“What’s that you’ve got there, Calvin?” Mrs. Wallaby asked, striding over to me, squinting at me through her glasses. Before she arrived I slipped the piece of paper into my mouth and began to chew.
“What was that?”
I swallowed. She brought her face so close to mine I could read the signature on her designer frame glasses: oscar de la renta.
“What was that?” she asked again. Of course I said nothing. She heaved a great sigh and told me to go sit in “The Judas Chair,” which was actually just a desk set aside from the others, facing a corner. She was not a bad woman, but sometimes I brought out the worst in people. Once she saved me at recess from a crowd of girls who were pinching me, trying to make me cry out. She brought me inside and put cold cream from her purse on my welts; then, after she spoke for a while about how I couldn’t go on like this, I just couldn’t, she gave me a long grave look and pinched me herself. It was not so hard as what the girls were giving me, and it was under my shirt, where no one would see. She looked deep into my eyes as she did it, but I didn’t cry out. I didn’t even blink.
On the night of the first day of summer vacation, Molly came again and got me from my bed. She said nothing, aside from telling me to get dressed and to follow her. We passed the golf course and I started off to where the rabbits were; she grabbed my collar and pulled me back.
“No,” she said. “It’s time to move on.” We spent the night hunting cats. It wasn’t easy. We exhausted ourselves chasing them through the dark. Always they outran us or vanished up trees.
“We need a plan,” she said at last. Closer to our houses, we found a neighbor cat named Mr. Charlemagne; we had chased him earlier and he escaped through a cat door into a garage. Molly positioned me in a bush by that door, while Mr. Charlemagne eyed us peacefully. Then she came at him. He took off for his door, but I jumped in front of it. For some reason he leapt right into my arms, looked up in my face, then turned to look at my companion. She had her knife out. He snuggled deeper into my arms, expecting, I think, that I would bring him inside to safety. I threw him down hard on the ground. Molly fell on him and stabbed him through the throat.
The authorities of Severna Forest — the sheriff and the chairman of the community association and the president of the country club —had dismissed the squirrel and rabbit deaths as the gruesome pranks of bored teenagers. When Mr. Charlemagne was discovered, draped along a straight-growing bough of a birch tree, a mildly urgent sense of alarm spread over the community. “Sick!” people muttered to each other while buying vodka and Yoo-hoo at the general store. Not one bit of suspicion fell on Molly or me. Everyone considered me strange and tragic but utterly harmless. Molly was equally tragic yet widely admired, with her manners and her blond hair and her big brown eyes. Sometimes I thought it was only because she stabbed that she could play the part of her sweet, decent self so well.
A few days passed before she came for me again, in the early evening after lacrosse practice. The Severna Forest peewee team practiced every Saturday afternoon. I was one of its best players, because I had absolutely no fear of the ball. Others still ducked when the ball came flying toward them like a little cannon shot, or knocked it away with their sticks. I caught it. If it hit me, I didn’t care. I scooped it up and ran with it, often all the way down the field because it rarely occurred to me to pass. I liked to run, and to be exhausted, and I thought one day the ball might fly at me with such force it would burst my head like a rotten pumpkin.
That day I got hit in the eye with the ball. Our coach, a college boy named Sam Corkle, hurled it at me with all his adult strength, thinking I was paying attention. When it struck my eye I saw a great white flash and then a pale afterimage of Colm’s face that quickly faded. The blow knocked me down. I looked up at the sky and saw a passing plane and wondered, like I always did when I saw a plane in flight, if my mother was on board, though I knew she was at home that day. Sam came up with the other coach and they asked me all sorts of questions, trying to determine if I was disoriented and might have a concussion. Of course I didn’t answer. Someone said I would throw up if I had a concussion, so they sat me on a bench and watched me to see if that would happen. When it didn’t, they let me back onto the field. I went eagerly — though my eyeball was aching and starting to swell — hoping to get hit again, to catch another glimpse of my brother.
“What happened to you?” my mother asked when Sam brought me home. She was sitting at the dining room table, where my father held a package of frozen hamburger to his own swollen purple eye. He had gotten into a fight when someone tried to cut in front of him in a gas line. It was a bad week for gas. Stations were selling their daily allowances before noon. “You too, sport?” he said.
My father examined my eye and said I would be fine. As my mother pressed hamburger against the swelling, there was a knock at the door. Sam answered it, and I heard Molly’s voice ask very sweetly, “Can Calvin come out and play?” I jumped from my mother’s lap and ran toward the door. She caught me and said, “Take your hamburger with you.” I stood at the door while she walked back to the dining room with Sam, and I heard her ask my father, “When did your son get a little girlfriend?”
Molly had an empty mayonnaise jar in her hands. “We’re going to catch fireflies,” she said, not asking about my eye. I followed her through the dusk to the golf course, dropping my hamburger in a holly bush along the way. We ran around grabbing after bugs. I was delighted she had come for me while there was daylight, thinking that must mean something. I grabbed at her flying blond hair as much as I did the fireflies; she slapped my hands each time.
I thought we were filling the jar so she could crush them mercilessly, or stick them with pins, or distill their glowing parts into some powerful, fluorescent poison with which she could coat her knife. But when it was dark, when about thirty of them were thick in the jar, she took off the lid and went running down the hill to the river, spilling a trail of bright motes that circled around her, rose up, and flew away.
Soon there weren’t any cats left for us — not because we had killed them all, but because after the fourth one, a tabby named Vittles, was found stabbed twelve times on the front steps of the general store, people started keeping their cats inside at night. Our hunts were widely spaced, occurring only about once every two weeks, but in between those nights Molly would come to the door for me and take me out to play in the daylight. We did the normal things that children our age were supposed to do, during the day. We swam in the river and played with her dolls and watched television.
In late July Molly decided to change prey again. She took me through the woods, out to the kennel. I could hear the dogs barking in the darkness long before we reached them. They knew we were coming for them.
The kennel was lit by a single streetlamp, stuck in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was a little service road that ran under the light, out to the main road that led to General’s Highway and Annapolis. I watched Molly stalk back and forth in front of the runs. The dogs were all howling and barking at her. It was two a.m. There was nobody around; nobody lived within a mile and a half of the place. The whole point of the kennel was to separate the dogs from the houses between June and September, so their barking wouldn’t disturb all the wealthy people in their summer cottages. It was a stupid rule.
Molly had stooped down in front of a poodle. I did not recognize it. It retreated to the back of its run and yipped at her.
“Nice puppy,” she said, though it was full grown. She waved me over to her, and then turned me around to take a piece of beef from the Holly Hobbie backpack she had strapped on me at the beginning of our excursion. She took out my lacrosse gloves and told me to put them on.