Something Pretty, Something Beautiful

We didn't start breaking into houses to steal things. The four of us started breaking into houses simply to see what would happen.

By the time we were eighteen, we were still doing it because none of us had found any reason to stop.

"Now," Will Wilson whispers, waving me forward, then silently pushing me over the high windowsill of another house we've broken into in Tacoma.

When we were little kids, like eight or nine years old, my friend Teddy and I would walk home from Sherman Elementary together collecting bottle caps and Popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. We searched the grass and the sidewalks, under bus stop benches and around paper boxes, keeping what we found in secret pockets we made in the lining of our jackets. Teddy and I would walk home in the rain, racing the cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks along the narrow streams of water in the gutters, then days or weeks later, when it was dry, we searched for the butts and sticks in the stiff, matted mess around the sewer drains.

Teddy and I were best friends.

On rainy days back at Sherman, Teddy and I built dams during recess in the dirt near the long jump pit. The rainwater ran through the pit in a shallow, foot-wide stream as it flowed along the far side of the school yard toward a big iron drain. Other kids came out to make dams too, but Teddy and me were always the first there, building the main dam, a tapering arc six inches high and five feet across, leaving the other kids to make small dams and beg us to release some water.

I remember being out there in my corduroys and nylon coat, wet like everyone else. None of us wearing raincoats. It's as if it rained so much no one bothered to fight it. Except Teddy. Teddy always wore one of those bright yellow slickers, curls of black hair bursting from beneath the yellow hood. Scraping more dirt toward the dam with his yellow rubber boots.

And as recess went on and our dam got to be seven and eight inches high at the front, now ten feet around, the kids below would always start their really loud yelling, wanting us to break our dam, to let the water rush down and wreck theirs. But Teddy and me always held out, even when one of the kids tried to kick a hole in our dam—one of the hyperactive kids, usually, the ones that every day had to go to the nurse's office to take their medication. The ones like Michael Coe, who we weren't friends with then and didn't ever want to have to talk to.

I had to push Coe away once, after he tried to kick at our dam. He was a low, heavy kid with a buzz cut and tight t-shirt. I knocked him into a small mud puddle, and he went into this frenzy, whipping himself in circles and screaming and his face turning red. Coe told on me, and the teacher made us put our desks together for a week, and that, we always said, is how we became friends. Although, really, that is how Coe started following Teddy and me to my house after school, showing up uninvited when me and my babysitter and Teddy were playing Wiffle bat baseball or eating bologna sandwiches. How, after a while, Coe started bringing his new friend Will Wilson over to my house.

But on those rainy days in the dirt, when the bell to end recess would finally ring, on those days Teddy would only then begin to smile, carefully moving to the very front of our big dam, the other kids now yelling happily and jumping up and down and Coe and the hyperactive ones turning in fast circles, flailing their bodies onto the hard, wet ground, the teachers a hundred yards away, screaming at us from the dry doorways, and Teddy with the tip of his round, brightly booted yellow foot, he'd make just a nick...