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“Remember when Mr. Leonard ate all those espresso beans?”

“God. Right. He didn't sleep for days.”

Jonas's dad shook his head, his mouth stuffed with M&M's. “I wish he could be here with us.”

“
Here?
” Lyle said. “Why?”

“I don't know. Isn't that what you're supposed to say?”

There was a noise behind the wall, a doglike rustle. The rustling grew louder, moving in their direction. Jonas's mom grabbed his father's arm. A peacock emerged from the wall, a wisp of insulation sticking from its beak like cotton candy.

“Our famous garbage eater,” his mom said, dropping her hand. “You can tell by the crest.”

While his family finished the M&M's, Jonas went upstairs to look around. There was no ceiling, only a tunnel of triangles holding up the roof. He peered behind a stack of Sheetrock and found his brother sitting by himself on an Igloo cooler. He looked carefully at Jonas, his leg still bouncing up and down. He was holding an X-Acto knife. Jonas had the eerie impression that he'd been sitting there for months.

“Want to write something?” Dustin asked.

Jonas looked at the stud in front of his brother's face. He'd carved something into the wood, in mismatched letters.
THE ZILLERS WERE HERE
. It would be inside the walls forever. Jonas took the knife but couldn't think of anything to add.

Eventually they all went out to look at the backyard, where the people moving in were building a swimming pool. Jonas walked up to the edge. He'd always wanted a swimming pool but didn't like seeing a big muddy pit where he'd once practiced his fencing moves. A brown puddle of rain moldered in the deep end. Aside from some pipes sticking out here and there, a steel fence holding up the taller walls, the thing was pretty much indistinguishable from a ditch. For some reason, it filled him with a cold and spooky feeling, as though he were peering into a humongous grave.

He told himself it was just a hole, a big fat ditch, but the feeling wouldn't go away.

Jonas glanced behind him. His mom and dad, Lyle and Dustin—they were staring at something on the other side of the yard, bunched together and talking as a family. They seemed to have forgotten about him. In a second he felt his trust suck away. What happened next, whether it was an accident or not, Jonas couldn't say. What he remembered was stepping right to the muddy lip of the hole, the feeling of
presto!
as the mud collapsed under his feet. A scuffle of shouts. His dad dropping next to him in the shallow end, splashing up mud, flushed with concern though he'd only fallen a few feet. Dustin and Lyle and his mother gathered at the edge.

“Are you all right?” his father asked, breathless.

Jonas looked at the mud. His family waited for an answer, as though they could help.

Dustin got off the elevator and walked through the doors of the burn unit, wondering at what point the smell of charred flesh had ceased to be remarkable. It had become just another thing, like the picture—hanging in the nurses' lounge, part of a before-and-after sequence—of an Afghani girl's cheeks melted into her shoulders. He remembered the shock he'd felt when he first saw it, as though something had unzipped his brain and stepped out of it. Now, staring at the picture from the hall, the coniferous shape of the girl's face, he felt only mild revulsion. It amazed him that you could pretty much adapt to anything. He walked past the ICU rooms, the thick, porky smell filling his nostrils. Once, during rehab, one of the other outpatients had told him that the word for human among cannibals in the Pacific Islands was “long pig.” He'd said this not as a joke but as a way of introducing himself.

Just last week Dustin had gone to Carl's Jr. and eaten a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, his first since the accident. It had tasted ghastly and delicious.

The support group had already begun. Dustin sat down at the conference table without speaking, embarrassed by the smallness of the group. In the middle of the table, partly blocking his view, was a tray of bologna sandwiches stacked into a Mayan pyramid. Dustin wasn't sure who all these sandwiches were intended for. Aside from the two burn counselors, he was one of only five people who'd shown up.

“I'm surprised to see you,” said the counselor he recognized. Jane, Janice, something like that. “How long has it been?”

Dustin shrugged. He was as surprised as she was. “I don't know.”

“A year at least. Maybe more. I remember seeing you a couple times in rehab.”

