1

Once you see one, you see them all.

She’d seen cameras everywhere. Ever since Byron had pointed out the two in the school’s lobby. And it was eye opening. Because they started to stand out. The shadows started disappearing like melting wax beneath a flame, and that flicker was the obviousness of something she’d missed for so long, that she’d looked past, that she figured blindness and familiarity were truly compatible. The cameras were in the trees, on the lampposts; they were littered in the belt and they were in the mall, they were in the restaurants, in the gas station, in Mr Sub and BB’s Rentals. And she wondered if they were all somehow connected. If Byron was right. If there was something strange going on in Reedy Creek that should discourage her from going to see Mr Perez, because the principal, the cops, they were all in on some enormous conspiracy keeping the wheels turning like some erratic flooded brook through what was once peaceful. And she considered as she counted out the cameras, as she counted the ones she could clearly see that were once invisible to her, that going to see Perez seemed unwise on account of those unfounded rumors that were now starting to make sense. That scared her. But Randy wasn’t at school. And Ms Hopson, Avery, told her he’d run away. That she expected the worse but respected the decision temporarily to allow him to blow off some smoke. Ange didn’t believe her. She heard guilt in her tone when they spoke. Ange respected the hell out of her for being honest, but a part of her blamed the woman as well, didn’t it? A part of her wondered what Randy might have been like had his mother not deigned to turn herself into a party dish.

He wouldn’t have held this grudge for so long. He wouldn’t have been this person he’s turned himself into to become something different than his dad. Something unique.

Ange was standing in the Secondary’s lobby, staring up at the camera above the admin pool for a moment, clutching to her backpack. The office was empty. Byron hadn’t called a teacher a prick. She smirked when she pushed open the glass door. Mrs Lemkin only looked up at her from the desk, her glasses perched on the tip of her cherubic nose, her lashes fluttering and her mouth puckered closed in apathetic impatience.

“The guys are all talking about you. Sayin’ you’re like, a goodie-goodie or something. Saying you’re hanging with greasers, punks, fags. Ange, what’s going on with you? You said we could be different here. You said Reedy Creek would be good for us.”

Ange had looked at Wendy. Horace was off to Adam’s grampa’s funeral, and she knew mom was going as well. They were standing outside, feeling the early fall breeze threaten winter, prompting them to break out their cute jackets. She’d looked up and spotted a camera on the bole of the tree in their yard. She felt like their lives, their privacy, had been invaded by some unseen power. She suddenly felt dirty. Like she had when Brad pushed into her on the couch. When he wouldn’t listen to her cries. “Don’t listen to them.”

“But…but, they’re popular here, Ange. They throw the parties. Rule the school. And I want that. I thought we wanted that.”

“We did.”

“But, what, Randy changed that for you? Is he really that great, Ange?”

“It’s not just about Randy, Wendy. And it never was. Brad…the guys,” she hated saying his name. Hated the sound of it as the word left her mouth. “—They don’t give a shit about what we think as long as we think what they do.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re not their friends. We’re their accessories. The moment they haven’t got a use for us, they’ll treat us like trash.”

“That’s bullshit, Ange. It is. Brad even said he wants to go out. He still really likes you, ya know. He said so. Maybe I’m second resort, or whatever, but if it means I’ll be at the parties, if it means people will know my name, then right now I don’t care.” Wendy pulled back her dark hair and smirked. “It means we don’t have to be prim and proper, like in Provo. That was boring.”

Ange had taken Wendy by the shoulders; she wanted to shake her sister, but thought growing up involved learning your own lessons. “Brad isn’t a good guy. He’s not. He’s cute, but that’s an excuse.”

“A good one.”

“Right now, yeah, but he uses it to get what he wants. And if he likes you, Wendy, if he does, you can’t stop him.”

“What does that mean? Jesus, Ange, what does that even mean?”

She couldn’t answer. Because saying it out loud, bringing somebody else into her misery would make what happened even realer. It would.

“It means you are what you are now until you aren’t.” It was that simple and that complicated, all at the same time.

Ange went up to Mrs Lemkin and forced a smile. “I’m here to see Mr Perez.”

“So you are,” the secretary said indifferently, flipping through her appointment book and glancing non-chalantly at the principal’s closed door. “I’ll let him know you’re here.” She buzzed the principal. “Have a seat, will you?” She gestured toward the row of chairs she’d seen Byron sitting in when Ange had first come in.

Ange sat down and waited while Mrs Lemkin spoke on the phone to Mr Perez. A minute later Lemkin looked up at her: “He will see you now. Door’s unlocked.”

