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  “This guy in one of our summer reading books last year. He’s totally lame and hates everything and has a nervous breakdown.”

  “Thanks, Neecey, that’s really encouraging.”

  “Don’t have a baby, Genie, I’m just busting on you. Besides, you’re like way more evil. Anyway, Cynthia started asking me all these questions about you and what was wrong with you that you didn’t think she was heinously fat and ugly, because she has like this really weird thing about being a total sled dog, even though she’s a complete babe and everybody always tells her so.”

  “Cynthia thinks she’s heinous?” It was impossible for me to imagine that.

  “You’ve seen her family. She’s like the only non-lard-ass of the whole lot, and she thinks it’s in her genes or something. I mean, she totally eats, and doesn’t scarf and barf or anything like that, but she’s got it in her head that she’s gonna swell up any minute like it’s the ghost of Christmas future and shit.”

  “That’s so bogus.”

  “For sure. But like I was saying, she started getting all curious about you Manning the Lookout, and she was like, well, your brother’s really sweet, and if it makes him totally happy, what could it hurt?”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah way,” Neecey assured me. “But the thing is, I think she likes doing it because it makes her feel sexy, you know, and even though it’s kind of strange, it’s totally safe.” She paused. “When I tell her you got that little monkey pecker down there, she’s gonna totally shit herself.”

  “Okay, Neecey, that’s enough.” I didn’t think the Lookout’s stature was any of Cynthia’s business, or an appropriate topic for them to dish about. I knew Neecey was only trying to get my mind off what I’d just done, like she usually did when I went off the deep end, but I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or bullshitting me or if she was really going to tell Cynthia or what. More than that, the whole situation suddenly struck me as so fucking weird that I couldn’t figure out what the weirdest part was—the fact that I knew it was weird or the fact that it didn’t feel as weird as it should have. I didn’t know what to do. So I just looked back at Neecey, keeping my eyes on hers, and we both smiled, but I didn’t know why.

  She turned to leave.

  “Neecey,” I said before she got through the door, “are you a slut?” For some reason, I felt like I had to know.

  She stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Why? Did somebody say something?”

  “No,” I said, “I just want to know.”

  “No, Genie, I’m not a slut. I’ve only been with two guys, Gary and Darren, and I wouldn’t do it with just anyone, because that’s like gross and pathetic. Besides,” she continued, “even if I was a slut, whose business would it be but mine?”

  I didn’t know, so I shrugged my shoulders, and she left.

  I turned on the water, took off my sneakers and shorts, and stepped into the shower. The hot water felt good—so good that I didn’t think about the case, or who was out to get me, or how screwy my sister was, or whether or not I was going to jail for incest because of what just happened. After a couple of minutes my mind had cleared out and began to fill up with images of Kathy and Cynthia and Stacy, and I soon realized the Lookout had already manned his post and was on the alert, standing at attention.

  FIVE

  Once I’d dried off I hid the ten-dollar bill under a box of Magic Markers in the top drawer of my desk, threw on some cutoffs and the WHO FARTED? T-shirt Neecey had bought me a couple of months ago, and went downstairs. I had a couple of pointed questions I wanted to ask her about what Razor had been doing at our house, but when I got down to the living room, she’d already cleared out. And since it was her job to watch me while mom was at work, that meant mom would be home any minute, because if there was one thing I was not allowed to be, it was home alone at night with nobody watching. Someday I would be, sure, like in two months when I was fully self-sufficient. But until then, waiting for “someday” felt a lot like being strung along by a marathon of movie previews when all you really wanted was for the show to start.

  I went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and saw my dining options were limited to a bucket of cold fried chicken, milk, lettuce, half a grapefruit, onions, soda, pickles, Kraft cheese slices, economy-sized ketchup and mayo, or the four beers left in a six-pack. I’d tried beer before, and I guess you could say it was pretty good—that was, if you liked flat club soda that was sour and stale on your tongue and burned your throat. I grabbed the bucket of chicken instead.

