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  I’d been thinking about that a lot more lately—how far out of my way I had to go to feel like a normal kid. Most of the kids I met at the beach were tourists or day-trippers from the city, so they didn’t know anything about me or what people said I was supposed to be like, and since the beach was in a different town from the one I lived in, there was no way for them to find out. They didn’t know I had emotional problems, a past, and a bad reputation, so they didn’t treat me like I did, and they didn’t have any reason to stare or back away like I was a total nutjob either, because Thrash wasn’t there to clue them in. No, I didn’t take Thrash to the beach, but it wasn’t like I’d planned to leave him behind or anything, because I hadn’t. There just wasn’t enough room in my backpack for a big beach towel, sunscreen, a packed lunch, and him, so when I went to the beach, I went alone.

  Maybe I’d gotten lucky. Maybe I’d needed a break from Thrash, too, without knowing it, just like having the Cruiser and going down the Shore had given me a break from everything else. I didn’t know and really couldn’t say. All I knew was that everything seemed different, felt different, when I was down the Shore on my own, like some weight had been lifted from my shoulders and everything kind of rolled off. In fact, I hadn’t been in an argument or a fight all summer long. Go figure.

  But I wasn’t dense enough to think that it had changed me in some way, or that all of a sudden everything else would be chill and easy like that, or that it would last, because I knew it wasn’t real. Well, the Cruiser was real, but everything else wasn’t. It was only vacation, just a few hours amongst strangers where I felt like someone else, and at the end of each day, I had to come back home.

  THIRTEEN

  It was still hotter than a cookout in hell, but the Cruiser was all spruced up and I figured I’d give it a quick lube while I was at it. I wheeled it around to the side of the house, under the kitchen-sink window, next to the big metal cube of the heating and cooling unit. I had to lube the Cruiser over there because WD-40 stained concrete when it dripped, and mom didn’t want the back porch to get all ruined. She said it was murder on weeds, too, and since we had a few at the base of the house on that side, she told me to do it there, kill two birds with one stone, and keep everybody happy. Yeah, sometimes it seemed that mom was too on top of things just to wait tables or tend bar and that she could do something else, but those were the cards she’d been dealt and she was only playing them. It couldn’t have been the easiest hand in the world, or the most fun, but that’s probably what made her so good at stacking the deck against me.

  That got me wondering. What if mom had let me take the Cruiser down the Shore on my own this summer not as a reward for straight A’s and good behavior like she’d said, but to get me out of the house long enough and often enough for Neecey or her to snoop around in my journal? What if they’d been doing it for months without me catching on? What if mom knew everything I’d written in it, too? Everything I had to say about teachers, classmates, counselors, what Thrash and I shared between ourselves, the way I’d started looking at girls in the past year, tailing Stacy down the road to full-on ass-obsession, or me hunched over myself in a closet giving the Lookout one hell of an Indian burn while I watched my sister’s best friend getting undressed through the slats like a sex offender? Jesus, that was just too goddamn humiliating to contemplate. I’d never be able to look mom in the eye again. Worse still, how would I ever be able to trust her?

  Screw that shit, I couldn’t think about it, I already had enough on my mind. I set Thrash on the heating unit, leaned the Cruiser against the wall, squatted down, and sprayed the chain in short, quick bursts. I did the handbrakes after the chain, put the cap on the WD-40, and sat on my butt under the kitchen window with my back against the wall.

  Just as I started to get comfortable and clear my head, I heard the front door open and close. Fucking Neecey. I could hear her inside, going up and down the stairs, opening doors, moving through the house, and I knew what she was doing—she was making sure I wasn’t home.

  Sure, we used to have good times together, look out for each other, stay up past curfew together when mom was at work, build pillow forts and tell ghost stories with flashlights under our chins or make Jiffy Pop and watch Saturday Night Live, drink too much soda and rock out with the stereo cranked up, or just screw around and laugh our asses off at nothing, and I’d thought we were close. Shit, I even used to look up to her, because she was pretty and popular and had so many friends and was good at school and always busy with this, that, or the other thing, but still found time for me, and made all of it look so goddamn easy. But she’d changed, and I barely knew her anymore. She was turning into this phony, two-faced, social-climbing snitch who knew she was hot and flaunted it everywhere, even in front of her own brother. She put on airs and was hardly ever around and didn’t know what the hell was going on in my life because she never bothered to ask anymore and told on me to mom and hung out with the cool rich crowd and was too good for us now and didn’t give a rat’s shaved nut about me.

  I suddenly had a feeling for Neecey that I’d never had before, one far more disturbing than anger, and if I saw her, I knew I’d do something I’d never come anywhere near doing in my life, and that was punch her dead in the face. Yeah, I was as close to the bottom as I’d ever been, but I got the feeling I could still sink a little lower. So I stayed right where I was, the way I was, trying not to move or think, only breathe, with my head down and my wrists tucked under my armpits, so she wouldn’t see me. I stayed that way even when I heard her come downstairs, into the kitchen, open the back door, step out onto the back porch, and then go back in and close the door.

