Bryce stood up.
And he started to turn around.
He turned and faced the apparently endless darkness.
I thought of that moment when little broken Charlie Baltimore brought me his Nintendo DS because he just wanted to mitigate the damage.
I thought about the dead things in Faisal’s story that really maybe did contain life, and I thought about Lump still needing help, and how much I needed everything that had led to this moment to mean something. And I twisted the goddamn light back on.
“There’s nothing down here,” he said, not having a chance to register how close he’d come to being left in his own worst-case scenario.
With the bulbs working and me standing there, he walked through the tunnel toward the rickety stairs as shittily as ever.
“Everything okay?” Matty said from the top of the steps.
I flinched hard enough to almost rip the light out of the socket. She turned her head a little and said, “You okay? What’re you guys doing down there?” For just a second in the dim yellow light, it was like looking into a crystal ball: she looked ten years older and ten times more badass. Like a noir detective, one hand resting out of sight on the butt of a six-shooter; calm, cool, and anything but oblivious.
Bryce walked past me and up the stairs, past Matty. “He told me to go down there to get another pumpkin.”
“Oh. All right,” she said, looking at me, her eyes scanning for subtext. “Well, I think I saw some extras in the other room. With the other pumpkins. Where all the other pumpkins are.”
“I don’t want a stupid pumpkin anyway,” Bryce said, breaking off toward his friends.
Matty and I sat down around the small table where Faisal was hanging out with Trevor and Michael. Goblin Joe was hovering around the table looking at all the pumpkin designs we hadn’t gotten around to carving yet.
“Everything okay?” Faisal said.
“Yeah, everything’s fine.” I looked at Trevor and said, “Couldn’t find him another pumpkin. I guess he doesn’t get to have one.”
And instead of smiling or telling me just how much Bryce should go fuck himself, Trevor said, “I think he’s scared.”
“Who?” I asked, even though I was sure I knew.
“Bryce,” Trevor said. “He spends so much of his time being a blow job but I think it’s because he doesn’t know how to be sad and scared like everyone else.” Like all the other machine boys in the world who don’t hurt like they’re supposed to.
“Why would he be sad or scared?” I asked, running through a mental list of reasons why someone like Bryce would feel anything like shame or guilt.
Trevor gave me a look that was, for Trevor, very sarcastic. “Because Lump is in the infirmary because of him. She told him that she’s seen how mean he is to Joe and it makes her so sad it hurts. She’s sad enough to be sick and he knows he helped make her feel that way.”
“What?” I said, forcing myself to keep a straight face. I hadn’t known her for very long, but Lump seemed like the kind of person who would emotionally gut-punch the Bryces of the world in defense of the Trevors and Goblin Joes.
“I’d be extra sad too,” Trevor said, and Goblin Joe nodded his goblin-head in agreement. “Anyway, thanks for the pumpkin.” Trevor looked us both in the eyes before nodding at Goblin Joe and heading over to Bryce’s table. He handed Bryce his pumpkin.
TWENTY-SIX: EMPTY SPACES
I PUSHED THE OLD METAL door to the infirmary open and saw everything I expected to see: a dingy old set of hospital beds with paper sheets, a faded medical kit on the wall, and posters featuring cartoon kids in cartoon woods dealing with cartoon injuries.
With no sign of Lump, I figured she was in a different room. Maybe sleeping on a couch in the back office.
Shelly was sitting at a desk cluttered with papers, her face lit up by her laptop. She was middle-aged with her hair in a messy bun, and she smiled a tired smile when she saw me walk in.
“Moses, right?” she asked. My hands started sweating the way they always did when people recognized me, but before I could get too far into my own head, she said, “Good to finally meet you. Unless you’re sick or dying or need me to reattach something.”
I smiled back. She was easy to talk to; she had a bedside manner, even out in the Michigan wilderness. “Nope, just looking for Lump. Er, Allison. Heard she was coming out here and I’m supposed to keep track of her. Faisal told me to come check over here.”
