Missing Pieces

by Carly Anne West

  I pull myself together as best I can. “Let’s do this.”

  Here’s the thing—once Aaron discovered I was good with gadgets, a world of opportunity in this strange yet boring town seemed to open up. Cranky Mrs. Bevel restores old doll heads, so of course we had to find a way to pipe creepy voices into her shop. Look, if you’re going to own a store filled with antique doll parts, you’re kind of already set up for terror. It was so easy once Aaron convinced her he was looking for something to replace the head on his mom’s broken Madame Alexander doll; I put a plug here and a switch there, and poof—haunted doll heads chanting: “We’re lonely” and “Come play with us.”

  And Mr. Quinn lets his dog poop on Aaron’s lawn practically every morning, and he never picks it up. All Aaron had to do was throw a ball into his backyard to get Mr. Quinn to step away from his mailbox for a few minutes. It was the perfect opportunity to test out my spring-loaded catapult in his mailbox. The weapon of choice—a nice, soft ball of dog turd—was really just poetic justice.

  Anyway, as far as I can tell, Farmer Llama never did anything deserving of the Robin Hood–level justice we’ve been doling out, so I’m not altogether certain what we’re doing here. But Aaron is 100 percent dialed in, and he’s not in a place to be questioned at this second.

  Aaron spends half his time looking over his shoulder, even though I’m the lookout.

  “Just focus on the lock,” I say.

  “Gimme some space. Any closer, you’ll be on my shoulders,” he says, and holy Aliens, Aaron is nervous. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him nervous during a prank.

  “You know we’re both going to be in so much trouble if we get caught, right?” I say, wiping a bead of sweat from my hairline.

  “Nope,” he says. “Not getting caught.”

  “C’mon, you can’t pull a prank on a llama farm without attracting attention. Llamas are too cute. Mess with llamas, pay the consequences. It’s just common sense,” I ramble.

  “Number one,” he says, “no one ever said anything about doing anything to the llamas. We’re after something of more … symbolic value. The llamas are off-limits.”

  “Try the bump key,” I say, and Aaron looks annoyed, but he tries it anyway.

  “Number two,” he continues, “I thought you only answered to your space alien overlords.”

  “True,” I concede. “We are ruled by a race of distant Space Overlords who will one day rain down their fury upon us lowly earthlings. So I guess we might as well seize the day?”

  “I still don’t get it,” he says. “I thought your family was Jewish.”

  “We are.”

  “So you guys, like, believe that we’re ruled by aliens?”

  “I’m sure I could convince at least one rabbi that it’s a possibility.”

  I crowd him again. “Maybe you should use the rake. The bump isn’t going to work.” Aaron positions a hammer over the key. “You’re never going to get the leverage you need with that,” I say.

  “I don’t need leverage,” he says, “when I’ve got torque.” He takes a deep breath and brings the hammer down on the key. With a thud, the old padlock drops to the ground.

  Aaron smiles. “By my count, that’s three for me and one for you this week.”

  “Hey, as far as I can tell, you’ve got zero excuse for not being a master lock-breaker by now. You’ve got a house full of locks! Jeez, you could practice on that basement door outside your house and become a pro in a day if you weren’t so lazy.”

  Somewhere along the way we must have stopped joking, though, because by the time I turn around, Aaron’s face has turned to stone.

  “What?” I ask, a knot forming in my stomach.

  “Nothing. Let’s just get this over with, okay?” he says, and I open the gate with far less joy than I felt a minute ago.

  The tension is short-lived, though. The enormity of our mission unfolds before us once we’re in Farmer Llama’s field.

  Aaron looks at me. “Stealth,” he whispers.

  I nod in response.

  We make our way along the fence line, wary of the farm owner whose name we don’t know, so we’ve just been calling him Farmer Llama. He’s rarely seen in public, occasionally at the natural grocer (evidently, he’s not the type to hold a grudge) or out in the field grumbling at them, and I swear to the Aliens they sound like they grumble back. What’s got me on edge is that, unlike Mr. Quinn or Mrs. Bevel, we haven’t been able to assess Farmer Llama’s comings and goings.

