Hellhole (5 page)

Audie's mom leaned in and spoke in a whisper that was dripping with compassion. “You know, Max, you can call us. Whenever you need something. I just feel so bad thinking of her cooped up in there, all alone all day.”

“Yeah, but you know how she is,” Max said, squirming. “She doesn't like people to see her when she's . . .”

He trailed off. Back in the day, his mom and Mrs. Gregory had been good friends. Now he couldn't remember the last time they spoke.

She frowned. “I know, but—”

“Mom, give it a rest,” Audie said. “He knows the drill.”

Principal Gregory threw up her hands. “Sorry! Can't turn off the mom in me!”

Max was willing to do anything to get out of this conversation, up to and including talking to Wall. “Where are you headed, Wall?”

“College visit for the weekend,” Wall said. “'Bama.”

“Oh.” Max tried to nod knowingly. “Sure. Go Gators.”

They all looked at him as if he'd kicked the Pope in the junk.

“Max,” Audie said, aghast, “it's
Roll Tide.
”

“Roll Tide!” the other three echoed in unison, pumping their fists.

Max tried to punch the air in a similar enthusiastic fashion, but he looked ridiculous and everyone knew it, so he switched to swatting at an imaginary fly instead.

“The coaches there are
very
interested in him,” Audie said, gazing adoringly into Wall's eyes. He took Audie's chin in his massive hand, moving in to kiss her.

“Emmanuel!” Chief Gregory interrupted, clapping his hands on Wall's back. “Come out and help me check the tire pressure.”

Wall gave Audie a wretched look and slumped out the door.

Principal Gregory paid Max for the gas. “Here,” she said, handing the change to her daughter, “buy yourself a drink.” She turned back to Max. “And you—remember what I said. Whatever you need, hon.”

“Mom.”

“Thank you,” Max said. “I'll remember.”

After she left, Audie let out a long, exasperated breath. She grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator, then rounded on Max like a feral dog. “So. Why'd you skip my game last night?”

Max decided to feign choking on his Slim Jim to escape this line of questioning, but the jangle of door bells saved him from having to resort to such theatrics. Three girls walked in, two of them talking loudly. The third girl headed straight for the snack food section. Max watched as the top of her straight brown ponytail bobbed down the aisle, then stopped, hovering above the Cheetos. Giggling, the other two followed.

“You know what?” said Audie, a wicked grin spreading across her face as she watched the girls. “I don't even want to hear your feeble excuses.” She pointed the remains of her Slim Jim into his face. “You know there's only one way to make this up to me.”

Max waved his hand, dismissive. “I'm not doing this today, Aud. I'm very close to beating the crossword record.”

“Oh, screw the crossword record.”

Max narrowed his eyes. “How
dare
you.”

“Come
onnn,
” Audie said in that whining voice she used when she knew full well she'd already won. She nodded toward the girls. “Try. For me.”

Max grumbled. Ever since that fateful night their thirteen-year-old selves decided to finally French it up—a kiss that garnered such rave reviews as “slimy” and “like kissing my brother”—any potential sparks between them got permanently switched to Off, unplugged from the wall, and buried in the backyard, never to be spoken of again.

This was totally fine with Max; he'd felt the same way about that gross kiss as she had. But once she started dating Wall, he got relegated to permanent third-wheel status, and now Audie was constantly getting on his case about nabbing a girlfriend. “We could go on double dates!” she'd insist, a prospect Max found especially nauseating. To get a date, one generally needed to be able to string words together in a coherent manner around the opposite sex, or at the very least be able to smile charmingly. Both Audie and Wall did these things quite well, whereas Max had all the flirting ability of a packing peanut.

The venerably popular Krissy Swanson approached the counter with an armful of snacks and sodas. Audie stood behind her and made a go-ahead gesture at Max, followed by something much more vulgar. “Fine,” Max mouthed at her as Krissy dug through her purse.

When she looked up, Max smiled. “Find everything okay?” he asked.

“What?” she said in a distracted voice, as if surprised to learn that the counter kid spoke Human. “Uh, yeah.”

Wiggling his eyebrows, Max held up the bag of Cheetos. “Processed cheese snacks,” he said with a knowing nod. “I like that in a woman.”

Audie had to excuse herself.

Krissy gave Max a look. “They're not for
me. I'm
getting the soy chips and diet protein water.”

“Oh, yeah, you gotta have protein,” he said, scanning the rest of her items and placing them in a plastic bag. “Amino acids are, like, the shit. You like veal?”

“I— What?”

“Me neither. It's baby cows, did you know that?” Max could already feel this thing going south, yet he pressed on, as always. “I don't think I could eat a baby anything. Except baby corn. Those things are so weird. It's like, are you real corn, or were you shrunk by a shrinking ray, or what's going on here?”

Krissy's eyes darted to the security camera. “Am I on a reality show right now?”

“No,” Max said. “Why?”

“Okay. Um, here,” she said, tossing him a twenty-dollar bill and grabbing the plastic bag.

“But it's only twelve—”

“Keep the change!” She grabbed the elbows of the other two girls and plowed out the door, barely able to keep her giggles in as she relayed the tale of her encounter with the troglodyte cashier. Brown Ponytail threw a languid glance back at him as they left.

Audie emerged from her hiding place behind the motor oil, holding her stomach. “You should be studied by scientists,” she said between laughs. “Veal?
Veal?
”

Max shrugged. This was nothing new. Humiliation in the face of the opposite gender was an unfortunate plague he'd simply had to get used to, like high milk prices or the continued existence of the Kardashians.

