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stomp upstairs, and disappear for a while. When that happened we knew we were getting kicked out into the street. We were already standing when Marcus eventually reappeared, tossing excuses, and we beat it out the sticky screen door to the next afternoon oasis.
    The telephone book was still waiting on Marcus's front step, and this year's Oldsmobile, the next in a proud line of Collins Oldsmobiles, was not to be seen. “Let's take the shortcut,” Reggie said. Walker was the last street in Azurest before Sag Harbor Hills, so it was convenient for taking a shortcut to the other side.
    We loved shortcuts. For a long time, it was hard to top the thrill of slipping into a slim corridor into the woods, undetectable except for the small mound of kicked-up soil by the side of the road. Sometimes a shortcut was half woods and half a sprint through someone's property, but the best ones cut through two unimproved properties, one in Azurest, the other in the Hills. Even though you were only making your way across two quarter-acre lots, it was like hacking through primeval forests, the gigantic fronds of an alien planet. The only people who had preceded us were fellow explorers. Each time the branches shivered closed behind us, we exited our juvenileexistences and joined the fraternity of the brave. I never discovered any shortcuts on my own. I only found out about them when the rest of the gang initiated me. Didn't have the eye, apparently.
    The real woods outside of the developments were the true frontier, enigmatic and intimidating. Behind the gas station, or leading out from the paths behind the park, we tramped farther and farther from the roads we knew, each fork thoroughly debated—left is madness, right is the buried treasure, the gold doubloons to be divvied up according to age and status. We stumbled across shotgun shells, remains of fires, crushed beer cans, fresh tracks gouged by motorbikes—dangerous characters were up to inscrutable things between towns. Who had left these things, who was lurking in the shadows? “The KKK” was the usual answer, the reliable if unlikely boogeyman, tossed out there to amp up the feeling of danger. Statistically speaking, there may have been some members of the KKK in the near vicinity—it was the Hamptons, a “resort community” after all, and even the worst America has to offer occasionally need to unwind, catch some rays—but it was unlikely that they were patrolling on horseback, in full getup, complete cracker regalia, behind the dirt trails of Mashashimuet Park. Nonetheless, everybody immediately traded versions of how they were going to outrun the KKK—“I'd be out in front of you dummies with a quickness,” “Knock your ass down to buy me some time”—while I kept silent, thinking of how I was going to save Reggie. Grandiose scenes of self-sacrifice came easily to me, wherein I distracted the Hooded Menace long enough to allow him to escape. He was my little brother.
    When we got to the shortcut in question, there was nothing to say beyond Reggie's verdict: “That's messed up.” We were used to emerging from the woods to see a car in the driveway of a shortcut house and having to hightail it back. We were not accustomed to the woods disappearing. The old oaks and chestnut trees and low-lying sticker bushes had been uprooted and cleared. In their stead, moist orange dirt was heaped in piles, and the freshly laid cement foundation gaped at us. It was messed up, some newcomers taking over land we had claimed. It wasn't hard to picture the future. First this lot,then the rest. One by one, the new Sag Harbor would replace the haunted houses in all their forms.
    “I hate that,” I said.
    “That's messed up,” Reggie repeated.
    We took the long way around. Not a lot of people in the Hills, either. Clive's house looked dead. The brown kente-cloth drapes behind the sliding glass doors to his living room were tight. Usually, they were open from May to September, inviting us