Once during their walk Will asked what it was like having her brother back. “He’s completely different,” she said. “Yet he’s the same. But watching the people you love get hurt is part of the deal, I’m learning. That’s the mistake I made with you, honey. And somehow, despite getting hurt, Charlie managed to hold on to the kindest parts of himself. It’s the only way we can survive what the world will do to us.” When she saw him losing interest, she finger-poked his ribs. “But the good news for you is: he’s very brave about changing lightbulbs.”

Another time they walked all the way to a thrift store, where she donated her old Relaxation Machine. “I’ve got a new one,” she’d said to the clerk, patting the Bolex that now hung constantly at her side, which she’d bring on their walks to shoot things that caught her interest. After that, Will urged her to venture again outside their neighborhood, downtown, or the culvert again, but she refused. “Trust me,” she said. “Our street is enough danger for me.” So he let it drop. They were going to Toronto on an airplane for something to do with her films the following fall, so he’d just have to trust her.

People Outside say someone is “losing it” when they get scared, but Will wasn’t so sure. It was more like his mother had been securing something during all that time Inside, clutching at it, like those people on TV stuck in a blowing tube, trying frantically to catch the money fluttering around them, except the bills were actually pieces of her. Even though it didn’t look pretty, from now on Will had to trust that she’d catch at least a few of them.

Jonah did get sent to Templeton, but he and Will were going to the same high school next year if he kept his marks up, so it wasn’t the end of the world. By now Jonah could recite his medical books backward, but Will hadn’t told his mother yet that they were both taking a year off after grade twelve to move to real San Francisco and skateboard professionally for a year before Jonah started med school. Will hoped for her sake that the Black Lagoon would be gone by the time that happened, but if it wasn’t, she’d have to build some more calluses.

Angela was doing better, and Will often skateboarded to the hospital for visits. When her breathing permitted, they’d wedge the door of her room shut with one of her vibration machines and lower her bed flat. Then Will would take off his shoes, and they’d lie for a while and kiss and clamp their pelvises together and stroke each other’s hair while listening to the whooshing and beeping of the hospital.

All that summer, Will and Jonah filmed themselves skateboarding with the new Bolex they earned working for Titus. They met some other skateboarders downtown who’d ventured forth from their own neighborhoods and driveways: a Chinese kid who bruised easily and had to hide both his bruises and his skateboard from a strict father who taught chemistry at the college; an only-child girl whose father was the city’s best hockey coach; a motor-mouthed Irish kid who used to be a soccer prodigy but quit when his mother died, Even the Belcourt Twins had returned from up north and somehow had acquired skateboards, though they were more interested in opportunistic mischief and hash smoking than doing actual tricks. But despite their outward differences, Will had observed that skateboarding was a contagion a certain species of kid was susceptible to. That they’d all had something go wrong in their lives: divorces, deaths, diseases, deficiencies, accidents, nutty relatives stuffed in a basement somewhere—expectations that didn’t fit reality; dark, unplanned swerves of fate; falls their families had taken. Each kid with their own personal Black Lagoon that skateboarding somehow rendered less terrifying.

Will and Jonah were by far the best skateboarders in Thunder Bay, which wasn’t saying much, but it was something. Though Will could see the true reverence the others reserved for Jonah. The way their jaws loosened as they looked at him sidelong. The way they sat down when he arrived, embarrassed they didn’t move with anything close to his exactness and grace. While Will’s style was jerky—he did strange things with his right hand, an involuntary bird claw with the fingers—Jonah was ever more elegant, languid, full of feline poise, all lithe power and confidence. He sizzled down Thunder Bay’s rough streets like water poured over hot rocks, skating with a complete, evident joy—a free person, open to the air, unleashed upon the world.

Will often dreamed of what a skateboarder Marcus would’ve been if he’d stuck with it. His low center of gravity, his quick reflexes, his pure abandon and clever, resourceful mind. He would’ve been incredible, maybe even better than Jonah, like a comet streaking across the city. Will’s one hope was that there were skateboards wherever that lakeboat had brought him, and some other fearless, lost children for him to ride them with.

When summer was over, Jonah and Will sent their footage away to be developed, and to their astonishment most of the reels came back usable. After a tutorial from his mother, Will threw himself into editing, using her old dusty machine that spliced and taped the clips together. Will began with the skateboarding footage, cutting the usable clips in which they actually landed their tricks into one pile, and placed their more gruesome falls into another, including the one where Will hit the ground so hard both his shoes flew off and Jonah’s near castration on a handrail a month earlier. The rest of the footage he put in a box in Toronto.

Since it only added up to a few minutes, he cut other clips he’d shot (he’d got the idea from his mother’s films, which he’d finally watched and found unnerving and occasionally beautiful, even though nothing happened): interactions with people on the streets of downtown, clips of buses and seagulls and bright-yellow fire hydrants, shots of Angela grinning in her hospital bed and decrepit old Pool 6 guarding the lake. He even put in a flash of Charlie’s hardened face—the only time he’d ever allowed Will to film him. When it still didn’t feel substantial enough, Will cut up films he used to watch when he was Inside, including the scene of the Creature swimming inches beneath the unaware woman in the Black Lagoon, and distributed these randomly throughout. For the last scene, right after Jonah rolled away from the handrail he’d miraculously slid, a feat so impossible and precarious it still seemed like special effects, Will inserted the shot where the front of a barn nearly fell on Buster Keaton, his tiny body narrowly passing through the open window, unharmed, cyclones swirling around his unconcerned face.

“I love all the other stuff you put in there,” Jonah said when he saw it. “Makes it more arty.”

“You don’t think it’s too weird?” Will replied. “Like it should just be skateboarding and that’s it?”

“No,” Jonah said, “it’s a masterpiece,” and Will gave him a shot in the shoulder.

For his thirteenth birthday, Will asked his mother to watch it. He dragged the card table into Cairo and set up the old projector on it.

“This is going to be radical,” she said, winking when she came in and sat down with a mug of black tea.

“Please don’t say radical ever again,” said Will.

“I was quite radical when I was young,” she said, with a mock scowl and a fist raised straight in the air, fingers forward, thumb tucked inside.

“I’m going to have an aneurysm,” Will said, as he attached the take-up reel to the projector and started winding it manually, so it wouldn’t break the fragile, hand-edited strip.

“What’s this feature entitled?” said Titus, from the doorway in his fur-trimmed parka, though it was late summer.

“It’s called: If I Fall, If I Die,” said Will.

“Doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” said his mother.

“Jonah thought of it,” Will said. “It’s because we put our worst falls in there, too, along with all the tricks we ride away from.”