What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  I’m only like thirty seconds behind him, with demented laughter still echoing in my head, but that thirty seconds is enough time for Anders to get to Marcy’s car, start it up, and pull out of the driveway.

  Where the hell is he going? He’s leaving, though. That much is clear. He’s bailing on me, Myers, and Marcy while he’s still not Anders at all. He’s some weird sort of doppelganger who looks like him, but doesn’t have his personality down. He’s only a poor study drawn with charcoal and rough lines.

  The color is all gone.

  Pffft. All gone.

  As I stand on the driveway, watching the back of Marcy’s car disappear down the street, the growing realization that I am holding up my body by sheer force of will, glued together by exhaustion, envelopes me in a tight fist.

  Whatever is happening to us and to Meadowfield is turning me into nothing more than a pummeled punching bag. One more punch and the fraying rope that’s tethering me to reality is going to snap. I’ll crumble into a thousand little pieces like Myers did back on the path in Prince Richard’s Maze.

  But I can’t.

  I just can’t.

  There has never once been anyone there for me but myself—not Beryl, not the old, dead people who left me a rich kid, not anyone. My friends have tried to be there for me, as much as they can, but the truth is we all have issues.

  We all have shitty lives in shitty houses with shitty things that go on behind closed doors that would make most people’s hair stand on end. Not one of us is beaten or has alcoholic parents. We haven’t been inappropriately touched by the adults in our lives. We’ve never known hunger or poverty.

  In some ways we’re all afflicted with things that are equally as bad.

  We hide behind smiley paper masks when in truth we’re covered with the pockmarked scars of apathy and mental illness, drugs, crazy-ass brothers, fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck mothers, and more.

  I want to curl into a ball right here on Primrose Lane, underneath the blue sky and bright sun, my thumb in my mouth and the other curled around my ear, but I can’t.

  Someone has to go after Anders while someone has to go back inside to see if Marcy is okay. Someone has to make sure that Myers doesn’t say or do something stupid, like talking to his mother and telling her everything.

  Someone has to figure out why there are things in our heads that shouldn’t be there, while someone else has to poke and prod at why a living girl covered in dotted lines and brought out of Dr. Viktor Pavlovich’s house this morning started clawing at the fabric of reality when she took one look at the four of us.

  She knows us. We know her.

  How can that be? We’ve never seen her before, have we?

  As I watch Anders drive away in Marcy’s car, hoping against hope that all he’s doing is heading over to Kimmel’s Bagels to get us all something to eat, I have a revelation.

  No one is going to help us.

  No one is going to help me.

  I might have my friends, and I’m sure as hell better off than any one of those poor, dead souls over on Covingtion Circle, but if I don’t pull up my big-boy pants, size 30 x 32 instead of size 46 x 32, I’ll be left with them floating around my ankles forever.

  Anders is gone, at least for now.

  Marcy and Myers need my help, and I need theirs.

  I take a deep breath and go back around Marcy’s house to the door to the garage. Inside, I smell grease and oil, trash and mold. At the door leading to the lower-level rec room I stop, my hand resting on the door knob and my eyes closed.

  I can do this. I can make this right. I might not be able to fix everything and I’m sure as hell never going to fix the burnt triangle on my arm. Still, I have to try.

  Something really messed up is happening, both to us and to town. I wish I could Scooby Doo this shit, but I can’t.

  I’m not smart enough to be Velma.

  Anders isn’t boy-scout enough to be Fred.

  Marcy might very well be Daphne, but it’s taken a miracle for her to get there, and Myers, well Myers might be dorky enough without the stoner vibe to be Shaggy.

  We just don’t have a Scooby with us. It must be nice to be a dog. Dogs don’t have any issues. They sleep all day, and when they don’t sleep, they eat.

  I gave up eating a year ago. As for sleeping, it remains to be seen as to whether or not I’m ever going to be able to close my eyes again.

