He is not stuck.
It is almost unbelievable.
Mrs Patterson is now ten steps from Max. Five steps. Her flashlight shoots ahead. Not at the ground but straight ahead. Two steps before she would have stepped on Max, she turns left and heads up the hill toward the road. It makes sense that she turns. Otherwise she would have had to climb over the rock or squeeze between the rock and the tree, but it was still close. If she had shined her flashlight on the pile of leaves, I am sure that she would have seen Max’s shape under those leaves.
‘How long are you going to wait?’ I ask, once Mrs Patterson is far enough away that I cannot hear her footsteps in the leaves.
‘Snipers wait for days,’ he whispers.
‘Days?’
‘Not me. But snipers do. I don’t know. In a little while.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
I don’t know if this is a good idea or a bad idea, but Max has made a decision. He is solving the problem. He is escaping on his own.
‘Budo,’ he whispers. ‘Are you real? Tell me the truth.’
I pause before answering. I want to say yes, because yes is the truth, and yes will keep me safe. Yes will keep me existing. But Max is not safe, and he cannot afford to believe in me now because I cannot save him. He needs to believe in himself. He has depended on me for too long. He needs to depend on himself now. I can’t get him home.
This is not choosing between chicken noodle or vegetable beef. Blue or green. This is not the Learning Center or the playground or the school bus or even Tommy Swinden. This is the actual devil in actual pale moonlight.
Max has to get himself home.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die. I’m imaginary. You imagine me to make things easier for you. So you’ll have a friend.’
‘Really?’ he asks.
‘Really.’
‘You’re a good friend, Budo,’ Max says.
Max has never said this to me before. I want to exist for ever, but if I had stopped existing at this very moment, I would have at least been happy. The happiest ever.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘But I’m only what you imagine. I’m a good friend because you made me a good friend.’
‘Time to go,’ Max says. He says it so fast that I am not sure if he was listening to me.
He stands up but stays bent over in a crouch. He starts moving up the hill but to the left of where Mrs Patterson went.
I follow.
As I step past the leaf pile where Max was buried seconds ago, I see the Lego train sitting by the rock. Max has left it behind.
In a minute we are on the edge of the neighbor’s lawn. The long, stretch of grass is split in two by a gravel driveway. On the other side of the lawn is another patch of forest. Smaller, I think. The lights of the next house look close. They shine through the tree line.
‘You should go to that house and knock on the door. The people will help.’
Max says nothing.
‘They won’t hurt you, Max,’ I say.
He does not answer.
I did not expect Max to get help from Mrs Patterson’s neighbors or anyone else. I think Max would rather melt every Lego piece and army man and video game in the world into a pile of gooey plastic before he ever talked to a stranger. Knocking on a stranger’s door would be like knocking on the door to an alien spaceship.
Max looks left and right across the lawn. He looks like he is getting ready to cross the street, even though he has never crossed a street alone in his entire life. Then he bursts out of the trees and runs across the lawn. He is visible in the moonlight, but unless Mrs Patterson is watching, he is going to make it across the lawn to the other side without being noticed.
As he reaches the driveway, spotlights on the house switch on. They light up the front yard like the sun. They are the lights that switch on and off when people move. Max’s parents have them in the backyard, and they turn on sometimes when a stray cat or a deer passes by.
Max freezes when the lights come on. He looks behind him. I am standing on the edge of the trees. I have been watching Max but not following. I have been standing and staring in amazement at this boy who once needed help deciding on which pair of socks to wear.
Max turns toward the trees on the other side of the lawn and starts running again, and that is when Mrs Patterson bursts from the trees to my right and runs like lightning across the lawn. Max does not see her at first, so I shout.
‘Max! Look out! She’s behind you!’
Max turns to look but does not stop running.
I start running. I shake off my amazement. I am suddenly filled with fear. I follow behind Mrs Patterson, who is now closing in on Max. She is faster than Max. She is faster than she should be.
She really is the devil.
Max reaches the trees on the other side of the lawn. He takes two steps into the trees and then jumps over an old stone wall. His foot catches a rock and he tumbles to the ground behind the wall, out of sight. A second later he pops up and begins running again.
Mrs Patterson reaches the trees about ten seconds later. She jumps over the wall, too, but she clears it, landing and running again in one smooth motion. She pumps her arms, the flashlight turned on but not pointed at Max any longer. She can see him now. She is getting closer and closer. The beam of the flashlight flies wildly through the trees.
‘Run, Max!’ I scream as I jump the wall.
I am seconds behind Mrs Patterson but I can do no good. I am helpless. Useless.
I scream again. ‘Run!’
Max reaches the front lawn of the next house. It is not as wide as the first, and the driveway is made of street stuff instead of gravel, but otherwise it is the same. He sprints across the grass, no spotlights turning on this time, and he disappears into the gloom of the trees on the other side.
Max is running out of houses and trees and pond. Two more houses and he will reach a street that he must cross. A street that he has never been able to cross alone before. Then he will be in a neighborhood with houses and sidewalks and street lights and stop signs. No more leaf piles and stone walls and tall trees. No more gloom. No more hiding places. He will have to find help or be caught.
