Faster now—Bree heaves her bombs out the window, and I haul the second bag up from the floor, dumping more artillery into her lap, Bree swearing, fumbling. A smash of broken glass—one of the paintballs must’ve hit a window. Trace is laughing, yelling something.
Flash of a porch light turning on ahead, a woman stepping outside in a white bathrobe, clutching the collar closed, grabbing our attention for an instant—
Then we’re over the curb, up onto the sidewalk, hurtling at a stunned face in the headlights. Reflective patches on the man’s ski jacket lighting up like phosphorescence, hand trailing a leash in midair, the dog at the end lost in shadow—
Trace jerks the wheel and thump, we’re back in the street, fishtailing around the corner, burning rubber, the stink filling our noses. Trace floors it to the stop sign, gasping, “Hol-y shit, hol-y shit,” then takes us left, faster, faster down Oak until town fades to woods, until we’re officially on Anson Pond Road and away.
We can breathe again. And once we can breathe, we can laugh.
“—shit, man, I really thought—”
“—didn’t even see him—”
“—they called 911 or—?”
We ride the adrenaline high through the night, going over it again, rehashing the details until it feels like legend, like Ricky Sartain or Dabney Kirk, but this time, I’m part of the telling, clamping my hands to my knees because I don’t want anyone to know I’m shaking with reaction.
Trace takes us over the Derby line—nothing but overgrown pasture, woods, quiet houses set far back from the road—then follows a different system of twisting roads into Pender again. The clock in the dash reads 8:32. Our laughter dies down a bit at a time, and Perfect Street’s on my mind: the woman in white coming out onto the porch, fist at her throat; the man in the ski jacket, almost roadkill, taking Fido out for one last sniff-and-pee around the neighborhood before settling in for the night, until we came roaring along like Death with a six-cylinder engine. What if Trace hadn’t turned the wheel in time? What does it sound like when a ton of fast-moving steel slams into living tissue and bone? But all I say is, “Wonder if we hit anything good with the bombs.”
“You hit somebody’s front steps.” Kincaid speaks from the turned-up collar of his coat. He’s been quiet tonight, but he still sounds steady enough, like he won’t be losing any sleep over the dog man or the splattered mailboxes.
“Really?” Bree laughs. “That’s awesome. I was throwing them so fast I couldn’t see where they landed.”
“You know we made their year, right? The Perfects?” Trace rests one hand on top of the wheel. “We gave every Man of the House an excuse to bust out their power sprayers and tool sets tomorrow and talk manfully over the fence to the clone next door about beefing up security. Then they can go blow money at the hardware store on motion-sensor lights and fencing and shit, and their Martha wife will get all tingly and give them their annual Valentine’s Day lay four months early because they’re such a good goddamn provider.” A pause, then: “I should go home.” Followed by, “I don’t want to go home.”
Silence. Sage leans forward. “You can come to my house.”
“Nah. Your parents hate me.” No argument from Sage. The mask sits on the center console now, smiling blindly at the roof. “I’d better.” Trace nods a little. “Just to check in. Then I’ll drop you guys back at the park.”
No one speaks. I settle back and wait, my makeup feeling itchy and thick, pores starved for air.
I’ve never been to the limits of Pender before. It’s a lot like what I saw of Derby, hinting at some long-gone past before the paper mill, when people must’ve made their living farming out here. Leaning fence posts, faint moonlit outlines of barns and equipment sheds.
Trace’s place is an old farmhouse sitting at the top of a sloping driveway, with a huge Quonset hut barn and possibly the biggest outdoor light I’ve ever seen mounted above the haymow door, spreading the whole dooryard in a flat, artificial green glow. I see a tractor, a chicken coop, lots of pasturage behind. “One sec,” Trace tells us.
“Babe—” Sage.
“Leaving it running. See?” Trace climbs out, key ring swaying in the ignition.
We watch as he walks up the driveway. Dogs—looks like hundreds—explode from the darkness, barking their heads off, leaping and jerking at chains, tails lashing around, answered by Trace’s booming “Shut up.” Apparently, he’s their human, because they sit immediately, whimpering and wriggling as the door bangs shut behind him.
