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  Now came the hard part. Thrash was in my desk chair as usual, while I was sitting on the bed. I stood up and switched places with him. I didn’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to do. I propped him up on the bed pillows and took a seat in the chair, staring down at my ankles and the laces on my sneakers. This was a big moment for us. I exhaled and raised my head to look at him. His eyes were small and beady, his smile was bitter and hostile, and with the way his skinny green arms were folded across his round yellow belly, he kind of resembled a gargoyle, or a demon.

  “You can’t just wish me good luck, right?” I said.

  Thrash was quiet. I didn’t like the sound of that. A thin line of sweat broke out on my forehead.

  “C’mon, no final words of advice?” Nothing. I rubbed my hands back and forth on my knees; my heart swelled and shrank. Still nothing. He was giving me the silent treatment—my punishment for leaving him behind. Of all the things I hated, he knew I hated that the most.

  “Fucking say something.”

  I waited. Thrash’s eyes were fixed, immobile, as if he were looking beyond or through me. I started shaking and sweating, and I suddenly felt like tearing his little green ass to littler green shreds. But I didn’t have the time to spare. My neck felt heavy and stiff. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Eat shit,” I said. I stood up, grabbed Thrash by the shoulders, whipped him around, and slammed him facedown into the pillows.

  That didn’t take as long as I’d thought, but it was somehow worse than I’d expected. I stumbled into the bathroom, turned on the water in the sink, and threw cold water on my face. My insides felt sticky and black. Nobody was on my side; nobody believed in me, nobody cared, not even Thrash.

  I could’ve killed a couple more minutes, but I couldn’t wait anymore. I went downstairs, checked all the window and door locks, and took the biggest and deepest breath I’d ever taken. Nah, I wasn’t anywhere near being on the jazz like Hannibal from The A-Team; I was jumpy and jittery and just barely keeping it together. Calm. I had to stay calm. I exhaled, let it all out, shook the stiffness from my arms and legs, rolled my neck, cracked my knuckles, and set myself. It was time. Before I left, I took the kitchen phone off the hook, in case mom called from work, so she wouldn’t be able to tell that I wasn’t where I’d promised her I’d be.

  I walked out the front door, said no good-byes, and didn’t look back.

  FIFTEEN

  A watch would’ve been a good idea, to keep track of time and all. But I didn’t own one and never wore one, so the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. All I had was the heavens to let me know the hour, and that didn’t work out so well because I’d gotten a later start than I’d expected, and by the time I’d crossed the Circle, trekked to the southeast corner of the deserted mall parking lot, and made it up the dirt trail that led to the fence, it was already good and dark.

  It had turned out to be a warm, clear night with the kind of slight, pleasant breeze whispering through the treetops that gave you goose bumps after a day of pounding thunderstorms. A few dim stars were blinking to life in the violet-black sky, and on the other side of the fence, a solemn thicket of woods and underbrush was the only thing standing between the reservoir and me.

  There was a syrupy overripe smell oozing through the air and the rotting remains of four abused bikes locked helplessly to the fence-post. I sized up the ten-foot barbed-wire fence in front of me; everything was spooky and still. I could still turn around, I thought, go back to my room, look Thrash in the eye and try to explain to him how I’d punked out, report to grandma tomorrow that the case was too much for me and give the money back, wash my hands of Neecey as she became the black sheep of the family for a change, and then bitch and moan about it in my journal for everyone else in the house and the goddamn world to read. Or I could climb that fence, land on the ground with both feet, take none of the paths diverging in the woods because there weren’t any, forge my own, and let the chips scatter and fall wherever they goddamn felt like it. Because once I’d passed this point, there’d be no turning back.

