Zach saw his friend’s face bloom and he mouthed the word “no” as Noah came out of his chair, baring his teeth. Tanner Peck shoved him back down roughly and held him there with one hand, balling his other into a fist and holding it in front of Noah’s face. “Try it, homo,” he said, his voice low, dangerous. “I’ll bust your head open.”
Noah sat there red-faced, pinned by the boy’s weight and leverage. Tanner sneered at him in contempt, then slapped the cheese sandwich out of his hand and onto the tile floor. “Faggot,” he said, giving a final hard push before strolling away to find someone else to pick on. Noah watched him go, his body trembling with rage, then without a word to Zach he slung his backpack onto his shoulder and ran from the cafeteria.
Minutes later he was outside behind the cafeteria, concealed behind a cluster of dark green dumpsters, the air stinking of spoiled food and souring milk cartons. It had stopped raining. He set his backpack on the ground and yanked it open.
“I want you to get him!” he blurted, crying and wiping his nose on his jacket sleeve.
The imp poked his oversized, horned head out of the pack. “You need to be more specific.”
“Get him. I don’t know, do something to him.”
“Like what?”
He wiped furiously at his eyes. “Make him feel like a piece of shit for a change. In front of lots of people.” Noah was clenching his fists. “Make him shit all over himself.”
The imp stroked the tip of a horn. “Can do.”
“Good. Let’s go do it right now.”
“Payment first. I want a kitten.”
Noah forgot his anger for a moment. “What for?”
“That’s my business. Give me a kitten – a live kitten – and it’s done.”
“Where am I going to get a kitten?”
“Pet shop?” offered the imp.
“So make Tanner shit himself, and I’ll get you one over the weekend.” The thought of what Dante would do with a live animal was quickly replaced by the sweet image of Tanner Peck’s public humiliation.
“No. Kitten first. Then Monday, Pow! Right in front of everybody.”
Noah nodded. “Okay. Tomorrow’s Saturday, I’ll get it then.”
The imp grinned. “You’re getting the hang of this. I’ll bet if you really think about it, there’s lots of cool things I can do for you.”
Noah started smiling. No doubt about it.
That night in his room, he sat at his desk with a green spiral notebook and started a what-if list with two columns. Dante perched on the back of his chair, looking over the boy’s shoulder and resting a hand lightly on the back of his neck to steady himself. Noah didn’t mind. It was sort of comforting.
The left column was made up of things Noah was thinking of asking for, and the right column was Dante’s quoted price for each. He hadn’t actually asked for anything yet, and he was trying to be smart about weighing the cost.
New mountain bike? Put a nail under Mr. Rawling’s tire. Xbox with all the extras and a hundred games? Use a pay phone to call in a phony bomb threat to the school. A sixty inch flat screen to hook it up to? Pull a fire alarm lever the day before the bomb threat. Make the school basketball team (along with the skills to actually play well?) Tell the principal that Mrs. Carlington the drama teacher has been drinking in the prop room. Make Brooke Simmons his girlfriend? Set fire to one of those abandoned houses on Webster Avenue.
Noah voiced his concerns that a lot of it would be hard to explain. Dante quickly pointed out that for a small additional fee, he could also provide lies no one would question to cover it all up.
“I’m not so sure about the fire alarm…”
“Not a real fire.”
“…or the bomb threat…”
“Not a real bomb.”
“Or burning down houses.”
“Hey,” the imp said, “those houses are falling apart and are going to be torn down anyway. You might as well get something out of it. And it’s good practice for the fire department in case a real house catches fire.”
Dante had a way of explaining things that the boy found difficult to refute.
Before he headed to bed, Noah closed the notebook and slid it under his pillow. He was starting to feel like he just might truly be able to get everything he ever wanted.
But Tanner Peck first.
Before long, both Noah and the imp were snoring.
