There’s this smell that always fills the air right before a spring thunderstorm in Arizona. It’s a bit like rust and turpentine; it comes from the leaves of the creosote bushes that grow in high elevations. Rain covers their millennia-old wax casings and sends their aroma billowing down into the valley. At first, you know the whole desert is blooming, with flowers and meadows and happy little critters once again bursting through the dry, wintery earth. Then the air settles and turns bitter, artificial even.

You soon feel like you’re in some New Age flea market, in a sweaty nylon tent, surrounded by copper trinkets and Kokopellis and pan flutes. At least there you could put a face to your confusion, which is impossible to do in nature, since that means you just saw God. It’s much easier at the flea market—just point to the leathery old saleswomen, barely holding it together, whose fascination with indigenous craftwork is eclipsed only by her penchant for real estate speculation and middle management. I guess she probably feels like God anyway.

Today was particularly bad. The sunlight refracted first through the storm clouds, then through the windows on the second story of Jacie’s house, then lit up Austin like a Baroque painting as he tortured Jacie with another bony, semisexual back massage. There she was, enjoying it, and there I was, mouth agape, looking up from her rug smelling like cat piss and blueberry molasses shisha. And somehow I could still smell that fucking creosote bush.

It was already half past four, which meant it was my time to go; only an hour until my mom gets home from work. I got up, still a bit high, to Austin calling out to me as I left the bedroom: Mudding at eight, I’ll pick you up. Jacie nodded a quick goodbye without saying much. Stone cold with me, as always.

The sun still belted down through the clouds as I started on my way home. I began to profusely sweat. Unluckily, I had forgotten to double up on my tall tees today, and within a couple minutes my upper body became itself a topographical map of Arizona: floodplains flowing from my armpits, a crescent shaped reservoir under my collar bone, and of course the famous twin peaks in the center of my chest, now accentuated by little basins of tit-sweat. The doctors say these are ‘just pubertal gynecomastia’; but this condition is known more colloquially, and in keeping with the geological terms, as nipple rocks. Basically, it’s a disgusting accretion of chest tissue that comes along with the rest of God’s punishment of teenage boys’ bodies. They might make you think twice about your gender, or at least have dreams about carving knives and self-performed surgery.

After around ten minutes of these wishful fantasies, I finally reached the park behind my neighborhood, which I recognized because I could make out the front of Grant’s house. It’s the exact same model as mine, reflected across the axis of the cul-de-sac. On paper, you might even think Grant and I are the same person. Our families moved to Orchard in the same year, for the same company relocation, to get into the same income bracket. We’re even the same age. It’s just that I’m not named Grant, though I could be.

I’ve always imagined Orchard’s city planners had included us in their presentation to the district government when the town was being built in 1999. Slide one begins with two happy families statically rendered in some cheap design program, frozen outside their newly-built driveways. Next slide follows with their sons watching Kimbo Slice knockout compilations and beating each other with leftover PVC pipes in the model homes’ designated “office nook.” Another slide rotates in. It’s one of the fathers, strung out on a ocher terracotta patio deck, lying next to a pile of dog shit, and the mother is gone, and so are the kids. The PowerPoint crashes.

So much for a planned community. Grant and I were both the subjects of an experiment in modern American child rearing, the conclusion being that despite having the exact same socioeconomic parameters, we couldn’t have turned out more different. Whereas I at least feigned a sense of filial piety, Grant relinquished all respect for any source of authority at a very young age—ten years old, to be exact. Along with his mom, who walked out the door that year and never returned, Grant lost a good important chunk of his brain.

He slowly developed into a sort of pathetic showman who would do literally whatever you wanted provided an audience that would stick around at least as long as his family. A simple dare begins the show, opening with some mildly embarrassing gesture; a Cha-Cha slide at a pep rally, for example, or eating a disgusting mixture of cafeteria condiments in one gulp. By the last act the show would devolve into a spectacle of self-cruelty, the audience on the edge of their seats as a butterfly knife disappears into the unflinching flesh of his thigh.

