“Oh yeah?” he said, shoving a mound of sugar flakes into his mouth and doing his best not to throw it right back up.
“Mmhhmm,” his mom said. “Says here the Emporium had to call security and everything,” she said, taking another sip of coffee.
“Oh wow,” Oscar said, spooning more sugar flakes into his mouth even though he wasn’t finished chewing the first spoonful.
“All over some stupid toy. Apparently, a couple of kids even made off with one during the commotion.”
Then Oscar’s mom did look up, fixing her dark-brown eyes on Oscar’s. People were always telling them how much they looked alike, with their smooth features and eyes like coal.
“Can you believe that?” she asked, and Oscar understood that she was asking exactly that … if he could believe it. Because if he knew anything about it—anything at all—it wouldn’t be so hard to believe it was true.
“Irvin mentioned something about you boys heading to the mall yesterday,” she said, giving Oscar so many chances not to lie. She’d opened every single door to the truth, inviting Oscar to walk through, to be honest. She was begging him not to disappoint her.
But it wasn’t just Oscar’s lie to protect anymore. Oscar had made sure of that when he dragged Raj and Isaac along with him. So, Oscar made a decision: he disappointed his mom to save his friends.
“Must’ve been after we got there,” Oscar said. Then he shrugged. A period on the end of the lie.
Oscar’s mom stared at him for so long, he thought maybe he could apologize without saying a word. He hoped his mom could hear it. Instead, she finally released his gaze and drained the last drop of coffee from her mug, folded the paper over itself, and threw it into the recycling bin without another word.
Oscar had never felt smaller. He spent the rest of the day at home, avoiding Raj’s calls and pretending he didn’t hear Isaac knocking at his door. He lay in bed instead, staring at the bulging eyes of the Plushtrap while it stared back at him.
“You’re worse than useless,” he said to it. Or maybe he said it to himself.
The next few days passed by Oscar in a blur, and finally, Isaac and Raj cornered him in the cafeteria.
“Look, if you’re possessed, we’ll understand, okay?” Isaac said. “Just blink twice if you need help.”
“C’mon, man. If you’re trapped in there, let us help you,” Raj said, nodding with Isaac.
“I’m not possessed,” Oscar said, but he couldn’t make himself smile.
“Dude, if this is still about the Plushtrap thing,” Isaac said, and Oscar thought that was a funny way of referring to a misdemeanor.
“It’s not just that,” Oscar said, and Raj and Isaac got quiet. Oscar figured they probably understood. They’d been friends long enough for them to notice that Oscar’s shoes never had the right logo, that his backpack had to last two school years instead of one.
“First-generation technology is always bogus anyway,” Raj said. “We’ll save up for Gen Two. It’ll give them a chance to work out all the bugs.”
Isaac nodded, and Oscar actually did feel better. They didn’t hate him. He was down a mom and a Plushtrap, but he was up two friends. Things were starting to even out. That’s probably what made the thing he had to say next even harder.
“I’ve gotta take it back.”
Isaac put his palm to his forehead, and Raj just closed his eyes. Clearly, they’d seen this coming.
“With those eyes and those teeth in it?” Raj said. “C’mon, dude, just let it go.”
“I can’t. My mom knows.”
They both looked up. “How are you even alive?” asked Isaac.
“I mean, she didn’t say she knows, but she knows,” said Oscar.
“What good will it even do?” asked Raj. “It’s busted. Our money’s already gone. And do you really want to answer questions about those, um, ‘upgrades’? ”
Raj and Isaac looked around to make sure no one had heard.
Oscar understood. It was bad enough owning up to the theft. Raj was right; he absolutely did not want to answer any questions about the eerily human eyes and set of matching human teeth.
Which is still impossible, Oscar told himself, even though he hadn’t mustered the courage to touch the eyes for himself and swore that last night, those same eyes had followed him across the room.
He shook off the memory.
