Out to Get You

by Josh Allen

  It felt good to use his final moments to get back at this thing, this thing that had set out to get him.

  He shattered what he could. He dented anything that wouldn’t break. He smashed and smashed, until the sound of his rampage was like an echoing jackhammer.

  Soon the dispenser was nothing but fragments. In the mess, he sought out what was left of the eye. Somehow it was still flickering and fizzling with its last hints of life.

  “STOP!”

  Wally turned toward the booming voice.

  It was his Science teacher, Mr. Whatever-His-Name-Was, his hands balled into fists at his sides, his face glowing an angry purple.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted.

  “I’m doing this!” Wally said, kicking at a plastic shard. The teacher’s eyes narrowed to small slits.

  The crushed roll of paper wobbled near Wally’s feet, so he bent and picked it up. “And I’m doing this!” He raised the paper roll over his head and brought it down as fast and hard as he could onto the floor.

  “Enough!” the teacher bellowed, and Wally kicked two more times at the floor before he stopped. He was panting a little now that it was over—now that everything was almost over. The dispenser was a shattered mess, and even if it was his last second on earth, Wally felt better. At least he’d gotten rid of the thing. At least he was taking it with him.

  The teacher walked farther into the bathroom and surveyed the disaster. His purple face pulsed.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” he said, shaking his head. “Wally, I cannot believe you did this.”

  Wally pointed down. “Mr. Johnson,” he said, “that thing—”

  “My name,” the teacher interrupted in a low voice as he moved closer to Wally, “is Mr. Jo-HAN-sen. And you’re going to remember it this time, Wally, because after all this”—he waved an arm around the room—“I’m the teacher who’ll make sure you never set foot in Ridgecrest Middle School ever again.”

  Wally’s eyes widened.

  “This will be your last day here,” Mr. Johansen hissed. “Your very last day.”

  Oh, thought Wally, feeling a strange mix of relief and dread. On the floor, near his foot, a red light flickered and went out forever.

  WE were on our way home from my volleyball practice, driving down Harris Street in Dad’s truck, when Dad hit the brakes hard enough that my seat belt locked up.

  “Heidi!” he said. “Check out that couch! It’s practically brand-new!” Dad pointed to a brown couch that sat along the curb between two elm trees. It was big and squashy and had short dark legs. A cardboard sign on it read: FREE TO A GOOD HOME.

  This happened all the time in our neighborhood. People just left stuff on their curbs for others to take. We’d gotten a bunch of furniture this way—a coffee table and a dresser and two barstools. It was one of the reasons Dad drove a truck. We could always load stuff up.

  “I can’t believe the things people get rid of,” Dad said with a smile. He opened his door and hopped out.

  I rolled down my window.

  “This will look great in the TV room.” Dad circled the couch a few times. Dad loved his TV room. He spent practically every minute in there watching old westerns. John Wayne was his favorite.

  “Aw, Dad,” I said, “are you sure we want that old thing?”

  It wasn’t like we needed all this free furniture. We weren’t poor or anything. The problem was Dad could never resist. He even brought home two church pews once—church pews! He lined them up along the sides of his TV room even though we already had enough seating for the three people in our house—me, Dad, and Mom. We tripped over the pews for days before Mom finally convinced the Wallaces up the street to take them.

  I leaned out the truck window and wondered what sorts of things had been on that couch. Crusty food? Flea-ridden animals? Something worse?

  “Uh, Dad.” I spoke quietly. “Whoever put that couch here probably had a good reason for getting rid of it,” I said, trying to change his mind.

  “What do you mean, little pardner?” Dad looked up from the couch.

  Little pardner. It was one of my nicknames. I had a lot of them, all from Dad’s westerns. There was also Dead-Eye, Slim, and Wrangler.

  Dad eyed the couch again and his smile lit up like a billboard. A find like this made him really happy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the couch has bugs…or lice…or germs.”

