by Barry Lyga
As he spoke, Marcie and Jorja both widened their eyes like owls on speed. Marcie had to divert her attention to a cluster of kids who were trying to fit their heads into the push-open drawer in one of the vending machines, but when she returned, she went right back to looking over at Jorja with disbelief etched into every line of her face.
Elayah gnawed at her lower lip. Yes, she had known that her plan with Liam had been stupid and foolhardy, but she didn’t realize it was so stupid and foolhardy.
“You weren’t supposed to fight the guy,” she admonished Liam when he finished.
“That part just sort of happened,” Liam said. “But look, the good news is that it wasn’t any of our parents. I got a good look at the dude—he was, like, in his late twenties, early thirties. Blond. No beard. Never seen him before. Not a parent. Not a friend of a parent.”
“He could be an accomplice,” Elayah said.
“You think our parents have accomplices?” Liam recoiled as though he’d just touched an electric fence. “We’re not talking master criminals here. After thirty-some years, one of them has a henchman sitting around, just in case?”
“Think it through,” Jorja said, arms crossed over her chest. “The accomplice wouldn’t have to know anything. You can just go on Craigslist or TaskRabbit and hire someone to go to the park at night and pick up a package.”
“Can we get back to how ridiculous this was?” Marcie asked. “I mean, I get Liam doing something this impetuous, but El? Come on! And—hey!”
Marcie excused herself to go tend to a group of kids who’d hit on the bright idea of lifting up a friend and throwing him over an inflatable barrier into a bouncy house. This had disaster written all over it, even to Elayah’s unpracticed eye.
“Any other surprises for us?” Jorja asked while she was gone.
Elayah hesitated before speaking up. She still wasn’t 100 percent certain she’d actually seen someone lurking out in the backyard. Even bringing it up risked making it real, as though she could conjure a nightmare into the waking world just by recalling it.
But these were her friends. Her best friends.
Jorja’s expression turned from annoyed outrage to puzzled consternation when Elayah told them about the shadowy figure. Marcie returned, caught the gist, and took her hand.
“What time was this?” Marcie asked without even looking over at her. She was scanning the room for further toddler crimes in progress.
“Twelve thirty–ish.” She checked her phone and scrolled to see what time Liam’s text came in and woke her. “Twelve thirty-seven, to be exact.”
“It couldn’t be the same guy, then,” Jorja mused. “You fought him at a little past midnight, right, Li?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no way to get from the statue to the street and then to El’s in a half hour.” Jorja seemed sure of it.
Elayah was less certain. “It’s only twenty minutes to the park. If he ran to his car after the fight…”
“And then scaled your fence?” Marcie sounded doubtful, taking Jorja’s side. “It’s awful tight.”
Liam cleared his throat. “El, you’re not even sure you actually saw someone, right?”
Had she? Elayah replayed the moments in her mind, but found nothing new or dispositive in her recollection. It had been late. She’d been both exhausted and amped at the same time.
When she didn’t answer right away, Liam went on: “You know what it probably was? Some reporter, scoping out the house, looking for a good photo. Something like that. I can tell my dad—he’s been pretty tough about making sure the press doesn’t cross property lines.”
“Don’t say anything,” Elayah replied quickly and a little more sharply than she’d intended.
With an eye roll, Liam said, “Is this more of the I don’t trust—”
“No. But like you said, I’m not sure I saw anything. So why make an issue of it?”
Jorja leaned against an inflatable slide, stumbled, managed to avoid falling down entirely. “Because we’re all sort of losing our minds? Not sure how to talk to our parents?”
It was a rare admission of vulnerability from Jorja. Elayah shot a glance over to Liam, expecting him to do one of those brotherly shoulder strokes or something like that. But before he could even move toward Jorja, Marcie—Marcie!—put an arm around Jorja’s shoulders and hugged her briefly.
“My dad called last night,” Marcie said quietly. “He calls once or twice a week. And I could barely talk to him. I just kept thinking, Was it you? Did you hurt someone?”
