by Barry Lyga
Jenny shrugged indifferently and grabbed a piece of toast on her way out the door.
“What about your son?” Mom asked, nudging Dad, who grudgingly looked up from his paper again.
“Forget to wash your hair this morning?” Dad asked.
“It’s slicked back.”
Dad frowned, but then relented. “You want to look like a greaser, that’s your lookout. What’s with the pink shirt? Are you a girl now or something?”
“Guys can wear pink now, Dad.”
“Did we forget something this morning?” Mom interrupted, stroking her own chin meaningfully.
“Mo-om!” He dragged the word out to more syllables than it needed, hating the whining note in his voice. He rubbed a hand over his carefully cultivated stubble. “It’s the style.”
“Style’s not the word for it,” Dad grumbled from the table. He had gone back to reading the Morning Gazette, which he prided himself on plowing through before leaving for work. Then, when he got home, he would go through the Evening Gazette. They were a Canterstown Gazette family—none of that Lowe County Times nonsense for them. “I don’t trust a paper that only publishes one edition,” Dad would say to anyone who dared ask. More like he didn’t trust a paper that had endorsed Mondale.
“Anyway…” Dean had nothing else to say, but he knew he had to say something. He let the word trail off into infinity, then smiled thanks at his mom and rushed out the door with his toast.
At school, he immediately sought out Brian, Jay, and the twins. He was excited, not just about his first day as SGA VP, but also for the first Monday morning Miami Vice death pool check-in with the guys. He had guessed three in the pool last Friday afternoon, and there had been four killings on the show that night. As long as no one else had guessed four, he would win.
Marcus had agreed to hold the guesses and the money. He and his twin, Antoine, showed up a couple of minutes late. Brian, Jay, and Dean were clustered in the cafeteria, waiting for the homeroom bell to ring when the twins hustled in, out of breath.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “We missed the bus. Had to run from the house.”
The Laird twins were known as the two fastest runners at the school, maybe even the county, depending on the outcome of the spring’s track season. Dean had nicknamed them Black Lightning, like the guy in the comic books, and the twins had really taken to it. Rarely did you see or think of one without seeing or thinking of the other. They routinely finished each other’s sentences and seemed to communicate telepathically.
Antoine was the quieter of the two. Yes, the Laird boys finished each other’s sentences, but usually Antoine had the shorter end of the communal utterance. What he lacked in verbosity he made up for with a wicked grin that spoke volumes.
“Open it!” Brian demanded. “We don’t have long! It’s almost first bell.”
Marcus fumbled for a moment with the envelope. It was a large manila affair, its flap gummed shut, five signatures overlapping the line of closure.
They’d come up with the idea while watching reruns over the summer: Every Friday afternoon of the new season, the five of them wrote down their names and guesses on slips of paper, then deposited those slips and two bucks apiece into an envelope.
Antoine, silent, leaned over to right the envelope in his brother’s hands. Marcus tilted his head in thanks—Dean imagined radiating concentric circles like Aquaman’s telepathy on Saturday mornings, transferring a Thanks from twin to twin—and tore open the envelope.
Just then, a hand slapped out from nowhere and knocked the envelope out of Marcus’s hands. Brad Gimble—football prodigy and overall tool—snickered. “Oops!”
“Knock it off, Gimbo!” Dean snapped.
“Bite me, loser!”
Before Dean could retort, Brad disappeared down the hall, flipping the group off as he went.
“How is he calling me a loser?” Dean marveled as the twins recovered the envelope.
“He’s never going to get over you beating him,” Brian said.
“Forget him.” Jay gestured to Marcus. “Hurry up.”
“Dean, three…,” Marcus read quickly, shuffling the papers. “Jay, eight… Brian, fifteen… Come on, man!” An eye roll.
“It could happen!” Brian protested. “A big drug bust with lots of…” He mimed spraying lead all around the room with a machine gun.
