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through the months of pain that followed, emerging with precisely what he and Bobby hoped for: beneath the shiny twist of scar tissue on Sunny’s leg—six inches long and almost the shape of Italy—was a stiff metal rod. Solid. Indestructible. The first part of Sunny’s skeleton had been replaced.
    Phase Two wasn’t nearly as successful. X-shaped scarring mapped the spot on Sunny’s forearm where the smashed crumbs of bone swam around inside his skin. Though he’d had a metal rodfitted, the arm remained twisted and weak. The sledgehammer had been too unwieldy for Bobby, half its size, to control, and both Sunny’s mother, Jules, and the hospital staff were more reluctant to believe his lies about what had happened. Regardless, they had achieved their aims for Phases One and Two. Having come this far, nothing could deter them from seeing the plan through to completion.
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    Before Phase Three commenced, Sunny declared it important that they didn’t work on an empty stomach. Bobby, always pestered by hunger, was happy to hear it. Inside the fridge sulked a large lemon cheesecake. They each gobbled up a generous slice. Bobby licked his teeth until the sugar buzz subsided, methodically hunting down all residual zing. His father never allowed food like this at home. He wouldn’t even let Bobby chew bubblegum. He said that if Bobby swallowed it, it would stick inside his guts for seven years. Bobby imagined his rib cage as an explosion of color. He was fine with that. When he was with Sunny it was how he felt on the inside.
    They took two bottles of Coca-Cola and sat on the wall in the front garden beneath the lip of the gutter. The sky was as dirty as a pigeon wing. It started to rain. Petrol-poisoned puddles shivered on the road. Traffic crawled by, car windows steamed with muddled hieroglyphics. Sunny licked the palm of his hand and swiped it upward over his brow.
    â€œWhat if you don’t like me when you’re a cyborg?” Bobby asked. As much as Bobby appreciated Sunny’s efforts to protect him, he feared losing him as a friend far more than any schoolyard beating.
    Sunny pushed his tongue against his front teeth, maggoty pink lumps pulsing in the gaps.
    â€œThat’s the part of my brain I’m going to keep,” he said.
    His mother, Jules, appeared, draped in the shadow of her umbrella. A kind, quiet woman, she worried about only two things, the ailing health of her parents, who lived hundreds of miles away, and the remarkable talent of her only child to injure himself in such dramatic fashion. She spoke slowly, hoping that her words might worm their way inside his ears somehow.
    â€œAre you hearing me?”
    â€œUh-huh,” Sunny said.
    â€œThen what did I just say?” He wriggled. She clipped him around the side of the head, but only lightly. She knew how easily he broke. “I said stay off the scaffold.” The scaffold had been erected around the house while the windows were replaced. Bobby and Sunny were already conspiring—silently, as only children can—exactly how they were going to scale it. Even when she made them promise, hands on heart, they were wondering how high they might get.
    â€œSunny, honey, I only tell you to do things because I love you, you know that, right?”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œExcept for when I tell you to tidy your room. I do that because you make a damn mess and I’m sick of it.”
    â€œI know.” Jules stroked Sunny’s hair.
    â€œI love you,” he said.
    â€œI love you too, honey.” She said goodbye to Bobby and walked slowly toward town. As she left, Bobby felt guilty enough to whisper an apology she didn’t hear. Guilt was an emotion he knew well. Adults mistook it for impeccable manners.
    The boys climbed a plaster-spattered ladder to the third story of the scaffold and threw broken brick chippings off the side, penny-whistling bomb