“Etta’s helping me, y’know. It was great night driving time. I logged maybe half of what I need.”

  Silence for a second, and then, “That’s good.”

  I guess I have to give him credit for trying. I try a change of topic. “Hey, did you hear about the sit-in at Coffin’s house?”

  “Of course. That’s old news.”

  Another step disappears out from under me. “Not that old.”

  “Your mascary friend Jorja was the ringleader.”

  “Mascary?”

  “Um, sorry if that came out wrong. It’s like way too much crap around her eyes.”

  Can’t exactly argue with that, but the other accusation isn’t true. “It wasn’t Jorja. It was Mrs. Glasier.”

  “Not what I heard. Oh, the Glasier witch was there, all right, but Jorja led most of the chanting. Shouted loudest, is what I heard.”

  “Anyway . . .” I can’t think of anything to say next.

  “No biggie. Coffin can take it. At least they didn’t smash his windows.”

  “You going to the town hall meeting?”

  “You kidding? Why? Who wants to see a couple of people yell at each other about some school election?”

  “Etta’s been getting hate mail.”

  This gives him pause for a second or two. “Really.”

  “Death threats, some of them.” For some reason, I want to impress him. I want him to know I’m not a dope, that I’m up on what’s going on, too.

  He says, “So, is this the same thing as with Sylvia? I mean, dogma versus Darwin? Evolution? All that?”

  “Must be. Phinney wants ID taught in science class. Sylvia’s not exactly for that, is she?”

  He gives a kind of snort. “Don’t get her started. She might throw rocks, herself. Drives my folks a little batty, talking about it all the time; they just want this whole mess to go away.”

  “Etta’s on Sylvia’s side, you know. She says she wants intelligence in the classroom, not religion.”

  “Sounds like Sylvia, all right. Maybe they should get together.”

  I decide not to tell him that this has already happened, like a little secret piece of news I know that he doesn’t. It occupies me a good deal of the rest of the ride to Bangor.

  Max finds another double space. I don’t say anything this time, but it still seems wrong to me. Then he wants to go right to This Time. I want to go to Shane’s place first, but I don’t say anything. I just open the door instead of walking past. Max is surprised, but he follows me in.

  Shane looks up from the counter and grins at me. “Hey, Ethan!”

  “Hey.”

  Max comes up behind me. “What would you do if we walked in when you were working on someone?”

  “I always lock the door when I’m doing a tat, if my business partner isn’t here. Can’t risk being interrupted.” He looks back at me. “The cuff looks great. What can I do for you boys today?”

  “I have a friend who wants a cuff, too. And I might buy another one.”

  “What kind of friend? What do they like?”

  “She’s . . . well, she’s kind of Goth, but she’s also Christian.”

  Max says, “Jorja? You sure you want to buy stuff for her?”

  I ignore him. Somehow, this place is mine, not his. I don’t think too deeply about it, but I feel it deeply just the same. Plus, on some weird level I’m thinking maybe if I’m nice to her, she won’t be such an activist. Maybe she’ll stop shouting at people. Maybe I’m trying to buy her off with gifts, but it’s worth a try.

  Shane has pulled out a silver cuff with an ichthus in it where the yin-yang is in mine. He sets it on a black velvet pad. I’m nodding, and Shane is searching for something else. He comes up with this plastic zipper bag that has something metal in it, flashes of silver and blue shining from it. Then he gets out a Styrofoam hand form stuck onto a metal bar that holds the hand pointing up. By the time he gets the metal thing on the form, I already know Jorja would love it.

  Shane says, “Maybe the Goth side of her would like this slave bracelet. I have a few designs, and this one also comes in purple.”

  My eyes must have lit up when he said “purple,” because he grins and reaches for another plastic bag. He puts away the blue one, and once the purple one is on the form I can’t stop looking at it. Between the silver rings around the wrist and the silver ring on the middle finger is a diamond pattern of purple links and black beads. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s exactly up Jorja’s alley, and it’ll make me feel better for not wanting her to get a tat and compete with me. A sticker on it says it’s twenty dollars. “I’ll take it.”

  Max surprises me. “What other ear cuffs have you got?”

