Neal turned sixteen in the spring and on the morning of his birthday drew a gigantic bat. He sketched with a No. 2 pencil on a lined sheet of notebook paper while, at the front of the classroom, his history teacher lectured boringly about something that happened a long time ago in the boring city of Chicago. Neal was supposed to follow along on his Chromebook, like the rest of class, but he didn’t care much about history, and he definitely didn’t care about anything that had ever happened in Chicago. He just wanted to draw his bat. He rubbed the graphite of his pencil in quick, fat strokes to darken its flesh. It hovered over a city skyline and flapped wings the length of ten skyscrapers. Neal colored its eyes with red ink from a ballpoint pen. The redness of the eyes suggested the bat was bent on destruction.

“Happy birthday,” said Joan, who sat at the desk beside him. “I like your bat.”

“It’s a demon,” Neal said. “A bat demon. It marches with the demon army. Only the army is more like a family.”

“Is this for your comic book?”

“I’m starting a new one,” he said. “This one takes place at the end of time. The human race is destroying the world, and only the demon army can stop us. The demon army must crush humanity to save the world.”

From the front of the room, Mr. Johnson reminded his students not to talk during class. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Neal. In a way, Mr. Johnson’s eyes were more terrifying than the bat’s.

Neal tapped the down arrow on the keyboard of his Chromebook to catch up with the lecture. He tried to concentrate on Chicago in the 1880s, but instead he thought about Joan. He remembered when they were kids, how their parents let them play together at the lake on the outskirts of town. Joan would lie on an inflatable raft in her bikini, and Neal would rise out of the water like the creature from the Black Lagoon.

Neal leaned toward her, asked if she would meet him by the lake after school. She said she would love to, but she had band practice.

“After dinner then,” he said. “Before it gets dark.”

Joan opened her mouth to answer, but the deep voice Neal heard next belonged to Mr. Johnson.

“I said no talking! Keep your eyes on your screens.”

Neal returned to his Chromebook. He read an article about the Haymarket Affair. It was more interesting than he’d expected. Industrial workers went on strike and held a big rally. Police tried to break up the demonstration. Someone set off a bomb.

An icon shaped like a cartoon word bubble flashed red in the corner of his screen. He clicked it to read an instant message. From Joan. She would meet him in the evening by the lake.

 

Neal took the bus home from school, then lay in bed and looked at his phone. He scrolled through news stories on The Washington Post app. He read a story about the war in Gaza. The death toll among Palestinians rose daily—higher and higher. Neal tried to picture all of the dead, tens of thousands, but he couldn’t. It was too many. He read about a pair of Israeli airstrikes on a refugee camp. The first strike killed a mother and father and their three-year-old child. The woman had been pregnant, and doctors managed, against all odds, to save the baby. The second strike killed seventeen children. More were believed to be trapped beneath rubble. Neal read a story about a ceasefire resolution before the United Nations Security Council. The United States vetoed the resolution. Neal’s mother called out from downstairs, telling him to come down for dinner.

The dining room smelled like soy sauce. Red and white Chinese takeout containers populated the table.

“We got your favorite,” Neal’s mother said as he sat down. She was still dressed in the gray blouse and high-waisted pants she had worn all day at the office. “General Tso’s chicken. The birthday boy always gets his favorite.”

Neal’s favorite Chinese takeout food was Szechuan beef, but he graciously didn’t mention it. He used a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks to pile his plate with white rice and General Tso’s chicken. The table vibrated slightly when his mother received a notification on her phone.

“Don’t we have a rule about phones at the table?” said Neal’s father through a mouthful of fried rice. A purple-checked collar poked out of the neck of his Patagonia vest. The fleece bunched up around his waist but failed to conceal the bulge of his stomach. “Wasn’t it you who made the rule?”

“It’s for work,” Neal’s mother said. “It’s important. Just this once, and I’ll put it away. It’s important.”

“And my work isn’t?”

Neal and his father ate while his mother tapped out a message on her phone. His father swallowed before speaking to an AI device across the room. He directed it to play a financial news podcast. Loud rap music blared from the speaker.

“No! No music!” said his father. “Turn off the music!”

“Richard! Turn off that music,” said Neal’s mother.

“I’m trying! I’m trying to turn off the music!”

From the speaker, a male voice rapped over the sound of gunfire. The rapper promised to make the police D.O.A.

Neal put down his fork, crossed the room, and tapped a button on the AI device to turn down the volume. Then he calmly told the device to stop before returning to his seat.

“Why don’t we throw that damn thing away?” his mother shouted. “It doesn’t even work. All it knows how to do is play advertisements.”

“Ignore the advertisements,” his father said. “I paid $100 for that damn thing. No way am I throwing out $100. Just ignore the advertisements.”

“I don’t like how you let technology run our lives,” his mother said. “What kind of example are you setting for our son? Children today suffer from too much screen time. They can’t even think anymore because they’re up all night on TikTok.”

Her phone buzzed as it received another email. She hunched over the phone to peck out a reply.

“Kids need to understand computers,” his father said. “Neal wants to go to college and study computers and make a ton of money. Don’t you, Neal? Don’t you want to study computers?”

Neal swallowed and cleared his throat. “I’m going to art school. I want to be a comic book artist someday, and I need to go to art school to get better at drawing comic books.”

His father rubbed his forehead as if it ached. “No way in hell am I paying four years of tuition so you can waste your life in art school. Useless. Listen, what you’re going to do is, you’re going to major in something smart, like data science or machine learning, and you’re gonna graduate and land a good job, and you’ll thank me later. You’ll thank me because you’ll be making big bucks. Maybe you’ll thank me by buying me a boat.”

“Oh, Richard, leave him alone. He has plenty of time to figure out what to do with his life.”

