Caitlin looked down, a bit guiltily. “Actually, I still want it,” she said, “just…not quite as much as before.”
Nick nodded, reached into the box of cash, and pulled out a twenty. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I made enough money anyway. You can have it for free.”
Reluctantly, Caitlin took the bill, clearly disturbed by the whole experience. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s too big to walk home with. I’ll come back with my mom later.”
“Maybe,” suggested Nick, “when you come over, you could stay for dinner.”
But Caitlin gave him an awkward, apologetic grin. “Maybe I’ll just get the tape recorder.”
“Right,” said Nick, trying to hide both his embarrassment and disappointment. “Well, thanks for stopping by.”
And then she was gone, just like that, along with everyone else who no longer had any interest in the junk on the table. Last to go was the man who hit the tree, as there were pieces of his front bumper he had to throw into the trunk before struggling to drive off with a wilting air bag in his lap.
Well, at least Nick could console himself with an incredibly fat wallet, even if somehow it felt like the money wasn’t really his. That it had been stolen by unintentional trickery.
“Wow,” said his dad, coming out of the house to see the flotsam and jetsam spread out on the table. “That turned out well!”
“Yeah,” said Nick, “surprisingly well.”
“Then can we get something to eat?” Danny asked. “I’m starving.”
“You two go—my treat,” Nick said, handing his father a few bills from the toolbox. “Just bring me back something. I’ll stay and clean up this mess.”
As his dad and brother drove off, Nick brought the tall stage light into the house, then went back outside with a large trash bag. But before he began tossing the remaining junk, one last car pulled up the long driveway, a pearlescent-white SUV that seemed to be dry in spite of the rain. Some kind of optical illusion, Nick figured.
As a flash of lightning ripped across the sky, all four doors opened simultaneously. Four men stepped out, all tall and each dressed in a pastel color—cream, pale green, teal, lavender—as if they had been on their way to an Easter parade. In one smooth move that almost seemed choreographed, the four men opened umbrellas.
They walked up to the picnic table and stood around Nick, who tried not to feel, or at least not to show that he felt, intimidated.
“So sorry we’re late,” said the tallest of the four. “We only heard about this at the last minute.”
One of the others held up a copy of the flyer and read aloud, “‘Antiques, Vintage Toys, Furniture, Tons of Cool Stuff.’”
The tallest guy wore a vanilla-colored three-piece suit, while the others had on slacks and crisp shirts. Due to a trick of the light, perhaps, or the contrast between the pastel shades and the gloomy weather, their clothes almost seemed to be glowing.
“‘Tons of cool stuff,’” the man in the vanilla suit repeated, then he flashed and held a cheery, soulless smile that creeped Nick out. “Sadly, I imagine no one showed up in this storm.”
The other three men laughed at that, as though he had just cracked a joke that Nick didn’t get.
“Maybe,” the vanilla suit went on as he reached under his jacket and pulled out his wallet, “we can still make the day pay off for you.”
“Actually…” Nick hesitated, enjoying this moment. “We sold practically everything.”
The man’s smile faltered and lost its genial quality, leaving just a faintly sour glint, and the other men stopped laughing.
“Yeah,” Nick went on, “we had a great turnout in spite of the rain. Sorry.”
The vanilla suit glanced at the other men and nodded at the picnic table. They fanned out, looking over the leftover detritus—mostly small personal items Nick had brought with him from Florida.
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Mr. Vanilla Suit said, turning back to Nick. “Very unfortunate.”
“For you,” Nick clarified.
The man paused, then nodded. “Of course. For us. But you’re a very lucky fellow.” His creepy “friendly” smile returned. “Say, you didn’t happen to get the names and addresses of the people you sold the items to, by chance?”
“At a garage sale? You gotta be kidding.” As weird as Nick felt about this entire encounter, he had to laugh at that. Then he turned and saw the other men collecting the remains from the table, sweeping the small and broken items into boxes and bags they had produced.