  “What if Farmer Llama’s in the barn?” I whisper.

  “Then we took a wrong turn.” Aaron shrugs.

  “Through his padlocked chain-link fence?”

  We take a few more steps before Aaron hisses, “Heads up!”

  We fall to the ground like snipers behind a barricade. Footsteps approach quickly, their pace increasing the closer they get. I ready my excuses.

  We’re selling candy for our baseball league.

  We’re with the Future Farmers of America.

  We want to mow his lawn.

  “This is it,” I whimper. “Mom, Dad, I love you. Please don’t send me to military school.”

  “Quiet,” Aaron whispers, but he’s laughing so hard he farts, and now I can’t keep it in, and oh well. It was a good life, I suppose.

  The footsteps come to an abrupt halt a couple of yards away.

  Aaron rises from the grass first and snorts.

  I stand to find myself eye-to-eye with a dusty gray llama.

  “Why do they sound so human when they walk?” Aaron asks.

  “I’ve asked myself that same question so many times.”

  “C’mon,” Aaron says, dusting off the grass. “Let’s just—”

  “Ignore the llama?”

  “Right,” he says.

  I salute him. “Roger that.” I nod. “Stealth.”

  The llama burps.

  “So what are we looking for?” I ask.

  “The barn,” Aaron says, and we both look at the field in front of us. I count five barns, all identical in size and faded shade of blue.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I … uh …”

  More footsteps, and out of the tall grass emerges a dark brown llama to accompany the first.

  “Hey, look, he brought a friend!” I say.

  “Can we focus, please?” Aaron says, and I can tell he’s getting nervous again, but I can’t help myself. We make it halfway across the field before we realize we’ve attracted a small crowd. At least five llamas follow us toward a small blue outbuilding at the edge of the field.

  I can’t contain my laughter.

  “What?”

  “I think we left stealth back there by the gate. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got groupies now.”

  A llama sneezes, spraying the side of my arm.

  “Anyway, we’re almost to the barn, right?” I say.

  But just as we approach the outbuilding, I hear a voice in the distance.

  “Maggie! Frank? What the dickens are y’all doing out there?”

  At first I think he’s talking to us, but two of the llamas turn in his direction when they hear his voice.

  “Shoot! Go go go!” I drop to the ground and army crawl on the itchy grass toward the little blue building.

  “Joey! Cindy! Where the devil are you?”

  I keep expecting people to pop out of the nearby buildings, but no, clearly Maggie, Frank, Joey, and Cindy are the llamas steadily chewing a path at our tail, giving away our location with every second they linger.

  “Now or never, Nicky,” Aaron whispers, and this time I can tell he’s not goading me on. Whatever this stupid mess is, we’re in it together.

  I crawl until my pants fill with dry grass, and in an act of awesome bravery (okay, pointless idiocy), I leap to a stand and swing around the corner of the outbuilding, Aaron following close behind.

  We stand there panting, backs against the clapboard wall of the barn, and all at once, I se
e Aaron’s eyes light up in the dark.

  “What?” I ask under my breath.

  “That’s it,” he says, and his face breaks into a smile.

  I can’t see what he’s so happy about. It’s just the inside of a barn wall. But whatever it is, it’s what we came here for tonight.

  Seconds later, I hear heavy boots crush the overgrowth where we were just hiding.

  “It’s dinnertime,” a gravelly voice says from so close by, I can hear him wheeze.

  We go silent, not even daring to exhale. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself to be invisible.

  One of the llamas grunts.

  “Now don’t you take that tone with me,” Farmer Llama says, and I elbow Aaron hard in the ribs while he bites his hand to keep from losing it.

  More shuffling in the grass, and finally, one of the llamas offers a more agreeable sound.

  “All right, that’s more like it,” he says, and his boots kick their way through the tall grass. One by one, his llamas follow their master, grumbling as they go.

  Once we’re sure he’s left the barn, and we can’t hear the llamas nearby, Aaron emerges from the barn first, signaling me to head through the stall to the area he was smiling at a minute ago.

