Mom’s arms are stretched wide, holding a sign painted in cheerleader-bright colors that says WELCOME HOME, TRAVIS! Tied around her wrist are the strings to a metric shit-ton of helium balloons. It’s bad enough I have to come back to Fort Myers. This is worse. I can’t pretend this whacked-out welcome wagon is for anyone else—I was the only Marine on the flight.

The sign crackles, crushed between us as my mom flings her arms up around my neck, standing on tiptoe to reach. Balloons drift down and bump softly against the top of my head. There is a year and a half’s worth of hugging in this one embrace, and I get the feeling that if it were an option, she’d never let me go again.

“Thank God you’re home,” she whispers against my chest, her voice breaking with tears. “Thank God you’re alive.”

I feel like shit. Partly because I don’t know what to say, but mostly because I’m alive. “It’s good—” The lie sticks in my throat and I have to start again. “It’s good to be here.”

She hugs me too long and strangers walking past touch my back and arms as they say thank you and welcome home, and it pushes me beyond uncomfortable. Common sense tells me these people in their Ohio State T-shirts and New York Yankees ball caps are just tourists. Regular people. But I’ve spent the past seven months living in a country where the enemy blends in with the local population, so you’re never sure who you can trust. My position is vulnerable and I hate that I don’t have a rifle.

“I need to get my bag,” I say, and I’m relieved when my mom lets go. She thanks the color guard, hugs a couple of the band girls, and then we head for the escalator to the baggage claim.

“How was the flight? Did they give you anything to eat? Are you hungry? Because we could stop somewhere for lunch if you’re hungry.” She talks fast and too much, trying to fill up the silence between us. A metallic female voice tells us the local time and weather so tourists can reset themselves. My watch is still set to Afghanistan time, even though I’ve been in the States for a couple of weeks. I forgot, I guess.

“Clancy’s was always your favorite,” Mom says. “You used to love their shepherd’s pie, remember?”

Anger ignites in my chest and I want to snap at her. Clancy’s is still my favorite restaurant and I haven’t forgotten I love shepherd’s pie. Except her intentions are good and I don’t want to be disrespectful, so I offer her a half smile. “I remember, but I’m not especially hungry,” I say. “I’m tired.”

“Dad wanted to be here to meet you today, but he had an important meeting,” Mom continues, in a tone that makes me wonder if she believes what she’s saying. Maybe she’s talking about someone else’s dad. “And Ryan has been working at the Volkswagen dealership until he leaves for college.”

After his professional football career ended, my dad bought three car dealerships. When I was in high school, I’d have worked at the VW dealership for free, just to have access to the shop and the parts for my car. But since I was his disappointment son, he refused and I ended up working on a landscaping crew for eight bucks an hour. Figures Dad would give Ryan a real job.

“And Paige …” Mom’s lips pinch into a disapproving frown as she trails off. My mother has never liked my girlfriend—correction, my ex-girlfriend. My mom thinks she looks cheap. I think Paige belongs on the cover of Maxim in nothing but her underwear, which is exactly why I was attracted to her in the first place.

Stowed in the bottom of my seabag is the one and only letter she ever sent me. It came in a care package with cigarettes, dip, coffee, and porn. Only Paige would soften the blow of a Dear John letter by sending it with the stuff deployed Marines want most.

It wasn’t a long letter:

Trav,

I thought you should know before you come home that I’m with Ryan now.

I wasn’t surprised she broke it off clean like that. Paige has never been one for diplomacy. She usually says what’s on her mind, even when it’s hurtful or bitchy. Another thing I’ve always appreciated about her. Well, that … and the sex. Especially after we’d been fighting, which we did often. I still have a faint scar on my cheek from where she threw a beer bottle at me after she caught me making out with some random girl at some random party. We cheated on each other all the time. That’s the way it was with me and Paige—insane and toxic, but always fucking awesome.

When I enlisted, I didn’t pretend she’d sit at home waiting for me. I didn’t tape her picture inside my helmet the way some of my buddies did with pictures of their wives and girlfriends. I always knew she’d hook up with someone else. The only surprising part was that the someone else was my brother.

The thing is? I don’t really care.

I mean, yeah, I might be a little curious about why Paige would be interested in Ryan. He doesn’t seem to be her type, which makes me wonder if she’s playing some sort of mind game with me—or him. I have no interest in being played and I’m only in town for thirty days. Ryan can have her.

I didn’t even want to come to Fort Myers, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I’d rather be with my friends. I want to be with the people who know me best.

I want to go home.

As soon as the thought crystallizes in my mind, I feel bad again. Especially with my mom standing beside me at the baggage carousel, wearing the biggest smile in the history of smiles and rattling on about how happy she is I made it home before Ryan leaves for college. To keep from sniping a smart-ass comment about my level of give-a-shitness, I look around the room at the hugging families and businessmen with laptop bags slung over their shoulders. Beyond a cluster of people waiting for their luggage, I see a dark-haired guy wearing desert camouflage leaning against a support column. It looks like my buddy Charlie Sweeney. We’ve been friends since boot camp and were sent to Afghanistan in the same platoon.

“Charlie?” I take a step toward him and this weird sort of happiness fizzes up inside me like a soda bottle, because if my best friend is here in Florida, it means he’s not—

“Travis?” my mom says. “Who are you talking to?”

—dead.

My stomach churns and my eyes go hot with tears that never seem to come. Charlie can’t possibly be in Fort Myers because he was killed in Afghanistan and I’m standing in the middle of a crowded baggage claim talking out loud—to an empty space. And all that happy just leaks right out, leaving me empty again.

“Are you all right?” Mom touches my sleeve.

I blow out a breath and lie. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I can’t get over how you’ve changed,” Mom says, hugging me again. I’ve always been tall, but I’ve grown two inches in the past year. Also, I used to have hair that hung nearly to my shoulders that Mom was always nagging me to cut. “You look so handsome.”

The black-flapped opening spits my bag onto the conveyor and I’m relieved to walk away from this conversation. I grab the bag with one hand and hoist it onto my shoulder, sending little puffs of dust into the air around me. Afghanistan has followed me home.

“Welcome home, Marine.” An old man approaches me, his sleeve pushed up to display the Marine Corps EGA—eagle, globe, and anchor—tattooed on his upper arm. Showing me he belongs to the brotherhood. “Semper Fi.”

“Always, sir.” I shake his hand.

He pats my elbow and lets me go. “God bless you, kid.”

Mom chatters endlessly on the drive, mostly about school. She’s the secretary at my former high school, so she thinks she knows all the gossip. I don’t care who’s dating who, or which teachers won’t be hired back next year, or that the soccer team had a losing season, but letting her talk means I don’t have to.

