My short story, “Sixth Man,” was published today (November 12, 2024) in the inaugural issue of the literary magazine Dulcet. Here is the pdf of the issue. “Sixth Man” begins on page 65.

https://www.dulcetlitmag.com/issues

Here’s the story below on my WordPress page. 

Pete Tillinghast needs to be here. Needs to say goodbye as midnight approaches. Needs to say it when nobody’s around. No self-consciousness about whether he looks sad enough or looks too sad. No, none of that. No watching eyes. No temptation to pretend to feel something that he doesn’t; or not feel something that he does.

The taste of salted asphalt and coming snow rides the February wind that skims across the Lenape High School parking lot. Pete clutches his jacket — his varsity jacket — near his throat. He shivers. This will be a short farewell. Pete alone with the guys. Or with memories of the guys. Or with … ghosts?

Pete’s not sure about an afterlife; never really thought about it much until this year which forced him to think about a lot of stuff he’d never thought about. But if souls go on then maybe they reach us through dreams, or memory, or prayer, or meditation. They’re not in cemeteries, and they’re certainly not in memorials, like this one here. That sort of bullshit comforts the living. Pete understood that reality since back when he was 8 years old and watched Grandpa’s casket being lowered into the ground, while some aunts and uncles blubbered and wiped their eyes.

Now, on this night, Pete whispers “goodbye” to his teammates. 

Suddenly, as if in response something springs from out of the nearby hedges.

“What the…?

It’s a fox, darting away, across the lot, past the school, and into the surrounding woods, disappearing just like that. 

It’s OK. You’re all right.

Pete takes deep breaths, calms himself, lets the adrenaline subside. Nothing but a fox. That’s all. A sly fox. It could have been worse. It could have been a skunk and then where would Pete be? But just a fox streaking for cover. Pete wishes he could be so light-footed.

About 45 minutes earlier, he’d slipped out the kitchen door, but Mom probably heard him leave. If she hadn’t heard him stumble on the steps, she’d certainly heard the car start, and Pete pulling out of the driveway onto the street and around the packed U-Haul parked in front of the house. Knowing Mom, she probably figured out that Pete is here. 

“Nothing gets by me,” she once told Pete, and she never needed to say it again, although she often did. They call her Nurse Notice at the medical center because she’d collar a doctor in the hallway and say, “I notice that the patient in room.…” And whatever Mom pointed out always needed attention. Or so Mom says.

Now, Pete exhales a spear of breath that shoots toward the memorial then dissipates about a foot from his face.

Grounded lights bathe the bronze sculpture of a young man with a basketball driving toward a layup. The pedestal enshrines the names of seven of Pete’s teammates who’d died on that horrible day over a year ago. DeShawn Baldwin tops the list. Pete’s best friend. Late, great, best friend. In a few minutes, after midnight, it would have been DeShawn’s 19th birthday. He’d probably be celebrating with guys on his college team, for DeShawn had been talking to recruiters on the sly since sophomore year. Recruiters who’d offered sweet basketball scholarships, packages that included food vouchers, and bitchin’ leased cars so he’d always be on time for practices and games, and “help” with classwork if DeShawn needed it. But DeShawn was book smart — way more so than Pete — and liked learning, so he wouldn’t have taken them up on that perk but still, as DeShawn would say: “It’s nice to feel the love!” 

At first, they wanted to build this memorial right by the school’s front doors, but some Lenape Township zoning code wouldn’t allow that, so they built it toward the side, right near the gym entrance, which seemed more fitting anyhow.

The structure keeps watch outside the arena in which teens produced sparkling moments of athleticism in an intoxicating amalgamation of ballet and boxing and track, with an inflated spherical object with a circumference of exactly 29 and a half inches thrown into the mix. 

DeShawn Baldwin ruled that basketball court.

No recruiter had ever approached Pete Tillinghast, which didn’t surprise him. The odds of any high school basketball player anywhere getting a free ride to college: 18 to 1; 105 to 1 if you’re talking about a Division 1 university team.

Of course, now, it doesn’t matter. There’s the ankle. Pete still limps. It might take a long time before he can even play in pickup games. If it wasn’t for the ankle and the tragedy — the two didn’t really have anything to do with each other, except that they did — but if it wasn’t for them, Pete, who just turned 19 himself, would have ended his basketball playing days on a high note: sixth man on the Lenape Wolves, a team that wins state, or would have.

