And as the Peterson family ages, their smiles turn from placid to pinched, and Aaron’s face disappears altogether behind the scribble of that angry red pen. Only one picture offers more than a scribble—what appears to be the last family portrait taken of the Petersons, judging by their ages. Beside the etched-away face of Aaron is what I first read as his name. But when I look closer, I see that the word isn’t “AARON.”
It’s “OMEN.”
I drop the flashlight and the room goes black. I stand in place, trembling on a squeaky floorboard it’s too late to avoid. Then, from somewhere in the dark, I hear the slow creak of a door swinging open.
I was so engrossed in the pictures, I didn’t even hear the footsteps return.
The thump, the drag, the labored movement of whatever has emerged into the room, is so close that I can hear breathing I know isn’t mine.
Run. Run!
But my stupid feet are stuck.
I want to be dreaming. Please let me be dreaming.
But I’m not. I know I’m not.
The breathing grows louder, like an animal preparing to pounce. I hold perfectly still, my only defense in the pitch-black of the room. But whoever is here knows I’m here. Floorboards moan under the weight of feet that methodically make their way toward me. They step to the glass case, rattling the awards on their shelves. They step to the desk, with its papers exposed to my prying eyes. They step to the filing cabinet, its papers still protruding from the drawer.
They step so close to me that I can feel that hot, menacing breath on the back of my neck. In its exhale, I hear my name.
“Nicholas,” the voice says. “You shouldn’t be here.”
A soft glow illuminates the floor and the flashlight at my feet. Looming over me is an impossibly long shadow.
I turn because I don’t know what else to do. I can’t run. I can’t hide. All I can do is face the shadow.
Heat hits my face and temporarily blinds me, and when my eyesight returns, the first thing I make out is argyle.
I tilt my head to reach the top of Mr. Peterson’s face, and I don’t like what I see. His eyes, darkened and distorted by the flame of the candle he holds, are barely visible. Below his eyes are the flaring nostrils of a man whose house I should not be wandering without permission, whose private office I should absolutely not be rummaging through. His thick mustache curls upward mockingly, belying the frown that’s only barely visible underneath.
I look down at my bare feet again, terrified and embarrassed, which is the only reason I notice that Mr. Peterson’s shoes are on.
In the middle of the night.
I look up again, taking in his pants and his argyle sweater. I’m in my pajamas, but Mr. Peterson is fully clothed.
I struggle for answers to questions I think he might ask, but he doesn’t ask anything. In fact, he hasn’t said another word since I turned around to face him. He’s just … staring.
I watch the light from his candle flicker and sway in the draft of the house, but Mr. Peterson holds it perfectly still. That’s how I notice his hands, smeared and coated in something thick and dark.
My eyes travel upward, and I don’t know if I’m expecting an explanation for why he’s here, what’s on his hands, why he’s up so late—or if he’s expecting an explanation from me—but what I’m not expecting is that smile. That horrible, out-of-place, unhappy smile that’s suddenly crept out from under his mustache and spread across his face.
Then he starts to laugh. It’s a low rumble from his gut at first, but soon it travels through his chest and his throat and out of his mouth, and the light, airy giggle is so vastly different from the growl it started as, I am all at once aware of how much of the room he takes up. His shoulders are broad enough to equal twice my width. I can barely see the doorway behind him.
And all I want is that doorway.
Then, as suddenly as his horrifying laughter started, it stops, and he holds the silence between us with a grasp as tight as that on his candle. He leans down, inches from my face, and meets my eyes.
“Nighty night, Nicky,” he says, and with a single puff, he blows out the candle and steps aside.
I sprint out of the room and find the stairs, running on feet I can’t even feel anymore. I run past the hallway I was so desperate to traverse quietly moments ago. In Aaron’s room, I swing the door shut behind me, locking it against what lurks in the darkness. I look to the top bunk where Aaron sleeps, certain the commotion woke him, but he doesn’t even snore anymore. He lies still, his face obscured by the comforter, and I wait for a second to see if he’s actually awake behind there.
When only silence greets me, I’m left with the sound of my heart pounding away in my ears, my teeth chattering in violent rhythm as I fight to calm myself. Then, once I’m finally still, I prop my pillow against the wall and watch the door from the bottom bunk, flinching every time the wood of the old house pops or settles.
I’ve forgotten the drawer full of possibilities.
I’ve forgotten the water I never drank.
I’ve forgotten the excitement I had about finally making a friend as strange as me.
All I remember is the music in the basement. Photo after photo of Aaron’s circled image. The grime on Mr. Peterson’s hands.
And that mad, mad smile that grew from a face that’s forgotten joy.
I throw my gray hoodie on over my backpack, but I should have known Dad would see it anyway.
“Getting a head start on studying, Narf?” he says, flicking a finger toward my hunchback.
“Never too early,” I say, then shrug. It’s the best antidote to his inquiries, a vague response with a shrug. He shakes his head and goes back to whisking whatever is bubbling on the stove. I can barely see the top of Mom’s head under all the steam emanating from dinner. She doesn’t seem to notice, though. She’s onto something.
“Be safe,” she says without looking up, before she knows where I’m going.
