As the laughter and chaos from the rings reaches a feverish pitch, one of the boys a few cages down says, “Thumbs up or thumbs down?”
One after the other I hear others casting their votes about the boy with the club foot. “Thumbs up,” cries a voice. “Thumbs down,” shout out a few more. As for me, I remain silent because I know in the end that my vote holds no weight. Either tonight will be his last or he’ll live to fight another day.
That’s what our lives are about now. It’s all either thumbs up or thumbs down.
The next morning I wake as more water is sprayed on me. I take the opportunity to urinate as the hose splashes over my bare skin, then I look over at the cage next to me. It’s empty and the door is open. Seconds later, the man with the tattoo is spraying all the filth inside of it down through the grate. He looks up and sees me watching.
“This is what I’ll be doing to your cage come tomorrow morning,” he says. “You’re meeting your maker tonight.”
His words pass through my head leaving behind a promise that I won’t have to endure this hell for much longer.
For most of the day I rock back and forth, slightly smiling as the men with their manacled women draped in fancy gowns pass by our cages and decide our odds.
That night, the man with the tattooed face comes for me.
“Get up,” he sneers as he takes a thick ring of keys from his belt. “Let’s see if you can make it five for five.”
“I thought you said my cage will be empty come morning,” I say as I stand up, stretch, and step through the open door.
“Smart mouths live short lives,” he snarls and shoves me, but I make sure not to fall. I refuse to give him the satisfaction.
When we enter the crowded rings, a thunderous cheer erupts. The announcer has named me ‘Cold Brown’ because I am supposedly a stone cold killer. I don’t own the name. I don’t care. All I want is for this night to end, whatever the outcome may be.
My opponent is named ‘Little Cold’ with a send-up as chilling as mine. ‘Little Cold’ is vicious, the announcer says. ‘Little Cold’ is brutal.
I don’t even look up as they push me into the ring, my bare feet on the sand. I just wait for someone to hit the gong so I can kill or be killed.
Off to one side I see the brown woman and her man, the one who was holding the purse yesterday with the fountain pen in it. Among screams and catcalls and horrifying laughter, I watch her quickly open her purse, pull the pen out and throw it into the ring at my feet.
More screams erupt and more money exchanges hands because they now see that Cold Brown has a weapon. When the gong reverberates throughout the ring, I quickly bend down, scoop it up, and clutch the pen tightly in my fist.
Across the ring from me is Bridgette—my sister—but I can barely tell that she’s still Bridgette and not a living, breathing monster. She is covered with bruises from head to toe. Her hair is matted, her eyes are glazed, and a bloody bandage is wrapped around one leg.
Bridgette is Little Cold and she has definitely killed. I can see it in her stare. I can see it on her face.
Bridgette—my sister—there for me to kill or let myself be killed.
In all the world, in all my dreams, I have always wished the best for her.
I tried to protect her when our parents left and I tried to save her when she fell in the hole at the apple orchard. Nothing I did ever made any difference.
I can change that now. I can set things right.
As we stare at each other, battered, and bruised, and nearly dead, I toss the fountain pen into the sand half way across the ring and spread my arms wide. The crowd goes crazy and the gold-manacled woman who threw me the pen is punched upside her head by her man, over and over, as tears stream down her face, first wet then red.
Bridgette rushes across the ring, grabs up the pen, and launches herself into air. I feel no fear as she drives the writing end into me, over and over again. I feel no pain. All I feel is a sweet release that is the most wonderful, beautiful, amazing feeling I’ve ever felt.
As I fall back against the sand, Bridgette still clutching to my bare skin, her wild arms thrusting over and over and the man punching his woman in the head and screaming that she cost him money, I think about a better world where children aren’t playthings and skin doesn’t matter.
And I smile.
And I die.
L is for Lee
Who Wants Only One Thing
THE RED, TWO-STORY colonial sticks out in our neighborhood.
