My brother Zeb, three years older than me and in high school by now, pedals while I hold tight to his belt loops. It’s my bike he’s riding, used to be his before he handed it down to me last summer. He takes us through the field and pedals into the neighborhood where the houses are tall and the lawns take up a whole block of land. He slams the brakes on the bike, hops off, lets it fall. “Come on,” he says. He stretches his arm out behind him for me to hold his hand. We walk to the side of the house, climb the stairs to the back deck, and he hands me the greasy thick gel, tells me to slather it on. “No gloves, we’re pros,” he says. We leave no prints, no evidence. He tells me to slip through the barely open window. I’m small enough, and my body is limber and lithe, even for a kid my age. I slip like a penny into a bank, like a rabbit into a hole, and I drop down into another world, furniture I never did see before—dark, heavy wood bed, chest of drawers, shining oak floors—and the sunlight has all day been fingering its way between the gap in the closed curtains making the wood smell the way only wood smells in the heat, something smoldering.