Angela stood up and nodded her head. She went to the office door and pushed it open, revealing the dim, almost lugubrious veneer of shadows in the man’s office; the venetian blinds were closed, letting in only slats of light from the courtyard outside where a few students usually leaned against the wall for a smoke, and the boardroom desk near the entryway was stacked with books and papers, some spread out upon the oak surface in a scattered fray, as if the man had been in the throes of studying. She recognized Adam’s dad’s book, the one her own father called cuckoo. Horace said the guy, Trevor Kramer, was never around but when he was, he wasn’t the type to give a shit about hosting kids. Mr Perez was sitting at his desk, breathing awkwardly, clutching to the edge of his oak credenza with one hand and then sliding back in his chair to re-adjust. His computer was positioned by his face so that she could just see his eyes, strained and incredulous, his thinning hair wet with sweat above his flushed and beaded forehead. She always thought the man was grossly out of shape, that the gut above his pants jostled like jelly whenever he walked and that he would likely die of cardiac arrest. She figured his complexion would look the same whenever that happened. It was the sort of observation Brad would have laughed at. And then his friends when he gave them his approval.

“Ms Nelson,” he said, kindly enough, tapping his thumb now on the table. He gestured for her to sit down. She pulled out the chair and swivelled in, her knees brushing the backside of his desk; she heard something scuffle behind the plywood and figured it was the man’s legs shuffling. “I’ve been informed you have some concerns about one of our students.”

“Yuh—yes sir. My boyfriend, actually. He’s, well, there’s no easy way to say this, but I’m worried about him. So is his mom. I’m not sure she’s the type to come flailing about those worries, but I am.”

“And the problem is?” There was more shifting under the desk. Ange heard it distinctly and wondered if the man was dancing a light jig.

“He’s doing drugs…”

“I’d assume a lot of students are doing drugs, Ms Nelson.”

“Well…maybe…” She wasn’t sure what to say. She saw the certainty in his eyes, yellowing bulbs lit beneath an arc of doughy red flesh. “Sir, I thought you could help in, I don’t know, intervening. Speaking to him. His mom’s tried. He and his mom, they have a, well, strained relationship.”

“And say what, Ms Nelson? What I’ve learned of students in my brief tenure here is that their will and their obstinate compunction to rebel will only encourage and invite your…your boyfriend to dabble in more, shall we say, narcotics. Because kids don’t care what we in authority have to say, and the more we outlaw certain activities, the more those very activities become enticing. You understand I’d just be reinforcing the behavior, don’t you?”

“I don’t…know…I just…” She wasn’t sure why she’d even come. But maybe it was because she needed to hear this. The sonofabitch is selling the shit. He is. He’s selling the shit and using Lazarus as his mascot. Byron’s right, he is. The authority uses the punks as their fall boys. Christ. She thought she might be sick.

“Listen, Ms Nelson. Angela, is it?”

She only nodded. Feeling her face flush.

“I know how this sounds.” More shuffling under the desk.

What is this prick even doing down there?

“I do. You came here with good intentions. I see that. But experimentation is a passage of rite for kids. I would elect to offer warning about what truly matters to the community right now, Angela. There is a killer on the loose. The mayor is even enforcing a curfew. We are witnessing a serious backlash to these recent murders, so right now I’m not certain the police would even respond to a report about drug abuse at the Secondary.”

Ange waited a moment to see what else he might say. How else he could implicate himself. To cement what Byron had told her. She quickly glanced around for cameras in his office but didn’t see any. Not readily, at least. She stood up, sliding back the chair and slinging the strap of her pack over her shoulder. She thought she’d just been lied to. That she was witnessing what an adult would conceivably say to protect his own skin. She thought it was despicable. She wasn’t sure if the man was a part of any conspiracy, she wasn’t, but she knew that as a principal he was supposed to take certain allegations with a level of seriousness. Especially drugs.

“Thank you, sir.” She only nodded her head when he smiled.

“Remember, Angela. There is a curfew in effect.”

“Yes sir.” She closed the door behind her and wondered why the man, the principal, would be so cocksure about a curfew but indifferent to a drug accusation.

Because he’s in on it, a voice hinted, and she was finally starting to believe it.

2

Croak watched them through the vent. He was told there was a loose grille in the cafeteria behind the garbage bins. And there was. The screws’ threads were nearly rubbed down to smooth cones, and they pulled out of the wall with ease when he pinched his finger and thumb on the heads. They rattled in his pockets as he shimmied around the tin corridors, smelling the cloying musk of re-circulated air, of the rusting flanges on the school’s boiler, of the countless spiders and insects, now just desiccated husks blown in clumps into the sharp edges, of the rats and their bones sitting now as their memorial of an existence lived scavenging the scraps from a cafeteria prone to leaving old rotting foods on the floor long after having dropped them from plates or ladles.

