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sounds and growling in their throats to make explosions. From there the town was a dull procession of chimneys, muted by a drizzle that made it somehow futureless, but also without history. It existed, as did its people, in a moment it wanted to escape. Sunny’s tunnel didn’t seem such a bad idea from up on high.
    Sunny tried to take off his T-shirt, but Bobby had to help feed his head through the neck hole while he bent like a disobedient marionette. Sunny’s left arm was still limp; the plaster cast had been removed only a few days before. They could feel the metal through the skin, a cold stiff lump of hard-won achievement. Wet, his body glistened. There was already something robotic about it, lithe and functional, the efficient engine of youth.
    â€œLet Phase Three commence,” Sunny yelled, proceeding to the far end of the platform three stories up. A sick feeling in his stomach, Bobby’s knees buckled. Phase Three, the final phase, was to have metal plates installed in Sunny’s skull. Had they waited any longer, the scant regard for danger enjoyed by young boys might have waned. Without danger, boyhood is undone.
    Sunny rocked back and forth on his feet, and as assuredly as he might step into a warm bath, he began running toward Bobby. His arms rose like wings on either side of his body, but Bobby could tell by the writhing eels of the muscles in his jaw that he was already having second thoughts.
    â€œAbort! Abort!” Sunny said, grinding his heels into the wood. But the surface was slick. There was no time for him to stop. Bobby grabbed him by the ankle and rammed a shoulder into his knee, which locked and spun Sunny’s leg to the left. This only seemed to give him more momentum. Sunny seemed briefly, gloriously weightless as he left the scaffold’s edge. He took to the air in near silence, scuppered only by the songbirds mocking a boy’s imitation of flight. Upside down and tumbling toward the earth, he said, “I’ll protect you Bobby Nusku.”
    Sunny cracked his head on the jut of a long, sharp metal pipe protruding from the scaffold—breaking his fall—and then dropped the remaining nine feet to the ground, where he hit the patio with the sickening thump of a boxer punching a side of beef. Blood formed a deep red maze in the cracks between the paving stones, an eerie puzzle with Sunny the prize in the middle. The balloon of nerves swelled in Bobby’s craw, filling his insides and threatening to prod his guts out through his bottom.
    Right then, Bobby learned of the dizzying nausea that arrives in the wake of a freshly made mistake. Mistakes are those moments when we grip the future so hard that it breaks, and we know we must build another future from the pieces, but one that shall never be as good. Bobby wondered how many pieces there would be, and if any would be too small to pick up.
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    Jules returned to find Bobby cradling her son’s broken head. In her panic she pushed Bobby to the ground, and became blind to everything but the boy, whose skull moved beneath her fingers.
    â€œHe fell,” Bobby said, “it was an accident,” but it was as if she couldn’t tune to the frequency he was using, that she’d changed to some emergency channel, the unique language shared by a whale and her lost calf.
    â€œCall an ambulance!” she screamed. “Call an ambulance!” Bobby rooted through her handbag for the house keys and ran inside to use the telephone.
    An ambulance spirited Sunny and his mother away. Bobby was left sitting in a puddle on the ground. Rain turned it from blood red to the gray of the others around it.
    He waited there all night until Jules returned, alone, at dawn. Dark bags hung beneath her eyes. Tears clotted her lashes. Bobby threw his arms around her waist and sobbed against the warm pillow of her pelvis. He held her hands and prepared to be told that his best friend