Whitney is not good at English and the complicated structures of grammar elude him. Hunched over his desk, he tries to shield his dog-eared notebook from the teacher's eyes. She taps her lacquered fingernails on the end of a sentence, poised over him like a hawk.

"Well, no," she says. "Wrong tense."

His As are crumbling edifices, his Bs balloons ready to pop. The point of his pencil snaps against the blue lines of the page and he has lost his words again.

Whitney grows up and starts hating his name, the way the last syllable slurs into a girlish whine. He starts hating many things. When his mum insists on inviting the Kent boy at his birthday party, he screws up his face in annoyance.

At the party he notices that Clark doesn't take part in their games, doesn't talk, doesn't even touch any of the other children. He spends the whole evening coiled up in a corner of the sofa, where he proceeds to devour six pieces of cake, staring into the void, the edges of his mouth curled in a smile for nobody. There's a smudge of chocolate syrup on his chin and his hair sticks up like wire around his forehead. Whitney thinks Clark is a bit of a jerk and doesn't deserve such a nice, boyish name.

Whitney is afraid of spiders. Arachnophobia, even the word reminds him of legs like thin rays of darkness, of insects dying in web cocoons, of the hypnotic way they creep towards him, slowly, irrevocably.

He dreams of spiders blackening the bedroom walls; the hiss of constant motion raises goosebumps on his skin. They are all over him, on his arms, his face, his neck. Spiders walk over his eyelids, he feels them against the tip of his tongue and the worst of all is the knowledge that they aren't crawling into but out of his mouth. They are born inside him, nested in his ribcage, his veins are roads, his throat a gateway and they choke him as they gush out, an invading army of beady red eyes. They will overcome.

Whitney rubs the side of the shoe with a brush, again and again, until the black leather shines like the back of a beetle and the joints of his arm ache with dull pain. He shifts from the floor, pushing himself up on his heels and grabs the next pair from the rack.

Dry mud is cracking around the soles and the image of his father, jumping into rain puddles just to make Whitney's detention harder makes him chuckle, feeling rebellious.

Dad insists that meat should be eaten rare and during dinner the steak bleeds on Whitney's plate when he pokes at it with a fork. He hates it. Hates him.

"Dad, I hat-"

He can't get the words out, breath stuck in the back of his throat. The house is buzzing with silence, dad is at work, but Whitney still feels the shadow of his presence looming over him, shaking his head, lips tight with disapproval.

Whitney watches Kent. Kent's eyes are closed and his head is tilted backwards, neck vulnerable and exposed under the warm rain of the shower. Thick puffs of steam rise, blurring the familiar faces around him into pink pastel smudges. The showers are crammed, anonymous bodies standing close together like the fingers of a hand, limbs moving heavily, as if hypnotised, against the white tiles of the walls.

Whitney screws his eyes shut and opens his mouth, letting drops of shower water slide down his throat. In a dizzy rush he can almost feel fingertips against his cheek, eyelashes on his neck, the warm pressure of bodies against him, a room made of walls of slippery skin, arousing and suffocating.

In the locker room he notices that there are bits of soap stuck under his fingernails. He peels them off and rubs his face with the towel until it feels raw. Little, nameless things are crawling under his skin, crying.

Whitney is nailing some sort of Jesus to some sort of cross. The corn around them hums in the breeze, insects drone heavily over the ground and his friends stumble around the field, doubled-over with laughter, mocking Clark for being such a weakling. Clark's skin is beaded with sweat and tinted yellow in the sinking yellow light of the afternoon. His lips hang open as if he is about to scream, but only a bubbling wheeze comes out. He stares at him.

This strange surge of devotion is a fierce thing, possessive and obsessive, a soul for thirty pieces of silver and a kiss. It angers him, and he pulls the ropes tighter than necessary, watching them digging paths into skin, blocking the blood circulation. There. Serves him right.

It's already dark when he stumbles back to Reilly's field after the game, a six-pack of beers under his arm and a jumbled apology on his lips that he'll never admit to. In the ragged white circle of his flashlight the cross looms empty, above the whispering corn.

Whitney thinks it's ridiculous; the way it always rains at funerals. The black cloud-blanket covers the whole sky apart from fringes of blue to the west. It's quiet; no claps of thunder disturbing the rain-drenched silence, only the sound of water pockmarking the ground. As two men lower the coffin into the pit the wind snatches his mother's handkerchief from her hands. He watches it flutter down, dangerously close to the pit, and he finally sees.

It's not his father's corpse inside the coffin. It's himself, with a face yellow and shiny like wax. Spiders are crawling out of his mouth, over him, over the coffin, over everything. Ropes and webs of darkness reach out, tangling around him and he sways forward, about to fall into the pit. Then a hand grabs his shoulder, steadying him.

They look at each other for a moment. Kent picks the muddy handkerchief up, holding it out to him with both hands, like an offering.

Whitney is starting to hate the sound of the school bell, the fact that he has to return home every day, where hours stretch out into infinity and mourning hangs from every curtain rod. His mother's face is puffy and grey, folded in resignation. She speaks even less than she used to.

No speck of dust in the house, no fingerprints on the window glass. Her hugs are swift and bony, her hands blotched and swollen with hot water and strong detergent. She bends over the sink, scrubbing it with a stiff brush, she cries into the spotless sink, she watches him as he tries to swallow another mouthful of mashed potatoes. He drops his fork.

Father's shoes are still on the rack, neatly polished, unworn, the black leather shiny like the back of a beetle.

Whitney is drunk. He has parked his truck at an empty, weedy driveway and sprawled over the front seats, he crunches another can of beer in his hand and tosses it out of the window. The evening is hot against his face, swathing him in sticky folds.

He does love her. But when her tries to touch her, to hug her, her hair is too glossy and trickle between his fingers like rain. Lana is a slippery goldfish and the more he tries to hold onto her, the more she slides away.

She was crying harder than him at the funeral. Her shoulder blades shook, fragile like the joints of bird wings.

Clark would be different, with his broad shoulders and his broad smile. Something to hold onto to, to push and pull closer, and bite and hurt and bleed without fear it would break apart. Something that would keep him standing. Whitney would shove him down, kick his legs apart, wrap a hand around his throat, push a thumb against his Adam's apple, breathe into his mouth and they would never ever kiss and-

The image dissolves into a swirl of nausea and he bends out of the window, tasting vomit.

Whitney can taste the dirty copper of blood when he licks his front teeth. He's got so used to the sound of machine guns he starts hearing a rhythmic pattern rising from the roar, a tune, a bullet melody of sorts. His helmet has slipped over his forehead and he stumbles around blindly; the injured man dead weight over his shoulders, pressing him down, down, down into the earth. The ground rocks and heaves under his feet and voices go crying past him, diluted in the wind. He has lost his words again. Blue sky, yellow sunlight, brown soil, red thoughts. Red, seeping through his fingers.

And then, slowly, the world empties of color, until only a solid white remains.

Whitney is--

Well, no. Wrong tense.