by Mark Crilley
“Dude,” said Leo in return. He never called Billy anything other than dude. Leo probably called little old ladies dude. “Look, your folks told me they wouldn’t be back until, like, midnight or whatever …”
Billy was remoting his way through a bunch of cartoon shows. He paused on an old low-budget monster movie.
“… so I can either come over there and babysit you for a couple hours—which neither of us wants—or just check in again at ten and make sure you’re still alive. Not that I want you to be.”
“C’mon, Leonard. You don’t want anything bad to happen to me. You’d be out twenty bucks a week.”
Normally Billy would have come up with a better verbal jab than the twenty bucks line, but he was devoting most of his attention to the image on the television screen: an enormous creature with lobster claws going to great lengths to stomp his way into a cheap imitation of Disneyland. There didn’t seem to be any special reason why. Maybe he’d run out of office buildings and power stations to wreck.
“All right, dude. Ten o’clock it is. Pick up the phone next time, will ya?”
“Okay, Leonard. And hey: tell your skater buddies to learn some new moves. My gramma can do better kickflips than that.”
Billy shut off the phone with great relief. He knew that the money his parents paid Leo involved him physically being inside the Clikk home. Periodically Leo would skip the phone call and just arrive at the front door. On these occasions he always left behind some very clear proof that he’d been there—doodles on a notepad, a half-finished bottle of Gatorade—apparently thinking a bit of Leo-was-here evidence every once in a while would be enough to convince Billy’s parents they weren’t completely wasting their twenty dollars.
Doodles on notepads. Bottles of Gatorade. Billy noticed stuff like that: details. He’d always had a knack for it, even when he was just a kindergartner. If the dark blue crayon in Crayola’s big box went from being called cerulean one year to cornflower the next, Billy knew about it and had a preference. And it wasn’t just kid stuff. If Billy got even half a second’s glance under the hood of a Hummer H2, he could tell which parts were new, which were old, and which parts the shady repairman had used strictly to skim money off the bill.
The lobster creature had reached the roller-coaster mountain in the middle of the amusement park and was tearing apart its papier-mâché walls. Sweaty actors with loosened neckties pointed and screamed convincingly.
Man. This is one stupid movie. If I were fighting a monster like that, I’d just pull the zipper on his back, stick my head inside, and tell him to get a better costume.
Billy punched the remote and jumped from channel 63 to 64. The Shopping Network: two middle-aged women going nuts over a very ugly piece of jewelry. Punch, punch, punch, punch: 65, 66, 67, 68. Boring, boring, boring, and boring. He was just about to shut the television off.
Huh?
That guy on TV.
That guy looked an awful lot like his dad.
Billy sat up and leaned halfway over the coffee table, staring with all his might. Piker sat up too.
The TV screen was filled with unsteady handheld video: some kind of ticker-tape parade. Street signs in a foreign language, early-morning sunlight. Dark-haired people with open-necked shirts, shouting, cheering. And there, in a big convertible sailing slowly through the crowds …
That’s Dad!
No, it can’t be.
Billy pressed the VCR button on the remote and then hit Record.
Bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep
“No tape!” Billy jumped off the couch, leaped over the coffee table, and fumbled for a blank videotape from the shelf under the TV, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the screen. Piker jumped down from the chair and began whining loudly.
“That can’t be him,” said Billy. “It’s impossible.”
Billy’s heart was beating faster. He tore the cellophane off the videotape and crammed it into the VCR as quickly as he could. He punched the Record button and sat down on the coffee table to continue watching the program.
“That’s not Dad. It just … can’t be. This stuff was obviously shot in a foreign country. Dad never goes to other countries. Except, like, Canada.”
But the man had the same face as Billy’s father: the wide forehead, the slightly grayed wavy hair, the enormous protruding jaw. There was a woman seated next to him. It was hard to tell because she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but that was … Billy’s mom, wasn’t it? She had the same perky nose, the same thin-lipped mouth, and—from what he could see, anyway—was wearing the exact same style of thick-rimmed glasses.
No. Way.
Billy was now leaning so far forward that his face was no more than ten inches from the TV screen. He noticed something about the trees and buildings in the video: everything was dripping with some kind of thick, purplish liquid. As if kids had gone on a rampage with giant purple-yolked eggs.
What the heck is that stuff?
Piker barked once loudly.
A woman’s voice accompanied the video, no doubt providing valuable information, but none of it was in English. A small icon in the lower right-hand corner of the TV screen confirmed what Billy already suspected: this was the International Channel, that weird cable station that went from Middle Eastern movies to Korean soap operas to Mexican news programs every half hour or so.
Billy trained his eyes on the pixelated faces before him. The camera zoomed in, went drastically out of focus, refocused on a palm tree, then finally brought the faces into some degree of detail. It was them. There could be no mistaking it. These were the same two people he’d eaten breakfast with, gone to monster truck shows with, and opened presents with every Christmas morning for the last twelve years.
The footage cut abruptly to a woman behind a desk reading the news. She had deeply tanned skin and almond-shaped eyes. Though she had yet to say a single word in English, Billy could tell by the way she paused and shuffled the papers in front of her that she was switching from one news story to another.
Billy was now off the coffee table and on his feet. He pressed Rewind and watched the video again. And again. And again. He memorized the details: the fruits in the market off to the side of the road (there were papayas, mangos, and bananas by the truckload), the make of the convertible (it was a black 1965 Lincoln Continental, in near-perfect condition), the footwear of the people in the crowd (sandals, one and all). He tried to decipher the words on street signs. One looked like it said DELA ROSA, another DELA COSTA.
This stuff was definitely shot in a foreign country. My parents … are … in a foreign country.
Billy rewound the tape for yet another viewing.
At least they have been pretty recently, or else why would this be on a news show? It’s morning where they are, nighttime here. This isn’t just another country. They’re on the other side of the freakin’ planet here.
SKEETER GIG. BACK LATE, DON’T WAIT UP.
Billy felt his knees buckle slightly, as if they were straining under the weight of not just his body but something else. Something heavier. Something much, much heavier.
“Skeeter gig?” said Billy. “Skeeter gig?”
A shiver ran down his spine and he swallowed hard.
“My parents didn’t go on any skeeter gig. They … they snuck off somewhere … without telling me.
“Mom and Dad don’t do stuff like this. It’s, like, a major event with them when they cross the state line into Illinois. And now they’re on the other side of the world? This is just way too weird to even be possible.”
Then it hit him: he’d been tricked.
“Mom and Dad lied to me.”
They were words he’d never had to say before.
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