Free A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice

act was finished. A fellow cheerleader was standing on a pool chair, making an earnest speech about how next week they would be sophomores, and then a year after that juniors, and then seniors, and then they would never be together again, and they had to enjoy the moment before . . . The girl exploded into tears and was embraced by her friends.
    Meredith noticed that Brandon and Greg had suddenly vanished.
    On his way home, Jeff Haugh was cut off at the intersection of Jackson and St. Charles by Brandon’s father’s “shitty Cadillac”. Jeff slammed on his breaks and cursed before he saw the Cadillac veer right onto Jackson. As it rounded the corner in front of him, Jeff recognized the two teenagers behind the wheel. He also guessed where the Cadillac was headed.
    Jeff gripped the steering wheel for a full minute. The car behind him was honking at him in staccato beats. Jeff felt his mouth open, as if he were going to say something to himself, but then he pursed his lips shut as he eased his foot off the brake and coasted through the intersection, safely on his way home.
    Earlier that night, Monica had let Stephen drive her around in the Jeep unlicensed. He had never driven above twenty-five miles per hour, and he had taken them both on a meandering journey through the streets of the Garden District. He expressed his enthusiasm for the car with excited questions about the gauges on the glowing red dashboard and whether or not it was true that running the AC would drain the gas tank faster. Monica had answered all of them with a slight hint of a smile in her voice. Her son seemed at once boyishly curious and The Falling Impossible
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    mannishly competent, which led her to believe the gift had served its purpose.
    Now Stephen was upstairs and Monica was listening to Mahler’s Second Symphony, “The Resurrection”, which was escalating to its grand crescendo. At first, the sound of shattering glass was nearly lost in a peal of strings. But then Monica heard it again.
    She sat paralyzed in her favorite reading chair, a Sidney Sheldon hardcover spread across her lap.
    The symphony had almost concluded by the time she remembered that the Jeep did not come with a car alarm.
    She heard Stephen’s footsteps on the stairs.
    Monica rose from her chair, the book falling to the floor. She heard the front door slam behind Stephen.
    Through the frosted glass panes of the front door she saw her son’s spidery shadow before the black silhouette of the Jeep. She opened the door with a hand so sweaty, it greased the knob.
    Something was wrong, but at first she could not tell what. Gradually she realized that the Jeep was slouched on its carriage, as if the tires and axle had suddenly failed to distribute the weight of the car evenly.
    She went down the front steps to see what had happened.
    The driver’s-side rear tire had been gouged repeatedly. It sat like a cluster of molten rubber around the hubcap. A clean white line ran down the passenger side, arching in an erratic sweep before angling up to meet the side-view window. The front passenger window had been smashed in; the pieces of glass glittered like diamonds across the plush leather of the seat. Over Stephen’s shoulder, she could see the word spray painted across the windshield, but in reverse. It took her a minute to make out the proclamation: COCKSUKR.
    When Monica appeared on the sidewalk next to her son, he jumped, and then his knees buckled. She held him as he moaned. There was nothing she could say.
    She clasped Stephen to her for five minutes, her own heart trembling with each sob. When he finally managed to breathe again, he said, “You can’t do anything, Mom. You can’t do anything . . .”
    She guided him into the house. “You can’t do anything, Mom,” he kept saying. “It’ll make it worse. Just don’t do anything, Mom, okay?”
    She lied to her son and agreed before giving him a shot of Chambord Royale and tucking him into bed.
    Three hours later, as