Authors: Brenda Ortega
“Are you going to give us the names?” Officer Simpson says.
Todd and Derek. We launched two of the three attacks, including the most destructive one with the spray paint. Bobby just came along for the ride at the end. Easy enough to say, but it’s not right to spread the blame. Sure, it was Todd’s idea, and Derek helped. And OK, technically Bobby broke the window. But I’m the one who needed revenge against Creeper. I’m the one who wanted this. Me.
“No.”
“I guarantee you the court will go easier on the punishment if you cooperate.”
I’m aware of my breathing, faster than usual. And even still, I get to the end of my breath in, and it feels as if I haven’t drawn enough oxygen. As if I’m already in an airless jail cell with no way out. So a little twinge of fear clutches my chest before every exhale, like a warning. “There’s no one else,” I tell Officer Simpson.
His leather gun holster creaks as he rolls back in his seat to face forward. He grabs the police radio microphone and interrupts the static to talk into it. “Base, this is twenty-four.”
The woman’s crackly voice responds, “Twenty-four, go ahead.”
“We’ve got a five-nine-four. We’re enroute with a female juvenile, ETA nineteen-thirty-six.”
“Ten-two, twenty-four.”
We back up and turn away from home. The ride is quiet and strange. Streetlights flicker as we pass underneath, like I’m living in an old movie. We pass familiar sights, but it all looks different from here.
There’s the gravelly spot at the entrance to my neighborhood where a bunch of us wait for the bus in the morning. The house on the corner where my friends Hannah and Hailey lived before they moved away from Michigan. We pass my old elementary school playground where I once saved Bobby from a bully bigger than him but smaller than me; the old farmhouse museum where I used to take self-guided tours and play pretend; and the golf course where I sled in the winter with everyone from the neighborhood, where one year we built an ice ramp so slick and fast Bobby shot straight up from it like a helicopter lifting off, arms outstretched and twirling… slow motion…
Till he crash landed. And it felt so long – me running, him lying there in a crumpled mess, not moving – before I heard him moaning, and he moved, and I fell to my knees in the snow next to him, happy to hear him whining for once. He was seven years old, but he looked so tiny with the hood of his down coat scrunched in a tight O around his face. I carried him crying all the way home, plus both our plastic roll-up sleds under my arm, repeating over and over in a song: “It’s OK. You’re OK. I’ve got you now. I promise…”
It seems like someone else’s life. Someone innocent. Someone confident. Someone who still believed her grandma’s promise about the world:
R
ight will win.
The police car’s engine accelerates as we leave a stop light. We’re inside Jackson city limits, driving through neighborhoods with big old houses sitting close together, past a brick church with a black wrought-iron fence, by a gated cemetery and lots of tiny corner convenience stores.
We round the curve into downtown, and the tall, dingy, 100-year-old stone and brick buildings of the city’s miniature skyline come into view. I always thought Jackson was a joke compared to Chicago or Detroit, but at the moment it seems big enough to swallow me up.
Officer Simpson slows way down to turn into the driveway of the police station, but then he swings wide and sharp into a parking spot without braking at all. I tilt sideways, then recover. The two policemen already have the car stopped, their doors open and one leg out.
The younger one, Officer Marks, opens my door. “I hope you’ve given more thought to telling us who else was involved,” he says kindly.
I scooch toward him wondering if I’ll be handcuffed. He takes my arm when I step out.
Officer Simpson joins us to walk toward the back entrance of the building, so they’re on either side of me. He says, “Mr. Reiber is very upset.”
Nothing but the clicks of our steps on the pavement. Don’t I have the right to remain silent like they tell the bad guys on TV?
Officer Simpson opens the metal door and holds it for me, saying as me and Marks pass by, “He plans to press charges.”
From behind he keeps talking as we walk down a narrow white hallway. “This will be your last chance to cooperate with us, and help yourself in the process.”
Got it. No need to explain further. Though I get the feeling he will.
“And just so you know,” he adds, confirming my suspicion, “if we do find the other people at fault, without your help, all of you will get the strongest punishment possible. I’ll make sure of it.”
