It was another August evening, and we were probably playing Wall Ball at the middle school when Travis, two years older, scorched by on this big ol’ bike, crushed the rubber ball, then picked up a tree branch and threw it, hitting Dylan, the smallest of us, in the forehead. His glasses went flying, blood gushed everywhere, and we had to rush to the hospital. But Travis, it turned out, helped carry him in there, kicking the door pretty wildly then talking, very politely, with a toothpick in his mouth, to the nurse at the reception desk. After that, he kind of ordered us to go home. “Yeah, it’s none of your guys’ business,” he whispered, taking the toothpick out, and squinting in kind of a weird, adult way. “Y’all can go. I’ve got this covered. I mean, shit, I’m gonna be in trouble anyway.”

It was my second year in Rockaway, Connecticut, and I’d be gone a year later. My parents shifted around a lot, and soon I’d be in Albuquerque. My memories from this town of two thousand people mostly revolve around Travis, who at 14 was always speeding around town or throwing switchblades at tree trunks or setting off fire alarms; I basically thought he was awesome. His father, the school principal, was kind of notorious for various reasons: he belched loudly in church and was big and scary looking, yet apparently bellowed heartfelt things about education in PTA meetings. That’s what my parents said, anyway.

Not like I cared about school; I was mostly looking at pornography and trying to hit fastballs. One Friday afternoon, Travis brought some magazines to a game, and five of us laughed at the photos under the bleachers like in a high school movie. Some of us ripped pages out and stuffed them in our pockets. But I’m not sure if – then and there – we actually knew how to react. Travis said he had “jacked off” to these pictures, which seemed to Carlos pretty hilarious, to Jared pretty serious, and to Dylan a reason to wax poetic about some girl he’d known. “Lola,” he said, positioning a finger on the scotch tape that bound his glasses together, “god, this girl Lola.” He went off on how his “pen-pal” wrote letters in red pen, how she drew loopy hearts around her name, and how, most importantly, she had these “huge knockers” if you squinted the right way at one photograph he kept in his pocket. “You’re a fucking idiot,” said Carlos, looking at the photograph. “It’s got nothing to do with squinting. Look,” he said, turning the photo sideways, then upside-down, for some reason. 

            Travis, as usual, didn’t care about Lola, about bullshitting, or about any of our shenanigans – as we looked at his porn, he smoked and casually gazed at the high school girls across the track. When Dylan walked over and asked for a “cig,” Travis shook his head and muttered, “stuff’s bad for you.” Then there was a crack of the bat, a long fly ball, and he vanished away.           

            Travis’s mother, otherwise known as “Mrs. Arnie” (the art teacher), was probably the nicest person in town. She clapped real hard if I did normal things like catch fly balls and was super friendly to everybody. She and his dad talked to lots of people after church, but it seemed like they might’ve hated each other, too, at least according to my parents.  

            “...thing about Travis’s mom, man,” said Jared once under the bleachers, “is that she’s almost too nice, man. I’m tellin’ ya, there’s something weird about that woman.”

            “Bullshit, man!” said Dylan, popping gum and lying on his back, cigarette floating in his left hand, so he was blowing smoke and chewing simultaneously, “that woman’s cool, dude. That fuckin’ woman comes over just to shoot the shit and drink fuckin’ wine with my mom, motherfucker.” He coughed and his voice became wheezy. “And she, like, brings candy and shit for me sometimes!”  

            At random moments during Wall Ball games, Travis would mutter stuff like how his dad was “a dickhead” and how he wished his mom “was less of a pussy.” I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was Travis’s dad would beat the shit out of him if he accidentally broke Dylan’s glasses, if he failed a test, or if he threw rocks at the fire-alarm system (things that happened multiple times). One morning, the area around his eye was purple, and he said, kind of proudly, “Dad and I got in a fight.” 

                                *                                     

          Sometime in October, Dylan and I were sitting at the same desk when our math tests came back. I got an “A,” and he got a “D.” He took off his glasses, dropped them loudly on his desk, and put his face in his hands for a good five minutes. Afterwards, he removed his hands, replaced the glasses, and started scribbling crap away with his pencil. It broke, but he sharpened it aggressively with a blue sharpener. The weird shit you remember. 

“Lola!!!!” he belted a few hours later, as we walked back from school. “Man, dude, you gotta see this fuckin’ woman. This woman is fine and this woman is legit. This woman is fuckin’ unbelievable, bro.”

            “But you haven’t seen her,” I reminded him. 

            “Oh I’ve seen her all right,” he said, punching the air and picking up his step. “I see her every day, man. I see her when I go to bed. I see her in my dreams, dude. I see her when I’m doing my homework. This girl is fucking everywhere.” His cigarette was going wild, shaking all over the place.

            We stopped because a car nearly ran us over. Then we continued crossing the street.  

          “This girl,” he said, tripping over the curb, “she’s gonna fucking marry me, man.” He looked up at me, squinting and smiling with his funny, blackened teeth. “And you probably don’t believe me, huh!?

            “It’s not that,” I said. 

            “Nah, that’s it, man,” he said, voice getting wobbly and strange all of a sudden. “You don’t buy it. You don’t buy anything I’m saying.” Then he started to cry. 

*

Sometime in December, Carlos and I were riding bikes in circles around town. We stopped because there was a big scene in front of the middle school, obviously a fight of some sort because we saw crowds forming and breaking and people whispering but as if they wanted to be heard. 

