Anyway, I held a candle and swayed back and forth and tried to have big meaningful flashbacks like everybody else, always keeping Danielle in sight, and when the wax dripped down onto the web of skin between my thumb and first finger I gritted my teeth and rode the burn out, which is how I knew I had what it took to do this thing all over again.
From the vigil, Steve drove them to the burger place Danielle’s always liked, the one across the lake, the one that I showed her the double-secret menu for. She ordered off it, I know. I was in the bushes in the parking lot, would definitely get seen if I tried to hunch over in a booth two away from them, but the way she ate her whole burger, then the end of Steve’s—yeah, the secret menu. And the way she ate his burger, without cutting around where he’d bit, it was like the most public kiss ever.
I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t lose track of them.
On the way to Steve’s compact, sensible little hatchback—of course he’d drive something like that, not anything cool and outlaw like a wrecked motorcycle—the whole way to that wimpmobile, Danielle was on the phone with her mom, explaining how she’d be home later, she was still, like, “sad and stuff, okay?”
I don’t blame her for that. I mean, she was sad, I’m sure, even if she wasn’t crying and wailing and messing up her makeup like so many of the girls at the vigil, who’d never had time for Tim when he was alive and it might have mattered.
Then, like the world whispering to me that I was on the right path here, Steve-o drove the two of them over to the worn-out version of the movie theater Shanna had worked at: the dollar show, a four-screener in a mall that still said “Sears” and “JCPenney” and the rest, but in these shadow letters, because the signs had all been taken away, like the world had moved on without this place.
By now, the superhero movie we’d taken Manny to had cycled to places like this, right?
I’d been hesitating, watching them, thinking if Manny came for Danielle while she was out with Steve, and Steve got crushed in a giant footprint or whatever, that would be no great loss, really. I might even get bonus points.
But, I had to remind myself, if they were on a date, then they’d be in a sort-of public place, and there’d be other people getting stepped on, not just Steve-o the raging pube.
I shouldn’t call him that, it’s from sixth grade and we’d all had individual discussions with the counselor about it, but I’ve also never been able to stop.
Anyway, a few minutes after the movie started, I paid my dollar-fifty, ducked in after them. Because this isn’t the real movie theater, there’s no assigned seating, you just find wherever you want, plop down. And because this was all meant to be, because I was doing the right thing, Danielle and Steve weren’t in the back row, where they could see any dark shapes slouching up on them. They were in what I guess, if we’d all lived, we might have started calling the Manny Seat: right in the middle of everything.
Scattered around the rest of the theater there were maybe fifteen other couples, all of them not so much paying to see the movie as paying to have nearly three hours to sit in the back so they could grope and fondle and—my mom’s gross way of putting it—“pet.”
I slunk down the aisle, sat way on the end in the row behind Danielle and Steve.
While nobody was looking, I slumped down lower and lower, finally palmed my mask up from the hoodie’s kangaroo pocket. Part of keeping on with a thing like I was doing, it’s leaving no witnesses to describe you. That would just slow you down.
So, I sat through the first hour of the movie again, all the setups and ridiculously obvious payoffs, the CGI overkill, the in-jokes and follow-throughs and tie-ups from the first two installments, and for a few minutes I even forgot what I was doing there, I was just another patron, enjoying the movie as much as it could be enjoyed.
But then, suddenly, Danielle was standing in front of me, staring right at me, the bright movie screen behind her glowing through her hair like she was the superhero.
I opened my mouth, waiting for some lie to come out that could place me here, but then it hit me: because the seats are so close front-to-back at the dollar theater, hardly enough room even for knees, not unless you chock them up on the back of the seat in front of you, she was having to turn sideways to shimmy down to the aisle, escape up to the lobby.
For a moment, though, I swear she kind of saw me, saw my eyes behind that mask.
