“Bus toll.”
John was blocking the open door to bus number twenty-two. His hand was out. The driver was hunched at the wheel, texting.
“What?” Harold said.
“Bus toll. School charges to ride the bus, like buses do, dummy.”
John had forgotten about Harold and the fly-soup soda. He’d gone back to dozing off in class and rumbling out of the school as fast as his fat feet would move. It didn’t matter if he forgot or not, collecting “bus tolls” was just what he did.
“Come on.” John shook his hand. “A buck. Pay up.”
“Pay you?”
“Yeah, me. I’m collecting for the school. You’re holding up the line.”
There was no one behind Harold. He shook his head. Not really saying no, just couldn’t wrap his mind around this moment. No one did stupid stuff like this anymore. But the driver hardly cared. Neither did anyone else.
“You deaf? You need me to spell it out, dummy? You need sign language?” John made a fist. “Pay the toll and get a ride.”
Something snapped.
It sounded like a twig between Harold’s ears; a thin line held taut between his brain and heart pulled too tight and plink. A cascade of emotions tumbled out, like a trapdoor had released a boiler tank full of rage in his gut.
Harold lifted his fist, knuckles tight and white, fingers curled. A small grin crept over John’s face like a shadow of dark clouds. This would be better than a bus toll. Harold taking a swing would be an open invitation for John to pound him like a fence post.
Harold eased his grip, the tension releasing the cords on the back of his hand. His middle finger unfurled like a billowing sail.
“Sign language,” Harold said.
John’s smile died.
A demon twisted the corners of his mouth and flushed his cheeks with hate. His eyes hid in the recesses of his hooded eyebrows.
“Hey, let’s go,” the bus driver shouted. “On or off.”
The door rattled. John wouldn’t be able to do anything, not now. Not with everyone watching. Harold wished he would. He’d take a shot to the jaw if that meant John was suspended. Or expelled. Totally worth it.
John’s hands curled into wrecking balls. They hung at his sides, his eyes flickering around. He was holding back, thinking about the possibilities, the outcomes. But thinking, as an honest career counselor would tell him, was not his strength.
Harold returned a daring grin.
That, he thought, would push him over the edge where he already teetered. Just a slight breeze and he’d come in swinging. Harold would take one for all the middle-school prey. He’d throw himself in front of the rogue predator, sacrifice himself for all the helpless and hopeless.
A superhero.
“Hey, what’s this?” someone said.
Harold sensed the shadow behind him pretending to grab something off the ground, felt it graze the back of his legs. Before he could turn or step away, John flinched one of those gotcha moves that would make anyone a little nervous, make anyone step back—especially someone already waiting for a roundhouse.
Harold’s heel caught Blake’s leg.
The weight of his overstuffed book bag carried him the rest of the way. There was a great crunch when he hit the curb, like the sound of a thick windshield. The book bag absorbed the impact, but his head whiplashed to the ground, the sharp edges of rocks and grit lighting up his crown.
For a second, he was dreamy.
There was a blue sky and white clouds. The smell of pollution. The tang of copper. A clock was ticking, the second hand thumping backwards one step at a time.
Tick.
Tick.
How can time go backwards?
The world rushed back with a whirl of slurring laughter. “Look at this,” Blake shouted.
“Give me that,” John said.
A shadow dipped over Harold. The pink flutter of a flag waved in his face.
“This your blankie?” John asked. “You take it to school?”
Harold sat up. Liquid sunlight spread across the back of his head. John flapped the pink flag again, snapping it like a weapon.
Mom’s kerchief.
Against his better judgment, Harold reached for it. John pulled it away, a bullfighter teasing his game. Laughter bellowed, the kind that punched you in the heart and stomped the wind from your stomach.
“Look what Harold has.” John waved the pink kerchief over his head. “He’s got a pink blankie! Ain’t that cute?”
The bus driver was yelling, but nothing short of riot police could stop John from dancing. It was a scene from the bully manual—the chubby kid on the ground, the oversized moron waving his sick mom’s pink kerchief just out of reach.
In a feel-good movie, this was the part where the kid gets off the ground and plants one in the bully’s midsection, followed by a high-arching roundhouse kick to his accomplice’s wide open laughing mouth.
This was no movie.
Harold rolled to his knees, moving like a walrus ready for a nap. Glassy specks rained from the top of his book bag, the zipper partially open. The pixie dust of his shattered laptop fell across his neck.
A hundred bottles of bug soda couldn’t make up for this moment. Even if Harold crushed the remains of a thousand cockroaches into a box of cereal and watched John slurp out the sugary milk from the bottom, it wouldn’t fill this gaping wound.
John was good. He was a damn good bully. If he could make a career out of it, he’d be a professional. Harold had to give him that.
“Want it back?” John sang. “Want your blankie back?”
Harold was about to zip up his book bag and go home. He would salvage the laptop for parts and then look through his telescope, anything to forget about this.
“Hey!” John shouted with an empty hand over his head.