“I still can’t believe that child’s mother calls her Lump,” she said good-naturedly.
I shrugged and offered, “I hear it’s a reclamation thing.”
She took a sip from a steaming Styrofoam cup and made a “hmm” sound while nodding at me. Whatever was in the cup smelled like spicy flowers. “Well, in any case, haven’t seen Lump. Hasn’t been in.”
“Oh. Huh,” I said smoothly. “Okay. Thanks, then?”
“Tell Faisal I said hi,” she said, getting back to her computer and not looking at me.
Nothing felt out of place. It was just a miscommunication, or Lump had decided that she felt fine, or she’d gone off to her cabin.
She was fine. Of course she was fine.
TWENTY-SEVEN: DEAD LIFE
WE AGREED TO MEET at the rope wall after dismissal from the rec hall. It took candy to bribe children into guardian roles, but it took cash to bribe groundskeepers. It looked like this:
NATHAN: Where are you going? It’s lights-out.
MOSES: Out.
NATHAN: Might be easier for me to forget you sneaking out if I had some extra beer money. Be a shame if Mr. Test found out.
MOSES: No.
NATHAN: What?
MOSES: Tell whomever you want.
NATHAN (SURPRISED AND A LITTLE HUFFY): You’ll get kicked out, you little prick.
MOSES (PULLS OUT PHONE; BEGINS TO LIE): I just recorded you trying to blackmail me; I’m going out.
He would rat me out or he wouldn’t, but something insisted I make the effort.
I found the group and made sure to make noise when I came through the trees. Michael and Faisal raised their heads up and waved. Matty’s back was to me.
They nodded at each other and Matty turned to me, waving and smiling.
I stopped.
“Who—wait. When did you get massively pregnant?” I asked Matty. The only time it is okay to ask a girl if she’s pregnant is when she goes from Not At All Pregnant to My Water Will Burst If I Sneeze in the span of six hours.
Her smile dropped and brought her face crumbling after it as her eyes welled up. Michael put his arm around her and made shushing noises into her hair before looking at me and scolding, “What’s wrong with you?” Then, to her, “I love you despite your condition.”
The icy October air went hot and thick. The only noise except for the wind whistling through the pines was Matty choking air down and burying her face into Michael’s arm. It’s nearly—if not literally—impossible to calculate the exact number of words in the English language; there are, however, according to the Global Language Monitor, more than one million and twenty five thousand of them. Of those one million and twenty-five thousand–plus words, the only the two I could think of were a stuttered version of “Oh, fuck.”
“Look at his eyes,” Faisal said out of the corner of his mouth.
Matty looked up from Michael’s coat and wiped her tears away with the backs of her thumbs. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before,” she said, beaming and cracking up.
The air around me thinned but nothing made any more goddamn sense. Faisal walked over and flipped up the bottom of Matty’s shirt, revealing a pale and very pregnant stomach that wasn’t the same color as the rest of her. On the flanks of her belly were large elastic bands that held her womb in place. His fingers seemed to disappear into the topmost point of her enormous stomach before they pulled a flap open with a ripping Velcro noise. He reached in and pulled out a red can of Woodsmith’s beer.
“Want a
Woody?” he asked.
“Okay, what?” The amount of effort and foresight it would take to get a replica stomach and convert it into a cooler big enough for multiple drinks and snacks was something I’d have expected contestants from the Olympiad to come up with.
They were the kind of weird I knew.
It was same kind of outlandish shit me and Charlie would have come up with.
“The pregnancy pouch!” she said, throwing her hands up. “We’ve been working on it for months and we finally get to use it for something other than getting good seats at Applebee’s,” she said, high-fiving her boyfriend.
“Did … how … you converted a fake pregnant stomach into a cooler? Where did you even get a fake pregnant stomach?”
“My mom works at a health center,” Faisal said. “And they had these for those presentations they give at high schools, but they upgraded. So I rescued one.”
