Gwendy's Button Box

by Stephen King

  And she still thinks about the buttons, of course, especially the red one. She sometimes finds herself sitting cross-legged on the cold basement floor, holding the button box in her lap, staring at that red button in a kind of daze and caressing it with the tip of her finger. She wonders what would happen if she pushed the red button without a clear choice of a place to blow up. What then? Who would decide what was destroyed? God? The box?

  A few weeks after her trip to the coin shop, Gwendy decides it’s time to find out about the red button once and for all.

  Instead of spending her fifth period study hall in the library, she heads for Mr. Anderson’s empty World History classroom. There’s a reason for this: the pair of pull-down maps that are attached to Mr. Anderson’s chalkboard.

  Gwendy has considered a number of possible targets for the red button. She hates that word—target—but it fits, and she can’t think of anything better. Among her initial options: the Castle Rock dump, a stretch of trashy, pulped-over woods beyond the railroad tracks, and the old abandoned Phillips 66 gas station where kids hang out and smoke dope.

  In the end, she decides to not only target someplace outside of Castle Rock, but also the entire country. Better safe than sorry.

  She walks behind Mr. Anderson’s desk and carefully studies the map, focusing first on Australia (where, she recently learned, over one-third of the country is desert) before moving on to Africa (those poor folks have enough problems) and finally settling on South America.

  From her history notes, Gwendy remembers two important facts that aid this decision: South America harbors thirty-five of the fifty least-developed countries in the world, and a similar percentage of the least-populated countries in the world.

  Now that the choice has been made, Gwendy doesn’t waste any time. She scribbles down the names of three small countries in her spiral notebook, one from the north, one from the middle of the continent, and one from the south. Then, she hurries to the library to do more research. She looks at pictures and makes a list of the most godforsaken ones.

  Later that afternoon, Gwendy sits down in front of her bedroom closet and balances the button box on her lap.

  She places a shaky finger on top of the red button.

  She closes her eyes and pictures one tiny part of a faraway country. Dense, tangled vegetation. An expanse of wild jungle where no people live. As many details as she can manage.

  She holds the image in her head and pushes the red button.

  Nothing happens. It doesn’t go down.

  Gwendy stabs at the red button a second and third time. It doesn’t budge under her finger. The part about the buttons was a practical joke, it seems. And gullible Gwendy Peterson believed it.

  Almost relieved, she starts to return the button box to the closet when Mr. Farris’s words suddenly come back to her: The buttons are very hard to push. You have to use your thumb, and put some real muscle into it. Which is a good thing, believe me.

  She lowers the box to her lap again—and uses her thumb to press the red button. She puts all her weight on it. This time, there’s a barely audible click, and Gwendy feels the button depress.

  She stares at the box for a moment, thinking Some trees and maybe a few animals. A small earthquake or maybe a fire. Surely no more than that. Then she returns it to its hiding place in the wall of the basement. Her face feels warm and her stomach hurts. Does that mean it’s working?

  11

  Gwendy wakes up the next morning running a fever. She stays home from school and spends most of the day sleeping. She emerges from her bedroom later that evening, feeling as good as new, and discovers her parents watching the news in silence. She can tell from the expressions on their faces that something is wrong. She eases down on the sofa next to her mother and watches in horror as Charles Gibson takes them to Guyana—a faraway country of which she recently learned a few salient details. There a cult leader by the name of Jim Jones has committed suicide and ordered over nine hundred of his followers to do the same.

  Grainy photographs flash on the television screen. Bodies laid out in rows, thick jungle looming in the background. Couples in a lovers’ embrace. Mothers clutching babies to still chests. So many children. Faces distorted in agony. Flies crawling all over everything. According to Charles Gibson, nurses squirted the poison down the kiddies’ throats before taking their own doses.

