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over and Hannah’s still just as dead? Matthew’s voice had shifted from weary to bitterly amused. It’s too late, Tricky, he said. You didn’t even say anything.
    He gave me a hard look, daring me to disagree, but I didn’t speak. I don’t know why but something told me I had to lie there playing possum, the grand tactic of my life.
    Matthew’s eyes fixed on my hands. Quickly he moved one of my wrists on top of the other so that he could grip them both at the same time. I had slender wrists but even so, and as weak as I felt, maybe I could’ve wrenched free of his grip but I was in a lot of pain.
    Matthew began to rise, pulling me up with him.
    Once we were standing, he started backing me up. I didn’t look around or fight him. I was trying hard not to cry out in pain as we moved together like awkward prom dates stumbling across a dance floor.
    When we stopped, I think I felt an updraft from the valley floor. If I were an eagle I could have soared away. The screech of the pain was so loud that I let my body surrender to him, like the moment when the lady in old movies collapses into the hero’s arms.
    Him Tarzan. Me Jane.
    I let my eyelids fall as Matthew took his hand away from my wrists and then my shoulder. Open your eyes, Tricky, he said.
    But I couldn’t, it was as if I were standing on a high-wire and even the slightest movement might be enough to overbalance me.
    Matthew yelled at me, I said open your eyes .
    Still I didn’t do what he said, thinking instead about the time we found a fat timber rattlesnake and when Matthew shot it, it moved like a whip and we ran for our lives screaming and when we stopped running we laughed so hard we thought we were more in danger of dying from the laughter than we ever had been from that snake.
    Tricky, I swear … Just open your goddam eyes right now.
    I thought about lake-swimming, deer-stalking and can-plunking. We’d had a lot of fun together in the Swangums.
    My chest felt like it was painted with a bullseye.
    I thought I could sense something moving, only the breeze perhaps, but then after a long pause, I heard Matthew speak, the sound of his voice having moved farther away. OK then, OK, he muttered. OK, Tricky.
    I opened my eyes. Matthew was ten paces back, his shoulders slumped and a look of defeat on his face. He smiled bitterly at me. By the way, your head’s cut pretty bad, Tricky, he said, reaching into his back pocket, pulling out his red bandana and draping it over a rock. You know, he said, you realize no one ever needs to find out you were actually there. Really it was nothing to do with you at all. I’m sorry, Tricky.
    And with that, Matthew turned around, giving me a dejected wave as he headed off into the trees, back toward the bikes.
    *   *   *
    I FELT FAINT IN THE heat, the sickly pine resin air. Stepping away from the drop, I wanted to sit down and sleep but the pain in my head flared again. I reached back and started pushing my fingers timidly through my wet hair. I had a huge thatch of hair back then—people said I looked like a young version of Bobby Ewing from the TV show Dallas —and maybe that proved to be lucky, as if my head were wrapped in layers of gauze. The hole was right at my crown and all sticky. My fingers moved down and just kept on moving, down, farther down.
    And then I swear I heard a squelching sound, like a boot landing in mud, and yanked my hand away in shock thinking I must’ve touched my brain. Looking at my hand it was almost as if the blood couldn’t be mine. Too bright, too thick, too much. I wiped the hand on a rock, picked up Matthew’s bandana and pressed it to the back of my skull.
    I had to get to Hannah but my head was all swirly in the sick-making heat as I started to wonder how long it would take for a corpse to rot in this weather. When would her body start to smell? And now I couldn’t stop thinking about Hannah