Gwendy's Button Box

by Stephen King

  “It’s just the strangest thing, and way too early for answers,” Castle Rock Sheriff Walt Bannerman commented. “We don’t know if there was a minor earthquake centered in this area or if someone somehow sabotaged the stairs or what. We’re bringing in additional investigators from Portland, but they’re not expected to arrive until tomorrow morning, so it’s best we wait until that time to make any further announcements.”

  Castle View was recently the scene of tragedy when the body of a seventeen-year-old female was discovered at the base of the cliff…

  23

  Gwendy is sick for days afterward. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson believe grief is causing their daughter’s fever and upset stomach, but Gwendy knows better. It’s the box. It’s the price she has to pay for pushing the red button. She heard the rumble of the collapsing rocks, and had to run into the bathroom and vomit.

  She manages to shower and change out of baggy sweatpants and a t-shirt long enough to attend Olive’s funeral on Monday morning, but only after her mother’s prompting. If it were up to Gwendy, she wouldn’t have left her bedroom. Maybe not until she was twenty-four or so.

  The church is SRO. Most of Castle Rock High School is there—teachers and students alike; even Frankie Stone is there, smirking in the back pew—and Gwendy hates them all for showing up. None of them even liked Olive when she was alive. None of them even knew her.

  Yeah, like I did, Gwendy thinks. But at least I did something about it. There’s that. No one else will jump from those stairs. Ever.

  Walking from the gravesite back to her parents’ car after the service, someone calls out to her. She turns and sees Olive’s father.

  Mr. Kepnes is a short man, barrel-chested, with rosy cheeks and kind eyes. Gwendy has always adored him and shared a special bond with Olive’s father, perhaps because they once shared the burden of being overweight, or perhaps because Mr. Kepnes is one of the sweetest people Gwendy has ever known.

  She held it together pretty well during the funeral service, but now, with Olive’s father approaching, arms outstretched, Gwendy loses it and begins to sob.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Mr. Kepnes says, wrapping her up in a bear hug. “It’s okay.”

  Gwendy vehemently shakes her head. “It’s not…” Her face is a mess of tears and snot. She wipes it with her sleeve.

  “Listen to me.” Mr. Kepnes leans down and makes sure Gwendy is looking at him. It’s wrong for the father to be comforting the friend—the ex-friend—but that is exactly what he’s doing. “It has to be okay. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but it has to be. Got it?”

  Gwendy nods her head and whispers, “Got it.” She just wants to go home.

  “You were her best friend in the world, Gwendy. Maybe in a couple weeks, you can come see us at the house. We can all sit down and have some lunch and talk. I think Olive would’ve liked that.”

  It’s too much, and Gwendy can no longer bear it. She pulls away and flees for the car, her apologetic parents trailing behind her.

  The final two days of school are canceled because of the tragedy. Gwendy spends most of the next week on the den sofa buried beneath a blanket. She has many bad dreams—the worst of them featuring a man in a black suit and black hat, shiny silver coins where his eyes should be—and often cries out in her sleep. She’s afraid of what she might say during these nightmares. She’s afraid her parents might overhear.

  Eventually, the fever breaks and Gwendy reenters the world. She spends the majority of her summer vacation working as much as she can at the snack bar. When she’s not working, she’s jogging the sunbaked roads of Castle Rock or locked inside her bedroom listening to music. Anything to keep her mind busy.

  The button box stays hidden in the back of the closet. Gwendy still thinks about it—boy, does she—but she wants nothing to do with it anymore. Not the chocolate treats, not the silver coins, and most of all, not the goddamn buttons. Most days, she hates the box and everything it reminds her of, and she fantasizes about getting rid of it. Crushing it with a sledgehammer or wrapping it up in a blanket and driving it out to the dump.

  But she knows she can’t do that. What if someone else finds it? What if someone else pushes one of the buttons?

  She leaves it there in the dark shadows of her closet, growing cobwebs and gathering dust. Let the damn thing rot for all I care, she thinks.

