by Adam Vine
Before I could respond, Gloria, who was bouncing along the edge of the trampoline in a big circle, said, “You make me sad, Drew. Those were our memories you burned. They were supposed to stay at Sunny Hill forever. Now, you ruined it. Are you gonna make it up to us?”
Andy laughed. “Christ, Lor. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Give the kid a break.”
“He will, soon.”
“Do you always have to sound like the motherfuckin’ Crypt Keeper when we talk about this shit?” Marty said.
Gloria shrugged. “Kill yourself.” Exactly what Natalia would say, I thought.
Apple rolled her eyes. “God, can we talk about something else?”
“Drew,” Andy stopped jumping and extended his hand, “bounce with us.”
Reluctantly, I took Andy’s hand and climbed onto the trampoline. I thought my weight would cause it to break. I was surprised it hadn’t already, with five fully grown adults jumping on it, but I knew this orchard wasn’t our orchard, with the same physical laws as the Sunny Hill I’d left behind, but some other version, like an off-color copy. We could all bounce together, because we were in the Other Sunny Hill.
The trampoline didn’t stress at all under my weight, and actually seemed to bounce us even better with me on it. I jumped.
“Look around,” Andy said. “Don’t you just love it here, buddy? If these trees could talk, huh? Bet they seen some crazy shit. You ever put a couch out here, get a cute girl, and just lay down to watch the stars? Take a couple of forties, get her clothes off, and… oh, sorry buddy. I forgot you’ve never had sex.”
“What? You’ve never been with a girl?” Apple said.
“Loser,” Gloria said.
“I’d fuck him,” Rebecca said, like I wasn’t even there.
“You’d fuck anything with two legs and three inches,” Marty said.
Rebecca shrugged. “So would you.”
Marty snorted.
“Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you guys?” Andy said. “Drew’s cool. If you don’t have anything nice to say…”
“I agree. About sitting out here,” I said, not wanting to delve into my sex life, or complete lack of one. “I come out here by myself and sit sometimes. It's actually one of my favorite things in the world. It's,” I hunted for the words to express how I felt sitting out under the stars, alone. “Peaceful,” I finished, lamely.
Andy didn't seem to notice. "See? Told ya he’s cool.”
“Seems like a loser to me,” Gloria said.
The trees reached and fell with every bounce, as real as any other place I’d been in my real life. I knew at this point I wasn’t asleep. Hallucinating, maybe, but I’d never had a hallucination this strong. My mind felt perfectly clear.
The fear I’d felt stepping into the Party of the Damned was gone. Finally seeing the ’93 Sunny Hill Crew in real life (or whatever current state of “life” I was in) made me feel elated, fulfilled, even joyful. They were so much like us.
“So, Drew,” Apple said. “Tell us about this girl. Why do you like her?”
“Who?”
“Don’t who us, Archimedes,” Marty said. “You know damn well who. You think we ain’t know ‘bout her? We know everything there is to know ‘bout you, dawg.”
Rebecca took a fat rip and passed me the weed. “You need to lighten up, Drew. You’re so serious all the time.”
“No, I’m not.” I tried to take a rip off the blunt in mid-air, like I’d seen Marty do, but it slipped out of my fingers and dropped somewhere in the grass. “Oh, shit. Sorry.”
I tried to get down and retrieve it, but Marty jumped in my way, a huge, Carter-like grin lighting his face from dimple to dimple. He produced another blunt from behind his ear, already lit, and handed it to me. “Relax! We got an endless supply where that came from.”
The weed was sticky and purple, shredding my lungs so hot I coughed smoke.
Gloria laughed. “Yeaaaaaaah! That’s the shit. Okay, he’s not a total loser. You’re pretty cool when you don’t try so hard, Drew.”
I shrugged. “I never try.”
Everyone laughed.
I felt something rising in my chest. The ’93 Crew was laughing at my jokes. They were my friends. Not fake, back-stabbing friends who wanted to keep me in my place, like the ones I had back in my own version of Sunny Hill, but real friends, friends who wanted me to be one of them.
“Drew-buddy, you want to try something cool?” Andy said. Who else calls me Drew-buddy like that? I wondered. I knew someone did, but I couldn’t remember who it was.
