Chapter 1

Joel openedhis bedroom window and closed his eyes, letting the cicada song blast his brain.

In the woods surrounding his backyard, millions of bugs trilled from the treetops. The sound wasn't pretty, but it was beautiful. Every male cicada pounded out a mating call in their belly drums—tymbals, Joel reminded himself, not timpani, though some did seem like tiny kettledrums whacked by even tinier mallets.

He crossed his arms on the windowsill and pressed his nose to the screen. They were louder than ever today, especially Magicicada septendecula, its song starting with a hesitant stutter before swelling into an ear-splitting rattle, like that triumphant moment when he finally got the fucking lawnmower started.

Weird to think these little guys were seventeen years old like him. It was like meeting the long-lost brothers he'd always wanted.

Under the rasping drone came the sharp slam of a car door.

Joel opened his eyes. That couldn't be either of his friends visiting—like him, they were stuck inside finishing term papers. Maybe Ella's jogging buddies were picking her up to train for next weekend's 10K run. A glimpse of her friends in those little shorts would definitely brighten his day.

"Stay." Joel stepped over Freckles, stretched out on the bedroom rug. She gave a brief tail wag but didn't follow him as he went across the hall into the master bedroom.

Mom's curtains were shut to keep the room cool. He parted them and peered out.

Bye Bye Bugsread the faded sign on the pale-blue van, the one with 86 and PEST flanking the Maryland state seal on the license plate.

Joel frowned. Mom called the friendly neighborhood exterminator at the first sight of nature encroaching upon their house: a solitary scout ant, a daddy longlegs minding its own business in the laundry room, a wayward gnat drawn inside by the negative air pressure of an opening door. No surprise she'd pulled out the big guns for this latest and greatest arthropod invasion.

Over on the driveway, Mom was talking to Lyle Evans, Mr. Bye Bye Bugs himself. Her words were inaudible, but her intention was obvious. She swept her arms upward, then put her hands over her ears and bent her knees, as if the noise were a weight upon her body.

The van's passenger door opened, and a boy around Joel's age slid out with what looked like minimum possible effort, his entire body signaling, I don't want to be here. He closed the door, then folded his arms and let his tall, muscular frame slump against the hood of the van. Thick waves of brown hair glinted as sunlight fought its way through treetops for the privilege of touching his head.

"Wow." Joel swallowed, then checked the hallway to make sure Ella hadn't heard him swooning out loud. But her bedroom door was shut, and Joel was alone.

Time to fix that.

He scowled at his own catastrophic hair in Mom's faux-gilded mirror, then slipped out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the open garage. He had to save the cicadas, after all.

"Thing is," Lyle was saying as Joel drew within earshot, "it'd take a ton of spray to cover all these trees. And they're so tall, I'd need to call for a crane. Even then we wouldn't be able to reach the tops."

"So I need to hire a crop duster?" Mom flared her fingers at the sky as though summoning a divine force. "Is that what you're telling me?"

"I'm telling you it's not worth it." Lyle took off his sweat-stained Bye Bye Bugs cap and swiped a wrist over his shiny forehead, which looked paler than usual today. Was he sick, or just sick of telling homeowners they couldn't literally kill every cicada?

"I want to literally kill every cicada," Mom said. "I don't want to hear them anymore."

Lyle gave a shallow sigh. "Doctor Mendel, you live in the woods."

"I moved to the woods for peace and quiet," she said. "I work a lot of night shifts at the hospital, so I need to sleep during the day."

"I understand." Lyle shifted his focus. "Hey there, Joel."

"Hey." Joel gave what felt like an awkward wave, then slid his hands into his front jeans pockets. "What's up?"

"I was telling your mom it'd be better to just put netting over them little bitty young cherry trees in the backyard. They're the only ones the cicadas might hurt. The big trees'll be just fine." He gestured to the towering hickories, walnuts, and maples. "Cicadas'll probably make 'em healthier with a good pruning."

