“No. It’s—I burned myself.”
“On what?”
“Dad, just don’t—”
Remy sits up taller. He tries to focus. “Wait—in your room? You burned yourself in your room?” He reaches for Hadrian’s arm, but the twelve-year-old pulls away.
“Dad,” his son hisses, meaning, Don’t do this here.
Remy looks around. People are looking at them. Remy has a moment of clarity, seeing himself through their eyes, a Black man and his son eating in an otherwise white restaurant at an expensive hotel.
Remy calms himself down, calls the waiter over. “Just put it on room three forty,” he says.
The waiter asks if he wants the pancakes to go. Remy shakes his head. Across from him, Hadrian has taken out his phone and is staring at it intently. Remy stands.
“We should get to the capitol,” he says. “Let’s hit the room and head over.”
They ride up in the elevator with an elderly white couple. Hadrian stays glued to his phone. When they reach the room, Remy swipes his card, stepping back to let Hadrian enter first, but when the boy steps into the room, Remy grabs his arm and raises it, pulling back his sleeve before Hadrian can stop him.
The Band-Aids peel back. Underneath is a deep scratch, running across his son’s left wrist. It has a slightly downward trajectory, as if something sharp has been drawn across it and in toward the body.
“What did you do?” Remy says, suddenly terrified. His son tries to pull away, but Remy won’t let him.
“Stop.”
“How did you do this? Did you cut yourself?”
“Dad, stop!” Hadrian pulls his arm away, runs for the bathroom. Remy chases after him, grabs the door just as Hadrian swings it shut. They struggle over it, but Remy has the power of primal fear on his side, and he pulls the door out of his son’s hands. It bangs against the wall. Remy puts his heel against it.
“Talk,” he shouts.
For a moment it looks like Hadrian will hit him, but then his own fear kicks in. He backs away, a child once more. He looks around wildly for a place to hide, jams himself between the toilet and the wall, knees to his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Seeing him there, cowering, cornered, Remy feels the blood leave his body. The adrenaline that was driving him collapses, and he too goes to his knees, scrambling across the bathroom to reach his son.
“Baby,” he says, “what did you do?”
Then he sees the bloody tissue in the trash can and the broken drinking glass and he understands.
“I’m sorry,” Hadrian says. “It hurt, and I got scared.”
“But why? Why would you?”
Hadrian pulls out his phone, his hands trembling, and holds it up. There in his message app, Remy sees the group chat, a dozen of Hadrian’s friends, text bubble stacked upon text bubble, and each one says the same thing.
A11
Simon
Sheriff Roy’s Holy Detention Center in Reeves County, Texas, was built in a sandy depression between two buttes. To reach the top of the northern butte from the road, you have to pull off at an unmarked gate and drive a winding deer path through a dry wash and low bramble until you can’t drive anymore, then abandon your car and head out on foot, which, on a 104-degree August day, means tying a T-shirt around your head and soaking it with water. It takes Simon and the others just under three hours to reach the crest. Flagg, in his leather duster, is sweating like a waterfall. Tiny lizards scramble in his shadow. Tarantulas creep through the dust, slow-motion-hair hands hungry for meat.
Louise, Duane, and Cyclops have stayed behind with the van, hiding in its growing afternoon shade. Overhead, the sun is swollen, angry, bleaching the bones of the living and the dead. When they reach high ground, Flagg lies on his stomach on the stony ridge. Simon, covered in sticker burrs, lies beside him, his face filthy, fingernails caked with dirt. The Prophet sits cross-legged beside them, his clothes clean, his face sweat free. Picking nettles from his ankles, fingertips stinging, Simon begins to wonder if Paul the Prophet really has been sent by God. He is, as they say, beginning to believe. Maybe, like the Prophet said, he can worship God and reason at the same time. Who says it has to be one or the other? Who says God didn’t create the universe and science, and so disrespecting science is disrespecting God?
Next to him, Flagg peers through a high-powered rifle scope （$129.99） he stole from Walmart.
“Looks like three Quonset huts and a double-wide,” he says. “Ten-foot razor wire all around with a single gated checkpoint. I count two deputies in the booth and four county vehicles.”