Free This Is What I Want by Craig Lancaster

else’s, scolding him (“Damnit, Omar, you’ve got to grab that ball with both hands!”), or when Mr. Kelvig singled him out for a chat after church on Sundays or insisted on buying him a malted at Pete’s when Omar just wanted to be with his friends. Or why he had to be up at this ungodly eight a.m. to help Mr. Kelvig. Omar yawned. Why? Because his mom had said so. End of discussion.
    “Isn’t that them right there?” he asked.
    Sam looked back at him, annoyed. “Where?”
    “Just let me . . .” Omar slipped his slender frame between Sam and the shed’s door frame. The pent-up mustiness hit him at once, flavored with hints of stale gasoline and parched soil. He reached for the top shelf in the far back, a simple task at his height of six foot eight, and he plucked the stacked pylons with his oversized hands.
    “Hot damn, Omar,” Sam said. “I’d have never seen them up there in the dark. You got X-ray eyes?”
    “No, sir.”
    “All right, come out of there. Let me get the rest of the stuff and we’ll get busy.”
    Omar stepped out the way he’d gone in and went back to waiting, making patterns in the dirt with his feet.
    Sam whistled a tune while he gathered the signs that would direct traffic around downtown, some spray paint, and some boundary ribbon.
    “You’re going to be a big star at the U, Omar,” he said between whistle blasts.
    That was another thing, Omar thought. Mr. Kelvig was always talking up the University of Montana, like it was a done deal that Omar would be going there, the way Sam’s own son had done back when Omar was just a little boy. He had to be nice about it, because like his mother said, Mr. Kelvig meant well, but privately Omar figured the old guy could kiss his half-Indian ass. Coach Boeheim wanted him at Syracuse. Coach K wanted him down at Duke. They wanted him at UCLA. The University of California at Mother-Fucking Los Angeles, as Coach had said. Mr. Kelvig might think the world stopped at Montana’s borders, but Omar had a few ideas of his own. He’d always need his mother, but he wasn’t going to need this town much longer, and he wouldn’t need Montana, either. All he needed was beaches, basketball, and girls. Stuff that in your ass crack, old man.

NORBY
    For a long while, Norby had harbored a theory that places acted like dry-cell batteries, storing remnants of the lives of everyone who had ever passed through them. Even as he had put steady distance between himself and where he’d come from, he’d held to that notion. But now, as he cleared the last bend in the road before Grandview loomed into view, he wasn’t so sure anymore.
    Apart from the physical layout, nothing here looked like he remembered. Fields that had once lain open, alternating between fertilized and fallow, now held mishmashes of RVs and travel trailers. Holding tanks and oil pumps sprouted in front yards and back forties. An infusion of oil tax money had allowed the town fathers to slap a new coat of paint on everything—Norby knew this from the email exchanges with his dad, who could talk up a storm about everything that didn’t much matter. The whole effect was a mash-up. Old farms, new alignments, cheap housing alternatives fronted by all the trappings of quick oil wealth—dirt bikes and watercraft and gleaming new pickup trucks.
    The butterflies flapped around his stomach again, same as with his struggle with creeping doubt that morning in the Billings hotel room, as he endured the tug-of-war between expedient desire—find a flight, now, and just go back—and practical consideration for his folks’ point of view. You get to do that once, he reminded himself before he set out on the four-hour drive home, and you’ve already burned your chance .
    And then, before he could give himself time to consider bailing out one last time, he was upon it. On the left, the cluster of three schools—elementary, middle, and high—where he’d spent thirteen years. On the right, a constant amid