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boxing altogether, brings his elbow down for Rory’s head. Rory slips it and hooks the other side of his rib cage. “I’m gonna hit you with a flashy one,” he whispers, clinching Symbol in the middle of the ring. “It’s gonna sound good, but it won’t hurt a bit. Drop when it hits.”
    Symbol grunts hate, blinking.
    “Here it comes.” Rory shoves Symbol back and throws a bigstraight right with none of his body behind it. It catches Symbol cold on the jaw with a nightmarish pop. Symbol looks at Rory dumbly and blinks once. Then he collapses like a great big tower exploded from the inside. Three of his fraternity brothers jump in the ring and run to him.
    Rory bites off his right glove, watching the big dipshit fake a return to consciousness. A mop-headed kid in a faded Kiss T-shirt lifts Rory’s arm, does his best impression of a boxing announcer. Rory unwraps his hands while he talks, standing in the middle of the ring in knee-length gym shorts, feeling ridiculous. The ring’s a cheap rental, set up on a stage that’s used the rest of the week for country-rock cover bands. Nanticote doesn’t have a college, but it’s the only town in the county that ain’t dry, so it has a college bar.
    When the announcer’s finished, Rory lifts the top rope and blinks out into the smoke. The open floor’s crowded with folding tables and college kids. Four pool tables and a jukebox down one side of the hall, the bar and a few booths down the other. He skinnies through the crowd and catches the black T-shirt Pike tosses him and sits, sliding it over his torso. “How’d I do?” he yells over the college bustle and the Rolling Stones.
    Pike’s voice rumbles through the commotion like a bulldozer through corn. “You were kicking the holy shit out of him until he fainted.”
    Rory grimaces. “I was hoping nobody’d notice.”
    “Probably nobody else did. I’ve had my head kicked in enough times to know what it should look like.”
    Rory runs his hand down his face and shakes his head, shedding the adrenaline the way a dog sheds water. Wendy’s sucking a Coke through a straw, reading from a large purple book. There’s a full Coke sitting between her and Pike. Staring off at nothing, she slides it over to Rory.
    “Thanks,” Rory says. “That’s just what I need.”
    Wendy shrugs without taking her eyes off the book. “I didn’t buy it for you, I’m just passing it on.”
    Pike lights a cigarette. “Now, that ain’t entirely true.”
    Wendy shoots him a look like she’ll cut him into fist-sized chunksand feed him to a something rabid if he doesn’t shut the fuck up. Pike closes his mouth around his cigarette and pulls smoke.
    “Did you have a good time?” Rory asks her.
    “I had cheese fries,” she says, pointing at an empty fry basket. “They were pretty good.”
    “You’re a tough nut,” Rory says. He rubs the back of his right hand. It’s starting to hurt, but not with the usual sharp twinge that comes after a good punch. It’s duller, running down the bones in his hands like something cancerous. “What’s the book?”
    Wendy tilts it so he can see the spine. The Collected Stories of Edgar Allen Poe.
    “You’re as bad as your grandfather,” Rory says.
    She reburies her face. “How so?”
    “You can’t dig him out of a book, either. That’s why he doesn’t have any friends. Spends all his time reading weird books. Or insulting people that ain’t read them.”
    Wendy’s eyes slink over to Pike. “I doubt we read the same books,” she says.
    “I doubt it too,” Rory says. “Nobody reads the same books Pike reads. I made the mistake of opening one once. Woke up on the floor two days later with a headache like I’d been smacked with a tire jack. Don’t even remember what the hell it was about.”
    “That doesn’t surprise me,” Wendy says. “You being struck senseless by the sight of the printed word.”

CHAPTER 7
~ Lost in one of the short, cold patches of sleep that sneak up