I feel for John. He didn’t ask for this shit, and neither did I. I lift the seat cushion of Melanie’s chair to reach for my notebook and discover that tonight is going to be different.
Because my notebook’s not there.
I quickly scan the floor around the chair, but it’s not there, either.
There’s a moment of cognitive dissonance as I stare at the empty spot under the cushion, the absence as surreal to me as a melting clock, while I’m trying to understand this impossible image.
I always put my notebook under the cushion when I’m done each night—it’s the most secure spot in my room, since I usually end up sleeping in the chair. It’s the only place I hide the notebook, and I always hide it.
On the screen behind me John McClane’s 747 lands at LAX with a screech of tires. The whoosh of jet engines fills my head as I toss the cushion aside, searching around inside the chair, thinking the notebook could be wedged in the crack where the back of the chair meets the bottom but knowing it’s too big to fit there. It’s a five-subject spiral-bound, for chrissakes. I pop the footrest and drop to my knees to look under the chair, but the notebook’s not there, either.
I’m about to flip the chair over and tear off the upholstery when someone clears their throat in front of me, and I look over the top of the recliner to see Mom and Dad standing in my room, glaring down at me. Apparently our home’s nonsqueak floors and well-oiled doors are just as useful for parents sneaking in as for kids sneaking out.
I can feel the sweat standing out on my forehead as I brush the hair out of my eyes and tap the space bar to pause the movie. I turn back around to face Mom and Dad and in my smoothest retail voice say, “Hello, parents. May I help you?”
A pained smile is stretched across Dad’s face, but Mom is serious as an undertaker. She’s still wearing the purple sweater she had on when I got home from school, nervously twisting the chain of the small gold cross around her neck. By this time of night she’s usually in her nightgown, ready for bed.
Mom looks at me with weary disappointment, and even though she’s way shorter than me—Mom sometimes shops in the girls’ department at Macy’s—that look makes me feel small. I’m definitely in trouble for something, but it’s hard to guess what, because there are so many options! Do they know I’m still hanging out with Jake? He hasn’t been allowed over since Dad caught him stealing beer. Oh shit. Do they know I’ve been sneaking out? Maybe we should’ve picked a more believable code phrase than “study for a biology exam.”
But it turns out I have made a much graver mistake than choosing a weak code word.
The good news is I know where my notebook is.
The bad news is it’s in Mom’s hand.
She holds it out like a snake that could bite, although it’s just a seemingly harmless, well-used spiral notebook. It has a red cover with a thick blue rubber band wrapped around the middle, and I’m very, very thankful that rubber band is keeping the notebook shut. I am less thankful for the numbers 11/7/18 written on the cover in black Sharpie, because they’re the reason I know my parents are going to open it.
— — —
For a long time I kept the front of the notebook blank. But one night at the end of summer, I had just finished writing my pages, had filled twice as many as usual, in fact, but I still didn’t feel good. Didn’t feel the temporary relief I usually got after filling a long section.
It was the night before my first day at the new school, and I was remembering how Melanie and I always used to stay up late going through our school supplies and comparing class schedules. She was two grades ahead of me, so I would ask her about the teachers I was going to have, ask if she had had them before and which ones were tough. I was always nervous and she’d calm me down, but now I was sitting in her chair in this empty room that was supposed to be mine, writing a bunch of bullshit in a stupid secret notebook. I felt silly. What was I doing? I couldn’t even remember the point.
So I reminded myself.
I paused Die Hard and searched through my boxes until I found one with ART SUPPLIES written on the side in Mom’s perfect script, then dug a Sharpie out and wrote 11/7/18 real big on the front of the notebook.
I felt much better right after I did it.
But I do not feel much better now, because if I had left the stupid cover blank, I bet Mom would’ve thought it was just a normal school notebook.
