“Huh,” Archibald says.
A flash erupts from one of the devices. A loud pop! sounds from below, and all lights in the house go out.
Buddy hustles to the basement, where Mary Alice and Julian, Graciella’s oldest son, sit in front of the now-blank TV, holding game controllers. “What happened?” Mary Alice asks.
Buddy goes to the far wall, flips open the fuse box, and resets the circuit breakers. Lights come back on, as does the TV.
Buddy walks past them and sets to work on the window shades with the drill that he’s retrieved from Frankie’s tool bag. Each shade has a flange that rests against the wood. He doesn’t have time to be clever, so he drives screws directly through the flange into the wood. He really wishes he’d remembered this earlier. He could have made locking hooks. (Except he wouldn’t have made hooks, because he didn’t remember doing that. He was so tired of Future Buddy being such an idiot.)
After he’s finished, Julian says, “That was…loud.”
Buddy puts away the drill.
Julian says, “And it’s pretty dark in here.”
“It’s perfect,” Mary Alice says kindly. “Less glare.”
Buddy goes into the laundry room and gets down the supplies he bought a few weeks ago. One of them is a shallow metal dish. He fills that up at the utility sink and brings everything out to the big room. He sets the bowl on the floor, and hands Mary Alice the plastic bag. The girl looks confused.
Buddy’s sympathetic. For the longest time, this was the memory that most confused him. But now, it makes perfect sense. “I’ll be right back,” he says.
He hurries to Mrs. Klauser’s house and knocks on the front door. He can hear Miss Poppins barking in excitement, and a second, even higher-pitched noise. The yipping increases in intensity when Mrs. Klauser opens the door.
“I was wondering if I could borrow Mr. Banks,” he says.
She laughs. “Take him all day! I don’t know how you talked me into this. He’s a terror!” But she’s smiling. She’s more energetic than she’s been in months.
Buddy acknowledges Miss Poppins with a pat to the head, but then scoops up the ball of white fluff next to her. Mr. Banks is barely two months old, all head and paws, and his puppy coat is so soft. Buddy holds the little creature’s face to his own, and it licks his face. Mr. Banks still has that lovely puppy smell.
He carries the dog back to the house, and as soon as he enters the backyard he has the attention of every child. They rush him. Squealing.
“Don’t scare him,” Buddy says. “This is Mr. Banks. I wonder if you could take care of him for me, for just a while?”
This is a rhetorical question. They follow him as if he’s the Pied Piper, and he walks them into the basement. Even Matty, now freed from the smoking devices and the attention of the government men, has been attracted by the commotion.
Buddy says to Jun, “Have you ever taken care of a pet?”
She nods excitedly. “I have a cat.”
“Then you’re in charge. Don’t let them squash him.” He puts the puppy in her arms.
He does a quick head count: three Pusateris, the twins, Mary Alice, Matty, and Jun Lee. Eight is the correct number, so that’s a relief.
The children don’t notice him leaving, and no one squawks when he closes the steel door. He checks his watch. 11:32. So little time! He sets the timer beside the door to thirty minutes and presses enter. The magnetic locks engage with a reassuring thunk.
MATTY
He was still shaky after frying the house’s electrical system, but he had to admit that the puppy helped calm him down. When the lights blew, Grandpa Teddy had rushed over and unplugged him, over the objections of Destin Smalls. “One test!” Teddy said. “That was the deal.” They kept arguing, and Matty escaped to the basement with the other kids to play with the dog.
Even Malice was enjoying herself. Somehow she’d gotten possession of a bag of pet toys. Inside was a real bone, a rubber ball, and a selection of squeaker toys in the shape of small animals that Mr. Banks would supposedly be happy to kill. She distributed them to the younger kids, and they seemed more excited by them than the dog was.
After playing Santa, Malice sat down beside him. He realized that the smell of her also calmed him down.
“So,” she said, in a voice pitched so that only he could hear. “My mom and Frankie are probably getting a divorce.”
“Whoa. Really?”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Can you tell me now what you and Frankie have been up to?”
“Uh…”
“Because whatever it is, it got our house taken away from us.”
“I don’t know what he’s been—”
“Don’t say that. Don’t. If you fucking lie to me, I won’t be able to take it.”
“I don’t want to lie to you,” he said.
“So don’t. Just tell me. Please.”
He was not about to tell her about her dad, and the mobster thing. But it would be such a relief to have one person his own age know what he was going through. Especially if it was Malice.
He looked around. The room was full of kids, but they were all paying attention to the puppy.
“He was helping me,” Matty said. “Helping me do stuff.”
She waited for him to explain.
“I’m like Grandma Mo,” he said. “I can travel outside my body, and see things.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” That might have sounded harsh from someone else, but the way she said it, it meant That’s amazing.
“You believe me?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Matty. I’m in the family. The shit I’ve seen?”
Relief flowed through him like cool water. He didn’t know what she meant by seeing shit; he hadn’t seen anything until something happened to him. Before that it was all family stories and rumors.
“I thought I was going crazy at first,” he said. “I’m getting better at it, but I still need…help. To make it happen. Psychologically, and uh, physically.”
“So that’s where I fit in,” Malice said.
He felt himself blush.
“It’s okay,” she said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed about. True, you’re a little young…”
“You think so?”
“Sure. But now it makes sense why you were so desperate. You needed to get high.”
It took him a moment to process this. “Right,” he said. “That’s where you came in.”
“Though I have to tell you, I’ve never seen someone smoke up and get such a boner.”
His throat seized, and he coughed.
“At the playground?” she said, oblivious to his distress. “Man, Janelle and I looked over and you were like, shwing!”
He covered his face. She leaned into his shoulder. “It’s okay, man. Janelle thinks you’re just a natural born perv, ever since the night in the attic.” He was so glad she was keeping her voice down.
“That was the first time,” he said.
“The first time you jerked off?”
He uncovered his face. “No!” Wait, did that make him sound more like a perv, or less? “The first time I left my body. And traveled.”
“Really? And to think, I was there.”
“Sometimes that’s the thing that gets me to travel,” he said. He couldn’t believe he was telling her this, but she was being so frank with him, so unfreaked out, that he wanted to tell her everything. “Certain emotions happen, and boom.”
“Sexual emotions.”
“Uh…yeah.”