Fade to Blue

by Sean Beaudoin

  Dalton walked over and helped Macy help the Euclidian up.

  “You okay?”

  The kid spat mud, then ran toward the school doors, trying not to cry. Macy mouthed a silent thanks and followed him on adorably sensible heels.

  “You’re standing on my field,” the Krispy Kreme growled.

  Dalton turned. “That make you the groundskeeper?”

  The crowd drew a collective breath. A few of the more brazen laughed aloud. The Krispy Kreme flexed, dipping to show the name sewn across the back of his jersey: JEFF CHUFF, QB.

  “Impressive.”

  “You got a problem, new fish?”

  “Your Ball is mistreating my ride.”

  The Crowdarounds turned, looking at Dalton’s scooter lying in the mud.

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #4

  Never let anyone mess with your ride.

  Conversely, feel free to mess with theirs, especially if there’s a chance they’ll be chasing you on it later.

  Chuff laughed. “So? Have your mommy buy another one.”

  Dalton lifted his crisp white button-up. Underneath was a T-shirt that said THE CLASH IS THE ONLY BAND THAT MATTERS. When he lifted that as well, everyone could see the worn grip of his silver-plated automatic. The hilt was wrapped with rubber bands to keep it from slipping down his pants, a little trick he’d learned from chapter 6 of The Cairo Score. Just like the scooter, the gun was shiny and mean-looking.

  “You’re strapped?” Chuff wheezed, stepping back. “That’s bloshite. Ever since The Body, we got an agreement.”

  “Like one of those abstinence ring things?”

  “A pact. All the cliques. Us and Foxxes and Yearbook. Even Pinker Casket. No guns.”

  “Huh,” Dalton said, fingering his gun. “Or what?”

  Chuff’s eyes scanned the rooftop. “When Lee Harvies find out you got a pistol on campus, they’ll let you know or what. You’re lucky, only your leg’ll get ventilated.”

  “It’s true,” Mole said, appearing out of nowhere. “Lee Harvies aim to keep the peace.”

  Dalton shook his head. “Let me get this straight. You got a clique that keeps other cliques from carrying guns by shooting at them?”

  “Used to be cops in the lot four days a week,” Chuff explained. “Hassle this, hassle that, badges and cuffs. Calls to parents. We all realized it was bad for business.”

  “So you have an agreement,” Dalton said. “What I have is a scooter in the mud.”

  “And?”

  “And it needs to not be there anymore.”

  Birds tweeted. Bees buzzed. Grass grew.

  “People lose teeth talking like that.”

  “People get shot talking about other people’s teeth.”

  Chuff looked around. The rest of the Balls shrugged. Dalton flicked the safety.

  “I got a full clip. You factor in a miss rate of twenty percent and I am still about to seriously reduce your available starters for next practice.”

  Chuff rubbed his oven-roaster neck, then grudgingly lifted the scooter with one hand, setting it upright.

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #5

  The thing about tough guys is they tend to be as tough as you let them be.

  “Now wipe it off.”

  Chuff didn’t move. His jaw worked like he was gnawing shale.

  “It’s a bluff!” Chance Chugg yelled.

  Dalton whipped out the automatic. The Crowdarounds panicked, pushing backward as a big-haired girl stood on the fringes with a cigarette in her mouth fumbling for a light. He stuck the gun in her face and pulled the trigger. A wail went up, followed by a raft of curses and screams.

  But there was no bang.

  Instead, a small butane flame licked out of the end of the barrel. Dalton held it steady, lighting the girl’s cigarette. The crowd roared with relief and giddy laughter.

  “It’s a toy?” Chuff yelled, already running forward. Dalton began a mental inventory of the Lex Cole library. At this point, the bad guy usually made a series of threats, gave a face-saving speech, and then walked away. Except Chuff wasn’t walking away. He was picking up speed.

  Um.

  Nine feet.

  Um.

  Six.

  Um.

  Three.

  Pang pang pang!

  Shots spattered through the dirt. Chuff veered wildly left, crashing into bags of equipment. From the roof came the reflection of a scope blinking in the hazy morning light.