"Great." Joel angled his body to peek around Lyle at the boy, who was staring off into the woods, maybe wishing he was at their next-door neighbor's barely visible house.

"Oh! Sorry." Lyle took a step back. "This is Danny. Danny, this is Joel. His mom's one of our best customers."

Danny turned his head, far enough to show he'd heard his dad speak but not far enough to acknowledge them.

Mom put a hand on Joel's arm. "Hon, why don't you take Danny inside and entertain him for a while?"

Entertain him? With what, a tap dance?

"Um, okay." Joel called out to Danny. "C'mon, it's cooler in there."

Danny shuffled toward him, so Joel headed back into the garage.

The kitchen had been enlarged after the divorce, a dining room wall smashed and removed, but when Danny joined Joel there, it felt cramped as all get-out, what with the awkwardness taking up so much space.

Joel turned on the radio. Music would ease the tension.

Instead of Whitney Houston or Jody Watley singing from the speaker, it was Chuck Yeager selling car parts: "Old soldiers never die. But neglected batteries do. That's why I feel better with a?—"

Joel clicked off the radio and opened the fridge. "Hope Pepsi's okay. Mom's still boycotting Coke over apartheid."

"Whatever." Danny sat on a stool at the breakfast bar and slid a bored gaze over the octagonal tank containing Mom's latest Siamese fighting fish.

Claws clacked against the hallway floor. Freckles trotted in on stubby legs, panting from the journey downstairs, and made a beeline for the newcomer.

Danny's face softened into a smile. "Hey there, pup." He leaned over and scratched behind one fluffy ear. "What kinda dog are you?"

"She's a—" Shit, his voice was too high. Joel cleared his throat. "She's a mix. Springer spaniel, collie, maybe corgi."

Up close, Danny was even more Wow. With his tanned skin and wide blue eyes, he could've stepped off the set of Ella's favorite soap opera. Not to mention the way that faded black U2 Joshua Tree T-shirt stretched over his biceps and pecs.

Joel snapped out of his haze and slid the Pepsi can across the bar, then picked up his own. They popped their tops simultaneously, in a combined zzzzt-kack! that made Freckles spin around and scamper back down the hallway.

They sipped in a silence accentuated by soda fizz. What to say next? All the obvious questions—Which school do you go to? or Do you play any sports?—were too boring, but the more interesting questions—You think they'll catch the Unabomber? or How about that Iran-Contra thing?—would make Joel look weird. Which of course he was, but being obvious about it made people uncomfortable.

"I think my mom has a crush on your grandpa," Joel blurted.

Danny finally looked directly at him. "What are you talking about?" His voice was so deep, maybe he was older than he appeared.

"I'm joking. It's just that she uses any excuse to call him. By now he's more like her therapist than her exterminator."

"He's my dad, not my grandpa."

Joel grimaced. "Sorry."

"Does he look that old?" Danny slouched over to the kitchen sink and peered out the window. "He does seem kinda…off. I didn't even notice." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I feel like an asshole."

Joel's chest gave a little twinge. "You're not an asshole." It felt true as soon as he said it. This crack in Danny's shell of coolness meant there was a real person inside who might have a real conversation with him. "Sometimes parents are hard to look at, especially when they're being…" He let Danny finish the sentence.

"Faraway?" Still facing the window, Danny glanced over his shoulder at Joel. "Maybe. I don't know him that well anymore." He eyed the little red phone-box salt and pepper shakers on the windowsill, the ones Gavin had brought from London. "I'm just here for the summer. I live in Colorado with my mom."

Whew. Danny had no local friends to tell him Joel wasn't popular, that at school he teetered between the Persecuted and the Ignored.

Also, they now had something to talk about. "I went skiing in Colorado once," Joel said.

"I'm not from the skiing part of Colorado." Danny scanned the backyard through the window. "I'm from the part that looks like Kansas, because it almost is Kansas."

Joel had flown over that flat, brown expanse on his way to Denver. "Sorry."

