The morning before I found the body, I went to church. Well, I tried to, anyway. When we got there, Mom white knuckling the steering wheel, the only sound road noise and the rattling of something deep in the dash, I couldn’t get out of the car.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t see them.”

Every Sunday was the same: Dad and his new girlfriend sitting a few rows deep in the pews directly across from us, dressed in athletic wear. Kourt always looked at her phone, and Dad looked at me. I stared at the ground and waited for the priest to shut up so we could leave.

“Today’s important, Isaac. If I can handle it, I think you can too.”

Through sheer will, I managed to step out of the car. But when I imagined walking inside, my palms started to sweat. Each Sunday became more difficult than the last, my breath a strained thing trying to make its escape.

Mom studied me with that scrutinizing gaze of hers and sighed. “I can’t give you the car,” she said finally. “I have work afterward.”

Standing on the curb, I watched her walk inside with the stream of business casual filing through the entrance. Mom never missed mass, as a matter of principle, or maybe a matter of will. But every Sunday I was under a microscope, Dad’s gaze burning me up, examining some failure I could feel but couldn’t see.

Stop caring, I’d tell myself. He has plenty of failures for the both of you.

But it was no use.

Suburbia wasn’t intended to be walkable, but I walked anyway, heading west along the access road toward PD’s house. PD obviously wasn’t his real name, but it was what everyone called him after the police arrested him for public intoxication and underage drinking. After attending some court-ordered drug and alcohol counseling, the charges were dropped. But the name stuck.

By the time I arrived, the back of my neck was flaming from the sun. I knocked until his father appeared at the door, bleary-eyed. He let me inside without saying anything, not even to chastise. PD and I didn’t talk about the thing that had happened to him—not the arrest, but the reason he’d walked out the front door of his house, a bottle of his mother’s pilfered whiskey in hand. He’d drank so much the cops had taken him directly to the hospital to pump his stomach. But that wasn’t the only thing that had landed him there.

He needs you, his father had told me afterward, in the hospital. It was the only time I’d seen him cry. Even if he tries to push you away, you can’t let him.

For years, I’d been spending the majority of my days at PD’s house, even more so now, and it was almost as familiar as my own—curtains like doilies, the carpet on the stairs worn from the repetitive up and down of shoe prints, the perpetual smell of incense and Clorox wipes.

PD’s room was upstairs, second door on the right (after the dark room, which his mother spent hours in, although I wasn’t ever sure if she was creative or just wanted to hide). I opened the door to his room and sat in the wooden chair next to the desk, pulling a pack of cigarettes from my pocket. I’d started smoking after everything with Dad, only it hadn’t really helped, it was just something to do. I liked the physicality of it, the stain on my fingertips, the insistence of the filter’s ash.

When PD woke, he was coughing. He quickly got out of bed and fumbled for the half full water bottle on his desk. He wore his clothes to bed like a cartoon character.

“Christ, you could’ve opened a window,” he said, reaching for the latches. The window slid open.

“I was bored,” I said, exhaling and leaving the butt in the ashtray I’d pulled from the bottom drawer, which I knew he only had on account of my messes.

“All right,” he said. “Now we’re both bored.” He rubbed his hair, matted on one side.

“What about Lee?” I asked. “I bet we could get him out to the creek, get some beers in him, and he’d be singing the answers to the exam on Tuesday.”

“Or we could study,” he said, and we both laughed. As PD left for the bathroom, I looked out the window at the playset no one used anymore because PD was grown and so were his siblings. Even now, I remembered the feeling of swinging, how when I turned my head upside down a flock of strange butterflies seized my body, a laugh caught in my throat.

Before his siblings left for college, before the incident with the police, PD’s house was warm, filled with laughter and small errors—jam splattered on the wall, two loose fence boards nobody had bothered to repair, rugs stained with strange constellations. But now, as PD’s mother spent hours in the dark room, his father kept busy by tending to the house.

PD stomped back into the room, his blonde hair dark from the shower. He wore the same clothes as before—jeans and a sweatshirt, despite the warm spring day.

The bedroom door opened, and PD’s father stood there, glaring at us.

“What did I tell you about doors?” he asked.

“When one closes, another opens?” PD suggested.

“No closed doors,” his father said. “Ever.”

The bathroom door could be closed, but only for seven minutes. After that, his parents grew worried.

“We’re leaving anyway,” I said. “We have an exam to prepare for.”

