Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

But they were all wrong.

Macy did not smoke or drink or do drugs and at sixteen, she was still a virgin unlike Chelsea Paris, Shannon Kittery, and the rest of the pop squad. Maybe as far as the virginity thing went, there had been precious few opportunities because she was not a natural vixen with all the necessary equipment in place by the eighth grade. Still, even had she been like Chelsea or Shannon she did not think she would have hit the mattress as fast as they had. It was the same with drinking and drugs, all the other assorted temptations that commonly led teenagers astray.

Macy did not indulge because she chose not to.

Maybe she had self-control and maybe she had self-respect and maybe she was more emotionally mature than her peers. Regardless, she set a high standard for herself and sometimes she wondered if it was because of her mother and her father. Her mother because Macy was honestly embarrassed at what mom was and had no desire to be like her. And dad because he had died young and Macy had never gotten a chance to really know him, but she felt that she owed it to his memory to conduct herself in a way that would have made him proud.

Macy, of course, never admitted this to anyone, let alone mom.

Because mom didn’t like to talk about dad. Whenever his name was mentioned she dropped into one of her funks and the only person who could get her out of it was Jim Beam. Macy sometimes thought that mom wanted her to run wild, would have been much happier if her only daughter fell from grace, stopped being such a “goody-two-shoes” as she often called her.

And how was that for parenting?

Mom would get a kick out of this, though. Macy attacking another girl and getting suspended-dear God, suspended -pending an investigation. Macy had a funny feeling she would laugh when she heard, say something stupid like, well, well, you’re just like the rest of us after all, aren’t you?

And that was the thing, wasn’t it?

Macy did not want to be like the rest.

She worked hard, studied hard, set high standards for herself to follow and now that had all come crashing down. She’d assaulted Chelsea Paris. Of all the impossible, unexplainable things.

She’d never live this down.

Half way down 7 ^th, Macy suddenly looked up.

Looked up and couldn’t believe what she was seeing…

The Hack twins, Mike and Matt, were standing on the sidewalk, lording over a pile of rocks, and casually tossing them at a minivan parked at the curb. Macy just stood there, watching as the boys threw them one after the other. The windows were spider webbed from the impacts, the doors and quarter panels scratched and dinged in.

Macy couldn’t believe it.

She’d babysat the two of them off and on for the past three years. They were monsters at heart, but they were not wantonly destructive like this.

“ Mikey!” she called out. “Matt! What do you think you’re doing?”

They looked over at her, smiled in recognition, and began throwing rocks again. The impacts were loud enough so that everyone in the neighborhood must have been hearing them, but nobody was paying any attention. Mr. Chalmers was even sitting out on his porch in plain view, just reading his paper.

“ We’re throwing rocks,” Mike said with typical ten-year old honesty.

Macy rushed over to them. “Stop it! What the heck is wrong with you two? Can’t you see you’re wrecking that minivan? Your mom will go nuts! God, what’s wrong with you two?”

Mike scratched his sandy-blonde hair. “Mom said we could.”

“ Yeah,” Matt agreed, “that’s what she said.”

Macy just shook her head. “Oh, I’ll just bet she did.”

“ It’s none of your business,” Mike said. “You better go.”

“ Mikey…”

Matt stared at her and his eyes were funny. “Get out of here! You don’t belong here!”

As Matt said that, Mike was behind her, too close for Macy’s liking. And what he was doing…this is what made her jump away and give Mike a shove that planted him squarely on his ass.

He’d been sniffing her.

Like a dog.

Sniffing her ass.

Mike got up, looked like he was fighting against something. “Maybe…maybe you better just go, Macy. Things are different now. Things can happen.”

“ That’s it,” Macy said, reaching out and snaring Matt by the wrist. “You’re coming inside right now, the both of you.”

But Matt yanked his wrist free.

Macy took a step back when she got a real good look at what was in his eyes. Neither of them had ever been openly defiant like this, but now they were not just defiant but almost savage. Their freckled faces were damp with sweat, hair plastered to their foreheads. And those eyes…so intense and hating, almost reflective like black glass.

Macy suddenly felt a shift of power around her.

The boys were not afraid of her. Not in the least. In fact, they were looking at her with no fear whatsoever and something even deeper and more caustic like absolute hate. They looked like animals, like they wanted to take her down with teeth and claws, guts her right there on the sidewalk.

“ You guys…you better go in,” she said.

Mike grinned at her. “Fuck you,” he said.

“ What?”

Macy stepped forward to grab him, even though the idea of touching the boy was suddenly repulsive to her. She stepped forward and Matt kicked her in the shin. Mike punched her in the arm. And then they both took hold of her and she had to fight with everything she had to throw them off. Her books went one way and she went the other. She made it maybe ten feet when the first rock struck her in the back. Then another glanced off her brow, slicing her open.

“ Stop it!” she cried. “That hurt! You better stop it right now!”

But they weren’t going to stop and she knew it.

They had gone crazy, the both of them. Something in them had just snapped and she could not only see it in their eyes, she could smell it wafting off of them in a hot, pungent odor. Trying to reason with them now was like trying to reason with wild dogs that were intent on taking you down. Another rock hit her in the stomach, another in the crook of her arm and hard enough so that it went numb right down to the wrist.

Macy ran.

The boys came after, flinging stones at her with everything they had. Rocks glanced off her back, whistled over her head. She outdistanced them quickly, vaulting over the hedges and running right up to Mr. Chalmers’ porch. The boys hopped the hedges and then skidded to a halt when they saw him.

“ What the hell’s going on here?” Mr. Chalmers said. “Why’re you boys chasing this girl? That you, Macy?”

“ Yes,” she panted. “They’ve gone nuts! They’re pegging me with rocks!”

“ They are, eh?” Mr. Chalmers tucked his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and set his paper aside. “What the hell’s got into you boys?”

“ We were throwing rocks at her,” Mike said.

“ Yeah, we were going to kill her,” Matt added.

Macy felt all the spit in her mouth suddenly evaporate.

There were no words to adequately describe what went through her head at that moment. Fear and shock and horror, too many other things. It all left her feeling weak and hopeless.

Mr. Chalmers stood there, hands on hips, appraising the situation. Though he was in his sixties, he was still a large, well-muscled man with broad shoulders and a thick chest, the result of his twenty years in the Army as a paratrooper with both the 82 ^nd and 101 ^st Airborne Division. He still had the requisite thick neck and bristly crewcut, though now gone white.

“ Mr. Chalmers,” she said. “There’s something happening here. I don’t know what. But some kids at school went crazy like this and attacked a teacher and the janitor. They killed them.”