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  From the way he and the others were studying it, they had to be thinking what I was thinking: the size and weight of the rock, the height of the top of the window—it would have to be a damn good throw by someone with a strong, accurate arm to do that amount of damage. Before I’d even finished the thought, the name of a prime suspect popped into my head. He had a strong, accurate arm, didn’t seem to give much of a shit about anyone but himself and his chum Tommy Sharpe, was a punk-ass bully, had set me up at football try-outs, and nearly cornered me twice in the mall. I didn’t know if Razor was a bigot, too, the kind to destroy the property of the only black church in town, but that was for someone else to find out. All I was gonna do was walk across the street and give the man in the black suit a free tip, a lead that would take him, and the cops, I hoped, down to the reservoir, to the front door of the Tuffalo residence.

  I stood up realizing how angry I was. Breaking the window at the black church was just totally fucked up and wrong, and even though it seemed similar, it wasn’t the same thing as Darren and the crew tagging the other church, not by a long shot. Every kid in town knew about Father Paul, even if none of the grown-ups were aware or had tried to do anything about it, and Darren and the crew had only paid him back a little for all the nasty shit he’d done. Eye for an eye, that’s all that was. But, as far as I knew, nobody in the black church had done anything to anyone, so their window had gotten smashed not for something they’d done, but most likely for who and what they were. That was some low-down, dirty bullshit, and in some ways, it reminded me of the retirement home. No one there had done anything to anyone either; shit, they were so old and so weak they practically couldn’t do anything at all. But their place had been vandalized, too, and what’s more, it seemed they were subject to an ongoing series of burglaries and thefts, while nobody seemed to give a damn. I guessed the home and the black church were the same in that way; to the depraved criminal mind they were targets, and that’s all they were.

  I grabbed the Cruiser by the handlebars and walked it toward the curb. Under ordinary circumstances I wasn’t a squealer or a rat, but I’d be delighted to make an exception this one time so the people across the street could have a leg up in nailing the scumbag who’d broken their window. I stopped at the curb and looked both ways before crossing. A blue Ford pickup sped by from the right, followed by a green Honda, and then a white squad car drove up on the left. I glued my eyes to it, to make sure it kept going, only to see the brake lights flash red as it rolled to a stop. The driver didn’t jam on the brakes, the car didn’t skid, and the lights and siren remained dormant. Maybe they’d stopped because they’d seen the same three people on the side of the church that I’d seen and were getting out to find out what was going on.

  I stayed where I was, relaxed and nonchalant, just watching the cop car. The people across the street turned to look at it, too. I was thinking that maybe Father Paul hadn’t been on the phone with the cops or hadn’t gotten a good look at me or hadn’t been able to give them an accurate description, because almost a minute had gone by and the roller just sat there. It occurred to me that Father Paul might not have been able to describe me very well, but the Cruiser, well, the Cruiser was unmistakable. It was the only bike of its kind in town and easy as all hell to pick out. So when the reverse lights finally lit up, the vehicle started backing toward me, and the three people beside the church peered across in my direction, I took all of it as a polite way of saying I should make myself scarce, which I did.

  TWELVE

  I’d never lammed it from the cops before, but I figured now was the time to learn how. It wasn’t so hard. They were in a car, so they had to go around street blocks while I could ride through them, and after some quick turns, a few cut corners, and a couple counts of trespassing through fenceless backyards, they were nowhere to be seen. No sweat. The difficult part was getting home after I’d ditched them, because since the cops were nowhere to be seen, I had no clue where they might be.

  That meant being extra careful, making a lot of unnecessary turns, stopping every once in a while behind a parked truck or a hedge and peeking out from behind to take the lay of the land, and more backtracking than anyone who wasn’t actually lost should ever admit to doing. It wasn’t that I was afraid of getting picked up and questioned by the cops—I’d been through it before and knew the routine, and as far as Saturday night was concerned, I had a rock-solid alibi by the name of Pauline. No, my motives for bolting were nobler than that. If the public pork hauled me down to the station house for a session with a klieg light and a rubber hose, sooner or later they’d have to call mom, and after the warning she’d given me this morning, that would pretty much ruin not only her mood and her day, but also the rest of my summer. So it seemed wiser to avoid them and spare her the unneeded trouble.