“Which makes you the best sixth man in Pennsylvania, Vanilla Ice,” DeShawn said. Pete, one of three white kids on the team, liked being called Vanilla Ice. As nicknames go, it could have been worse. 

The tag fit, too. Pete’s skin in summer would burn in an hour if Pete let it, but he’d learned early the benefits of sunblock, the application of which Mom didn’t have to nag him about.  

Pete’s Nordic looks often drew stares, and though he didn’t have a girlfriend now, he certainly could have.

The intensity of Pete’s aquamarine eyes sometimes made people double-clutch in mid-sentence, and his gaze always seemed to just miss its mark as if he stood atop a ski slope, mapping the path he’d take.

A growth spurt between sophomore and junior years brought him to 6 foot 4. A spike in appetite and time in the weightroom saved him from being spindly and inconsequential. Pete’s still lanky, but steel-cord strong — a force on the floor. Or was.

He’d always been quick, and family videos show him progressing through the years usually holding a basketball. There’s one of Dad teaching him to dribble at 3-years old, which Pete did to the applause of onlooking relatives.

In the Lenape High School games, in the midst of thrown elbows and squeaking sneakers and grunts and trash-talk and fist-fights without fists, his teammates just called him “Ice,” the speed of competition forcing them to drop “Vanilla.” Pete liked that, too.

Nobody’s called him that since that day.

That day, that day, that nightmare of a day.

He overslept. And Pete Tillinghast never oversleeps. He never overslept before that morning, and he’s never overslept since. Now, he’s lucky if he can sleep at all. Pills the shrink prescribed give him maybe four hours a night. He thrashes in his sleep, needs to wear a mouthguard so that he doesn’t bite the shit out of his lips.

Mom had set the alarm for him, but when he awoke the lights blinked the hour when the brownout hit. He didn’t shower. No time. Pete bounded down the stairs just as Mom came home from late shift.

“Shouldn’t you….”

“Drive me!”

Mom pivoted and they both bustled into the car.

The Wolves were heading across state to Pittsburgh to play some team in the semi-finals that wins, it seems, every other year because the kids live in a neighborhood where God and basketball get equal billing.

“Floor it, Mom! Hurry!”

He tags DeShawn.

“Ice, where you at?”

“Tell Coach don’t leave. I’m on my way.”

“Hi, Mrs. Tillinghast!” DeShawn calls.

“Hello, DeShawn! And go Wolves!”

“We need our sixth man!”

Mom says: “Hrumph! This one. Can you believe this?”

“Just drive, Mom,” Pete says. “I already hung up.”

And Mom books it, screeching into the school lot like the lead car of a SWAT team. Pete grabs his kit and starts to make a mad dash. The last dash. About 20 feet in he steps wrong in a pothole; muscle and bone in his ankle snap. Pete screams, falls. Sharp pain radiates from the already swelling ankle up his leg reaching as high as the knee. Pete would learn in years to come that trying to describe pain is like trying to describe love. You must assume that the other person just knows.

Pete almost loses consciousness. He hears howling from somewhere and realized only later that it had been him. He kept trying to get up even though everybody — Mom, Dad, DeShawn, teammates, the other parents, Coach Baker — kept insisting he stay down. No. Staying on the ground made him claustrophobic, and even more desperate.

Later, Mom told him that he’d also kept insisting that he go to the game, even as the ambulance arrived and he hopped on the good leg, supported by DeShawn and another kid, over to the vehicle where they sorted him onto the gurney. 

At Mom’s hospital, they right away injected something that numbed not only the injured area, but the entire right side of Pete’s body, even up to his mouth so that he slurred his words. Then they told Pete to count backward from 10. He might have made it to seven. 

While under, they twisted cartilage back into place, cemented bone together, and stitched the area where the injury broke through the skin. Then they worked in the pins and plates, securing them with bolts. 

While every trace of Pete’s consciousness vanished in the death-like slumber of anesthesia, his teammates sped across Pennsylvania still determined to win the semis despite the absence of their sixth man.

And that’s when it happened.

His teammates obituaries would later use “suddenly” in the headline. And it certainly was sudden.

The facts were simple. The driver of the 18-wheeler had fallen asleep. That’s all. He crashed through the median on the Pennsylvania Turnpike into oncoming traffic; into the lead van carrying DeShawn, the other starters, and a couple of subs. 

No survivors.

