“I’ll bet you don’t even shave your bush,” he told me once. “I mean, how would you hold the razor?”
I had ignored similar things for the better part of a month, but that particular sentiment was just too disgusting to ignore. I spit in his face, right in class, right in front of Mr. Pullman, and when he stepped over to split us up, Gabe started laughing. He’d broken me, made me give in to his awful impulses, and so he won.
I can still remember the grin on his face, even all those months later, when I bumped into him after a football game. It was homecoming. The stadium was less than half a mile away from the house, close enough to walk without much worry. Usually, a few friends tagged along with me, but on that night, I was going solo. I saw Gabe at the game, I always saw him, tracked him, kept an eye on him the way you might keep an eye on a rattlesnake that people let slither around their house. It was only really dangerous if you didn’t know where it was.
I had a handful of friends at that point, weirdoes like me, people pushed out of the inner circles, hiding in plain sight at the edge of the crowds. There were plenty of us, and we were never really alone, but we never really mattered either. That was fine. Life on the inside of that glass globe looked awful by comparison. I caught glimpses of Gabe and his friends, the preppy, well-kept pretty boys in Dockers and tucked-in polo shirts, a wall of stinking, high-school-boy cologne enveloping them wherever they went. One of them had procured a bottle of liquor, some cheap, plastic-bottle vodka from the look of it, and they were passing it around, taking swigs whenever they felt it was safe to. They kept it hidden under a plastic megaphone with our school logo on it, the Green Bronco.
When the game was over, the crowd began to break up, splitting into subgroups for rides home with parents, older siblings, anyone that would spare a seat. I hugged my friends and set out down the darkened stretch of road lined with cars on their way out. There were too many people, and I began to feel itchy in my fingers, the way I always did after too long in a crowd, so I sneaked off onto one of the quiet neighborhood paths that would lead me home. I crossed around the edge of the field house, and there he was, stumbling along towards me. His house was also within walking distance, just in the opposite direction, heading for the nice part of town. He saw me, and I glanced down to the ground.
“Oh,” he said, coming to an awkward halt. “You.”
It wasn’t the usual way he spoke to me. It was a tone of curious, almost playful surprise, like we were old friends stumbling across each other.
“Me.” I stopped too.
He struck up a strained conversation, always careful to glance over his shoulder to make sure none of his friends were creeping up on us. So we talked, standing there, hidden in the shadow of the field house, and all of the things I hated to admit were impossible to ignore. He was handsome, almost painfully so, like a rower at an Ivy League school or a rugby player. Amazingly, he was actually being pleasant to me, making me laugh by making fun of himself, the same way he might act with the truly attractive girls in our grade. The ones who weren’t untouchable. Before long, after the headlights had disappeared on the horizon, we began to walk toward my house, deeper into the woods, the pair of us swallowed by the dark. And then, without warning, I pressed him against a tree and began kissing him, and before I knew it, he was fumbling for his belt, dropping his pants around his ankles, practically begging me to get on my knees. Instead, I pushed him down onto his bare knees and pressed his face into my crotch.
It’s important to understand that I wasn’t some poor, pitiful girl who was swept off her feet by the prom king. I started the entire encounter, and I was the only one who got an ounce of satisfaction that night. After I dug my nails into his back hard enough to rip his shirt, I pushed his head away, picked up my panties, and left him standing there, his dick throbbing in the cool, open air. I couldn’t help but smile.
When Monday rolled around, he refused to look me in the eyes, and from that point forward, he never so much as mentioned my name. It was a wonderful feeling, dangling our encounter over his head like a sword on a thread. From time to time, I would even slip him a note in class that read something like Did you tell your friends yet? or When will you take me out to eat again? Not once did he ever respond, but the fear of the world knowing what he had done, and more importantly, who he had done it with – ohhhh, that was absolutely delicious.
I was itching that night, and I’m itching now as I write all this down. Everything up to now has been tough to talk about. Mom. Dad. Andy. All of it.
But I’m itching now because I realize that everything up to this point has been treading water. The real story, the bad stuff, is just about to begin.
Dad paced around the house for the next hour or so, but he could only stand doing nothing for so long.
“Jack,” he said, pausing in my doorway, “I’m…” He seemed at a loss for words, unsure of exactly what he was going to do.
“I’m going out for a drive,” he added. “Just stay inside.” He made it halfway out the door before I heard him turn back around and stomp down the hall. “And lock the door.”
When he was gone, I sprinted to the front window and peered through the blinds as the truck pulled out. I figured he would circle the neighborhood a few times before heading deeper into town, widening his search. Regardless of where he went, I knew he wouldn’t find anything.
I went back into my room and flopped onto the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out just what my next move should be. I had no idea where Andy had been taken, but I knew who took him. There was only one clue out of all this, only one thing that led anywhere: my path from the bus stop into the Trails and finally home the day before the Thief appeared. I had no doubt whatsoever that I had drawn the thing in, or my bear had. I thought of Barnett, of the strange, still-hazy scene, and the idea of going in there alone was enough to make me shiver. But then I thought of Andy, all by himself.
He was tougher than me by a mile, but he had been right. Neither of us knew what we were up against. If, by some chance, I could actually find him, I knew the odds of me getting him home were slim. I knew all of these things, but that didn’t matter now. He was out there, and I would find him if I could, even if it meant the end of both of us.
I threw whatever I could find into my backpack. A flashlight. A bottle of water. A lighter. A handful of roman candles. I slung the bag over my shoulder and slipped the knife into the pocket of my jeans. I took one last look around the house, a curiously quiet place without Dad and Andy there. Had Mom stood here once, hands on her belly, a young, whiny Andy at her heels, and my father, nervous and jittery, asking if it was finally time? I wondered if she had taken one last, longing look at her home before she went to the hospital. Three left that day, and as far as anyone knew, four would return. The house must have been quiet then too.
Memphis prowled in and startled me back to the present, curling around my leg. He always seemed to show up, whether he was or wasn’t needed.
“I’ll be back,” I told him, kneeling down. I scratched his head and rubbed the tears from my eye. “And I’m bringing Andy back with me. You hear me?”
He looked at me with his sharp, lazy eyes, and I ventured out into the day, alone. It wasn’t three o’clock yet, but the woods between the neighborhood and the field were as dark as nightfall. The storm from the day before had broken, but the sky was still dark, still gloomy, and I knew it could rain at any moment. Every breeze through the grass, every crack and pop of branches, made me glance over my shoulder in fear. Monsters, both human and otherwise, seemed to lurk in every shadow, behind every scrubby wall of brush. More than once, when the wind picked up, I froze, the terror boiling up in my throat like bile, and I nearly turned and fled in the opposite direction. Each time, I would close my eyes, think of Andy, think of whatever darkness he was in, and the moment would pass, ruffling through my hair like the wind. So I pushed on toward the Trails, which stood like a monolith of dark green, and I shuddered as soon as I set my eyes on them.