Juley was frustrated by the Sunday School debate and irked about Aaron’s harassment by Keith and Steve. He felt protective toward his friend and he stopped being as cooperative at school and at home. He became difficult. He waxed disruptive and funny in class. With increasing frequency he was sent to detention. Even there he cut up. He began to be friends with some other bad boys. With Billy who was fat and rather smart and always rocking back and forth in his chair. With Doug, red-haired like Keith but nicer, mischievous and hyperactive, a prankster.

Aaron and Juley lived in the northern, newer part of town. Billy and Doug came from neighborhoods on the other side of the transit tracks. It’s not at all certain they would have met but for the detention room. As it was, they formed an early posse.

Most of the time Juley did the deciding for them. They all helped with the thinking, but Juley had the strongest will. Aaron recorded, Billy protected, Doug sparked from indignation to chuckles, and Juley declared. For a number of years that delegation worked.

They weren’t bothered any more by Keith and Steve. Although they were never in classes all together and seldom even in pairs, Juley received courage for his convictions from his friendships with the other three, and the other three got their individual measures of support. Billy grew large and coarse-featured, but he never knew he was unattractive so his peers didn’t either. Aaron and Doug were appreciated even when they discovered their homosexuality, together at first, and then with their respective and individual domesticity and promiscuity. The four helped each other through the years of dead boredom in their suburban community, through the seasons of raging impatience awaiting their lives.

Usually Juley spurred them. Sometimes they all led others in reasoned acts of disobedience. The causes were often big, like saving the planet and ending world hunger, and occasionally as small as a personal experiment. Once Juley made a mess of his mother’s kitchen counter by trying to pour milk into three abutting glasses without righting the bottle between them. That was a simple physics experiment. Another time he threw a bowl of rice into his sister’s offending face. She had been arguing in favor of cars and corporations while he had just finished reading The Silent Spring. He grew indignant and wanted to see what his parents would do. His father smacked him and his mother made him clean up the mess. Juley amassed information and drew conclusions.

For a time he was almost uncivil in his disobedience. In his late twenties, consumed with dismay about the sprawl of suburbs and the metastasis of cars, Juley moved with his second wife Sharon, sister Ruth, Billy and four dogs to the backwoods of Colorado, retreated behind the thick walls of a bermed lab, and built a few bombs. But he veered from that course before any detonation; he got his revenge on the world like he did on his former wives, by doing nothing at all. Just as his exes tripped on their own nurtured delusions, so Juley got the dubious satisfaction of witnessing the world wobble as his predictions were realized. Of course he would rather have been wrong. He lived long enough to see his children sickened by the simian viruses that swam in required vaccines. He watched his olive-skinned grandchildren grow cataracts and melanomas in thin-filtered sunlight. But the phenomenon that really bothered him, the one that Juley always knew could have been fixed quickest, was the continuing tendency for suburban teens, emotionally abandoned by their parents and maddened by safety, to take automatic weapons to schoolyards and slaughter their peers.