“Are you going to tell me?” he asked.
She smiled. She still hadn’t come to accept his father’s side of the argument they were having in the office, that it was indeed time to tell him. If he was honest, he wanted to know now more than ever.
She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, then went inside. Harold sat alone, the wire seat biting his bottom.
The pellet gun clapped and fired.
A squirrel spun on a barren branch, clinging for a moment before falling. It bounced through the tree and thudded on the neighbor’s lawn.
9.
His father wasn’t around much.
When he was in his office, the doors were closed and locked. He never locked the doors. Harold would sometimes press his ear to the door to eavesdrop on murky phone conversations that would abruptly stop. He didn’t stick around to hear what happened next.
His father left for days.
“On business,” he would announce with the distant eyes of an online gambling addict.
Mom wasn’t much better.
She spent her days in hour-long naps and sluggishly moping through the house. He came home from school and smelled the cigarette smoke before rounding the back corner, where she sat bleary-eyed and vacant. She appeared to be giving up on whatever life-changing discovery she’d guaranteed only a few weeks earlier.
Harold spent all of his time in the attic. The room was, once again, littered with empty pizza boxes, dirty dishes and half-empty soda bottles.
The basement remained locked. Occasionally, Mom would venture down but only to climb back up the steps a few minutes later, her footsteps pounding the old wooden steps.
They made the Addams family look normal.
Mid-November, Mom made the trip up to his room. She informed him without judging the usual dismal state of his room that he would be going to spend a week or more with the grandparents. It wasn’t the week that bothered him, or the thought of eating dry turkey for Thanksgiving. It was the last part.
Or more.
They were going back to the basement.
She didn’t say so, but that was the only reason he went to his grandparents. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t done before, but the or more part suggested something different.
They’re not coming back up.
He believed that. He knew it was true. They were gearing up for something big, and despite his mom’s promise they would tell him what they were doing, they were going ahead without telling him. He wasn’t sure if that pissed him off more than a permanent move to the back room of the fart factory.
Harold sat in the attic, stewing.
He didn’t like being left out. Mom threw a bomb on his lap, said they were inventing Nirvana and they were leaving him behind. He was a Ballard, damn it. He was part of this messed-up family and they thought they would abandon him?
He peered through the telescope, focusing between houses where neighbors were playing a game of kickball. John drilled one of them in the face, the rubber ball bouncing sky high. Harold didn’t like being ignored.
So he’d do what he did best.
Because the school counsellor was so right.
\\\\\\\\\\////////////////////
“I’m going to do some homework,” Harold told the grandparents. “Probably take a nap.”
They liked it when he did homework. They never asked to see his grades, just liked to think he was in the back room, frying his brain on quadratic equations. The bedroom window slid open with a bit of noise, but nothing they would hear. He crawled out backwards, scraping his hands on the ground.
It was four o’clock by the time he reached his house.
He ran most of the way, stopping half a dozen times to catch his breath. His legs were wet noodles as he climbed the back porch and, quietly, let himself inside.
The house had the eerie silence it always did when his parents were in the basement, as if ghosts were enjoying the empty space and vacated only moments before the door opened. Harold silently crossed the house, his wheezy breath the only sound that might give him away.
He carried three Mountain Dews to his bedroom.
By five o’clock, the day had turned into that New England gray depression and Harold had finished the last of his soda. He was positively vibrating with caffeine.
He aimed the telescope between the houses. The yard was now empty. The neighborhood kids had been doing their usual horsing around, but now that dusk had arrived, they were gone. It was too early for dinner. Most of them were out until dark. Harold had been watching them for the past week, keeping notes. Today was the day.
And now they were gone.
He spun the telescope, about to give up when he spotted the basketball. They were three houses to the right and a block over. The basketball rim was parked on a curb. Blake and John were lazily throwing hapless shots at the thing, probably talking about girls or the next sixth grader they were going to fleece at the bus stop.
Harold watched them tool around for another five minutes. His legs were still jelly from the run; the exertion seemed to have drained his courage. It wasn’t until John shoved someone to the pavement on a rebound that the slow drip began fueling his furnace of rage.
Exactly what he was looking for.
Sometimes good people do bad things.
Mom wasn’t talking about John. People like John were bad all the way through. They were a rotten bone, an infected tooth. They were nothing but trouble, a waste of a human body. And they would only bring harm to everyone else.
Harold thought this as he watched the kid get up from the pavement with scuffed palms.
Harold would be a superhero. He would be the one that put a stop to this infection because sometimes good people had to do bad things. Batman didn’t kill people, but he beat them until they wished they were dead. And criminals never forgot that beating. Harold wanted to deliver a message that John would never forget. Change his life. And everyone else’s life.
Like the kid getting up off the pavement.
He made sure the house was in order as he snuck into the backyard. The little wire table had been cleaned up, the coffee mug of cigarette butts gone. Harold ignored the hope that things would change without him having to do something about it, the hope that a normal, happy family would emerge from the basement. But he didn’t believe in hope.