I looked away, grunted something she could maybe hear as down in front or stupid entitled kids, and then she was past, was gone to the lobby for whatever, probably thinking I’d been an accident victim or something—the mask, the late hour, the lonely place—and should she buy me a bucket of popcorn, or would that be an insult? That’s how she thought, trust me. And it made it worse somehow, what I was actually here for. I went cold on the inside, slumped down lower than I already was, like a submarine periscope sinking in a cartoon, and by slow degrees, in complete ninja mode, I crawled down to directly behind Steve, all fixated on the big animated finale on-screen.
Now that Danielle was gone, he could scratch and adjust himself to his heart’s content. Enough that it almost seemed like maybe there was more going on, like, in the darkness of the dollar theater, he was making a move on himself.
Like I say, I never went for Steve, not really. And I have zero idea what Danielle saw in him. As proof of his, like, character, or lack of character, who goes to a happyfun good-guys-win superhero movie when his girlfriend just lost one of her best friends in the most violent way? And lost him just a couple of weeks after losing her other best friend, who she’d had since first grade?
“Piece of shit,” I whispered, and Steve froze, turned his head to the side, probably not sure he’d heard what he’d for sure heard.
My glow-in-the-dark cord whipped up into the dusty projector light like a tentacle in a monster movie, soaking in every last lumen it could, then looped down over his throat, the joystick handle falling perfectly into my waiting hand. Because his chair was bolted to the cement floor—Tim’s had been a rolling office chair, a hand-me-down from his dad—this was miles easier, leverage-wise. And because Steve was lanky tall, he couldn’t even limber his legs and feet up enough to make a real racket.
He grabbed, pulled, then finally spasmed to death so much faster than Tim had.
I slithered the cord back to me, lay down on my back, waiting, and what I had to become aware of at the level I was at, it was the same thing we’d all had to think of when we’d been snapping Manny back together at the front of the theater for the assistant manager: those senior football players, peeing down the smooth concrete slope of the theater.
The reason I was having to think it this time, and on this side of the lake, it was that, in death, Steve’s body had relaxed or whatever, and now his pee was dripping down past his seat, was splashing one oily drop at a time onto the concrete right in front of my mannequin face. It rolled the other way, thank gravity, but not until it had pooled up some. The incline or decline or whatever at the dollar show isn’t exactly steep, right?
Then—I could only see because that puddle was so close to my eyes—the whole theater, like, shook, or rumbled, like an asteroid had just hit in the parking lot. I feel guilty for saying it, but my heart kind of leapt here. That sound, that crushing impact, it could only really be Manny, right? There was no reason he couldn’t clamber up from this side of the lake if one of us was over here. And now there were two of us over here? He’d probably watched us the whole way across the bridge, Danielle in the passenger seat of a puttering wimpmobile, me on an unmufflered Kawasaki 750 with a shaky headlight. And, if it was him, if he was showing himself before I could finish with our little crew, what that meant was everybody was going to have to understand why I’d been doing what I’d been doing, what I was right now doing—what I’d just done. Really, though, compared to the body count Manny was probably about to leave in his wake, the body count and the damage to this condemned mall, Steve-o would probably be completely forgotten, j
ust another body in the rubble. And Tim and Shanna would, in hindsight, just be prelude, prequel, prologue, whatever, which I guess is the way I think from having seen that third installment of the superhero movie so many times by now.
Anyway, as soon as I knew the ground shaking had to be Manny, I also had to think of that sinkhole footprint he’d left on Oak, and how that wasn’t the end I wanted for Danielle, seeing a giant smooth foot coming down for her.
“I’m already here!” I screamed as loud as I could, up into the theater at Manny, hoping he could hear through the ceiling, not caring that rest of the moviegoers definitely could. “I’m already doing it!” I told him, and I guess everybody. “You don’t have to!”
