One of the trusted few had been Sherman.
“Jesus,” he said into my ear, “I’ve called like a thousand times.” He sounded exasperated.
“Ok. Well, you don’t have to yell at me,” I said.
“Sorry, sorry, Luce. I’m just…I mean…I got worried.”
“About what?”
“The dude. The dude that like tried to attack you.”
“What-“
“It’s on the news. I saw that and I fucking freaked out, Lucy. I swear, oh my god, I swear I nearly had a heart attack.”
“It was on the news?”
“On the Internet. Are you ok?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m totally fine.”
He sighed. “Good. It looked so bad. I mean, I know he didn’t, but I mean, what if he’d had a gun or something?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It lingered in the air between us.
“Sorry,” said Sherman. “I don’t mean to make you worry. That was a stupid thing to say. Pretend like I didn’t say it. Besides I haven’t seen that guy. I guess he might still be out here, but I don’t see him anywhere.”
“Wait. What do you mean ‘out here’?”
“I’m out here. On Jennings. Fuck, everyone else is out here, why shouldn’t I be?”
I smiled. I nearly started walking towards the front of the house so I could look out the window to try and see his car, but the cord on the rotary only went so far. Sherman still cared for me. I knew he did, but I still wasn’t about to let him off the hook. He could’ve leapt out of nowhere and karate chopped the theoretical gun from Wilson Plass’ hand and I would’ve treated him like a hero, yet the next time I spotted SharDi Leasey and her notoriously braless upper torso in the school hallway, the lingering resentment would’ve returned full force.
“You didn’t need to come out,” I told him.
“I did. I had to. I couldn’t just stay in town. I was too freaked out.”
“Well. Thanks. I guess.”
“Yeah. You’re welcome.”
I could picture him squinting and pushing glasses up his nose, his usual nervous tick when receiving a compliment.
“They’re going to need more cops,” said Sherman. “I mean if there’s already this many people out here and Maddy and Jack aren’t even here yet…” He whistled.
“Pretty ugly?”
“Hella and a half.”
“Did you figure out the artist yet?”
“Artist…” like he couldn’t remember what that meant.
“The Maddy cartoons?”
“Oh! No. Not yet. They’re pretty good, you know? Art wise.”
“I know.”
“But I’m not the one that keeps getting them taped to her locker so I’ll shut up.”
“It’s okay,” I said, letting him off the hook a little.
I told him about Nick’s assertion that Small Town Girl was going to bomb.
Sherman said, “He put that on his Facebook, too.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. You didn’t see?”
“I didn’t…I’m not friends with Nick, not in real life, and definitely not on the Internet either.”
“Yeah,” Sherman said, “he like linked to a story, not a story, but to the website for the movie, and then put in a little thing where he typed that the movie would bomb. For sure.”
I sighed. “He might be right.”
“Yeah?”
“Maddy seemed kind of scared about how good the movie was going to be. At least the last time I talked to her for all of 5 minutes. But who knows? Maybe it’s good. Maybe all this promotion stuff will pay off.”
Sherman grunted. “The one thing about it though, about the post Nick put up, there’s no immediate ass licking from Geoff.”
“Do I even want to know what that means?”
“It’s like they’re sitting next to each other and whenever Nick posts something, the second it’s up, Geoff hits the ‘Like’ button or comments on it, good little ass-licking Salacious Crumb he is. This time, at least so far, he hasn’t done it.”
After a moment he asked if I knew what a Salacious Crumb was. I assured him I did without mentioning that during high school one year Maddy had dressed up as Slave Princess Leia for Halloween. I didn’t want to break his teenage boy brain.
Soon as we hung up I walked the house. I clamped down on my anxiety enough I didn’t check cabinets or the toilets, but I did take the opportunity to make another circuit with an eye toward discovering any sort of camera or microphone Dina and Trent might have put in place.
The potential for the intrusion was upsetting, but at the same time I could kind of understand it.
A mansion or a bank, any place valuables were stored, would be monitored.
Starting tomorrow and through Saturday morning, a man whose movies had earned over a billion dollars worldwide and his wife, also a movie star, would be staying here. They were valuable. A private security force would be on the ground 24/7, but an extra layer of eyes and ears couldn’t hurt.
Despite her intrusion the other night, I wished Dad hadn’t tossed Carla’s brownies. I wanted at least a little comfort food and I wanted it made for me. My level of twitchiness was high enough I might be able to boil water and dump in noodles, but prep above that level seemed far too ripe an opportunity for me screwing up.
Dusk was falling when Dad got home. He smiled coming into the house, weird in and of itself, but then, come through the living room door, looking at me, he laughed, a short burst concluded by his looking at the ceiling.
“Did you make it in ok?” I asked.
He nodded.
“There still a bunch of people out there?” I asked.
He pointed at me.
“Yes.”
The look on his face indicated that he had more to say, just give him a moment to arrange the words right before they came spiraling out of him in a jumble.
“They have tents.”
“Tents.”
He nodded. “Skinny Arbogast is charging people money to use his property.” Dad pointed the direction of East Jennings, Skinny Arbogast’s land just the other side of Jennings from our place.
