So, my cover was in place. My alibi was streaming in my bedroom, which I wasn’t in.
The next part hurt, hurt like you wouldn’t believe, chipped an actual piece off my soul I’m pretty sure, then made me swallow it, but it was for the best.
Thing was, not like this is news, but Tim, in addition to his big sister just off to college, he had two little brothers, right? Not to mention a mom and dad who were mostly not terrible, who should have grounded him for making them come collect him at the movie theater on their date night. Like all of our families, though, they were potential collateral damage, innocent parties Manny would crush when he reached down through their roof for the kid he used to play with, the kid who used to love him.
And of course we’d all held Tim’s little brothers when they were twin babies, held them under supervision, and his mom had chaperoned our bowling parties and museum visits, video’d our recitals, and his dad, I guess he’d never done anything super great, but he did have some old car in their garage he was always saying him and Tim were going to fix up one weekend. It was much more than a weekend job, was more of a “get a different car” kind of thing, but, with dads, sometimes it’s the thought that counts, and his dad for sure had a lot of thoughts. Tim’s big sister might get out alive when Manny came calling, but that’d just be because she was living in a dorm up in Denton. But who knows, maybe Manny comes knocking when she’s home doing laundry, right?
So, like I say, I’m not some AP math whiz, but even I can see that one dead sophomore is so much better than a whole family. It might even make the four of them left, like, bond together more, watch out closer for each other, take more trips. Tim’s dad, ex-dad, former dad, grieving dad, whatever, he might even take the twins out to the garage, to work on that hopeless car.
Thing was, though, since I was the only one who’d figured out the path Manny was churning through what had been our group of pranksters, that meant it fell to me to do something about it. Warning Tim would do no good. I could reach him, could find out what game he was logged into and chat him up, but what would I say? “Hey, Tim, Manny’s been eating my mom’s fertilizer, man, and if you want to save your family, you maybe’d better, like, hang yourself in the closet or something, cool? You with me on this?”
His first question back would probably be along the lines of “why me,” as in, Why just him, as in: Why not you too, Sawyer?
He’d be right. People being politely asked to kill themselves have lots of very good, on-point questions. I’d have to explain that it would be me, it should be me, it was going to be me, but for now I was the one saving everybody. My time was most definitely coming, though. If I wanted my family to live through this, then I could no longer be just an eventual victim. But first I had to rush around, get things done, save everybody’s families until Manny didn’t have anybody left to kill, and would have to back off.
And, anyway, I mean—Tim’s mom finding him hanging by the neck in his own closet? Really? That would break her heart, would probably destroy the family just as much, only slower. Running away couldn’t be an answer either. From Manny’s height, he would see us scrambling over county lines, start striding that way, stepping on whoever, it wouldn’t matter to him. Then it wouldn’t be only our families dying, but completely uninvolved families, times ten, times twenty. And then the air force would probably get involved, and Rockwall, Texas, would be this big national incident blowing up on the evening news.
No, this had to be me. I had to toughen up, like my dad was always telling me.
You were right, Dad.
Thanks for the advice, man.
7
SO, WITH THAT MOVIE playing on my laptop, the garage door still up like I’d “accidentally” left it after dinner, the overhead light long since cycled off, I cleared a path in front of my dad’s heavy old Kawasaki, rolled it out to the curb, swung a leg into the creaky saddle, and let gravity and the long slope down to Wilshire take us, popped the clutch at the very end.
When the engine caught, the motorcycle’s thready headlight kicked on, its beam shining into the ditch, courtesy of my dad’s big wreck. I reached over, straightened the headlight back to center, then followed it. The pegs and bar on the right side were bent up and jagged, the foot brake over there ground half off, the twist throttle catchy, but JR had a dirt bike we’d all lived on freshman year, out at his place. After riding it into the ground a hundred times each, a beaten-up street bike was gravy, was cake, was the most docile pony.
I cut the engine just down from Tim’s house, coasted into the trees, tensed up because, with the headlight off for this final approach, I might be about to get sliced in half by a barbwire strand I wouldn’t see until too late.
Five minutes later I stepped through the sliding glass door of the second side of the garage his dad had converted into an insulated room for his pool table, just, he’d spent so much releveling the concrete floor that there hadn’t been any money left over to Craigslist what he was leveling the floor for.
The door from the garage to the house was locked, but the key was down a ceramic frog’s throat on the other side of the room. I apologized to the frog for making it party to this. In my head I was thinking that the frog thought it was a watchdog, that it had kept Tim’s family safe all these years. And if mannequins can walk and talk, then why not, right?
Two creeping minutes after that mumbled apology, I was standing over Tim’s sleeping form in the bedroom I still called his big sister’s, since he’d just moved into it. He’d fallen asleep in the office chair at his desk, his soldier on-screen caught in a loop of respawning, since this was a hacked game, one he could never lose.
Moving slowly, zero noise, I sidled in alongside him, reached past like I was his third arm, and got his character out of that loop, but still, when I leaned up from that, Tim was watching me with sleepy eyes, like I was maybe a dream.
“Saw?” he creaked, stretching it into a yawn, and of all the moments of this whole thing, this was by far the longest one. It was like the world was suddenly this huge balloon inflating around me, everything swelling at once, the pressure all around pounding in breath by breath. I hadn’t expected him to say my name, I mean, hadn’t expected him to call me what he and no one else had been calling me since third grade. I hadn’t expected him to not even flinch from me suddenly being there in his room, in my long-sleeved black undershirt from skiing, my mom’s black balaclava on my head, my hands in black leather gloves even though it was hot, which should have told him everything he needed to know about my plans.
My eyes maybe got a certain shine to them here, my voice a kind of quaver, my chest a cold hollowness I’d never really known before.
It’s not easy, killing your best friend. One of them, anyway.
But, I told myself, this was the only way to save his family from Manny. It was for the best. There was no other choice. If he could, if he knew, he’d tell me to get on with it already.
“I’m sorry for this, T-man,” I said to him, and stepped around behind him, a hard loop of light strung from hand to hand, pulling tight around his neck, right where spies in the movies always do it, like the windpipe has vertebra, and what you have to do is slip between two of them.