by Robin Reul
“Do you have other siblings?”
He shakes his head. “Just the one brother. He overdosed on OxyContin. He’d stolen my dad’s prescription pad. If I hadn’t found him when I did, he probably would have died.”
“Wow.” I hug my knees toward my chest. “Well, obviously you saved his life, which is good. He’s still on the planet. I’m sure he’s grateful to you for that.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t spoken to him since it happened.”
“How long has it been?”
“Almost two years.”
I absently rotate my bracelet around my wrist. “Wow. I can’t imagine not talking to my brother for that long. Dylan’s a pain in the ass sometimes—he’s thirteen—but still. That’s rough.”
Jack nods. “My parents kicked him out. He’d pushed them too far and nearly messed up my dad’s career because you have to report stolen pads to the police. It’s not like Alex didn’t know what might happen. He wasn’t oblivious; in fact, just the opposite. He was smart enough to know it was exactly what it would take to get my parents’ attention.”
Dale swerves slightly, and the contents of the bag dig into my hip deeper. I shift slightly to lessen the pressure. This truck apparently has zero shock absorbers. No doubt we will both be black and blue by the time we get wherever we’re going.
“That’s awful,” I say.
“My family puts the fun in dysfunctional.”
A laugh escapes, and I quickly slap my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny.”
“I think you can find the humor in anything after a certain point.”
We involuntarily bump against each other in the back of the truck for a while until Jack finally says, “So since I’ve completely overshared—because apparently you bring that out in me—it’s only fair that I get to ask you a totally personal question.”
“That seems reasonable. Shoot.”
“Why’d you leave school before the end of sophomore year? I mean, you didn’t move away, right? Did you transfer?”
I look at him with disbelief. “You really don’t know?”
He shakes his head. “Should I?”
Oh boy. I angle toward him to look him square in the eye. “If I answer your question, you have to promise you will not treat me any differently afterward or feel obliged to ask more questions because you’re worried about being impolite, because that’s usually what happens. And I’m so over that. Do you still want to know?”
“With a build up like that? Probably twice as much now as I did before. And I promise.” He cracks a half smile.
I lean my head back against the cab window. “So, the short version is…I had cancer.”
“Holy shit.”
I steal a glance at him, half expecting him to scoot over two inches like I might give him a virus.
“It turns out pregnancy, the flu, and cancer have a lot of the same symptoms: nausea, vomiting, fatigue, abdominal discomfort. So, when I spiked a fever and collapsed in the hallway one night, my mom rushed me to the hospital. I was expecting it to be one of the first two, which would have been crappy enough, but they ran all these tests and it turned out to be number three. I have this super-rare condition that only like a hundred and forty people have ever been diagnosed with called Carney’s triad. It mostly affects teenage girls, and it’s when three different types of tumors grow in three separate organs of the body, usually the stomach, lungs, or adrenal glands. Most people present with it in one organ if they’re lucky, but over their lifetimes, a small percentage get all three.”
His mouth is hanging open. “Jeez. Did you have all three?”
I shake my head. “The one I had was in my stomach. They call it a gastrointestinal stromal tumor, or a GST.”
“Did you have to do chemo or radiation?”
“The kind of cancer I have doesn’t respond well to either, so they do surgery. They removed part of my stomach along with the tumor, and I have to take this gross medicine with all these nasty side effects like muscle pain, headaches, and weird rashes to keep it from coming back. But it doesn’t always work the way it should. With Carney’s triad, you can have a tumor in one place and have it removed and then years later another will grow somewhere else.”
His eyes flit to my stomach reflexively, as if searching for evidence of what I’ve been through, and then back to meet mine. “But you’re cured, right? It’s gone.”
I shake my head. “There is no cure. There’s always a possibility it’ll come back. I have regular follow-up visits where they monitor what’s happening with radiography so they can see if new tumors are growing.”
“Why didn’t you come back to school after that?”
“By the time I was able to, I’d missed half of sophomore year. I ended up doing homeschooling. It was much easier than having to go back to school and have everyone talking about me, or worse, not talking to me because they don’t know what to say. People are weird about stuff like that. Even the people you’d never expect to behave that way. So, I did classes online and had to check in with an advisor once a week, which was actually great because I got to work at my own pace, and I was able to take the GED and graduate months before I would have normally.”
He bobs his head, expressionless. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. But then his brow furrows, and he says emphatically, “That’s ridiculous. That people act that way, I mean—not what you chose to do. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I probably would have chosen not to go back either.”
“Sometimes perspective comes in ugly wrapping paper.” I arch my back slightly, eyeing him. “You’re not going to look at me differently now, right? Because you promised.”
“Nope.”
I smile. “Okay, good.”
“But you’re fine now, right?” he presses.
Oscar hastily slides open the rear cab window, and we’re snapped back into the moment.
“The battery died and as luck would have it, Dale is the last human on Earth with a flip phone. Seriously—you should consider donating that back to 1995,” he says offhand to Dale, then turns back to us and adds, “At the last check, it appears like they’re just up ahead off the highway on this service road. They haven’t moved since we started tracking them, which can’t be good because it means they either ditched the phone or they’re dissecting my car like a frog.”
