Danny shrugged and flipped the knife so that he now held it by the blade. When Mick wrapped tentative fingers around the handle, Danny surrendered it to him.
It was heavy, heavier than Mick thought it would be. He brought the blade up, as if stabbing an invisible man, and it caught some nearby leaves, sliced cleanly through them.
“Jesus!” Sean exclaimed. “It’s a fuckin’ Ginsu.”
Mick smiled.
Maybe I could stab Skip in the chest and force somebody to give him a fucking heart.
And then Mick saw Skip standing there before him – eyes narrowed, brown hair whipping forward as he threw a punch. Mick brought the knife up again, and, in place of corn leaves, he saw Skip’s fingers being severed. In Mick’s mind, blood flew; Skip was on his knees, crying as he covered the bleeding stumps with his good hand.
Mick’s smile grew.
Danny held out his hand for the knife’s return. “All right, Mickey, the leaves are dead.”
Mick blinked back to reality. He held the blade perpendicularly and Danny took it from him, returned it to the safety of its sheath. Mick watched him slide it back into the backpack.
Sean was ready to get moving again. “Okay, are we goin’ north or not?”
Danny kept the compass off the knife handle. He held it in the palm of his hand; the needle pointed down the row in the direction they’d been hiking. “Right on the money.”
They resumed their march. Mick slid his headphones back into place and followed. The choir sang in his ears while, in his mind, the dream Skip suffered further mutilation, made impotent by the blade of the knife. Without him, Harmony High was a monster with no teeth, no claws.
Neutered.
Harmless.
Mick sighed, knowing it would not last. The beast that was his high school would shed and replace its slain bullies like anaconda skin.
Over the sound of the music in his ears, however, Mick could hear a voice, a whisper as faint as a breeze blowing through his brain: “Then again, maybe not.”
Six
Cindi Hawkins stopped in the middle of the row; her face held an expression close to horror. “I gotta pee.”
Nancy Collins shrugged. “So go already.”
“What if someone walks up on us?” Cindi danced from foot to foot. “Or, Jesus, your friend Paul with his video camera?”
Nancy grinned. “You think his life is so barren he’d want a tape of you pissing?”
Cindi blushed. “You never know.”
“Oh, please!” Nancy shook her head and looked at the sky. “I’ll stand watch. Just hurry up and go.”
Cindi took a quick look around, then hurried off behind the green curtain the stalks provided.
After a moment of silence, Nancy could hear the sound of water striking the hard earth. She wondered if Cindi wet her pants as she took her squat and could not help but snicker.
Nancy ran a hand across her sweaty forehead, then dried it on her T-shirt; black letters across her breasts begged CHOOSE LIFE. She’d bought the shirt because she liked George Michael, because he’d worn it in a WHAM! video. Now, however, she only wore it around the house, when she needed something she wasn’t afraid to get dirty. She’d come to realize that the saying made it sound as if she were some anti-abortion nutcase, but, in reality, she came down staunchly pro-choice.
Cindi screamed.
Nancy ran to the sound; her backpack bounced up and down on her spine. She pushed her way through the stalks, leaves brushing across her face, leaving strands of corn silk in her hair. Nancy tore into the row where Cindi had taken her restroom break, saw Cindi pull up her clothes as she scrambled to her feet. Had Nancy not been so concerned, she might have smiled at the wet spot on the back of Cindi’s shorts and underwear.
“What happened?”
Cindi pointed to the foot of the stalks. There, across the row from the puddle she’d made in the dirt, a cloud of insects buzzed around a dead animal. It lay on its side, bloated, its eyes open and unseeing, its stiffened haunches jutting outward like the legs of an overturned table.
Nancy’s face curdled and she backed away. “Sick!”
“Is it dead?”
“Extremely.” Nancy looked around. “This whole cornfield and you decide to squat next to road kill?”
“I’m not morbid or anything!” Cindi adjusted her clothing; a black-and-white-striped, sleeveless top and ripped jeans shorts. Her outfit, and the style of her natural blonde hair, made her look like Debbie Gibson – fresh off the Out of the Blue album cover. “I was in such a hurry I didn’t see it until I’d already started. I like looked over and saw its beady rat eyes and those huge rat teeth ... and I totally freaked.”