“Or are you covering up for someone who did?” Jorja asked it not rhetorically and not even aimed at Marcie. She clearly—miserably—was thinking it, too. About her father.
Elayah’s phone vibrated for her attention. Probably her mom, checking up for the umpteenth time.
“Excuse me,” a somewhat harried mom said, approaching Marcie. “My little guy went up the slide there and is afraid to come down. Could you…?”
Marcie nodded and smiled and went off to retrieve the kid. Elayah hauled out her phone to assuage Mom and froze at what she saw.
Let’s try it a different way this time.
1986: DEAN
Scratching away with a pen on a sheet of flimsy airmail stationery on a Friday night, Dean occasionally stopped to consult the English-Spanish dictionary he had open on his desk:
How is your sister?
¿Cómo está tu hermana?
The weather has been very nice here. How is it there?
El clima ha sido muy agradable aquí. ¿Cómo está allí?
“What are you doing?”
Dean startled, almost ripping the thin paper beneath his pen. Jay had materialized from nowhere and now leaned against the doorframe leading into Dean’s bedroom. Dean hadn’t even heard the doorbell ring.
“I’m writing to my pen pal,” he told Jay.
“You have a pen pal?” Jay’s tone folded astonishment and disgust into a single question.
“So do you,” Dean snapped back. “The one we were assigned in Spanish.”
Jay gaped at him. “From last year, you mean? You’re still writing to him? Wow!”
“I actually like Pedro,” he told Jay without a hint of the shame he knew his friend sought. “We both like comics.”
Jay shrugged as though disappointed in the answer but satisfied with the tone. “I never even wrote to mine. He sent me a letter, but I never read it. It was just a stupid extra-credit assignment. How was she going to know we did it—follow us to the post office and watch us mail each letter?”
At that, Dean tossed the pen across the desk, letting it roll until it fetched up against the bulk of his chemistry textbook. Jay lived life by one credo, which—boiled down to its essence—was Don’t do anything that’s inconvenient or not fun. The rest of the world didn’t work that way, but Jay was smart enough, his parents permissive enough, that he could get away with it.
“Whatever. I’ll finish it later. Let’s go.”
Friday nights, Jay made the rounds, starting at Dean’s house—Dean always rode shotgun; he’d known Jay the longest—then circling around to pick up the twins, then getting Brian last. Bri always bitched about being the last to be picked up and having to cram into the back seat. Jay and Marcus took turns mimicking his discontent until he finally shut up.
With the start of the new season, they’d recently enacted a new ritual for Fridays: heading to Jay’s for Miami Vice. This way, they could figure out the winner of the death pool in the moment. Jay’s parents had converted their garage into a huge TV room, with a massive fifty-inch reverse-projection TV taking up half a wall, external speakers, and a semicircular sofa. They would load up on bags of chips, soda, and a bowl of M&M’s, then watch Vice and keep careful count of the bodies.
When the show ended at ten—and they doled out the contents of the pot to the winner—the night stretched out before them. Jay, the oldest of them all, had his full adult driver’s license, plus his own car, so he wa
s the permanent driver for the group. They could pool a few bucks to defray Jay’s gas costs, then spend the night in his car, going wherever they wanted, doing whatever they wanted.
Regardless of their final plans, though, they always—always—had to be in the car at midnight for the weekly “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on WKOR, “the station that rocks backward!”
Now Jay piloted them around Canterstown, cruising up the main drag to the factory, which hovered into view as they crested a hill. The Wantzler factory anchored the horizon, its black bulk a stamp on the purple-blue night sky. There were no windows—or at least very few—so it gave off no light, only glowed at its base from the lights in the employee parking lot. The factory ran twenty-four hours a day to meet demand, its smokestacks purling gray against the sunless sky, disgorging new clouds like sacrificial offerings. Everyone in the town was connected to the factory in some way or another. When not running the board of ed—a part-time job if ever there was one, apparently—Jay’s father was an engineer who designed the machines Wantzler used to manufacture cassettes. Brian’s mother was secretary to the factory’s director of operations. Dean’s dad worked down in Baltimore but had spent six years as some sort of director for Wantzler.
