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There’s nothing unusual about it, Nick thinks. His childhood is crisp new polo shirts, carefully combed hair, lacrosse practice and vacations at the lake house — and at night, in the darkness, his childhood is viscous pools of blood on the basement floor.
The first time he participates in the ritual, he’s eight years old. But it isn’t his dad who leads him into the basement tunnels, who curls his little fingers around the knife blade and guides it to the target. It’s his grandpa, the same stately old man who taught him how to swim and how to roll a cigarette, a trick Nick’s been pulling out of his sleeves at all his parents’ parties since he was five. Adults think it’s adorable when a kid does adult things like that. And his grandpa isn’t like other people’s grandpas; he’s different, he’s well-dressed, he’s interesting, he likes to teach Nick things that other boys in Sunnyvale don’t know.
He puts the knife in Nick’s hand and leads him to the black goat. Rope encircles its hooves. It’s been down here for hours, maybe longer; its chest heaves and its eyes flicker strangely, the pupils square and oblong, its nostrils flaring. It reeks, a barnyard animal scent Nick’s never smelled before, matted fur and the thick scent of waste, of fear, captivity.
“Do I have to?” Nick asks.
He feels the weight of Grandpa’s old, gnarled hands on his shoulders. There are no calluses on Grandpa’s hands. His fingers are long and delicate, well-manicured; his only flaw is the tobacco stains on the pads of his fingers, turning his skin yellow.
“Nobody has to do anything, Nicholas,” Grandpa says. “What makes a Goode stand out from the crowd is that we don’t let fear or weakness stop us. We do what must be done.”
Nick understands. His grip on the knife tightens. He kneels before the goat, and when it thrashes, its bound hooves lashing out at Nick, he doesn’t flinch. He holds steady, the way Grandpa would, and presses the knife point against the goat’s throat.
Goodes get the best grades in school. Goodes take on the burden of leadership, his dad says; they captain the lacrosse team, they run for class president, they volunteer to help the teacher after class, to tutor their classmates who are struggling with reading and math. They do what must be done.
Nick presses down with all his eight-year-old strength and rips the goat’s throat open from ear to ear.
In the winter of 1976, the roof of Shadyside’s only high school collapses under the weight of snow. Three kids are killed, crushed or suffocated while they’re sitting at their desks. The rest of the school makes it out okay, but it's a senseless, tragic accident, an accident that reminds Nick of the rank smell of goat fur, and two things happen as a result:
One: Nick’s application is accepted for an elite Junior Police Cadet Academy in the city next year.
Two: The Shadyside high schoolers are bused to Sunnyvale until their roof can be repaired.
“You win some, you lose some,” Will mutters on their way out the door.
At school, Nick watches the buses pull in. Shabby and old-fashioned, the paint chipped, spots of rust showing through everywhere he looks. There are broken windows letting the cold air in, and the kids who file off the narrow bus steps look like they’re already shivering — but more unsettling to Nick is that it looks like they’re used to it. It looks like they dressed for this, like their bus windows have always been broken and the heat has never been turned on.
He puzzles over this for a moment, biting the inside of his cheek. A girl walks past him, red hair a tangle, eyes bruised from lack of sleep or from a fight. She’s dressed in a man’s plaid coat, too big for her and shabbier than anything Nick’s ever seen. It smells of watery beer and cigarette smoke; the cuffs are frayed, and she has one loose thread wrapped tight around her index finger, twisting it tighter and tighter as she gets closer to Sunnyvale’s front gate.
“Hi,” Nick says.
Ziggy Berman looks at him for the first time. She eyes him up and down, doubtful, wary. He knows immediately that those bruises on her eyes aren’t from insomnia. And he knows immediately that she’s used to getting bruised; maybe not from her parents, but from her classmates. From life. He smiles at her, gentle, coaxing, and she doesn’t smile back.
“Hi,” she says.
Ziggy Berman is: bandaids on her fingertips, paint stains on her hands, the smell of sun-baked earth clinging to her skin. She’s a creased, shoplifted paperback of the new Ramsey Campbell novel: lurid covers with killer dolls on the front, dog-eared pages, satirical drawings done in ballpoint pen in the margins anytime something spectacularly stupid happens. She’s a worn yellow hi-liter from probably the year after Nick was born, and hand-me-down notebooks filled with pages of someone else’s notes, and scuffed, floppy tennis shoes held together with tape.
She doesn’t have snow boots. She looks at Nick like he’s stupid or crazy when he asks, as if no one in Shadyside wears snow boots. He looks down at her tennis shoes again, stained dirt-grey with slush from the road, soaked through by the winter weather, and learns not to ask questions like that again.
She’s a bagged lunch stained with grease. A single sandwich made of whatever she scrounged up from the cupboard. Cheap bread that she flattens with her fingertips, biting each sandwich into tiny circles and spinning them slowly in her hands, pressing the white bread down until it forms a thin, processed disc that looks like nothing Nick has ever eaten.