The house looks exactly the same as it did when I left, including Mom’s ceramic frog next to the front steps. She keeps a spare key hidden underneath in case we get locked out. All my friends know the key is there, but Paige is the only one who’s ever used it. She would drive over in the middle of the night and sneak up to my room. I wonder if she does that with Ryan now.

My mom leads me through the house to my bedroom, as if I don’t remember the way. She opens the door and—like the rest of the house—it looks like it was frozen in time. Gray paint? Check. Color-coordinated comforter? Check. Concert flyers taped randomly to the walls to disguise the decorator paint job? Check. Curled-up photo of Paige and me at my senior prom stuck in the corner of the mirror? Check. Even the book on the bedside table is the same one I was reading before I left. The whole thing is… creepy.

“I left everything the way it was,” she says as I drop my bag on the floor. “So it would feel familiar. Like home.”

I don’t tell her it doesn’t feel like home at all. I pull the photo from the mirror, crush it in my fist, and lob it at the trash can.

“Why don’t you rest?” Mom suggests. “Take a nap. I’ll come get you when Dad and Rye are home.”

When she’s gone, I dive onto the bed. It’s the one thing I’m very happy about. The mattress is soft and the comforter is clean, luxuries I’ve lived without since I left for boot camp. I stretch out on my back, my boots hanging off the bottom edge of the bed, and close my eyes. I can’t get comfortable. I roll over onto my side and try again. Then my stomach. Pry off my boots with my toes. Finally, I grab my pillow and hit the floor, dragging the comforter with me. I’ve slept on the top bunk of a squeaky metal rack in the squad bay at Parris Island, on a cot at Camp Bastion while we waited to start our mission, and in February the temperature dropped so low one night I had to share a sleeping bag with Charlie. All things considered, the thick carpet is comfortable, and I fall asleep fast.

I’m walking down a road in Marjah. It’s a road we’ve walked often on patrol. I’m on point with Charlie and Moss behind me. It’s cold, clear, and quiet, except for the crunch of our boots and the sound of prayer we hear every morning. The street will come alive soon with people going to the mosque, washing in the canal, or going to work in their fields. Right now, though, the street is empty. The hair on the back of my neck prickles and I know something is going to go down. I stop and try to warn Moss and Charlie, but no sound comes out of my mouth. I try to signal with my hands, but I can’t lift them. I want to run back to stop them, but my legs won’t move no matter how hard I try. I watch, helpless, as Charlie steps on the pressure plate. Boom! He’s enveloped in a cloud of dust. The bomb, hidden in the base of a tree, sprays him with shrapnel. Charlie falls to the dirt road, motionless. My limbs unfreeze and I walk slowly toward his body until I’m standing over him. The world shifts and I’m on my back, pain radiating through my body, as if I’d stepped on the mine, not Charlie. I open my eyes and there’s a face above me. An Afghan boy I’ve seen before who smiles as he fades away.

I shoot upright on the floor, my eyes open and my body on alert, but my brain is still in the hazy space between nightmare and awake. My mother is shaking me. My hands curl around her wrists, squeezing until she cries out in pain. “Travis, stop!”

I let go immediately and just sit there, blinking, my heart rate going crazy. I’m shaking a little. Mom smoothes her hand across my forehead the way she did when I was small and had a fever. “It’s only a dream. Let it go. It’s not real.”

I’m fully awake now and I know she’s right. It’s not real. This nightmare is a patchwork of my worst fears. But my imagination wraps itself in this quilt of horror whenever I sleep. I haven’t averaged more than a couple hours a night for weeks.

As my heart rate drops back to normal, I watch her rub her wrists. I could have broken them. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“It’s okay.” She looks at me sadly. “I wish I could erase whatever troubles your dreams.”

Except the past can’t be rewound and this is the life I chose.

I didn’t have a noble purpose in joining the Marines. I didn’t do it to protect American freedom and I wasn’t inspired to action by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was in grade school then, and the biggest priority in my life was any bell that signaled it was time to leave school. I enlisted mostly because I wanted to escape my dad, who’d made my life hell since I quit the football team at the end of sophomore season.

I hated football. Not because I wasn’t good at it or because it wasn’t fun, but because I hated the way it took over my life. Dad signed me up for Pop Warner Tiny Mites when I was five. So while other kids were learning to ride two-wheelers, I was practicing my receiving. It was fun when I was little—the game was still a game—but as I got older, I hated the pressure. I hated that run-through-a-woodchipper feeling I got after he’d critique my game films. But what I hated most was that in practically every reference to me—in newspapers, game commentary, post-game TV recaps on the local news—was a reference to him. I was never just Travis Stephenson. I was son of former Green Bay Packer Dean Stephenson. Sophomore year he started talking about scouts and college ball, and all I could think about was how I was going to be stuck living my dad’s dream. So when the season ended, I quit. He went ballistic, and I became a nonentity.

The day I turned eighteen—three days after I graduated high school—I went to the Marine recruiter’s office and signed up. More or less. The process is more involved than simply signing your life over to the US Marine Corps, but the result is the same: four years of active duty, the next four years in ready reserve. It might not make sense to want to go from a lifetime of coaches yelling in my face to a drill instructor yelling in my face, but I figured it couldn’t be that much different. Except that at boot camp I wouldn’t be son of former Green Bay Packer Dean Stephenson. I’d just be me.

Mom cried when I told her because, in her mind, enlistment meant certain death in a foreign country. She begged me to enroll at Edison State instead. “I know you didn’t get the best grades,” she said. “But you can take the basics until you decide on a major. Please, Travis, don’t do this.”

My dad just looked at me for a long time, his mouth a tight slash across his face. It was a familiar expression. One reserved for me. In his world, where winning is everything, he had no use for the kid who refused to play the game. If I had picked up another sport, he might have forgiven me. But I didn’t and neither did he.

His laugh was whip-crack sharp. “Remember the motorcycle you were going to rebuild? Or the band you and your friends were going to start? Or, wait—how about the promising football career you threw away like it was garbage instead of your God-given gift? How long, Travis, do you think you’ll last at boot camp before you want to quit that, too? You don’t have the discipline it takes to be a Marine.”

As if he knew any more about being in the military than I did.

Three weeks later, I shipped and didn’t come back. Until now.

I can admit now it might not have been one of my smarter decisions, but I didn’t want to go to college and I didn’t think I was going to end up in Afghanistan right out of infantry school. I figured I’d be assigned to a base or sent off to Okinawa. Thing is, I’m a good Marine. Better than pretty much anything else I’ve ever done. So even though the Marine Corps has moments of extreme suck, I don’t really regret my choice.

