She was wasting precious minutes of her lunch period, but couldn’t tear herself from the window. Warren walked to the end of the sidewalk and turned onto the grassy trail that would take him through the woods beside the middle school.
In the sky above the woods, Ashley saw birds. She pressed her face against the glass and watched as vultures, a dozen or more, circled in the blue sky.
* * *
Ashley ate her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in three bites and slurped the last of her orange juice.
Sid ate with one knee propped on the bench, chewing vigorously, and poised to flee the lunchroom as quickly as possible. He stuffed the remnants of a tinfoil-wrapped veggie lasagna into his empty Star Wars container.
“No salad today?” Ashley asked.
Sid’s lunch always included a salad in some form, the extra gross kind with slimy purple beets and hunks of impossible to swallow broccoli.
“Last week of school,” he said, smiling to reveal bits of green stuff in his teeth. “And she said the lettuce at the grocery looked wilty.”
Sid snapped his lunch pail closed, and they hurried to stash it in his locker before bursting onto the playground. They speed-walked to their group of friends at the back of the playground. They’d already gathered and were shuffling books and videotapes between them.
“I saw Warren skip out,” Ashley said. “It looked like he and Travis had a fight.”
“Good,” Sid muttered. “He won’t be in science class, then.”
“Ash, do you have Interview with the Vampire?” Darren Mound called, as they approached.
She pulled the paperback from the back of her shorts where she’d tucked it into the waistband.
Sid held up a VHS tape of Rosemary’s Baby. “I’ve got Rosemary’s Baby,” he announced, and several of their friends held up their own tapes. Sid selected The Evil Dead.
“You’re going to watch that at my house, right?” Ashley asked him as she exchanged books with Darren, who then traded Interview with the Vampire for a tattered copy of The Godsend with another girl.
“Obviously,” Sid said. “My mom would probably give our TV away if she caught me watching it at our house.”
“Mine too,” their friend Rita said, as she swapped a VHS of The Shining for a rented copy of The Fog. “My mom thinks horror movies make kids do drugs.” She laughed and shook her head. “Parents are seriously clueless.”
Their group met twice a week on the playground to swap horror books and movies. In the summer, they’d made plans to have a weekly meet up at the arcade.
The screams began as they were trailing toward the building.
The bell to end lunch would ring any minute, and Ashley and Sid started back toward the double doors.
The scream tore across the play yard and halted Ashley and Sid mid-stride.
Heads shot up and running slowed to a stop. Ashley saw a sixth-grade girl trip over the asphalt ridge by the basketball courts and go down on her hands and knees. Ashely cringed. She knew the sharp sting of such a fall. That girl would spend her afternoon classes picking stones from her palms.
“Where’d that come from?” Sid started, but the scream came again, piercing the air and now punctuated by voices.
Ashley ran to the side of the school. Other kids did the same. They crowded around her, and they all watched in stunned silence at the teacher screaming and clutching her throat as Mr. Curry, the gym teacher, carried a body from the woods.
Simon Frank laid long and limp in the teacher’s arms. Curry struggled to carry the boy. His knees dipped low with each bend, and Ashley expected Simon’s body to slip free and land with a thud on the grass. It didn’t.
As more teachers surrounded the boy, ushering Mr. Curry and the screaming teacher through the doors, Ashley heard the first sirens in the distance.
* * *
Max had dialed 9-1-1. He didn’t understand why until Mr. Curry struggled through the double glass doors with a dead child in his arms.
Max didn’t realize in those first seconds that the child was dead, but as he rushed forward to assist the winded teacher, he saw Simon Frank and gasped, almost dropping the kid before he’d relieved Mr. Curry of the burden.
Miss Bluhm was still screaming, and Max wanted to tell her to shut up. It was too much - the screams and the face of the boy beneath him. Max looked away as he carried Simon, heavier than he could have imagined, down the hall.