Time ticks by. A lot of time. Kincaid reaches over and turns off the engine.
“He said he’d be back, right?” I scratch at my makeup.
“It’s his mom.” Bree stops, meeting eyes with Sage, the first time I’ve ever seen her defer to Sage for permission.
“She’s different,” Sage finishes.
“Shocker.” I wait. “How different?”
Moon snorts as he opens the last beer. “Like totally bizarre.”
Kincaid speaks to the windshield. “She used to be the Sunday school teacher over at First Presbyterian. Sweet Ms. Savage, everybody called her. Always brought her own Bible to church with her because she said it helped her feel closer to God.”
“Were you in her class?” I say, but he doesn’t seem to hear; he’s back in storyteller mode.
“For a long time, Sweet Ms. Savage really was sweet. She directed the Christmas pageant. Ran the bake sales. Always had Trace by her side, making change or handing out tracts. Suit, loafers, side-parted hair, the whole ventriloquist dummy look.”
“Come on,” I say, but Bree shushes me.
“It was the kids in the congregation. They just kept getting worse. Mouthing off, acting up, no respect for the church. People say they broke her spirit. Sweet Ms. Savage went sour. Started talking to herself, quoting the Bible all the time. Old Testament stuff, fire and brimstone.”
I look up at the house. The curtains reflect the greenish hue of the outdoor light, the panels pressed right against the glass like some gale-force wind is blasting nonstop inside.
“Then little Billy Berwick brought a dirty playing card to church. Kept flashing it at his friends during the lesson, under the desk, you know. ‘What do you have there, Billy?’ Ms. Savage said.” Kincaid’s impression of her voice is high and prim. “‘Nothing,’ he said back. ‘Well, perhaps you’d like to share this nothing with the rest of the class,’ she said. So he held it up for everybody to see, right there in the church basement. And it was bad—I mean bad. Like, triple X.”
“Oh, shit,” Moon says.
“Yup. She snapped. Grabbed that Bible of hers and just started whaling on him, whamwhamwham. Knocking him out of his desk, stomping him while the other kids tried to pull her off.” He props one mud-coated sneaker against the dash. “Finally, the pastor heard the screaming and ran downstairs. Had to put her in a choke hold until the ambulance got there. Church fired her, of course. Nobody’s seen her much since then.”
We’re quiet a second, then Sage cracks up. “You are such a liar! His mom never taught Sunday school—where’d you hear that?”
“I don’t know,” Bree says. “Trace is starting to make a lot more sense to me now.”
Kincaid nods slowly. “I speak the truth.” He picks up the mask, peering through the eye holes at the night.
We all jump when the front door of the house bangs open. “—yeah, yeah, okay. Okay. Okaybye!” Trace clomps down the steps, the dogs going nuts again, but this time he does a kind of presidential crowd greeting with them, petting heads, getting slobbered on—“Hey, buddy, hey, bubba, how you doing”—leaving them barking and wagging and wanting more as he jogs back to the car.
“Anybody want some jerky?” He’s got a big square of it wrapped in tinfoil, homemade stuff that smells like spices and smoke. Nobody speaks up. “Okay. That’s cool. More for me.” He eats it as we go.
Tonight, we follow Kincaid.
We all agree to go straight home after Trace lets us
out at the park, to wash the evidence from our faces and lie low. Still, when Trace’s taillights flash, taking Sage wherever they go for privacy at night, and we hear Kincaid’s wheels hit the parking lot, Bree and I look at each other. And there’s no question. It’s now or never.
We’re smart about it, pulling up our hoods to hide our painted faces, waiting until his board sounds distant before we follow, edging up our pace a little at a time, afraid of losing him.
Ahead, Kincaid passes under streetlights, taking the same route Bree described to me on the bus that morning. Down to the corner of Maple, a right onto Summer. We try to hurry without running or tipping him off to our footsteps. It’s like I’m cursed with it now, this need to know where he comes from, as if it will somehow be the key to everything: why he clouds the truth with urban legend, how he almost made me believe in the Mumbler the other night, just for a moment.