Beneath the surface of the table, Neal balled his hands into fists. “I already know what I want to do. I’ll be an artist. A comic book artist.”

“Now listen, do you think a babe like your mother ever would have married a slob like me if I was nothing but a starving artist?” Neal’s father turned his head up to the ceiling and laughed. “Fat chance! She’s in it for the money!”

“Oh Richard, stop it!” Her phone buzzed again, and she held it up to her face to read an email.

“Your mother’s a real feminist.” Richard wiped his eyes. “She liberated the money from my wallet.”

Neal stood up abruptly and approached the AI device. He spoke to it in a low tone—causing loud rap music to blare from the speaker. The rapper said he slapped his ho for running her mouth.

Neal’s father shouted something, but Neal didn’t listen. He stormed to the garage and slammed the door. He wheeled his bike onto the driveway. The evening felt warm, and the neighborhood was quiet except for the rhythmic chirp of insects. Neal mounted his bike and rode to the lake.

 

A flock of Canadian geese took flight, pumping wings frantically to rise above waters lit gold by the setting sun. Neal stood on the pebbly lakeshore and held a hand to his forehead like a visor. The flapping reminded him of his bat. He imagined the geese as soldiers in the demon army. Bird soldiers would be loyal and united in purpose.

A bicycle crunched to a stop in the gravel behind him. Joan dismounted and slid a purple helmet off her head. She told him the lake looked beautiful, she had never seen it so beautiful.

“I wish I had a boat,” Neal said, sliding his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I’d like to be out on the water. If I had a boat, we could sail away together on the lake. Sail away and never come back.”

Joan crinkled her nose. “It’s not far to the other side.”

Neal and Joan held hands and walked along the lake. The shoreline was slender, bordered by a thick grove of trees. Joan glanced at Neal’s face, the dark curls that tumbled over his forehead, then looked away, over the water.

“I’ll miss you when I go to college,” she said.

“That’s not for a long time.”

“I’ve been reading about the environmental studies department at CU Boulder,” she said. “One of the professors published a paper on intensive agriculture, how the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers diminishes crop yields over time. When I go to CU Boulder, I’ll study under that same professor.”

“You’ll be a great scientist,” Neal said. “You’ll solve climate change by junior year.”

“Oh, I plan to.”

The light played tricks on Joan’s hair. Usually it was blonde to the point of whiteness, but the sunset colored it bright yellow, like a magic marker. Neal wanted to draw her portrait. He wanted to keep the drawing close to him always and never forget her face. He squeezed her hand and turned toward the trees, where evening shadows grew long and dark.

“I’ve been telling everybody I want to be a comic book artist. But really, I don’t know. I just can’t think of anything better. I mean I like art, I like comics. I guess I don’t know what I want to do at all. But until I figure something out, I’m going to keep telling everybody I want to be a comic book artist.”

“You’d be a good one,” Joan said. “You’re already great at drawing bats.”

“It used to be fun when my parents asked what I want to do when I grow up. Now it makes me sick. I don’t want to program computers or sell stocks. I don’t want to be a lawyer or electrical engineer. Everybody tells you to be something and contribute to society. Well I read the news, and according to The Washington Post, society is in big trouble. I don’t want a job. I mean I know I need one for money, to survive. I just don’t see the point in working a billion hours a week and wearing wingtip shoes.”

“I can’t imagine why a comic book artist would ever wear wingtips,” Joan said.

She met Neal’s eyes and nodded toward the trees. He leaned in and listened to her breathing for a moment before kissing her. He led her by the hand into the seclusion of the grove, where they kissed fiercely and groped and knelt to the ground and lay together. Joan looked different in the dark. Her shadow-self manifested savagery and lust. Neal imagined her as queen of the demon army, feeding off the dark energy generated by the adoration of her legions. Shadow Joan was a goddess deserving of worship. Shadow Joan made Neal forget his frustrations and anxieties. She reminded him that the world was vast and strange. She was his night goddess, and he, her lord of air.

 

The stars had revealed themselves by the time Neal and Joan straddled their bikes, waved goodbye, and pedaled in opposite directions to their homes. Neal passed the big houses by the lake before entering his neighborhood of smaller bungalows and aging Victorians. The avenue was quiet and lit by streetlamps. A black cat kept watch from the warm glow of a window. Neal glimpsed a news broadcast on a television screen. He remembered the war in Gaza. He imagined bombs dropping on houses. He imagined his own neighborhood on fire, embers carrying the stench of the dead. Almost as soon as he began to think about it, he stopped. It was terrible. Sometimes the world was terrible.

Handbrakes squeaked as he arrived in his parents’ driveway. The moon shone round and yellow in the sky. The air felt cool in a pleasant way, and Neal pitied his neighbors, locked away in stuffy boxes. He spied his parents through windows, each scrolling their phones in separate rooms. He considered going inside. He considered pursuing a college degree in software development. He turned to the sky.

“I swear to the moon.”

On the night of his sixteenth birthday, Neal made a secret oath. The words came naturally. When he opened his mouth, the syllables simply tumbled out. His voice rang unfamiliar—deep and resonant. The words charged him with delicious energy, and by the time he finished, he felt as if his old self had shed away, replaced by something new. Part shadow. Part bat. More than anything he wished to fly. And someday he would. He knew it. Fly away from school. Away from his home and parents. Fly away even from Joan. His new self was more adrift than the old, and hungrier. An entire world awaited him, and he intended to see it and savor it.

“I offer my soul,” he said, rocking in the saddle of his bicycle. “I swear myself, forever and always, to the armies of the night.”

Later, when Neal put himself to bed, he remained awake for hours, his mind racing with delirious excitement. Gradually the softness of his pillow calmed him. When at last he dozed, moonlight shone through his bedroom window, and he dreamt of nothing but bats.