Page 75 of The Bright Lands

Everything ok?

He texted Kimbra:

I’ve learned that KT was brought home this evening. He’d been arrested in Dallas.

Kimbra responded:Oh.

Sorry about that, Joel thought. Add it to the pile of things to feel awful over.

Joel walked until he caught a glint of moonlight on his black convertible parked in the distance, on the highway’s dark shoulder. He toggled his phone over to the escorting ad and found he could still only study it for a few seconds. Looking now at his brother’s grinning face, his shirtless body, Joel saw it in a new light.

Didn’t the ad feel a little absurd, like a bad joke? Indeed, some of the Bison, according to Kimbra, had apparently considered it a prank when they saw it. But Joel wasn’t stupid. There must have been plenty of Bentley boys who did not find it funny, who might even have taken it seriously, considered it evidence of his brother’s deviance. Would it be such a stretch to imagine that the ad could have outed Dylan, however inadvertently? All it might have taken was one person spreading this URL to put the boy in terrible danger.

His brother’s murder might have been a hate crime. The thought was too banal, too appalling, to fathom.

Whether the ad was genuine or not, it raised another question. Why had Dylan never told Joel that he was gay? Surely he must have known that Joel would treat the news with nothing but love and discretion. Dylan had always laughed when Joel described the absurdities of the city’s gay scene, had always taken a good-natured interest in Joel’s trips to bars and beaches, had never betrayed a hint of homophobia.

That old joke—50K—Dylan had carved into the concrete of the dam, had started back when Joel was fresh in Manhattan. One weekend, he had met a lavishly drunk man at a bar in Chelsea who had clung to Joel’s elbow and insisted, endlessly, that he had a “fifty-karat cock.” When Joel had told that story to his brother, Dylan had been aghast and delighted by the phrase in the way only teenage boys can be. It had passed into their limited private lexicon: “Yo, J—you found any more of that fifty-k?”

Maybe there was an answer in that, he realized. Maybe Joel had been so busy bringing word of the modern world to his simple backwoods brother he’d never bothered to learn if there was any news at home.

The dirty ad was featured on the escorting site’s listings for Dallas, Houston and Austin. Joel wondered what kind of offers his dead brother’s digital self was receiving at this very moment. He played with a hypothetical: suppose someone in Bentley had been planning a trip out of town one weekend, and while browsing the pages of the escorting website, looking to set up a little fun while they were in the city, they had happened to find Dylan’s ad. Long odds, Joel’s analytical mind told him, but still—stranger things have happened.

As he approached his car, he felt a spark in his ragged brain. Wasn’t this ad of his brother’s—with all of its lurid pictures—uncannily similar to the photos that had been spread of Joel ten years before? Wasn’t it—

There was someone seated in his convertible.

Joel stopped. He had lowered the convertible’s ruined cloth hood this morning and so had no difficulty seeing the man sitting in the driver’s seat, staring forward out the windshield. Sitting very still.

imissedyou.

The man’s head began to turn, very slowly. Joel saw that it wasn’t a man.

It was a boy. It was his brother.

Dylan stared at him with one eye. The other eye was so badly bruised it had swollen shut.

Dylan opened the car door.

Joel’s brother wore a green Bison jacket and a pair of pants that glistened silver in the moonlight. His bare chest was the same cold white Joel had seen at the morgue. Dylan’s bruised face was drawn into a grimace of pain.

Dylan took one faltering step out of the car. Another. His bloody bare feet sent up a whisper as they kicked the gravel.imissedyou.Joel clenched his fist around his phone, felt the useless knife on his ankle. He willed his legs to run. Every raw synapse in his brain willed his legs to run.

Dylan opened his mouth. His voice came out tight, twisted.

“You have to go.”

Dylan took another step.

“You have to go tonight.”

Joel opened his mouth to scream. No sound came.

“Run, Joel.”

Dylan stopped. He stood a few inches away, giving off an awful stench of rot and mildew and clay. The wound in the boy’s throat was a black pit into which no moonlight penetrated. It stared back at Joel like a reptile’s eye.

“If you don’t go tonight there’s no escape.”