The sky was so low it seemed to be sitting right on top of downtown Hawkins. The world whipped past me as I clattered along the sidewalk. I skated faster, listening to the wheels whispering on concrete, then thudding over the cracks. It was a chilly afternoon, and the cold made my ears hurt. It had been chilly every day since we’d rolled into town three days ago.

I kept looking up, expecting to see the bright sky of San Diego. But here, everything was pale and gray, and even when it wasn’t overcast, the sky looked colorless. Hawkins, Indiana: home of low gray clouds and quilted jackets and winter.

Home of…me.

Main Street was all tricked out for Halloween, with storefronts full of grinning pumpkins. Fake spiderwebs and paper skeletons were taped in the windows of the super-market. All down the block, lampposts were wrapped in black-and-orange streamers fluttering in the wind.

I’d spent the afternoon at the Palace Arcade, playing Dig Dug until I ran out of quarters. Because my mom didn’t like me wasting money on video games, back home in California I’d mostly only gotten to play when I’d been with my dad. He’d take me to the bowling alley with him, or sometimes the laundry, which had Pac-Man and Galaga. And I sometimes hung out at the Joy Town Arcade at the mall, even though it was a total rip-off and full of metalheads in ratty jeans and leather jackets. They had Pole Position, though, which was better than any other racing game and had a steering wheel like you were actually driving.

The arcade in Hawkins was a big, low-roofed building with neon signs in the windows and a bright yellow awning (but under the colored lights and the paint, it was just aluminum siding). They had Dragon’s Lair and Donkey Kong, and Dig Dug, which was my best game.

I’d been hanging out there all afternoon, running up the score on Dig Dug, but after I entered my name in the number-one spot and I didn’t have any more quarters, I started to feel antsy, like I needed to move, so I left the arcade and skated downtown to take a tour of Hawkins.

I pushed myself faster, rattling past a diner and a hardware store, a Radio Shack, a movie theater. The theater was small, like it might only have one screen, but the front was glitzy and old-fashioned, with a big marquee that stuck out like a battleship covered in lights.

The only time I really liked to sit still was at the movies. The newest poster out front was for The Terminator, but I’d already seen it. The story was pretty good. This killer robot who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger travels back in time from the future to kill this waitress named Sarah Connor. At first she just seems kind of normal, but she turns out to be a total badass. I liked it, even though it wasn’t a real monster movie, but something about it also made me feel weirdly disappointed. None of the women I knew were anything like Sarah Connor.

I was zipping past the pawn shop now—past a furniture store, past a pizza place with a red-and-green-striped awning—when something small and dark darted across the sidewalk in front of me. In the gray afternoon light, it looked like a cat, and I just had time to think how weird that was, how you’d never see a cat in downtown San Diego, before my feet went out from under me.

I was used to wiping out, but still, that split second of a fall was always disorienting. When I lost my balance, it felt like the whole world had flipped over and skidded out from under me. I hit the ground so hard I felt the thump in my teeth.

I’d been skating since forever—since my best friend, Nate Walker, and his brother Silas took a trip to Venice Beach with their parents when we were in the third grade and came back all jazzed up on stories about the Z-Boys and the skate shops in Dogtown. I’d been skating since the day I found out about grip tape and Madrid boards and rode down Sunset Hill for the first time and learned what it felt like to go so fast your heart raced and your eyes watered.

The sidewalk was cold. For a second, I lay flat on my stomach, with a thudding hollow in my chest and pain zinging up my arms. My elbow had punched through the sleeve of my sweater and the palms of my hands felt raw and electric. The cat was long gone.

I had rolled over and was trying to sit up when a thin, dark-haired woman came hurrying out of one of the stores. It was almost as surprising as a cat in the business district. No one in California would have come running out just to see if I was okay, but this was Indiana. My mom had said that people would be nicer here.

The woman was already kneeling next to me on the concrete with big, nervous eyes. I was bleeding a little where my elbow had gone through my sleeve. My ears were ringing.

She leaned close, looking worried. “Oh, your arm, that must hurt.” Then she looked up, staring into my face. “Do you scare easily?”

I just stared back. No, I wanted to say, and that was true in all kinds of ways. I wasn’t scared of spiders or dogs. I could walk along the boardwalk alone in the dark or skateboard in the wash in flood season and never worry that a murderer was going to jump out at me or that a sudden deluge of water would come rushing down to drown me. And when my mom and my stepdad said we were moving to Indiana, I packed some socks and underwear and two pairs of jeans in my backpack and headed for the bus station alone to escape to LA. It was a total trip to ask a stranger if they got scared. Scared of what ?

For a second I just sat in the middle of the sidewalk with my elbow stinging and my palms raw and gritty, squinting at her. “What?”

She reached out to brush gravel off my hands. Hers were thinner and tanner than mine, with dry, cracked knuckles and bitten fingernails. Next to them, mine looked pale, covered in freckles.

She was watching me in a quick, nervous way, like I was the one acting weird. “I just wondered if you scar easily. Sometimes fair skin does. You should put Bactine on that to keep it from getting infected.”

