“For now? Try to make myself act normal before my parents get home. After that, homework. Hopefully I can forget about Mr. Martin long enough so that I don’t get F’s in every class.”
“But you’re not going to let him win, are you?”
“Hell no. He told me to remember how scared I am right now. And I’m not gonna lie—I’m absolutely terrified. But it doesn’t matter how scared I am. I’m not giving up. I don’t know when it’ll happen, and it may be a long time from now, but I am going to destroy him.”
“Good,” said Tina. “I’ll help.”
I got myself more or less under control before Mom got home. If she suspected that anything was wrong…well, I’d been acting weird a lot lately, so this wasn’t unusual. She asked how my day at school had gone. I told her it was fine.
I decided that for the entire month of September, I would simply ignore the problem with Mr. Martin and his psycho buddy. How long could his friend’s vacation possibly last? Presumably there were people around here he could murder for money, but it would be a much smaller victim pool than he’d have in the lower forty-eight. He’d eventually have to go back. He wasn’t going to permanently move to Fairbanks just to be conveniently located in case I needed to die.
And so I tried to return to a normal life.
I guess I was kind of successful, if you ignore the nightmares and the paranoia and the stomachaches that I was starting to worry might be turning into an ulcer. And also the fact that I sort of had my first girlfriend, but I was scared to be seen with her outside of school, so we couldn’t really do anything except have lunch together. The extent of our physical affection was some hands-holding and the occasional kiss on the cheek. Tina was all-in on the idea of defeating a serial killer, but when I suggested hiding in an empty classroom after school so we could make out, that was a very definite no.
Like most kids, I thought of the end of summer as the day school started, but technically it was September 23rd, a Sunday.
I’d made it to autumn without getting killed.
Could I make it to winter?
14
The whole “girlfriend” thing was a challenge. We were indeed boyfriend and girlfriend, not just friends, but my parents had plenty of questions. Tina and I talked on the phone every evening for at least an hour, and this was long before the magical invention of cell phones, so my options were the one in the kitchen or the one in the living room, neither of which afforded any privacy. It’s not like Mom and Dad stood there staring at me while I talked to her, but even when I lowered my voice, I had to assume that my end of the conversation was a matter of public record.
Though she was comfortable talking to me, Tina’s social skills were…not fantastic. The first time my dad answered the phone, she got so flustered that she couldn’t remember who she wanted to speak to and ended up hanging up on him. This did not impress him. Mom and Dad would occasionally try to engage her in small talk, but would always end up shaking their heads as they handed me the phone.
When my parents asked why I didn’t invite Tina over, I blamed her dad. This was a reasonable excuse at first, since Tina was thirteen and not twenty-six, so it wasn’t creepy that her father wouldn’t let her go over to a boy’s house. But when my parents offered chaperoned dates and that still wasn’t allowed—as far as they knew—it started to get a little weird. Why wouldn’t we be allowed to go get hamburgers if my parents sat a couple of booths away? They even suggested that her father join them at the restaurant, which made me worried that at some point they’d ask to talk to him directly, and they’d discover that each of the fathers were being blamed for keeping these young lovers apart.
“You’re not ashamed of us, are you?” Mom asked me, smiling but not completely joking.
“No, of course not. It’s her dad. He’s still not over the death of her mom and he’s just really overprotective right now. He’ll get over it soon.”
“You don’t have to worry. We’d be nice to her.”
“Why would I think you wouldn’t be nice? Why would you even say that?”
“She seems to have trouble talking. I thought that might be part of the reason.”
“She’s shy. She’s really shy. Not everybody can be super outgoing.”
“I get it,” said Mom. “I’d just like to meet my son’s girlfriend. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
I probably wasn’t going to be able to fend her off for much longer. At some point, Mom would show up at school before we got on our respective busses and demand to be introduced to her. Perhaps I should even suggest that. The extremely small chance that Mr. Martin or his buddy were spying on the building after school let out was becoming overpowered by the extremely large chance that Mom would eventually say, “Enough’s enough. Time for me to meet her.”
Then it was October. The nights of sunlight were long gone. The sun would rise after my alarm went off, and set early in the evening. And it was cold. High of forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and we’d lose twenty-five degrees of that by the end of the month. I followed the official Alaskan teenager dress code of “Don’t dress appropriately for the weather,” so I braved the cold in jeans and an unbuttoned denim jacket.
I wasn’t thinking about Todd as much.
I hadn’t forgotten about my best friend. He just didn’t occupy my every waking thought. With no further appearances from the assassin and no reason to believe that Mr. Martin was peering in my windows at night, it was more and more difficult to keep up my