"Not as sorry as I am," Danny said.

Intriguing. Joel opened his mouth to ask why, but Ella strode into the kitchen, her bare feet slapping the tile floor.

She saw Danny and slowed. A look passed between them, one of Hot Person Mutual Recognition. As a college student, Ella was probably too old for this boy, but beauty was beauty.

"Hey," she said to Danny, who returned the word just as casually. Joel did not introduce them.

Silence fell as Ella opened the fridge and took out an apple, which she rubbed against the front of her sleeveless lime-green top. Then she gave her long, black hair a perfectly executed toss as she glided back toward the hallway on her extra-long legs. Danny watched her go, skating his gaze down her body in a way that Gavin had never done.

Duh, of course Danny wasn't into guys. Joel couldn't be that lucky twice in one year. Besides, this dude was out of his league—out of Gavin's league, for that matter.

"So are you gonna take over your dad's business someday?" Joel asked.

Danny screwed up his face. "No way. He makes good money, but it's gross."

"Bugs aren't gross. They're cool, and the whole world depends on them. Like—" He stopped short. Ecological rants were definitely weird. "Like everything."

"I don't mean bugs. I mean going into other people's houses, like their attics and basements and stuff." Danny's eyes widened, and he held up a hand. "Sorry. I'm sure yours is fine."

So Danny was a bit of a dork too. Good to know.

"I'm going to be an entomologist," Joel told him. "Someone who studies bugs."

"I thought entomology was the study of where words come from."

Was it? No. But was it? "I-I don't think that's right."

"Okay." Danny shifted his weight from heels to toes and back again, tapping the rim of his Pepsi can with an unsteady rhythm.

"Or I might become a rock star. I haven't decided."

Danny's smirk held the hint of a real smile. "You look more like an entomologist than a rock star."

"If you think that," Joel said with a nod to Danny's T-shirt, "you're listening to the wrong kind of rock."

Danny rappedthe side of his head as he followed Joel out of the kitchen. His ears still rang from the cicadas' buzz, which sounded like a bucket of bolts tossed into a combine. At least indoors he was free of the heavy air, the claustrophobic trees, and especially the tiny, faded-denim sky. It all made him homesick for Colorado.

Not that he wanted to go home.

On the stairs, Joel's red-and-white-checkered Vans were at Danny's eye level. How he'd kill for a pair of those, if football cleats didn't use up half a year's shoe budget.

Last month, Joel wouldn't have been the kind of guy he could've hung out with at school without suffering major social consequences. But there was something…okay about this boy. Maybe it was just that Joel was the first person—other than Dad, sometimes—to be nice to him in weeks.

Besides, none of the old popularity rules applied anymore. Danny had blown them up for good.

He stopped at the threshold to Joel's room, which could've easily held the entire top floor of his own house.

The walls almost made Danny dizzy. Every inch was covered with band posters arranged all willy-nilly and overlapping. To add to the sloppiness, some of the posters had twin ragged holes in the center. How could Joel just rip pictures from a magazine without taking out the staples first? Didn't he care how they looked? And who the hell were Chameleons UK?

"Hang on, it's a mess." Joel crouched down to scoop up the scattered books, notebooks, pens, and highlighters off the pine-green rug. "I'm writing a term paper, and I think better on the floor." Balancing the stack in his arms, he tottered over to the desk and dumped it all next to a portable electronic keyboard. As he turned back to Danny, two of the pens tumbled off behind him. "Come on in."

The drone of cicadas rose again as Danny ventured into the room. The window was closed but showed a wall of green trees on the other side.

Joel zipped over to a ceiling-high set of CD shelves. "Does your school end early?"

"Huh?"

"It's still May. Too soon to be done for the summer." Joel started pulling out CDs, their plastic cases clattering together.

Danny could've recited the same lie he told Dad's photography-club buddies—"I go to private school that finishes mid-May." But why care what Joel thought when they'd never see each other again after today? "I got suspended for the rest of the school year."