“Oh.” I shook my head. The palms of my hands still felt like they were full of tiny sparks. “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

She leaned closer and was about to say something else when suddenly her eyes got even bigger and she froze. We both looked up as the air was split by the roar of an engine.

A swimming-pool-blue Camaro came bombing through the stoplight at Oak Street and snarled up to the curb. The woman whipped around to see what the trouble was, but I already knew.

My stepbrother, Billy, was leaning back in the driver’s seat with his hand draped lazily on the wheel. I could hear the blare of his music through the closed windows.

Even from the sidewalk, I could see the light glinting off Billy’s earring. He was watching me in the flat, empty way he always did—heavy-lidded, like I made him so bored he could barely stand it—but under that was a glittering edge of something dangerous. When he looked at me like that, my face wanted to flush bright red or crumple. I was used to how he looked at me, like I was something he wanted to scrape off him, but it always seemed worse when he did it in front of someone else—like this nice, nervous woman. She looked like someone’s mom.

I scrubbed my stinging hands on the thighs of my jeans before bending down to get my board.

He let his head flop back, his mouth open. After a second, he leaned across the seat and rolled down the window.

The stereo thumped louder, Quiet Riot pounding out into the chilly air. “Get in.”

---

Once, for two weeks back in April, I thought that Camaro was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It had a long, hungry body like a shark, all sleek painted panels and sharp angles. It was the kind of car you could rob a bank in.

Billy Hargrove was fast and hard-edged, like the car. He had a faded denim jacket and a face like a movie star.

Back then, he wasn’t Billy yet, just this hazy idea I had about what my life was going to be like. His dad, Neil, was going to marry my mom, and when we all moved in together, Billy was going to be my brother. I was excited to have a family again.

After the divorce, my dad had hightailed it to LA, so I mostly only saw him on second-rate holidays, or when he was down in San Diego for work and my mom couldn’t think up a reason not to let me.

My mom was still around, of course, but in a thin, floaty way that was hard to get a hold on. She’d always been a little blurry around the edges, but once my dad was out of the picture, it got worse. It was kind of tragic how easily she disappeared into the personality of every guy she dated.

There was Donnie, who was on disability for his back and couldn’t bend down to take out the trash. He made us Bisquick pancakes on the weekends and told terrible jokes, and then one day he ran off with a waitress from IHOP.

After Donnie, there was Vic from St. Louis, and Gus with one green eye and one blue one, and Ivan, who picked his teeth with a folding knife.

Neil was different. He drove a tan Ford pickup and his shirts were ironed and his mustache made him look like some kind of army sergeant or park ranger. And he wanted to marry my mom.

The other guys had been losers, but they were temporary losers, so I never really minded them. Some of them were goofy or friendly or funny, but after a while, the bad stuff always piled up. They were behind on their rent, or they’d total their cars, or they’d get drunk and wind up in county.

They always left, and if they didn’t, my mom kicked them out. I wasn’t heartbroken. Even the best ones were kind of embarrassing. None of them were cool like my dad, but mostly they were okay. Some of them were even nice.

Like I said, Neil was different.

She met him at the bank. She was a teller there, sitting behind a smudgy window, handing out deposit slips and giving lollipops to little kids. Neil was a guard, standing all day by the double doors. He said she looked like Sleeping Beauty sitting there behind the glass, or like an old-timey painting in a frame. The way he said it, the idea was supposed to sound romantic, but I couldn’t see how. Sleeping Beauty was in a coma. Paintings in frames weren’t interesting or exciting—they were just stuck there.

The first time she had him over for dinner, he brought flowers. None of the other ones had ever brought flowers. He told her the meat loaf was the best meat loaf he’d ever had, and she smiled and blushed and glanced sideways at him. I was glad she’d stopped crying over her last boyfriend—a carpet salesman with a comb-over and a wife he hadn’t told her about.

A few weeks before school let out for the summer, Neil asked my mom to marry him. He bought her a ring and she gave him the extra key to the house. He showed up when he felt like it, bringing flowers or getting rid of throw pillows and pictures he didn’t like, but he didn’t come over after ten and he never spent the night. He was too much of a gentleman for that— old-fashioned, he said. He liked clean counters and family dinners. The little gold engagement ring made her happier than I’d seen her in a long time, and I tried to be happy for her.

Neil had told us he had a son in high school, but that was all he said about him. I figured he would be some preppie football type, or else maybe a younger copy of Neil. I wasn’t picturing Billy.

The night we finally met him, Neil took us out to Fort Fun, which was a go-kart track near my house where the surf rats went with their girlfriends to eat funnel cakes and play air hockey and Skee-Ball. It was the kind of place that guys like Neil would never be caught dead in. Later, I figured out that he was trying to make us think he was fun.

Billy was late. Neil didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was mad. He tried to act like everything was fine, but his fingers left dents in his foam Coke cup. My mom fidgeted with a paper napkin while we waited, wadding it up and then tearing it into little squares.

