Otherworld

by Jason Segel

  “Your parents will let you?” I asked, shocked. My parents locked the doors and drew the shades as soon as the sun went down.

  “My dad’s dead,” she said.

  “Your mom, then?”

  “She’s not home.” The girl seemed annoyed by my questions. “Where’s your parents, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. They don’t tell me where they go.” As far as I knew, they could have been in Hong Kong. They often showed up with trinkets they’d purchased at airports in faraway lands.

  “Who’s that lady at your house who was on the phone all morning?”

  That was when I realized how long I’d been gone. Hours had passed since I’d slipped into the woods. Mrs. Kozmatka would have called my parents, and they wouldn’t be happy. “She’s the nanny.” The last word slipped out before I could catch it.

  “Huh. Must get boring hanging out with an old lady all the time.” It sounded like an observation, nothing more.

  I was pretty sure I’d rather play in traffic than spend another hour with Mrs. Kozmatka, but it didn’t seem macho to say so. I shrugged instead. “I guess.”

  “Come on,” said the girl, setting off down a path with the barrel of the pellet gun resting on her shoulder. I scrambled to catch up with her, and once I had, I paid close attention to the route we took. I knew I had to be able to find my way back.

  —

  That night, when we reached my house, every window was ablaze. I could see around one corner of the building to where a police car was parked in our drive. Its flashing red and blue lights painted the lawn, but there was no siren to accompany them.

  “How many rooms are there in that house?” the girl asked.

  “Lots,” I told her. “I’ve never really counted.” It was a lie. There were twenty-two.

  “What do you put in all of them?”

  I could have listed all the contents of my life, but the subject bored me. “Will you be in the woods tomorrow?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. “I got a lot of work to do. D’you see the fort? Some of the walls washed away the last time it rained, and the roof keeps coming down.”

  “I saw,” I told her. “I can help.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She seemed unsure.

  “My name is Simon.” It had been so long since I’d introduced myself to anyone that my name felt like a gift.

  “Kat,” she replied. “Raid your parents’ garage tomorrow. Bring some nails and a rope.”

  —

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Kozmatka was crying. My mother was draining a tumbler of red wine while my father conferred with a police officer in serious tones.

  “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in,” said the cop, who’d caught sight of me over my father’s shoulder. He winked at me like the two of us were in on a secret. “Looks like someone’s been exploring the woods.”

  I gave myself a quick inspection and realized I was covered in brambles and a leaf was sticking to the bottom of one of my sneakers.

  “Simon!” Mrs. Kozmatka yelped. She started to rush for me, only to be blocked by my mother, a master of optics, who wanted the policeman to see her receive the first hug.

  “What were you doing out there?” my father demanded. Even back then, he always seemed vaguely annoyed by my presence. Like I was a puppy his wife had wanted. He’d indulged her little whim and now the beast wouldn’t stop relieving itself all over the rug.

  “I was playing,” I told him.

  “Didn’t Mrs. Kozlowsy—” my mother started to say.

  “Kozmatka,” said the nanny, who must have realized she was going to be fired and didn’t feel the need to take my mother’s crap anymore.

  “Didn’t Mrs. Kozmatka tell you to stay away from the woods?” my mother said sternly. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused? Officer Robinson had to come all the way out here…”

  Officer Robinson looked a bit thrown by our family dynamic. “It was no trouble at all, ma’am,” he insisted. Then he knelt down in front of me. “Did you get lost?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  I couldn’t help it. I must have grinned like a maniac. The cop mussed my hair and stood up. He was a nice guy. Still is—though he wasn’t quite as helpful the next few times we met.

  “Excuse me, Officer,” my mother began, “but I really don’t see—”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Eaton, the woods around Brockenhurst are pretty safe during the day. That’s where most of the kids here play. My own girls included. Of course,” he said, looking down at me, “it’s a good idea to get inside a couple of hours before dark. There are some wild dogs that come out when the sun starts to set.”

  “Wild dogs?” my mother gasped, as if he’d said lions or bears.

