by Susan Vaught
A sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of a past experience. . . .
I clicked off the mental-health websites and closed my eyes. Flashbacks. Like maybe I was there that night after all. I didn’t want that to be real, but I didn’t want to be having hallucinations, either. And if all of that at the Abrams farm was one giant awful flashback, then . . .
My fingers selected a file and clicked the mouse, even though I didn’t really want them to. I sat there staring at my list and listening to myself breathe and feeling my heart race, then stop, race, then stop.
Then I got busy with strikeout.
1. Old Mr. Abrams got shot, and nobody knows who shot him. MOM OR CISSY SHOT HIM WITH A SHOTGUN. WHY?
2. The Abrams farm got burned to the ground, and nobody knows who set the fire. MOM OR CISSY SET THE FIRE. WHY?
3. Cissy and Doc might be dead or alive, and nobody knows where they are.
4. Mom might have been WAS there.
5. I might have been WAS there.
6. Somebody might have been watching us while we searched. THE SOMEBODY HAD SHOES JUST LIKE CAPTAIN ARMSTRONG.
7. I might be PROBABLY AM crazy.
When I finished, I saved it under REALLY PROBABLY CRAZY LIST. Then I closed the file, shut the laptop, and put my head down on its warm lid. When people solved mysteries on TV, they didn’t keep getting bigger questions and worse stuff to worry about, did they?
I was pretty sure I had some answers now.
The problem was, I didn’t want any of them.
Critical Thinking: Serial Killers Don’t Wear Plaid
Footer Davis
5th Period
Ms. Perry
I. Hypothesis
Serial killers don’t wear plaid shirts. Is this always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false?
II. Evidence Collected
I looked at all the pictures in a dictionary of serial killers, then searched 1,354 photos online. A few serial killers might have been wearing plaid, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Serial killers seem to prefer button-ups with T-shirts underneath, or jail jumpsuits, unless they are Russian. Russian serial killers wear really freaky-looking stuff, even in jail. Most serial killers have stupid nicknames people shouldn’t give them, like Black Angel and Deathmaker and the Giggling Granny. Those names make them sound like heroes or comic-book characters, not something scary and evil. They also have bad hairdos, and some have moustaches that look like they belong on clowns. One serial killer dressed up like a clown. If you type in “serial killer” and search for it, you get about 164 million hits. If you type in “God,” you get more than a billion hits. So at least the world hasn’t gone “totally BLEEPing insane” like my neighbor Captain Armstrong says.
Serial killer dressed as a clown. This is a good reason not to like clowns.
III. What I Learned from This Report
1. Russian serial killers are stranger and uglier than walruses, and God is still more popular than maniacs.
2. My hypothesis that serial killers don’t wear plaid is sometimes or always true.
3. The guy watching the school from across the street at the store is probably a creep, not a serial killer, because he wears plaid shirts.
PLEASE SEE ME AFTER CLASS.
CHAPTER
9
Thirteen Days After the Fire
If I had a brain tumor, it was growing very slowly, because I was still alive and having to go to school. That sucked. Not the being-alive part but the school part. I wasn’t much in the mood for school. I never was when Mom had to be away.
“I was supposed to see Ms. Perry yesterday after class, but I didn’t go,” I admitted to Peavine on Thursday as we sat behind the scraggly bushes next to the school, doing surveillance on the creep at the convenience store. He was back again, wearing plaid and eating his lunch and staring at kids out at recess. “Think she’ll send me to the office?”
“She might. You know she’s strict.” Branches and leaves covered most of Peavine’s face, but when he glanced at me I could see the bright blue of his eyes through the brush. “What’d you do to tick her off this time?”
“She didn’t like the paper I wrote.” The guy across the street chomped on his hot dog. He ate a hot dog every day. I wondered if he put the same stuff on it. That would be boring, and probably more like a serial killer than a creep, since serial killers liked everything the same.
Peavine sighed. “She never likes your papers, Footer, but it’s nothing personal. She hates my stuff too.”
“You always write about worms and fishing and baseball.” I batted at the branch closest to my face, then snapped it so I could see better, then I didn’t want to see better, because I was feeling guilty and I’d been feeling guilty for days and just couldn’t stand it anymore. “I think Angel found my mother’s barrette at the Abrams farm. I tried to ask Mom about it when I visited Wednesday, but she just talked about mice in the basement and got all weird about having a piano in her wrist and sang really loud.” I cleared my throat and made myself look in his general direction, even though I saw mostly bush instead of his face. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before.”
“I didn’t want to ask you about the barrette, but I’ve been worried about it,” Peavine admitted. His blue eyes seemed twice as big as usual, and he was whispering, even though nobody was close to us. There were hundreds of kids out messing around everywhere, but here between the bushes and a brick wall, it seemed like we were alone in the universe. My eyes drifted to a rock on the ground, and I thought about Dad saying Mom was his star, but Mom calling Dad a rock and wanting to be his flower. Peavine was my strong, sturdy rock, right down here on the ground where I needed him. I didn’t know how he saw me. I hoped I was his rock, or maybe his flower beside the rock.