He believed in taking charge.
The fence was hard to climb with such weak legs. He fell behind the neighbor’s garage and wiped himself off as he peeked around the corner. The lights were off. More importantly, the neighbor’s back porch was exactly as he expected it to be.
No ninja skills this time; Harold blundered onto the back porch. The pellet gun leaned in the corner; the clear-lensed safety glasses hung on the trigger guard. A chalkboard hung on the wall, where marks measured the number of dead squirrels for the month.
Harold carefully placed the glasses on the floor, making a mental note of how they were hanging and which way the rifle was leaning. He loaded a single pellet into the chamber. There would be time for one shot. Then he shirked the book bag and wrapped the gun with a brown blanket.
Running back to the corner of the yard, he positioned a log as a step and lowered the rifle to the other side, careful not to knock the scope out of adjustment. No opportunities to train the sights. This mission would be one and done.
Harold set a boulder on the other side of the fence as a step for when he returned.
Dusk was falling like fog. There would only be twenty minutes left of good light. He pulled a dark hood over his head and crossed the street with the rifle strapped to the back of the book bag, as casual as a bored teenager. Once he passed Mr. Dushane’s privet hedge, he dipped into the side yard and army-crawled his way to the corner.
The angle was no good.
He could hear the basketball, but there wasn’t a clear shot. He made his way to the other side of the yard and found a spot between a group of hydrangeas. He’d have to run through the backyar
d to escape.
The shrubbery was sparse, but he’d dug into the middle, snapping twigs until he created a sightline to the basketball court. Unwrapping the pellet gun, he watched Blake and John toss the ball around. The other kids were gone. It was just the two of them.
Even better.
Harold mounted over the top of his book bag and steadied the rifle with his eye behind the scope. What little strength was still in his legs was drained by a wave of nerves. He was about to do this.
And there was no going back.
He began to count his breaths to settle his quivering hands, to quiet his racing heart that had become a rhythmic pounding in his ears. That last Dew was maybe one too many. He closed his eyes, counting to ten. He did it again. And again.
The basketball stopped thumping.
They were sitting on the curb, their phones illuminating their faces. The rest of them was cloaked in the fast-falling night. Harold settled behind the scope once again. Blake’s lips moved silently in the crosshairs, eyes cast down. John sat like a heap of mouth-breathing flesh, waves of stupid beaming all the way through the scope.
Harold sighted on his phone.
He could put the pellet through the casing and shatter the back side. If he was lucky, it would break his finger, too. John’s parents would pay for a new phone and that wasn’t exactly punishment. He could put the pellet on his neck, leave a nasty welt. Maybe even break the skin.
But Harold wasn’t there to break a finger or leave a red spot on John’s neck. He was there to change that boy’s life. He was going to make that shot count.
Slowly, he raised the end of the barrel.
The crosshairs moved over his chin and rested between his stupid eyes.
Fifty yards out. No wind.
Pellets weren’t perfect ammunition for accuracy. There would be some luck. But his neighbor, a war veteran, a man with sniper training, taught him to cut luck to a minimum. Harold raised the crosshairs to the top of John’s forehead to allow for a slight drop.
John sat perfectly still.
Squirrels were more of a challenge.
Finger tightening on the trigger, Harold let his breath leak from his lips. Snipers pulled the trigger between beats of their hearts. Harold closed his eyes, recalled all the bad things John had done to him and others, fed the hate-boiler churning in his stomach.
Last breath. Pause. Squeeze.
Crack.
The barrel recoiled. The pellet began its trip across one yard, over the street. Harold saw it rip through the air, saw it hit its target slightly to the left of where he was aiming. He swore he could hear the wet impact.
John’s head snapped back.
A deep bellow was followed by a long stretch of silence that was shattered by a pained and panicked screech. It was sharp with edges of fear.
Blake dropped his phone. John thrashed like a high-voltage line had fallen across his face. His cries rang like a natural disaster that drew people out of their houses. Someone’s mom was the first to reach them, kneeling next to John while Blake blabbered useless observations.
There were calls for help. Another adult picked up John’s phone.
Harold was there too long.
He should’ve crawled out by now. The realization of what he’d done landed on him with great force, pushing him into the ground, an elephant with all four legs in the middle of his back.
What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?
Calls for help were getting louder.
John had yet to hold still despite the efforts of moms and dads. The cooker of hate and rage had gone cold and sour in Harold’s stomach, spewing greenish fear and disgust. He clamped his hand over his mouth and dry heaved as quietly as he could.
That forced him to move. It broke the paralysis and allowed him to begin backing out. Parents were looking around. John was babbling about hearing a sound, but he wasn’t quite sure where it came from. If not for the darkness, they would’ve seen Harold crawl out of the hydrangeas and move down a side yard.
