The Girl on the Edge of Summer

by J. M. Redmann

  Even stupid adolescent didn’t explain why Brandon would have, keep, and use Eddie’s phone.

  Another text pinged, “On my way.”

  I scrabbled in the glove box and took out the Swiss army knife I kept there and shoved it into my sock. Not much of a weapon, but this was getting too weird, and anything was better than nothing.

  Maybe this was it, his big reveal, showing me he had Eddie’s phone. Compromised evidence. This was beyond stupid, and I didn’t think I could fix it.

  Again a faint glow, but this time it was walking toward me, coming from around the side of the warehouse. A young, short, slightly pudgy boy outlined by the cell phone light.

  I got out of my car.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as he approached. He was wearing a dark zip sweatshirt, the hood pulled up to keep the drizzle out. His pants were too long, the hems rolled up but even so dragged on the ground.

  “I need to show you something,” he said.

  “That you took Eddie’s phone? The one the police have been searching high and low for?”

  He was close enough, still holding the phone as if it was an revelation, that I could see his expression of surprise. Shock.

  He recovered enough to say, “What are you talking about? Why would I have Eddie’s phone? I thought the police took it.” He could do the words, but his tone and expression couldn’t match them. A bad liar.

  “They couldn’t find it. They’re still looking for it. Because you’ve been too dunderheaded to turn it over to them.”

  “I don’t have Eddie’s phone.” His face was slack, again saying the words, but without the semblance of emotion that should go with them.

  “You just texted me from his phone number,” I pointed out.

  “It’s my phone now,” he said, as if that made it all right.

  “No, you need to turn it over to the police. It might help them find who Eddie’s killer is,” I argued.

  “I know who Eddie’s killer is,” he said. Now emotion crept into his voice, smug, like he was the only kid in the class who knew the answer.

  “You do?” But I couldn’t tell if he was on the level or just a bragging kid. “Even more reason to go to the police.”

  “No, I need to show you something.”

  “You need to tell me how you got Eddie’s phone.” I tried to put as much adult authority in my voice as I could to attempt to jar him out of his adolescent fantasy.

  The ones who are too young to know the consequences are the most dangerous. Another snake down my spine. I cursed myself. I had dismissed him as a naïve, nerdy schoolkid. And he was. But a layer under that was a boy desperately struggling to be a man and having few of the markers of success—sports, looks, popularity—to easily give it to him. Most boys like him—and girls, like I was at his age—took a side street, found a home with the rebels and the outcasts. Held on until we could escape those toxic years.

  A few didn’t. I should have seen it, his desperate neediness, his clumsy attempts at manipulation, to be in control. I hadn’t let him, an unforgivable crime. Especially since I was a middle-aged woman. Enlightened feminist guys don’t hang around with man like Eddie.

  There was a bulge in his jacket that looked like a gun.

  Keeping my voice steady, I said, “This isn’t a computer game, Brandon. Real people, real consequences.”

  “I win, I always win,” he said. The same smug tone.

  The snakes on my spine stared hissing.

  A crash from back in the warehouse, something falling?

  His head jerked at the noise. “You need to come with me,” he said, insistence rising in his voice.

  “Who’s in there?”

  “No one.”

  “Who made the noise?”

  His head spun back in that direction.

  “Who else is here?” I said calmly. He was getting agitated and I didn’t want to add to it. “You can tell me,” I said. “No one can hear us out here.”

  He shook his head as if clearing it. “There is no one here. No one who counts.”

  “Who doesn’t count?”

  Then he laughed, “Just my friends from school. The buddies who always hang around with me unless they have something better to do.”

  “You’re angry at them?”

  “No,” he snapped, “why say that?”

  “Because you sound annoyed,” I said. But I didn’t want to get into his anger. It was too dangerous. “Why do you need me here?”

  “You killed Eddie, don’t you know?”

  “But I didn’t.”

  He took the gun out and pointed it at me.

  Not good. His hand was steady and he looked comfortable with it, someone used to guns.

  “You need to come with me.” There was an edge to his voice, the anger honed to a fine point, almost gloating.

  “What are you trying to accomplish?” I asked, buying time.

  But there was nowhere to sell it in this desolate area, the drizzling mist muffling sound, blurring vision. No one would come out here until the morning; resisting him would get me shot here. Even as small as he was, he could drag my body into the canal, only yards away.

  “You just need to come with me,” he said, the gun still steady.

  “Okay, I’ll follow you,” I said. This is crazy, I wanted to yell. I’d forgotten, or neglected to consider, all the crazy young boys, stung with teenage hurt, raging hormones, and raging humiliation, and the fury with which they lashed out. Little nerdy Brandon. Seventeen and probably hadn’t even been kissed yet.

  “No, you go first. I’m not stupid.”

  I didn’t reply, because he was stupid. He might kill me—guns are good at that. But he couldn’t walk away from this and go back to his life. He’d have a short moment of glory—rather, attention—then he’d rot in jail for more years than he could imagine. But he said he always won, and that was the only outcome he’d considered.

  I walked in the direction he’d come from, slowly, from the dark, and to scan for anything that could help.

