Then I went forward again, my legs shaky, my whole body, actually, trembling. I didn’t know what I would find around that next corner. Whatever it would be, I knew it wasn’t good. Will had sounded vengeful, furious. Still, I couldn’t turn away. It took me a minute to make sense of what I was seeing. There were two shapes in the night-dark alley, but three voices. There was the sound of someone—a man—begging for mercy and sniveling in pain; there was a girl’s voice, crying; and there was Will, unleashing a string of curses, a tirade of anger in which the ferocious tone of his voice carried more meaning than the sum of his words. The girl was folded into a ball against the far wall of the alley; she huddled as if she were in an earthquake drill, her head between her knees and her arms up over her head. Across from her, Will dominated the man, who was sprawled on the ground. Will’s whole energy seemed to have expanded, and he rained punches down on the man’s prone figure—his head, his chest—like a monster or an angered god.
