Splitting dusk’s encroaching dimness by a trail of flashing red-blue lights from multiple police cruisers in aggressive pursuit, a rusty ‘92 Honda Accord barreled down a two-lane rural highway. At high speeds near the limits of its disrepair-impaired capabilities, the junker rattled to its core, and so to the core of its four teenage occupants: a sixteen-year-old, shaggy-haired white boy intently focused at the wheel, his lanky wannabe-clone in the front passenger seat failingly attempting to roll a joint on the vibrating dashboard, a subculture-conflicted, cornrows-headed white girl behind the driver quietly freaking out, and a small, spectacled, thirteen-year-old black boy next to her wearing an American Eagle t-shirt and khaki cargo pants ten years washed-out and twenty out of style.

The boy braced himself between whatever sticky, stained contours the back seat could provide as the car shook intensely with each chaotic deviation in poorly-maintained asphalt that it bounced over. The rust bucket felt as though it could fall apart at any moment in any number of ways, but everything had been falling apart for as long as he could remember regardless of best efforts or lack thereof, so embracing the safe familiarity of not really giving a shit felt as good an option as any. Freeing, even, as there was nothing in his mind he could do in this moment to change these circumstances. Sitting here as chill as could be managed while being knocked to and fro from the rough ride with his life in the hands of an inebriated, teenage driver who was fueled by either gross overconfidence, a deathwish, or both simultaneously, the boy felt wholly resigned to the Universe’s will, just waiting for the chaos to shake out however it would.

“Ya’ll still got any shit on you?!” the driver yelled over the cacophony of ascending and descending siren tones wailing from the police cruisers close behind. “Dump it!”

The lanky front passenger paused rolling his joint, stared at it for the briefest of moments, and continued rolling. The aesthetically eclectic girl and dorky boy exchanged blank looks that communicated nothing to either. This seemed to bother her more than him.

The girl scooted up and leaned her torso over the gap between the front seats so the driver could better hear her. “Those pricks at the party took everything. Except his.” She cocked her head in gesture to the calm, dorky boy. “Callum’s. Said he stashed it.”

Callum wondered now why he had told her that.

“No shit?” The driver shot a glance over his shoulder at Callum, accompanied by an upward nod, and Callum saw the scattered, scared look deep in the driver’s bloodshot eyes that told a truth his confident voice had not.

The lanky front passenger prudently piped up, “Then, why are we running?”

Despite responding with, “I have no fucking idea,” the driver, attention returned back to the road, assumed a posture of even more intense and stupid determination than before, flipped the bangs out of his eyes, tightened his grip on the steering wheel’s worn leather, and pressed the vehicle’s accelerator deeper, nearly to the floor.

The girl turnt up suddenly and unnaturally, startling Callum. “Woo! We’re in it now, baby!”

The old car barely responded to all this however; it had nothing more to give. The driver slapped the steering wheel in anger. “Come on, you piece of shit!”

The lanky passenger extended a newly lit joint. “You look stressed, dude.”

“Get that outta my face!” the driver snapped, slapping the joint to the floorboard, an act which sent the lanky passenger down to retrieve it with a very desperate lack of hesitation.

The girl scooted even more forward. “I’ll hit that shit!” Waiting for the lanky boy to conclude his search, she looked over at Callum out of lack of much else to do except fidget anxiously. “Wanna get like him.”

Callum didn’t really know what that meant, and for some reason the girl didn’t look away, so he put on a polite but empty, tight-lipped smile as he often did toward people when situations felt awkward. The girl’s silent observation and the weirdness that ensued from it seemed as though they would never end until the lanky boy finally handed back to her the joint she was waiting for.

“Fuck yeah,” she declared.

Callum looked out his side window into the dark obscurity of the oak forest flying by just off the narrow highway’s shoulder. The trees nearest were washed in the white headlights of the police cruiser on the Accord’s bumper and alternately flashed red and blue in rapid succession, but the painting lights pierced only so deep into the underbelly of the forest’s dense canopy. As Callum became lost in the hypnotic flux between the facade of illuminated bark and the shadowed, seemingly infinite depths beyond clarity of any light, the tree-line broke, and he witnessed a broad landscape open up before him, all bathed in the blue of a sun recently set.

A striking meadow of violet flowers that hung like tiny bells from their stems gave way to miles and miles of tall grasses running wild out toward the Ozark Mountains whose rounded, tree-blanketed slopes formed an undulating horizon backlit by the last orange vestiges of the closing day’s light. In the gently rolling, intermediary foothills between the prairies near and those mountains far, only a few miles away, an especially vertical and rocky monolithic hill jutted up like a massive stone sentinel standing watch over the region. He had never been, but Callum knew other kids reminisced fondly of evenings spent hiking to the summit, much to the vexation of the private land’s cantankerous owners, to enjoy the view, drink, and smoke the night away far from the prying of any adult. He never thought much of the place beyond a passing interest that arose whenever he heard these stories to maybe someday visit.

