This load of thinking was making me way tired. I slept about ten hours that night. It was the last good night's sleep I would have in months.
Seven
I thought that sleeping so much would take away my bad mood. It didn't, really. In homeroom I decided to rip on Alex about band practice. He swore he had been home the whole night, that he had been working on this history paper we had due next week. He swore Renee wasn't with him.
"Yeah, since when do you not knock out a history paper ten minutes before it's due?" I asked him in disgust. "Could you at least have called?"
"Well, you could have called me," he said, like I was his mother. "Hey. Guess what? I remembered this one time I hit Creed that I totally forgot about. Can you believe I hit him twice and totally forgot about the second time?"
"If you can forget band practice you can forget anything, I guess," I muttered, but he ignored me.
"We were about twelve years old, and I was riding my bike to Ryan's and passed by that old Indian burial ground behind your house."
"Lenape Indians' burial ground. Yeah." It was in the woods out behind our property, though whether it was an actual burial ground was unproven. All we ever dug up as kids were a few arrowheads.
"I saw Creed coming out of there, and he had this piece of paper," Alex went on. "He showed it to me from, like, ten feet off, and wouldn't let me come any closer. He said it was his treasure map, and he had just buried treasure in there."
"He buried treasure in the Indian burial ground?" I asked. I'd heard of kids digging in there. I'd never heard of anyone burying anything in there. Leave it to Creed.
"Yeah. And he was being so obnoxious with this map. He kept waving it by the corner and going, 'I would venture to say that my treasure will be very valuable someday ... I would venture to say that it wouldn't be wise for me to share it with you.'"
"His smart-mouth mode," I said, and shuddered. "'I would venture to say...'"
Alex laughed. "And 'Suffice it to say.' He always said, 'Suffice it to say.'"
"Right." I laughed, too.
"So, he's dangling this treasure map in front of me and telling me he doesn't want to tell me what he just buried." Alex laughed again. "We were, like, twelve years old, not eight. He thinks I'm gonna beg him to see this treasure map, right? What would make him think that a twelve-year-old would want to play pirates? First I grabbed the map and was going to tear it into a thousand pieces. I couldn't look at it, you know, give him the satisfaction. So I tried to tear it. But he had sent it through one of those plastic machines, so that it was inside something that felt like a place mat."
I cracked up totally, despite myself. "You mean he laminated his treasure map?"
"Yes. And he was all looking at me like nanny-nanny-boo-boo when I couldn't tear it. So I just threw it down and hit him."
I was still laughing. "Oh my god. I would keep that story under my hat. Because if not, everyone's going to be digging for Creed's treasure in a few weeks and keeping me awake all night."
Alex shook his head. "Actually, the Indian burial ground is not the main attraction. All of a sudden the Pine Barrens is. Did you hear about Mrs. Creed in the Wawa last night?"
"No," I told him. "I was sleeping early."
"You shouldn't sleep, man, you miss everything."
"That's why I was sleeping."
He wouldn't take the hint. "Ryan was down there and came to my house all freaking. He said that Mrs. Creed had been in there, like, three times, looking to guilt kids who had not helped her search the woods for Chris on Saturday. Renee and I were afraid to go down to Wawa after that."
"Oh, so you and Renee sat in your house instead of hanging at Wawa?" I blasted. "Don't give me this history-paper shit."
He got kind of quiet, like, Ooops.
I looked up at the clock. Five minutes until the bell. I really didn't feel like hearing this.
"Mrs. Creed talked to Mrs. Kyle one of the times she was in the Wawa last night." Alex grabbed my arm, like this was totally important in comparison to his lying in my face. "She says she and Mr. Creed really want to believe Chris ran away. But she said she had kept every dime of his paper-route money for six years. He's got three grand in the bank. She's been watching the bank account—like, going online for the balance three times a day—and not a penny of it has moved. In other words, he hasn't touched his bank account, and no money is missing from anywhere in town. No money, no bus ticket. No muscle, no surviving in the woods. Yeah, she's starting to think he's dead. She's saying somebody else wrote the note to make it look like a suicide. And what really happened is that one of the boons—probably Richardson—killed him and dumped the body. In the Pine Barrens, maybe the boondocks."
