Fetch

by Scott Cawthon

  But now, she had the fox, and what was she doing? She was giving it to him! In an act of utter sainthood, she was giving her most prized possession to him. She’s won it for him. Because she knew how much he’d always wanted one.

  She’d just checkmated.

  “No,” he said, flinging the fox back at her. “No, I don’t want it.”

  “Alec! What sort of way is that to act toward your sister? She’s giving you her gift on her birthday!” their mom cried.

  “She’s such a phony! Can’t you people see that?? She’s the worst kind of spoiled, bratty fake! How can you not see that?”

  Alec was ranting now. It was all he could do to keep his head from spinning on his neck, Exorcist-style.

  “You want me to take the fox?” he said, and he could only guess by the way his mother looked at him that he looked positively maniacal. “Okay fine, I’ll take the fox.”

  He ripped the toy back from his sister’s grasp hard enough to tear the arm, sending soft tufts of stuffing floating into the air.

  Their mother let out an involuntary shriek, and Aunt Gigi put her hand on her sister’s shoulder.

  “Meg, get a grip. You’re making it worse.”

  Their dad tried to make it better.

  “Alec, come on, sport. Don’t do this today.”

  “Oh, I see, because it’s so predicable that Alec would ruin the party. It’s so inevitable that Alec would spoil perfect little Hazel’s good time,” he said, snarling at his family, who could only look back at him in horror.

  All of them, that is, except for Hazel. Hazel simply stood there, arms limp at her sides as she stared at him.

  And there they were. The tears.

  She hadn’t let them fall earlier. She had saved it all up for that moment, when she had the perfect audience. That’s when she let the floodgates open. And even still, she only let a few fall.

  “I can’t take it anymore!” Alec raged, and carried by the wind of the truly possessed, he fled the scene of his worst crime yet. He’d brought the whole party crashing down around him, just as they’d all predicted he would. He’d done his very best to get the better of his sister, and in the end, she’d still won.

  And if that wasn’t enough, she’d actually made him believe—for the briefest moment—that she really was as good as she pretended to be. And that she’d wanted to be his friend.

  Pounding a path through the pizzeria, Alec whizzed past confused-looking staff and his sister’s gang of friends and one or two Lonely Freddy bears, barely registering any of it, including Hazel’s friend, Charlotte, who was about to puke because someone had ignored all warnings to the contrary and fed her chocolate.

  He didn’t stop running until he’d pushed himself through at least three sets of doors and left the cacophony of kids and games and bells and singing behind him. He was somewhere in the cramped maze of backrooms that made up the inner workings of Freddy Fazbear’s Family Pizzeria.

  He slowed to a walk as he tried to catch his breath, but it wasn’t until he’d come to a complete standstill that he realized why it was he couldn’t seem to exhale. It was because he kept gulping air in.

  It was because he was sobbing. Just like a little kid. Just like a spoiled brat.

  He backed against a wall and threw his shoulders against it, once and then again, tucking his chin to his chest as he let his shoulders absorb all the shock.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said, again and again. “It’s not my fault.”

  But the more he heard his pathetic words in his ears, the more he knew they weren’t true. It was his fault, all of it. He’d ruined the party, ruined Hazel, ruined his whole fifteen years by believing everyone was out to get him. He closed his eyes as he threw his shoulders again and again against the wall as he pictured Hazel’s watery eyes, the lines creasing his mom’s forehead, his dad’s head shaking in disappointment.

  Finally, he’d tired himself out enough to stop slamming against the wall, only to realize it wasn’t a wall at all; it was a door. And what he’d thought was the sound of his own tantrum was actually a sound coming from the other side of the door, something that sounded like a loud thumping.

  Pressing his head against the door for a closer listen, he looked up and down the hallway to make sure no one was coming before he ducked into the room with the strange sound.

  The light switch was deep inside the room to his right, and he had to walk several steps in the dark, groping the wall until he finally found it, the door having closed with a heavy thunk just after he’d stepped inside.

  When the room was finally lit, he saw it was something of a storage room, only far more cluttered with what appeared to be abandoned toys, arcade games, and machinery than the extra stocks of napkins and paper cups he was expecting. The back wall was lined with long-dormant arcade games Alec could remember being popular ten or so years ago. Folded cafeteria-style tables were stacked in rows against a side wall, their attached circular seats giving the arrangement a look like dominoes. The wall closest to him consisted of rows of wire racks, each holding various broken or dated toys that might once have been part of the prize counter display. Now, the cluttered shelves of sad, ownerless toys looked less like prizes and more like the stuff that goes missing under kids’ beds.

  He slumped into one of the seats of a cafeteria table that had fallen from its place against the wall.

  His nose was still running from his meltdown in the hallway, and when he lifted his hand to drag it across his face, he felt a tickle of plush and remembered he was still holding the fox.

  Its torn arm dangled by a few stubborn threads. Otherwise, the toy was shiny new, just as it had been promised to the kid lucky enough to get that stupid coupon.

