Piggy tore his hand through his hair. “Mr. Cillo and my father are friends. You can’t libel the man.”
“You mean slander. If you wrote ‘Mr. Cillo was twiddling his daughters’ in the newspaper, that would be libel,” Louis said.
Piggy flicked Louis’s temple.
“Does it matter?” Kyle called into the chasm.
The boys stared at Kyle’s back. The cicadas had gone silent, and the air fell thick between them.
“I believe it matters,” Ben said.
Kyle turned, his face in profile, hooked nose dipping down, lips curled up into a smile.
“If Mr. Cillo caused pain, enough pain to make his own daughters kill themselves?” Ben said. “I think something needs to be done.”
“Done about what?” Eddie stood dripping behind them. He had scaled up at a sharp angle and climbed up unseen from a skinny ledge behind.
Ben dropped his eyes; the others looked down and away. Kyle rose, shaking out his bones like an older man, tore his towel from the ground, and approached Eddie, whose square chest heaved from the climb. He handed him the towel. “We were saying something needs to be done about this place. It ought to be memorialized. It’s sacred ground.”
“You think so, huh?” Eddie panted. “I don’t agree. I think it’s crap.”
“But it feels wrong for people to be getting their kicks out of this place,” Ben rushed, hating himself for acting like they weren’t talking about what they were talking about. “And we can’t be here every day, like guards, can we?”
Eddie blotted his bad hand with the towel. The plastic bag was gone, and the bandages hung like the end of a soggy Q-tip. He dropped the towel to the ground and lined up for another dive. The sun broke violently through the haze and left them exposed; everyone but Eddie shaded their eyes and drew on baseball hats.
Eddie faced the water. “I suppose that depends on whether you guys feel like you owe them something or not.”
Piggy waited for the splash before charging toward Ben, his finger pointed. “You know what we don’t owe them? Dragging their father’s good name through the mud. I don’t want nothing to do with that. I’m outta here.” Piggy scraped up his blanket, hooked his fingers inside the plastic loops on his personal six-pack, and headed for the clearing. Louis stood behind, working his lips like he was trying to swallow something bitter.
“Go ahead, say what you have to say,” Ben said.
“Piggy’s right. You’ve got to give up this idea. It’s just”—Louis shook his head—“sick.” He threw his pack on his back and stalked away.
Ben turned to face Kyle. “You leaving too?”
Kyle shook his shaggy head. “No place else I need to be.” He swept up his towel from where Eddie had dropped it, returned to the tip, and spread it on the ground. He settled, facing out at the water, his long legs dangling over the side. He patted the towel beside him.
Ben eased himself down carefully next to Kyle, tucking his legs beneath him. The tip had never bothered Ben before; heights didn’t get to Ben, though he never hung out for very long at the tip, always dove fast, like something was at his back (after the time Francesca followed him in, it was always like that). Clouds appeared and cast a black pall on the surface, and Ben shivered. Together they watched Eddie do a compact backstroke, the water around him swirling, melted crayon wax, purple and black.
Eddie’s backstroke turned into a free-float. Kyle pointed. “You see that? He looks natural. Peaceful even.”
Ben wanted to say there was nothing natural about diving over and over like a robot with a banged-up hand. Ben tried to look more closely. He thought maybe he could see Eddie’s eyes, fixed on the sky, not slitted mean, like when he talked to Ben and the other boys on the ledge, but wide and searching, trying to find Connie among the clouds. For a second, Ben could tell himself that Eddie was fine, they were all fine.
“He does look peaceful,” Ben said.
“Don’t be fooled. There’s nothing peaceful about him. He’s in hell, dude.”
Ben frowned. “Obviously. I was just saying.”
“And he’ll be in hell a lot longer if you keep calling his uncle Chester the Molester.”
“But what if it’s true?”
Kyle gazed at Eddie, floating on his back, his hand a white blur at his side. “Those girls did something incredibly stupid and dangerous. And they had a terrible accident. And from that, you get that their father was abusing them?”
“I’m saying something was so bad in that house those girls decided to creep off in the middle of the night to do something they had to know might get them killed.”
Kyle made a scoffing noise.
“Think about it. Even if it was an accident—” said Ben.
“Was an accident?” Kyle said.
“Even if it was. You don’t play fast and loose with your life like that unless you don’t have much to live for,” Ben said.
“How about the fact that their cousin keeled?” Kyle asked.
“People die.” Ben waved to Eddie. “It happens. It doesn’t mean you decide you don’t want to live anymore either.”
“You ever hear of depression?”
“This is different. I know their father had something to do with it.”
“But you don’t know what that something was.”
Ben shifted and faced Kyle, sending shards of mica over the side and floating down to the water. “What else could be that bad?”
“Have you ever considered that we may never know?”
Ben clawed the ground, scraping for something to throw into the water, hard. The rock cut his fingers, and he wiped streaks of blood on his bathing suit, resentful. Usually Kyle was solid. He was close with Eddie, too, but their families’ bad blood was like an invisible barrier that kept them from getting too close. Kyle had been Ben’s protector, was the one he could count on to clock anyone who mentioned Coach Freck and Ben in the same sentence. Less so now, since Ben had gotten so big and his shame had faded, but he knew Kyle still had his back, if he needed him. Yet here he was, staying behind to give him a lesson.
“Maybe we won’t know,” Ben said finally, jamming his towel and a baseball hat hard into his nylon sack. “But if I could prove they were being abused, and if everyone knew they weren’t crazy, or stupid, it would make a difference.”
“It sure would.” Kyle stood, waving his arms in a lazy X over his head down to Eddie. “It would cast a pox on Eddie, and his parents. But for the Cillo girls? They’re gone. Least in the way you knew them. For them, it won’t change anything.”
Ben stood. “I gotta go. I got somewhere to be.”