I pulled back and stared at him. "Just like Leandra was saying yesterday?"
"You got it."
I shut my eyes and tried to tell myself that there was something to enjoy in this. Even my friends were getting some kind of roller-coaster ride out of it. When your friends start talking all negative on the boons, it's one thing. But here was a mature adult. The kid's own mother.
"Well..." I felt confused. "Did anyone see Richardson with Chris after school on Thursday?"
"I don't know." He shrugged like that wasn't important. "All I know is that Mrs. Creed is now saying he had it in for Chris ever since he pushed Chris off the bleachers last year and busted his foot."
"Oh." I had forgotten about that point. Here I was the night before, thinking the boons were overrated in the violence department. I had to admit to myself that of all the kids who had punched out Chris, Bo's thing had to be the worst. It made for a trip to the hospital, for X rays and crutches and all that stuff. Plus, Bo carried a knife and mouthed off to people all the time. I was wondering if I should feel like a fool yet.
Alex watched me look confused, and he shrugged. "Makes perfect sense to me."
"Yeah," I muttered softly. But something about it was bothering me. The vision floated through my head of the day Bo pushed Chris and all the medics showed up and that red flashing glare of the ambulance bounced around the classroom walls. The medics had taken Chris out in one of those nonmovable neck contraptions. It was a big deal. Bo got in a lot of trouble. Especially when his only excuse was, "The dude was all motormouthing right in my ear and wouldn't shut up!"
We used to hit Creed for the same type of stuff—in, like, sixth grade. But this was high school. It made Bo seem out of control, totally violent.
Sixth grade. It was easy to remember all that blood running from Creed's nostrils—so much so that the other details kind of got lost. Maybe I had wanted them to get lost.
The whole thing came wafting back to me like a bad smell. The teacher had come running over and collared me, and she called me selfish for caring more about a guitar than another human being. She hauled us both into the corridor, but because of Chris's bleeding nose, she dropped him at the nurse's office before taking me to the principal's office. The nurse took one look at him and said, "It could be broken. He should have an X ray." And so, as I was sitting in the principal's office, I saw the medics out the window. They took him away on a stretcher.
Richardson had sent Creed to the hospital, and the only other person in the world to do that was me. Nobody was wondering if I had killed Creed.
The bell rang, and I almost jumped out of my chair. Alex stood up beside me going, "How's La La Land, abnormal one?"
"Fine."
I probably should have reminded Alex about me in sixth grade. But I was starting to feel there wasn't too much that would get in the way of his perfect sense. He was my friend, my best friend, but even best friends have this line and you don't cross it. I had never thought about Alex's line before, because I had never come so close to it. But I knew it instinctively now, like I knew Alex. Some people you joke around with, you play poorly written songs with, you bust on boons with. But you don't go after their version of reality. He wouldn't hear me; it would just piss him off. That pissed me off.
"I can't do band practice tonight," I said.
He crossed himself like he was Catholic, as we went into the corridor. "Are you at death's door?"
"No." I shrugged kind of casually. "Ali McDermott wants me to come over."
I watched him stare, and almost added the one detail I didn't really care about, which was "to meet her boyfriend." But I decided just to let him think whatever he wanted to.
Eight
It was dark when I got to Ali's that night. I waved to her mom in the living room, and her mom waved back and smiled but didn't get up off the couch. She looked tired. I wondered if the divorce had turned out to be harder than she had expected.
Ali's little brother, Greg, was watching TV with his face, like, right up to the screen. My mom used to lecture me for doing that. Mrs. McDermott didn't seem to notice.
Ali and I went upstairs into her bedroom, and she slammed the door. I jumped a little at the loudness of it.
I started to take off my jacket, and she said, "Don't let that get too far from you. If my mom's new boyfriend comes over, we have to leave. We can go out in the yard, okay?"
"Sure," I said. Whatever she felt she needed.