“You can have some of mine,” Nick offers one day.
She looks at his food the same way she looked at him the first day they met — but she doesn’t ask if he’s sure, and she doesn’t say thank you. She just takes half of his sandwich with a shrug. Maybe she can’t afford pride when it comes to food. Maybe she chose the half he’s eaten from deliberately, because she puts her lips exactly where Nick placed his, and he wonders if she can taste him — if she’d let him take the sandwich back so he can try to taste her.
Ziggy Berman wears the same jeans every day. Ziggy Berman can’t afford to replace her math textbook when the Sunnyvale girls rip it to shreds. Ziggy Berman goes home on a bus with broken windows and shoves her mother’s empty liquor bottles off the kitchen table so she can do her homework.
But Ziggy Berman is whip-smart and full of deadly humor. Ziggy Berman steals the art teacher’s new fabric markers and draws a skull on Nick’s khakis when they sit together at lunch. Ziggy Berman spends hours parked by the radio trying to record David Bowie’s latest album, and Nick will never forget the spark of surprise, the teasing lilt of her lips when he told her he liked her nickname, when ducked his head and half-whispered half-sang the lyrics to Five Years, the slow, painfully sweet blush that spread across his cheeks when she leaned close to him and tapped the drumbeat out on the cafeteria table. It’s Nick’s favorite drumbeat, so simple, so vital. It sounds like a heartbeat to him; Ziggy whispers that it sounds the same to her. He likes the calm start, the intensity that builds so slowly it’s like an ocean wave pulling you out to sea, the detached nasal tone of Bowie’s voice careening upward until he’s screaming, desperate to be heard.
But it’s the lyrics that hit Nick the hardest. The end of the world, the erasure of everything that matters. All those petty categories that people push themselves into just slipping away. And when he sings the chorus, his throat tightens, and he hopes Ziggy can’t hear the catch in his voice — but he sees the way she swallows her smile and looks away, and he knows that she feels it just like he does.
“Do we ever perform the ritual to help other people?” Nick asks his father one night in the basement.
His father turns to look at him. Will turns to look at him. Nick can’t read their expressions.
“Kid,” says his dad, “everything we do helps other people.”
Nick learns not to ask that question again, either.
Nick is different.
Will captains his lacrosse team because he likes the perks, likes to boss the other boys around. Nick does it because he feels obliged; because the other boys listen to him; because he’s just a little bit sharper, a little better at strategizing on the field, at managing disputes and pulling the team together.
Will pays a Shadyside girl to do his homework for him, then brags about being top of his class. Nick fights for his grades, really fights for them, spends hours each night studying if only so he can keep his acceptance to the junior police academy next year.
Will sneers at the Shadysiders. Will wears the right clothes and turns his nose up at anyone who doesn’t, no matter why. Will laughs when his friends bully the kids who bus in from out of town. Will pores through their dad’s bookshelves on economics and politics and parrots back everything he reads without really understanding it; Will listens to the radio, bobs his head, doesn’t really know the lyrics.
Nick takes the stolen fabric marker from Ziggy and draws a pentagram on her jeans, sees her eyes widen with surprise and scandalized delight. Nick pockets a David Bowie tape at the record store, his heart pounding as he walks out without paying, feels a little thrill that brings him closer to Ziggy, knows she must feel that thrill every day of her life. He sits by the riverside, beneath the bridge that separates Sunnyvale from Shadyside. He keeps a boombox hidden behind a loose stone in the bridge’s foundation, and when nobody is listening he moves that stone and looks inside: takes out the hand-rolled cigarettes he hid in there, pops the Bowie tape into the player, pulls a dog-eared dimestore horror book out and lays on the river bank with that book propped on his chest, unable to read a single damn word. The lyrics wash over him; he closes his eyes and sees Ziggy’s face, the sunlight catching in her hair, the crooked, reluctant smile she always reserves for him. He listens to Bowie and he watches Ziggy’s lips form words he knows by heart: words for outsiders, losers, freaks.
Nick is different from his brother.
Nick is weird.
Nick understands what it’s like to be an outsider, knows the way his father side-eyes him at the dinner table isn’t good, keeps his ambitions and his hobbies so close to the chest that he feels a tangle of anxiety in his gut every time he thinks of them. Nick knows what it’s like to be a little too smart, a little too kind, a little too off-beat. He's good at hiding it — he has to be — but he is, and maybe sometimes he doesn't want to hide it at all.
He understands Shadyside. He understands Ziggy.
But he remembers being eight years old and slicing that goat’s throat, remembers the warm rush of blood over his hand, the slickness of it, the smell of copper, the way it spilled over his shoes and pooled in the cracks of the basement floor.
And he remembers that he liked it.