by Kaleb Nation
“I’d have called you if I thought it was bad,” he said. “But I figured it wasn’t. I saw you walking in earlier, so at worst your car was gone.”
“And a $2,500 camera,” I said with a sniff.
“Yeah, that,” he said, disinterested. “My aunt was pretty mad about it because she told my mom this morning when she found out you went to my school. Then she really popped when she found out I knew you. So here.”
He lifted a hand and lightly thwacked my cheek. “That’s from her. She said to do that if I saw you, for that murder story.”
I sighed. This was Arleta—if there was any confidentiality in my police report, it was long gone once the officers went home. One of the most popular pastimes in Arleta was gossiping. Spud took another bite.
“So did you make that up or did you hit your head or what?” Spud pressed. “You know, that part about the guy trying to kill you.”
“I actually don’t remember,” I said. He narrowed his eyes. You salty liar, they accused.
“Don’t start,” I told him. “I’m not even sure what happened anyway. Maybe I did just hit my head really hard.”
Part of me hoped it’d eventually become something Spud and I would laugh about. Now that it was midday and the cloak of night had disappeared, even considering what I had seen felt silly.
“Well, that’s nice,” Spud said with a shrug. “It’s good you’re in one piece, because I need your help with something, and that’d be really difficult if you were in a hospital bed.”
“I can’t help you crack any more codes or unsolvable puzzles,” I said. “You’ll have to hack it yourself.”
“What?” he stammered. “No, I figured that out. I need you to tell me if this girl likes me.”
“I said no unsolvable puzzles,” I reminded him.
“Listen,” he leaned closer. “I need this. I need to know. You’re the only person in the world who can help me. Literally, you are.”
He nodded his head to the side. “It’s Tiffany Dawson. She’s in a green shirt. It says ‘West Is Best.’ Beside the table. You see?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said with a halfhearted sigh. Tiffany was one of those girls who fell three rings outside of our socially mandated circle, with naturally blonde hair and glittery blue eyes. She also had an inclination toward any male whose arm muscle circumference neared the size of my head.
She picked up her tray and began to leave the cafeteria line, weaving in and out of the jostling students, hair brushing around her face like a magical gust of wind had entered the room to dance around her. Was her glow real or from her bleach-white teeth? She remained unaware of our reconnaissance: an easy thing to do when she was unaware of our existence entirely.
“Just curious about which alternate universe you met her in,” I said, tearing my gaze away sourly. “I’d like to visit it one day.”
“She totally looked at me in English earlier,” he protested. “And her eyes lingered. They lingered, Michael. Against mine.”
“In horror?” I said.
“In wild, uncontainable love,” he replied. “I’m gonna go up to her, and you watch her, alright?”
“Please,” I said, “stick to romancing computers. You won’t like this, I promise.”
“Michael,” he insisted.
“She’s far away.”
“Don’t give me that,” he said. “You’re the boy genius, Eye Guy.”
He was gone. I wasn’t in the mood for this but I tried to keep my gaze on her so I wouldn’t miss it. Staring at Tiffany Dawson…such a chore, Michael. I guess my job had some perks.
There were actually two ways that I could read someone’s emotions. Looking at a photograph was one, the other was a bit more complicated. In person, there was one specific moment I could read in someone’s eyes, a certain look of surprise when their guard was let down. It was hard to pin what it was exactly: it was usually that split second when someone made eye contact for the first time or when they were surprised abruptly. That was why I called it the Glimpse.
Spud was just a step away from her already but then clumsily tripped beside her and into a table, causing her to spin around at the sound. I winced as I saw his cheeks go red. Their eyes met for a fleeting moment, he spluttered out in apology, then he was gone again. He dove back into the chair across from me.
“Please tell me you saw it, I can’t do that again,” he said, out of breath.
“I’m sorry Spud,” I shrugged. “It’s just no.”
“No?” he echoed, his face falling. “But…didn’t you see? She smiled, for a second.”