  When I finally got home, I chained the Cruiser to the back porch, quietly though, and gave the outside of the house a thorough inspection—staying low, peeking through the windows, keeping my ears open for the slightest sound—because I still wasn’t too stoked to meet up with Neecey the Narc if she was home. I circled the house twice, once in each direction, and found the coast was clear. She was out—big fucking surprise—so I went inside and headed for my room.

  I needed to check a couple of facts in my journal. More specifically, I thought I remembered Darren saying that he’d been with most of the crew on Saturday night, instead of all of the crew, or just the crew, when we’d spoken on Monday. And that’s what I was after, confirmation, something small but concrete to let me know I was on the right track. It wouldn’t exactly blow the case wide open, but if Darren had said it, it would at least strengthen my theory of what had actually gone down.

  I sat Thrash on my wooden desk chair, put my backpack in the closet, shut the door, and stepped back over to my desk. I was just about to open the top drawer when I caught the smug grin darkening Thrash’s face. Yeah, I’d seen that look before, plenty of times, but I’d never found it very appealing. It was the face he saved for when he thought he knew something that I didn’t, or when he was calling me out for trying to pull his leg, or just about anytime I reached for my journal or a book. I didn’t have a clue what had crawled up his tiny plush ass this time, though, and that made me nervous. My skin went clammy, my breath shortened, and I felt a sticky sweat on the back of my neck. Okay, sure, it was a little fucked up to have an imaginary friend at my age, but the idea of an imaginary friend that could turn on you was some pretty sick shit, even for me.

  I took a couple deep breaths and slapped my cheeks a few times to snap out of it, but my hand wasn’t as steady as it could’ve been when I pulled open the top drawer to my desk. Right away I noticed something was off. My Magic Markers were gone—and the key to the side drawer, where I locked up my journal, was on top of the ten-dollar bill grandma had given me, instead of underneath, where I’d hidden it Monday night. My cheeks flushed, my scalp stood up, and I was covered with goose bumps so pointy and sharp that I felt like a blowfish. I had this flash of being ice cold and burning hot all at once, like a Steak-Umm going from the freezer to the frying pan. It took a couple more seconds for the rest to sink in, but when it did, the pressure started building, fast.

  So that was how Neecey had found out about Stacy; she’d been reading my journal! Jesus Christ, that was a new fucking low, even for her. That journal was private, only for me; the only reason I had it was so I could practice expressing what I was thinking or feeling without having to worry about people slapping the cuffs on me, and that meant nobody else could read it. But I couldn’t even have that anymore, not so much as a single thought to myself, without some goddamn head-shrinker or two-faced hench-daughter trying to wring it out of me. That was serious bullshit, because Neecey wasn’t just stealing my stuff, or lying to me, or trying to screw me up on the case. She was messing with my brain now, and there was no way in hell I could just sit there and take it.

  My fingers twitched, my face snarled. Maybe this was it, maybe I
finally had to break with Neecey once and for all—and tell mom. I didn’t want to do it, because, like I said, I might’ve been a lot of things, but a rat had never been one of them. As soon as I’d thought that, I wished I hadn’t, because all of a sudden mom’s lecture from earlier came shrieking back to me, all that talk of snitching and doing the right thing. I’d thought it’d seemed fishy then, but it stunk to high heaven now. Was it just coincidence, or had mom been telling me something without meaning to, just by the way she’d run things together? But if mom had been hinting at something, then maybe it wasn’t just Neecey; maybe Neecey … Jesus, maybe Neecey had been acting on orders!

  My chest and back felt hot, itchy, and tight, as if a heavy wool sweater, two sizes too small and fresh out of the dryer, had been yanked down over my shoulders. Hadn’t mom and Neecey started ganging up and really putting the screws to me right about the time I’d started my journal? Couldn’t I see they’d begun acting that way because they knew what was in it? Was my newest counselor in on it, too? That made sense; the journal had been his idea in the first place, and I’d never once suspected that it might be a scam to get me to give up information I wouldn’t have told him or anybody else. Mom, Neecey, my counselor—were they all in on it together?

