing the visualization blueprint he’d drawn on his first day and shook his head.

“I talk all the time,” said Jonah, his limp diluting with every step. “I talk to myself. I talk to my brothers. I’m talking to you. I talk when I want. But when I’m there, I keep my mouth shut, do my schoolwork, and go home.”

Will noted they were nearing the path to the culvert. “So where’s Marcus?”

“He left me a note written in blood on birchbark. Said he wanted to meet. Typical Marcus. I heard he was living on his own in the woods, stealing things for the Butler to make money.”

“Garden hoses, right? You guys use the match bombs as a diversion while Marcus steals the hoses from the backyard.”

Jonah did a little palm-clap. “Very good. But I only taught them how to make those bombs. That was it. I don’t need money. My brothers are working at the call center now. Anyway, you can’t buy your way out of Thunder Bay. I’m leaving my own way.” Will was about to ask how when the mouth of the culvert yawned before them, black as deep space, and a force overtook him, denying the obedience of his legs. He watched Jonah plunge into the soupy dark. Will’s heart was double-bumping lethally, but more than his nascent Outside bravery, it was the mounting distress in his bladder—now a stingy jellyfish spreading its tentacles across his pelvis—and the prospect of relief that pressed him into the eeriness of the tunnel. The dark was pure as the linen closet in London with the door shut, and Will’s eyes gulped it greedily, the borders of his body lost to him. He put one foot in front of the other, and the opposite opening approached like an inhospitable planet.

“Come on, Will,” Jonah beckoned from the woods when he emerged. After he walked through a stand of pine, five flashlights snapped, and Will found himself surrounded by a Stonehenge of boys.

“You again,” said Marcus, his eyes incandescent with mischief and bravery. “Couldn’t resist coming out for another taste of the world, huh, Will?”

Will slyly watched Jonah’s reaction to see if his household’s situation was common neighborhood knowledge, but found no confirmation on his new friend’s face. Marcus’s hair was longer than before, now well past his eyes, greasy and matted with leaves. He wore a filthy one-piece snowsuit—a cross between caveman and spaceman. On his feet were snowmobile boots, much smaller than the hexagonal tracks in Will’s yard.

“I’ve been looking for you, Marcus,” Will said, speaking quickly. “I’m going to school now. And I’d got really good at ice sliding until a wolf—”

“—Too much talking,” the biggest Belcourt Twin said, the light of a calculator watch flaring on his wrist. “Time is nigh,” he added.

Marcus rapped Jonah’s skateboard deck with his knuckle. “Are the Home Ranger and the Rolling Indian up for a little visit?”

Will and Jonah followed the boys, romping deeper into the woods, the only sound a faint rustle of highway. After a while, their amber beams reached out to define a structure in the scrub, a shack, crafted of corrugated metal rusted oxide-red, a few wood scraps, and a tarp worked in somehow. One wall was comprised of a huge green road sign—TORONTO: 1376 KM—which reminded Will momentarily of his basement.

“Like my place?” Marcus said, unhitching a padlock with his scarred hands and ushering them inside. “Built it myself,” he said, swiveling his light and their collective attention around the interior. Will had expected the trappings of delinquent boys—discount sodas, firecrackers, various Destructivity Experiment material—but it was surprisingly neat. There was a camping stove, a few chairs, a bedroll, and a single book, titled Great Lake Navigation. Nearly fifty garden hoses hung from nails everywhere, green, black, and orange. Stacked on a shelf were hundreds of tins of sardines and many pint boxes of blueberries. Struggling to disguise his envy, Will was thrilled his theory had proven correct: Marcus had been living Outside. In an Inside entirely of his own making. Wonderfully alone. Beyond the reach of adults, with nobody to worry over him or bombard him with guilt—it seemed to Will a tremendous luxury.

“You approve, Will?” said Marcus. “I already heard about your little tangle with that wolf. Impressive. Thanks for helping to keep my stuff safe.” Will resisted the sudden urge to embrace Marcus and tell him everything that had happened since they first met in one great typhoon of description: his Destructivity Experiments, the taste of the leaf he’d chewed, the boring excitement of school, his blood bouncing on the ice, his dead uncle Charlie, Jonah’s miraculous ollie. “Oh, and the Twins saved this for you,” Marcus said, pointing to the old Helmet he’d left by the creek. Will didn’t know if it would be worse if he ignored or acknowledged it, so he settled on a meaningful nod.

“You’ve got a ton of hoses in here,” said Jonah. “You still selling them?”

“Haven’t seen him in a bit,” replied Marcus. “We’ve built up a surplus. But hoses don’t matter anymore.”

“Haven’t seen who?” asked Will.