  We stare down at it, a pile of identical tin signs stacked high in the corner of the barn.

  “What did he even need this many for?” Aaron asks.

  I look anxiously over my shoulder at the barn door. “You’re sure he’s not going to miss it?”

  “Nicky, he has like a million,” he says, and I know he’s right, even if what we’re doing feels a little wrong.

  We keep off the main roads, snaking through side roads and side yards, avoiding streetlights like kryptonite, the sign tucked under my arm as I bring up the rear while Aaron forges a safe path.

  Back at home that night, I scratch my belly raw. Little red bumps have begun to spring up, and I finally have to ask Mom where the cortisone cream is.

  “What in God’s name did you do to yourself?” She gasps, reaching for the scratches as I yank my shirt down.

  “Poison oak,” I say, which is completely unsatisfactory.

  “Poison oak? But it’s only on your stomach.” She side-eyes me.

  “It’s personal, okay?” I invoke the ultimate excuse, the explanation that kills any adolescent inquiry dead.

  Mom backs away with her hands up. “I don’t want to know.”

  It’s my second victory of the day.

  I wait until I hear the television click off in my parents’ room and their soft, intermingled snoring fills the air before I pull the dented tin sign from under my bed.

  I gaze upon my prize:

  We had no choice but to take the sign; it was literally calling my name.

  But actually, it called to Aaron first. It was my name, and he answered the call, planning a heist that would only have special meaning for me.

  We’ve never stayed in one place long enough for me to make a good friend. That night, I toss and turn, worried about how long it will take for my family to leave Raven Brooks, just like we’ve left everywhere else.

  By late July, we’ve picked our way through most of the locks at the Golden Apple factory. I’ve gotten almost as good as Aaron, but I don’t feel the need to tell him that. He already knows. Most of the time, I think he’s glad about it, but sometimes—like today—I think maybe he’s jealous.

  Imagine that. A kid jealous of Nicholas Roth. The new kid. The Narfinator. The one who knows every Twilight Zone episode by heart (thanks, Dad) and every element on the periodic table (thanks, Mom). The one who likes sushi better than cheeseburgers and likes girls who are taller than him and thinks Talking Heads is still the best band there ever was, I don’t care what anyone says.

  “You planning to bust that lock this century, or should I start rationing food?” Aaron says behind me.

  Yeah. He’s jealous.

  “I told you to eat your breakfast,” I say in my best mom voice.

  “Eat this,” he says, leaning in to punch me in the shoulder, but I spring the lock just in time to swing open the door, and he stumbles through and lands squarely in a pile of bubble wrap packing. It seems we’ve found the shipping department.

  I laugh so hard I think I’m going to rupture something, and eventually Aaron laughs, too.

  “Welp, nothing to see here,” I say, shoving a box of packing peanuts aside.

  “Not so fast,” Aaron says, mesmerized as every human on earth is by the simple act of popping a sheet of plastic bubbles.

  Once we exhaust an entire roll of bubble wrap, we both are really hungry, and we make our way back to the room that used to be the elephants’ graveyard of electronics before we picked it clean. Now we refer to it as the Office. We left an operating TV and VCR in there after we discovered that the generator that powers the conveyor belt powers electricity for some of the second-floor offices as well. Aaron’s amassed a sizeable library of movies thanks to an obsession he has about recording them when they air. His timing for catching the best movies is freakishly good. Throw in a couple of cushy executive chairs pilfered from the nicest offices and we have our very own media room.

  Aaron rummages around in a filing cabinet and pulls out a bag of cheese crackers and a couple of sodas.

  “You seriously have rations?” I say, tearing into the crackers. I pause for a second when I hear skittering behind the wall beside me. Great. Now the rats know we have crackers.

  “I like to be prepared,” Aaron says. “The end is nigh.” He laughs a ghoulish laugh and I roll my eyes, and things feel normal again. As normal as they can around Aaron.

