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  “Well, Cynthia likes you, and Darren likes you. He’s always saying what a little wild man you are and that you’d be really cool if you could just chill out some. And he’s like old enough and popular enough that he could make your life total cake, but you don’t ever give him a chance.”

  “He only pretends to like me because of you, Neecey, and by the way, I don’t need him looking out for me.”

  “God,” she sighed, “he just can’t keep that mouth of his shut when he’s high, can he?”

  “No, I guess he can’t,” I said, deciding to cast one out there to see if I caught anything. “And if Razor’s anything like Darren, you could find yourself in a fat, hairy mess.”

  Neecey slowly raised an eyebrow and said, “What the hell are you talking about? They don’t even hang out.”

  Actually, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. It was as if there were two different conversations going on at the same time and I wasn’t up to speed on either one.

  “Nothing,” I said, “I was just saying.”

  “Well, don’t worry, it doesn’t have anything to do with Darren either.”

  It didn’t have anything to do with Darren, it didn’t have anything to do with me, and it didn’t have anything to do with what she either did or didn’t do with Razor. In fact, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything at all, except Neecey wasn’t leveling with me, and that sure as hell didn’t add up. I was at a loss, and if I so much as hinted that Razor had set me up for a clock-cleaning at tryouts, Neecey would flip out and I’d never find out all the things this didn’t have a damn thing to do with.

  “I wasn’t saying that, Neecey.” I hit the soft-talk again, hamming it up. “Shit, I don’t know what I was saying. What happened at the home is still sort of weighing on my mind. You know about that, right?”

  “Huh? No. What happened?”

  Her answer didn’t make sense. “Darren didn’t tell you that the cops came by his house on Sunday morning to ask about the sign at the retirement home getting tagged?”

  “No, he must’ve like forgotten or something.” Neecey pinched her fingers to her lips and rolled her eyes. “But it was tagged? For real? Ohmigod, that’s like so lame!”

  It wasn’t lame, it was retarted, and I was almost positive she already knew it.

  “Yeah, grandma was upset and shit, so I had to hear all about it, you know how she is.” I was conning Neecey so well that I was actually getting into it. “Then, like later on, I stopped by the arcade and ran into Darren. I’m surprised he didn’t say anything to you—that’s weird.”

  “Why’s it weird?”

  “No reason, just you guys see each other practically every day and he has a big mouth and all. Whatever.” I shrugged. It was all so easy; there was nothing I could do to blow it. “And like when I saw Razor with Stacy …” Aw, shit. Except for that.

  Neecey cut me off instantly. “Oh, you saw Stacy there, too?” She paused. “She’s the one you have the hots for, right?”

  Now, that definitely didn’t make any goddamn sense. I’d never told anyone about Stacy—not Thrash, not mom, not her, not anybody. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but all of a sudden everything seemed more confused and tangled up than I’d expected. I’d missed something, I must have, and whatever advantage I’d thought I was playing was gone.

  Neecey smiled, a big aha kind of smile. “Oh, now I get it. That’s what this is about, right? You totally have the hots for Stacy, and because you saw her with Razor, it made you feel all jealous and inadequate and everything, so you’re like taking it out on me because he was here.”

  I didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “Jesus, Genie. Why didn’t you just say so?” She perked up now, like she knew she had me and couldn’t wait to finish me off. “This one book calls it affirmation, and says that guys need it because they’re totally insecure about how their little squirts stack up. But don’t worry, except for those massive gunions of yours, you’re like normal for your age.”

  Just who the fuck was she supposed to be, anyway? My sister? My sex-ed teacher? My goddamn social worker? I honestly couldn’t tell anymore.

  “Sure, Razor’s older and bigger and all, but that doesn’t mean his pecker is. You can so trust me on that.”

  I was prone on the ground, bleeding, and she was twisting the knife. I had one move left. “You never answered my question,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What did Razor come over for?”

  Neecey hesitated, as if considering whether or not it was safe to tell me. Then she said, “Razor came over to like ask me to do something for him, but I wouldn’t, so he left. Got that? Good, because that’s all you’re getting. End of story.”