“It’s a possum, not a rat.” Nancy began to chuckle. Once, at cheerleading practice, Cindi saw a flock of ducks land in a puddle behind the school and announced to everyone that she didn’t know ducks could fly.
“I’ve always just seen them walking or swimming,” she’d told them, “like penguins. Penguins don’t fly, do they?”
You wondered if you should laugh or break down and weep.
Nancy waved the ripe air from her nose. “Didn’t you smell it?”
“Like I said, I was in a hurry. Besides, my sinuses are acting up ... and this whole field stinks like a barn.”
“It’s called nature.”
“Sor-ree. I guess I’m outta the running for ‘Miss Outdoors.’”
Nancy’s chuckle faded, replaced by the sounds of hidden insects somewhere in the corn. Why had Nancy agreed to play this stupid game in the first place? She hated being hot, she hated being dirty, and, most of all, she hated bugs. And the cornfields had the latter in abundance. She could see leaves knitted together by spiderweb, could see black beetles as they moved across the green, and what she couldn’t see ... she could hear. The sound was all around them now – a high-pitched chirping, reminding her of the giant ants in that movie Them. Nancy wondered what was actually making the sound, then shivered.
Please, God, she thought, let whatever those things are stay out there.
Cindi grabbed up her backpack in one hand. “Let’s just make steps.”
Nancy nodded, followed Cindi back through the stalks, covering the ground in healthy strides. Had they come three miles? Four? Not far enough yet that they could slow their pace.
“Did you hear the forecast?” Cindi called back, her eyes on the blue path of sky above them. More light spilled into the row now, banishing the earlier gloom, bringing heat.
Nancy shook her head, wanting to conserve her breath for the long hike ahead. Cindi was a good friend, but, as her mother had said, she had the gift of gab. It seemed she had not stopped talking since they left Nancy’s house at eight-thirty.
Eight-thirty.
Another part of this little game Nancy had not counted on was the extra time it had taken to walk from her house to the northern cornfields. She’d asked Deidra to join them, asked to stay at her house right on the edge of the crop, but Paul was already spending the night.
It was amazing how fast that relationship was moving. Before the Duran Duran show in July, they had never even gone on a date. Now, here it was September and they were already doing it.
Not that Nancy was all that virginal. She and Danny had been going out for almost a year now, and he had seen enough of her to know her blonde hair came from a bottle, but they had yet to go all the way. Instead, she kept him hungry, wanting more, serving him appetizers but never the main course. She was all too aware that a boy who got his fill quickly developed a taste for something new.
That didn’t stop Danny from trying to wear down her resistance, however. In fact, she thought he liked the challenge. And, if he played his cards right, one night she might finally let him slide home. Nancy shook her head. Slide home. Why was something as beautiful as sex associated with such stupid metaphors?
She heard a rustling noise again.
Movement in the corn.
Nancy had been aware of it most
of the morning, assigning it to the wind. The breeze had died down, however, and yet the sound remained strong. She looked around, but, like the bugs, the culprit remained invisible to her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Cindi asked.
“Shhhhhh.” Nancy put a finger to her lips, then pointed to the right. “I think someone’s over there.”
“Oh, shit. Do you think they were watching me?”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “Would you get off this voyeur thing? If they find us, we’re stuck with them.”
“Did your boyfriend make these rules up himself?”
She glared at Cindi, her voice remaining a hoarse whisper. “Shut ... up.”
Low voices filtered through the mesh of cornstalks, and though Nancy couldn’t make out the words – distance, or the density of the corn, served to muffle them – they seemed familiar.
As she stood there, hunched over in the row, Nancy heard something faintly in her mind’s ear. It was as if her thoughts feared being heard as well.
“They’re just about even with you,” they whispered. “If you can sneak up on them, you could try and take something. Then, if you both get to the quarry at the same time, you’ll win.”
It’s not right, she countered.