I’d been the one to discover Dad’s cheating. It was only last year, but it felt like a lifetime ago. My after-school snack was spinning in the microwave. The appliance’s mechanical whir always made me feel uncomfortable in a way other electronics didn’t: there was something dangerous and nuclear about the microwave—it didn’t react well to certain objects or materials; sometimes, food unexpectedly exploded; and when I stood too close, my headphones didn’t work, the music breaking up like a bad radio signal. Sometimes I stared at the closed door, watching the food rotating on the glass dish, and wondered if my brain was flickering in response.

My pizza rolls had just emerged from the microwave when Dad came out of his bedroom with a woman who wasn’t Mom. She was familiar in a way I couldn’t place, until I realized I had seen her before. She was the cashier from the On Cue, the one Dad frequented for his fountain drinks. Her hair was long and brown, her eyes too close together, her skin dark from tanning.

“Isaac,” Dad said. “I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

“I live here,” I said stupidly.

“But you have band after school,” he said.

“I quit band,” I said. “Months ago.”

Dad never seemed to remember anything about me, only I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not.

“I’m Kourt,” the woman chimed in. “Your dad’s told me so much about you.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Because he doesn’t seem to know much about me.”

As my afternoon snack grew cold and stiff on the kitchen counter, Dad explained to me that he loved Kourt. I asked him how he could love a cashier instead of Mom. That’s awfully elitist of you, he said. I wanted to know how he fell in love with someone who handed him a Styrofoam cup and directed him to the drink dispenser.

“It’s complicated, bud,” he said. “But we can work it out.”

Only we hadn’t worked it out. Dad was ejected from the house, along with his obscure books and the nice speakers that used to sit on the bookshelf in the living room. Now Mom and I had nothing to listen to in that room except for the TV.

When we arrived at Lee’s, cars were rammed into the driveway and parked along the curves of the cul-de-sac, paint sparkling like beetle shells. It was hot, and PD was wearing a lot of clothes, his hair clinging to his forehead with sweat.

We could hear the noise from outside. It was a party, or something like it, so we barged our way in. People stood in clusters in the front room, and in all the other rooms, everyone dressed in pastel colors and sipping from small plastic cups of blood-red wine. Glass dishes were set on counters, filled with pink and green egg-shaped candy.

“Oh shit, it’s Easter,” I said to PD. No wonder Mom had been on me earlier.

Religion was some kind of war between my parents, something they were holding against each other. I seemed to be one of those things too. Sometimes it was nice, like when Dad bought me the iPad I’d been wanting for the last two years, or when Mom took me to buy the newest Call of Duty for midnight release. But mostly, it just hurt, like how Dad wouldn’t talk to me anymore and how Mom kept chastising me about church, and college, and anything else she could think of, like she believed if we adopted some basic rules life would regain some sense of control. You have to go to college, Isaac, she told me once. There are no other futures for you. Not unless you want to be a deadbeat like your father.

But Dad went to college, I’d said. And he’s still a deadbeat.

No one stopped us as we wandered Lee’s house, shoving handfuls of candy into our jeans. In the kitchen, I grabbed two miniature water bottles and handed them to PD. He downed them instantly, wiping his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. A group was in the backyard, crushing cans of beer and tossing them into a wire wastebasket on the other side of the yard.

We found Lee upstairs in the game room, playing video games with his cousins. They were drinking ginger ale, and when I lifted the nearest cup, I saw there was only ice and no alcohol.

“The Lord has risen, bitches,” I said. “And we’re going to the creek.”

In between the subdivision we all lived in and the newer, richer neighborhood, Prism Heights, there was a wooded area with a sizable creek. When we were kids, our subdivision was the only manmade thing around. I’d carry a backpack down to the creek and stay for hours, listening to the mourning doves and crows and whacking cat tails against the wrought iron fence dividing our subdivision and the wilderness beyond. I hiked the chipping rocks, pushing through the weeds and the sludge of the creek, searching for anything that would let me see it. As I’d grown, so too had civilization; now the creek was a mere sliver among paved roads and manicured lawns kept green through chemicals. Our parents often talked about the coyotes and bobcats that occasionally attacked small dogs kept in fenced yards.

The city ought to do something about this, they said.

Like what? I always wondered. Kill everything until the only threat to us was ourselves?

“Don’t care,” Lee said. “I’m qualifying,” he added, his eyes following the screen’s action. He wore sweatpants, bright white socks, and a T-shirt that seemed to be making a science joke I only half understood.

“That’s not a real sport,” PD said, although I knew he didn’t really believe that. Most likely, he was annoyed because Lee was actually good, which was why we never played with him.

“We saw another of those snakes,” I said. “The rat-tail or whatever.”

“Black tailed rattler?”

“They’re not this far east,” Lee said after I nodded. “But I suppose it’s not impossible. Where exactly did you see it?”