Dustin nodded. He squinted at the woman's name tag:
JAMIE
. A burn victim herself. She was missing both forearms and navigated the world with prosthetic hooks, which tended to give her the edge in the self-pity department. Her face, too, was worse off than Dustin's, a mask of barklike skin caked with cosmetics. She used to bug him all the time in the ward, trying to get him to come to meetings, insisting how important it was to talk to fellow “burn survivors.” The insistence on “survivor” had made him laugh. The last thing he'd wanted was to hang out with a bunch of pathetic freaks talking about how grateful they were to be alive. Now here he was, confronting a tray of sandwiches. Jamie introduced the woman beside her, a pretty counselor-in-training named Angela; the girl glanced at her lap, ashamed perhaps that she wasn't disfigured.

They went around in a circle, introducing their burns to the group. A guy with one arm, Dustin's age, who'd been charred to cinders when someone threw a firebomb into his bedroom; a man with 65 percent burns who'd put gasoline on his carpet to eat away the glue, intending to strip it; a woman in a plastic mask whose face had caught fire at a restaurant, ignited by a flaming drink. Walter, a burly guy in a wheelchair, talked about the destruction of his legs after his motorcycle exploded on the freeway. When the nurses unwrapped him for the first time, he'd seen something crawling from his leg, a gleaming white snake; he'd screamed for the nurses to get it off, but it had turned out to be a tendon.

Dustin had the rare feeling he'd gotten off lucky. There were two planets: the one where unburned people lived, filled with music and light and strolls on the beach, and the other one, where tendons fell out of your leg and people's faces caught fire during dinner. For the first time, it made sense to Dustin to want to hang out with people from the same planet. What would he possibly have to say to anyone else?

“Is there a reason you've decided to visit us now?” Jamie asked him, after he'd introduced himself. For some reason, Dustin found her face less startling than the watch strapped to her prosthetic arm.

He shrugged. “It's my day off work.”

“Did you have a Z-plasty?”

She was looking at his face. Did she remember what he'd looked like? “Two months ago,” Dustin said quietly.

“And a graft, too, looks like.”

He nodded, embarrassed.

“Looks terrific,” the pretty counselor-in-training said.

The others chimed in, too, a chorus of compliments. A year or even six months ago, he would have told them all to fuck off. Now, barraged by their compliments, Dustin realized that he'd driven all the way out here—fifty miles—to show off his new face. To have some perfect strangers lie to him. He felt queasy, partly because the lies made him feel better.

“And your hand,” Jamie said, nodding at it, “does it hurt?”

“When it's cold,” he said.

“You're exercising it—to help the banding?”

Dustin nodded. He didn't tell her he had to keep his thumb stretched up like Fonzie when he drove; otherwise, he'd lose the movement in it altogether and it would stay bent into a hook for the rest of the day. Down the hall, a boy was screaming at the top of his lungs, upset about getting his dressings changed. It sounded like he was being savaged by bears. Even for a burn unit, the screams were impressive.

“Eight years old,” Jamie explained, “and hasn't had a single visitor in a month. His mother calls once a week and says she's coming over, but never shows up.”

“What happened to him?” Walter asked.

“Do you want the
official
story? The official story's some kids threw gasoline on his legs and lit him on fire. This is in Jordan Downs, mind you. The projects. Of course, it's the father who brought him in and told us the story.” The anger in her voice, so incongruous with the clown-thick makeup on her face, startled Dustin. “His whole family came to see him once, after he was admitted, and stole a VCR from the waiting room. Everyone but the mom's been barred from the hospital.”

They went on with the meeting, trying to ignore the unholy screams. Dustin's heart seemed to curl up like a pill bug, poked into a ball. It was news to him that there was anything much to poke. Angela, the counselor-in-training, must have seen something in his face, because she leaned over to him while they were
eating sandwiches. “Would you like to stop by the boy's room? I'm going to visit him after the meeting.”

“For some reason, I'm scary,” Jamie explained, raising her metal hooks.