  Dad leaned in and smelled the couch. He slapped the cushions a few times and studied the dust that swirled up.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “This couch is great. It’s perfect.”

  He plopped down onto it, and I shivered a little. I opened the truck door and jumped out.

  “People these days throw stuff out way too soon, Heidi-o.” He took a deep breath. “Back in the day, people hung on to things. They had to back then.”

  Dad talked a lot about the “good old days,” but he didn’t mean when he was a kid. He meant the Wild West days—the days from his movies.

  “Well, Slick,” Dad said, “help me load it up.”

  Dad lifted one end of the couch, and I tried to lift the other. It was heavier than we expected, so I kind of had to nudge and slide my end, but after a few minutes, we muscled the couch into the back of the truck, and Dad slammed the tailgate. I wiped my hands on my shorts.

  “Your mom will be thrilled,” he said. I wasn’t so sure about that, but Dad just beamed.

  When we got home, we had to rearrange a lot of furniture to make space for the couch. We had to push the recliners against the far wall and shift the coffee table over by the fireplace. When there was an open spot, we put the couch right in the middle of the TV room, just like Dad wanted.

  Mom raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Do we really need it?”

  “It’s perfect,” Dad said. He clapped his hands twice and looked at me. “Didn’t I tell you it’d be perfect?”

  Mom pulled the vacuum out and started swiping away at the couch with the hand attachment. “You never know where these things have been,” she said.

  When she switched the vacuum off, Dad plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV. The cushions were big and fluffy, and Dad sank down into them. He reached for his cowboy hat, a big, brown Stetson he kept on the coffee table and only wore while he watched his westerns.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I’ll spend hours on this baby.” He patted the couch like it was a new pet. He clicked the remote and flipped through the channels. “Mighty comfy,” he said.

  A few seconds later, he pointed to the TV.

  “What luck! This is Rio Bravo,” he said. On the screen, a smiling John Wayne polished a star-shaped badge on his vest. “It’s a classic! John Wayne plays a sheriff. It’s got gunfights, poker games, stagecoaches…all the good stuff!”

  Dad looked at me.

  “How about it, Buster?” he said. “Want to watch with me?”

  Dad rubbed the spot on the couch next to him.

  Maybe I should, I thought. It had been ages since I’d spent any real time with Dad. He watched so many westerns that I barely saw him anymore—just his face, smiling in the glow of the TV screen as gunshots ricocheted.

  And there was something else.

  Sure, Dad’s westerns were silly—the swaggering sheriffs, the ladies in lacy dresses, the snarling bad guys. But something about westerns just felt…right. The good guys always won. The bad guys always lost.

  Westerns were simple. And I could sit there and watch them with Dad, like a little girl again. I even kind of liked Dad’s nicknames for me.

  While I was thinking about all this, Dad patted the couch next to him and sent up another poof-cloud of dust. I pictured the things in that dust—spores, bacteria, mold.

  The hair on my arms rose.

  “Uh
, no thanks,” I said to Dad. “Not tonight. Too much homework.”

  Dad’s face fell, but then a fistfight in a saloon broke out on the TV, and just like that, he was back into his movie.

  I headed up to my room.

  An hour later, when I passed Dad on my way to the kitchen for a snack, I noticed something. He’d settled lower into the couch, and the cushions had kind of folded in around his legs and sides.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, leaning in from the hallway. “You’re sinking.”

  He didn’t look up. He just kept watching John Wayne. He did answer me, though.

  “Yeah, Bandit,” he said. “That’s how these good couches are. They practically wrap you up in their cushions. It’s luxurious.” He flashed his smile.

  When I walked by a half hour later, he’d sunk even lower. His waist and thighs were buried in the couch like they’d been swallowed by the pillowy cushions.

  “Um, Dad. Are you sure that’s normal?” I asked. Hoofbeats rang out from the TV.

  “Perfectly normal,” he said, and he turned up the TV. “I’ve never been so cozy.” Still, he seemed to be squirming. I thought of quicksand.