But none of that will matter if Mrs Patterson catches him first, and it looks like she will.
Mrs Patterson reaches the tree line just seconds after Max. I am about twenty steps behind her when I see a thick, bare branch swing out wildly from the gloom and smash Mrs Patterson in the face. She cries out and drops to the ground like a rock. A second later I see Max. He has changed direction. He has turned right. He is running through the trees toward the road instead of into the forest toward the next house.
I come to a stop where Mrs Patterson is lying on the ground. Her nose is bloody. Her hands are pressing down hard on her left eye. She is moaning.
Max has danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, and he has won.
I turn and run in the same direction as Max, not bothering to enter the trees. I can run faster if I stay on the lawn. When I reach the street, I stop and look left and right.
No Max.
I turn left, toward the main road, and run, hoping Max has kept moving in the same direction. A few seconds later I hear him call my name.
‘Over here!’ he shouts in a whisper. He is on the other side of the street, in a small patch of trees, crouched behind another stone wall.
It takes me a moment to realize that he has crossed a street on his own.
‘What did you do?’ I ask, climbing behind the wall with him. ‘Mrs Patterson is hurt.’
‘I set a trap,’ he says, panting and shaking and sweating but grinning, too. Not smiling, but so close to smiling.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘I pulled a branch way back and let it go when she got close,’ he says.
I stare in disbelief.
‘I learned it from Rambo,’ he says. ‘First Blood. Remember?’
I do remember. Max watched the movie with his dad, and then his dad made
Max promise not to tell his mom.
Max told his mom when she got home because Max is a terrible liar. Max’s dad slept in the guest room that night.
‘She’s really hurt,’ I say. ‘Bleeding.’
‘It wasn’t really a Rambo trap. His trap had spikes that stuck in the police’s legs. I didn’t have any rope or a knife, and I didn’t have time even if I had that stuff. But it’s where I got the idea.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I don’t know what else to say.
‘Okay,’ Max says. He stands up and moves along the stone wall, staying low, in the direction of the main road.
He does not wait for me to lead or even ask me for a direction. Max is moving on his own.
He is saving himself.
CHAPTER 59
Max reaches the end of Mrs Patterson’s street and stops. He has stayed in the woods on the opposite side of the street, walking slowly and quietly between the trees, but when he turns off this street, he will no longer have patches of forest where he can hide. The houses with the long driveways and enormous plots of land along the pond will be gone. He will be on a street with short driveways, bunched-up houses, street lights and sidewalks.
If Mrs Patterson is still chasing Max, he will be easy to see.
‘Go right,’ I tell Max.
He is standing on the corner. His body is pressed against a tree. He looks unsure about which way to go.
‘The school is to the right,’ I say.
‘Okay,’ Max says, but instead of stepping out from behind the tree where he is hiding, he turns into the backyard of the first house on the street.
‘Where are you going?’ I ask.
‘I can’t walk on the sidewalks,’ he says. ‘She might see me.’
‘So where are you going?’ I ask.
‘I’ll stay behind the houses.’
This is what Max does. We walk for almost thirty minutes this way, crossing from one backyard to another. When the space between the houses is not guarded by fences or trees or garages or cars, Max runs. He stays low to the ground and moves fast. When a backyard is fenced, he walks around the outside edge, pushing his way through bushes and weeds. He scrapes his hands and face on shrubs and soaks his feet in puddles and mud but he keeps moving. He sets off six more spotlights along the way but no one inside any of the houses sees him.
Max is not like the Rambo guy in that movie. He can’t swim through abandoned mines or break into police stations or climb mountains, but that is because there are no mines or police stations or mountains here. Max has houses and backyards and fences and trees and rose bushes, but he uses them just like Rambo would.
When we reach the next intersection, Max recognizes where he is.
‘The park is across the street,’ he says. ‘Over there.’
He points left in the direction of the park. The school is behind the park. But instead of turning left, he turns right.
‘Where are you going?’ I ask. He is already moving along a fence, making his way behind another house.
‘We can’t cross the street there,’ he whispers. ‘That’s where Mrs Patterson would expect me to cross.’
Max crosses the street two blocks down, and he does not cross at an intersection. Instead he waits behind a parked car until no cars are coming and then he runs across the street without the help of a crosswalk.
Max just broke his first law, I think.
Unless there is a law against pooping on someone’s head.
Once he is on the other side of the street, Max keeps running. He is using the sidewalk this time instead of sneaking behind houses, and he is running as fast as he can. He wants to get to the park as quickly as possible, I think. The park feels safe to me, too. The park is a place for kids, even in the middle of the night.
Max crosses one more side street and then he turns right into the park, running off the footpaths and toward a soccer field between two steep hills. Max’s dad once tried to take him sledding on these hills. The hills are made for people to sit on while watching the soccer games, but they are great for sledding, too. There are tons of kids on the hills after every snowstorm. But Max refused to get on the sled and complained the whole time that his mittens were wet. His dad finally drove him home without saying a word.
Max flies down the hill today, faster than a sled, it seems, and runs straight across the soccer field. Near the goalpost he turns right toward the baseball field, but he stays off the footpaths, running on the grass and through the trees on the edges of the trails instead. After he is past the baseball field, Max turns right past the playground toward the trees.