“That isn’t the point,” Oscar said, and Raj and Isaac couldn’t say anything because they knew it was true. It wasn’t about the money or the toy. It was about the taking. And Oscar wasn’t a taker. None of them were.
“You guys don’t have to come,” he said. “I was the one who did it.”
But Raj and Isaac just sighed and looked at their shoes, and Oscar knew he wouldn’t be walking to the mall himself by that afternoon. His friends would be there with him.
“You’re an idiot,” said Isaac.
“I know.”
For some reason, the box felt heavier in Oscar’s hands on the way back to the mall. Maybe it was because of all the money they’d sunk into it.
“What if we see those security guards again?” Isaac asked, and they stopped just outside the doors to the east entrance.
Raj shook his head. “What’re they gonna do, arrest us for returning what we stole?”
“Good point,” Isaac said, and they began the slow walk to the Emporium.
But when they arrived, the Emporium was gone.
“What?” Oscar whispered as he read and reread the big orange letters lighting the place above the glass doors that used to be yellow. Now they spelled HAL’S HALLOWEEN HALLWAY.
“Did we come in the wrong entrance?” Raj asked, but they all knew they hadn’t.
Any doubts that remained were laid to rest the minute they walked through the door. The same stained and grimy floor spread the length of the store, but now, instead of shelves lined with dusty toys and dark spaces, every sort of Halloween accoutrement spilled from the metal racks. There was an aisle for decorations and lights, another for party favors, two for candy, and what looked to be five or six aisles crammed with every sort of costume, from murderous slashers to sparkly princesses.
“Did we fall through a wormhole or something?” Isaac asked, scratching the back of his neck.
“Hey, guys, look,” Raj chuckled, pulling a green Plushtrap Chaser costume from the rack and holding it against him.
“Dude, seriously?” Isaac said, yanking the costume from Raj’s hands and replacing it.
Oscar made his way to the cashier’s counter at the front of the store, the scene of humanity’s meltdown not even a week ago.
“Where’s the Emporium?” asked Oscar in a daze.
The girl behind the counter wore a pair of yellow antennae on long springs that bounced when she looked down from her perch at Oscar.
“The what?”
“The store that was here before,” Oscar said.
“Oh yeah,” she said without answering the question, nor apparently caring to.
“Where’d it go?” Oscar asked.
“Not a clue,” the girl said, returning to the screen of her phone. “I just filled out an application and poof,” she said, waving her hand lazily. “Here I am.”
“But I need to return this,” said Oscar, suddenly feeling very young and small next to this older girl.
The girl looked back down at him, and her eyes widened just enough to know he’d finally gotten her attention. It lasted only a second, though.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked, looking at her screen again. “Why would you want to return it? You could sell that thing for a fortune.”
“It’s … it’s not mine,” Oscar said, looking down. When he looked back up, the girl had lifted the eyebrow closest to him.
“It is now.”
Oscar looked back down at the box in his hands, the cardboard looking more crinkled than ever.
When he rejoined Raj and Isaac, they were decked out fully in hockey masks and pix
ie wings.
“I’m going for a kind of murderous fairy vibe,” said Raj.
“I can’t return it,” Oscar said, and Isaac and Raj lifted their masks.
“Well … no one can say we didn’t try, right?” Raj said.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” said Isaac, but he didn’t follow it up with anything, so Oscar knew he couldn’t think of a reason why.
Ten minutes and three sets of pixie wings and hockey masks later, the boys headed back to Oscar’s house to devise a plan for trick-or-treating. Every year, they vowed to make it to the other side of the train tracks, where the good candy was rumored to be. Every year, they ran out of time, distracted by the false promise of the good stuff closer by.
“We fall for it every time,” Raj said. “Not this year. This year, we start on the other side of the tracks and work our way back.”
Oscar and Isaac agreed. It was a good plan.
The plan set, Raj and Isaac fell deep into a match to the death on Raj’s newest console game, taking turns after wiping palm sweat from the controls before each turn.
