Benji bursts out laughing.

“That happened once. And it wasn’t weed.”

“Do you remember how you phoned me and screamed, ‘I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO BLINK’?”

“Don’t joke about that. It was seriously fucking nasty.”

Kevin looks like he wants to touch him. He doesn’t.

“And if you’re going to steal a car, don’t do it on this street, okay? Dad would get seriously pissed off.”

Benji nods, but doesn’t make any promises. Then he pulls a joint from his pocket and tucks it gently behind Kevin’s ear.

“For later. With a bit of tobacco, just the way you like it.”

Kevin gives him a quick hug, so fleeting that no one would notice, but still so hard that it speaks volumes. He can never sleep after games, and that’s the only time he smokes. Only best friends know that sort of thing about each other. Only two boys who once lay side by side under the covers, reading comics by flashlight and realizing that the reason they always felt like outsiders was because they were superheroes.

*

As Benji walks off into the darkness Kevin watches him go for a long time, feeling envious. He knows the girls fall for him because he’s good at hockey; without it he’d only be an average, mediocre seventeen-year-old. But not Benji. They fall for him for completely different reasons. He’s got something everyone wants, something completely independent of anything he does on the ice. His eyes always let you know that he could leave you any moment if he felt like it, without so much as a backward glance. He isn’t tied to anything, he just doesn’t care. Kevin is terrified of loneliness, but Benji embraces it as a natural state. All through their childhood Kevin has been scared that one day he’ll wake up and discover that the other superhero is gone. That this friendship never meant anything to him.

Benji’s blood is different from other people’s. He disappears into the forest on the road down toward the lake, and Kevin can’t help thinking that Benji is the only truly free individual he knows.

*

That’s the last time they see each other in their childhood. That ends tonight.

21

Maya watches Kevin’s every move when he comes back into the house. At first he looks like a kitten that’s been left out in the rain. Abandoned and forgotten, even though she’s never encountered anyone who’s at the center of things as much as him. Then he downs two drinks out in the kitchen and roars, “KNOCKSHOTS!” with Bobo and Amat, and jumps up and down with his arm around Lyt, so hard that the floor vibrates, singing, “WE ARE THE BEARS!”

She isn’t sure when he gives her the first alcoholic drink, but the second one isn’t anywhere near as repulsive. He keeps making bets with Lyt about who can finish their drink first, and Kevin wins every time, and Maya smiles indulgently and says: “Honestly! You hockey guys can’t even drink without turning it into a competition!”

Kevin looks directly at her, as if they were alone, and seems to take her comment as a challenge.

“Get more shots,” he tells Lyt.

“Yes! Run, Lyt, I’ll time you!” Maya laughs sarcastically, clapping her hands.

Lyt runs straight into a wall. Kevin laughs so hard that he’s left gasping for breath. Maya is fascinated by the way he always seems to be living in the moment. On the ice he doesn’t seem to think about anything but hockey, and off it he doesn’t seem to think about anything at all. He lives on instinct. She wishes she could be like that.

She doesn’t know how much they drink; she can remember beating Lyt at drinking three shots in a row, then standing on a chair with her arms raised in triumph as if she were holding a giant trophy.

Kevin likes the fact that she’s different. That her eyes never quite stop moving, that she’s always watching. That she seems to know who she is. He wishes he could be like that.

*

Ana stops drinking after the first shot. She doesn’t really know why, but Benji has disappeared and he was the reason she wanted to come. She’s standing in the kitchen with Maya, but people keep getting in between them. Ana can see the way the older girls look every time Kevin laughs at something Maya says, somewhere between derision and a death threat. She feels Lyt’s hands on the base of her spine and moves farther and farther into the corner. No matter how hard she sandpapers herself, how small she makes herself, she’s never going to fit in here.

*

Benji walks across the ice until he reaches the middle of the lake. He stands there smoking, and watches as the town goes out, one house at a time. The hard shell beneath his feet is rocking slightly; it’s late in the year to be this far out alone at night, even for Beartown. He’s always liked toying with the idea of falling through and disappearing into the cold darkness beneath, even when he was a child. Wondering if everything painful would cause less pain down there. Perhaps surprisingly, his dad’s suicide didn’t make him frightened of death, but the reverse. The only thing Benji doesn’t understand is why his dad felt obliged to use a rifle. The forest, the ice, the lake, the cold—this town offers thousands of ways to die a natural death.

He stands out there until the smoke and sub-zero temperature have numbed him inside and out, then he walks back to the town, heads into one of the smaller residential areas, and steals a moped. He rides off toward Hed.

*

“Why don’t you like hockey players?” Kevin asks.

“You’re not particularly smart,” Maya laughs.

“What do you mean by that?” He seems genuinely interested.

“You discovered the jockstrap seventy years before you invented the helmet,” she says.

“We know how to prioritize,” he says with a big smile.

They drink some more. When they have bets, he wins. He never loses.

*

“The Barn” is a poor name for a bar, possibly all the more so if it is actually in a barn. But, as Katia’s boss usually puts it: no one has ever looked at anyone in Hed and said, “You know what, you’ve almost got too much imagination!” A band is playing on the stage in front of a handful of spectacularly uninterested men in varying stages of middle age and intoxication. Katia is standing at the bar when the bouncer comes over to her.

“Does your brother own a moped?”

“No.”

The bouncer chuckles.

“In that case I’ll tell him to park it around the back.”

Katia, the second-eldest big sister of the little brother who is bound to be the death of them all one day, merely sighs when Benji walks in. She doesn’t know if he goes looking for trouble or if it seeks him out, she just knows that you never find one without the other. Lucky for him that his eldest sister isn’t here, she thinks, because she’d have broken his neck by now. But Katia can’t be angry, not with him, she’s never been able to.

“Calm down, I’m going to take the moped back,” Benji promises, and tries to smile even though she can see he’s in a foul mood.