Once out of sight, he got on cold, dead legs and sprinted across the street, gun unwrapped and out in the open for anyone to see. He raced between houses, around the block, and made it to the back of his house. If someone was coming for him, he couldn’t hear them through the pounding of blood in his ears.
He scrambled over the fence, dropping the rifle as he fell on his ass. His neighbor’s house was dark. Had he been home, he would’ve heard Harold fall on the porch and knock over a chair.
Panic landed sucker punches deep in Harold’s midsection, but he had enough wits to carefully replace the safety glasses and the trigger guard. Without pausing, he retraced his steps over the back fence.
He ran all the way to his grandparents’ house, stopping twice to breathe. The second time he heard sirens and barfed a puddle of slime. He didn’t have the strength to climb back through the window. He climbed on a trash can to throw himself inside the room.
A thud filled the house.
“What was that?” Grandma was in the kitchen.
Sweat-soaked, he crawled under the covers. When she opened the door, Harold said he was having a bad dream and must’ve kicked the wall. That was why his face was flush, why he was out of breath.
She didn’t notice the open window.
In the morning, Harold pulled twigs and leaves from the bed and replaced the trash can.
But no one had come looking for him.
10.
John returned to school after Thanksgiving break.
He had a patch over his eye. It was a thick pad of white gauze taped into place. Over that was a black pirate patch strung around his head.
The doctor saved the eye, but there might be permanent damage. Rumor was he had a fake eye inserted in his head, one that could see in the dark and take X-ray pictures. Once he had the patch off, he’d be able to see through clothing.
Naked vision or not, he was a middle-school celebrity.
Whatever guilt was lurking in Harold’s midsection evaporated when all his classmates posted photos with him on social media. He was a real-world victim of violence, minding his own business when some psychopath shot him. John had never done anything to deserve it.
Nothing at all.
There was an investigation, of course. The police were involved. They went door to door. When no one answered at Harold’s house, they called the grandparents. “His parents are unavailable,” Grandma said. “And Harold was here when that young man was shot.”
John fixed his good eye on Harold in between classes, staring a long moment. Maybe he was wishing Harold would shy away, give some sign of guilt. Instead, he gave him a thumbs-up, like a glad-you’re-okay-buddy rather than a too-bad-your-eye-didn’t-pop.
Mr. Tanner didn’t say anything to Harold, but a heavy-lidded glance across the hallway convicted him without a jury. The school counsellor ran a fascist regime, after all. He was the true purveyor of X-ray vision, seeing right to the truth.
What did you think would happen?
Harold thought he’d get some payback for all the crap he’d eaten from that waste-of-life John. He couldn’t beat the oaf in a straight-up punching match, but he’d beat his ass in a game of smarts.
Harold would likely go to college and graduate with honors and run a multimillion dollar corporation. He could buy whatever construction company John would be pounding nails for and make his life miserable, but who has that kind of patience? Harold wanted a little taste of retribution now.
Not later.
So he put a pellet in his eye.
\\\\\\\\\\////////////////////
“I know you did it.”
The accusation trickled through Harold like frozen shards of glass, cutting him all the way to his feet. He closed his locker door. Karen stood on the other side, books folded across her chest. A blank expression lay across her face.
Harold looked around. Is she talking to me?
“You know, the smeller is the feller,” he sa
id. “Sooooo…”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
“He’s a jerk, I know. But that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is that what you are, Harold?”
That stopped him. He had a quick retort (he always had a quick retort loaded), but that stopped him. She didn’t say who you are. She said what you are. Like that action made him less than human. A thing. Because no one would do something that low.
He wanted to tell her it was a bad shot, that he was aiming for the jerk’s (her words, not his) forehead. Harold wanted to leave him with a scar between the eyes for the rest of his life, so that when he was at his lowest, when he was trying to make his life better, whether that was in alcoholic recovery or drug addict rehab, he would remember all the people he hurt. Not just the ones in adulthood, but the lives he altered in middle school.
Every time he looked in the mirror, he would be reminded by that little dent. Instead, he’d have a bum eye that would be corrected with glasses or laser surgery, something that he’d forget ever happened.
He wanted to remind her that John was the bad guy.
Bad guys don’t win. They aren’t turned into heroes. They don’t pose for selfies when they get what’s coming. They don’t get sympathy. He was a jerk and he deserved what he got. He deserved more than that. If she knew how many lives he was going to screw up, she would thank Harold for trying to make a difference.
She would like him.
“I wish I would have shot him,” Harold said.
That was as close as he came to admitting it.
And that was the last time she ever talked to him. They were only twelve, but he would never forget that.
\\\\\\\\\\////////////////////
It was mid-December when school was back to normal.
Everyone ignored Harold, the girls didn’t talk to him, and John went back to punching slowpokes in the back and nodding off in class.
Seeds of Foreverland: A Science Fiction Thriller Page 5