Chapter 2

Walking down the bike trail,Joel already missed feeling Danny's T-shirt sleeve brush his own, the way it had on the narrow road shoulder.

It was hotter here, with the woods set back at least a hundred feet on either side of the trail. Danny kept peering off into the trees, maybe searching for that nonexistent murderer.

Joel didn't blame the guy for being wary. They'd known each other for less than an hour, and so far their main interaction had been Joel foisting the ultimate love-it-or-hate-it song on his innocent ears. Now they were heading down a nearly deserted bike trail, with the creepy-sounding Magicicada septendecim blaring in stereo.

"Usually it's a lot busier than this on weekends," he told Danny. "I guess the cicadas are keeping all the sane people indoors."

"Do you ride here a lot?"

"Sometimes. My bike's a piece of shit. It only has one gear, so uphill is murder and downhill is terrifying. Mom won't buy me a better one until I ride the shitty one more often to prove my burning desire to ride a bike. She doesn't want to fork out a hundred bucks on something I'm going to ignore. So we're at an impasse." Again he'd answered a simple question with a monologue. He had to give Danny room to talk. "What about you? Big biker?"

"I usually drive, unless it's off road, and then sometimes I ride horseback."

Hold the phone. "You're a cowboy?" Joel's eyes felt like bulging cartoon hearts.

Danny shook his head. "We have horses. No cows."

"So you're a horseboy."

"‘Horseboy' makes me sound like a centaur." Danny drew back his shoulders, looking pleased at that image of himself. "I was sort of a cowboy when I worked on a ranch last summer."

Joel pictured him, hat and all, lassoing a calf and wrestling it into the dust. "Why not this summer?"

"It wasn't an option." Danny rubbed the back of his neck. "After I got in that fight, Mom wanted to send me to this church camp—so I could be reformed, I guess. Dad rescued me by letting me stay with him this summer. I think my mom was so shocked he'd offered, she said yes right away." He tugged at the front of his T-shirt, where a spot of sweat was forming between his collarbones. "He hasn't been back much since they split up. This is the first time I've seen where he lives."

Finally Joel had gotten more than two sentences out of Danny. "I go to my dad's one weekend a month, plus a couple weeks in the summer."

"Where's he at?"

"Beltsville," Joel said. "It's south of here. He works at this big government agricultural research center there. That's where the Goatman came from, they say."

"The what?"

"Half-man, half-goat. Carries an axe. So they say."

Danny's pace slowed. "How far south of here?"

"Far enough. Probably." Joel kept a straight face. "So, are you glad you came, or do you wish you'd gone to the Jesus place?"

"I'd rather be anywhere but the Jesus place. Their brochure scared the crap out of me." Danny did that neck-rubbing thing again. "It said there'd be someone watching me all the time."

"‘Someone,' as in God?"

"As in other people. Making sure I stayed good, I guess. On the straight and narrow."

"You seem good to me." Too much. Backpedal time. "Not that I'm an expert on the straight and narrow."

"What do you mean?"

"Let's just say if we weren't Jewish, I'd probably be banished to Jesus camp too."

"What'd you do?"

Oops. Joel had put his foot in it trying to impress Danny. He couldn't tell a near stranger his sordid sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll story. At best, Danny wouldn't believe him. At worst, he'd think Joel was hoping to reenact the story today.

Not that that would be a bad thing.

"Look! Pennsylvania." Joel pointed at the horizon, where the rolling blue hills crouched beneath early summer haze. "The Mason-Dixon line is over there."

"The border between the North and South?"

"You've heard of it?"

"In history class," Danny said.

"I thought people out West didn't study the Civil War much. A guy at school moved here from California, and he said their history class spent, like, a week on it, but then two months on the Mexican-American War, which I don't know jack shit about."

"On your left!" rang out a woman's voice behind them. Joel tugged Danny's arm, pulling him off the side of the path.

A pair of bicyclists whizzed past, their spinning wheels offering a high-pitched counterpoint to the insects' baritone drone.

Joel checked for other people approaching. "Okay, we're clear. Let's go."

"Where?"

"To my place." Joel marched down the hill toward the edge of the woods, where a wineberry bush held the faded blue survey ribbon Ella had tied there to mark their turnoff spot.

Danny's footsteps rustled in the long grass behind him. "Weren't we just at your place?"

"That was my house. This is my place."

"But what is it?"

It was tempting to drag out the mystery by saying, You'll see, but that might've overhyped it. "It's a spot my sister and I bring our friends to. Not at the same time, though. She's too cool for me now that she's in college. But I found it, so I get squatters' rights forever." He lifted his face into the cool air as the woods closed around them. "Now hurry up before someone sees us."

Following Joel through the woods,Danny tried to forget about the Goatman. It was probably just another joke, anyhow. But the more he tried not to think about the Goatman, the more he saw an axe handle in every crooked tree branch, and the more he heard a low, menacing bleat puncture the wall of cicada song.