“Trav.” Mom taps at my bathroom door as I’m doing up the last button on a blue-and-white-striped shirt I found hanging in the closet. It’s either Ryan’s or something my mom bought before I left, hoping I’d wear it. The sleeves pinch at the elbows when I bend my arms, but I wore the same desert cammies for seven months. My fashion sense has atrophied. “Dinner in five minutes.”

I wipe the steam from the mirror. I went for so long without seeing myself that my face still kind of surprises me. It feels like I’m looking at a stranger. Someone who is smaller than I imagined, although not small at all. And the guy in the mirror is not wearing a combat uniform or body armor. Without them, I don’t feel much like myself, either.

The scent of roast beef greets me in the hallway, and I swear if Paige were standing naked in front of me, begging to get back together, I’d pass her by to get to the table. The closest we came to a home-cooked meal in-country was the time some of the Afghan National Army soldiers roasted a whole goat, which we ate with a local rice dish and Afghan bread. We had chicken from the village bazaar a couple of times, too, but mostly we ate MREs. Which is short for Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Or, as we usually called it, Meal, Rarely Edible.

“Travis.” My dad gets up from the head of the table as I enter the dining room and shakes my hand, as if I’m a business associate. Or a stranger he hopes will buy a car. He’s still wearing a suit, his yellow tie slack at the neck. “Welcome home, son.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Mom prods Ryan, who is sitting across from me, texting someone on his cell phone. We’re barely a year apart, but he looks so young.

“Hey, Trav.” He smiles at the screen, then gives me a weak-ass chin lift. “Welcome back.”

Jesus, this is awkward.

My family has never been especially good at warm and fuzzy. My mom’s thing was always ferrying us to practices, supplying juice boxes at halftime, and sitting in the stands at every game. Even rainy days she’d be there, huddled under her green-and-white umbrella. Dad’s displays of affection came after a win, accompanied by a manly pat on the shoulder and an I’m proud of you, son. It’s been a long time since I got one of those. And Ryan… when I was seven and he was six, our grandpa gave me a Korean war G.I. Joe for my birthday. It was meant to be a collector’s item, but Pops said I should play with it, enjoy it. Sometimes I did, but mostly I kept it on top of my dresser because I thought it was cool. One day, Ryan took it without asking. When I complained to my dad, he told me to quit whining and let my brother play with the G.I. Joe. Ryan pulled the arm off. That pretty much sums up our relationship: I have it. He wants it. He gets it. He ruins it.

Even so, shouldn’t it feel good to be with them again? Why do I feel closer to a group of guys I’ve known less than a year than I do my own family?

“Did you get all the packages I sent?” Mom asks, passing me the serving dish of mashed potatoes.

After she accepted that I was going to enlist with or without her blessing, she pursued being a Marine Mom with the same enthusiasm as being a Football Mom. She registered on a bunch of Internet USMC parent websites, slapped a yellow magnetic Support Our Troops ribbon on her SUV, and went insane with care packages. Between church groups, the different “any service member” organizations, and parents, it wasn’t unusual for a guy to get fifteen care packages at once. Getting mail was like Christmas, sitting there cross-legged on the ground opening presents. And my mom usually sent me quality stuff—instant heat packs, a coffee press and gourmet beans, and a solar shower that was stolen by one of the Afghan National Army soldiers before I even had a chance to use it.

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” I was pretty terrible at keeping in touch, but in my defense, we were cut off from the outside world for the first couple of months we were there. Then we got a satellite phone and were allowed to call home every couple of weeks, but only for about five minutes at a time. During one call I suggested she could probably cut back on the dental floss and paperback mysteries and send some school supplies for the kids who would mob us, begging for everything. “The kids went nuts for the pens and crayons.” Water. Candy. Food. Pens. I don’t know why, but they loved pens. “I’m, um—sorry I didn’t call much.”

Her eyes widen. Probably because I’ve never been in the habit of apologizing.

“Well, we figured you were probably busy,” she says.

In Afghanistan, that was true, but I have no excuse for boot camp or infantry school. She sent me tons of letters and I never answered any of them. I called her on the first day of boot camp and recited the words fastened to the wall beside the phone: This is recruit Stephenson. I have arrived safely at Parris Island. Please do not send any food or bulky items to me in the mail. I will contact you in three to five days by postcard with my new address. Thank you for your support. And that was about it. Aside from that handful of five-minute phone calls, I haven’t talked to her for more than a year.

“Ellen always called me after she got a letter from Charlie,” Mom says. “So I knew you were okay.”

At boot camp we did everything in alphabetical order, so the two other recruits whose names I learned first were Lee Staples and Charlie Sweeney. One of them was always in front of me or behind me, depending on the whim of our drill instructors. Staples bugged me because he cried after we got our heads shaved. I mean, okay, I can see how it could be considered degrading because it strips away one of the things that sets you apart from everyone else, but what-the-fuck-ever. It grows back. Anyway, when they finally let us get to sleep that first day, after being awake more than twenty-four hours straight, Charlie and I were assigned to the same rack—Stephenson on the top bunk, Sweeney on the bottom. We were stripping down to shorts and T-shirts when Charlie said, “Hey, Stephenson, I heard if you go to the Buddhist church services on Sundays, they let you sleep.”

“I heard,” I said. “If you claim to be Jewish, you can go to Sabbath services and still have time off on Sunday.”

Charlie laughed. “I like the way you think.”

I’m not going to tell you I knew right then we were going to be friends, but he wasn’t a whiner like Staples. I don’t know why it was Charlie who became my best friend. It’s not one particular reason I can identify. I had his back. He had mine. Period. Somehow I guess Charlie’s mom and mine became friends, too.

“We’re so proud of you.” Mom’s eyes get watery and my dad nods in agreement, which makes me wonder if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse can be far behind.

“So what was it like over there?” Dad’s eyes glow with something I haven’t seen in years. At least not while he was looking at me. “Did you kill anybody?”

He’s curious. Who wouldn’t be? But how do I answer that question? Yes, I’ve killed, but it’s not like picking off bad guys in a video game. The first time I shot someone, I thought I was going to puke, but I couldn’t because we were in the middle of a firefight and I couldn’t stop shooting. I won’t tell my dad that. Not at dinner. Not ever.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I say.

His pride fades as his eyes narrow. “Why? Do you think you’re too good—”

“Travis, did I tell you?” Mom interrupts him. “There’s an organization in Tampa that’s been collecting school supplies for the kids—”

“I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear about your little pet project, Linda,” Dad cuts in. I’m surprised to hear him talk this way to my mom. No matter how bad things got between him and me, he’s always been good to her.

“No, Dad,” I say. “I don’t think I’m too good to tell you about Afghanistan. I just don’t want to talk about killing people at the fucking dinner table.” Not waiting for his response, I turn to Mom. “And I do want to hear about your project.”