Here he was now. Staring down at the principal below him, pushed deep into his credenza, Pug’s sister across from him, their voices lost to the strange thrum of the school’s ventilation beating deep in the gut of the place.

“You’re looking for evidence.”

“Of what?”

“I think you will know it when you see it.”

He was turning the camera on the council. That was his part of the operation. And he thought Darrel Janz, or the moon-mural version of the guy, was just an incredibly odd part of Grimwood’s convincing abilities. That whoever the man under the town truly was, he carried with and in him a significant ability to negotiate in his favor. He had his orders. But were they really orders if you were getting something of equal value in return? He didn’t think so. The vent was both warm and cold, suffocating and airy; it was a channel of contradictions, and he hated being inside. He hated the feel of the sticky tin against his fingers; he could hear people talking in murmurs through the walls and ceiling. He was outside everything in here. Outside but still accessible. He felt like one of the cameras, hidden, out of sight but always watching. And he figured the prospect was exciting. His Polaroid, which had already played a part in convincing the girl in the principal’s office to go on a date with his brother, dangled slightly from his neck, its weight burdensome and clunky. He watched the principal shift his hips awkwardly and he thought he saw his belt buckle splayed to the side, hanging on his chair’s seat. He thought he saw the man’s pants hiked down some, showing flashes of his underwear, even his bare ass.

Pug’s sister was not seeing any of this. She looked once up at him, behind the vent, but it was momentary. She didn’t actually see him, but maybe sensed that she was being watched. When she did finally stand up, he thought she looked disheartened. But enlightened at the same time. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Wasn’t sure what the two could have been talking about. Angela closed the door and then it was just the principal. Sitting there. And now Croak was certain the man’s pants were cinched down, hugging deftly to his plump hips.

He slowly pulled the Polaroid camera from around his neck, grabbing the strap tightly; he knew what he had to do with the pictures after he took them. Knew what he had to write. But until then he wasn’t sure what the evidence would be. Whatever it is, Grimwood’s already aware of it.

Mr Perez pushed his chair back away from the desk and now Croak could see that his belt was undone. He could see the stark white of the man’s underwear, could see the flayed open zipper, and he watched somebody crawl out from under the desk, her dress hiked over her hips, her hair bunched up and coming undone where the bobby pins must have pulled out. Whatever she was doing under there, it was wrong. Croak knew that. It was wrong and it was exciting. Because the two had done it before an unwitting audience. Like changing in front of an open window, taking off your shirt when you think somebody might be standing out there watching.

Mr Perez stood up and quickly buttoned his pants, looping closed his belt under the great heft of his stomach; and the woman stood as well, pulling down the hem of her dress and sweeping back awry strands of hair. When Mrs Napolitano went to kiss Mr Perez, pulling him as she grabbed the shoulder closest to her, he snapped a photo. And again when Mr Perez’s hand reached down to grab her posterior, her tongue flicking his ear, in and out. Like something out of one of Pug’s dad’s movies. When he took the second photo they both looked up at him, at the vent. He could feel his heart racing as their eyes were on him, not looking at him or seeing him but gauging something’s presence. So he left them. The principal and the sheriff’s wife.

His evidence.

3

“You have a sec to talk?”

“Everything cool?”

She wasn’t sure. Right now she saw an element of safety in Byron. She’d been looking around for him and finally saw him at his locker, pulling out a book. She wasn’t even sure where to begin in the first place. She hadn’t really seen him around school, so the fact they met when they did proved a particular sort of coincidence. Like thinking of a number in your head and then seeing evidence of it everywhere in the world. Screaming at you. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“You talk to Perez?”

She only nodded. She didn’t want to be here anymore. Didn’t want to be at the school, didn’t want to be in Reedy Creek. It all felt wrong now.

“Wouldn’t do anything, would he?”

She shook her head, looking down at his graphic T: this time it was a portrait of Mao Zedong, but with an etched Hitler-stache.

Byron tucked back the book in his locker and licked his lips. “We can’t really talk here. I don’t trust that they’re not listening. If you can skip out on class for a bit, we can chat where I know they won’t be watching.”

“I think…I think I need that.”

Ange walked with Byron out the back door by the parking lot where a few of the guys were smoking, leaning against their cars, most likely talking about the killer on the loose and making believe what they might do to that Stevenson guy if they ever caught him. Egos. It was always about egos. She understood that now. Popularity for a guy was different because it didn’t have anything to do with how many friends you had but with how people perceived you. Your prowess. Your potential.

The baseball field was ahead. She saw the cameras on the light posts. She’d never really noticed them before. She’d seen them, yes, but she never acknowledged them. They didn’t matter because they weren’t in her orbit. “They’re everywhere,” she said, nudging up at the closest lens, its black convex like a reflective stripe on the pole. She felt like they were in a prison yard.