The windows are dirty and the grass is starting to get high. All the other houses are bright and cheery, with perfectly manicured lawns and topiary bushes, but not that house.
During the last days of the spring semester, as we walk home from school, we cross the street when we pass by it. No one looks at the darkened windows. No one talks for fear that when the words leave our mouths, there will be an opening there where something bad can rush in and take hold.
Something bad like what happened to Paul.
Since his funeral last Saturday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the red, two-story colonial and the family that lives there. I’m not sure why. Somehow it seems as though the house is beckoning to me, but I don’t want to listen.
‘Lee. Come and see what’s inside. You know you want to. You know you do.’
Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. Still, the words tickle the gray matter behind my eyes.
‘Lee. Come and see. Come.’
The Karlofskys own the red house. No one knows them well. They’ve only been in Meadowfield a little over a year, and they’re outsiders. Nobody cares about outsiders here because it’s pretty well understood that if you’re from someplace else, you’ll probably leave.
People in town usually mind their own business, but when the Karlofskys first came here, my mother tried to be neighborly and bring cookies. She forced me to come along, but I didn’t go quietly.
“I don’t want to,” I whined, even though I was already in high school and whining didn’t work anymore.
“You hush yourself,” she told me as we walked down the sidewalk toward the red house.
“Maybe they don’t even like freaking cookies,” I grumbled, and she smacked me for having a smart mouth. My mother has always been loose with her hands like that.
When we knocked and the door opened, weird can’t even begin to describe the family inside.
Mrs. Karlofsky had an accent and tall hair, with thick gray streaks rising over her ears. She stood so straight with her arms at her side and her hands pointing out, it almost hurt to look at her. Dr. Karlofsky didn’t speak English. He was supposed to be some sort of inventor or something, and mostly worked out of the attic. Their son, who was just about my age, had something wrong with him. He was humpy and misshapen, and walked with a limp. There were always boogers in his nostrils, and he acted as though he was perpetually beaten.
What’s worse was his name—Igor—which only added insult to injury.
It became pretty clear, like, in a nanosecond, that Igor and I weren’t going to be friends, so I ignored him at school. He ended up falling in with a different crowd anyway, mostly fringe kids who play video games twenty-four hours a day and still manage to get top grades. No one picked on Igor to his face, but behind his back, we talked.
He was so weird.
Uber weird.
As weird as Paul dying.
I’m still numb from his funeral and our annoying friend, Margo, is trying to help me get my mind off him. He wasn’t supposed to die, because fifteen-year-olds don’t die, and I can’t stop thinking that I could have done something, even though he had brain cancer and I don’t have that kind of power.
After we drop our books off at home Margo brings me to Greenwood Park to hang at the playground. In tenth grade we’re too old to be on the swings, but I don’t care and neither does she.
“Come on, Lee, I want to see what’s inside that dump,” she says to me. “That house has been dark and Igor Karlofsy hasn
’t been in school all week. They’re obviously out of town.”
“What for?” I ask, even though I’m sort of curious, too. I mean, a weird family means a weird house. Maybe they have taxidermy and crap hanging on their walls.
“Because I’m bored,” she says, which makes me feel nervous, because lately when Margo’s bored she’s been dancing around trying to get me to kiss her and I’ve been dancing around trying to make sure that never happens. Paul’s gone and I can’t imagine ever kissing anyone else but him. I haven’t decided yet if I like boys or girls, even though I think I’ve already decided but don’t want to admit it yet.
Only to Paul, and he’s dead.
Anyway, Margo says “Come on, Lee,” but I just stare at the ground. “What’s the matter?” she taunts, kicking the dirt with the tip of her toe as she swings past. Then she pumps her legs and the chains of the swing creak. “You scared?”
“No,” I murmur. “Maybe.”
“Sissy,” she calls me. Really? Who uses that word anymore?
“I am not,” I say, probably a little too vehemently.