  24

  Gwendy is sunbathing in the back yard, listening to Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band on a Sony Walkman, when Mrs. Peterson comes outside carrying a glass of ice water. Her mother hands Gwendy the glass and sits down on the end of the lawn chair.

  “You doing okay, honey?”

  Gwendy slips off the headphones and takes a drink. “I’m fine.”

  Mrs. Peterson gives her a look.

  “Okay, maybe not fine, but I’m doing better.”

  “I hope so.” She gives Gwendy’s leg a squeeze. “You know we’re here if you ever want to talk. About anything.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re just so quiet all the time. We worry about you.”

  “I…have a lot on my mind.”

  “Still not ready to call Mr. Kepnes back?”

  Gwendy doesn’t answer, only shakes her head.

  Mrs. Peterson gets up from the lawn chair. “Just remember one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It will get better. It always does.”

  It’s pretty much what Olive’s father said. Gwendy hopes it’s true, but she has her doubts.

  “Hey, mom?”

  Mrs. Peterson stops and turns around.

  “I love you.”

  25

  As it turns out, Mr. Kepnes was wrong and Mrs. Peterson was right. Things are not okay, but they do get better.

  Gwendy meets a boy.

  His name is Harry Streeter. He’s eighteen years old, tall and handsome and funny. He’s new to Castle Rock (his family just moved in a couple weeks ago as a result of his father’s job transfer), and if it’s not a genuine case of Love At First Sight, it’s pretty close.

  Gwendy is behind the counter at the snack bar, hustling tubs of buttered popcorn, Laffy Taffy, Pop Rocks, and soda by the gallon, when Harry walks in with his younger brother. She notices him right away, and he notices her. When it’s his turn to order, the spark jumps and neither of them can manage a complete sentence.

  Harry returns the next night, by himself this time, even though The Amityville Horror and Phantasm are still playing, and once again he waits his turn in line. This time, along with a small popcorn and soda, he asks Gwendy for her phone number.

  He calls the next afternoon, and that evening picks her up in a candy-apple red Mustang convertible. With his blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like a movie star. They go bowling and have pizza on their first date, skating at the Gates Falls Roller Rink on their second, and after that they are inseparable. Picnics at Castle Lake, day trips into Portland to visit museums and the big shopping mall, movies, walks. They even jog together, keeping in perfect step.

  By the time school starts, Gwendy is wearing Harry’s school ring on a silver chain around her neck and trying to figure out how to talk to her mother about birth control. (This talk won’t happen until the school year is almost two months old, but when it does, Gwendy is relieved to find that her mother is not only understanding, she even calls and makes the doctor’s appointment for her—go, Mom.)

  There are other changes, too. Much to the dismay of the coaching staff and her teammates, Gwendy decides to skip her senior season on the girls’ soccer team. Her heart just isn’t in it. Besides, Harry isn’t a jock, he’s a serious photographer, and this way they can spend more time together.

  Gwendy can’t remember ever being this happy. The button box still surfaces in her thoughts from time to time, but it’s almost as if the whole thing was a dream from her childhood. Mr. Farris. The chocolate treats. The silver dollars. The red button. Was any of it real?

  Running, however, is not negot
iable. When indoor track season rolls around in late November, Gwendy is ready to rock and roll. Harry is there on the sidelines for every meet, snapping pix and cheering her on. Despite training most of the summer and into the fall, Gwendy finishes a disappointing fourth in Counties and doesn’t qualify for States for the first time in her high school career. She also brings home two B’s on her semester-ending report card in December. On the third morning of Christmas break, Gwendy wakes up and shuffles to the hallway bathroom to take her morning pee. When she’s finished, she uses her right foot to slide the scale out from underneath the bathroom vanity, and she steps onto it. Her instincts are right: she has gained six pounds.

  26

  Gwendy’s first impulse is to sprint down the hallway, lock her bedroom door, and yank out the button box so she can pull the small lever and devour a magic chocolate treat. She can almost hear the voices chanting in her head: Goodyear! Goodyear! Goodyear!

  But she doesn’t do that.