“Yup. My friend Billy Stridel said he saw one in his bathroom. He was scared to touch it. His family rents from some landlord that bought up properties around the time the Corners came, and he thinks this guy’s just some pervert or something, thinks touching it, breaking it will get them evicted.”

“Jesus,” she whispered. “But…but you don’t buy it?”

“Not a damn word,” Byron said. He looked serious. He swiped his hair off his brow and shared a slight smirk. “After you,” he offered. They were standing by the bleachers; she knew this was where some of the losers came to get high, but that wasn’t her observation. It was what Brad and the guys said. That the faggots and greasers, the punkers and loners came to the stands to hang in the shadows and light up where the popular kids couldn’t mess with them. And here she was now. She hunched down and climbed into the shade. She could smell pot; she could taste its organic putrescence on her tongue. She smoked the shit over summer because Brad did. Because she liked him and she wanted him to like her. Because popularity was a game of coaxing and giving in. Of pressure and acceptance. She smiled when the guys looked up at her. There were three others down here, passing around a joint, their hair long just like Byron’s, wearing torn jeans and plaid shirts tied like belts around their waists. A little like Bender from the Breakfast Club. Yeah, like they saw the movie and made a pact to be Judd Nelson’s kids. She smiled. She remembered one or two of them actually coming to BB’s over the summer to rent the flick and she figured there was some truth to the quip.

“Hey Ministers,” Byron said, “this is a fellow seeker. Angela.”

The guys nodded and smiled. They weren’t cute. Not in the conventional sense of the word. But they were striking in their mysteriousness. She thought that was a benefit to them. “Ministers?”

Byron laughed. “You read Orwell?”

“Animal Farm. Yeah.”

“1984. This is the Minitrue under here, Angela. The Ministry of Truth. But not in that bullshit, ironic Newspeak from the book. We aren’t here to falsify, that’s what Reedy Creek’s already doing. We’re here to make sure two plus two is always four.”

“Instead of?”

“Five,” Byron said. “The truth isn’t fluid. It doesn’t change according to who is in power. The truth is the truth. But that ain’t true anymore here.”

The guys smoking up all nodded. “I’m Taylor,” the one with the sparse showings of a mustache said, his hair like blond drips of wax curling over his face.

“Clay,” the next guy said, this one starting to deeply inhale the joint pinched between his fingers, nails painted black, and liner tracing his rather plump lips. Ange thought he might be good looking if he tried. He had striking blue eyes.

“I’m Martin,” the last guy said, this one most resembling Judd Nelson, down to the tied flannel and undone combat boots that looked about three sizes too big. His shoulders were hulking and sloped, and once he stood, Ange figured he might be 6’2. “You’re usually chummin’ with that prick Brad and his gang.”

“Used to,” Ange said. She sat down in the grass, brushing aside old cigarette butts.

“He’s a cocksucker. So is his dad. And his gramps.” Martin only smiled and took the joint, wiping his nose before taking a deep drag. “His gramps most of all. Heard the piece of shit has a problem with the,” he touched his nose and sniffed twice. The other guys laughed. This was not something they’d say to Brad. Ange knew that. She wondered if they understood how crazy he really was. What he was capable of.

“She’s seen the cameras. Suspects Perez is in on everything,” Byron said.

“So you’ve opened your eyes,” Clay said. “Good on ya.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Taylor said. “This place is safe. Can’t see shit under here. The Watchers may just sit and wonder what the punks are doing under the bleachers. And that’s all they can do. Till they send out their footsoldiers.”

“Footsoldiers?”

“Jesus, Byron, where did ya find her?” Martin snarked.

“Ya know. Storm Troopers. Head honchos send out the muscle to do the groundwork. This whole town is one big operation. An experiment. It’s a fishbowl and I bet the feds are pulling the strings and planting sleeper cells in positions of authority. Guys like Perez in the principal’s office, Napolitano with the badge. My dad said that fucker was a prof or something, but there were rumors that he was a plagiarist and he lost his job. I don’t know. What I do is that he’s a cop now in this shithole under intense surveillance. You find any cams in your house?”

“What?” Ange asked.

“Shit, you even looked?”

She hadn’t. Not because she couldn’t find any but because she thought there were still sacred spaces, there were still inviolable privacies extended to Americans. She only swallowed and crossed her legs.

“I found one in my parents’ room,” Clay said. “And another in the TV room. I guess the feds wanted to see if I played with my pecker when my ma and dad went out for a movie or whatever.”

“You tell your folks?” Ange asked.

“Nope. Because the thing is, there’s a line drawn in the sand. The rule makers and the rule obeyers. When you’re still living with the ‘rents or hiding under bleachers to smoke up and talk politics, your opinion doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. So you stay on your side and you don’t discuss shit with people outta the shadows.”