It didn't help that here, the bugs' noise sounded more eerie than the ones at Joel's house. They made a wailing EEEEEE-ooo, kind of like a flying saucer in an old sci-fi movie.

A splash hit his arm. Danny looked up, but the trees had stolen the sky again. "Is it raining?"

"That's not rain," Joel called out. "It's cicada piss."

"What?!"

"Relax." Joel turned to face him, walking backward. "It doesn't stink or stain. They drink tree sap and absorb all the nutrients. What's left over is basically water."

"Still." Danny swiped the drops off his arm. "Gross."

They walked on through the trees—oaks and hickories, Dad had told him during their hike on Wednesday, back when they were getting along great. The shade was nice, but Danny would've paid twenty bucks to see a damn horizon.

He craned his neck to scan the solid green canopy of noise. According to Joel, life as an adult cicada was one big spring-break trip, with nothing to do but make music and get laid.

Did the male cicadas ever pair up together? No, that was unnatural, just like Danny's impulse to find out what Joel's hair felt like.

He rubbed his face hard. Maybe he should've gone to that crazy church camp after all. It might not have "cured" him, but it might've offered a few weapons to fight this guerrilla war inside himself.

Whatever. Right now he had to focus on not tripping over a root.

As he walked, the air grew warmer, and the sunlight made bigger and bigger patches on the ground in front of him.

"We're here!" Joel called out. Danny looked up.

The woods had given way to a clearing half the length of a football field. Small shrubs were scattered like a handful of Yahtzee dice, but most of the meadow was a panorama of color. Bumblebees zoomed around lilac-colored clover blooms, while butterflies flitted among school-bus-yellow flowers that might've been a more flamboyant cousin to the prairie coneflowers back home. The scene was a lot like the photo on Dad's mantelpiece, the picture that had won him a prize in a local competition.

"Cool," he said.

"You haven't seen the best part." Joel plowed through the knee-high weedy grass toward a flattish, rough-edged piece of slate the size of a tray tabletop. He gripped the two near corners, then flipped the rock.

Danny looked over Joel's shoulder into a hole a little more than a foot wide. Inside was a large black trash bag covering an item that just barely fit into the hole. "Buried treasure?"

"Bingo." Joel whipped off the bag, revealing a beat-up bubblegum-pink Street Beat compact boom box, which he set beside the hole. Then he withdrew a green metal storage box, the kind Danny had once used to hold his art supplies, back before football and girls left him no time for that stuff.

Joel unlocked the box and creaked open the rusty lid. Then he lifted out three plastic zipper bags, one with a bunch of cassettes, the second a pack of cigarettes, and the third some kind of clothing.

Danny peered into the hole. "What's in this other box?"

"That's my sister's. We can't touch it on penalty of death." Joel tossed him a blue T-shirt, hitting him in the chest. "Hope this fits you."

The shirt read Virginia is for Lovers beside a big red heart. "I'm confused. Why are we?—"

"I'm dying for a smoke, and my mom's a lung doctor with a freakishly good sense of smell," Joel said as he stood and stripped off his shirt. "This way she won't smell smoke on me and ground me for life. Again." He looked up at Danny, bare-chested but stern. "Even if you don't want a cigarette—which is totally cool, no pressure—you need to change so I don't get busted."

"Won't your pants smell like smoke? Or do they have a force field that blocks it out?"

Joel's head popped through the top of the white T-shirt. "You want me to take off my pants?"

"No! I mean—" Danny fixed his gaze on a clump of prickly-looking plants with fuchsia flowers. "It just seems?—"

"Inconsistent?"

Danny shrugged. "Little bit."

"Counterpoint: I have a strict policy of keeping burning cigarettes away from my nether regions."

"Your what?"

Joel put his hands beside his hips, pointing all his fingers forward like a gunslinger. Then he gave a little pelvic thrust. It was so ridiculous, Danny had to laugh.

"You're probably right," Joel said, "but I don't have a spare pair of pants here, and I'm not going to sit in my skivvies in a meadow. You never know what might crawl up there."

Danny peeled off his U2 shirt, not looking at Joel but also not turning his back. There was nothing wrong with being half-naked or even totally naked around other guys. He did it all the time in locker rooms.

He struggled to shove his arms through the Virginia T-shirt's sleeves—Joel was clearly a size or two smaller than him—but managed to get it on.

Joel crammed their original shirts into the zippy bag. His T-shirt read Maryland is for Crabs, in the same typeface as Danny's but with a crab instead of a heart.

Danny sniffed his own sleeve, which smelled of tobacco plus lemon-scented laundry detergent. "Where'd you find these shirts?"

"Tourist shop on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel." Joel sat cross-legged on the grass and set the boom box between them. "Yours is the Virginia slogan, like in their ads—not on their flag or whatever, although that would be funny, especially if they did it in Latin. I guess the Maryland people did this crab thing as a smart-ass reply."