I mention all of this because parked outside of Grant’s house were a couple of emergency vehicles, signaling a possible roadblock in the plans for him to come mudding with us tonight. I doubted it, though. Grant is pure, unadulterated willpower and he’s not dead yet. So I crept into my house without giving it another thought.

No one was home yet. I headed to the bathroom to wash up and see if my body had somehow gotten worse since I last checked. Just some more dry skin around my lips, and thankfully my Ronaldo-inspired short on the sides, long on the top haircut is finally growing out a bit. I wanted to look better for tonight. I held on to the slim chance that I’d somehow convince Jacie she’s been seeing a fake version of me this whole time. That one minor change in how my shirt folds at my waist, or the intonation of my voice, or the amount of unplucked hair between my eyebrows, would break her delusion that I’m just a minor character and not the protagonist of all of our lives here. But then I remembered a smile she gave Grant a few days ago, a very sweet, erotic smile, and if he does come tonight (which he will, as I’ve mentioned—that smile was enticing enough), I’d have to pull some real game-changing moves, like breaking my nose into a more threatening shape or dying my hair or something.

So I more or less gave up and locked myself in my room to avoid any further confrontation between my body and my mirror. After a couple hours of literally staring at paint chips, I checked my Guild Wars TeamSpeak channel. Sure enough, Grant was online, which meant another narrow escape from an overnight stay in the psych ward’s “early observation bed” for the risk prone. Unless they have TeamSpeak and Guild Wars in there now, which would probably help; there’s no better self-harm prevention system than a group of online strangers who care somehow as much about a dungeon raid as they do your mental health. But I doubt the Maricopa County public health complex would be that smart. No, Grant was in fact at home. In fact, he is coming. Good for him.

At around eight, Austin pulled up in his dad’s Jeep with Jacie. I called shotgun, made Jacie sit in the back and honked the horn for Grant, who quickly trotted out of his house in a bad outfit and broke the little rusted bell above his door when he shut it too hard. Making no effort to pick it up, he spit out some blueish gunk on the pavement and shook hands with me and Austin as he got in. Jacie gave him a hug and must’ve smelled something rotten on his neck—sweat or cum or whatever goo that had been caking there the whole day in his bed-dungeon-gaming station—and flinched back almost too politely. She and Austin had been complaining about the strict dress code at school, probably for opposite reasons, and immediately resumed after we got in. Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” buzzed quietly out of the subs and Grant and I shared a bottle of Jack Daniels. The sun was setting and we headed off towards the outer wash of Orchard.

It was a short trip to the frontage road and soon the pavement ended entirely. We turned off into a dried up riverbed and followed along a crumbling gully. The Jeep was well equipped, though, despite having little exterior apart from a tarp roof and plastic windows. What metal was there was painted bright yellow, almost perfectly complementing the dirt and dust clumps like the work of a genius artist. The chassis was the work of a genius engineer; the Jeep was raised a couple feet over the legal limit to accommodate giant shock absorption springs, which allowed us to raze anything that could stand in our way. Tumbleweed, cacti, quail, maybe even a couple corpses if we’d be so lucky to come across them.

It was nearly dark. The last rays of sunlight turned purple and shot out through some mountains in the distance. We reached the end of Orchard’s current zoning rights, marked by a few decrepit sans-serif signs. Past those was a relatively open expanse of desert-under-construction, as Orchard has been slowly creeping into its surrounding area for the last decade; a few patchworked clearings and suspicious heaps of mortar and plywood look like fallout from a war between nature and the golf course lobby.

Despite those remnants, outer Orchard was empty and foreign enough to give rise to a spate of urban legends and fantasies of hell—necessary things to believe here. They’re first of all moralizing tales, for mothers to warn their children, for example, but more so for Orchard’s own legacy, so that even the last driveway at the edge of the desert acts as a sentinel for the old dominion of the community. But Orchard is a far cry from an empire. We have no enemies to protect against. It’s necessary to create them from within, and then expel them. A father gone berserk, say, who murders his family with a truck and flees to the badlands. Or a missing cheerleader found dead in a big pit with cheerleaders from all the other schools in the district. Or a waterpark from the nineties that had to shut down after a disaster on the fifty-foot Dragoneater, whose plastic remains are now somewhere hidden in all the bush and dirt, somewhere beyond that last driveway at the edge of the desert.