“Why?”

“Because they wouldn’t believe it. They just sit and watch Reagan prattle, they take for granted that we’re the better in the Cold War cause the Soviets are oppressive. But then you look at these cameras, all of them, just everywhere, and you start to wonder if the Soviets are just a scapegoat, ya know. Like the fuckin’ bad guy in Scooby Doo, and once you pull off the mask it’s just Reagan or Bush under with a shit-eatin’ grin sayin’, ‘damn, you caught us, we’re just one big world conspiracy, congrats, but now you gotta die to keep the secret safe.’ Then BAM.” Clay startled Ange, slamming his fist into his open palm. “They find your body with a suicide note and a gunshot wound to the back of your head.”

“We all have them in our homes,” Byron said.

“I don’t understand,” Ange said. “How can they do that?”

“This place is an experiment. A grand sociological display of immigrants and rural bumpkins clashing. Maybe a federal oriented cesspool, a game Washington’s playing. People making bets and shit on who will do what next. Maybe these murders, maybe they’re orchestrated as well to gauge response. Think about it. This place is literally run now by Pure Ethanol. The subsidies coming in, they ain’t just for the corn; they’re for the cameras, for the surveillance. We are like a microcosmic example of America writ large. The drug game, the gun game, it’s all on play here. It is. Maybe they’re testing how policies will work here before they expand. Maybe a group of government big wigs are sitting with their feet up watching Reedy Creek on primetime. One old general’s saying, ‘I bet the fuckin’ pharmacist is going to bite it,’ and then voila, the guy’s murdered. And I heard it wasn’t just murder, either. I hear he and that girl Sarah, they were marked. In blood. Accused for their sins or something. And that sounds to me like the twisted shit big wigs would like to watch when Knot’s Landing ceases to impress.”

Martin laughed and Clay followed. Taylor took another hit of the joint and held the smoke in his mouth. Ange was in disbelief.

“I know it’s hard to hear.”

“It sounds like bullshit. All of it.”

Byron sighed. “Maybe it is. Maybe the Minitrue down here is just hiding from the bullies. But you’re assuming the government has your best interests at heart, and not their own. You ever hear of false flags?”

Ange hadn’t. Not off the top of her head. But she didn’t want to appear obtuse. Not in front of these guys. She hated now only thinking of what she might find in her house if she looked. If there were cameras in there, she hated what that could even mean. How that would change her opinion about the States, about her government. Her dad had only glowing things to say about Ronnie Reagan, and she more or less only heard him in passing but thought she agreed. She did. But what Perez had just done to scoot her out of his office. It didn’t seem right.

“It’s the shit one country does to conspire against another. Like a military operation where you’re invading, say, Cuba, but you’re flying the Canadian flag to indict them of the war crime. It’s covert shit. What the Germans did to their own people but blamed on the Poles so they could justify invading. Or, shit, the Reichstag fire, started by some young commie, and used by the Nazis to prove the Communists were plotting to overthrow the Reich. This was just stoking the fire of Hitler’s recent inauguration in creating an enemy to continue his own march toward history. The CIA did the same shit in Iran to overthrow that Prime Minister they didn’t like too much. Mo-sa-ddegh, or however the hell you pronounce it.”

“It’s simple,” Martin added. “We know we’re at war with the Soviets. You don’t even need to use a literal flag, but you use their influence, and throw up cameras, a whole shit ton of them even, and you say you suspect there’s Russian influence, there’s KGB agents or whatever, and that’s supposed to make it okay. That’s what Reedy Creek is.”

“A Russian operation?”

Martin laughed. “No, Angela. We’re in the fucking nucleus of an American experiment using the Russians as a false flag. These farmers hate the city people. They do. They’re on opposite sides of politics and culture; there’s nothing in common between them. I should know. I was born here and my pops works the tractor. These cameras are pretty brand spankin’ new. And they went up the moment Pure Ethanol started recruiting and hiring, and the big city people started slurping up the funds available. I mean, look at the expansion here. I know you’re new. I know you ain’t a Creeker, so you don’t know how sparse this place was. How barren. Cameras go up and the mayor puts together some sort of council. Not a chamber of commerce, not representatives voted for by anybody, just a bunch of academics who as far as we’re concerned have very little purpose beyond writing big words in fancy publications. I mean, shit, one of them’s a goddamn bestselling writer who got his little ass handed to him on a nationally broadcast debate from Harvard. The sheriff’s a professor. So is the principal. And the head honcho, that Paul Holdren guy, he must be sipping some sort of immunity from the progs cause I read he was nearly implicated in the mass murder-suicide of a group of environmentalists and donors in D.C. What are they doing here?”