“Why-“
“All the motels in Eaton are full. Most the motels in Ashmond are full. Media and then the curious. The celebrity curious. So what happened some point today, Skinny drove out here, just right out here, saw all the people, and his entrepreneurial initiative kicked in full force. He told folks they could camp out on his land and keep an eye on our house around the clock for a fee.”
“Ok.”
“A hundred bucks a head or fifty. I’m not sure which. I heard conflicting amounts all day long.”
“Are you going to call him?”
“And do what? Congratulate him on striking the iron when it’s hot?”
“I don’t know.”
“He even has some Honey Buckets coming out.” Dad searched my face for recognition. When it didn’t come out he said, “Porta Potties.”
Dad walked over and sat down in the armchair. Hunched forward, he rubbed his temples and stared at the floor.
It was a reminder of his pose waiting in the hospital when Mom was sick. The thing of it was, if I went to him and tried to rub his back or hug him he wouldn’t react. He’d remain locked in the pose. If anything, he might retract from the touch. It was like he needed to cut himself off; even his own family sometimes couldn’t help soften the blows he endured.
When it got dark, I stood in my bedroom and looked out towards the mini-camp. Flashlights and lamps and the tiny blue bobbling shapes of phones and laptops and pads floated like neon vessels.
The sound of the crowd washed towards the house and a large portion of the noise failed to penetrate the wood and glass, but still some managed to seep inside. Not only had Dad brought dinner (bur
gers and shakes from the local drive-in), but he’d stopped at the hardware store and asked for the earplugs carpenters used, the kind that would really do the job and keep noise out.
Things wouldn’t get too loud out there. A deputy remained posted. The news vehicles had left for the night. Ruth Arnett’s car was gone, but a black SUV remained in our driveway. I couldn’t tell if the duo down there was Dina and Trent or their replacement men in blue and black. Dina I could imagine needing to go to the bathroom and eating and sleeping. Of Trent I was still unsure. There might be a cord attached to him that he slipped into an outlet to recharge every now and then.
I lay on my bed in the dark and tried to imagine the crowd out there getting even bigger. And then at some point, something triggering them, like a noise or signal, and the crowd ran down the driveway, swarmed the guard, and the fans, the raving mad and the simply curious, washed up around the base of the house, like flood waters reaching a house without crashing through. Whoever was in the home couldn’t leave. Wouldn’t dare it. Not with the water at its doorstep. The hazards the water presented too stark.
Then Sherman showed up, parting the crowd, getting me to safety. I smiled at the image, at the merging of imagining the crowd and water, Sherman arriving at the house in a boat of some sort. I was trying to reconcile the mash-up of images in my tired, exhausted brain when sleep rolled me up into her arms.
Birds tweeting, the sky a murky predawn white, I woke on my side, the unopened package of earplugs near my hand.
Chapter 13
Thursday morning Dad offered to drive me into town, but I declined. He looked haggard. He hadn’t slept nearly so well as I had and not only was his room in the back of the house, but he’d used the earplugs. Problem being, they kept out noise. Not stress.
He was working half the day, then coming home to wait for Maddy and Jack.
Sherman had told me most people would’ve skipped school if their movie star sibling were coming to town. I’d pointed out that was exactly why I’d be going to school as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I didn’t want people to think that I assumed some heightened sense of being above everyone else from the blind luck of having a famous sibling.
Through the simple misfortune of my personality being tuned to a moderately introverted station, that was already the case. I knew people thought I was stuck up. I didn’t need to make matters worse.
Walking to the mouth of the driveway, I could see the people camped out on Skinny Arbogast’s land notice me, visibly react to my presence. A couple aimed their phones and at least one had an actual camera. Several people were asleep, sitting in fold out chairs, wrapped in blankets.
The two security personnel weren’t Dina and Trent. Two others with the blue L pinned above their breast. Both humorless white males with thick necks, one of them with a Bluetooth device notched in his ear. They both nodded when I said good morning.
I’d walked past them toward the end of the driveway, and that was when Ruth drove up, slowing her car and signaling to turn in and park behind the SUV. She smiled and waved driving past me. She hadn’t come anywhere near colliding with me, she’d hit her brakes early enough, but still, the proximity of the car turning so near to where I stood set my nerves on edge.
Getting out of her car, she called to the two security men.
“Morning, Sam. Morning, Other Sam.” Shutting her door she dropped her shoulders and exhaled. “Come on guys. That’s the point where one of you says, ‘Morning, Ralph’. Didn’t you guys ever watch Warner Bros. cartoons, for Pete’s sake? You know which one I mean, the one with Wile E. Coyote and the sheep dog? No? Fine.”
All that as she pulled a backpack and her sign out from the car trunk and slammed it shut. She walked towards me. Behind her Sam and Other Sam exhibited Trent’s patented bloodless stare.
“Hey, Lucy.”
“Hi.”
“How’s it going?”
“All right I guess.”
“Waiting for it to get over?”
I nodded.
She looked across the road at the camped out contingent.
“No way.”
“What?”
“Honey Buckets.”
She pointed it out. Two portable outhouses erected towards the back of the gathering. Dad was right. Skinny must have had them brought out last evening sometime.