He wasn’t only heavy, he was gruesome. Simon stank of decay, his body felt swollen and doughy. The boy was dead, beyond dead, and Max knew he was doing it all wrong. Mr. Curry should not have picked the child up. They should have left him in the forest for the police and the coroner. He didn’t know much, but he knew that.
The bell shrilled, and Max tensed, ready for an explosion of children at opposite ends of the hallway, but to his relief, no curious faces and stamping feet appeared. Other teachers rallied. They blocked the doors, organizing the kids into rows outside.
“Bring him in here,” Mrs. Pollister, the school nurse, insisted, grabbing Max’s elbow and ushering him into the nurse’s station.
Max laid Frank on the little padded table that stood against the wall. White medical paper crinkled beneath him. The smell of rot filled the little room.
Max continued to look away from the boy, but he didn’t miss Mrs. Pollister’s shocked expression as she leaned over him.
“My God,” she breathed. “He’s dead.”
Max nodded his head numbly as Mr. Curry and several other teachers crowded into the little carpeted nurse’s room.
Somewhere down the hall, Max heard Miss Bluhm’s screams shrinking to sobs.
“Miss Bluhm and I were walking in the woods and found him,” Mr. Curry explained, his face crimson as he spoke.
Mrs. Pollister’s hands went to Simon’s neck as if to search for a pulse, but then her fingers curled in and she shrank away.
Simon’s neck had been torn open, soft, dark tissue lay exposed beneath the flaps of skin. Maggots squirmed in the wound.
Max stared at Simon’s t-shirt. It displayed roaring lion bursting forward with teeth bared. It was a Van Halen shirt. Max had noticed Simon wearing the shirt a few months before. Max himself had seen Van Halen in concert two years earlier. He’d asked Simon if he’d ever seen them live. Now the question hung strange and inappropriate in the center of his skull - live, live, live….
“Good Lord,” another voice rang out.
Max saw Principal Hagerty in the doorway, his hands rushed up to cover his mouth.
Max’s gaze shifted back to Simon, and his stomach clenched as if he might spew.
The boy’s eyes were wide open, wider than seemed possible. Usually a dull brown, Simon’s eyes were glazed with tiny red veins and so bulging, they looked like they might fall out. His lips were pulled away from his teeth in a grimace of terror.
Simon had been terrified when he died, and his final expression was plastered on his face like the ghoulish rubber masks the five and dime stores sold around Halloween.
The sound of sirens grew louder, deafening. And soon official sounding voices crowded the halls of the school.
Paramedics shouted for the teachers to make room.
Max stumbled into the hallway, pressing his hands into the cool brick walls as he fumbled to the boys’ bathroom. He shoved through the door, burst into the largest stall, and dropped to his knees to retch.
13
“What did you mean earlier,” Sid blurted, as they walked home.
They’d passed the video store, and Ashley had glanced in. She’d planned to check if they’d gotten Frightmare in yet, but the desire had vanished.
The screams of the teachers continued to echo through her head.
She knew Simon had gone missing. She’d heard a few other kids talking about it in the cafeteria earlier in the week. Ashley figured he’d gotten mad at his parents and was hiding out at a friend’s house, punishing them for withholding his allowance or refusing to get
him a new video game. It never crossed her mind something bad happened to him.
“About what?” Ashley asked, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jean shorts.
“You asked me if I saw Warren’s eyes.” Sid explained, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other and then back again. The heavy bag caused the entire left side of Sid's upper body to droop, but no one wore their bag full-on, not unless you were a supreme dork. And Sid wasn’t adding dork to his already loathsome nickname, Butterball.
“I forgot,” Ashley murmured, still trying to wrap her mind around Simon, one of their own, being dead. “They were kind of yellow and shiny looking. I don’t really know how to explain it.”
“Like he was sick?” Sid asked, a hopeful tinge in his voice.
Ashley frowned, though she understood why Sid hoped Warren was sick. Warren delighted in torturing Sid, and as summer approached, a sick Warren would give him a brief respite.