  “You should get up,” I said. “Dad, you should really get up.”

  “Sure thing, Heidi-o,” he said. “Give me just a second.” He wriggled a little, but he stayed put, glued to the TV. He started reciting the movie right along with John Wayne.

  The next time I checked on him, twenty minutes later, he’d disappeared up to his armpits. He was just shoulders and a head and a big Stetson hat, jutting out of the center couch cushion, but his smile still beamed, and his eyes were still fixed on the TV.

  From the hallway, I called to him.

  “You’ve got to get out of there, Dad,” I said. “You’ve just got to.”

  He wriggled around again, but nothing happened. Finally I marched into the room, grabbed his shoulders, and pulled. I leaned with all my weight, but it didn’t help. He sank even lower.

  Panicking, I ran to the garage and grabbed a rope, thinking I could tie him up like a rodeo calf and pull. But when I burst back into the TV room, all I could see was Dad’s face, John Wayne reflected in his rusty-brown eyes.

  I yelled for Mom. She came into the room just in time to see Dad’s big smile—the last part of him—sink beneath the billowy cushions and vanish. As he went under, his hat settled onto the middle couch cushion.

  Everything went quiet. Even the movie on the TV seemed to go silent.

  “Dad?” I said. “Are you there?”

  I poked the couch with a finger. I waited. Mom and I slapped the cushions and prodded the folds of the couch with broom handles. We tore the cushions off and felt into the couch’s crevices like you would for loose change.

  But it didn’t make any difference.

  He was gone.

  * * *

  We kept the couch for three months. We didn’t sit on it. Not even once. We just left it there, in the TV room, hoping Dad would climb out.

  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d plopped down on the couch with him that night and watched Rio Bravo by his side.

  Would the couch have swallowed me, too? Or would I have been able to save him?

  After a while, looking at the couch made us miss Dad too much. So one November morning, Mom and I moved it out to the curb. It wasn’t easy. We had to nudge and slide and push and grunt.

  But eventually we muscled it out next to a fire hydrant.

  Panting, I stood by the couch for a quiet minute, and I thought of some of Dad’s nicknames for me.

  Tex. Bronco. Lefty.

  Then I trudged back inside.

  The couch didn’t stay there long. Like I said, people in our neighborhood did this kind of thing all the time, and after a few minutes, when I checked through the window, the couch was gone.

  BRADY stuffed the last of his pizza bomb into his mouth.

  “Blech,” said Julie Simmons from across the lunchroom table. “You eat like a caveman.”

  Brady opened his mouth, leaned forward, and showed Julie his half-chewed food—a mash of crust and pepperoni and cheese. Julie was always going on about blue whales and lost puppies. Making her look at a mouthful of meat was just what she deserved.

  “You’re disgusting,” Julie said. She rolled her eyes.

  Brady didn’t care what Julie thought. Pizza bombs were the best things they made in the cafeteria. You couldn’t help but wolf them down. Julie Simmons, the Veggiesaurus rex, would never understand that because she only ate things like tofu and arugula. The weirdo.

  Besides, Brady wanted to get through with lunch as fast as he could. After lunch came Biology, and today was the day he’d longed for since the first day of seventh grade.

  He was finally—finally!—going to dissect a frog.

  That was the whole reason he’d taken Biology in the first place—to dissect things. When he’d signed up, he’d imagined himself in a white lab coat and stretchy rubber gloves cutting out lungs and eyeballs and hearts and laying them neatly on a table. He’d figured it’d be a bit like being a mad scientist.

  But so far, Biology hadn’t been anything like mad science.

  It had just been…well…science.

  They were two months into the school year, and he hadn’t gotten to dissect anything. Instead, he’d read long chapters from a thick-spined book called Life and You (which was filled with impossible-to-pronounce words and not nearly enough pictures). And he’d listened to Mr. Gough’s mind-numbing lectures on circulatory systems, ecosystems, and a dozen other kinds of systems (which always made Brady’s eyes droop). And he’d even written three essays and taken two tests (on which he’d earned a C and a C minus).

