School had let out hours earlier, but there was a pickup game behind the middle school that ran until the light gave out, and after that there was the particular freedom of two sixteen-year-olds on bikes with nowhere they had to be until dinner was undeniably cold. They rode the path that cut behind the neighborhoods and dropped down toward Cabin Run Park, where the lower trails ran dark under the trees even on a bright day.
It had rained two days before and the air smelled of wet leaf litter and creek mud. Their tires hissed on the damp asphalt.
"You could have made that last shot," Jamal said.
"I did make that last shot."
"The one before it made the last shot necessary."
Marcus laughed and stood on the pedals up the short rise where the trail met the service road β a narrow strip of cracked pavement the county used for the pump station and trailheads, gated at the top, empty most nights. Kids cut through it anyway.
They were coasting along its edge, lights off because the moon was enough and lights felt like admitting you were nervous, when they heard the tires.
It wasn't a car passing on the main road above. It was close, and wrong β a squeal, rubber fighting pavement, too fast for the turn where the service road bent toward the parking lot. Headlights swept the trees in a wild arc, white and then gone, and an engine rose and fell as whoever was driving corrected, overcorrected, and gunned it.
A dark luxury car β long, low, the kind with a grille that cost more than Marcus's bike and Jamal's combined β tore past the far end of the service road and was gone up toward the main road before either of them had fully stopped.
They stood straddling their bikes in the dark.
"Jesus," Jamal said.
"You see a plate?"
"I saw my life. Did he hit the guardrail?"
They listened. The crickets came back first, then a frog down by the creek. No crash. No siren. Just the ordinary night resuming, which somehow made Marcus's heart beat harder.
"Come on," he said.
They walked the bikes down toward the bend, because riding felt too loud now. The service road was empty. There was a scuff on the pavement, a dark curving mark where the tires had bitten, and glass β no, not glass. Something glittering near the storm drain set into the low side of the road where the runoff went down to the creek.
Marcus almost didn't stop. Jamal did.
"Hold up."
Twenty feet from the road, down the shallow slope where the grass gave way to gravel and then to the concrete mouth of the drain, something was lit.
It lay face-up near the storm drain, its screen cracked in a spiderweb from one corner, and still glowing. In the dark, that small rectangle of light looked obscene, like something that had been dropped and forgotten by someone in too much of a hurry to notice β or someone who couldn't go back for it.
Marcus slid down the slope in his sneakers, gravel slipping under him. Jamal stayed at the top with both bikes, watching the road.
"Don't touch it if it'sβ" Jamal began, and stopped, because neither of them knew how to finish the sentence. If it's what? Evidence? Stolen? They were sixteen. The vocabulary for this belonged to television.
Marcus crouched. It was a phone, newer than his, expensive, in a plain dark case scuffed at the edges. The screen showed a lock screen and a time, and then, as he watched, it buzzed weakly against the gravel and went dim, the battery nearly gone.
"It could just be lost," he said.
"Twenty feet from the road? In the gravel? Man, nobody loses a phone there. It got thrown or it fell out ofβ"
"Out of a car doing that?" Marcus nodded back toward the bend.
They looked at each other over the little lit screen.
The debate, such as it was, lasted maybe a minute and neither of them was proud of the shape of it later. Jamal said they should leave it, that things found near park roads at night were the beginning of stories adults told you about. Marcus said if it was lost, the owner would be looking for it, and you couldn't call an owner from a dead phone, and anyway leaving it by a drain before rain was the same as destroying it. Jamal said that was a speech Marcus had prepared for his conscience. Marcus said Jamal could ride home if he wanted.
Jamal didn't ride home.
Marcus picked it up with two fingers, like it might be hot. It buzzed once more in his hand, a dying shiver, and the cracked screen lit his palm.
He put it in his hoodie pocket. The weight of it was wrong all the way home β too present, banging lightly against his hip on every pedal stroke, while Jamal rode beside him saying nothing at all, which for Jamal was a whole conversation.
By the time Marcus's house came into view, porch light on, his father's truck in the driveway, he had already decided not to mention it at dinner. He told himself it was because there was nothing to mention yet.
It was just a phone. He would charge it, find the owner, and that would be the end of it.
Marcus waited until the house had settled before he plugged it in.
Ava had gone to her room. His father was in the kitchen rinsing pans, the radio low. The ordinary noises of the house gave Marcus cover, and he hated that he had thought of it as cover.
In his room, door closed, he found a cable that fit and set the phone on his desk beside his homework. The cracked screen lit. Fourteen percent, then fifteen, climbing. A lock screen without a photo β just a dark abstract background, corporate and anonymous.