Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  Finally Robert got in another of his soft touch shots, which Mike dove for and popped up. I smashed it right back down just shy of his sprawled figure. That made it 20-17.

  “We’re one point away,” I said to Robert.

  He smiled.

  “This is it,” he said.

  Doug hit the birdie back over the net, and I slapped it across the wood floor toward Robert. He stooped to pick it up, and when he stood, he seemed to pause in thought a moment, twirling the shuttlecock in his fingers.

  “This is it,” he said again.

  Everything got really quiet as Robert arched his back and moved to serve the match point.

  “Alright, time to pack up the gear and get changed,” the gym teacher, Mr. Smith, bellowed. Gym teachers don’t talk. They bellow.

  The shuttlecock plummeted from Robert’s hand and skittered a few inches away from his feet. He stared at me for a few moments, mouth open, not comprehending. But as it sunk in, he let his neck go limp and his head dropped beneath his shoulders.

  Doug smiled an evil smile.

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  He could tell this development bothered us and enjoyed seeing us in pain.

  Robert snapped his head upright. His face turned bright red, and a thick vein bulged in the center of his forehead.

  “Fuck!” he said. Spit flew.

  It’s the only time I’ve ever heard him swear.

  * * *

  I had a dream last night that they were celebrating Denzel Washington Day in Mexico. It was like watching a commercial or montage or something on TV where different people were giving brief “Happy Denzel Washington Day!” type messages in broken English, and for some reason a lot of them got confused and said Bill Washington instead of Denzel. The last one said “Bill Washington Day makes us cooler than the real Magoo!” and then I woke up.

  * * *

  We got our clay bowls back from the kiln. Mine looks like a squished turd. Some of the glazes turn different colors once they bake, and I guess I wasn’t paying much attention when I painted mine, because it’s a weird swirly brownish green. Beth’s bowl turned out awesome, though.

  Art class is kind of an “A for Effort” kind of deal, so I still got a B+. Now we are working on construction paper mosaics.

  Beth went into more detail about the crazy girls in her choir class while I cut up tiny squares of paper.

  “There’s a hierarchy. Molly is sort of the one calling the shots, and Tess, Bridget, and Bree are her minions. There are some other underlings who try to work their way into that upper echelon periodically.”

  I made a sort of “mm-hmm” sound to let her know I was listening. I never really know what to say in these types of conversations, but it seemed important to let her know that I was paying attention and what not.

  Plus I was really concentrating on my paper squares. My mosaic is going to be of a dog. Dogs are like the only thing I can draw very well, so about 75% of my art is dog related, which is pretty weird ’cause we’ve never had a dog.

  “Did you ever watch Meerkat Manor? ’Cause these girls are exactly like the meerkats. They periodically challenge the dominant female but mostly it’s like her acceptance gives them a purpose in life, so they scramble to find and secure their spot in the hierarchy. They’re super mean to anyone that they feel is any kind of threat to that. They can be quite vicious about it all.”

  “Right.”

  “In a lot of ways, it’s not the dominant female, Molly, who’s really all that bad. The minions are the ones who get all cut throat. And girls aren’t like guys. They can’t just have an aggressive confrontation and be done with it. It becomes a never-ending series of passive-aggressive insanity.”

  “Yeah? I don’t see it, I guess. Seems like most girls are pretty nice, really.”

  “Oh, believe me. They know when to hide their fangs. Seriously, you would not believe the shit they’re capable of.”

  Chapter 11

  I CLICKED THE FLASHLIGHT ON and off again for a split second like a camera’s flash. (I use the term “click” loosely here. Nick made sure to get the quietest flashlights possible.) I noted the position of the coffee table and couch corner and stayed still for a second before crawling forward the equivalent of three or four paces in the dark. I reached forward slowly, feeling along the edge of the table’s glass top. It was cool enough that I could feel it through the brown cloth gloves.

  I replayed our conversation from the ride over while I sat in the silent dark. Waiting.

  We’d left Nick’s apartment at dusk, the Malibu weaving its way through the half-light. We worked our way out toward the subdivisions we’d driven by last time. Decorative street lamps clicked on all around us.

  “It’s all on you tonight, man,” Nick said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll go in with you, but I’m the one waitin’ by the window this time. You’ll do the first sweep to see if anyone is home and what kinda loot might be up in there.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like a terrible idea.

  “Look, it ain’t hard,” he said. “You just move slowly and quietly and do little blasts of light with the flashlight to see where you’re goin’. You make it quick as hell so nobody can see the light and be sure it was there. Man, you’d be surprised what you can get away with while people sleep. The last thing they want to believe is that someone is in their house, you know? You just have to be cautious.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m tellin’ you. I know for a fact a couple of people have seen my light before and just convinced themselves it was their imagination ’cause I turned it off so fast. And held all still and shit. They fell right back to sleep.”

  Another flash of light moved me into a long hallway. The light reflected off of the pale wood flooring. There were three doorways to my right and two to my left, all open. I inched down the hall. The floorboards moaned beneath me, and I stopped and held my breath.