The Pet Zone was a small shop in the Summer Road strip mall, wedged between a Dominos Pizza and a Dollar Shack. It was walking distance from his house, and at eleven-thirty the next morning, Noah pushed through the glass door, ringing the overhead bell, his backpack set firmly on his shoulders. It wasn’t one of the big, brightly-lit stores like PetSmart. This was much smaller, a tight space with close, high aisles and spotty lighting, heavy with the ammonia smell of cat boxes and the funky odor of reptiles.
A kid in his twenties with a patchy black beard and equally patchy mustache – mine was better, thought Noah – leaned on a glass counter and gave him a sullen nod as he entered. Noah nodded back, then started up an aisle.
“Backpack’s gotta stay up here,” said the kid. “Store rules.”
Noah froze, his thumbs hooking protectively in the straps.
The kid made a face. “I’m not gonna take your shit, kid. Just leave it on the counter.”
Noah hesitated, then slowly took off the pack and set it gently on the glass, checking to make sure the drawstrings were tightly fastened.
“Thanks,” the clerk said, shoving the pack aside and into a glass bowl of turtles warming themselves on a rock. The bowl tottered, but didn’t go over. Noah took a long look at the pack, then headed deeper into the store.
Zach had brought him here a couple times to get pinkies for Zach’s yellow boa Rita. It was both sick and awesome watching the snake devour the infant mice. He remembered during one of those trips that there had been a playpen on the floor in the back, loaded with stained quilts and holding a dozen kittens. He headed there now, looking back to the counter, expecting the clerk to be watching him. The kid was nose down in a Rolling Stone magazine.
Noah cut across several aisles on a scouting mission, quickly determining that he was the only customer in the store. That was good, but having his backpack confiscated wasn’t. The plan had been to simply grab one out of the playpen, shove it in the pack and leave.
The kittens mewed near the back of the store, their little voices soft and plaintive. Noah circled to the playpen and saw it was directly in line with the clerk’s view. He ducked behind an end cap of doggy chew toys and looked up, seeing a big convex mirror in a ceiling corner. Again, he was in full view if the clerk raised his head. So was the playpen. Swearing, Noah scooted across the back aisle, pretending to look at fish, moving to the other side of the kitty corral. Another parabolic mirror was mounted in this corner. He moved again, up an aisle featuring bird supplies, amazed at he high levels of security in place to protect a bunch of cats.
It was late April, too warm for a jacket, and his t-shirt would never conceal an animal. He’d been counting on that backpack. Maybe he should just buy one? A day-glo sign on the playpen stated the kittens were a low, low $15.00 each. Quite a bargain. Unfortunately he had a grand total of two-thirty-five in his pocket.
He drifted to the front to see what the clerk was doing, and saw the kid was still in his magazine, head bobbing to a beat only he could hear. Noah glanced at the backpack just as a pudgy white hand emerged from the drawstring opening, groping into the turtle bowl and snatching up one of the reptiles before darting back into the pack.
Panicked, Noah looked at the clerk.
He hadn’t seen.
Retreating to the back of the store, Noah let out a shaky breath. What was he going to do? Dante said without the kitten, the deal was off. The bell over the door jingled as someone else came in, and Noah realized his time was up. Without thinking, he walked straight to the edge of the playpen and plucked out the first kitten he saw, a dove-gray
fur ball with big eyes and white socks. It purred at him. In one motion he yanked out the waistband of his jeans and stuffed the animal into his crotch.
It made a muffled yowling sound.
It started squirming.
A tiny claw grazed his left testicle.
Noah moved quickly to the front, not too fast and not too slow, trying not to hobble, his heart hammering. He reached the counter and pulled his backpack off the glass, walking past a middle-aged woman taking a tone with the clerk and waving a can of fish food in his face.
“Hey, kid!” A hand clamped down hard on his shoulder, jerking him back.
But that only happened in his mind as he pushed out the door and into the parking lot. He slung the pack over a shoulder and limped quickly down the sidewalk, past all the stores and around behind the strip mall, trying to get to a quiet place before the kitten neutered him. Behind yet another dumpster, Noah freed both the animal and the imp from their places of concealment.