“Uh-huh,” Marcus said, ignoring him. “Antoine, five. And me… five…”
Dean grinned broadly. He’d won!
“Of course you two guessed the same number,” Jay complained as Dean scooped up his winnings.
“It’s a coincidence,” Marcus said defensively.
“You share one brain,” Jay told them. “Lame death count anyway.”
Antoine shrugged as the bell rang and the boys dispersed to homeroom.
Third period was Dean’s free period, which usually meant loitering in the cafeteria or goofing around in the library, but now meant he could hang out in the SGA office. There were two desks in there, and he looked forward to the empty space and the free time.
As long as Dean could remember, he’d wanted to be a writer. He spent his free time conjuring science fiction novels, fantasy epics, extended runs on the comic books he still loved. When not doing homework or chores at home, he spent his time at his desk, outlining and plotting. Now he had a free period every day and a space of his own to work in. He just knew something great would come of it.
The office was on the second floor, a tiny room crushed between the math and science departments. He experienced a minute thrill on opening the door with his key and was slightly disappointed to see Mr. Grimm there, sitting at one of the desks, grading papers.
“Oh, hi,” Dean said, hoping that his displeasure didn’t come through.
Despite his name, Mr. Grimm generally had a broad, friendly attitude and was well liked by the student body. Which, Dean realized, was probably why he had wound up as the faculty adviser to the student government.
“Good morning, Mr. Vice President,” Mr. Grimm boomed. He couldn’t help it—he always boomed. “I’m just wrapping up. I’ll get out of your way.”
It was weird to have an adult—and a teacher—defer to him, but Dean wasn’t sure what to do about it. Besides, he liked the idea of having the office to himself.
“You know, I’m not supposed to say things like this, but I’m glad you won and not Brad Gimble,” Mr. Grimm said. “I get the feeling he was just looking to pad his college applications.”
Dean shrugged. He still wasn’t 100 percent sure how he’d managed to eke out a victory over the more popular football player, but he wasn’t going to question it.
Mr. Grimm gathered up his things, then paused at the door. “Did you guys hand out the teacher survey?”
One of Dean’s first jobs as SGA vice president was to write up and distribute a survey to the school’s teachers to see how they could work better with SGA. He had spent the weekend trying to type it up at home, then given up after a dozen typos. Mom had sat down with his handwritten version and produced a clean copy in five minutes.
“I have it,” he told Mr. Grimm, “but just one.”
“You can make copies now, during your free period, and put them in the teachers’ mailboxes.”
Dean’s nose wrinkled. He didn’t mind cranking the mimeograph machine, but he hated the smell of the toner.
“Do I have to?” He gestured to his pristine white jacket. “I don’t want to get purple all over my new—”
“No mimeos for this,” Mr. Grimm interrupted. “You can use the Xerox machine in the principal’s office. Remember to let it warm up for a few minutes before you push any buttons.”
Dean had used the photocopier once before—it was as big as a doghouse and coughed and chuckled like his dad’s old Chevelle. Still, it was a million times better than hand-cranking the mimeograph and breathing in the Purple Death.
Mr. Grimm waved and headed out the door, then stopped once more. “Forgot—you’re go
ing to need to get some paper from the supply closet.” He fished around in his pockets and produced a key ring with over a dozen keys. “It’s one of these. I think the one labeled 2QR.”
Mr. Grimm handed the keys over and disappeared down the hall. Dean hefted the key ring and then tucked it into his pocket. Time to get to work.
As the school day ended, Dean made his final locker stop. Jay caught up to him as they headed for the door and the buses. They were laughing about something on The Cosby Show when Mr. Grimm ran up to them.
“Dean, you forgot to give me my keys back.”
Dean froze. He had forgotten. How? He sheepishly handed them over.
When Mr. Grimm was gone, Dean kept walking, then stopped when he realized Jay had fallen behind. Peering around, he saw his friend standing in the same spot as before, staring off into the middle distance.