  So goddamn scared. I could hear the blood pulsing through my ears, my heart banging away. Could feel the electricity surge through the nerves and jolt my body with life. I’m talking all the way alive, too. As alive as a man can feel, anyway. Even more than the last time.

  I imagine how many people go through their whole lives and never feel this, and I can’t believe it. Really.

  This house had been our second choice. We tried a sandy-shaded brick place first. It was all locked up. Every window and door into the place. I thought we might just head across the street or something, but Nick seemed pretty rattled. He didn’t say anything. We drove a few miles away in uncomfortable silence and wound up at this white vinyl sided house with cobalt blue shutters. All the ground floor windows were locked here, too, so Nick scaled his way up onto a balcony deck. The sliding glass door slid right open.

  Couldn’t you just picture someone telling themselves that they wouldn’t need to lock this since it’s up here on the balcony?

  I scuttled forward again. I shined the flashlight into the first room on the right and swung it across the room. The beam caught on a monitor, an ergonomic office chair, and a large oak desk. A pair of brown filing cabinets stood in the corner. An office. Vacant. Good.

  I’d already cleared the two bedrooms (one littered with toys making it easy to identify as a kid’s room, the other looked more like a hardly-ever-used guest room) and bathroom upstairs and worked my way down here. All vacant so far, aside from Nick waiting for me up by the sliding glass door.

  I leaned across the hall to the first door on the left. I flipped the light on and immediately saw a light shine back at me and part of a face right next to it. I clicked the light off again within a fraction of a second and froze there. My mind raced over what all I’d taken in — white porcelain. A sink and toilet. I clicked the light back on and off again, after I realized that it’d been the bathroom mirror shining the flashlight back at me. Also vacant, of course.

  I could hear the sound of a fan running in th
e next room on the right. I figured I knew what that meant.

  The flashlight revealed a single figure lying in the fetal position in the middle of a king-sized bed, wrapped in a pink, white and blue quilt, breathing slowly and evenly. The back of the figure’s head faced me, and long brown hair cascaded in all directions behind the neck and shoulders. White fabric hung down from the ceiling above in the rectangle directly over the bed. An oscillating fan in the corner provided white noise to the sleeper. And to me, too, I guess.

  I squatted in the doorway for a long moment. The pitch black nothing was all around me. It felt weird that someone was actually here. That I could hear her breathing a few feet away from me. But then I think somehow I knew the whole time that someone would be. I heard the fan about halfway down the steps, and I figured it was helping someone sleep. Maybe if it had been two people — a couple — that would’ve scared me. But just one... I felt in control. Like I was getting away with something.

  I noticed one other detail in the bedroom as well: A jewelry box rested atop a dresser along the far wall — on the other side of the bed. I thought about going to get it. I wanted to, actually. But I thought I better leave it to Nick since he’s kind of a pro or whatever.

  I moved with a little more confidence now, quickly clearing a den type room with a foosball table on the left, and a storage-slash-exercise room on the right full of stacks of boxes, a recumbent bike, and a treadmill.

  I crept back down the hall, felt my way in the dark along the coffee table and around the corner of the couch, and dragged myself up the steps. The sixth step creaked as I stepped on it, so I stopped and waited again. I had to keep reminding myself to keep it slow and steady.

  Nick still waited by the door, motionless. I moved to him and whispered in his ear.

  “There’s a lady downstairs. Asleep.”

  It sounded weird coming out that way. I think it was the word lady that didn’t sound quite right.

  He whispered back.

  “Anything look promisin’?”

  “Saw a jewelry box in her room.”

  I led him down the steps to the bedroom. We kneeled outside the room while he took a quick look with his flashlight.

  The woman on the bed had moved. She still lay on her side, faced away from us, but her legs were sprawled out straight now. I wanted to tell Nick, to warn him to maybe be extra quiet or something, but I couldn’t.

  I could sense him moving into the room somehow, though I couldn’t see or hear him. All was silent for quite a while. Maybe time seems slower when you’re waiting, but I’ve got a feeling that Nick is even more cautious than me.

  Suddenly I heard a sigh and the faint sound of movement from the bed. The sound of sheet rubbing against sheet. She rolled over, and it all went quiet again. Her breathing fell back into the same slow and even pattern as before after a minute or two.

  Next, I heard the slightest scraping sound, and I knew Nick must have pulled the jewelry box from the top of the dresser. No movement from the bed. No problems. I realized I was smiling like a crazy person in the dark.

  After another long wait, his flailing hand tugged at my shirt when he got to the doorway. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to let me know he was there or just finding his way out into the hall. We climbed the stairs, and Nick decided to look through the box as we got near the sliding glass door.

  He poked through the necklaces and bracelets in the box with his left hand while his right manned the light.

  “Looks like good shit,” he said. “Some of it might be costume jewelry, but this is a hell of a lot more than last time, I think.”

  He closed the box up and tucked it under his arm. We clambered down from the balcony and strolled off into the night like nothing happened.

