“Of course! But only to the right people,” he says. “And if you’re a friend of Julie, you’re the right people.”
Claire slides out Hiruko the Goblin and gazes up at Julie. “Do you know this one?” she asks, trying not to sound too eager. “I hear it’s like The Fly—”
“I’ve seen it,” Julie says, her eyes sparkling, and Claire feels a jolt of excitement. “It’s buck wild. We can totally rent it if you want. And watch it at my place.”
Claire nods. “Double feature with Aliens, right? I still need to see it.”
Julie shakes her head and presses her hand to her heart. “An absolute travesty. We have to fix that.” Then she pulls on Claire’s wrist, drawing her deeper into the store. “Come on, let me show you what else he’s got.”
They weave through the shelves, the air dim and cool and filled with dust. Frank is settled back behind the checkout counter, flipping through an issue of Fangoria. “You let your friend pick!” he calls out as they glide past him. “She’s obviously got better taste!”
“Shut up!” Julie yells back, dodging a cardboard standee of Bill and Ted.
They wind up in a narrow back room. Classic, says the hand-lettered sign, and there’s a small shelf that just says Hitchcock! in big block letters.
“Oh, man!” Claire cries out.
“I remember you liked my Vertigo shirt,” Julie says, looking sideways at Claire. “Frank’s got everything, even the hard-to-find ones.”
Clare kneels down in front of the shelf, sweeping her gaze over the titles. Julie’s right: There are movies here that would never in a million years show up on the shelves of Blockbuster. Under Capricorn, Jamaica Inn, even The Ring—some of these look like bootlegs too, but Claire’s pretty sure Hitchcock’s entire oeuvre is represented.
“Pretty righteous, huh?” Julie leans against the shelf. Claire looks up at her, grinning.
“I can’t believe all these movies are here,” she says. “In Indianola! Of all places.”
“I know!”
Claire stands up. She’s never met anyone who knows as much about movies—not even Josh, although he pretends to.
Julie pushes a hand through her messy hair, her hip jutted out at an angle. Her black nail polish is already flaking off her nails. And she’s grinning at Claire like they’re best friends.
She really is the coolest person Claire has ever met.
CHAPTER
Eight
JULIE
At the end of her shift on Friday, Julie calls up Mr. Vickery, the man in charge of the committee that deals with the monsters and the treaties. She put her report in about what had happened at Claire’s house a few days ago and never heard anything back. She knows they can be slow, but someone’s life could be in danger here. Claire’s life, in particular. They’ve been talking pretty much every day since they hung out watching movies at Julie’s place, and Julie has dreams of playing the hero, sweeping Claire off her feet like in those romance novels Julie’s mom is always reading. Not that a phone call is nearly so exciting.
The line rings a couple of times and then Mr. Vickery himself picks up—Julie stole his direct number out of her dad’s address book.
“Mr. Vickery?” she says, hoping she sounds like an adult.
“Yes? Who is this?”
“My name is Julie Alvarez. I’m Victor Alvarez’s daughter.”
“Ahhh.” His voice softens. “Yes, little Julie.”
Julie scowls at that.
“How’s your mother?”
“She’s fine. I was calling about the report—”
“Yes, I received it. Troublesome stuff.” He doesn’t sound troubled. “Have there been any other issues? Any—” Papers shuffle on the other side of the line. “Have there been any deaths or injuries since you filed it?”
“No.” Julie twines the phone cord around her finger, irritated and impatient. “I just wanted to see what you were going to do about it. Before someone gets hurt.”
More shuffling. It sounds like static.
“Well, Julie, the committee’s looking into it. These things take time.”
“Take time! The monsters are violating the treaties and coming into town.”
“I realize that. But unless there’s proof of a serious, immediate threat to a human, we prefer to keep our distance. I’m sure you’re aware of the delicacy of our situation here in Indianola. There aren’t really any precedents for things like this, you know. And we’ve found that keeping us separate from them is the wisest course of action.”