  I heard dry, uneven breath rattling in my lungs and my head felt steamy and light. Of course they were in it together. Shit. What did I think they were talking about during those closed-door portions of my monthly progress meetings, when mom and Neecey went in to talk to my counselor while I waited outside? Did I actually think they were all patting themselves on the back about what a swell kid I was, or how nicely I was coming along? What an idiot I’d been! All that time they’d been scheming, plotting the mind games and espionage they’d use to keep me down, right under my goddamn nose, playing me like a chump.

  I wanted to hurt someone, bad, and I would have, but no one was around. I must’ve figured that smashing something was the next best thing, because before I knew it, I heard the door to Neecey’s room clattering open and I was standing next to her closet. I had to destroy something, something good, something it’d hurt her to lose, because she hadn’t just ignored the KEEP OUT sign on my door and gone into my desk and read my journal, but she’d torn what little privacy I had to shreds, and I could never put it back together again, not with all the rubber cement in the world.

  I was fuming, but it came to me: I’d burn one of her scrapbooks—those sissy, construction-paper albums that she filled with stickers, doodles, sayings, magazine photos, pressed flowers, and pictures of her and her friends that they all wrote in and signed. She’d been making them since about fourth grade, and she kept a pile stashed in the back of her closet, tucked safely away. One of those would do nicely; they had all her memories, crushes, roller-skating parties, fair-weather friends—you name it, it was in there. If I couldn’t have any thoughts to myself, then neither could she, and if I destroyed one of those, it’d blast a big fat hole in Neecey’s world the way she’d blown the bottom out of mine.

  I went to turn the doorknob, foaming at the mouth, growling, wanting nothing more than to open that door and exact my revenge, but my hand froze up, wouldn’t budge. I tried to push the thought out of my mind, focus on the task before me, but I couldn’t. My chest heaved, my ears pounded, and my muscles clenched so hard I thought they’d snap off the bone, but I just stood there, strangling the doorknob to death, not moving.

  I was thinking about Cynthia, about hiding in the closet, Manning the Lookout, and my shoulders slouched forward and my chin fell to my chest and I felt weak and queasy, like I’d collapse if the doorknob weren’t holding me up. If I ransacked Neecey’s closet now, she’d never let me near it again, let alone inside. I’d either have to give up on vengeance or on Manning the Lookout, and no matter which way I played it, I only stood to lose.

  I should’ve been able to whip that door open and wreak a whirlwind of havoc without batting an eyelid, but I felt torn in half and realized there was more to it than just forfeiting my private peepshows. Neecey reading my journal behind my back was the same thing as me watching Cynthia naked without her permission; you could argue that shit till you were blue in the face, but there was no getting around it. And wrecking something of Neecey’s to settle the score—on purpose, knowing it was wrong—would make me exactly the same kind of bottom-feeder as Neecey, mom, my counselor, and whoever the hell else was involved in the town-wide conspiracy to break me down to nothing.

  My hand slipped off the knob and fell limply by my side. I dragged myself back into my room, closed the door, and flopped facedown onto my bed. I was pissed off and shaking and thwarted and felt humiliated and guilty and betrayed, and if I didn’t know any better, I would’ve said that, for the first time in my life, I even felt ashamed. Not for having seen Cynthia naked, I guess, but for how I’d gone about it. If you wanted to show something private to someone, you had to invite them to see it, simple as that. And even if Cynthia had found out that I was Manning the Lookout and was okay with it after the fact, she’d still never invited me to do it and probably never would, so I’d only been fooling myself to think it was all right. The same went for Neecey. I’d never told her she could look at my journal, but she’d taken it upon herself to do so. And she’d have to answer for that. I didn’t know when she’d answer for it, but I hoped it’d come sometime sooner than the apology I knew I owed Cynthia—the one she’d never get.