“Maybe,” Ash said, though sick hadn’t been the word she’d thought of when she’d noticed Warren earlier.
She stopped walking, struck by a disturbing thought.
Sid looked back at her.
“What?” he asked.
“What if Warren killed Simon?” she said.
Sid’s eyes widened, and he glanced toward the woods running along the opposite side of the road.
“Warren’s a jerk, but… I don’t know, Ash.”
Ashley struggled to imagine it as well. Warren doing what exactly? Stabbing Simon? Beating him with something?
Simon was a quiet kid. He and his few friends mostly stayed out of the way of the Thrashers. Ashley had never seen him get his lunch tray dumped in his lap or watched his books skid across the floor because Warren had slapped them out of his hands.
“If he did,” Sid muttered. “I hope they find out soon. If Warren wants to kill anyone, it’s probably me.”
Ashley resumed walking, not wanting to agree out loud with Sid. Warren already didn’t like him, but the day before, Sid had gotten Warren in trouble during math class.
Paula George had complained to the teacher that her Walkman had disappeared from her desk. Sid pointed out the headphone wire, noticeably pink, hanging from Warren’s desk. When the teacher wrenched open Warren’s desk, the boy had turned bright red and glared at Sid until Mr. Crisp told him to go to the principal’s office.
“Could it have been Warren, Sid? In the woods?”
“The monster?” Sid asked.
“Yeah.” Ashley bobbed her head up and down.
“I didn’t really see him. It was dark, but maybe if he were wearing a mask.”
“Yeah,” Ashley agreed. “That’s what I think. If he had one of those ghoul masks on, it totally could have been him.”
Sid shuddered and glanced behind them. Ashley glanced back too, but the road stood empty.
“Are you going to visit the raccoons tonight?” Sid asked as they turned onto his street.
Ashley shook her head.
“Better not. If my mom hears about Simon, she’ll try to call. I don’t want to freak her out.”
“Yeah,” Sid agreed. “My mom’s already wearing a path in the driveway.”
Ashley followed Sid’s gaze to his driveway where his mother walked back and forth, her long blue skirt billowing like a ‘come home this instant’ flag.
“See you in the morning,” she told him, turning onto her own street and leaving him to walk the last half block on his own.
* * *
Max heard his front door open. He leaned forward on the sofa and saw his mother’s gray sedan parked in his driveway.
“Hi, Mom,” he called as the door clicked shut.
She peeked her head into the room and then produced a tinfoil covered pie.
He imagined the soft give of Simon’s flesh, as if his organs and bones were merely pie filling beneath his skin. He frowned and shook his head.
Maria gave him a sympathetic glance, and she walked past him, depositing the pie in the kitchen before she returned to the living room.
She sat next to him on the couch and rested a hand on his leg. “Linda called me from the school. She told me what happened today.”
Max snorted.
His mother sounded as she had a dozen times in his youth when a teacher or the principal had called home to say Max had been teased or Max had been stuffed in a locker after gym class or the time Max had taken a cleat and smacked Kurt, the school bully, on the back of the head for tripping Max during his timed mile.
For a moment, the memories startled him, and he marveled at his choice to become a teacher.
“I’m sorry, honey. That must have been terrible for you.”
He leaned back and sighed, avoiding looking at his mother because her kind face might bring him to tears.
He’d been avoiding the thought of Simon since he’d climbed on his motorcycle after school and sped away, and yet in truth, he’d thought of nothing else.
“It was bad,” he admitted. “And we made it worse. Now that detective will really hate my guts.”
The word guts left a filmy aftertaste on his tongue, and he stood, hurrying to the kitchen for a glass of water.
“The boy was dead,” Maria said, walking in behind him a moment later. “Sometimes it’s too late.”
Max closed his eyes.
“I know it was too late, Mom. But we messed up the scene, contaminated it or whatever. Mr. Curry shouldn’t have picked him up. I touched him too. I carried him.” Max shuddered at the memory of the soft bloated body and felt shame at his disgust.