  I’d just finished dusting off two drumsticks, a thigh, and three wings when Mom came home with her arms full of groceries. Her hair was slicked down wet, her cheeks were moist and shiny, and the white button-down blouse of her waitress uniform was turning see-through at the shoulders from the rainstorm outside. The grocery bags were sopping and starting to give, so I hustled over to the front door to lend her a hand.

  After we unpacked the groceries, mom and I had a little face time. I knew my counselors were always reminding her that she needed to take an active interest in me on a regular basis, but I also knew that she didn’t need to be reminded. Almost nothing I’d ever done had slipped her notice, and if it were up to me, I’d reward her with some well-deserved time off.

  But right now she just wanted to chew the fat and have some company after a long day of work, which I was more than happy to supply. She asked if I was hungry and how grandma was doing and how my day went. I told her I wasn’t really hungry because I’d just eaten six pieces of chicken in less than three minutes, and then I told her about football tryouts and getting plastered on my ass, but not about being knocked out. She wouldn’t have taken that well, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the night sitting around in the emergency room, waiting for them to tell us that I’d probably live. I didn’t mention the case, my client, or her identity, either, because real detectives never revealed that kind of thing unless they were swapping it to a source for an important piece of the puzzle in return, or unless the coppers forced them to.

  Mom gave me her worried look when I told her about tryouts and asked me if I was hurt. I told her the trainer had checked me out and said I was okay, but my head ached a little and my neck and shoulders were stiffening up. They were. The effects of the hot shower were wearing off and the soreness of the thumping was settling in. Mom gave me a glass of water and two aspirin, and pressed her palm on my forehead. She said she’d hoped we’d spend some time together this evening, maybe watch TV or play a board game or just sit and read together in the living room like we sometimes did, but if I wasn’t feeling well, I should probably lie down and rest. Normally I would’ve taken her up on the offer to play a game, because we were pretty evenly matched at Scrabble and it was always a close game, right to the end. But I really wasn’t feeling up to it and I needed what energy I had left to try to do some work on the case. I told her I was sorry and I’d give her a rain check if that was okay, and she said it was, she understood, and that I should go up and rest.

  I closed the door to my bedroom, slapped the light switch, and heard rain ticking loudly against the roof, windowpanes, and sides of the house. I picked Thrash up from my bed, tossed him on my wooden desk chair, and clicked on the fan to circulate the air. Then I unlocked the side drawer of my desk, pulled out my journal, and made some notes about the case. I took my time, trying to remember everything I’d learned so far and doing my best to record the witness testimony verbatim, because you never knew when you’d have to throw their own words back in their face, and it was better to get them right when you did. But since I hadn’t found out all that much yet, it didn’t take very long, so I put my journal aside to confer with Thrash.

  He was already ticked off—like he was every time I picked up my journal or a book. He’d always thought that writing in my journal was a waste of time, and that if I wanted to get something off my chest, I’d be better off actually doing something about it, instead of just sitting arou
nd playing hide-and-seek with myself on a piece of paper. Yeah, sometimes Thrash was worse than the mad scientist in a bad movie: he had crazy theories about everything. And according to him, reading and writing were timid and bloodless; the only thing they’d do was wind up dulling my instincts and making me weak, which at my size was the one thing I could not afford to be. He might’ve had a point in there somewhere, but I’d heard his tirade a thousand times before and told him I still wasn’t in the mood for it.

  I changed the subject and asked him what he thought about the case. He said that since Darren was a liar, he had to be lying—he either knew who’d done it and wasn’t saying or had done it himself—and that we should stick to him like green sludge on stagnant water until we had enough evidence to nail him. But I wasn’t so sure yet. Thing was, Thrash had his own reasons for wanting to see Darren take the rap—he’d never forgiven him for stealing my old bike—and that might’ve been affecting his judgment. Okay, I hadn’t forgiven Darren, either, but I couldn’t charge him with this crime just because I knew he was guilty of the other one. That wasn’t the way detectives worked.

