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other. Bennie was over to Andy’s right, wearing a gilt-threaded sarung around his waist and holding a machete.
    All that was left to Andy by then were a few stray thoughts and a few physical sensations that would not have time to become sense memories. He heard the other three chanting in a language he did not recognize, saw the flare of the torchlight reflected like a silver sun in the blade of the machete as Bennie raised it high, then brought it down hard on his wrist. He felt a cold dull blow, and then, as the blood began to spurt and the pain pulsed up through his arm to the very center of his being, Emily’s face floated sideways over Andy’s. Her mouth with its chipped front tooth was astonishingly wide-open, like one of those throw the beanbag through the clown’s mouth cutouts. It came closer and closer and closer until it filled Andy’s world.
    Don’t go down there, Andy thought again, as she pinched his nostrils closed and covered his mouth with hers.

8
    Holly had rules. She didn’t drive stoned, she didn’t work stoned, and she didn’t get stoned around the kids, which meant that it wasn’t until nearly ten o’clock that night that she finally got a chance to sample her new purchase. She rolled the world’s thinnest joint in her room and took it outside to smoke.
    It was a quiet night. There was no moon, but the stars were bright enough to read by. The temperature was perfect—if there’d been an outdoor thermostat, this was where she’d have set it—and the air smelled of the rain forest. It was a scent that was hard to describe and even harder to forget, all undertones, sweet and earthy, ripe and rotten, a rose garden planted over a shallow grave. Most of the cabins and Quonsets dotting the cleared hillside were dark, but Holly could see Peeping Fran, her nearest uphill neighbor, lying on a chaise longue on the screened-in veranda behind his cabin, writing by the blue-white light of a Coleman lantern. He looked up and waved; she held up the joint by way of invitation; Fran shook his head.
    After the initial hit Holly felt herself begin to truly relax for the first time since her encounter with the dickhead at Blue Valley. After the second hit she was obliged to concede that Vincent had been telling the truth: this was indeed two-toke smoke. Which was about how long it took for word to get around among the mosquito population that supper was being served.
    Holly wetted the tips of her thumb and forefinger with her tongue, clipped the joint, and turned to go back inside. As she opened the screen door she heard Dawn crying and hurried into the kids’ bedroom.
    “What is it, baby?”
    Sniffling; hiccups.
    Holly switched on the battery-powered lamp between the twin beds—nothing short of a tornado would wake Dawn’s ten-year-old brother at this point—ducked under the mosquito netting, and crawled into the narrow bed beside Dawn. “C’mon, baby doll, tell Auntie Holly what the problem is.”
    Dawn, tight-lipped, between hiccups: “Something…in my eye.”
    Oops, thought Holly. My bad. “Dawnie, this afternoon, when I picked you up at school and you asked me if I’d been crying, and I said no, I’d just gotten something in my eye, that wasn’t only a lie, it was a BPM. A big fat BPM.”
    Two years ago, when Holly took on the role of single mother, she’d felt so utterly unprepared that she’d decided there was no point even trying to bluff her way through it. So when she realized she’d blown a call, deciding arbitrarily to enforce bedtime by the clock instead of the sun, for instance, or insisting upon helping Marley perform some everyday task instead of letting him do it himself, regardless of how long it took or how uncomfortable it was to watch, she had no problem apologizing, declaring a BPM—Bad Parenting Move—and reversing her own ruling.
    “Unh-unh.” Dawn shook her head doubtfully.
    “Unh- hunh,” said Holly. “When something scares you or makes you sad, it’s always