The pink kerchief sucked through the open slit of a bus window that quickly snapped shut. It disappeared behind the glass reflection of clouds. The bus driver blocked the door and threatened John. She would call the principal if he didn’t leave.
“You can’t make me walk,” he said.
“You can sit up front, then,” she said. “Right next to me.”
Harold had the remains of a fifteen-hundred-dollar laptop in his book bag and all John had to do was sit up front. He didn’t do it. Of course not. He walked off before she thought twice about the principal. Blake, his partner, his lackey, the idiot that pretended to be picking something up so that Harold would trip, followed.
“Well?” the bus driver said. “On or off?”
Harold climbed into the bus, his book bag ringing sick little broken jingles. All eyes turned on him, a boy making the long walk of shame. He’d sit in the back where troubled and forgotten boys and girls went. Halfway down the aisle, the pink kerchief fluttered.
Karen had it.
She’d reached out the window when John was taunting him, and snatched it from his grubby fingers. He wouldn’t do anything to her for betraying him. She was too pretty. Too popular.
Harold took it from her on his way to the back of the bus, wadded it in a ball and shoved it in his front pocket. The door squealed shut and the bus jerked forward. At some point, they all forgot about Harold. All of them except the girl sitting in the seat in front of him. She turned around with an arm across the bench and sort of sneered.
“You could’ve at least said thank you.”
He supposed he could’ve thanked Karen. She didn’t have to do that. But what would that have mattered? She only did it because she felt sorry for him. Because he was a loser.
A fat, helpless loser.
And his parents were weirdos.
A mountain of rage sat on his chest. He could hardly breathe. He didn’t want to feel this way, just wanted these feelings to go away.
What did you think would happen?
Maybe he flipped John the finger because Harold wanted to feel this way. Anger, at some level, felt good. Gave him a reason to do something. To get
back. What did he think would happen?
He didn’t know.
But Mom always said the subconscious did most of the thinking.
8.
The sidewalk had been swept.
Harold paused on the front porch. He could hear voices through the door, a high-pitched murmur followed by a lower tone. In ninja-mode, he crossed the porch without making a sound and leaned near the window closest to his father’s office. There was no mention of gel-smeared calendars or stacks of missing money.
Then again, he couldn’t make out half of it.
For a moment, he considered leaving. He wasn’t going back to the grandparents already; he’d just buy a bus ticket and head south. A little foresight and he would’ve skimmed the money drawer a little deeper.
The front door was unlocked.
Harold slipped inside the house and quietly crossed the foyer. His father’s office doors were partially open.
“How long have you been planning this?” Mom said, not quite shouting.
“It’s the only way, Patricia.”
“You’ve been thinking this all along, then?”
His silence was telling.
She paced. “What about Harold?”
“He’ll know the truth.”
“He’s twelve, Tyler.”
“We can’t wait much longer.” A desk drawer opened. “Not after today.”
“We shouldn’t be hasty.”
“We can’t afford to be negligent. We’ll never have the support of the university on this, no matter what the findings. We push forward on this, Patricia. It’s right there, just like we planned.”
“This is absurd. You didn’t consult me.”
“No, but this is still ours. Yours and mine, we discovered it. We’ll make it happen. We can’t take this lightly.”
Mom walked by the door’s opening. His father leaned over the corner of the desk. He was wearing a flimsy cap pulled over his forehead. He unlocked the money drawer. He wasn’t digging to the bottom, wasn’t pulling up the trapdoor in front of Mom, but he appeared to pause.
And then he looked up. He looked right at Harold.
“We can talk about this later,” he said.
Mom looked through the doorway, a paisley scarf wrapped around her head. She stepped out in a hurry. His father closed the doors behind her. His flimsy cap was actually a light blue surgical cap.
“Hon, didn’t hear you come in,” she said. “Where have you been? I was worried.”
“Stopped at a friend’s house after school.”
That was a lie. He got off the bus and went to McDonald’s and hid in the back corner, eating French fries and Quarter Pounders. He needed some space, needed to think. Mr. Tanner’s voice was in his head, making too much sense.
He needed that gone.
Mom wrapped her arms around him; they were bony and strong. She kissed his forehead, her puckered lips stiff and dry. It was like hugging a scarecrow.
“You all right?” Mom asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Good.”
She asked about the grandparents while straightening loose shoes at the front door. Harold followed her into the kitchen, the basement door slightly ajar, the blackness foreboding and cold, like Mom’s skin.
She was setting up the coffee machine to go off in the morning and chatting while she did so. Her color was good. Harold couldn’t decide if she was wearing makeup or not, but the gray clouds had dissipated. Her eyes were no longer rheumy, shoulders no longer slumped.
“Are you sick?” he blurted.
“What?”
“Are you sick?”
“No, hon.” A serious tone returned. “I’m fine.”
“Because Mr. Tanner knew about your treatments.”
“I was sick. Not anymore.”
“Is that what you’re doing in the basement?”
Another long pause. “It’s bigger than that.”
She tried to change the subject while pouring old coffee in the sink. Her hands, once solid and still, quivered as she fished a coffee filter from the cabinet.
