by Holly Black
“You’re crazy!” the woman shouted at him. “Your whole family’s crazy! Do you think your mother wants him anymore?”
“My father shot us in the back,” Harry said, and turned and bolted down the aisle for the door.
When he got outside he began to trot down seedy Oldtown Road. When he came to Oldtown Way he turned left. When he ran past number 45, he looked at every blank window. His face, his hands, his whole body felt hot and wet. Soon he had a stitch in his side. Harry blinked, and saw a dark line of trees, a wall of barbed wire before him. At the top of Oldtown Way he turned into Palmyra Avenue. From there he could continue running past Alouette’s boarded-up windows, past all the stores old and new, to the corner of Livermore, and from there, he only now realized, to the little house that belonged to Mr. Petrosian.
15.
On a sweltering midafternoon eleven years later at a camp in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Lieutenant Harry Beevers closed the flap of his tent against the mosquitoes and sat on the edge of his temporary bunk to write a long-delayed letter back to Pat Caldwell, the young woman he wanted to marry—and to whom he would be married for a time, after his return from the war to New York State.
This is what he wrote, after frequent crossings-out and hesitations. Harry later destroyed the letter.
Dear Pat:
First of all I want you to know how much I miss you, my darling, and that if I ever get out of this beautiful and terrible country, which I am going to do, that I am going to chase you mercilessly and unrelentingly until you say that you’ll marry me. Maybe in the euphoria of relief (YES!!!), I have the future all worked out, Pat, and you’re a big part of it. I have eighty-six days until DEROS, when they pat me on the head and put me on that big bird out of here. Now that my record is clear again, I have no doubts that Columbia Law School will take me in. As you know, my law board scores were pretty respectable (modest me!) when I took them at Adelphi. I’m pretty sure I could even get into Harvard Law, but I settled on Columbia because then we could both be in New York.
My brother George has already told me that he will help out with whatever money I—you and I—will need. George put me through Adelphi. I don’t think you knew this. In fact, nobody knew this. When I look back, in college I was such a jerk. I wanted everybody to think my family was well-to-do, or at least middle-class. The truth is, we were damn poor, which I think makes my accomplishments all the more noteworthy, all the more loveworthy!
You see, this experience, even with all the ugly and self-doubting and humiliating moments, has done me a lot of good. I was right to come here, even though I had no idea what it was really like. I think I needed the experience of war to complete me, and I tell you this even though I know that you will detest any such idea. In fact, I have to tell you that a big part of me loves being here, and that in some way, even with all this trouble, this year will always be one of the high points of my life. Pat, as you see, I’m determined to be honest—to be an honest man. If I’m going to be a lawyer, I ought to be honest, don’t you think? (Or maybe the reverse is the reality!) One thing that has meant a lot to me here has been what I can only call the close comradeship of my friends and my men—I actually like the grunts more than the usual officer types, which of course means that I get more loyalty and better performance from my men than the usual lieutenant. Some day I’d like you to meet Mike Poole and Tim Underhill and Pumo the Puma and the most amazing of all, M. O. Dengler, who of course was involved with me in the Ia Thuc cave incident. These guys stuck by me. I even have a nickname, “Beans.” They call me “Beans” Beevers, and I like it.
There was no way my court-martial could have really put me in any trouble, because all the facts, and my own men, were on my side. Besides, could you see me actually killing children? This is Vietnam and you kill people, that’s what we’re doing here—we kill Charlies. But we don’t kill babies and children. Not even in the heat of wartime—and Ia Thuc was pretty hot!
Well, this is my way of letting you know that at the court-martial of course I received a complete and utter vindication. Dengler did too. There were even unofficial mutterings about giving us medals for all the BS we put up with for the past six weeks—including that amazing story in Time magazine. Before people start yelling about atrocities, they ought to have all the facts straight. Fortunately, last week’s magazines go out with the rest of the trash.
Besides, I already knew too much about what death does to people.