  Instead, she closes the toilet lid and sits back down. Let’s see, I bombed my track season, pulled a pair of B’s for the semester (one of them just barely a B, although her parents don’t know that), and I gained weight (six whole pounds!) for the first time in years—and I’m still the happiest I’ve ever been.

  I don’t need it, she thinks. More importantly, I don’t want it. The realization makes her head sing and her heart soar, and Gwendy returns to her bedroom with a spring to her step and a smile on her face.

  27

  The next morning, Gwendy wakes up on the floor of her closet.

  She’s cradling the button box in her arms like a faithful lover and her right thumb is resting a half-inch from the black button.

  She stifles a scream and jerks her hand away, scrambling like a crab out of the closet. A safe distance away, she gets to her feet and notices something that makes her head swim: the narrow wooden shelf on the button box is standing open. On it is a tiny chocolate treat: a parrot, every feather perfect.

  Gwendy wants more than anything to run from the room, slam the door behind her, and never return—but she knows she can’t do that. So what can she do?

  She approaches the button box with as much stealth as she can muster. When she’s within a few feet of it, the image of a wild animal asleep in its lair flashes in her head, and she thinks: The button box doesn’t just give power; it is power.

  “But I won’t,” she mutters. Won’t what? “Won’t give in.”

  Before she can chicken out, she lunges and snatches the piece of chocolate from the little shelf. She backs out of the bedroom, afraid to turn her back on the button box, hurries down the hall into the bathroom, where she hurls the chocolate parrot into the toilet and flushes it away.

  And for a while, everything is all right. She thinks the button box goes to sleep, but she doesn’t trust that, not a bit. Because even if it does, it sleeps with one eye open.

  28

  Two life-changing events occur at the start of Gwendy’s final semester of high school: her college application to study psychology at Brown University is granted an early acceptance, and she sleeps with Harry for the first time.

  There’ve been several false starts over the past few months—Gwendy has been on the pill for at least that long—but each time she isn’t quite ready, and gallant Harry Streeter doesn’t pressure her. The deed finally goes down in Harry’s candlelit bedroom on the Friday night of his father’s big work party, and it is every bit as awkward and wonderful as expected. To make the necessary improvements, Gwendy and Harry do it again the next two nights in the back seat of Harry’s Mustang. It’s cramped back there, but it only gets better.

  Gwendy runs outdoor track again when spring comes, and places in the top three in her first two meets. Her grades are currently A’s across the board (although History is hovering in the danger zone at 91%), and she hasn’t stepped on a scale since the week before Christmas. She’s done with that nonsense.

  She still suffers from the occasional nightmare (the one featuring the well-dressed man with the silver coin eyes continuing to be the most terrifying), and she still knows the button box wants her back, but she tries not to dwell on that. Most days she is successful, thanks to Harry and what she thinks of as her new life. She often daydreams that Mr. Farris will return to take back possession of the button box, relieving her of the responsibility. Or that the box will eventually forget about her. That would sound stupid to an outsider, but Gwendy has come to believe that the box is in some way alive.

  Only there will be no forgetting. She discovers this on a breezy spring afternoon in April, while she and Harry are flying a kite in the outfield of the Castle Rock High baseball field (Gwendy was delighted when he showed up at her house with the kite in tow). She notices something small and dark emerge from the tree-line bordering the school property. At first she thinks it’s an animal of some sort. A bunny or perhaps a woodchuck on the move. But as it gets closer—and it seems to head directly at them—she realizes that it’s not an animal at all. It’s a hat.

  Harry is holding the spool of string and staring up at the red, white, and blue kite with wide eyes and a smile on his face. He doesn’t notice the black hat coming in their direction, not moving with the wind but against it. He doesn’t notice the hat slow down as it approaches, then suddenly change direction and swoop a complete circle around his horrorstruck girlfriend—almost as if kissing her hello, so nice to see you again—before it skitters off and disappears behind the bleachers that run alongside the third base line.

  Harry notices none of these things because it’s a gorgeous spring afternoon in Castle Rock and he’s flying a kite with the love of his young life at his side, and everything is perfect.

