Dread Locks

by Neal Shusterman

  It felt like we’d survived a shipwreck together, or maybe a natural disaster. Hurricane Tara.

  A dozen thoughts were swimming through my brain, colliding with one another, making it difficult to think straight. I saw my friends in a new light, but I wasn’t entirely sure any of us were ready for that—and I had the feeling our friendship had just evolved into a new form. But was it a form that would float, or would it sink like a stone?

  A stone ...

  I reached into my pocket and began to fiddle with the lizard Tara had given me, feeling its well-carved scales, the point of its tail, the bulge of its eyes. As I looked at my friends now, in some strange way they seemed not all that different from that lizard. Their expressions were growing harder—a sort of wall suddenly coming down around them, shielding their sudden vulnerability Like they were turning to stone.

  I turned to Tara. She appeared happy and carefree, her golden curls flowing from her head like snakes, almost squirming with each toss of her head. I rode home with Tara in the dark, the single headlight from my bike lighting the way. As we reached the gate of her mansion, I asked her how she had known about Danté’s secret.

  “I didn’t know what it was,” she said. “I could just tell that he had a secret. He’s the one who gave it away.”

  “But why did you make him do it?”

  I thought she became a little uncomfortable then. Maybe a little serious. “It’s what I do,” she said. “It’s what I am.”

  “It’s how you get your kicks?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that simple.” Then she sighed. “Listen, it’s no big deal. I just took a tiny little nip out of your friends today. Not enough to hurt them ... just a tiny taste.” It was perhaps the weirdest thing in a long line of weird things she had said to me.

  “Great,” I said uncomfortably. “I’m glad you didn’t just swallow them whole.”

  She looked at me for a long time before she spoke again. A faint crescent moon came out from behind the clouds. I could see it reflected off those glasses that were so ridiculous at this time of night. “Have you ever heard of the alchemists?” she asked.

  I almost laughed. I had no idea where that had come from, or where she was going with it. “Yeah—they were in medieval times, right? They tried to turn lead into gold.”

  She nodded. “They found out that lead can’t change into gold.” She was silent for a moment, as if weighing what she was going to tell me. It must have weighed quite a lot, because she said it very slowly. “... But some things do change....”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Living things. People.”

  I was whispering now. Whispering just like her. “How do they change, Tara?”

  But she backed away. “Good night, Parker.”

  Then she turned and hurried through the gate.

  When I got home, the security system was on, and no one could be bothered to disarm it for me, so I went around back. I took a moment before I went in, though, to go to the far side of the pool, where that dumb statue of me stood on its pedestal, lit from two sides. Shimmering reflections from the rippling surface of the pool danced across my bronze face, almost making it look alive.

  I reached into my pocket then and pulled out the stone gecko. I set the lizard on the pedestal next to my bronze feet, marveling at how it looked so real that it might skitter away at any moment, if it weren’t made of stone.

  8

  THE OIL FIELD

  I think she’s a vampire or something.” Katrina said it out of the blue while we were playing pool in our game room. She liked to say things just as I was about to shoot, to throw off my concentration. It worked. The cue ball missed the nine ball I was aiming for and went straight into the corner pocket. Scratch.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I told her. “Tara’s just like you or me ... just a little ... more so.”

  Katrina got the cue ball and lined up her shot. “Yeah? Well, how come she wears those sunglasses? How come she’s always staring at people like she wants to drink their blood?”

  “An eye condition. She even wears them at night, when it’s dark. And besides, vampires can’t be out in the sun at all, or they burn to a crisp—and they hate garlic.”

  “What does garlic have to do with it?”

  “Didn’t she eat Mom’s Linguini Garlique when she came over for dinner last week? That stuff has so much garlic you won’t even eat it. So maybe you’re the vampire.”

  Katrina shot, breaking up a cluster of balls, but none dropped into a pocket. “I didn’t say she was a vampire. I said she was a vampire or something.”

  I moved around the table to find a good shot and sank the seven ball. “You’re right about that,” I said. “Tara sure is something.”

  Rumors flew through school all the next week about Tara and Ernest Benson. According to the rumors, they had been spotted having burgers at the Pound-a-Beef and going to the movies together. Rumor was they were an “item.” I hate rumors.

  Tara said absolutely nothing to me about it. I mean, it’s not like we were spending all that much time together. We’d get together a couple of times a week to talk or do homework. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her about it, so I decided to ask Ernest instead. It was down to the last few minutes of lunch on Friday. Ernest sat alone at a table. Used to be he was with Melanie, or with his football buddies, but lately he’d been eating alone. Tara had already left the cafeteria. It was now or never, so I crossed the cafeteria and sat down across from him.

  “Hey, Ernest, what’s up?” I said brightly.

  “The sky,” he answered, like it was something original. He opened a container of milk. There were already four empty ones on his tray.

  “So what’s with all the milk?”

  “I like milk. Is that a problem?”