Dante ate the kitten.
Noah threw up.
For the rest of the weekend, Noah didn’t talk to Dante, tried not to even look at him, only shaking his head when the imp tried to hand him the “what-if” notebook. He kept busy around the house, cleaning up his mom’s empty bottles, emptying the ashtrays, taking care of dishes and garbage and laundry, making his own meals. She was either out somewhere or sleeping it off. More than a few times he wondered if she was at the Aces Tavern, and if what Tanner Peck had said might be true. He didn’t like thinking about it, but the idea had caught hold and he was having trouble shaking it.
Instead he thought about Dante and the kitten. It had been the most horrible thing he had ever seen, and he knew it was one of those things a person couldn’t un-see. He couldn’t look at the imp the same way anymore, realizing that despite its often comical appearance, he didn’t know the creature at all. The imp had started with the head, and the terrible scene played over and over for him, in full HD. Still, it kept him from imagining what his mom might be doing while she was out.
By Monday morning, however, visions of the kitten and his mom were forgotten in the anticipation over Tanner Peck’s public shitting. He ran the distance to where Zach was waiting for him, Dante weighing down his backpack, struggling to contain his excitement. Zach picked up on it, and Noah lied, telling him he had found a five dollar bill on the sidewalk earlier.
The front of East Wellington Junior High was its usual, crowded, Monday morning chaos, with kids streaming in on foot from every direction, buses off-loading students, and lines of cars, minivans and SUVs dropping kids off at curbside. Noah and Zach navigated through the maze of vehicles and teenagers, heading for the wide stone steps of the entrance.
“Hey, homo!” Tanner’s voice, directed at Noah.
He and Zach were halfway up the steps and froze, Noah cringing out of habit, turning to see Tanner coming off a bus on the far side of the driveway circle. Two of his cronies were with him, both laughing. Tanner’s mean little piggy eyes were fixed on Noah as he crossed the circle.
A soccer mom, having unloaded her offspring and already chatting on her Blackberry, pulled her silver Honda Crossover away from the curb and accelerated a bit harder than usual. The grill slammed into the ninth-grader’s hips, bouncing his face off the hood before his limp body was flung twenty feet across the pavement, his head hitting a yellow-painted curb with a wet smack.
At the moment of his death, Tanner Peck’s sphincter muscle relaxed involuntarily, and he shit all over himself.
Right in front of everyone.
There was no school the rest of the day. Noah sat in his bedroom, staring at nothing. He refused to speak to Dante, despite the imp’s attempts to draw him into conversation or hand him the spiral notebook, which he simply slapped away.
Dante perched on the end of the bed, picking nervously at a big gray wart on one foot, watching the boy. “You got what you wanted,” he ventured at last.
Noah said nothing.
“And he won’t be picking on you anymore.”
Silence.
“It’s not my fault you weren’t specific.”
Noah glared at him. “Not your fault? You killed him!”
The imp shook his head. “The curb killed him. Mrs. Aldrich’s SUV killed him. She wasn’t paying attention, he wasn’t watching where he was going. If he hadn’t been a bully, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. It’s really his fault when you think about it. Certainly not yours.”
Noah looked at the creature in disgust. “I wish you would go away forever.”
The imp looked wounded. “And in twenty-six days I will. Unless you want me to stay longer.” He raised a hairless eyebrow.
“I wish I’d never met you.” Noah glanced at the spiral notebook lying on the floor. Filled with stupid, childish wishes, none of it important anymore, the dreams of a kid. What had he done? And what did he have to show for it? A mustache he couldn’t keep and a dead kid.
Dante looked as if he was about to speak, but Noah pointed a finger at him. “You shut up. I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.” Then he left the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
His mom was at the kitchen table, and he could tell at once that she’d been crying. A folded piece of paper was on the table in front of her, next to her ashtray, glass and nearly empty bottle. Upon seeing him she swiped at her eyes, further smudging the heavy mascara, and gave him a weak smile.
