Chapter Ten
I scour the logical places. The costume stand, the makeshift prop museum, the alcove where Castaway Planet blooper reels flicker on a loop. Nothing.
“He’s about six-two, black shirt, yellow rubber watch, white hair that goes like ppfft all over?” I tell the costume-stand lady. She’s filling a display stand with ten-dollar replicas of Sim’s mechanical heart—slim pods cased in cheap frosted plastic, blinking out of sync with each other. She nods indulgently, like I’m describing an imaginary friend.
“If I see him,” she says, “I’ll tell him you want him.”
I do a fast sweep. The hotel lobby, the indoor pool. The east end of the ballroom, where a dozen girls bicker in a fanfic workshop. I circle back to the Q&A just as the Shandley mob floods out. Bec’s green shirt glints through the crowd. I push through people to get to her.
“Jesus. Where’d you go?” She hooks my arm. I steer us to a calm corner, in front of an artist hand-painting Starsetter nutcrackers.
I grab her shoulders. “Did you see Abel leave?”
“No, I—”
“You didn’t?”
“I was…busy.”
“Right. Right.”
“Why are you so frazzled?”
“We should stick together!”
“I’m sure he’s okay.”
“How could he disappear?”
“Brandon, I’m sure he just took a walk. He looked really pissed.”
Dave bounds up with a wide white smile. “You ready?”
“Meet you out there,” Bec says.
“Cool.” He touches her arm. “See ya later, man,” he says to me. I get a half-salute and he lopes away.
“What was that?” I ask.
“I have a date.”
“With him?”
“No, with Shandley. We’re going ballroom dancing.”
“You’re not driving anywhere, right?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Why?”
“He could be a serial killer. How would you know?” I can tell I’m being annoying, the kind of annoying where it feels like I haven’t showered for days and everyone should just stay away. Bec sticks her hands on her hips.
“Are you mad ‘cause Tom Shandley’s a dick? I could’ve told you that.”
“I’m not mad.”
“People are assholes sometimes. You can’t let it get to you.”
I sigh. “Please just help me look for Abel?”
“I can’t. On account of the aforementioned date.” She pokes my stomach. “What, you think those Hell Bells people are holding him hostage?”
“Stop.”
“Like, maybe they’ll be tightening the thumbscrews, trying to get him to recant his Cadsim hate, and you’ll burst in like the conquering hero just as—”
“Quit it!” I shrug off her hand. “I’m serious.”
“Will you lighten up?”
“Don’t even joke about that!”
“Why?”
“Forget it. Forget it. Just go out. Go meet Dave. Have a really awesome time.”
“I will. He’s fun.”
“Maybe you can share a milkshake and buy some ironic t-shirts together.”
“You’re being a jerk.”
I shrug.
She shoves the camera at me.
“Upload the vid yourself,” she says. “When I get back, you better be human again.”
She huffs off down the merch aisle, ducking a juggler by the autograph table and a crying girl in a platinum Leandra Nigh wig. I congratulate myself on my freshly acquired talent for pissing off the few real friends I have. Outside the glass doors, Bec meets up with Dave and he drapes his arm around her like I used to in the halls before our first-period Chem class, my hand trying different positions and grips in the hope that just one might feel natural. They disappear past the thick crowd of travelers in the lobby. She doesn’t look back. Cold clangs in my chest, and my brain calls up Episode 1-7: Captain, if I could experience real love for one day, I believe it would be …
Men.
Two men at the action-figure booth. Black trench coats, black hats. Their faces are painted Henchmen-white and they’ve got the red contact lenses and the same cool concentrated stares, like they’re unlocking the dark little room in your brain where you stuff all the thoughts that would make your parents blush.
But what I really notice are the t-shirts.
They’re hidden at first, just thin slices of white underneath the coats. But then the taller guy moves his arm and I see the intricate image on the shirt. It has to be homemade. There’s no official merch with that picture on it, and it looks hand-drawn by someone devoted to detail.
Obsessively, psychotically devoted.
The Hell Bells.
I zip up my vest. Status: High alert. I feel every one of the zipper teeth, the sick uphill click-clack of a roller coaster ready to drop you into blackness. Their white faces tilt together. One of them starts to whisper.
They’re walking my way.
***
I don’t wait. I run for the RV. Through the lobby, down a glass corridor, out the doors and across the hot parking lot. Abel’s face looms in front of me as my sneakers smack the pavement. He wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t run from them. He’d walk right up to them and say something bold like What’s your deal? Like Cadmus did to Xaarg in 1-04, like Abel did to Shandley in the Q&A room.
I’m running so hard I can’t stop in time. I smack into the side of the Sunseeker. I gasp in a breath, look behind me. Scan the parking lot.
No one. Empty.
I open the door, slowly. It’s dark and stifling inside, like a confessional on a summer day.
“Abel…?”
He’s not the one who answers.
Come in, Brandon.
I always hated confession. I would make up sins like swearing and shoplifting gum to hide the real ones: masturbating in the shower, impure thoughts about Luke Perry in those ancient 90210s Bec loves.
Someone important wants to talk to you. Isn’t it time you started listening to Him?
I lock the door, latch all the windows, and pull down the blinds. I thump down in the passenger seat and dial my parents. I don’t know why. It’s not like I can talk to them about this, but I like tapping the familiar pattern of their phone number. They’re not home. Of course. Saturday dinner with the Donnellys. Mom’s curled her hair and brought her shepherd’s pie in a white casserole dish; Dad’s wearing a plaid shortsleeved button-down and his thin hair is wet and carefully combed. They’re drinking red wine and saying the words “Loyola” and “Communications major” a million times, trying to convince everyone they’re still proud of me.
I try Nat next, but who knows where she is. Her cell’s turned off and I get her message: I’ll call you back, maybe, over the anguished background yodels of some girl-punk band I’m not cool enough to listen to. Whatever. I don’t want to talk to her anyway. Last time I asked her for advice she lit a cigarette and said “God is like junior high, Brandon. Graduate already.” Then she told me she was thinking of moving to Kenya with some greasy philosophy major she’d known for five weeks, and possibly getting an ankh tattooed on her shoulder.
Plastic Sim is still in my vest pocket. I fish him out and spread his arms to the sides; trace a slow T across his body—wrist to wrist, chin to shin. One time when I was eleven or twelve, I was in St. Matt’s alone after serving Sunday Mass, and I sat down in the front pew and stared up at Jesus on the cross. Our Jesus was really realistic. You could count his ribs, trace the subtle definition of his muscles, gauge the strength of his legs just by the synthesis of sinew and bone. I tried to pray a decade of the rosary but the prayers never made me feel much; the thees and hallowed bes were too foreign and too familiar all at once, and God was probably so mad at me he didn’t want to hear it anyway. I ended up dreaming of what sex would feel like, to be so close to a man you could feel his bones with your bones. And then a shadow slanted across the pew, and a warm hand clapped the back of my neck.