Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award

Finalist for the Binghamton University’s John Gardner Fiction Book Award

Finalist for the Saroyan Prize for Fiction

Longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize

"Hilarious, Devious, Original, and Unforgettable."—Karen Russell

A vivid and assured work of fiction, from a major new voice, following the life of a young man growing up, leaving home, and coming back again, marked by the start beauty of California's Mojave Desert and the various fates of those who leave and those who stay behind.

This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner's world - the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school's confederate mascot; Daley's mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley's most meaningful - and most fraught - connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.

A luminous debut, Desert Boys by Chris McCormick traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.

Release date: May 3, 2016

Publisher: Picador

Print pages: 224

Sample

MOTHER, GODFATHER, BABY, PRIEST



Not long ago, three desert boys built a paintball field in the middle of nowhere. The idea came to Daley Kushner after his mother, a severely cautious Armenian immigrant unwilling or unable to differentiate between simulated violence and the real thing, refused to pay for her only son to be hunted down “like a mule” at the professional field in Acton. Daley didn’t bother informing her that nobody, not ever, had hunted a mule. He just took his idea to the other boys, who immediately agreed to the plan. Dan Watts, whose parents owned a landscaping business, offered to borrow the necessary equipment, and Robert Karinger—whose dad had fought in the First Gulf War—had the idea to call each other by last name only: Kush, Watts, and Karinger. This gave an otherwise fun project the heaviness of what Karinger called “a life-and-death enterprise.”

“Why Kush,” said Watts, “and not Kushner?”

“Kushner sounds too much like my name,” said Karinger. “We’d confuse people.”

Nobody, Kush knew, would ever confuse him for Karinger, and what people there were to confuse, Kush couldn’t say. He was just grateful to have a nickname, and ready to get to work.

This was the summer before high school. The boys biked from town to the Antelope Valley’s uncultivated desert, working long days so they could get the most use out of the paintball field before classes started in the fall. The dirt from newly dug trenches and bunkers established rings of three-foot-high passageways and walls, which Karinger called “bulkheads.” From time to time, they ventured farther into the desert to find and collect abandoned furniture: a plaid La-Z-Boy sofa—orange foam innards jutting from its arms—made a quality barrier along the north section; a large brass-framed mirror, cracked in places and fogged by the remnants of old adhesives, provided an interesting Enter the Fist effect from an otherwise blind trench. Other objects, including many of the shredded tires lining the nearby 138, were sorted into tall wobbling piles. After weeks of shirtless, blister-forming labor in 100-plus-degree weather, the three boys flexed and compared their newly shaped and sun-soaked muscles. Then they rode home to fetch their guns.

Karinger was the only one to bring along any armor. He owned a face guard designed to look like a World War II–era gas mask. He never wore it, though, and simply carried the mask under his arm in the desert. Holding the mask seemed to give Karinger an indisputable authority, which he used to set up the rules of the game.

“Since there’s three of us, we can only do one of two things—every man for himself, or two-on-ones, rotating the lone wolf.”

The idea of being ganged up on had always frightened Kush, but not badly enough to consider inviting one of the sisters—Karinger’s or his own—to even the teams. He suggested they stick to every man for himself. Then, suddenly afraid, too, of never having a partner: “Or two-on-ones, if you guys want.”

Karinger pressed the tip of his gun against Kush’s chest. Kush hadn’t read Freud yet, but he still felt a kind of thrill.

“In war,” Karinger said, “indecision means death.”

Watts, half-Mexican, tanned while the others burned. He offered his suggestion coolly. “Let’s do every man for himself, see how it goes, and then reassess.”

“Right,” said Karinger. He aimed his gun a few inches from Kush’s foot and fired three shots at a rock the size of a coyote’s skull. He told Kush to pick up the rock and toss it to him.

“This,” Karinger said, holding the paint-splattered rock in front of him, helmet still under his arm, “is the Stone of Victory. Be the first to take the Stone back to your starting point without getting hit, and you win.” He placed the Stone of Victory in the crook of a Joshua tree’s arm.

The three stood back-to-back-to-back and, as directed by Karinger, took one hundred long steps each in his own direction. Then they waited for Karinger to fire his gun in the air—the designation of the start.

