And just as easy as that, George's spirit was tamed. He came out of the shower pink and steaming and scrubbed, put on the sweats that Adam found for him in an old gym bag, ate his sandwiches, and climbed into Adam's bed with his brothers. When he saw them again next, they were reassembled and downcast, though they ate the instant oatmeal with raisins and cream that he set out for them with gusto. "I think a bus ticket home is about forty bucks, right?" Alan said as he poured himself a coffee. They looked up at him. Ed's eyes were grateful, his lips clamped shut. "And you'll need some food on the road, another fifty or sixty bucks, okay?" Ed nodded and Adam set down a brown hundred-dollar bill, then put a purple ten on top of it. "For the taxi to the Greyhound station," he added. # They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around the apartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases off his bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasing the signs of their stay. "Well," he said at length. "I should get going to the shop." "Yeah," Ed said, in George's voice, and it cracked before he could close his lips again. "Right," Adam said. "Well." They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair, already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood and cracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pockets absently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten. "Well," Adam said. They left, turning to give him the keys he'd had cut for them, a gesture that left him feeling obscurely embarrassed and mean-spirited even though -- he told himself -- he'd put them up and put up with them very patiently indeed. And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless spare keys. No one would ever come to stay with him again. # What I found in the cave, (he said, lying in the grass on the hillside, breathing hard, the taste of vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping run down the hillside) What I found in the cave, (he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of how hard to squeeze, whether to caress) What I found in the cave, (he said, and was glad that she hadn't come with him, hadn't been there for what he'd seen and heard) What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Her skeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Her red hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over her small skull like a halo. He'd laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at the exact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered with rags and trash. It was dark and it stank of shit, there were piles of shit here and there. The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brother Bradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn't find him under there.