“Then let’s go,” Margo says. “I want to see.”
“In a minute,” I tell her, then light the cigarette I stole from my Mom’s purse. We pass it back and forth while I try to ignore that Margo keeps staring at me in the same way that Paul used to. She’s starting to freak me out and I’m ready to break in two as it is.
Finally, I drop the cigarette to the ground, grind the butt into the sand with my sneaker, and we head off to where Igor Karlofsky lives.
The sky starts to get dark before we even get there and it begins to rain a little. I suppose that’s a good thing because people hide indoors when it rains, so no one sees when Margo backs up against the side of the house and kicks in one of the basement windows. Nobody watches when we slip into the dank dark.
The house smells funny and Margo says, “It stinks in here.”
“It smells depressing,” I whisper, which makes no sense at all because depression doesn’t have a smell. It’s sort of like saying sadness or love has a smell.
Gray light streams through multiple window wells in the basement so it’s not like we’re caught in the dark. Outside, the rain starts to pound the ground more insistently, and we hear the rumble of thunder.
“Where to?” Margo says.
I shrug and walk over to the foot of the stairs, then stop and listen. Even though it appears that the Karlofskys are out of town, maybe they aren’t and we just broke into their house like total idiots. Some would say that I’m so distraught over Paul that breaking and entering is a major cry for help. Maybe they’d be right. I don’t know. All I feel is dead inside.
“Shhh,” I say. “Listen.”
Nothing.
“Don’t be a dumbass,” Margo snips. “They’re out of town.”
“Maybe,” I say and mount the stairs. Suddenly Margo is right behind me and I can feel her hot breath on my neck, which makes me uncomfortable. I roll my eyes, which she doesn’t see, climb a few more steps, and open the basement door.
The first thing we notice is that there are dishes on the kitchen table. Thankfully, they’re clean. Igor’s mother must be one of those weird moms who sets the dinner table after breakfast. My Auntie Millie does that. My mother says Auntie Mille has obsessive compulsive disorder and everything has to be just so.
I think maybe she just likes things tidy.
“Now where?” I say to Margo because I’m starting to get creeped out. If Paul were here instead of in a box in the ground, and Margo was someplace else, he would be holding my hand and I wouldn’t be so freaked. Unfortunately, all I have is annoying, cloying Margo now, and having her is like having no one at all.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Living room?”
I nod and follow her down a center hall and take a left into a big room with a baby grand piano filling up almost the entire space in front of the bay window. Margo immediately goes to it, sits down, blows away a thin blanket of dust and lifts the lid.
The keys are shiny white. “Do you know Chopsticks?” she asks.
“No,” I snap. “And neither do you. Maybe one of their neighbors is watching the house. Do you want someone to hear piano music and call the cops?”
She glares at me for a moment and I know that she’s thinking if it were Paul at the piano instead of her, I wouldn’t have snapped at him. Sometimes I think she’s always known about me and Paul, and sometimes I think it’s the farthest thing from her mind.
“Fine” she says and closes the lid. “Sorry.”
Suddenly, there’s a loud crash outside and the picture window in front of the piano lights up like fire.
“Crap,” I whisper.
“Wow,” she grimaces. It’s thundering and lightning now and the storm must be right above town because there’s hardly any time between the flash and the boom. I can hear the rain ramp up and buckets of water start splashing against the window.
“I wonder where they are,” I mumble as I go to the mantle and pick up an old photograph of the Karlofskys that they must have taken at an amusement park or the state fair. It’s one of those fake antique pictures, where the three of them are dressed in old-fashioned clothing and not smiling for the camera.
“Who cares?” says Margo. I just shrug.
Next we peek into the dining room on the other side of the center hallway. There’s nothing there but a beat-up old table and chairs. I guess the Karlofskys aren’t much into entertaining because the table is covered with books.