  “You weren’t even supposed to be here,” he said to the fox, but he couldn’t muster the rage to give the words any bite. He was all angered out. In fact, he could hardly feel anything but the shame of having failed so miserably to show his sister up.

  Her words rang in his ears: I wanted you to stop hating me so much.

  This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be what his sister had wanted this whole time—to win a toy he’d never gotten because good kids earned 10,000 ticket prizes and bad kids got followed around by a bear for a friend.

  Alec held his head in his hands, hoping his mind would still. But memories of his sister came rushing back, crashing through his skull and ping-ponging off the insides of his brain like a dated arcade game.

  The pictures she would draw for him and randomly slip under the crack of the bathroom door.

  The dumb jokes he’d make that only she would laugh at.

  The last piece of pumpkin pie she would never eat at Thanksgiving because she knew it was his favorite.

  There were all the moments over the past week, times when he thought she’d been one-upping him, trying to outdo his cunning. Times when he’d thought he caught her looking at him but couldn’t figure out what she was thinking. He’d just assumed she was scheming. But what if she was just looking? What if she was just waiting for him to look back at her?

  What if she was just waiting for him to be a big brother?

  Alec could barely form a cogent thought.

  It seemed impossible that he’d gotten it all so wrong: the attention his parents lavished on her and spared for him; the bad seed label he’d given himself that he was so certain the family had given him; the days and months and years he’d spent lamenting his outsider-ness. What if they’d all actually wanted him inside with the rest of them?

  He thought about what Hazel told him the other day, how she’d seemed so upset, and he couldn’t figure out why.

  I bet you didn’t even know that we moved here for you.

  She was trying to tell him, to get him to understand.

  I wanted you to stop hating me so much.

  Alec couldn’t control himself. He clutched the pirate fox, squeezing the life it didn’t have out of it before throwing it as hard as he could into the shelves beside hi
m, knocking a bin of outdated, unwanted toys to the floor right along with the brand-new Yarg Foxy with the torn arm. All the toys fell in a collective heap to the floor, spilling across the dusty ground in various thumps and squeaks.

  “Great,” Alec said. “Just fantastic.”

  It wasn’t enough he’d ruined the party and hurt Hazel, but now he was going to get in trouble for trashing the back room of Freddy Fazbear’s.

  He ducked behind the shelving rack and began sifting through the toys, throwing them back into the bin they fell out of while doing his best to locate the fox. After everything he’d already done, losing the toy she gave to him just wasn’t an option. Not if he ever had any hope of making things right.

  But finding the Yarg Foxy proved to be a harder task than he’d thought it would be. There were rubber ducks and plastic snakes and felt puppets, but there was no peg-legged fox with a tragically torn arm.

  “C’mon, seriously?” Alec said, exasperated and utterly exhausted by this time.

  All he wanted was for this horrible day to be over with.

  Alec was so lost in the sea of toys that he forgot about the thumping—that strange sound he’d heard on the other side of the door before pushing his way in. He hadn’t heard it again since opening the door, but the thumping was back now, echoing from some part of the room he couldn’t see. Now that he was behind the shelving unit, though, he could tell that the sound was coming from somewhere close by.

  He peered into the far corner of the room, in a cluttered area behind the very last shelving unit lining the wall. There, tucked into a shadowy corner, was a large green Dumpster-type container, a padlock sealing the lid shut.

  Alec took a few slow steps closer to the Dumpster, hoping beyond hope that the thumping wasn’t coming from inside that bin.

  Now beside the bin, he hadn’t heard any more thumping for the last several seconds, and he was mostly satisfied that he’d been mistaken. Clearly, the thumping had to be coming from the other side of the wall the Dumpster leaned against.

  But just as Alec slid his fingers underneath the lid to peek through the crack allowed by the lock, the bin rattled and thumped, and he stumbled backward, scooting as far away from the container as he could get.

  His heart pounded hard enough in his chest that he thought it might explode, but when nothing crawled out from under the crack in the lid, his pulse eventually began to slow to a normal pace.

  Rats. It had to be rats, or some other sort of vermin.

  “Glad I didn’t eat the pizza,” he said to himself and felt his stomach turn.

  Leaning on his elbows, Alec found himself wedged between the wall and the farthest shelving unit from the door, buried behind a sea of forgotten things.

  And there, staring at him from underneath a colorful canopy like something he might have seen in a circus, was a Lonely Freddy bear, just like the one he’d seen staring into nowhere that day he argued with Hazel.

  “You again,” he said to it. “You being punished or something?”

  But he immediately disliked the thought of the already unsettling bear having … misbehaved.

  He stared at the bear as it stood at attention on its platform under the canopy, seeming to gaze at something just over Alec’s shoulder.

  Alec turned and looked at the green Dumpster behind him, but when he turned back around, he was startled to find that the Lonely Freddy’s eyes had somehow shifted.

  They seemed to looking right at Alec.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, friend,” the bear said.

  Alec stopped and stared at the bear.

  “Um, that’s great,” he said to it, and that should have been the end of it.

  Alec didn’t expect it to say something else.

  “We should be best friends.”

