8
On a Thursday night in early August, Gwendy is hauling a garbage can to the bottom of the driveway when Frankie Stone swings to the curb in front of her in his blue El Camino. The Rolling Stones are blaring from the car stereo and Gwendy catches a whiff of marijuana wafting from the open window. He turns down the music. “Wanna go for a ride, sexy?”
Frankie Stone has grown up, but not in a good way. He sports greasy brown hair, a shotgun pattern of acne scattered across his face, and a homemade AC/DC tattoo on one arm. He also suffers from the worst case of body odor Gwendy has ever come across. There are whispers that he fed a hippie girl roofies at a concert and then raped her. Probably not true, she knows about the vicious rumors kids start, but he sure looks like someone who’d slip roofies into a girl’s wine cooler.
“I can’t,” Gwendy says, wishing she were wearing more than just cut-off jean shorts and a tank top. “I have to do my homework.”
“Homework?” Frankie scowls. “C’mon, who the fuck does homework in the summer?”
“It’s… I’m taking a summer class at the community college.”
Frankie leans out the window, and even though he’s still a good ten feet away from her, Gwendy can smell his breath. “You wouldn’t be lying to me now, would you, pretty girl?” He grins.
“I’m not lying. Have a good night, Frankie. I better get inside and hit the books.”
Gwendy turns and starts walking up the driveway, feeling good about the way she handled him. She hasn’t taken but four or five steps when something hard plunks her in the back of her neck. She cries out, not hurt but surprised, and turns back to the street. A beer can spins lazily at her feet, spitting foam onto the pavement.
“Just like the rest of the stuck up bitches,” Frankie says. “I thought you were different, but you’re not. Think you’re too good for everyone.”
Gwendy reaches up and rubs the back of her neck. A nasty bump has already risen there, and she flinches when her fingers touch it. “You need to go, Frankie. Before I get my father.”
“Fuck your father, and fuck you, too. I knew you when you were nothin but an ugly fuckin chubber.” Frankie points a finger-gun at her and smiles. “It’ll come back, too. Fat girls turn into fat women. It never fails. See you around, Goodyear.”
Then he’s gone, middle finger jutting out the window, tires burning rubber. Only now does Gwendy allow the tears to come as she runs inside the house.
That night she dreams about Frankie Stone. In the dream, she doesn’t stand there helpless in the driveway with her heart in her throat. In the dream, she rushes at Frankie, and before he can peel out, she lunges through the open driver’s window and grabs his left arm. She twists until she hears—and feels—the bones snapping beneath her hands. And as he screams, she says, How’s that boner now, Frankie Stoner? More like two inches than two feet, I bet. You never should have fucked with the Queen of the Button Box.
She wakes up in the morning and remembers the dream with a sleepy smile, but as with most dreams, it vanishes with the rising sun. She doesn’t think of it again until two weeks later, during a breakfast conversation with her father on a lazy Saturday morning. Mr. Peterson finishes his coffee and puts down the newspaper. “Your pal Frankie Stone made the news.”
Gwendy stops in mid-chew. “He’s no pal of mine, I hate the guy. Why’s he in the paper?”
“Car accident last night out on Hanson Road. Probably drunk, although it doesn’t say so. Hit a tree. He’s okay, but pretty banged up.”
“How banged up?”
“Bunch of stitches in his head and shoulder. Cuts all over his face. Broken arm. Multiple breaks, according to the story. Going to take a long time to heal. Want to see for yourself?”
He pushes the paper across the table. Gwendy pushes it back, then carefully puts down her fork. She knows she won’t be able to eat another bite, just as she knows without asking that the broken arm Frankie Stone suffered is his left one.
That night, in bed, trying to sweep away the troubled thoughts swirling inside her head, Gwendy counts how many days of summer vacation remain before she has to return to school.
This is August 22nd, 1977. Exactly three years to the day from when Mr. Farris and the button box came into her life.
9
A week before Gwendy starts the tenth grade at Castle Rock High, she runs the Suicide Stairs for the first time in almost a year. The day is mild and breezy, and she reaches the top without breaking much of a sweat. She stretches for a brief moment and glances down the length of her body: she can see her entire damn sneakers.
She walks to the railing and takes in the view. It’s the kind of morning that makes you wish death didn’t exist. She scans Dark Score Lake, then turns to the playground, empty now except for a young mother pushing a toddler on the baby swing. Her eyes finally settle on the bench where she met Mr. Farris. She walks over to it and sits down.
More and more often lately, a little voice inside her head is asking questions she doesn’t have answers for. Why you, Gwendy Peterson? Out of all the people in this round world, why did he choose you?
And there are other, scarier, questions, too: Where did he come from? Why was he keeping an eye on me? (His exact words!) What the hell is that box… and what is it doing to me?
Gwendy sits on the bench for a long time, thinking and watching the clouds drift past. After a while, she gets up and jogs down the Suicide Stairs and home again. The questions remain: How much of her life is her own doing, and how much the doing of the box with its treats and buttons?
10
Sophomore year opens with a bang. Within a month of the first day of classes, Gwendy is elected Class President, named captain of the junior varsity soccer team, and asked to the homecoming dance by Harold Perkins, a handsome senior on the football squad (alas, the homecoming date never happens, as Gwendy dumps poor Harold after he repeatedly tries to feel her up at a drive-in showing of Damnation Alley on their first date). Plenty of time for touchie-feelie later, as her mother likes to say.
For her sixteenth birthday in October, she gets a poster of the Eagles standing in front of Hotel California (“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”), a new stereo with both eight track and cassette decks, and a promise from her father to teach her how to drive now that she’s of legal age.
The chocolate treats continue to come, no two ever the same, the detail always amazing. The tiny slice of heaven Gwendy devoured just this morning before school was a giraffe, and she purposely skipped brushing her teeth afterward. She wanted to savor the remarkable taste for as long as she could.
Gwendy doesn’t pull the other small lever nearly as often as she once did, for no other reason than she’s finally run out of space to hide the silver coins. For now, the chocolate is enough.
She still thinks about Mr. Farris, not quite as often and usually in the long, empty hours of the night when she tries to remember exactly what he looked like or how his voice sounded. She’s almost sure she once saw him in the crowd at the Castle Rock Halloween Fair, but she was high atop the Ferris wheel at that moment, and by the time the ride ended, he was gone, swallowed by the hordes of people flocking down the midway. Another time she went into a Portland coin shop with one of the silver dollars. The worth had gone up; the man offered her $750 for one of her 1891 Morgans, saying he’d never seen a better one. Gwendy refused, telling him (on the spur of the moment) that it was a gift from her grandfather and she only wanted to know what it was worth. Leaving, she saw a man looking at her from across the street, a man wearing a neat little black hat. Farris—if it was Farris—gave her a fleeting smile, and disappeared around the corner.