  As for who was responsible for what’d happened at tryouts—who the message was from and what it meant—well, Thrash got all worked up at first and carried on about how Orlando was a low-down dirty rat and had to pay, but then I told him Orlando had apologized and told me somebody else had made him do it, and because I knew Orlando was depressive and felt guilty about everything, it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d do on his own or be able to lie about. Thrash had always been jealous of Orlando, so I knew he wanted him to get some payback the same way he wanted Darren to. But the explanation I gave him seemed to calm him down just enough for him to think about it some more.

  We sat there for a few minutes, not saying anything, and then came the surprise. Thrash thought Razor was behind it, and when I asked him why, he had his reasons all lined up. One, Razor and Orlando had some history between them because they both lived down by the reservoir and had been starters on the junior-high team last year. Two, everybody knew Razor was the kind of guy that pushed around and roughed up anyone younger, smaller, or that he could get some leverage on. Three, Orlando was a prime target to get leveraged. Although Orlando was bigger than Razor now, all Razor had to do was blackmail him: he probably threatened to lie to Orlando’s mom, telling her he’d seen Orlando and me hanging out, if Orlando didn’t rattle my skull at tryouts and keep his mouth shut about it. And with the prospect of his mom’s wrath in the mix, Orlando would have to do it—he’d have no choice. Four, there was the timing. I’d seen Razor at the arcade and then left right after I’d questioned Darren, which must’ve been between quarter after three and three-thirty because tryouts had started at four. A half hour to forty-five minutes was more than enough time for Razor to track down Orlando, whether at home or at practice, and put the squeeze on him, especially since we now knew Razor had a moped to get around quickly if he needed to look in both places.

  It sounded pretty convincing, and I was willing to buy it, at least until a better theory or more evidence came along. But if I wanted to know why Razor had set me up for a shellacking at tryouts, then I knew better than to ask Thrash. He didn’t give a shit why people did what they did, only who’d done what to whom—action, reaction; crime, punishment—because he said a failure to respond with a show of strength meant certain death in the wild. And if a show of strength meant sucker punches, eye gouging, kicking, scratching, biting, ambushing people, luring them into traps, or slowly ripping them to pieces, then that’s what had to be done.

  So I didn’t bother asking him. I already knew what his answer would be, and that he didn’t really understand the question anyway. Yeah, there were lots of things Thrash didn’t really understand, which meant there were lots of things I couldn’t talk to him about, even when I wanted to, because he just didn’t get them. Like chicks. Sure, Thrash was killer on questions of conspiracy and revenge, but he just wasn’t built to handle the allure of the female half of the species. Literally. Thrash’s round, featureless underbelly didn’t have the necessary equipment, and that gap in his plumbing was why he was never interested in talking to Kathy, and why I never told him about Cynthia or the Lookout, or how Stacy made me feel like someone was burning popcorn in my stomach. He knew about Neecey prancing around like she did because he’d seen her, but he never understood why it weirded me out so much. Then again, that’s the way it was with Thrash—there were some things he had in spades, and there were some things he just lacked, and that’s the way he’d always be.

  I’d always supposed that first week of beatings had made him hard and cruel, but I couldn’t be sure because I never got beat like that. I mean, I got into fights with other kids and took some lumps when I wasn’t giving them, but my parents never hit me and neither did Neecey. That’s what eventually made me suspicious of my first counselor and caused me to ditch her—she was always trying to get me to say that I’d been abused. But I couldn’t say it, and never would, because I hadn’t been, and I didn’t think I’d ever get better if I blamed my parents or my family or anybody else for shit I knew they hadn’t done. I was a little fucked up; that’s all there was to it, there didn’t have to be a reason or a cause. But my counselor kept trying to squeeze the easiest answer out of me, like to prove herself right or something. So I started lying to her, making shit up to keep her in check. After a couple of months she said I was “unresponsive” and passed me along to another counselor, where things went more or less the same way. By the time I got to counselor number five at the beginning of sixth grade—the one who suggested I start a private journal to try to write about what I thought and felt and to keep track of my urges and “episodes” and everything—I was officially branded a problem. But by then I didn’t give a shit. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and my hands to myself during school and there wasn’t anything they could do to me.