When we rolled by, we saw the drying yellow grass, getting frosty in this weather. 

            “Shit!” said Carlos. “Blood!”

            We got off our bikes and walked closer, between crowds of familiar students and teachers, then saw Travis’s mom on the ground, face-up, staring at the sky, glasses lying neatly next to her. She looked dead. 

           “Get away, get away,” said Travis’s dad, also in the picture. He was shepherding people in some direction. Also in attendance was my mother, looking ghostly, and Dylan, just standing next to Travis’s dad and looking very focused.  

            “Shit,” said Carlos.

It was Travis who was handcuffed, by two cops, on the outer edge of the lawn. He was red in the face, mumbling something to himself. 

            “Man, look at that shit!” said Carlos. 

Travis ducked into a cop car, and the car just sat there. Travis’s dad, meanwhile, stood around, hands on hips, staring into a weird abyss of people, looking both very assured and very horrified. Everything moved slowly, yet felt focused and clear.

            “What happened, man?” Carlos asked a group. A girl from our class said, “Travis punched his mom in the face.

            “Huh?” 

            “Word is,” she said, eyes getting huge, “he first tried knifing his father. They both came out of the car, and Travis just jumped on them. That’s what Caleb said, anyway.”

            It was a Friday, an hour after school ended. I had no idea why Travis’s parents drove to school. I don’t know why Travis attacked them. All I knew was that, at this moment, Dylan marched up to us, smiling with his blackened teeth and saying, “dude, you guys need a cigarette. Fuck man. This shit is crazy. He tried to kill them. I saw it. Fuck. Absolutely insane. Let’s get outta here. Nah. Let’s stay.”

He paced in a circle, then turned to us. 

“Travis was like a psycho-killer, man. He had this knife, he threw the knife, and dad catches the knife in mid-air. Dad punches the mom. Holy shit. Fucking, fucking crazy. I don’t know.”

            “That’s not it,” the girl said. 

            “Travis’s dad catches a knife?” said Carlos.

            “Catches the knife,” said Dylan. “No joke, man. This shit is wild. This shit is a movie.” 

*

            The truth came out a week later: Dylan’s father, some guy I’d never met, had been sleeping with Travis’s mother, Mrs. Arnie, and this was somehow related to the violence. I don’t remember how I got this information except that it wasn’t from Dylan, and it wasn’t from Travis. Anyway, this group, if we were a group, stopped hanging out, maybe because Dylan got quieter, or Jared moved to Canada. Plus there was less of Travis, who kind of bound us together. Then I left Rockaway for good. 

            “It’s tough,” said Carlos, years later, when we talked on the phone. “That kid, Dylan, ended up going on medication hard-core in high school. I don’t know for what. He was even weirder afterwards, like he wasn’t as hyper and shit, but he was fucking boring, kind of a weirdo, honestly. Stared into space a lot.”

            When I asked about Travis, he said, “and that kid went into the army after high school, went to Iraq, almost got himself killed, and that fucker is still somewhere I swear to god, but I don’t know where. He used to be awesome in football, though. He played linebacker.

            “What about his dad?” I asked. “The principal dude.”

            “...was fired, man. That guy just beat up his wife and kid too much, and honestly, I think he got physical with students. They divorced, by the way. Weird fucking family, honestly. Travis and his mom moved to Blacksburg after.” 

            At some point, I lost touch with Carlos, too.   

*

            What I remember clearest about my two years in Rockaway was the last day of November, not long before the bloody scene at the school. The five of us had taken a train to watch a UConn basketball game, because Travis’s dad had tickets, and Travis decided to take us. This surprised me, because I figured Travis had friends of his own, friends his own age. “Nah, man,” Jared had said once. “Travis doesn’t have friends. You see him hangin’ with those deadbeat pot heads, but you know, he hates those guys.”

            We never ended up at UConn that night, because the train went in the opposite direction, and it was totally Travis’s fault. We ended up in a plain, grassy area of suburbia that nobody would choose to travel to. But it was a pleasant night as we waited for the train going back east. Sounds of lawn sprinklers surrounded us.

Dylan said, almost to himself, “She probably doesn’t even know I’m thinking about her right now.”

At some point, Travis climbed to the top of the metallic train platform, and we followed him. At different points, we took out cigarettes. Nobody said anything for a while until Travis (lying on his back and looking at the stars) started to talk about his dreams. Dreams about goblins, dreams about the bad guys in Super Mario Brothers, dreams about an evil clown that lived under his bed, and finally, dreams of women who gave him blowjobs. Dreams that made him wake up with cum all over his sheets. 

            “Ah, gross!” said Carlos, laughing. 

And then things got serious as Travis talked about movies. He went off on a big, strange monologue about monsters and movies, asking why a Hollywood director couldn’t make a movie about a monster ripping an enormous piece out of the night sky, and there’d be nothing behind it but blankness. “That’s honestly what I don’t get,” he said, pulling a drag on his cigarette and squinting into the stars. “We watch all these movies, right? But nobody’s made an actual good one. Why can’t somebody just direct one about a giant monster walking in the background, and then, while everybody is sleeping or walking their dog or eating or whatever, this monster just reaches into the night and rips a huge square of the sky out, just planets and blackness and space and everything? And that can just be the end of the movie?”