  Another noise from within the warehouse.

  “Damn it,” he muttered. “Hurry up!”

  “Where am I going?”

  “To the door,” he answered, as if I should know where the door was.

  I guessed it was somewhere near the side he’d appeared from. The noise at least let me know someone was alive in there. I had wondered if he’d lured us all out there to kill off one by one everyone he thought had humiliated him.

  “What are you going to do with us?”

  “You’ll see,” he said, a grim satisfaction in his voice.

  I came around the corner of the building and could just make out the outline of a door partway down the side.

  Still no lights except a faint wisp from his phone screen behind me. He had turned it to flashlight mode to light his way.

  “This the door?” I said as I approached it.

  “Yeah, go in.”

  I entered an office area, vague shapes of desks, file cabinets, chairs in the dim light. I moved slowly in, my foot brushing a trash can near one of the desks.

  “Now where?” I asked.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  Not helpful, except it told me he had little empathy, no ability to consider I’d never been here before and couldn’t know what he did.

  I plodded my way to the far end of the room, only the glow from his phone giving any light back here. Guessing, I turned right.

  “No, the other way,” he said, as if I’d done something stupid.

  Brandon had carefully thought this all out, that was clear. But he’d only planned to win. Even something as minor as my not knowing the way to go disrupted his plans.

  Oh, baby cakes, welcome to the real world, I vowed, as I shuffled along in the dark, his cell phone light doing little to help me navigate the dim hallway. I was going to do everything I could to ruin his plans. Computer games only have a limited set of variables. Life is infinite.

  It was a ch
arcoal tunnel that got blacker as the tiny glow from the office windows was left behind. I had to assume there was a door at the end of the hallway; it was too black to see anything. I fumbled for a doorknob, my hand feeling in the dark.

  Since Brandon didn’t tell me not to, I opened the door.

  Another dark void. This one felt bigger, the interior of the warehouse. There were no windows to let in even the faintest of lights from the airport.

  I thought I heard shuffling, breathing, then a plane rumbled overhead and drowned out any other sound.

  “Keep going,” Brandon instructed.

  I took several steps in the dark until my foot clunked against something solid. And painful.

  “Keep going,” he said, his voice growing agitated.

  “I can’t see and I don’t know where to go,” I answered. If his goal was to just shoot me, he would have done it by now.

  He let out an annoyed sound, then stepped around me, too far away for me to tackle him.

  A light blazed on, a single bulb hanging from the rafters. It cast hard shadows in the corners, but was daylight compared to the blackness before.

  Three other people were in the room.

  Sophia and—what was her name?—Janice had their hands tied together, wrist to wrist, forcing them to encircle one of the steel supporting beams. Tied to another beam with his hands behind him was Alan. He was slumped to the floor with blood trickling down his chin, but his eyes were open and he was watching.

  “Where’s Kevin?” I asked.

  “I’ll get him later,” Brandon snarled, as if that was one part of his plan that hadn’t worked right.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Kill us all?”

  “No, you are,” he said, with a triumphant smile. “You’re going to shoot everyone here and then in a fit of remorse shoot yourself.”

  “You think I’m going to go along with that?” I mocked him.

  He leveled the gun at me. “It doesn’t matter what you do. They’re dead, killed with the gun that killed Eddie, and then you’re dead. Who’s going to talk?”

  “Are you crazy? You played a few computer games around forensics and you think you know enough to fool the cops?”

  He had the gun, the only weapon I had was my brain. I hoped it was enough.

  “It’s not that hard,” he retorted, but his face was getting red. “You’re about to be arrested for his murder anyway.” The smug smile came back as he pulled something from out of his jacket and tossed it to me.

  A baggie containing a bullet.

  “I was smart enough to dig it out of the lawn,” he bragged.

  “How did you…?” I started.

  Sophia answered, “I told him. Alan told me, and I was talking about what a creep Eddie was. Brandi-bots here said he didn’t seem so bad, so I told him about Eddie attacking Tiffany’s mom.”

  “And I was smart enough to make the bullet go away so the cops couldn’t find it,” he said, gloating. “Plus your car was seen around the time Eddie was killed.”

  “So you lied and claimed to have seen it. They’re already suspicious of that one. The gym sticker is faded from the sun as it is. A passer-by on a dark night notices it? Not likely. The cops aren’t as stupid as you’d like them to be. If they haven’t traced that call yet, they will.”

  Again, the look of uncertainty as I pushed against his perfectly laid plan.

  The really sad thing is I was right. Joanne would know I would never do anything like this. Kill a scumbag like Eddie? Maybe, but not three innocent kids. The police would dig and dig again. He’d go to jail, we’d be dead; it would all be a sad, stupid waste. Unless I could stop him.

  “Ever won a computer game straight through? No stopping and going back to the last saved version to avoid being killed by trolls? One mistake and you go to jail for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m not going to make any mistakes.”

  “Never got surprised by the trolls?” I taunted. “I told my two cop friends I was coming out here tonight, meeting you. Just in case. If I don’t call them in about an hour to say I’m okay, then they’re out here with sirens screaming. Think you can kill us all and clean everything up in that time?” I glanced at my watch. “Oh, make that a half hour.”