Joel gaped at him. "For what?"

"Fighting."

Joel scanned him up and down, then edged closer to the wall. "Why were you fighting?"

"I'm not violent or anything. There was just this one guy—" He stopped, blinking away the image of that thick face, teeth bared and bloody, cheeks crimson with betrayal. "Long story."

"Sometimes those are the best kind. But you can tell me later. Right now…" Joel fanned out a half dozen CD cases like a magician doing a card trick. "Pick one."

All the covers were facing Joel. "I can't see what they are."

"That's the point," Joel said. "It's a surprise."

Danny pulled on an orange case left of center.

Joel yanked it out of his hand. "Awesome choice!"

"It wasn't really a ch?—"

"This album came out two weeks ago, so you might not've heard it yet." Joel slipped the CD onto the player's drawer, then handed Danny the plastic case.

A pair of tangerine lips spread across the album cover. Near the top, The Cure and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me were scrawled in a black loopy script, with curlicues straight out of a ten-year-old girl's doodles.

"You know them, right?" Joel asked.

"Sort of." That freshman goth kid at school—the one the guys loved to torment, until Danny made them stop, and then all goddamn hell broke loose and he ended up here—wore Cure T-shirts all the time. "Our town only has one radio station, and it just plays Top 40 and country."

"We have a lot of stations here, but they all play the same shit. I only know most of my favorite bands because we hosted an exchange student from England." Joel pointed to Danny's shirt. "Big U2 fan?"

He shrugged. "They're all right."

Joel grinned. "I like boys," he said as he turned back to his CD shelf.

Danny froze. Did people on the East Coast just come out and say those things? Was it no big deal to be gay here?

So much for being homesick.

"O-okay." He coughed. "That's cool. Um, does your mom know?"

"Does she know what?" Joel grabbed a CD off the lowest shelf and held it up. The cracked case displayed U2's first album, Boy.

So that's what he liked. Not boys, then.

Danny coughed again, heart pounding. "Great album."

Joel pressed it to his chest. "‘I Will Follow'—always and forever my favorite U2 song. That guitar riff kills me. Did you know they used a glockenspiel to make that ding-a-ding-a-ding-a sound in the background?"

Danny nodded as if he'd known that. He was still fighting to rein his mind off the path it had been galloping down since he'd thought Joel was coming out to him—maybe even coming on to him.

A few minutes ago, this guy had been nothing more than a distraction from the latest fight with Dad. In a flash, Joel had transformed into a real person who'd almost accidentally fished out his deepest secret.

"Anyway, back to The Cure." Joel nudged the CD drawer into the player. There was a mechanical whir as the disc settled into place. "Are you ready? Be sure before you answer, because it's going to blow your fucking mind."

"I'm ready."

Joel shut the door tight, then took the CD player's remote control and sat on the floor with his back against his unmade bed, which lay in a corner of the room beneath a skylight. "The acoustics are better over here."

Danny sat beside him, leaving enough space between them for an imaginary person. He turned his face away from the bed's rumpled maroon sheets so he wouldn't picture Joel stretched across them.

Joel pointed the remote at the stereo. "Here we go."

A deep, unnerving chord pounded twice on a keyboard, together with an echoey drum machine. The chord repeated over and over as another high, thin keyboard note popped in and out.

Then came a distorted, winding guitar solo. This was already the weirdest, wildest music Danny had ever heard.

He looked at Joel, who had his eyes shut, his head swaying in time with the writhing music. He'd pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, the sleeves of his faded red Save Ferris T-shirt reaching nearly to his elbows. Joel's short, coal-black hair looked like it had been sculpted yesterday into something punkish, but today it was a lopsided mop, with a single lock falling over his brow.

Danny clasped his hands around his forearms in a makeshift straitjacket. He couldn't touch this guy. Even looking at him like this was trouble. So he closed his eyes and listened to the dangerous music.

