At 3:20 in the morning I woke and rode my bike down the old coast road to Casey Bellows’s house. I followed the broken white line in the middle of the road, ghostly gray under the stars. Every now and then somebody’s yard light blinked from the jungle, but mostly it was black as tar. The only living thing I saw was a toad that sprang out and leaped across the road. Scared the spit out of me.

By 3:45 I stood with Casey by the old Ford van in his yard, our camping gear strewn around us in the yellow glow from the garage. We both wore T-shirts, shorts, and hiking boots strong enough to take a beating. My boots were new, and stiff. I hoped they wouldn’t give me blisters.

I was wide awake now, and could feel the anticipation jumping inside me. This time tomorrow we’d be sleeping under a volcano in a place so remote even rats had no business going there.

I looked east, out toward the black ocean across the coast road. No hint of dawn. “Jeese,” I said, wiping the back of my neck. “Already I’m sweating.”

Casey grunted, securing his sleeping bag to his backpack. “Wait till you feel the heat where we’re going…you’ll wish you were dead.”

“You always come up with just the right thing to say, Case.”

“That’s why I’m here, bro.”

Casey was my shaggy-haired best friend, a redhead with freckles and a raspy voice. He wasn’t big, but he was strong. He played eighth-grade football with the hunt-and-kill mind of a Cro-Magnon, and I felt sorry for anyone who had to face him.

I took off my glasses. For this trip I’d tied nylon fishing line to the stems and made a cord so that if my glasses fell off I wouldn’t lose them. Without them everything looked blurry.

“Where’s your dad?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“Making coffee.” Casey picked up his mess kit and checked to see if everything was in it.

My dad was a few thousand miles away. He was supposed to be flying in tomorrow or the next day from a job that had ended in Alaska. He was a big-ship skipper and took freighters all across the world, which meant he was away a lot. But when he was home he was on me like a four-star general. We got along okay, I guess, but it took him a few days to get out of his big-boat-boss mode. He wasn’t a fan of my spending time with the Scout troop because he wanted me home helping Mom while he was away. But I liked Scouts, and was learning good things, and I wanted him to be proud of that.

“Hey, Dylan,” Casey said. “We’re packing the van, remember?”

I blinked and put my glasses back on. “Yeah, sorry.”

“So,” Casey said, his hair sprouting up like a pineapple top. “Take both our tents or share one?”

“Why take two?”

“Yeah. Mine’s bigger.”

“Yours, then. Hey…you need to rake that weed patch on your head.”

He grinned and pulled his camo boonie hat out of his back pocket and slapped it on. “That help?”

“Not really. Ugly is ugly, ah?”

Casey threw his mess kit at me. I ducked. “Watch your back while you sleeping, punk,” he said. “Anyway, you just jealous ’cause I got the ladies’-man hair, right? They like red, you know, not that rotten-banana color you got.”

I laughed. “That’s good, that’s good.”

“We aim to please.”

He tugged his boonie hat closer to his head. It used to belong to his dad, a former U.S. marine. “
Still
a marine,” Mr. Bellows always corrected us. “Once a marine, always a marine, and don’t you forget it.” Casey wore that hat everywhere—school, Scouts, church, even to my cousin’s wedding, though my mom snatched it off his head and stuffed it into her purse. Casey was going to be a marine, too. “Special Operations,” he said. “Only real men survive.” I’d known Casey all my life and knew he could do it.

We piled our gear in the middle of the van, leaving room to sit around the edges.

“Help me with the quartermaster box,” Casey said, heading into the garage. “Weighs a ton.” The box was the size of a giant cooler and held our big cookstove, lanterns, cooking gear, first-aid kit, ropes, knives, U.S. Army foldable shovels, and other tools. “Grab that end.”

“Stand down, shrimp,” I said. “I’ll carry it by myself.”

“Be my guest.”

It was heavy, but I was taller than Casey and I could get my arms around it better than he could. I was used to lifting because we were working out with a weight set in my garage, trying to bulk up for high school football. But we were only eighth graders and still had a long way to go.

I lugged the box to the van and shoved it in, wondering how we’d fit into that shoe box on wheels with all the gear we had. There’d be eight Scouts, two adult leaders, and a driver.

We waited in the yard for Mr. Bellows, who was our scoutmaster. Casey dropped to the grass and started doing push-ups, grunting. “Five, six, seven—”

“What’s taking your dad so long?”

“Coffee…nine, ten…gotta have it. You know…cops.” Mr. Bellows was a Hilo Police Department detective.

Casey fell to the grass.

“How many?” I said.

“Twenty…. Usually do fifty…every morning.”

“You’re an animal.”

“Thank you.”

Mr. Bellows opened the door from the kitchen and ducked into the garage. He eased the door shut and winked. “Don’t want to wake the boss.”

“No, sir, we sure don’t,” Casey said. He stood and slapped bits of grass and dirt off his hands.

Mr. Bellows often referred to Mrs. Bellows as the boss, as though she ruled the house and if we woke her she’d come out with a stick. But I knew he was kidding. She was one of the nicest people I’d ever met, and always treated me like her own son. Mr. Bellows did, too.

Mr. Bellows still looked like a marine, clean, lean, and fit as a boot-camp drill sergeant. He measured six foot one the day all of us in the troop marked our height on the wall in Casey’s garage. He had red hair like Casey, but his was whitewalled, military style. On the inside of his right forearm was a four-inch tattoo:
Semper Fidelis.
“Got that before I got my brain,” he’d said. “But I like what it says, Always Faithful.”

He raised his coffee cup and silver thermos. “I’m a whole man now. You boys ready?”

