It had to be like that, though, for Manny.
Otherwise we might clue in that he was coming for us.
He didn’t count on me, though.
5
IF SHANNA’S MOM and little brother hadn’t died moments after her, with her, mixed in together with her—I guess you could say “because of her”—then maybe I would have let things take their natural course. Manny could have just waltzed in—my dad likes that one, too—he could have waltzed in in his stooped-over, giant way and strangled Danielle, decapitated JR, burned Tim, and, I don’t know, drowned me in the tiny-to-him toilet like I deserved for dreaming up that prank in the first place.
We all kind of deserved it, I mean.
I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences.
And, to be clear, I was sort of making that up for Danielle and JR about not having been the one that put Manny on my dad’s motorcycle. I’d completely put him there, specifically to freak my mom out, make her drop the eggs or something equally hilarious. My dad left him there probably because it felt like at least someone was getting some use out of the bike he couldn’t ride anymore but also didn’t have the heart to sell.
My case for Danielle and JR had been more convincing if I hadn’t done that, though. I probably learned it from my mom, even, using Miracle-Gro to cheat her garden bigger. That’s all lying about Manny on the motorcycle was: Miracle-Gro, to get this idea to bloom up in Danielle’s and JR’s heads faster.
And it had still been a joke then anyway, right?
It was. Hundred percent.
Sure, Shanna was getting fired and on permanent lockdown, Tim was getting grounded until he grew a pair—his dad’s go-to—until he grew a pair and quit being a follower, and the prank hadn’t exactly shamed the assistant manager like I’d meant, but still, it wasn’t a total loss. We had the story of what almost was, didn’t we? That’s worth nearly as much, if you tell it right.
Anyway, big surprise, before too long there were flyers stapled to every utility pole in the neighborhood. Evidently some deviants of one brand or another were breaking into everyone’s toolsheds and gardening supplies, making off with fertilizer, and probably—the word I kept hearing whispered was “surely”—surely selling it from the beds of pickups in shady parking lots. Just, evidently, in different bags, because it was never the whole bag of Miracle-Gro that was gone, but just the Miracle-Gro itself, scooped out the hole torn in the bag’s wide, vulnerable belly.
Who would have ever guessed that’s what mannequins out in the wild eat, though, right? I mean, who ever even knew there was a “wild” for mannequins, but if there is, then: garden fertilizer?
Still, some of that Miracle-Gro, probably most of it, it wasn’t only dirt minerals and plant vitamins. Our neighborhood is competitive, I’m saying. Same way Olympic athletes might resort to steroids if they think they can get away with it, a lot of our neighbors, my mom most definitely included, had been opting for the least eco-friendly, closest-to-radioactive grow-fast stuff they could buy. And, the thing was, they knew it was dangerous to play with, worse to ever consider actually eating. How I knew that? One or the other of the neighborhood SUVs was always pulled over at a farm stand to buy some organic vegetables, the kind that wouldn’t turn their families into instant mutants.
So, Manny, I had to imagine, from eating that every night for two weeks, he had to be three or four times taller than he’d been for that truck driver, by now. Meaning? He was a kaiju, pretty much. The mannequin version of Godzilla. And, being that massive, that towering, that scary, the only place he could hide anymore would be Lake Ray Hubbard, which, tellingly, was three or four feet fuller than usual, full enough it was flooding some of the close houses.
I’m not in AP math, so I can’t do the numbers for how much water a fifty-foot-tall mannequin would displace, and then factor that into the grade or whatever of the slope around the lake over here on the Rockwall side, but if I could, I know they’d match up perfect.
Manny had to be giant by now.
And, in his dim, slow-thinking way, he still had the four of us in mind—four because he didn’t have to think about Shanna anymore.
For all I knew, he was even like Frankenstein’s monster, right? Maybe he hadn’t killed Shanna on purpose, had just been trying to, I don’t know, hug her. Maybe he’d just been so happy to see her again after all these years. But we’re so fragile compared to a monster like him. He doesn’t know his own strength. He just knows he’s lonely, and probably afraid. And he doesn’t care what moms or dads or little brothers or sisters are in the way of him not being lonely, he’s just scared without anybody to play with.
Or?
He hates us.
He remembers everything in perfect detail, he’s been watching us walk back and forth through my garage for the last three years, never giving our old best friend a second glance.
Either way, we were dead.
Really, I figured, it would be better for the world if we all just killed ourselves. Except of course that would break our parents’ hearts and set bad examples for our little brothers and sisters, and everybody at school would have to go to endless assemblies about what to do if you get invited to participate in a group suicide, and we didn’t want to be remembered like that. It’s much better to be on the murder victim wall, right? The Died Too Young wall?
And, I say “we” here, yeah, because I assume that to be the case, but, I mean, Tim still wasn’t supposed to be talking to us, and when I tried to conscript JR in using the vaguest possible outline of “Manny is a giant who’s after us,” so we could go to Danielle as a team, he kept asking if this was a joke or from a movie or what. Meanwhile, Danielle had just, for reasons un-understandable to anyone remotely sane or with an ounce of taste or self-respect, started hard-core dating Steve from her yearbook team, so that pretty much just left me to stop the big mannequin killing spree, didn’t it?
Sawyer, the only one who figured it out. The only one who knew it was okay if Manny came for us, but it would be way uncool if he also killed our families.
It’s kind of heroic, really.
Not that it felt that way.
Tim was first.
6
WHAT I DID TO get ready for what I had to do was download not the movie we’d sneaked Manny into—that server pinging would be asking Manny to come kill my family—but one of the earlier ones in the series. I even legit-rented it the day before, left its three-hour ass playing on my laptop so it would go over right before the rental expired, so long as our router didn’t reset. Translation: I was home the whole time, trying to stream that movie into my eyeholes before it went away. I’d have to be a crazy person to rent it and not watch it, wouldn’t I? Especially with the deadline on it only three hours away, and me getting warnings every few minutes that I was wasting my gift card?
My dad would probably even defend me, if it came to that. It’s important to reinforce responsible behavior. Never mind that we have the same movie on DVD in the living room, which was his purchase, so we could bond over the action scenes or learn from the upstanding values or pretend not to be eyeballing the skintight costumes or whatever. What would be important was the “responsible behavior” part of it, this being the “first time in recorded history”—my phrase, which he stole, and has been using against me—this being the first time I’d ever exhibited such unteenagerly behavior.