After the meeting, Dustin found himself trailing Angela down the hall. The boy had stopped screaming a while ago, but the silence, after such an unearthly racket, made Dustin nervous. He followed Angela inside the room and stopped at the foot of the bed. The boy, burned from the waist down, seemed to be asleep, legs and feet bandaged into elephant-sized stumps. There was nothing extraordinary about his burns—percentage-wise, he was fairly well-off—but something about the room, its complete lack of cards and flowers and proof of visitors, took Dustin off guard. He remembered the way his family had visited him constantly on the ward, those first weeks when he was out of it on morphine, confused and miserable and assaulted by nightmares, devil men with long, fiddlehead noses trying to skin him alive or set him on fire—how his dad had written the day of the week on a big sheet of paper and hung it in front of him, taped to the heat shield, so that Dustin would see it whenever he woke up and know what day it was. His mother had held his foot like a hand, squeezing it gently to say hello. Looking at the abandoned boy in his room, Dustin felt petty and ridiculous, ashamed for taking his misery out on his family.

“Someone's come to see you,” Angela said, leaning over the bed.

The boy opened his eyes, flinching in terror. “Mommy?” he said, trying to sit up. When he saw who it was, his face fell so completely that Dustin wanted more than anything to be his mother.

He began to visit the boy every week, driving out to Torrance Memorial on one of his days off work. The boy never seemed particularly pleased or unpleased to see him. Even when Dustin brought him something—a GI Joe, a Matchbox car—he would clutch the toy to his chest without taking it out of the package, refusing to talk. To fill the silence, Dustin would tell him about his own burns and how pissed off they'd made him, how sometimes he'd wanted to kill himself instead of going through another day. He still felt this way occasionally, when the itching wouldn't stop or when he made the mistake of looking at old pictures that had
been salvaged from the fire. Except for a tightness in his brow, the boy's face gave no indication he was listening. It was a handsome face with miniature, doll-sized ears and eyes that ticked like a watch when he blinked. His eyelashes were unnaturally long, curled at the tips like a camel's. Dustin wanted to clean the goop from them, but didn't dare try for fear of making him scream.

It wasn't until he started bringing him food, smelly bags of Wendy's or McDonald's, that the kid began to brighten when he entered. His favorite were vanilla shakes. Dustin made sure to pick up one for each of them. The kid would slurp at his shake ferociously until it was gone, his cheeks sucked in like an old man's. When he could slurp no more, Dustin would give him what was left of his.

One day, after finishing both their shakes, the boy stared at him instead of the TV, as if working up the courage to speak. “Does my face look like you?” he asked finally. Dustin's heart plummeted. He'd fooled himself into believing he looked unremarkable.

“No,” he said softly. “You look normal.”

The boy frowned, as if he didn't believe him; the kid had no idea that his burns were confined to his legs. Dustin left the room and went to talk to a nurse, who gave him a hand mirror. It was the same one his father had held up to his face after the accident. On his way back, Dustin stopped for a second and leaned against the wall to catch his breath. He brought the mirror to the room and held it in front of the boy, who studied it fearfully before easing into a grin. This is what had been worrying him the whole time: the idea that they looked alike.

Later, as he was leaving, the boy met Dustin's eyes: a look of such fierce attachment that Dustin almost flinched.

Outside the hospital, in the parking garage, he grabbed the hand putty from the passenger seat and kneaded the pain from his fingers. He still had an hour before he was supposed to meet Taz. More and more, it was his decision to visit; he couldn't remember the last time she'd driven out to Auburn Fields. It should have been humiliating, this crawling after her, but then when he actually saw Taz in person—standing there all tan and friendly and contrite—he forgot the grievance he'd been nursing or whatever they'd been arguing about on the phone and felt only the frantic stage fright of losing her completely. Dustin tried to think when
this fear had begun in earnest. Her birthday, probably. He couldn't even remember what they'd fought about; what he remembered, clearly, was returning to his mom's place with muddy shoes and seeing Taz waiting at the door, damp-eyed and apologetic, newly seventeen, and the flood of happiness in his chest giving way to a sort of panic. Lately she'd begun backing out of dates at the last minute, calling him to say she wasn't feeling well or that her dad was getting too suspicious. He couldn't be sure, but Dustin suspected she was actually going out with friends her own age. Yesterday he'd called her line at home and it had been busy for over an hour; when Taz answered, on the tenth try, she claimed she'd left the phone off the hook by mistake.