“Tiffany is always smiling,” I replied, taking a bite of food.
“You gotta be wrong.”
I didn’t need to reply. He was very quiet for a while, then he huffed.
“But every psycho-prodigy messes up once in a while.”
“No.”
“Really, there’s a chance.”
“No.”
He sighed. It was an unfortunate fact that neither of us got dates. I was frightening enough, and Spud, my only friend, was exclusively intimate with computer programming languages.
“Do I owe you anything?” he murmured.
“Nah,” I replied. “But you could show me some fun secret government files if you want.”
He grabbed his laptop far too eagerly for my comfort.
“I wasn’t serious,” I stopped him. He leaned back dejectedly, nibbling on his toast.
The day did not get any more interesting, but only got worse when the yawning math teacher Mr. Chex twirled his moustache and assigned us a massive test, during which time he took a nap. I was all too happy when school was over, only to walk out to my usual parking spot and be greeted by someone else’s car in place of mine. I cursed the crash again and started the long trip home on foot.
A mild breeze brushed the grass on the roadside. Every step away from the school and my lifeless day lifted tiny weights off my shoulder. Alli’s school wasn’t far from mine, and when I started to pass it on the sidewalk, I saw her hovering around a group. I strolled up, pushing my fingers through the chain links.
“Get in my van, I have candy,” I growled at her in my best creepy voice, and she turned from her friends, who all looked at me with expressions of horror.
“Get in my van instead,” she replied, “I’ve got a jar of punch-you-in-the-face.”
Her expression betrayed her words though, because she had lit up when I’d appeared. I usually drove myself home so I never showed up to see her. Her friends’ started breathing again, but I’d probably upset Alli’s chances of getting them to come to our house for a while.
“Where’s Spud?” Alli asked. I nodded my head back in the direction of school.
“In the library,” I said. “I’m here walking home all alone and lonely.”
“Mom said I could go with Kate and Sammy,” Alli said apologetically. Her friends continued to eye me suspiciously.
“I get it,” I said, shrugging. “I’ll just walk home, and probably get run over by a car, or mauled by a bear coming out of the trees—”
“Fine.” Alli sighed in defeat. Both of her friends looked at her wildly, but she paid them no heed. Sometimes I wondered if she could read my emotions too. She had changed from their side to mine and I hadn’t even gotten to my good begging yet.
She ran around the gate and joined me, waving to her friends as she disappeared.
“They’re not gonna be mad at you, right?” I asked.
“They’ll get over it,” she replied. “Hungry?”
She held out a remaining half of a sandwich. I shook my head. We walked in silence for a while, the March sun throwing pinks and yellows across the horizon that bordered the high canyon sides of the Valley. Multilayered clouds hovered above us like the fluffy shreds of a torn pillow littered across the sky. Cars drove slowly by us in the school zone, kids babbling as they traveled in packs down a crosswalk.
“Did you do anything today?” Alli asked, since I wasn’t ta
lking.
“Not much,” I replied. “Lame stuff mostly. Math. I hate math.”
“I hate math too,” she agreed.
“You’ll die when you get to mine.” I elbowed her. “They use letters as numbers.”
“I’m already doing that,” she huffed. “X plus one equals four. What is X?”
“X needs to die in a fire,” I replied, and my sister chuckled. She always did that, at every crazy joke I made. That was probably why I’d gone to get her that evening. Which reminded me…
Without warning, I whipped my pocket camera out, and Alli dodged to get out of the lens. I was faster though, and rattled off a few snapshots as she struggled to hide her face.
“Stop it!” she demanded. This was our game. Alli hated me taking photographs of her. She wouldn’t take her hands from her face until I put the camera away.
“I got at least ten this time,” I gloated.
“And you’ll have none when I break that camera with a tennis racket,” she said.