* * *

Also not long ago, though more recently, I got an email inviting me to a baptism that would take place in my hometown, the Antelope Valley.

The baby to be baptized was a boy whose father happens—or happened—to be an old friend of mine from childhood. The boy’s mother sent the invitation along with an apology for not sending a hard copy. She didn’t know my physical address, she explained, and I wasn’t on any of the social networks. After a bit of investigation, she found a blog I’d contributed to, and an email address. She signed off:

Hope to see you,

Jackie (Connolly) Karinger

?

For some time after reading the message, I wandered around my apartment, thinking of little else. This was the second piece of news I’d heard about my old friend Karinger in as many months, after a gulf of communication between us that lasted over five years (and never, finally, resolved itself). The other bit of news being that he’d been killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in November. Another friend from that time, Dan Watts, with whom I’d been in slightly better touch, called in January to tell me. At one point in the conversation, Watts said: “I always imagined those soldiers using paintball guns, that the war was just a large-scale version of what we played as kids.” I confessed that the same thought had occurred to me.

Still, I couldn’t focus on much in Jackie (Connolly) Karinger’s message other than the strange addition of the smiley face. In bed or in the shower, I’d find myself ascribing to the face some meaning, a hint at something larger, something Jackie (Connolly) Karinger might have wanted to say to me, but could not.

One day in February, I decided to take a walk to mull over the invitation. Even on sunny days, Oakland at that time of year was mysteriously wet and chilly. A used bookstore stood ten blocks from my apartment, and I didn’t realize I was heading there until I was drying my shoes against the mat out front. Lloyd Alcero, an old classmate of mine at Berkeley, greeted me from the register at the center of the store. The place was small, and I could see I was the only customer.

“Hey,” I said. The sound of my voice came out tinny and weak. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in days. I cleared my throat and moved toward the back of the store, to a section I’d been interested in some time ago, but not so much recently: GLOBAL TERRORISM. Someone had placed a sticker of W’s face on the label. Neck tilted, I scanned the spines along the shelves.

Lloyd Alcero came up behind me. “Doing research for another prize-winning essay?”

There had been an essay contest on campus a few years earlier for English majors. My submission was a piece about the effects of past wars on American fiction (specifically, Salinger’s), compared to the inability of our current wars in the Middle East to produce similar results (due, according to my thesis, not only to the lack of a draft but to an anomalous combination of what I called “unwarranted-ness and apathy” as well). I didn’t—and don’t—know if I believed that, but the essay turned out to win the top prize: publication in Berkeley’s alumni magazine, California, along with a check for five thousand dollars. Naturally, the only people who remembered I’d won were other participants in the competition, including Lloyd Alcero, who brought up the topic every time we spoke.

“No,” I said. “What about you, Lloyd? You writing anything?”

Lloyd was one of those young gay men whose outlandish flamboyance and energy, inextricably linked, seemed to exhaust and straighten other gay men who came into contact with him. He was wearing a white bandanna over his forehead, and a tuft of dyed-green hair sprouted like a small artichoke from his chin. He stopped fussing with the books, happy to hear the question. “Just my novel,” he said, shifting the bandanna. “It just keeps growing and growing—it’s up to, like, twelve hundred pages now. My ideas keep feeding off each other.”

At this point—maybe he noticed my boredom—he pulled from the shelf a book whose cover showed the burning Twin Towers. “Can you believe this September will be ten, as in one-zero, years?”

I did the math; we’d been in high school for less than a month.

“I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was,” he said, laughing. “I spent most of that morning asking people why it was such a big deal. It wasn’t like Britney Spears died or anything. Needless to say, I was not a bright kid.”

I actually felt relieved. To this day, I cringe when I think about how nonchalant I’d been, how casually I’d treated the news. I told Lloyd so.

“Well,” Lloyd said, getting back to the books. “We were just kids, you know? We were children. On the other side of the country, no less. What can you do?”

Choosing a few slim books at random, I stacked them on my arm. I felt a strange, patriotic obligation to buy something.

“You should come in more often,” he said. Again he adjusted his bandanna, which I guessed was a nervous tic.

I wished him luck on his novel. “Let me know when it’s ready for another pair of eyes,” I said.