A rattle as he hops off in one of the dark places, moving through a side yard bordered by hedges. We keep low, hustling after him, boxwood raking our clothes. The hedges end, and Bree stops so suddenly that I run into her back. “Where is he?” she hisses.
Ahead, I can make out the shape of a garage, another backyard. I listen to the night sounds, cars passing down on Main Street, people probably heading home from the football game. “He’s hiding. Has to be.” Nobody could disappear that fast. Why would he hide? I could understand him jumping out from behind a tree, trying to scare us, pay us back for stalking him, but instead he’s trying to throw us off his scent.
I narrow my eyes, trying to pick him out from the shadows and shade trees, the same way his face appeared in the marsh woods that day. Search for the planes of cheekbones and forehead—the skull shape, and how appropriate, painted like he is tonight, not a woods elf but a headhunter, watching us from the bushes, features framed by long hair.
“Do you see him?” Bree asks.
There could be something there, in the brambles dividing the property lines. Too motionless to be human, too tall and bent, like an alder tree choked by vines. I think of the marsh, the shape on the opposite bank, the soft sway of something like hair among the branches. Think of my closet door. Open. Then closed.
“No.” I step back fast, catching her sleeve. “He’s gone. Let’s go.” Because all I want to do is get out of here, my skin cold and rigid, and I don’t want her falling even one step behind.
Bree isn’t one to be pulled, but she must’ve picked up on some of what I was feeling back there, because she doesn’t shake loose until we’re safely back on Summer.
Thirteen
HE GETS TO me in my dreams, the man with the dog. Our car, like a skidding ice boat, sailing over the curb with no sense of impact, no sense of time except for the endless stretch of my horror. His featureless, light-blasted face floats before the windshield, and there’s little sense of the others around me—Bree, Sage, all peripheral—all of us bracing for impact, a contraction that squeezes me down into a fetal position beneath my comforter, where I wake, neck and shoulders aching with tension, head pounding, not sure I’m back in reality until I hear Ma’s laughter from the kitchen.
I’m almost sick with it at breakfast on Monday morning, my generic squares taking on milk fast as they sit untouched. Dad’s already gone; Ma moves around me, a hum of one-sided conversation that I can’t seem to grasp.
I didn’t expect to feel this scared. Going back to school makes it all real again, somehow. It rained yesterday and I didn’t go out. Both parental units had the day off, a rarity, so we made a real Sunday of it, lounging around eating and watching the Pats beat the snot out of the Jets, while I did everything I could to avoid local news and social media, not wanting to know what people were saying. It hits me now. We could get caught. We really could. What if the cops gather up the scraps of water balloon and dust for prints, tweeze fibers, run them through the lab? We should’ve worn gloves, hairnets, been smarter. I wonder if any of the others are doing this, dying of dread over breakfast?
At the bus stop, Sage has her usual Pop-Tart, winking at me as I come up; she’s taken Trace’s flannel back, and the hem bags past her coat. Bree looks the same as always—knew she would—and Hazel’s busy with Toy Blast on her phone. “Did you look it up?” Bree asks softly.
I shake my head, really afraid I might barf. She hands me her phone, the video clip from Sunday morning’s local news report already cued up.
“A street in Pender was vandalized last night during the town’s annual homecoming festivities. . . .” Footage of various houses on Perfect, siding splattered with Halloween-colored paint; a broken pane of window glass; a close-up shot of one of our bombs, frozen to the pavement overnight, the shredded balloon fluttering in the wind like a tiny flag of surrender. “Police are looking for the driver of a vehicle eyewitnesses say drove through the neighborhood firing paintball guns from the windows, and nearly struck a—”
I hand the phone back, my lungs limp, wasted as that balloon. Bree doesn’t notice, an enigmatic half smile back on her lips as she puts her phone away. “God. Trace is going to be insufferable today.”
“Ha. Yeah, he is.” Sage examines the sprinkles in the pastry glaze. “Did Landon text you guys at all?”
My “No,” blends with Bree’s “Like I talk to Landon.”
Sage shakes her head at her. “Right. Your ‘everybody hates me’ delusion.”
“It’s not a delusion. It’s keen observation of other people’s words and body language. Called being perceptive. Probably means I’ll be an extremely successful artist someday.”
