John Brandon - Citrus County

On the way back, he stopped at the mailboxes. There was a letter, forwarded from Clermont. D. Register. Mr. Hibma rubbed his thumb over the return address. His ears began to buzz. Holy shit, Dale had written him back. Mr. Hibma’s forehead tingled. He had no idea who he was. He was in the middle of Florida, at a bank of mailboxes. He sniffed the envelope and it smelled salty. He wasn’t going to fumble ripping it open. He was going to tear it evenly across the top.

Mr. H,

I have decided to respond to you even with the risk that your plan is not in earnest, because if you fail to do what you propose, your letters themselves may constitute some sort of art. I understand that this is probably a hoax, but the world needs all kinds of people, even perpetrators of hoaxes.

Mr. Hibma didn’t feel stoned anymore. When a stranger from another continent challenges the validity of your very self, you are no longer stoned. Dale had written him back. His letter hadn’t been redirected by handlers. Dale was interested in Mr. Hibma. She wanted to believe he could kill someone. She wouldn’t say that, but Mr. Hibma knew. Inside, she was rooting for him. She believed in his old self, the self from before he’d started trying to change. She wasn’t a stranger. Mr. Hibma had something like a friend. For him, this was what a friend was.

Mr. Hibma felt like a con man and he felt gullible. He’d conned himself with this plan to mold himself into a real middle school teacher, a monitor, a mentor, and he’d fallen for it. What was he trying to do to himself — hosting wing meetings and buying greeting cards and forcing his smile on everyone and carrying his burritos across the hall to the lounge to sit in there with the rest of them? He’d seen this as his future and it was coming apart in a matter of moments. He was ashamed. He’d been trying to make things easier on himself, as if they ever could be.

Mr. Hibma went inside and gorged himself on the rugelachs, stopping every couple minutes to read Dale’s letter again. It was handwritten. Mr. Hibma had Dale’s handwriting and she had his. He was getting grease smudges all over the paper. He didn’t care. He had no idea what Dale looked like, and he wished he could picture her at her desk, overlooking Reykjavik, a begrudged grin on her face as she wrote Mr. Hibma’s reply. He had no idea if he was conning Dale as he’d conned himself. He had no idea if he could follow through on his proposal, and he didn’t expect to know. It wasn’t something you guessed at. Mr. Hibma was going to find out if he was indeed a perpetrator of hoaxes. He was going to find out if he could change the basic fabric of his life. He was going to call his own bluff.

His evening free, Toby took a walk with Shelby after track practice. The days were getting longer. The woods were producing that ticking sound that came with heat. They walked alongside a straight country road on a trail beaten into the weeds. They neared the post office and could hear that something was happening on the other side. It was a fundraiser. Toby and Shelby listened to some people talking and understood what it was for. The last train that would ever push itself through Citrus County was scheduled for next Thursday, and after that the tracks would have no use. These people had gathered with the intention of turning the tracks into a bike trail. They looked like bikers, most of them. Toby could imagine them wearing fingerless gloves and bright helmets.

“I don’t know how I feel about this,” Shelby said. “Walking along train tracks is important for little kids.”

“I used to do it,” said Toby.

They did a lap around the gathering. There were T-shirts, bumper stickers. Someone from a bike shop had a table set up. Everyone was united.

“I’m not going to worry about it,” Shelby said. “I’m going to support this.” She took a five-dollar bill out of one of her pockets and dropped it in a big jar. “It’s not my job to protest things.”

“We’re entitled to a hot dog,” Toby said.

They moved to the refreshment table and picked up hot dogs and cans of soda. There was a backhoe sitting on the edge of the post office lawn, and Toby and Shelby went and sat in the yellow scoop, in the shade. The backhoe was enormous. It was hard to say if its presence was related to the fundraiser.

Toby sipped his soda. He unwrapped his hot dog from many layers of limp tin foil. He felt comfortable with all the people around. He liked being with Shelby when there was no chance of them making out. He watched her open ketchup packets and mustard packets and squeeze them.

“My mom used to take these from places,” she said.

Toby didn’t really want his hot dog, now that he smelled it. The soda was enough.

“Fast food places,” Shelby said. “Even something like this. She’d clean them out. We had buckets of sweetener.”

“Were you poor?” Toby asked.

“Not really. She was, growing up.”

“I don’t consider that stealing,” Toby said.

“To this day, when I use a big ketchup bottle it feels like a treat.”

Shelby stacked the empty packets in the tin foil and balled the foil up. She took a bite of her hot dog. Dusk was coming on, but there were no crickets out or anything. People were still showing up to the gathering, hardly anywhere to park.

“Look at that little thing,” Shelby said.

Toby craned his neck. It was a tree frog, right next to Shelby’s leg. It looked frightened. It didn’t belong in the scoop of the backhoe, shady spot or not.

“I used to have one of those as a pet,” Toby said.

“Did you catch it and keep it in a jar?”

“He appeared in my shower one day. Every time I went in there he was in a different spot.”

“Did you name him?”

Toby shook his head. He watched Shelby wipe ketchup off her lip.

“He kept losing color,” he said. “See how that one’s so green?”

Shelby didn’t move away from the frog, but she didn’t try to touch it either.

“There was nothing for him to eat. I had to let him go.”

Shelby looked at Toby before she finished her hot dog. “That counts,” she said. “That’s a story you shared with me.”

Toby shrugged.

“I’d like to see somebody say it wasn’t.”

Toby looked over at the crowd. The edge of the backhoe scoop was digging into his legs. He had given Shelby something of himself, but he felt like he’d gotten something. He’d given and now he had more. That was the trick. The thing he’d been trying to get from Shelby, whatever it was, he could only get by giving. He could smell Shelby. She smelled like clean, clear water. He moved his hot dog farther away from him. He didn’t want to leave the backhoe scoop. In the scoop, he didn’t have to think about anything he didn’t want to think about.

That night, Toby got his mother’s hand mirror and carried it out of his bedroom, out onto the porch, where he sat heavily in Uncle Neal’s rocker. He set the mirror in an empty chair, the chair he usually sat in. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. He grasped the mirror and looked at himself. His hair had grown to the point where he looked wild, disgraced. Toby had been thrown into the wrong life. He wanted a life where there was nothing between him and Shelby. He wanted to have that life without having to strand Kaley in the bunker. He was a kidnapper and might soon become something worse, but he was still a kid too. He could feel himself as a kid with a ripening heart who looked forward to things, who borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else, who loved dumbly like people were meant to.

He would’ve given anything to go back to the beginning of the semester. There’d been nothing wrong with his old self. He’d been blind, about a lot of things. He saw now that he’d needed Mr. Hibma’s detentions. He missed them. In detention, he was a kid. Mr. Hibma was the closest thing Toby’d had to an adult who gave a shit about him. He’d made it seem that Toby’s actions had consequences. He’d sat there with Toby, just the two of them, instead of going home, and sometimes the silent air of the classroom had been tinged with relief — Toby and Mr. Hibma, the both of them, relieved to have a part to play. And look at Toby now. He’d been away from the bunker for five days. He could barely get a bite down. He didn’t sleep, didn’t dream. He knew Kaley was out of food. She was starving and he couldn’t eat. As bad as Toby’s life had been, he’d never seen a situation as desperate as Kaley’s was right now. She was alive, but her thoughts had run out. She probably had no more emotions, not a trace of anger.