“C’mon, Jake, you promised. You promised, man.”

“Look, it’s not my fault, alright? Besides, I told you we might not be able to use my house.”

“Then what the hell were you making promises for, moron?”

“Fuck you, Allan.”

Allan, quick as a snake, wrapped his arm around Jake’s neck, and half a second later Jake was in a patented Allan Kirkwood Headlock. Jake uttered something between a grunt and a whine and began the pathetic struggle of one who has already lost his battle. Allan had a look on his face that said “This is going to hurt you a lot more than it’s going to hurt me.”

As entertaining as this exchange was, I turned to Sean, who wasn’t watching the fight at all. His eyes stretched the length of the field, all the way across to where the trees began and the ground dropped into the gully of the creek, and I had this weird feeling that with those eyes Sean could see everything.

A moment later, he turned to me all nonchalant, like he knew I’d been looking at him. “Remember the treehouse we used to talk about?”

I nodded. Behind me, Jake was screaming uncle as best he could, given the circumstances. He sounded like a toad.

“There’s no reason we couldn’t fix it up. If we laid down a square of felt and brought up the cards, it’d be like a regular casino.”

I thought about it a second. “What’s wrong with Allan’s house?”

“It’s being fumigated.”

“Right,” I said. ‘Fumigate’ was a word Sean had had to explain to me a couple days earlier, how it was when they built a circus tent around your house and sprayed the whole thing with poison. I’d told him it sounded like the front door to a mansion, the sort of mansion so big that you had to name all the doors just to keep it straight. He thought that was funny.

“And my parents would go apeshit if they found us-” He twisted his face up real bad, like he’d just heard some awful word. “-gambling.” I laughed at that.

“And now, now that Jake’s mom’s decided that she’s got to keep the riff-raff out, we’re left with very few options.” I had to agree, and I was thankful to him for not mentioning my house at all. I never spend afternoons at home, if I can help it. The house gets real quiet, like it was empty. I always feel like I’m going to turn a corner or something and find someone sprawled out on the floor dead, bleeding and everything. It gets better after Mom comes out of her room and starts dinner, but she doesn’t talk much and when she does she sounds so sleepy that it makes me tired just to listen. I guess all that should’ve made my place choice number one or something, parents out of your hair and all, but I’ve never felt comfortable with having people in my house when it’s like that. The silence is bad, but for some reason I think breaking it would be worse.

Allan screamed behind us, and Jake managed to wriggle from his grip. As Jake ran away from all of us, toward the gully, Allan yelled after him, “I’ll teach you to bite, you little pussy!” He was pressing his hand against his side where Jake had presumably taken the bite out of him, and to me it looked like he’d just been shot in the gut. I expected blood to come gurgling out from between his fingers at any second. Allan shuffled to Sean and me half-grimacing, half-laughing. “That little shit’s gonna get it when I catch him, am I right?” Allan, who stood a full eight inches taller than the four-foot-ten, light-haired Jake Jacobson, was asking a rhetorical question.

Sean laughed earnestly and then said, “Me and Sam are gonna fix up the old treehouse and make a casino out of it. You in?”