The second I realized it I wanted to shoot myself.
Wait. Poor choice of words.
Let me start over: Anthony and I were walking back to the car from the mall. He was hugging the big plastic bag with half water, half air, and his brand new pet goldfish, grinning like a 7-year-old boy is supposed to grin. This is great, I thought. Getting him a goldfish was a great idea. He hasn’t smiled like this since the funeral.
That’s when I realized it. The idea poured into my slow dumb brain like molasses.
You don’t cheer up a little boy whose mother just died by getting him a pet with a life expectancy of five days.
“Right over there at that rest stop, a boy killed himself. Oh, it was a long time ago. He had just come back from the War and after about two or three months he just went and shot himself. Well. At first, his mama and daddy didn’t want nothing to do with him.”
“Why?”
“Well, they was embarrassed. Then, after a while, they said alright, they’d have a funeral. And we went, and that preacher stood up there in front of that boy’s parents –they was Baptist- and said, your boy is going to HELL, the Lord hates suicide, and all. Well I wanted to get up but your grandfather kept holding my arm, saying sit still, sit still. I just was never so mad in all my life. Oh! To do that boy’s parents that a way.”
What made William a real asshole (even at age 9) wasn’t just that he dared Jeremy Flemmons to find a way to stick a quarter in his brother’s crack without Gary realizing it. It was that he told the entire school that, when Gary got home and went to the bathroom, he shrieked, “Mom, I pooped a quarter!” at the top of his lungs.
At lunch, William did impressions of his brother nonstop while the whole table just roared. Allison Gilbert laughed so hard she spit out her sandwich, and that made everyone laugh even harder. William loved it. “Mooooooom,” he kept howling. He could do his brother's voice perfect. “Ah pooped a QUAH-TAH! It’s a QUAH-TAH, Momma!” Holy lord, I know it was mean, but was it funny. “And it didn’t even HURT!!!”
Now, as far as any of us can remember, it was right after that when Gary started acting different.
Alice knelt in front of the biggest pyramid, the hot sand cutting into her knee where she had fallen scrambling through the marketplace the day before. She swept the rocks away and set the box down. After a year of living with it constantly by her side, every inch of its splintered frame had become completely familiar. Suddenly she gasped. All the air flew out of her lungs. It was as if she had been punched in the gut – there was a dark, heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Alice concentrated. She had been warned about this part. She tightened her lips, grasped the handle firmly, and for the first time in over a thousand years, the crank to the oblong wooden box turned.
Manny nearly choked on his coffee when he walked into his office and saw the book lying on his desk. He shut the door behind him quickly, checking desperately to make sure no one had seen it. The venetian blinds swung and smacked against the door where his name was carefully stenciled on the glass.
Manny’s hands shook, spilling coffee on the checkered floor as he gaped at the book that had been mysteriously left on his desk after last night’s violent struggle. Holeyman. It could only mean one thing: His secret identity had been discovered.
