Everyone knows it’s time to go to bed. But no one goes into their tent just yet. Instead, you all sit by the fire, staring into the coals, which are still breathing red in the wind. It’s a chilly nightagain—they’re definitely getting colder—and you all put on your extra clothes until you’re bundled up like arctic explorers. In the morning, you will start the final part of your trek. The most important part. The only part that matters.
“I’ve never seen a dead body before,” says Will finally. “That was my first time.”
He rests his chin on a palm, watching the embers blink out.
“Do they all look like that? Like, so freaking sad and empty?”
Nobody says anything for a moment. You feel so drained suddenly. The surge of energy you got from eating real food has faded. Just as importantly: so has the Xanax. You know this comedown well, the moment when your anxiety senses a drop in defenses and starts lurking in your chest. Soon, before you even know it, it will move to your head and everything will be charged with a foreboding edge. You really want to say something to make Will feel better, but you find that you can only tell him the truth.
“Yeah,” you say. “They do.”
Everyone looks at you.
“When I saw my brother for the last time, I didn’t feel anything because I knew it wasn’t him. Not anymore. It was just this sad husk.”
You don’t know how much people remember about what you were shouting in the fog yesterday, but everyone keeps quiet now. Even Diana can’t look at you for long. Will is the only one who maintains eye contact.
“How did he die?” he asks.
It sounds like a simple question, but there are actually a thousand answers. You’ve constructed so many different timelines and explanations. There are, of course, basic facts to rely on, but theydon’t tell the whole story. The facts never do. Still, saying all this to the group is too much, so you dig into the pocket of your pants and pull out a blank piece of paper. It’s the paper from the very first game of Fear in a Hat—the paper where you should have written Sean’s name—and you set it on the ground in front of you.
“It’s complicated,” you say.
And then, because you don’t know what else to do, you start to tell the story.
THIRTY-FOUR
You start with the day after your fight, the first day you can remember that your brother ignored you. You don’t tell them why; just that he’d gotten angry and now he wouldn’t engage with you in any meaningful way. He avoided you in the hallway in the morning, and when you spoke, he listened with dull eyes. Or he just walked past you, down the stairs, and outside to the garage where his bike hung upside down like a vampire.
You tell them about the biking. And how Sean had always launched himself into things with an all-consuming passion. How most of his obsessions were at least a little risky or adrenaline fueled. Diving, for example. And before that, when he was in junior high, half-pipe skating. And before that: jumping off the garage to practice “being a stuntman.” By comparison, riding for miles on a fixed-gear bike seemed positively benign. Like a hobby for old people after their knees were blown out.
At first, he mostly rode at night, but then he started adding mornings too. Every day before the sun came up, you heard the vibrating drone of the garage door, and if you made it to your window quickly enough, you’d see Sean take off down the street, head down, legs cranking away at an inhuman speed. And for a while, you told yourself this could be a good thing. Maybe itwasn’t just a penance he’d given himself. Maybe it was a way to quiet his mind, and once he achieved some peace, everything would eventually go back to normal.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, it all seemed to intensify. You were so desperate for contact with him that you walked into his room sometimes when he wasn’t there, just to feel near him. And that’s how you found the flyers for the bike races. They weren’t anything official. These were street contests for bike messengers and crust punks. No real rules. From what you could tell, the racers followed a series of checkpoints to a mystery finish line, downing beers along the way.
You’d found the latest poster on top of the dryer when you were doing your laundry. The biggest race of the year. An all-day event that promised hundreds of riders. You decided to do a little research. And after falling down a rabbit hole of racing forums and YouTube videos of people evading the cops and racing each other drunkenly through the streets, you knew you had an important choice to make:
Leave it alone or tell your parents.
You were pretty sure they wouldn’t want him doing this, and that they would probably do what was necessary to stop him.
There was just one problem. If you went to your parents, you would be ratting him out again. Theagainpart you didn’t share with your friends. They didn’t need to know about your first betrayal. They just needed to know this would be a stab in the back, and if you ever wanted Sean to forgive you, it wasn’t the way to go. So, in the end, you didn’t mention it to your parents.
You didn’t tell anyone, in fact. What you did was wait for theday of the race to arrive. And when you saw him getting ready in the days ahead, making his own practice maps, and even chugging one of your dad’s Coors before heading out for a workout, you made plans to follow him.
If he was going to do this, then the least you could do was show up and see how it went. In other words, you could be there for him. And maybe if he saw your support, he would begin to thaw a bit. You don’t say much about how badly you wanted his forgiveness. How desperately you wanted him to talk to you again. Instead, you just tell them about your brother. About how he was the person who knew you best. The person you went to when you pissed your pants in day care and needed help getting rid of the evidence. And how before you knew what a panic attack was, you told him you weren’t feeling right one day at the pool, and he sat you on a bench by the concession stand, bought you some Johnny Apple Treats, and made jokes about the lifeguards until your heart rate slowed. Sean was the parent you loved the best. Only he wasn’t a parent. He was an eighteen-year-old who was subject to mercurial moods, and he didn’t always make the best decisions in the best of conditions. So you decided to keep an eye on him.
It was cold and rainy on the day of the race. You waited until you heard him open the garage before you got in the Corolla and followed him to an alley behind an abandoned Kmart in Minneapolis. You weren’t sure what you were expecting, but the people gathered there were not elite athletes. They were like his bike-shop friends, tattooed and wiry, many holding cans of cheap beer and cigarettes at eight o’clock in the morning. They were largely unprotected against the freezing drizzle.
Sean rolled up on his bike, which looked a little too newcompared to the well-worn frames of the other contestants. He paid his entry fee. He received a T-shirt with an hourglass full of beer that readCLOCK’S TICKIN’and a map to the first checkpoint. He stood around for a while, mostly keeping to himself, jumping in place to stay warm. It seemed like he was debating whether to stay.
You kept out of sight on a side street with a clear view of the alley. And as the hour edged toward nine, you saw someone handing out beers. Sean accepted one and looked at it closely, maybe wondering if he was really going to do this. Then somebody blew a whistle and everyone began chugging. At the sound of this shrill signal, something seemed to flip and Sean cracked his beer and tipped it skyward, Adam’s apple bobbing, until he had polished it off.
He was already a little behind at this point—his momentary indecision had cost him a few seconds—but as soon as he got his bike going, he was quick to make up ground, weaving between some of the slow starters. You followed by car and tried not to get close enough for him to see you. It helped that you could always pick out his shiny new bike among the other racers’ scraped-up models.
But mostly, you could barely stand to watch.
The race was mayhem. The rain picked up early on, and at each checkpoint there was another beer to shotgun. And after each checkpoint, there were more wrecks. People got less inhibited and skidded across the soaked asphalt. Which seemed like it was all part of the fun. Occasionally, another rider would stop to help a downed cyclist, but mostly people laughed even when competitors wiped out in the middle of a busy street. You even saw one rider kick at another on a tight curve.
