“No, John. We’ve never been in our lives, either one of us. Are you the only one who took the sauce?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I’m tryin’ to say. We went to Robert’s place, but Head and the guys didn’t come. I think they got nervous when they saw a needle come out. There were some kids around, the party kind of landed there, at Robert’s trailer. Now please, please, please get your phone or turn it off. That damned song you got in there is driving me up a wall.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You took something that scared Head? The guy who did the stuff that killed River Phoenix just to prove he was the better man?”

“Dave . . .”

“All right, all right.”

I pulled out the phone, flipped it open, slapped it to my head.

“Yeah.”

“David? It’s me.”

Ah, that feeling again. That chill of unreality, my belly full of coffee turning to liquid nitrogen.

The voice was John’s.

No question about it. The man who was sitting across from me, smoking quietly without a phone anywhere near his head, had called me.

I glanced at John, said into the phone, “Is this a recording?”

“What? No. I don’t know if we’ve talked tonight, but we don’t have much time. I think I called you and told you to come here. If so, don’t do it. If I haven’t called, then obviously you should still stay away regardless. Now, I need you to go to Las Vegas. There’s a guy there—”

“Who is this?”

John, in the booth there with me, gave me a look. On the phone: “It’s John. Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you and I can see you,” I said, a tremble in my voice. “You’re sitting right here next to me.”

“Well, just talk to me in person, then. Oh, wait. Do I look like I’m injured in any way?”

“What?”

“Fuck! Someone’s at the door.”

Click. He was gone.

I sat there, the phone still pressed to my ear, suddenly very, very tired.

IF I HAD been sitting with anyone else, I would have assumed I was being set up for some drunken practical joke. But I knew this wasn’t some elaborate prank of John’s for two reasons: one, John knows how I get when I’m pissed off and wouldn’t intentionally do it, and two, it wasn’t funny.

I was scared. Truly scared, maybe for the first time since I was a little kid. John looked pale and half dead. My feet were wet and cold, my contact lenses were itching, my brain aching from sleep deprivation. I wanted to burn that cell phone, go home and lock my doors and curl up under a blanket in the closet.

This is the breaking point in a human life, right here. But my whole life had been leading up to this, hadn’t it?

From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again and again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I’d stop fucking up the party.

They wanted to push me outside, where the freaks huddled in the cold. Out there with the misfits, the broken, glazed-eye types who can only watch as the normals enjoy their shiny new cars and careers and marriages and vacations with the kids.

The freaks spend their lives shambling around, wondering how they got left out, mumbling about conspiracy theories and Bigfoot sightings. Their encounters with the world are marked by awkward conversations and stifled laughter, hidden smirks and rolled eyes. And worst of all, pity.

Sitting there on that night in April, I pictured myself getting shoved out there with them, the sound of doors locking behind me.

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

It was like dying.

“WAS THAT ME?” asked John. “That was me, wasn’t it?”

I looked down at my coffee and considered flinging it into John’s face.

“I’m sorry, Dave. I really am. For messin’ up your sleep cycle and for everything that’s about to happen, the people that are going to, uh, explode.”

I was already up, walking out. I guess John paid at the counter behind me, I don’t know. I pushed my way out the glass door, dug out my keys. I opened the driver’s door and Molly the dog immediately flung herself out onto the pavement, barking her head off, looking right at me. Then she trotted off across the empty lot, turned and barked some more, then trotted a few steps farther and barked again.

John said, “I think she wants us to follow her.”

She scampered off down the sidewalk, glancing back at us to make sure we were coming. I slid into the car.

I pulled out of the space and drove in completely the opposite direction of the dog. John seemed like he wanted to comment on this, but the look on my face probably warned him off. I vaguely heard the sound of the dog running and barking after us as I turned onto the street, but disregarded it. We drove in tense silence.

Finally, tentatively, he asked where we were going.

“We’re going to fucking work, John. It’s six o’clock and we’re opening the shop. There’s nobody there to cover for us.”

