by Jeff Strand
Had I thought about this for an extra half second, I would have picked an excuse that couldn’t be verified as a lie with a quick visit to Facebook. (For example, “He needed a ride to the post office” would have worked just as well.) But it was too late now.
“Of course,” my mom said.
“Thanks.” I pretended to hang up and slipped the phone back into my pocket.
Adam hadn’t said to bring the doll. Should I bring it? Leave it at home? “Bring the doll” might have been implied, but he didn’t actually say it, so I decided to leave the doll safely under my bed.
Fifteen minutes later, with Kelley in the passenger seat, I parked my mom’s car outside of Trollen Park, a small playground where I spent long hours as a little kid, though pretty much nobody ever went there anymore. Adam was seated on the bottom of the slide. Another symbol-covered box rested on his lap.
CHAPTER 6
“Uh, hi,” I said as we walked toward the slide.
Adam glared at Kelley. “What’s she doing here?”
“She knows about the doll, but it’s okay, because she doesn’t believe us. What’s in the box?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Come closer.”
“Okay, Adam, you’re totally creeping me out,” I said. “I understand why you’re mad, but that doesn’t mean you have to turn evil.” “I’m not evil.”
“Well, you’re acting kind of evil. Please stop.”
“That’s close enough,” said Adam when Kelley and I were about ten feet away. He gave us a smile that was a combination of Oh yeah, dude, I’m totally evil and I want my mommy.
He lifted the lid off the box.
Inside was something shocking, something horrifying, something that filled my heart with absolute dread, something that.okay, you’ve already guessed that it was another voodoo doll, right? I don’t want to insult your intelligence by trying to stretch out the suspense too much if you’re ahead of the story.
Yeah, it was a voodoo doll. It looked almost exactly like the first one: tan-colored, the texture of a burlap sack, mostly featureless, etc. I gasped. Every sweat gland on my body activated at the same time. My vision blurred a bit. My stomach flopped around. But I did not wet myself.
“You have got to be kidding me,” said Kelley.
“I’ve never been more serious in my life,” said Adam, who did look pretty darn serious.
“So.. .what’s that for?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?”
I shook my head. “If Mr. Click is already dead, why would you need another voodoo doll of him?”
Don’t worry, I’m not that dumb. I was merely trying to throw Adam off balance by saying something idiotic. I’m not sure whether my ruse fooled him or not. Adam lifted the doll out of the box. “Does he look familiar?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m sorry,” said Kelley. “I’m used to being the one who knows what’s going on, and I have no idea what’s happening here. Who is that doll supposed to be?”
“Me,” I said.
Kelley scowled. “Adam, what on earth is the matter with you? Our teacher is dead, and you’re still going to play these stupid games? Seriously, I feel like I should just punch you right in the face.”
“Please don’t threaten him,” I said in a much higher pitch of voice than I’d intended.
“Do you need a demonstration?” Adam asked.
“No! No! No demonstration!” I requested.
“I mean it,” Kelley told him. “I will kick your scrawny twig butt into the ground. I’ve never been in a fight in my life, but I will destroy you.”
Adam curled his index finger and then flicked the doll in the stomach.
During my sixteen years on this planet, I’ve been fortunate enough to never have been punched in the gut with full force by a heavyweight boxer. But I’m pretty sure it felt exactly like Adam flicking the doll. I let out the loudest “Ooomph!” in human history, doubled over, lost my balance, and fell to the ground.
Kelley crouched down next to me. “Are you guys playing a.?” She trailed off, because she could tell that I wasn’t faking. My face was probably bright red. I’m sure that a fine, classically trained actor could mimic the blow to the stomach and make it convincing, but Kelley knew that I was a lousy actor who had only gotten into one school play, and only because not enough guys tried out.
I coughed and lay on the ground and clutched at my stomach and hoped that Kelley would make good on her promise to destroy Adam. I said a whole bunch of words that probably wouldn’t offend you but which I will leave out of the story anyway.
When I could speak without oodles of profanity again, I said, “So what do you want?”
“I want you to know that I’ve got a voodoo doll of you, and if you go to the police, I’ll jab it with a pin!”
“I was never gonna go to the police!”
“Well, now I know you won’t!”
“You knew it already!”
“Not one hundred percent!”
“What do you mean not one hundred percent? What possible reason could I have ever had to run to the cops?”
“You...you...you...you...you could’ve gone insane.” Adam frowned. “Uh, sort of like me. Sorry.”
I was positively furious. “Things were going just fine,” I said. “I mean, not so much the dead Mr. Click thing, but it would’ve all blown over! We didn’t have to do anything except not panic! And now you’ve put my life and leg in danger to keep me from doing something I was never going to do anyway!”
Adam looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to yell back or apologize again. His lower lip began to tremble.
“You’d better not be about to cry,” I said.
His shoulders began to quiver.
