He’d talked himself out of skipping the sleepover a dozen times. Doug had done a lot of thinking since locking lips with teen goddess Tiffany Dennys during their very meaningful thirty-minute make-out session. The meaning being: though total opposites, some potent magic was thrusting them together, and life was too short to worry about all the reasons they were a terrible match, so better to go along with the thrusting. Whether that magic was love or genetic compatibility or dumb luck, Doug was sure he didn’t want to know. Of course, the buzz cut wouldn’t do him any favors. So, while the others gathered firewood and cleared an area for sleeping bags, Doug stalked the edge of the camp with a jerky gaze, praying for and dreading Tiffany’s arrival, which lent him a vigilant demeanor. Perhaps this was why the Dead Man came over and said:
“If this night doesn’t bring revelation, I won’t ask anyone to come here, again. I promise. You weren’t wrong, earlier. Ours is dangerous work.”
“Then why—let’s leave … now. I’ll dig the other side of the creek if you … just—”
“Doug,” John said, just above a whisper. His face contorted under the concentration required to explain. “They don’t tell me everything. I think they’re afraid I might not go on with The Work.”
“Who … are we talking about?”
John pointed up.
A wedge of remaining daylight shot through the western trees and warmed the tops of their heads. Partially blinded, Doug tried to look, but saw only dust and other floaties in the beam. He recalled a quote his English teacher shared today about light being time thinking about itself. It didn’t make any more sense now.
John turned his back. He faced the charred treetops over the old crime scene. Doug looked, too, but more at him. The guy’s face went inky while the tips of his hair lit into a crown of burning filaments. John was a nut, a monster, and, if not kept at least ten feet away, his influence was stupefying. The Dead Man’s arm came around his shoulders. It was thin, nearly weightless, almost floppy, like a short section of garden hose. Doug eyeballed the guy’s fingers twiddling inches from his glasses. They were lean, the knuckles swollen and cracked. Doug couldn’t move away, as if his feet were buried in the mud. Always a bit closer to the grave with John around, he thought.
“Thanks for being here,” John said. “I know you took some convincing.”
“I can’t let … If something happened to—to everyone.”
“You’ve a better reason than most to be here.”
“Even you?”
“I have to try everything. This is my last inning, top of the ninth. If that means I go in the Grove, I’ll be glad to have you and the group with me. Better than a sour hospital bed surrounded by nurses and the old doctor waving a light in my eyes while I lose consciousness like it’s some damn alien abduction scene. Right, buddy? Who knows what forces are at work here. We could experience the real thing tonight.”
John squeezed his shoulder. Doug was left to watch the radiant pink dusk die behind the hills. Color fled the trees. He was alone in the woods at night. He wasn’t alone, of course. The kids had each other. But the Grove was no longer a refuge, their green and secret pocket from which they slipped back and forth to the real world. Still, he kept watch. After getting John and then E.’s approval, Greg and Josué started a fire in the dirt pit that Erika had made at the base of the Big Tree. It cast a dim glow that allowed Doug to discern where the woods thickened beyond the creek. An hour later, sheer walls of solid nothing rose all around them to the stars, making the boy claustrophobic and convinced that the portal through which they’d passed daily into the valley had sealed and left them captive until daybreak, maybe until the end of time. His imagination was speeding now. What powers and restraints did the killer possess? Why hadn’t the group strung trip wires with cans full of rattling bits—some standard action-movie precautions to survive the night? Because they were kids.
The crickets were screeching and still no Tiffany. His grip on the crowbar tightened. What Doug felt wasn’t bravery. If someone charged him or his friends out of the dark, he hadn’t any faith in his ability to hit anybody or anything with the weighty iron bar. There was a possibility the girl would be slaughtered before she reached camp. No one else seemed concerned. The group sat behind him, a ring of firelight and laughter. Alex was cracking deadpan math jokes: “An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders one beer. The second orders half …” No one understood the punch lines, but they rolled sideways, saying, “Keep going!” Even E. laughed with skittering stops of breath. Doug was glad for that, and part of him wanted to share that moment with her. But E. didn’t need him, Tiffany did. He judged the group’s confidence in John’s powers, or their own, or any power other than the ability to plunge a knife hungrily into another kid’s flesh as naive, careless. He shook his head and turned his back on them. They weren’t seeing what he was seeing because they weren’t looking.