Jack and I got so caught up in each other’s stories that I nearly forgot why we’re here. And of course, none of us thought to check if they sold chargers at the gas station. Dale picks up speed as he exits the highway. My parents would freak out if they could see me right now. Yes, this is ill-advised and reckless, but it’s also a total rush.
Oscar passes Jack’s phone back to him and says, “Oh, and by the way, right before it died, you got a text from someone named Natasha.”
“I did? What did she say?” he asks a little too eagerly.
“I didn’t read it,” Oscar tells him, which makes sense because he was slightly preoccupied with trying to track his stolen car. “We should probably come up with some sort of plan for if the guys are still there when we find the car.”
“A plan would be good,” I agree.
Jack shoves his phone in his rear pocket. “It’s about the element of surprise, and in the worst-case scenario, being prepared to offer them something they want in order to get what you want.”
“I have that Target gift card you gave me,” Oscar says.
“Probably not gonna be enough. Do you have a watch or anything?”
“Do people even wear watches anymore?” I ask.
“I have a watch. It’s a digital Casio waterproof to a hundred meters.” Oscar proudly holds up his wrist to show us.
“The thing is: we’re not all that intimidating, but we need to give off the impression that we are,” Jack says, reeling him back in.
“All that. Yes. But how the hell are we gonna pull that off?” Oscar asks.
We drive down a dark, narrow road that runs parallel to the highway. The truck hits another pothole, and one of the green bags awkwardly topples onto my leg, dislodging the tie and falling open. What looks like a human head peeks out of the bag. Jack and I simultaneously cry out and recoil.
The truck hits yet another bump, and the head fully emerges, along with naked shoulders.
“Holy shit!” Jack yelps and instinctively puts his arm across me protectively, as if that might do anything.
You know that moment they say happens when you face the prospect of imminent death and your entire life flashes before you? Yeah, that doesn’t actually happen.
Instead, I immediately start visualizing the grisly way in which I am potentially about to meet my end. A guy that looks like Santa is going to chop us all to bits and bury us in a shallow grave behind some scrub brush on the side of the 101. I haven’t even done anything worth doing with my life yet.
And then the body slumps sideways, revealing the face. The eyes are painted on and the hair is fake.
It’s a mannequin. Jack and I start laughing. I lean forward and peel the rest of the bag away to reveal that it is more specifically a mannequin head and torso. No legs.
“That’s creepy,” I say. “What do you think he does with them?”
“Maybe he’s building an army for the zombie apocalypse,” Jack offers.
He loosens the tie on another bag and pulls it down, revealing yet another mannequin. There must be at least ten bags back here, and they all seem to have the same dimensions. A smile spreads across his face, and he lets out a laugh.
“I have an idea,” Jack says.
Chapter 10
Jack
Saturday, June 5, 1:58 a.m.
This reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite films ever.
“Did you ever see the movie Home Alone?” I ask Hallie.
“The one where the kid’s parents go on vacation and forget him, and he has to defend his house from the two incompetent burglars? Of course. Why?”
“Do you remember the scene where he sets up all the mannequins to make it seem like there’s a party going on so the burglars wouldn’t think he was there all by himself?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes dart to the bags, and then her face lights up as she realizes where I’m going with this.
I yell through the slider window to Dale, “Hey, what’s the story with all the mannequins?”
“Did they escape? I worried they might break loose and create a panic.” He chuckles. “My friend makes things out of them—mermaid sculptures for gardens, coffee table bases, all sorts of wild stuff. She’s very creative. Got a deal on them for her from a warehouse that was going out of business.”
“Would you mind if we liberated the rest of them? It’s dark, so I’m thinking if we set them up around the truck, it’ll look like there’s more of us and we’re not messing around.”
Dale snorts. “I like how you think. Have at it. If you dig in the corner there, you’ll probably find some old ball caps. Feel free to throw some of those on them to make them look more authentic.”
Hallie and I set to work taking the mannequins out of the bags and setting them up along the perimeter of the truck bed. We discover Dale’s stash of ball caps in the corner under a folded furniture pad. The first one I pick up is red with a white cross on it and says “Orgasm Donor” in thick, black letters. Classy. There’s no time to be judgmental, so I stick it on a mannequin head and grab a few more. The sayings on them are equally creative. It’s like he bought out the clearance section of a Spencer’s Gifts. Judging by the contents of his truck bed, Dale clearly has a sense of humor.
I toss a few caps at Hallie, and she follows my lead. There are just enough of them to go around. I turn a couple around backward for good measure because in every gang movie I’ve ever seen, there’s always those one or two guys who wear them flipped around, too cool for shade. As long as it’s dark and no one has stellar nighttime distance vision, it’s definitely passable. The only problem is, the mannequins are still naked. Nothing says “quake with fear” like potentially having your ass kicked by a bunch of nudists in suggestive baseball caps.
“How about if we put the garbage bags over their heads like ponchos?” Hallie suggests. “Maybe in the dark they’ll look like commandos.”