  Shane narrows his eyes and looks at Max like he’s thinking. Then he pulls out a plastic bowl with a bunch of cuffs and gives Max another black pad. I help him sort through them, though I sneak a gaze into the display case, wondering what else Shane might have pulled out but didn’t. What I see tells me Shane has pegged Max as less daring, maybe; the cuffs Shane gave him are all pretty tame. No beads or crystals or dangles, like some of the stuff he didn’t pull out.

  There’s one in the case that looks like it might be a spider web curled so that it would be the cuff part, with a long, thin chain down to a silver spider that must be a stud to go through a pierced lobe. I almost ask about it, but Max distracts me before I can get up enough nerve. He picks up a silver band, a narrow, shiny center going around the cuff, with tiny silver dots in a line on top of the band and below it, like margins. Shane sets the mirror near him. It takes Max a minute to get the thing on. He admires himself in the mirror and then turns to me.

  “You like?”

  I’m tempted to kiss him, but somehow I think he’d freak. So I just grin and nod at him. To Shane I say, “Um, what’s in that other bowl?”

  Shane picks up the bowl with the spider in it, and I hear Max say, “Now, that’s weird stuff.” But I ignore him. I reach for the spider, but just as I’m about to pick it up I see a bat. Like the spider, the bat is a stud. As I pick it up I see there’s a long thin chain on this one, too, falling in a big loop to the stud from a silver cuff, which is carved to look like a tree branch. Shane sets the spider on the black pad, and I set the bat next to it.

  Max says, “You’re not serious.”

  I pick up one and then the other, and I look at Shane. He’s watching me closely. Then he says, “The bat.”

  Something that I didn’t even know was there lifts off my shoulders. I feel light, and both excited and peaceful.

  Max makes a scoffing sound. “How much is that one?”

  Looking at Shane, I say, “I don’t care.”

  Shane grins at me, and I know for sure now there’s some connection between us, something Max doesn’t see and wouldn’t understand if he did. I pay for the lot, including Max’s cuff.

  At This Time, Max buys himself some brown leather gloves to go with his jacket, but we don’t see a whole lot more today. Or maybe we’re both so focused on what we got at Shane’s that we can’t spare any imagination for clothes. No black shirt today, but that’s okay.

  We’re at the counter paying for Max’s gloves when the little bell over the door tinkles. I look up kind of automatically and nearly lose my balance. It’s Guy.

  The place is dark enough that someone just coming in has to adjust their eyes, so he doesn’t see me right away, thank God, because I must have looked like a dorky little kid. By the time he’s fully inside and sees me, I’ve recovered as well as I can.

  “Ethan!” He comes over and offers his hand to shake. I’m busy taking in the jacket he’s wearing, black leather but definitely not something he bought here. It looks like black butter, soft and smooth. No suit jacket under that, for sure. It’s Saturday, after all. “Good to see you. I was just catching up on some work at the office. This is one of my favorite places.” He barely touches the arm of my jacket. “It looks like you’ve shopped here before.”

  I’m trying to come up with something—anything—to say, when I feel Max shove me a little. “Oh, um, Guy, this is my friend Max Modine.” To Max I say, “Guy LeBlanc. My mom’s divorce lawyer.”

  I catch the look on Max’s face. He’s impressed. Maybe too impressed, like he’d rather be with Guy than me. But I decide not to worry about that.

  “Glad to meet you, Max.” He tilts his head, sees the ear cuff. “That’s unusual.”

  “It’s an ear cuff. I have one, too,” I say, immediately regretting it. Stupid, needy little kid.

  Guy looks at me. “So you do! I didn’t see that ear very well. Where’d you get them?”

  Max says, “The tattoo parlor, next door.”

  I am irritated now; Guy is my find, and so is Shane! So I say, “If you stop in, tell Shane Ethan sent you.”

  Guy laughs, showing a gorgeous set of white teeth. “I’ll do that.” He starts to back away. “Say hello to your mom for me.” A wave of his hand, and he disappears into the racks in back of the store.

  The sound of the tinkling door, muffled behind us as we leave, follows me down the sidewalk toward the car.

  Max breaks the silence. “Man, what a dick magnet! How long were you gonna keep him a secret?”

  This stuns me. “Secret? There’s no secret. Anyway, he’s too old for us.”