“We could drive around the parking lot at the factory and see how long it takes for Fatso to run us off,” Brian suggested.
Fatso was Martin Fratelli, two years their senior, and a former heavyweight wrestling champ in high school. He’d never managed the transition to college and had remained in Canterstown, where his great muscular bulk had managed a different sort of transition, settling around his waist. He worked nighttime security at the factory.
“Nah,” said Marcus. “Pops is working night shift this week. I don’t need the hassle.”
The twins’ dad was a shift supervisor. Possessed of a keen sense of justice and fairness, Mr. Laird felt compelled to assign himself the worst shift at least once a month as a show of solidarity with those under him.
“Then what?” Jay complained. When Jay had a task to focus on, there was no one better to have on your side—he was dedicated, brutally efficient, and utterly unmovable from the path to his target.
But when Jay had no target in his sights, boredom swamped him quickly and easily, drenching him in fractiousness and puckishness. Bored, distractible Jay was the worst kind. Most of the trouble Dean had gotten into in his life was the result of something into which Jay had dragooned him while in the throes of desperate ennui.
Brian tried again. “I heard Jenny Miller is having a sleepover with a bunch of the girls from drama club.”
Marcus groaned. “If you say the words panty raid, I’m gonna kick you out of the car.”
“I just—”
“It’s not like in the movies!” Marcus yelled.
Dean sighed. Marcus and Brian argued about this all the time. Brian insisted that girls’ sleepovers were like the one in Animal House, and Marcus swore up and down that they were just a bunch of girls sitting around in pajamas with junk on their faces, eating ice cream and listening to old David Cassidy records.
Before the argument could get too heated, Dean jumped in. “I have an idea,” he said quickly. “It’s a little weird, though.”
When no one objected to a little weird, he went on: “Wouldn’t it be weird to follow a pizza-delivery guy all night?”
“You mean, call for a pizza, then follow him back to the house?” Marcus said. “That sounds lame.”
“No,” Dean told him. “I mean just follow him everywhere he goes, all night long.”
Flipping down the visor, Dean used the vanity mirror to check out the back seat reaction. Antoine had mastered the art of turning a shrug into a facial expression. Marcus looked somewhat doubtful. Brian appeared nonplussed.
But it was Jay’s car, and all that mattered was Jay’s opinion. With a curt, triumphant nod, Jay flipped a uey in the middle of Founders Street. It was late Friday night and there was no traffic in either direction, but the guys in the back seat still yelped in mingled and joint outrage and surprise. Dean grabbed for the armrest and held on for dear life.
Moments later, they were parked—lights off—in a small lot just off Center Street. Before them lay a three-store “shopping center” that included a (closed for the evening) dry cleaner, a (closed for the evening) optician, and Nico’s Pizza, one of three pizzerias in Canterstown and the only one that delivered.
“Who farted?” Marcus demanded.
A brief argument ensued, ending when Jay cranked down his window a couple of inches to let in some fresh air.
“This is boring,” Brian suggested a few silent moments later. Marcus grunted in agreement, and Antoine actually deigned to speak: “I agree.”
“It won’t be,” Jay promised with an air of absolute, impossible, and unearned conviction.
Quite against every rational impulse he possessed, Dean believed Jay. He didn’t know why. Jay sweated confidence, emitted it like radiation, glowed with it. His persuasive powers were natural and reflexive and difficult to combat.
Soon someone emerged from Nico’s bearing a thermal pizza pouch. He was in his twenties, lanky, with a scruffy beard and a faded red Nico’s ball cap perched on his head. He climbed into a slightly battered, late-model blue Datsun and pulled out of the parking lot.
After a pregnant pause, Jay cranked his Chevette’s engine and followed.
Dean leaned forward in anticipation. In anticipation of precisely what he could not identify, but he figured something would happen. Something interesting.
