“Does this mean we’re friends?” Will called out as the boy paused near the back hedge and glanced over his shoulder. Will could see his belly undulate evenly as he breathed.

“Whatever, sure,” he said.

“But someone is still trying to catch you, right?” Will said. “Aren’t you scared?”

The boy cocked his head. “You were serious when you said this was your first time outside, weren’t you?”

Will nodded.

“You know what?” the boy said, smiling again. “I was wrong when I said you should go back inside. There’s nothing to be scared of out here.” Will realized then that this boy’s brave, bright face was a light he wanted to shine upon him forever. “Look, I bet your head has already stopped bleeding.”

Will pulled the shirt away and saw it was chocolate brown.

“See?” the boy said. “Nothing can really hurt you, Will.” Then he vanished into the ferocious-looking woods.

2

When Will returned Inside, the air in Cairo was thick as cream and stunk of couch crevasse. He gagged and ran to Venice, where he blotted his forehead with gauze to find that the actual cut was tiny: a single pit, like a one rolled on a die. Luckily, it hadn’t swelled and was high enough to cover with his bangs if he wore his Helmet tipped forward, which he did, both to protect his wound and to conceal it.

He hid the blood-blackened shirt—featuring a skeletal sorcerer wielding an electric guitar—down in Toronto, then returned upstairs to draw a cup of water from the sink in Paris. Slurping, he forced himself to sit, fighting to slow his breathing, while watching steam belch from the lid of the slow cooker—the only culinary appliance his mother could abide other than the breadmaker, because it couldn’t scald them, and it rendered food sufficiently mushy to eliminate the always present danger of choking. If ever Will stopped chewing while at the table, even if only pausing before flooding his mouth with milk, she’d leap up and start whacking his chest with her forearm.

By the big chrome clock he knew she’d be just starting Side B of her Relaxation Tapes. She’d been doing them daily in San Francisco for a month now: donning the huge creaky headphones that swallowed her ears, the opaque Terminator shades that assailed her eyes with light, rendering her deaf, blind, oblivious. He couldn’t imagine two hours of anything even denting the obsidian shell of the Black Lagoon, but Will cherished this new time away from her supervision. He’d tried the apparatus on once when she was in the bath, but the blinky light show and left-right pan of surf made him fall asleep and then immediately pee himself, which his mother did sometimes when she supremely lost it, but that was more the Black Lagoon’s fault, not the Tapes. Regardless, it seemed to Will somehow simultaneously depressing and thrilling that his entire Outside ordeal had lasted a total of nine minutes.

After dinner, Will was wearing his Helmet along with a hooded wetsuit, standing on a chair, and reaching into the stratosphere in London while his mother cowered in the doorway, her blonde chin-length hair framing a pair of dark, insectoid sunglasses. She was snapping her blue elastic band against the velvety inside of her wrist.

“You sure you’re okay?” she said, which actually meant, like most things she uttered: be careful.

“It’s fine, Mom,” Will said, vaulting to his toes, which made his forehead throb. He grasped the lightbulb and twisted, unsure if it was turning or only slipping through the rubberized gloves of his wetsuit. Like all their earthly possessions, they’d ordered the wetsuit from a catalogue, and he’d since drawn numerous ice cube–laden baths to test it. He hadn’t tried shocks yet, but the idea was that the rubber insulated against those too.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said, her face tied in a wince.

“Sit around in the dark talking to yourself?” he said, and she smiled.

For weeks she’d worried over this dead bulb in London. She usually had deliverymen do it, but after meeting the boy, Will had begged her to let him try. There was still a moon launch’s worth of preparation, including highlightered diagrams she’d taped to the fridge in Paris. If Will were older, she’d probably make him wear a condom, which was like a penis scabbard she told him about for making sex with vaginas safer, but more boring.

She’d been right about one thing: the Outside was indeed steeped with danger. His encounter with the boy had confirmed it. But the Inside could be dangerous too. Besides getting sling-shotted by the amethyst (he’d classified the purple crystal with his encyclopedia), Will had nearly died twelve times in his life—four she knew about, each of which had incited weeklong Black Lagoons. When wet, the tub in Venice got slick as mucus, and Will once almost died from a Helmetless slip that dropped him violently to his butt, which was why they only took baths (they used to share baths but they stopped because of vaginas). Another time he crashed while riding the exercise bike. Once he overdosed on four extra-strength Tylenol. Then he ate yogurt expired by a whole week. Later, he choked on a chicken finger that he tried to push down his throat without chewing—like a boa constrictor, because he just learned about them.

But electricity was one of the premier Black Lagoons: the pain and paralysis, the way it lurked in the walls, everywhere and nowhere, unreasonable, invisible as fear itself. Though his mother stuffed safety guards into every unused outlet, Will had once shocked himself by allowing his wet thumb to linger on the plug of his tape player. He returned to himself across the room with his tongue buzzing and spectral in his mouth. He never told her. Events like that could pack her off somewhere permanently demented.

“Hey, these blades are actually made out of wood,” Will said, now with a good grip on the bulb. The fixture was also a ceiling fan, except she’d long ago hired an electrician to disable this function because if it came unmoored it would cut them to shreds.

“They once made airplane propellers with wood, you know,” she said, with another snap of her elastic. “Think one of those wouldn’t hurt?”

“I guess it would,” said Will.

The bulb turned, and he hated the metal-on-metal sensation, an ungodly grind like chewing sand. The fan rattled a little, and she emitted a clucking sound somewhere between Oh and No. At the climactic instant the bulb pulled from the socket, she fled the room, and Will couldn’t help but feel let down. He nearly yearned for the shock that would blast him from his perch in a hail of sparks and fire, a display he figured the boy would admire, torching Will as dead as the blue jay he’d watched die in the smelly earth so long ago.

That night, after their stew and smoothies, she made him a banana split with BRAVERY scripted along one of the banana halves in chocolate syrup, and he imagined that it wasn’t for the lightbulb, but for his covert trip Outside. During their usual bedtime cuddle, he worried for the whole twenty minutes that she could smell his wound or somehow detect the Outside on his clothes, even though he’d changed his cut-off shorts, took two separate baths, and was wearing the wetsuit to bed, which she disliked because she said it made him sweat like a squash player, and he could perish of dehydration.

His mind veered to the day’s venture: the wind sashaying around him, the birch trees shaking as though in applause, the gently smoking bomb, the boy’s kind, welcoming face, while the preposterous sky flew upward beyond all measurement. He was overtaken with a drowsy urge to describe it to her, this dreadful miracle of the Outside and most of all the boy: Other Will. Even if only whispered in her sleep-blocked ear, Will wanted to somehow administer this information to her like some awful medicine, then watch her vanish into a hurricane of Black Lagoon, the hellish aftermath of both his dangerous venture and the more troublesome concern of the Outside being inside him now, like a stain. But the idea charred him with guilt. And as sleep wafted over from the continent of her body, warm and unlimited beside him, he dreamed of the amethyst striking his forehead again and again, of his own candy-apple blood on his hands, and of the boy repeating that revelatory, heart-stopping sentence—Nothing can really hurt you, Will—as if it all had something to teach him, as if it were something he ought to try again.