Spencer and Alek became as close as their mothers; they were always together. Alek was usually quiet, a reserved child, but he had a sense of humor and of self-expression that came out in the most unexpected ways. A fleeting obsession with Batman during which he wore a Batman muscle costume all day, every day, for months, even out on errands with his mom, earning compliments from cashiers and supermarket stock boys.
He played a tin soldier in the church’s Christmas production, done up with the full French-style moustache, drawn on with a makeup pen. When an audience member came up to him after the show and kneeled down to congratulate him, the six-year-old Alek looked up and considered the man. He frowned, then he said, “So do you want my autograph?”
Alek was still water running deep, picking up and feeling more of what went on around him than he let on. A barbeque Joyce and Heidi held ended early when the police showed up at Heidi’s door, claiming they were responding to an emergency. Joyce looked at Heidi, who raised her eyebrows—she didn’t know of any emergency. It took half an hour for the moms to find out that Alek, who hadn’t been getting enough attention during the festivities, had decided to call 911 and report a crime in progress. Alek explained to Spencer, who defended his friend; Alek was guilty only of laziness, not sabotage. He’d picked up the phone at Spencer’s house to make the fifteen-foot phone call over to his own, but his finger slipped when typing the 916 area code. An honest mistake!
Or like how well Alek understood Spencer. Spencer’s favorite topic of conversation during his first five vocal years was his own birthday. Without letting on, Alek picked up bits and scraps of things Spencer said about it, and then, when it was finally time to bake a cake for the neighbors, Alek asked Heidi if he could be in charge. He dragged her to the toy store, made her buy three plastic army men and a tiny American flag, and wedged them into the top of the cake in a loose approximation of the marines at Iwo Jima.
Spencer walked into the kitchen on his tenth birthday, saw the cake, looked over at Alek, and then smiled, overwhelmed by the feeling that never before in the whole grand course of human history had a more perfect gesture been performed by one friend for another.
ALEK SITS NEXT TO HIM, looking out the window. Spencer is slumped in his seat, feeling himself beginning to fade. He takes a photo of the laptop on the tray table, the half-sized bottle of red wine, and posts a picture: “First Class Baby!”
Then his eyelids go heavy, and he leans back to bask in the wonderful, heavy swaying, slipping in and out of much-needed sleep.
Soft, reassuring motion, R&B on the noise-canceling headphones. He does not know how long he’s been asleep when there is a moment of foggy disruption, a distant jangling behind the music. Body in uniform at full sprint across his vision, the half realization that he is waking up, tumbled headlong into a movie scene already under way. Headphones off. Eye contact across the aisle, Anthony’s face screwed up in confusion.
Now he is fully awake and crouched between the seats. A gate in his brain has lifted, and a tidal wave of adrenaline is crashing in; his muscles tighten and time decelerates for him. He sees a glass door slide open, a skinny man with an angry face wearing a backpack the wrong way, strapped to his stomach, and somehow Spencer knows without having to think that the bag is full of ammunition and swung to the front because that way it’s easier to reload. Spencer can hear the footfalls as clear and loud as if the man was stomping on purpose; he steps forward, reaches to the ground, and picks up a machine gun that for some reason is lying there. He lifts it up, and Spencer can hear the metal-on-metal cha-chunk of the weapon being cycled.
A beat passes. Someone has to get this guy. A sliver of frustration sparks off something in his brain. I’m gonna die here—then an electrical charge surges through his entire body and one more final thought tumbles home with a flood of energy, a notion stored away from a classroom at Fort Sam two years ago that his brain now accesses like a hard drive retrieving a kernel of information: I am not going to die sitting down. The realization verges on euphoria. Sound compresses so he no longer hears the screams, and the shattering glass he only now understands is what woke him filters into a thin and distant memory, like the noise itself has been sucked from the train into the past and now all he hears, the only noise in the entire world, is heavy, clomping footsteps. The terrorist is getting closer. He hasn’t started shooting yet.
Spencer gets up and starts running. Alek’s voice comes to him as encouragement from another universe, cheering him on: “Spencer, go!” and Spencer locks eyes with the terrorist; then his vision narrows, his more extraneous senses leave him. He does not register sound at all, his peripheral vision collapses, and he can see nothing but a small part of the man he is charging, a square of fabric, and he aims for that.
He realizes that he is totally exposed.
There is no cover.
There is no other distraction for the shooter because everyone else is crouching.
He is a big, easy target. He is exposed for one second, two seconds, Here is where I die, three seconds, four seconds—the terrorist cocks the gun back again, lowers it at Spencer, and as Spencer pumps his legs, he hears with total, focused clarity the shooter pulling the trigger and the firing pin striking a bullet.
Then everything goes dark.
GUNS WERE PERHAPS the only difference between Heidi and Joyce. Spencer had free rein to play with whatever kind of toy he wanted, and his mother had given in to the fact that her boys loved guns, because—well, boys love guns. She had to laugh at Heidi who, bless her, still grasped on to her misplaced hope that Alek and his siblings would grow up in a gun-free household. Good luck, Joyce thought. The two new surrogate sisters established boundaries to deal with the one part of parenting that caused friction. The trash cans between their two houses marked the demilitarized zone: no guns on Heidi’s side.
It was just a few years later that Joyce walked out to see Heidi, waiting in the driver’s seat of her SUV, while a commando team of camouflaged teenage paintballers piled into the back. She was overrun; she’d given up. Joyce couldn’t help herself. “Man, Heidi,” she yelled, “looking good with all that camo!”
Heidi looked out the window, and tried to suppress a smile. Then they both exploded with laughter.
By then Alek and Spencer had formed a kind of impromptu league of war games. They tipped over trash cans in the street and dove behind cars, they gathered neighborhood kids to serve as comrades, lined up on opposite ends of Woodknoll Way, and charged, pelting each other with so many airsoft pellets that the gutters ran neon yellow and green, as if the roads of northeast Sacramento had been drenched by psychedelic rain. Other kids wanted in. Soon there were five to a side, then ten, running kamikaze charges at each other from opposite ends of the street.
There was no strategy at first, then it was just that if you got hit you were out, but how could you prove someone got hit? Arguments broke out, so it grew more intense, then became refereed by a set of unwritten and eagerly disputed rules, veritable conventions at the summit of Woodknoll Way, where two dozen arguing kids hammered out the finer points of make-believe warfare, all in an attempt to even the scales and maintain some sense of fairness. This became especially necessary because Alek began bringing firepower other kids couldn’t compete with. One day he came out to fight with what Spencer figured must be a $150 replica Colt 1911 gas-blowback CO2-powered pistol. Alek could fire rounds at 350 feet per second, so the other kids were diving behind cars and tumbling into hedges while Alek strafed the neighborhood like a pint-sized Tony Montana. Order had to be restored. So they started dividing up teams according to quality of equipment. Alek would be paired with