Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne

       a.

      Imagine a perfect square of impossibly blue sky.

      Darkness frames it; a handmade ladder of two-by-fours reaches into it.

      It could be Heaven.

      The boy has butterflies in his stomach, and an urge to turn back. He knows, somehow, that if he climbs up into the sunlight, nothing will ever be quite the same.

      Fourteen-year-old Tory Geller waits upstairs in the master bedroom of this half-finished California-Ranch-Mission-Tudor-Mediterranean-whatthefuck tract home, sitting in the yawning gap where doors with modest pan-European ambitions will someday be hung. Tory is cocksure and cool. His legs dangle over the hardscape twenty feet below and he smokes and gazes out across the cheerful clutter of downtown Santa Barbara, to the slate-water harbor and the smear of Channel Islands hanging just above the ocean horizon.

      “You better’ve brought something.” Tory says this with sharpness, doesn’t turn.

      Behind him, Jack Baylor, also fourteen, steps off the construction ladder and out of the stairless stairwell. Smaller than Tory, still growing, Jack wears thick glasses and a gold-and-blue St. Stevens Day Camp windbreaker with frayed elastic cuffs. A green glass bottle of Mickey’s Big Mouth beer comes out of one pocket of his jacket, Oreos from the other, and Jack lays his offerings down on the plywood subfloor next to Tory.

      “So,” Jack says, diving in, “like. Tory, hey. I’m really sorry about this whole deal with Cathy—”

      Tory opens the Mickey’s and takes a noisy swallow.

      “—it’s just, my mom knows her mom from church, the thing’s a setup,” Jack pleads his case. “I mean, like I even want to fucking go to the stupid dance.” Not bad. He’s added the “fucking” at the last minute, nice touch, flinty and hard-assed, he hopes.

      Tory belches. “You swipe this brew?”

      Jack’s face reddens. There is nothing in his mind now besides this wholly blind desire to purchase Tory’s respect. But, here, at fourteen, Jack has not yet perfected his lies. “No.”

      “Wuss.” Tory smokes, belches, drinks.

      Wuss. Jack waits, and wonders what will happen next. His friends have warned him that Tory might just beat the shit out of him. Jack has never been in a fight.

      “You gonna stand there all day?” Tory says. Jack sits—safely distant in case Tory gets an itch to shove him off the edge. Tory’s nostrils spill smoke dismissively. “Relax, Baylor. N.B.D. Know what I’m saying? Hell. Sutton’s already done her.”

      Done her. Jack knows what this means. Nods gravely.

      Tory smokes. He looks sidelong at Jack. “Sutton says she got both his balls in her mouth, at the same time.”

      This, to Jack, sounds wrong. He wrestles with a mental picture of shy-but-perky Cathy DeLong, varsity football Peppette, vaguely arranged ass-up and head south between the splayed hairy legs of the pothead, Tommy Sutton. “Is that good?” he wonders, aloud.

      A geyser of beer spews from Tory’s mouth. He’s laughing. After a worried moment, Jack joins in, slowly convincing himself that he meant it to be funny.

      “All right.”

      “Yeah.”

      “Yeah. Yeah.”

      Tory offers Jack the crooked cigarette.