After, there wasn’t exactly silence, but all the people muttering and standing and wondering, getting gruntled up, they were background static anyway, quiet enough for the shrieking in my head to somehow jump out of my head, be all around: the old system of tornado sirens, they were winding up, doing their moany arooo thing. Which made sense, since there’d been a warning-crawl on the television at dinner, the whole way through my dad’s catfish story, but tornado warnings are every night in Rockwall, at least toward the end of spring semester.
I leaned my head up to hear better, to feel if there was a change in pressure, like some impossible whirlwind was sucking all the air up to the clouds to slam it back down at us, but all there was was hammers and fists through the dollar show’s speakers, and one of the superheroes on screen screaming in outrage when she finds that destroyed colony of peaceful aliens.
You can still do this, I told myself.
None of the tornado sirens are ever actually real, or they don’t really indicate a tornado, they just get everybody riled up, diving for the basements and shelters. Seriously, in my whole life I’ve seen one funnel actually touch the ground, and it was way across a field. It maybe killed a mouse or two. I mean, sorry, mice, you matter too, but this was probably going to be another crying-wolf thing, like always.
That didn’t keep the house lights from coming on, though.
Worse, what they lit up for me was Danielle, standing at the end of the row, looking down at what the lights had lit up for her: me. Or, not “me” exactly, but some guy lying down behind her boyfriend. Some guy who, when he looked up to her, had a mannequin face. Except for the eyes.
She tracked up from me to Steve, his head lolled back over the chair, his eyes probably open and dry, staring up at the ceiling, a raw red line surely circling his neck.
Danielle dropped the coke she’d gone for, was running before it hit the floor.
And, I admit it, I was crying now, sort of, behind my mask. Starting to, just quietly. Not because of Steve, who cares about him, but because, ever since I’d started doing this, I’d accidentally started kind of imagining that when it was over, Danielle was going to wake up, see me for who I really was, and that was going to be the beginning of everything. Never mind that she was on the kill list, that she had to be sacrificed if we hoped to save her family from Manny. It was a dream, all right? A wish, like.
But then that wish, it sort of was coming true already—what she was doing, standing at the end of the row, was finally seeing the real me. Just, it was the one who killed Tim, the one who, as far as she knew, had probably killed Shanna as well.
The one who was coming for her, now that her boyfriend was out of the way.
I slapped a hand to the back of a seat and hauled myself up, didn’t let myself think of her mom raising her like she had, her mom working two shifts to pay their bills and whatever, and her little sister doing her hair just like Danielle’s but doing it all wrong, and somehow better, in a little-kid way.
You can’t let yourself see that kind of stuff when you’re about to have to kill that person. And you also can’t re-see her running for the shimmery surface of the lake, her shirt falling away behind her, the strap of her bra across her back black, not bright green like you’d have expected, to match the cups.
Do the math, do the math, I told myself as reminder, for resolve.
She had two family members, where Tim had had four, five counting his big sister, but still, her mom and sister hadn’t done anything to deserve Manny’s wrath, had they? And, I mean, who knows, maybe Marcy, her little sister, maybe she’s going to grow up to fly to Mars and invent the big space-polio vaccine or something, and her mom’s going to watch her on the television, and Marcy’s going to say into the mic for all the world that this is for her sister, whom she still misses and thinks about every day.
Her sister who died watching a superhero movie.
I raced to the end of the row, fell out into the aisle, my chest already heaving, my mouth behind the mask gulping all the plastic-tasting air it could.
“I’m sorry, D,” I called out to her, and my voice vibrating the thin mask and tickling my lips, the sound of my voice, of her best friend’s voice, it stopped her.
She turned around, cocked her head over to the side, probably seeing Manny’s face and trying to make that track with what she’d just heard.
“Sawyer?” she said, kind of parentheses around her eyes, like her mind was in a holding pattern, was so ready to tell her lips to smile, that this was some big terrible joke.
“This more of a lobby thing than a ruin-the-movie thing, maybe?” some dude said, the question mark not really a question mark, of course.