These give us our history. But they aren’t legends of evil. They’re tragedies, at best, but more so things a few pages deep in a Google search of Orchard, for the truly curious. And we were truly curious; as I said, it’s necessary, and sufficient to give Austin the drive to press harder on the pedal, take a couple more miles deeper into the desert’s scorched earth, in the futile hope of coming face to face with our own sort of suburban mythology.

We were deep in the darkness now. Some looped guitar trap hook played loudly out of the speakers. I was getting really drunk. I glanced backwards and noticed Grant and Jacie’s legs touching; he was probably in heaven right now. I became a bit melancholic, constructing a fantasy world to the somber beat, a world where Jacie and I had a big house in the Swiss alps, where between farming and milking cows we had disgusting sex but she loved it even more than I did. Not that that’d be remotely possible—none of it really—but it was enough for me to get a brief sober grasp on the reality that we were headed straight for a pitch-black ravine, and that no one seemed to care. After a split-second of imagining all of our fiery deaths, and all of the postmortem benefits of being immortalized in tragedy like that, and heaven too, the Swiss alps and Jacie type of heaven, I shouted out to Austin to stop, and he hit the brakes at the edge.

I was honestly terrified, but the encounter exhilarated Austin. His cheeks were red and shining with sweat; he immediately let out an airy laugh that smelled like gum rot from even two feet away. He’d clearly also had some drinks before all of this. He suddenly switched on the Jeep’s brights and jumped out into the mud.

We followed him out a bit more carefully. To the west was the county juvenile; its floodlights shone brighter than the moon and were easy to spot, not that we didn’t know exactly where it was. A long row of telephone towers connected the complex to a dark point in the east horizon and ran across the ravine in front of us. One tower stood tall at our feet. With a few rocks and enough willpower, we could probably destroy those lost teenage souls’ only connection to the free world. Though it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference for them; it sucks out here too. They should know, maybe they already do and that’s why they’re there in the first place. But we chose to save federal property destruction for another day, and opted for the genius idea to just climb on top of the tower and see what happens.

Austin and Jacie went first, got halfway, and sat on one of the metal branches to take a few sips from the bottle. No electric shocks, apparently, so Grant and I followed. We sat with them and looked out towards the juvenile. Music was still playing from the Jeep: some glistening guitar chords that made you feel like drinking lemonade.

A few minutes up there felt like forever. We talked about our favorite parkour videos, and how if we had big buildings or lived in a favela we’d probably also be gods at jumping around and doing backflips and running away from terrorists or international police, whichever was chasing us. But all we had was office parks, driveways and these electrical towers. And we don’t even have a GoPro or a drone to film any of it even if we wanted to. Just our shitty memories, which mean nothing and certainly can’t be uploaded anywhere.

The conversation was tapering off until Austin told Grant that he could never be like those Russian parkour guys. I knew what this was leading to, but I stayed silent, using the tension as a natural amphetamine. Austin claimed, anyhow, that those guys have nothing and all they want to do is get to heaven. And for the most part, they do, I thought, and when they get there they just dangle their legs off the edge and look down hundreds of feet to their shitty post-Soviet warzone village and, by extension, our shitty earth, laughing at the shitty life they’ll never return to. Grant could never do anything like that, Austin claimed; Grant just sits back in his nice air-conditioned home on his big couch watching those Slavic angels laugh at him from the holy skies. And yet Grant has the gall to complain about the lack of parkour obstacles here. If Grant could be anything like those guys, Austin said, then he wouldn’t have any reservations about climbing all the way to the top of the tower we were sitting on.

So Grant did. We all got down to watch and make sure he actually touched the top, jeering and egging him on. We didn’t really care if he could or couldn’t do it, obviously; we actually wanted to know if Grant could be like Grant, the Grant we all knew, the one that would do something like those Russian guys, with just enough push.

