“If you have time, I mean,” RJ had said from behind his laptop, about that.
It was like we were playing battleship.
“Ha ha,” I said back, and never looked up.
“So is this the end of our summer romance?” he said back, and this stopped me.
I looked around my screen, was about to say something back—no idea what, but I could feel the words in my throat—when his dad ducked in with news about those steaks, how if you don’t pay at least glancing attention to the corporeal, then you risk getting lost forever in the abstract—his usual out-loud bumpersticker—and I forgot what RJ had said.
That night it came back, though.
Two-thirty in the morning found me at our living room window, no lights on behind me, to give away that I was there.
In the bushes there was the cherry of a cigarette, rhythmic like a heartbeat. Except slower. More deliberate. And at the wrong height for RJ.
Unless he was breaking his own rules, using Cedric’s custom little headstone as a bench
He was.
I hugged my arms to my sides, felt the coldness of my phone press into my bare skin.
Without looking back, I glowed the phone on, opened the app, and lowered my hand, the picture snapping once the phone was straight up-and-down enough.
The picture was empty, of course.
Just our couch, that stupid floor lamp I used to think was a robber. The doorway to the left of it, black and yawning.
I deleted it.
~
Probably the scariest image RJ sent to me that week, that he fully knew I had to show to Lindsay, who was going to cc the whole class, it was one of his dad that he’d doctored.
It was in the hall again, like the rest—my guess is he was using his mom’s tall mirror at the turn into the living room to orient, keep the lateral in check—but it was different in that it was just static.
Over our cheese-puffed, brainstormy weekend, we’d agreed that the suggestion of motion, of something approaching the phone, that that was all kinds of scary. Better than something you were walking away from, anyway.
But this one, this time, it was what he was walking away from.
It was his dad, way back by his bedroom—RJ’s mom’s long gone, of course; I don’t even remember her, so much—and he was just sitting against that wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, his head cocked over, an obvious kind of stain on the wall.
Lindsay looked up to me in Life Science when she saw it, and I looked away, wasn’t thinking about money so much anymore.
That afternoon, I found reasons to be outside, stayed there just piddling until RJ’s dad pulled up, lifted his briefcase to me on his way in.
I waved back, looked back to my house, and went inside to check if RJ had uploaded that particular shot to the hidden directory.
He hadn’t.
It was just the stock hundred we’d come up with together. They seemed so tame now.
I was about to back out of that terminal—already had, really, had to key back in—when I caught the tail-end of that list of files I’d just called up.
The count was a hundred, like I’d been expecting, and they were named sequentially after the sneak_up lead-ins—clever clever—but there was another directory there now. Inside the protected directory.
I tried “Lindsay” as password, but it wasn’t her this time.
I tabbed up, then, went root to try to at least see how many characters this password might have, but I suck in the shell, and the architecture, it was all different now, was some kind of chutes and ladders game, a labyrinth, one with dead-ends and bottomless wells and something that, when I tried to open it, locked up my system.
What had RJ done?
I rebooted, was about to just rush that file system, hit it with everything I had, but then that image of RJ’s dad was in my head again.
The bedroom door. The door to RJ’s dad’s bedroom.
I pulled my phone, called the picture up.
The doorway was on the wrong side.
Wasn’t it?
Yes. I’d practically grown up over there. RJ’s dad had encouraged it, even, after his last encounter with my dad.
But how could it be on the wrong side?
I stood, walked out into our own hall. It wasn’t as long as RJ’s, and had tables and junk all cluttered in it, but still.
I stood at the end, right by my doorway, closed my eyes and took a takeback pic.
Just normal.
I looked through the walls, to the memory of RJ’s house, and then to this hall.
The mirror.
He had the mirror.
I dragged my mom’s in from her closet—she was out walking, like always, ‘because it was daylight’—set it up against the turn into the living room.
Already I didn’t like this.
I could see myself too well. Like I was at the end of the hall, waiting for myself.
But screw it.
This wasn’t for me, this was for the app. This was for RJ.
I walked up to my reflection, held my phone down and backwards, snapped another pic.
Nothing. Just the usual.
I turned around, sure I was missing something—did RJ’s dad have some old brown-and-white photographs framed on the wall on the left side?—and lowered my phone, didn’t realize the app was still on until I felt the camera burr, the image processing.
I held it up.
It was my hall, reversed.
Except I was standing there right in the middle of it.
“What are you doing?” I said out loud, to RJ, and just then my dad stepped into the hall in his workshirt, looked from the mirror to me and didn’t even say anything. Just brushed past, shut his door behind him.
~
The day Lindsay gave me a ride home was the day RJ had to spend in the main office. There were counselors and principals and even a city police.
It wasn’t for the takeback shot in circulation today—a benign old image of Cedric he’d blacked-out, let bleed at the edges, like he was loping up behind, his mouth glittering—but for the one of his dad, shot in the head.
“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Lindsay said, both hands on the wheel.
“He’s just screwing around,” I told her.