I pretended that maybe it was all a big scam and Neil didn’t even have a son. It was the kind of thing that was always happening in horror movies—the guy made up a whole fake life and told everyone about his perfect house and his perfect family, but actually he lived in a basement, eating cats or something.

I didn’t really think it was the truth, but I imagined it anyway, because it was better than watching him glare out at the parking lot every two minutes and then smile tightly at my mom.

The three of us were working our way through a game of mini golf when Billy finally showed up. We were on the tenth hole, standing in front of a painted windmill the size of a garden shed and trying to get the ball past the turning sails.

When the Camaro roared into the parking lot, the engine was so loud that everyone turned to look. He got out, letting the door slam shut behind him. He had on his jean jacket and engineer boots, and raddest of all, he had an earring. Some of the older boys at school wore boots and jean jackets, but none of them had an earring. With his mop of sprayed hair and his open shirt, he looked like the metalheads at the mall, or David Lee Roth or someone else famous.

He came over to us, cutting straight through the mini- golf course.

He stepped over a big plastic turtle and onto the fake green turf.

Neil watched with the tight, sour look he always did when something wasn’t up to his standards. “You’re late.”

Billy just shrugged. He didn’t look at his dad.

“Say hello to Maxine.”

I wanted to tell Billy that wasn’t my name—I hated when people called me Maxine—but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered. Neil always called me that, no matter how many times I told him to stop.

Billy gave me this slow, cool nod, like we already knew each other, and I smiled, holding my putter by its sweaty rubber handle. I was thinking how much cooler this was going to make me. How jealous Nate and Silas would be. I was getting a brother, and it was going to change my life.

Later, the two of us hung out by the Skee-Ball stalls while Neil and my mom walked down along the boardwalk together. It was getting kind of annoying, how they were always all gooey at each other, but I fed quarters into the slot and tried to ignore it. She seemed really happy.

Skee-Ball was on a raised concrete deck above the go-kart track. From the railing, you could look down and watch the cars go zooming around in a figure eight.

Billy leaned his elbows on the railing with his hands hanging loose and casual in front of him and a cigarette balanced between his fingers. “Susan seems like a real buzzkill.”

I shrugged. She was fussy and nervous and could be no fun sometimes, but she was my mom.

Billy looked out over the track. His eyelashes were long, like a girl’s, and I saw for the first time how heavy his eyelids were. That was the thing that I would come to learn about Billy, though—he never really looked awake, except…sometimes. Sometimes his face went suddenly alert, and then you had no idea what he was going to do or what was going to happen next.

“So. Maxine.” He said my name like some kind of joke. Like it wasn’t really my name.

I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed a ball into the corner cup for a hundred points. The machine under the coin slot whirred and spit out a paper chain of tickets. “Don’t call me that. It’s Max or nothing.”

Billy glanced back at me. His face was slack. Then he smiled a sleepy smile. “Well. You’ve got a real mouth on you.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. “Only when people piss me off.”

He laughed, and it was low and gravelly. “Mad Max. All right, then.”

Out in the parking lot, the Camaro was sitting under a streetlight, so blue it looked like a creature from another world. Some kind of monster. I wanted to touch it.

Billy had turned away again. He was leaning on the rail with the cigarette in his hand, watching the go-karts as they zoomed along the tire-lined track.

I sent the last ball clunking into the one-hundred cup and took my tickets. “You want to race?”

Billy snorted and took a drag off the cigarette. “Why would I want to screw around with some little go-kart when I know how to drive?”

“I know how to drive too,” I said, even though it wasn’t exactly true. My dad had taught me how to use the clutch once in the parking lot at Jack in the Box.

Billy didn’t even blink. He tipped his head back and blew out a plume of smoke. “Sure you do,” he said. He looked blank and bored under the flashing neon lights, but he sounded almost friendly.

“I do. As soon as I’m sixteen, I’m going to get a Barracuda and drive all the way up the coast.”

“A ’Cuda, huh? That’s a lot of horsepower for a little kid.”

“So? I can handle it. I bet I could even drive your car.”

Billy stepped closer and leaned down so he was staring right into my face. He smelled sharp and dangerous, like hair stuff and cigarettes. He was still smiling.

“Max,” he said in a sly, singsong voice. “If you think you’re getting anywhere near my car, you are extremely mistaken.” But he was smiling when he said it. He laughed again, pinching the end of his cigarette and tossing it away. His eyes were bright.

And I’d figured it was all a big goof, because it was just how guys like that talked. The slackers and the lowlifes my dad knew—all the ones who hung out at the Black Door Lounge down the street from his apartment in East Hollywood. When they made jokes about Sam Mayfield’s daredevil daughter or teased me about boys, they were only playing.

Billy was looming over me, studying my face. “You’re just a kid,” he said again. “But I guess even kids can tell a bitchin’ ride when they see one, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

And I’d actually been dumb enough to believe that this was the start of something good. That the Hargroves were here to make everything better—or at least okay. That this was family. jjkW8CXIITH2qwboJSUs2I2e8+RepYJHO24CT31CFbdOgItrSI67g5M1VKN9RYmB