They all laughed when the boy showed up on screen. They couldn’t help it. It was just so funny seeing him up there in his birthday suit. Never mind that he was crying, or that his eyes didn’t look right. His thing was out, tucked shyly between his legs, and it was just so funny. They rocked in their cheap plastic chairs, which had begun the day organized in tidy rows and were now spread helter skelter across the auditorium. Even Ms. Bell giggled, gripping the Bible in her lap, her fingers bruising the leather cover. Kids, teachers, parents, everyone joined in—everyone except Marcos Walker, who did his laughing on the inside where no one else could hear. He sat near the back, thirteen but slight enough to pass for eleven, his body teetering between frail and lean. He wore a pair of black cargo shorts that rode under his waist, an unattached pair of plain white headphones, and a red polo that he hated but his mother loved. She was coming. She’d said so in her last text message—meet you at school! She’d sent it to him that morning, before the morning ended.

  Before the dark.

  They’d been watching the slideshow, the one Mr. Vandegrift played for the eighth graders every May 31st, connecting his computer to a projector and turning one wall of the auditorium into a full-blown movie screen. Memory Day, he called it, and usually it was lame. But this year Marcos had been in it. And people had cheered. Actually cheered. Not just the teachers, either, who were required to cheer, but the other kids, too. When Marcos saw himself onscreen, walking down the hall with his headphones on, he’d been horrified. He’d felt like his skin was made of bugs, like his body wanted to dissolve and run away in a thousand crawling pieces, then he’d looked around and seen them clapping. For him.

  His mom hadn’t wanted him to get the headphones. She’d said they’d make him stick out, turn him into a joke. But the headphones helped. The headphones were ironic. They told people it was okay to laugh, and that was usually enough to make them not want to. More than anything, the headphones said it was okay to talk to him. A girl wearing headphones became an answering machine—I’m not here at the moment, try again later—but on Marcos the ‘phones were an invitation. They opened him up to conversation. He skipped lunch for two days and bought a pack of hot pink sticky notes for the little exchanges, the hellos that never got any further than hello. He’d slap them on kids’ backs in the hall and slip them across the aisle when the teacher wasn’t looking. Things like “hey fuck you” for guys and smiley faces for girls. Unless the girl was Amy Mellow. He was too scared to write anything to her. His proudest achievement with the notes came when Ms. Bell told him to remove his headphones and he handed her a note that said, “sorry can’t hear you.” That earned him a trip to Mr. Vandegrift, who shook Marcos’s hand like Marcos was the president. Mr. Vandegrift was cool. Mr. Vandegrift got it.

  The slideshow seemed to linger on Marcos forever, and maybe Mr. Vandegrift had rigged it that way; maybe he had known, somehow, that this was a moment Marcos wouldn’t want to end. At last the slide changed, and then something completely unexpected happened, something even better than the applause. Amy Mellow glanced at him over her shoulder, showing one light blue eye and a sliver of mouth, and she smiled.

  No, Memory Day had not been so bad.

  Not so bad at all.

  After the ceremony, the kids lined up to leave. Sixth graders first, seventh graders second, and eighth graders last. Mr. Vandegrift opened the wide, levered doors to the main hall, and the kids marched out in single file. Everyone talking. Nobody really paying attention. Summer was only a few days off, an open road stretching into the distance, and school was already sliding away in the rearview mirror. Marcos didn’t notice when the line stopped moving, was lost in his head, dreaming of clapping hands and secret half smiles. He bumped into the kid in front of him, but the kid didn’t react. Just staggered a step and stopped again. All the chatter had cut off, as neat and clean as a guillotine’s slice. Not a single mouth moved between Marcos and the doorway, which was crowded with bodies, all of them still. Statue children. Marcos wrote a question mark on a sticky note and handed it to the kid, whose name was Tyler or Terry. Tyler or Terry took the note, looked at it, and said, “They’re screaming. In the hall.”

  Marcos’s heart took off with a running start. He jotted, “Who?”

  “All of them, I think.”

  Some were still screaming as Mr. Vandegrift shepherded them back into the auditorium. Some were sobbing. Some were teachers. Mr. Duke, a grizzled old history nerd whose fingers were always stained white with chalk, crawled on his hands and knees, like a beaten dog. Snot-ropes swung wildly from Mrs. Lovegreen’s nose. A wave of unreality splashed over Marcos. It became difficult to stand up. Difficult to want to. He looked down, saw one of his headphones dangling by the cord and thought, that’s not where you belong, but he couldn’t seem to remember where exactly it did belong, so he left it alone. Miss Ferrell, who’d taught English to Marcos in sixth grade, helped Mr. Vandegrift guide kids back to their seats. She’d always been a cheerful woman, but now she was happy with an exclamation point, so happy it hurt. A grin cemented her mouth. Her eyes darted about like sunlight on running water, and her feet, propped up on painfully high heels, moved with frantic jerkiness.