  28

  UPSTAIRS, THE TV is still on, and Myers is flipping channels. Every station has its cameras pointing at Meadowfield, Massachusetts and the parade of people gathered outside of Dr. Viktor Pavlovich’s house.

  “They’ve already cornered off his vegetable garden,” Myers says. “They think he really did bury some people there.”

  “That ruins salad for me forever,” says Marcy. Any other time her words would be morbidly funny, but today, right now, they’re not. She has a paper towel filled with ice pressed to the back of her head, and her eyes are glassy. For that matter, she’s not even watching the TV. She’s staring at the wall above where the television is mounted, but I can tell her thoughts are someplace else.

  My stomach gurgles, but I ignore it. Instead I walk over and sit down in the chair next to Marcy. Myers is still staring at the TV with his mouth slightly open. My coconut’s eyepatch on his eye is a little unnerving. I half expect him to say ‘Arrrghhh,’ at any moment, but even if he does, it won’t make me smile.

  It will only creep me out.

  “Give me the remote,” I say to him and hold out my hand. Absentmindedly, he reaches over and grabs it off the counter and shoves it in my direction, his one good eye never leaving the screen. The news is focusing on that girl’s freak out again. There she is, right on camera, with her dotted lines, her eyes staring directly in front of her, and her high pitched scream stunning everyone into silence. Thankfully, the camera doesn’t pan back or swing wide so the four of us appear on screen. If I saw myself and the horrified look that must have been on my face, with the equally mortified expressions of my friends, all of which had nothing to do with Viktor Pavlovich and everything to do with some different sort of horror, I might get sick again.

  I take the remote from Myers and turn off the television.

  In some way, Myers and Marcy are probably thankful. Besides, we have something to talk about, but no one wants to start.

  None of us are stupid. We know it has to be done.

  “What happened to us last night?” I whisper. I might as well have spoken the words into a microphone. They seem to echo off the walls, asking the question over and over again.

  “We were abducted by aliens,” says Myers.

  Marcy stares at him, her hand still on the back of her head, her fingers glistening from where the ice is already starting to melt.

  “One incredibly unrealistic theory,” I grimace.

  “Is it?” says Myers. “Look at your arm. They branded you.”

  Bringing up my arm ramps up the stinging pain more than I could have imagined, and I wince.

  “Does it hurt?” asks Marcy. Everything about her is so sweet. Everything about her is gentle and kind. How could Anders have pushed her into the counter? I mean, she’s Marcy. We’re friends. We’ve always been friends.

  I nod my head, but I don’t want to talk about aliens strapping me to a table, burning a triangle into my arm, shoving a transmitter up my nose so they can find me whenever they want, or sticking something really unpleasant up the other end for some ungodly reason that probably makes no sense other than that aliens are known to do that.

  “Probably not as much as your head,” I say. “I’m sorry Anders pushed you.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she says. “You’re not him.”

  “I don’t think he’s quite him, either,” adds Myers being all Captain Obvious.

>   I stare at him, wondering the same thing that I have found myself wondering about Anders lately. Will we be friends once we leave Meadowfield? Will we even know each other in a few short years?

  “I think we took drugs or maybe we were drugged,” I say. I don’t know how that could be true. The four of us don’t do drugs, but nothing else makes sense. I certainly don’t know what being drugged has to do with the shit show we woke up to this morning, but being all woozy like we’re hung over makes sense.

  “How?” says Marcy.

  “That’s stupid,” says Myers. “Why would anyone want to drug us, anyway? No one even pays attention to us. It’s like we’re invisible.” As we’re talking, Myers reaches over and flips open the pizza box. There are two small pieces left, and he slightly nudges them with his fingers. “Does pizza go bad?”

  We both shrug. “Would it matter?” I ask him. Myers is a bottomless pit with a cast iron stomach. I’ve seen him take peanut butter and chocolate bits, pop them into the microwave, melt them into mud and drink the whole thing like soup.

  He tears a paper towel off a roll that is sitting on the counter, piles the remaining pizza on it, and pops it into the microwave.

