The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  “We're going to head in. We're meeting a bunch of people inside. Do you want to join us?”

  “I'll walk with you,” he said, “but I promised Ashleigh I'd come find those guys when I got here.”

  The last of the parade had already turned into the Cougar Stadium parking lot and the road was filled with people moving toward the entrance. They all fell into the herd, waiting patiently and catching up while they did so. Mia was a buyer for a women's clothing store chain, working out of San Francisco. Scott was an engineer for some tech firm or another; Will had lost the name almost the moment he had heard it. Brian surprised them all by revealing that he worked for a major music label. Even Martina was impressed.

  Will had spent many afternoons in Brian's basement listening to CDs and hanging out, singing along and playing air guitar. He was proud of the guy for having turned his passion into his job. Like Will himself, and former-football-star-turned-coach Tim Friel, he hadn't accomplished all of his dreams, but at least he was pursuing them, doing something that made him happy.

  “Good for you, Bri. Seriously, that's great.”

  By then they were inside the gates of the stadium and it was time to part ways. Will stepped to one side and let the crowd flow by and around him. He watched the others for a moment as they were swept away by the human maelstrom. Then he began to glance around.

  Teenagers. Families with kids of all ages. A teacher or two that he recognized. At the concession stand just beside the entrance to the bleachers he saw Kelly Meserve and a couple of other former classmates but did not bother trying to get their attention. He wanted to get settled first. It took him a moment to visually confirm which bench would be for the home team. Danny, Eric, and Nick would be seated on the Cougars' side of the field.

  Will started toward the stands.

  Beyond the shifting crowd that ebbed and flowed ahead of him, he saw a single lone figure leaning motionless against the bleachers. Stacy Shipman shot him that mischievous grin, eyes sparkling, and he wondered how long she had been watching him before he had become aware of her presence.

  Will arched an eyebrow, pleasantly surprised, and sidled through the long line in front of the concession stand. The whole reunion weekend thing had a strange, bittersweet quality to it—even without the oddness of the previous night's events—but somehow all of that had dissipated the moment he had spotted Stacy there.

  “Hey,” he said as he approached.

  “Hey,” Stacy replied. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  That sly grin remained and her chin dropped slightly, a charming gesture that he was certain was unconscious. She did not move away from the bleachers or shift her position in any other way. A spark of hope ignited in his chest that she had been waiting for him.

  Will scratched at the back of his head, unsure how to continue. “Listen,” he began slowly. “About last night. If I seemed weird at all—”

  “I always thought you were weird, Mr. James. It's one of the things I admire most about you.”

  He blinked and felt his smile grow wider. “I'm going to take that as a compliment. And by the way, I hope everyone told you how incredible you were last night. I'd like to hear you play again sometime.”

  Stacy arched an eyebrow, the freckles across the bridge of her nose darker in the sunshine. The chilly breeze blew a thick lock of dark hair across her face, and with one finger she tucked it behind her ear.

  “Time will tell,” she said. Then she pushed off from the wall and grabbed Will by the hand. “Come on. Let me buy you a hot dog. They're awful, but it's all part of the Homecoming experience, y'know?”

  Will felt her fingers clasped in his own and let her pull him to the back of the concession line. “If you say so.”

  “I do.” And there was that grin again, the look that said she was a woman of great mystery and many secrets, and if he discovered them, he might be just as amused by them as she was.

  They waited in the line, which soon grew even longer as the duo running the concession stand seemed incapable of filling even the simplest of orders without at least one mistake. Yet even though Will was vaguely aware of the antics behind the counter—of hot dogs with the wrong condiments and diet Coke instead of regular, of miscounted change and wrongly tallied totals—the delay did not bother him in the least.