I shrugged. I’d seen a snake last week, but I didn’t know what it was, only that I didn’t like being near it. “We got beer and smokes, which is more than your loser cousins can say.”

PD probably shouldn’t be drinking, but it wasn’t really the alcohol that was the problem. And I knew he’d do it anyway, so I might as well be there to keep an eye on him.

“You’re the loser,” one of Lee’s cousins said. “I’m going to Clemson in the fall. You’ll be lucky to graduate high school.”

I glared at him. I wanted to fucking throttle him, but I wanted the answers to the test more. The TV screen flickered as Lee reached for the power button.

PD and I drank and smoked on the way to the creek, but Lee didn’t. He never did that sort of thing, so I guessed he wasn’t completely like us. When we were kids, we’d had more in common, but now all we shared with Lee were circumstances—we were from a good neighborhood, from good families, and we all embodied the same space, although we knew it was temporary, that the places we were headed weren’t the same. Lee seemed to be good at everything, at least all the things adults seemed to value, whereas PD and I weren’t good at anything. We were dumb kids from smart families.

PD led the way, charting us toward the creek entrance we always took—a steep slide, a hop across three rocks, and deeper into the woods. Everything was dry despite the creek. This part of Texas was always dry, one dropped cigarette away from erupting into flames.

“I know why you invited me,” Lee said finally, as we followed PD into the creek. PD was just a smudge ahead, the bag of beers slapping against his lower back as he took the rocks quick, cigarette in hand.

“The rattler,” I reminded him, puffing on my cigarette.

“I’m not that dumb,” Lee said. “And you’re not very clever, either,” he added, and I shot him a glare. He nodded at the pack, and, surprised, I lit him one and he accepted it.

I waited for him to say why he’d come if he knew what we were up to. We were approaching our usual spot—an enclosed swath of trees that couldn’t be seen from the road. PD already sat on one of the large rocks, beer in hand, tipping his ash into a small crevice.

Lee paused, holding out a hand to stop me.

“I know you think you’re helping him,” he said. “But he needs something you can’t give him.”

“And what is that, O’ wise one?” I asked.

“You can’t keep falling behind to keep up with him,” Lee said, shaking his auburn head.

I didn’t say anything, instead watching PD stretch his legs and look around for us.

“Is this your plan?” Lee asked. “Just stay here, forever?” I knew he wasn’t talking about the creek but something bigger.

“What about you?” I asked, annoyed. “It doesn’t matter how smart you are, Lee. Someone’s always smarter. You want to do that forever? Aren’t you tired of competing?”

He scowled, pushing past me to join PD on the adjacent rock. When PD offered him a beer, he accepted.

The reason Dad and I didn’t talk anymore was both complicated and simple. We hadn’t talked for months, ever since the party I hadn’t attended.

“Where are you?” Dad asked over the phone. I could hear chatter in the background, the rise and fall of laughter. It hadn’t been just any party, it’d been Kourt’s birthday. Dad had texted me about it. I’d wondered if the people in the background of the call were Dad’s friends or Kourt’s. When he’d lived with us, Dad hadn’t had any friends.

“At home,” I said.

“I thought you were coming to the party?”

“I never said that.”

“I’m sorry about the way you met her. I messed up, okay?”

“You’re still messing up,” I said.

“I’m trying to make it right,” he said. “Kourt’s friend has a younger sister, you know. I think you two could hit it off.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“Then find someone else, Isaac. When I was your age, I was pining after girls. All you do is hang out with that weird friend of yours.”

“Well, I’m obviously not like you,” I said.

“Just come to the goddamn party, Isaac. I just want us to be a family again.”

You had a family, I wanted to say.

“You like the idea of a son. Only you don’t like me,” I said instead, before I could stop myself.

I held the phone to my ear. I waited for him to contradict me, to say something, although I wasn’t sure what. But he never did.

We drank on the rocks until the clouds covered up the sun. Mom had texted me several times, wondering if I’d be back for dinner. We were all pretty drunk, especially since PD had secreted some whiskey in a CamelBak. We passed it back and forth, taking sips from the plastic nozzle like runners. That’s when PD announced we should go find the rattler, even though it’d been my idea and we’d made it up. Lee gave me a side-eye.

“The jig is up,” I said, although I’d never said the phrase before.

“Then let’s find something,” PD said. “Didn’t you say you saw a coyote out here?”

“It was dusk,” I said. “And it might have been a fox.”

Lee laughed. He was actually a pretty fun guy when he let loose a little. He’d even cracked a few jokes at the expense of his boot-licking cousins, who went to the private Catholic school downtown. Private/public, religious/secular, wealthy/poor, smart/dumb. Even now, we knew the divisions started early and only grew more pronounced.

