John Brandon - Citrus County

“No, it was a dud.”

She made a face. “Well, I won’t charge you for this one. The owner says no returns, no refunds, no mercy, but there’s right and there’s wrong.”

“I appreciate that,” said Toby.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said. “This doesn’t mean you’re a regular.”

Uncle Neal left for a long job in Largo. For several days, Toby subsisted on corndogs, honey sandwiches, and a bin of cashews. He mixed up pitchers of punch, never finding the correct sweetness. He spent time in Uncle Neal’s rocker, waiting for the evening air to lose its heat. He went to track practice, where Coach Scolle, bored with Toby because he wouldn’t take the bait of the coach’s taunting, let him go his own way. The baby grasshoppers appeared, millions of them, black with bright stripes down their backs. They’d be everywhere for three weeks then promptly disappear, not showing themselves again until they were brown and thorny. The dishwasher broke and Toby found that he enjoyed doing dishes. He hung out in Uncle Neal’s shed for the heck of it, because he could, breathing the fumes of the hemlock.

One night, Toby dug some cans of beer out of the pantry and poured one over ice. He went to the back corner of the house and pulled himself onto the roof. He ran his palms over the shingles, took his shoes and socks off and then his shirt. He basked in the moonlight, slugging the old watery beer, until he abruptly climbed down from the roof and went to his room and dug out his mother’s hand mirror and clutched it to his chest. The mirror was the only thing of hers he had. He’d found it at the bottom of a box of his warm clothes, years after his mother had died. He squeezed the mirror in his fingers until he thought he might break it. Kidnapping Kaley, thus far, was not saving Toby from anything. He had performed a great act, but where were the great consequences? Everything was the same. Whatever had been wrong seemed more wrong now. For him and for Shelby. Why had he thought it would be a good idea to damage her? She could have been something good in his life. That’s why she was so scary. Maybe she still could be. Maybe Toby could manage all this. Just the day before, Shelby had walked Toby to track practice. She had dragged him around a corner, put her hands under his shirt and opened her fingers onto his ribs, had run them, prickly hot, up to his chest. She’d held him there until he had no choice but to kiss her again. They would kiss anytime it struck Shelby’s fancy. Toby supposed that was the deal. This time, he’d noticed that her thin lips did not feel thin at all. He’d pushed forward and she’d pushed back, pinning him against a wall. One of the sprinters had walked by then, and a hurdler, and Toby was relieved. Shelby withdrew her hands and backed up. Coach Scolle was approaching. She ran her hand over Toby’s buzzed head and strolled off into the dark shade behind the gym.

Toby pressed his mother’s mirror to his cheek and then stashed it back in the closet. He didn’t want to start up with the mirror again. If he needed the mirror he was in trouble, and maybe he wasn’t in trouble.

As the week wore on, Toby resorted to homework to distract his mind. He had plenty of math exercises to copy down, and a biology chapter to look at. He had to give a presentation on South Africa in Mr. Hibma’s class, so he checked an “S” encyclopedia out of the school library and lugged it home. To his disappointment, it contained nothing but straightforward facts — agriculture, population, land area. Mr. Hibma wasn’t interested in those things. He would want to know what country South Africa had a rivalry with, what illegal activity it was known for, who had been assassinated there. Toby had to incorporate food into his presentation. He had to get a South African song. Toby needed a good score, at least a B. He did not intend to fail a class or be subjected to summer school. Forging his detention slips, staring at the wall, getting detention at all — these were no longer part of the program. He wanted not only to continue being underestimated, he decided, but to start being ignored. He wanted to meet his obligations at school and with Kaley in the bunker and with track and field, and maybe if he did all that he’d know what to do about Shelby. He just needed to meet his obligations. Kaley would be fine. She could be somewhere else or she could be in the bunker. Toby looked at it that way: You don’t always get to choose where you are. Toby sure as hell didn’t.

Mr. Hibma had watched the half-hour loop of Headline News three times, staring at a story that had to do with insurance companies and all the recent hurricanes. He drank a glass of warm chocolate milk. He read two chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird . He could yawn, but not sleep. Glen Staulb had died. Glen Staulb was a New England playwright Mr. Hibma had been enamored with while in high school. Each of his plays was written according to a certain constraint; none of the characters could speak, or the lines had to be lifted from another play. Mr. Hibma, at the time, had considered Glen Staulb the height of brilliance, and though Mr. Hibma had since outgrown the gimmickry of the plays, he still valued the excitement they’d brought him, valued the time he’d spent alone with the pages feeling superior to the rest of the world because it was full of people who were lukewarm toward Glen Staulb, who hadn’t heard of Glen Staulb and didn’t care to. Mr. Hibma missed his youth in general, he realized, back when the knowledge that he was different from other people filled him with pride, not dread. Mr. Hibma was almost thirty. His mind was growing stale, his body stiff, but mostly he was exhausted by the idea of remaining in his life for another fifty years, for another five. He wished his life were a terse novella. He wished he knew how long he was destined to live. He wished he knew whether he’d be murdered or killed by a venomous snake or just waste away of old age.

He turned off the TV, set his dinner plate in the sink, threw out a tabloid he’d purchased that afternoon, and sat in front of his computer. He got himself onto the Internet and began poking around. The Internet, for Mr. Hibma, was a guilty pleasure. He missed no chance to publicly rail against computers, forbade his classes to research their presentations on the Internet, refused, no matter how heartily the other teachers urged him, to keep his grades and attendance and lesson plans on the computer, bragged about the layer of dust that blanketed the keyboard of the Gateway in his classroom.

He found his way to a site for a suntan lotion company, then a gambling site. When Mr. Hibma used the internet to masturbate, he did not allow himself to visit porn sites, finding it more rewarding to troll for incidentally sexy images. He didn’t want the women posed in ways expressly meant to make men masturbate. Mr. Hibma hit a travel site which featured a hot mother sprawled on the beach with her children. He found a site for women’s tennis. He undid his pants and slouched in the desk chair, awaiting an erection. Here was something, a French airline — stewardesses.

Mr. Hibma jumped in his chair, the breath startled from his lungs. It was the neighbor’s dog, with its piercing barking. It was like an old man hacking in your ear. Mr. Hibma’s heart was thumping, his penis as flaccid as it could be, a slick of jello in his palm. He shut down the computer, then sat in silence a minute until the dog started up again. It was a collie mix whose owners, about a month ago, had moved in two villas down from Mr. Hibma. They always left the dog on their porch, and it barked most every night. Mr. Hibma had complained to the owners, a fortyish couple who both wore flip-flops and both had dyed yellow hair. They weren’t going to do anything about the dog. The dog was something to be lived with. Like everything else.