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pharmaceutical bag and Hannah’s funky little pink purse advertising Cancun! in rhinestones. So Tabitha went back to cruise the aisles of the shop until she found what she needed. Then at the locker room she replaced Solange Lefebvre’s treatment for yeast fever with a cure for constipation. She hoped Solange’s English wasn’t so good that she’d strain to read the small print on ze package.

    As for Hannah, Tabitha removed the thumbtack holding up a sign reminding volunteers to wash their hands whenever they got crap and stuff on them. With care she punctured the little flattish foil packet all the way through a half dozen times, at an angle so the little slits might not be visible in dim light. How providential, a gift from God: the condom that Tabitha hadn’t had time to insist Caleb wear. Across the edge she scrawled, U Go To Hell and she drew a big heart around the words. She thought of writing “from a special friend” with the hopes that Hannah would give out to some unsuspecting boy, but she wasn’t sure how to spell special. She slipped it into Hannah’s purse and replaced the health advisory with the thumbtack.

    On the way back to find Kirk and see what the doctors were going to say, Tabitha Scales passed through a corridor where light came in through the UV-glazed windows, picking out with punishing clarity the bad art that someone had forced the hospital to hang on display. Angels and little stupid flowers and, for some reason, a fire hydrant. The constant pinging of the hospital PA system paused for once, allowing airtime for a half-dozen measures of some weary song that had been played too often all year long. What was it? Oh, right. “Believe,” by Cher.

    Tabitha experienced a certain lift. Mom was comatose and Caleb was waiting offstage.
    For the last day of October, the sun was curiously strong. She thought that she might be blushing, though maybe that was the aftereffect of the idea of blowing the football team in alphabetical order. (As if. Not even close.)

    She had all of her life ahead of her. She felt almost special.

6
    A LATE OCTOBER sun can seem like a trawler seen from an undersea slope. The way it hovers in that cellophane blue, the way it drags shadows across the terrain like dark nets. This year the trees had husbanded their leaves with a kind of greediness, but their grip was slackening.
    Morse Hill Road felt like a sluice through brown rapids.

    Jeremy pulled into the lot at Bozo Joe’s, more colloquially called Unfriendly’s after the fast-food franchise that, like so many other chains, had abandoned Thebes and unloaded the decommissioned building at a loss. Fixtures too: the mock Colonial-style booths upholstered in Wedgwood-blue vinyl, the ice cream flavors painted on the slats of a display panel shaped like a window shutter. But the unplugged freezers by the take-out windows now housed brown paper napkins. The menu featured your basic burgers and grease. Bozo Joe wasn’t in the business of fulfilling anyone’s culinary dreams. This was Thebes, New York, after all.

    Jeremy sat in the car, fiddling with his car keys. He’d hoped the others would arrive earlier, so he could get away with ordering only a cheap coffee. But no sign of Marty’s car—Babs, the Chariot of the Odds.

    Irresolute, staying put until he got too chilly, he watched the late afternoon Sunday patrons come and go. He’d been in Thebes for how many years now, and still he felt he had only a feeble grasp of what made it tick—what made it refuse to die. Around here, most guys his age had been married a good decade. They were saddled with dead-end jobs in the sand and gravel industry or with failing family farms too far from anything to sell to developers. The men tended to drink themselves to sleep most nights. Their wives, according to the oracles of the faculty lounge, did the same. And to judge by Jeremy’s own workload, their kids were prematurely soured underachievers, blanched and neutered by