pockets as he trailed the rest of them through the darkened parking lot of the Liquor Mart, Micah in his army-green surplus coat and Jordan in the Jack Skellington hat he always wore, his ears sticking out like bat wings beneath the brim. Jordan’s twin sister, Joanna, had tagged along at the last minute, her blond hair tucked up into a beanie with a furry pom-pom on top of it. Colby had been surprised: Jo, with her key ring full of discount cards and a car that smelled like vanilla cupcakes on the inside, always felt older and less susceptible to half-baked plans than the rest of them, even though Jordan was forever making a big point of telling everyone he’d been born first. But then she’d bumped Colby’s shoulder and smiled hello, her straight white teeth like a slice of winter moonlight, and he thought maybe he wasn’t actually that surprised after all.
“Stealth, dude,” Micah said now, leading them across the service road with the slightly sketchy confidence of one of those guides who brought people down into the Grand Canyon on donkeys. “Car would be too suspicious.”
Colby frowned. “More suspicious than the four of us wandering the streets in the middle of the night like a bunch of hobos?”
Micah snorted. “Moran, if you’re too much of a pussy to do this, just say so.”
“Fuck you,” Colby said, glancing instinctively at Joanna before he could quell the impulse. “Let’s go.”
Alma got a little scruffier as they got closer to the tower, the sidewalk narrowing before it disappeared completely so they had to walk single file along the grassy shoulder, low-slung houses crowding close together like teeth in a mouth that was too small. A broad, stocky pit mix paced the length of a chain link fence, winter-crisped weeds nearly brushing his belly. Colby winced at the casual cruelty of whoever had left him out here, reaching his hand out for the little dude to sniff.
“Come on,” Micah said, kicking at Colby’s ankle to keep him moving as the dog barked and growled in response, suspicious. “We’re almost there.”
“I know where we are,” Colby muttered, digging the fuzzy end of a package of peanut butter crackers out of his inside pocket and slipping a couple through the chain link. “I grew up here, same as you.” Alma wasn’t the kind of place people left, as a general rule. Colby didn’t have to try real hard to picture them all in ten years, still living with their parents and working jobs that were mostly bullshit, spending every weekend trying to outrun their own boredom just like they had since they were little kids setting stuff on fire in the parking lot outside their Cub Scout meetings at the Knights of Columbus hall. Probably the idea should have bothered him more than it actually did, Colby thought, jogging across the blacktop to catch up. But there were worse things in life than knowing exactly what to expect.
Now they shimmied down into a shallow ravine, Joanna swearing under her breath as she almost lost her footing, then wriggled through a hole in a fence and picked their way through an overgrown lot full of empty beer bottles and shredded tires and, inexplicably, a corduroy armchair set to full recline. Colby was seriously considering telling Micah to screw himself and going home to jerk off in the shower when, finally, there it was: the familiar silhouette of it tall and black and imposing, proud against the purple-black sky. “Shit” seemed like the only appropriate thing to say.
Joanna stopped and gazed at it for a moment, her expression startled in the orange glow of the lone safety light affixed to the rickety-looking catwalk that ringed the water tank. “I didn’t realize it was that big,” she admitted, shivering once inside her jacket.
Micah shrugged. “It’s a water tower, Jo,” he said, like that should have been obvious. “Let’s go.”
Jo cut her eyes to Colby, who held his hands up in the dark. “Don’t do it if you don’t want to,” he told her quietly. He felt protective of her all of a sudden, though he told himself it was just because she was the only girl here. “I don’t know why the fuck I’m about to do it, if you want me to be honest with you.”
“I always want you to be honest with me,” Joanna said, but before Colby could reply one way or the other she was headed across the field, the white pom-pom