“You’re teachers, Max. It goes against your being to leave a child in the woods, cold and alone.”
* * *
Warren was not in school the next day, nor the day after.
The teachers were subdued, many red-eyed, and there’d been rumors the last two days of school would be cancelled. Instead, things went on as usual with the added air of mystery and obvious sadness.
Ashley watched the gym doors after she’d changed into her shorts and t-shirt. Other kids shot hoops, and a few had dodgeballs, hoping Mr. Curry would give them free days for the last few gym sessions before summer.
Curry walked in wearing his signature navy blue Winterberry t-shirt and white shorts.
Ashley remembered the dark smears on his white shorts the day he’d stumbled from the woods with a dead Simon clutched in his arms.
He blew his whistle before quickly taking attendance. Several kids were missing, noticeably absent were Simon’s two best friends, Jon Hastings and Benjamin Rite. Ashley guessed they’d be out for the rest of the week.
When Mr. Curry reached Warren’s name, Ashley looked around the room, searching for the boy’s square head in the crowd.
Sid shuffled over, pulling on his Batman t-shirt. On the other side of the room, Travis and two other friends stood whispering, their heads close together.
“Warren Leach?” Mr. Curry repeated.
He put a mark on his clipboard and blew his whistle a second time.
“Basketball today. Groups of five. Line up on the wall,” he shouted.
“We’re not going outside?” Melanie Dunlop asked. Melanie had a Madonna obsession. Even during PE, she refused to take off the dozen bracelets encircling her wrists. Large fake gold hoop earrings hung from her ears. She liked to go outside so she and her friends could sit on the bleachers and giggle about the boys.
“No,” Mr. Curry told her.
He didn’t elaborate, but Ashley knew why. There had been long yellow tape streaming along the edge of the sidewalks, blocking not only the woods near Winterberry Middle School, but the playground as well.
“Warren’s gone again today,” Ashley whispered.
“Yeah, I noticed in science class,” Sid told her.
* * *
After school they walked into town.
Sid had gotten his allowance the day before and he bought them each a Dr. Pepper and a chocolate chip cookie from the Seven Eleven store.
Afterward, they cut through the laundromat and climbed onto the building’s roof.
Sid finished his cookie in two bites and then walked the perimeter of the roof, looking over the edge. When he rounded the front of the building, he jumped back.
“What?” Ashley asked.
Sid put a finger to his lips and pointed over the side.
Ashley walked to the edge and peeked over. Travis and three of his goons stood by a park bench, their skateboards beneath them.
Ashley laid on her belly and scooted to the edge, peeking her head over the side and tilting her ear to listen. Sid did the same.
“Dude, he’s totally planning something wicked,” Travis boasted. He pulled out his knife, flipped it open and flung it toward a patch of daisies. The knife stabbed through a daisy and into the ground.
“I don’t know, Travis,” one of his friends said. The friend, Gary, was taller than Travis with long skinny legs and arms and a stringy mop of hair that looked like he hadn’t washed it in a week. “My ma said his parents are flipping out. They think somebody kidnapped him.”
Travis chuckled and retrieved his knife. “That’s what Warren wants them to think, dumbass.”
The other two friends grinned and nodded their approval, but Gary didn’t seem to buy it. He closed his mouth, though, and Ashley knew why. If he challenged their leader, he’d soon find himself the hunted instead of the hunter.
“Then where is he?” Gary finally said, tipping his skateboard on its edge and spinning it around.
“I know where he is,” Travis boasted.
Sid’s eyes popped wide and Ashley grinned.
But instead of saying the words out loud, Travis leaned close to his friends and whispered it.
Ashley and Sid couldn’t hear them.
Sid leaned further over the roof. Ashley darted a hand out as Sid’s glasses slid from his face. Her thumb brushed one lens, and Sid’s own arms shot out as he scrambled to catch them, but it was too late.
The spectacles landed with a crack at Travis’s feet.
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