Danny sat down beside the bag of cassettes. "What kind of music do you have?"

"The good kind. Pick one."

If he chose badly, Joel would make fun of him, so he reached into the bag and yanked out a random cassette. "That Prince album from last year. How is it?"

"Only his best yet."

Danny frowned at the Sign o' the Times cassette case. It sucked that such lush cover artwork had been squished into this tiny rectangle. The cover would make a great poster for his bedroom—that's if Mom wouldn't rip it down the second she saw it.

He put the tape into the little boom box and pressed play. The title track's moody, funky electronic beat and bass came from the speakers. He turned up the volume. This player made a lot of noise for its size. Kinda like the cicadas.

Joel tapped out a pair of Marlboros and passed one over, along with a checkerboard-design Bic lighter. Danny lit the cigarette, his first since the night of the big fight.

"We need this ashtray, too." Joel handed him a concave lump of glazed mint-green clay. "The whole reason this meadow exists is because some kids accidentally set a fire while smoking, and a bunch of trees burned down."

Danny examined the ashtray, which could be called "round" only because it wasn't square. On the bottom, J.M. 1978 was etched with a child's scrawl. "You sure you don't want to be a sculptor instead of a rock star?"

"Very funny. Can you believe they were having third-graders make ashtrays? Even back then, everyone knew that smoking kills." Joel lit his cigarette and took a deep puff. "Eventually, anyway," he added. "See those pine saplings on the edge of the meadow? That's the woods starting to come back. One day this'll all be trees again."

"That's too bad."

"Nature's not bad or good. It just is." Joel stretched out on the ground, his crab shirt rising up to expose an inch of pale belly.

Danny lay down near him, close enough to reach the ashtray between them. He shut his eyes against the bright sun, but the light turned the back of his lids a hazy scarlet.

So this was it? They'd journeyed over road, bike path, and trail just to smoke in peace?

Then again, in peace was key. Danny let out a long breath, his sun-softened body molding itself against the cradling grass. The cicadas droned in stereo from the woods around them, but now they were a background to the music on the boom box.

For the first time in weeks, he was truly relaxed.

He reached out to tap his cigarette over the ashtray. Joel's knuckles brushed his. Danny jerked his hand back.

"Sorry," they said, the words overlapping. Joel's voice sounded as panicked as his own.

"You go first," Joel said.

"No, you go."

"I insist."

"So do I."

"Okay."

"Fine."

Danny reached out, knocking his hand against Joel's and almost dropping his cigarette. This time they laughed.

"Idea," Joel said. "Whoever's younger goes first."

"I'm seventeen and three weeks."

"I'm seventeen and one week." His forearm tilted down, then up. "Your turn."

Danny quickly shed his ash. His pulse was racing now—the nicotine rush, of course, not adrenaline from touching this boy's hand.

"How long are you staying with your dad?" Joel asked.

Too long yet not long enough. "I go home the end of July, when football practice starts."

"Do you wish that was today?"

"Nope."

"You're not homesick?"

Danny pictured what awaited him at home: the stares, the laughs, the whispers. If he were scrawny like that freshman in the Cure shirt—scrawny like Joel—he'd get much worse than stares, laughs, and whispers. But popularity was all relative, and a hundred touchdowns wouldn't win him back the friends and status he'd once had. Did he even want them anymore?

"I miss my horses," he said finally.

"Mm." There came the sound of smoke blown between pursed lips. "I bet they miss you, too."

Danny's throat tightened. Pablo and Hopper were probably poking their heads out of their stalls right now, still expecting him to be the one to groom and feed them. "Thanks, now I feel worse." He slid his foot over to give Joel's sneaker a teasing kick. "Asshole."

Joel chuckled. "Sorry, I was trying to be nice when you felt sad."

"I don't feel sad."

"You miss your horses. It's okay to feel things."

"No, it's not." Danny opened his eyes. "I mean…you know what I mean."

"I do know." Joel cleared his throat, then rolled onto his side facing Danny, resting his cheek on his biceps and letting his hand drape over the back of his head. "Isn't it wild we're the same age as these cicadas?"

"They've lived longer than my two horses put together." Danny would've mirrored his posture, but it felt dangerous to align their bodies too perfectly, so he just turned his head, shading his face with his forearm.

"That's what's so wild. Usually bigger animals, like elephants, live the longest, especially compared to tiny ones like mice." Joel tilted back his head while a small white butterfly fluttered past his temple, its wings forming an afterimage on Danny's eyes like a living flashbulb. "Then again, small dog breeds live way longer than big ones, so maybe the rule doesn't work across the board." He scratched his jaw with his thumb. "Hmm."

Danny snickered. "You make the weirdest conversation."

Joel lifted his chin. "I like knowing things. What's wrong with knowing things?"

"You don't know everything."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah, really."

"Okay, horseboy." Joel angled a shoulder in what would've been a flirtatious gesture by a girl. "Tell me something I don't know."