LITMIR.BIZ

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cave was now directly in the avatar’s path. There was no other way around it. Whatever was hidden inside was probably going to be worth it.

      IT WAS my mother’s treasures, her silver necklaces and gaudy rings, their shiny symbolism, the way many of them were handed down through the maternal line, the way these symbols could make up a home and present a family history with more than one plotline—it was their complexity I craved each time I urged my PlayStation avatar to open another treasure chest, to sink deeper into the cave with its quivering stalactites.

      When I was nine, these treasures had taken on a literal quality that I could never quite shake from my mind. My family and I were on a soon-to-be-condemned pier. We were on vacation in Florida. The pier shook each time the tide slapped its splintering pillars. There was a groaning as the water made contact with its rusted metal joint bars. My father ruffled my hair. I threw a plastic Coke bottle into the water, and inside that bottle was a message.

       Dear Pirate,

       How are you? It’s nice to meet you even if I don’t know who you are. I’d like to know you, so please write back. Also, if you could, please send me treasure.

       Your friend Garrard

      We arrived back at our house, exhausted from a ten-hour car ride, to find a yellowed piece of notebook paper taped to the front door, a map of our yard with a giant X where the note claimed a pirate named Lonzo had buried his treasure. My mother feigned shock, pressing her fingertips to her cheeks and leaving ten red marks on her face after she dropped her arms. “This is wild,” she said. “This is just so wild.” My father helped me carry a shovel from the garage to the spot in the yard Lonzo had marked on his map. The X was spray-painted in silver on the grass. Together, we pressed our tennis shoes to each of the shovel’s shoulders and dug into the hard-packed clay. Three feet deep, we found a box filled mostly with costume jewelry but also with real jewelry that I would later discover belonged to my grandmother, items for which she had no further use. She and my grandfather had arranged the whole thing on the night my mother called to tell them about the message in a bottle.

      After we ran water from a garden hose over the box, I kept the jewelry in the bottom drawer of my desk. I would take the shiny gold pieces out of the box and place as many of them as I could on my neck and wrists and stand in front of the mirror. Twirling. I did this again and again until my father walked in on me one day and told me I needed to stop, that Lonzo would feel sad if he saw me mocking his treasure that way.

      “I want to live with Lonzo,” I said. “I want to be a pirate.”

      “You probably wouldn’t like it,” my father said. “You’d have to mop the deck all day. He’d turn you into one of his slaves. You’d get sick of the water.”

      THE COLD FRONT from the night before brought severe wind gusts that sent sheets of water from my pressure washer over the tops of other cars, leaving water spots on their windshields, the drops fizzling and evaporating on contact with the roasting metal. I stepped out of the service garage, shielded my eyes, and stared at the long line of car windows I would now have to Windex. Behind me, one of my father’s employees was pressing the button to a hydraulic lift, and Chloe’s car was being lifted to the height of the man’s shoulders so he could begin replacing the oil. I was to drive her car back to her house later that afternoon, leave my car at the dealership overnight, and carry out the plan.

      Earlier that morning during Bible study, Brother Nielson had lingered in the showroom for a little longer than usual, holding himself upright with one hand on the side of the Mustang.

      “I keep wondering,” he said, as I passed by carrying a handful of car keys, “if you’re ever going to answer my question.” I couldn’t tell if he was trying to test me or if he seriously wanted to know what I thought about the Middle East, to know that the next generation was secure in its fight against terrorism.

      “Leave the boy alone,” Brother Hank said, sticking his head out of a nearby office.

      “He’s not old enough to care about politics. Girls are all he’s got on the brain right now.”

      “Girls, huh,” Brother Nielson said. “Nothing wrong with that.” He straightened his back as much as he could, wincing. “Just don’t forget there are bigger things in this world.”

      He stuck his hand out in front of my path, and I moved the keys to my other hand and clasped his in a firm handshake that grew firmer with each second until the grip was so severe I thought we might crack each other’s knuckles. His eyes stared directly into mine, full of some secret knowledge. I felt almost as though he could detect the contamination I had passed into my palm earlier that morning before the sun rose, as though the condom I had purchased from the gas station carried a hidden scent or an oil undetectable except by the most righteous of men.

      “We’re living in the End Times,” he said to me. “Stay sharp.”

      I SET the pressure washer down on the concrete, grabbed the Windex bottle and some paper towels, and walked onto the blacktop lot to tackle the line of water-spotted windshields. In the distance ahead I could see the pine trees on the hills begin to sway in the wind, and I was grateful for this, for the relief of the current as it swept past me, even though I knew it might increase the chances of sunburn, my SPF-40 lotion already washed away by the water, the tips of my fingers already pruned.

      I was on my fifth or sixth windshield when the woman approached me.

      “Excuse me?” she said, her smile blending into the glinting line of the windshield’s sun glare. “Can you tell me something about this car? I’m looking to buy soon, and I really have no idea.”

      I turned to face her. Her makeup was smeared along her dull-lidded eyes; she fidgeted with the black string of a purse draped haphazardly over one shoulder. The car in question was a standard Taurus, one among a long line of them. There seemed to be no reason for singling this one out. There seemed to be no reason for singling me out. I thought of something my father would say during Bible study: how every now and then God presented a moment of perfect opportunity. It was our job as Christians to seize that moment and lead one of His lost souls to salvation.

      The woman’s dented, hail-beaten Camry idled behind her, the driver’s-side door left open. I thought of saying, Ma’am, you look lost. I thought of saying, Ma’am, there is no neutral. I thought of how happy it would make my father if I was able to tell him I’d ministered to my first customer. But I couldn’t do it. Her question had been so direct, so real, that to dodge it felt like a betrayal.

      “There’s nothing wrong with a good Taurus,” I said. “Dependable. Fairly decent mileage. They hardly ever wear out on you if you take them in for tune-ups on time. But, you know, it’s just a Taurus.”

      She placed her hand on my forearm and smiled again. “You’re so kind,” she said. “You didn’t have to tell me the truth.”

      I wanted to fall against her chest and feel her arms wrap around my shoulders. I wanted to toss the paper towels and the Windex bottle on the asphalt, slide into her car, and disappear into the hills, then, whenever she wasn’t looking, toss the condom package out of the cracked window.

      “THIS IS SO WEIRD,” Chloe said. “Where did they get these creepy sound effects?”

      We watched as Janet Leigh stepped into the shower, her pale calf tensing. We knew what would happen next, but we held our breath. Though she didn’t need it, Chloe had applied extra foundation to her face, removing the shallow pockmarks where acne had once scarred her. She wore her hair down. We had both dressed for the occasion. I wore a black button-down and a light jacket that I had waited to remove until I was in the doorway. Chloe wore a dress I’d never seen before. If her mother thought there was anything strange about our outfits, she never said so.

      We sat on the couch in her basement in front of the blue light of the television. Occasionally, Brandon would sneak down the stairs and hide behind the couch, jumping out to scare us.

      “You’re too old for that,” Chloe said,

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