conditioning) and lie on her bed with the lights off, letting her mind float on the music. It made her feel less lonely.
Across the yard, in his tree, listening to Nina's music, Puggy felt less lonely, too.
Matt picked up Andrew at 8:40.
'Where's the gun?' asked Andrew.
'In the trunk,' said Matt. 'I love this song.' He cranked the volume all the way up on the stereo, which was playing 'Sex Pootie,' by a band called the Seminal Fluids. The lyrics were:
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
I want your sex pootie!
And so on.
'What's a sex pootie?' asked Andrew.
'What do you think it is?' asked Matt, scornfully, although in truth he wasn't sure what a sex pootie was, either. To change the subject, he said: 'This sound system sucks.' Matt had great contempt for any sound system that was not loud enough to stun cattle.
'Why'd your dad buy a Kia?' asked Andrew.
' 'Cause he's a dork,' explained Matt.
Andrew nodded understandingly. His dad was a dork, too. It seemed like everybody's dad was a dork. It amazed Matt and Andrew that their generation had turned out so cool.
'I just hope Jenny doesn't see this car,' said Matt.
Jenny was the girl they were going to kill. Matt thought she was hot. She was in his biology class at Southeast High School, and he'd spent many classroom hours looking at her while pretending to look at diagrams of the pancreas and other organs. He'd tried to think of some way to talk to her, but he never came up with anything feasible. But now that he was going to kill her, he figured that would break the ice.
Matt had been assigned to kill Jenny by Evan Hanratty, a Southeast High student who had organized that year's edition of Killer. Killer was a game that surfaced every year at various high schools; it had been vehemently condemned and strictly banned by the school authorities, so it was very popular with the students.
There were various versions of the game, but basically it worked this way: You paid the organizer some money (at Mart's school, it was ten dollars to become a player). The organizer then gave you, in secret, the name of another person in the game; your goal was to kill that person. At the same time, you became the target of some other unknown person, who would be stalking you.
At a given time, the game officially started, and the killing began. After each round, the survivors were given new targets; the game repeated until the last surviving killer collected a cash prize from the organizer.
The killing was done with squirt guns. For the kill to be legal, you had to squirt your victim in the presence of one witness—but only one witness. This meant that you couldn't get your target at school or in a public place like the mall; you had to work by ambush, usually at the victim's home.
Some kids got their parents involved. A kid would get his mom to drive him over to the target's house; then he'd hide in the bushes while the mom, looking innocent, would ring the bell and ask if the target was home. When the target came to the door, the killer would leap out of the bushes, squirt gun blazing.
Matt and his friends thought it was way unmanly to use your mom to kill somebody. They preferred the night ambush, operating under the cover of darkness, when you had the element of surprise, plus the element of (you never know) possibly seeing the target naked.
Matt parked his dad's Kia two streets away from Jenny's house. He opened his trunk and got out his gun, a SquirtMaster Model 9000, top of the line, $33.95 at Toys 'SI' Us. It looked like a real assault weapon and held a gallon of water; it could accurately shoot a stream of water fifty feet.
Matt and Andrew loped through the humid night to Jenny's driveway. They encountered nobody but mosquitoes; this was an expensive Coconut Grove neighborhood, whose residents stayed inside their compounds at night.
Jenny's house was big, but surrounded by trees and barely visible from the street. There was a six-foot masonry wall around the property, and the driveway was blocked by a motorized steel gate. Next to the gate was an intercom speaker.
'What's the plan?' whispered Andrew. 'You wanna ring the buzzer?'
'Nan,' said Matt. 'What'm I gonna say? 'Hi! It's Matt Arnold, here to kill Jenny.' We gotta go over the wall.'
'What if they have a dog?' asked Andrew.
'I like dogs,' said Matt, thinking, Shit, I hope they don't have a dog.
They walked along the wall around to the back of the property. There, next to a huge tree, they found a place where the wall looked pretty easy to climb. Matt gave the SquirtMaster to Andrew and went over the wall first; Andrew then tossed the gun over and followed. Once on the ground inside, they stopped for a minute to listen for a dog, but all they heard was flute music. With Matt in the lead, they began to walk quietly toward the house.