  The sky above was gray like a stone, and that’s exactly what I was, a cold, mute stone leaning against the side of the house, with no sense, no emotion, easy to overlook, and that’s the way I wanted it. I heard her puttering around inside, opening the refrigerator, pouring something in a glass, and then closing the door. Just knowing she was in the vicinity was making me boil over. But all I had to do was keep myself balled up tight, stay quiet, remember to breathe, and wait it out, either for Neecey to leave or go upstairs, and then I could make a break for it on the Cruiser.

  If I’d had a long stick, a bandanna to tie my stuff in, and my ten-dollar bill, I could’ve hit the road right now and never looked back, “Born to Run” style, just like the Boss, or the old man. I’d ride the Cruiser as far away from here as I could, maybe go to the city and run out of money in four seconds and have to pawn my ride and fall in with junkies and dirtbags and then wind up in a gutter somewhere, with my teeth all broken and brown, half my head caved in, and a hypodermic needle hanging out of my arm, or I’d get taken in by some pimp with rings on all his fingers, who’d dress me up in mesh T-shirts and spandex shorts and slap me around and rent me out to wealthy middle-aged degenerates, male and female alike, who’d give anything for a few minutes alone with a ripe young boy, because those were things that happened to runaways and everybody knew it because crap like that was always on TV. No, it wasn’t as appealing as Tom Sawyer laying low in a cave with that Becky chick, or moving to a cabin by a pond far off in the woods, but it’d almost be worth going through all of it to see mom and Neecey freaking out when they’d realized I was gone: worrying, crying, pulling their hair out, calling the cops, putting my picture on milk cartons, losing sleep, fearing the worst, blaming themselves for all they’d done wrong, and wishing for one last chance to apologize and make it up to me and have me come home again—which was the one thing I’d make sure they never got.

  But my ten-spot was upstairs and Neecey was inside, so I couldn’t get to it, and there was no way in hell I was gonna run away from home with a stuffed frog and no backpack and empty pockets on top of it all, because that was just suicide. Besides, that money had come from my client, and I hadn’t finished the job she’d paid me to do, so if I just took off without finishing it, that’d be like stealing, which I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much if my client
wasn’t also my grandma, because you’d have to be a hot runny piece of shit to steal from your own grandmother, and that’s all there was to it. But I’d never steal from her, and I’d never run out on her either, because she didn’t run out on us. No fucking way. She’d jumped right into the breach when the old man split, picked up all the slack, practically moved in, so there were still four people in the house pretty much all the time instead of just mom, Neecey, and me sitting around, scratching our heads, trying to figure out what the hell was missing from the picture.

  When the old man up and split, Grandma was already retired and lived in this small apartment about half an hour away on her Social Security checks and the pension she got from working in that factory all those years, and she was supposed to be kicking back, taking it easy, learning to knit or whatever, and enjoying her golden years. But she tossed all that aside, stayed over three or four nights in a row, and looked after us when mom was at work, because mom had to quit her night classes and take a second job tending bar to pay the bills. So grandma took care of the house and cooked and cleaned and stayed up late to talk to mom when she was down and hugged all of us a lot. She was small and stern and shrewd and full of energy and more fun than having one of those inflatable bouncy chambers in your very own bedroom. She let us stay up to watch Fantasy Island and always had candy in her pockets (good candy, not that poison she tried to feed us now) and made pudding or baked cookies or cupcakes from scratch and tickled us and taught us how to dance like they did in the old days before good music was invented and showed us how to cheat at cards and told us secrets and read us fairy tales or Where the Wild Things Are, which was my favorite then, because Max was a bad little fucker and I always respected that.

  And when I got suspended a few years later, she came over every day to watch me and didn’t keep her distance as if I were toxic waste, like everybody else did, and never gave up on me and brought me the detective books to read so I’d have something to do besides feel how empty and meaningless time could be, and she talked to me about them, quizzed me on them, showed me how to pick up the clues as I read and how to think things through, and made me grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch and played practical jokes on me so I’d feel normal, like putting her teeth in my glass when I wasn’t looking so I’d almost drink them or hiding Thrash so I couldn’t find him or sneaking up behind me and kissing me loud on the ear or making me hide our neighbors’ newspaper under the bushes because she didn’t like them, and she was always telling me that I was her special little man, no matter what anyone said, I was just a handful like my grandfather, that was all, or timing how fast I could run from our house to the corner or seeing if I could jump up to touch that tree branch or that one, hugging me whether I could or couldn’t, and forcing me to tell her that I loved her.

  But then she started dressing funny, like her shoes wouldn’t match or she’d have on one knee-high but not the other, or she’d talk to people who weren’t there, in a language that wasn’t really language, and she’d get confused a lot and leave the iron on or the oven on or the car running, so that she almost killed herself or us ten times, and couldn’t find her way back from the store or called the cops at two A.M. because some prowler had stolen the dentures that were still in her mouth, or she sat up all night on the sofa with a lit candle in her hand, saying they were coming, and we had to put her away, although all of us together could barely afford it. Since then she’d steadied a little, but was in and out more and more and was clearly getting worse, so it was only a matter of time, and mom could hardly talk about it without breaking up and someday soon we’d lose her, either the lights would be on but nobody would answer the door or the lights would go out and that would be that.