I let the long loop of glowing green line unspool down from my hand and blinked away the tears forming in my whole body.
Danielle took one step back, bumped into some woman running for the exit, probably sure a tornado was about to drill down into us, or maybe thinking I was some shooter even though I didn’t have a gun, and banging into her knocked Danielle hard to the side, her ribs catching the front corner of one of the dollar show’s ancient-old wooden armrests.
She folded around it but never stopped watching me, my whole six long steps up to her.
Because I didn’t want to scare her anymore, and because I was pretty sure my voice would break anyway, betray me, I came around beyond her, looped the string around her throat, her hair tangled in it, and pulled back hard to make this fast, and the least painful for her as I could. It’s what you do for someone you secretly love.
I pulled hard enough that her hair tore and her head popped back, something in there creaking loud and kind of snapping, and then her chin kind of lowered forward onto her chest.
“Danielle?” I was able to say then, kind of a croak, my mask right down by her face now.
Her eyes were still wet, staring, the dark pupils dilating wide from whatever she was seeing now, where she was.
I pushed the mask up onto my forehead and, for the first time, as goodbye, as hello, kissed her slow and soft on the cheek, and touched her lips with the side of my gloved index finger, and then I was flying backward.
My first thought was that I’d waited too late, that Manny had cracked the roof of the theater open, had me pinched between his massive fingers, but then it was some moviegoer infected with superheroism, showing off to his girlfriend or boyfriend or whoever.
He slung me up, my mask catching on Danielle’s hair or something and popping back down onto my face mostly lined up, only blocking most of my vision, and when he saw me, he flinched back hard, fell back into a row himself, ending up sitting down perfect in the end seat like ready for the movie to continue.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, to him, to Danielle, to everyone, and then hit it, running hard for the exit door, diving out and running for the parking lot three empty storefronts down, where my dad’s motorcycle was waiting on its kickstand, the sky green above and around me, boiling with murder.
In the special report on the news that night, Blankface was born.
“No,” I said, sanding the eyeholes of my mask larger with my mom’s emery board. “It’s Manny.”
11
THEY DIDN’T SHUT SCHOOL down for Danielle’s and Tim’s funerals like they should have—there wasn’t
enough of Shanna to bury, and, with her family dead, there was nobody to bury her for—but they weren’t counting absences either.
I don’t know whose idea it was to do a double service, but I guess it saved everybody having to find different black dresses and jackets and dark sunglasses for the next time around. This way it could be one-and-done, like my dad used to say when he coached our Little League.
The whole high school and most of the town stood there in the hot wind and listened to the speakers drone on about “too young” and “called home” and whatever, but a lot of people, instead of all-the-way listening, they were watching the clouds build on the horizon. The tornado the alarms had screamed about while Danielle was being killed hadn’t actually happened, but around here you never know. At least that’s what everybody’s always saying. Better safe in the cellar than sorry halfway up into the sky, all that.
Because JR and me were the last ones left, we got to stand right at the very front.
When everybody’s looking at you like that, you kind of have to turn your whole face into a mannequin, right? At least I did. Every time I licked my lips, I could see someone out there waiting for me to start crying.
I didn’t have any tears left in me, though. The whole night after Danielle, I’d pretty much emptied out, and ever since then all I could think about was that it was almost over. It was almost over except for one person.
Was it fitting that JR would be last? I mean, because it was his creek we’d originally found Manny in. Was it all coming full circle, like teachers and coaches and parents love so much, like it confirms for them that the world makes sense, is following some big design or whatever.
But he wouldn’t actually be last, I told myself.
If the barber of Spain cuts everybody’s hair, who cuts his hair, all that.
I’m the barber, here.
I was making sure everybody else showed up obviously killed, so their parents wouldn’t have to live with feeling guilty for their kid having offed him- or herself, but who could give me a neck-level haircut at the end of the day, right?
Night of the Mannequins Page 6