  I clawed my way up the fence until I was near the top, then stretched one arm after the other over the three rows of barbed wire and clung tight to the top pole. I did what amounted to a dip up so my torso wouldn’t get snagged or cut, and flung my legs up and over to the right like a gymnast—swinging them upward, bending at the waist, twisting over the barbs, readjusting my hands in midair—but as soon as my feet hit the other side of the fence, they didn’t catch the links, but slipped straight down. I lost my grip, fell backward, landed with a soft splash of mud on my ankles and shins, and directly onto my butt, which instantly felt cold and wet.

  I realized pretty much immediately that I hadn’t put on underwear when I’d changed my clothes earlier, and I was not happy about the discovery. It wasn’t like me to forget something as important as that, but it gave me an idea. If I ever got out of this, I’d start a new, top-secret journal, which I’d keep in a booby-trapped safe, and I’d compile my own list of pointers or rules that other detectives never told you. And my first rule would be: If you were going out to the woods in homemade ninja shorts after a day of hard rain, you always had to wear underwear, just in case you fell on your butt, because having to deal with swamp ass for the rest of the night totally sucked. That was a solid first principle—Keep your ass dry—and I wished I’d thought of it earlier, because it didn’t do me a damn bit of good now.

  But I’d made it up the trail, over the fence, and into the woods, and from this point on it was all downhill. The hillside wasn’t too steep, but the ground sloped and rolled all the way from here to the reservoir bed, and if it weren’t for the jungle of vegetation before me, it would’ve made for a nice, easy stroll. I couldn’t even pretend to know what half the crap was called, because Thoreau was the naturalist, not me. But it didn’t matter. I was going through anyway.

  I took the penlight out of my pocket, turned it on, and probably would’ve laughed out loud if I hadn’t needed it to be slightly more effective. The light was pale and weak and sputtering, and if the rays stretched a foot, then they stretched twenty-three miles. I’d been counting on that light to help me find my way, or at least to keep me from tangling my feet up and falling on my face. Fuck.

  Well, at least I knew the direction I needed to go, diagonally southeast. I put my back to the mall so I was facing south, turned my shoulders forty-five degrees to the left to point myself southeast, and set off. My feet squished on wet earth and leaves with every step as I groped my way through the damp, furry darkness. Up ahead, the green-yellow glow of fireflies flared and darted through the trees like small, swirling eyes. The sudden wing-flap of a bird sounded somewhere in the branches above. I kept walking. The shushing of the breeze was muted and eerie, like the signal for an ambush. I froze. I felt watched, surrounded, as if I were being followed on all flanks and flushed into a trap. I knew it was just my imagination, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something hungry and sinister was awaiting me in the shadows. I breathed quietly, turned slowly, and saw all around me exactly what I’d expected to see—nothing. I exhaled and wiped the sweat off my face.

  I tried to speed up, following the downward slope of the ground, plowing forward as quickly as I could through the thick maze of blackened trunks and undergrowth. My eyes had adjusted; I could see a dense grove of trees choked with bushes up ahead. When I reached it, I plunged my hands into the weave of branches like I was parting a crunchy curtain and wiggled my way through, as twigs snapped and needled my skin. It felt like I was going through the rollers in a car wash. But I pressed forward, and when I pushed through to the other side of the grove, I was covered head to toe with dewy rain, and the trees and shrubbery spread apart and the ground leveled out completely, so that the forest floor was flat in every direction.

  All of a sudden I felt lost, but I kept going. After another fifteen paces or so the ground started to rise upward, which meant I was definitely heading in the wrong direction,
because the reservoir was at the bottom of the hillside. I turned around and went back the way I’d come, or so I thought, but I must’ve veered off course a bit, because the grove I’d just pushed through was gone.