“It’s great for sneaking food into movie theaters. Like lots of food. Like if you want to bring a whole roasted chicken and drinks.”
“This is amazing,” I said, more to myself than anyone else while checking out their invention. The inside was lined with silver insulation that kept the beers cold. I cracked one open. It’s hard to argue with extremely cheap beer from the inside of a uterus.
“Plus, if we get caught, bam: pregnant and crying,” she said, pointing to her face, which was legitimately puffy. “Thank you, Freshman Drama Club.”
“You guys are like an evil brain trust,” I said as we headed into the woods, putting more and more distance between ourselves and our responsibilities. Allegedly evil brain trusts were in my wheelhouse.
“How’s Lump?” Pregnant Matty asked as we worked our way through the trees.
“Oh, she actually wasn’t there. I think we just missed each other.”
Her brow knitted up for a second before she said, “Huh. All right.”
And before we could talk any more about it, Michael said, “We’ve got about a mile hike before the farm we have to trespass through, then we’re pretty much in town. Shouldn’t take too long to get there.”
We trekked into the night, winding down the utility roads that eventually spilled onto the backcountry highway. We followed the signs for the town of Bannister, back the way we drove in but before the freeway. It was dark and it was snowing.
“Hey, is there still a Snickers in there?” Faisal asked Matty.
She opened the pouch and poked around for a few seconds before holding up a bag of fun-size candies. “There are five little ones. It’s like a full-size one, but made up of fun little constituent parts that you have to painstakingly open one at a time. Here,” she said and held the bag out.
He pinched his face together. “I thought there was a full-size.” He shook his head after thinking for a second and said, “No, wait, I remember there being one. We bought it at the first stop on the way here.”
“Ate it,” Michael said from behind us.
“What?”
I smiled as I brought the can of utero beer to my mouth. Listening to them bounce back and forth—listening to them riff and play on each other—was like watching a stylus find the groove on an old record. One I hadn’t heard in a while.
“I ate it. Hence the bag full of little Snickers. To make up for it.”
“You think five little Snickers is the same as one big one? A king size?”
“Yes,” he said definitively.
“You have never been more wrong.” Faisal opened the bag and full-speed threw one of the candies at Michael, who managed to catch it while simultaneously ducking.
“That’s probably not true,” he said, opening the candy and eating it. “It’s math! It’s just fractions. Five-fifths is more than equal to one-ones. That’s algebra; I just algebra’d you.”
“You think you can verb your way out of this?” He threw another candy that Michael tried to catch.
“I can algebra.”
“No. Look: if I have half a cat and you have half a cat and we mush them together…” He brought his hands together, interlacing his fingers. “We don’t have a full cat; we have two floppy, dead halves of a cat.” His hands fell apart.
The beer and the miles between me and the town made me laugh out loud.
“I would say we have a full cat. Unless it’s two ass-halves; then we just have an ass-cat.” Michael said, sneaking a look at me and then making his face go deadpan when he saw I was laughing.
“I would say that just because the components are in place doesn’t mean the machine works, you candy-thieving motherfucker.”
“Wait. Is it a robot cat?”
“What? No.”
“I just thought components—two halves, even if they were ass-halves, of a robot cat might work.”
“No. This is a very dead, freshly sawed-in-half cat.”
I made a note in my head to tell Lump about the robo cat with two butts. As a kid with an unfortunate familiarity with feline trauma, I figured she’d appreciate the ass-cat.
Matty sipped on her beer, smiling, taking knee-high steps through the snowbank and leaving craters behind her. Partly because of lake effect, partly because of how far north we were, and partly because of freakish cold snaps, there was more snow in October than I’d ever seen.
But it didn’t seem to affect them. In the miles and miles of freezing expanse all around us, they were warmth. We were warmth.
Every quarter mile there were utility poles with dingy yellow lights fixed to them: old streetlamps that the county hadn’t upgraded to arc sodium. One of them winked out as we walked under it.