He didn’t reply to this. Instead, he leaned his seat back, turned and looked out the passenger window at the passing storefronts and the few early-morning joggers, not saying a word. I eventually asked him how he was doing, got no answer. I could see he was still breathing. That was good. Sleeping, that’s all. I guessed that was good, too.

If he gets sick and dies, Robert Marley, they’re gonna find you in a ditch somewhere.

I stopped at a red light, feeling foolish as always for stopping at an intersection at an hour when the streets are deserted, just because a colored lightbulb told me to. Society has got me so fucking trained. I rubbed my eyes and groaned and felt utterly alone in the world.

Thump!

Scratching, on the window.

Like claws.

I flinched, turned.

It was claws.

Molly’s. She was on her hind legs, her paws pressed against the window.

“Woof!”

“Go away!”

“Woof!”

“Shut up!”

“WOOF!”

“Hey! I said shut up! Get your feet off my car!”

“WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut! Up!”

This went on for longer than I care to admit, and it ended with me getting out and leaning my seat forward so Molly could jump into the back. Yes, the entire spiraling trajectory my life took since that night was because I lost a debate with a dog.

She sniffed around John and then barked at me, the sound deafening in the enclosed space. Still, John didn’t stir.

“What do you want?”

That seemed like a perfectly reasonable question at that moment. The dog clearly had intentions, somehow, and wasn’t going to leave me alone until I acted on them.

“What? Do you think I’m your master? Did little Timmy fall down the fucking well? What do you—”

I stopped, my eye drawn to her jingling collar, and the little metal tag there.

I’m Molly.

Please return me to . . .

She stopped barking.

THE PLACE WAS way the hell out of town, out near the big drain cleaner factory.

At one point I took a right turn and Molly went into a barking fit. I did a U-turn and she immediately calmed down.

I saw a big, run-down Victorian house standing off by itself at the end of the block, and realized the dog had just directed me to the right address. I didn’t know if dogs really did that but at that moment I was sure this dog could do it—

“Oh, shit.”

I actually said that out loud, in the car. Something had clicked so hard in my mind my whole body twitched.

I knew this place. I flashed back to the party, a huge kid with red hair, his back to me, standing with Robert the fake Jamaican.

That was Big Jim Sullivan.

This is his house.

Big Jim was a year ahead of me in school, six inches taller and twice my weight. He got famous around town after a carjacking attempt, which ended with Jim tearing the gun out of the assailant’s hand (ripping the skin off the guy’s trigger finger in the process) and then beating the man over the head with his own gun. Afterward Jim visited the guy in the hospital and spent several hours reading Bible verses to him. He once won a fight with Zach Goldstein by chucking him bodily over a guardrail.

I had lived in constant fear of the man, and even now I had the urge to flip the dog out of the car window and speed away.

You see, Jim had a sister.

We called her “Cucumber,” but I couldn’t remember her real name. She was in Special Ed, a couple of years younger than me. People think she got that nickname because of some sexual thing, but it was a reference to sea cucumbers. They have this defense mechanism where they puke up their guts when faced with a predator, hoping the predator will go for their guts rather than eating them. I should know, I made up the nickname.

You see, Jim’s sister used to throw up a lot, and I mean a lot. Like, twice a week at school she’d wind up vomiting somewhere or on somebody. I don’t know what exactly caused it. She had a lot of things wrong with her but at least she got one of the more clever nicknames out of the deal.

My last year in school, after I had gotten sent off and put into the Behavior Disorder program, Big Jim heard me using that nickname and I lived the rest of my school days afraid he would break me into little pieces in the parking lot. The worst part would have been that as I was bleeding and feeling teeth breaking off in my mouth, I would’ve spent every second of the pummeling knowing I deserved it.

So Big Jim was at the party. With Robert? What did that mean? And why was his dog there? Did he bring his dog to every party? Had he gone blind, and was Molly his Seeing Eye dog? Was it the dog’s birthday?

I felt like an idiot. Here I was toting the animal all over town, putting myself at grave risk in the process, when I could have just left her at the party where her owner was.

I scrambled to think of how I would approach him with all this, the soy sauce and Robert and his unnaturally smart dog.