“Hey,” Nick said, raising his voice, “what are you doing?”
“Don’t worry,” said the vanilla suit, placing a fifty-dollar bill on the picnic table in front of him. “I’m sure this will more than cover it.” Then he reached into his wallet and withdrew a business card that looked as slick as his suit. He placed it gently on top of the fifty. “But if anyone should happen to bring back anything you sold them, I would ask that you get in touch with me.”
Nick shook his head. “No, uh, I don’t really think…”
The man placed another fifty-dollar bill on top of the first, making a currency sandwich with the business card. “We’ll make it worth your while. Very worth your while.”
Before Nick could answer, the four men jumped back into the SUV with their boxes and bags. Through the windshield Nick saw Mr. Vanilla Suit angrily whip out a cell phone as the car sped in reverse down the driveway. Then its tires squealed on the asphalt as the driver shifted gears. The car raced up the street, its tinted windows hiding the men inside.
Nick looked at the two fifty-dollar bills on the table. Not much he could do about it now, he supposed, and he added the bills to the others in the toolbox.
“So much for having to clean up the garbage,” he muttered as he crumbled the business card into a small ball and dropped it in the empty trash bag.
Flickering light. A door bursts open. Flames. Smoke. Words lost in the roar, the crackling, the burning—Nick shouts to his mom—she was just behind him a split second ago—but a second can split in a million different directions.…
Nick woke from the dream into dim morning light coming from a small frosted window in the far wall of his attic room. High above, the four triangular planes of the roof joined together in a pyramidal skylight, but the glass had been covered with black paint. The only way he knew it was a skylight at all was because of the small spots where the paint had peeled away. At even the brightest times of day, the attic lingered in twilight.
With all the junk gone, the attic was pretty bare. It would take a lot of work to make this room feel homey. Nick’s bed and a small desk—all that his dad could afford to buy him right now—appeared small and lonely in the otherwise empty attic space. Nick figured he would soon fill the room with furniture, a wide-screen TV for sure, and maybe a pinball machine or a pool table.
Yeah, he thought, dream on. None of those things would fit through the attic opening anyway, even if they could afford them.
Nick pulled himself out of bed with a yawn and a scratch, and tripped over his shoes and dirty clothes. He pulled the handle that released the rickety attic ladder and clambered down to the second-floor hallway, then made his way to the main stairs and down to the kitchen.
At the table, his brother was scarfing down cereal, studiously reading the back of the box. His father, still in his flannel bathrobe, was standing at the open back door.
Just outside stood the elderly woman from next door, wearing a home-knit sweater that said I LOVE MY PUG, and her pug, who wore a matching sweater that said I LOVE MY OWNER.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman was saying to Nick’s father. “A person could get hurt.”
Under her arm, like a metallic football, she held a scuffed chrome object. It was the dreaded toaster. Something Nick hoped he’d never see again.
“Uh,” said his dad, trying to gather his uncaffeinated brain, “like the sign said, all sales are vinyl, are viral—um, final.”
> “I’ll take care of this, Dad,” Nick said, moving toward the back door.
His dad didn’t argue. He just went looking in cabinets for coffee, not realizing he hadn’t bought any yet.
“Is there a problem with your purchase, ma’am?” Nick asked.
“Don’t try to sweet-talk me,” she snapped. “You salespeople are all alike.”
“Salespeople?” Nick held up his hands. “I’m a kid.”
“Bait and switch and leave the customer high and dry without so much as a how-do-you-do,” she went on.
Nick had no idea what any of that meant, but her voice was too annoying for this early in the morning to argue with.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll take it back. How much do I owe you?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“She paid five,” said Danny from the depths of his cereal bowl. “I remember.”
“Five for the toaster, the rest for damages,” the woman snapped. “And you’ll be lucky if I don’t sue.”