Young lives extinguished just like that; gone by the time Pete awoke blinking his blurred hospital room into focus. A retinue surrounded him: Mom, Dad, Dad’s latest girlfriend, Pete’s older brother and sister-in-law, Uncle Joe, Cousin Jim. 

“You’re in the hospital, hon,” Mom said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to be fine, just fine,” Dad asserted, and his girlfriend chimed agreement.

“Fine?”

“How are you feeling, dear?” Mom asked.

Pete pondered for a second.

“Everything’s fuzzy; like in and out,” Pete said which, for some reason, elicited a sprinkling of giggles, though he wasn’t trying to be funny and what he said wasn’t amusing. 

“You’re snowed, Pete,” Dad explained.

Pete looked at the IV, and then the hanging clear bag that delivered measured drips.

One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Three-Mississippi.

Then he noticed the little white cone with the black button near his hand and Mom tells him: “For morphine. Press it when the pain starts coming back.”

“OK. Did we win?” Pete asked. 

The gathered visitors sort of wilted, as if his gaze were a camera gone out of focus.

“We’ll talk later,” his father said.

“I want to know now.”

A voice boomed from the doorway.

“Mister Peter Tillinghast.” They parted to let the doctor come forward to explain the extent of his injury and detail what had to be done to put Pete’s right ankle back together. 

As the doctor spoke, Pete noticed that people left in response to some silent request so that by the time the consultation ended, only Mom and Dad remained. 

“Son….” Dad began, and he never called Pete “son.”

“Yes, father?” Pete responded sarcastically. Banged up and all, he still resented Dad for the divorce.

Mom’s sob aborted this exchange, and she cried out: “There was this horrible, horrible accident, Peter!” 

Then Mom explained, or tried to explain, as best as somebody who completely loses it can explain anything. During her halting, sputtering, sloshing, coming-up-for-air recitation, Dad rubbed her back, a gesture that Pete would always remember afterward. Pete hadn’t seen his parents touch each other since they separated.

When Mom finished, dissolving in sobs, Pete asked: “Yeah, but where’s DeShawn and the other guys?” 

Mom cried out: “He doesn’t understand!”

Dad stepped up, grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Son, we just told you there was an accident. A terrible accident.”

“Oh,” Pete said, closing his eyes and going to sleep.

That was over a year ago. The shrink told Mom that Pete should perhaps do his lessons at home and then gradually ease back into school. Before COVID-19, that might have seemed an unusual plan of action. Now, everybody knew how to teach and learn virtually. Or at least go through the motions.

The memorial service at the school had been mobbed, and Pete went to four of the seven funerals, until he couldn’t get out of bed for a week and the shrink said “enough.” 

The last burial he’d attended had been DeShawn’s. The media kept their distance, the tower vans and gaggle of reporters milled way over at the other side of the cemetery, nearly out of view. 

As the minister read over the coffin, Pete kept glancing at Mr. Baldwin who looked older, shrunken. DeShawn and his dad had forged a father/son camaraderie after DeShawn’s mother died. 

DeShawn honored Mr. Baldwin, talked about him to Pete often, and never once in disparagement, which must be some sort of record for a teenager. 

And Mr. Baldwin looked like somebody easily mythologized. Powerfully built, he loaded trucks for a shipping company, working around people half his age because any peers had long before dropped off because of bad backs, knees, or shoulders. Driven away by the strenuousness of the job. But Mr. Baldwin kept on.

His face could have been carved from rock. Stoic. Strong. But with a smile that developed slowly and kept widening; a protective light that chased dark moods away. So, that’s where DeShawn’s smile comes from, Pete realized when he first met the father.

Mr. Baldwin had been quite the athlete himself, and the trophy case in the Lenape High School lobby featured talismans of championship basketball and football teams that he’d starred on, as well as individual honors for wrestling and track, records that have yet to be broken by any Lenape student since. 

Pete had pieced together Mr. Baldwin’s trajectory after he graduated from Lenape, because the arc of his life had not pointed toward manual labor.

Something happened that set young Mr. Baldwin off course, and he dropped out of college, tried to become a professional musician, but gave it up when he married. Somewhere in there he became a boxer, and his crooked nose and scared features mapped the detour that had led to that dead-end.

“Pete, you were my DeShawn’s best friend,” Mr. Baldwin had said when he’d visited Pete in the hospital, as if the father had already begun gathering the facts of his dead son’s biography. Then this big, strong, immovable object collapsed onto a chair and wept into his hands — sounding as if something had gone down the wrong pipe. 

