Empire Falls

he didn’t come. Zack had his reasons for wanting company, but damned if he could remember them, and now here was Double Dibble wanting to know the exact thing Zack couldn’t really explain.
    “Waiting for it to get dark,” Zack told him. Which was true. He’d parked the Camaro on the shoulder of the old landfill road in the gathering dusk. The house the Voss kid lived in with his grandmother was just visible through the trees, though. You couldn’t see the car from the house unless you were looking for it.
    “You’re just pissed off ’cause he showed you up,” Justin said, rolling down his window to toss out an empty Cheetos bag.
    “That’s a two-hundred-dollar fine,” Zack pointed out. One of the good things about being a cop’s son was that over time you learned what all the consequences were. That didn’t mean you wouldn’t take a chance anyway, but at least you knew how big a rod they’d stick up your ass if you got caught. To Zack’s way of thinking, some crimes were worth the risk, but it was hard to imagine anybody dumb enough to risk a two-hundred-dollar fine over a sixty-cent bag of Cheetos.
    “How would anybody know it was me?” Justin said, licking his orange fingers.
    “You wipe your hands on my dad’s upholstery, he’ll fuck you up good.”
    Double Dibble kept on licking, the clean fingers glistening, the others still Cheeto-orange. “Nah, your dad likes me.”
    “Not as much as he likes this car,” Zack reminded him. “Not even close.”
    Just one orange finger, the middle one, was extended now. Justin sucked on it provocatively.
    “John Voss showed me up when, dipshit?”
    “Playing the game.”
    Zack knew this was coming, of course. He’d put off responding to the remark so it would seem like it didn’t mean shit to him. “How the fuck do you figure that? I’m the one that taught him.”
    “Yeah, but he’s better at it. You flinch.”
    “The fuck I do.”
    “You flinch, every time.”
    “Right. Like you’d know. You’re too chicken to play, even.”
    Justin shrugged, wiping his fingers on his pants.
    Zack would have liked to drop the subject, but couldn’t. “The reason he doesn’t flinch is he doesn’t have a brain . He’s too stupid to be scared.”
    “You’re the one who’s always saying there’s nothing to be scared of,” Justin reminded him, examining the orange streaks on his baggy chinos with mild regret. “That’s why we’re all supposed to play, right?”
    “It’s a rush, okay? What I’m saying is, he’s so fucking stupid he doesn’t even get the rush.” Justin didn’t look convinced. “Anyway, fuck you. You don’t play, you don’t get to criticize.”
    “I played once. It’s a dumb game.”
    “A dumb game that made you piss your pants,” Zack snorted.
    One thing was for sure. Zack was going to have to sit down and reevaluate his whole friend situation, which was going from bad to worse. It wasn’t that long ago he’d had pretty cool friends. Now he was surrounded on all sides by losers. This was what happened when you didn’t pay attention.
    Some of it couldn’t be helped, of course. Zed and Thomas had moved away with their parents, and they’d been the best of the bunch. Then a couple other friends decided they wouldn’t have anything to do with him anymore, though they never said why. Like he couldn’t figure it out when they started hanging out at the country club pool and playing fag sports like tennis and golf. Which left him with pretty slim pickings, like Justin Fucking Double Dibble. He’d actually been pretty cool in junior high, but now it was like he didn’t give a shit anymore. He’d been a pretty decent basketball player, but he wouldn’t even try out for the team, which was fucking stupid because he probably would’ve made it. Anymore all he wanted to do was eat junk food and play video games and whack off to that porn shit he was always downloading off the Net.
    Next year would be better. As one of the few sophomores on varsity, Zack had been admired, if not completely accepted or welcomed by the older guys, especially the seniors. At times it almost seemed like they’d heard something about him before they even met him, something that made them suspicious. He’d thought it’d be different after the Fairhaven game, but Coach had fucked him over by giving the starting linebacker job back to Billy Wolff after his ankle healed. Like that was all it took for him to forget who made the hit that