  After a few more minutes of doing the dead man’s float on my mattress, I lifted my face out of the pillow, picked myself up, and moved Thrash over to the bed so I could sit in the chair. But I didn’t look at him. He was in one of his I-told-you-so moods and it was better not to get him started, especially when he was right. I’d never stopped to think my journal wasn’t just for me to express myself and work my way up to actualizing, but that it was also a record of what was going on in my head, evidence that people could use against me if they ever got hold of it. I guessed Thrash had either known or suspected it all along and that’s why he’d always been dead set against it. But that didn’t mean I had to let him chew my ear off now.

  I reached into my desk, put the key to my desk drawer on my key chain to prevent further breaches of security, stood up, and looked out my bedroom window. Just beyond the window fan and the small maple tree right outside, the sky was a smear of dark blue and charcoal, like a smudged finger painting. The nearby maple leaves hissed in the wind, the bough-tips swayed and shook, and I thought about all those nights I’d squirmed through the window and hunkered down in the crux of its branches. I wasn’t allowed out after dark, but I sometimes let myself out on my own recognizance anyway, to get some air, watch the stars, read with a flashlight, or just to take a break, especially when I’d had all I could stomach of Pauline’s noisy grazing and guffawing and talking out loud to keep herself company. Sometimes I just felt like I had to get out or I’d crack, and the tree outside my window was the closest and easiest place to sneak out for a breather when I needed one.

  That’s what I needed now, because I felt nervous and tense all over. I tucked Thrash under my arm and went downstairs to the kitchen, where I grabbed some cleaning products from under the sink, a roll of paper towels from the counter, and then stepped outside to the back porch. I’d been on the Cruiser in the rain twice within the past couple of days without wiping it down, and I knew for a fact that someone else’s grubby hands had been all over it, and the thought of that made me sick. I probably could’ve waited until later to clean it, because more rain was coming, but working on the Cruiser had a way of relaxing me, and since it was mine, I enjoyed taking care of it.

  I plopped Thrash down on the lawn chair next to the beer cooler, drenched a paper towel with window cleaner, and set to work on the front wheel. I did the wheels first, because cleaning along and between every individual spoke was the kind of drag that I usually wanted to get out of the way as fast as I could, and once I’d finished them I’d do the rims, the rest of the chrome, and then th
e frame. That’s how mom’s new boyfriend, Craig, had taught me to clean it, and he was a mechanic, so he knew about those things. He’d also given me some pointers and an old manual on bicycle repair he’d had lying around his shop while I’d been building the Cruiser in the spring, but I’d collected all the parts from the junkyard and put them together myself.

  I couldn’t really describe how it felt—having built my own bike from nothing, making a masterpiece out of other people’s garbage—but it didn’t take long for me to figure out what it meant. I’d actualized like a madman for a month and a half; I wasn’t tied to the same four or five crummy blocks between the trailer park and the strip mall anymore; I could wake up in the morning and get to and from school without having to worry about what kind of bullshit was waiting for me at the bus stop twice a day; I could go further from home than I’d ever been before; and no matter where I went, I kept my chin up a little, because I was traveling in style. To anybody else the Cruiser probably just looked like a totally sweet ride (which it was, easily one of the sweetest rides in town), but to me it was more than that. To me the Cruiser was like a new way of life.

  It didn’t change much with the kids at school; they just gave me all these confused and jealous looks, as if seeing a kid like me on a ride like that was some kind of riddle or paradox. But I’d expected as much from them. It was different at the beach this summer, though. There the Cruiser was a conversation starter; kids would come up and ask me about it, where I got it, how much it cost, if they could try it out, and I’d tell them about how I built it myself and lie about how easy it’d been, although I restrained myself so I didn’t brag too much. When I broke it to them that nobody was allowed to ride the Cruiser except me, they usually took it pretty well and didn’t pester me too badly, and they asked me to play Frisbee or Nerf football anyway, so I generally wound up hanging out and goofing off with other kids for most of the day, which was something I never did around here.