“I am so sorry, Mr. Baldwin,” was all Pete could say.

“I know.” 

When Mr. Baldwin stopped, he didn’t look at Pete as he stood and walked unsteadily out of the room, throwing a goodbye wave over his shoulder. Pete wondered if he’d always be somebody Mr. Baldwin would avoid.

Two days later when they discharged Pete, Mom delivered a request from DeShawn’s family as they headed home.

“Yes, I’ll do it,” Pete said.

Mom asked: “Honey, are you sure?”

“I am going to do it.”

The Baldwins wanted Pete to say a few words at the funeral. Public speaking terrified Pete, but this was DeShawn. 

“Maybe explain how you two became friends?” Mom suggested.

“I guess,” Pete stuttered.

Pete couldn’t diagram friendship. How do any two people become friends? Respect counts and that came in 8^th grade when Pete and DeShawn played on different teams for the grammar school championship. DeShawn’s squad won, of course, and he’d scored the most points, of course. But Pete made an impression with his assists because as the teams shook hands after the whistle (“good game” “good game” “good game”), DeShawn unclenched and then pointed at Pete: “Dropping dimes the whole time!”

“Thanks,” Pete mumbled. 

The next year they’re teammates at Lenape. They cracked each other up and liked the same music, movies, and TV shows. Also, they shared the same philosophy. An ancient philosophy.

They discovered this when walking out of the gym one night. Coach Baker liked to quote famous lines, and the players had to find out who said them by the next team gathering. Occasionally, a kid would know right off and shout the answer, earning a break from doing suicides the next practice. This night, Coach Baker quoted: “What we do in life echoes in eternity.”

One of the players shouted: “Maximus from the movie Gladiator. My dad watches it all the time.”

“Correct!” Coach Baker said.

Not completely correct, DeShawn told Pete as they made their way to their parents’ cars. “Actually, Maximus was quoting…”

Pete interrupted, “Marcus Aurelius!”

“My man!” DeShawn said, as they bumped fists.

Turns out that they read everything they could about the Roman emperor specifically, and stoic philosophy in general.

“My middle name is Marcus, Ice,” DeShawn said. “Dad picked it. I ask him why once and he tells me because he knows I’m stoic from the first time he sees me.” 

Pete said, “My Mom. Teaches a course called stoic nursing at the hospital.”

“We’re probably the only high school students in the state talking about Marcus Aurelius,” DeShawn said.

“Does that make us nerds?”

“Nah, man. Makes us warriors!”

They didn’t hide their interest in stoicism, but they didn’t preach it either. Mostly, their friends and teammates upon whom this datapoint even registered, just smiled, and shrugged as they would about the quirks of anybody they liked. 

In the days leading up DeShawn’s funeral, plans were made and modified and then modified again until it came to pass that Pete would still give a eulogy, but at the burial site instead of in the church. 

And that day came. 

A cold, bright day. So cold that the dead grass crunched underfoot as mourners made their way from the caravan to the gravesite. And so bright that shadows of trees and tombstones looked as if they’d froze.

Between the priest’s blessing and before the flowers were dropped upon the casket, Pete hobbled on crutches over to the edge of the grave, turned, and faced the assembled. 

A sudden gust made the paper jump about until he clenched top and bottom to try and keep it still like some town crier in an old movie, but his hands shook, nonetheless. Squinting the words into focus, Pete began. Later, someone would tell him — because he asked — that his voice seemed shrill and he almost shouted, though there was no need.

“DeShawn Baldwin! Star! And not just because of what he could do on a basketball court or baseball field. DeShawn was — is — one of those who bring light to us. His smile was the sun. Anybody who ever met DeShawn, went away feeling better about themselves. That’s real star power. And DeShawn, and DeShawn….” 

Pete couldn’t read the next part because of tears. Why hadn’t he considered that? He wiped his eyes, as his speech flapped some more. He took a deep breath … and then fainted.

By the time they’d gotten him to the hospital, they realized that he didn’t really need to go to the emergency room; that Pete probably collapsed from anxiety and grief. 

“People do that all the time at funerals,” the nurse in the ambulance explain. “Weddings, too.”

After about an hour in the ER, a nurse practitioner took his vitals, declared him fit, and they left. Dad got his Uber, Pete and Mom got theirs. 

Pete decided then, on that ride home, that he needed to get away from Lenape Township forever, get away from memory, get away from ghosts.