As usual, she seems to know what I’m thinking. “You know I don’t like you sleeping in that chair. It’s bad for your back. I was cleaning the blankets up this morning and putting them on your bed when this tumbled out.” She points at the notebook. “I thought it was just a normal school notebook, but then I saw the date on the front.” She laughs, a dry, humorless laugh. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s today’s date!’ But then I noticed, no, it’s not. The year is different.” She taps the 18. “It’s last year. It’s the day before Melanie died.”
Well, fuck me.
I do a slow clap, but its intended snarkiness is diluted because I’m so nervous that I miss my hands on the first clap. “Well played, Detective.” I hold my shaking hand out. “Now, can I please have my notebook back?”
Mom pulls it away from me. “What’s inside here, Kirby?”
“You mean you didn’t look?” Yeah, right.
“I don’t want to read your diary, but—”
I scoff, “It’s not a diary.”
“Oh no? It’s not? Then you won’t mind if I read it.” Mom starts, slowly and dramatically, to slide the fat rubber band up, and I plant a foot on the seat of the easy chair and reach over the headrest to lunge for it.
I almost tip the chair over. “Give it back! It’s mine!”
Mom yanks the notebook back and her eyes go wide, like I’m a dog that just snapped at her.
“Whoa!” Dad says. “Calm down, tiger!”
“You have no right!” I yell, standing up on the seat of the chair and pointing down at them. “You have no right to invade my privacy!”
“Invade your privacy? Invade your privacy?!” Mom looks around for the invisible audience I must be telling this joke to. “We’ve given you nothing but privacy since Melanie passed away.”
Jesus, I wish they’d stop saying that.
Mom sees me scowl and softens her tone. “Kirby, we hardly see you. You come home from school and go right to your room. You never talk to us—”
I spread my arms in shock. “I’m talking to you right now!”
“You know what kind of talking I mean, Kirby. We used to be a family. But now, now . . . when you talk to us at all, you talk to us like we’re your . . . your roommates or something.”
Mom is getting worked up, and Dad puts an arm around her shoulder. He doesn’t like it when Mom gets upset. He gives me a stern look. “It’s not healthy, Kirby.”
I’m still standing on the chair and I feel silly, so I climb down.
“You’re drifting,” Mom says. “Ever since Melanie died—”
“Jesus,” I interrupt, “will you please stop saying that?”
Mom’s head snaps up, and she looks at me the way she did in the kitchen, when she asked if I hated Dad. That alert expression once again reminds me of a hunting lioness, and it makes me nervous because it seems to see so much.
She finishes with steel in her voice. “You’re drifting away from us, and I don’t know how to fix it. But I know that it starts with us speaking to each other. You go to school in the morning, and when you come home you lock yourself in your room and maybe, if we’re lucky, you say five words to us all day.”
I can’t deal with this shit. “I’ve got five words for you right now.” I count them off on my fingers. “Get. The. Fuck. Out.” I count my four fingers, then flick up the fifth. “Please.”
My parents don’t flinch. Sad, but not surprised, they regard me like a puppy who just pooped on the carpet.
Mom checks her watch, then looks at Dad, who shrugs. “Okay, well, I guess we’re done here.” She points the notebo
ok at me like a judge’s gavel. “Whether you believe me or not, I haven’t read your notebook yet. But believe this: I will. I’ll give you until tomorrow after school to think about it. If you’re willing to sit down and talk with your father and me—a real talk, an honest talk, about whatever it is that’s clearly going on up in that head of yours—then I’ll give you your diary back. Unopened.”
“It’s not a diary,” I grumble.
“Fine. I’ll give your whatever you want to call this back.” Mom’s face twists in pain, but she swallows the anger. “And if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine too,” she says lightly. Big scary smile on her face, she raises my notebook over her head. “I’ll read this cover to cover. I’ll sit down with a bag of popcorn and mark my favorite parts with a highlighter.”