But in the context of tonight, something about the isolated, ephemeral nature of its visage through this briefest of portals conjured waves of inexplicable loneliness and vague longing that surged through Callum, promptly breaking apart the cold apathy that had been encasing his heart which became newly awash in the sudden terror of realization at his dire physical predicament, as though for only the first time permitted to really see and react: He was stuck helplessly in the disgusting backseat of this drunk stranger’s car spinning increasingly out of control through the night in frantic, hopeless flight from the law for practically no reason.

And he wanted to live.

Without reservation he scooted up into a better position to speak into the driver’s ear, but in that moment, the car bottomed out with a brutal thud passing over a nasty pothole and violently threw Callum back into the backseat’s embrace. Tires squealed as the ungovernable vehicle roughly bounced left across the center line of the two-lane highway.

The driver’s body was maximally tense as he let off the gas and frantically proceeded to over-steer counter to the drift, first yanking the wheel to the right, then just as the off-balance 1.5 tons of metal and plastic felt certain to roll, left, slamming center of gravity back squarely over all four tires. As the car’s trajectory straightened out and its suspension settled, Callum buckled his seatbelt.

“That’s right. Back the fuck up, motherfucker,” the driver snarled assertively into the center rear-view mirror as he regained composure and accelerated back up to previous speed with hastily renewed attitude.

As Callum’s racing brain mulled over strategies to convince the foolhardy driver to surrender, he noticed the wailing sirens of their pursuers had given some distance, and the accompanying red, white, and blue light-show that had been flashing on the tree-line out his window pierced much more shallow now.

So shallow, in fact, a low, brawny, fast-moving, tawny brown quadruped bounding up onto the road out of the depths of the forest’s darkness ahead was barely discernible in the Accord’s dim headlights alone.

“Look out!” Callum screamed.

The girl beside, the lanky front passenger, and again the tires below all horrifically screeched in helpless unison as the car swerved left to a nearly unrecoverable angle and promptly hit a second road aberration—ruin tends to run in groups—which made unrecoverability decidedly so. Callum instinctively grasped the seatback in front of himself. The car was destined for a high speed collision with whatever awaited it in the underbrush a short drop off the highway’s shoulder, which Callum briefly attempted to spot through the front windshield amongst the headlight-blasted, nondescript mosaic of greenery, tree trunks, and confusing topography hurtling toward him before turning his head away reflexively. Out his side window, across the highway, he saw the catastrophe instigator—a mountain lion—darting back into the dark thicket of its origin.

Callum closed his eyes, and nothing flashed before them there in the darkness; he thought of no one. There was only a black void and a flood of existential dread even blacker that ran through it, overwhelming the boy so entirely it engulfed parts of himself he didn’t even recognize. And knew now he’d never know. The faded American Eagle logo across his chest pressed against the restraint of his seatbelt as he felt himself go airborne.

An empty beer bottle sailed end over end hundreds of feet above the Ozark Mountain foothills out towards the flatlands over which the newly rising moon hung. It arced downward and shattered somewhere indistinct among the rocky slopes and treetops below. From origin of its flight sat a sixteen-year-old white boy with dirty blond hair down to the shoulders of his Nirvana t-shirt, his blue-jeaned legs dangling over a limestone cliff’s edge.

“Why are we up here again?”

No answer came to him on his high shelf above the world as he stared off at everything and nothing in particular of the expansive vista spread out before him. Out past the gloomy, forested foothills immediately below; past the leveling-out farmlands intermediate; past the river that separated those grasslands and the industrious small town of Woolbury, but a ten-mile-wide, homogeneous conglomeration of lights from up here; and past the flat-topped woods beyond all that stretched on to the somber, moon-hung horizon.

On whom the boy had expected to hear from, he turned his head to check upon: a boy of like complexion nearby—a young man really, a year older but looked three. This other boy was much larger, not so much in height nor muscularity but extraordinary natural stockiness, almost as wide as the small boulder he sat cross-legged upon as he looked out on the same view. Despite the glare from the long-haired boy, the stocky one sat remarkably unbothered, with hands (of arms bare from the white tank-top he wore) resting Zen-like on knees (of legs half-bare from the black jean shorts he wore).

“Earth to Jackson.” Still no answer.

With a sigh, the long-haired boy laid back supine and looked straight up at the first stars of the night painted on the azure canvas above. “You know, we could be at the Holler right now… pulling baddies.” He grinned impishly.