Her eyes flicker nervously toward my dad. He makes a wide-armed shrug and rolls his eyes. His Super Bowl ring flashes on his hand, a huge reminder that he is a Winner.

“I was just—” Mom stumbles over the words, the light gone from her eyes. “I was just going to say that I’ve talked to them about starting a branch here in Fort Myers.”

“That’s really cool.” I smile at her. The begging kids were okay at first because they were scared of us, but after a while they were grabby and demanding. I don’t tell her that, though. She seems pretty excited. “The kids go crazy for that stuff. Pens, paper, soccer balls, and those beanbag animal dolls—they lose their minds over those things.”

“May I be excused?” Ryan balls up his napkin and drops it on his plate. “I’ve got a, um…” His gaze meets mine for a split second before sliding nervously away. A date. He has a date with Paige. “I’m meeting up with some people.”

“Maybe Travis would like to go along,” Mom suggests.

“I’ll pass.” The image of me riding shotgun with my brother and my ex-girlfriend almost makes me laugh. “I’m wiped out.”

Ryan shoves away from the table and the three of us spend the rest of the meal in a silence thick with things unsaid. The only sound is the clinking of silverware against the plates. I hate that a year wasn’t enough separation to keep my dad from getting under my skin, and I hate that I let him make me feel fifteen all over again. When it’s finally over, I go to my room and lock the door.

We got back to Camp Lejeune a couple of weeks ago and had to have a post-deployment health assessment to take care of any physical problems we developed in-country—primarily skin problems from washing in muddy canals, acne from having a constantly dirty face, bug bites, and a few guys had lingering coughs from chest infections. The evaluation is also supposed to gauge our mental wellness, but that’s a joke. We say everything is okay because the fastest way to wreck your career is to admit it’s not. So I didn’t tell anyone about my recurring nightmare. I only told the doctor I was having trouble sleeping and he prescribed me some pills.

They rattle as I pull the amber bottle out of my bag and dump three tablets into my hand. I swallow them dry, then ease myself to the floor and let the world fade away.

Chapter 2

A loud bang jolts me awake and I reach for my rifle. For a couple of seconds I panic because it’s gone, then I remember I’m in Florida and my rifle is in the armory in North Carolina.

“Travis! Travis!” My mom is pounding on the door and she sounds frantic. I unlock it and she launches herself at me, nearly strangling me in the process. “Oh, thank God. You’re awake.”

Something wet trickles down my bare chest. She’s crying. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

“You’ve been asleep for sixteen hours.” She catches a shuddering breath. “And your door was locked. I thought—I was afraid you overdosed.”

There are moments—thousands of them during the course of every single day—when I’m swamped with guilt that I came home alive and Charlie didn’t, but I don’t have a death wish. I scrub my eye with the heel of my hand, dislodging sixteen hours’ worth of crust. “I was just exhausted.” I pat her awkwardly on the back. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a while. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Wiping her tears on the back of her hand, she surveys the nest of blankets on the floor. “Is something wrong with your bed?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping on the ground.” There were nights we slept in holes in the ground. Other nights, we slept in abandoned compounds. Our patrol base was an abandoned schoolhouse with holes in the roof and birds in residence in the ceiling. “I’m not quite used to a bed yet.”

She sits down on my bed. “Do you want a firmer mattress or—What happened to your legs?”

“They’re, um…” I look down at the fading red welts that circle my ankles and creep up my calves. “They’re flea bites.”

“Flea bites?” She looks horrified.

“Yeah, well, after a while everything gets really dirty,” I explain. “And the people over there have mud-walled courtyards around their houses where they keep their livestock. Sometimes we’d sleep in there.”

Charlie’s mom sent him a flea collar once that he strapped around his ankle, but it didn’t work. We called him Fido for a while after that, but he’d just bark and go, “Devil dog! Oorah!” which would crack us up every time.

“You slept with—” Her hand comes up to her mouth. “I can’t—I don’t even know what to say.” Her eyes fill again.

Afghanistan sucked. In the summer we sweated our balls off in the hot sun. In the winter we had to battle hypothermia. It was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life, even colder than when we lived in Green Bay. Poisonous snakes. Scorpions. Flies. Fleas. Sandstorms. Knowing that every time we left our patrol base, someone was going to shoot at us. I don’t miss it exactly, but it feels as if I’ll never be fully at home here again. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“There’s a party tonight at the Manor.” Ryan pokes his head into my room after another uncomfortable family dinner of awkward small talk and things left unsaid. I’m unpacking my bag. The dresser drawers, I discover, are empty—apparently Mom didn’t keep everything the same. Before, she was always nagging me to dress nicer and was embarrassed that I bought clothes at the Salvation Army. She probably had a field day throwing away all my ratty T-shirts and jeans with holes. Doesn’t matter. None of them would have fit.

“You interested?” Ryan asks.

The Manor is a dilapidated rental house on the beach that’s part commune, part concert venue. My friend Eddie Ramos has been living there since graduation, but we’ve been partying there since we were freshmen. I’m not sure I’m ready to see my old friends yet, but I don’t want to spend the evening watching military crime shows with my parents. Not only because it’s always a Marine who ends up dead on those shows, but because I can’t take another uncomfortable minute in their silence. I don’t know what’s going on with them. I always thought they were solid. “Yeah, sure.”

Ryan dangles the car keys from his fingers. “Wanna drive?”

I snatch them. “Meet you at the car.”

Outside, I lower myself into the driver’s seat of the red VW Corrado that used to be mine and run my hands along the steering wheel. The faint scent of pot mixed with McDonald’s brings back memories of all the hours I spent with this car—working on it, driving aimlessly around Fort Myers with friends, messing around with Paige in the backseat. I found the car on the Internet when I was fifteen and bought it with my own money. Did all of the work on it, too. It bothers me a little that Ryan felt entitled to appropriate the car after I left, but I’ve never said anything. I wasn’t using it. Now… it doesn’t really feel like mine anymore.

Ryan drops into the passenger seat and the scent of cologne overwhelms the car. I cough and roll down my window. “Damn, Rye, did you bathe in that shit?”

“Paige likes it,” he says. “She bought it for my birthday.”

My eyebrows hitch up. “She did?”

He nods and when he gives me a cocky grin, I see the chip in his front tooth from the time he wiped out at the skate-park. There’s so much wrong with this conversation, I don’t know where to begin. Paige hated when I smelled like anything but me.

If Kenny “Kevlar” Chestnut were here right now, he’d theorize in his Tennessee drawl that chicks are naturally attracted to the scent of badass. He’s a wiry little guy with bright red hair and a lower lip constantly bulging with Skoal. We call him Kevlar because he’s the only one in our squad who could stomach the pork rib MRE, so we figure his stomach must be lined with Kevlar. He talks real fast, as if he doesn’t get all the words out at once, they’ll disappear. He talks shit about girls, even though he has zero experience and even less game. Charlie never let him get away with it.