  “Hardly!”

  I don’t like the direction this is going—never mind that I’d lusted after Guy myself—so I say, “Maybe he’ll go looking for an ear cuff, and he and Shane will hit it off.”

  Max laughs. It’s not a fun laugh. He’s laughing at me. “You gotta be kidding, Ethan. Shane is totally not in this guy’s league. Don’t be a dork.”

  I stop in my tracks, wishing I could think of something to say to this. Dork?

  The look on my face must tell Max he’s gone too far. He wraps an arm around my neck and squeezes. I’m hoping he’ll follow it up with a kiss—a quick one to the cheek would be enough—but I guess that’s too daring for him.

  On the way home, Max pulls into our spot again. I’m trying to sulk; I’m not real happy with him right now. But he’s too gorgeous, and he has no trouble getting the right kind of rise out of me.

  He’s left the engine on again to keep us warm. Afterward, I’m on my back, groggy and watching the sky slowly turn to dusk. Max’s hand rests on my chest. His fingers start to move, and as he walks them over to one of my tits he starts giggling and then pinches me hard.

  “Hey!” My voice is soft; I don’t really mind. I grab his hand with one of mine. “What’s so funny?”

  He frees his hand and wanders back to tender pink skin. “If there’s an intelligent designer, why do men have tits?”

  I strain my neck so I can look at his face. “Is there an answer, or are you saying there’s no designer?”

  “Oh, I think there is, actually. But the ID side won’t like it.” He lifts his body up and kneels as well as he can in the confined space, one leg on either side of my hips. “It’s so gay guys have another body part to play with.”

  He proceeds to play with mine, and before long we’ve both come again, and I’m feeling kind of sorry for straight guys. I mean, there can’t be a girl alive who would know how to get to a boy like another boy does.

  When we get back on the road, I start noticing the election signs. Maybe it’s because this is the first time I’ve been up so high on this road, in this huge vehicle, while not either gazing like a puppy at Max or trying to watch him in my peripheral vision. Anyway, there are signs for a lot of things, not just the school board seat. Just as I’d predicted, they’ve multiplied like roaches. Town council, state representative—everything you can think of. They look unstable on their rough-cut, raw pine sticks, even mine (I mean, Etta’s), impaling the ground insecurely and tilting each at a different angle as they march in irregular formation along the scrabbly roadside. Uncut grasses and the heads of dead weed flowers crowd the sticks and partially obscure the signs.

  Closer to home, where there are more houses, I see two or three signs in the front lawns. Some have Etta’s name on them, and I feel an odd pride: someone else supports her enough to put up a sign in their own yard. Then I see something that makes me tell Max, “Stop!”

  He brakes and turns toward the side of the road. “What? What’s the matter with you?”

  I throw the door open and trot to a yard maybe two hundred feet back, Max right behind me. “What is it?”

  I point. There’s an Etta Greenleaf sign, the one that says, RELIGION IS FOR CHURCHES. SCIENCE IS FOR SCHOOLS. And right next to it there’s another one, looking like the people who live here made it. It says, STEAL THE SIGN AGAIN AND IT’S $50 MORE TO GREENLEAF.

  Max says, “Yeah? So?” He just doesn’t get it. I turn and head back to the car. “Ethan, what’s with you?” Both our doors slam at about the same moment. “Well?”

  I look at him, trying to figure out the best thing to say. “You know, I’ve been helping Etta put these signs up. People are stealing them. Stealing them! What the fuck do they think, that’s going to make a difference?”

  “Well . . . you didn’t put that one up, did you?”

  I heave a weary sigh. “No, of course not. It’s in someone’s yard. But they’ve been stealing them from all over. Even from our own yard.”

  Max looks confused. “Dude, this is just some erectoral vote, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  He pulls back onto the road. “You know. It doesn’t mean dick.”

  “Ha! Ask your sister.”

  “Not askin’ her nothin’. She’s off the deep end at the moment.”

  “I thought you cared about this. Science makes us okay, remember? And religion doesn’t?”

  He shrugs. “I guess. Maybe I’m just getting kind of tired of hearing about it.”