Neighborhoods went by on both sides separated by the road we were following, the smell of damp grass coming from the vigilantly watered lawns. Some people were home from work and in their yards, babbling from terraces, blue fluorescent fly zappers hanging from the porches and armed for the attack of flying beasts. It was all a blur to me, because I’d seen this route every day for years now, even if it was from a car window. My steps became an autopilot.
“You’re not listening, are you?” Alli said, slapping my arm.
“What?” I looked at her quickly. “Of course I’m listening.”
“What did I just say?” she demanded.
“Something about death? Destruction?” I tried. She hit me again.
“I don’t know why you wanted me to walk home with you if you’re not listening.”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Look, I was in a car crash last night—I’m not in the best condition.”
I waved at my gauze-covered arm. “You can’t blame me. Then on top of that I had a really weird dream last night.”
“Were you chained to a chair and fed maggots?” she asked. My eyes widened in horror.
“What? No?” I coughed. “Where did you read that?” Holy hell, she’s only eleven.
“It was on TV,” she said. “I watched a show on a serial killer.”
“How do you even know what a serial killer is?” I said with dismay. “You’re supposed to still think that’s somebody who murders Cap’n Crunch.”
“I don’t even eat Cap’n Crunch.”
I gave in. “It was a dream about…running, from somebody.” I didn’t know if I should mention he’d been my client.
“Was he really ugly?” Alli said. “I dreamed of an old ugly man last week. But when he tried to get me into the gas chamber, I sprayed him with acid.”
I stared at her blankly. My sister stared back.
“I don’t really know how to respond to that,” I said, blinking. “But I think you might want to schedule something with mom when we get home.”
“I don’t need a therapist,” Alli said adamantly. “I’m eleven.”
I was about to retort but we were crossing another busy street and the cars covered my voice. We got onto the sidewalk again, passing into our neighborhood.
“Mom said I wasn’t supposed to ask you about nearly getting murdered,” Alli stated. I tried not to look at her suspiciously. She had a clever way of getting her intentions across.
“You know I do enjoy a good almost-murder story,” she said.
“Didn’t mom rule that out?” I replied. “I was just delirious, right?” Part of me wanted to know what my mom was saying about it.
“But still,” she insisted, “you remember something.”
I debated whether continuing with this conversation was a good idea. My sister’s head was disturbed enough. In the end, I decided I probably wouldn’t make things any worse up there.
So I told her everything that I could remember, from sneaking out of the house and quietly driving to meet Mr. Sharpe. My story followed what’d happened step-by-step, but I left out the silver claws and the flying. Even she would find that unbelievable, I thought. When I came to the end, we were nearly home, and Alli was quiet for a long time.
“Mom really swore at you?” Alli finally asked, and I burst out laughing. That would be the one part of the story that Alli got hung up on. We’d reached Hogan Lane—thanks to Alli, I’d returned to this street in much higher spirits than I’d left it. I knew it’d be a good idea to get her.
“So what do you think?” she said. “You sure it’s in your head, or maybe it happened and it was a good cover-up.”
“There wasn’t a body,” I replied. “I can see where mom and the police are coming from.”
“Yeah,” Alli agreed, and I could hear that even she was slowly becoming convinced. “And honestly, if Mr. Sharpe was real, wouldn’t his car still be parked on the side of the road right now?”
It took all of my mental power to keep myself from gasping out loud, though I couldn’t disguise the sudden shuffle of my steps.
His car! I realized. Mr. Sharpe had driven up to meet me…and…if he’d been killed on the rocks, his car would still be out there!
All of a sudden, a way of definitely proving my story—true or otherwise—had appeared. In my shaken state the night before, I had completely forgotten that detail, and now that it had showed up, every cell in my consciousness focused on it at once.
Luckily, we had just reached our driveway and Alli was distracted. She went into the house without paying me any more regard, clueless that she had caused me to have a breakthrough.