“Sure,” I said.
“Ready?” Andy held out three fingers to the others. They stopped bouncing. “Keep going,” Andy told me. I bounced. They all counted together, “One, two, three!”
At the last second before my feet touched the trampoline, the five of them bounced simultaneously and I was launched high into the air.
Suddenly I was looking down on Sunny Hill from above, that familiar rotten shake roof where I’d sat and drank beer with my friends, watching the red sun fade over the Pacific Ocean so many times, that same sea of diamond lights, that same tiny model Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, complete with its own miniature Ferris Wheel, all drenched in moonlight.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I peaked a good one or two hundred feet off the ground. I wasn’t scared of the height. But when I looked down, something about the ’93 Crew had changed. I couldn’t tell what it was until I started to fall again.
Their skin was blue-grey, mottled and riddled with worms. Their clothes were muddy and torn. Their eyes were empty, runny egg whites sitting in cold sockets. They weren’t people anymore. They were whatever was left of people after they die, all wearing the wounds that killed them.
Marty had a hole in his chest from where the steering column of his car impaled him in the crash.
Gloria was covered in stab wounds from where her late boyfriend knifed her to death in their murder-suicide.
Rebecca was foaming at the mouth from her overdose, veins full of black sludge under her skin.
Apple wasn’t dead. I thought she was at first, but when I got closer I realized she was alive, only covered in filth – mostly her own. She looked the way Carter had described her to me after their A.A. meeting. Her hair was brittle from being left unwashed for months. Her dead brown teeth looked ready to fall out of her gums. I recognized her instantly. Apple was the homeless woman who’d accosted Bea and me at the library, the one who asked us for a cigarette, then told Bea I was going to rape her.
That was when I noticed Andy. Andy wasn’t dead, either. He was wearing a police uniform, obsessively ironed, buttons polished and collar starched. He had aged twenty years in those few seconds I was launched from the trampoline, his muscles twice their already respectable former size. He was completely bald, that glorious mop of dune-blonde hair gone, replaced by a pink, perfectly-shorn scalp. He was grinning at me like I was an old friend.
How had I not recognized him before, after so many countless hours obsessively studying his pictures? The pranks, the blunts, the guns, the digging? Had I not seen it because he had really changed so much, or because I didn’t want to? Mr. Hard Ass. Officer Skoakland.
“Drew-buddy!” Officer Andy Skoakland said. “This is my Crew.”
I wanted to vomit.
“Didn’t hurt much,” Marty said, brushing absently at the gaping hole in his chest. “Shit. Barely even felt it. Real talk.”
Gloria looked at her stab wounds and shrugged. The blood leaking out of her was the same color as her nail polish. “I loved him. Okay, he had a bad temper. So what? He was a really great guy.”
“Until he wasn’t,” Dead Marty chuckled. Andy gave him a high-five.
Dead Gloria bounced away from them, mumbling, “At least I never drove drunk, assholes.”
“I did,” Homeless Apple mused in stutter-stop. “They took my license, my kids! Got kicked out of my own house! Now I sleep unde
r a fuckin' bridge!” She cackled bitterly.
Dead Rebecca was the portrait of calm. “You bitches don’t know anything. I thought this was Tylenol.”
“So you ate the whole bottle?” Dead Marty clapped and laughed again, so hard he almost fell off the trampoline.
Dead Rebecca crossed her arms and stared at him. “My head hurt, fuck-brain. I was coming down off a five-day meth binge with no food or sleep. I barely remembered to drink water.”
Officer Andy put his arm around Dead Rebecca, then said to me, “Not exactly a lively bunch. Forgive the pun, shitty humor comes with the badge. But they still know how to have fun. I never met anyone who could party as hard as these degenerates, until I met the New Sunny Hill Crew. You guys, wow,” Skoakland motioned with his hands like his head was exploding. “You four – well maybe not Sam, that guy’s kind of a square – but you guys, you’re animals. No, you’re monsters.”
I looked down. The ’93 Crew was still standing around the frame of the trampoline, but the trampoline itself was gone. I was falling towards a bottomless black hole where the trampoline had been, a black pit stretching down to oblivion.