He did it, and as he reached the top of the wire canopy, he yelled out to the open desert; maybe he really did feel like an angel. Then as he came down to the second bar from the top, he lost his footing, twisted his toes in a wide notch on the platform, and plummeted to the bottom.

I didn’t really register what happened. I guess I was shocked. I gasped. Jacie screamed and Austin’s mouth dropped. Grant wasn’t moving. He laid face down, contorted like a screw in the mud. Everything was silent except for the hums of the motor and a few indifferent insects.

I went deep into my mind, remembering this YouTube-recommended video I’d watched earlier that day, one with a little colony of capuchin monkeys in a fertile glass-encased grove. I learned that capuchins have a strange tendency to display a range of human emotions; the video was an experiment by some scientists to test the monkeys’ capacity for grief and empathy. They dropped a dummy mechanical monkey into the colony’s cage and after twenty minutes, when the dummy inevitably failed to move and react accordingly, the colony believed it to be dead. Then, the monkeys held a brief ceremony around the lifeless corpse: they caressed each other, mothers embraced their children, the elder alpha male stood above a crag as if to deliver a solemn elegy to their fallen friend.

And there we were, gazing upon Grant’s slowly twitching body. Here I should have maybe had a revelation about the miracle of God’s creation, which separates us from the monkeys. The essence of human life, that is, which is revealed only in its absence, such as when the mechanical spurts of muscles and nerves overtake the fluid free-willed movement of a human body until it ossifies into stone-cold death.

The capuchins, like myself, missed this entirely. They never questioned the monkey-ness of their fallen friend. It didn’t once cross their mind, since, at the end of the day, they’re monkeys. So one might attribute my failure to register the gravity of the event to ignorance, human stupidity, a bad brain unevolved since the capuchin era. But at least monkeys mourn the death of who they think to be a member of their own kind.

I missed that part too. And really a more accurate analogy would not be a BBC production of a groundbreaking zoological study on the social behavior of capuchins, but instead a viral Weibo-hosted video of a couple spider monkeys dressed in little Gucci tracksuits, scrolling through Instagram in a tiny monkey bed. Forty seconds of our attention, yet all the more human. Makes you want a monkey pet yourself, maybe even go over to Alibaba for a bit and check if the Chinese really can just buy monkey pets.

So I just kept standing there, blankly, a bit curious but honestly just bored. I don’t know if it was reassuring or terrible that Jacie and Austin probably thought the exact same way as me. Within a couple of minutes, Austin silently gestured back to the Jeep, we got in, and just left him there. In the middle of the night, surrounded by dirt and rebar and concrete slabs and thorny desert brush, laid Grant.

In five years the whole area should be constructed, a westward residential extension of Orchard, and maybe they’ll just build over him and he’ll haunt someone’s home office nook. Maybe in a hundred years Torres Peak, the dormant volcano that overlooks our town, will finally erupt, melting all the plaster and asphalt and cover the neighborhood in ash and igneous rock. And maybe in a thousand years they’ll build an extraction rig over the volcanic reservoir zone and find a pocket of oil that was created as a direct result of Grant’s fossilized organs and hydrocarbon-compounds, and then use the oil to build another Orchard where the old Orchard once stood. Maybe then, there’ll be another Grant and Jacie and Austin and me, and maybe they could make better decisions than the original us. But that’s a long time. We needed to get home before eleven.

Some days passed and no one brought it up. Grant wasn’t in school but we didn’t have any classes with him anyway, which meant there was really no way to verify what happened immediately after. He was in my dreams occasionally and I wished I could have asked him, but if I had the power to control my dreams I definitely wouldn’t use it to talk to Grant.

Exactly one week later, as I got home from Jacie’s place before my parents, checked the mirror, got upset, then checked my chatroom, there Grant was, online again. He asked me about Jacie. I told him he didn’t have a chance, not after how badly he fucked up a week ago. He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed. Whatever man. With that, we loaded up a dungeon raid. With that, we were innocent, once again, forever. Unless they’ve got Guild Wars in heaven now. I wouldn’t be surprised.