E. laughed freely, hair thrown back, not caring who was watching. Tonight, their tormentor would try what he might, stalk in and attempt to cut them down. But the spirit of the group, whether they’d face him united or divided, was in her hands. E. believed that the man who’d defiled her sister’s image was the killer. E. also believed in her lone fury, that she could stop him if his strike didn’t land first. If she had to, she would dig the sonofabitch’s eyes out with her bare hands. Her rationale was simple: The living die. He was flesh and blood, unlike the lurking phantom he pretended to be, and therefore his body could be torn and spilled, even by a fourteen-year-old girl if her aim was true. E.’s strength was bolstered by her friends’ willingness to fight beside her. John was prepared to give his life to the cause, though that had little to do with her, being guided by his messages from space. E. didn’t believe that the boy communicated with some omnipotent god or received visions from a woodland spirit world. He was talking to himself, a very special part of his psyche not everyone knew how to access. She didn’t and wanted to learn, to be less emotionally dumb, to have the courage to bring people together, not remain divided and thereby scatter them, maybe find peace with Erika gone. So when John had pronounced earlier that tonight would “yield profound revelation,” E. believed him implicitly, even if she didn’t understand him, yet. For once in her life, she understood faith. She’d always hated the word. Faith: When a supposedly intelligent organism believes a thing to be true despite an utter lack of logic and/or empirical evidence. Perhaps E. had faith in her own development. Even then, zero belief was required. Effort, long hours at the library, had allowed her to know more than anybody her age about the human mind. What little good that had done her. Now she had something stronger—faith in her new friends, that they could be counted on when the moment called for it. Her faith was not all so grounded. Her understanding of spiritual matters was shifting. E. didn’t believe in an afterlife, so how could she believe that her sister was watching over the group as more than a colorful drawing on a tree trunk? But she did. Erika’s presence was a circle of buoyant happiness around the fire, binding them, bestowing purpose and a sense of belonging.
“Dougy!” she called to her old friend at the circle’s edge, so that he too could feel a part. The boy came reluctantly with a frumpy smile and sad eyes because Tiffany hadn’t showed. E. made him a spot beside her, and Dougy thanked her as Greg bragged about his older sister, who was supposedly even taller than him, getting on the high school basketball team. Josué braved speaking some, too, about his favorite aunt, who took him to R-rated movies so long as they had hunky male actors and who was an exceptional horse rider and sometimes would take him along the moraine. And it seemed to E. that these weren’t just a good bunch of kids, but some of the very best people on Earth. The epiphany threatened to break her heart with happiness. She let it.
“Look what I brought!” She patted her eyes and pulled tinfoil-wrapped potatoes from her bag, which didn’t sound good to anyone. Potatoes without salt or butter? She stuffed them underneath the coals where they re
mained forgotten until fished out hours later. Their baked skins were charred in spots and their bodies steamed, moist and fragrant. Everyone praised her for thinking of them, and E.’s heart glowed warm as the coals at their feet.
A hush fell over the group as they ate. Their eyes wandered up the Big Tree, which loomed above the camp. Its most prominent branch stretched over their heads for a window of sky. The last quarter moon hung there like a slice of bone-white fruit. The kids were in the woods together at night. The exhilaration of this fact hit them all at once, and the profound liberty made their skin creep. They shared its charge around the fire, raised their bowed heads to exchange shy smirks. A few white lies and well-timed phone calls in front of their parents were all it’d taken. No one said anything, not wanting to scare away the moment—until they heard someone crunch up to the creek bridge.
E. broke the shackles of fear first and stood.
“Tiffany?”