“I’ve been worried too,” I whispered back. My throat felt a little dry. I wanted to tell him I didn’t think the barrette wasn’t any big deal, but I couldn’t look him straight in those sweet blue eyes and lie, and besides, I didn’t want to start feeling guilty all over again. “I guess Mom lost the barrette.”
Peavine dug into the dirt with one hand, scooting little piles of dust forward, toward the bush’s gnarled trunk. “Do you think your mom was at the Abrams farm the night of the fire?”
My stomach twisted up, but I made myself breathe in and out, really slow like it said to on this YouTube video I watched on my phone last night. It was about stopping flashbacks and relaxation and “centering,” whatever that meant. The breathing helped enough to let me talk.
“Maybe she was there,” I said. Then before I could chicken out, I added, “Maybe I was there too.”
So much for breathing. My whole chest hurt like a walrus might be sitting on me with its giant walrus butt right on my ribs. Had I said that? Had I really, really just told Peavine I thought I was at the Abrams farm the night of the fire?
I was going to die of not breathing and thinking about walrus butts.
As I saw twinkly spots and tried not to think about walruses and opened my mouth to breathe, Peavine knocked his dust pile over.
“Seriously? You think you were at the farm, Footer? You making that up?”
I shook my head and made myself breathe, breathe, breathe. No walruses. No walrus butts. None. Absolutely no thinking about walrus butts.
“I’ve been seeing things,” I told Peavine when I could talk. “You know, like Mom does? Hallucinations. Only, I don’t think they’re really hallucinations. I read about those, and other stuff, and I think I’m having flashbacks. I think maybe I’m remembering stuff, but when I try to really think about it, it disappears and I just feel crazy. It’s like I can’t look at what’s right in front of me.”
Or right beside you, my mind whispered. In the dark, waiting to pounce. . . .
I shook my head to make that stupid brain-voice shut its mouth. Would Peavine believe me about being at the Abrams farm the night of the fire? Did I even believe myself? I doubled b
oth hands into fists and pressed them into the warm dirt, breathing the hot air and staring mostly at the leaves right in front of my nose. A suspicious stranger might have burned down the farm. Or a creep. Or Captain Armstrong. I was crazy. I had to be.
Peavine snapped a few branches so he could look at me better. “You’re not crazy, Footer,” he said, and he sounded so certain, he almost made me believe it. “Quit worrying so much. Whatever’s going on, you and me, we’ll figure it out together, okay?”
The way he was looking at me, so sure and so sweet and so completely Peavine, I wanted to kiss him.
So I kissed him.
I didn’t want to talk about the barrette or the fire anymore, and Peavine was always so nice to me, and I wanted to know how it felt to put my lips on a real boy’s lips instead of my own arm pretending, before I got locked up in a hospital like Mom for the rest of my life and never got to kiss anyone.
I had pretended to kiss Peavine before, and some other boys, but mostly Peavine. This real kiss lasted two seconds, and it was nothing like pretending. He tasted like salt and the barbecue potato chips he always ate at lunch, and there was a leaf right at the corner of our mouths, and a branch scratched my ear when I did it.
Peavine kept his eyes open. I know, because mine were open too. His eyes got a lot bigger as I pulled back, and he just stared at me for a second. The right side of his mouth twitched, like he wanted to grin but he was too freaked out. Finally, he said, “Okay,” and breathed a few times.
“Okay?” I wasn’t breathing at all. “That’s it?”
“I—uh, no, I—did you mean to do that?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He grinned with both sides of his mouth.
I grinned back, then realized my heart was beating really, really fast. “Do you think I’m a rock or a flower?”
“What?”
“A flower and a rock, like my mom said about her and dad when they first met, remember?”
Peavine still looked totally blank.
“A flower.” I got all hot in the face and started to sweat while he thought about it. “Like clover. All delicate and pretty and stuff. Or a rock. Like plain, strong granite. Which am I?”
“Is there a right answer to this?” When I didn’t say anything, he asked, “Can I think about it?”
My heart wouldn’t quit racing, even though he didn’t choose. Honest, I didn’t even know which I wanted him to pick. So I just said, “Okay.” And then, “What do you think he’s really doing, that creep over there?”
My voice shook when I asked the question, and I wondered if Peavine would tease me or ask me the difference between a rock and a flower, or make us talk about why I kissed him. I really didn’t want to talk about it, even though I thought I might want to kiss him again someday.
For a few more seconds Peavine just sat there watching as the guy in the sleeveless plaid shirt finished his hot dog and threw away his trash. “I think the guy’s casing the playground,” he finally answered.
I was so relieved, I almost busted out laughing, even though I would have seemed crazy if I’ve done that. “Why is he so interested in our recess?”
Peavine shrugged, making the bush branches rustle. “Because he’s a creep, like you said.”
The man did seem to be scanning the playground. He kept moving his head back and forth, slow, like he was searching for something, staying mostly on our side.