  Soon everyone was seated again . . . well, nearly everyone. Mr. Duke stationed himself under his chair instead of on top, and several girls and boys formed a weepy group hug. As Miss Ferrell tried in vain to separate them, Mr. Vandegrift took to the stage. He was a short man—more than a few boys at school stood taller than him—but he was equipped with an easy air of confidence that added an extra foot to his frame. That self-assurance, so natural on him, so normal, slipped away with each slow, climbing step. By the time he reached the podium, he seemed someone else entirely, a stranger in Mr. Vandegrift’s clothes. He leaned over, and the mic covered his mouth as he spoke, stole all but two words.

  Son.

  Gone.

  But that made no sense. Mr. Vandegrift had no sons, was one of those replacement father types, doomed to love kids but never to have one of his own. Half the auditorium exploded: commotion, confusion, kicked-over chairs. The other half withdrew, faces like closed doors. Marcos pulled out his phone and stared at the text his mother had sent twenty minutes ago, at seven forty-three. Meet you at school! A strange chill came over him, as if the light spilling down from the fluorescents had turned to ice water. He walked to the stage, movement all around. Mr. Vandegrift was talking to Miss Ferrell, who seemed unable to stand still. He paused when Marcos stopped in front of them.

  “Whos son is gone?” Marcos scribbled.

  Mr. Vandegrift blinked. Shook his head. Softened. He flipped the note and responded in compact, careful handwriting: “Not son, Marcos. Sun.” Then he put a hand on Marcos’s shoulder and walked him out through the doors into the hall, where there were windows, where Marcos could see.

  Things got fuzzy after that. Marcos remembered going back into the auditorium, everything too bright, the way outside feels after leaving a matinee. He remembered feeling shivery cold one moment and feverishly hot the next. But mostly he remembered forgetting. Losing track of where he was. Who he was. It seemed there were two of him, one sitting in his chair and holding his phone, the other standing at the window in the hallway and staring out into the dark. Now and then these two versions would crash, and he’d come back to himself with a start, his heart lodged high up in his throat. His name kept wandering away from him until he got dizzy chasing it. Marcos. I’m Marcos, but my mom calls me Mark because Mark is safe, Mark blends in. That’s the first half. The other half is like that thing you do with your feet. A moving kind of thing, a walking kind of thing. Walker. That’s it. She got it from the dead guy in those car movies—she took one look at him and said you don’t get whiter than that dude. Paul. His name was Paul, and her name is Rita, but it used to be Isabella. Isabella Flowers, no no no, close but oh so far. Her name was Isabella Flores, and Paul Walker was always racing around out in the sun, and where is the sun, oh my God, Dios Mío, where is the sun? Brow sweat, cold. Skin flushed, hot. Standing at the window, sitting in the chair, dark sky, bright lights, around and around and around. He’d never moved so much while staying so still. He’d never felt such simple, overpowering contradiction. It was night. It was morning. It was night.

  For a nauseous, seesawing passage of time, he held onto his phone like it was a life raft, like he was lost at sea and it alone could keep him afloat. He stared at his mother’s last message, and every so often he almost—almost—brushed the keypad with his thumb. But he couldn’t write to her, wouldn’t know what to do if she didn’t write back. So he went on staring at the screen, waiting for the small text bubble to appear at the bottom and tell him she was still there, still on her way, still coming to meet him at school. He stared so hard he stopped blinking. His eyes began to burn, and he looked up through a watery lens to spot Amy Mellow a few rows ahead of him, hugging herself like someone stranded outside in the winter. She lived a few houses down the street from him, and sometimes at night he opened his window, imagined her voice coming to him in the dark. It would be soft and sweet, a voice like caramel as it melts in the mouth, and he would call back to her with a voice that wasn’t his voice but a good one, and it would be like they were together in the same room, talking. He could think of nothing better. Two voices meeting one another for the first time, that was music. Marcos got up from his seat. Walked over to her. Sat down. He picked up the stray earbud dangling over his chest, knew where it went now, and gently stuck it in her ear. She turned her head and looked at him.

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  “There’s nothing playing,” she said.