“You’re going down,” Raj said, but his thumbs jammed furiously at the buttons while Isaac sat back smiling.
“Every time,” Isaac said. “You say it every time. One day, you’re just going to have to admit—”
“You’re not the champion,” Raj said, beads of sweat forming on his brow.
Oscar was barely paying attention, though. He was chiseling away the remaining battery leakage from the compartment on the back of the Plushtrap Chaser.
The wind was picking up outside, and it looked like the storm the news had been blathering on about for the last week was finally going to hit. The electricity kept flickering on and off, which was only contributing more to Raj’s losing streak.
“C’mon, it doesn’t count if the power goes out,” Raj complained.
“I don’t make the rules,” Isaac said, smug in his luck.
It had to make Raj even angrier that the game was his; so was the console. He should be better at it, except that they mostly kept it plugged in at Oscar’s because he was the only one without siblings hanging around begging to play. Oscar wasn’t interested in video games right then, though.
“Oscar, help me out here. Power outages warrant a redo, don’t they?” Raj asked while they waited for the power to come back on. The light outside was fading fast.
“Hmmm?” Oscar asked. He’d tried scraping away the rest of the gunk, swapping out the battery for one in the little fan that sat on his mom’s bedside table, even turning the battery around to face the opposite charge, hoping maybe it was a manufacturing defect. Nothing powered the Plushtrap Chaser, though.
“Why are you still messing with that?” Isaac asked, clearly tired of the drama it had brought to the last several days.
“He’s right,” Raj said in a rare moment of agreement. “It’s hopeless, Oscar. Just let it go.”
“I think we should literally let it go,” Isaac said, “as in get rid of it.” He twisted his mouth for a second. “It’s not just broken, it’s … I don’t know. Just wrong.”
Oscar didn’t disagree, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He ignored Isaac, and he ignored Raj, too. But Oscar didn’t feel like it was hopeless. They’d gotten away from mall security. He’d kept the truth from his mom. They’d tried to do the right thing and return it. It was like there was some reason he had to keep this thing.
He flipped it over and stared into the murky glistening green eyes of the ugly rabbit.
“If you’re possessed, blink twice,” he said to the bunny, chuckling quietly.
Yet while the Plushtrap didn’t blink, it emitted a sound. A sort of quiet chirp, so fast it might not have happened at all.
“Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” asked Raj.
The power flickered back on, and the video game resumed, along with Raj and Isaac’s arguing as they continued their tournament to the death.
Then, just as Oscar was getting ready to flip the rabbit over again and take his thousandth look at the battery compartment, he spotted a tiny hole at the side of the rabbit’s metal jaw. At first, it looked like nothing but a bolt holding together the hinge of the lower jaw. From this angle, though, Oscar could see that it wasn’t a bolt at all.
It was a port.
Oscar’s house phone began to ring as the lights flickered again.
With the Plushtrap still in his hands, Oscar ran to the kitchen to catch the call before the machine picked up. Even if they could afford two phone plans, Oscar’s mom would have insisted on keeping a land line. She was big on backup systems.
The line was crackly, and it took Oscar asking three times who it was before he could clearly hear his mom’s voice.
“Ugh, this storm,” his mom said. “How about now?”
“Yeah, I can hear you,” Oscar said, barely listening. He was trying to get a closer look at the port on the Plushtrap, but it was hard when the light in the kitchen kept blinking out.
“LM, I need your help tomorrow,” she said.
“Sure, Mom,” he said, not listening.
“I’m sorry to ask. You know how much I hate asking. It’s just that with this storm tonight, we’ve had so many people call in sick, we’re going to be completely backed up on laundry and charts tomorrow, and … are you listening?”
“Uh-huh,” Oscar lied, but it suddenly dawned on him why she sounded so apologetic.
“Wait, no, Mom. No, not tomorrow.”
“I knew you’d be upset, hon, but it’s—”
“Mom, tomorrow is Halloween!” Oscar said, suddenly panicked at what he’d agreed to, not that he’d have had much of a say in the matter either way.
