Marcus looked at the Twins. They nodded.

“He used to work for the Butler,” Marcus said. “But not anymore. Nobody knows his name. He mumbles and never really makes sense. He salvages metal downtown. Tears out the guts of all this city’s old industrial pigeontraps. That’s where I met him. We leave him hoses, and he leaves money in grocery bags.”

“But why does he want hoses?” said Will. “Is he a gardener?”

“Who cares?” the big Twin said.

“Does he wear boots?” said Will.

“Question time’s over,” said Marcus. “Look, it doesn’t matter, because now that Jonah’s got my bag for me, I’ll be leaving rotten old Thunder Bay forever and won’t need to touch another garden hose again in my life,” he said, rubbing his hands together like a cartoon villain.

“But where are you going?” Will said, his eyes misting at the notion of Marcus leaving forever, “What about this place you built? And—”

“—Yeah, Marcus, the thing is,” Jonah began. “I still have the backpack, but I don’t exactly know where your paper is. I had it stashed with my drawings, and then they all just … disappeared.”

Marcus’s eyes sunk into black pits, and he sat down on a crude wooden bench and pressed his palms to his cheeks, pushing back his bangs into a kind of crown. The scars on his neck grew red as stoplights. The Twins inched to the edges of the cabin. “It’s okay,” said Marcus in an ineffective, self-consoling way that reminded Will of his mother. “The Butler still can’t find me here. Neither can his wolves.”

“But Marc,” one of the Twins said, “he knows it’s you who took it.”

“You could give it back,” said the other Twin nervously.

“It’s too late for that,” said Marcus grimly, setting his forehead on the table.

“Look,” interjected Jonah. “Maybe Mr. Miller snatched it from my desk. I could ask him?”

At the mention of Jonah’s desk, Will’s stomach dropped and a milkshake of bile rose in his throat. Thrust before him was his first Outside crime: the drawing he’d stolen and given to Angela on his first day of school. How could he now risk his only chance at friendship by telling Jonah he’d taken it? He had to get it back from Angela. He could only hope she still had it and hadn’t boiled it down to make a Jonah-scented perfume or something.

Perhaps it was the thrill of finding Marcus, or the bulge of guilt in him, but by this point Will’s bladder was on the cusp of detonation. Any second he’d shower everyone in Marcus’s cabin with a boiling brew of blood and urine. Afterwards, surgeons would have to fashion Will an artificial one out of something gross like a sheep’s stomach or a gall bladder—whatever that was.

“Marcus, where’s the bathroom?” Will said.

Marcus lifted his face and cast his eyes around the cabin theatrically. “Now where did I install that lavatory …,” he said, hand on elbow, two fingers to his chin.

“Are you fucking kidding?” the big Twin said.

Jonah leaned into Will. “Just go outside, Will,” he whispered.

Will exited through the rickety corrugated door, listening to the Twins’ snickering wane as he plunged into the brush. He walked until he found a stump that was vaguely toilet-like—hollow with one section risen up at the back. He fished out his penis and brandished it, but nothing ensued. He’d never peed anywhere other than Venice or the strange urinals at his school that reminded him of children’s coffins made of porcelain, all tipped up on end. He was thinking about how reckless and unlawful it was to deface the forest this way, especially since lately he’d started liking trees, when a thick arm tightened across his neck.

“Stay still, prawn,” a wheezy voice said. “I’ll twinkle your throat like a stripe. Don’t entertain whimsies about it.” Another arm grappled his waist, squeezing the effervescent jellyfish of his bladder, which was now crawling electric up his back.

“Who’re those zygotes in utero?” he said, nudging Will to the shack.

“Who?”

“The mini-titans, rooting through the groundswell!” the man yell-whispered, his breathing textured with tiny pops and wheezes like the embers of a dying fire.

Will managed to rotate his head but the face was sallow and scooped out by darkness. “Just boys. One of them lives there.”

“Oh, so that’s the differential, is it? Well, what’s my address?” the man hissed. “Quick!”

“I … don’t—”

“Okay smarty-pepper, what’s yourself?”

“My address?”

“And don’t conjure me that swimming in pool six.”

Will whimpered the name of his street as he released a painful zap of urine into the brush, squeezing it to a halt.

“Your name, pipsqwuak!” he panted. “Put your groundhogs behind it.”

“My name is Will …,” he said, straining.

The man emitted a little gasp, loosening his grip momentarily. He drew close to Will’s ear, and his tone softened. “You’ll operate best by vacating here, chummy. This venue is the worst refuge. He’s imminent.” Then the man ratcheted his arms again and began to drag Will into the woods. For a moment, Will felt nearly calmed by the man’s force, as he sometimes did when his mother Black Lagooned so bad that her before-bed cuddles bruised him. And it was amid the sanctum of this thought that release arrived, full-steam and warm, deflecting off the man’s coat and whooshing over Will’s legs, splashing into his dropped jeans and trickling through his cuffs like downspouts.

“Orchard fire!” the man bellowed, releasing him, and Will landed in a flat-out sprint, hoisting his pants as he crashed through a barbed wire of branches, the moon swinging overhead in the night sky like a scythe blade loosed from its stick.

He soon dashed into the culvert with sweat scorching his face, his still-healing thigh tearing away from the bone. He dropped his arms to pump at his sides through the tunnel. When he was two doors from his house, the air snapped with a new injection of cold, and tiny flakes were sent to spiral into the air, almost not falling at all.

Bursting through the window into New York, he shucked the urine-soaked pants from his legs and camped under the covers of his cot, his chest thudding like a speed bag, on the brink of going Black Lagoon supernova. He lay awake for what felt like hours, waiting for his eyeballs to pop and his heart to perform its last kick and his life to ebb. But soon Will grew leaden, and before long he crashed headfirst through the plate-glass window of sleep.

11

Will lay low until the following Monday, when he woke early and departed for school before his mother emerged from San Francisco.

“Happy to have you back, Mr. Cardiel,” said Mr. Miller glumly, wiping his glasses on the hem of his golf shirt before draining the noxious contents of his mug. When the bell rang, Jonah wasn’t at his desk; neither was Angela. Will approached Wendy, Angela’s next-closest friend, and learned that Angela had been sent to Toronto for special treatments. “They don’t have the right machines in Thunder Bay,” Wendy said grimly, revealing a glimmering briar of braces when she spoke.

With the school bell still in his ears Will jogged back through the dripping catacomb of the culvert, this time with only a tickle of fear, and plunged into the woods on the other side. After some searching he found Marcus’s shack between two wooded hummocks. It was half-dismantled, the corrugated metal and chip wood splayed outward on two sides. The garden hoses had vanished, as had the sardines and blueberries and camp stove and bedroll. Will failed to find any boot prints in the hard dirt around the shack, which was crisscrossed with roots, but he did turn up a few lifeless chickadees and grackles on the cabin’s perimeter.

The streets of County Park were narrower and less treed than those of Grandview Gardens. The driveways harbored pickup trucks, mostly, all with tool-bearing racks and locking containers. Curiously, there were no power lines overhead, and every third house had a green box out front that read DANGER! BURIED CABLE! aside the image of an electrocuted man, twisted in rapture.