Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“ Hell no.”

But then I realized that I could do this; I could do anything in the Twilight Zone of the Mute’s closet-size room — nobody was watching me but the Mute and the voiceless thing in the cage. Some hard pressure flew out of my chest then and launched me forward, like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my fingers through the cage door. I followed his lead, brushing the green straw off Saturday’s fur. Still I thought this was pretty stupid behavior, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.”

At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Mutis smiled shyly at me, opened a drawer. There was so much dust on the bureau that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had balanced on her ears, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to that old magician’s trick of pulling rabbits out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared in plaintive hand-lettering. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble in tempo with the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with multiples of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“Okay.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard; even Saturday, with her rump-shaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter a maple cavity that I assumed was their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, who would return your gaze without shame no matter what names you called him, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet, me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! flyers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST: MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you,” I said, in the old-man-with-a-flu voice that I used to excuse my own school absences.

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents, too.

“Yes. That is exactly right. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. “I know where you can find your rabbit.” Then I heard myself reciting, in this false, ancient voice, the address of Eric Mutis.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back.

“Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful , she loves being home !”

At school, I may have been the only one to note the change in Mutant. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his whole face puckered with strain — as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks, emptied of even one flickering thought — just like a doll’s eyes, in fact. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless blue planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October, and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry—” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

On Sunday night, Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional.

“Jesus H., are we graduating from something? Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

“This is stupid,” he mumbled, staring down the grass alley toward the deeper shadows. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

I was glad he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to appease whatever forces I had unleashed a year ago, when we’d made the real Eric into a doll.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there. Who gives a fuck what happens to the scarecrow? Why save a doll?”

But I knew what I had to do now. I wouldn’t let the Attacker, whoever or whatever it was, dismantle the doll of Eric Mutis completely, carry him out of our memories a second time.