Stephen King - Under the Dome

“We can’t get going until she’s gone,” Norrie said.

Benny shrugged. “What’s the big deal? If she sees us, we’re just some kids goofing around on the town common. And know what? She probably wouldn’t see us if she looked right at us. Adults never see kids.” He considered this. “Unless they’re on skateboards.”

“Or smoking,” Norrie added. They all glanced at their cigarettes.

Joe hooked a thumb at the shopping bag sitting in the carrier attached to the handlebars of Benny’s Schwinn High Plains. “They also have a tendency to see kids who are goofing around with expensive town property.”

Norrie tucked her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. It made her look wonderfully tough, wonderfully pretty, and wonderfully adult.

The boys went back to watching. The Police Chief’s widow was now talking to Mrs. Grinnell. It wasn’t a long conversation. Mrs. Perkins had taken a big brown envelope from her carrier-bag as she came up the steps, and they watched her hand it to Mrs. Grinnell. A few seconds later, Mrs. Grinnell pretty much slammed the door in her visitor’s face.

“Whoa, that was rude,” Benny said. “Week’s detention.”

Joe and Norrie laughed.

Mrs. Perkins stood where she was for a moment, as if perplexed, then went back down the steps. She was now facing the common, and the three children instinctively stepped further into the shadows of the walkway. This caused them to lose sight of her, but Joe found a handy gap in the wooden siding and peered through that.

“Going back to Main,” he reported. “Okay, now she’s going up the hill… now she’s crossing over again….”

Benny held an imaginary microphone. “Video at eleven.”

Joe ignored this. “Now she’s going onto my street.” He turned to Benny and Norrie. “Do you think she’s going to see my mom?”

“Mill Street’s four blocks long, dude,” Benny said. “What are the chances?”

Joe felt relieved even though he could think of no reason why Mrs. Perkins’s going to see his mom would be a bad thing. Except his mother was all worried about Dad being out of town, and Joe would sure hate to see her more upset than she already was. She had almost forbidden him to go on this expedition. Thank God Miz Shumway had talked her out of that idea, mostly by telling her that Dale Barbara had mentioned Joe specifically for this job (which Joe—Benny and Norrie, too—preferred to think of as “the mission”).

“Mrs. McClatchey,” Julia had said, “if anyone can put this gadget to use, Barbie thinks it’s probably your son. It could be very important.”

That had made Joe feel good, but looking at his mother’s face—worried, drawn—made him feel bad. It hadn’t even been three days since the Dome had come down, but she’d lost weight. And the way she kept holding his dad’s picture, that made him feel bad, too. It was like she thought he’d died instead of just being holed up in a motel somewhere, probably drinking beer and watching HBO.

She had agreed with Miz Shumway, though. “He’s a smart boy about gadgets, all right. He always has been.” She looked him over from head to foot, and sighed. “When did you get so tall, Son?”

“I don’t know,” he had replied truthfully.

“If I let you do this, will you be careful?”

“And take your friends with you,” Julia said.

“Benny and Norrie? Sure.”

“Also,” Julia had added, “be a little discreet. Do you know what that means, Joe?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure do.”

It meant don’t get caught.

Brenda disappeared into the screening trees that lined Mill Street. “Okay,” Benny said. “Let’s go.” He carefully crushed his cigarette in the makeshift ashtray, then lifted the shopping bag out of the bike’s wire carrier. Inside the bag was the old-fashioned yellow Geiger counter, which had gone from Barbie to Rusty to Julia… and finally to Joe and his posse.

Joe took the juice lid and crushed out his own smoke, thinking he would like to try again when he had more time to concentrate on the experience. On the other hand, it might be better not to. He was addicted to computers, the graphic novels of Brian K. Vaughan, and skateboarding. Maybe that was enough monkeys for one back.

“People are gonna come by,” he said to Benny and Norrie. “Probably lots of people, once they get tired of playing in the supermarket. We’ll just have to hope they don’t pay any attention to us.”

In his mind he heard Miz Shumway telling his mom how important this could be to the town. She didn’t have to tell him ; he probably understood it better than they did.

“But if any cops come by…” Norrie said.

Joe nodded. “Back into the bag it goes. And out comes the Frisbee.”

“You really think there’s some kind of alien generator buried under the town common?” Benny asked.

“I said there might be,” Joe replied, more sharply than he had intended. “Anything’s possible.”

In truth, Joe thought it more than possible; he thought it likely. If the Dome wasn’t supernatural in origin, then it was a force field. A force field had to be generated. It looked like a QED situation to him, but he didn’t want to get their hopes up too high. Or his own, for that matter.

“Let’s start looking,” Norrie said. She ducked under the sagging yellow police tape. “I just hope you two prayed enough.”

Joe didn’t believe in praying for things he could do for himself, but he had sent up a brief one on a different subject: that if they found the generator, Norrie Calvert would give him another kiss. A nice long one.

Earlier that morning, during their pre-exploration meeting in the McClatchey living room, Scarecrow Joe had taken off his right sneaker, then the white athletic sock beneath.

“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat,” Benny said cheerfully.

“Shut up, stupid,” Joe replied.

“Don’t call your friend stupid,” Claire McClatchey said, but she gave Benny a reproachful look.

Norrie added no repartee of her own, only watched with interest as Joe laid the sock on the living room rug and smoothed it out with the flat of his hand.

“This is Chester’s Mill,” Joe said. “Same shape, right?”

“You are correctamundo,” Benny agreed. “It’s our fate to live in a town that looks like one of Joe McClatchey’s athletic socks.”

“Or the old woman’s shoe,” Norrie put in.

“ ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,’ ” Mrs. McClatchey recited. She was sitting on the couch with the picture of her husband in her lap, just as she had been when Miz Shumway came by with the Geiger counter late yesterday afternoon. “‘She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.’”

“Good one, Mom,” Joe said, trying not to grin. The middle-school version had been revised to She had so many children her cunt fell off.

He looked down at the sock again. “So does a sock have a middle?”

Benny and Norrie thought it over. Joe let them. The fact that such a question could interest them was one of the things he dug about them.

“Not like a circle or square has a center,” Norrie said at last. “Those are geometric shapes.”

Benny said, “I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don’t know what you’d call it. A socktagon?”

Norrie laughed. Even Claire smiled a little.

“On the map, The Mill’s closer to a hexagon,” Joe said, “but never mind that. Just use common sense.”

Norrie pointed to the place on the sock where the foot-shaped bottom flowed into the tube top. “There. That’s the middle.”