Julie glowers. She’s heard this tone of voice before—from her father. It’s his politician’s voice, the one he uses when he’s trying to let her down gently. So she knows what Mr. Vickery is saying. They aren’t going to do a damn thing.
She thanks him and hangs up the phone. The clock on the wall clicks over to six o’clock. Quitting time. Julie sighs. Claire can’t hang out today and she doesn’t feel like going home, doesn’t feel like sitting up in the attic staring at a TV screen and marinating in her own thoughts. Maybe Lawrence is home. He doesn’t usually work in the evenings, and she’s been meaning to talk to him anyway. She wants to know what the hell’s going on with Audrey.
Julie leaps out of her chair, not bothering to tidy the scatter of papers strewn across the desk. She goes across the hall to the break room and clocks out. Out front Forrest is leaning over Brittany’s desk, trying to flirt. Julie ignores both of them and steps out into the hot, steamy evening.
She picks up a hamburger for herself and a blended Coke float for Lawrence—it’s his favorite and a tried-and-true bribery item—at the K&L Root Beer Drive-in. Then she speeds through town so her food doesn’t get cold.
Since Lawrence still lives with his mom, his house doesn’t look like he belongs there, with its pale blue siding and the rosemary and jasmine growing along the porch. But Julie knows that Lawrence sticks around because Aunt Rosa has a lot of health problems, and he doesn’t want her to be alone. His dad fled the picture years ago, and when his mom reverted to her maiden name, Reyes, Lawrence changed his last name to match.
Julie rings the doorbell. The porch looks the same as it has since she was a little girl and used to come over here on Sunday afternoons. She hopes Lawrence is actually home, and not out on some creepy date.
Footsteps shuffle around inside the house, and then the door opens. Lawrence peers out through the screen.
“What are you doing here?” he asks in a whisper.
Julie holds up the blended float. “Wanna hang out?”
“Is that from K&L?”
“Sure is.”
Lawrence slides the screen door open. “Mom’s sleeping,” he says. “So you need to be quiet.”
“I’m always quiet,” Julie whispers. “Besides, I don’t want to stay in the house. I thought we could go shoot targets out back, like we did when we were kids.” She pauses, grinning. “Unless you had other plans.”
Lawrence rubs at his forehead. He seems a lot older than nineteen. “Why would I have other plans?” He’s trying to play it cool and failing.
Julie just shrugs, though, and steps past him, handing him the blended float. The house is quiet and neat like always. Lawrence keeps it clean. She plops down at the kitchen table and eats her hamburger while Lawrence lurks over by the refrigerator, slurping at his float.
“Haven’t seen much of you lately,” he says.
“Haven’t seen much of you lately.”
Lawrence doesn’t meet her eye. “I’ve been working.”
“That what the kids call it these days?”
“You’d know. You’re the kid.”
Julie shoots him an irritated look, then takes a bite out of her hamburger. “Fine. I’ll go first. I’ve been hanging out with Mrs. Sudek’s granddaughter. Claire.”
“Mmm.” He pauses. “Be careful.”
“Be careful with what? We’re just friends.” She doesn’t look at him, though. “You’re the one that needs to be careful, if you’re
seeing Audrey.”
“I just don’t want you to get all heartbroken again.”
Julie takes another bite of her hamburger. He certainly knows how to weasel out of a conversation. She knows he’s thinking about what happened with Kimberly Diaz last year. To be fair, it was an emotional disaster of epic proportions. But Julie’s managed to get over it, mostly, and besides, Claire is different. She’s from the big city.
“It’s your turn,” Julie says. “What’s been keeping you busy?”
Lawrence shrugs “Pretty sure you know.”
“Oh come on! Since when do we keep secrets from each other?” Julie tosses a wayward tomato onto the burger wrapping. “Audrey Duchesne? Really?”
Lawrence scowls. “Yes, really. Why’s it so surprising?”
“Because you’re a nerd and she’s a cheerleader.”
Lawrence rolls his eyes.
“Seriously, what’s going on? Did you ask her out?”