Nick reached into his pocket and found five crumpled singles. He handed them to the woman. “Here’s five for the toaster. If you want more, consult my lawyer,” and he pointed to Danny.
The woman snatched the bills begrudgingly and thrust the toaster into Nick’s hands.
“So what’s wrong with it?” he asked. “Did it burn the toast?”
The woman barked out a laugh. “Try it yourself,” she said, giving him a denture-cream snarl. “I’m sure it’ll make your family breakfast very special.”
Once she was gone, Nick plunked the toaster on the counter. It wobbled a little on its uneven feet.
Should I do this? he wondered, staring at it. Probably not.
“You gonna make toast?” asked Danny. “Because I found some jam in the pantry. It’s green.”
“That’s not jam, it’s mint jelly,” Nick told him.
“Then how come it says ‘Strawberry’?”
“Hmm,” said Nick. “Maybe let’s not eat it.” He examined the toaster, running his hands over the chrome. Now that he looked closely, he could see it had unexpected grooves and indentations that had nothing to do with making toast. They weren’t dents either. They appeared to be part of the design.
On the bottom, engraved in spidery cursive script, was the phrase Property of NT. He wondered if it had been there before, and realized that he didn’t care. Then Nick noticed one more thing.
“There’s no plug,” he said.
“Maybe it runs on batteries?” Danny suggested.
“Hmm…maybe.” Nick got two pieces of white bread, put them in the slots, and lowered the hard black lever. The moment the bread was in, the toaster began to hum, and the coils inside began to glow.
“It looks like it’s working,” Nick said, wondering what the old woman’s problem was. “I guess it does run on batteries.”
In a moment the hum grew from a faint buzz into a swarm of bees, into the roar of a jet engine. The bulbs in the light fixture above him shattered as an arc of bright blue light burst from the toaster, knocking Nick against the opposite wall. Then the blue light was gone, and the toaster fell silent.
“Dad!” yelled Danny. “The toaster killed Nick again.”
Nick’s father, whose coffee expedition had taken him to the far corners of the house, came running back into the kitchen.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “What happened to all the lights?”
“I think the toaster has a short circuit or something,” Nick said, shaking his head to clear it.
“Great. I’ll see if I can find a fuse box after I take you both to school.”
Nick stood up, checking his chest for a big gaping electrical burn hole, but there was nothing. Whatever that energy surge was, it wasn’t lethal. It didn’t even hurt.
Just then the toaster went ding and the toast popped up, incinerated into thin strips of smoking charcoal.
If there is ever a time when you do not want to stand out in any way, shape, or form, it’s your first day in a brand-new middle school.
It would have been bad enough for Nick if he had started on the first day of the school year like everyone else, but to begin in April made him an unknown quantity, a mysterious interloper from some exotic foreign state. The girls would already be wary, the guys already suspicious, and everyone would hate the sports teams he now had to root for in secret. How anyone survived a move to a new middle school was beyond Nick.
He chose his clothes carefully that morning. Nondescript jeans with no designer label—just in case that particular designer was out of favor here. A simple beige T-shirt that would go well with any color someone around him might be wearing. He even ditched his Tampa Bay Rays baseball cap that first day. His plan was to dive into the shark-infested waters of this school without so much as the slightest splash.
Unfortunately for Nick, Mitch was all about cannonballs.
Nick had just entered the school when, from way down at the far end of the hall, louder than every other conversation, he heard, “Hey, Nick, over here, it’s me, Mitch! Hey, everyone, that’s Nick—he’s the NEW kid!”
All eyes turned to Nick with that singular gaze of eighth-grade judgment, the unspoken “not one of us” gaze that has sent many a teacher into prolonged therapy.
“Your name’s Nick?” somebody said. “We’ve already got too many Nicks.”
“He’s cute,” he heard one girl say.
“No, he’s not,” he heard another say.
Suddenly the hallway felt like a gauntlet he had to pass through, and the first-period bell hadn’t even rung.