  “LEE HARVIES!” someone yelled, and there was chaos, more shots picking up the dirt in pairs, friends and enemies scattering. Plaths formed a black beret phalanx. Sis Boom Bahs circled like tight-sweatered chickens. The Balls dragged a groggy Chuff into the locker room as everyone shielded their heads, ducking into the relative safety of the school.

  “Run!”

  Dalton didn’t run. He knelt among the churning legs and slid his finger over a bullet hole in the grass. There was a streak of sticky red. It could have been blood. It smelled a whole lot like vinegar. He stood and scanned the rooftop, catching a glimpse of a bright white face. It wasn’t a face, it was a hockey mask. A Jason mask. The mask looked down at him, just a plastic mouth and nose, black eyes surrounded by silver anarchy symbols.

  It was totally, utterly, piss-leg scary.

  The rifle rose again. This time Dalton covered his head and ran inside like everyone else. Even in One Bullet, One Kill Lexington Cole hadn’t thought it smart to go mano a mano with a sniper.

  GLOSSARY

  Further clarification for some references or concepts to be found in FADE TO BLUE.

  THE VIRTUALITY Virtual worlds play an important role in today’s business and retail environments. There are also numerous entertainment and military applications as well. Achieving full verisimilitude (increase in production value) may be a lifelong process, as certain product-extracting infrastructures are perpetually evolving. The concept of the virtual world as proposed by the visionary Ben Fade predates computers and has been traced to comments made by Pliny the Elder on his Roman deathbed (79 A.D..—year of the doughnut). Any true Virtuality abides by specific rules involving gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time chronology, and intra-environment communication. See Halberstam, D., How We Got the Best Swag and the Brightest Gear, Most of It Totally Freaking Free (Little, Brown, 1971) for further details.

  DIET CRANK Initially marketed by Enamel-Free Enterprises, this soft drink, which claims to have triple the caffeine value of six donkey-sized tureens of Colombian coffee, is a favorite of young professionals, truck drivers, café poets, and the terminally logorrheaic. Wildly popular overseas, in Japan it’s known as Funny Ouch My Esophagus. In Germany it’s called You Vill Drink Now. In England it’s known as Moloko Milk, and in France it’s simply called Surrender. An offshoot of Diet Crank that failed to catch on with the fickle American consumer was Liquid Agassi, pulled from shelves in the mid-nineties.

  DYNATONE/GLAZO “D/G,” as it is usually referred to, is one of the largest corporations in the world. Having worked on projects like the Belgian Congo’s 90,000-square hectare Diamondless Dirt Hole and Libya’s Monument to Muammar, which is the world’s largest poured-concrete fist, towering nearly a hundred stories above the bay of Tripoli, not to mention smaller projects such as the Korean War and the invasion of Grenada, they are incredibly well connected in political circles. Some say top D/G executives have been directly influencing both local and national elections since the Nixon administration. Unverified reports have claimed D/G actually owns both Lichtenstein and Hungary outright. In any case, they are a prodigiously wealthy and heavily diversified company, with billions of dollars sunk into pharmaceuticals, technology, child labor, resource extraction, retail enterprises, and production of any film starring Vin Diesel. A chain of casual clothing stores, The Clap, was one of their few public failures. Other products, such as the Palm O’ Suds liquid soap brand, as well as the Cardboard Palace line of InstaShelters for the homeless, have been major successes
.

  AMELIA EARHART She flew a plane or something. It has yet to be explained what the big deal was. If all it took was disappearing to be endlessly conjectured over, not to mention being mythologized in generations of schoolgirl book reports, half the country would be selling their stuff and camping out in the bushes behind Taco Bell. Not too long ago they put Amelia on a stamp with one of those old leather aviator caps with the fur lining. So, really, the last laugh’s on her. No one ever looks good in a leather aviator cap.