“I call bullshit, Kenneth,” he said once, after Kevlar claimed he had sex with a University of Tennessee cheerleader. “You’re just a red-haired little bast—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Kevlar gets all huffy when we make fun of his hair or call attention to the fact that he is the smallest guy in our platoon. “Solo’s got red hair, too.” Mine is closer to brown than red, but he thinks including me in his affliction will lend him credibility.

I laughed and dropped my arm around his shoulder. “The color of your hair is irrelevant when you’re as handsome as me.”

The memory brings both happiness and pain. I squeeze my eyes shut and inhale a deep breath.

“You okay, bro?” Ryan brings me back to the moment. “This whole thing with Paige isn’t—”

“Messed up?” I look over at him, with his shaggy hair and the shell necklace he wears because he thinks it makes him look like a surfer, and his face is as earnest as I’ve ever seen it. He really likes her. “Completely, but—” I cut a cross in the air the way the priest does at church, and start the engine. “You have my blessing.”

We haven’t even gotten out of our development when I notice a lot of play in the clutch as I shift from gear to gear.

“How long has the clutch been like this?” I ask.

“Like what?” Ryan says.

“Burned out.”

“It seemed okay to me.”

I let out the clutch and the car stutters as it accelerates. “Okay? You work at a fucking VW dealership.”

“I’m not a mechanic.”

“You don’t have to be a mechanic to know when your clutch is messed up.” I’m probably angrier than I should be. I know how to replace a burned-out clutch, but it’s the principle of the thing. There was nothing wrong with the car when I left. This is classic Ryan. And my car is Korean war G.I. Joe.

He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t say anything at all. He just looks all butthurt—like I’m the bad guy—and then turns his face toward the window.

As we head toward the beach I notice the differences in the landscape of the city. New businesses that weren’t there last year. Old businesses that are gone. It’s like a whole chunk of time has just… disappeared. The songs on the radio are different. The faces on the celebrity tabloids at the airport newsstand were people I didn’t recognize. There’s even a new American fucking Idol.

We pull up in front of the Manor, and I guess I’m expecting it to be different, too. Except the white cottage with the crooked porch steps never changes. There’s a beer can on the porch railing that’s been sitting there as long as I can remember. Even on the rare occasion someone decides to clean the place, no one ever touches the beer can. It’s become art.

“Trav, dude, where you been?” The first person to greet me is Cooper Middleton, half-baked and heavy-lidded, a halo of pot smoke around his dirty blond head. He’s sitting in the same saggy lawn chair he was sitting in the last time I was there. Maybe he’s been there the whole time. With Cooper, it’s not implausible. He graduated with me, but as far as I know he’s never had a job—unless selling weed counts.

“Afghanistan.”

He looks off into the middle distance for a moment, a ghost of a smile on his face, and I can tell he’s somewhere else. “Oh, yeah… sweet.”

The living room is a mosh pit, all the thrift store furniture pushed up against the walls to make room for dancing, and a band—made up of some of the people who live at the Manor—warms up in the dining room. As I walk through the house, people reach out to me, shaking my hand and welcoming me home. Instead of feeling welcome, I feel hemmed in, like at the airport. Jittery. Freaked out at being in the middle of a crowd without my rifle.

“I need a beer,” I say to no one, and my trigger finger flexes as I press my way through the crowd to the kitchen. Paige is perched on the counter, a plastic cup and cigarette in the same hand, gesturing widely as she talks to a group of girls. Paige has an opinion about everything and sometimes she will not shut up. But her black hair is marble shiny and her plush lips are stained red from whatever she’s drinking, so who cares what she’s saying? Her eyes break away from her friends and meet mine. I feel the magnetic pull and have to remind myself she’s not mine anymore.

Before I can approach her, Eddie comes up. “Trav, man, welcome home!”

He goes in for a slap hug that I know will turn into a takedown attempt. It always does. He lowers his shoulder and circles my waist with his arms, trying to wrestle me to the floor. We used to be more evenly matched, but now he doesn’t stand a chance. I curl my leg around his and drop him.

“Dude, you may as well call terminal uncle.” I laugh as I haul him to his feet.

“It’s been too fucking long.” He gives me a hug for real this time. “How ya been?”

“Good.” Lie. “You?”

“Same shit, different day, you know?” Eddie shrugs.

I have no idea what it’s like to be the nineteen-year-old night manager of Taco Bell with a pregnant girlfriend. I’m not saying Eddie made the wrong choices—he’s living an honest life and it’s not my place to judge—but, no, I don’t know. I’ve spent the better part of a year on the other side of the planet in a country where a guy will shake your hand and smile, then go pick up his AK-47 and shoot at you. Where a little boy will demand—with no tears in his eyes—that you give him a hundred bucks’ compensation for accidentally killing his mother, which is less than the going rate for killing his dog.

Paige hops down from the counter and walks toward me and my brother. I can see her red string bikini through the thin white tank top she’s wearing. I’ve unstrung that bikini before. She goes to Ryan first—so weird—reaching up on tiptoe to ruffle his hair as she kisses him. His arm slips around her waist. Her face is different when she looks up at him. Softer. Less angry. “You smell good.”

Ryan doesn’t look at me, but I see the I-told-you-so-grin tug at his lips. I laugh. Paige cocks her head at me and smiles. “Well, if it isn’t G.I. Joe.”

“G.I. Joe”—I take her drink and down it in a single swallow. It’s fruity, but the alcohol is strong—“was a pussy.”

She laughs her smoky, sexy laugh and kisses my cheek, her boobs—which her parents bought for her fifteenth birthday—brushing against my arm. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks for the care package,” I say. “Miss January brought a lot of guys a lot of pleasure.” She laughs again.

“It was the least I could do.”

“How’s Bill?” I ask.

Her dad owns a national barricade company that supplies orange barrels, cement barricades, and traffic cones to construction jobs. Every single barricade has his name on it. He and Paige’s mom never liked me.

She shrugs. “Still hates you.”

“Figures.”

“So how long are you home, Trav?” Eddie asks.

“A month,” I say.

He nods. “Nice.”

The noise of the party fills in the space where the conversation should continue but doesn’t, and Eddie just does that nervous little laugh people do when they don’t know what to say. This never happened with Charlie. We talked about everything, from the philosophical to the ridiculous—like who would win in a fight between a liger and a grizzly/polar bear hybrid. We nearly got into a fight ourselves over that one.

“How’s, um—how’s Jenn?” I ask.

“She’s good.” He nods again. “The baby is due in September. A girl.”