Dad would say: “You need to do what you need to do, Pete.”

Mom would warn: “You take yourself everywhere you go.”

A week after DeShawn’s burial, the semi-final game that the team had been racing too when the truck smashed across the barrier would be played. The Wolves would roster a squad comprising the five subs in the other van who hadn’t been killed that day and a bench with JV players. The Knestburgh Knights would do the same: create a team with five substitutes (not counting their sixth man) and JV players.

“The Scrub Bowl,” Pete called it.

He stayed home, watching on the Lenape High School cable channel that displayed all the earmarks of rickety equipment operated by an amalgamation of teacher and student volunteers. Often, two kids from the media lab would do play-by-play, but not this time. Somebody decided that that would besmirch the ceremonial aspects of the contest. And no cheerleaders, either.

This was more than just a game. 

Before it began players and coaches from both teams, as well as the refs, gathered at mid-court, took a knee, bowed their heads. They joined hands, appeared to be praying. Then fans filtered solemnly down onto the court, as well, keeping a respectful distance from the group of players who became a circle within a circle. 

“Look at that,” Mom said. She shook her head, but no tears. Pete, laying on the couch with a blanket and three pillows, figured that she must have made a decision that in order to get her child through mourning, she would have to at least fake that she no longer grieved so intensely. 

Then the game began.

Over the years, Dad would call it the “Woodstock Game,” something Pete had to Google. Dad meant that if everybody in Grandpa’s generation who swore they’d attended that outdoor rock concert had actually been there, the headcount would have been half the population of the United States.

The Peterson Events Center at the University of Pittsburgh seats 12,508, something else Pete Googled. At least 10 times that amount eventually claimed to have been there to witness something special, and that wasn’t a reference to the before-game consecration.

Apparently, nobody had bothered to tell the scrubs that winning or losing didn’t really matter in light of the tragedy. The game would be as close to an immortal event that high school students could fashion.

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth through regulation and then the first overtime. At some point Pete got a text from a friend: “It’s on ESPN!” and Pete flicked over. But that would not be the only channel to cover it. By the end of the second overtime, more of the national media descended. And because it was a slower sports news day than even slow-news-Saturday-afternoons can be — filled with overseas’ soccer, and a smattering of golf and bowling — more and more networks picked it up. 

By the end of the fourth overtime, it had gone global. The kids made plays that dazzled and amazed. Three of the unknowns in that contest would go on to star in the NBA, including a Wolves freshman DeShawn had once pointed out to Pete, pronouncing: “Dude’s got game, for real.” Three of the overtimes finished on shots that tied it up in the final second. 

And that’s how it ended. On the last play. Finally — finally! — the Knights put it away in the eighth overtime — a state record for playoffs — with a Hail Mary shot made at half-court with one second left on the clock. The Wolves had been ahead by two points. The Knights emerged victorious: 115 to 114.

“Dagger! Dagger! Dagger!” an announcer on one of the networks shouted.

Or as a “locutor” on one of the Spanish stations yelled: “La daga! La daga! La daga!

Afterward, the Knights dedicated the victory trophy to the Wolves.

Pete couldn’t sleep for a week, not until the shrink prescribed a heavy narcotic, which he only needed to take for a month or so. 

Now, with Pete standing before the lighted memorial as midnight approaches, the wind kicks up, rattling the leaves in the corner of the school building. No moon. No stars. No, not on this night. Just black cloud cover holding off snow that could breach at any moment. 

Pete places his varsity letter at the foot of the memorial, laying it among the wreaths and other tributes that the maintenance crew periodically gathered. They store what can be stored in some sub-subbasement in the school’s labyrinthian underbelly where unused machines rust in the dark. 

The memorial includes Lenape High School’s insignia and the inscription. “In loving memory…” Then the poem “To An Athlete Dying Young,” which almost didn’t make it because it offended someone somewhere somehow. “Moment of Silence Memorial” the school board had christened the structure.

Suddenly, lights flash across Pete as if they’d been thrown by a prison tower. He turns to see another car pulling into the lot and parking next to his. Pete knows it’s Mr. Baldwin. 

Why is he here now?

Pete wanted solace and solitude. He never even considered that his midnight rendezvous might have to be shared. Mr. Baldwin begins walking over. He slices the air in greeting. Pete raises his hand as if back in class, then faces the memorial again. When Mr. Baldwin’s footsteps close in, Pete turns.