Interesting choice of words:
at fault
. For him it’s a one-shot deal, figuring out who broke the window tonight and soaped and egged and spray painted those other times, and I’m more than willing to own up to all that stuff regardless of who threw and soaped and sprayed, more than ready to face whatever consequences – I don’t care. But it’s so much more complicated if I stop to think about it. You don’t turn into a no-conscience criminal without some help.
If he really wants to know who’s to blame for me – who turned me in the wrong direction, who pointed the way forward, influenced me to go, shoved me in the back, toward one bad turn, then another, and another, till I didn’t know where I was anymore – then he’s got a lot more people to question.
And he should start with Mr. Reiber himself, better known to me and my dad as Creeper. The jerk who tugged the loose string that started unraveling my life last summer.
then
I thought I was training my dog
August sixth I checked out this dog-training book from the library,
Mastering Your Misbehaving Mutt
, that said I could teach Barney to halt from a full sprint at my call. By Chapter Eight, he’d supposedly poop where I told him.
It wasn’t working, even by August twenty-fifth, two days before I had to return it.
Me and my best friend Justine stood in my front yard, watching Barney dart around Creeper’s lawn, sniffing where he’d marked his territory. The steamy summer heat wilted my dog-training determination but somehow encouraged my dog’s playfulness – like a greenhouse speeds the budding of seeds. During that day’s obedience session, Barney was willing to sit for a treat, but he sprang away as soon as I dropped his leash and commanded him to
stay
– despite me holding out another biscuit as a reward if he’d only listen.
Justine took a couple steps forward, then turned back to wave me on with her. “Let’s go. We better get him out of Mr. Reiber’s yard.”
“No. Stand still. If we go, he’ll run. Barn! Here boy!”
Barney stopped and looked, the leash swung haphazardly over his neck and down his front like a scarf. His triangle ears perked, and his windshield wiper tail flicked on. His panting looked like laughter, so I smiled back at him – a wide grin just like his. Then he trotted the opposite way, slipping into Creeper’s shade-draped side yard, toward all the other yards that would lead to the far end of the neighborhood.
Justine must have seen my smile. “It won’t be funny if your mom finds out,” she said, gathering her long black hair off her sweaty neck with both hands.
“I’m not laughing. It’s just… C’mon. I can’t help it – he’s so cute, and it’s no fun training. All I want to do is kiss him.”
“Well, whatever. Yeah, he’s super cute. I’ll admit that.” Justine twisted her hair expertly into a loose bun on top of her head. “But this is exactly why my parents won’t get me a dog. You have to train them when they’re little, or you’re dead.”
She was right.
“Now what?” she said.
I didn’t know what I should do next except pray to God with all my might that Creeper didn’t call animal control for the zillionth time. Mom would probably answer the door again. She’d gladly hand over Barney if she could, but those officers just wanted us to leash him. And pay fines if they caught him loose.
Barney’s life would be destroyed if we chained him up all the time. He loved disappearing for hours in the woods that surround our subdivision, sniffing, digging, chasing squirrels through the underbrush.
The thought of it made me want to go there too.
I hadn’t seen my dad’s green Buick coming up the street until it pulled in front of our mailbox. That erased my grin. I decided not to tell him, even though he’d probably understand. “Barney’ll be back soon,” I told Justine. “Let’s go to your house.”
We hadn’t gone three steps when Dad shouted – not words, a gut scream. We froze. Had he seen Barney running loose?
He slammed the mailbox door so hard it shook on its pole. Then he threw the car into reverse. He gunned the engine without even looking. His tires screeched from the sharp backwards turn up the driveway, and the car bounced and jerked into the garage.
“Geez. What’s wrong with your dad?”
“No idea.”
Dad opened his car door so hard it boomeranged back. He kicked it open again.
Justine squeezed my elbow. “Let’s get out of here.”
Dad slammed the car door shut with both hands. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Go ahead,” I said, but I wanted to leave too. I’d never seen my Dad this mad. He didn’t
do
angry. Even when he got laid off from his job, he just sat in his family room chair and stared at his phone and looked out the window at the trees. For two weeks straight. “I gotta stay.”
“Call me later,” Justine said as she took off power-walking down the street. Our next-door neighbor mowed his lawn.