Lawrence hesitates. Takes a drink from his float. Then he sighs and sits down at the table with her. “She asked me out, actually. The day after we saw her at the arcade. Just—called me up, out of the blue.”
A chill crawls down Julie’s spine. “How’d she get your number?”
“Same way anyone else would. It’s listed.” He leans back in his chair. “Are you jealous or something?”
Julie makes a gagging noise. “Of you? Hell no. Audrey is—she creeps me out, is all.”
“The grunge girl hates the cheerleader. You’re such a cliche´.”
“Don’t call me a cliche´. And I didn’t say I hate her. I said she creeps me out.”
“And why exactly does she creep you out?”
Julie falls silent. She chews her hamburger. Lawrence stares at her from across the table. It’s true, she can’t say why; only that something seems, well, wrong with her.
“I think she’s just trying to play you,” Julie finally says. “So you won’t bust her drinking at the Stargazer’s Masquerade this year.”
Lawrence laughs and shakes his head. “I can take care of myself, Julie.” He swirls his float with his straw. “So how’s work?”
There he goes, changing the subject. She lets him, though. She doesn’t want to talk about Audrey anymore.
“Another monster came by Claire’s house.” She pauses to grab a couple of fries. “I really think something’s going on. The committee’s not doing anything about it, though. Typical.”
“The monsters don’t hurt people unprovoked,” Lawrence says. “There’s no reason they’d start now.”
Julie finishes up her hamburger and wipes the grease from her fingers. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” She looks up at Lawrence. “So, target practice? I bet you need it, for cop school.”
Lawrence keeps sitting there, looking annoyed.
“It’ll be fun,” Julie says. She doesn’t add that she thinks the concentration will help distract her from thinking about Audrey, or about the monsters, or about Claire and the idea that their scents intertwine in a cosmically interesting way. What the hell does that even mean?
“I don’t want to wake Mom up.”
“What? Because of the gunshots? You know it’s like a ten-minute hike down to the target spot.”
“Fine.” Lawrence gives a sigh of defeat. Just like an old man. Yeah, Audrey’s definitely using him for boozing purposes.
Julie grins. “Excellent! Go get the guns. I’ll meet you round back.” She balls up the wrapping from her hamburger and tosses it in the garbage. Lawrence disappears into the mysterious fathoms of the house and Julie goes out onto the back porch. Even though it’s late in the day, the sun hasn’t set, which means the air is still hot. At least the target spot is shady.
She plops down on the wooden swing that Aunt Rosa keeps out on the porch as she waits for Lawrence. Another relic from her childhood. She used to try to flip over the top when she was a little girl, but Lawrence always hated that swing. His father made it for his mom during one of his sober periods, and Julie understands now that Lawrence dismisses it as a bribe. Which it probably was.
The back door opens. Lawrence steps out with a rifle and a box of bullets and two pairs of safety goggles. His cop gun is tucked into the holster he wears with his uniform. Dork.
“Can I shoot your pistol?” Julie asks immediately.
“Absolutely not.” Lawrence hands her the rifle. “You’re familiar with this one. I don’t want any accidents.”
Julie pretends to be annoyed, making a big show of hemming and hawing. But really, it’s part of the tradition of target practice. Lawrence always has to stick to the rules. It’s comforting that even if he’s dating Audrey, that much hasn’t changed.
They step off the porch and head to the back of Lawrence’s property. This house has been in his family for ages, on his father’s side, and so even though Aunt Rosa raised Lawrence here more or less by herself, really the house and land and everything belong to Lawrence. Which is kind of weird, because even though he gave up the deed, Lawrence’s dad is still alive. Uncle Randy. Julie doesn’t know him, just has a vague memory of a tall, rangy white guy smoking cigarettes on the back porch, the silver glint of a beer can always within arm’s reach.
She’s pretty sure Lawrence’s obsession with rules is part of his quest to become an inverted image of his father: His father’s the negative, he’s the photograph.
A breeze picks up and rustles around the trees. The path leading down to the target is really just a strip of worn-away grass, nothing official. Julie’s been coming down here as long as she can remember. It’s her one concession to growing up in a redneck town like Indianola. She might refuse to do stock shows or wear cowboy boots, but she’ll shoot a gun at an empty Coke can.