  * * *

  Nick was giddy on the ride home. (Maybe I was, too.) His pupils were all dilated. His knuckles turned white ’cause he was gripping the steering wheel so hard.

  The night stretched out around us as far as we could see and farther. Infinite.

  We drove aimlessly through suburbs and rural patches. Fresh air gushed in at us through the four open windows, and when we got going fast enough, there was a weird pulsing sound like a helicopter from something to do with the air flow and open windows. Nick fixed it by putting right front and left rear windows most of the way up. I didn’t really understand it, but the helicopter noise stopped, so who cares?

  “I know you get it now,” he said. “I can see it.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re stronger than you was. The way you handle yourself and everythin’. You’re not scared. Not like you was.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just said:

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you can’t see it yet, but you’ve changed. I can tell you’ve got a lot of grit to you now. I always figured you did, but you might have more than I thought even.”

  He smiled at me. He actually seemed proud, which kind of weirded me out.

  * * *

  As the car ride continued, the giddiness faded to a dull glow. The road gashed a strip of pavement through dark woods. Vines hung down from most of the branches. We wandered again.

  “Somethin’ I’ve been meanin’ to tell you,” Nick said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Already told you about avoidin’ houses with dogs. But if you’re in one of these houses, and you come upon a dog, and that dog starts barkin’ which they usually do, you gotta strangle it.”

  I held my breath for a second.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to. It might be, like, a life or death choice. If the dog gets the attention of the owner, they could shotgun blast you in the face or call the cops and get you locked up.”

  He shook his head before continuing.

  “Gotta kill it.”

  I was quiet for a moment. The headlights caught on swarms of bugs hovering above the road.

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” I said.

  “Look, you eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Well, they slaughter 400 cattle per hour in those meat plants. I read a book about it. It’s like a concentration camp. So you’re part of killin’ animals every day of your life or close to it. Killin’ one dog ain’t nothin’ compared to that. Nothin’.”

  He felt his pocket and pulled out a cigarette pack, but it was empty. He crushed it and tossed it to the floor.

  “We all eat meat. We all kill. I’m just honest about it. I grasp the reality of it and deal with it. Everyone else — all the limp dick yuppies and shit — they lie to themselves. They only see slices of red stuff in styrofoam at the super market like it was grown in a lab somewhere. I see the blood and death. How many of them do you really think would slit a cow’s throat themselves for a meal? Not so many, right? But they’re still part of it. They still support it in droves. The end result is the same as if they did it.”

  I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think. He pushed his knees up to hold the steering wheel steady and pantomimed a strangling motion, his hands choking the air between us.

  “You gotta get ’em high on the throat. Right under the chin. Push in with your thumbs to close the wind pipe, and then just squeeze like a motherfucker.”

  Chapter 12

  I WENT TO BETH’S TODAY after school. It was weird. We ate quiche with her parents, whom asked me a bunch of inane questions like where I lived and what my parents did for a living and such. After that we had this crappy cheap neapolitan ice cream, and Beth’s mom did this weird thing.

  “Are you sure you want to be eating all of that?” she said, raising her eyebrows at Beth.

  Beth stopped eating and just looked down. And she threw the rest of her ice cream away after that. It sucked. I wanted to throw mine away, but I had to be polite and finish it. It tasted like fake bullshit.

  She didn’t really seem like she was in the mood to hang out after that, so I took off before long. It was
still interesting to actually spend some time at her house, though. It was nothing like where I live. I am officially a working class guy aspiring for the hand of an upper middle class girl. They had vaulted ceilings and a wide variety of decorative plants. They could photograph this shit and put it in some kind of Martha Stewart magazine or something.

  If they ever make a magazine called “Modest Living,” I think our apartment could be in there, though.

  * * *

  Got my payment from Nick today. $765. That is like so much money!

  Turns out crime totally pays.

  It’s weird ’cause I’ve never really understood the appeal of jewelry in the first place. People seem to get off on the monetary value of the precious metals and jewels more than they actually like them. They repeat little marketing bullshit slogans like “princess cut diamonds” and stuff. Total nonsense. Nothing makes me want to vomit more than the diamond commercials at Christmas, too.

  I don’t know. I leave luxury for the rich. I guess I don’t leave it, actually. I steal luxury from the rich and pawn it for spending money. I’m like a selfish modern day Robin Hood, really.

  * * *

  In Psychology today we talked about how there’s this theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. So if I started playing drums today, let’s say, it’d take me 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert level drummer. That means if I put in a good three hours a day of practice, it’d take a little over nine years. It’s crazy that you can boil it down to that.

  A series of simple steps. Practice. Repeat.

  It’s all just wiring it in your brain, though. Experience and repetition are the biggest things. Every day is a chance to get better and better and better at whatever you want to do. Or whoever you want to be, I guess.

  * * *

  So maybe I have changed after all.

  I was standing by my locker after lunch. Just standing. Thinking. Staring off into space. I was half watching this weird freshman kid who wears cut up socks as wrist bands drag his hand along the lockers as he walked way down the hall.