“They’re running the drugs,” Byron said. “Perez and Napolitano are overseeing the running game. They import from out of town on the big rigs coming through with lumber deliveries for the housing projects. And they use Lazarus to play the dealer so their hands don’t get dirty.”

“How the hell do you know this?”

Byron looked at the guys and then at Angela. He hadn’t taken a hit of the joint and only shook his head when it was passed his way. It was quiet in the field right now. A slight breeze stirred his hair. “Cause when you know you’re being watched, you kind of wanna watch back. You want ammo on them if they have it on you. It’s the why we don’t know. Why is there a council of writers and profs running this game. Look, fucked up thing is, we found a box of tapes in the summer.”

“It was in the woods out by 34,” Clay added. “We were smoking out where the cars drown out everything, cause we followed a deer out as far as these firs near an old farmhouse earlier in June, I think, and the place just stuck.”

“Yeah, and there was a box. Pretty dry. It was just put out there. I don’t know. Can’t remember if it had rained or not. But it wasn’t there the day before. There were tapes inside. VHS. Labeled too. With dates. We went to Taylor’s place and popped one in. It was, well, it was candid footage of this girl. In her bathroom. Putting on make-up. That kind of stuff. She was very pretty. I think Martin, I think he fell in love with her.”

“Fuck you,” Martin jibed.

“We watched them all. All of those tapes. And they were just of this girl. At home. At work. She was a waitress. We…we saw her life as she lived it without…without the assumption anybody was watching. It was so…intrusive. Invasive. It felt wrong, but at the same time, we just couldn’t get enough of it, ya know. I mean, this was a real girl, here in Reedy Creek, and for some reason there was a box of tapes of her in the woods. Clay wanted to find her so we could give the tapes to her, but I thought that was stupid. Cause she didn’t look like she knew about them. She…shit, she showered on these. And we watched her. I know how that sounds, Angela, I do, but you can’t help getting drawn in when something’s so…real.” Byron’s cheeks flushed. “She was beautiful and raw and normal. We liked that. But—” Byron looked away, toward the field where leaves were brushed along the grass in currents.

“She got in a huge car accident, like, a week or so after we found the tapes. It was in the Post,” Taylor said, looking down at his fingers, at his shoes, as if he was embarrassed.

“Elizabeth Hedges,” Ange whispered. She remembered the story in the Post. How violent the accident had been.

“That’s right,” Byron said. “We watched her live just before she died. Maybe as she died. We fucking burned the box of tapes out in the woods, choked on the smoke. But it felt right. We didn’t want to be associated with them. Didn’t want them tied to us. Because it felt perverted and sick and we didn’t want to know why we found them where we did. Who might have left them. Who was keeping them or cataloguing them. We just didn’t care. Because it was…it was wrong.”

“You did the right thing,” Ange said.

“We stopped by her funeral service. Saw it in her obit. Didn’t know her. But we saw what her death meant to the people who did. And, shit, it was crushing.” Byron wiped the corner of his eye and then feigned a smile. “Nobody there knew what we’d done. What we’d seen. But after that, we started noticing everything a lot more. The cameras. And we wondered if somebody might find a similar box one day. Maybe even tapes of us categorized inside. And the thought is fucking terrifying, because I wouldn’t put it past this place.”

“So what does the Minitrue do?” Ange asked, smiling, hoping to somehow calm down Byron and ward away the guilt. Because she could feel the guilt growing under these bleachers like the soupy humidity of some tropical jungle.

“This. We smoke and we inform when we can.” Martin smiled.

“But you…don’t tell anybody who matters? You don’t go to the…the press? The Post? There’s a story here. A big one.”

“There’s a death sentence,” Byron said. “You talk, you die. Cause you’re meddling with something bigger than you. Who knows what that girl, Elizabeth, what she did to put focus on her, but that accident, it was staged. False flag. We know it was. It didn’t sound real, and when we went by there, it didn’t look real either. Nothing about it seemed…organic. Maybe she died cause she found tapes just like us. Maybe she meddled.”

“But you can’t know that.”

“We know for now we might be safe, Angela, because we’re under the radar. We’re on the other side of the line. Adults don’t give a shit about us until we’re in their world. Until then we can just prepare.”

“You sound like a…like a fucking coward,” Angela said. She stood up, careful not to hit her head on the underside of the bleacher or get any of that old gum in her hair.

“You just got introduced to the shit. You don’t have a right to judge or throw out accusations,” Byron said, his eyes cross.

“I guess I just expected something else,” she said, turning around and walking toward the field and around the diamond. She felt their eyes on her. They were cowards. She understood that now. That’s why they were under the bleachers. Not to remain out of the watchful eye but because they preferred remaining unseen: from the cameras and the bullies. The Minitrue was a scam. Bullshit theater.