An understated chuckle from Jackson precluded a response in his voice significantly deeper and more gruff than the long-haired boy’s. “When have you ever… pulled a baddie?”

The long-haired boy searched his memory. “Why you gotta say it all mocking like that?… Actually, just last weekend.”

“Mhm. But?”

The long-haired boy sat back up with expedience and spoke directly at Jackson, hurriedly, embodying the tension of the story he recounted. “But that fucktard Mike was there and said if I took this hoe out before paying him his grand he’d cut my balls off and stick em down her throat for me. It was just a—” He made a half-pinch hand gesture. “—little awkward after that.”

“Bastard’d do it, too.”

“Yeah, I know.” The long-haired boy looked back out over the vast landscape, which straightaway slowed his pace. “He’s kind of becoming an actual problem. I gotta figure something out quick. Like, real quick.”

A swell of wind rustled the treetops below and interrupted the boys’ conversation with a howl. The long-haired boy scooted back a bit to bring his legs up onto the topside of the bluff he sat upon the edge of. He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head lower so that his sight-line was downward toward the slopes and treetops below. The wind died down.

“My dad came by Hope House the other day.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” There was an inordinate amount of audible weight behind this exchange so short and mostly contextless in the here-and-now. “I think he thinks I’m gay.”

Jackson chortled.

The long-haired boy paid it no mind and continued, “I haven’t seen him since before he went into county two years ago, and the one of the first things he asks is—” The long-haired boy put on a parodical impression of a deeper-voiced speaker. “—Jonah, do you like girls?”

“And what’d you say?”

Jonah flashed a comically exaggerated look of suspicion at Jackson, but the broad boy on his boulder, still stoically staring off into the distance, didn’t notice. “I said I don’t know. They don’t seem to like me. I was just fuckin’ with him, kinda, but I don’t think he picked up. He just said, Well, one day they’ll like you, and you’ll like them. And one day, you’ll fall in love with one of them. When that happens, son, treat her like a queen. Give that woman whatever her heart desires. Cater to her every whim. Fulfill her every wish. Because if you don’t… she’ll turn into a cunt like your mother.”

Jackson laughed heartily. “I’m sorry, that’s fucking funny.”

Jonah’s face was grim. “Yeah, too bad every time he mentions mom I just wanna smash his fucking teeth in.”

“Oh, yeah…” Jackson readily slid back into melancholy. Then, he moved: a simple turn of the head in inspection of Jonah sitting unaware and downcast near the cliff’s edge. “Why don’t you do it?”

Jonah didn’t much react to the coaxing. In the seconds since becoming heated from those painful old memories of domestic tumult, his demeanor had already cooled, largely thanks to the normalizing effect of being in this place above everything. “Figured it’d be better to ask for cash for the whole Mike thing. But he just got out of another two-year stint in county so, of course, he’s broke as a joke.” The long-haired boy picked up a pebble and slung it side-arm off the cliff. “Not that he ever had any money or I wouldn’t be living in a fuckin’ foster home.” He snickered maliciously while shaking his head disapprovingly and looked over at Jackson who was again motionlessly surveying the evening vista. “You’re almost eighteen, right?”

“Close.”

“Shit, so you’re almost out.”

“Yeah.”

“Damn. Lucky.”

“Mm.”

A couple miles out on the caliginous plains, left to right along a horizontal line a few shades darker than all the blue-emerald murk around it traveled a high-speed procession of tiny alternately blue and red flashing lights. The lights disappeared and reappeared at intervals as they passed in and out of behind the tree-line down along that road’s edge.

Jonah noticed. “That’s a lot of cops.”

Jackson was unmoved.

As though in reverence of this occurrence reminding him of and pulling him back into reality, Jonah stood to observe it. “Isn’t that the highway out to the Holler?” As his brain assembled all relevant pieces of stored information and calculated probabilities, his face gradually scrunched into a look of concern. “No way they busted the party.”

He drew the smartphone from his jean’s pocket and saw upon its display no bars of reception. He lifted the device as high as he could straight up toward the heavens, and looked up at the display, confirming the lack of cell service in this spot. As Jonah took the first steps to roam for signal, Jackson spoke out bluntly.

“I did it.” He was pointedly deadpan.

Jonah’s reaction to this contextless confession was subdued, as if its most likely reference was so absurd it had to mean something else completely unconcerning. So he continued to stare down into his cellphone’s display as he mumbled back, “Fuck you talking about? Did what?”

“I called the police.”