  “I know,” he wrote.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  She took his hand, and for a moment there was something playing. For a moment his heart was a song. They sat in silence, sharing his headphones, and it came to him that he wasn’t as scared. Not as much. Not anymore. Maybe being scared, he thought, was one of those things you weren’t meant to do alone.

  Others weren’t as lucky. One boy tried to escape while no one was looking, only he forgot to press down the bars to release the latch and ran headlong into the doors. The school nurse, Mr. Bartholomew, was too busy hyperventilating to be of help, so it fell on the lunch lady to hold a bag of ice to the boy’s head. A girl with short, spiky hair smashed her chair into plastic splinters and started cutting herself. She managed to draw a long furrow into her forearm before teachers wrestled the pieces away. The lunch lady, now on double duty, used a cloth to stop the bleeding and rocked the girl to sleep with one arm. There was a fistfight and a slap-fight, both equally violent. Then Mr. Vandegrift got cartoons running on the projector. Old stuff, like Looney Tunes and Dr. Seuss. He dimmed the lights just enough to make the characters pop, and all around the auditorium eyes lifted to the screen. T.V. was Tylenol P.M. for the soul. It tucked you in and laid all your thoughts to rest. Marcos didn’t watch. Didn’t feel the need, now that he had a hand to hold.

  At some point the doors swung open, and a woman staggered into the auditorium, hair over her face.

  Mom!

  Marcos started to get up, but the woman ran to a boy in the front row and began to hug and kiss him. The relief that had charged through Marcos tripped and stumbled, leaving him slack against his chair. So it went every time the doors opened and someone walked in, hope resurrecting itself briefly, painfully, only to die all over again. The parents who came for their kids occasionally left with them, but more often than not they took a seat on the floor and settled in, even those who didn’t live in town. Marcos thought he understood why. There was light in here. In here it wasn’t night. And maybe the parents stayed because of something to do with Holden itself, something they could feel. Holden was nothing but a few tightly spaced residential streets parked in the vast brown nowhere of western Nevada. It had a bite-sized grocery store, a pizza shop, and a big enclosed middle school—Heritage—that had survived in thanks to inter-district transfers and local donations. But while other communities dried up during the recession, Holden had limped on. The people who lived here lived here together, neighbors in a time when many had forgotten what it was to be a neighbor. This same auditorium moonlighted once a month as town hall and hosted smaller weekly affairs, like Mrs. Bell’s Bible Club and Bingo Night for the retired and bored. You couldn’t find work in Holden—work required you to get in your car and drive to South Point or Longview or even Las Vegas, if you were willing to get up early enough—but you could find home.

  You could find that.

  By noon (if there was still such a thing as noon), over a hundred bodies were packed into the auditorium. The temperature climbed. The stink of fear spoiled the air. Around two o’clock, another fight broke out over one of the auditorium’s few wall sockets. It could have passed for a drunken barroom brawl, if the participants weren’t children: eight or nine of them, kicking and punching and shoving while Bugs Bunny munched happily on a carrot. Mr. Vandegrift got a broken nose trying to break it up, and Miss Ferrell came out scratched and bleeding. They were the only authority figures left on the job. Mrs. Bell had married herself to her seat and Mr. Duke remained out of commission, holding the back of his neck like someone in an earthquake drill. Most of the staff had simply gone missing. Run off in search of their families, or just run off. Once things calmed down, Mr. Vandegrift deputized a handful of parents and gave them jobs. One man put a system in place so kids could take turns charging their phones. A few women acted as restroom escorts, accompanying students back and forth down the hall. Another guy guarded the doors. The lunch lady, relieved of nursing duty by an actual doctor, fired up the kitchen and soon the whole auditorium smelled like microwaved chicken patties and pizza. And fear. That stayed, too.

  “They say the sun is out in Russia,” Amy said. She balanced a paper plate in her lap while browsing Twitter with one hand (her other hand was still busy holding his). None of her calls to her dad had gone through, but the internet remained as surfable as ever. “They say it’s daylight there, even though it’s supposed to be dark. Look, there’s a video.”

  In the video, people walked about under enormous spired buildings. Above them rested a clean blue sky. The sight of it put an ache in Marcos’s chest.

  “We don’t even know”—he flipped the note over and finished on the back—“when that was recorded.”

  “An hour ago, they say.”

  “Uh huh,” Marcos wrote. “What else do they say?”

  She scrolled through her feed, then spoke again, hushed. He could tell by the way her lips barely moved. “This person says God is angry with us. That when the sun rises again, it will rise on judgment day.”

  Marcos mimed a yawn.

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “My mom does.”

