‘There’s nothing to do.’
‘Find the girls?’
He shrugged.
‘Ring the bell?’
‘They rang it.’
‘You’re the one who brought us out here. What were you expecting?’
He glanced back at the bedroom’s bare walls, the rectangular, dustless space in the floor where, until very recently, a bed or rug must have been, the empty light fixture overhead. Struwwelpeter. My friend. ‘Opposition,’ he said, and shuffled off down the hall.
‘Where are you going?’ I called after him.
He turned, and the look on his face stunned me, it had been years since I’d seen it. The last time was in second grade, right after he punched Robert Case, who was twice his size, in the face and ground one of Robert’s eyeglass lenses into his eye. The last time anyone who knew him had dared to fight him. He looked. sorry.
‘Coming?’ he said.
I almost followed him. But I felt bad about leaving Jenny. And I wanted to see her and Kelly out on the lawn, pointing through the window at us and laughing. And I didn’t want to be in that house anymore. And it was exhausting being with Peter, trying to read him, dancing clear of him.
‘I’ll be outside,’ I said.
He shrugged and disappeared through the last unopened door at the end of the hall. I listened for a few seconds, heard nothing, turned, and started downstairs. ‘Hey, Jenny?’ I called, got no answer. I was three steps from the bottom before I realized what was wrong.
In the middle of the foyer floor, amidst a swirl of leaves and paper, Kelly Mack’s black baseball cap lay upside down like an empty tortoise shell. ‘Um,’ I said to no one, to myself, took one more uncertain step down, and the front door swung back on its hinges.
I just stared, at first. I couldn’t even breathe, let alone scream, it was like I had an apple core lodged in my throat. I just stared into the white spray-paint on the front door, the triangle-within-a-circle. A wet, wide-open eye. My legs wobbled, and I grabbed for the banister, slipped down to the bottom step, held myself still. I should scream, I thought. I should get Peter down here, and both of us should run. I didn’t even see the hand until it clamped hard around my mouth.
For a second, I couldn’t do anything at all, and that was way too long, because before I could lunge away or bite down, a second hand snaked around my waist, and I was yanked off my feet into the blackness to my left and slammed against the living-room wall.
I wasn’t sure when I’d closed my eyes, but now I couldn’t make them open. My head rang, and my skin felt tingly, tickly, as though it was dissolving into the atoms that made it up, all of them racing in a billion different directions, and soon there’d be nothing left of me, just a scatter of energy and a spot on Mr Paars’s dusty, decaying floor.
‘Did I hurt you?’ whispered a voice I knew, close to my ears. It still took me a long time to open my eyes. ‘Just nod or shake your head.’
Slowly, forcing my eyes open, I nodded.
‘Good. Now sssh,’ said Mr Andersz, and released me.
Behind him, both Mack sisters stood grinning.
‘You like the cap?’ Kelly said. ‘The cap’s a good touch, no?’
‘Sssh,’ Mr Andersz said. ‘Please. I beg you.’
‘You should see you,’ Jenny whispered, sliding up close. ‘You look so damn scared.’
‘What’s—’
‘He followed us to see if we were doing anything horrible. He saw us come in here, and he had this idea to get back at Peter.’
I gaped at Jenny, then at Mr Andersz, who was peering, very carefully, around the corner, up the stairs.
‘Not to get back,’ he said, so serious. It was the same voice he’d used in his own front hallway earlier that evening. He’d never looked more like his son than he did right then. ‘To reach out. Reach him. Someone’s got to do something. He’s a good boy. He could be. Now, please. Don’t spoil this.’
Everything about Mr Andersz at that moment astounded me. But watching him revealed nothing further. He stood at the edge of the living room, shoulders hunched, hair tucked tight under his dockworker’s cap, waiting. Slowly, my gaze swung back to Jenny, who continued to grin in my direction, but not at me, certainly not with me. And I knew I’d lost her.
‘This was about Peter,’ I said. ‘You could have just stuck your head out and waved me down.’
‘Yep,’ said Jenny, and watched Mr Andersz, not me.
Upstairs, a door creaked, and Peter’s voice rang out. ‘Hey, Andrew.’
To Jenny’s surprise and Mr Andersz’s horror, I almost answered. I stepped forward, opened my mouth. I’m sure Jenny thought I was getting back at her, turning the tables again, but mostly I didn’t like what Mr Andersz was doing. I think I sensed the danger in it. I might have been the only one.
But I was twelve. And Peter certainly deserved it. And Mr Andersz was my teacher, and my friend’s father. I closed my mouth, sank back into the shadows, and did not move again until it was over.
‘Andrew, I know you can hear me!’ Peter shouted, stepping onto the landing. He came, clomp clomp clomp, toward the stairs. ‘Annn-drew!’ Then, abruptly, we heard him laugh. Down he came, his shoes clattering over the steps. I thought he might charge past us, but he stopped, right where I did.
Beside the couch, under the draped painting, Kelly Mack pointed at her own hatless head and mouthed, ‘Oh, yeah.’
But it was the eye on the door, I thought, not the cap. Only the eye would have stopped him, because like me — and faster than me — Peter would have realized that neither Mack sister, smart as they were, would have thought of it. Even if they’d had spray paint. Mr Andersz had brought spray paint? Clearly, he’d been planning this — or something like this — for quite some time. If he was the one who’d done it, that is.
‘What the fuck,’ Peter muttered. He came down a step. Another. His feet touched flat floor, and still Mr Andersz held his post.
Then, very quietly, he said, ‘Boo.’
It was as if he’d punched an ejector-seat button. Peter flew through the front door, hands flung up to ward off the eye as he sailed past it. He was fifteen feet from the house, still flying, when he realized what he’d heard. We all saw it hit him. He jerked in mid-air like a hooked marlin reaching the end of a harpoon rope.
For a few seconds, he just stood in the wet grass with his back to us, quivering. Kelly had sauntered past Mr Andersz onto the front porch, laughing. Mr Andersz, I noticed, was smiling, too, weakly. Even Jenny was laughing quietly beside me.
But I was watching Peter’s back, his whole body vibrating like an imploded building after the charge has gone off, right at the moment of collapse. ‘No,’ I said.
When Peter finally turned around, though, his face was his regular face, inscrutable, a little pale. The spikes in his hair looked almost silly in the shadows, and made him look younger. A naughty little boy. Calvin with no Hobbes.
‘So he is dead,’ Peter said.
Mr Andersz stepped outside. Kelly was slapping her leg, but no one paid her any attention.
‘Son,’ said Mr Andersz, and he stretched one hand out, as though to call Peter to him. ‘I’m sorry. It was… I thought you might laugh.’
‘He’s dead, right?’
The smile was gone from Mr Andersz’s face now, and from Jenny’s, I noted when I glanced her way. ‘Kelly, shut up,’ I heard her say to her sister, and Kelly stopped giggling.
‘Did you know he used to teach at the school?’ Mr Andersz asked, startling me.
‘Mr Paars?’
‘Sixth-grade science. Biology, especially. Years ago. Kids didn’t like him. Yes, Peter, he died a week or so ago. He’d been very sick. We got a notice about it at school.’