Do you know what time they’re planning on playing? And how is your Monday going?

Game will be at 4 p.m. Thursday each week. Today was okay. I helped Lola with design stuff for the articles we’ve already got. Do we really want to run that 10,000-word piece on Magic: The Gathering tournaments . . . ?

Oh! Maybe “Magic: The Gathering” could be the overall theme?

Sorry I couldn’t be there to help out, assignments and all that.

Didn’t I tell you I made “Magic: The Gathering” the theme, like, a week ago? That epic piece of literature is going to be the magnum opus of the Westland Post.

(Although maybe we should trim it to 9,000 words.)

What are you up to tonight?

I just left the office and I’m on my way to hang out with a couple of girls from East River who I used to run track with. Might need a beer or three after attempting to edit Galaxy’s grammar.

That beer fridge I suggested might not be such a good idea. I’m probably going to be an alcoholic by the end of the year, no joke.

All the best writers are! Hemingway would be proud. Also . . . shots before football? They do call booze liquid courage for a reason.

Drinking before football is going to be 95% of my strategy.

And the other 5%?

1% pure, unadulterated athletic talent. 4% luck.

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.

Indeed it is. 60% of the time, it works every time.

TUESDAY

At lunchtime we went to a café near the mall and stood in line together, in silence, because it was a Bad Grace Day and she’d barely said more than a word to me for hours and it’s hard to bounce off someone who isn’t there. The song over the loudspeaker changed to “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the Elvis version, and it was so ridiculously cliché that I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing.

When we reached the counter, I ordered a tea. Grace didn’t want anything, but she insisted on paying for my drink, which I let her do, because I liked the way it made me feel. People didn’t buy hot beverages for just anybody, right?

In that moment, with Elvis crooning Take my hand, take my whole life too over the speaker, tea was so much more than leaves steeped in boiling water. It was a symbol, after half a week of nothingness, that Grace Town was still interested in me, even if she couldn’t find the words to say so.

• • •

“What part of that outfit, exactly, will help us blend in while we’re shadowing her?” I said.

It was Tuesday night, one week since Madison Carlson had provided us with insider intel, and I was driving toward East River High. Murray was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, wearing a trench coat and a fedora, an unlit cigar wedged between his lips.

“The rain was falling like bullets,” said Murray around his cigar, continuing his hard-boiled narration of the evening’s events in a fifties American accent. It was not, in fact, raining at all. “I turned to the kid”—Murray turned to me—“and said, ‘I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.’ He was a good guy, six feet of skin and bones, with a decent head screwed on his shoulders. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the dame he was chasing was like secondhand smoke: beautiful but deadly.”

“Secondhand smoke isn’t beautiful.”

“The kid said something stupid, but I ignored him. ‘We’re coming up on East River now,’ I said as we rounded the corner and the acrid lights of the school came into view. ‘Park here or they’ll have eyes on us in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’”

“Seriously, if you don’t shut up and take that hat off, I’m gonna leave you in the car.”

“I couldn’t take any more of the kid’s whining. I needed a smoke, and badly.” Murray struck a match and went to light his cigar, in my mother’s car no less. I smacked him across the back of the head.

“Ow, fuck, all right, all right!” he said, shaking the match until the flame flicked out. He took the hat off and left the cigar in the car, and we walked toward the white lights of East River’s track. The wind picked up, carrying with it the clean, crisp smell of fall. Dead leaves crunched under our feet. Streetlights burned in the dimness, but the roads were empty and quiet. I dug my hands into my pockets and speculated as to what the hell Madison Carlson had sent us here to see.

When we reached the track, we found the bleachers deserted, so we hung back in the shadows. Muz nudged me in the ribs and pointed across the field and said, “Over there,” which was entirely unnecessary, because she was the only one there, a small figure cast up against a galaxy of fluorescent light.

Grace was dressed in her usual oversized, boyish attire, but there was something different about her tonight. Her hair was pulled back and her face was pink and glazed with sweat and she was bent over, hands on her knees, heaving breaths. After a minute she stood and limped—caneless—back to the starting line, where she knelt. Took a breath. Started running, her limp haphazard, her face set in a grimace that deepened each time her injured leg impacted the red rubber of the track.

“What’s she doing?” said Muz as we watched her.

Maybe it was because she was usually so pale and brittle—not fragile, not by a long shot, just hard somehow—but I’d never imagined her as capable of physical exertion. After she’d sprinted about one hundred feet, Grace stopped and screamed and pulled at her hair. She took up her cane from where it’d been cast trackside and hit it across her injured leg again and again and again before sinking to the ground in a sobbing heap. No wonder her limp remained pronounced.