December Park(28)

“There! There!” someone yelled, and the voice was close enough behind me to trigger a perceptible twinge at the base of my spine.

For one moment, I considered bolting out onto Worth Street and making a mad dash for my house. There was a good chance I’d get to my porch before they grabbed me. But then for whatever reason, I threw myself forward through the wall of pine trees at the last second.

The trees swallowed me up. Blindly, I propelled myself forward, my hands swatting pine boughs out of my face. I struck a tree trunk and landed hard on my side in the dirt, temporarily liberating all wind from my lungs, and rolled until I came to rest in the approximation of a sitting position.

My eyes still closed, I felt the prickle of pine branches closing in on my head. I brushed them away, opened my eyes, and found myself corralled within a cover of dense and shaggy firs. I pulled my legs up to my chest and remained sitting, breathing harshly into the pit between my knees. I couldn’t see my pursuers, couldn’t see the lights of the Mathersons’ house, couldn’t even see the moon. My face stung and my eyes were blurry with tears.

I heard them, though: their shouts, their fury, calling out to one another as they got separated. They were all around me, yet they couldn’t find me in my perfect hiding spot. Keener’s truck, its exact location impossible to pinpoint, growled somewhere close by. Holding my breath, I listened to feet crunching through the woods. They were moving much more slowly now. Lost. Looking for me. I caught nonsensical snippets of disembodied voices.

“Come on,” someone said. The voice was impossibly close, and I could not fathom how I hadn’t heard the speaker’s footsteps upon the carpet of crunchy dead leaves.

I pressed my face into my knees, wishing I could shrink to the point of disappearing.

The footsteps retreated. Their voices gradually grew more and more distant as they retreated toward the street. I heard Keener’s truck roll coolly down Worth Street, then waited until the simmering sound of its engine was heard only in my memory.

Still, I did not move right away. It wasn’t that they were clever enough to trick me into giving away my position by feigning retreat, because they weren’t. They were morons. No, it was merely that I needed a moment to catch my breath and realign myself. The anger had not yet set in, temporarily bullied into submission by the stronger, innate sense of self-preservation. But it would strike soon enough. I knew it would.

I touched my face. My fingers came away wet with blood. Or mud. I couldn’t tell for sure in the dark, but judging by how my face felt, I had a pretty good idea what it was.

I sat until my overheated body was once again aware of the cold. Turning over on my side, I crawled forward through the veil of trees, much more aware this time of the pricking and prodding and scratching of limbs. Then I paused. Listened. Because for a second, I had been certain . . . had been certain . . .

I risked it: “Who’s there?” Then winced, bracing myself.

Someone was right beside me, hidden just beyond the trees. I was suddenly sure of it.

“Who’s there?” I said again, my voice trembling.

Still, I received no answer. And I could no longer hear that whistling rasp of someone else’s respiration.

I stared at the darkened curtain of pines, expecting at any moment to see a figure emerge. Those spiny black boughs would part like curtains, and a white face would appear from the depths, eyes rimmed in silver, a gaping mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth . . .

I turned and bolted out of the woods.





There were no lights on at my house when I arrived, and my father’s car was gone from the driveway. Quiet as a baby’s whimper, I stripped out of my clothes in the upstairs bathroom, only to feel a cold resignation wash over me at the sight of my mud-ruined jeans. Balling up the jeans, I buried them at the bottom of the laundry hamper.

Then I examined my face in the bathroom mirror. My lip was split, and there was dried blood smeared across my face. Also, it looked like I would have one hell of a shiner when I woke up tomorrow morning. I tried to convince myself that much of the bruising was really just shoe polish, even though I knew it wasn’t. I washed up at the sink, then dabbed a swab of cotton doused in rubbing alcohol to the split in my lip.

The anger and humiliation struck me later as I struggled to find sleep in my bed, my face burning but only partially due to the rubbing alcohol and my injuries. I thought I would stay awake all night—that I would hear the shudder of my father’s unmarked sedan coming to rest in the driveway at dawn, would smell coffee brewing on the stove . . .

Thinking all this, I fell quickly asleep.





Chapter Four


The New Kid





I awoke the next morning, Sunday, feeling bruised and sore all over. My ribs hurt, my face hurt, and there was an aggressive headache drilling through the center of my brain. I saw bright orange leaves float by my bedroom window and remembered that today was Halloween.

I got up, went into the bathroom, and spent the next few minutes gazing into the mirror, trying to convince myself that the wounds on my face incurred from last night’s run-in with the Keener Gang didn’t look as bad as I’d feared. But they did. My lip was puffy and the split at its center had dried to a brownish-purple scab, and the skin around my left eye was swollen and bruised.

Thankfully, it was early and everyone else in the house was still asleep, so I dressed and slipped out the back door before anyone could see me.