  Gwendy returns to her bedroom without comment and slips on tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. She thinks about running Suicide Stairs but decides against it, vaguely afraid of an impulse to throw herself off. Instead, she travels a three-mile loop around the neighborhood, her footsteps slapping a staccato rhythm on the cold pavement, crisp autumn air blushing her cheeks. I did that, she thinks, picturing flies swarming over dead babies. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

  12

  “You looked right at me,” Olive says. Her voice is calm, but her eyes are burning. “I don’t know how you can say you didn’t see me standing there.”

  “I didn’t. I swear.”

  They are sitting in Gwendy’s bedroom after school, listening to the new Billy Joel album and supposedly studying for an English mid-term. Now it’s obvious Olive came over with what she likes to call ISSUES. Olive often has ISSUES these days.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  Gwendy’s eyes go wide. “You’re calling me a liar? Why in the world would I walk right by you without saying hello?”

  Olive shrugs, her lips pressed tight. “Maybe you didn’t want all your cool friends to know you used to hang out with other lowly sophomores.”

  “That’s stupid. You’re my best friend, Olive. Everyone knows that.”

  Olive barks out a laugh. “Best friend? Do you know the last time we’ve done something on a weekend? Forget Friday and Saturday nights with all your dates and parties and bonfires. I’m talking the entire weekend, any time at all.”

  “I’ve been really busy,” Gwendy says, looking away. She knows her friend is right, but why does she have to be so sensitive? “I’m sorry.”

  “And you don’t even like half those guys. Bobby Crawford asks you out and you giggle and twirl your hair and say ‘Sure, why not?’ even though you barely know his name and could care less about him.”

  And, just like that, Gwendy understands. How could I be so stupid? she wonders. “I didn’t know you liked Bobby.” She scoots across the bedroom floor and puts her hand on her friend’s knee. “I swear I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Olive doesn’t say anything. Apparently the ISSUE remains.

  “That was months ago. Bobby’s a really nice guy, but that’s the only time I went out with him. If you want, I can call him and tell him about you—”

  Olive pushes Gwendy’s hand away and gets to her feet. “I don’t need your goddamn charity.” She bends down and gathers her books and folders into her arms.

  “It’s not charity. I just thought—”

  “That’s your problem,” Olive says, pulling away again. “You only think about yourself. You’re selfish.” She stomps out of the bedroom and slams the door behind her.

  Gwendy stands there in disbelief, her body trembling with hurt. Then the hurt blooms into anger. “Go to hell!” she screams at the closed door. “If you want to address an issue, try your jealous bone!”

  She flings herself back on the bed, tears streaming down her face, the hurtful words echoing: You only think about yourself. You’re selfish.

  “That’s not true,” Gwendy whispers to the empty room. “I think about others. I try to be a good person. I made a mistake about Guyana, but I was…I was tricked into it, and I wasn’t the one who poisoned them. It wasn’t me.” Except it sort of was.

  Gwendy cries herself to sleep and dreams of nurses bearing syringes of Kool-Aid death to small children.

  13

  She tries to smooth things over the next day at school, but Olive refuses to talk to her. The following day, Friday, is more of the same. Just before the final bell rings, Gwendy slips
a handwritten apology note inside Olive’s locker and hopes for the best.

  On Saturday night, Gwendy and her date, a junior named Walter Dean, stop by the arcade on their way to an early movie. During the car ride over, Walter pulls out a bottle of wine he lifted from his mother’s stash, and although Gwendy usually passes on such offers, tonight she helps herself. She’s sad and confused and hopes the buzz will help.

  It doesn’t. It only gives her a mild headache.

  Gwendy nods hello to several classmates as they enter the arcade and is surprised to see Olive standing in line at the snack bar. Hopeful, she flips her a tentative wave, but once again Olive ignores her. A moment later, Olive walks right past her, large soda cradled in her arms, nose in the air, giggling with a pack of girls Gwendy recognizes from a neighboring high school.

  “What’s her problem?” Walter asks, before sliding a quarter into a Space Invaders machine.