“Just waiting for you, old man,” Casey said.

Mr. Bellows grunted and glanced around, saw that we’d packed everything. “Excellent. Let’s roll!”

Casey rode up front with his dad. I sat in the back, leaning against my pack, loving the freedom of being out on the road, getting away. I wanted Dad to come places with us, too, wanted to do things together. But when he got back from his weeks or months at sea, he liked to stay home with me, mom, and my sixteen-year-old sister, Dana. I guess I couldn’t blame him.

Mr. Bellows hummed as he drove.

“Who we picking up first?” Casey asked.

“Sam…then Zach, Tad, Mike and his dad, Billy and his brother, who’s going to drive this beast home. After that we grab Louie and head out.”

I stretched my legs out, for a moment wishing I was back home asleep like Dana. Mom would be getting up at dawn to pad outside in her jammie bottoms and T-shirt to pick the newspaper out of the bushes. But Dana would sleep till noon.

The tires hummed on the highway. I closed my eyes.

I was jolted awake when someone opened the side door and tossed a backpack in.

“Morning, Sam,” Mr. Bellows said. “You ready?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bellows.”

“Climb aboard.”

Sam jumped in, shut the door, and found a spot across from me. We nodded. Sam was eleven and the smallest kid in the troop. He was half Chinese, half French, and as tough as his spiky black hair made him look. “You awake?” I asked.

“Yep.”

Next stop, the headlights washed over Zach, waiting out on the street holding his boots. No lights on in his house. He climbed in and sat next to Sam. Zach was twelve, skinny, and in my opinion, short on common sense. I flicked my eyebrows to say, hey. He smiled.

At Tad’s, Casey had to go knock on the door. Tad’s mom ushered Tad out with a kiss on the top of his head. She waved at Mr. Bellows. “Be careful.”

Mr. Bellows raised a finger off the wheel, nodding.

Tad bumbled out to the van, a dreamy kid. I scooted over to make room. His hair was wet and he smelled of soap. Like Sam, he was eleven, and new to the troop. The young guys started talking. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. They yapped like mynah birds.

At Mike Paia’s house, Casey jumped in back so Mike’s dad could sit up front. Reverend Paia was a Methodist minister and our assistant scoutmaster. I liked the Reverend. He was kind of pudgy and always happy. Mike would look just like him when he was older.

Mike settled in, mumbling hello. He had curly black hair. He was fifteen and getting flabby because he liked lying around on the beach. He wasn’t into sports. He rubbed his hands together.

“Cold?” I said.

“Revved up. Aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “Sure.” We were going to the most remote spot on the island. It would be like going to Mars. “This trip will be awesome.”

“And then some.”

“Argh,” Tad spat, trying to lace up his boots.

“Here,” I said. “Give me one.”

He put both feet in my lap. I tightened the laces and double-knotted them. “Too tight?”

He shook his head. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Billy Wheeler and his older brother, Jesse, got in next. Billy was eleven. He wore a silver chain around his neck, and in Scout meetings he sat running it across his lips. He was jumpy, and you could always get a shriek out of him if you came up from behind and said
boo!

“Thanks for driving the van back, Jesse,” Mr. Bellows said.

“Hey, I got to wake Billy up with an ice cube…already it’s a great day.”

“I’ll get him back,” Billy said.

Jesse scoffed. “In your dreams.”

I smiled.

We headed back out to the road. In the east, dawn was barely beginning to show.

Twenty minutes later we turned onto a rough dirt road that led into a jungle. The van jerked over ruts and small rain-washed ravines, the headlights bouncing in the bushes. Glimpses of light squinted from dark, sagging houses lurking in the trees.

We fell silent.

I leaned toward Casey. “Louie lives
here
?”

“Coming up.”

The van lurched over the ruts, camping gear sliding around in the van. Abandoned refrigerators and moldy couches swallowed by weeds and vines sat in every other yard. I’d never even thought about where Louie lived. He’d just joined; he showed up at the meetings and disappeared afterwards. “You been here before?”

“Once, with Dad.”

“Why?”

“Shhh.”

A faded turquoise four-door Ford Fairlane sat rusting in Louie’s yard. Casey leaned close so the others wouldn’t hear. “Louie sleeps in that car sometimes.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me.”

I nodded. It was Casey’s dad’s job to know about people in his district. I studied the car. Its back window was shattered and looked like a giant spiderweb.

“You know he has an older brother?” Casey said.

“No.”

“Arrested three times. Shoplifting, fighting, and racing.”

“Racing?”

“Cars. Street racing, at night.”

“Wild.”

Mr. Bellows pulled into Louie’s yard.

Three huge dogs charged out from under the porch, showing teeth and barking with deep-throated sucking sounds. Reverend Paia rolled up his window.

The headlights lit the front of the once-white house. Louie was sitting on the steps with his gear in the weeds at his feet.

The dogs leaped at the windows of the van, their claws clicking and scratching the doors. A light went on in the house next door. Those dogs would wake the whole neighborhood if Louie didn’t shut them up.

Louie stood and swung his pack over his shoulder, squinting into the headlights. He flicked long strands of black hair out of his eyes as he came toward us. He was mostly Hawaiian and Filipino. On the wall in Casey’s garage he measured six foot one, three inches taller than me, and he was all muscle. He wore baggy shorts and a loose black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He was the same age as Mike, fifteen, but he sure looked older. Like a man, ten years too soon. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

“Hush,” Louie whispered to the dogs. They whimpered and slunk back into the black gap beneath the porch.

Reverend Paia rolled his window down and Casey pushed the van door open. The racket of the younger guys spilled out into the night.

When they saw Louie, they shut up.

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