Mom and Dad agreeing. The three of them going all al-Qaida on him.

Chance pretended to agree.

Yes, sir, I need to pay my debt and I will do so with industrious alacrity.

Throwing in some SAT vocab words. Dad staring at him, like who are you kidding, dude, but Mom and Rumley looked really impressed.

Rumley moved his mouth.

Community service. Oh, shit.

And here the frick he was.

Sitting in the Save the Marsh office on night eleven of his thirty-night sentence. Shitty little puke-colored room with pictures of ducks and bugs, whatever, on the wall. One dirty window looking out to a parking lot where no one but him and Duboff parked. Stacks of bumper stickers in the corner he was supposed to hand out to anyone who walked in.

No one walked in and Duboff left him by himself so he could run off to investigate how global warming got up a duck’s butt, what made birds hurl, did bugs have big dicks, whatever.

Thirty frickin’ nights of this, nuking his summer vacation.

Five to ten p.m., instead of hanging after school with Sarabeth and his friends, all because of a social norm four out of five people did.

When the phone did ring, he mostly ignored it. When he did answer, it was always some loser wanting directions to the marsh.

Go on the frickin’ website or use MapQuest, Rainman!

He wasn’t allowed to make outgoing calls but since yesterday he’d started to hook up with Sarabeth for cell phone sex. She was loving him even more for not ratting her to Rumley.

He sat there. Drank from his can of Jolt, now warm. Felt the Baggie in his pants pocket and thought Later.

Nineteen more nights of supermax confinement, he was starting to feel like one of those Aryan Brotherhood dudes.

Two and a half more frickin’ weeks until he was free at last, doing his Luther King thing. He checked his TAG Heuer. Nine twenty-four. Thirty-six minutes and he’d be good to go.