“That’s awesome, man, congratulations.” I take a sip of beer, looking for an escape. Eddie was my best friend in high school, but now… I know there’s a place inside me that still cares about him—about all of them—but tonight I can’t really find it.

The band starts playing, and Eddie looks relieved. Maybe we were both looking for an escape. “Talk to you later, bro?”

I nod and he’s swallowed up by the dancing mass of people in the living room. The bass makes the walls rattle and I wonder if this will be one of those nights when the neighbors call the police. In the middle of the crowd I see one dark head, standing still in the middle of the thrashing bodies. Black hair spikes out from his head in random cowlicks like… Charlie.

He stares at me.

I blink, and he’s gone.

“Travis, are you okay?” I hear Ryan’s voice pulling me back to reality. “You spaced out for a second.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” But I’m not. Sweat trickles between my shoulder blades beneath my shirt. “I just need a beer.”

Cooper is at the keg, refilling his cup. “Trav, my man! Where you been?”

Kid seriously needs to cut back on the weed. “We’ve already had this conversation, Coop.”

“Oh, yeah.” A stoned giggle rolls out of him. “Afghanistan, right?”

“Right.”

“Dude, did you see any poppies?”

Leave it to Cooper to ask me about the drugs. “Like the Wizard of Oz, man,” I say, because that will make him happy, but we didn’t take naps in the poppy fields of Afghanistan. We took fire from the Taliban.

I fill a cup, then go out to the living room, my insides still coiled from—I’m not even sure what to call what happened. Hallucination? Haunting?

Standing with my back to the wall, I watch the party going on around me. A couple of girls in tiny skirts stare at me on their way upstairs to the bathroom. Derek Michalski, who graduated with the unofficial senior superlative of Most Likely to Do Time for Dating Underage Girls, is hitting on a girl who looks about twelve or thirteen. Cooper and his girl, April, are deep into one of those stoned conversations filled with profound insights they won’t remember tomorrow. Used to be I was part of this. Now I wonder where, if anywhere, I fit. And if I even care.

A few beers later, I return to the kitchen, where Eddie, Paige, Ryan, and a few others are sitting around the table, reminiscing about some road trip they took last summer. Paige is sitting on Ryan’s knee, his hand curled around her hip. She plays with his hair as she talks over Eddie to be heard. “… and then the fucking car died in the middle of nowhere, remember? And…”

I sit for a while, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m thinking about the last time I got drunk. Just before we deployed, Kevlar smuggled a bottle of cheap, nasty tequila into our room and we drank it while watching M*A*S*H episodes on Charlie’s old TV. When Kevlar passed out, snoring and drooling on my pillow, Charlie told me that back home in St. Augustine he lived with his mom and her lesbian partner, and that his dad was an anonymous donor.

“I don’t really talk about it because I don’t want to get shit for it, you know?” he said. “Charlie has two mommies. Shit like that.” I might have made fun of him if I hadn’t been so drunk, but the tequila made us maudlin. Morbid. “If anything happens to me over there, Solo, I want you to go see her, okay?”

“Dude, don’t be so fucking stupid,” I said. “I’m never going to meet your mom because the only thing that’s ever going to happen to you is me, kicking your ass.”

I was wrong. The worst thing did happen—and I couldn’t stop it.

I lift my beer cup for a drink. Dirt fills the lines of my hand, and my fingers are stained with blood. The cup slips from my grasp, splashing beer across the top of the table. Paige jumps off Ryan’s lap, shrieking something at me, but I don’t understand what she’s saying. My chest is tight and I’m having trouble breathing.

I have to get out of here.

My chair falls over as I stand up.

“Trav, where are you going?” Ryan calls after me, but I don’t answer. I push my way through the living room and out the front door. The air is cooler outside, clear, as I pull it into my lungs in giant gasps until my heart rate returns to its regular rhythm. I look at my hands. They’re clean.

I walk down the street toward the Shamrock, the biker bar on the corner of Delmar and Estero. Apart from bikers, the only people who go there are leather-skinned old beach rats and brittle-haired women who think they’re still young and hot. The music is dirtball rock, the floor is sticky, and the beer is served in plastic cups, but they’re good about looking the other way when you “forget” your ID.

Going through the open doorway, I pass Gage Darnell. He was a year ahead of me at school, but dropped out when he turned eighteen. He’s leaving with a familiar-looking girl with a fake tan, fake nails, fake blond hair, and probably fake boobs. She looks like an Internet porn star—and not necessarily in a good way. I went to school with her, too, but her name escapes me. Angel? Amber? Something strip clubby, I think.

“Hey, Travis, welcome home.” Gage offers his fist to bump, then continues on his way. The blonde wiggles her fingers at me, then latches on to his arm. I might have slept with her.

Perched on barstools are a couple more girls around my age. The one wearing cutoff shorts and cowboy boots is Lacey Ellison. She’s not especially hot and wears too much makeup, but we didn’t call her Easy-E in high school for nothing. She’s flirting with a biker sporting a Hells Angels emblem on his leather vest and a dirty blond goatee. Lacey giggles at something he says and touches the snake tattoo on his forearm.

Beside her is a girl with a mass of light brown hair pulled into one of those sexy-messy knots. Compared to Lacey she’s overdressed; the only skin showing is a narrow stripe between the top of her threadbare Levi’s and a washed-out blue T-shirt. She doesn’t acknowledge me—not even a little chin lift—as I claim the empty stool next to her and order a beer, and for some reason, this bothers me. Probably because I’m drunk. “Nice night, huh?”

Her green eyes meet mine in the Guinness mirror behind the bar and it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. I’ve never slept with this girl, but she was the first I remember wanting.

Harper Gray.

The first time I kissed her was at a middle school slumber party Paige threw when her parents went to Key West, leaving her alone for the weekend. It was at the end of summer and I was new, because my dad had just been traded to Tampa Bay, but I’d already made friends with most of the guys on the eighth-grade football team at early practice. The lure of alcohol and girls wearing pajamas was too strong to resist, so we crashed the party. After raiding the liquor cabinet, Paige decided it was time to play seven minutes in heaven. I went first, using the spinner from an old board game, and it landed on Harper.

“Your seven minutes start… now,” Paige said as Harper followed me into the laundry room. I shut the door and she leaned against the washing machine, looking scared. I remember the sharp scent of the bleach mixed with the fabric smell of clean laundry. “I’m Travis.”

“I know.” Her eyes flicked shyly down to our feet—we were both wearing beat-up old Chucks and it seemed like a sign—then up at me. “I’m Harper.”

I already knew, too.

“Like Harper Lee?” I was showing off. I hadn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was on my mom’s bookshelf, so I knew the author’s name.

“No,” she said. “Charley Harper.”