“I’m serious. I don’t want to see that crap,” I said.
His face scrunched up a bit.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
Adam cried.
So, yeah, on top of all of the other stuff he’d done, Adam had to go and create an awkward moment for everybody. Kelley and I just stood there, exchanging uncomfortable glances while we watched him cry. I certainly wasn’t going to give him a comforting hug.
A car drove by, and I immediately thought, “Oh no, they’re going to see Adam crying and realize that we accidentally killed our history teacher with a voodoo doll!” but the thought was fleeting.
“Are you done?” I asked Adam as he wiped his nose off on his sleeve.
“Gimme another ten seconds.”
He cried for another ten seconds, then sniffled and looked at me. I think his expression was supposed to melt my heart, but it did not. “So now what?” he asked.
We both looked at Kelley.
Kelley sighed. “You know, Tyler, I’m putting up with a lot for a relationship that was never going to last past high school.” “I know.”
“Okay. So. Hmm. I guess we could get a safety deposit box or rent a storage unit or something to keep the doll protected. But then you have to spend the rest of your life hoping that the bank won’t get hit by a hurricane. Are you comfortable with that?” “Not really.”
Kelley turned to Adam. “Where did you get the doll?”
“It’s this place called Esmeralda’s House ofJewelry.”
“On Duncan Street,” I told her. “Where all those little shops are.”
“So, what? Half an hour away?”
“About that.”
“Then we take the doll back. If they can give it power, they can take it away.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Two minutes ago, I didn’t believe in voodoo, so no.”
“How did you even get the doll if you were out of money?” I asked Adam. “And how did you get my essence?”
“Save the info dump,” said Kelley, taking out her cell phone. “I’m going to find their number on Google. Adam, is there anything else you can tell us that might help?”
“That I’m really sorry?”
“Ask me how much that helped. Go on, ask me, jackass.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. But, you know, it’s like what Anthony Hopkins said in Psycho: ‘We all go a little crazy sometimes.’”
“That was Anthony Perkins,” I said.
“No, it was Anthony Hop.oh, dammit! I can’t do anything right today!”
“If you cry again, I’ll break your nose.”
“That’s not cool.”
“Shhh.” Kelley tapped the screen a few times and then held her phone to her ear. We all stood there silently for a few moments, and then she disconnected the call. “I got their voice mail. They’re open until seven. If we leave now, we can make it.”
“Awesome!” I felt an incredible sense of relief. They had to be able to take away the doll’s curse, right? Nobody would just hand a deadly doll to an idiot without some way to fix things.
Everything would be okay. I would not have my own rocket- leg experience.
“How about you give me the doll?” I asked Adam.
He nodded and handed it to me. I held the doll carefully, the way you hold a baby that would explode if you dropped it.
“Did you do any other horrible things we should know about?” Kelley asked him.
Adam shook his head.
“Are you sure? Now’s the time to spill everything.”
“Nothing. I mean, I started to write a letter that would go out to the media if I turned up dead, but I didn’t get very far.”
I stopped walking and gaped at him. “Are you kidding me?” “Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t know what you were gonna do!”
“Unbelievable.” I resumed walking while I took out my cell phone and called my mom.
“Tyler?” she answered.
“Hey, Mom, Adam can’t find what he needs, so we’re going to keep looking. I just wanted to let you know.”
“No, you need to come home. You’ve had a traumatic experience.” “I should only be about another hour.”
“Seriously, Tyler, come home. I mean it.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“Tyler, come home. That’s an order.”
“Uh, okay. I’m on my way,” I lied, and then I hung up. Something fun to deal with later, I supposed.
We got in the car, Kelley in the front seat and Adam in the back. I held the doll out toward Kelley. “Could you hold this? Carefully?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No way.”
“If I let Adam hold it, it’ll be a pretzel.”
“I’m not taking responsibility for that thing. If you brake too fast, I could crush your head.”
“I trust you.”
“I’m glad you trust me, but I don’t want to be riding in a car with a driver who has a crushed head.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’ll hold it,” Adam offered.
“Nah.”
Kelley didn’t have her driver’s license yet, and to be completely honest, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to hold the doll even if she did.
“Give me the box,” I told Adam as I pulled the lever to pop open the trunk. He leaned forward and handed it to me, and I carefully placed the doll inside. Then I got back out of the car, set the box inside the trunk, pushed some blankets up against it for additional padding, said a silent prayer, and then shut the lid of the trunk.
I’d be totally fine. The doll would be safe until we could un-voodoo it.
As I started the engine, Kelley entered the address into the GPS. We’d get there at 6:51. Cutting it close, yeah, but I was pretty good at trimming a few minutes off the GPS’s projected arrival time.
We drove away from the park. I certainly don’t want to ruin this story for you, but I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that things were not totally fine.
CHAPTER 7
“Are we lost?” Adam asked.
