“Manny,” I told her.
“What do you mean?” JR asked, his mouth Icee-blue.
“Maybe somebody hadn’t just thrown him away in the mud, yeah?” I said, looking them both in the eyes to really set it, JR first, then Danielle. “Maybe he’d been there forever, and he finally just, like, got uncovered.”
“He looks exactly like the ones in the window where my aunt works,” Danielle said.
“He’s probably mad from not having a—you know,” JR said, miming a penis like he was holding a fire hose. Danielle averted her eyes, rolled them like girls do.
“I’m serious,” I said, then waited a kind of campfire-tale amount of time before adding, “I didn’t put him on my dad’s motorcycle. And I know my mom didn’t. She says he’s creepy, all pasty white like that.”
“That leaves just one obvious person,” Danielle said, tapping her chin in fake thought. “However shall we solve this impossible mystery?”
“My dad loves that bike,” I said, all serious. “He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t make it a joke like that.”
“So Manny was trying to ride away?” JR asked, a hint of nervousness to his voice.
“My dad almost died on that bike,” I said right back, a hint of insult to my voice.
When you’re talking about your dad being in the hospital for three weeks, nobody can say anything back for about ten seconds.
“Why does he even keep it?” JR asked.
“It’s this whole big stupid thing,” I told him, not wanting to go into it.
“Maybe somebody kicked him out of a plane,” Danielle said. “Manny, I mean. That little airport’s right there, isn’t it?”
“That dentist airport?” I asked, after the beat it took to place it in my head, all the way on the other side of the interstate.
“Maybe they kicked a person out,” JR said, falling in, “and, on the way down, the only spell he could cast to save himself was to become a mannequin.”
“Because that’s a spell all wizards memorize,” I said. “And also because wizards are real. I’m trying to be serious here. Y’all weren’t sitting at the same angle I was. I saw Manny stand, I saw Manny walk away.”
“His legs are put together with little pieces of wood,” Danielle said, I guess trying to be the adult of us or something.
“And he just has a bulge,” JR said, leading with his pelvis again, most definitely not being our grown-up.
“He was our friend for that whole summer,” I said. “And then we just forgot him.”
Neither of them could argue with that.
We all three kind of shrugged, and we were bad enough people we didn’t even call Tim or Shanna that night, and then Shanna kind of quit calling us altogether that week—she’d done it before, to punish us—and Tim was so grounded he didn’t have access to any kind of phone.
Maybe this is how it happens after high school, right? Or even on the ramp up to high school being over. You just drift away, and then it gets easier not to call, and then you forget the number, and then you see your old friend in line for the movie or whatever and you let your eyes keep moving, because it’s going to be awkward now. Never mind that they know you better than any other human in the world. Never mind that they fake-spilled juice into your lap in fourth grade when you’d peed your pants. Never mind that you hugged them when they slept over and cried about their dad moving out. Never mind a thousand things.
I don’t know, I really don’t.
We’ll never get to that awkward stage anyway. Obviously.
Unobviously? Neither me nor Danielle nor JR looked behind us that walk home that night, but if we would have, I bet we would have seen a tall male form standing behind us, watching us from under the brim of his Redskins cap, his pants and shirt and shoes not even close to matching, his blue eyes painted wide open and intense. His posture absolutely perfect.
4
SHANNA WAS THE FIRST TO GO. And by “go” I mean die. And by “die” I mean get killed.
It’s like—she was still part of us, I guess, of the group that had abandoned Manny one perfect summer so long ago. So, Manny, he was starting on the outside or something, starting with her because she was furthest from the actual prank, and he was going to work his way in.
Leaving guess who right in the gooey middle, surprise.
Anyway, yeah, news flash, Shanna died when that Mack truck veered off the service road, jammed through her bedroom wall, kept right on going through the rest of her house. Big disastrophe, horrible tragedy, made The Dallas Morning News, her mom and little brother both dead too, whole community in tears, candlelight vigils, memorials, half days at school, the whole deal. “Why them?” everyone was asking. “What did they ever do to deserve this?” “Isn’t it so random how that can happen to just anyone?” “It could have been any one of us, couldn’t it have?”
There were no answers, of course, but it wasn’t because there weren’t answers. It was because nobody was asking me what I might know.
Would I have even told them, though?
Honestly, at that point in things, I’m not sure.
Whatever I would have said, though, it’s a sure thing they wouldn’t have believed me. There’s not one half of one tenth of a sliver of a chance that they wouldn’t have called me crazy from grief, suffering from survivor’s guilt, acting out via conspiracy theories, engaging in magical thinking, maybe even showing the front edge of a psychotic break with reality, a break due to, I don’t know, to our failed prank, and how it had fundamentally upset the nature of what I’d been foolishly calling reality, the one, you know, where mannequins don’t get up, walk around.
It’s probably good I kept quiet, I’m saying.
But I could have told them all a thing or two, if they’d wanted to listen. Or, I’d have asked them certain leading questions. What if that truck wasn’t random? What if Shanna’s mom and brother were just collateral damage? Most important, especially as it still applied to me and Danielle and Tim and JR, what if Shanna sort of maybe had been asking for it?
As far as I knew—as far as they said, and we believed them, why would Shanna and Danielle lie—Manny had been their first kiss, one truth-or-dare afternoon. And that whole summer was a . . . I don’t know what the best joke had been. There were just so many, each more fabulous and inventive than the last. Setting Manny up in old people’s yards holding their spraying garden hose with one hand, the other lifted to wave in a 1950s “we just won the war, everything’s hunky-dory” way should any cars drive by. Using two of us to lift his eyes up level with the bottom of Danielle’s second-story bedroom window, making her scream loud enough her dad nearly caught us. Giving Manny Sharpie tattoos and then Windexing them off, making them bigger, louder, worse and better at the same time. Carrying his head into Kroger and hiding him open-eyed in the cantaloupes, running off with him like a football before any clerks or bag boys could catch us. Leaving him on benches in the park and then hiding in the bushes, blowing dog whistles as hard as we could so the dogs would try to attack him, the owners desperately apologizing, trying hard to drag their crazy dogs back to the normal world.