I never told you that I once had a little brother named Edward. When I was ten, my little brother wandered up into the top floor of our house one night and suffered a fatal epileptic fit. This event virtually destroyed my family. It led directly to my father’s leaving home. (He had been a hero in WWII, something else I never told you.) It deeply changed, I would say even damaged, my older brother Albert. Albert tried to enlist in 1964, but they wouldn’t take him because they said he was psychologically unfit. My mom too almost came apart for a while. She used to go up in the attic and cry and wouldn’t come down. So you could say that my family was pretty well destroyed, or ruined, or whatever you want to call it, by a sudden death. I took it, and my dad’s desertion, pretty hard myself. You don’t get over these things easily.
The court-martial lasted exactly four hours. Big deal, hey?—as we used to say back in Palmyra. We used to have a neighbor named Pete Petrosian who said things like that, and against what must have been million-to-one odds, who died exactly the same way my brother did, about two weeks after—lightning really did strike twice. I guess it’s dumb to think about him now, but maybe one thing war does is to make you conversant with death. How it happens, what it does to people, what it means, how all the dead in your life are somehow united, joined, part of your eternal family. This is a profound feeling, Pat, and no damn whipped-up failed court-martial can touch it. If there were any innocent children in that cave, then they are in my family forever, like little Edward and Pete Petrosian, and the rest of my life is a poem to them. But the Army says there weren’t, and so do I.
I love you and love you and love you. You can stop worrying now and start thinking about being married to a Columbia Law student with one hell of a good future. I won’t tell you any more war stories than you want to hear. And that’s a promise, whether the stories are about Nam or Palmyra.
Always yours,
Harry
(aka “Beans!”)
Making Friends
Gary Raisor
Jack-o’-lanterns smile their secretive, broken-mouthed smiles as they peer out from behind darkened windows. Eight-year-old Denny Grayson hurries down the sidewalk. He is barely able to contain his excitement. Tonight is Halloween.
A hint of chill hangs in the air and the tang of woodsmoke carries. It’s a good smell. The huge yellow moon tags along, floating over his shoulder like a balloon on a string. When he glances up, he sees the man in the moon smiling broadly. Beneath his green latex Frankenstein mask, he smiles back eagerly. He has waited with much anticipation for this night.
A small group of kids pelt by, anonymous in their costumes. Only the patter of their expensive new Adidas and Nikes links them to an exclusive club, one to which Denny will never belong. He watches enviously as they pound on the door. “Trick or treat,” they demand in high, childish voices. He turns and scurries to the next house.
A quick stab of the doorbell brings a smiling, silver-haired woman to the door. “My, aren’t you scary looking?” she laughs merrily. “Are you going to say trick or treat? What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
Denny shakes his head and asks, “Ccould I hhaff a ddink of, wwatah, ppleese?” Her smile wavers and she blushes as understanding comes. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course you can.”
When she goes to the kitchen, Denny reaches into the candy dish sitting so invitingly by the door. He barely retracts his hand before the woman returns with a glass of water. Turning his back, he lifts the mask and takes a short sip. “Ttankk yyoou,” he mumbles thickly, holding
out his plastic sack. The woman drops in extra candy. After every house on the block has been visited, he climbs on his bike and heads for home, racing the moon from streetlight to streetlight watching the shadows wheel and dart before him.
Pedaling furiously, he soon reaches the section of town where the houses aren’t so nice. He weaves the familiar route up the rutted street until the small, rundown house comes into view.
Quietly letting himself in, he tiptoes past his mom who is fast asleep on the couch. As usual, the reek of soured whiskey follows him across the creaky floor.
He barely has time to stuff the mask and candy under the bed before he hears Mom’s heavy tread. She enters the room and drunkenly embraces him. “Oh, Denny, I’m so glad you’re home. Momma just had the most awful dream. It was full of blood, and children were screaming and screaming … ”
Denny pulls away from her and throws himself onto the rickety bed. She stares at him in helpless misery. “I dreamed you went trick or treating again,” she blubbers wetly, and Denny knows she’s going to talk about it. “I’m so sorry, baby. I know I let you down. If only I’d checked the candy. Who’d have ever thought someone would be sick enough to put razor blades in a child’s—”
Denny turns to the wall and stonily ignores her. Stiffly, she reaches a fluttering moist palm toward him that stops short. “I know the kids at school make fun of your problem. But I talked to Dr. Palmer again yesterday, and he says he might be able to help.”