“There! See?” Matty said, pointing at the light with her fully extended free arm. The filament inside the glass was a glowing orange sliver. She pointed at Faisal with her hand holding the beer, shaking both arms for emphasis.
“Matty thinks she causes lights to turn out when she walks under them,” Faisal said to me. “She’s got powers.”
“I never said I have powers.” She said it in a way that made it sound like maybe she did, in fact, possibly at one point say that she had powers. Her face was red, but only from the cold, and she couldn’t stop smiling.
I remembered lying in bed when I was a little kid and thinking about my secret superpower. I’d lie there and imagine standing in line at a bank right when a man in a ski mask would burst in. Everybody would freeze or panic, but I’d puff out my chest and tell him he picked the wrong day to be a bank robber. And all of the bullets he fired at me would rain down off my chest, dented and crooked.
“Do it again,” Faisal said, nodding toward the next light down the road.
She turned to me. “I can’t do it on command. It just happens.”
All superhero origin stories are the same: it’s never by choice, it just happens. Sometimes you get bit by a radioactive spider and sometimes you’re a wealthy billionaire vigilante, but sometimes your cousin just happens to miss your heart.
“I looked it up once,” Michael said. “It’s called ‘streetlight interference phenomenon.’ People think it’s a thing.”
“See? Streetlight—what?”
“Interference phenomenon.”
“Interference phenomenon. I don’t make the rules. I just break them. The rules of physics and science—I destroy them.”
“Moses?” Faisal asked. “You’re the science-y one. Is Matty a wizard?”
“Could be. Maybe some people just operate on a different frequency or burn more cosmic energy than others. It’s not lights turning on, right? It’s them turning off. Maybe you’re just a magnet for energy. Like an X-Men villain. But for light bulbs.” I said the entire unfiltered thing without thinking, without reminding myself that this is how you talk to friends, not acquaintances.
“Like Dumbledore!” she said.
“Which X-Men villain do you think Dumbledore is?” Michael asked her. “This is very important for our relationship.”
I smiled into my beer.
“No, he’s got the light-switch spell th
ing! From the movie! It’s like the Clapper but for wizard sticks.”
“Wands,” Faisal said.
“Which reminds me: Moses, I have a question,”21 she said.
“Shoot,” the Human Bullseye said.
“Well. This is a conversation that we have a lot, which means it’s important to know where you stand, so be honest.”
“I know where she’s going with this one,” Michael said.
“If you could hav—”
“—kill one person and get away with it, who—” Michael said but stopped when we all looked at him. “I thought it was the murder freebie question. It’s not the murder freebie question?”
Even though I could still see Charlie’s head kicking back, a red-black hole appearing as Plastic Buddha ruptured …
Even though I wasn’t sure my ears were done ringing and I could still feel the wet red hitting me as Charlie crumpled over …
Somehow I heard the words and I expected more of a gut punch from them but there was something about the sound of all of us laughing that made the hit fall short.
“It’s never the murder freebie question, man,” Faisal said.
“Don’t you act like we haven’t talked about murder freebies. I would say murder fre—”
“Michael!” Matty said. “No one is talking about murder. That’s not my question. My question is what kind of superpower would you have?”
“An oldie but a goodie,” Faisal conceded. “You know Matty’s is turning light bulbs off and Mike’s is a weird blank check for murder—”
“Those aren’t the powers we chose!” Matty said.
“Yeah! That’s not the power Matty chose!” Michael said.
She glared at him but couldn’t hide the smile behind her eyes. Whatever cold snap was coming off of Lake Michigan wasn’t letting up but neither were we.
I could feel Charlie in the wind, but I was here. I was with people who wanted me here. I was standing up in the sideways wind.
“Also,” Matty said, holding up her hand while she started counting off on her fingers, “no flying, no invisibility, no Wolverine claws, and no time travel.”
“Wait, why can’t we choose Wolverine claws?” I asked.
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