The steps stopped. They redoubled, charging. The creek boards groaned and splashed under the runner’s weight.
“Come at us, coward!” E. shouted.
The kids all rose. Everyone forget their weapons except for Doug, who held the crowbar in front of him as if wishing for someone to please take it and relieve him of the responsibility of defending real human lives.
“Coward?” Tiffany Dennys leaped into the light triumphantly. “No, no, hon. Not me,” she said.
Tiffany shimmied among her spooked friends, as if trying to get a conga line going. She sang the school cheer in its entirety. The full attention of the group felt good on her. She enjoyed showing people that she was free to do whatever the hell she pleased and that she didn’t give a shit what they thought about it, either. She’d come from tailgating at a high school game with this cheer girl, Diane. Tiffany didn’t want to see old friends. She was starting over: new clique, new look, new outlook. But Diane said, “Hey, when did you start worrying about everything?”; they wouldn’t see the old crew, her brother was playing a big game against Shepard High, and she knew a guy there who always had a bottle in his car. Maybe because of all the changes, the speed at which they’d hit her, getting fucked up sounded too good to pass up, a last hurrah. The guys were blah. They’d all sipped fumy vodka with the lights off in the parking lot and the windows cracked to keep from fogging. The windows did anyway with the faintest mist, the kids adrift on the buzz of the loudspeaker and circular stadium roar. When Diane wasn’t drinking, her head dropped against the dash as if seasick. Tiffany was in the backseat with the guy’s friend. He was older and cute, but wouldn’t look at her even when she folded her leg to poke his with her bare knee. “You can touch me if you want,” she’d said, tired of waiting for it or maybe to call his bluff, anything but an ounce of falseness. The guy went off, all offended. His hands flew up and hit the car top, saying he wasn’t a pervert. Tiffany could see the hard-on through his jeans. Which was whatever, until Diane called her a whore. Tiffany had restrained from slamming the car door, but couldn’t help flipping them off. These were the kind of phonies she needed out of her life. Hassling her … for what? Being real. Then all she’d wanted was to be back in the woods with her band of rejects.
“False alarm,” Alex said, though that was clear. Maybe to get everyone to sit again. Not even Alex knew for sure, only that it felt better to have said it.
“Wow, E.,” Tiffany said, “you get so fired up about stuff. Or is it only me?” Then her face blanked, seeing Doug. “Oh—”
He tried to explain the buzz cut. Meanwhile, his heart crumbled, crowbar sinking until it hit the ground, and he wished the killer would pop out of the bushes and end him already.
“Doug!” Tiffany rushed over and kissed him on the cheek. “God, I thought you were Rocky.” She pulled away, conscious that the others had watched the kiss and were probably scandalized. She kissed the dork on the other cheek to show everyone she could kiss whoever she wanted as much as she wanted. She’d cared about crap like impressing people and rumors for most of junior high, which was long enough.
“You’re … You’ve been drinking?” he said. The girl radiated booze, like his grandmother when she kissed his forehead and slurred, “Love ya, love ya, love ya.…”
“Damn, genius, nothing gets passed you.” Tiffany flipped around her backpack and teased open the zipper. “I wouldn’t leave my new best friends in the whole world out of the fun all selfishly.” She pulled a large plastic bottle from her bag. Clear alcohol swashed inside.
“Whoa,” Greg said. The others’ less-than-enthusiastic faces curbed his excitement.
“I’m not sure that’s allowed here,” John said.
“Christ,” Tiffany said, “sometimes I wonder if you’re my good friend, Baseball John, or my goddamn … a hypocrite. No offense. But I do.”