“So what are you doing after you get back from the airport?” he asked Audie just as the door opened. He nodded hello at the new customer, a guy sporting heavy black eyeliner, several piercings, and a visible hangover. The man nodded back, making a beeline for the coffee machine.

“I don't know,” Audie replied with a shrug. “Maybe go see the new Michael Bay explodathon.”

“Spoiler alert: Everyone dies.”

Audie rolled her eyes, having grown sick of Max's standard spoiler-alert joke long ago. “We'll see. I was gonna devote the day to
Madden
”—here she cracked her knuckles as she always did at the mention of the game, like a Pavlovian response—“but my Xbox is busted.”

Max gasped.

His voice dropped to a horrified whisper. “The red ring of death?”

“'Fraid so.”

Max's main fear in life was,
of course,
that his mother could drop dead at any given second . . . but if he was being completely honest, the prospect of the same thing happening to his Xbox struck him with an almost equal amount of terror. “Well, you can go play on mine if you want.”

“Really?” She did her Audie-is-super-excited-about-something hop, bouncing from one foot to the other. “Key still under the mat?”

“Yep. I'll call my mom and tell her not to bash the intruder's head in.”

“Thanks, man!” She lunged across the counter and gathered Max into a headlock. “All is forgiven. As long as you come to my game next week.”

“I'll . . . see what I can do.”

“Just once before the season is over! That's all I ask!”

“Okay, okay.”

“Or at the very least, come to the pep rally this Wednesday. You don't have any secret dates with fictional people on Wednesdays, do you?”

“I do not.”

“Then come.” She tossed the empty Slim Jim wrapper at him. “And thanks for the meats.”

“Any time.”

Audie laughed as she exited the store.

Guyliner brought his coffee up to the counter, his eyes bleared and tired. “And a pack of smokes. Whatever's cheapest.”

“Sure.” Max rang up the purchase and placed the cigarettes on the counter.

The guy let out a small laugh. “You were there too?”

“Huh?”

He showed Max the back of his hand, which featured the faded slash of a black Sharpie. “At the concert,” he said, nodding at the similar mark smeared across the back of Max's hand.

From the ash that floated up out of the hole.
Max hadn't noticed until just then that it was still there.
But I took a shower . . . ?

“Killer show, right?” the guy said, handing Max some money. He took a long gulp of coffee. “Lucky I didn't black out in a gutter somewhere. Anyway, cheers.” He held up his cup in thanks and exited the store.

Max examined his hand. He licked his thumb and rubbed it against his skin, but no matter how hard he tried to wipe off the mark, it wouldn't go away.

 

When his watch alarm went off at the end of his shift, Max slammed his pen and crossword book onto the counter and pumped his fists into the air.

“I win at LIFE!” he shouted, enjoying for a moment the delusion that completing twenty-five crossword puzzles in fourteen hours meant he'd won at anything at all.

Stavroula's grumpy face poked out from behind the Funyuns. “Why you yell?”

“Oh, sorry,” Max said, lowering his arms. “I just—” But talking about his victory would make it sound even sadder. “Nothing.”

She looked at her watch. “Okay, ten o'clock. You go home now.”

He took off his vest, threw out the wrapper from his Hot Pocket dinner, and stuffed his crossword book into his bag. “Thanks, Stav.”

“And tell your mom I say feel better.”

The sting of the earlier lie prickled in his stomach. He nodded gravely. “I will.”

He biked home under a moonlit sky. Bracing for the worst as he opened the mailbox, he was relieved to find nothing more than a Home Depot catalog. That, he could handle. They made good shovels.

On his way to the back kitchen door, he assessed the house. Dark, except for the flicker of television visible through his mother's bedroom window and the rectangle of light coming from the basement. The leaves of his mom's beloved ficus tree inside blocked the view of the small den down there, but judging by the guttural noises and whistle blows coming from within, Audie was well into her
Madden
conquest.

After dumping his stuff onto the kitchen table and wondering why Ruckus hadn't greeted him with a friendly claw to the face, neck, and torso, Max grabbed a granola bar and headed to the basement. Sporty football music hit his ears as he descended the stairs. “This was my plan all along,” he sang down to Audie. “You wear your thumbs down with hours of playing and then I swoop in to kick your ass.” He unzipped his hoodie as he neared the bottom of the steps. “Jesus, Aud, it's like a hundred degrees down here—”

He stopped.

The granola bar fell to the floor.

Perched on the edge of the plaid 1970s-era couch, where Max had fully expected to find Audie, was a man in a teal-blue velour tracksuit. His beard was rust colored and shaggy, as was his hair, out of which poked two white, jagged horns. And though he was currently dumping the remains of a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos into his mouth with a cheese-dusted hand, the coloring didn't end at the edges of his fingertips.

Every visible inch of his skin was red.

He shook the controller at the television with his other hand and flashed Max a garish grin, food globs flying out of his mouth as he spoke.

“This shit is awesome.”

“AAAAAAAH!” MAX SCREAMED,
then added another “Aaaaaa-AAAAAaaaaah!” for good measure.

He spun around and bolted up to his mother's bedroom, pounding the door open so forcefully she nearly fell out of bed in surprise.

“Max!” she shouted, fumbling with her covers. “Jesus Christ, what's wrong?”

He blinked several times, terrified that he'd just ruptured her aorta. “Are you okay?”

“Yes! Why are you so freaked out?”

Max swallowed. He wanted to tell her, but shocking her into cardiac arrest was not optimal. “I'm . . . not,” he said slowly, trying to force blood back into his cheeks. “I just—I heard ambulance sirens on my way home, and I worried.”

The tension washed out of her face, giving way to a smile. “Well, sorry to disappoint there, pal. I'm still here, healthy as a glue-factory-bound horse.”