December Park(144)

“Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”





Chapter Twenty-Nine


The Patapsco Institute (Part One)





My grandmother prepared oven-roasted chicken dressed with peas, a plate of sweet potato patties (extra crispy), and a salad. With my father working late, it was just my grandparents and me again. I shoveled the food down, keeping one eye on the clock. I didn’t want to be late for our meeting at the park.

“Look at this kid,” my grandfather commented once I’d set my fork down on my empty plate. “Keep eating like that, you’ll need a new wardrobe when school starts up in the fall.”

“Can I be excused?”

“Can you?” retorted my grandmother.

“May I?”

“Are you going somewhere?” she asked.

“Just hanging out with the guys.” I tried to make my voice sound as bland as possible. “You know. Same old stuff.”

My grandmother glanced at the same clock I’d been gazing at throughout dinner. “Only a couple of hours before curfew.”

“I know.”

“Let the kid go, for Christ’s sake,” my grandfather chimed in. He was trying to fish something out of his coffee with one finger.

“Go on,” said my grandmother. “Just be careful, Angelo.”

Three minutes later, I knocked on Adrian’s front door. His mother answered, and I felt my testicles retreat up into my abdomen, as if I’d just waded into freezing water.

“Oh, hi. Can Adrian come out?”

“Adrian’s not home.”

“Oh.” Yet I remained on the porch, stupefied. “I was supposed to pick him up after dinner. We’re going to the park.”

“He’s not home,” she repeated in that same emotionless and dilatory voice. I imagined giant grubby worms eating through her brain, indiscriminately brushing up against the cranial switches that controlled her speech.

“Oh. Do you know where he—?”

She shut the door in my face.

Confused, I rolled my bike down the Gardiners’ driveway and coasted up Worth Street. The sun was beginning to set, but the evening hadn’t cooled off all that much. It had been a cold winter, and now we were in the middle of a hot summer. For whatever reason, I recalled that peculiar phrase my father had muttered to me on the morning of July Fourth—No rest for the wicked. I thought maybe I was beginning to understand it.

As I rode to December Park it occurred to me that unlike last summer (or the summers before that), we hadn’t yet engaged in any of our usual summertime activities—no stealing johnboats from the slips at the Cape (they were always chained to pilings, but Michael had no problem cracking the combination locks); no Capture the Flag or citywide tag that typically lasted all summer; no afternoons languishing beneath the sun at Shoulder Beach; no late nights listening to Andrew Dice Clay cassettes in Peter’s basement.

I supposed the Piper was to blame for some of it, but it was also apparent that we had changed things, too. We. All of us. Years ago, we had outgrown the Kiss Wars and the games of tag. We had outgrown a lot.

It was exactly seven o’clock when I reached the outskirts of December Park. The park grounds were vacant except for the scraps of trash and the swings that swayed ghostlike in the breeze. It looked like a circus had just picked up and left town. Metal glinted in the fading daylight by the cusp of the woods, and I saw Peter leaning his bike against a tree. Behind him, the ground swelled up to a vast incline studded with elms and bushy fir trees. Back there somewhere, hunkered down like a beast in waiting, was the Patapsco Institute, the ugly twin sister of Stanton School.

From the Solomon’s Bend Road side of the park, I watched Michael and Scott swoop down the hill on their bikes. They joined me, and the three of us biked toward Peter, our legs pumping, my sweat-soaked T-shirt cooling in the wind.

Peter snatched a leafy branch off the ground and waved it like a checkered flag as Michael, Scott, and I blew by him. Michael raised his hands in victory, balancing the Mongoose with just his legs, even though Scott had beaten him to the finish line. We circled back around, breathing heavily, and dropped our bikes in the dirt.

“Where’s Adrian?” Peter asked me.

“I have no idea. I went to his house, but his mom said he wasn’t home.”

As if on cue, Adrian marched out of the woods, grinning. He had his Incredible Hulk backpack strapped to his shoulders and wore a wide grin. “Hey, guys!”

“What the hell, man?” I scolded him. “I said I was gonna pick you up.”

“I got anxious. I’ve been down here for a couple hours.” He glanced over his shoulder. “But I’m not so sure there’s a building back there.”

“There is,” Michael assured him.

“What happened to not going off into secluded places alone?” I said.

“I told you, I got anxious. No big deal.”

“Tell ’em what happened,” Scott said to me.

I told them about the cop coming into the thrift store and following me home. Scott added the part about the cop looking into the ravine after I’d ditched him.

“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me,” Peter said. “Are you sure this is the same cop?”

“I’m positive,” I said.