Dean knew that look. A good time usually followed. Or trouble. Sometimes both.
“I’m gonna miss the bus,” he said, returning to Jay’s side. “Come on.”
“I’ll drive you,” Jay said with an almost vacant expression on his face; he was building something in his head. “He just… gave you his keys?” Jay asked slowly.
“I needed paper. For the copier. So I had to unlock the supply room.”
A savage and utterly unrestrained grin split Jay’s face. “I have an idea.…”
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
In her garage, Elayah stared at the relics laid out before her on an old garden tarp.
Relics was probably kind. Most of it was, she had to admit, junk.
There were postcards from such mundane places as Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore. A few sheets of paper containing what appeared to be emo poetry of the very worst, most high-schoolish sorts. A blue envelope containing a love letter from “L” to “M” that was alternately so overwrought and so dirty that she blushed in embarrassment for the writer and the recipient, then for herself for reading it. The word girth actually appeared more than once.
There were vinyl 45s and those cassette tapes. Ancient video game cartridges. A magazine called Byte. A collection of Garfield comic strips. (Wow, that cat was old!) A couple of old VHS tapes that she could identify only because her dad still had one of him and his brother crushing the hundred-meter relay their junior year, long before Uncle Antoine ran off to Mexico. Dad kept saying he was going to digitize it but never got around to it.
There was a VCR in the attic. Maybe she could watch the old tapes.
Maybe she could listen to the old cassettes and 45s. And find a way to access the data on the old disks.
And…
And she sighed, gazing at her empire of crap. After a deputy had photographed everything, a reporter from the Loco had—as promised—stopped by and photographed everything again, then interviewed the four excavators. Afterward, Jorja had pointed out that they needed to do something with the capsule contents… and the three others had looked pointedly at her.
“This was your idea.…” Marcie had said, then trailed off.
Gee, thanks, bestie.
So she had packed everything up and brought it home. Twenty-four hours ago, she would have been thrilled at the opportunity to paw through the remnants of her dad’s teen years, to sift through the late twentieth century and learn things that you couldn’t find on Wikipedia and in old movies.
But that was before she’d held a murder weapon in her hands.
It was a murder weapon. She was sure of it. Elayah didn’t believe in ESP or second sight or psychic powers, but she believed in gut instinct, and every part of her—including her gut, especially her gut—cried out that the knife was exactly what it seemed to be: the ender of a life. A cutter of the cords of Fate.
Yeah, okay, she was getting a little poetic in her excitement. Still. The point stood.
She left the tarp and its contents for another day and went inside, flicking open her phone as she did so. The Loco site had been updated, and the story about the time capsule was now the top link:
Local Teens Unearth a Piece of Our Past
With the byline Rachel Sagura. Rachel was not much older than Elayah, a comms major at the nearby community college with journalistic aspirations. Or at least a desire to end up on TV.
For more than thirty years, the piece began, it has lain beneath the ground, deposited there in years past by a group of high school friends who thought they themselves would dig it up someday. Instead, that task has fallen to their children.
Ronald Reagan was president when the time capsule went into the earth on the hill overlooking Canterstown High School in the fall of 1986. Cyndi Lauper, Bon Jovi, and Huey Lewis and the News made the music that had everyone in town dancing. The Berlin Wall still stood, and the Challenger disaster was still fresh in everyone’s mind.…
Elayah groaned a bit and skimmed down, eager to skip the part where Rachel proved that she possessed core competencies in both Wikipedia and copy-and-paste.
The capsule was unearthed by a quartet of current Canterstown seniors, led by Elayah Laird, who describes herself as “something of a polymath, I guess.”
Elayah winced. She’d said it wryly, with a healthy dose of self-deprecation, but that color didn’t come across in black-and-white text.
