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good on his face.
    “Sorry, man,” Deke said. “I thought he was dry. Rhonda told me he was dry.”
    Dry? Pax didn’t know what he meant. He wanted to ask why the chub boys had come, and what they were doing to his father, what the
fuck
was happening—but the questions failed to arrive at his lips. His thoughts refused to stay in order. He bounced along silently as Deke drove back into town, past the Gas-n-Go and the First Baptist Church, onto High Street where a row of houses overlooked the creek. When he was a kid, the only people who’d lived down here were the rich folks.
    Deke parked in front of a two-story house, brick on thebottom and wood siding on top, a traditional ranch with the roof raised ten feet.
    “Can you walk?” Deke said.
    Pax slowly opened the door and thought,
Can
I walk? He put a foot down on the cement driveway. He hadn’t noticed before how all the driveways up north were paved with asphalt, but down here they were all cement.
    “P.K., you want me to help?”
    Pax lifted a hand and stepped down. When the surface refrained from tilting beneath his feet he followed Deke up to a tall, narrow door. Inside, the living room was as airy as a church sanctuary. Light poured through the row of new, high windows that had been set above the old walls. The furniture was all polished oak, all argo-sized.
    Donna came out of a back room and looked at Paxton. “What happened?”
    “Is the guest room made up yet?” Deke asked. “He needs to lay down.”
    At the end of a hallway was a room painted bright orange and white—University of Tennessee colors. The bed filled up most of the space. Twelve feet long and eight feet wide, practically a playing field in its own right, covered by a UT Volunteers bedspread. He couldn’t guess where they’d gotten a mattress for it.
    “Go Vols,” Pax said. It was the first thing he’d been able to say aloud since leaving his father’s. “My dad …,” he said.
    “Your dad’s going to be fine. Just lay down, P.K. If you need to throw up, there’s a bathroom next door.”
    Deke left the door ajar when he stepped out. Pax lay on his back and breathed deep. The ceiling fan hung high, high above him, the blades turning slowly.
    The blades slowed, came to a stop. Then the room began to turn.
    He gripped the bed and closed his eyes.
    The day the Changes started, they were riding Pax’s fire-engine red Yamaha four-wheeler, ripping up and down the gullies behind Deke’s place. It was the second week of July, a few weeks after Paxton’s fourteenth birthday, 90 or 95 degrees. They didn’t hear the siren until Pax shut off the engine to give Deke a turn. It didn’t sound like a cop car or a fire truck. Had to be an ambulance, though ambulances didn’t come up to Switchcreek much. Deke, scrawnier and a head shorter than Paxton, hopped on the back of the ATV and put his arms around P.K.’s waist.
    When they reached the road Deke hopped off to listen—that way!—and they drove a quarter mile until they saw the ambulance parked in the driveway and two EMTs walking up the steps to the house. Jo Lynn’s house.
    Pax didn’t remember getting off the ATV, or walking into the house. He didn’t remember seeing another car in the driveway, though his dad’s Crown Vic must have been there, because his mother was in the living room, her arms around Jo Lynn’s shoulders. Jo had called her right after she dialed 911.
    The EMTs were in the back bedroom, where Jo’s mother lay. Agatha Whitehall had run a fever for days, Pax learned later. Jo Lynn hadn’t been home that week, hadn’t even known her mother was sick; Agatha and Jo hadn’t gotten along for years, and lately Jo lived mostly at Paxton’s house. It was only because she’d gone home to retrieve more clothes that she found Agatha screaming. Her head was going to explode, Agatha said. Her bones were on fire.
    When they wheeled her body into the living room, Paxton’s mother turned Jo’s face away and pressed the