  “We call them coydogs around here, and your son is no safer from them in your yard than he is out in the woods. You might think of getting Simon a slingshot or a BB gun and teaching him how to use it. The dogs are scavengers. Cowards. They won’t put up a fight.”

  “Simon is eight,” my father argued. “He can’t be out running wild in the forest.”

  “Why not?” the cop asked, and my father clammed up.

  “I can’t see why Simon would want to play in the woods when he has toys and a pool and everything he could possibly want right here,” my mother informed the cop.

  “You’re absolutely right, ma’am,” Officer Robinson told her. “I’m sure your boy has everything you could buy. But out there in the woods, Simon can make his own world.”

  My mother remained skeptical, but my father must have felt that his manhood had been challenged. He sided with the cop. After that, I was allowed to leave the house in the morning and return just before dusk, covered in leaves and mud. No one ever asked what I did in the woods. I didn’t tell them—and I never breathed a word about Kat.

  Over time, my behavior improved. I got into fewer fights. Kat and I built new worlds and burned old ones down. We ruled over our forest kingdom with barbaric benevolence. Kat showed me how to shoot, saw and hammer. I gave her my ridiculous weekly allowance whenever her mom didn’t have money for groceries, and I taught Kat how to curse in French. At school we beat up each other’s bullies and did each other’s homework. We bought our first game consoles together—and transitioned to PCs together. We were inseparable in every world we visited.

  Kat was my best friend and my family for ten whole years, but I don’t think I ever spoke her name in front of my parents. She belonged to my world, not theirs. She was none of Grant and Irene’s business.

  —

  The sun is setting behind me. It’s a beautiful Sunday evening in Brockenhurst. A cold wind ripples the swimming pool water, and the trees at the edge of my lawn shove against each other like commuters boarding a subway car. Kat’s somewhere beyond those trees. She can’t be far. I can feel her. I hope she’s all right, but until I see her at school tomorrow, I’ll have no way of knowing. My Otherworld gear is just a pile of shards. I’m legally forbidden to use email. And Kat blocked my calls three months and four days ago.

  So how do you lose your only friend? It’s an excellent question. I’m still searching for the answer. All I know is that the chain of events kicked off sixteen months ago. At the time, life was about as perfect as it will ever be. I should have known it wasn’t going to stay that way. I should have been prepping for disaster. The universe was worried that I’d go soft being happy. I needed trials and tribulations to keep me on my toes.

  First my father accepted a job offer in Dubai. It was supposed to be temporary. “Only a couple of years,” my parents assured me. They seemed blissfully unaware that they were talking to someone for whom two years was the difference between Pokémon and pubic hair. I should have whipped out the Kishka at that point—and threatened to expose my mother’s crooked family tree. Then again, if I ever make a list of the shit I should have done, it would stretch all the way to Atlantic City.

  While my pare
nts enjoyed the fruits of slave labor in a tacky desert hellhole, our house in New Jersey would be transformed into a high-end vacation rental. I was not allowed to stay. They were adamant about this, though I emailed them countless articles about the things that took place in high-end vacation rentals and assured them that I couldn’t possibly do any more harm to the house than the furries and orgy enthusiasts who’d soon be occupying our bedrooms.

  In the end, I was given two options, and staying in Brockenhurst wasn’t one of them. I could move to Dubai—or I could pack my bags for boarding school. My father’s illustrious alma mater in Massachusetts had accepted me for the spring semester. Which meant dear old Mom and Pop must have been plotting the move behind my back for quite some time. I would have been heartbroken if I’d ever trusted them in the first place.

  I considered running away. I was pretty handy with a slingshot and pellet gun at that point. I figured, if nothing else, I could live in the woods. It was Kat who pointed out that I’d gone completely insane. There weren’t enough woods left to hide me. Besides, two years was nothing in the grand scheme of things, she said. And she said it with such conviction that I started to wonder if she could see the grand scheme from her bedroom window. At the end of our time apart, we’d both be out of high school, together and free. She swore we’d talk every day until then.

