Джеффри Дивер - Nothing Good Happens After Midnight - A Suspense Magazine Anthology

And in the end, nobody had seen her.

Hiding the actual package of rolls was another issue altogether. Carrie had to keep them out of sight somewhere for two days. Why had she gone down and bought it so early? What if her mother checked the car’s trunk in the next two days and wanted to know what this cache of toilet paper was all about? There would be no guarantee that her mother wouldn’t open the trunk, and no fooling her if she did. So Carrie couldn’t put them there where her mom could find them.

Or, really, anywhere in her own house.

In a panic she’d called Emily from the Target parking lot, which she hated to do because she knew from TV that it would leave a telephonic record of when they’d talked. If anybody, like the police for example, did some kind of real investigation for this crime of trespass — or was it vandalism? Or both? ...Whatever, they’d be able to put it together that she and Emily were planning something.

But what else could she do?

She had not planned on this degree of subterfuge holding onto the TP. She hadn’t even thought of it as an issue. Before Emily picked up her own phone, Carrie actually considered throwing the evidence away in one of the dumpsters behind the Target. But if she couldn’t even score and hold onto a few rolls of TP, that would surely betray her pathetic personality flaw.

Gutless and fearful, that’s what they’d say about her.

There was a really thin line between being one of the good kids and one of the cool kids, and so far Carrie had managed to fool most everybody as fitting into both camps.

But Emily, like Dawn, was all the way cool. She actually thought that Carrie’s worries about where to hide the toilet paper were legitimate. And Carrie’s suggestion that they stow the TP in Emily’s Tuff Shed in her backyard (which Emily’s dad almost never used anymore) was actually a great hiding place and a pretty brilliant idea.

Sucking in a breath, pushing with the flat of her hand on the continual churning of her belly, Carrie stood up. She was still mostly dressed. She’d left her socks on and worn her jeans and her black high school logo sweatshirt to bed. It wasn’t like her mom and dad came in every night to tuck her into bed anymore. The unspoken personal space barrier for the past year or so was her door: if closed, everything was fine and there was no need to come in and check on her. So tonight she had left it closed. Her parents trusted her and she was, here at home at least, definitely one of the good kids.

Using the flashlight from her phone, she found her tennis shoes and put them on. Then, with the flashlight still on, she crossed the room to the windows that faced out at the front of the house. Pulling open the plantation shutters, she unlocked and then raised the right-hand window, and stepped out into the night.

If the quiet in her room had been comforting, the quiet outside was all but terrifying. Standing on the dewy grass, she listened to nothing.

Then suddenly she realized that she still held the lit-up phone and that the window was open. She tip-toed back to the house, closed the window and turned off her light. Now it was pure dark. None of their neighbors even seemed to be watching television. There was no moon. She checked her phone; it was 12:08. She was seven minutes early. Squatting behind one of the low bushes that grew in the front of her house, she settled down to wait.

Seven minutes ... yikes!

At last, at long last, car lights up at the corner turned onto her street. She checked her phone, exactly 12:15. Standing up from where she was hiding behind the bushes, she ran across the lawn and out to where Dawn’s car was pulling over to the curb.

Dawn, driving, let her window down. “Hey,” she whispered. “Way to go. Perfect. Hop in the back seat but don’t close the door all the way. Just hold it. No noise.”

Carrie, her heart beating so hard she was surprised that they couldn’t hear it, followed these instructions to the letter. As soon as she was in, Dawn got the car rolling again and caught Carrie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Is this awesome, or what?” Dawn asked.

“Totally,” Emily said from the front passenger seat.

Carrie wracked her brain searching for the right answer. “Easy peasey,” she finally said in the calmest voice she should muster.

“Easy peasey, so cool. We knew you’d be down with us, Car,” Dawn said, then giggled and added, “Jason’s going to just shit.”

For a while, Chris Duke believed that he was friends with Jason Trent. After all, they’d played on the same football teams for eight years, Pop Warner on up, with Trent always the quarterback and Chris usually a linebacker on the D-squad, although he’d had some luck last year transitioning to fullback and had even taken a few snaps at that position last Spring. Things had been looking up. Chris was large, strong and fast. Maybe he could become an impact player.

He and Jason had always gotten along well enough, not that they talked much or anything like that. But they were teammates and that’s all that needed to be said. Then they became a little more than that after grades came out at the end of Chris’s junior year and he hadn’t made the academic cutoff with his 2.0 GPA, when he needed a 2.5 to stay on the team; he’d gotten a damn C-minus in geometry, like he was ever going to use geometry in real life.

But Jason — though himself not the sharpest tool in the shed — was in the summer school tutoring program and the two of them spent a couple of days a week at Jason’s fancy house on the golf course trying to make sense out of triangles and circles, proofs and space, and the areas of figures. Total waste of time, Chris thought, since what was that stuff ever going to do with him? And ultimately he didn’t understand it anyway.

But he and Jason had broken up the tedium and failure of the geometry lessons with computer games and working on Jason’s passing and handoffs and Chris’s receiving. They had laughed a lot. Jason was rich — well, his parents were — but basically he seemed like an okay guy. When they checked in back at summer camp, Chris knew that Jason put in a word to Coach to let him try out in the backfield again.

But then his final summer school grade, another C-minus, came in and the coach told him he had no choice. It wasn’t his decision to make. Chris didn’t make the academic cut and therefore he couldn’t be on the team.

Jason, who went off to football practice after school every day like he always did, simply dropped out of Chris’s universe. He obviously couldn’t have cared less about whether or not Chris was still on the team. He’d given it his best shot to help him, sure, but now that was over. It hadn’t worked, and the two guys had nothing left to say or to do with each other.

A couple of times, Chris had nodded to Jason passing in the hall and though he’d nodded back, it was obvious that his former tutor did not know for sure exactly who he was.

Jason probably meant no offense, of course, but life was life, fair was fair, and he was still the quarterback after all, while Chris was nothing.

Oh, except a loser.

He only accidentally heard about Jason’s parents’ vacation to Cabo when he’d been sitting at the next table in the cafeteria and heard Jason telling his current babe girlfriend Dawn that he’d be alone in the house starting Thursday and through the weekend, so she could come over any time and...

...and she’d stopped him there, although there had been a lot of laughing.

Now it was Friday morning, about twenty-five minutes after midnight, and Chris had made his way past the backs of four houses down the Sixth fairway, to Jason’s place. Two houses in, there’d been some dim lights on inside, and across the fairway, a few more, but otherwise generally it was dark, dark, dark.