The Lesson of Her Death

remembered how his friend had strained to get up on the parallel bars and he had watched horrified as the wood rods sagged almost to breaking under the weight.
    Why were they friends?
    This afternoon Jano was walking around Blackfoot Pond, holding the gray chipped tackle box and the rod and reel. Tracing steps, trying not to think about that terrible night of April 20. He felt bad. Not depressed but fearful, almost panicked. He felt as if a screaming Honon warrior in an invisible Dimensional cloak was racing toward him from behind, preparing to leap, closer closer closer, to tear him apart. Jano’s heart galloped in his chest, heating his blood as it pumped and he felt terror spatter him like a spray of hot water. Like a spray of come.
    He pictured the girl lying in the mud, her white fingers curled, her eyes mostly open, her bare feet with their long toes.…
    No no no! She’s not an actress in a movie, thirty feet high on the screen in the mall. She is exactly what she is: pretty, heavy, smelling of mint, smelling of grass and spicy flowers. She is still. She does not breathe. She is dead.
    Jano shuddered, feeling the Honon troops circling around him, and found he was staring at the crushed muddy blue flowers at his feet. He thought of Philip drowning the other girl, holding her down. And what was he, Jano, going to do now? Who could he talk to? Nobody … The panic crested and he sucked in air frantically.
    Eventually he calmed.
    Why
is he your friend?
    Well, he and Phathar
did
talk about sci fi a lot. And movies. And girls. For a guy who never dated, Philip was an expert on sex. A walking dictionary of terms that every fifteen-year-old should know. He told Jano how gay guys shoved their fists up each other’s asses and how you could tell whether a girl was a virgin by the way she bent over to tie her shoes.
    But Jano decided that their most common bond was how much they hated their fathers. Phathar was scared of his and that made plenty of sense because the old man was a total hatter. (One Halloween, Philip’s dad had come into the yard, sneaking up behind trick-or-treaters, carrying bloody cow’s intestines in his arms. He’d just stood staring at the totally freaked kids.) But Jano’s father was worse. He was like a Honon warrior hiding in a Dimensional cloak, passing through the house as if Jano didn’t exist. Sneaking past, looking at his son oddly, then vanishing.
    …
The dimensional warp swelling out out out finally bursting into the now, the here, all that purple energy of the Naryan realm flooding onto the earth
.…
    The movie had had a happy ending. Jano didn’t think this life would. He climbed to the top of the dam and then dropped onto his knees. He leaned forward looking at his gray reflection in the still water. He didn’t like water that was so still. It made him look like death. His thin face. He lowered his head to the water. He wondered what it was like to breathe water instead of air.
    Look at that, Jano. You ever touched a girl there? You ever tasted a girl?
    He stared at the water. He could smell its oily sourness.
    You ever fucked a girl, Jano?
    By lowering his head another two inches he could taste the water. He could lick it. The same way that Phathar gave him the opportunity to taste the girl’s cold mouth, her tongue, her cunt. He could swallow the water, he could swallow her, hide in her forever. A princess—
    “Excuse me, young man.” The voice was like a chill downpour on his back. He leapt up. “I talk to you for a minute?” The deputy was tall and very thin.
    Jano’s mouth was dry as summer pavement. He swung his tongue back and forth between his sticky teeth and didn’t say anything.
    “What’s your name?”
    “I didn’t do anything.”
    “I’d just like to talk to you.” The deputy was smiling but Jano’d seen that smile before and didn’t believe it. A lying smile. The same smile his father kept on his face. “I understand you and a friend were fishing here at night about ten days ago.”
    Jano couldn’t speak. He found his skin was contracting with terror and he imagined that his bowl of thick hair was vibrating visibly. Other footsteps sounded behind him. He turned.
    Lance Miller grinned and said to him, “Hey, how you doing?”
    Jano didn’t answer.
    The other cop looked at Miller and said, “You know him?”
    “Sure, T.T.,” Miller said. “This’s Bill Corde’s son. Didn’t you introduce yourself, Jamie?”

W ith panic in his voice