  “But you don’t?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes. Maybe. What else?”

  “Some senator guy wants to nuke everyone. He says America won’t die in the dark. He says we’ll bring light back into the world. With fire.”

  Now that was a frightening thought. The night ending with a flash. Marcos shivered. “What about the president?”

  “Nothing. He hasn’t tweeted once.”

  “God is real.”

  Amy elbowed him and went on scrolling. He tried to eat more of his pizza, but chewing was too much work. He looked down at his own phone, at his mother’s text. Meet you at school! She worked days as a maid and nights as a dishwasher in South Point, Holden’s big sister across the valley. Five miles on pavement. Two by dirt road. Where are you? he typed, then deleted. Without warning, the white background went dark. A shadowed face, angular, gaunt, peered out at him from the black screen. Marcos flipped the phone over, his breath stolen. He turned it right side again. The screen was back to normal. Just a reflection, he thought, just my reflection. But the face on the phone had been weeping, and when Marcos touched his cheeks, testing them to make sure, they were dry.

  Marcos tightened his grip on Amy’s hand and tried to forget what he’d seen, what he thought he’d seen.

  He tried.

  The clocks marched on, and up on the screen Bugs Bunny munched on, and in the corners the shadows seemed to grow, climbing down from the chipped ceiling, reaching up from the stained floor. The doors opened less. The stink grew worse. A false stillness settled over the bodies packed into the auditorium. Mouths fell quiet, but fingers and feet twitched restlessly. And all the while a slinky, uneasy question—a question that, if glimpsed, might have worn a weeping face—stalked Marcos down the back alleys of his mind. He wondered how many people across the country were doing this same thing right now. Sitting in the light of their living rooms, staring at their televisions or computers or phones, and waiting, waiting, waiting. For families to come. For news. Something. After all, waiting was what people did at night—the sun went down, their bodies shut off, and they waited for morning. It was built into their DNA, to huddle by the fire and hide from the dark.

  But what if the campfire wasn’t safe anymore?

  What if its warmth and light were a trap?

  The projector flickered, and a boy appeared on the wall. A real boy, eleven or twelve, not some cartoon character. Nothing behind him, nothing under him. He stood in darkness, on darkness, his body slightly out of line with the vertical. Hair stuck to his face in wet black strands. He was naked. Tears fell from his eyes, which were a little too bright, a little too empty. Eyes like dying penlights. A shiver ran through Marcos on tiny cold feet, and for a moment he wanted to scream. Those eyes. Those eyes. Then Amy’s hand clenched down on his, ground his fingers together. She was laughing. So was everyone else. Laughing in terror. Laughing in delight. Laughing because the fear bone and the funny bone were close friends, because laughing was a release, and it was funny, that kid up there where he had no right to be, crashing the party with all two inches of him hanging out. You could see his fucking pubes. Marcos didn’t know where the sun was, didn’t know where his mom was, but he knew how many pubes the kid on the screen had—three! The kid had three!—and they were making some memories for Memory Day now, you’d better believe it. Memory Day? More like Memory of Day. Marcos gritted his teeth to keep from making any sound. It was hard. He was shaking, it was so hard. His laughter felt like a crazy person in his chest, howling to be let out, set free. Beside him, Amy’s head jerked on its neck, blood rising to her face. It looked like she was being strangled, like she was being murdered, and it was all so . . . funny.

  When the laughter died, it died slow. Marcos couldn’t hear the silence that was left behind, yet he felt it. A pressure on his ears, a weight against his chest. It reminded him of trying to touch the bottom in the deep end of a pool. He breathed in, expecting it to fill his lungs, choke him. Panic rippled darkly through his nervous system. He clutched Amy’s sweaty hand. Soon that hand would go limp, let go, but for now it still had the strength to squeeze him back. He held on tight and waited, along with everyone else, for whatever would come next.

  Up on the screen, the boy remained still except for the tears sliding down his cheeks. There was something wrong with those tears, just like there was something wrong with his eyes. Normal tears didn’t shine that way, and how could there be so many of them? They came and came, running off his face in slow straight lines, drenching his skinny white chest. To cry that much, a person would have to be hollow inside, a well filled up with hurt. To cry that much, a person would have to be sad for the whole world.

  A shadow rolled across the boy’s eyes, like a cloud under the moon, and for a moment he became a silhouette, the shape of a boy and nothing else. Then the shadow passed and light poured out, as thick as blood and as white as bones.

  His lips moved.

  He began to speak.

  “Good night,” he called out to the men and women and children packed into the middle school auditorium. “Good night.”