“Hi, honey. You okay? I mean, about what happened today?”
Noah sat across from her. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
She put her palms on the piece of paper, managed the smile a moment longer before it crumbled, fresh tears flowing. She sucked in a breath. “Oh, Noah.”
He had seen her cry before of course, many times in fact, always when she had been drinking and only once when she hadn’t, when his grandmother had died. The drinking followed soon after. She cried when she was lamenting some injustice done to her, or when life dealt her another lousy hand, or just when she was feeling sorry for herself. He had grown numb to it. This was different somehow, and he was alarmed.
“Mom, what is it?”
She looked down at the table, at the paper, unable to meet his eyes. “We’re…we’re being evicted. In three days.” She sniffed, loud and wet, gray mascara tears falling on the paper. “I’ve got nothing, Noah. No money, no job, the car is shot. I’m going to be on…the street.”
Noah’s throat tightened, and his eyes welled up.
“The social services lady,” his mom continued, still looking down, “she warned me…she said if I couldn’t keep a job, keep a home for you…” She shook her head. “She said they’d have to put you in foster care.”
Noah’s cheeks were hot with tears, his chest hitching as he stared at her.
“Baby, I’m so sorry.” Crying harder now. “It won’t be forever. I’ll get back on my feet, and…”
Noah bolted from the table, running for the sanctuary of his bedroom, throwing himself onto the bed, heaving and shuddering as the sobs came. How could she have done this to them? How many times had she promised everything would be okay? He had believed, trusted her. A foster home? New school, no friends, tougher kids kicking his ass? He had no illusions about his mother’s latest promise that it wouldn’t be for long.
Even through his own crying he could hear her wailing in the kitchen. And yet she didn’t come to his room, to sit on his bed and hold him and tell him everything would work out somehow. Didn’t come to tell him she loved him. He thrust his head under the pillow so he wouldn’t have to listen to her.
Eventually his tears subsided, leaving him feeling dazed and hollow, eyes raw, a tangible hopelessness weighing him down like a heavy blanket. Her crying had stopped too, and finally a hand came to rest gently on his back, rubbing his shoulders softly.
“Mom?” he started, sitting up, and saw instead that it was Dante sitting beside him, sadness on his face. “I’m sorry, Noah. I truly am.”
; Noah wiped at his nose and muttered, “Thanks.”
The imp sighed. “If only there was something I could do…”
The boy sat up, grinding his palms into his already red eyes. “Like what?”
“Nothing.” Dante folded his hands in his lap. “You don’t want my help. You want me to leave. Just counting the days till I’m gone.”
Noah sat next to him, his hands folded in his own lap. “New bikes and video games and girlfriends can’t fix this.”
They sat quietly for a time, then Dante looked sideways at him. “Maybe,” he hesitated. “Maybe there’s something I could do. A really big something.”
“What?”
“Never mind. You’d never go for it.”
“Let me decide that. Tell me.”
Dante took a deep breath, then looked at the boy. “Powerball.”
“What?”
“Powerball. One-hundred-seventy-three million dollars. I give your mom the winning numbers. All your problems go away.”
Noah stared at him with wide eyes. Could it be done? It would mean their own home, a new car, no need for his mom to try to hold a job. No social services, no foster home.
“I thought you could only handle small stuff.”
The imp shrugged.
Noah’s eyes narrowed. “You lied.”
“I just didn’t tell you everything.” He hopped down and started pacing a slow circle, playing with his hairless tail. “I can only do the big stuff for a big price.” He stopped and looked right at the boy. “This one’s gonna cost a soul.”
“I knew it!”
“Not your soul!”
Noah snorted. “Really? And how does that work?”
“There’s a proxy clause in our arrangement,” the imp said. “It has to be a precious soul, someone you love, that’s what makes it so valuable. And that person doesn’t know about it until…later. They go on with their entire life like nothing ever happened.”
“How is it possible for one person to make that decision for another person? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Red Circus: A Dark Collection Page 18