She went toward the school’s backdoor, looking into the courtyard toward Perez’s office window; his blinds were still shut, his room likely coarse beneath the dusty motes of sunlight still filtering into the gloom. She did not see Brad watching her. He’d been watching her since she walked across the field with Byron. He stood against his car and flicked his cigarette, following her until she went inside the school.

4

Croak had put the photos of the principal snogging his homeroom teacher into a brown envelope. He’d written across the front in black marker:

WE NEED TO TALK

He did not leave a name. Grimwood had told him exactly what to do. As a kid he’d learned to follow orders. He tucked the envelope inside his Social Studies book and waited outside the secretary pool for a moment. There were a few women in there, some typing, a couple talking to each other. He knew what he had to do to get them out of the office. Even if just for a moment. Because he couldn’t be seen leaving the envelope in Mr Perez’s mail slot. He slowly inhaled and brushed the rest of the dust off his knees from crawling around inside the walls.

He opened the door and went toward the lady at the front, Mrs Lemkin. Perez’s office door was still shut and he wondered if Mrs Napolitano was in the office or if she’d somehow excused herself without striking any assumptions on the part of the ladies sitting in the pool. He figured rumors were started that circled the town a dozen times in this very room.

“A fight’s broken out. Just off Main there. Looked like a couple of students, but it might’ve been an adult too. I didn’t watch. Couldn’t really see…”

“What?” Mrs Lemkin asked, a light suddenly igniting in her eyes.

“Just outside. You’ve gotta stop it.”

The woman with the round spectacles stood up, her chair clattering away from the table. The other ladies did as well. Croak noticed something of a bloodlust among them; the interest in witnessing the act of fighting was enough to break the monotony. He understood that. Lemkin squeezed by the front desk and her co-workers followed, leaving the phones unattended and, better yet, the mail slots hanging on the back wall beneath a bannerhead reading “Teach for the Stars” without witness to what he would leave. He waited till the ladies were out of sight of the glass panes and quickly walked toward the back of the pool, pistoning around desks and hopping over cords, computer and phone, until he came to the cheap painted plywood slot system, where a label maker had printed and stuck stickers naming each respective cubby. He could hear the radio humming quietly from one of the tables. He thought it was the Bangles’ Walk Like an Egyptian. He was told the station a Ms Hemingway listened to was particularly open to Grimwood’s form of communication, and Croak wasn’t quite sure what that could mean. Not yet at least.

He found the slot with Perez’s sticker and he pulled out the brown envelope. He’d made sure the ink didn’t smudge, and there it was, still bold, still incriminating. What’s the point of this? Without a name, it could be anyone? Maybe that was it. If he was helping Grimwood fight the enemy, maybe the operation would consist of the enemy fighting a mystery. He didn’t think it sounded like a half-baked idea. He plopped the envelope on the top of a stack of papers and wheeled back, still listening to the radio, to the Bangles as they gave way to the first chords of a Cyndi Lauper song, something Pug’s sisters no doubt danced to but something he couldn’t quite stomach hearing without making gagging noises. And then the beat broke for a moment between little bursts of static. But that wasn’t quite true, because the song was still there. He could still hear Cyndi’s voice, but it was lower. Lower than the other voice. The new voice. The voice that shouldn’t have been there. The voice from the phone:

“You’ve done well, Cory. Your answer is waiting for you in your mailbox. This is the revolution. A crack spreads in the foundation; in time pieces start to fall off.”

And then it was Cyndi, louder again:

“If you’re lost you can look and you will find me—time after time—”

Croak took off from the office. Before the ladies returned disappointed that they’d been conned, and before the principal made it to his slot and saw photos of him with another man’s wife.

5

Croak rode home, pedaling as fast as he ever had. Faster even than the time the Rosco brothers chased him down for peeping on their sister, purely by accident, only to catch him a quarter mile down the street and leave him with a fat lip and black eye. Randy returned the favor, back when Randy held a different code of honor and vowed he’d stick up for his little bro. He wanted to beat his mom home. Especially if there was a tape in the mailbox with video of her on it. He didn’t want to explain that. Not at all.

He checked the mailbox by the front door and found what he was told he would: a box, covered in brown paper and taped precisely on the corners, his name written neatly on the front. Cory Hopson. He felt the sort of excitement he’d once only reserved to opening packs of ball cards or peeling the cellophane off the new X-Men comic just to check out who Wolverine was decapitating in the issue. But this was more intriguing because the anticipation held implications beyond a little boyhood escapism; he was holding something that mattered, something that could make him, Randy, and his mom normal again. That could fix them. And that’s what counted most. Because Randy ran away, because your mom feels guilty and she always tries to sate that guilt with a different date and a different man. But this man is your answer, bud. He is. This man will bring Randy home, he will be there in the morning when you wake up and he will be sitting on the edge of your bed to tuck you in when you go to sleep, because you’re never too old for that, never too old to be read to, or to talk sports.