  Without that landmark I couldn’t tell which way I’d come in or how to get out. I stood there wet and nervous. I felt stuck. I wanted out, fast, and I knew I had to get moving, because the longer I stood there, the more nervous I’d get, until I couldn’t move at all. I started walking; I didn’t care which direction. I kept hiking over knotted, uneven terrain for what seemed like miles, until I came across a small clearing with a bumpy rock in it and decided to sit down. The rock was large, mossy, and slick, but my ass was wet anyway, so I took a seat. A bright half-moon was just visible through the parted treetops, and it shone down on me like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

  A mob of crickets chirped back and forth all around me in the darkness. In different circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them or paid them any mind. But I was trying to get my thoughts together and decide what to do next, and the noise was throwing me off. It seemed to grow louder and louder as I sat there—reet, reet, reet—like the knife thrusts during the shower scene in Psycho. I breathed deeply and tried to shake it off. I knew something as little as that shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did, and it made me think of Thrash. The woods were his world, his niche, and many species of frog either hunted or mated nocturnally, so he probably could’ve gotten me where I needed to go, no problem at all, plus rustled up a snack of some sort, and maybe a slippery frog chick for me to cuddle up to, if that’s what I wanted. Yeah, I could’ve used him now, and I was totally sorry I’d left him at home.

  But I also thought of Thoreau, and how he could walk from town back to Walden in the dark, letting his feet and other senses guide him, while anybody else who tried the same wound up stranded in the middle of nowhere, just like me. Thrash, Thoreau, it didn’t really matter, though. What I needed was a glow-in-the-dark compass, a scout, or a guide, like that poet that Orlando had told me about—what the hell was his name?—who was born on my birthday.

  Shit. Getting to the party was supposed to be the easy part of my plan. I leaned over, rested my head in my hands, and tried to think. I needed to concentrate, figure out what the hell I was doing and which way to go, but the crickets were making such a goddamn racket that I couldn’t. For a second, I pictured Thrash gobbling those pests like popcorn shrimp in barbecue sauce, but that didn’t scare them off. I covered my ears and tried to focus again. My chin dropped to my chest. I felt completely down on myself, like I’d made a serious mistake, maybe a fatal one, and that I honestly might not get out of this, when I noticed that the crickets had gone quiet.

  There was a faint sound, kind of like running water, just over my shoulder to the right. I stood up and ran toward it. Suddenly, a square, manicured hedge sprang up a few yards ahead of me and was coming on fast. But the ground was muddy and I had on shitty sneakers—no brakes and no time to put them on anyway—so by the time I thought to stop, I couldn’t. My shins, arms, and face were whipped, stung, and cut up by the branches I hit on the way through, but at least I managed to tumble into a dive roll on the other side and come up on my feet. I shook off the dousing I’d gotten from the bushes, checked to make sure I still had everything in my pockets, and took a glance around to figure out where the hell I was.

  The yard was enormous, bordered on both sides by hedges and trees, and flooded with half-moon light. Like most of the waterfront properties around the reservoir, the backyard was about thirty-five yards wide and maybe two hundred and fifty to three hundred yards long, sloping up from the water to whatever two-, three-, or four-story pile was overlooking it from the front. About fifteen yards to my right, the grass rose slightly and then burst up into large, irregular-shaped rocks, which leveled out to a small, natural-looking deck made of slate and pebbled concrete that blended seamlessly into the rippling surface of a kidney-shaped pool, which was lit from below by underwater lights. As the pool curved at the back, there were short all-weather palm trees and an exotic mound of earth, rock, and colorful flowers that rose gradually over the far edge of the water, kind of the way an oven range hooked over a stove. And from the creases in the rocks at the top of that mound, sheets of water cascaded down to the pool below, creating a nook or grotto about eight feet wide and eight feet deep.

  I guess that was the running water I’d heard. But I knew that pool, just like I knew the first story of the house to my right was this concrete, steel, and high-glass affair that jutted out maybe twenty feet over the lawn beneath it, four or five feet aboveground, without struts or supports, so it hovered there like a weightless rectangle. It had massive glass walls and sliding doors that opened onto winding slate slabs acting as stairs, but which had no handrails or casings, so they looked like they were suspended in midair, and which drifted slowly down to the slate-and-pebble walkway that led through the grass to the pool. I also knew that inside there were four or five low, square-shaped chairs upholstered in this grainy fabric—some red, some white, others black—a tan sofa of the same style, hardwood floors, amoeba throw rugs, glass tables with thin metal frames, a few high-tech bookshelves and lamp stands, and these dark, almost dagger-shaped African masks hanging on the inner concrete wall. I knew all that because I’d been here before. Just that once, but it wasn’t the sort of place you’d forget.

