Behind the Song

by K. M. Walton

  I pull the Ewok head off the dash and toss it at him. “What about that?”

  He smiles, slips it on, mumbles something I can’t make out. I point to my ear, shake my head.

  He says it again.

  Still nothing.

  “You gotta enunciate under all that fur, dude.”

  Troy clears his throat. “I said, the teddy bears shall have their revenge!”

  I nod slowly.

  Troy nods slowly.

  A dog barks.

  I look out the window. A woman is walking her dog on the sidewalk. She raises her eyebrows at me, turns abruptly, and crosses the street.

  “We should probably, um, you know, do this thing.”

  “Right,” says Troy.

  I open the passenger door of the SUV, but before stepping out—before walking up to the porch, ringing the bell, and punching a very stunned Calvin Reid Harcourt in the face, thereby forever raising our flag in suburban victory—I, Super Frog, look at my best friend, an Ewok, and say the only thing there is left to say.

  “Dude.”

  He nods. “Dude.”

  We get out of the car.

  Author photo

  © Daniel Meigs

  David Arnold lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his (lovely) wife and (boisterous) son. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Kids of Appetite and Mosquitoland. One Halloween many years ago, after a long night of well-executed trick-or-treating, a few bullies in hockey masks stole David’s candy. Those bullies, like Calvin Reid, were eventually brought to justice. The bag of candy was never seen again. You can learn more (about David and his books, not about candy) at davidarnoldbooks.com and follow him on Twitter @roofbeam.

  MISS ATOMIC BOMB

  A SHORT STORY INSPIRED BY THE KILLERS’ “MISS ATOMIC BOMB”

  By Anthony Breznican

  The Killers wrote an anthem about being blown away by heartbreak and longing, but the lyrics for “Miss Atomic Bomb” were enigmatic enough that I thought they could hold a much more sinister meaning if twisted just the right way. The key was combining them with another story—a true one—from an article I’d read about Monique Luiz, the little girl who costarred alongside a mushroom cloud in President Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 “Daisy” campaign ad. The ad was so notorious and frightening that she and her family kept her involvement secret for decades. I began to wonder, what if someone had uncovered this hidden truth from her past? And what if the circumstances of the world were…different? Guided by the Killers’ song, one “what if” led to another, and this story was born. I guess you’d call that a chain reaction.

  —Anthony Breznican

  “Ten…” the boy said as he brushed by Cassandra Roberts in the hallway.

  It wasn’t his voice that stopped her dead. It was the eagerness in his eyes.

  “Excuse me?” the girl asked.

  “Nine…” he said, softer.

  For a moment, they stood face-to-face in the crush of students as lockers clattered shut and a choppy sea of hands and elbows nudged them back and forth. The boy smiled, flashing a mouth wired with silver braces. Acne flared on his cheeks like flash burns. “Eight?” he said, with a lilt at the end, like a question.

  Three words. Ten. Nine. Eight. Each one a whisper. Each hitting her like a shock wave.

  Then the boy was gone, swept away by the current of the crowd. Cassie heard Abigail Peters, her best friend, shouting for her over the heads of classmates flowing into the white light of the exit. Another friend, Mia Vaida, grabbed Cassie’s hand and pulled. “We have to hurry,” Mia said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Cassie’s eyes searched the hallway for the boy as her feet started moving. She was walking, but it felt like falling backward.

  • • •

  They made it to the mall in record time, but it was still too late. The Republic Supply Co. had advertised a shipment of jeans going on sale that afternoon, but by the time the girls arrived, half their school was already in front of them. Even as they waited in the zigzagging line, the trio could tell there wouldn’t be much left except for the odd sizes and irregulars. Cassie, who was tall and muscular for only sixteen, went to the boys’ section first, since there was always more stock there. She found a remaindered pair that probably would have fit her waist, but the legs were too short. There was nothing in the store that fit Abigail’s bony frame, or the stout, sturdy Mia. Literally nothing. The white metal shelves had been picked clean.