  RENOB Boner backwards, which is such a totally good thing to call your little brother in the station wagon all the way to Chuck E. Cheese’s without your parents figuring out, at least until right when you pull in the parking lot and then Dad turns around and threatens not to let you play Skee-Ball and, worse than that, while busy pointing his big jabby finger, you’re not even going to get a slice of plain cheese pie if you don’t knock it the hell off, mister, like right now. Then, when you call Dad a dawkcid, it’s a whole month without the Xbox, plus regular meetings at school with Miss Stusser who smells like garlic raisins and tries to help you, through the miracle of word association, achieve your own brand of angsty pubescent closure.

  THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY Possibly the greatest film ever made. The 1966 Italian western stars Clint Eastwood as Good, Lee Van Cleef as Bad, and Eli Wallach as Ugly. What kind of lousy agent did Wallach have? And who would ever screw with a guy named Lee Van Cleef? Well, Clint does. And wins. There used to be this heavyweight boxer named Livingstone Bramble. It was like, who in their right mind would step in the ring with a guy named Livingstone Bramble? I don’t even know if he was any good, but his name was terrifying. Anyhow, Clint wears this carpet-y poncho the whole movie and shoots tons of badly dubbed henchmen with his six-shooter and generally emotes about as often as a Rapa Nui totem, but since being Violent and Uncomplicated is somehow directly at the epicenter of American-male-fantasy viewing, Good/Bad/Ugly has spawned about a million action films, even those movies where ponytail neck-slapper Steven Seagal saves the environment with the help of sexy Eskimos. Oh, yeah, and then there’s Ennio Moriccone. Dude could pen a film score.

  RAPA NUI What turtlenecked associate professors at parties holding tiny grape bunches while eating them one at a time explain to you is the real name of Easter Island, where those big-head statues are. The Turtleneck then goes on to inform you that glass is actually made of compressed sand, Hemingway is overrated, there’s a hole the size of Texas in the ozone layer, and game theory is the secret to winning at blackjack.

  DOKTAH JACK AND THE KEVORKIANS Once described by Lester Bangs as “the epitome of American Sludge Metal” and widely dismissed by critics as “sort of like Carcass, but without the nuance and melody,” Doktah Jack (real name Billy Jack Ozal) have had a long and influential career. Signed initially to Dead in the Water records, they have since recorded for more than a dozen labels. Their best known song, “Actually, a Really Expensive Bird,” hit #166 on the Billboard charts at the height of the nineties grunge movement. A subsequent tour opening for Hanson goth-tribute band Charles MHanson was ill-fated at best. Currently reformed after a long mourning period following the deep-sea implosion of drummer, Danny “Meatslap” Edgerton, they are playing a flannel-and-bourbon roadhouse on the edge of a town near you.

  MANNISH JIM Not just a once-a-day supplement, it’s a powerful confidence booster that gives you strong, powerful confidence! Over thirty million men have experienced the strengthy, proven, naturally rock-firm results! It’s a proprietary blend! It’s naturally strong! There is a confident firmness in its guaranteed peak-enhancement strength! Order today!

  LEATHERFACE The Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy. He lurches around in a full rubber apron sort of doing really bad things to hitchhikers and unwary teens who scream and run a lot, but usually don’t get very far. Leatherface’s real name is Ed Gien and the sixteen movies made about him since 1974 are all vaguely based on a guy who supposedly lived with his cannibal family, including his brothers Chop Top and Nubbins, in a big scary house in Amarillo or somewhere. Why is it that all the cannibals live in Texas? And why do they always turn their nubile blond victims into chili? And how come no one’s cell phone ever works at night in the foggy swamp?

  BINARY CODE In binary code you can replace the alphabet with eight-bit strands that stand for each character. Like, B is 01100010. It totally works. So, for instance, if this tool is hassling you at your locker, and you want to be all like, hey, tool, YOU SUCK, you just write a 0 on one palm and a 1 on the other, and then you open and close your hands real fast in front of his face, flashing this message: 01000101 11101010 01011010 10001011 10100101 11101010 10001010 00101101.