  Stacy told him about her life after Eastborough High, her disastrous and truncated college experience, and the short stint she had done in rehab, thanks to a certain white powder. She was remarkably candid about the whole thing, but when Will thought about it that wasn't so remarkable at all. It was just Stacy. Her real life of late was far less sexy than her raspy-voiced stage persona would lead one to think. She had always been interested in old homes and architecture. Cocaine had prevented her from getting a degree, but she and a partner had started their own business restoring historic homes, and it gave her a pleasure that was evident in every nuanced word when she spoke about it. Between that and her music, she had found a contented place in her life.

  Will grew more and more enamored of her. The woman Stacy had become was even more fascinating than the girl she had been. He wanted to tell her that but was afraid she would think he was only flirting. When they finally reached the counter, it seemed as though no time at all had elapsed, and he felt foolish when he realized he had no idea what he wanted. He ordered a hot dog and a drink and found himself nodding when Stacy asked if he wanted nachos as well. He watched her as she pulled money from the pocket of her jeans and paid the gray-haired man in the booth. The guy must have been sixty-five, but she charmed him in an instant. Will was not certain, but as Stacy pocketed her change he did a mental calculation and thought that the old fellow had forgotten to charge them for the nachos.

  Stacy picked up the tray with the hot dogs and drinks before he even had a chance to offer, then pointed her elbow at the nachos. “That's your job. Don't forget napkins. That's a man thing. Forgetting the napkins.”

  “And straws,” Will added.

  “Them, too.”

  They left the concession behind—the line even longer than before—and as they finally made their way up into the bleachers, they discovered that the game had begun. More than five minutes had already elapsed in the first quarter, but neither team had gotten on the scoreboard yet. The Cougars had the ball on Natick's twenty-five-yard line, but it was third down, with seven yards to go. Eastborough's quarterback threw a deep pass downfield and the receiver caught the ball, but he was out of bounds.

  “Damn,” Stacy whispered.

  She paused just ahead of him, unmindful of whose view she might be blocking, and turned to watch the next play. Fourth down, twenty-five-yard line. The Cougars brought their special teams unit in to go for a field goal.

  “Come on, you guys,” Stacy said. Then she did a little yowl. “Let's go, Cougars!”

  Will laughed and she shot him a dark look.

  “Sorry,” he said, still smiling. “It's just . . . this isn't the sort of thing you ever cared about back in the day.”

  Her eyes rolled and she gave him a sheepish look. “I know. I still don't, really. But it's our reunion, and Homecoming and all. If we lose it'd be a bad omen. So, go Cougars! Right?”

  A cheer went up from the crowd and they both spun just in time to see the ref in the end zone throw up both hands to signal that the field goal attempt had been successful. They had missed actually seeing the play, but the important thing was the scoreboard, which now read: Home 3, Visitors 0. Stacy let out that funny little yowl again and resumed walking.

  “Where are your friends supposed to be sitting?” she asked, half turning to him.

  Before he could reply he spotted them, halfway up the bleachers. There were other familiar faces, but in a cluster along three benches adjacent to the aisle, he saw Ashleigh and Eric, Danny and Keisha, Lolly, Pix, and Nick Acosta.

  “Stacy,” Will said.

  She paused and glanced back at him. He nodded toward the upper rows of the bleachers, where Danny an
d Ashleigh had now noticed them and were beckoning with frantic waves and gestures, as though they were trying to coax in an airliner.

  “Up there. The freaks who look like they're having seizures. Should we run?”

  Stacy laughed, skin crinkling at the corners of her soft brown eyes. “I don't run. Although if they don't stop that, we might have to slip casually away.”

  “They'll just think we went to grope each other under the bleachers.”

  That eyebrow arched up again. “And maybe they'll be right.”

  Will opened his mouth to respond but she had already started up the steps toward the others. And he wouldn't have known what to say anyway. It amazed him how easily she could take him off guard like that. But he liked it.

  Just as he started up after her, plastic tray full of nachos clutched carefully in his hands, a finger tapped his arm.

  “Hey. Is your name Will James?”

  Will turned around, brow knitted in curiosity, and found a tall, wiry, redheaded teenager standing there looking decidedly uncomfortable. The kid had a sullen look that he recognized almost immediately.