You could see how long he’d been waiting for someone to say that.

* * *

They were only kids, sure, but some of them dealt with the circumstances with more gravity than others. While Watts and Kush, happy to be out of class early, joked about how terrorist attacks should happen more often, Karinger focused on the long-term consequences.

“Maybe we’ll get a world war,” he said.

Since school had started up again, they’d gone out to the paintball field only on the weekends, and went that Saturday after the attacks. The mood was different this time—no one seemed to be having any fun. At one point during the game, Karinger, who’d Scotch-taped a miniature American flag between the eyes of the mask under his arm, started walking, without urgency and without aiming his gun, directly at Kush. Kush was so confused by Karinger’s nonchalance that he hesitated to shoot. And then Karinger did what he’d never done before: he put on the mask. The gas-masked figure kept approaching at this slow, haunted pace, and Kush began to doubt the person behind the mask was Karinger at all. By the time Kush lifted his gun, he felt the sharp blast of a paintball against his right biceps. He dropped his gun to grab at the wound with his left hand, where a second tremendous pain began to grow. Karinger continued to shoot from a few yards away. He wouldn’t stop firing. Kush dropped into a ball on the dirt, at which point, the popping sounds of released carbon dioxide and ammunition stopped, at least for a moment.

Watts came over, yelling at Karinger. Kush tried, and failed, to hide his crying. After a while, Watts offered his hand to help him off the ground.

Karinger said, “Why the hell didn’t you shoot me, Kush?”

Watts said he’d had enough for the day. He was going home, and Kush wanted to join him. But as Watts got on his bike to leave, Karinger told Kush to stay for one more game.

“You’re going to win,” Kush said. “Why would I even play?”

“You’ve got to start thinking different,” Karinger said. He’d taken off his mask now and was jabbing his fingers into the side of his head. He had the bright blond hair of an albino, and he’d recently had it shaved to military length. Sometimes Kush imagined Karinger with blue eyes, but now that Karinger was staring directly at him, lecturing him, they were clearly hazel. “Stop saying everything that goes through your head, Kush. The first step in being tough is convincing people you’re tough. Including yourself. You’ve got to pretend you’re tougher than you are, keep some shit to yourself. This is what not being a pussy is all about.”

He went on to explain the rules of this new two-person game: essentially, chicken. They’d each get one shot at the other person from a certain distance before taking a long step closer. Then they’d shoot again, and step closer. And so on. The first person to quit the game lost.

“Thanks for the pep talk,” Kush said. “But I’m going to pass.”

“Fine,” Karinger said. “You can get two shots for every one of mine. You want to get me back, don’t you?”

Gingerly, Kush rubbed the welt on his hand and thought of how gratified he’d feel to give a matching one to Karinger. So he walked to his spot in the desert, thirty feet from where Karinger stood. Then he hollered, “Are there any rules?”

“You shoot twice, I shoot once. No need for masks”—he tossed his aside—“because there’s no face shots. And no ball shots. Cool?”

“I won’t aim for your face, but you should probably wear your mask. I can’t promise anything.”

“No masks,” Karinger called out. “It’ll force you to focus your aim.”

Kush tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. The heat had the back of his tongue scaly. He aimed his gun and shot, missing wide left. His second shot missed high.

Karinger’s first shot hit Kush on the left wrist.

“Shit!” Kush said, grabbing the pain.

They stepped closer. This round, Kush’s first shot missed again, but his second hit Karinger in the right shin.

“Good,” Karinger called out, shaking his leg.

By the time they were standing ten feet away from each other, Kush had stopped feeling the pain. He found himself laughing wildly every time he was hit, just as Karinger did. As they stepped closer together, Kush imagined their bodies merging. The silly idea had an odd heaviness in his mind, and allowed him to feel a tickling pinch where the pain ought to have been.

When they got within point-blank range, they aimed at each other’s chests.

“It’s a draw,” Karinger said, still laughing. “See, man? It’s a draw.”

Their laughter quieted down. For three, four seconds, their eyes met. Then, at the same time, they pulled their triggers.

There it is, Kush thought, doubled over in the desert. There’s the pain again.

They hadn’t merged after all.