  “Long story.” Gwendy stares after her friend and her anger returns. She feels her face flush with annoyance. She knows what it was like for me. Hey, Goodyear, where’s the football game? Hey, Goodyear, how’s the view up there? She should be happy for me. She should be—

  Twenty feet away from her, Olive screams as someone bumps her arm, sending a cascade of ice-cold soda all over her face and down the front of her brand new sweater. Kids point and start to laugh. Olive looks around in embarrassment, her eyes finally settling on Gwendy, and then she storms away and disappears into the public restroom.

  Gwendy, remembering her dream about Frankie Stone, suddenly wants to go home and shut the door of her room and crawl under the covers.

  14

  The day before she’s scheduled to attend junior prom with Walter Dean, Gwendy rolls out of bed late to discover that the basement has flooded overnight after a particularly heavy spring thunderstorm.

  “It’s wetter than a taco fart down there and just as smelly,” Mr. Peterson tells her. “You sure you want to go down?”

  Gwendy nods, trying to hide her rising panic. “I need to check on some old books and a pile of clothes I left for the laundry.”

  Mr. Peterson shrugs his shoulders and returns his gaze to the small television on the kitchen counter. “Make sure you take off your shoes before you go. And hey, might want to wear a life preserver.”

  Gwendy hurries down the basement stairs before he can change his mind and wades into a pool of ankle-high scummy gray water. Earlier this morning Mr. Peterson managed to unclog the sump pump, and Gwendy can hear it chugging away over in the far corner, but it’s going to have a long day. She can tell by the water line that marks the basement’s stone walls that the floodwater has dropped maybe two inches at the most.

  She wades to the opposite side of the basement where the button box is hidden and pushes aside the old bureau. She drops to a knee in the corner and reaches down into the cloudy water, unable to see her hands, and works the stone free.

  Her fingers touch wet canvas. She pulls the waterlogged bag out of its hidey-hole, puts it aside, then picks up the loose stone and places it back into the wall so her father won’t notice it once the water has finished receding.

  She reaches to the side again for the canvas bag containing the box and coins—and it isn’t there.

  She flails her hands under the water, trying desperately to locate the bag, but it’s nowhere to be found. Black dots swim in her vision and she suddenly feels light-headed. She realizes she’s forgotten to breathe, so she opens her mouth and takes in a big gulp of foul, moldy basement air. Her eyes and brain immediately begin to clear.

  Gwendy takes one more calming breath and once again reaches down into the dirty water, this time trying her other side. Right away, her fingers brush the canvas bag. She gets to her feet and like a weightlifter performing a deadlift squat, she raises the heavy bag to her waist and waddles her way across the basement to the shelves next to the washer and dryer. She grabs a couple of dry towels from an upper shelf and does the best she can to wrap the canvas bag.

  “You okay down there?” her father hollers from upstairs. She hears footsteps on the ceiling above her. “Need any help? Scuba tank and fins, maybe?”

  “No, no,” Gwendy says, hurrying to make sure the bag is fully concealed. Her heart is a triphammer in her chest. “I’ll be up in a few.”

  “If you say so.” She listens to her father’s muffled footsteps again, but going away. Thank God.

  She grabs the bag again and shuffles across the flooded basement as fast as her tired legs will carry her, grunting with the weight of the box and the silver coins.

  Once she is safely inside her bedroom, she locks the door behind her and unwraps the canvas bag. The button box appears undamaged, but how would she really know? She pulls the lever on the left side of the box and after a breathless moment when she is absolutely convinced the box is broken after all, the little shelf slides open without a sound and on it is a chocolate monkey the size of a jelly bean. She quickly stuffs the chocolate into her mouth and that gorgeous flavor takes her away again. She closes her eyes while it melts on her tongue.

  The bag is ripped in several places and will have to be replaced, but Gwendy isn’t worried about that. She looks around her bedroom and settles on the bottom of her closet, where her shoeboxes are stacked in messy piles. Her parents never bother with her closet these days.

  She removes an old pair of boots from their oversized cardboard box and tosses them to the opposite end of the closet. She carefully places the button box inside and adds the pile of silver coins. Once the lid is securely back on the shoebox, she slides it—it’s too heavy to pick up now; the cardboard would surely tear—into the shadows at the very back of her closet. Once that’s done, she stacks other shoeboxes on top and in front of it.

