“Keep this up and we’ll be back in court, re-evaluating your weekends and visiting privileges.”
Privileges, Frank thought. Privileges! He felt like howling. This was what he got for telling her how he actually felt.
“How is she now?”
“Okay, I guess. Ate most of her lunch, then said she was going to take a nap.”
Frank actually rocked back on his heels, and dropped the dented can of suds to the floor. That was what had been nagging him, not the question of what Nana was doing home from school. He knew what her response to being upset was: she slept it off. And he had upset her.
“Elaine . . . haven’t you been watching TV?”
“What?” Not understanding this sudden U-turn in the conversation. “I caught up on a couple of Daily Show episodes on TiVo—”
“The news, El, the news! It’s on all the channels!”
“What are you talking about? Have you gone cr—”
“Get her up!” Frank roared. “If she’s not asleep yet, get her up! Do it now!”
“You’re not making sen—”
Only he was making perfect sense. He wished he wasn’t.
“Don’t ask questions, just do it! Right now!”
Frank killed the call and ran for the door.
5
Jared was set up undercover when Eric, Curt, and Kent came tromping through the woods from the direction of the high school, making plenty of noise, laughing and bantering.
“It’s gotta be a hoax.” That was Kent, he thought, and there was less enthusiasm in his voice than earlier, when Jared had overheard him in the locker room.
Word had gotten around about Aurora. Girls had been crying in the hallways. A few guys, too. Jared had observed one of the math teachers, the burly one with the beard who wore the cowboy snap shirts and coached the debate team, telling a couple of weeping sophomores that they needed to compose themselves, and that everything was going to be okay. Mrs. Leighton who taught civics stalked up and stuck her finger into his shirt, right between two of the fancy snaps. “Easy for you to say!” she had yelled. “You don’t know anything about this! It’s not happening to men!”
It was weird. It was more than weird. It gave Jared the staticky feeling that accompanied a major storm, the sickly purple clouds piling up and flashing with inner lightning. The world didn’t seem weird then; the world didn’t seem like the world at all, but like another place that you had been flipped into.
It was a relief to have something else to focus on. At least for a little while. He was on a solo mission. Call it Operation Expose These Pricks.
His father had told him that shock therapy—ECT was what they called it these days—was actually an effective treatment for some mentally ill people, that it could produce a palliative effect in the brain. If Mary asked Jared what he thought he was accomplishing by doing this, he would tell her it was like ECT. Once the whole school got a look and a listen at Eric and his stooges trashing poor Old Essie’s place and cracking wise about her boobs—which was, Jared was certain, exactly what they would do—it might “shock” them into being better people. Moreover, it might “shock” some other people into being a little more careful about who they went on dates with.
Meanwhile, the trolls had almost arrived at Ground Zero.
“If it’s a hoax, it’s the supreme hoax of all time. It’s on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, everywhere. Ladies are going to sleep and pulling some caterpillar shit. And you’re the one who said you saw it on the old bag.” This one was definitely Curt McLeod, swinging dick that he was.
Eric was the first to appear on the screen of Jared’s phone, hopping over a tumble of loose stones at the edge of Old Essie’s area. “Essie? Baby? Honey? You around? Kent wants to crawl inside your cocoon and warm you up.”
The spot that Jared had selected for his stakeout was a thicket of fern about thirty feet from the lean-to. It appeared dense from the outside, but was mostly bare earth in the middle. There were a few bits of orange-white fur on the ground where some animal had camped. Probably a fox. Jared had stretched out, iPhone at arms’ length. The camera was pointed through a gap in the leaves and centered on Old Essie lying in the opening of her lean-to. Just as Kent had said, there was a growth on her face—and if it had been like cobwebs earlier, it was solid now, a white mask, exactly like the ones that everyone had now seen on their phones, on news and social media sites.
That was the one part that made him uncomfortable: the homeless woman sprawled out there, defenseless, sick with the Aurora stuff. If Jared gave Lila his ECT explanation, he wondered what she would say about him just videoing it instead of putting a stop to it. That was where the structure of his logic began to creak. His mother had taught him to stand up for himself and for others, especially girls.
Eric squatted at the opening of the lean-to beside Old Essie’s white-wrapped face. He had a stick in his hand. “Kent?”
“What?” Kent had stopped a few steps away. He was scratching the neck of his tee-shirt and looking anxious.
Eric touched the stick against Essie’s mask then drew away. Strands of the whitish material trailed from the stick. “Kent!”
“I said what?” The other boy’s voice had lifted to a higher pitch. Almost a squeak.
Eric shook his head at his friend, as if he were surprised, surprised and disappointed. “This is a hell of a load you blew on her face.”
The roar of laughter that came from Curt made Jared twitch and the bush rattled a little around him. No one was paying attention, though.
“Fuck you, Eric!” Kent stormed over to Essie’s mannequin torso and kicked it tumbling into the deadfall.
This display of pique didn’t divert Eric. “But did you have to leave it to dry? That’s low-class, just leaving your splat on the face of a fine old babe like this.”
Curt strolled over beside Eric to take a closer look. He cocked his head this way and that, licking his lips in a thoughtless way as he appraised Essie, considering her as if he were deciding between a box of Junior Mints and a packet of Sour Patch Kids at a checkout counter.
A sick tremble found its way to Jared’s stomach. If they did something to hurt her, he was going to have to try to stop them. Except that there was no way he could stop them, because there were three of them and only one of him, and this wasn’t about doing what was right or social media ECT, or making people think, this was about Mary and about proving to her that he was better than Eric and really, given the circumstances, was that true? If he were so much better than these guys, he wouldn’t be in this fix. He’d already have done something to make them quit.
“I’d give you fifty bucks to bone her,” said Curt. He turned to Kent. “Either of you. Cash on the line.”