“I realize that, but sweetie, aren’t you and your friends a little old to be—?”
“No! Why do you always do that?” Oscar said, taking it a little too far, but now it was too late.
“Do what?”
Oscar could barely hear his mom now. The storm was encroaching on the phone lines and rattling the house from the outside.
Maybe it was the fact that she sounded so far away that made Oscar feel like he could say what he said next.
“You act like I’m older, like I should be just like you. Like I should be just like Dad. You never let me be a kid. Dad died, and you expected me to just grow up.”
“Oscar, I—”
“I stole it okay? I stole the stupid Plushtrap toy. Your Little Man stole it !” Oscar said, and he knew it was cruel, but he was just so angry because it was happening again. Once again, he was missing out on what everyone else got to enjoy.
The lights blinked off and on in the kitchen, and suddenly, his mom was gone.
“Mom?”
But all that greeted him was silence, then the echo of his own breath, and finally, the rapid tone of the circuit’s busy signal.
Oscar walked slowly back to his room, just in time to watch Isaac put the finishing moves on Raj’s fighter. All Oscar could do, though, was stare at the tiny port by the Plushtrap’s jaw. The damage of what he might have just done to his mother was too much to contemplate all at once.
“Raj, I need your cell phone charger,” Oscar said.
“What? Right now? I was just catching up!” he said, pointing to the screen.
“No, you weren’t,” Oscar said.
“Listen to the man,” Isaac said. “He speaks the truth.”
Oscar flinched at the reference to him as a ‘man’ and followed Raj to the hallway, where he fished a knotted cord from a drawer and handed it to Oscar.
Oscar knew it was a kindness of Raj not to ask what he’d need a phone charger for if he didn’t have a phone, but Raj was still following Oscar’s motions with interest.
Back in Oscar’s room, Isaac had Raj’s fighter’s HP down to ten percent.
Oscar took a small breath and held it, then brought the charger’s A-connecter to the hole in the Plushtrap’s head. When the plug fit snugly in place, Oscar exhal
ed.
“This is it, Raj. I’m putting you out of your misery in three …,”
The sound of Isaac’s fighter powering up for his death move pulsed in Oscar’s ears as he marched the Plushtrap and charger to the outlet across the room.
“Two …” said Isaac as the lights began to flicker overhead.
“Just get it over with,” Raj said miserably.
“And you’re de—”
Oscar didn’t remember plugging the adapter into the wall. He didn’t remember the lights going out, or Isaac’s fighter winning the golden belt. If he was pressed, he might not be able to remember his own name.
All he knew for the moment was that the room was dark, and he was on the other side of it.
“What the … ?” he could hear Isaac say.
“Do you smell burning?” he could hear Raj say.
“Oh—oh man, Oscar,” Isaac said.
“Oscar? Oscar!” said Raj.
Oscar couldn’t understand why they seemed so panicked. He could barely make out the outline of their heads in the moonlight that illuminated the room in flicks and whips while the tree branches outside waved under the storm.
“Oscar, how many fingers am I holding up?” said Raj.
“You’re not holding anything up,” Isaac said, and Raj shook his head.
“Right. Sorry.”
“I’m fine,” Oscar said, not certain that was true, but he was getting weirded out with them acting so worried about him. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
“Uh, do you not remember soaring across the room?” Raj said, and they looked even more worried now.
“Knock it off,” Oscar dismissed, using the wall for support as he struggled to get to his feet. His head felt like it was stuck in a fish tank.
“We’re not messing with you,” Isaac said, and a closer look at their faces told Oscar it was true.
“One minute, you’re plugging in the charger, the next minute, you’re airborne. I think it was the lightning.”
Outside, the moon fought for space in the sky against the invading clouds. Inside, Oscar’s vision blurred for a moment longer until he finally felt things come into focus.
“Maybe we should call his mom,” he heard Isaac say.
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