* * *

I still hadn’t responded to Jackie (Connolly) Karinger. Her email stayed open on my computer—I must have read it thirty times. Looking around the room, I saw on the edge of the coffee table the three books I’d impulsively purchased from Lloyd Alcero. In an effort to buy more time, I went over to inspect them: Understanding the War on Terror, After 9/11: America’s Global War, The Muslim One: A Memoir.

I turned the third book over. The author’s black-and-white photograph: a young woman wearing a hijab. Chin down, she looked up at the camera. Her thin eyebrows tensed, giving her face the severe expression of a distraught mother, but she couldn’t have been much older than I was. Seeing her photograph reminded me of someone I’d known (“known” is a strong word) in high school. For all I knew, she could have been the same woman. Upon checking the bio, however, I learned that the author was raised not in California, but in Florida, where she’d foiled her uncle’s plot to set off a car bomb at an amusement park. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling—due, I suspected, to the timing of it all—that this author happened to be someone whose life was perpendicular to mine, and that, if I were to read her book, I’d learn something about myself at that intersection.

She’d written the memoir, strangely, in the third person. It began: “For the first sixteen years of her life, Adila Atef spoke with a throaty, confident voice.” By the time I reached the epilogue, I’d forgotten the book was not, in fact, a novel. The veracity of the story was re-revealed to me in those final pages, where the author converted to the first person:

Contrary to the beliefs of many—friends included—I wrote this book in the third person not for its therapeutic or distancing effects, but because it represents more accurately the way in which I remember these events unfolding, more like a film than a diary. The I can’t exist in more than one place at a time, and I am here, now. Who, then, was that other Adila?

Nowhere in her story was the experience of the girl I’d been aware of in high school. She and the author were not, I accepted, one and the same.

* * *

Of hundreds of girls at Antelope Valley High, only one wore a headscarf.

She was two years ahead of Karinger, Kush, and Watts, and so they rarely crossed paths. The only reason they knew of her was because, after the terrorist attacks, she’d been harassed in the main quad at lunch, and the local media came to produce a special report. Peter Thorpe, local newscaster, along with a microphone-tethered cameraman, interviewed students on campus. He asked questions some in the community later agreed were loaded, including whether or not this girl’s wearing a headscarf to school was in any way disrespectful, “considering the circumstances.”

Kush and Watts—along with about fifty other kids—vied for a spot in the shot’s background, making faces and flipping the camera the bird. By the time they realized Karinger was being interviewed, Kush and Watts had missed the entire conversation.

“He took my name, age, and class,” Karinger said when he rejoined his friends. “I’ll be on TV at seven o’clock tomorrow night.”

And so they made plans to watch the special at Karinger’s place, a brand-new two-story tract home on the west side of town. His mother, Linda, had won the house in a lottery, one of a thousand she entered every year. She, along with Roxanne—Karinger’s twelve-year-old sister—joined Kush and Watts in front of the TV, between multiple roaming cats. The three boys sat on the center couch. Linda took the love seat, and Roxanne, stomach and elbows down, lay flat on the carpet in front of them, chin on her hands. She wore a pair of little denim shorts, fraying at the ends. More than once, Kush caught Watts following the thin white lines of her legs to their meeting place.

The show started. Peter Thorpe spoke to the camera, live in-studio, against a green-screened photograph of three women in burqas. Kush looked to see that everyone’s attention was on the screen. When it was, he studied the bottoms of Roxanne’s big toes, which were only slightly larger than paintballs. His own sister, Jean, had just moved away for college, and he rarely saw her. He rarely saw any girls—definitely not the bottoms of their toes—so he studied Roxanne’s with the unsexed air of a paleontologist.

The segment shifted to an exterior shot of the high school. A voice-over informed the viewers that he (Thorpe) had recently had the opportunity to speak directly with students. One after the other, kids began making their on-screen claims. (“I have Trigonometry with her, but she never really says anything”; “She seems nice enough, but you never know”; “I’m sure it’s hard for her to be the only one, but her being here is hard for everyone else, too, you know?”)

Finally Karinger, with his white-blond buzz cut and matching, furrowed eyebrows, appeared on the screen, much to the elation of his mother, who placed her hands over her nose and mouth, speaking into them: “My man, my man!” Roxanne turned her neck to look at her brother on the couch above her, as if checking for similarities and differences between him and his on-screen counterpart.