  There was something troubling about his voice. Something in its tone, like his vocal cords weren’t resonating properly. Like he was speaking from farther away than he really was. He sounded cold and distant—and when I caught a glimpse of his eyes, they felt cold and distant, too. His eyes were gray—speckled, granite gray—and his pupils were very small, almost pinpricks.

  “How come you’re not sitting with your friends?” I asked.

  “I don’t want ‘em,” he answered. “I don’t need’em.”

  This was not the Ernest Benson I knew. He had always been outgoing, the center of attention. He was loud, fairly obnoxious, and always funny ... but he had changed. Or should I say he was changing. Whatever he was becoming, he was only partway there. It was such a strange thought, I had to shake my head to chase it from my mind. I forced myself to remember why I had sat down with him in the first place.

  “So it sounds like you and Tara are a couple,” I said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one. I just heard.”

  He finished his milk and crushed the container in his hand. “Then you got lousy hearing.”

  “So it’s not true?”

  Ernest looked at me all stone-faced, trying to make up his mind whether he should say anything to me or not. “We went out once. We had burgers and saw a movie. That’s all.”

  I was relieved to know it had only been a single date.

  “So ... you’re not going out with her again?”

  “No.” He offered no more. But now I was curious. I remembered what she had done to my friends Dante and Freddy, picking them apart and putting them back together with her words.

  “Why?” I asked. “What did she say to you?”

  “She didn’t say anything. It was the way she looked at me.”

  I shrugged. “So? She looks at everyone like that.”

  But Ernest shook his head. “No ... not the way she looked at me.” He glanced down at his tray for a moment, then back up at me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I looked down, too, because I didn’t want to meet those cold eyes. Instead, I caught sight of his hand on the table. Just like the tone of his voice and the look o
f his eyes, there was something strange about his hand. Not just his hand, but his skin in general. The awful, flickering fluorescent lights of the cafeteria did have a tendency to paint everyone in morgue tones; but even so, Ernest’s skin didn’t look right. Not so much pale as gray. Like dolphin skin. Maybe he’s sick, I thought. Maybe it has nothing to do with Tara. “So all she did was look at you?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.” He shook the boxes of milk on his tray, confirming that they were all empty. “Hey, do me a favor,” he said. “See that table behind you?”

  The kids had left the table behind us, but they hadn’t bothered to take away their lunch trays.

  “Check the cartons from those trays—see if there’s any milk left in them.”

  I looked at Ernest, not sure I had heard right. “You want to drink other people’s milk dregs? What if they backwashed or something?”

  “I don’t care,” Ernest said. “I don’t care about anything anymore.”

  I found him a half-full box of milk, then left without watching him guzzle it.

  As for what happened next, it would be easy to say that my brother brought it on himself. It’s not like I intended it ... but then, I didn’t stop it, either. You could say I was an accomplice. A partner in crime.

  It started innocently enough. Garrett was just leaving the bathroom, drying his hands with a towel. I was in my room doing homework at my desk. I guess I must have been too easy a target for Garrett to resist. There was a snap and a sudden painful sting on my arm.

  “Ooh, that’s gotta hurt,” Garrett said. He stood there with his towel rolled up into a rat tail. He had snapped it at me like a whip. Usually he never does it right, and it doesn’t connect, but this time he got it perfect. There was already a painful welt rising on my forearm.

  “Garrett, you’re dead!”

  He just laughed as I chased him out of the room. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom and took off after him down the stairs. I was a master of rat tails, and Garrett knew it—but it turns out I didn’t have to use it. On the way down the stairs he lost his footing and did a classic stair tumble, rolling most of the way down.

  “Ha-ha!” I shouted, as he hit bottom. “What a loser.” He angrily picked himself up and bounded back up the stairs as if I had pushed him. I took off back to my room.

  I knew where this was going. I knew where this always went. This was one of those brotherly fights that just keeps escalating until either someone gets really hurt, or a parent gets involved to break it up.

  I tried to slam the door to my room before Garrett could get there, but he was too quick. He shouldered his way in and pushed me onto the bed, pounding my shoulder.

  “That’s what you get for laughing at me!”

  “Loser,” I said again.

  He pounded me one more time, then got up to leave. As he headed out, I reached down and tugged the throw rug that covered the hardwood floor. He stumbled again. “Look at that! You can’t even walk out of a room without falling,” I said.

  He turned to me. “At least I don’t have a crush on a girl who thinks I’m a joke,” he said. I knew he was talking about Tara.

  “She doesn’t think I’m a joke!”

  “Shows how blind you are!”

  Now I could feel my ears getting hot. I knew my face was turning red. “Yeah, well at least ... well at least Dad won’t have to buy my way into college, like he’ll have to do for you.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. It was true Garrett didn’t have college-quality grades. His PSAT scores had been frighteningly low. I had hit a nerve, and it was his turn to go red. He looked over at my trophy shelf right next to him, and with a single swift movement, he knocked all my trophies off the shelf.

  “No!”

  They clattered to the ground, the marble bases cracking, the little plastic men breaking off at the ankles. That’s when Mom came into the room.