  “Wait a second,” Will said, pointing at him. “You're . . . I met you yesterday. You—”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah. I live in your old house. And it's Kyle. Kyle Brody.”

  What the hell is this kid doing here? And—

  “How do you know my name?”

  The kid sighed and glanced around as though he were afraid of being seen speaking to Will. “It's . . . shit, this is stupid. I can't even believe I'm here. Look, this is crazy, but I have a message for you.”

  “What?” Will asked, staring at the kid. “What are you talking about?”

  But even as he asked, Kyle Brody was passing him a yellowed scrap of paper. On it, scrawled in an eerily familiar hand, were two words:

  Don't forget.

  Cries of outrage rolled like thunder through the stands. In the midst of that cacophony someone shouted the word “Fuck” loud and long, stretching it out so that it became almost a moan. “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”

  Will blinked. His throat was dry. His gaze ticked from the yellowed scrap of paper in his hand up to the impatient expression on the pale features of Kyle Brody. He wondered, apropos of nothing, if Kyle's parents had assigned him the same bedroom that Will had lived in when growing up. Once again he gazed at the scrawl on the page. Don't forget. What was that supposed to mean?

  “Don't forget what?” he asked, barely aware of having spoken the words out loud.

  “How'm I supposed to know?” Kyle demanded. Then he shrugged and backed off a step. “Look, I delivered it. Don't even know why I did it, but here I am. And here I go.”

  The kid turned and started off toward the stairs that led out of the bleachers. For a second Will could only shake his head and stare mutely after him. He spun around and glanced up into the stands. Stacy had made it halfway up to the place where Ashleigh and the others all sat and now stood on the steps watching him curiously. Everyone else was watching the game. For just a moment he surveyed the faces of his friends, familiar and comforting, and he felt himself drawn to them. There was room on the bench just in front of Ashleigh and Eric for him and Stacy to sit down and he felt pulled toward that place. Yet all of that seemed hazy to him, as though in a dream, the world cloaked in a mist of confusion and the faintest hint of menace in the air.

  His fingers rubbed the yellowed paper. The note had been folded in two. It was solid, rough to the touch, and it crinkled as he refolded it. There was nothing around him just then that was more real than that note.

  Will raised his eyes and searched above the heads of the people moving through the stands, trying to find their row. Seconds had passed. He saw the bright orange of Kyle's hair ahead, perhaps halfway to the steps that led down from the bleachers. Then, without really even being aware that he was going to go after the kid, he was moving, slipping past people in pursuit.

  He caught up to him on the far end of the bleachers.

  “Kyle!”

  The redhead snapped around as if he'd been yanked, glanced once at Will, and rolled his eyes. By then Will was in close, blocking out Kyle's view of the stands, trying to keep their exchange at least semiprivate, there in the midst of the Cougars' fans.

  Will held the note in front of him like a priest brandishing a communion wafer. “Tell me.”

  The kid scowled, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Tell you what?”

  A rush of anger and frustration went through Will. Much as he had tried to block it out, his mind had been slipping gears since last night. When he had awoken this morning he had been profoundly unnerved by the tricks his memory was playing on him. But the note in his hand, rough under his touch, was not the product of his imagination. It was tangible.

  Will shook his head, and for the first time since the kid had handed him the note he looked into Kyle's eyes, really looked at him.

  “Listen, kid . . . Kyle. A lot of weird shit has been happening to me the last couple of days.” He shook the note. “This is just the latest. Not a lot of it makes sense to me. You're here. You came all the way down here to hand me this—”

  A frown creased Kyle's forehead. “I go to Eastborough, man. It's Homecoming.”

  “Yeah.” Will nodded. “Of course it is. But, look, you brought this with you. Aren't you at all curious what the hell it means?”

  Sullenly, the kid tipped his head to one side, gaze downcast. He shrugged lightly. “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  Kyle glanced around as if afraid he was being watched. Then he nodded. “All right, yeah. I'm curious. Killed the cat, didn't it? So tell me, then. What is it?”