  “Think you’ll get any more before Christmas?” Cassie asked the clerk, a turkey-necked older man with wire-frame glasses. The man shook his head: “Not until a month or two into the new year. At the earliest.” He made a clipboard appear from behind the counter, like a boring magic trick. “Have you signed up for the waitlist?”

  Cassie actually had signed up for several waitlists, but the Republic Supply Co. only used them to let you know when a new shipment arrived. You had to be there in person to buy anything. First come, first served. She guessed the form was just a way to get people to stop nagging the clerks. “Thanks,” she said, and wrote her name and contact number anyway.

  The strip of shops was called The Street, but the kids all called it RetroVille, since the storefronts were built to evoke the kind of small town that had only ever existed in Hollywood back lots and the promises of politicians. This quaint little downtown was only three years old, crammed inside a modern glass and steel atrium that was meant to be psychologically pleasing to those who craved the illusion of sunshine and fresh air.

  Cassandra leaned against one of the lampposts in the food court, staring through the thick glass windows as the sun sank into a purple churn of clouds rolling over a mountain range in the distance. It was late for monsoon season in the desert, but a bruised sunset always meant treacherous weather was moving in.

  “Cass, check it,” Abby said, nudging her friend. “Oppressive male gaze, at six o’clock.” Mia, who was finishing off the last of a bottle of water the three of them were splitting, turned around to look, too.

  It was the same boy from the hall, staring at them from outside the railing of the food service area. He held a plastic daisy plucked from The Street’s fake-rock water fountain and wiggled it at them in a wave.

  “You got a problem?” Mia called out.

  The boy shook his head. His fingers plucked a petal off the daisy and let it drop at his feet. “Six,” he said, just loud enough for them to hear. Then he touched a finger to his chin, pantomiming deep thought, before locking eyes with Cassie again and repeating: “Six…” He pulled off another petal.

  Abby and Mia scrunched their faces, but Cassie straightened up from the lamp. “Oh crap, you know…I forgot,” she said to her friends. “He’s in Mrs. Shute’s history class with us. We have a project we’re doing together. Just…hang on, okay?”

  Her two best friends in the world shrugged. Whatever. Cassie was always up to something weird. “Don’t take forever,” Abigail said.

  “Yeah,” Mia agreed. “I wanna get home before the storm hits.”

  Cassie walked briskly toward the boy, arms stiff at her sides, her satchel full of books swinging from one hand like a bludgeon she might decide to use. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  The boy turned his mouth down in a sad-face expression. “Five…” he said in a baby voice, lifting the daisy and plucking off another plastic petal. Cassie shoved the fake flower out of her face.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed.

  The boy flexed another painful smile, showing off his braces and stretching his inflamed cheeks. “You know what I’m doing,” he said. “You’re Daisy.”

  “Uh, I don’t know what you’re talking abo—”

  “Sure you do,” he interrupted. “Everybody knows Daisy.”

  She couldn’t speak. She had to force herself to breathe, to appear calm.
“My name is Cassie.”

  The boy nodded. His eyes were half-lidded, oblivious to her lie. He wouldn’t quit with the plastic flower, raising it again and saying in a baby voice: “Four…” which came out “fwarh…”

  Cassie stole a look back at her friends. Sweat soaked her back. Her heart battered against the inside of her chest like something buried alive.

  The boy smiled and touched her nose with the fake daisy. “I figured out your secret,” he said. “You’re the girl from that political ad. The little girl counting down the flower petals as she rips them off one by one…”

  “Can you please shut up…?”

  “And then the roar of the fireball behind her. That flash of white on her face…your face… A mushroom cloud filling the screen…”

  “I have to go…”

  His rising voice stopped her. “I always wondered how they did that! Not the blast, I assume that was some green-screen special effect. But that intense white glow on your face.” Cassie spun back to him. Her friends became alert and a few strangers wandering The Street turned to watch, too. “I bet you could feel the heat when you saw that light,” he said. “But it’s not quite the real thing.”

