_OceanofPDF

and tell me what the fuck I was doing there?”
In the silence, I looked at him in his blue hoodie and my Santa socks.
His cheeks were shadowed with the first growth of beard. He was always
clean-shaven in school. Always standing straight when everyone else was
liquid. Running the entrepreneur society. Playing club lacrosse because we
had no team. Dating a girl too ambitious for his traditional values.
“Why then?” I asked. “You could have gone anywhere.”
“Right.” He shifted in his seat in preparation, then back. “I could have.”
“What happened?”
“Once upon a time, in the hilly part of Beverly Hills, there lived a boy,”
he started. I laughed, and he smiled before he continued. “Our neighbors
moved, and the new owners gutted the place down to the studs. The entire
property was a construction site. We—Byron and I—could see it over the
fence from our rooms. It was pretty tempting, especially on weekends. All
those piles of dirt to climb, the digging machines just sitting there. And we
figured, why not? Just check it out. Who were we hurting?”
He took a sip of his water and flipped a glass over to pour me some
even though I hadn’t asked.
“Byron inspected the foundation like a damn city planner. I scaled the
house frame to get to the third story they were adding. I could see all the
way to the ocean. I felt like I was on top of the world. Anything I could see
was mine. The whole city. So I drew a sight line from the horizon to the
house. Thank God I did.”
I didn’t interrupt the pause he took.
“The pool was empty. Just the tiles and a balled up painting sheet over a
puddle of tar. Everything was so orderly except for that—the tar and
unfolded sheet—so I looked again. It was Lyric, just lying there. She was
the sheet. The puddle was blood.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah. I never yelled Byron’s name so loud. She had a concussion.
Didn’t remember shit. Otherwise, she was okay, but my father asked what
the fuck—and my dad doesn’t drop a ‘fuck’ unless he’s really pissed off. He
asked us what the fuck happened?”
“He couldn’t have blamed you,” I said.
“I’ll never know. Because I lied. Like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Obviously she followed us, but I said I saw her crawling through a space