  Yeah, I got it, but it wasn’t all I was getting. And it wasn’t the end of the story; it was only some of it. I dashed out of the living room, into the kitchen, grabbed my backpack, and slammed the back door as hard as I could on the way out. Then I jumped on the Cruiser and set off, so Thrash and I could go somewhere to piece together the rest.

  NINE

  I rode around for a while, going nowhere in particular, trying to figure out why Neecey was giving me the runaround and if her doing so had something to do with the case. I guess driving in circles was the best I could do about it. I wasn’t quite sure where to go or what to do, but that pretty much told me what the next move was, because if you didn’t know what to do around here, then there was really only one place to go. I took the back road by the trailer park to the Circle, hopped off the Cruiser when I got there, and went through the chore of walking it halfway around. Then I jumped back on, off-roaded through about twenty-five yards of landscaping, and pedaled the whole of the mall’s perimeter, casing the sidewalks slowly as I went, keeping my eyes peeled for the signs of a red Puch. If another ambush was heading my way, I wouldn’t mind knowing in advance. I didn’t see anything, though, so I locked the Cruiser to the bike rack by Abraham and Straus, which had an overhang in case of rain. Then Thrash and I went in.

  I snaked through ladies’ fashions, conquered the urge to examine the skimpy lingerie in the underwear department, and then held my breath like a magician in a water-torture chamber as I raced by the perfume counter and out into the mall. All together I had two floors and a mezzanine to cover, “more than seventy stores,” if you believed the directory in the main hall—all of it faux-marble floors, sparkling display windows, and a continuous loop of Muzak that wouldn’t have annoyed you at all if you were either deaf or dead.

  I took the escalator to the bottom floor and passed by Osh Kosh, Kay-Bee’s, and a pottery store on my way to Giorgio’s, an Italian restaurant with full-service dining in the back and a pizza counter in front. I avoided eating there whenever I could, because their dough tasted like it was special-ordered from a Styrofoam factory in China. But lots of other kids couldn’t get enough of the stuff and were always clustered around. And that’s what I was after—a few stoolies to lean on, a couple leads to work over. At any rate, it wouldn’t hurt to try. I wasn’t quite sure who I was looking for or how I’d approach them, but on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in the summer, chances were I’d have my pick of opportunities.

  I rolled up to Giorgio’s and saw the waiters inside crowded around a table in the back, stuffing their faces in the lull between the lunch and dinner rushes. All it did was remind me that I hadn’t eaten lunch. There were a few skinny kids dressed in oversized shorts and T-shirts loafing around the front, but they were only fourth-grade video-game addicts, jonesing for a quick pizza fix before their next half-day session of Dragon’s Lair. I already knew they couldn’t tell me squat, except how to save the maiden or how many quarters they’d swiped from their parents today, so I didn’t waste my time.

  I kept going, past the Gap, Spencer’s, and Chess King, until I reached the fountain near the escalator bank at the center. The fountain—a two-foot-deep concrete pool with a statue of a fat, naked baby spitting water into it—was situated bet
ween the escalators, had a clear view of who was coming and going in all directions, and served as the mall’s unofficial meet-up point. In other words, it drew kids like flies and sucked up loose change. It wasn’t doing much of either right now, though, because there were two teenaged couples sitting on the fountain’s edge, grabbing and pulling and purring at each other and mashing their mouths together and grossing everyone else out so they all stayed away.

  Thrash and I took a seat on the opposite edge of the fountain, our backs turned to the French-kissing four. With all their slurping and the fountain’s gurgling in the background, I started to realize how difficult the case actually was. It was only graffiti, sure, but with no eyewitnesses, no hard forensic trail, I’d either have to catch the perpetrators in the act (too late for that), get someone to rat, force the culprits to confess, or I might never smoke them out. And even if I somehow got lucky enough to discover who they were, a single rubber bracelet didn’t seem like enough evidence to make the charges stick. Worse still, the sources I’d questioned so far were obviously hostile, so the information I’d gotten from them wasn’t totally certain. I had no leads, a few vague hunches, and no one to grill. It was enough to stump anyone.