Jonah’s full attention was now on Jackson still meditatively unemotional in his cross-legged perch looking out over the region. “What?” Jackson apparently did not feel an immediate desire to clarify, so out of a slack-jawed face of astonishment Jonah reiterated a series of facts both boys certainly already knew, as if to re-assure himself of the validity of his impression of reality after the unbelievable nature of Jackson’s confession had shaken his certainty of it. “Our friends were at that party. You know that. And especially tonight! Why would you ever do that? That would just fuck everybody. You’re messing with me.” Jonah attempted to calm himself by repeating this as though he believed it, quite unsuccessfully since deep down he unfortunately did not. Jackson wasn’t one to mess. “You’re messing with me.”

“Told ‘em everything. Holler Boys, too.”

Jonah’s face was twisted in utter bewilderment. “Everything? Everything about what? Those drugs Callum found? And the Holler Boys?! Why would anyone ever tell them anything except suck your dick?” Jonah took two steps of a march toward Jackson. “The hell’s wrong with you, man?!”

Jackson’s cold, dead stare stopped Jonah in his tracks. The big boy had swiveled his head to watch Jonah’s approach over his shoulder, and the indomitable gaze, dangerously threatening and wholly uncaring, he shot from his eyes into Jonah’s felt from a place far removed from the simplicity of a probing confrontation, and Jonah was not prepared to meet it any closer.

Back out on the plains, just ahead of the lead set of police lights in that distant caravan of police lights that had spawned this conflict burst a small but brilliant fire into abrupt existence. Surprised by the flash in his periphery, Jonah jerked his head to see and threw his hands up in astonishment. Jackson slowly turned his gaze from Jonah to look as well. A moment later, a faint boom from the distant explosion passed through the area, briefly echoing about before the evening’s ambiance was taken back by only the chirping of katydids and the new, incessant, solitary bark of a dog from somewhere down the slope behind the boys.

It wasn’t clear if the Jonah’s first response to the explosion was aimed at Jackson or in general. “The fuck is going on, man?!” Jonah was in absolute turmoil inside, uncertain in such a great multitude of ways he was frozen in action with his hands on his head. Jackson’s inappropriate and unacceptable soundless stillness only fueled his frustration.

He turned back to Jackson, releasing all that frustration in a manic rant, though he dared not again attempt approach. “Well, somebody’s probably dead!” He gestured toward the faraway highway where the bursting flame had already died down into just a flickering orange dot. “So now what?! You better hope that’s not somebody we know! Why’d you even tell me all this shit, man?! The fuck am I even supposed to do now?!”

Jackson paid none of Jonah’s crisis any mind, which would have certainly infuriated Jonah moreover if not for the pause affording him notice of the barking dog, which stole away his attention and graciously gave his reeling mind a bit of room to breathe in giving it something different to do. He listened intently down those relatively gentler slopes and trails that led away from the cliff’s edge, that he and Jackson had hiked to get here. The bark, distant but growing ever closer, sounded both an alarm and aggressive warning.

“Old Man Wilson. Last time he caught us up here, I had a motherfuckin’ shotgun pointed at me… so I’m leaving.” Not at all unexpectedly by this point, Jackson continued to not give much ado about anything at all. “I need cellphone signal, and I need to figure out what the fuck is going on down there.” Jonah gestured again to the faraway highway and looked out at it from the cliff’s edge. All the red-blue flashing police dots had come to a standstill clustered not far from the flickering orange dot, all-together creating a uniquely vibrant glow, contested in radiance by only the far-off town of Woolbury, in that one tiny spot amongst the diffuse blue of late twilight that stretched for miles in every direction.

Jonah threw his both hands up and let them fall with slaps onto his thighs. He wondered why he even explained everything he just had to Jackson, unsure who he was even really speaking to anymore. This person he knew and trusted for years, though admittedly more as “one of the crew” and not as the closest of friends, was out of nowhere someone… else he didn’t know at all. None of Jackson’s cryptic actions made any lick of sense, nor did his inclination to suddenly confess them under no duress. There was too much to think on that had come too fast to figure out in the time given to think on it, and there was no more time to think now.

As he turned away from the cliff’s edge to leave, Jonah shook his finger at Jackson. “We’re gonna talk again.” He didn’t say it, or consciously think it even, but he meant somewhere safer where he wouldn’t be alone with the unapproachable malevolence he had glimpsed behind Jackson’s eyes that felt like it was just waiting for a good enough excuse to destroy him.

Jonah scanned down the slopes and trails to estimate the most optimal exit route to avoid the approaching hostile hound (and likely master), and once he was confident in his choice, began moving downhill. After no more than a half-dozen steps down the way, he pivoted back to Jackson unaffected upon his boulder. “Are you coming?”

“Not yet.”

Jonah alternated between checking surety of his footfalls on the uneven trail out and looking back to see if Jackson—now just the silhouette of a broad, hunched back atop a boulder haloed by the rising moon—had moved at all. He had not, even as Jonah descended into the cover of woods that would see him to the base of Pilots Knob.