“Do you really think the committee’s not going to do anything about that monster coming into town?”
Julie glances over at Lawrence in surprise. “You’re the one who says not to worry.”
Lawrence shrugs. “I don’t think the monsters are going to hurt anyone. But I don’t like the committee just sitting on their hands either. We can’t just let a treaty violation slide.”
It’s nice to know that Lawrence agrees with her on something for once, even if it probably is just because he loves rules.
They keep walking until the trees clear out and reveal the big dirt backstop Lawrence installed during one of his fits of safety obsession. Julie remembers him backing his truck up to the tree line and piling dirt into a wheelbarrow to cart it over. It seemed like a lot of work, but she knew he did it so stray bullets wouldn’t vanish into the woods.
The big metal box of targets sits in its usual place in front of the backstop. It’s been there long enough that grass has grown around it so that it look like an extension of the woods. Bits of broken glass sparkle in the sunlight. They’ve never kept real targets out here, just old glass bottles and aluminum cans that Lawrence rinses out and stores in plastic bags in his garage.
“I’ll set them up.” Julie leans her rifle up against a tree and bounds over to the box. The latch is nearly rusted away. She flips it open, pulls out five Coke bottles, closes the box, and lines them up in a row. When she turns around, Lawrence is loading his gun, the muzzle pointed toward the trees. She goes over beside him.
“I haven’t been out here in a long time,” Lawrence says. “They have an actual shooting range down at the station.”
“Oh yeah? Has your aim gotten any better?”
Lawrence gives her an annoyed look. “Actually, yes, it has.”
Julie grins. “You go first, then. Let’s see what you got.”
“Put on your eye protection.”
Julie makes a face at him, but she does as he asks, and when he hands her a pair of earplugs, she puts those in too. She knows from experience it’s not worth arguing with him about it.
Lawrence lines up his gun and fires off five shots, one after another. Three of the bottles explode, shimmering in the sunlight.
“Damn,” Lawrence says.
>
“Ha! Brutal. I bet I can get them.” Julie grabs the rifle and loads it and lines up her shot. It’s been forever since she’d last come out here, but the motions come to her like a sense memory. She pulls back the bolt and squeezes the trigger. The rifle’s explosion sets her ears to ringing, but at least the bottle’s nothing but bits of fragmented sunlight in the grass.
“Got it!” she shouts.
“Yeah, I can see that.” Lawrence doesn’t sound too impressed.
Julie lines up and takes her next shot. The last bottle tips off the chest and rolls a few feet before stopping, unharmed.
“That counts.” Julie straightens up.
“Hardly. Set your gun down.”
Julie smirks at him but does as he says. Lawrence walks up to the box and picks up the bottle Julie missed as well as an assortment of Coke cans and lines them all up. Over the muffle of her earplugs Julie can make out the chattering whine of cicadas up in the trees and the distant buzzing of grasshoppers. The sounds of heat, the sounds she’s always associated with this place.
“So tell me more about this thing with Claire.”
Julie goes still. “There’s no thing,” she says. “We’re friends.”
Lawrence pulls his gun out of its holster and looks over at her. “You said that. I was asking about the thing with the monsters.”
He fires off three shots and three Coke cans go flying off into the dirt.
“Aren’t you going to shoot at the rest of those?”
“Figured I’d leave them for you.”
Julie picks up her rifle and peers through the scope. “They keep showing up at her house. Twice now, like I said.” Bang. She misses completely. “The last one, it was saying something about astronauts.”
“Astronauts?”
Julie looks through the scope again. The Coke cans loom distorted and huge in front of her, glittering in the sunlight. Everything feels distorted lately. “And it said me and Claire are cosmically interesting.”
Bang. She fires before she’s ready, so she has a few deafening seconds to prepare for Lawrence’s reaction to that statement. Figures that she actually gets that last bottle. Glass sparkles everywhere. She puts her rifle down, staring straight ahead.
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