He saw a few familiar faces:
There was Caitlin, wrapped in the octopus-like arm of a guy who seemed too tall to be an eighth grader. As Nick passed by, she offered him the same slim, awkward grin she had left him with at the garage sale. She had come back to pick up the tape recorder from his father while Nick was in the shower that night. He knew she couldn’t have planned it that way, although it felt like she had.
There was the girl with the pigtails who had also been at the garage sale. She now looked him over like a piece of meat that she was considering buying at the market. He couldn’t remember if she ever told him her name.
There was Vince, who greeted him in a Lurch-like monotone, saying, “Welcome to the most pathetic school on this or any other planet.”
And, of course, at the end of the hall, there was Mitch, who might as well have been printing out “Kick Me” signs to paste all over Nick’s body with every word that he said.
“Dude, I’ve been waiting for you,” Mitch told him. Then he turned to an uninterested kid beside him. “Hey, have you met the new guy?”
Nick grabbed Mitch by the arm and walked him away from the crowd. “You already asked everybody that. Please don’t ask again.”
“Sorry,” Mitch said. “I was just trying to help. I know how hard it is to move into a new school.” Then he turned to a jock passing by. “Nick’s from Tampa. Probably roots for the Buccaneers, huh?”
Which coaxed forth a “They suck!” from somewhere behind Nick, making his journey to the dark side complete.
The jock, meanwhile, walked by without a word, bumping Nick with almost enough force to knock the books out of his hands. Whether it was intentional or the jock was simply a klutz, Nick couldn’t say, but the force of the impact was enough to throw him back against the lockers and rattle his skull.
Mitch didn’t notice. “Listen,” he said as the first bell rang, “there’s something I have to show you.”
“Maybe another time, okay?” Nick shook his head to clear it, and he tried to move on to his first class in the now-hellish school, but Mitch clung to him like a barnacle.
“It’s the thing I got at the garage sale. There’s something weird about it.”
Nick thought about Toaster Woman and took a deep breath. “I never said it worked when you bought it. All sales are—”
“Final, I know,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “But I don’t want to ret
urn it. You just gotta see what it does.” He reached into his pack and struggled to pull the device out. By this time the hallway was nearly empty. “I was messing around with it last night,” he said, “you know, before gift wrapping it for my sister. Go on, pull the string.”
If only to get rid of him, Nick grabbed the ivory ring, pulled the string out, and released it.
“Mitch,” Nick began, “I really can’t do this now, I have to—”
“—check my pocket before it’s too late,” the machine said in a harsh, tinny voice.
“You hear that?” Mitch asked, excited. “Listen to the machine, man. Do what it says!”
But with the late bell about to ring, Nick had no patience for whatever joke Mitch was about to pull.
“I will not listen to a stupid machine.” And he pushed past Mitch, hurrying to his class with mere seconds to spare.
He headed for the first seat he could find—an open desk toward the back. And as the classroom was still quieting down, he slipped into the seat, drawing no attention to himself whatsoever.
Back on track, he thought. Until the cell phone in his pocket, which he had forgotten to turn off, began to ring.
And once again all eyes turned to him.
“Whose cell phone is that?” the teacher demanded. “Hand it over.”
And from somewhere in the room he heard someone say, “Ha-ha, the new kid’s already got detention.”
Cafeteria food is the same throughout the cosmos. It transcends both time and space as a universal constant. And although Nick longed for familiarity, this particular fact was not very comforting. By the time he found his way to the cafeteria, he was last in line.
“Move along, you get what you get, no substitutions, I’m in no mood today,” said a lunch lady in the white, nurselike uniform of all cafeteria workers. She dished out meals with skillful speed, such that the line moved much more efficiently than it had at Nick’s school back home.
No, Nick had to remind himself, this is home now.
“I hate it when Ms. Planck is in a bad mood,” said the girl in front of Nick. “I always end up with something I have moral objections to eating.”