“Hhee ccan’tt hhellp.”
The silence becomes a thick wall between them. For the first time, she notices he is wearing a jacket. Alarm sifts through the alcoholic haze to finally settle on her face. “Where were you tonight, Denny? You didn’t go trick or treating, did you?” She yanks him around, trying hard not to wince as the horribly disfigured mouth smiles crookedly at her.
“Nooo, I wass mmakin’ ssome neww ffriendss,” he utters cheerfully, jumping from the bed and crossing over to the window. He jams both hands into his jacket pockets. His fingers touch a small lump nestled within—it’s a candy bar. For a second, he’d almost forgotten he’d placed one in the candy dishes of all the homes he visited tonight.
As he thinks about the kids who make fun of the way he talks, his fingers curl tightly. A sharp flash of pain causes his hand to fill with sticky red wetness. After tonight, he’ll have lots of friends to talk to. He stares into the night and smiles a terrible, secret smile. The man in the moon is smiling too; only, this time, a river of blood is gushing from his mouth.
You Deserve
Alex Jeffers
Frogs peeped and croaked. Crickets chirped. Mosquitos whined. Ripples smacked against the rowboat’s hull and drops dripped off the blades of the oars Rory held up out of the water, raised and poised like a soaring bird’s wings—I couldn’t really see them but that’s how I imagined it. I couldn’t really see Rory but I knew what he looked like. There were more stars in the sky than a city boy was used to, millions more, but no moon. Some kind of music floated across the water from the party but all I could make out was bass. “Watch for it,” Rory said.
“What?”
“You’ll know when it happens.”
Then the bonfire on shore exploded and people started screaming.
“Yeah,” said Rory.
Back up.
See, when Rory asked if I wanted to go out in the boat, I thought (hoped) it was so we could be alone together and make out. Or something. Despite everything. He was so pretty and I didn’t much like or understand his friends. They didn’t like me, I hadn’t known them all forever and I wasn’t their sort. They had their own language that I’d never studied in school and didn’t have a phrase book for. But Rory was nice to me from the minute we drove up to the lake house, me and Little Dad in the car with Fitz (the cat) yowling in her travelling cage on the back seat, Big Dad behind us driving the rental van with everything from the Boston apartment except the furniture. This handsome, really fit kid in plaid boardies and no shirt was juggling yellow tennis balls on the front lawn where Little Dad pulled up so I wondered if it was really the right house. Cabin, whatever.
“Hey, Stevie!” the kid called when Little Dad switched off the ignition (I’d never heard anybody but Big Dad call Little Dad Stevie)—“Hey, Stuart! Mom said you were coming up today. Need some help?” He was still juggling, not even looking at the balls.
“Hey, Rory,” Little Dad said, getting out, “good to see you. You’re taller.” Then he poked his head back in and said to me, “That’s Rory. Neighbor. Get out of the car, it’ll be fine.”
Look. The Ackles Lake summer colony was all people who’d known Stuart Ackles-Echeverría and Esteban Echeverría-Ackles years before Big Dad and Little Dad picked up a teenage son out of the adoption box. Last summer, the summer I moved in, was the first time in forever they didn’t go to the lake for a week. Sure I was shy.
But when I looked up there was Rory sticking his right hand through my open window, grinning like he meant it. “You’re Max,” he said. “Finally. Welcome to Ackles Lake. Mom says you’re here for the whole summer—that’ll be great. After we get everything unloaded, wanna go for a swim?”
And, see, nobody’d ever flirted with me before but I’d watched movies and read novels, and I was pretty sure (hoping) Rory was flirting all that first week when he was showing me around and introducing me to people and taking me and his dog, Peony, for long walks along the lakeshore and through the woods. Peony was this big, mean-looking pitbull who scared me half to death when Rory brought her over the first time, but she was really a wriggly sweetheart and Rory said I never had to worry about her but if anybody tried to mess with me they’d have to worry.