“Oh, um…”

“He’s an artist.”

“Cool.” My scope of small talk completely played out, I decided to go in for the kiss. Our noses bumped the first time and I could hear the shaky nervousness in her laugh. The second time we got it right, but I forgot to take the sour apple gum out of my mouth, so my tongue was all over the place as I tried to kiss her and hide the gum at the same time. It started out sloppy and ridiculous, but eventually we got it right and I remember my fingers sliding through the waves of her hair.

Nothing else happened. We just stood there, pressed against each other, kissing. Until Paige’s voice told us our time was up. I didn’t want to stop and was about to suggest we drop out of the game, when the door flew open. Paige grabbed Harper by the wrist and pulled her back out to the party.

She was tangled in a whispering knot of girls when I came out of the laundry room. All my friends wanted the details of what happened between me and Harper. They expected something good, so I embellished. Said she let me feel her up. By Monday, my lie had taken on a life of its own. People were saying Harper had sex with all the guys who crashed Paige’s party. Calling her a slut. I don’t know how it got so out of control, and I could have told everyone what really happened, but I didn’t. When she came up to me in the cafeteria, I ignored her. By the following weekend, Paige was my girlfriend.

“Hey, Charley Harper, can I buy you a beer?” It’s not the smoothest opening line I’ve ever used, but I’m not feeling smooth. I’m jagged. And drunk.

She lifts her nearly full cup but won’t look at me. “Got one, thanks.”

Okay.

“You might not remember me, but—”

“Travis Stephenson,” she interrupts, her words like a roadblock. “Welcome home. Now leave me alone.”

Damn, she’s hostile.

“What’s your problem?”

Harper stares at me a moment and I’m mesmerized by the green of her eyes. So I don’t see it coming when she punches me in the face. “Are you kidding me?”

“Jesus Christ—ow!” My eye socket throbs—she definitely doesn’t hit like a girl—and I’m going to have a black eye. “What was that for?”

“I was thirteen years old, Travis!” Harper is yelling at me and everyone is staring, including Lacey and her dirty biker. “I still played with Barbie dolls in secret when my friends weren’t around. I didn’t have sex with anyone at Paige’s party, but you told everyone I did. And when I tried to deny it, no one believed me. You trashed my reputation and now I’m supposed to think it’s cute you remembered I’m not named for Harper fucking Lee?”

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t what? Didn’t do it? Didn’t mean it? Save the excuses.”

I want to defend myself, but this moment is a lot like boot camp. It doesn’t matter if I’m guilty or not. She’s spent years believing I’m an asshole and the only thing that is going to fix it is an apology. “Harper—”

The bartender comes over. “Everything okay here?”

“Just fine,” Harper snaps. “I’m leaving. You can put my beer on his tab.”

Jesus, that was a cool move. And although she hates my guts, I’m kind of turned on and I wish she weren’t leaving. “Add a shot of tequila, too,” I tell the bartender, but he shakes his head. “You’re done.”

Which sucks, because I’m not nearly drunk enough. I down the rest of my beer and drop a pile of bills on the bar, hoping it’s enough to make up for the drama I’ve caused here tonight. I turn to leave and Paige is standing there, her mouth all smug. I hate how she does that.

“Rye’s looking for you,” she says. “He’s ready to go.”

“Okay.” My eyes wander down to her ass as I follow her out of the bar. Force of habit, I guess. Also, it’s nice. Kind of bubbly.

“So, Harper Gray, huh?” she asks as we walk up the middle of the street.

“When it’s your business, I’ll let you know.”

She snorts a laugh. “You can do so much better than her, Trav. She’s beach trash.”

“Shut up.”

“Do you want me to come over later?” she asks.

“For what?”

She catches her full lower lip between her teeth and looks up at me from under her dark lashes. It’s an innocent act that used to get me hot. I have to admit, it still works. “I think you know.”

“So let me get this straight,” I say. “You hook up with my brother behind my back and now you want me to do the same to him?”

She flicks her ice-blue eyes toward the night sky. “It’s not like it means anything.”

Somewhere in the recesses of my beer-soaked consciousness, I think this is meant to hurt me, but it doesn’t. When I think about what Paige and I have had, love has never entered into it. “That’s so messed up. You know that, right?”

“Do you want me to come over or not?”

“No.”

“I’ll be there at three.”

Even before I open my eyes I can feel the presence of another person in my room, and the hair on the back of my neck puts my body on alert. Hand-to-hand combat is not usually the Taliban’s style. They’d rather take our money at the local bazaar and use it to buy weapons to kill us. They prefer ambushes, roadside bombs, and sniping from windows and rooftops. But there is someone here with me in the dark and I’m not going to wait to be killed.

I surge upward, grabbing the intruder around the knees, and drop him to the floor. I pin him beneath me, the tip of my knife at his throat. In the slashes of moonlight coming through the blinds, I realize he is not a he. It’s Paige. And for the first time since I’ve known her, she looks scared.

“Oh, shit!” I drop the knife as if it’s red-hot and scrabble backward against the side of my bed. “Jesus, Paige, what the fu—Did I hurt you?”

Her fear falls away as she registers my surprise and she laughs as she picks up the knife. “You’ve always liked it a little rough, Trav, but this is extreme, don’t you think?” She crawls toward me, the knife gripped in her hand, and straddles my lap. “But…” Her lips are so close to mine I can taste her breath. “I think I like it.”

I take the knife from her and put it on the bedside table, on top of the book I’ll never finish. She slides her tank top off.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“That”—she fishes a condom from the pocket of her tiny denim skirt—“should be obvious.”

She unties her red bikini. This is so not something I should be doing, but her skin is warm and familiar and… here.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten laid, but I’ve been living in the middle of a desert, where women are hidden under burqas. Besides, Muslim women… well, the Qur’an forbids nearly everything fun anyway, so even if you could see their faces, there’s not much point in even considering it.

I did kiss a Muslim girl once. When Charlie and I arrived at Camp Lejeune, the rest of our unit was on pre-deployment leave. We had to stay on base for a crash-course version of all the training the battalion had done while we were still at infantry school. Just before we were scheduled to deploy, Charlie and I were given a few days’ leave so we could go home. Instead, we went to New York City. Kevlar—we didn’t even really know him very well, but he was new like Charlie and me—invited himself along.

At a club the first night, Charlie was hitting on this girl from Smith College. She told me her roommate had just broken up with her boyfriend and a kiss from a hot—her word, not mine—Marine would restore her friend’s faith that not all men are assholes. As Charlie’s wingman, I knew there was a better than average chance her friend was a dog, but I was committed and drunk.