“Or a paranoid cat lady. Since when do you care about art?”
Somewhere, in another galaxy far, far away from the hellish guilt dimension I’m writhing in, the hoodies are coming, shoulders hunched, sleeves tugged over their raw knuckles to fend off the cold.
“Since always. I just suck at it.” Bree reaches down, straightening Hazel’s hood, which was tucked into her coat collar. Hazel makes a vague shooing motion without looking up. “So, what was Landon’s issue? Drugstore ran out of Essie Wicked and she needed an emergency mani before school?”
My gaze is locked ahead, seeing splattering paint, the stunned face of the dog man. Green Hood stares at me as he goes by, saying nothing, apparently speechless since Bree neutered him with a pair of pruning shears in front of a live audience.
At school, everybody’s talking about it, dividing the population into kids who think it’s hilarious and kids who don’t, primarily ones who live on Perfect or streets like it. I pass through it all, glazed over, telling myself that the flashing arrow pointing at my head is a by-product of no breakfast and too little sleep, that Ma will not be seized by a craving for Jell-O Jigglers, discover the boxes missing, and put it all together in a stunning mental leap. Nobody knows. Nobody is looking.
I don’t see anybody worth seeing until lunch. Bree, Sage, Trace, and—Kincaid, unbelievably. Packaging reduced by 35 percent: no board, no coat, hands in his jeans pockets. Trace goes straight to the hot-lunch line and pretends to muscle his way in front of the last guy in line, starting a laughing shoving match that ends in a teacher swooping in, cawing.
Kincaid splits off and drops onto a stool across from me at the flotsam table. His T-shirt’s black, faded, worn over a white thermal undershirt, the collar of yet another shirt visible under that. He reaches across the table, and for a split second I think he wants to hold hands; my arm moves a quarter of an inch before his fingers land and start tapping a signal on the laminate between us. The close call with total mortification coats me in panic sweat, making me force the cheese crackers I was holding into my mouth all at once. He watches with interest as I struggle to chew. Hard swallow, sip of iced tea, then I rasp out, “You actually came to school.”
“I wanted to hear what people were saying.”
“Do your teachers remember your name?”
“Did you like your fortune?”
I give him a long look, showing him that I’m onto him, his whole shti
ck; that maybe Bree isn’t the only one who spends their whole day defending personal barricades. I know he was hiding from us in the darkness last night, just out of reach. Which, if you ask me, is way weirder than the stalking ever was. “I think it was meant for you.”
“You’re still not seeing it.” He leans forward, and I’m close enough to make out sunbursts around his pupils, some cracks of gold in those murky irises—and we’re right back in the marsh, him holding me, me reaching out with my eyes shut. “No mistakes in this world. Not for us. You opened that fortune; it was meant for you.”
Us—as in me and him? “You don’t even know what it said.”
He scratches his elbow, pushing up his sleeve to examine a scab there. Road rash; I guess even he wipes out on his board sometimes. “Destiny. Responsibility. Pretty soon, the universe is gonna test you, and you better be ready.”
I drop my hands to the table, staring. That cookie was vacuum-sealed; I remember the puff of vanilla-scented air escaping when I ripped it open. It takes me a second to say, “Oh my God. You know what you are? I just figured it out.”
His whole face lights up—genuine, intense interest blasting away the perma-stoned soothsayer act—and for the first time I see how deeply bored he usually is, with school, maybe with all of us.
Of course, everybody chooses that moment to reach the table, trays and soda cans touching down. “Fellow vandals,” Trace greets us.
“Told you.” Bree looks at Sage. “Insufferable.”
“I can’t believe we’re sitting at this table again.” Trace bites the head off a flaccid burrito, his tone low. “Anybody ask you guys about it?” We all say no. “Nobody acting suspicious?”
“Everybody’s suspicious,” Bree says. “Not necessarily of us.”
“Nice. Should’ve heard Spicer in shop this morning.” Trace screws his face up, sobs out, “‘They broke my mom’s birdfeeder, man!’” We laugh. Trace nods at me. “Anybody ask Clarabelle about the other thing?”
The Missing Season Page 10