  But until that happened I’d never run out on grandma or give up on her, and I’d visit her two or three times a week like I always did and look after her the best I could, because who else was gonna do it, fucking pencil-necked Bryan? Bullshit. Grandma was a bigger man right now in her wasted state than he could ever hope to be. Fuck that, if anybody was going to take care of her, I was gonna do it. She was my grandma. I was claiming her, even if nobody else would. And if somebody thought that was fucking retarted or that she was fucking retarted or that anybody else was fucking retarted just because they had problems or couldn’t answer when they were called on in class or because they were old and their brains were dying, then they shouldn’t sneak around misspelling it on the front sign under cover of night like fugitives from special-ed, but have the balls to come up and say it to my face, so I could relieve them of their lips and teeth.

  No, I wasn’t gonna run from this; there was too much riding on it.

  I was gonna stay right where I was, see it through till the end, and make goddamn sure that somebody paid.

  I was still crouched down on the side of the house when I heard Neecey turn on the water in the kitchen sink and rinse out her glass. I was just on the other side of the wall, maybe three or four feet away, directly beneath the window where she couldn’t see me, and it took about a thousand years for her to clean that glass, or at least that’s the way it seemed, because it was absolute murder to keep myself still. My insides were taut, jumpy, and drawn, like the spring-loaded arm of a pinball machine pulled all the way back, ready to blast forward. I heard the window lock above me shift and the panes scrape upward. The aluminum siding felt like a cheese grater against my back. Mom was right about one thing—I’d need deodorant soon, because I could smell myself a little, and it wasn’t the fresh, clean scent of Irish Spring. The doorknob to the back door turned and the door squeaked open. Fuck. Neecey was coming out to check around the sides of the house; I just knew it. Any second now she’d turn the corner and see me and then I didn’t know what would happen, but whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good. If I were younger, I would’ve covered my face, thinking that if I couldn’t see Neecey, then she couldn’t see me. But I was too old for that shit. So I just took a deep breath, lowered my head, and closed my eyes.

  The seconds ached by like hours, but nothing happened. Then Neecey said, “Hey, Mrs. Murdock,” and while the sound of her voice was like metal fingernails raked across a chalkboard, what she said was oddly soothing. Mrs. Murdock was Cynthia’s mom—that’s who she was calling. Neecey hadn’t seen me, she hadn’t come out to check the side of the house; she’d just opened the window and the back door to get the cross breeze because it was always stuffy in the kitchen in the summer. Everything loosened up, and I suddenly felt so relaxed that I could’ve fallen asleep. But I wasn’t in the clear just yet.

  “Hey, babe,” Neecey chirped. “Yeah, I just got back.”

  Great, this was just what I needed. I was trapped into hearing one of Neecey and Cynthia’s girlie gossip sessions, and the way they went at it, I could be here all day.

  “Okay, I guess. It’s like we both knew it would happen sooner or later, with him going off to college and everything.”

  It sounded like they were talking about Gary, and my only hope was that he’d dropped her like a water balloon off the Empire State Building.

  “By the way, I totally told you he was seeing Jessica Whitmore. Yeah, he told me, but like who couldn’t figure it out with all the pizza deliveries she’s been getting lately?”

  Nice one, Gary—giving Neecey a taste of her own medicine. All of a sudden I was almost sorry to see that wood post go.

  “Meat lovers!” Neecey screamed and laughed. “Ohmigod, Cyn, you’re a total slut!”

  As far as I knew, Cynthia had never even held hands with a guy, so if she was a slut, then I was the pope.

  “Darren? Uh-huh, I told him, but he already knew. Not really. He said he’d started hooking up with Jessica about the same time, so he didn’t think it would be fair to like have a canary on me, or hold me back from finding someone new, because he was totally leaving anyway. I know, right? That’s what I’ll miss about him most, I guess. He’s just, I don’t know, he’s always been like so decent.”

 
; If you asked me, Gary letting Neecey run around with Darren wasn’t decent—it was stupid.

  “Yeah, we talked for a while, said what we had to say and all, promised we’d still be friends, and that was like it.”

  Fucking Gary. He’d had a chance to twist the knife as they called it quits but punked out instead.

  “No, hon, I feel totally fine, seriously. I’m not like melancholy or anything. It’s like I’ll miss him, but it was time, you know? Yeah, I hope so. He was my first, Cyn, and he was totally gentle and he always did everything he could to make things easy for me and I’ll always be completely grateful for that, because a lot of guys are total selfish pricks and he could’ve been that way, too, but he wasn’t.”

  I wondered what that was worth—the gratitude of a two-timing fink.

  “Totally. Uh-huh. Maybe I was lucky, because he’s like older, more experienced, and way laid-back and all. But your first is always special, ask anybody, even if he’s like this grodie skeezer, and once you’ve had yours, you’ll completely know what I mean. Which reminds me …” Neecey’s voice faded, and I couldn’t hear her. She had a habit of walking in and out of the kitchen while she was on the phone, twisting herself in circles so that the cord wrapped around her waist, which was probably what she was doing.