I remained in this nearly frozen state through dinner, my body like a discarded exoskeleton. There were few questions over dinner: how was the day, what did you learn Alli, did you remember to ask if your sister could help at the bake sale, is Michael listening to us speaking…hello, Michael, are you there? Alli’s hand waved in front of my face and broke me from my thoughts, and I robotically rolled out answers to them. Luckily they ignored my mental absence, probably thinking that regret over my car crash was sinking in.
After my mom disappeared into her office and my sister took over the living room television, I headed for my room and switched on my computer screen. That was my habit. I’d sit at the screen and edit photos all night, or study the gazes of politicians who’d been on the news, or the eyes of celebrities just so that I could mentally predict the tabloid headlines that’d be out months later.
That night, though, I couldn’t even touch the mouse. I sat in the center of my face-covered walls, Alli’s revelation rolling through my head. The car…that silver Maserati with the blue headlights.
I know it’s there…
Now that everything had blown over for the most part, did I even want to know the truth?
I was unable to banish it. Finding truth was too much a part of me to simply disregard. If I found it, then I could tell the police and my story would be proved true, and they’d go hunting for this man who’d somehow escaped. My mom wouldn’t be angry with me anymore and my name would be cleared.
And if there was no car in the first place? It was an option I didn’t want to think of, because that meant I’d truly been having hallucinations. But it would put my mind to rest. Because if there was no car, then there had been no man. And if there was no man, there had been no murderous gaze or silver claws, and all of this was a mere overreaction.
I glanced at the clock. It was almost time for bed.
Or time for work? my treacherous mind countered.
My cell phone was in my grasp a second later, dialing Spud.
“What’s up?” he answered. “Crash another car?”
“Not yet,” I replied.
Evidence
The last time I’d sneaked out of the house, I’d nearly been turned into human rotisserie. Sometimes I wondered just how dangerous I could get if I didn’t constantly keep myself in check. Maybe if I’d tried to be more norma
l, I wouldn’t have found myself climbing out my window at midnight again, careful of even the slightest noise this time. Maybe then I wouldn’t have scraped my palms by scooting across the shingles until I reached the roof of our garage, dangling from the edge until the ground was close enough to let go. Maybe then I’d just stay at home and sleep at night, and surround myself with insignificant pains like how to get a hotter girlfriend or how to keep my boss from yelling at me for being late to work.
A girlfriend and a real job wouldn’t be that bad, would it? I thought. As if I had time for either. I stole across the grass still damp from the light shower that had appeared early in the night, and slipped through gate.
The emptiness of the street squeezed in like a quilt. There were no lights in the houses, no cars pulling into the driveways. One might have found more life in a taxidermist’s freezer.
I hurried down the sidewalk with furtive glances back at my house, its wooden panels appearing gray in the dim cast that covered the dismal street. My mom was probably (and hopefully) catching up on sleep, now that I didn’t have a car to escape with. No lights switched on as I walked with my hands in the pockets of my jeans. There were only the empty echoes of the city far away, and the ever-present blue fly zapper someone had forgotten to unplug before going in to sleep.
To be safe though, I’d told Spud to park at the end of the street. I could see the outline of his beaten brown Chevy pickup around the corner, the lights off but the engine rumbling low into the night.
“I knew I kept you around for something,” I told him as I climbed into the passenger side, the bench seats covered with an old mat stitched over its original material. Spud huffed as I closed the door.
“You owe me a good bunch of things for this,” he said, though his tone betrayed his phony annoyance.
“What about the free work I gave you yesterday?” I countered. “I think we’ll be even.”
Spud pushed on the gas to shut me up. The engine was far louder than my BMW’s had been—the sound made me wince, but there was nothing to be done about it. Most of his truck’s original pieces weren’t even there anymore, the radio from sometime in the 1990s but the steering wheel at least two decades older. A new sound system had been wired in messily with cables poking up from under the seat, and every time Spud slowed for a stop I had to push a speaker back under the chair with my foot. I only relaxed when we were a good half-mile from my house and Spud turned the headlights on.
