‘Trick-or-treating’s for babies,’ I said.
‘Hmm, I wonder which of your friends taught you that,’ my mother said, and then a look flashed across her face, different than the one she usually got at times like this. She still looked sad, but not about me. She looked sad for me.
I took a step toward her, and her image wavered in my glasses. ‘I won’t sleep there. I’ll be home by eleven,’ I said.
‘You’ll be home by ten, or you won’t be going anywhere again anytime soon. Got it? How old do you think you are, anyway?’
‘Twelve,’ I said, with as much conviction as I could muster, and my mother flashed the sad look again.
‘If Peter tells you to jump off a bridge. ’
‘Push him off.’
My mother nodded. ‘If I didn’t feel so bad for him. ’ she said, and I thought she meant Peter, and then I wasn’t sure. But she didn’t say anything else, and after a few seconds, I couldn’t stand there anymore, not with the wind crawling down the neck of my jacket and my mother still looking like that. I left her in the doorway.
Even in bright sunlight, mine was a dreary neighborhood. The gusts of wind herded paper scraps and street-grit down the overflowing gutters and yanked the last leaves off the trees like a gleeful gang on a vandalism rampage. I saw a few parents — new to the area, obviously — hunched into rain-slickers, leading little kids from house to house. The kids wore drugstore clown costumes, Darth Vader masks, sailor caps. They all looked edgy, miserable. At most of the houses, no one answered the doorbell.
Outside the Andersz place, I stopped for just a minute, watching the leaves leaping from their branches like lemmings and tumbling down the wind, trying to figure out what was different, what felt wrong. Then I had it: the Mountain was out. The endless Fall rain had rolled in early that year, and it had been weeks, maybe months, since I’d last seen Mount Rainier. Seeing it now gave me the same unsettled sensation as always. ‘It’s because you’re looking south, not west,’ people always say, as if that explains how the mountain gets to that spot on the horizon, on the wrong side of the city, not where it actually is but out to sea, seemingly bobbing on the waves, not the land.
How many times, I wondered abruptly, had some adult in my life asked why I liked Peter? I wasn’t cruel, and despite my size, I wasn’t easily cowed, and I did okay in school — not as well as Peter, but okay — and I had ‘a gentleness, most days’, as Mrs Corbett (WhoreButt, to Peter) had written on my report card last year. ‘If he learns to exercise judgment — and perhaps gives some thought to his choice of companions — he could go far.’
I wanted to go far from Ballard, anyway, and the locks, and the smell of lutefisk, and the rain. I liked doorbell ditching, but I didn’t get much charge out of throwing stones through windows. And if people were home when we did it, came out and shook their fists or worse, just stood there, looking at us the way you would at a wind or an earthquake, nothing you could slow or stop, I’d freeze, feeling bad, until Peter screamed at me or yanked me so hard that I had no choice but to follow.
I could say I liked how smart Peter was, and I did. He could sit dead still for 27 minutes of a 30-minute comprehension test, then scan the reading and answer every question right before the teacher, furious, hovering over him and watching the clock, could snatch the paper away without the rest of us screaming foul. He could recite the periodic table of elements backwards, complete with atomic weights. He could build skyscrapers five feet high out of chalk and rubber-cement jars and toothpicks and crayons that always stayed standing until anyone who wasn’t him tried to touch them.
I could say I liked the way he treated everyone the same, which he did, in a way. He’d been the first in my grade — the only one, for a year or so — to hang out with the Mack sisters, who were still, at that point, the only African Americans in our school. But he wasn’t all that nice to the Macks, really. Just no nastier than he was to the rest of us.
No. I liked Peter for exactly the reason my mother and my teachers feared I did: because he was fearless, because he was cruel — although mostly to people who deserved it when it wasn’t Halloween — and most of all, because he really did seem capable of anything. So many of the people I knew seemed capable of nothing, for whatever reason. Capable of nothing.
Out on the whitecap-riddled Sound, the sun sank, and the Mountain turned red. It was like looking inside it, seeing it living. Shivering slightly in the wind, I hopped the Anderszes’ three stone steps and rang the bell.
‘Just come in, fuck!’ I heard Peter yell from the basement, and I started to open the door, and Mr Andersz opened it for me. He had his grey cardigan straight on his waist for once and his black hat was gone and his black-grey hair was wet and combed on his forehead, and I had the horrible, hilarious idea that he was going on a date.
‘Andrew, come in,’ he said, sounding funny, too formal, the way he did at school. He didn’t step back right away, either, and when he did, he put his hand against the mirror on the hallway wall, as though the house was rocking underneath him.
‘Hey, Mr Andersz,’ I said, wiping my feet on the shredded green mat that said something in Serbian. Downstairs, I could hear the burbling of the Dig Dug game, and I knew the Mack sisters had arrived. I flung my coat over Peter’s green slicker on the coatrack, took a couple steps toward the basement door, turned around, stopped.
Mr Andersz had not moved, hadn’t even taken his hand off the mirror, and now he was staring at it as though it was a spider frozen there.
‘Are you all right, Mr Andersz?’ I asked, and he didn’t respond. Then he made a sound, a sort of hiss, like a radiator when you switch it off.
‘How many?’ he muttered. I could barely hear him. ‘How many chances? As a teacher, you know there won’t be many. You get two, maybe three moments in an entire year. Something’s happened, there’s been a fight or someone’s sick or the soccer team won or something, and you’re looking at a student. ’ His voice trailed off, leaving me with the way he said ‘student’. He pronounced it ‘stu-dent’. It was one of the things we all made fun of, not mean fun, just fun. ‘You’re looking at them,’ he said, ‘and suddenly, there they are. And it’s them, and it’s thrilling, terrifying, because you know you might have a chance… an opportunity. You can say something.’
On the mirror, Mr Andersz’s hand twitched, and I noticed the sweat beading under the hair on his forehead. It reminded me of my dad, and I wondered if Mr Andersz was drunk. Then I wondered if my dad was drunk, wherever he was. Downstairs, Jenny Mack yelled, ‘Get off’ in her fighting voice, happy-loud, and Kelly Mack said, ‘Good, come on, this isboring.’
‘And as parent. ’ Mr Andersz muttered. ‘How many? And what happens. the moment comes. but you’re missing your wife. Just right then, just for a while. Or your friends. Maybe you’re tired. It’s just that day. It’s rainy, you have meals to make, you’re tired. There’ll be another moment. Surely. You have years. Right? You have years. ’
So fast and so silent was Peter’s arrival in the basement doorway that I mistook him for a shadow from outside, didn’t even realize he was there until he pushed me in the chest. ‘What’s your deal?’ he said.
I started to gesture at Mr Andersz, thought better of it, shrugged. Footsteps clattered on the basement stairs, and then the Macks were in the room. Kelly had her tightly braided hair stuffed under a black, backward baseball cap. Her bare arms were covered in paste-on snake tattoos, and her face was dusted in white powder. Jenny wore a red sweater, black jeans. Her hair hung straight and shiny and dark, hovering just off her head and neck like a bird’s crest, and I understood, for the first time, that she was pretty. Her eyes were bright green, wet and watchful.