Only Child

“A hardware store?” the kid said, jaw dropping. “How could it possibly...?”

“Everything,” the Mole assured him, still intent on his instruments.

Hours and hours, one kid after another. Michelle was working one of the rooms, Cyn another. Clarence moved between the suites, taking notes. The Prof sat in a tufted easy chair, chain-smoking, being creative.

The Mole fiddled with equipment I couldn’t begin to recognize. Occasionally, he pretended to listen to advice from the Prof. Rejji covered the door. Terry pulled kids aside for whispered conversations while they were waiting. Despite my telling him we wanted a representative sampling, his personal preferences seemed to dictate his conversational targets.

At night, we sat around and talked over what we’d pulled out of the day. Between us, we’d heard about a dozen different kinds of drugs—chronic to crystal, E to H—and SATs, booze, football, shoplifting, AOL chat rooms, vandalism, cars, a “master race” graffiti gang, hip-hop, the NBA draft, love affairs, Jell-O shots, steroids, Amy Fisher—opinion seemed divided between Guido victim and skanky slut—chick fights, clothes, MP3s, asshole teachers, fucked-up DSL service, the tragedy of Napster, music I never heard of, tank parties, comic books, huffing, movies, drive-bys, computer gaming....

The next day, two boys in blue varsity jackets with white leather sleeves got into some kind of argument with one of the girls waiting to be interviewed. “Say you didn’t! Say you didn’t!” the girl dared them. One of the boys stepped to her, shoulders hunched. Max cat-footed over to where they were standing, put his finger to his lips.

“Who the fuck are you supposed to be?” the taller of the two demanded.

Max wrist-locked the kid to his knees, held him there effortlessly as he looked without expression at the other one.

“What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened around here?” I asked some of the teenagers, randomly.

Vonni’s murder came up in less than half the answers. Three different kids claimed her for a close friend, one girl getting teary-eyed when she said the name.

But a year-old homicide generally didn’t have much of a chance against who was crushing who, what guy was pure butter, which girl was total ghetto, who always acted like a real crackhead at school, what BMX move was totally sick, which new computer game was ultra-mega, where the next rave was supposed to be.

A few kids were focused elsewhere. Some talked about Columbine. Not about the slaughter scene, about poor Dylan and Eric.

A teen with a military haircut and camo pants told me McVeigh had been framed. “Where’s John Doe Number Two?” he demanded, angry.

Some were very deeply depressed about the new run of Buffy. “Now even The Slayer sucks!” one cracked. A girl with lithium eyes was upset at how much child support they were making poor Eminem pay.

One kid had a “Death Before Dishonor” tattoo on his forearm. He told everyone who would listen that his brother was in the Marines, and he was going, too, as soon as he graduated.

Two girls got into an argument about whatever. “Bring it, B!” one yelled at the other. The crowd of kids snarled at them collectively to take it outside. The girls headed for the door. Nobody followed. The two girls stopped in their tracks. Stared at each other, sharing disappointment.

The ones we came to call the “movie kids” were surface-scarred by their marrow-deep smugness. So completely, condescendingly in the know that they felt comfortable pontificating about “gross points” and “final cut.” They breezily corrected each other about who was “A-list at Miramax,” and dropped names like “Denzel” as if he had been over for dinner the night before. But when it came to asking for credentials, they were all parties to a mutual nonaggression pact.

No problem, until a girl in a Joan Baez outfit started ragging on some studio for putting out a horror movie directed by a convicted child molester. “They’re disgusting!” she said. “After what he did...”

A twenty-something with one of those lower-lip goatees and Buddy Holly glasses looked down his long nose at the girl, intoned, “Judge the art, not the artist,” and looked to Terry for approval. Terry gave the kid a bright- white smile...a red flag to Max, who stepped between them, put his arm around Terry’s shoulders, and muscled the kid over to where his mother was sitting. Quick, before life could imitate art.

A kid sporting double wallet chains and a “WWMD” medallion said college was “grayed out.” Later, Terry translated. “WWMD” stood for “What Would Manson Do?” and “grayed out” meant “not an option.”

A girl with a matchstick body and beta-carotene skin told us that we didn’t understand—before anyone asked her a question.

One Goth boy, who looked like he’d played vampire prince so often that he’d ended up hematologically challenged, drove a black PT Cruiser, customized to look like a hearse, with “aR_xthur R_xules” in neat white lettering on the fender.

A good quarter of them started every sentence with “Basically,” as if it were some kind of verbal tic.

Boarders and bladers stood apart from cyber-geeks. Poseurs, players, and self-proclaimed pimps got along— punks of a feather. Cheerleaders didn’t mix with cholas. But even whiggers and skinheads shared pieces of the same room without so much as an eye-fuck. “Reminds me how guys act in full minimum,” I told the Prof later. “Walking on eggs, right? They know one wrong move gets them sent back to the Walls.”

They all talked different, but they all talked. And none of them said anything we needed.

“We still have a ton more of them,” Michelle said. “How many of those cards did we spread out there? Thousands?”

“Not that many,” Rej said. “But a lot. A real lot.”

“Cyn?”

“The girls talked about it more than the boys. But that’s natural, I think.”

“They doing any speculating?” I asked.

“The ones I talked to, they all seemed satisfied. Scared and satisfied,” Michelle offered.

“Satisfied that some monster was just passing through?”

“Yes. And scared that he could come again. But not truly scared. More like...fascinated, maybe. A few even made Friday the Thirteenth jokes. Tres chic.”

“You’ve got their pedigrees?” I asked Clarence.

“Mahn, this is a job for a clerk, that is all. Rejji gives them this form to fill out, and they do. Every single line. They want us to be able to find them, do they not?”

“Yeah. And you all put check marks on the ones who said anything about Vonni?”

Michelle and Cyn nodded.

“Terry?”

“I high-signed Clarence every time one of them said anything, too.”

“You do any better than we did?”

“No...but I didn’t push, either. Like you said.”

“I’ve got three for you to try up-close-and-personal, tomorrow,” I told him. “For now, let’s call it a night.”

“You like that mom-and-pop food, huh?” Rejji said, smiling at my blue-plate special of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and chopped spinach.

“I like just about anything I can pronounce,” I told her.

“Bet he tops off with vanilla ice cream,” Cyn cracked.

“Why can’t we just stay at the hotel?” Cyn asked me on the drive back. “You already paid for all those rooms, didn’t you? I mean, we’re going right back there tomorrow....”

“If we tried to sleep there, we’d be bombarded by kids sneaking past security. I’ll rent a couple on another floor starting tomorrow, okay?”