THE NIGHT IT HAPPENED, I snuck out to meet a boy. Seth Murphy and I had been dancing around each other for a couple of months, stealing glances in algebra, smiling at each other in gym class. Jenna asked his best friend if Seth liked me and the answer came back yes. Then, finally, he’d asked me to the movies. And my parents said yes—much to my surprise and delight. But then they went with us, smiling but watchful chaperones, sitting far behind us in the back row during the seven o’clock show of Minority Report.
Seth and I held hands in the dark as Tom Cruise tried to stop crimes before they occurred, and I could feel the heat of Seth’s skin. When Seth leaned in to kiss me, his breath smelling of root beer and popcorn, my father cleared his throat loudly—unbelievably! humiliatingly!—from the back of the theater. Seth looked briefly embarrassed in the blue light from the screen, and then we both started laughing, earning annoyed shushing from the people around us.
The next Monday, Seth left a note taped on my locker.
Meet me at Old Bridge around 11? If you can. I’ll wait. Just try.
My father was a cop, so sneaking out was no small feat. I knew that when he was home they usually checked on me around ten, then went to sleep. So I waited, pretended to be sleeping until I heard my father come in. He placed a hand on my forehead, then left, turning out the light in the hall. I waited until it felt like the house was asleep. Then I crept downstairs. Catcher, our huge yellow Lab, was lying by the back door. He stared at me with sad eyes, his tail wagging hopefully.
I didn’t have any choice. I had to take the big lug with me, otherwise I knew he’d start barking at the door after I left. So I did. I didn’t lock the door behind me. It was cold, my breath coming out in clouds, my jacket too thin. The sky was clear and riven with stars, a bright high moon lighting the road in front of me. I remember feeling proud of myself, excited—I don’t know if it was about Seth Murphy as much as it was just having a moment of freedom. My parents were strict, my dad especially. He wasn’t so hard; I knew he loved me. He just thought the world was a bad place, filled with bad people, and he wanted to keep me safe as long as possible. Turned out that he was right.
But I didn’t believe that then with my feet crunching on the gravel. I thought my dad was paranoid and my mother was too passive, always following his rules. Paul always said that the world was my oyster, that it wasn’t small but big and full of possibilities. I was flushed with the excitement of meeting Seth Murphy alone in the night. With my dog.
I think they were already there waiting; they must have been. When I reconstruct that night, I try to remember. Could I have missed their vehicle, parked in the shadows waiting for hours of quiet before they went inside? I don’t know. Did they see me leave? Did they wait for me to come back?
Seth Murphy didn’t show. I waited an hour, then headed home, let down, disappointed—but weirdly relieved, too. What would come of meeting a boy at the bridge in the middle of the night? Catcher was his usual docile self, not perturbed in the least that we’d gone out together in the middle of the night.
When I moved out through the trees into the clearing where the farmhouse stood, I saw the light on in the kitchen and the bottom of my stomach dropped out. Please let it be Mom, I thought. Mom was easy, slow to anger. There was something between us, a shared desire to laugh things off that I didn’t have with my father. I could tell my mother anything. I could tell her that I liked Seth and that I wanted to meet him but that he didn’t show and I wouldn’t have done anything with him anyway. I just wanted to know what it would be like to sneak out in the middle of the night and maybe, maybe kiss a boy. She would get it. We’d talk it through. She wouldn’t hide it from my father, but she’d make it more palatable. If it was him, sitting there in the kitchen, waiting? There’d be yelling and tears, grounding. And that look, the stern frown of disapproval. That was the worst of all. I stood in the trees, trying to see inside from a distance. The gray of my father’s tee-shirt or the pink of my mom’s PJs. Someone walked quickly past the window. That’s when Catcher started to growl, low and deep.
“What is it, boy?” I said. “Quiet.”
I had to think of a lie. Catcher was sick? I took him for a walk? No one would ever believe that. I had to do a project about owls for school; I went out looking for some. Nope. My mother knew every single thing about my schoolwork. That wasn’t going to fly. If there had been an owl project, she’d be out there with me.
We moved closer, Catcher growling, me holding on to the frayed red collar he’d worn as long as I could remember. The brush of his fur rubbed against my fingers, his dog smell strong and weirdly comforting as I crouched down low.
“Catch,” I said. “I’m so dead. Stop growling.”
How did he know there was something wrong all the way back there? How did he know? I stood up slowly and peered around the window frame. The scene was so odd, so strange that I almost couldn’t understand what I was seeing at first.
Two men. One was smallish but muscled and wiry, standing by the door, a gun nearly the size of his forearm gripped in his hand. One tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in black. Both of them wearing black ski masks. Another man was sitting on a chair, arms tied, slumped, a bag pulled over his head. My father. He wore his Lost Valley Police Department tee-shirt. My mother was on the ground, her pink pajama top open to reveal her belly button—lying quiet and peaceful on her side, as if she were just sleeping. There was a third stranger, someone thin and small, a boyish body, also wearing a mask, at the kitchen table with his head in his hand. The taller man was standing in the doorway with a shotgun.
I drew in a ragged breath and swallowed a scream. Sinking onto my haunches, my mind raced. The next farmhouse was a little over a mile up the road. If I ran as fast as I could, I could make it in twelve minutes. My father kept a gun locker in the old barn. I wasn’t supposed to know the code, but I did. The same code he used for everything, my mother’s birthday. I knew how to fire every one—from the service revolver, to the Glock 9mm, to the Sig, to the shotgun. Never pick up a gun unless you’re prepared to kill someone with it. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. But be ready if it does. Our hunting trips hadn’t gone well. I had bad aim and lacked the hunter’s heart to take the life of a creature who never did anything but munch on leaves. But I knew the shotgun made up for bad aim and the men in my house were not deer or bunnies.
Catcher had gone quiet, issuing a low whine, feeling my fear, knowing instinctively to stay quiet. I put my arms around his neck.
Run for help or stay and fight? I asked him silently.