  Thrash was swatting as many flies on what to do next as I was, so I stood up from the edge of the fountain and walked to the front window of the bookstore on the right. It was called Waldenbooks, named for the book Orlando had given me, and there was a placard just inside the store’s entrance to spell it all out for you, in case you didn’t know. What the placard didn’t tell you was that Walden wasn’t just the title of the book, it was also the name of the pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau had gone to live for two years and two months, all alone in a cabin he’d built by himself. He’d named his book after the pond because that’s where he’d written it, and the pond was named Walden because, at some point or another, that’s what it had been—walled in. Thoreau had pieced that one together all on his own, just like a detective, and I knew he had because I’d read it.

  Orlando and his books, shit. There’d been all this crap about how I was supposed to be the smartest kid in school, but I’d always thought Orlando was way smarter than me. It was like he’d read and remembered everything. He also had this weird thing where he knew the birthdays of all these famous authors by heart, which I found out the time he’d asked me over to his house on my birthday. Even though I had junior peewee practice after school that day and knew mom was getting off work early to take us out to dinner, I said okay anyway, but that I couldn’t stay long.

  His house was awesome. It had like six or seven bedrooms, a finished basement with a sauna, this crazy office with bay windows, a glass den with high ceilings and a concrete wall and a real fireplace, all this new and modern furniture, paintings and sculptures everywhere, and a pool out back that was made to look like a lagoon with a waterfall. I told him his place looked like an art museum from the twenty-first century, and he said that’s what his parents wanted, because they were both architects, and took me upstairs to his room. It was bigger than Neecey’s and mine combined, and it had all this pocked concrete and metal and skylights in the ceiling, which made it look like part Fortress of Solitude, part library, because all the walls were lined with books.

  Orlando knew it was my birthday because I’d told him a couple of weeks before, and he said I was lucky because there were a lot of famous authors born on that day—this guy named Nietzsche, a poet named Virgil, and some other ones, too—so it was a great day to be born. Then Orlando walked over to one of the shelves, pulled out a book, and handed it to me. He said the guy who’d written it was born in July, and that it was one of his favorites, so he was giving it to me as a present. I tried to pronounce the name but mauled it, and Orlando laughed that high-pitched laugh of his and said, no, it’s pronounced Thuh-row, and that I was really gonna like it.

  I felt weird and kind of embarrassed. I’d never been invited to somebody’s house before, or talked about writers or books with someone my age, or gotten a birthday present from another kid, and I realized I was out of my depth. But I was game to play along, so I asked Orlando why he thought I’d like it. He said I’d have to read it for myself and then I could tell him. He warned me it’d be hard at first, but since I was already a genius, I’d figure it out sooner or later. That was the first and only time he ever mentioned anything about that, and although I knew he was busting on me, there wasn’t any spite in it, and we both cracked up laughing.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said thanks, and asked him when his birthday was. He said in early January, but it wasn’t as good as mine, because the only writer born on that day that he knew of was this Italian guy who wrote a detective story about a monastery, but he’d only just become famous in the past few years. I told Orlando he was luckier than I was, because my birthday seemed crowded, but his was practically empty, and that he should write a book, become famous, and even our birthdays out a bit, or at least get off his ass and actualize for a change. He shook his head, sighed, and said that sounded an awful lot like selling out to whitey and we both cracked up again.

  That’s how I’d gotten Walden in the first place, all the way back in fifth grade part one, and by now I’d read the book four times, cover to cover. And Orlando was right; it was hard. In fact, it had like no plot at all, so it was even hard to describe. But if I had to say what it was about, I’d say it was the story of some guy holing up in the woods for a couple of years, more than a mile from his nearest neighbor, kind of like a hermit, only he spent most of his time writing about what he did and what he thought was essential for like a deeper and more meaningful life. The moral of the book was self-reliance. Well, it was about nonconformity, too, but you couldn’t be nonconformist if you weren’t already self-reliant (I read that in the editor’s introduction), and Thoreau went to live in the woods to conduct an experiment to see if he was. Walden never told you straight out if Thoreau was self-reliant or not, but I figured he must’ve been, otherwise he would’ve died alone in the woods and never would’ve been able to write about any of it.