  “No! You’re lying!”

  Well, yes, I was, but he had no way of knowing that.

  “End it now,” I said, my voice as calm as I could make it. “If it stops here, you’ll be okay. Claim Eddie threatened you. No DA is going to go to the mat for him. You’ll get a slap on the wrist. Bragging rights, even, for how tough you are. But if you go through with this, you’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  “No, you’re lying!” he yelled again.

  “It’s the tape,” Janice said.

  I looked at her.

  “Shut up!” he yelled.

  “What tape?”

  Sophia said, “Him sucking Eddie’s dick. They got bored and drunk and turned on their little nerd. They made him suck their dicks.”

  “Shut up! Just shut up! You’re lying!” He was sweating, and even the dim light showed the red of his face.

  If he wasn’t pointing a gun at us, I would have felt sorry for him. But I had more important things to worry about than his male psyche.

  I quietly stepped away from them, opening us up so we’d be more-spread-out targets.

  “No, she’s not. I saw the tape,” Alan said. “You throwing up, running out the door, tripping, them grabbing you and rolling you in dog shit. They filmed it all.”

  Again, keeping my voice calm and soothing, I said, “Brandon, that’s a horrible thing to have happened to you. But it’s not your fault. Men get assaulted, too, even strong men.”

  “No, you’re lying! The video is fake! It didn’t happen like that.”

  “If it’s fake, then why does it matter? Why bring us here?” I asked. But I knew the answer. It wasn’t fake. He’d been humiliated and degraded in a brutal way. First he’d lashed back at Eddie—who made the same mistake I’d made—thinking Brandon, pudgy little Brandon wouldn’t do anything.

  “Because you’ll tell these lies about me. I’m not like that.”

  “No one thinks you’re like that,” I said.

  But he kept going, not listening. “I’m from a long line of hunters and soldiers. We’re men, real men. My dad’s a soldier, fighting overseas.”

  “Your dad’s in jail for going AWOL,” Sophia said.

  “Liar! He’s got medals to prove it.”

  Worlds collide. “No, that’s your aunt,” I said. “His sister.”

  Brandon whirled on me. How many messed-up kids could there be with soldier fathers locked away? The toxic misogyny my date had described would produce a kid like this, caught between expectations of what men were and the short, round body nature had given him.

  “She’s a bitch!” he shouted.

  Bingo.

  I wondered if there was a kid in there who could be saved, who could find his way out of that noxious swamp of rigid, impossible expectations.

  But that would be up to the psychologists. Right now I had to save the rest of us.

  Every time he’d been distracted by one of them, I’d moved farther away.

  Now he had to swivel his head back and forth.

  He finally seemed to catch on.

  “Hey, you move over there.”

  “Move where?” I asked. I took a step, pretended to stub my toe and stumble, enough to bend down and grab the knife, sending it sliding along the floor toward Sophia and Janice.

  Then I spun around and jumped for the light switch, and everything was black.

  I immediately threw myself on the floor, sliding away as far as I could.

  As I expected, the gun fired, aiming for where I had just been.

  “Stop it! Turn the light back on!” Brandon yelled.

  But we weren’t playing in his game anymore.

  It’s an old trick but I felt along the floor, finding a few di
scarded bolts and nails. I tossed them across the room to an empty place.

  Brandon fired again.

  Two bullets gone.

  I hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at his gun but had to assume it had at least ten shots. Eight bullets was more than enough for four of us.

  Brandon turned on the light on his cell phone.

  Guess he didn’t like to be in the dark, either.

  But this was a huge space, open in the middle, but with piles of large wooden crates and partly dismantled cars spanning the edges.

  His light didn’t go very far.

  A plane roared overhead. Taking advantage of the deafening sound, I skittered back behind one of the cars, grabbing another handful of junk and tossing it behind him—and away from the others.

  He fired again.

  He was getting close to the light.

  I picked up what felt like a wrench and threw it right at him, outlined in his light.

  A good blow to the shoulder. He dropped his cell phone. “What the hell? That’s not fair!”

  There was an open tool kit beside the car. I grabbed what I could, screwdrivers, sockets, and threw them at him. He was trying to retrieve his phone, but the light gave me a target.

  In frustration, he fired in my direction, but the bullet went wide.

  Suddenly the door slammed and his muffled voice yelled, “You can’t get out. You’re locked in here. No one is getting out of here.”

  Footsteps running away.

  I gave it a moment, then retrieved his cell phone, but I clicked his light off. Softly I said, “Did you get the knife?”

  From the dark, “Yeah, working on it,” from Sophia.

  Janice said, “He has one of those guns, the kind that shoot a lot of bullets.”

  Well, that was cheery news.

  I risked clicking his light on, going back to the outer wall. There had to be another way out of here. But other than the inner door to the office, there was only one big bay door at the far end, and it was securely padlocked. If I had a gun I could blow it away.

  So I did the next best thing and called 9-1-1, using my phone. As I dialed, I went to the inner door.

  Ah, yes, it could be locked from in here. Just a cheap doorknob lock, but it might slow him down enough…for a miracle.