  CLOSURE Any Meg Ryan movie has closure. So does every episode of Sex in the City, anything sung by Celine Dion, anything your mom’s therapist advises, as well as anything your menopausal aunt cries over up in your sister’s room after running away from the table during Thanksgiving when Grandpa asks mid gravy-pour “when she’s gonna get married already.” After Mom goes up and talks to her for awhile and she comes back down all red-faced and holding twelve balled-up tissues in her left hand and Grandpa apologizes even though he’s not sure what for, and then your aunt tells everyone “I’m okay, I’m okay” about twenty times while emptying the rest of the chardonnay into her coffee mug, and Dad makes a dumb joke about how turkey makes you sleepy, and then everyone sort of starts silently wondering whether it’s the Cowboys game or the Macy’s parade that’s likely to be more colossally mind-numbingly boring, THAT’S closure.

  AIR DIKE The namesake for his own brand of two-hundred-dollar shoes mostly made by children in Malaysian sweatshops, Jim “Wayner” Dike led Baylor to the Elite Eight in 1983. He was drafted forty-second by the New Jersey Nets, and subsequently led the league for six straight years in fouls committed at 4.8 per nine minutes of court time. At six-eleven and two hundred sixty-eight pounds, he was known for his rugged play, particularly for his usage of his large posterior in securing inside position. After his retirement, to little fanfare—mostly summed up by the sentiment “What’s his name was still playing?”—Jim Dike slowly came to be revered in certain circles for his Eeyore-ish everyman qualities. What started as an Internet joke, footage of “Wayner” boxing Kobe not only out of the paint, but three rows into the crowd with one flex of his massive ass, resulted in an unprecedented swell of popularity. Slots on talk shows and cooking programs followed. An infomercial for his line of My Glutes Are Thugs, Dog workout tapes resulted in impressive sales. But it was Jim Dike’s second career as an incredibly successful athletic shoe pitchman that ultimately made his name. It was a development once described by Ron “RonCo” Popeil as “astonishing in the annals of gullibility.” When someone said, “Astonishing in the anal of what, Ron?” everybody laughed, but most of them felt sort of ashamed later for being so immature.

  Q&A with author SEAN BEAUDOIN

  This type of science fiction is a departure from your previous book, Going Nowhere Faster, and is also very different from your forthcoming book, You Killed Wesley Payne. Are you a sci-fi fan? Who were some of the authors or filmmakers who inspired you?

  I’m less a fan of sci-fi than I am a fan of good writing in pretty much any genre. If it’s funny, sharp, original, daring, unusual, or bold I’ll read it. My favorite director growing up was Stanley Kubrick, by a pretty long shot. My advice to anyone considering film school is to save a hundred thousand dollars and buy a half-dozen Kubrick DVDs instead.

  Comic books play a big role in Fade to Blue. Are you a big comics fan?

  Yeah, but I’ve never been a superhero guy. I’m more of a story guy. I definitely feel like some stories can only really be told with drawings. And I’ve always sort of felt a bit resentful of the way that comic art is sometimes not treated as real “art.” It’s similar to the reception that YA novels get in certain literary quarters. So why not marry the two and make everyone mad?

  You’ve said in the past that Fade to Blue came out of a
friendship you had in high school. Can you talk about that?

  I could, but I’ve already gone on about it too much. Suffice it to say that my teen romances were a mixture of mentally exaggerated and cinematically tragic.

  Have you ever been Goth?

  Is that an acronym? G.O.T.H. It sounds like something they pasteurize out of milk. No, I probably would have been, but I’m allergic to eyeliner. I did clomp around in colossal black boots and ripped black T-shirts for about five years straight, though. Actually, I still do that.

  Even though there is mystery and intrigue in this book, at its core it’s a lot about loss and the confusion that comes with that. That’s something many teens can identify with. Did you have similar experiences in your teen years?

  I did have a few people close to me die inexplicably while I was pretty young. Either the circumstances went unexplained or the details were shielded for years, which always felt very conspiratorial and menacing. I definitely tried to access the randomness and unreality of that experience in Fade to Blue.

  Fade to Blue was written during the second Bush administration and has pretty political overtones, dealing with both corporate greed and personal apathy. Did you see parallels between the world of Fade to Blue and the world you were living in?

  It does? You’re reading way too much into it. I am totally apolitical. And I own a great deal of stock in Halliburton.

  Did you know Fade to Blue is the name of a band with an EP called Yawhoogle?