She flopped onto her bed, and I could see that from her viewpoint she had a bird's-eye view into five different windows at the Creeds' house. It looked like the den, the kitchen, and a row of three upstairs bedrooms.
I pulled up onto my stomach beside her and heard the bed-springs groan. "Is your mom going to freak that I'm up here?"
She turned her head and passed me another one of those mystery smirks like she did yesterday, like, It's cool, but I don't want to talk about it. Leandra's mom would have pitched a fit.
Then I had another thought. "Where's this boyfriend of yours?"
"He won't mind you lying on my bed, either," she muttered, watching the Creeds'. "He knows you're coming. He's not thrilled, he doesn't trust you. But I told him you're cool and that he'll trust you if he gives you a chance."
"That's really good of you," I said, getting a little tired of all the mystery shit. "So, who is it? I take it it's somebody I know, if he doesn't trust me."
"It's somebody."
At that moment, my heart almost fell through the bed. I got this idea in my head and I don't know where it came from. It's Creed. It's not like I could exactly see Ali going out with Creed, but supposedly Ali went out with anybody and anything these days. I watched her, thinking there was some logic to this. Her dumping on him, talking to him probably more than anybody else ... She said she had seen the note ... She's running around these days with a mystery boyfriend ... Maybe he's sleeping in the crawl space under her house or in the attic or something.
I decided to back off. If she was hiding Creed, it would be a complete stress to her, and I would find out soon enough.
"See the middle window upstairs?" Ali whispered.
"Yeah." There was a darker window between the two lit in the upstairs. It looked like a small lamp was on inside, while in the two other rooms, the overheads were on.
"That's Chris's room. She's not in there right now. She goes in there every night for about half an hour."
"To do what?" I imagined Mrs. Creed, like, sitting on the bed and crying or something.
"She's looking for something. She goes through his drawers, his mattress; she even pulled the whole rug up as far as the bed last night."
"What do you think she's looking for?" I asked.
"His diary, probably."
That was way interesting. I could see Mrs. Creed downstairs in the den. She was talking on the telephone, and her mouth was going a hundred miles an hour.
"She's talking to the cops," Ali muttered.
"How do you know?"
"I overheard Renee say she badgers them every ten minutes. They're trying to look at him like a runaway. They're thinking if he committed suicide—duh—there would be a body. There's not much they can do about a runaway. But in her mind, they should be spending their every waking breath looking for her kid. So it's probably them. It's not like she has a whole lot of girlfriends or anything."
"Maybe it's a relative," I put in, watching Mrs. Creed's mouth run on and on.
"She has two sisters. But they can't stand her, either. I found that out one night when I had to eat dinner over there in, like, fifth grade. My parents were going out, and I had to take Greg over there to eat. Mrs. Creed was at her mother's funeral, in Texas. Mr. Creed was all worried about her being at this funeral. He said that Mrs. Creed's two sisters couldn't stand her, hadn't even talked to her in years. I think if Chris turned up dead, she would call them. But not yet."
She pointed to something upstairs.
"See that picture on the wall? The one right in the center of Chris's room?" she asked.
"Yeah." There were five pictures on the wall, and four surrounded one.
"The diary, it's inside the lining of that photo." She turned a triumphant grin on me, and I looked from her to the photo, completely hypnotized. "See how it stands out about an inch farther than the others? Can you imagine having a mom so nosy that you'd have to find an ingenious place like that to hide your diary? If she had found it, I don't think she would still be in there searching."
She giggled, and I got the feeling this was some sort of game to her. She enjoyed knowing that Mrs. Creed couldn't find this thing, while she knew exactly where it was.
"You really, really don't like this woman, do you?" I asked her.
"I hate her. But then again, I hate all mothers right about now. That's really why you're here. I'd like a second opinion on whether I'm crazy or not."
"Whatever." I shrugged. The back of a head rose over the top of a TV chair in the Creeds' den, and I realized Mr. Creed was sitting there with his back to the window, reading a book. You could just make out the outline of one side of him, with the chair covering the rest.