“As opposed to going commando,” I joke.
By the time we’ve finished, we’ve successfully created the illusion that we are an army of badassery descending on these car thieves to take back what’s rightfully ours. Hallie and I fist bump. Dale pulls down Lucille from the gun rack overhead and places it on the seat between himself and Oscar, ready to spring into action. Even I wouldn’t want to screw with us.
Suddenly Oscar shouts excitedly from inside the cab, “There it is!”
We turn around and peer through the windshield. I spy the giant Buddha head peeking back at us from the driveway of a small, dilapidated house. There are at least eight other cars crammed onto the driveway and on what was once a lawn before the drought and neglect took over. Dale turns off the headlights as we slowly make our approach.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone around. The car is parked in plain sight as if we pulled into the driveway and left it there ourselves. It’s anticlimactic.
Dale stops the truck and cuts the engine. Somewhere, a dog barks and pierces the silence.
All four of us cautiously and quietly get out of the truck, looking around in all directions for any signs of life.
The car appears to be in perfect condition—no dings or scratches or signs of forced entry. Oscar walks up to it and peers in the driver’s-side window. He tries to open the door and finds it unlocked. He lets out a loud sigh of relief and ducks in, then turns around and straightens up, holding up his phone like a victory prize.
“Phone’s here. No keys,” he reports.
We spread out and check the perimeter around the car—on top of the tires and underneath—to see if they were dropped, but no luck. Oscar pops the trunk, and we follow him anxiously as he opens it. Our bags are there, seemingly intact and untouched. Weird.
“At least all our stuff is here,” Hallie says as she unzips her bag, checking it. Oscar shakes his head and starts pushing our things to the side and then lets out a sigh of relief.
“Thank god.” He pulls out a black urn etched with paw prints—it easily could have been a cookie jar for dog treats—and pops open the lid, checking to make sure its contents are intact.
The dog starts barking again, but this time more urgently, and moments later the front door to the house cracks open. The porch light flicks on, drenching us in light. A guy stumbles out. He’s in maybe his midfifties and wears a faded flannel shirt over an old white tee, a pair of gray sweatpants, and stained construction boots that look like they’d hurt in an ass kicking. In fact, it’s hard to tell in the light, but the stains might even be patches of dried blood. Or ketchup. Hopefully ketchup. A loud, yippy Chihuahua spills onto the porch in front of him, baring its teeth at us.
“Settle down, Princess,” the guy says to the dog in a warning tone, then cups his hands over his eyes like a visor. “What the hell’s going on out here?”
Oscar closes his eyes and whispers repeatedly to himself under his breath, “This is just an audition. This is just an audition.”
“We should be asking you the same thing,” Hallie pipes up, squaring her hands on her hips.
“You stole my car,” Oscar says boldly, immediately in the scene with total focus. He’s convincing as hell.
And now the guy really does not look happy. “I didn’t steal nothin’,” he says. Princess starts barking furiously. “Get off my property.”
My heart is pounding a mile a minute. I’m fueled by pure adrenaline. “Not until you give us bac
k our property,” I say in what I hope is an equally intimidating tone. The guy turns his gaze on me, laughing. He doesn’t take us seriously. Not that I blame him. We’re not exactly what you’d call threatening.
“Like I said, I don’t have anything that belongs to you, so you best be on your way back to the middle school or wherever it is you came here from.” He crosses his arms, puffing out his chest and standing his ground. “Tired of you punks knocking on my door all hours of the night.”
Sticks and stones. I’m not naive. I know things could easily change on a dime here. But…he doesn’t appear to have a weapon, and given the circumstances, he seems like the kind of guy who might have pulled one out by now if he had it. There’s also only one of him and four of us. Twelve, if you count the mannequins. God, I’m hoping he’s counting the mannequins. I roll the dice that my instinct is spot on.
“Oh yeah? Then how do you explain his car sitting in your driveway?” I ask as I notice Hallie out of the corner of my eye reach into Dale’s truck and grab Lucille off the seat. She holds it up toward her ear like she’s at bat. She looks very convincing, but what the actual fuck is she doing?
“Who told you to come here?” the man asks with a jerk of his head.
“We’ve been watching you for a while,” Oscar says, channeling every detective confronting a suspect in every crime drama ever. This seems to make the guy nervous.
Hallie takes a step forward. “If you hand over the keys, we’ll happily be on our way with no trouble. Otherwise, we’re not making any promises. Don’t make the rest of us have to come out of the truck.”
She doesn’t seem the slightest bit worried that he might call her bluff.
The guy’s eyes flick behind her to the silhouettes of bodies in the pickup truck bed. He looks them over suspiciously. They are rigid and unmoving, which makes perfect sense because they’re made of fiberglass and plastic. He boldly takes a step toward the truck, squinting for a better view, and for a moment I worry he’s going to walk over there for a close inspection. Then Dale moves the mannequins ever so slightly as if they are getting restless and are champing at the bit to jump into action. He throws his voice from behind the truck bed, dropping it an octave. “Just say when, and I’ll take him out.”