Empire Falls

crush he claimed John Voss had on her. She also suspected that Candace didn’t realize that by flitting, emotionally if not physically, from boy to boy, she was imitating her mother.
    “He really loves me,” she explained, as if the boy’s feelings for her were the deciding factor, as opposed to her feelings for him.
    “What about Zack?”
    “There’ll probably be a fight when he gets out of the hospital,” Candace admitted fatalistically.
    Strange, but fights over Candace appeared to be backing up. Earlier in the week, Bobby, the girl’s former boyfriend from Fairhaven, who Candace claimed had been in jail, showed up at the high school, just off school grounds, looking for Zack Minty, whom he didn’t know by sight, unaware that the boy whose ass he’d come to kick had been admitted to the hospital that morning with an infected gash on his shin. For some reason he’d waited a long time to have the injury looked at, claiming he didn’t even remember how he’d got it but speculating it must have happened at football practice. It hadn’t looked like a football injury to the emergency room physician, who immediately put him on antibiotics. For a long time Zack’s fever had refused to come down, and yesterday the doctors still wanted to keep him under observation, though they’d promised both him and his father that unless his fever spiked again, they’d release him on Friday and wouldn’t stand between him and playing on Saturday, the last home game of the season.
    “Do you think Justin would win?” Candace wondered idly, as if this were a conundrum, on the magnitude of Superman versus the Incredible Hulk.
    “Against Zack or Bobby?” Tick asked, though it made no difference, since Justin stood no chance against either.
    “Zack,” Candace clarified. “I don’t think Bobby’d fight Justin. He just wanted to get it on with Zack because he heard Zack’s tough.”
    Even sheltered from the worst of the wind, it was still cold—and getting dark too, though it wasn’t yet four o’clock. Still, coming here had been a good idea. Tick could feel her spirits gradually picking up. Her shoulder still hurt from being dragged by her backpack, but what happened had frightened more than injured her. And, as was often the case, talking to Candace buoyed her spirits, though she did wonder if the mere fact that somebody was worse off than you was a proper basis for friendship. Both girls were silent for a while, listening to the water slide by at their feet.
    “When you and Zack were together,” Candace finally said, “did you ever play the gun game?”
    Tick studied Candace’s expression and saw the fear in her eyes. “Once,” she admitted.
    “He said you used to play it all the time. He was trying to get me to.”
    Zack called it “Polish Roulette,” which was supposed to be a joke. He’d broken one of his father’s revolvers open and shown Tick there were no bullets in the cylinder. Then you were supposed to put the barrel of the gun against your head and pull the trigger. The idea, as he explained it to Tick, was to see how rational you were. If you knew by the evidence of your own senses that the gun wasn’t loaded, then you had nothing to fear. Except it was still a gun and your mind couldn’t forget that. “It’s a rush, though,” he admitted, grinning at her, “ ’cause, like, what if you were wrong and there was one bullet in there you missed?”
    “Don’t you hate it when you find out people are lying to you?” Candace said, apparently referring to Zack’s claim that he and Tick had played the game all the time.
    “Candace,” Tick said, “promise me you’ll never do it?”
    “Okay.” She shrugged, her fear apparently evaporating the instant she shared the story with her friend.
    “No, I mean it,” Tick said. “Promise me right now, or we’re not friends anymore.”
    “Okay, okay,” Candace said, more seriously now. Then: “We’re friends? I can tell people we’re friends?”
    “Sure. Why not?” Seeing how badly Candace wanted that made Tick wonder whether it would have made a difference if she’d told John Voss the same thing. What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?
    It was nearly dark now, and when they started back toward the riverbank a movement on the shore attracted their attention. About fifty yards upstream, right where the river began to bend toward