“Where’d you get that much money, anyway?”
“I mowed a lot of lawns,” I told him. I was lying. I’d taken the money from my dad’s safe. Yes, I was the kind of kid who snooped through his father’s desk and found the safe combination. There was quite a bit of money in there, because Dad didn’t trust banks very much and wanted to have cash on hand in case of an emergency. I doubted he ever pulled the stacks of bills out of there to count them, so my plan was to gradually replace what I’d taken before he noticed it was missing.
“You got anything else valuable on you?” he asked. “What about that watch?”
“It’s a cheap scratched-up watch.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s a piece of crap. Nobody would buy that. What about your shoes?”
“Then I’d have to make up a story to my parents about how I lost my shoes. I’m too old to just lose a pair of shoes.”
“Fine. Three hundred dollars. The only reason I’m doing this is so I didn’t drive all the way out here for nothing. But do you see the way I’m looking at you right now? What I’m doing is memorizing your face. So if I find out that an innocent person got shot, I’ll be able to describe you to the sketch artist.”
I was confident that he wouldn’t go to the police and tell them he’d sold an illegal firearm to a fourteen-year-old boy, but I didn’t call him out on that because I wanted to move this transaction along. “That’s fair,” I said.
He reached under one of the pillows and took out a pistol. Then he reached under another pillow and took out a small box of ammunition.
“This gun looks kind of shitty,” I said.
“It is shitty. You should have specified that you wanted a non-shitty gun when we spoke on the phone. It won’t blow up in your hand and it’ll fire a bullet at whatever you point it at.”
“What kind of gun is it?” I asked.
“How the hell should I know? It’s a gun with the serial number filed off. You want a scholarly dissertation, go to a licensed dealer. Now, you do know that the gun itself is untraceable, but that they can trace a bullet back to the gun, right? So if they dig the bullet out of the person you used it in self-defense against, and they find the gun under your bed, they can do some tests to say that the bullet was fired from that specific gun. What I’m saying is, get rid of it when you’re done.”
“I will. Thanks.” I took the wad of bills out of my pocket and handed it to him.
He quickly flipped through the bills, counting them. “Okay, we’re good. I honestly thought you were going to hand me a jar of pennies.”
I unzipped my backpack and put the gun and ammunition inside. Then I slid the door all the way open.
“Hey, kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful. I mean that. You’re a little jerk but I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I’ll be as careful as I possibly can,” I said, getting out of the van.
As I walked away from The Old House, I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. This was one great big step closer to being real now. I might indeed have to kill the man who’d abducted my best friend.
2
Todd and I had been friends ever since he took a checkmark on my behalf.
The deal in Mrs. Starkling’s fourth grade class was that if you got in trouble for something, she wrote your name on the upper right corner of the chalkboard. That was your first warning. Everything was still cool, but you’d been put on notice. If there was a second infraction (it didn’t matter if it was a repeat of the first or a whole new variety of misbehavior) you got a checkmark next to your name. Now shit was getting real. There were no specific consequences to the first checkmark except the shame. But you were only one inappropriate giggle from the second checkmark. You needed to start thinking very seriously about your attitude and how you could improve it.
If you got the dreaded second checkmark, you were on your way to visit the principal, who waited with his paddle to administer corporal punishment. My understanding is that he went easier on the girls or the younger kids, but if you were a fourth grade boy, he beat your ass without mercy. And the parents were totally fine with it. To the best of my knowledge, there was no form they could fill out to say “I withhold permission for you to beat my child’s ass during school hours.” If you came home crying...well, you should have behaved in class.
Nobody knew what would happen if you got a third checkmark. I assume that Mrs. Starkling would just club you in the back of the head with a sledgehammer and drag you off to the slaughterhouse. Every Friday before school let out, she’d erase the names, and announce to those of us who’d been naughty that we would start with a clean slate on Monday.
Now, I was not a bad kid. I studied hard, got decent grades, and tried to pay attention as much as possible. But I couldn’t keep out of my own head, which caused me to come up with fascinating observations that had to be shared with the kids around me, immediately. This was, of course, “talking in class.” I got a hell of a lot of checkmarks for talking in class.
Worse, I’d conjure up mental images of such side-splitting hilarity that even if I bit down on the sides of my mouth hard enough to draw blood, I couldn’t keep from laughing. I’d imagine that Mrs. Starkling, while walking down my row, let loose with a thundering, extended trumpet solo of flatulence. “Oh,