The ’93 Crew all held out hands for me to slap as I plummeted past them. I tried to grab onto Andy, but he grinned and pulled his hand away at the last instant, pretend-combing his bald scalp instead.
“Oops. Smell you later, Drew-buddy,” Officer Andy said as I fell into the hole.
Marty advised, “Get your ass to the gym.”
Rebecca said, “You’re cute! I’m serious. Big guys are hot. You’re like a giant teddy bear. Don’t worry about her, Drew! Her loss, if she chooses that burnout instead of you. Bye! Hope we see you again soon!”
And Gloria intoned, “We will.”
***
I fell through pitch blackness towards the echo of zydeco music. An orange shoebox dropped with me. I don’t know how long I fell. It could have been a minute, an hour, or a day. I grabbed the box and clutched it to my chest so it wouldn’t drift away from me as I descended.
At some point, the shoebox started talking. “Hey, kid,” Scudds Gurney’s voice said, muffled. “Hey, kid. Open the box.”
I did.
Scudds’ skull was inside. His flashbulb eyes glinted at me, and I could see my broken reflection in his mirrored teeth, the same as they had been in the garage, when his skull was covered with flesh.
Scudds’ voice said, “You wanna see a magic trick?” The jawbone didn’t move.
Was I going to say no?
Slowly, the skull’s jaw slid open. I cringed at the surprise sound of a Polaroid picture being taken, the flashbulbs blinding me as they went off. The whir of printing film echoed all around me. A fresh photo fed out from between the skull’s mirrored teeth. I took the picture out of Scudds’ mouth and waited for it to develop.
The image in the Polaroid was moving. Two bodies silhouetted in a sliver of moonlight, having sex on a sleeping bag laid on the floor of Sunny Hill. A Brazilian girl with killer legs, and a wild-haired, chip-toothed man I was once foolish enough to call my best friend. Bea was riding Jay in the corner of the living room, behind the green couch with the red floral print. Her voice echoed somewhere, “Tonight I’m going to finish what we started.” Her soft, stifled moans escaped the picture, stabbing straight into my gut. “Oh shit,” Bea gasped. “Holy shit. Don’t stop. Right there. Oh, Jay. I’m gonna cum.”
Jay grabbed her hips, thrusting deeper into her. “Me, too.”
I looked away. I couldn’t watch. But I heard them.
When it was over, I shoved the picture in my pocket and cried, and fell, and cried. I thought I would fall forever, crying and digesting myself until this fat, pitiful excuse for a body was gone, but Scudds Gurney’s skull said, “Got another one for ya,” as another picture trundled busily from his grinning mouth.
While it was developing, he printed a third, and finally a fourth. I arranged them in the order they printed. The image on the first picture began to take shape.
In the first picture, Bea was dead.
I stopped crying. My guts twisted like a ball of cooked spaghetti. I closed my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real, but when I opened them again, the picture was still there in my hand. I forced myself to look.
Bea lay in a pool of her own blood, half-leaning against a blood-smeared wall. In the foggy off-color of the Polaroid, her blood appeared rusty crimson. Her face was moribund, as if she’d bled out, one of her eyes still open. She was cradling her neon green running shoes in her arms. Beneath the hem of her shorts, both of her legs were gone.
The next picture was of Jay. He had been decapitated.
The third picture was of Carter. Carter had died holding his guts in his hands, after they were cut out of his perfect abs by someone using what I could only guess was a very large knife. His last expression was one of extreme suffering.
The fourth picture was of Natalia. Natalia had been trimmed like a tree. Her skinny limbs had been lopped down to bloody stumps. Her torso was propped up against the front door of the house, a blue Post-it note pasted over her mouth. I didn't have to read it to know what it said.
They see you.
***
I woke up to blue lights flashing. It was dawn, and I was outside, lying on the deck couch next to the barbecue. I felt like there was a tumor about to crack through my skull.
A cop car was parked with its emergency lights on in front of Mr. DeLucio’s house. The siren was off. Mr. DeLucio’s front door was open. I picked up the fire poker from where it lay next to me and walked up the driveway to Mr. DeLucio’s house.
Unless the pictures had lied, the state I’d seen Mr. DeLucio in the night before as he played Moonlight Sonata suggested he was on the verge of suicide. I know, because I’ve been there. The guy lived alone, was a registered sex offender, and we'd taken away the only thing he had to live for: the pictures, his memories of happier times.