Upstairs, Chris's youngest brother, Matthew, was sitting at a little desk in a bedroom, with his back to us. It looked like he was doing homework. From seeing him around church, I gathered he was about nine. The door opened to the other room, and Chris's other brother, Justin, came in, dressed in pajamas. He kind of flopped onto his bed on his stomach but didn't bother to turn off the light. He just lay there, staring. He looked about ten, though I wasn't sure about him, either.
You could see into their house so well in the surrounding blackness, I could see that Justin's eyes were open. He just lay there on his stomach, staring out the window.
"Now, check out some weird things," Ali whispered. "Look at Matthew's room, Chris's room, then Justin's room. Notice anything funny?"
I looked up and down the row a couple times, and then it struck me. "Same furniture. Same ... type of desk, dresser, mirror—"
"Right down to the bedspreads." All had the same blue bedspread. Even the mirrors were the same, in the same spot. Chris had the biggest bedroom, but the two end ones were just about identical in every way. These kids didn't even have any posters on the walls. Chris's five pictures were all framed, not like something a kid would put up himself. Each of the other two rooms had three pictures on the walls, but you couldn't see what they were, only that the frames matched.
"Great place to get a sense of individuality." Ali smirked. "You've really got a shot at having your own identity in that place, huh?"
"It's sad," I muttered.
I heard the front door bang beneath us, and Ali cursed. "That's my mom's boyfriend. He's a pig."
She got up without breaking her stare at the Creeds' and tossed me my coat with a sigh. I really didn't feel like sitting on her front lawn. It was cold enough that you could see your breath outside. She grabbed her coat, and I felt like asking her, "What's the difference between staying in here and going out to the front lawn?" Either way, she was within thirty feet of the guy. I heard Ali's little brother trudging up the stairs and going into his room. His door slammed.
"See?" she told me. "He's such a pig that he can't even fool a seven-year-old."
I laughed a little. "So how come your mom goes out with him?"
She rolled her eyes, putting one arm into her coat. "She's ready for a mental institution, that's why. She's waiting for me to call the loony bin on her."
She froze with one arm in her coat. I turned around and saw Mrs. Creed at the doorway of Chris's room, and the light suddenly went as bright as the other two rooms.
"You can't miss this. Just ... lie back down. Maybe the pig will just leave tonight."
I lay back down in my jacket, watching Mrs. Creed shout something out into the hallway. No sooner was it out of her mouth than both kids got up—Matthew out of his chair, Justin off his bed. Matthew looked to be arranging his schoolbooks and stuff, and Justin just stood there rubbing his eyes.
"Lights-out ... Troops, march..." Ali muttered. "In the summer the windows are open. You can hear her clear to Atlantic City. She thinks she's cute. She's clueless that her own family wants to puke on her."
Matthew put out his light, and the room went dark. Justin reached for the light switch, but before he hit it off, he flipped the bird out into the hallway.
"Did you see that?" I let out a laugh.
"He's the only one with any spunk," Ali said. "Yeah, I really like ol' Justin. He's actually about twelve, though he looks a lot younger."
A knock at the bedroom door made me jump a little.
"How you doing, Ali-girl?" a man's voice rang out.
"I'm going out." She sounded tense.
"Oh yeah? Who's in there with you? That boyfriend of yours again?"
"No. Nobody's here. I said I'm going out..." She added under her breath, "Not that it's any business of yours. Christ ... it's Albert, Mom's New 'Soulmate.'"
She turned back to the window, and this time I could see Mrs. Creed in Chris's room, scratching her chin, looking this way and that like she was sizing up every space in every corner.
"She'll find it one of these nights," Ali told me.
Mrs. Creed walked slowly over to the closet. It was the sliding-door type of thing that takes up a whole wall. There weren't many clothes hanging, but there were some sweatshirts and things on the shelf above. Mrs. Creed picked up a sweatshirt, held it by the shoulders, and let it dangle open. She shook it. Looked down the neck hole, felt each sleeve, then tossed it on the bed. She picked up a second one and did the same thing.