“Well that makes sense. Actually that’s awesome. It almost makes me want to go back to the motel and change out of my diaper.” She ticked her head right, indicating Sam and Other Sam. “Diapers. Those guys know what I’m talking about.”
She grinned, waiting for me to return her smile.
“But no. That is so awesome. I was starting to wonder what all these people were going to do if they had to go the bathroom. I mean for me, the simple facts of holding a sign for hours on end…If there’s no easy way to take a bathroom break, you do what you have to. You invest in some Pampers. You do. You think I’m joking, but no. Ohhhh, no.”
The eerie thing was how her voice and face matched that of her dead sister in the Funny-or-Die videos I’d seen.
She started across the road and then stopped and walked back towards me.
“I keep forgetting to thank you. I mean I already thanked your dad for letting me park on your guys’ property, but I need to thank you, too. It means a lot. Like I said, Kip was a story, and people went ‘Awwww, how horrible,’ and then when the next news cycle started 5 minutes later, they all forgot about her. So thank you.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what I did.”
“You let me try and make people remember what happened to her. What can happen to anyone who strays a little too close to the malarkey Horace Walton and his church try and pass off as being life changing. Life changing…”
She stepped to her right and looked past me to the two security men and shouted, “More like life ending!” Her face twisted up, ageing her, and then just as quick she relaxed, went back to looking cute like a curly blonde squirrel in glasses.
“Have a good one, Luce.”
“You, too.”
She started across the road, hustling like it was more than the 25 feet away, looking back over her shoulder at one point and smiling at me as she said, “Honey Buckets!” like it was too, too unbelievably cool.
“FYI. Curtis and George keep putting those up on your locker,” said Sherman.
I’d just torn the day’s first editorial cartoon off my locker and bunched it in my fist.
Cartoon Jack and Maddy and Lucy stood on some farmland. Jack knelt down beside a bale of hay. He appeared to be giving it a rectal exam.
Grinning he said, “It’s only a personality test.”
Cartoon Lucy held her rear end. “My butt hurts,” she said.
I uncrumpled the cartoon and showed it to Sherman.
“Their drawing is getting a lot better,” I said.
“Really? I’d say worse. Your sister’s boobs…One is as big as her head and the other one’s tiny.”
“Still. Like I said. Better.”
Sherman nodded. He looked anxious, like he awaited a reward for figuring out the identities of my tormentors.
“Do you want me to do anything?” he asked.
“About Curtis and George? I don’t think I even know who they are.”
“They’re in 7th grade.”
I laughed. “Of course they are. Yeah. Sure. Beat ‘em up.”
“Jesus. You’re not serious, right?”
I shook my head. I motioned for him to get close to me.
Whispering, I asked, “Is that Facebook post still up?”
“What Facebook post?”
“Nick’s. The bombing one?”
He nodded.
“Can I see it?”
He brought it up on his phone.
On the ride into school, any time I’d looked at Nick he’d had this smug litt
le look on his face. I didn’t know what it meant. The fact that he wasn’t babbling like a jackass – in other words acting normal – had me concerned.
Like Sherman had pointed out last night, Geoff still hadn’t commented or liked Nick’s prediction. A cursory scroll through Nick’s Facebook page revealed Geoff almost always acknowledged Nick’s imminent wisdom or incredible sense of humor. No matter how mean-spirited or poorly spelled Nick’s update, Geoff was always there, ready and willing to lick his master’s boots. But not in this instance. I didn’t know what that meant. Geoff hadn’t ridden the bus this morning. Neither had Kitty, an occurrence that seemed to piss off Pat Corley a little more than it warranted, not that he’d had a normal morning, dealing with the mess in front of my house.
Waiting in front of the Ferguson’s, the bus idling, he’d even yelled back to me and asked if I knew where Kitty was. The way he swore you’d think it actually was my job to keep abreast of her activities.
I handed Sherman his phone.
While I’d scrolled, Sherman had been studying the morning’s cartoon. He frowned.
“They might be getting better, but these guys still kind of suck. It doesn’t even look like you. It could be any girl with a ponytail.”
“Wait.” I put my hands on my butt and made a face.
Sherman laughed. He snorted. I laughed right along with him, something that hadn’t happened in a long time.
At lunchtime I decided to walk to the football field. It doubled as our track. I felt like walking a couple laps. I wasn’t hungry and the thought of a noisy cafeteria seemed less attractive than normal. Eyes all seemed to be focused on me.
At one point Mr. Pederson had seen me in the hall and he seemed to deflate a little when I told him I hadn’t talked to Maddy about his request. In fact I’d forgotten all about it. After seeing how crestfallen he got, I’d snuck into the bathroom and called myself, leaving a voice message to do just that. As I left the stall, two senior girls at the mirror looked at me like I was the world’s weirdest high school sophomore, hands down. I could only wonder what rumor might spring from their overhearing me mumble from a stall.
Headed down the long main hallway toward the school’s front doors I heard voices coming from the direction of the administration offices. The group walked out into the hall. I put on the brakes at sight of them - Principal Colan and Vice Principal Nelson and their two guests.