  Then again, they’d already done it. After I hit Ms. Witherspoon they suspended me for three months and then held me back, so I had to do fifth grade all over again. Yeah, that was a real treat. Fifth grade had been so easy the first time that I couldn’t remember learning a single thing, and as I sat there day after day with nothing to do the second time, I could actually feel myself getting dumber. If I hadn’t brought the detective books to school to keep me busy, the ones grandma had given me and talked with me about during my suspension—so I’d have something to do besides stare out the window all goddamn day, pining for lost freedom like a convict in maximum security—then I probably wouldn’t have made it. Scratch that, no probably about it; I wouldn’t have made it. Period.

  Not that my teachers gave a shit about whether I made it or not. During my suspension, it was up to them to decide whether they would send me my assignments or let me make them up. Some of them did, most of them didn’t, simple as that. And because most of them were happier to pad their roll books with zeroes by my name than to give me a fair shake, there was no way in hell I could pass, not even with summer school, and because my “reprehensible” marks in conduct had just about cinched the case anyway.

  I didn’t get that at first. It wasn’t like they enjoyed my company so much that they couldn’t bear the idea of going on without me. Shit, I thought they would’ve been happy to get me out of their hair. That wasn’t what they did, though, so I knew I had to be missing something. So I started watching people—teachers, kids, a few of the other parents, the cleaning staff—observing them closely, paying attention to details, trying to size them up at a glance like Sherlock Holmes, or to predict their moves two steps ahead like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, applying what I learned. Not that I gave a shit about any of them—most of them were so dull and stupid it hurt to be in the same room with them. But I was a marked man by then, with nothing going for me and nothing to do, except to work out the bigger picture, so that’s what I did.

  I’d already skipped a grade, second grade actually, after I was given some tests to figure out why
I wasn’t integrating socially with my classmates. I didn’t speak to other kids and didn’t respond when my teachers called on me in class, so the higher-ups probably wanted to see if I was “special,” meaning retarded. Truth was, I just couldn’t do it. Every time I was called on, I knew the answer right away, but my mind would start going so fast—spinning round and round, wanting to say not just the answer but everything I was thinking all at once—that I couldn’t figure out what to say first or how to say it, and even though it’d be something really simple like “seven” or “noun” and right on the tip of my tongue, I’d draw a blank and say nothing.

  So they gave me these tests to see if there was anything up in the old attic at all. I didn’t score through the roof, but I did score damn well near the rafters, and they figured that I hadn’t integrated with my peers because they weren’t really my peers—I was already at a much higher level than they were. The tests had proved I was “special,” just not in the way anyone was expecting. Not that that made me feel any better. But being “special” in this way meant I was moving on to third grade instead of second, with a group of kids I didn’t know from shit. And because my birthday was in October, after the cut-off date, so I’d started kindergarten just before I’d turned six, I went from being the oldest kid in my class to the youngest, and all of a sudden everybody else was much bigger than I was.

  My new teachers in third grade knew all about those test scores, so they wouldn’t let it go when they called on me and I couldn’t answer them. They said crap like, “That’s an easy one, you have to know it,” or “You certainly don’t act like the smartest kid in class,” or they pulled me aside and told me I shouldn’t be afraid to share my “gifts” with everyone else, like I was being stubborn or selfish or something. Shit, they should’ve just taped signs to my forehead and back that said KICK MY ASS and saved all of us a lot of time. The kids I would’ve been in second grade with had already started getting used to me because most of us had been in the same class together since kindergarten; I didn’t talk to them and they didn’t talk to me, but at least they’d left me alone. But my new classmates didn’t know me and I didn’t know them any better, and the way our teachers carried on basically handed them a cause to rally around.