“No, but it’s how you play the game.”
“Wait here,” Nancy told Cindi in a tone so hushed it was barely audible.
Cindi mouthed something like, “What are you doing?”
Nancy shrugged as she crossed over into the next row. She paused there for a moment, then crossed more of the rippled terrain that separated her from the voices. Then Nancy heard the beat of music – Axl Rose, singing from somewhere deeper in the corn. She shook her head. How did this group she was stalking hope to remain unnoticed when they were blasting “Welcome to the Jungle” to anyone within earshot?
She froze, troubled.
What if these people weren’t playing the game? Nancy had heard of farmers growing crops of marijuana in cornfields, hiding the pot amid the stalks. These people – these criminals – wouldn’t think her spying innocent. No. They would want the location of their weed to remain secret, wouldn’t they?
She thought it over for a moment, then shook her head, frowning.
She didn’t really believe those were pot farmers. What really bothered her was that she was about to become a criminal herself. Spin it anyway you like, Nancy was going to go up to someone and take their property.
The hushed tone within her skull urged her on. “You’re gonna give it back,” it said. “It’s part of the game. You want to win, don’t you?”
She realized her inner voice made perfect sense. In spite of her misgivings, the thought that she could return it at the end of the day, with a smile that said “no hard feelings,” made the pill easier to swallow. It was all just part of the game.
Nancy pressed onward. A few moments later, she found herself one row away from her goal. She could see them, three forms sitting in the corn, smoking and passing around a bottle of something while they rested. They had a ghetto blaster with them. It sat on the ground, its speakers turned away from her, its bass cranked so that the soil vibrated with every lick of the guitars.
“You hear about that kid that killed himself listenin’ to ‘Suicide Solution’?” one of the boys asked. The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but Guns ’N’ Roses overpowered it, distorted it somehow.
“That’s bullshit,” another boy answered. “Like Ozzy Osbourne can say ‘kill yourself’ and the kid’s got no free fuckin’ will. Nobody can tell you to do something and you just do it, like you’re a goddam zombie. The kid made a choice to knock himself off and the parents are lookin’ to blame Ozzy ’cause he’s got money fallin’ out his ass.”
Nancy saw an open backpack; it sat at the foot of the cornstalks, next to the stereo, tempting her. She got down on her hands and knees, felt the music in her elbows as she crawled forward and leaned toward the pack. The stereo served to shield her below the covering of leaves, and the boys were not looking in her direction, but that could quickly change. She reached into the open bag; the teeth of the zipper rubbed across her knuckles. Her fingers found the pointed corner of a cassette case and grabbed hold. She slid it free of the canvas, the embossed Whitesnake logo shining beneath the plastic. The case suddenly fell open and the cassette began to slide. Her hand blurred out, grabbed it before it could crash into the bag. Slowly, she pushed the tape back into place and once more closed the plastic cage around it, her eyes flipping between her hands and the back of the boys’ heads in the next row.
Nancy backed into the stalks, the tape clutched in her fingers. Her movement set the leaves into motion and her heart froze in her chest. Her eyes whipped up to the forms she knew but did not know, expecting to find their eyes on her, but they’d heard nothing of her actions. The commotion of the stalks was apparently imperceptible beneath the blare of Guns ’N’ Roses.
Her crime complete, she retreated across the rows; hunched over, stealing backward glances to ensure she was not being pursued. Finally, with the voices and music growing distant behind her, and her heart thudding in her chest, she looked down at her prize. In her mind, Nancy saw the girl dancing on cars in the video for “Here I Go Again.” Boys, she thought. Show ’em tits and headlights and they’ll buy anything.
Nancy looked up and the green sword of a leaf struck her across the face. She brushed it aside, revealed Cindi’s worried expression. Both girls jumped, then put fingers to their lips to hush each other.
“What’d you do?” Cindi wanted to know, her face somehow unsettled and anxious all at once.
Nancy held up Whitesnake, a satisfied grin blooming. “Our insurance.”
