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got back.
    “How'd you like it?” he asked.
    “It's great. I didn't want to get off”
    “Man,” he said, “what I wouldn't have given for a bike like that when I was your age.”
    We each took a handlebar and wheeled my new bike up the driveway. My father had cleared a place for it inside the toolshed.
    “I looked at the ten-speeds,” he told me, “but they cost an arm and a leg. Besides, what do you need ten speeds for?”
    “I don't know,” I said.
    Before we went inside, we stood for a few minutes in the backyard, gazing up at the stars. It was a clear, moonless night. The Big Dipper, one of the few constellations I knew, was blazing in the sky like an upside-down question mark.
    I had just ratted on my best friend. At that very moment, Kevin was probably walking out of the woods between his mother and Paul, and I didn't know if he was going to hate me or thank me. My father put his hand on my shoulder.
    “Thirteen,” he said, as if that explained everything.

Race Riot
     
    T he way I heard it, these two black guys crashed the teen dance in the Little League parking lot. One of them had a funny hat, a red sailor's cap pulled down over his eyes. The other was tall and skinny. At first they just hung out near the band, jiving and nodding their heads to the music.
    In 1975 Darwin was still an all-white town, a place where blacks were not welcome after dark. It must have taken a certain amount of courage for the two guys just to thread their way through the crowd, knowing they were being watched and whispered about, maybe even pointed at. The focus of the dance shifted with their arrival, until the whole event came to revolve around the mystery of their presence. Did they like the music? Were they looking for trouble?
    Nobody really minded until they started bugging Margie and Lorraine. Later Margie said it was no big deal, they just wanted to dance. But shewas wearing these incredible cutoffs, and Sammy Rizzo and some of the other football players didn't like the way the black guys were staring at her ass. There would have been trouble right then, but a cop stepped in when it was still a shouting match and sent the brothers home.
    I'd left the dance early with Tina, so I didn't see any of this happen. I didn't even hear about it until Tuesday afternoon, when Sammy Rizzo slapped me on the back and asked if I was ready to rumble.
    “Rumble?” I said. The word sounded old-fashioned and vaguely goofy to me, like “jitterbug” or “Daddy-o,” something the Fonz might say on
Happy Days.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Tonight at eight. Better bring a weapon.”
    I didn't own any weapons except for a Swiss army knife that seemed completely unsuitable for a rumble, so I had to improvise from a selection of garden tools hanging in my parents’ toolshed. My choice—a short, three-pronged fork used for weeding—was a big hit at the Little League.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Sammy. “That looks like something outta James Bond.”
    “Yeah,” Mike Caravello observed. “You could probably rip someone's balls off with that.”
    We were sitting on picnic tables inside the pavilion, waiting for the baseball game to end. Caravello sat next to me, twisting his class ring aroundand around his finger. He made a fist and the ring's red jewel jutted up from his hand, a freak knuckle.
    “Some nigger's gonna get Class of ‘74 tattooed on his face,” he said, flashing a nasty silver grin. He was way too old to be wearing braces.
    A jacked-up Impala squealed into the parking lot behind the first-base bleachers. Caravello pounded the tabletop.
    “Fuckin’ excellent! It's the twins!”
    The twins got out of the car and looked around, using their hands for visors. They were both wearing overalls with no shirts underneath, and their muscles were all pumped up from lifting.
    “Which one's Danny?” I asked.
    “The one with the tire iron,” Caravello said.
    My chest tightened up. Until that moment, the fight had seemed like a game to