Croak went inside. He ignored the kitchen. He was hungry but eating didn’t matter right now. Nothing mattered but an answer. He galloped down the stairs into the basement and sat on the edge of the coffee table in front of the television, its screen black, mute. He peeled off the tape and pulled up one flap of brown paper on the side, his heart racing. For a moment he heard Darrel Janz, and when he looked up, the man’s face, hair parted to the right, was lit beneath the full moon at its apogee, his eyes curious and nearly twinkling as he looked at Croak from that Reverse World inside the TV. “This just in. Cory Hopson might have found a substitute for the father that left his family high and dry. More at 11.” But the screen was dark. Like Darrel had never been there. Like Croak had just imagined him. And maybe he had. Maybe Reedy Creek was drawing the crazy out of most people. There was no scarred image on the screen, no static; it was just him and the box. The box with the VHS tape.

Croak lifted the cassette out and stared at it. His name was printed on a sticker: CORY’S ANSWER, MAY IT BE THE RIGHT ONE. He thought it sounded funny. Like something you’d find in a church. A psalm, or whatever they called those good-hearted verses. He didn’t think about what Mr Perez would think when he found the photos. Didn’t think about whom the man might blame, or what sort of things he would think to do to keep the secret from the sheriff. Those things didn’t matter. Not to Croak. That was Grimwood’s game. Croak stuck the tape in the shitty VCR his mom purchased two years ago from a yard sale that had him convinced the thing was haunted. Maybe it will be now, he thought. The thing worked intermittently, and he only ever watched movies down here when his friends came over. Especially if they got their hands on something he didn’t want his mom to know they were watching. Anything with tits. She didn’t care much about the violence. For some reason that was pass and go, but boobs held between them some sort of prohibitive draw that had parents focused on keeping their kids’ eyes chaste.

Croak pressed play.

And he saw his mom sitting to a coffee with a man whose back was turned on the camera. Lifting and sipping, smiling and taking the man’s hand. Showing him something real. Something authentic, and he wondered if she was ever once like that with his dad. If, once upon a time, she was ever flirty and optimistic about the future with the man that would leave her to fend for herself because he might have gotten a little scared. He knew why Randy was upset. Randy had every right to be. But he didn’t understand why Randy would let that hate persist when it meant changing him for the worse. This was the same footage he’d seen on the Reverse-World’s news, when Darrel Janz showed it to him superimposed over the moon-mural that when the TV was plugged in was actually a sunlit sky over a stretching prairie. Or when he imagined it, and the coincidence was so spectacularly powerful that his imagination was able to coax something identical to reality, or to a version of reality he’d never seen. Croak wasn’t sure anymore. He really wasn’t. Because he was a kid, and for now he was open to several possibilities that in a few years wouldn’t make a lick of sense. If he even remembered any of this.

His mom finished the coffee and slid the mug aside. When she stood up, she pulled the man as well, by his hand, and she kissed him, her face disappearing behind the back of his head, one hand reaching up to stroke his hair. The kiss was deep and passionate, something he’d imagine moms and dads normally did while the kids played. I just want to know who he is. Please. That’s the only answer I’ve ever wanted. I swear to God I will never ask for another favor. I just want to know who this man is, who I can look forward to playing catch with, who will come to my graduation and ball games, who will sit down with a beer and offer me a root bewski when football’s on because we will have our traditions. Our father and son traditions. And I know I will never wake up again to a quiet house because Randy will come around. He will buy this new normal. This new family. Randy will be Randy again, the boy who found Trent Rosco and beat the shit out of him, who took him to the park and nearly put him in the hospital for splitting my lip. That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. To see Randy normal and to see my mom smile again.

His mom grabbed her coat from the back of her seat and the man walked to her, helping her put it over her shoulders. Like a gentleman. And then she walked toward the camera and he turned. She stopped and kissed him again, her head obstructing his face, because like any moment of anticipation, this would never be quick and easy. He was supposed to be perched on the table, leaning forward so that his nose was nearly pressed against the screen, his heart racing and his skin broken out into gooseflesh. His mom swivelled and walked out of frame leaving only the man. The man who until now had been a stranger.

But Croak knew who he was. He did.

You’d never suspect the man just down the street. Maybe that’s why Grimwood had you spying on the principal. Because he was with another man’s wife. And your mom…shit, he was just preparing you because your mom is with another woman’s husband.

“Holy shit.” It was all he could say.

The man on the tape was Pug’s father.