“I think,” I said over burgers on the deck because, look, that’s half the point of having gay dads, “Rory McDougall is flirting with me.”
“Max,” said Big Dad.
Little Dad said, “Rory’s a really good kid. Unlike some of his friends. Long as I’ve been coming here with your dad, I’ve been one of the folks far as he’s concerned, not Stuart’s fag-spic little jumped-up friend in scare quotes. So, yeah, I like him. But I don’t know if he’s gay. He’s never said anything or, like, come to us for advice. Didn’t he have a girlfriend summer before last?”
“I had a girlfriend every summer when I was his age,” Big Dad said, which was something I couldn’t imagine. “I dunno, either. What do you mean, flirting? Are you flirting back?”
Back up.
“So Stevie lost his job? That’s too bad.”
We were sitting on the little dock below Rory’s house. (I called it a dock, he said jetty.)
“Yeah.” I was over, almost over, being worried about it, because Big Dad and Little Dad told me I had to be. “That’s why it’s the whole summer, not just a week, and why we brought all that stuff. Everything that didn’t go into storage. We’ll find a new place to live in the fall.”
Rory pushed the toggle on his remote-control box and the little speedboat on the lake sped up, making a wide arc and throwing up a white bow wave. “Where?”
“Big— Stuart talks about Hawaii or California. But we can’t leave the state because … ”
“Because the adoption isn’t final and those aren’t two of the places Stu and Stevie can be married?”
“Yeah,” I blurted, relieved not to have to say it myself.
“You know.” Rory was glaring at his speedboat out on the water. “I’m adopted too.”
“I—I kind of figured. You don’t look so much like your mom.”
“I dye it,” Rory said, putting a hand to his thick, buzzed black hair. “Tinted contacts.”
“Pancake makeup to cover the freckles?” Ms. McDougall was a redhead, really pretty. Really not Asian.
“Well, that’s out of the way then. But I was just a baby, from some baby farm in China. Not—”
“Hey!” I yelled, “watch your boat!”
It was headed right at us, speeding really fast, faster than a toy ought to be
able to go. When it hit a ripple it bounced right out of the water but kept coming, skipping higher and farther and faster with each bounce, and I thought I could hear its motor whining, and I didn’t have time to think. I shoved Rory, he went off the dock into the water on his side and I threw myself off the other.
“Wow,” said Rory when he came up with a big grin. “I never thought it could actually go airborne.”
The boat had smashed to bits four feet down the dock. Jetty. It would have got me right between the eyes.
Go back.
Little Dad, original suit-and-tie workaholic, came home early, carrying a copy-paper box that rattled when he dumped it on the coffee table. Six inches of his tie dangled out of the left jacket pocket. He looked really happy when he straightened up, pulled off his jacket and threw it at the armchair, grinned at me, and said, “I need a hug.”
I hesitated and glanced at the screen where my avatar was fighting for his life without any help from me, then back at Little Dad. There was stuff I didn’t understand or trust about living with people who loved me. I was about to get up, though, when Little Dad shrugged—he didn’t look offended, just kind of manic—and plopped down on the sofa beside me, peering at the TV. “Is that you?” he asked just as an enormous war axe split my avatar’s skull open and I paused the game.
“It was,” I said, worried maybe he wouldn’t approve of the game. It was M for Mature—Big Dad had to buy it for me.
“Sorry—I distracted you. Are you dead now?”
“It’s okay.” I set the controller down. “I’m not very good at it anyway.”
Little Dad put one arm around my shoulders. “It’s okay to ask me why I’m home so early, carting every single personal possession I ever left at the office. Including an extremely important World’s Best Dad coffee mug.”
My stomach went bad. “You got fired.” It wasn’t a question. My mom got fired a lot, back when I had a mom. It was terrible every time.
“Laid off,” said Little Dad. “More unexpected but less demeaning.”