  For the first six months we did. Then Kat’s mother, Linda, announced she was marrying a man named Wayne Gibson. He’d moved to town around the same time I left, and they’d bonded over bourbon at some local bar. Suddenly Kat was busy helping her mom make arrangements for the wedding. Our texts and video chats dwindled to a few a week. After the blessed nuptials took place, she sent me some pictures of the event. I didn’t say so at the time, but I thought her new stepdad looked like a real douchebag. He wore a military dress uniform with a bunch of fancy medals that he’d polished to a shine, and in every picture he stared straight at the camera, as if daring the photographer to take the photo off-center. But Linda in her frilly cupcake of a dress was beaming like she’d just been crowned prom queen. She’d always been so nice to me, though. I figured her happiness was all that mattered.

  That was when Kat slowly began to vanish. She’d send me a strangely cheery note now and then, but most of my texts went unanswered and my emails weren’t opened. In my more paranoid moments, I started to think that maybe Kat had planned it all. That maybe she’d convinced me to leave New Jersey because her grand scheme didn’t include me. I went a little nuts with the cybersurveillance. I set up a Google alert for her name. I studied her dormant Instagram feed for secret messages. The last thing she’d posted was a series of photos devoted to the home improvements her new stepfather was making. There was nothing really interesting in the pictures—just lots of electronics and wires. She hadn’t posted on Facebook in months, so I stalked the profiles of our mutual acquaintances, searching for clues. I spotted a blur of copper-colored hair in the background of a few party pics, and that was it. Kat was alive, but she was moving too fast to be captured on camera. I kept writing her, sometimes three emails a day. The last time she responded, she told me she needed some space. The message was one sentence long.

  Everything I thought I’d known had been torn down and reassembled. Kat had been my touchstone, and without her, I didn’t recognize the world anymore. I didn’t care to. I stopped going to class. I stayed in the dorm, playing Assassin’s Creed with my roommate, a Ukrainian head case named Elvis who collected toy robots and possessed a very dim view of the human race.

  Then one morning four months ago, I woke up to find a Google alert for Katherine Foley. The Brockenhurst newspaper was reporting that she’d been arrested the previous night for stealing her stepfather’s SUV and driving it into an ornamental koi pond. The police report noted that a sodden, half-smoked joint had been discovered under the gas pedal.

  The paper didn’t publish a picture, but I had no trouble finding a few online. I’m still surprised the photos didn’t go viral. The black SUV was submerged all the way to the backseat doors, and the pond’s fat golden koi were gliding in and out through the open windows. The half of the vehicle sticking out of the water was almost perfectly vertical. It was a truly impressive feat of automotive mishandling.

  Scrolling through the pictures of Wayne Gibson’s SUV, I kept thinking back to that fateful day when I’d first stumbled across Gangsters of Carroll Gardens. One glimpse of the Kishka and I’d known he was my grandfather. I didn’t need to read the caption or contact the local genealogical society. I’d just known. The same way I knew that the wreck I was looking at on Facebook wasn’t an accident. I can’t explain why, but there was no doubt in my mind that Kat had destroyed her stepfather’s car on purpose.

  —

  Elvis drove home to see his parents most weekends, and he kept a run-down Volkswagen off campus. I suppose I should have been more suspicious when he offered to loan me the car if I let him use my computer. But I would have given him a kidney, too, if he’d asked. So I handed over the computer and drove seven hours to New Jersey. When I pulled up in Kat’s drive, I thought I might have made a wrong turn. The beautiful house I found in the middle of the woods looked nothing like the hovel I remembered. It was painted white, and the jack pines around it had been cleared. Somehow the foundation had been lifted as well, and the house no longer seemed to be sinking. I knocked on the door and Kat’s stepfather answered, greeting me with the same stare I’d seen in the wedding photos. He was compact and wound tight—six inches shorter than me and thirty years older. But I knew he could probably take me and I could see he was eager to try.

  He politely informed me that Kat had been grounded and couldn’t see any friends. She’d fallen in with a bad crowd, he explained, and she needed some time alone to get her head back on straight. I assured Mr. Gibson that I had never belonged to any crowd—good or bad—and I’d driven all day just to see his stepdaughter.