Still, the support forum on our site had a few members now. From school, mostly, because he’d put the brand on the bottom of the images he was texting.
When Lindsay pulled up to my curb, I didn’t get out at first.
I turned to her, was in some level of prep for asking her to maybe hold back on forwarding any more of the messages, that I needed to talk to RJ first, but then her face was right there.
I bumped into her, pulled back smiling.
And then we sort of kissed.
I rose from the car, drifted across the lawn, and, once the front door was closed my dad clapped me on the shoulder and then shook my whole body. It was in congratulations.
“A real piece,” he said, my mom standing right there in the kitchen doorway, “you need any, you know, any—” but I was already in my room by then.
That night I trolled through our hidden directory again, was going to crack into that Area 51 if I had to use a crowbar, but then there was a new version of the app waiting right there, shuffled in with the images.
I put it on my phone, laid back on my bed so there’d be nothing behind me, and clicked through.
All that was different was the theme. We’d had it just standard silver and blue, tried and true, but now all the backgrounds were shades of black, and all the words—there weren’t many—were a deep maroon.
The update log in the readme said that it had been blacked out for night use. So that the glow from the screen wouldn’t give you away.
I looked to the front of the house. To me, standing in the window, looking into my phone’s bright display, having to squint from it after studying RJ in the bushes for so long.
The next day he was back in the halls, n
o problem.
The first text he sent explained that he was having to throttle back for the moment. So it was going to be dead dog pictures for the foreseeable future.
That’s a complicated word to text, too, ‘foreseeable.’
The attached image was another Cedric snap, in the same backwards hall, his toothless old mouth glinting in the washed-out sixty-watt.
He was closer now.
~
“How are you cloaking yourself?” I asked him, finally.
We were in the bushes, standing on a bed of cigarette butts.
Our beers were balanced on the headstone. RJ had carried them right out the front door.
“How am I what?” he asked back, squinting through the smoke.
“You’re using the mirror,” I told him.
He cocked his head over, said, “That one?”
We stepped out of the bushes and he hit his flashlight widget.
His mom’s ancient old mirror was leaned up against the side of the house.
“It was sucking the light away,” he said, then leaned back to the headstone.
“Your dad throw a fit?” I asked. Because his dad always did, when it came to his mom’s things.
“I told him it was scaring me,” RJ said, pinching his cigarette away like a tough guy, grinding it out on the bottom of his shoe. “Why, you want it?”
I looked out to the black monolith of his house, not a single light on.
Four hours ago, his dad had got back from work for the ten-thousandth time.
I shook my head no, I didn’t want it.
“So we ready to go live then?” he said.
“Sure,” I told him. “Whatever.”
He nodded cool, we touched beer cans, and then he was gone, back to it, and I was still standing there when my phone got a text.
Lindsay, probably. Test tomorrow.
I was half right.
It was a long shot, blurry, from a made-up number, but still, you could just make out the two of us in her car, her mouth pressed against mine in the daylight, right there by the trashcans and the mailboxes, where RJ and me had used to build big complicated ramps to launch our bikes up into the sky.
Only one of us came down, though.
I’m sorry, RJ.
~
Two days later, two days before it happened, Lindsay edged down beside me before Life Science, tipped her laptop over so I could scope it.
It was the bulletin board site. Mine and RJ’s support thread, the faq, the bio of the app, all our best guesses at marketing.
“It’s just for college,” I told her.
“No, look,” she said.
There was a new thread. It was the series of Cedric pics, like, if you glued them to the corner of a tablet of paper then flipped through them, you could see him creaking along again.
It was the next step.
Our pie-in-the-sky idea with the app, it had been to take not one shot, but five or six in a burst, then plant the same sneak_up image into each, a little closer, a little bigger, and then, when the user opened that file, thinking they were just getting a static pic, they’d instead get an image that all of the sudden stuttered ahead, so much closer to them.
That was the pay version, of course. Because you’ve got to have a pay version.
But now RJ was giving it away for free.
“No, this,” Lindsay said, and scrolled down.
It was some kind of blog, or a long post.
No: the bios we were supposed to be attaching. The faces behind the app.
I don’t remember RJ’s exactly, word-for-word, and it’s gone now, of course, is evidence in some file cabinet, has been scrubbed from the net, but I wouldn’t want to remember it in that much detail, either.
Because RJ couldn’t scare us with pictures anymore, what with everybody watching, he was using words, now. Trying to come up with a story to explain why Cedric was dogging him like that.
It wasn’t even close to how it went down, though, the Cedric thing.
I mean, I had been there for it, kind of. It was right after RJ had moved in beside us, when his mom was still around.
Then one day, maybe after they’d unpacked their last box, she just wasn’t. Even though her car keys were on the hook, her shoes in their place, her sunglasses (it was summer) by the sink. There was never any note, any ATM photo, any goodbyes.
