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with fish and sunken cacti. Trevor made waves. Kids were running between the paloverde. Laura appeared from the brush. I pulled myself out of the water to greet her. The sky turned grey and snow began to fall. The trees covered as if by fleece. The water froze over. Everyone was still as statues. Except for Laura and me, it was a sudden graveyard. The sky fell to dusk. Laura tiptoed onto the icy canal. I tried to shout but could not speak, and so I knelt down on the banks with my head tilted up to swallow the snow just as the ice shattered slowly and as helplessly as glass. When I looked at Laura again, she was knocking heavily upon the frozen surface as if upon a door. For the first time, there was blood in my underwear. I went home from school early. Laura called when I did not return the next day. “They found him,” she said. “Oh?” I said hopefully. “Dead. The whole school is wearing black just like you, A.” “Oh my God, Laura.” “You better come back before they think you did it.” Trevor was the first to die. He wandered away from the party hours after Laura and I had left. Wandered miles into the desert much farther than the path she and I had taken home. It took four days for a policeman on horseback to follow a trail of blood that led to a lot of abandoned, half-constructed homes.
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