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coat often appeared to wave at her from their hangers in the dark. Theannouncer made a low noise of interest. Jackson liked Randy’s basement room. He always liked places where no one else came. The back of a warehouse, the cab of an abandoned pickup. Anyplace where no one would know. He thought of the empty locker room, of Chris.
    Their whole thing – that was what it was, a thing – was muted in his memory. The bat sounds of swimmers underwater, interrupted with an occasional hand job. He wanted Chris to like him, desperately, but he couldn’t say why. That was the bigger problem. Chris didn’t like him desperately, but Jackson was willing to pour himself into whatever vessel it took to make himself wanted or wantable. He would lay everything out on the table in front of Chris – a desperate banquet of need. And now what did it even matter? Chris was out there, standing under the locker room shower, kicking off his Speedo, throwing it down against the tiles, the water beating against the broad of his back, running down the roads of muscle, and Jackson was going to be stuck in Everett, in secret, alone.
    When the announcer faded off for the commercial break, Randy turned to Jackson. “What’s going on with your dad, man?” He was looking very intently at crumbs of weed, trying to herd them onto another rolling paper. “I heard it was bad.”
    â€œWhat did you hear?” Jackson asked.
    â€œAh – nothing, really,” Randy said. “Just that he … you know. Hit her a bunch. Broke the windows.”
    Jackson picked up a paperclip from the table, bent it open, twisted it. “Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you hear,” he said.
    The announcer came back on and they sat in silence for a while. “All of my sheep were gone, a man said. The whole farm, lifted up in the night.” The announcer said gravely, “This is not as uncommon as you may think.”
    He ditched Randy at eight. “Dude,” Randy said. “Are you sticking around? You staying with your old man?”
    â€œYeah,” Jackson said. Later, he wouldn’t know why he’d saidit, why he’d come to Marysville at all. His life – and his mother’s life, and Lydia’s – pivoting on that stupid “Yeah,” accidental, inevitable.
    â€œYou want a ride?” Randy’s eyes were bloodshot. His T-shirt was torn a little and a patch of his soft chest was showing.
    â€œYeah,” Jackson said. “Thanks, man.” Randy led him out of the cave of the room and followed him into the wet air.
    The pool was a mile from Randy’s, and it was seven miles after that to his father’s house in Tulalip. His father’s house, his mother’s motel. Jackson hoped Lydia wasn’t worried about him. Chris always practiced at the pool from four until seven. One night Jackson had shown up at the pool just around closing, and they’d hid in the locker room until the janitors had locked up. Chris lifted Jackson up onto his shoulders, naked, and threw him over and over again in the shallow end. It was dark and he had to keep clambering over Chris’s head, clutching at his hair. They didn’t talk about it, just kept laughing and doing it again. He could have done that forever. They hadn’t even slept together – they never did, not really, but he didn’t care. He would have done that for the rest of his life. The short flight through the air, the lukewarm water, again and again.
    Randy slowed by the pool under the sodium lights as though he knew. There were no cars in the parking lot. Of course not. What had Jackson thought, that because he was there, the pool would suddenly stay open? That Chris would be slicing through the water or sitting on the pool deck waiting? He had the feeling of someone having come back to see an empty house, someplace he used to live. He wanted to feel what he used to feel, but there was