squealed away from the curb.
“It wasn’t your place!” he shouted. “I’m against violence!”
“Oh, shut the hell up, Doug, you big girl!” I screamed, roaring onto Ashland Avenue. “I am too, but it happened! It’s not like they’re going to kill him. .”
“And now Billy will never bother you again! No one will! You’ll have all the space you need to figure out the mysterious destiny of Doug Stuffins!”
“It wasn’t your place! You have no right!” he said, but his voice faded and my view through the windshield narrowed as my windpipe quit working. I was choking, something biting into the skin at my neck, and I smelled putrid meat before looking into the rearview mirror at the same plastic devil mask from Cinco de Mayo leaning over the backseat. The wire Ski Mask Guy was killing me with was digging into my throat. I couldn’t make a sound while Doug gazed out the window, sighed, and said, “Life is so unfair,” as I cranked the wheel. I smashed into a parked van on the left, sending pedestrians scattering like cockroaches hiding under a refrigerator. Doug screamed, and I did it again, this time crushing the side of a sluggish bus on the right, its passengers pressing their shocked faces against windows. Ski Mask Guy slid from side to side but his grip only tightened. Doug saw him and went mute, squeezing himself into the corner.
“You’re next, chub-bub!” Ski Mask Guy squealed in his schoolmarm voice.
I pressed the gas pedal to the floor, speed and motion my only defense. It was the second time the maniac had tried to choke me to death and this time it was working-this time I had no Harry, only Doug, and he was a gaping frozen meatball. I whipped the car back and forth, sideswiping a Toyota and crushing the mirror of a minivan. Ski Mask Guy’s grip slipped and I gasped, “Doug! Do something!”
“Fatso ain’t gonna do
“Watching,” Doug muttered. “Not doing.” And he lifted the laptop and swung it hard against Ski Mask Guy’s head. When the freak sprang back, Doug hit him again, shouting, “Let her go, you son of a bitch!” And he did, slamming a shoulder against the back door and tumbling from the car. Doug’s laptop flew out too, shattering into a million pieces against the pavement. I could breathe, but barely, and looked into the empty backseat, where the devil mask grinned slyly up at me.
I gaped into the rearview mirror as Ski Mask Guy rolled to his belly and his head popped up.
I caught a glimpse of a face that was melted.
It was branded with a reverse
And then I told Doug everything.
I told him about the scene at my house, and my family that had now been missing for more than two whole weeks.
I talked about Uncle Buddy, Ski Mask Guy, Detective Smelt, and Club Molasses.
I explained the Outfit, ghiaccio furioso, and especially the notebook.
At the end, I sat back against the driver’s seat and closed my eyes, waiting for the disbelief, the questions about my sanity, maybe a polite query about possible drug use.
Except Doug believed me.
He believed every word I said.
In fact, out of the six and a half billion people who populate the earth, Doug Stuffins was precisely the right person to believe me. He had spent his life memorizing, internalizing, and vicariously living through stories on film that were as unbelievable as mine, and even more so, and they were alive to him just as mine was now. If I had told him Ski Mask Guy was a carjacker, Doug would have scoffed, but explaining that he was an insane masked assassin trying to kill me for an Outfit instruction manual that I found in a steel briefcase hidden inside a buried speakeasy was completely believable.
We were parked at the Superdawg Drive-In, and Doug stared at the demonic mask in his hands, saying quietly, “It all makes sense now.”
“What does?” I croaked, holding ice against my neck.
“Like you said, my destiny. . what I was born to do and meant to become.”
“Who?”
Doug turned to me with a look of certainty. “The sidekick.”
“The what?”
“The sidekick. Robin to Batman. Doctor Watson to Sherlock Holmes. Tom Hagen to Michael Corleone. .”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said, sitting up.
“Don’t you see?” Doug said. “I’ve been writing my life all wrong. I cast myself as the hero when I’m actually the loyal and able wingman with a quick mind and the intellectual resources, i.e., a brain brimming with movies, to help solve any problem.”
“Doug, this isn’t a movie. .”
“I know it’s not. It’s real life, finally.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“I can help you. I
The idea of help was so foreign to me, so utterly unavailable, that I had forgotten how badly I yearned for it. There was nothing adventurous about the bloody web I was caught in, nothing exciting about the black void my family had disappeared into. I was trapped all alone inside my reality and had ceased hoping that it would ever be any different. But now Doug was offering to pierce that sick bubble and join me. I doubted that he could help-I doubted that anyone could help me besides myself-but I didn’t want to be alone anymore. “You can’t tell Max anything.”
“I won’t, I swear.”
“As long as I’m confessing, I. . I think I might love him. Maybe.”
“Yeah,” Doug sighed. “Me too.”
There was a pause between us, and I glanced at Doug inspecting the devil mask. “Doug. . are you gay?”
“I don’t know yet. I might be,” he said. “Age sixteen totally sucks when it comes to absolutes.”
“But you just said you love Max. That sounded pretty absolute.”
“No I didn’t. I said ‘me too,’ in agreement with your ‘maybe.’ What I meant is that I have a somewhat murky and as yet undefined feeling for him.”
“But you also like him as a friend, right?”
“Of course! You and Max are my. .,” and he stopped before saying “only friends,” and stared at the floor. When he looked up, there was certainty in his eyes, and he said, “If I were the sidekick, do you know what my advice would be?”
“What?”
“That it’s time to confront your enemies. You’ve been chased enough,” he said. “Remember when we watched
“And Eric Roberts,” I said, seeing what he was leading to.
“At the end, Mickey Rourke walks into the mob boss’s private club and tells him to go bite himself because there’s nothing else he can do. But at least it’s something.”
I thought of Uncle Buddy at my house and Detective Smelt at Twin Anchors.
They didn’t know where I was but I knew where they were.
Just like that, Doug had given me an idea.
Maybe Batman was onto something with the whole sidekick thing.
20