No commentary drifted forward from the back seat. The peanut gallery, for now, remained silent.
Jay proved to be an excellent tail; he kept a couple of car lengths back, following almost lazily as the pizza guy cruised up Center. When he signaled left to turn onto Grady Street, Jay waited until he’d completed his turn and could no longer see the Chevette in the rearview before signaling his own turn.
When they came around the corner, though, Jay nearly slammed on the brakes. The Datsun was parked only a few yards in from the corner, its lights still on, sidled up against the curb at the foot of a shallow slope that led to a well-lit Victorian. The guys in the back seat shouted in surprise, but Jay recovered well and simply kept going, as though he’d always intended to chug down Grady.
“That’s Brad Gimble’s house,” Dean said.
“Gimble the Dimble,” Marcus offered.
“Gimbo el Dimbo,” Brian added.
“Gimble the Simple,” Antoine said into a moment of silence, a slight upturn to the corner of his mouth.
It wasn’t a perfect rhyme, but it was still perfect and they all laughed.
As they passed the Datsun, the pizza guy climbed out and leaned in for his pizza, oblivious to them.
“Boooooring!” Brian chanted as Gimble’s house shrank in their rearview.
“Where’s the beef?” Marcus demanded in an aggrieved, elderly falsetto.
“It’ll get better,” said Jay. “I promise.”
How did he know? Dean wondered. This whole stupid idea had been Dean’s stupid idea, and he hadn’t even been entirely certain what he hoped would come of it. But now Jay had taken ownership of the notion. Which was good because the heat was off Dean to make it something interesting. But also bad because Jay had no boundaries and tended to take things too far.
Jay hung a left at the next intersection and drove straight back to Nico’s. They beat the delivery guy—probably haggling over his tip—and parked in the darkest part of the tiny lot.
A few minutes later, the delivery guy returned, parked at the front door, and ambled inside.
It was twenty after ten.
Nico’s business must have centered primarily on late-nighters, because starting about fifteen minutes later, the delivery guy bolted out the door, commencing an hour-long burst of activity. He started stacking up the orders, hustling three and four of them at the same time. Nico’s had a thirty-minutes-or-it’s-free guarantee, so he leadfooted it t
hrough the dark streets.
The guys followed him each time. Against all odds and against every conceivable likelihood, the night became fun and somewhat exciting. Jay used the sparse traffic to hide, playing an automotive game of cat and mouse. He’d let the delivery guy get far enough ahead that the others thought they were sure to lose him, then suddenly pull around a car and make a turn and—mirabile dictu!—there was the Datsun, chugging along.
They wove a complex skein through the streets of Canterstown that night, from the factory-adjacent near-shanties all the way up into the winding hills over town, where the private school kids lived their manicured-lawn lives. Sometimes they’d trail him back to Nico’s; other times they’d peel off early and get back to the parking lot before him, to lie in wait.
Right up until eleven, he was consistently busy. He rarely even turned off the car upon his return to Nico’s, leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine running as he dashed in, then careened back out with an armload of pizzas, subs, cans of soda.
Nico’s closed at midnight on the weekends, and by a few minutes after eleven, things slowed down. The guys followed him on a lazy, twisty route through the hills over town, back behind the high school. They were the only two cars on the road, so Jay was hanging back, though not as far back as Dean would have liked.
The radio blared. Bruce Cockburn sang about the rocket launcher he wanted.
“‘… had a rocket launcher,’” the guys sang along, “‘some son of a bitch would…!’”
Jay punctuated the word die with a bash on the steering wheel. Dean’s heart skipped a beat, then double-timed as he realized how close Jay had come to hitting the horn.
The delivery guy pulled over to the curb at a smallish Tudor house. He had a single pizza and three Cokes, attached to each other by a six-pack’s plastic loops, which he dangled from his free hand as he bounded to the door.
“Hey, this is Lisa McKenzie’s house,” said Brian, cupping imaginary breasts before him.
An appreciative sigh filled the car. Jay coasted to a stop two houses away and killed his headlights.