  “What is going on in here? Garrett, did you do this?”

  “He broke them! I can’t believe it! He broke them!” I got down on my knees, trying to pick up the pieces. It’s amazing how many pieces there were. I could feel tears of fury coming to my eyes now.

  Garrett just looked down at me. “What does he need them for?” he said. “He’s got a life-size one in the backyard.”

  I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did next, or what I even hoped to accomplish, but I stretched out my hand, palm forward at Garrett and said:

  “Na!”

  It was that old Greek curse Mr. Usher had told us about, but Garrett didn’t know that. He just ignored it, staring me down like a mad dog, then stormed out.

  “Garrett!” shouted Mom, but he was gone. I was gone a second later, but I didn’t follow Garrett. Our battle had ended. He had won. I bounded down the stairs.

  “Parker, where are you going?” Dad asked as I passed his study.

  “Out.”

  “Out where?” He swiveled back and forth in his special desk chair—the one Tara had sat in the first time she trespassed in our house. I was out the front door before he could question me anymore. I never used to be secretive with my parents. I never had anything to be secretive about. But I was changing bit by bit. I was getting a little harder. Harder to read, harder edged.

  I went straight to Tara’s. I shouldn’t have. I should have taken the time to calm down, but when you’re mad, you don’t see clearly enough to know that you’re not seeing things clearly.

  When I got there, Tara must have seen in my face how angry I was.

  “Having a bad day, Baby Baer?”

  “You’re lucky your sisters are on the other side of the Atlantic. I wish my brother was, too.”

  “Sounds like you could use a specialist in sibling removal.”

  “Not removal, just torture,” I said. “I want him to suffer.”

  She laughed, and instead of inviting me in, she stepped out, closing the door behind her. “You’ve shown me your favorite place,” Tara said. “Now let me take you to mine. Get your dirt bike.”

  I did as she said. I went back, got my bike out of the garage, and met her at her front gate. “I’ll drive this time, you ride in back,” she said.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  I rode on the back of my own bike as Tara went winding through the streets of our expensive neighborhood, then turned down an old dirt path I never even knew existed. All the while, I felt this tingle of excitement. I was free-falling into one of Tara’s mysteries, and I liked the feeling.

  For miles we wound between huge, old oaks that nearly blocked out the sun. Then we came out into a remote clearing filled with half a dozen giant praying mantises.

  “What the ... ?” I nearly fell off the back of the bike. The green creatures rose about twelve feet high, their heads as big as my whole body. Tara stopped the bike sharply, kicking up a cloud of dust that filled my nostrils, making me sneeze.

  “Do you like it?”

  It took a few moments for my mind to process what I was seeing. These weren’t giant insects; they were oil wells. Not the kind that tower high, but the kind that pump up and down, looking something like big bugs. But these had been painted green with big bug eyes. None of them were moving. In our town it wasn’t unusual to find these old, abandoned oil pumps, but I don’t think anyone knew about this forgotten cluster—and I certainly didn’t know they were painted green.

  “You painted them like this?”

  “I thought they were too ugly painted gray.”

  “When did you find the time to do this?”

  Tara shrugged as she got off the bike. “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

  As I looked around, I laughed. Six big bugs filled the clearing, and no one but Tara and I knew.

  “These things are balanced by counterweights,” she said. “I’ve oiled the gears. It doesn’t take much to get them moving.”

  Together we leaned on the great mechanical beasts, bit by b
it getting them to pump up and down, until the clearing was full of great green, bobbing bugs. Then we sat down in the middle of it all, the smell of old oil filling the air, and the strained sound of tired gears grinding out the afternoon. I asked Tara why she had bothered to paint them, and again she just shrugged. “Sometimes,” she said, “art’s only purpose is to make the artist happy.” But she had succeeded in more than that, because being in the middle of this strange moving symphony made me happy, too.

  “I spoke to Ernest,” I finally told her.

  She didn’t appear troubled at all. “We had a fun evening out. I won’t be seeing him again.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Ernest said.” Then I took a deep breath and asked her what I was really thinking. “Tara ... am I ... am I just a joke to you?”

  “Never,” she answered, without hesitation. “Why would you think that?”

  “Just something my brother said.”

  “Your brother, Garrett,” she repeated. It bothered me that she knew his name. “Is he horrible to you?”

  “He’s just an idiot.”

  “You had a fight?”

  I shrugged. “It was stupid. He ended up breaking my trophies.” I thought for a moment, then added, “So I told him, ‘Na!’”

  “The Greek curse!” Tara said. “Good for you!”

  I laughed, because she didn’t. She took it seriously. She took me seriously. We didn’t say anything for a long time. We just listened to the groaning gears of the bobbing bugs as they pumped empty wells.

  “What are you afraid of, Parker? What are you afraid of more than anything else?”

  It was a strange question, but not coming from Tara. If she hadn’t asked a strange question, I would have started to worry. “I don’t know. Dying, I guess.”