  “Besides,” says Marcy. “I can’t do drugs. They could mess up everything.”

  My stomach gurgles again, and I can’t tell if it’s gurgling from hunger or from nausea. I stare at the floor and wait for the rumbling to pass. Finally I look up at her and say, “Do you have anything to eat?”

  “Really?” says Myers. “Mr. ‘Extra Meatball’ wants something to eat? Now I really know something screwed up is happening.”

  The whole extra meatball thing is so stupid. We went out for slices sometime before the end of junior year. That’s when I was still starving myself silly, and refusing to eat. I was basically living on Diet Coke. Everyone was pestering me so much about not eating that I mustered up the courage to order one meatball on the ‘Extras’ menu, hoping it wouldn’t make me gain ten pounds.

  The waitress looked at me like I had something wrong inside the head and Myers made fun of me for weeks, calling me Mr. Extra Meatball, while Marcy kept telling me how great I looked and Anders kept sticking up for me like always.

  Myers’ nickname for me wore thin fast, then disappeared altogether—until now.

  Marcy shakes her head. Myers will never learn to keep his mouth shut. “We have some apples in the refrigerator,” she says. I’m thankful that she doesn’t tell me the junk drawer is filled with mega amounts of sugary candy. We’ve all been raiding the Coles’ stash since we were little.

  Candy, however, is no longer something edible for me. It’s poison.

  “Thanks,” I say and go over to the refrigerator as Myers pops the two slices back out of the microwave. They’re floppy. Nuking pizza for even 20 seconds will ruin it. He juggles them in his hands until he drops them back on the counter.

  A little bit of tomato sauce splatters and falls to the floor, almost in slow motion. As it hits, it creates a circular pattern.

  I stare at the stain on the ground, its faux bloody dribble becoming real—more real than anything else around me. The round splotch is more real than my hunger and more real than my friends. A lightning quick memory, viscous and cruel, slices through my brain like Dr. Viktor Pavlovich’s scalpel probably sliced through an unwilling victim’s face.

  “Anders,” I whisper. “The blood.”

  Marcy looks up at me, my hand gripping a refrigerator apple. “I know,” she says. “Someone got hurt.”

  Just like that, I fall down that rabbit hole hidden someplace in Prince Richard’s Maze, and another memory, darker than blood, explodes into being.

  29

  I CAN’T MOVE. I’m lying with my back on cold, uneven ground with an enormous weight on my chest. I’m numb all over and so tired that I can barely open my eyes. Still, I force them to stay open as big black orbs stare back at me.

  “Baaaaa,” I hear. “Baaaaa. Baaaaa. Baaaaa.”

  I want to move. I want to scream. I want the heavy weight on my chest to go away because I can barely breathe at all.

  I try to scream—to cry out for everything to stop, but I can’t muster the words. All that comes out of me is a low moan. Then a sick and twisted laughter starts up from somewhere close, and I’m scared for real.

  Suddenly, the weight disappears and there is a blur all around me. I hear growls and hisses and something going ‘hummpf.’ There are voices everywhere, but they are so chaotic and my brain is barely firing on one cylinder that I can’t make out the words.

  All I know is that I’m lying on my back surrounded by chaos, and I’m frightened. I’m more frightened than I think I’ve ever been, and I want to go home.

  I want to go home right now.

  A thud brings me back to reality, and the apple that I have pulled out of Marcy’s refrigerator rolls across the floor from where it has fallen out of my hand.

  “Are you okay?” says Myers, but it comes out all mush-mouthed because he is shoving day-old pizza into his mouth.

  “What?”

  “You look like you’re going to be sick.”

  “What?” I say again. “No. Yes. No.” There are those lies again. We all communicate in the shadows of truth, never saying what we really feel. Never saying what we really mean.

  Marcy is still holding the ice wrapped in paper towels to her head, but she manages to stand. After a moment, she takes the whole thing away and feels around in her mass of curls. “It’s only a bump,” she says. “I’m fine.”