There is a small patch of forest that stands between the school and the park. There are trails covered by woodchips, and the teachers sometimes take the students on these trails in the fall and spring. Mrs Gosk took her class for a walk a few weeks ago so her students could write some poetry about nature. Max sat on a stump and made a list of all the words that rhymed with tree.
There were 102 words on his list. It wasn’t a poem, but Mrs Gosk was still impressed.
Max heads in the direction of the forest. He runs along the edge of a small pond on the edge of the trees, daring to step on the path for a moment before he reaches the entrance of the forest and disappears into the gloom.
Fifteen minutes later, after getting lost on the trails twice, we stand on the other side of the forest. A field stands between us and the school. It is the same field where Max has refused to run and jump and throw softballs on field day. The moon has risen higher in the sky since we left Mrs Patterson’s house. It hangs over the school like a giant, blind eye.
I want to tell Max that he has made it. I want to tell him to crawl into the bushes along the edge of the forest and wait until the morning comes. I want to tell him that once the buses start pulling into the circle at the front of the school, all he has to do is run across this field to the school and go through the front doors like it was a regular school day. He could even walk down to Mrs Gosk’s classroom if he wanted. Once he is inside the school, he will be safe.
Instead I ask, ‘What’s next?’
I ask because I am not in charge anymore. I don’t think I could be in charge even if I wanted to be.
‘I want to go home,’ he says. ‘I want to see Mom and Dad.’
‘Do you know the way home from here?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘You do?’
‘Yes,’ he says again. ‘Of course.’
‘Oh.’
‘When should we go?’ I ask, hoping he says that we will wait for morning. That we will let Mrs Gosk or Mrs Palmer or the police bring him home.
‘Now,’ he says, turning and starting to walk along the edge of the field. ‘I want to go home.’
CHAPTER 60
I do not know how long we have been walking when we pass the Savoys’ house. The moon has moved across the sky but it is still hanging over our heads. Max has not said much. But this is Max. He may have turned into Rambo overnight, but he is still Max, too.
We have been walking for a long time, staying behind houses and bushes and trees whenever possible. I have followed Max the whole way, and he has not complained once.
I can’t believe that Max will be home in a few minutes. I have stopped imagining the look on Max’s parents’ faces when they see him standing on the stoop. It is about to happen for real. I did not think it would ever happen.
I stop just before our driveway and stare at my friend. For the first time in my life, I understand what it feels like to be proud of someone. I am not Max’s mom or dad, but I am his friend, and I am bursting with pride.
And then I see it.
Mrs Patterson’s bus. The bus with the room in the back just for Max.
Max is about to turn up his driveway and take the final steps to his house, but he doesn’t know that Mrs Patterson is waiting for him. He doesn’t know that parked down the street, a little bit past the house, in the dark space between two street lights, is Mrs Patterson and her bus
.
He doesn’t even know that Mrs Patterson has a bus.
I open my mouth to shout a warning but it is too late. Max is four or five paces up the driveway when Mrs Patterson steps out from behind the giant oak tree where Max and I have waited for the bus every day since kindergarten. The tree that Max touches until the bus comes.
Max hears the footsteps before he hears my voice, but both sounds are too late. He sees Mrs Patterson closing in on him and he runs. He is more than halfway up the driveway when Mrs Patterson’s arm comes down on Max’s shoulder and grabs hold. The force of her arm causes Max to trip and stumble to the ground, and for a second Max is free. He crawls toward the house on his hands and knees, but Mrs Patterson is on him in seconds, reaching down and grabbing him by the arm. She lifts him up like he is a doll.
Max screams. ‘Mom! Dad! Help!’
Mrs Patterson presses her free hand over Max’s mouth to silence him. I do not think that Max’s parents would hear him anyway. Their bedroom is upstairs and in the back of the house, and it is late. They are sleeping, I think. But she does not know this. She wants him to be quiet so she can get away with him for ever.
Finally I move, running up the driveway, stopping in front of Max. He is wriggling, trying to break free. His eyes are wide. I can see the terr++++++or in his face. He tries to scream through Mrs Patterson’s hand but all that comes out is a low hum. He kicks at Mrs Patterson’s shins. Some of his kicks connect, but Mrs Patterson does not even flinch.
I stand there like a helpless fool. I am inches from my friend, watching him fight for his life, and I can do nothing. Max stares into my eyes. He is pleading for help but there is nothing I can do. I can only watch my friend be dragged away for ever.
‘Fight!’ I yell at Max. ‘Bite her hand!’
He does. I watch his jaw drop open and then shut. Mrs Patterson winces but does not let go.
Max’s arms flail. His feet continue to kick. He grabs onto the hand that is pressed over his mouth and tries to pull it free. He strains, eyes bulging even more, but he cannot. He pounds his fist on her hand. Then I see something in his eyes change. The panic is replaced by something else for just a second. Max reaches into his pocket and removes the object that has caused his pocket to bulge all night. It is the piggy bank that was sitting on his desk in his room. The tarnished pig filled to the brim with pennies.