  Cassie pushed up close to him. “One more word, creep-o, and you’ll be beyond sorry, I swear.”

  The boy extended his index finger like a magic wand and dotted a constellation in the air. She could feel it, matching the moles and freckles on her face. The ones that had always been there, even when she was a little girl. “Call me a creep again,” he said, “and the world will call you Daisy.”

  “Cass, you okay?” Abby called out, still leaning against the light pole.

  “Want us to call a watchman?” Mia shouted, scanning the mall for one.

  Cassie shook her head, putting on a genuine-enough smile. “We’re just messing around,” she called back to them. “Neither of us wants to do this project.”

  Mia and Abby settled back against the lamppost, still staring at them.

  “But I do want to do this,” the boy said, smiling. “My name is Michael, by the way, Michael Ulmer.” He extended his hand to Cassie, who didn’t take it. Michael Ulmer bit his lower lip. “Please shake my hand, Daisy.”

  She was trying to look anywhere but directly at him. “If I shake your hand, it’ll look weird,” she said. “I just told my friends we already know each other.”

  “Don’t you think it’s sad we don’t?” he said. “I know I’m new here, but I’ve been in your class for two months and you never bothered to get to know me. I guess it’s funny that I got to know you first. The real you. The one your friends over there have no idea about.”

  Cassie sighed through her nose. “What do you want, Mike?”

  “Michael,” he said. “And what I want is simple. I want to be friends. I want your attention… Have I got it?”

  Cassie’s eyes studied the floor. She wanted her friends to come rescue her. She needed someone’s help. But—nobody could know what this boy had figured out. Cassie feared that more than anything. “I don’t know what you think you know, but—”

  “I know everything,” Michael said, tucking the flower into his pocket. “Stop lying to me like I’m an idiot.” He tipped up on his toes to look over Cassie’s shoulder. Her friends had gathered their things and were walking towards them.

  He leaned in close. “Since you’re talking to me like I’m stupid, I’ll talk to you like you’re stupid,” he said, the words cascading out in a hush: “You’re the little girl from the Daisy ad, the campaign commercial that scared the living shit out of the entire United States of America and helped Chet Stillman become President Stillman. By a lot. By a landslide.”

  The words made Cassie’s stomach tighten. Her eyes and head throbbed. The boy’s mouth pressed against her ear. “You’re the star of the most reviled piece of political propaganda ever created,” he said. “And you live in a community that worships the man it destroyed.”

  Cassie’s eyes flicked to the fake rock fountain where Michael Ulmer had stolen his plastic daisy. There was a mosaic of Stephen Dashner on the wall behind it, right between an electronic parts store and a pharmacy. The portrait stood two stories tall, and the smiling, gray-haired man it depicted had his eyes turned up to the glass ceiling of the atrium. His campaign slogan, now considered sacred text, was spelled out beneath the mosaic in green and black tile: Promise for the future. A promise worth keeping.

  Dashner was a former Marine and father of three who had driven an M1 Abrams tank for three tours in Iraq, then later had become a lawyer, then a state senator, a governor of California, and a one-term occupant of the White House. He had been defeated in his reelection bid by Chet Stillman, a real-estate billionaire with a big mouth, deep pockets, and a shallow understanding of global geopolitics.

  Shortly before the election, an Iranian-funded splinter group had detonated a dirty bomb on an American airbase in Turkey. Dashner’s opponent wasn’t above exploiting this incident to stoke panic and bombarded the airwaves with a thirty-second TV spot featuring a cute little girl, counting the petals of a flower before a nuclear countdown reached zero and incinerated her alive. As the child disappeared into the maw of radioactive fire, Stillman’s voice intoned: “These are the stakes… To make a world in which all of God’s children can live—or go into the dark.” A title card read simply: Vote Stillman on Nov. 3.

  And America did.