Rachel introduced the others and then went on:
Rising early, the foursome gathered at the school, having been given permission by the town to dig on municipal property. With the map they’d discovered already digitized for safekeeping, they puzzled out the location of the capsule and dug it up, uncovering a treasure trove of 1980s memorabilia sure to spark to life the nostalgia center of any self-respecting Gen Xer.
“We were kinda hoping for gold doubloons,” Liam said. “But I guess you can’t always get what you’re hoping for.”
Liam’s deadpan delivery fared about as well in text as had her own.
Rachel evenhandedly included some comments from Jorja and Marcie, then wrapped up with the information that “the four plan to examine their booty and perhaps present it as an exhibit at the Canterstown Public Library this winter.”
Examine their booty? Really? That was Rachel’s idea of wordsmithing? Elayah shivered in sheer repulsion and hoped for the sweet release of death. She would hear a lot of “Examine this booty!” tomorrow at school for sure. No doubt some of it from Liam.
There were photographs of the stuff currently laid out on the tarp—two wide shots of everything and then a gallery of close-ups. Below that, the usual comment section.
I remember those shoes! Best shoes I ever owned!
OMG—I had that exact same Walkman! My kids would never get it if I showed it to them.
That ALF lunch box could have been mine!
A bunch of oldsters reminiscing, going all nostalgic. What would they say if they knew, though? If they knew what else had been in the time capsule?
Still staring at the phone, she walked through the living room. Dad had gotten home from work and lay on the sofa, swiping through his iPad. “Eyes up!” he admonished her, and she juked her line of sight up just in time to avoid colliding with the coffee table.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly.
“Kids these days,” Dad said, clucking his tongue for effect. He smiled as he said it.
“Adults these days,” she retorted. It was their usual back-and-forth.
“What’s got your head in the clouds, sweetheart?”
Elayah flopped down onto the sofa next to him. “The time capsule.”
“I saw the story.” He waved his iPad in the air a bit.
“I found your thing,” she said. “It’s out in the garage with the rest of the stuff. I’ll go—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I’ll see it later. What’s bothering you?”
She hadn’t yet told him about the knife. Liam’s dad had seemed pretty serious about keeping it under wraps. “What was the point of doing an inventory if you didn’t actually keep it accurate?”
He pursed his l
ips and tilted his head back, time traveling. “Well, look, we were sloppy. What can I say? I guess we didn’t bother to inventory it all.”
Sloppy or not, though, one of them had put that knife in there. What did he know? What did he know that he wasn’t telling her?
“Honey?” he asked, sitting up straighter. “You’re doing that thing where you disappear into yourself. What’s bothering you?”
She considered telling him about the knife, right then and there. But she couldn’t do it. She had to give the sheriff time to start looking into it. And besides, there was nothing for her dad to do about it.
“Nothing, Dad. I just have to ask Liam some stuff.” She sidled away, slipping into the kitchen, tapping at her phone.
Elayah: hey
Liam: yo
Elayah: has your dad said anything about the
Liam: oh yeah he always shares case information with me
Elayah: come on
Liam: I’ll ask him when he gets
Elayah: promise?
Liam:
After dinner, she went out into the garage and recovered the hinged photo frame from the tarp. She presented it to her parents with a little drumroll playing on her phone. Mom took it from her and stared at it for a long while, her eyes glistening.
“Look at you. Both of you.” She held it out to Dad, who nodded and said nothing, his lips pressed together.
“I’m sorry,” Elayah said. “Should I not have showed it to you?” She’d never known her uncle Antoine and probably never would. His last communication from Mexico had been something like fifteen years before she was even born.
“Baby,” her dad said softly, and stood to put his arm around her. “You did just the right thing.”
They squeezed each other for a moment. It was quiet for too long.
“I just don’t remember your hair being so greasy!” Mom said abruptly, and she and Elayah cracked up as Dad spluttered a nearly incoherent defense of his teen self.
Later, she sat in her room, staring at the ceiling. It was long past time to go to sleep. There was still no news from Liam, nothing at all about the police investigation.