There was a noise like a rat clawing the walls. William knew exactly what it was.
“Daniel!” he hissed. “Quit grinding your teeth.”
The noise stopped.
“How many Red Bulls did you have?”
Silence. The temperature was mild, and the air held a slight chill, but William felt uncomfortably prickly, like his skin was full of tiny bites. He wasn’t cut out to be a sniper. He wanted to grab Daniel and leap across the gap between buildings and crash into an enemy stronghold, guns blazing. But a reckless kamikaze attack would only result in early elimination. After he picked off the soldier across the way, he’d text Christina and coordinate an ambush. All she had to do was herd a row of cars past their sniper’s nest….
“Have you noticed anything weird about the way Melissa’s been acting lately?” Daniel said.
“Dude. Not now.”
“How about me, have you noticed anything going on with me? I’m having a hard time with some of the things that come out of my mouth. I wish I had a movie of everything I did so I could rewind and study it, you know, like game film? Have you ever thought about how great that would be? Then you could draw up a playbook for how to behave in every situation. Ideal outcomes. Et cetera. I think Melissa wants to break up. I’m afraid she’ll meet some amazing guy at NYU, like a coxswain on the crew team, a Winklevoss or something, and I’ll see them together on Instagram, like—”
“AH!”
The red flash came from a second-floor window. William’s attention had been so focused on the third floor that he hadn’t noticed any activity below it. He ducked down and hugged his gun maternally to his chest, but it was too late: the sensor flashed and the rifle quivered, its motor emitting a low hum. Then it was still.
“Shit!” Daniel popped straight up and fired once, then collapsed into a low crouch as if he were spring-loaded. “I think I got him.” He waited a beat. “Actually I didn’t see anything.”
“Goddammit,” William said, forgetting to whisper. “What’s a coxswain?” He shook his head. “Don’t answer that. Why are you so jittery? You don’t even get nervous for games.”
“I might be seriously going through a full-blown thing here is all.”
“Shh!” William held up a hand for silence. He pointed down at the floor.
Footsteps were pit-patting up the stairs of their mansion. They’d tiptoed along the same steps, and William recognized the floorboards’ groans and squeaks. He cupped a hand to his ear, listening intently. Then he put up three fingers, indicating the number of enemy soldiers he suspected. It was a wild guess, but he’d seen the gesture in so many covert operations on TV that he couldn’t resist doing it himself.
Daniel shook his head vehemently. “There’s only two infantry soldiers per team!”
“Use the fucking hand signals,” William hissed.
Daniel held up two fingers and then pointed with great purpose to the door. Then he held up his gun, angled it down and mimicked a firing recoil.
William nodded. Daniel popped up smoothly and hustled to the bedroom door. He backed against the wall beside it and stood with the barrel of the gun pointed at the ceiling, a classic battle-ready pose that William found unspeakably awesome. A second later he was standing on the opposite side of the door in the same stance.
They locked eyes and listened. Footsteps padded along the second floor. Creaks resumed. The enemy was half a staircase away from their sniper’s nest. William gave Daniel a curt nod—go!—and Daniel pivoted to swing his gun around the side of the doorjamb. He squeezed off a shot and pulled his body back into the room.
“Shit!” Startlingly close. While Daniel’s gun recharged, William poked his weapon into the hall and fired at the dark figures on the stairs. He caught the satisfying sensor flashes of some girl’s body armor—red light pulsing to illuminate her startled face—and then ducked back inside the room. The house sighed with the protest of achy old bones as the enemy retreated down the stairs.
William grinned. “Smoked ’em.”
Daniel fidgeted with his scope. “I feel like I’ve been saying some weird shit to her lately and I can’t remember what. It’s like…” He chewed his lip. “You know those dreams where you’ve done something horrible, like killed somebody or crashed your parents’ car, and then you wake up with that sudden rush of oh shit, because for a few seconds you think you actually did that stuff for real? And your life is ruined? It’s like a low-level version of that all the time with Melissa. Imagine being confused between what you actually said and what you thought you said, and waking up in a cold sweat just remembering some random thing you’re not sure how she perceived.”
William flashed to a confession he’d once sent to Dr. Diaz: I dreamed that I died and when I woke up, I was so happy, just all floaty there in my bed with the morning sun coming in through the blinds, until I heard the German shepherd across the street, and my mom flushed the toilet, and then I was alive and late for work.
“I sort of know what you mean,” William said.
Daniel’s eyes were reptilian and bulbous in the gloom of the bedroom. He was incredibly keyed up, and William didn’t think it was just laser-tag adrenaline. Daniel always seemed to wax and wane like the moon. William chalked it up to the way his friend managed the stress of basketball and school and a million clubs and activities. Some people got prescribed Xanax; Daniel just rode the waves of his consciousness where they carried him. William had always admired his friend for that. Division I–caliber coping skills with a little bit of booze thrown in here and there to dull the sharper days.
But now that they were on a road trip, Daniel’s routine of shooting reps and morning runs and Leg Days and Arm Days and Chest Days
