The alarm.
I didn’t go back to the bed.
Well, not yet.
I stood there wondering.
I can climb pretty fast. I could climb up and open the window. I could be out in, say, ten seconds. Another ten seconds to run across the yard. Then I could get to the alley behind the house. Once there, well, I could hide in another yard or something. It would be easy.
Except one thing.
Jack was on a football scholarship. He was a running back.
I stopped for a second and smiled, wondering just where he’d tackle me. Probably about five feet from the window, because he’d know just which one had been breached—they’d have a sensor board upstairs, I was sure.
Alarms would go off. The roving van would arrive. The woman cop with her hair in a bun would arrive. I’d go to jail. My dad would have to come and get me.
I went back and lay down on the dog bed.
I turned on my back and tried to see the underside of the shelf above me. Finally I did, just the faintest image of the unpainted wood. I reached up and touched it a couple times, almost to remind myself that I was actually there. I wasn’t very hungry; although I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten, it must have been hours ago.
My eyes started feeling fuzzy and finally they closed.
Anyways, that’s how I came to be hiding in my ex-girlfriend’s house.
Chapter
Six
To tell you the truth, I’ve always been pretty lousy with girls. Going out with them has been difficult for me.
I don’t mean I don’t like them or anything like that.
I’ve always liked them. I’ve liked them since I was, like, six years old. I mean I’ve wanted a girlfriend since I was six. Really.
I probably like them too much, because to tell the truth, they drive me a little crazy. You’ve probably noticed that.
I even like them when they have a cold or a runny nose or when they’re just walking down the street. I mean I’m interested in girls in general in sort of all the phases of who they are, and not just when they’re all dressed up and standing around at some party trying to get noticed.
Actually, it was not entirely correct for me to say that Laura was my first girlfriend, because if you want to just factor in girls in general, she really wasn’t. I mean, she was my first girlfriend in certain ways, and by that I mean certain uncomfortable and potentially awkward ways that sort of put a lot of pressure on our whole relationship.
I’ll tell you what I mean by that in just a little bit, but what I should do first is talk a little about this other girl I know, this girl in my neighborhood named Suzie Perkins, because if I have to say I ever had another girlfriend, it’d be Suzie for sure, except that we were never really romantically involved or anything.
We were almost romantically involved, or maybe I should say we certainly could have been romantically involved, but the truth is, we were always just friends, and still sort of are, but always, like I said, with a hint of potential romantic involvement, even though in the end it didn’t work out that way.
I met Suzie about a million years ago when I was only about twelve, so it’s almost like I grew up with her, or at any rate we got to know each other pretty well before we got to be teens and there’s all this pressure to start making out, as if when you see a girl and some bell doesn’t go off in your head you’ve got some weird problem, which is a situation that’s really pertinent to Suzie and me. I mean really sort of apt, and you’ll know why later. That hadn’t happened yet at all, because when we first met we were almost still virtually just little kids.
It was through that kid I know named Carol that we met, I mean Suzie and me, because Carol was always finding out about new kids in the neighborhood and Suzie had just moved in next door to him, so naturally when she came out in the yard in front of her house my friend Carol—who is a boy, by the way, even though his mom named him Carol, which in certain ways is a very preppy, sort of stand-out name—went out and started to chat her up to find out where she’d moved from and what school she was going to and everything like that.
One thing you’ve got to know about Carol is that he’s actually very weird. He would sometimes lie about who he really was. I mean, he would actually adopt a false identity and tell people he had different parents and lived in a different neighborhood and all these other lies, like being a tennis champion, just to impress them and see their reactions. It gave him what he called a private satisfaction, and I will say he never did it to scam or cheat anybody; his whole sort of private satisfaction was just seeing them believe he was somebody else.
Sometimes we’d be standing around a store or out in a parking lot waiting for his mom after we’d gone to the movies or something, and he’d start a little conversation with somebody passing by—some adult usually, but he was good at this with kids, too—and tell them all about himself, but saying he went to a different school than he really did, and lived in a wealthier area of the neighborhood, or a different neighborhood entirely, or even a different state, and people seemed really impressed by him, which was only natural because of all the terrific things he said about himself.
He did it with kids in the neighborhood, too. When a new kid would come along, riding his bike or something, Carol would ask him little questions about