Dad ripped off his Tigers baseball cap and flung it against the garage wall. “This is it, this is war, I’m done!”
I approached real slow as Dad opened the trunk for the groceries. He looked like a crazy person, talking to himself, with hat hair – smushed on top and curls flipping out over his ears. Then he crashed the trunk shut and turned to go inside, fumbling for his keys, four plastic bags swinging from his forearms. “No more, the party is over, Creeper is toast!”
Creeper? What did he do? I thought a moment, turned, and sprinted for the mailbox. I flipped open the hot metal door, and saw it. A huge glob of dog poop.
“Holy Mama!” I jumped back a step, but then I leaned forward because I just – couldn’t – believe it. It was so gross, I had to look closer. Then the stench hit.
After being closed up in there for who knows how long, broiling in the heat, the stink was like pond muck – times 10,000. I wanted to hold my breath forever.
It looked as disgusting as it smelled, oozed into the shape of an ancient Indian mud hut with stones and twigs and grass sticking out of it. Plus, smears covered the whole inside of the mailbox from top to bottom, the way someone would spread frosting all over a cake.
I closed the door and ran back across the street. Hadn’t I heard how messing with someone else’s mailbox was a federal crime? I started up the driveway, imagining the cops hauling Creeper away in handcuffs, when my older brother Mike rushed out the front door. He pulled a green-and-white MSU baseball cap over his curls.
“Mike, you won’t believe it,” I said, meeting him on the front sidewalk.
He pulled car keys from his front pocket without speaking, but his eyes said,
Get out of my way or you’ll regret it
.
Still I knew he’d want to hear this news: “Creeper put dog poop in our mailbox.”
He didn’t react, just blew right by me, cutting across the grass in a rush to the garage and Dad’s car.
At first I thought he was in his
too-cool-for-you
mood, his
I’m-a-junior-now
mood. It was all I saw since he grew that fuzz he called a mustache. Never the old Mike, who’d toss the football with me, or help me learn baseball pitches, leaping and screaming “Sweet, D-Dawg!” whenever my curveball floated and dipped like a sparrow. Back then I thought I’d have an automatic friend in Mike when I got to high school, maybe even a protector, but now that I’m a freshman he mostly pretends he doesn’t know me.
I watch him drive away. Then I figured out why he left.
Mom was yelling – loud. “And what about you? What should you have to do?”
My parents never shouted. Ever. Fighting meant quiet. It was tight, heavy silence, with maybe a slammed door or banged cupboard to increase the tension. Eventually, they would start talking again – not friendly at first and never about what caused the fight. They’d start with something small, like a dentist appointment that was coming up, or who could drive Mike to his football practice. The weight would lift slowly. I used to wish they’d yell and fight it out and get it over with all at once.
But right then, I would’ve given anything for a silent fight. The noise fired in my ears, rattled my bones, so I feared I might break apart.
“This dog does nothing but cause problems, running loose, pooping everywhere. Turning neighbors against us. Then we fork over money on dog food and vet bills. Money we don’t have! Your priorities are screwed up!”
Nothing from Dad. Just Mom gushing like an unplugged fire hydrant, like nothing I’d ever heard, like she might never stop.
“How about this. How about getting a job? Making that your priority? What a radical concept! I’ve never heard anything—”
“This has nothing to do with a job!” Dad finally said.
“Everything has to do with a job. Why don’t you see that?”
Their arguing paused, and I prayed it was over. I tiptoed to the porch and slipped into the skinny space between the house and a tall shrub that covered half of our front picture window. I peeked in. I couldn’t see Mom.
Dad paced around. “I’m calling the cops. Creeper’s not getting away with it!”
Mom flew around from the kitchen, through the dining room and into Dad’s face, a blur of red face, purple tank top and waving arms. “Don’t you dare call the cops!
You
bought the dog.
You
don’t care if he goes in the neighbor’s yard.
You
clean it!”
Mom stomped back into the kitchen. Dad tore upstairs.
I dropped to a squat with shrub branches poking my arms and legs. Tears tried to push out, so I hugged myself tight, closed my eyes, and shook my head back and forth. I rocked a little in that tiny bit of space – forward and back, clenching and re-clenching my teeth, grinding my sadness into mad.