“Hi, Mr. Baldwin.”

Mr. Baldwin gestures, redirecting Pete’s gaze to the memorial. They stand in silence for a moment.

“Cemetery’s closed now, of course,” Mr. Baldwin finally says. “I’ll be going there today, too. To see DeShawn. His mother.”

Pete clears his throat. He can’t think of anything to say.

“You can call me Jamar, you know.”

Pete buries his hands in his pockets, scuffs the ground.

“No, sir. I don’t think that I can do that.” 

Pete never called Mr. Baldwin anything but Mr. Baldwin or “your Dad” when DeShawn lived.

“That’s all right,” Mr. Baldwin says.

More silence, then: “You’re moving away.”

“Yes, I am, Mr. Baldwin.”

“How are you going to live?”

Pete’s father gave him a chunk of cash to last a year and also names to call in Philadelphia who had helped Pete find a place to live. Pete wants to write a novel, even though up until now, he would just spend an hour or so staring at a blank screen. 

“Join a writers workshop,” his old English teacher had suggested. So that’s the plan. Pete had already paid the deposit and the first and last month’s rent on the apartment that he’d be moving into tomorrow — which becomes today in a few minutes. 

Dad had said: “Everybody should have a gap year.”

Mom vowed to visit often.

“There’s a threat,” Dad had said, and Pete didn’t know whether to laugh, because since his parents split up, he couldn’t quite differentiate between a friendly jibe and a cloaked insult. 

“Going to college?” Mr. Baldwin asked.

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“Don’t know?”

“I probably will, Mr. Baldwin.” 

In the sky, two distant lights scurry through the night. Planes, not exactly going in different directions but not exactly in sync either. One could be traveling north/south, the other east/west, Pete thinks. Who could tell?

He glances over at Mr. Baldwin. The pounded granite face of the old boxer had set into such a sorrowful mask that Pete starts to reach over to pat the man’s shoulder. Mr. Baldwin does a quick take and glowers at the hand. Pete buries it again in his pocket. 

And that’s how Pete knows. He just knows.

He can almost hear the contradictory feelings battling inside Mr. Baldwin. One wanting to tell Pete: “It’s not your fault that you’re alive and my son isn’t.” The other saying: “I wish it was you who died in that crash and not my DeShawn.” These thoughts must be fevering for dominance in Mr. Baldwin, just as two thoughts battle inside Pete. One says: “You know, Mr. Baldwin, I wish it were me who died that day.” The other exclaims: “I live! I am alive! Thank you, God! I am alive!” 

Mr. Baldwin now declares: “It’s snowing.”

Pete doesn’t see anything and wonders if he’d heard right. But then an arrogant flake plops on the end of his nose, and Pete brushes it off. Then other flakes hit him, and now it’s coming down hard.

“It’s good you’re leaving, Pete. You need to get away from this misery. I have to stay.”

Years later, somebody in Pete’s life would exclaim: “But you’re one of the most normal people I know!”

This happens right after he confesses that he battles depression and anxiety and needs to take medication. Pete might, to a select few, elaborate a bit, and discuss the Lenape High School tragedy and what part he played in it. Or didn’t play in it. 

His wife — whoever she may be — will know that there’s more to the story. His children — whoever they may be — will just accept that their daddy limps, for the doctor is wrong: It will never go away. He will teach philosophy at a university. And write.

Mr. Baldwin slaps him on the shoulder.

“Well, it’s officially DeShawn’s birthday. I’m getting before the roads ice over, Pete. Think of DeShawn every now and then, will you?”

“Yes sir.”

And after Mr. Baldwin leaves, they begin to gather around the memorial. Yes, they. Them. They first appear as a glow that becomes separate throbs of light that self-assemble. Within seconds, they are there: Bently, Cuttino, Jameel, Curtis, Miles, and Bradly. And there’s DeShawn. 

In their uniforms looking back at Pete with curiosity. Trying to figure Pete out as Pete tries to figure them out.

Where are you? they seem to ask.

Pete shakes uncontrollably by the time he scraps the windshield and jumps into his car. He puts his hands on the vents out of which will soon swoosh hot air. Then Pete Tillinghast drives out of the Lenape High School parking lot for the last time. He glances in the rearview, but snow hides the memorial and whoever or whatever might be lurking around it.

“Nothing’s lurking there!” he scolds himself. “It was an hallucination! Pull it together!”

He continues navigating through the treacherous night.