  Aware now of the way his heart was racing, Will nodded toward the bleachers. A few rows up there was room on the end of the bench. With obvious reluctance Kyle went up the stairs and sat down, sliding in so that Will could take the seat beside him.

  “Where did it come from?” Will asked.

  Kyle watched the game, eyes focused and yet also somehow distant. After a few seconds he gave a soft laugh. “Weird,” he said, and shook his head, attention still on the action on the football field. “It really used to be your house? You lived there?”

  “Until I went to college, yeah.” Will wanted to urge him on but he could tell now that he had to let this kid tell it in his own way or he wasn't going to tell it at all. Around them people shouted and cheered. Popcorn flew, and along the very same row in which they sat, Will saw a kid about Kyle's age tipping a bottle of Jack Daniel's into a half-empty two-liter bottle of Coke as his buddies looked eagerly on.

  “Which room was yours?” the kid asked.

  “The one at the far end of the hall with the windows in the front. The one with the ash tree just . . . never mind.” The ash tree wasn't there anymore.

  Kyle nodded as though that made all the sense in the world to him. “That's my room, too.”

  “So you found it in your room?”

  The kid shook his head. At last he turned to regard Will carefully, meeting his eyes, and there was an unease there that Kyle was doing everything to hide.

  “The storage area? Under the house?” the kid began.

  “Yeah. We kept all kinds of stuff in there. Wheelbarrow. Storm windows and things. Half the time I think my parents forgot it was there. I hung out in there with my friends sometimes.”

  Will didn't have to elaborate, didn't have to explain that he and his friends would go there to drink beer and maybe smoke a joint now and again. There was an instant communication between them. Kyle understood those things implicitly because it was his house now and he was of that age and had done the same things.

  The edges of Kyle's mouth twitched in a blink of a smile. “My dad put a lock on it last summer. But I copied the key.” Then all trace of amusement disappeared and once more the kid could not look at Will. “That's where the problem comes in. I've been down in that hole a thousand times. There's some loose insulation in the ceil
ing, by a beam—”

  Images flashed through Will's mind. He could picture the storage area under the split-level's enclosed porch as if he had just been there yesterday. The door wasn't much, just a few planks of heavy wood and a latch. Inside, the floor was the same concrete as the patio. To get through the door you had to crouch low and duck your head, and even inside you still had to stay down low. Will could not count the number of times he had bumped his head. There was a single bare lightbulb with a chain to turn it off and on, and a couple of thick support beams for the porch ran up through the little room.

  And in the insulation that kept the winter cold from seeping into the porch above, there were lots of rips and tears that were perfect for hiding things. Like a dime bag of marijuana, which Will had never really liked but would smoke with his friends if they had some. Or like the Polaroid nudes he had taken of Caitlyn sophomore year and later burned at her insistence.

  Will nodded. “You hide things in there,” he said, though his voice sounded far away even to him and the roar of the crowd seemed to diminish. He felt as though he were slipping into the same mist that seemed to envelop everything at the moment. But then his fingers rasped on the yellowed paper of that note in his hand and he blinked and turned to look at Kyle again.

  The kid was studying him with renewed interest, as though he had never seen Will before at all. Or as though he had just discovered that Will was a brand-new type of creature, something entirely unexpected.

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “Sometimes I do.” A moment of guilt made him drop his gaze, but then he brought his eyes up again and looked at Will more firmly. “I was in there yesterday, right after I saw you. I was going to get something I had hidden in there, but then I found the note.”

  His words hastened; his tone became more anxious. “Other than my father, I have the only key. I figured he'd found my . . . the thing I'd hidden. I pulled the envelope down. I was losing it, thinking I was totally busted. But then I saw what it said—”

  “What envelope?”

  Kyle broke off and gave him a quizzical look. Then understanding dawned and he gave another little shrug. “You don't think it came like that, do you? How do you think I knew your name and where to find you and shit?”