At the Quiet Edge(6)

“I don’t live in a storage unit,” he snapped.

“Okay, good.”

Her face was so chubby and sweet, and her tiny white earrings were enamel bits of popcorn, and that must mean she was okay, right? He had plenty of friends to hang out with at school, but no one ever thought to come out here to the edge of town all the way past the landfill to hang out with him. Except Mikey. And Mikey had turned into a stupid gamer this year.

He eyed Josephine again, concerned about her motivation, but equally tired of being bored to death. “There’s an apartment behind the office of the storage facility. Two bedrooms. A kitchen. A patio. It’s normal, all right? It’s not a frickin’ storage unit.”

“Seriously? That’s so cool. You live in a hidden apartment!”

Everett shrugged. It wasn’t cool, actually. It was a crappy apartment like any other crappy apartment but without other kids to hang around. And no pool or park either. He felt suddenly self-conscious again. “I’ve gotta go,” he said.

“Sure. Anyway, I’m Josephine.” She held out her hand like they were breaking up a meeting or something. After frowning for a moment, Everett reached out and shook it.

“See you tomorrow,” she said as she let him go.

If she was a bully, she was playing a very long game.

“Wait,” she shouted when he was twenty feet away. “Give me your number!”

Everett shook his head at the sight of the phone she held up. Another thing to be embarrassed about. “I don’t have a phone yet.”

“That sucks! Tell your mom you’re afraid of kidnappers. That’s what finally worked for me!”

A laugh popped from his mouth. “Not bad. I’ll try it.” This time when he turned back toward his walk, Everett was smiling. Maybe Josephine was all right.

He picked up his pace, eager to get home and get through his history homework so he’d have free time before dinner while his mom was still working.

He’d discovered a new locker to check out.

As hobbies went, he’d found an exciting one, though he knew it was wrong. That was probably what made it exciting, of course, but Everett had promised himself he’d use up all his illicit thrills on this and not experimenting with pot or alcohol or something.

At first it had started out as a good deed. Or not quite a good deed, since he got an allowance for it. But he had volunteered to help out his mom around the storage facility for a couple of hours every week. He helped sweep or pick up litter. He changed the garbage bags from the common areas and broke down boxes for recycling. And he checked the locks on the storage doors.

The first time he’d found an unlocked door, he’d simply locked it and moved on, but lying in bed that night, he’d regretted it. He’d watched that Storage Wars show. He’d seen the weird characters who rented space in this town. There could be anything right there, a few yards away from his bed. Gold coins, ancient documents, wild photographs. Anything.

Not that he was a thief. He didn’t take things . . . or nothing that valuable, anyway.

His arms prickled at the idea that he might have inherited something bad from his father. Did criminals pass on badness through their genes?

But truly Everett was only curious. In fact he could even convince himself he was helping people, because when they left locks open, thieves could take their stuff. He locked up their valuables. He protected them. Mostly.

Once he’d started watching for opportunities, he’d run out of unlocked units pretty quickly. They popped up on occasion, especially during the summer when more people were moving in and out, but they weren’t common.

Still, he’d noticed something else during the downtime between open locks: a lot of people really didn’t try hard to scramble the numbers on their combination locks. His mom sold two kinds of padlocks in the office. The more expensive, sturdier version came with keys, but you could also buy a cheaper one with a four-digit combination. Once it was engaged, the owner had to spin the numbers to jumble them, but most people were too lazy for that, and Everett could just nudge them forward in a straight line until the lock opened.

Yesterday, he’d discovered an even more special kind of laziness: an actual sticky note with the combination written right on it. The bright-yellow paper had caught his eye, the corner poking out beneath the bottom of the roll-up door like a tiny flag designed to alert only him.

He’d tugged it out, and as soon as he’d seen the four digits, he’d taken a careful look around. Once he’d verified that the security camera on the side of the building pointed slightly away from him, he’d lined up the combination and popped open the lock. There hadn’t been time to explore, so he’d relocked it in the hopes of sneaking in tonight.

Anticipation fizzed through him even though he’d never found anything all that interesting in the previous spaces. What if it wasn’t curiosity that got him pumped up? What if he just liked being bad? Wasn’t that exactly who his father had been?

Shoving away thoughts of a father he barely remembered, Everett sniffed and put his earbuds in to distract himself with his ancient iPod. The truth was that he mostly just shifted things around in the units, shining a flashlight on random junk. He opened boxes to check for treasure, of course, but the best thing he’d discovered was a cool old car he’d been able to sit in.

Maybe he’d get bored and outgrow his evil criminal phase. Or else he’d need darker and darker thrills until he became a career criminal who ruined people’s lives forever, and when everyone discovered the truth, they’d say, What did you expect from a con man’s son?