  I was in Orlando’s backyard, and I felt an overwhelming sense of relief at knowing where I was. But it didn’t last long: just as instantly I felt this desperate urge to run over to that oversized aquarium and pound on the glass until Orlando came swimming down. But it didn’t look like anybody was home, and he wasn’t allowed to talk to me anyway, even if he’d wanted to.

  In a couple more months it’d be three years since Orlando had given me Walden, and in all that time I’d never had a chance to talk to him about it. Nobody had ever given me a book before that, not even grandma yet, but I was excited as all hell to get a birthday present and couldn’t wait to read it, which I did right away.

  It sucked. Like I said, the book was hard and didn’t have a plot, and at first it seemed as if the whole thing was nothing more than some uppity egghead spouting off about what he thought was essential for life, offering his opinions on every goddamn thing, as if anybody else could be paid to give a shit what he said. Not exactly a page-turner. In fact, it bored me so far off my ass every time I picked it up that I would’ve rather gone to the dentist and had my teeth drilled without novocaine than bother with the rest. But I didn’t want to tell Orlando that, because he’d said it was one of his favorites, and I was worried he wouldn’t want to be friends anymore when he realized I didn’t like it or understand it.

  I didn’t know what to do. But when he asked me about it at school, I said I hadn’t had time to read it because of junior peewee practice and homework and stuff, although I’d always finished my assignments in class and never had a minute of homework in my life. Yeah, I lied to his face to cover for myself, and I did it more than once, and each time I did, I knew it was a totally shitty thing to do to a friend. He seemed to buy it, though, and let it drop until football season ended. But he started up again in mid-November, asking me if I’d read it and if I liked it and what I thought and all these other questions, and I told him we should talk about it after Thanksgiving break, because I was still just getting into it.

  That bought me more time, but after Thanksgiving break I stalled him again, and it wasn’t until months later, after I’d read most of the detective books, that I’d finally tried Walden again and had better luck. But by then it was too late. I’d already clobbered Ms. Wither-spoon, got suspended, and been banned from speaking to Orlando about the book or anything else.

  I’d always felt bad about that, really bad, and I still did. Since my suspension, I’d read the book closely, over and over, and made dozens of trips to the library to learn as much about Thoreau as I could. Shit, I probably knew enough about Thoreau to f
ill twenty book reports by now, but mostly it just seemed like wasted effort: I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what Walden was about, and I still had that feeling—like Orlando had given me a gift, and I’d given him the finger.

  But Orlando was no dummy, and if he’d figured out what I’d done, then I didn’t know how the hell I’d patch it up with him. I guess I was banking on getting my chance at the first official football practice: he’d get all stuttered up trying to explain what’d happened at tryouts, and I’d cut him off all cool and shit, and tell him I knew he never would’ve pasted me like that if Razor hadn’t put him over a barrel, that it just wasn’t like him, and that I’d figured it all out and didn’t blame him and still wanted to be friends. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized a hell of a lot more was riding on the case than I’d expected. It wasn’t just to stick up for grandma and the other old-timers, or to save Neecey from the danger she’d put herself in through her own idiot choices, as if that weren’t enough. No, it was to clear Orlando’s name, too, and it was my job to come through for all of us.

  I was wet, cut up, covered in mud, and for some reason shivering, and while only a few minutes could’ve passed, it seemed as if I’d been loitering in Orlando’s backyard for a long time now with nothing to show for it. But I’d gotten the grip on myself that I needed, so I was okay with the delay and the misdemeanor. I still didn’t know what time it was, but I knew where to find the reservoir—just a couple hundred yards away, down the gently sloping grass to my left.