  She gets to her feet, backs up, and surveys her work. Convinced that she’s done a competent job, she picks up the soaked canvas bag and heads for the kitchen to throw it away and grab some cereal for breakfast.

  She lazes around the house the rest of the day, watching television and skimming her history book. Every thirty minutes or so—more than a dozen times in all—she gets up from the sofa, walks down the hallway, and peeks her head into her bedroom to make sure the box is still safe.

  The next night is the prom, and she finds that she actually has to force herself to put on her pink gown and make-up and leave the house.

  Is this my life now? she thinks as she enters the Castle Rock gym. Is that box my life?

  15

  COIN & STAMP SHOW

  BUY! SELL! TRADE!

  Castle Rock VFW

  Saturday, May 20

  9am—2pm

  Refreshments Sold!

  Selling the silver coins isn’t back on Gwendy’s radar until she sees the advertising flyer taped to the front window of the Castle Rock Diner. After that, it’s pretty much all she can think about. There was that one trip to the coin shop, true, but it was mostly of an exploratory nature. Now, however, things have changed. Gwendy wants to attend an Ivy League university after she graduates from high school—and those places don’t come cheap. She plans to apply for grants and scholarships, and with her grades she’s sure she’ll get something, but enough? Probably not. Surely not.

  What is a sure thing are the 1891 Morgan silver dollars stacked inside a shoebox in the back of her closet. Over a hundred of them at last count.

  Gwendy knows from leafing through back issues of COINage magazine at the drug store that the fair-trade price of the Morgans is not just holding steady; their value is still rising. According to the magazine, inflation and global unrest are driving the market in gold and silver coins. Her first idea was to sell enough of the coins (maybe in Portland, more likely in Boston) to pay for college and figure out how to explain the sudden windfall only when it becomes absolutely necessary. Maybe she’ll say she found it. Hard to believe, but also hard to disprove. (The best-laid plans of sixteen-year-olds are rarely thought out.)

  The Coin & Stamp Show flyer g
ives Gwendy another idea. A better idea.

  The plan is to take two of the silver dollars, enough to test the waters, and bike down to the VFW first thing this weekend to see what she can get for them. If they actually sell, and for real money, then she’ll know.

  16

  The first thing Gwendy notices when she walks into the VFW at ten-fifteen on Saturday morning is the sheer size of the place. It didn’t look nearly as spacious from the outside. The dealer tables are arranged in a long, enclosed rectangle. The sellers, mostly men, stand on the inside of the rectangle. The customers, of whom there are already more than two or three dozen, circle the tables with wary eyes and nervous fingers. There doesn’t seem to be a discernible pattern to the set-up—coin dealers here, stamp hucksters there—and more than a few of the merchants deal in both. A couple even have rare sports and tobacco cards fanned out across their tables. She is flabbergasted to see a signed Mickey Mantle card priced at $2,900, but in a way, relieved. It makes her silver dollars look like pretty small beans in comparison.

  She stands in the entryway and takes it all in. It’s a whole new world, exotic and intimidating, and she feels overwhelmed. It must be obvious to anyone watching her because a nearby dealer calls out, “Ya lost, honey? Anything I can help ya with?”

  He’s a chubby man in his thirties wearing glasses and an Orioles baseball cap. There’s food in his beard and a twinkle in his eyes.

  Gwendy approaches his table. “I’m just looking right now, thanks.”

  “Looking to buy or looking to sell?” The man’s eyes drop to Gwendy’s bare legs and linger there longer than they should. When he looks up again, he’s grinning and Gwendy doesn’t like that twinkle anymore.

  “Just looking,” she says, quickly walking away.

  She watches a man two tables down examining a tiny stamp with a magnifying glass and tweezers. She overhears him say, “I can go seventy dollars and that’s already twenty over my limit. My wife will kill me if I…” She doesn’t stick around to see if he seals the deal.