Except she wasn’t ugly. She was beautiful, with dark, hopeful eyes—even though she was trying not to look hopeful—and I couldn’t have been an asshole if I wanted to. She wouldn’t let me do anything other than kiss her—believe me, I tried—but the gods of getting laid smiled on me for the rest of the weekend. Afterward, Kevlar—who failed to seal the deal with every girl he met—called me a haji-lover for kissing a Muslim girl. He spent the trip to Afghanistan nursing a busted bottom lip.

When it’s over, Paige moves off me and falls back against the bed, gasping for air. My own breath is short and my bones feel liquid. “Jesus, Trav, I forgot how fucking good it is with you.”

She’s right. It is good. Except when the adrenaline starts wearing off, I hate her. I hate my brother, too. Mostly I hate myself. “You need to go.”

“Why?” She nuzzles my neck, as if we’re still together.

“You got what you came for.”

“Don’t be that way.” She reties her bikini. “You wanted it, too.”

I shrug. “Fine. Stick around. You and your boyfriend can have breakfast together in a couple of hours.”

Paige laughs. “You’re jealous. How cute.”

“I’m not.”

Thing is, I’m really not. If I feel anything at all, it’s anger—that she hasn’t changed and that all the years we were together were a huge waste of time.

Chapter 3

I’m standing on the cracked sidewalk in front of a tiny orange-and-white cottage on Ohio Avenue, wondering what I’m going to do next, when a man comes out the front door. It’s still dark, so at first I don’t think he sees me.

“Is there a good reason why you’re outside my house at four thirty in the morning?” he asks, resting a travel mug of coffee on the hood of an ancient Land Rover. His keys jingle as he unlocks the driver’s-side door. He surveys my T-shirt, soaked through with sweat under the arms and in the middle of my chest. It’s a long run from my house to Fort Myers Beach—and there’s a bridge involved.

A little self-loathing goes a long way.

“Just ended up here, sir.” I don’t have a good answer. After Paige left, I pulled on my running shoes and took off. I didn’t even bring my cell phone. “Wasn’t sure where else to go.”

“Interesting choice of destinations.”

I nod. “Not real well thought out, either.”

He chuckles. “Need a lift somewhere?”

“I could use a ride home.”

The porch light flickers to life and Harper steps out, the wooden screen door slapping shut behind her. “Travis?”

Her feet are bare and she’s wearing little pajama shorts that sit low on her hips and make her mile-long legs go on forever. I have to look away. The last thing I need is to get a boner in front of her dad. “Yeah, um—hi.”

Her dad’s eyebrows lift, but he sips his coffee without comment.

“What are you doing here?” She steps off the porch into the small patch of sandy grass, sounding only marginally less annoyed with me than she was earlier. “Haven’t you had enough abuse for one night?”

Apparently not. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to get some air.”

“You look like hell,” she says. “Did you run the whole way?”

“More or less.”

Her mouth falls open. “That has to be at least—”

“Seven miles.” They both stare at me, but seven miles is nothing. What’s more interesting is that she knows where I live.

“Well, o-kay.” Harper’s dad glances at his watch. “I need to get to work, so why don’t you drop me off and then take Travis on home?”

“Let me go change real quick,” she says.

Bummer. I kinda liked the pajamas.

“Nice Rover, sir.” The Land Rover is older than me and except for a CD changer he probably installed himself, there are no creature comforts inside. The windows are crank-operated, the door locks are not automatic, and the spare tire is mounted in the middle of the hood.

“Thanks.” The driver’s door creaks as he slams it shut. “I bought her when I was in college. Every couple of months I need to replace a part or fix something, but she’s a tough old girl.”

“If you ever need a hand…” I stop, feeling like a moron and sounding like a suck-up.

“You know your way around an engine?”

“Some.”

He nods. “You’re Linda Stephenson’s boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” It’s interesting that he mentions my mom and not my dad. Like maybe there’s another person in this town who doesn’t think the sun rises and sets on former Green Bay Packer Dean Stephenson.

“You can call me Bryan instead of sir,” he says. “It makes me feel old.”

“Yes, si—” Old habits die hard. “Okay.”

“You used to be such a little douchebag.” He’s one of those older guys who can use a term like “douchebag” without sounding like one. The same way he can get away with wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt and not look as if he’s trying too hard. Anyway, given that the last two things I did tonight were get punched by his daughter and have sex with my brother’s girlfriend, I’m pretty sure I still qualify as a douchebag.

“Yep. I sure was.”

Harper reemerges from the house, this time wearing the same jeans and blue T-shirt she was wearing at the bar. As she climbs into the backseat, I turn around to look at her and notice Elvis Costello’s face on the front of her shirt. So cool.

“Hey, I forgot to tell you last night,” Harper’s dad says, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror at her as he backs out of the driveway. “But I reconnected online with an old college friend of mine. She’s thinking of coming for a visit.”

Harper rolls her eyes. “My dad discovered Facebook.”

“What do you do that you have to be at work so early?” I ask him.

“I do the morning show at Z88.”

“Wait. You’re Bryan of Bryan and Joe’s Morning Z?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“I used to make my roommates listen to your show on the Internet.”

He laughs. “And they still speak to you?”

“Are you kidding? They loved it. You should be syndicated.”

The Morning Z is the perfect show because they don’t pretend to know everything when they’re talking about stuff, their guests aren’t lame, and they play more music. Everyone I know listens to that show.

“We’ve talked about it,” he says. “But that brings pressure we aren’t sure we want.” He glances at me. “You know, if you ever wanted to come talk about Afghanistan…”

I imagine telling all of southwest Florida how Kevlar used to jack off to a picture of Wonder Woman—the cartoon, not Lynda Carter. The thought makes me chuckle. “I’ll think about it.”

A few minutes later, we’re at the radio station. Bryan invites me in for a tour, but I turn him down. It’s been a long, strange night and I feel like I might be tired enough to sleep without pills. “I should probably get home.”

He disappears inside the building and Harper takes over the driving. “Are you hungry?” she asks, turning onto Daniels in a direction opposite from the way to my house.

This is not a question I expected. I’m not especially hungry. I’m exhausted and I can still smell Paige on my skin. Except I think Harper is asking me to spend more time with her. This might make me a glutton for punishment, but I don’t want to refuse. “Starved.”

She pulls into the Waffle House out by I-75 and we sit in a booth by the windows. After ordering a couple of All-Star breakfasts with eggs over easy and bacon, Harper looks at me. “Why are you here?”

I stir my black coffee with a spoon, just to do something with my hands. “I guess I wanted to apologize. I was stupid when I was fourteen, and clearly I haven’t made much progress since.”

“Do you think an apology is enough?” she asks. “Do you know how many guys grab my butt or say disgusting things to me because they think I’m the kind of girl who enjoys that? I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’

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