I felt silly, and almost dizzy, maybe from spilling all my secrets and not having to feel like a jerk anymore, or maybe from kissing Peavine. The world turned faster than it was supposed to, and my ears buzzed, and I still wanted to laugh.
“You think he could be looking for us?” I asked Peavine.
“What would he want us for?”
“No idea.” I choked back a giggle. “But let’s see what he does.”
I stood up fast, before Peavine could talk me out of it.
“Footer!” Peavine jumped up too, and a bunch of kids throwing a football nearby stopped to look at us.
The guy across the street saw us too, and he got real still. His eyes locked on mine, and I was pretty sure his eyebrows went up. My heart thumped and thumped, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. I started smelling smoke.
Oh, no.
The front part of my brain tried to shove away any thought of fire before I flipped out on the playground again and got myself kicked out of school or sent to a hospital or locked in a room with Stephanie Bridges. The back part of my brain started screaming. Red lights stabbed into my eyes, blinking and swirling, and a loud noise made me flinch.
“It’s the police,” Peavine said from what seemed like a quadrillion miles away from me. He sounded awed.
How was he seeing my hallucinations? That wasn’t even possible. He couldn’t—
Oh.
The police. The red lights, the noise—a police car had pulled into the parking lot across the street from the school, and two uniformed officers I didn’t know got out. Both of them walked toward the creep in plaid, who raised his hands like he was saying, Easy now, or I got no gun, or I’m a nice guy—don’t arrest me.
The officers stopped in front of the guy. Both of them had short hair. They were wearing sunglasses, and their arms were crossed. If I were the creep, I’d be nervous, because they really didn’t look friendly.
“Footer,” somebody said, and I realized Ms. Malone had snuck up beside the bushes while we watched all the action across the road. Her tone didn’t sound friendly either. She had on sunglasses, and her arms were crossed just like the police’s were.
I didn’t smell any more smoke, and I didn’t feel the least little bit silly. I didn’t even feel like kissing Peavine again, for the moment.
“Ms. Perry needs to see you,” Ms. Malone said. “Now. And after that, you and I, we need to talk.”
From the Notebook of Detective Peavine Jones
Interview of Nadine Perry, Twelve Days After the Fire
Location: Ms. Perry’s Fifth-Grade Classroom
This is proof that I am brave enough to be a detective.
Me: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview about the fire.
Ms. Perry: Young man, I am only doing this because Ms. Malone asked me to keep you busy while Fontana Davis serves her detention, since she has to ride home with you and your mother.
Me: She likes to be called Footer.
Ms. Perry: That is a ridiculous nickname.
Me: Um, yes, ma’am. Sorry.
Ms. Perry: I have no problem with you, Mr. Jones. You take your work seriously, and you try to be a decent influence on your sister.
Me: Um, thank you, ma’am. About the fire, can you tell me where you were the night the Abrams farm burned?
Ms. Perry: I was out to a nice dinner with Mr. Drake.
Me: The librarian?
Ms. Perry: [Says nothing. Looks pretty scary.]
Me: Um, okay. So, do you have any thoughts about what might have happened to Cissy and Doc Abrams?
Ms. Perry: They died in that fire, of course. No doubt Fontana has filled you full of silly notions about them surviving. She has more intelligence than any child needs, but she squanders her potential. How she can bring any topic back around to walruses and serial killers—it beggars the imagination. Look at her writing her sentences. I’m positive she’s thinking about marine mammals and murderers instead of how to treat her schoolwork with more seriousness.
Me: Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am. I’m sure Footer is taking this very seriously.
Ms. Perry: I think she’s the biggest challenge I’ve faced in thirty-three years of teaching social studies. I fear she’s headed down the same path as her mother.
Me: [Detective is silent. Are detectives always supposed to know what to say?]
Ms. Perry: Mr. Jones, your friend attacked a younger boy on the playground. I know you all say the other boy started it, but I think both Fontana and the boy should have been suspended. Without discipline and structur
e, Fontana will never learn to face life on life’s terms. She’ll wind up just like her mother, living more in fantasy than reality.
Me: [Detective remains silent.]
Ms. Perry: For example, her latest insistence that a “creep” has been watching the school’s lunch recess gave me no choice but to call the authorities. No doubt some law-abiding citizen will be harassed and questioned because a little girl read too much about serial killers and scared herself. She has been much worse since that terrible fire, and I understand that her mother has been hospitalized again. It would not surprise me at all to learn that Adele Davis has to stay in the hospital a very long time. Maybe that’s what needs to happen.
Me: Um, about the fire again. There are other suspects. Like the creep, or Captain Armstrong. What do you think about—
Ms. Perry: I understand that Fontana’s father took her to see her mother. [Suspect shakes her head.] I think that’s too much stress for Fontana. I’m glad that DCFS authorities have gotten involved. Maybe they can bring some order in Fontana’s life before it’s too late for her.
Me: Thank you for your time, Ms. Perry.
Reflections on Respect and Following Instructions
Footer Davis
Lunch Recess Detention
Ms. Perry
Page 10 of 10
90. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
91. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
92. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
93. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
94. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
95. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
96. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
97. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
98. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions.