Cindi’s eyes drifted to the cassette, then whipped back up. “I’m so sure! You stole that?” She grew a grin of surprised disbelief. “Who are you and what have you done with Nancy Collins.”
“I didn’t steal it! I borrowed it.”
Cindi rolled her eyes. “Whatever! I thought they’d caught you or some junk.”
“Not me,” Nancy smiled, tossed the tape into the air with one hand, then caught it with the other. “I’m too slick.”
Still smiling, Cindi slid her backpack onto her shoulders. “Well let’s go, Slick, before they find out you took their tape.”
As Nancy followed, she tossed the cassette into her own pack – proud of herself. It was the first time she could remember not playing it safe ... and it felt good.
Seven
“Did you dream last night?”
At the sound of his voice, Deidra turned to look at Paul and found his camcorder lens aimed at her. He was taping her now? Sweat soaked her, plastered her hair to her forehead. She was certain it was not a look she wanted preserved. She caught her breath and answered his query, “Yes.”
“What did you dream?”
She smiled, flirting. “You want this on camera?”
Paul’s voice became serious. “If it was about the Wide Game.”
She waved a fly from her face, gave his lens an odd glance. “It wasn’t.”
“Okay.” He stopped recording and lowered the camera, carried it by the handle above the deck. “What was it about?”
“I dreamed about you,” she told him. Excluding herself, she’d dreamt about Paul more than anyone she’d ever known. He’d crept into her subconscious soon after they’d first met. In the beginning, he was someone who would just pop up – another bit of the dreamscape. Later, as they became closer, he moved from guest shot to supporting player. Now he was the leading man. And yet he wasn’t the type of boy who would ordinarily nourish such dreams; he had no physique, no tan. His nose and ears belonged on a larger face, and the bow on this package was a crown of hair that rested on his head like a puffy, brown motorcycle helmet. Not at all like the boys she’d been attracted to in the past. But, unlike those boys, his eyes were dreamer’s eyes – a million journeys being taken behind them – and he treated her with genuine care, affection, and respect.
Paul smiled. “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind. It was prom time and I was dancing with Robby.” Deidra saw Paul’s smile quickly fade to a lame façade, and, knowing she’d said the wrong thing by mentioning an ex-boyfriend, she hurried on to the good part. “He left me alone and I was sitting there, in my rosy pink dress, with this huge Gone With the Wind skirt that cost my parents a fortune, and I just started crying. You magically appeared next to me and we talked.”
“What did we talk about?” he asked, still cautious.
Deidra thought for a moment. She retained the images of dreams far longer than the words. Finally, she shrugged. “I’m sure you lavished me with a ton of praise.”
“I never tell you anything that isn’t true.”
Deidra attempted a smile, wanting to believe him, but because of things she’d done in the past, she couldn’t feel worthy of the compliment. She continued: “Anyway, we talked, and then we just got up and left. Don’t ask me how we fit my dress into your Mustang, I don’t know.”
Paul chuckled, pushed away the leaves of a crooked stalk and wiped strands of corn silk from his black Nightmare on Elm Street 3 T-shirt. “Then what happened?”
“I think you know what commonly happens after proms.”
She began walking backward, expecting to see him smiling at her, surprised he was not. “Did you dream?”
He nodded. “I dreamed I was running through the corn.”
“Trying to win that shower?” she asked. She’d meant it to be cheerful, but Paul’s face remained solemn. It frightened her a little.
“There was someone after me,” he told her.
“Like who?”
“I couldn’t see who it was. I just knew I had to keep running. I was scared ... I mean I was really terrified.” His voice held no levity. His cheeks had become ashen, and his hand gripped the handle of the camera until the knuckles turned white. “There was this Indian girl. She was dancing naked around a huge fire.”
Deidra’s concern vanished, struck dead by a bolt of irrational anger. She frowned at him, hurt beneath the frost of her gaze, her arms crossing her body. Paul had made love to her, then dreamed about other naked girls? When she spoke, her voice was bitter, reminding her of the “Old Deidra,” the way she’d been before she moved to Harmony – depressed, confused, and always bitchy. “At least in my dream Robby had his clothes on.”