  29

  The first half of May passes in a blur of classes, tests, and graduation planning. Everything from sizing caps and gowns, to sending out commencement notices in the mail, to finalizing graduation night party arrangements. Final exams are scheduled for the week of May 19th and the Castle Rock High School graduation ceremony will take place on the football field the following Tuesday, the 27th.

  For Gwendy and Harry, everything is set. After the ceremony is finished, they will change clothes and head to Brigette Desjardin’s house for the biggest and best graduation party in the school. The next morning, they leave for a week-long camping trip to Casco Bay, just the two of them. Once they return home, it will be work at the drive-in for Gwendy and at the hardware store for Harry. In early August, a ten-day vacation at the coast with Harry’s family. After that, it’s on to college (Brown for Gwendy; nearby Providence for Harry) and an exciting new chapter in their lives. They can’t wait.

  Gwendy knows she will have to make a decision about what to do with the button box once it’s time to leave for college, but that’s months in the future, and it’s not a priority this evening. The biggest decision facing Gwendy at the moment is which dress to wear to Brigette’s party.

  “Good lord,” Harry says, smiling. “Just pick one, already. Or go as you are.” As she is happens to be in bra and panties.

  Gwendy gives him a poke in the ribs and turns to the next page in the catalog. “Easy for you to say, mister. You’ll put on jeans and a t-shirt and look like a million bucks.”

  “You look like a trillion in your underwear.”

  They’re lying on their stomachs on Gwendy’s bed. Harry is toying with her hair; Gwendy is paging through the glossy Brown catalogue. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson are at dinner with neighbors down the block and not expected back until late. Gwendy and Harry came in an hour ago, and Gwendy was mildly surprised to find she didn’t need to use her key. The front door was not only unlocked but slightly ajar. (Her dad is big on locking up; likes to say Castle Rock isn’t the little country town it used to be.) But everyone forgets stuff, plus Dad’s not getting any younger. And with thoughts of the party to occupy them—not to mention thirty minutes of heaven in her bed beforehand—neither notices a few splinters sticking out around the lock. Or the pry
marks.

  “C’mon,” Harry says now, “you’re a knockout. It doesn’t matter what you wear.”

  “I just can’t decide whether to go strapless and dressy or long and flowy and summery.” She tosses the catalog on the floor and gets up. “Here, I’ll let you choose.” She walks to the closet, opens the door…and smells him before she sees him: beer, cigarettes, and sweat-funk.

  She starts to turn around and call to Harry, but she’s too late. A pair of strong arms reach out from the shadows and hanging clothes and pull her to the floor. Now she finds her voice, “Harry!”

  He’s already off the bed and moving. He hurls himself at Gwendy’s attacker, and amidst a tangle of clothes hangers and blouses, they grapple across the floor.

  Gwendy pushes herself back up against the wall and is stunned to see Frankie Stone, dressed in camo pants, dark glasses, and t-shirt, as if he thinks he’s a soldier on a secret mission, rolling around her bedroom floor with her boyfriend. That’s bad, but something else is worse: lying on the closet floor, half-buried in fallen clothes, is a scatter of silver dollars…and the button box. Frankie must have found it while he was waiting for her, or while he was waiting for Harry to leave.

  Has he pushed any of the buttons?

  Is Africa gone? Or Europe?

  The two young men crash into the night table. Hairbrushes and makeup rain down on them. Frankie’s Secret Agent Man shades fly off. Harry outweighs Frankie by at least thirty pounds, and pins the skinny little dipshit to the floor. “Gwen?” He sounds perfectly calm. “Call the police. I’ve got this skanky little motherf—”

  But that’s when it all goes to hell. Frankie is skinny, Frankie doesn’t have much in the way of muscles, but that is also true of snakes. He moves like a snake now, first wriggling, then hoisting one knee into the crotch of Harry’s boxers. Harry makes an ooof sound and tilts forward. Frankie pulls one hand free, makes finger-prongs, and jabs them into Harry’s eyes. Harry screams, claps a hand to his face, and falls to one side.