  I want to say that I’m fine, too, but I’m not. I’m someplace else with my back pressed against the ground in the middle of the woods.

  “We have to find Anders before he hurts someone,” I blurt out. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t even know if I’m awake. There is a pained expression in Marcy’s eyes, and I recover quickly. “Before he hurts someone else.”

  Ten minutes later we are no longer in the Coles’ house. Myers has finished stuffing his big head with pizza and Marcy has dropped the wrapped ice cubes into the sink. We are down the street at my house and I’m pulling my truck, the one I bought when I turned sixteen and a half, out of the garage.

  I remember Beryl was annoyed that she had to go to the dealership with me and even more annoyed that she had to sign papers so I could buy it in the first place.

  Sometimes I think that I was an absolute ‘oops’ moment in her life. Well, I guess that part is true. I never had a dad. I think that sobering fact has ‘mistake’ written all over it, but it’s not something we ever talk about.

  I guess kids from single parent families eventually ask the forbidden question about the other half of the duo that created them. I never have. I don’t know why. Beryl is more than enough parent for me. I don’t need to contend with another.

  Someday, when I’m way older and I get some rare genetic disease that requires me to know my family history, I may ask. Until then, I’m good, or at least I’m as good as I can be.

  My truck is white and has an extended cab. I have fuzzy white dice hanging from the mirror. I don’t know what they mean, although Anders’ mother has told me, almost every time that she sees me in my truck, that she had fuzzy white dice on her car when she was growing up, just like mine.

  I hope that’s not an indication of my life to come, where I’ll be trolling around for pick-ups like she does, and then bragging about them to kids who shouldn’t even know that people do things like that.

  My life is sad enough.

  Marcy sits in the passenger seat next to me. One of her hands is at her mouth, and she’s chewing on the skin adjacent to her nails. Marcy would never bite her nails like I do. She’s worked too hard to get them to where they are. Chewing them would ruin everything. I know that’s how she thinks.

  Myers is in the bac
k seat again. It’s his permanent spot, always behind the rest of us. As I palm the wheel away from Primrose Lane, away from Merriweather Drive, and away from the horror across the street from Sandra Berman’s house, Myers belches a great big pizza belch, long and low and a little wet.

  “You’re gross,” Marcy says to him, which is about as mean as Marcy ever gets.

  “Totally gross,” I tell him. I look in the rearview mirror at Myers’ one good eye, the other covered by my pirate patch.

  Myers stares at me for a moment, then closes his eye, leans back, and slouches down in the seat. “Everything is gross today,” he says. “Really gross.”

  30

  THERE AREN’T VERY many places that Anders can go. Our lives in Meadowfield are finite. Once we pierce the bubble of town, we’re either in East Meadowfield, Springfield, or over the Connecticut border in endless fields of tobacco. Kids from other towns work the fields in the summers. Meadowfield teens don’t. We’re supposedly too busy studying for our college entrance exams.

  As I drive, I try and imagine where I would be heading if I were Anders.

  Normal Anders would have finished soccer for the day. He might be hanging out with some of the jocks, but more often than not, he’d be with us.

  He isn’t normal Anders, though. Since we all woke up this morning in Prince Richard’s Maze, he’s been someone else who I don’t know at all. None of us do.

  “Where are you going?” asks Marcy. She keeps rubbing the back of her head like maybe it hurts more than she’s letting on.

  “You’re hurt,” I say.

  “I’m fine.”

  “None of us are fine,” I shake my head as my truck hits the top of Merriweather and I have to go left or right. I turn to Marcy, hoping for a little guidance, and catch sight of her profile. She’s so elegant and pretty. How an infinite pool of genetics reaching back millennia formed and reformed until Marcy Cole was brought into being is unreal. I know I’m only thinking such bizarre thoughts because I’m still not quite normal yet. There is still stuffing inside my head, but it’s rapidly going away. Hopefully when it’s completely gone, I’ll never have to feel this way again.