“No,” I said. “The GPS says we’re going the right way.” “This isn’t the way I went.”
“Sometimes in the modern age you can reach a destination using more than one route.”
I did have to admit that I wished the GPS had an Avoid Scary Neighborhoods setting. The sun had set, and this was the kind of place where you really didn’t want your car to break down after dark. I don’t mean that in a cannibal-rednecks-with-chain-saws way, but muggers and drug dealers were worrisome enough. Most of the buildings seemed to be warehouses, and the ones that were actual businesses seemed to be closed. It was kind of strange and eerie.
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” said Adam. “I’m making up for what I did.”
“No, you’re not. You’re sitting in the back. You didn’t even offer to pay for gas.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“I know that. So how did you get the doll?”
Adam didn’t reply.
“I’d really like to know how you got the doll,” I said.
“What does it matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess that if you robbed a convenience store to get the money to buy the doll, that’s probably something I should know.”
“It wasn’t anything like that.”
“Also, you never answered the essence question.”
“Essence?” Kelley asked.
“He needed my essence to give the doll its power.”
“Do you really want to know?” Adam asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s kind of gross.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you remember when you spent the night at my house a couple of weeks ago, and we decided to go swimming, and you asked if you could borrow some toenail clippers? Well, we’d never emptied the trash in that bathroom, and I was pretty sure that nobody else had clipped their toenails in there since then, so I dug out a few of them.”
Kelley suddenly rolled down her window, as if she were going to be sick and didn’t want to do it in my mom’s car.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
I saw Adam nod in the rearview mirror.
“So you sat there, digging through the bathroom garbage in search of my toenails, and still thought this whole thing was a good idea?”
Adam shrugged.
“Our friendship is over.”
“I figured.”
Kelley still had her window down and was breathing in fresh (actually, not so fresh) air. This was really more of a windows-up kind of environment, but I didn’t say anything.
Finally she rolled her window back up and turned around to look at Adam. “You,” she said, “are vile.”
“What is this? ‘Pick on Adam’ Day?”
“Yes. That’s a great idea. Let’s make a week out of it. You suck, Adam.”
“Okay.”
“You get negative points in every possible category of human existence.”
“I’m not sure what that means, but okay.”
“If you were lying in the desert miles from civilization and I had a bottle of water, I would—”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Everybody in this car understands that Adam sucks. We can let it go now.”
We stopped at a red light. The street was empty except for a really skinny guy in baggy jeans and no shirt. He was on my side of the vehicle. His head was shaved, and his body was covered with approximately eighty billion tattoos. The centerpiece was Mickey Mouse doing something of which the Disney lawyers would almost certainly not approve.
He looked at us and smiled.
Not a “Hey, how ya doin’, welcome to the neighborhood!” friendly smile. More of a sinister smile. I didn’t like that smile at all.
He stepped off the sidewalk and approached the car.
“You should go,” said Kelley.
“It’s a red light.”
“Just go.”
“It’s got a camera!” I’d been in favor of those controversial cameras when they were announced, because I had no plans to run red lights, but now I wished I was a registered voter with a say in t
he issue.
The man was right there. He tapped on my window. Not knowing what else to do, I rolled it halfway down.
“We don’t want any marijuana,” I told him, feeling like an absolute dork after I said it. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve never done drugs, but I could not possibly have said, “We don’t want any marijuana,” in a way that made me sound less cool.
He held out his palm. “Got a buck?”
“Oh yeah, sure.” I started to reach for my wallet and then decided that this was not the best scenario in which to do such a thing. The guy didn’t look homeless. He still looked pretty darn sinister.
I dug through the change next to the drink holder. “I’ve got, uh, twenty-five, fifty, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three cents. Is that enough?”
“It’ll do.”
I tried to give him the change, but I was so nervous that I moved my hand too fast and I forgot that the window was halfway up and my hand smacked into the glass and coins flew everywhere.
Why was the light still red? This was the longest red light in the history of traffic.
“You gonna pick it up?” the guy asked.
The light turned green.
And then the gun came out.
I guess he had it in the back of his underwear, which is not where I would choose to keep a gun. Half of my brain shrieked, Drive! Drive! Drive! while the other half politely suggested that because the barrel of the gun was about twelve inches from my face, I should not make any sudden moves.
I froze.
Kelley froze.
I didn’t dare take my eyes off the gun to peek in the rearview mirror, but I’m pretty sure that Adam froze too. Or fainted.
Time stood still, because time loves to make moments like this last as long as possible.
You’re probably familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator. When I read Catcher in the Rye in English class, we discussed how Holden Caulfield may not be telling us the truth about everything that happened. However, I can assure you that I am being one hundred percent accurate and honest when I tell you that the first thing I was able to say was, “Argh-ugh!”
I said, “Argh-ugh!” again to make sure my message was clear.
“Your phones,” he said. “Drop your phones on the floor.”