  “What?” Alec said, looking a little harder at the bear. Was this how it was supposed to work? He thought it was supposed to be sort of interviewing him. But the bear wasn’t asking him questions so much as it was … telling him things.

  “Very best friends,” said the bear.

  “Okay,” Alec said, trying to brush off the chill that kept running up his arm.

  It’s a stuffed animal, he said to himself. It’s a stupid toy.

  But it was strange that no matter how many times he tried, Alec couldn’t seem to stand up. He couldn’t seem to look away from the bear. All he could do was sit there and stare at it as it stared back.

  Alec had never noticed the bear’s eyes before. Had they always been that blue? And if he didn’t know better, he’d think that they were almost glowing. But that was crazy.

  Then it did start to ask him questions.

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “My favorite color?” Alec asked, almost as if he wasn’t in control of his own voice anymore. “My favorite color is green.”

  The bear moved immediately to the next question. Wasn’t it supposed to share things about it, too?

  “What’s your favorite food?”

  “Lasagna,” said Alec, his answer automatic and immediate.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A pro skateboarder.”

  “What’s your best subject in school?”

  “History.”

  It went on like that for what felt to Alec like hours, but it couldn’t possibly have been that long. He was having such a hard time feeling the floor underneath him or the sensation in his fingers. It was like he was floating, like he was hearing every question drift to him from the end of a long tunnel.

  Then the bear’s questions took a different turn.

  “Who do you admire most?”

  “My aunt Gigi.”

  “What do you fear the most?”

  “The dark.”

  “What would you do if you were asked to hurt someone you love?”

  It felt like the bear was reaching its soft, plush paw into his very soul and extracting the answers he kept the most hidden. And it was doing it so effortlessly.

  Its eyes were as blue and deep as an ocean trench.

  “What’s your biggest regret?”

  And at this question, Alec did stop. He resisted at first, or maybe he simply didn’t know the answer. But the bear wouldn’t move on. It asked again.

  “What’s your biggest regret?”

  Still, Alec hesitated, and the pull from inside of him began to grow painful, like something was squeezing him from his very core.

  “What is your biggest regret … Alec?”

  With the pressure building from inside, he could barely breathe against the pain, and through the tiny spaces in his gritted teeth, the answer trickled out.

  “Hurting Hazel.”

  The pressure eased, and sensation eventually returned to Alec’s body, warming his extremities all the way to the middle of him. But when his body breathed back to life, something felt fundamentally different.

  He stared hard into the blue eyes that had burned through his soul, and he searched for answers of his own, but he only came away with more questions because the blue eyes of the bear had suddenly turned light green.

  “What’s happening?” he tried to ask the bear, because suddenly, the bear seemed to be the one with all the answers, but Alec couldn’t open his mouth.

  He stared and he stared, and the bear simply stared back.

  A panicky feeling began to rise in his chest.

  I just need to get outside, he thought. I need some air.

  But breathing wasn’t his problem. Moving was.

  He tried to extend his leg to stand, but nothing happened. He wanted to push his palm to the floor to brace himself, but he couldn’t.

  Voices, faint at first but growing louder as they approached, gave him a touch of renewed hope. He recognized them immediately.

  “Mom! Hazel!” he called out, or at least he tried, but every time he felt his throat flex to yell, the words struggled to find their way out.

  “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’ll find it,” he
could hear his mom say.

  The thumping from the giant bin behind him kicked up again, and he wanted so badly to move away from it, but nothing was working. Every muscle suddenly felt crystalized.

  “Did you hear that?” Alec heard Hazel say from the other side of the door.

  Yes! Screamed Alec. In here! Look in here!

  He could hear the door open from the other side of the room, but he couldn’t see around the shelving unit. All he could see was the bear as its newly green eyes bore through him.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here,” Alec’s mom said, and he thought he’d never been more relieved to hear her voice.

  “Mom, look!” said Hazel.

  For a second, Alec’s heart leapt. They’d spotted him. He couldn’t see them, but maybe they saw him.

  What if I’m having some sort of seizure? he thought.

  No matter, though. His mom and his sister were here to help now.

  Except why weren’t they talking to him? Why hadn’t they come around the side of the shelving unit?

  “Aw, see?” his mom said. “I told you we’d find it.”

  But you haven’t found me! Alec tried desperately to scream. I’m right here! I’m right here!

  The thumping from the bin had gone silent the moment the door opened, and why now? Why couldn’t the noise pick up again now?

  “He just … threw it in here,” Hazel said, and the pain in her voice was enough to make Alec feel like the smallest, most disgusting cockroach.

  “Hazel,” their mom said, her voice so gentle. “He loves you. I know he does. In his own way, he really does love you. Just like we love him.”

  Alec’s throat tightened into a knot, and this was the moment. This was finally the moment he would tell them how sorry he was, how wrong he was, how much he’d missed out on by wanting so badly to believe he was on the outside.

  Now all he felt was that he was somehow trapped … inside.

  “Come on, sweets. The party is going to wrap up soon. Let’s go polish off that cake, shall we?”