  I’m thinking, That’s too bad, because it ain’t over, but I don’t say it. I glance at the dashboard for the clock. Just after four. And suddenly something I’ve been pushing to the back of my mind since Max picked me up earlier crashes to the front with a painful thud. I fully expect that Dad has let it be known by now that he doesn’t appreciate being left out of Kyle’s life—and out of this problem that might even threaten that life. And I fully expect that Mom is going to take it out of my hide somehow that I told him.

  On top of that, despite the way something delightful jumps from one part of my body to another every time I so much as glance at Max, we just don’t seem to be on the same wavelength in some areas, and it’s spoiling the euphoria. So what I do say is, “Listen, I should probably get back. And it’s almost your curfew, too.”

  He lets a few seconds go by. “I was kinda thinking we’d go get a soda or something.”

  Maybe this would be the time to let him know what’s going on; I haven’t wanted to before, but it seems more serious now. To get things going, I say, “I think my mom probably needs me.”

  “For what?”

  We’re maybe four minutes from my house at this point, not enough time to tell him before we get there. “Maybe a quick stop.”

  We share a large order of fries with our drinks. Max gets a Diet Pepsi, which takes me a little by surprise, but I don’t say anything. I mean, around here girls drink those, but not boys mostly.

  I open. “So, the reason my mom needs me right now. These days, I mean.” And I stop. Max, sucking on his straw, waves a hand in a circular motion, like Go on. I take a deep breath. “I have to ask you not to talk to anyone about this. Promise?”

  He swallows. “I guess. I don’t know what it is.”

  “It doesn’t affect you, really.”

  “If it takes you away from me, it does.”

  Sometimes the wavelengths flow together.... “Yeah, but—hell, it’s my brother. Kyle. We just don’t want it spread around, you know? He has this problem.” I start with the ice bag in the shed and go through all the weirdness with the fabric ropes and the work glove right up to when I saw his hand this morning. Max’s eyes get wider with each new aspect of this weirdness. For my finish, I say, “So we have to keep an eye on him. And now that my dad’s not around anymore, it’s just Mom and me, and she can’t do it all the time. She’s already, like, fried. Exhausted. And it’s why she got me the iPhone. So she can reach me if she needs to.”

  Max looks stunned. It takes him a minute before he says, “Wow. Man.” And then, “Shit.”

  I stare down at my fingers, playing with a soggy fry, eyes focused on the spots where the grease soaked in. Somehow even telling Dad about Kyle hadn’t felt quite as overwhelming as telling Max.

  “Is there, you know, anything I can do?” His voice is soft.

  I look up at him; he’s serious. Not like it’s just something you say. “I guess just understand that I need to get home. That I can’t leave Mom alone too long.”

  He nods. “K. I’m done here. You?”

  Max backs the Sequoia into my driveway. “This way no one from the house can see through the tinted glass,” he says just before exploring the inside of my mouth with his tongue. God, but I could live in this mobile white castle with him. Then he asks if he should go in and say hi to Mom.

  I don’t think this is a good idea; I expect there will be yelling, at me, as soon as she hears the door open. “Maybe not today. Another time.”

  He makes a quick grab at the side of his head and pulls his ear cuff off, I guess so he won’t be seen wearing it at home. Then he gives me one more quick kiss and I’m out. I watch him drive off, feeling lonely and scared like some little kid, knowing that inside my house a monster waits. Maybe two different monsters, if you count Kyle. And yet I have no place else to go. Just to be on the safe side, and maybe to eliminate another thing to set Mom off, I take off the bat stud and cuff and shove them into the bag in my jacket pocket.

  Be with me, Edgar, I think to the bat Heidi gave me; help me face my fears. I close my eyes, navigating by echolocation, touch the door handle on the very first try, and open the door.

  I see Mom through the doorway into the kitchen, paperwork on the table in front of her, smoke curling upward from an ashtray. She doesn’t even look up. I know, somehow, that this is even worse than yelling. I stand there a minute, not knowing which direction to go in, caught between knowing I have to let Mom yell at me and being pulled upstairs as though it’s a sanctuary, which it isn’t really. Heidi said I’d have to find a way up to escape the elastics that pull me back and forth. I don’t realize I’m staring at Mom until she turns her head. Her eyes are puffy, but the expression on her face isn’t sadness. It’s cold fury.