The Lesson of Her Death

What’re you doing home?” Before Philip could answer he continued urgently, “Come on out here. I gotta talk to you.”
    Philip rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt then walked through the house. His sister was asleep under a mound of pink satin comforter. In his parents’ room Philip’s mother also lay asleep. Her mouth was open and her lipstick had left wet, redblotches on the pillow around her face, like stains of fresh blood. He continued outside, onto the back porch.
    “Hey, man,” Philip called, walking barefoot down the stairs, “what’s—”
    “I was just at the police.”
    The boy stopped walking. “What did you tell them?”
    “Nothing,” Jamie whined. “Nothing.”
    Shit. The knife. That’s what it was. He knew it. He felt sweat break out on his forehead. Philip continued into the bushes and sat down. Jamie sat too.
    “What do they know?”
    “They know I was there and they know I was there with somebody that night. They’ve got sort of a description of you.”
    “Shit. Like, how did they find that out?” Suspicion filled Philip’s round face.
    “I didn’t say anything. My father …” Jamie said. “He …” He couldn’t bring himself to say anything else about it. He pictured his father going through the dirty clothes, finding his underwear, putting it in an evidence bag.… He began to cry. “They said we’re going to
prison!
What are we going to do? Oh, man.”
    Jamie’s hands were shaking but Philip was calm. In the dimension where he spent much of his time nothing was impossible, nothing was what it seemed. Maple trees were sodium boosters of intergalactic vehicles. Sidewalks were crystal walkways a thousand feet above the plasma energy core of the planet. Stars weren’t stars at all but holes in the paltry three-dimensional world through which the all-powerful, all-brilliant Guardians trillions and trillions of light-years big looked down. In Philip’s world fat boys in dirty blue jeans were sinewy, lithe heros, who could pull on cloaks and disappear from their terrible enemies. “We have to vanish,” he said softly.
    “Vanish?”
    “Like, dimensionally.” He added in a whisper, “Permanently.”
    Jamie whispered, “It was just a
movie
, man.”
    Philip continued in his quiet voice, “We’re both fucked. You want to go to prison? Then what? Come back and live at home? With your father?” He smiled in a weary way. “This dimension sucks, Jano.”
    Jamie was silent.
    “We took an oath,” Philip said quietly. “We took an oath—”
    “We shouldn’t have done it to her.”
    “An oath to the death.” Philip looked up at the sky through a cluster of faint purple lilacs.
“That
dimension’s real. This one isn’t. We took an oath. Are you going back on it?”
    Jamie grabbed a black branch dotted with buds and small blossoms. He stripped the sinewy twigs away, like peeling skin off bones, and flung the branch away furiously with a low moan.
    Philip said, “Remember Dathar? The way he leapt off the Governance Building? They thought they had him but he got away.”
    “He didn’t get away. He died. The Guardians brought him back but he died.”
    “It’s the same thing,” Philip whispered. “He got away.”
    Jamie said nothing.
    The sound of a siren, howling like a dentist’s drill, filled the front yard. Philip’s smile vanished as the squad car skidded to a stop. He stared at his friend. “You told them!”
    “No!” Jamie scrambled to his feet.
    Footsteps sounded. Running, the men spread out. Ebbans and Slocum and Miller and two other deputies.
    “You turned me in!” Philip screamed as he began willing his huge body to run, feet pointing outward, stomach and tits bouncing with every step, feeling the sting of his chafed legs and the deeper pain of a struggling heart.
    “Whoa, boy, hold up there!”
    “Stop him! Slow him up!”
    Slocum was chuckling. “He’s doing okay for a big fellow.”
    Somebody else laughed and said, “We need ourselves a lasso.”
    The men easily caught up with Philip and pulled him to the ground. They were laughing as if they’d grounded a suckling pig for a barbecue. Handcuffs appeared and were ratcheted on pudgy wrists.
    One of the cops asked Jamie a question but the boy missed the words. All he could hear was the sound of Philip’s voice, filling the backyard, as he shrieked, “You turned me in, you turned me in, you turned me in!”

C orde paused outside the house.
    He saw: a broken lawn