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“No way!” Ruth said.

“They started dating junior year. She came up here with him that summer, and every summer since.”

“I would love to hear those stories! I bet they had some crazy parties down here.”

“My dad would love to tell them. He’s addicted to the glory days.”

“God,” Ruth said as she threw an arm over Mickey’s shoulder. “Promise me our lives will get better than high school.”

When she looked at Ruth, Mickey thought that for the first time in her life she understood why they called them “glory days.” Why this time would be something to relish. Something she would never forget.

“Obviously,” she lied.

Ruth turned around and looked at the firepit.

“Can we use this?”

Mickey shrugged, looking for another smooth rock.

“We’ve made s’mores down here a few times.”

“That’s adorable.”

Mickey’s face flushed, but she wasn’t exactly sure why.

“Does your uncle use the house too?”

Mickey’s lip went to her teeth. Her parents never told her not to talk about Uncle Phil, but somewhere along the way, she learned his name came with electricity. It made her parents jump—just a little jolt before they recovered, but it was enough to cause her to develop her own reaction. Eventually, it was enough to make her sidestep his name—the whole idea of him—entirely.

“No,” Mickey answered.

“Why not?”

Mickey kicked at a pile of leaves and inspected its wet underbelly.

“He’s dead,” she said. “He died in prison.”

It was the truth, and beyond the bare-boned facts of what happened that night all those years ago, it was about all she knew.

“Damn!” Ruth said, her eyes wide. “What’d he do? Did he kill someone?”

Mickey swallowed. “Yeah, actually. But my dad says it was by accident.”

“No way.” She took a step closer to Mickey and hit her on the arm. “Tell me everything!”

“It was in high school. Dad always said he was kind of a weird kid—like, a sensitive, artsy type. He had a motorcycle—it’s still here, in the shed—and made my grandparents totally crazy. When he was a senior, there was some accident and a girl died. He didn’t mean to kill her, but it was his fault, I guess.”

Mickey had never told anyone about Uncle Phil, but she saw Ruth’s attention as if it were physical, a cord floating free around her, and she had never wanted to hold on to anything so badly in her life.

“That’s crazy,” Ruth said. “That’s so crazy.”

“Yeah, we don’t talk about it.”

Ruth nodded. But then she yawned, her eyes squeezed shut like a cat’s.

“It happened here.”

That Mickey knew she wasn’t supposed to share. Her parents didn’t even know she knew that, but Sean had told her. It was a few years ago, on one of the nights when they made s’mores around the firepit. After they had packed up the marshmallows and graham crackers, Mickey tripped over her flip-flop and stepped straight out of it. Sean picked it up, grinning. Then he leaned in close and whispered, This is where Uncle Philip killed that girl, and ran away with her shoe, moonlight reflecting off his basketball shorts. Mickey froze right in that spot. She couldn’t move an inch. It was dark, and so much darker when she was alone. She stayed there, shaking and crying, until her dad noticed she wasn’t with them and came back for her. But no matter how many times Silas asked her what Sean had said to make her so scared, she never told. She knew instinctively, even then, that seeing her dad’s reaction would be so much worse than experiencing her own. He died before she was born, but she was nevertheless raised under Uncle Phil’s weight, the space in which he should’ve lived occupied, instead, by her father’s bone-dense grief.

“Here?” Ruth asked, and she wrapped her arms around herself, despite the thick heat of the New England summer.

Mickey nodded. She felt guilty, using her uncle like that. But Ruth’s yawn had hurt like a slap. She needed Ruth’s eyes back.

“That’s crazy,” Ruth said. But she didn’t look like Mickey did when she learned it. Ruth was grinning.





PEYOTE





I THINK IT’S TIME that I tell you what I’m actually working on.

This might not come as a huge surprise, but I wasn’t born Peyote Trip. Same with Calamity and KQ and everyone else. When a newb arrives in Hell, that lucky winner gets a new identity, stupid name and all. The idea is to strip us of our humanity. We have no use for that here.

Everybody starts off remembering their real name. I don’t know how it goes for the folks on the conveyor belts, but for the rest of us, repeating our real names becomes our version of prayer. Even so, with so much time and distance, we forget. Eventually, we all become whatever name we were given.

I would have done the same, if it hadn’t been for Slippery Pete.

Slippery Pete was my bunkmate on the Second Floor. He was a veteran Second-Floor man, and proud of it. He must’ve been a butcher topside, or maybe a serial killer. He knew about pressure points and how to snap a joint unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen. He seemed to like the Second Floor, as much as anyone could. It was honest work by Hell standards, and he was good at it.