“Bigger than what?” Harold asked.
“Bigger than a lot of things.”
“I heard you guys in the office.”
She laid her hands flat on the counter, back to him. Head hanging. The weight of a thousand thoughts sat on her shoulders once again. After a long pause, she went to the front door for her shoes and returned to the kitchen.
“Come on,” she said, whispering.
Harold followed her out the back door.
\\\\\\\\\\////////////////////
The backyard was long and skinny. The garage occupied the back half, the door grimy with age and algae. The grass hadn’t been mowed since mid-summer. That was Harold’s job, but no one seemed to notice he’d stopped.
Mom went to the little patio just off the back steps, a circular paved area his father had built for her years ago. It was surrounded by little gardens that used to be flush with herbs and marigolds. In the summer, she’d stake tomatoes and peppers.
Now it was weed choked; the dried remnants of tomato stalks twined through metal cages next to a mosquito-infested pond of green sludge.
She sat on a black metal chair. A mug was on the wobbly table, the cold coffee inside littered with cigarette butts. A crumpled pack of menthols was next to it. She tapped out a cigarette and lit it.
“When did you start smoking?” Harold asked.
Mom waved her hand with the cigarette wedged between her boney fingers—the knuckle knobs leaving a perfect gap for the cigarette—huffing a column of minty blue smoke. She pointed at the empty chair and leaned on the wire table, the uneven legs sloshing the cold, ashy coffee.
“We love you very much,” she started.
“Dad doesn’t.”
“He does in his own way.”
“You sound like a battered spouse.”
“Stop that.” She pointed her smoking fingers at him. “Your father is under a lot of pressure. We both are.”
“And my life is a fairy tale.”
The clapping of a pellet gun echoed from over the fence. Mr. Willis, the gun-toting veteran, was sitting on the back porch, pumping the gun. He was behind the privacy fence, but Harold knew he would be sitting on the back porch adjusting the sights, loading lead-ammunition pellets, the well-oiled components sliding into place with definitive snicks.
“Your father is very focused and… he just, he has a lot on his mind.” She took a shaky breath, not buying her own BS. She flicked the ashes in the old cup of coffee. “We’re not good parents, Harold. We wanted to be, but some things are bigger than family.”
“Right. Saving the world, freeing the slaves, that sort of thing. I get it. It’s hard being a superhero.”
“Sometimes good people do bad things.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
She inhaled, looking off. She let the smoke leak from her lips. There was no answer for that.
“You didn’t plan on having me, did you,” Harold said.
“Your father didn’t.”
“Big surprise.”
“I dreamed of you, Harold. I wanted to be your mother, so I… you know, I got pregnant. It wasn’t fair to your father. I mean, it wasn’t fair to either of you, I guess. And I’m sorry all of… of this…” She waved her hands, a gesture that encompassed all the crap. “All of this got in the way.”
“So what is all of this?”
“Problems, Harold. Problems that lead to problems.”
“But you said you weren’t sick.”
“I’m not. But in some ways…” She shrugged.
“What does that mean? You’re either sick or not. Do you have Alzheimer’s? I should know, you know. That crap is hereditary.”
“I’m not normal, Harold.”
He snorted. “I got news for you, neither am I. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re the freaking Addams family, Mom.”
Crack-snap.
The neighbor p
ulled the trigger. The round snapped like a breaking board, the pellet ricocheting off the back fence.
A sigh rattled through Mom. She dropped the cigarette into the mug, a dead fizzle putting it out. Her eyes had grown pained, sorrowful. Regretful. Just twenty minutes earlier she was bright and hopeful. Now she was back to the Mom he had come to know so well.
“Some things are bigger than love, hon.”
“Like…?”
“You’ll learn soon enough.”
“That’s not enough, Mom. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong. In fact, it’s all very right. I just hate how it’s affecting you.”
“How is it right? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.”
She nodded in deep thought. When she looked up, the fog had left her eyes. The pain dissolved and a smile broke open. He was looking into the face of madness.
“If there was a place,” she said, “where you could have anything you wanted, a place that fulfilled every desire, a world that could be whatever you wished, no pain or sorrow, no suffering, would you go there?”
“You’re talking about heaven.”
“I’m talking about dreams that come true, Harold. I’m talking about building worlds with our imagination, dreams that are as real as this table.”
“Mom, don’t take this the wrong way. But you might be insane.”
“What would you give for a world like that? And what if you could give that gift to the world, would you? It would cost your only beloved child a normal life, but would that be worth it?”
She reached out with those cold, boney fingers and clasped his hand. It was the touch of death, a shiver that leaked into his arm, clenched his chest. But her dark eyes were loving, hopeful.
“You sound crazy, Mom.”
“I know.”
“Just because you know you sound crazy doesn’t mean you aren’t.”
“What would you give?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“You would give anything, hon. And you know it.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
She sat back, adjusting the tightly drawn kerchief around her head. He noticed a dark spot bleeding through the forehead. It looked like the gel stain he’d noticed on the pink one.
Seeds of Foreverland: A Science Fiction Thriller Page 4