  “I know who you are, son,” I remember him telling me. “And I don’t think Katherine wants to see you. You haven’t been back here in months, and it would probably be best if you just stayed gone.”

  It stung for a second, I gotta admit. That was just about the last thing I wanted to hear. But while part of me was inclined to believe it, hearing it come out of Mr. Gibson’s mouth felt wrong. There was no way in hell Kat would share her feelings—any feelings—with a man who looked like he invaded third-world countries for sport. So I asked if I could have a word with Linda instead. I was told Mrs. Gibson wasn’t at home, which was total bullshit. It was past seven in the evening, and I could smell Linda’s signature stew cooking. I said I’d be happy to wait, and Mr. Gibson said that wouldn’t be wise. When I sat down on the porch, he phoned the cops.

  Officer Robinson arrived on the scene, and I was sure I’d been thrown a bit of good luck—until he and Kat’s stepfather greeted each other by name. Officer Robinson (Leslie Robinson, I now knew) took me aside for a man-to-man. He said he sure was sorry to hear about my recent breakup, and boy, did he feel my pain. He’d been dumped a few times in his day, and he’d learned that “sometimes a man has to just walk away.”

  “Kat’s not my girlfriend,” I told him.

  The cop just laughed. “Maybe it was never official, but you think I’m too old to recognize a young man in love?”

  His expression was so cheesy that I wanted to vomit, but I managed to keep the contents of my stomach from spewing out onto his shoes. I swore I wasn’t in Brockenhurst to win Kat’s heart. Something was wrong with her, I insisted over and over. But I didn’t have any evidence to offer. As desperate as I was at that point, I wasn’t crazy enough to inform a policeman that my best friend had destroyed an SUV on purpose.

  Officer Robinson wholeheartedly agreed that Kat was in trouble. The kids she’d been hanging out with were pretty bad news. But he promised me the Gibsons had the situation under control. They didn’t need—or want—any help. And then he warned me not to return to the house.

  �
��Mr. Gibson works in the security business,” he told me in a low voice. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he has cameras up all over this property. I know for a fact that he’s licensed to carry a firearm, and I’m sure he’s got a few hidden away here. Believe me, Simon. You don’t want that man ever mistaking you for a prowler.”

  I’m not an idiot. I knew better than to go back to Kat’s house. But I didn’t give up on her, either. For the next few days, I hung around town, sleeping in Elvis’s Volkswagen and trying to run into Kat. I was loitering outside the high school the following Monday when her stepfather dropped her off at the front door. I know she must have heard me calling her name, but she never even glanced in my direction. She clutched her books to her chest and bolted toward the entrance. When I tried to follow her inside, a guard stopped me and I got to have another man-to-man with Officer Robinson, who informed me that it’s never a good sign when a girl runs away from you. This time I had to agree.

  An hour later, Officer Robinson personally escorted me and Elvis’s Volkswagen to the Brockenhurst town limits. I spent the first part of the drive back to Massachusetts cursing Kat for ignoring me. As I passed through Connecticut, the crosshairs of my rage shifted to Wayne Gibson. When I reached the Massachusetts border, I nearly did a one-eighty on the freeway. The SUV in the koi pond meant something, I was sure of it, and the answer was back in New Jersey. But I had no money and no place to stay, and I couldn’t bear any more sappy sympathy from Officer Robinson. The hopelessness of the situation was sinking in when I arrived at my boarding school dorm and was greeted by the FBI.

  —

  When the agents told me why they were there, I knew in an instant that opportunity had knocked. At some point during the three days I’d been gone, someone had used my computer to hack the server of the world’s largest manufacturer of Internet-connected toy robots.

  Laugh all you like, but it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Imagine what someone who’s truly evil could do with an army of toy robots that can see, speak and record. The FBI certainly had a few ideas. But my roommate, the Ukrainian wing nut, apparently had something quite different in mind. He’d reprogrammed the toys to inform the children of the world that “The robot revolution is nigh.”