Page 138 of The Bright Lands

The sole concession the school made to grief was to postpone the Bison Homecoming game. Instead, on the Friday night following all the trouble, a formal memorial was held in the school’s gymnasium. A line of wreaths stood beneath the basketball goals as Bethany Tanner and Luke Evers were awarded Most Valuable Player—the only honor for which the cash-strapped school had medals at hand—and smiled grimly for photographs.

Tomas Hernandez and the Turner twins watched them from the stands with frowns. It had been made clear to Luke and Bethany and the others that there were still plenty of folks in this town with a vested interest in keeping the exact nature of the Bright Lands obscured.

Jamal awaited Luke and Bethany outside the memorial. They rode in Luke’s truck to Joel’s house, where they found him less stoned than might be expected. His arm, fresh out of yet another shoulder surgery, was suspended in a cast, his head shaved from the operation to relieve the pressure in his cracked skull. Very few flowers stood on his nightstand.

“The charges got dropped,” Jamal told him.

“You told your mother to send me the legal fees?” Joel said.

“Can we come visit you in New York?” Luke asked.

Joel smiled. “I wouldn’t be able to keep you out of trouble.”

Mrs. Whitley shushed the kids out the door a few minutes later, more insistently maternal with her surviving son than they had ever seen her with Dylan.

Paulette sat on the edge of Joel’s bed. She stared at his bruised face. Joel had learned that although Dylan had hidden his queerness from his mother he needn’t have bothered. Paulette had known about both her boys from the day they were born.

She never mentioned to Joel that the fiery demise of Bentley First Baptist may not have been entirely Dylan’s idea.

“Did I do good?” Joel asked her.

She rested a hand on his hand. She never did start to cry. “You always have.”

At the dam, Bethany and Jamal and Luke sat on the tall walkway and ignored the stars.

Bethany lit a blunt. “So why did it stop when Garrett died? Didn’t it want people to get killed?”

“I was texting with Mr. Whitley about that,” Luke said, taking an inexpert drag, coughing. “I think it needed someone it could get inside, someone who’d given themselves over to it. Someone to help keep it over here, somehow. Like a circuit helping it connect our world to...wherever it came from.”

“A vessel,” Bethany said. They’d all heard that thing speaking—thinking? screaming?—at the end there, just before it made it aboveground.

The three of them watched the water a long time, the flat line of nothing out there. They had put a stop to something that had ruined a hundred lives. Why didn’t it feel like a victory?

Luke opened his mouth to say more but Jamal cut him off. “That thing’s someone else’s problem now.”

CLARK

She was jogging when she saw the little convertible crest the rise in her road and draw slowly toward her like a shadow fleeing the Sunday dawn. She stopped when he came close, but Joel said only, “Take your time. I’ll meet you at the house.”

She found him inside a few minutes later, brewing coffee in her machine. She sat at her family’s old table, not even bothering to change out of her sweaty clothes, and accepted the cup he carried to her, carefully, with his one good hand.

“Are you sure you have to leave so soon?” she said.

Joel brought a cup to the table for himself. “There’s business in the city. No such thing as bad press, I guess.”

“And that’s what you’ll do? Go back and analyze property values?”

He shrugged with his good shoulder. “Maybe if I get absurdly rich I’ll fight crime. The one-armed Batman.”

She sipped her coffee. She tried to smile at the sling suspending his shoulder. “How does it feel?”

“Like I’ve pressed my last bench press. But I can hardly complain.”

Unspoken memories of Dylan’s belated funeral yesterday morning—the end of a long week of such proceedings—hung briefly between the two of them.

Joel said, “Dylan must have known that KT was up to no good on those weekends they were supposed to be at the coast together. Why do you think he didn’t try to stop the tricking and the drugs?”

Clark played with a napkin. “Because KT was too convenient for the narrative. I went and checked—Browder moved back to town on May second. The first trip the boys took to the coast came three weeks later. My guess is that Browder went back to the Bright Lands sometime soon after he arrived and met Dylan there. Apparently there’s phone records showing that your brother and Browder was texting each around the clock by the end of the month. With KT’s help, Dylan and Browder could disappear together. Guess which of our deputies was off-duty for seven of those ten weekends Dylan and KT told people they were in Galveston?”