Officer Skoakland’s face appeared in the door as I approached. I wasn’t surprised to see him. He looked tired. Sweat beaded on the hairless curve of his head. There were grim circles under his eyes. From the look on his face, he wasn’t surprised to see me, either. He nodded at me, and his eyes showed no recognition of what had transpired on the trampoline the night before in the Other Sunny Hill.
Officer Skoakland eyed the fire poker in my hand. “Next time, take a kitchen knife, buddy – fire poker’s too easy to disarm.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You all right? You look like you got run over by a bus.” He didn’t wait for me to respond. “Listen. I don’t know if it was you who made the call. I just want you to know, you won’t get in trouble.”
“Is he dead?”
Skoakland lowered his voice. “You won’t be accused of committing a crime. It’s clear he took his own life. God knows he fit the profile. Guy was a basket case. Hell, he was a fuckin’ sex offender. Flasher. Chester molester. A general all-around goon. The world’s better off without him.”
He killed himself. Considering what Bea yelled at him while we were burning the pictures, about Apple hating his guts… no. You’re not going to do that, Drew. If he’s dead it isn’t anyone’s fault but his own. I can’t blame Bea for this just because I’m mad at her.
Another voice spoke up in my head, cold and angry. Yes I can. She’s a lying whore. I pushed the thought away, feeling sick for having it. I shrugged Officer Skoakland’s hand off. “Okay.”
“We always appreciate anonymous tips at the SCPD. Probably wouldn’t have found him for a few days if you hadn’t called us, ‘til he started to stink, anyway. But, hypothetically, if you were the one who found him, and you ever need to talk – if you feel disturbed in any way – I want you to know, Drew-buddy, you can trust me.”
If I feel disturbed in any way? After last night? Maybe he wasn’t there, after all.
The cold voice returned. So, what are these five Polaroids still doing in your pocket?
I stared past Officer Skoakland through Mr. DeLucio’s ope
n front door. There was a dead person in there. Not a movie dead person, but a man I had known, in this world, who only a few days ago had gotten in my face about partying too loudly.
“Officer, it wasn’t me. I just woke up,” I said.
Officer Skoakland nodded in that way people do when they don’t believe a word you’ve said, but want to humor you anyway. “Uh huh. Sure. Okay. Okay.” His eyes followed my gaze inside. “Do you want to? See him, I mean. You wanna see the body?”
I nodded.
Officer Skoakland led me inside.
I’d never been in Mr. DeLucio’s house before. The shades were drawn, and the inside was gloomy and cluttered. It reeked of cigarettes. There were piles of old newspapers, books, DVDs, and junk mail on every surface. The place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. The walls were covered by smoke-stained family pictures and programming awards. There was a framed magazine cover with a much younger Benjamin DeLucio’s face on it from PC Computing.
The acrid sting of cat piss hit my nose as we started down the hall towards the bedroom. I saw the culprits watching me indifferently, two white French longhair cats, who fled skittishly when Officer Skoakland entered the hall leading to the bedroom.
“Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, fatties. You little shitters are going to the pound soon as the cleanup crew gets here.”
Over his shoulder, he said to me, “You ever seen a dead guy before?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“It’s better on T.V.”
He opened the door to the master bedroom. I followed him inside.
Mr. DeLucio was sitting on the opposite side of the room. He had hanged himself from the knob of the bathroom door with a belt. His head was purple and flopped over to one side, eyes bulging sightlessly to nowhere. His butt was a few inches off the ground. His legs, stretched out in front of him, lay heavy on the carpet. He was wearing a green striped t-shirt stained with grease at the neckline and armpits, and vomit-covered jeans.
I’d read about doorknob-hanging suicides before, while I was researching how to take my own life on the Internet, back when I was fourteen. You place the belt or rope around your neck, sit down slowly, straighten your legs out so only your heels are touching the floor, and let your butt fall. Most people aren’t tall enough to sit down completely, so the noose tightens, and you suffocate and die. Your legs have no leverage to stand you up again to relieve the pressure of the noose when they’re stretched out like that, so you’re still going to die even if you change your mind at the last second.
