Only Child(80)

I checked and Mommy was in her room with the door closed, so I grabbed a pencil from my desk real quick and went downstairs. I opened the door to the garage a tiny bit and from the kitchen I heard “Garage door!” I put the pencil on the floor in between the door so it stayed open, but only a tiny bit so Mommy wasn’t going to notice. Then I ran back upstairs fast.

Right after that the doorbell rang a few times and I heard Mommy go downstairs. Voices came up from downstairs, and I stood in my room with my heart pounding, pounding, pounding. It was almost time to go. I waited for all the voices to move from the hallway, and everyone was probably sitting down in the living room.

I went to the bathroom one more time. I put on my shoes and my jacket that were hiding under my bed next to my backpack. I was about to put the backpack on, and that’s when my eyes got stuck on the trucks. They were still lying all over the place from when I got mad and kicked them. I didn’t want to leave them like that, so I went over and put them in a straight line. That was better, and now it was the right time to go.

I waited at the top of the stairs and I listened to the voices. This was going to be the hardest part. Get downstairs and outside. I went downstairs on my tippy-toes and I tried not to make the stairs squeak—and you have to try to walk all the way on the side of the steps, that’s where they don’t squeak. The thing was that you can see the bottom of the stairs from the living room, so that was going to be tricky. I paused a few steps up and my heart was pounding so loud that everyone in the living room was probably hearing it. Then I went down the last couple of steps very fast and around the banister and over to the door to the garage. I waited to hear Mommy’s voice saying, “Zach, where are you going?” but it never came. The people in the living room kept on talking, and no one even noticed that I came down the steps.

The pencil was still in the door, and the door was still open a tiny bit. I opened it more and squeezed through and closed it behind me. I walked through the garage and unlocked the side door that always has a key sticking in it on the inside because it got bent and you can’t take it out, but it still works to open the door. I walked in our backyard and I stood there for a minute, and the coldness outside made my nose get tingly. I put my hand in the pocket of my pants and felt the angel wing charm with my fingers. Then I checked the time on Andy’s Lego watch that I took from his desk, and it said 2:13.





[ 47 ]


    Scooby-Doo in a White Van


IN THE FRONT POCKET of my backpack was a map that I made last night of the way from my house to my old preschool and the cemetery across from it. It reminded me of what Dora always says in the beginning of all the shows—before her and Boots go somewhere: “Who do we ask when we don’t know which way to go? The map!” And then the map comes jumping out of Dora’s backpack and sings, “I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the maaaaap!” in a voice that’s really annoying. The map tells Dora and Boots which way to go, and they have to cross like three obstacles every time—a creepy forest, a windy desert, the crocodile pond, and stuff like that. I don’t watch Dora anymore, that’s really a baby show, but I watched it all the time when I still went to preschool, so that’s funny that I was thinking about that when I was getting ready to go find the preschool.

In my head, I pretend-walked the way a lot of times last night, but I made the map anyway, just in case. The way to my old preschool is like this: Cut through our backyard and then go to the corner where the school bus stops for the middle school kids. It’s not a yellow school bus that comes, but a regular bus that gets used as a school bus because there aren’t enough yellow school buses. After fifth grade, that’s what Andy was going to do, get on the regular bus to go to the middle school, and he was excited about that.

So you go past the middle school bus corner and then up the hill to where the big green field is and the college behind it, and then after that you get to the road with the firehouse on the corner. Walk around the firehouse and then it’s another hill up. The preschool comes on the right, where the church is, it’s in the basement of the church. And the cemetery where Andy’s grave is is across the street from the preschool.

That was going to be my mission, to find the way, and no one could see me walking there all by myself or they would think, “Why is a kid walking there all by himself?” and then they would ask me about it and my whole mission was going to be blown.

After the map tells Dora and Boots which way to go, they say the three stops like the creepy forest and the windy desert and the crocodile pond a lot of times before they go, and they make check marks when they pass the stops. When I crossed the road in between our backyard and Liza’s house, I stopped and stared at the place where Andy was lying in my dream, with the arrow sticking out of his chest and the blood everywhere.

After I got around the middle school bus corner, I stopped and pulled out the map. And I got out a pencil from the front pocket and made a check mark next to “middle school bus corner.” Then I put the map in the pocket of my jacket and started walking up the hill to the big green field that was the next stop on the map.

Walking up the hill was hard. My legs started to feel tired, mostly because the backpack was really heavy from all the supplies I packed and it was starting to hurt my neck, and Andy’s sleeping bag was swinging against my legs. I decided to take a little break and take off the backpack. Then I realized I stopped right in front of Ricky’s house. There was a whole pile of newspapers rolled up in blue plastic bags on the walkway. No one lived in Ricky’s house anymore because Ricky was dead from the gunman and now his mom was dead, too. I looked at the garage door. Mommy said that in there she made herself dead, and I was wondering if she was still in there or what, and that gave me a scared feeling, so I put the backpack on again and started walking fast.