Beneath the wall of noise lay that same pair of twin chords from the song's opening moments. Danny clung to them like a drowning man with a piece of driftwood.

"Are there ever any words?" he asked, though it felt like breaking a sacred silence.

"Shh," Joel said. "Just wait."

Waiting was torture. The song built and built, a new instrument coming in every time the whatchamacallit—bar? measure?—began again.

Then the words arrived in a series of frenzied shouts, words that didn't belong in a song called "The Kiss." They were rough, violent, full of tug-of-warring love and hate.

At last the instruments dropped out, one by one, until a long note, played on what sounded like a church organ, was all that remained. Finally, even that faded.

Danny opened his eyes and took a deep breath.

Joel pointed the remote, lowering the volume on the second song, which sounded mellower. "Intense, huh?"

Understatement of the century.

A knock came at the door. Joel lowered the volume further. "Yeah?"

Joel's mom came in carrying a red leather wallet. "Danny, I'm afraid it's going to be a few hours. Your dad has to call in backup." She opened the wallet and drew out a ten. "Hon, why don't you take him down to the 7-Eleven and get yourselves some snacks? You shouldn't be cooped up inside on such a beautiful day, and you won't want to be in the yard while they're spraying."

"Thanks!" Joel leaped to his feet and kissed her cheek as he took the money. "Do you want anything?"

She beamed at him, blinking, like she'd expected an argument instead of gratitude. "Surprise me."

"Might take a walk on the bike trail, too." Joel stuffed the cash into his front pocket. "Since it's a nice day, like you said."

"Oh." She gave Danny an uneasy glance before frowning at Joel. "Put on sunscreen before you go. And be back by four, or I'll send your sister to find you, and she won't be happy."

"Totally," Joel said, though he wasn't wearing a watch, and neither was Danny.

Outside, Danny had to lengthen his strides to keep up with Joel, who moved fast for a short guy. "Your mom seemed a little wigged out about the bike trail," he said when they were out of their parents' earshot.

"She's just overprotective," Joel said. "No one's been murdered there for, like, four years."

Danny stubbed his sneaker toe on a half-buried piece of gravel, then gave a nervous laugh.

Here on the long driveway, the cicadas had built not just a wall of sound, but a ceiling, too. Danny looked up. The treetops extended over his head, blocking out the sun and sealing him into a chamber of chainsaws. "Will the bugs fall on us?"

"Not until they die, which hopefully won't be today." Joel gestured to the trees with both hands. "These cicadas have been underground for seventeen years. Seventeen years! Their long, dark, boring life ends with a few weeks of fun in the sun, and my mom won't even let them have that. It's such bullshit."

Soon they reached the main road, and Joel turned right, whistling what might have been the second song from that Cure album. The shoulder was littered with brown, bug-shaped cicada husks that looked like little alien escape pods. Danny tiptoed around them.

"It's okay, the skins are empty." Joel crushed one beneath his sneaker. "It's like stepping on a fallen leaf."

Danny trod gingerly on a pair of skins. They made a satisfying crunch, so he did it again with more force. "How far to the 7-Eleven?"

"About half a mile," Joel said. "We'll go there after the bike trail."

What was the big deal with this bike trail? Maybe it was like the Arby's back home, a place that was kinda lame but everyone gathered there anyhow. Every town probably had an Arby's, even if it didn't have an Arby's.

Danny stepped on another empty skin. "What are the cicadas doing all that time underground?"

"Growing. Changing. Getting ready to party."

"Why does it take so long?"

"Because—" Joel raked his teeth over his lower lip, then did it again. "I don't know. But someday I will." He beamed up at Danny, his black eyes dancing, his lower lip now a bright-red stop sign.

Danny looked away before he couldn't look away. That smile had sent a jolt racing through him so quickly he could've denied it altogether, even to himself. Back home, he would've stuffed this feeling down deep without a second thought.

But he wasn't in almost-Kansas anymore.