  Thoreau didn’t die in the woods, though, and he somehow managed to write down just about every single thing he thought and did while he was there. He built a cabin, dug and stocked its storage cellar, made a chimney to warm the place in the winter, planted and sowed a bean field and other crops, and he told you how he did all of those things down to the smallest details, even how much they cost him. Shit, that guy actualized his ass off all the time and was never at a loss for anything. Then again, he couldn’t afford to be. I’d read the biography about Thoreau at the public library, too, and it said that a lot of the people who’d known him either didn’t like him or said or wrote all this nasty stuff behind his back, like how short and ugly and confrontational he was, as if he’d been some kind of jerk in real life, or the kind of person who was really tough to warm up to. So it made sense how a guy like that would write about being self-reliant, because if nobody really liked him, then he pretty much had to be.

  But the rest of his book had all this other stuff about economics and railroads and how to observe and study nature and the proper names for things and transcendental philosophy that I was sure I didn’t get. Worse still, all that other stuff sometimes made me think I didn’t understand the book at all. For instance, Walden was supposed to teach you about being self-reliant. Fine, that was pretty clear. But if being self-reliant was the best thing you could possibly be and every bit as great as Thoreau kept saying it was, then I could never understand why he eventually left his cabin in the woods and moved back to town with everyone else, like he did. You know, why didn’t he just stay there? Maybe self-reliance wasn’t really the moral of the story, or maybe I wasn’t reading it right, but that didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me.

  It also didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense for me to be standing in front of the bookstore’s entrance, scouring the tops of bookshelves for the young, dark-skinned giant who clearly wasn’t the
re, when I had more legwork to do. So I snapped myself out of it, turned around, and headed to the cheap jewelry and accessories kiosk on my left. The salesclerk was this big disheveled teddy bear of a woman who was seated on a wooden stool, had her nose buried in a paperback, and looked like she could bake the hell out of a cake. I slid up to the scrunchies, hair clips, and earrings, and ran my eyes over the bangles, spiked wristbands, and beaded friendship bracelets hanging on the rack until I found what I was looking for. I took the rubber bracelet from the retirement home out of my pocket, held it up to the ones for sale, and saw that they were practically identical. I’d expected as much, but detectives had to verify whatever facts they had as best they could, even the really obvious ones. That way you could be sure of what you knew before tackling what you didn’t.

  “Can I help you?” asked the saleswoman.

  “No, thanks, I was just checking something,” I said all cheery and polite as I pocketed the bracelet and turned to go.

  “Um, excuse me,” she called, standing up.

  I turned back, saw her pointing at the $1.50 sign by the bracelets, and knew what she was getting at.

  “This is mine. I brought it with me,” I said.

  “How do I know that?” She smiled. “Can you prove it?”

  “It’s got dirt on it—look.” I showed her the bracelet, pointing to a little brown smudge on the side.

  “Okay, sorry.” She smiled again. “Just making sure.”

  “Is there a problem over here?” a gruff male voice sounded from behind.

  I peeked over my shoulder and saw the tan uniform, thick belt, and child-molester mustache of a mall security guard closing in from out of nowhere.

  “No, no problem, my mistake.” The saleslady waved him off, sweet as could be.

  “No problem, then, you say?” He kept advancing.

  I wondered what the hell was wrong with some people—you gave them walkie-talkies, pepper spray, and a beat to walk and it made them hard of hearing. The saleslady reassured him again that nothing was wrong, and our little party broke up: she got back on her stool, the security guard walked one way, and I went the other. I realized I had to be more careful. Not because I might get ejected from the mall by a rent-a-cop with nothing to do, but because I’d been set up for a hit yesterday and I hadn’t been watching my back. And if a slow-footed, beer-bellied mouth-breather like that could sneak up on me, then just about anyone could, so I had to stay on my guard.