“Going to Aaron’s,” I say, even though I think I could have gotten away with saying nothing at all.
“You’re spending an awful lot of time over there,” Dad says, whisking so hard he’s doing a little dance from the hips down. “Whatever happened to Miguel’s son, Enzo?”
“The Petersons don’t mind,” I say, avoiding the topic of Enzo altogether.
“Lu, we really should have them over,” he says, but Mom raises her hand to stop him, still not looking up from whatever formula has her rapt attention.
“Seven weeks,” she says, like we’re supposed to know what she means.
Miraculously, Dad does know what she means. “Honey, come on.”
“Nope,” she says, and we all know it’s the end of the conversation. Whatever she says next is just meant to educate us, not to debate. “Seven weeks and no invitation over. They don’t want to know us; we don’t need to know them.”
She actually means a lot more than she says. We’ve lived in enough places to understand the weight under a non-invite, or a failure to say hello, or the silence that follows when Dad introduces “Lu, my wife,” or Mom points to, “Jay, my husband.” Maybe it’s because “Lu, my wife,” has at times been described as abrasive, or “Jay, my husband,” has had to call far too many newspapers “his” newspaper to be considered a real newsman. Maybe it’s because “the Roth family” is a Jewish one, or maybe it’s because our house is older, or our cereal is off-brand, or our license plates are from another state, or our accents don’t quite match this side of the country. What we know by now is that “We don’t need to know them” is Mom’s way of protecting us from what people say when they’re trying to be polite, or what they don’t say when they’re trying not to be rude.
This isn’t the conversation I want to have tonight, though. Not any night really, but especially not tonight. I just want to get out the door before I give myself away.
“I’ll talk to them, okay?” I say, and Mom makes a pssht sound.
“Don’t bother,” she says,
but she says it with a little singsongy voice so I can tell she’s not too upset. Not at the moment, anyway. She’s deep in the throes of her research now. I can tell by the way she keeps cracking her knuckles.
“Don’t be too late,” Dad says, but he’s smiling at Mom like he always does. My backpack and the amount of time I spend across the street are already distant memories.
The Petersons’ front door is open a crack, and I look around for anyone in the yard. It’s empty, though. In fact, the whole house seems quiet.
I knock softly on the door before opening it a little wider. “Hello? Aaron? Anyone there?” Then, a little softer, “Mr. Peterson?”
I’ve seen less and less of Aaron’s dad lately, a development I couldn’t be happier about after our encounter in his study I still haven’t been able to find again, even in the daytime, not that I’d want to. Stranger than that, though, is the way no one else in the family seems to bring up his increasing absence. It’s like he’s sort of just … fading away.
I hover by the door for a minute before pulling out Aaron’s note.
I check my watch. It’s 5:03.
Normally I’m not such a stickler for time, but I’m more nervous for this prank than I’ve been about the others. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had an opportunity to test the synthesizer with another audio system. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on edge ever since that night at Aaron’s. I tried asking Aaron about it in the morning, but I don’t really know what it was I saw. Whatever it was, one thing was clear: Mr. Peterson sees something in Aaron, and judging by Aaron’s presence in all those pictures, he sees something in his dad, too.
What that is, I can barely begin to guess, but it has something to do with Golden Apple Amusement Park.
I look at my watch again. 5:05.
“Mrs. Peterson?” I try again, then knock a little louder on the open door. “Uh … I mean Diane?”
This is definitely an intrusion. Aaron and I might have had solid plans, but that plan didn’t include me strolling through his house when no one’s here. The door is open, though. Maybe Aaron meant for me to come in.
I’m almost to the kitchen before it dawns on me that something could be wrong.
I turn in every direction—the kitchen, the stairway, the three hallways that lead to different corners of the house, then back to the open front door.
“Okay, I’ve seen all I need to see,” I whisper, resolved to give Aaron a hard time later about chickening out.
I turn back toward the door and straight into the broad chest of a towering Mr. Peterson.
“Aaron’s not here.”
I back up so fast I bump into the couch, nearly falling over it.
“The door was open,” I say stupidly.
Mr. Peterson doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me. No, that’s not right. He looks through me. I bet he could see what I had for lunch. Not for long, though, because I’m about to lose it.
“I … uh … I called for—”
“Aaron’s not here,” he says again, and this time it sounds a lot more like Get out of my house before I melt you into a human pile of wax with my death-ray eyes.
“Right. Okay. Absolutely. I was just on my way out.”
I babble all the way to the door, closing it so fast that I catch my heel and scrape the skin, but I hardly feel the sting as I skitter across the street, eyes over my shoulder, waiting for Mr. Peterson to come lumbering through the door and lunging toward me. I’m to the sidewalk when I allow myself to run through what I saw—Mr. Peterson was in his usual argyle sweater, but something was very wrong. His mustache was curled so crisply that the tips practically touched his eyebrows. He had that gunk on his hands again, but this time, he’d smeared it on his pants, too. His hair was a mess, and from the smell of him, I’d guess he hadn’t showered in a few days. And there was something else, something truly unsettling.
He looked scared. No, scratch that. He looked terrified.
“Where’ve you been?”