On-screen Karinger began:

“At first I was kind of—” He looked to Peter Thorpe for approval. “—pissed.” He leaned into the microphone. “She definitely brings up a lot of stuff you don’t want to be reminded of.” Now he turned to look at the camera. Kush wondered how many times Karinger had practiced this before—he was a natural. “But that doesn’t mean she can’t wear whatever she wants to wear,” Karinger continued, “because that’s what my dad fought for.” The kids in the background thrashed each other for attention. Kush, meanwhile, looked at Roxanne. He didn’t feel what he thought he ought to feel; he found himself thinking of the shape of Karinger’s legs, trying to remember if they belled out in the calves the way Roxanne’s did. Then he turned to Watts, who looked up from Roxanne’s legs, too, and gave Kush this look, eyebrows-up, that said, I know, huh.

Linda reached out to her son and put her hand on his knee, saying something about the future president. Everyone congratulated Karinger on his performance—even the cats, swarming, seemed pleased with him—because he really did represent how the community felt, disturbed but principled. A bit self-righteous, Kush might’ve added, but at least humane. On their bike ride home that night, Watts and Kush talked about how proud they were of Karinger, admitting surprise. Kush hoped Karinger’s speech would inspire the rest of the school to leave the Muslim girl alone.

Unable to sleep that night, Kush got out of bed and found a pen and a sheet of paper with two lists he hadn’t updated since middle school: one list, “Foster,” for people he admired and another, “Pester,” for people he felt he could do without. On the “Foster” side of the paper, which he’d go on to fold and carry in his Velcro wallet for a number of years, he wrote beside Karinger’s name: As a kid, you like your friends because you have fun together. As you get older, though, you start rooting for them. You want to be proud of them.

* * *

Five days after Jackie (Connolly) Karinger’s invitation, Dan Watts called me.

After high school, Watts was the only one of us to stay in the Antelope Valley. While Karinger joined the marines and I moved to Berkeley, Watts worked his way through an EMT program at the local community college, passed the National Registry examination, and now worked as a paramedic. We blamed his schedule for how rarely we spoke (a few times a year). His voice had a coarse, sleepy quality, which some of his recent acquaintances must have mistaken as a consequence of his rigorous job. The voice was, however, the voice he’d always had, and hearing it this day came as a warm comfort.

He asked whether or not I had plans on the eighteenth of April, the date of the baptism. When I told him about Jackie’s email, he sounded relieved: “I didn’t want to bring it up in case you weren’t invited.”

“Wait,” I said. “What would you have done if I didn’t know about the baptism? What if I’d asked what was so important about April eighteenth?”

“Huh. I didn’t think that far ahead.”

I asked about him—was he going to be there?

“Believe it or not,” he said, “I’m the godfather.”

A strange, embarrassing jealousy came to me.

“What about you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I told him I changed my mind every hour. “I can’t get the thought out of my head that he wouldn’t have wanted me there.”

Watts laughed. “Probably not. But isn’t that your cue?”

“Do you remember that Muslim girl in high school?” I said. “The one they did the TV special on?”

“Yeah, for sure. Did you guys meet up? Wait, are you with her now?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’ve just been thinking of Karinger’s interview. Where he shocked us with his sheer humanity. Remember that?”

“Yeah,” Watts said. “Too bad it didn’t make a difference.”

I’d remembered Karinger’s self-righteous but heroic speech, but I’d forgotten the rest of the story. Less than a week after the televised special, the girl in the headscarf was enjoying the lunch her mother had packed for her that day (a peanut butter sandwich, of all things), when she was pinned down by a group of six female seniors, who proceeded to spray-paint her white scarf red and blue. She rolled up to avoid both the fumes and the beating she presumed (understandably but incorrectly) was coming. According to Peter Thorpe’s follow-up report, she elected to be homeschooled for the remainder of high school. The six girls, who’d each been handed a five-day suspension, were initially also banned from attending senior prom. After a community petition gathered enough signatures, this additional ruling was reversed.

“I really believed Karinger’s speech was going to convince everyone on campus to leave her alone,” I said. “I went home that night and wrote this extremely sentimental note about growing up. About being proud of your friends, as opposed to just enjoying their company.”