PD had rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt enough for me to glimpse the twin scars on his wrists, the angry red lines he’d made with slivers of a Jack Daniels bottle, which he’d smashed against the sidewalk when he’d realized the cops had found him. When he saw me looking, he yanked his sleeves down and avoided my gaze.

You know you can talk to me, I’d told him more times than I could count.

I know that, Isaac. But you’re not my fucking therapist. I don’t want to talk about it. Not to anyone, not even you. Especially not you.

In search of something, the three of us tromped paths we’d flattened before. PD and I crumpled our beer cans and chucked them on the ground for Lee to pick up and place in the bag PD had brought. The drunker we got, the bigger the creek felt.

“I ain’t seen shit,” PD said loudly. “Where’s all the goddamn nature?”

When he drank, he sounded a lot like his parents, who were both from the Deep South. Where we lived, people debated what part of the country we should be a part of.

“There’s nature,” Lee said as a fly landed on PD’s arm.

PD slapped at the insect. He seemed to be having trouble standing up without rocking back and forth or side to side, and that’s when I realized he was way drunker than Lee and me, that he’d probably been sipping from the CamelBak like, well, water.

Even though my parents were divorced, like every other kid’s parents in suburban America, it wasn’t the divorce that was fucking me up. This thing with Dad, this broken thing between us, was part of it, but there was something else, something I was just starting to see.

Maybe it would heal me, if I had the courage to let it.

But it wasn’t just about me.

I took the CamelBak from PD and wore it myself, tugging whiskey into my mouth through the nozzle, which reminded me of a cow udder, although I obviously didn’t know what that was really like.

We muddied our sneakers as we crossed the creek. Suddenly, one of us gave a shout and then we were all running, although I wasn’t sure why. When we stopped, we stood in front of something waterlogged in the shallow creek bed at our feet.

It was a body, face down in the water, clothes dark with mud. We all stared at it, as if expecting it to stand, dripping water, or yell at us. But the body remained silent.

“Holy shit,” PD exclaimed, stumbling forward.

“Don’t touch it!” Lee yelled, but PD was already lifting the brackish hair, tangled around the base of the neck like seaweed. Whatever he saw made him go rigid, his face paling.

As Lee reached for his phone to call 911, I splashed through the water.

“Who is it?” I asked. The man wore jeans and thick-soled work boots. The creek had turned his fair skin tan and swollen.

Lee held his phone in his hand like maybe someone was still on the line, but I couldn’t be sure. He chewed his lip, his body curled into itself as if it could shield him from what was before us.

PD was breathing roughly. He grabbed a rock and chucked it at the body. The rock landed with a thunk in the shallow bed, splintering into small white shards.

I stepped forward to see who the man was, but PD shoved me, hard. I collapsed into the dirty water, splitting my skin on a rock. When I turned around, he was kicking the body in the ribs.

“You’re fucking crazy,” Lee said, his voice strangely high pitched. Dimly, I heard him back away, then run through the woods the way we’d come.

The body shook as PD kicked, creek water spraying. I lunged forward, but he was strong and mad, and I struggled to contain him. I locked my arms around his torso, weathering the elbows he threw at my stomach.

Pinning his arms to his side, I jerked him to my chest so we were almost hugging, dragging him through the water and away from the body. Lee was long gone, and I knew the cops would be here soon.

“That’s him,” PD whispered.

This was the thing we hadn’t talked about, the thing that had fucked him up. I said something to him, I wasn’t sure what, but whatever it was it seemed to calm him down. Slowly, we exited the creek and came to stand on the sidewalk of the other subdivision, the one that wasn’t ours, clothes, bodies, and limbs wet and covered in mud.

“At least, I thought it was him,” PD said. “But now I’m not so sure.”

He stood looking back into the woods the way we’d come. Somehow, the pack of cigarettes in my pocket was mostly dry. I handed him a cigarette, but he was shaking too hard to light it, so I lit it and handed it back. He raised it to his lips and said nothing. His face was wet, and I wasn’t sure if it was creek water or tears.

Once, after the hospital, I’d made the mistake of calling him by his name. His real name. His eyes had gone wild. Don’t call me that. Not anymore.

At the sound of the sirens, PD took off, fast walking the long way back to our neighborhood, sucking hard on his cigarette. I followed, trying to catch up to him.

“Look like you belong here,” I hissed, slowing my pace and taking a glug of whiskey, trying to empty the bag.

“I do belong here,” he said, matching my stride.

We didn’t see the cops, but we heard them in the creek, calling to each other like whales in water.