  Michael Ulmer had figured out something the Roberts family kept hidden for more than twelve years: the little girl in the ad was Cassie. Her mother and father had taught her to hide this at all costs because the people who reviled that ad—the ones who felt manipulated by it, exploited by it, betrayed by what it led them to do—had maintained an enduring hatred for “Daisy.” It didn’t matter to them that she had just been a four-year-old little girl, who was so nervous on camera she repeated the word “six” in her countdown.

  “What do you want from me?” Cassie asked.

  Michael Ulmer’s face brightened. “I want you to say goodbye to your friends so we can get to know each other better.”

  Cassie turned her face in profile, still unable—unwilling—to look at the boy. Her mind raced. She wanted to bolt, to run as fast and as far away as possible. But there’s no place to hide from a secret you carry with you everywhere.

  She walked back to her friends and Michael watched as she stood talking to them for what seemed like far too long. “Hurry up, Daisy!” the boy called out.

  Abigail looked from him to Cassie and asked: “Did he just call you ‘Daisy?’”

  “Yeah, of course,” Cassie said, shaking her head, blinking, shrugging. “Daisy…we’re doing a thing on that political commercial. Extra credit.”

  “That ad was so gross,” Mia said.

  “I was glad when Mrs. Shute was done with that section,” Abby added.

  “Me too,” Cassie said, and this was the truth.

  “But it’s a fascinating story, don’t you think?” Michael said, interrupting the trio of girls. “We’re putting together a really awesome report: ‘What Happened to the Real Daisy.’”

  “Sounds depressing,” Abby said.

  “And boring,” Mia added.

  “You’d be surprised,” Michael said, rising on his toes with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Come on, let’s get to it, then,” Cassie said, pulling the boy’s arm. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, we need to go anyway,” Abigail said. “The watchmen are chasing people out. Storm’s almost here, and they’re worried it’s gonna bring in a ton of stragglers.” Over by the glass walls of the atrium, security had appeared to ratchet up the metal doors on each window.

  “Just don’t stay up too late studying,” Mia called back to Cassie. “All work and no play, babygirl. Remember what that makes.”

  Cassie watched her friends walk away
, aching to join them, heartsick at what this rando creep had figured out—and terrified of what he might do with the information. Then she turned back to Michael, who was grinning.

  “Nice job getting rid of them,” he said. “You’re a really good liar.”

  • • •

  Cassie and Michael rode silently on an electronic walkway outside the mall. She hoped that if she went along with him, she could also reason with him. But he was enjoying it all too much.

  “It wasn’t even an original ad, did you know that?” the boy said. “It was just a rip-off of some other political commercial they ran back in the 1960s. The whole thing: the girl, the fireball, the scary voiceover…”

  “Yeah, I’m in the same history class as you,” Cassie said, crossing her arms as she turned her back to him. “And can you keep your voice down? Please.” There were dozens of other people on the conveyor belt ahead. Fortunately, they were transfixed by the TVs embedded every fifty feet in the corridor, broadcasting breathless reports about the storm and concerns about the high number of stragglers caught in it.

  Michael Ulmer wagged a finger at her. “History class. That’s when I knew,” he said. “I’d been staring at you from the moment I walked into that school, Cassandra Roberts. I mean, you’re gorgeous. But when Mrs. Shute showed us that frame-by-frame sequence of the ad. I just—I knew. Even though you’re older. Even though your hair is different. Even though nobody else noticed. I noticed. I saw you.”

  Cassie stared down at the grinding, creaking walkway. Michael Ulmer’s finger lifted her chin. “If your face wasn’t so beautiful, I’d have never studied it so closely.”

  She pulled away from him, walking forward. “That’s comforting.”

  “Hey, come on, now,” he said, following after her. “It’s a compliment.”

  “Compliments and threats. Two things you’re full of.”

  “I’m not threatening you. I’m stating the obvious. People would be furious if they found out. Life would get hard for y—”