  That’s why it feels like the right time to ask him about how everyone acted when he walked into the Gamers Grotto at the Square. It’s been a few weeks, but I haven’t been able to shake the memory.

  “I went clothes shopping with my dad,” I offer.

  “Sounds riveting,” he says.

  “It was all right. A kid named Enzo hooked me up with some pretty cool stuff,” I say, easing into what I really want to ask him.

  Aaron doesn’t say anything, though. He just fiddles with the metal tab on his soda can.

  “I think he said he knows you,” I say, trying again.

  This time Aaron looks up. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  Just like that, I’ve hit a nerve. Instead of backing off, I decide to press on it.

  “Yeah, so what’s up with the way everyone seems … I don’t know …”

  He eyes me carefully.

  “Weird around you,” I say, but that’s not really what I want to say. I want to say “scared around you.” I want to ask him why I’m not afraid of him. I want to ask him if that makes me a chump, the would-be victim of a C-list horror movie.

  “You didn’t, like, kill a cat or something, did you?” I ask, and I don’t know how to follow that up, so I say, “’Cause I like cats.”

  Aaron looks at me like the Aliens have already arrived, like I’m their alien spawn, like I have tubes for ears and antennae for eyes and a long, forked tongue that I use for catching and eating the human race I used to be a part of.

  “Why would I kill a cat?” he asks, and his question lays bare how stupid my question sounds.

  “I don’t know,” I say lamely.

  “Enzo stopped hanging out with me because he’d rather play video games,” Aaron says quietly, wiggling the tab of his soda can until it comes off. He flicks it across the room into an old waste basket.

  He doesn’t have to say any more. I can hear every single word he’s left out—Enzo would rather play his expensive video games that his successful dad can buy him because his dad has a job, and that job isn’t going away. It’s yet one more thing I can’t figure out how to bring up with Aaron—that his dad is always around, even during the day, like how my dad is around all day when he’s between jobs.

  There are reasons why the Enzos of the world don’t hang out with the Aarons and the Nickys of the world. They don’t h
ave to be good reasons or fair reasons. But there are always reasons.

  Too bad, I think. Enzo seemed okay.

  I let out a massive belch that echoes across the empty factory floor. “I don’t even like video games that much,” I say.

  It’s a humongous lie, and Aaron knows it, but for the first time all day, he looks relaxed, like a tiny bit of the twelve-year-old he is has started to seep back in.

  Later at Aaron’s house, though, the lightness that seemed to free Aaron of some massive burden that afternoon disappears once again under the weight of his family. Everyone at the Peterson house is in a bad mood.

  I thought it was just his mom, who met us at the door, then floated away without saying a word. Then, after taking too much time removing my rat poop shoes and placing them outside the door, I lost track of Aaron and practically ran straight into Mya in the hallway. She was looking over her shoulder, and when she turned and saw me, she jumped back about a foot.

  “Jeez, Nicky, don’t be such a creeper!”

  “I’m not—”

  “I have to go,” she said, hurrying out the door with one more furtive glance over her shoulder, not at me but behind me. I turned to see what she was looking for, but all I saw were the shadows that lie in the twists and turns of the Petersons’ house.

  Now, as we sit in Aaron’s room tinkering with the lock on an old chain we scrounged from a construction site, I wait for Aaron to say something. Anything. Because we’ve been sitting here in dead silence for over an hour.

  “My parents got a letter from the school. I have my class schedule, but I don’t know who any of the teachers are, so it’s pretty much meaningless.”

  “Mmm,” Aaron grunts.

  “I had a Life Sciences teacher at my last school,” I say. “She had this thing about rabbits. Like, she had about a dozen at home, and she was constantly worrying about them. Sometimes she even brought them to class because she was afraid they’d be lonely, but I always kinda thought it was more so she wouldn’t be lonely …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So yeah, I thought that was weird …” I clear my throat.

  Aaron stares out the window.

  “The Alien Overlords came to see me last night. They brought me aboard their vessel and threatened to melt my brain into soup unless I promised to become a secret alien agent and share top secret human intelligence with them.”