In the middle of it all, too, when everybody in the neighborhood was volunteering their house to be searched—except my dad, of course, who knew his rights, and didn’t so much need the law knowing about his gun collection—in the middle of all that, Cedric had turned up dead.
It was bad timing, but he was old, so it made a sort of sense, everybody guessed. Especially if he was grieving.
What didn’t make sense—to my dad, at least—was the granite mini-headstone RJ’s dad came home with. For the dog. After his wife had already obviously split with the vacuum cleaner salesman. But—this is still my dad—anybody who’d commemorate an animal like that, maybe his wife was just being reasonable, right?
And I’d never even once seen a vacuum cleaner salesman.
And, the whole thing—Cedric, RJ’s mom—that whole first impossible year of craziness, of running to the door every time it rang, of buying longer and longer cords for the phone, it was never something RJ and me talked about. How do you, right? Still, that was where we met, right there at that dog funeral, so it’s not like we could forget it either. My mom had walked me across to stand there with the new kid while RJ’s dad droned on and on about the dog, really talking about his wife. Finally, I’d even cried, and RJ had edged over, stood close enough to me that we were kind of touching.
Ever since then, you know. Joined at the hip, all that. Battleship combatants for life.
But friendships forged over a dead pet, I guess they’ve got a built-in expiration date. This re-do RJ had spun up of what happened to Cedric, and just to sell a piece of software, just to make everybody in senior class finally notice him—it had to be over, me and him.
And Cedric was the tame part, too.
The real story was what had really happened to his mom that day, what the neighborhood had been waiting to find out for years. But RJ and his dad didn’t even have a garbage disposal back then, I don’t think. Maybe a therapist would see some kind of call or plea in what-all RJ made happen to her in his fake bio, I don’t know. That doesn’t mean he’d turn his back on RJ for even a moment, though.
According to the post, Cedric hadn’t died of old age or, as RJ’s dad wanted, of sadness either. His spirit wasn’t out wherever RJ’s mom was now, keeping her safe.
The way RJ had it, it was the rings that had killed Cedric. And the necklaces. The earrings. Three brooches, a handful of bracelets, because garbage disposals can’t chew metal.
But neither could Cedric, so it had to be forced down with this little mini-Louisville Slugger he had. Piece after piece, all RJ’s mom’s jewelry. A little internal bleeding for the family hound—I remember that part. And not on purpose.
When I was done with it that first time, that only time, I shook my head no, my eyes wet, and pulled Lindsay’s laptop shut as gently as I could, like I didn’t want everybody to hear.
“Do you want to just sleep at my house?” she said, the worry there in her eyes. “My parents are, you know. This weekend.”
I swallowed, tested my voice in my head before using it, asking if she wanted me to bring a movie, something like that.
“Can you get any, like, anything to drink, you think?” she said.
“You like beer?” I asked back, still not looking right at her but into the future.
Anything was possible.
3.
That afternoon—this was Friday, the Friday before the rest of my life—RJ opened their utility door, caught me at his dad’s refrigerator, my arms clinking with garage beer.
“I’ll pay you back,” I told him.
“Remember Zelda?” he said back, not even a little co
ncerned about the beer, or his dad.
“Which one?” I asked.
We’d raced through them all.
“Fourth grade,” he said.
NES. His dad had insisted we start there, even though it had already been a serious antique by our third grade.
He was right, too. It was the right place to begin.
I got the last beer I could carry, balanced it on top and eased the refrigerator door shut with my calf.
“Gannon with two n’s . . . ” I said, then looked all the way up the steps to him. “So, this mean you’re back, man?”
“Where have I been?” he said, something mocking in his voice.
“We need to take it live,” I said, catching a beer, and he heard the goodbye in my tone, opened his hand for me to waltz out into whatever this night held for me, and started the garage door down before I was halfway across the drive.
Because I was suddenly sure that if I looked back, I’d see Cedric trotting up out of the past, barely going to make it under the door, I looked back, fumbled the one bottle that kept getting away. It shattered at my feet, the door sealed itself to the concrete, and I wanted so bad to scrape that brown glass over, into the little gutter RJ’s dad always edged between the drive and the grass, then maybe get the hose to take care of the guilty smell. But Lindsay. Lindsay Lindsay Lindsay. And RJ’s dad knew we were into that beer anyway, didn’t he? He had to. It was understood.
Just before she picked me up, my dad surely driving home from his shift, his face grim as ever, his talk radio whispering to him—I was having to time this so perfect—my phone buzzed with a text.
It was the lamp in my living room, the image I’d deleted. It was just standing there. Different anonymous number.
I looked to RJ’s house and the one light that was on, it went off.
Pulling away with Lindsay, then, we passed RJ’s dad, and, right before she turned right for her house, I caught RJ’s dad’s brake lights flaring. So he wouldn’t run over that shattered bottle on his concrete. So he could get out, be sure he was seeing what he was seeing. So he could walk inside, ask RJ what he knew about this, RJ looking up at him from his laptop, a tolerant grin already pasted on his face.
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