Riley left Garland Middle for Garland High; Grace, left behind, worried that she would begin to seem too young to him, a babyish phase he should now grow out of. After school she rushed to wherever he was, always with Alls and Greg. Greg often accused her, even in front of Riley, of trying to take Riley away from them. She laughed and Riley rolled his eyes, but Greg was right. She was jealous. No matter how long she and Riley were together, the boys had been together longer. Sometimes, it didn’t seem fair that Grace gave all her love and attention to Riley when his was spread so thin. But he wouldn’t let her in with the boys, not really, even though all of them spent so much time together. When she did the things that she thought would earn her admittance—threw an empty glass bottle at the brick back wall of their middle school, called Greg out for farting—Riley scolded her. There was one time she remembered particularly. It was after Halloween, and they were all sitting on Riley’s front porch eating leftover candy.
“What’s a hillbilly’s favorite thing to do on Halloween?” Alls started.
“What?” Grace asked first.
He looked at the floor, trying to keep a straight face. “Pump kin.”
Riley’s laugh was loudest of all. Then Grace, recovering first, said, “What did the leper say to the hooker?”
“What?” Greg asked.
It was too late; she was already grinning. “Keep the tip.”
Alls cupped his hands over his ears in mock alarm, but he was laughing, and so was Greg. Riley was not. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. “I’m bored out of my skull.”
Later, when his friends had gone home, he told her that she’d embarrassed him. He framed his argument generously: “Quit trying to be a guy,” he said. “You don’t have to fake it. Just be yourself.”
She wasn’t faking it, she started to explain. She was just—
“But I don’t like you like that,” he said.
Just-be-yourself had its limits. She adapted to his vision. She liked that girl more than she had ever liked herself before anyway, so that was the self she became.
Starting that year, the boys often went to Greg’s basement after school. Greg was already drinking hard then, stealing booze from his father, who had a wet bar downstairs and drank too much to keep track of his inventory. The first time Greg offered her a screwdriver, she told him to shut up, thinking he was making fun of her. “No, I’m having one,” he said. “You’ll like it, it’s good.” Greg kept his pot down there too, right in the drawer with the party toothpicks and restaurant matchbooks, as though he wanted his father to find it.
One night in early April, the boys were lit to the rafters and Grace was nursing her screwdriver when the boys decided to take Mrs. Kimbrough’s car out for a drive. Greg took the keys from her purse, which was next to the bed where she and Mr. Kimbrough slept. Riley had never driven so much as a lawn mower, and Greg was too bombed to get the key into the lock. Alls had learned to drive a golf cart caddying that summer. Grace protested wildly, in a whisper. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. She had snuck out of her house. Riley told her not to worry; they would drop her off at home. Alls backed Mrs. Kimbrough’s silver sports car out of the driveway, narrowly missing the brick mailbox. Greg pumped up the bass and then locked the windows to hotbox the car. Alls jabbed at the window buttons, trying to roll them down. His dad drove an old car without power windows and he couldn’t figure it out. Grace made them drop her off at the end of her block so her parents wouldn’t wake.
The next morning was Sunday, and Grace biked over at eight thirty, per custom, to go to church with the Grahams. She found Alls, Riley, and his parents in the kitchen, all with their hands over their eyes. The telephone was in the middle of the table, no one touching it. Mr. Kimbrough screamed from the receiver that he would wring Riley’s balls off. Riley’s mother always put angry parents on speakerphone. She wanted neither to spare her sons their fury nor to have to regurgitate it herself.
“Tell him to get over here,” he shouted. “I want your little shithead crying on the floor just like mine is.”
Marmie, the Grahams’ beagle, began to howl at the phone, and Mrs. Graham gestured at Grace to shush her.
“It’s no use letting him lie to you.” It was Tracy Kimbrough now. “Greg told us everything.”
Greg had told his parents that he let Alls and Riley borrow his mother’s car and that they had crashed it. He claimed to have stayed home. Now the car’s front end was bashed in and there was vomit all over the backseat and floor.
“You could’ve killed someone!” Dr. Graham bellowed.
“It’s a miracle you weren’t arrested,” Mrs. Graham said. “Really, I wish you had been.”
“Alls, you need to go home now,” Dr. Graham said.
Riley was sorrowful and self-flagellating as he promised to pay for his half of the damages. He didn’t contradict Greg’s ridiculous story to his parents. But he told Grace later that they had all driven downtown, what there was of it, where they were flagged down by two seniors from school. One of them was a locker-room pills dealer, freshly expelled. His name was a four-letter word on all parents’ lips. They let him drive, playing autobahn on Old 63 until Riley puked on the floor. The older boy plowed the car into the pin oak on Dawahare Street, and they left the car there, bashed in and full of vomit. Alls went home with Riley, who discovered on his doorstep that he’d lost his keys over the course of the evening. Alls didn’t even have a key to his own house—his father was always losing his keys and borrowing his son’s—so he’d learned to pick the locks with paper clips when he needed to. He got them into the Grahams’, and they collapsed on the couches in the family room.
Grace couldn’t understand why they had let Greg off the hook, but Riley shrugged off her questions. She figured it out on her own: Greg had been buying the pot and supplying all the alcohol. He stole money from his parents all the time: He sold his belongings and claimed to have lost them, collected money for fake tutors and fake field trips. He paid for most of the damage to the car in exchange for Riley and Alls taking the blame.
But the blame assigned to Alls and Riley was not equally distributed. Mrs. Kimbrough focused her rage on Alls alone, and when his father tried to pay for the damages, the Kimbroughs refused his money.
Charlie Hughes was “having a hard time,” everyone knew, meaning he was an alcoholic whose private struggles had become public. His wife, Alls’s mother, had walked out on them just two months before, after Charlie’s third DUI. Paula Hughes had worked at the United Methodist day care in the mornings and babysat the younger Turpin children in the afternoons, and when she left, Jeffrey Turpin started a rumor that Alls’s mother had been deported. Alls was reconsidered by his peers: His complexion, though pale, had a strong olive cast that they now remarked on for the first time. Other than his coloring, he looked like a younger Charlie, long-nosed and lanky and ready to get into trouble. But Alls didn’t correct the rumor. He must have preferred it, in its loud stupidity, to the truth that few knew: His mother had promised to return when her husband got sober. She had given up.