I spin hard enough that this time, I do feel the sting of my heel. I buckle under the burn and look down to see that I’ve started bleeding through my sock and all over the back of my Vans.
When I look up, Aaron is leaning against the streetlight looking bored.
“What do you mean ‘Where have I been?’ Where have you been?” I ask, and it comes out a little angrier than I mean for it to, but my shoes. These are actual Vans, not knockoffs. I was so lucky to get them for my birthday last year—Dad got a nice bonus for once. But now they’ve got blood on them, and why the heck wasn’t Aaron where he said he’d be?
“Whoa, whoa,” he says, putting his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t realize the plan was firm.”
“Seriously?” I say, folding the heel of the canvas under my foot so I can minimize the damage.
“Jeez, sorry,” he says, and it’s not enough. I’m mad at him for acting like it’s no big deal. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe I’m mad that the more I think I understand Aaron, the more mysterious his whole life seems.
“Hey,” he says, this time looking genuinely concerned. “This is gonna be epic.” I back down because he’s not wrong. This is going to be epic. The only thing that’s gotten me through trips to the natural grocer with my mom and Mrs. Tillman’s phony smiles and condescension is the thought of showing people what her fake enlightenment really is—a bunch of farts disguised to sound like caring. She isn’t Zen. She’s just plain old greedy.
I start off ahead of Aaron, still not totally over my frustration until he says, “Your Vans look cooler like that.”
Then I’m okay. Because he knew.
I shift my backpack to my other shoulder, and we take side streets to the natural grocer. We tell each other it’s so we won’t be seen, but really I think it’s because that’s the long way, and maybe I’m not the only one who’s more nervous for this prank.
“You remember the plan, right?” I say.
“Dude, it’s my plan. Of course I remember it.”
We agreed that I would be the one to distract Mrs. Tillman while Aaron hooks up the synthesizer. I should be handling the install, but it’s more believable that I would be looking for a birthday gift for my mom; Mrs. Peterson has already made her opinion of Mrs. Tillman’s store pretty known.
We’re almost to the store now. We wait for the rush-hour traffic of Sixth Street to clear, then Frogger our way through the straggling cars and parked vans outside of the natural grocer, hoping the loaded backpack isn’t a dead giveaway.
“Remember to disable the primary audio outlet first,” I say to Aaron.
“I know.”
“And you know to start the volume super low, right?”
“Right. Super low.”
“Because the synthesizer is three times as amplified as a normal audio system.”
“Uh-huh,” he says.
“So if you don’t start it low—”
“Dude, calm down,” Aaron says.
“You do realize we’re toast if we get caught,” I say. “More than with Farmer Llama. Like, burnt-to-a-crisp toast. Like, butt-on-fire toast.”
“Yeah, I get it. Flames and roasted nuts and all that,” Aaron says, but somehow, I feel unconvinced.
The little bell above the door announces our arrival at the natural grocer. Smoothly, Aaron slips the backpack from my shoulder and makes his way to the back of the store, snaking through the aisles with the more obscure products. Mrs. Tillman interrupts her own conversation with a customer and takes a moment to eye me. She didn’t see Aaron.
When she’s done extolling the benefits of wheatgrass to a skeptical-looking man, she turns her full attention to me.
“Hello …”
“Nicky,” I remind her, even though every time I’ve been in here with my mom, she’s reminded Mrs. Tillman that my name isn’t Mikey.
“Right. And what brings you in today?”
“I’m, uh, looking for a birthday gift for my mom,” I say, just like Aaron and I rehearsed.
“Oh!” Mrs. Tillman looks shocked, and I can feel myself getting defensive already.
“Do you have anything you could recommend?” I ask, pretending to look around at the shelves but really searching for Aaron. I see his head bobbing down the last aisle by the stairs to the office. The intercom is by the little window that looks out over the whole store from the loft.
“For your mother, you say?” Mrs. Tillman says, and a weird little smile creeps across her face.
“Yeah. My mom,” I say, pointedly, my full focus back on Mrs. Tillman because now I know what she’s getting at. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Tillman says, and she’s terrible at faking sincerity. “I just didn’t think she was—”
“That she was what?” I can feel my face getting hot.
“Well, you know, the products I sell are for people who have reached a certain level of … enlightenment.”
“She has a PhD,” I say.
Mrs. Tillman smiles again. “What I mean is, one needs to possess more than academic intelligence,” she explains like she’s doing me a favor. Like there’s no way I could possibly understand.
I turn away so she can’t see how red my face is getting, or how my eyes are starting to feel wet. Then, as I blink the burning from my eyes, I see Aaron’s face in the office window above. He’s smiling and giving me a thumbs-up, and I think I’ve never felt more powerful in my whole life.
I turn back to Mrs. Tillman, voice steady.
“I’ll just look around. You’ve got customers,” I say, nodding to the small line that’s formed in the time since she’s been talking to me. There’s the man with the wheatgrass and a woman with twin kindergartners playing jump rope with the coiled aisle separators.
Mrs. Tillman leaves without excusing herself and scolds the kids for playing on the rope before reaching down to grab the microphone under the register.
Missing Pieces Page 9
