The heat was getting bad and Jill's house -- an oven in the summer -- didn't have air conditioning. I was rocking back and forth on the worn-out sofa, Jill was lounging in an armchair and Nate, her neighbor, was kneeling alone in front of the television, messing with the channels because the remote was lost. The cramped darkness of the living room had settled like a wool blanket.

The heat made my left hand throb. That's the one I broke playing defensive end my freshman year. Haven't played any sports since. Just didn't feel like it, I guess.

Nate looked at us.

"Want this one?" he said. The color was a little silvery, but you could definitely see arms and bathing suits and faces and shiny skin moving around in a blue lake in the jungle -- a different climate than the oppressive midwestern heat wave that comes to Butterfield every year.

Nate stood up and backed over to the sofa, eyes on the screen. He sat next to me. All our eyes were attached to the lovely faces and bodies and blue water with fingers of sunlight in it.

My mind drifted away from the heat for a while, and I just got lost in the slow images, forgetting about the crummy table the TV was on and the dead color of the wall behind it.

Then I snapped back to reality and glanced at the other two. My cellmates.

I studied Jill from the side with my head tilted at a convenient angle. It wasn't the first time. She had a young face for 16, with some freckles and a light sunburn, all framed by pretty straw-brown hair that hadn't been cut in months. She had long legs, now curled to her chest. I knew high school was going to be the high-water mark for her. She didn't have any special talents, so it looked like downhill from where we were.

Nowhere. Initiative was sort of a distant concept to me. I was looking out the prison window and thinking about taking off my shirt when the phone rang.

"C'you get that?" said Jill, crossing her legs.

"Yeah?" I greeted the caller.

"Yeah, who's this?"

"Mitch. Who's this?"

"Eric. Larry there? Wait, this is Jill's house, right?" Eric was 17, a year older than me. We were slightly close because he was my second cousin, and sometimes we talked.

"Yeah. Jill's" I said. "Larry's not here ... and I haven't seen him. Why?"

"Ah. Never mind." He was in a hurry to go. "Look, call me if he shows up."

"Yeah I w--" He hung up. A little rudely, I thought at the time, but I guess he was just nervous.

"Eric Reed, looking for Larry Chandler," I told Nate and Jill. Nate burned a hateful, private glance into the air because he couldn't stand Larry. Nate spent a lot of time alone and didn't get along well with people. His hair was black, his eyes too wide and his hands had a habit of snatching at things in a confrontational way.

We watched some more TV and stuck to the furniture. I had a vague urge to leave but there was just no place to go and nothing to look at in Butterfield other than Jill. The movie about sexy people in a jungle lake ended, and a talk show came on.

After a while, the phone rang again. Jill flashed her green eyes at me, and I grabbed the receiver.

"Yeah?"

"Mitch?" It was Eric again.

"Yeah."

"You didn't see Larry, did you?"

"No. What you want him for?"

"Um ... he's in trouble with the police. Or, he will be if they catch him."

I separated myself from the sofa. "Why? He hurt somebody?"

"Well, um, I'm seriously not sure. Something bad happened between him and some girl from Woodleigh Hills. Down at the river. I'm trying to find where he's at." Eric stopped for a second. "We're getting out of here, man."

"What's that mean?" I asked. His last sentence got my complete attention.

"Well, uh, we're just gonna get out of here. We had something worked out in advance -- I just hope Larry sticks to it." I got the idea that Eric had been waiting to spit it out. "He's supposed to be here around four, and we're just gonna go. We're driving to New York, hooking up with some people there, uhhhh, I think to New Orleans, then I think California to hook up with some girl Larry knows. Then at the end of the year, we're going back to New York for 2000. That's gonna be the party. The. Party. And we're never coming back here."

He quit talking. I was pretty tense, waiting to see if he would say it.

"Hey," he finally asked, "want to come with us?"

"Yeah," I said evenly, "I guess."

"Okay. Just get over here at four if you want to go. Bring some money. And clothes."

He hung up. My watch said three twenty.

I stared at the TV.

"Eric and Larry are going to New York and California in half an hour," I said. "They're not coming back and I guess I'm going with them. Want to come?"

I said it to both of them, but it was more of an invitation to Jill, who was resting her chin on her knees, than it was to Nate, who was simple, like a reptile. She hunched her bare shoulders and looked away from me into the TV, thinking. When she put her hand through her hair without realizing it, I knew she would never say yes -- she was popular in high school, and she didn't want to give it up. She was aware of a hollow destiny waiting for her no matter what she did, and she wasn't about to leave center stage voluntarily.

She shook her head resentfully.

I'd assumed that Nate, who didn't enjoy the company of other people and was lucky we acknowledged his existence, would decline automatically. But I guess getting out of Butterfield was more important to him than keeping to himself. Maybe he was trying to escape his own destiny.

"Sure, I'll go." He said it casually. I wanted to kill him.

"Well, uh, actually," I said, "there's enough guys going now, so it was just open to girls."

A dark flicker came into his eyes like a panther that somebody left in a cage to starve. Then the flicker dwindled away. He understood, but I could still sense a deep simmering fury inside him. I felt bad but I didn't want him to come along -- although I was unhappy leaving him alone with Jill, who seemed a little angry at me for some reason, like I was deserting her or something.

I took a last, complete look at her before I got up and walked out the front door.

It took me 10 or 12 minutes to walk to my house and few more to avoid my mother's niggling complaints. I wanted to see my sister and tell her a quick goodbye because she'd probably end up crying a lot, but she wasn't home. So I went up to my room and shut the door.

I had a hundred dollars left from my gas-station job before I quit and I threw it along with some clothes into a duffel bag.

"Mitchell," my mother was yelling, "you're gonna fix the stove, aren't you?"

"When I get back ..." I screamed.

I studied myself in the mirror. Maybe I would dye my blonde hair dark in New York. I wanted to go to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, which I'd heard things about.

In a hurry, I got out of the house and started walking. Above the buildings cluttering the base of the sky I saw mountains. By the time the sun touched them, I'd be gone.

I wanted to learn how to surf in California -- I hoped I could buy a board for a hundred dollars. The afternoon was ending and so was the heat. All my joints had been locked up but now I could move again. It seemed like I was as close to the sky as I was to the ground.

Eric's house was dead. His driveway was empty. It was only about five minutes past four, but I guess they left right on time. The heat returned with it the humidity and the throbbing in my hand. Even worse, I felt sick to my stomach.

I kicked around on the lawn until Eric's dad got home and asked what I was doing and if I'd seen Eric. I told him I hadn't and left reluctantly, no real destination in mind. I guess I wandered for a while ... thinking how Nate's eyes had burned ... until I found myself in front of Jill's house again.