Mom and Dad turn and walk out my door, but halfway out Mom spins around so violently that Dad grabs her high on the arm, like she’s a drunk he’s holding back from a bar fight. Tears stand in her eyes as she hisses at me. “I’ve lost one child. I won’t lose another.”
— — —
As soon as the goon squad leaves, I text PJ.
Actually, you know what, I would love to study for biology tonight. Final exam, mothershucker.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
THE CRISP NIGHT AIR HITS my face as I step out the garage’s side door. It will take PJ and Jake a half hour or so to walk from their respective houses, but I decide to head down to the circle early and wait for them there. Better than going crazy building the Great Wall of Cardboard in my bedroom.
I pull my jacket hood up and stomp my feet on the gravel beside the back porch. I should be quiet—I usually sneak out silently, pausing every few seconds to listen for my parents upstairs—but tonight I just grabbed a couple cans of spray paint from the garage and stomped out the back door like I was leaving for school. I don’t care if my parents hear me, and I don’t care if Dad notices the spray paint is missing. I can’t possibly get in more trouble than I’m already in. I brim with the cavalier confidence of a condemned man, sprinting up the scaffolding steps past a sign that clearly says NO RUNNING.
Still, the night holds greater horrors than my parents. So instead of turning on my flashlight, I put it in my backpack with the spray paint and wait for my eyes to adjust, watching the grassy field and hangar behind the house slowly emerge from the dark like a Polaroid developing. Clouds are covering the moon, so it’s pretty dark.
It’s colder than it was earlier, so I tuck the bottom of my pants into my black boots. I’m sure it makes me look like a paratrooper, but whatever. I’d tuck my pants in once we got to the farm anyhow. The mud and cow shit can get so deep that one night it sucked the shoe right off my foot and I had to hop home on a soggy sock.
I can see the electric fence at the far end of our property now, which means my eyes have adjusted as much as they’re gonna, so it’s time to roll.
I head down our long driveway. Our house sits a little back from the road, which stretches left up a big hill and right down to a crossroads and then on over a stone bridge and into the woods that lead to the base of the Blue Mountain, a pretty little ridge that’s visible now only as an absence of stars. During the day the range does indeed look kind of blue, which I can’t explain because it’s covered in normal green trees, a pleasant hump in the carpet of forest.
All around our house are cornfields, barren after the harvest. Across the street the plowlines in the dirt trace the contour of the hill like a topographic map, and I just barely spot three dark silhouettes racing over these geometric lines, disrupting the order of the even rows. A chaotic force of nature defying man-made order.
I freeze in the middle of the driveway and hope that the horse dogs are heading toward their barn down the road and not over here, toward my delicious boy flesh. The dogs rarely cross the street into our yard, although the few times they have were memorable indeed.
As they tear down the hill, their paws seem to fly above shadows that ripple over the rutted rows. I breathe a shaky sigh of relief as I trace their trajectory and see that yes, they’re heading toward the only other “house” on our street, the big gray barn that’s probably filled to its rotting rafters with the bones of deer and drifters. A strong fall wind blows down off the Blue Mountain, scattering stray corn husks into the dogs’ path as they disappear through a gap between the barn’s big front doors, hanging askew on their tracks.
I wait a few seconds to make sure the dogs don’t come back out. Shit. Should I cancel the mission? I’ve never seen the horse dogs out at night before.
For the first time I wish I really was studying for a biology exam.
— — —
I first saw the horse dogs a couple of days after we moved into the house in Shuckburgh, at the beginning of the summer. The trees and grass were Instagram green, the air filled with the high hum of busy insects, the corn tall and waving like an ocean across the street. Mom and I were on the front porch, lugging in cardboard boxes from the U-Haul. I put a stack of boxes on the porch and was standing up when I saw three horses trotting in the open pasture behind the barn.
“That’s weird,” Mom said after I pointed them out to her. “There’s no fence. Does the farmer just let the horses run wild?”