“Sounds like you,” Watts said. “You still carry that note around, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not that sentimental.”

The truth was, of course, I’d been even more sentimental. Years after I’d written it, after what turned out to be our last conversation, I slipped the note into Karinger’s backpack. My hope was that he’d stumble upon it after I’d gone home, understand its significance, and return to me, his best friend, inspired to make me proud again.

“I don’t know,” said Watts. “I bet you still have it.”

“Tell me about the baby,” I said. “Tell me about your godson.”

But then my phone pinged, and I saw the name—LLOYD BOOKSTORE—on the screen. I told Watts I’d call him back in a few minutes, but I ended up talking with Lloyd for a long time, an hour and a half, and meeting up with him that night at a bar, and by the time I got home, Watts may or may not have been at work or asleep, and I didn’t want to bother him either way, so I turned off my phone and went to bed.

* * *

For the boys, there had never been in their midst a girlfriend—a young woman with the power to transform the priorities of a young man fundamentally—until Jackie Connolly pressed her cornsilk lips against the forehead and cheek and mouth of their friend Karinger. This was their junior year: the rattle of 2003, as Karinger would say, the fangs of 2004.

That Karinger, the only one with a girlfriend, was also the only one of the three who had a car seemed to the others not to be a coincidence. Earlier that year, Linda Karinger had purchased for her son (and, she specified, for her daughter to inherit) a royal blue 1988 Ford Mustang. If it weren’t for the daily rides to and from school—not to mention the joyrides on the weekends—Kush and Watts might have resented Karinger for his “sick ride,” as they, without irony, called it. As it was, Karinger’s successes felt entirely like theirs to share.

Until, of course, along came Jackie Connolly.

She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else’s denigration of it.

Her blond hair, invariably tied back with a red headband, was as thick as the tails of the horses she tended to on her parents’ farm in Quartz Hill. Regularly she came to school smelling like an old haystack. Although she was thin in the face, arms, legs, and chest, her hips spread against her like the San Gabriel Mountains. They’d had a class together here and there since freshman year, and Kush had met her during a brief stint with the Future Farmers club. But it wasn’t until Karinger, Jackie Connolly, and Watts all had junior English together that she became Karinger’s girlfriend and therefore part of the group. The schedule had it so the end of that particular class meant the beginning of lunch. Kush, enrolled separately in Intro to Literary Criticism, had to cross the width of campus to meet up with the other three, who, by the time he arrived, had invariably begun eating already.

Maybe all young people in love think about their relationship in the future tense, but Karinger and Jackie Connolly vocalized their future. Earlier in the year, the launch of the new war in Iraq promised Karinger at least some action, and he and Jackie constantly hypothesized on their capacity to be a military couple, to have a military family. They even talked unabashedly about money. Getting married before shipping out meant higher pay for Karinger, and possible wedding arrangements were tossed around in the lighthearted, creepy tone of the clinically deranged. They were proud to kiss in public—never raunchily, mouths always closed—and held hands any time they were in reach of each other. Nobody but Kush seemed to mind.

Because she shared the class with Karinger and Watts, Jackie Connolly seemed to think of Watts as Karinger’s best friend, not Kush. (In Kush’s mind, their friendship was an equilateral triangle—a generous thought, since Watts was the newer addition to the group.) Kush would watch Jackie laugh after Watts made a joke, and she’d go on and on until she snorted and—in some particularly egregious cases—cried. Meanwhile, after Kush told a joke of similar quality, she’d offer only a bit of flattery, this eyes-averted chuckle and smile. He found himself simultaneously jealous and contemptuous of this girl—this pallid, manure-shoveling girl.

Once, on a violently windy Saturday afternoon in November, Karinger backed out of plans to head to the paintball field, citing Jackie as his reason. Instead of riding in the smooth royal blue Mustang the way they’d envisioned, Kush and Watts pedaled their bikes side by side like children, struggling to push forward into the gusts. At one point, Kush confided in Watts his secret hatred of Jackie Connolly.

He said, with effort: “Don’t tell Karinger, but I want to rip that red headband out of her hair and throw it at her stupid face.”

Watts, who was in better shape and full of breath,