Tiffany’s father would notice it missing from his office stash, would bark about her age, about consequences. The man wouldn’t share a smile with his daughter unless drunk. Then he became another man. Master of inappropriate jokes, fifty bucks to say sorry, congrats, love you, hi baby, tie loosened and blazer lost godknowswhere—his closet an army of replicas—the running joke, “Daddy, where’d you lose your jacket this time?” “Oh, between drinks three and four.…” Mr. Dennys’s house parties of unwound business bores and official assholes ran late and often, so her father could hold a lot of liquor. On nights he’d had too much, a third man appeared. Once, this man gave Tiffany money to dance for him and two others in the coatroom on New Years Eve. They’d all pitched in to make her yes. Why did she take the money? Because she could do anything? “No—like this.” He jerked her around to display her backside—or had she made up that part of the memory? She was eleven-ish. After that the man wouldn’t stop coming at her with compliments around the house, even when he was sober (“My god, baby …” “Those legs and … wow …” “… not my little girl any longer.”), teasing to yank her towel after showers, threatening to tickle a smile out of her, as if it were a game. She might’ve convinced herself it was, a long and relentless game in the shape of the world, if not for the nighttime visits. Sometime later—her timeline was a shit mess, she’d started drinking, etc.—sometimes, in the middle of the night, huffs of scotch crashed over her cool cheeks and collar bones and all down her arms and, instead of breaking hot with panic, froze the parts of her body left carelessly above the covers. Sometimes she would wake to the sickly sweetness in her lungs. Tiffany remained still as a corpse, so stiff and not-there that, if touched, she wouldn’t know. Mornings after, she woke in a calm terror, not unlike when she’d heard Erika had died. A part of Tiffany was long and truly dead, an important part, she knew. Even if she cried, hard, she couldn’t have it back. Why even wake up? What kept her outgoing, going out, going? Only when she thought about it did she not want to sing or dance or do anything for anybody, but be gone.
“He’s only looking out for you,” E. said. She was still on her feet, on guard.
“Oh, aren’t they all,” Tiffany said and sat in the girl’s spot. She rested her head on Doug’s shoulder for a second and then sat up very straight.
“For everyone’s safety,” E. said, “do you really think it’s a good idea to be drinking out here?”
“You dorks kill me. I love you, but … trust me, guys—it’s an old Bachelor’s Grove tradition.”
Tiffany tipped back the bottle. Afterward, she didn’t breathe hard, only shook her shoulders, hair shimmering in the firelight. She was really loosening up and shook again to send the vibe down to her fingertips, and maybe out to those around her. She was wearing only one earring today—a dangly cross. It was a new thing she was trying, and it felt good to shake.
“You make that look easy,” Greg said. Everyone heard him asking for it.
“Here she comes.” Tiffany passed the bottle. “This helps keep you warm at night, too, guys.”
“The reverse is factually true,” Alex said.
“Oh. Well … it’ll get you a wee bit shit-faced, Greg. But you may
want to check with Alex on that point.”
“Who’s Rocky?” Alex asked. The name wasn’t on any of the suspect lists.
“Nobody you want to know,” Tiffany said.
Greg coughed after a sip. “Tastes like gasoline.”
“Gas is way grosser,” Tiffany said and winked.
Greg handed the bottle to Alex, who passed to E. without glancing up from the notes. E. held the bottle at arm’s length and didn’t pass. She looked as if she might dump it. Tiffany ignored the bitch.
“Hey, wouldn’t you like a sip-a-roo, Alex? Hold up—is it really Alex? Or Alexandra? Alexie? I mean Alex is cool on a girl.”
“No. Thank you. I would, however, like to know which school Rocky attends. A last name would also help.”
“Take a sip, and I’ll … tell … all.”
“I also want to know where you first met him. And how.”
“Bold—three sips—if I’m doing the math right. You’d know better than me.”
Alex took the bottle from E. in both hands and sniffed the mouth suspiciously. “It’s garlic-y.”
“My bad,” Greg said, raising a hand. “Pasta for dinner with that Texas toast.”
Talk broke out about how good that stuff was, but hushed when Alex’s eyes shut and the bottle upended. Alex took three even sips and one hot swallow that would likely impair critical thinking—a necessary sacrifice. In any endeavor, opportunity necessitated risk.
“OK.” Alex sounded a little hoarse. “Speak.”
Into that Good Night Page 13