December Park(97)

We all shrugged.

“I called his house this morning,” Michael said, dropping his backpack to the curb, “but his mother said he wasn’t home. It wasn’t even seven yet. Where would he go that early?”

I tried to imagine Doreen Gardiner’s dead voice over a telephone line. I imagined it sounded like the automated phone calls we sometimes got at the house confirming my grandparents’ medical appointments.

“You think she would report him missing if something happened to him?” Scott said as we hoisted our bikes off the pavement and Michael ran up to his garage, where he threw his backpack inside and came out riding his Mongoose. “Like, if he vanished? Angie, you said she was a weirdo, but do you think she wouldn’t—?”

“I don’t know what she’d do,” I said truthfully, hopping on my bike. “And what are you saying? That something might have happened to Adrian?”

“I don’t know. It’s just weird that we haven’t seen him all week.”

“Should we go to his house and see if he’s okay?” Peter suggested.

I shrugged.

Our ride to Worth Street was shadowed by the seed that Scott had inadvertently planted in all our heads: would we have any idea if Adrian had been abducted by the Piper? It was possible, wasn’t it? I suddenly felt like a coward for not knocking on the Gardiners’ door sooner.

When we arrived at Adrian’s house, we pulled slow figure eights in the street on our bikes. No one wanted to knock on the door. It had been many months since I’d told my friends how creepy Adrian’s mother had been, but my description must have been vivid enough to ward them off permanently.

Eventually Scott stopped his bike and shot daggers at me. “We’re here now. Someone needs to do something.”

“Don’t look at me,” I told him.

“Shoot,” Michael said. “Mothers hate me.”

“So does everyone else,” Peter said, but we were all too wound up to laugh.

Scott asked Peter for four cigarettes, and Peter reluctantly handed them over. Scott broke one in half—“Hey!” Peter said, frowning—then tucked all four into one fist so only the filters poked up. He held his fist out, and we brought our bikes in around him.

“Who wants to draw first?” Scott said.

Michael plucked one from Scott’s hand. It was whole.

“Gimme that.” Peter snatched the cigarette from Michael and tucked it behind one ear. Then he looked uncomfortably at the remaining cigarettes in Scott’s hand.

“Just pick one,” Scott urged him.

“Fine.” He did. It was also whole. Relief spread across Peter’s face.

Scott repositioned his fist in front of me. Like someone just handed me a gun in a round of Russian roulette, I stared at his hand and felt my mouth go dry.

Peter lit his cigarette and blew smoke in my face. “Do it, Mazzone.”

Turning my head away, I blindly snatched one of the cigarettes from Scott’s hand. I heard my friends make an “ooh” sound. I looked at the cigarette in my hand to find that it, too, was whole.

Scott revealed the broken cigarette in the center of his palm. “Crap. Best two out of three?”

“No way,” Peter and Michael harmonized.

Scott set his bike down and threw the cigarette at Peter on his way up the Gardiners’ driveway. It was like watching someone forced to walk the plank of a pirate ship.

“Ditch the smoke,” I said to Peter.

He tossed the lit cigarette on the ground.

Scott knocked on the door and waited. Nothing happened. He knocked again. Finally, when it seemed we might all wait around until the world ended, Scott turned and looked at us. He held up his hands in a sign of surrender, then turned his ball cap backward on his head.

Michael used his finger as a gun and pretended to shoot at Scott, and Scott proceeded to do a commendable rendition of a cowboy tap-dancing over bullets. That was when the front door opened.

“Shit,” I muttered. “His mom.”

Scott faced the woman. He readjusted his ball cap and shifted from one foot to the other while he spoke to Ms. Gardiner.

She listened, cocking her head like a snow owl, her face carved in half shadows. She was gaunt, cadaverous, her movements like a Disney animatronic slowly winding down. Then she said something to Scott. He nodded dumbly.

Out of nowhere I wished for Scott’s benefit that he would suddenly blink out of existence—Please, God, let him vanish and not have to talk to that scary witch for one more second.

The door closed, and Scott moved slowly back down the slope of the lawn. His dejection was evident in every fiber of his body. “He’s not home,” he said, picking his bike up off the pavement.

We all looked at each other.

“Then where is he?” Peter said eventually.

“She didn’t say.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“Fuck, no.”

Peter retrieved his cigarette off the ground. It was still lit. “You should have asked.”

“You would have asked? Give me a break. You didn’t even want to go up there.” Then Scott looked at me. “She had this huge f*cking scar on her neck.” He ran one finger across his jugular.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”

Michael turned his bike around and faced the intersection of Worth and Haven. Scraps of paper and street sand blew across the pavement. “Let’s get out of here.”