As though they heard us—which they probably did; I swear those bastards have supernatural hearing—the closest horse swiveled its head in our direction and then started galloping toward us. The other two followed close on its heels, and as the horses got closer, we saw that they weren’t horses; they were dogs.
They were dogs the size of horses.
Each of the dogs was a different, unsettling mix of breeds mashed together and inflated to grotesque proportions.
The lead dog was some kind of greyhound mix, with long legs that made it look particularly horselike. Its body rippled with lean muscles, and its tongue lolled out as it pulled ahead of the pack.
The second dog was a kind of Doberman mix, triangular ears, mottled brown and black, running with military precision.
The third dog lagged at the back of the pack, laboring to run under its burden of muscles. It was the scariest of the three, a mastiff mixed with a Volkswagen mixed with a heavy metal drummer. It was solid black, and even in the bright summer sun it seemed to spill darkness onto the field around it. Its head was square with short ears that poked forward like devil horns, its broad face split by an eager grin of sturdy teeth.
Mom dropped the box she was holding, and something expensive-sounding broke inside. She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the house. The greyhound and the Doberman stopped short at the edge of the road and paced back and forth, digging up the dirt and biting the air as they glared at us, but the mastiff kept running across the road, practically tearing up the asphalt, and didn’t stop until it was right on our porch. It didn’t bark, but merely looked at Mom and me as we peered out through our new front door’s window. The sticker was still on the glass, and I wondered briefly if it was shatterproof. A dog can’t leap through glass, can it?
The horse dog didn’t seem angry anymore, though. It sniffed around our porch, sniffed the box Mom had dropped, then peed on the leg of our new porch glider, marking its territory. Then, before it left, it looked at us through the window again, this time for longer, as though it were memorizing our faces. Then it huffed and ran back across the street, the other two dogs pulling into formation behind it as they ran in a tight pack through the open door of the falling-down barn and disappeared inside.
It had marked us.
We were on their turf now.
— — —
I turn around to head back into the house when I see that the light is on in my parents’ window and decide that, actually, I’ll take my chances with the dogs. As long as I’m quiet, I should be fine.
Just then my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I shield the light of the screen as I read PJ’s text: there in 15. When I look back up, I’m gripped by the certainty that I see something move
in the shadow of the barn. I imagine the moon sliding out from behind the clouds just in time for me to see the dog’s gruesome grin as I try to run but trip and fall onto my hands and knees, placing my tender neck at the perfect biting level. None of that happens, of course, but every moment my straining eyes conjure new shapes from the darkness that evaporate a moment later.
Pull yourself together, man! If John McClane can defeat fourteen terrorists and make it home in time for Christmas dinner, I can sneak past a couple of dogs.
I have a method for getting down to the bus stop each morning, and since it works then, it should work tonight, too . . . I hope.
I turn right and leave the driveway, cutting across our yard toward the line of pine trees that run parallel to the road, past the barn, and down to a small circle of trees about fifty yards from the stop sign.
I tiptoe behind the line of trees. As I pass the barn, its weathered gray boards glow through the gaps in the branches, and I can feel its malevolent presence reaching out to me from the dark gap between its crooked doors. I hold my breath until I pass it, then fast-walk the last hundred yards downhill, into the sanctuary of the circle.
I let out the breath I was holding for the past minute and admire the cluster of stars captured in the oval of pine boughs above me. The circle is a dense copse of pine trees with a nice hidey-hole in the middle, just big enough for three people to meet in. I used to call it “the copse,” because that’s what it is, until Jake got angry at me and said, “Get the fuck out of here with those bullshit French words,” so now we just call it “the circle.”
I check the time on my phone. Almost midnight. Jake and PJ should be here soon.
The floor of the circle is covered in a soft carpet of the needles shedded from the pine trees, and I lie down on them, enjoying their springy softness and the night’s silence for about two seconds, until I remember the reason I snuck out tonight in the first place.
This Might Hurt a Bit Page 2