Margo walks over, reaches down, and picks one up. She opens it and gasps. “That’s gross,” she says and drops the book back on the table. It lands opened to a black and white picture of a cadaver with its chest cavity open and the skin peeled back, exposing all the nasty stuff inside. I curl my lip because Margo’s right. It is gross.
“What is all this?” I say and my words seem to reverberate off the dining room walls.
“I don’t know,” Margo snaps because I think she’s starting to feel like we shouldn’t have broken into the house at all. “Isn’t Igor’s dad like a doctor or something?”
“Obviously,” I say as I run my hands along the spines of the other books. They’re all about anatomy and physiology and a whole bunch of other ‘ologies’ that I can’t even pronounce. Most are written in other languages and a few are even written using different letters.
Outside another flash and crash hits dangerously close to the house and Margo yelps. Before I know it, she has her face buried into my collarbone and her arms wrapped around me. Her touch makes my skin crawl. The ache of Paul’s death drapes over me like the burial shroud that’s covering him in a big, pine box decorated with messages we all wrote on the smooth wood in different colored sharpies.
That’s what he wanted when he died—for all of us to sign his casket. At his funeral, I wanted to draw a heart on it and write Lee and Paul in the middle, but I couldn’t. It didn’t matter that my message would be buried in the ground. It only mattered that I didn’t have the guts to admit the truth. Instead, I wrote something stupid that I don’t even remember. It held no more meaning than one of those dumb posters people post online that are supposed to be words of encouragement.
I let Margo stay in my arms for a very short amount of time before I push her away and head to the stairs that lead to the second floor of the colonial.
“I don’t think I want to,” she says as I climb up a few steps and they creak underneath my sneakers.
“Why?” I say. “Don’t be a sissy,” throwing her words back on her and hoping that they slap her in the face. As I turn and walk up the stairs, I make a mental decision that I’m going to start pulling away from Margo this summer. I know we’ve been friends for a long time, but she’s not Paul, and now that Paul’s dead, the connection that I have with Margo seems stretched thin.
I decide I’ll break away from her slowly, so that by the end of the summer she won’t even remember that we were ever close to begin
with. I know that’s sort of mean, but life can be mean, and without Paul, I’m not sure I care anymore.
“I’m not coming,” she calls after me. “This was a bad idea.”
“Then wait,” I tell her. “I’ll be back in a minute. I just want to look.” The truth is that tears are starting to well up in my eyes because Paul should be here instead of Margo, and we should be laughing, and joking, and maybe making out in one of the bedrooms because it feels right and we can.
As I slowly walk through the upstairs, looking at the sparse and empty rooms and feeling the quiet engulf me in a vice-like grip, I suddenly hear a creak overhead. It sounds like a footstep, but it can’t be, because no one’s here.
I stop and listen. Then I hear it again, soft, like the padded paws of a demon-cat.
“Lee?” I hear Margo cry from downstairs, but I ignore her.
The attic is next to one of the bedrooms and the door is open. There’s another flight of stairs leading up and part of me doesn’t want to follow them but part of me does.
Inside my head I hear that little, insistent voice again.
‘Come on, Lee. You know you want to. You know you do.’
As another lightning strike hits close by and the thunder roars, I take the stairs two at a time, not sure what I will find, but knowing in my heart that I have to look.
What I find is equal parts horrific and wonderful.
Dr. and Mrs. Karlofsky are standing in one corner. Their hands are folded one over the other and they are looking approvingly at Igor, who is drenched with rain. There is a hatchway in the attic roof that’s open, and metal rods are sticking out into the sky, beckoning for the electricity to come and find them.
On the table is Paul. His lifeless skin is blue and his clothing is dirty because he’s obviously been dug up from his wooden box in the graveyard and brought back here.
I gulp. Igor stops and looks at me with tender kindness.
“The brain,” he whispers. “It was filled with the cancer. Too far gone. I don’t know that I can bring him back.”
Little Killer A to Z Page 9