  But all that was about to change. Because today was mad science day. Everyone was talking about it.

  “I just don’t see what it accomplishes,” said Julie Simmons to anyone at the lunch table who would listen, “cutting up those frogs just so we can learn some dumb lesson. I mean, it’s cruel.”

  Brady snorted.

  Of course Julie would whine about the frogs. When she walked home from school, she sometimes stopped and talked to the squirrels and birds—“Oh, good morning, Mr. Squirrel. Are you gathering a lot of nuts today?” Brady had seen her do it. And last year when a huge spider crept down the whiteboard in Ms. Baker’s class, instead of just letting Brady squash it, Julie had coaxed it onto a blank sheet of paper and released it out the window.

  Yep. A definite weirdo.

  “I think I’ll fake sick,” she went on, “to see if I can get out of it.”

  Brady snorted again, louder this time, hoping she’d hear.

  “You don’t have the guts to fake sick,” he said, and he knew it was true. Julie might have been an animal-loving tree hugger, but she was also a classic Goody Two-Shoes. She’d do anything to get an A. She wouldn’t fake sick if her life depended on it.

  Julie, Brady figured, was getting exactly the dilemma she deserved. She could dissect a frog and get an A, or she could skip the dissection and get an F. He bet it was the kind of predicament that gave her nightmares.

  Brady smiled.

  With five minutes still left in the lunch break, he cleared his tray and bolted to the classroom. He was the first one there besides Mr. Gough, who actually was wearing a white lab coat. The old teacher was getting things ready, pulling silver trays out of the supply closet and laying them on the students’ desks. The trays were about the size of the rectangular cakes his mom sometimes baked, and in each tray was a scalpel with a small pointy blade and a pair of white stretchy gloves. Best of all, right in the center of each tray lay a grayish dead frog. The frogs, about the size of hockey pucks, looked stiff and shriveled.

  “Sweet,” Brady whispered to himself.

  That was when the smell hit him, like chemical pickles. Mr. Gough had w
arned the students about it the day before. “Formaldehyde is a compound used to preserve the frogs,” he’d told them. “It’s pretty strong.”

  Brady took his seat. His eyes watered and his nostrils flared. He rubbed his eyes and breathed the smell away.

  Mr. Gough placed a tray in front of him.

  His frog lay belly-up, and the soft skin of its underbelly gleamed, reflecting the fluorescent classroom lights.

  Brady couldn’t believe it. Soon he’d get to hold the thing in his hands. He’d get to poke it, wriggle it, dangle it over some girl’s head (preferably Julie Simmons, who sat next to him, a fact he hated most days—but one that would come in handy today). And, even better, he would get to slice the frog open, making a straight cut up its chest like Mr. Gough had taught. He’d get to fold back its skin, pluck out its tiny heart, and roll it, like a marble, between his fingers.

  He shifted a little in his chair. He couldn’t wait. Mad scientist time was coming.

  Nothing, he thought, can ruin this.

  Just then, Julie Simmons walked in.

  “Eww,” Julie said, taking her seat next to Brady. She plugged her nose, and her face went the color of cooked pasta. “This smells awful.”

  Brady rolled his eyes.

  She made a pouty face at the dead frog in her tray. “Ohhh,” she said. “The poor thing.”

  Ugh, Brady thought. He couldn’t wait to “accidentally” splatter frog guts on her.

  The bell rang, but instead of letting his students get to it, Mr. Gough launched into a droning lecture. He went over all the instructions and warnings he’d covered the day before, and he reminded the class four times that the scalpels in their trays were “really sharp.”

  Wrap it up, Brady thought.

  Finally Mr. Gough wound down and said, “You may begin.”

  Brady snapped on his rubber gloves.

  Julie’s hand shot up. “Mr. Gough,” she said. “I don’t think we should do this.”