The Boys Are Back in Town (8 page)

“Damn,” Stacy whispered.

She paused just ahead of him, unmindful of whose view she might be blocking, and turned to watch the next play. Fourth down, twenty-five-yard line. The Cougars brought their special teams unit in to go for a field goal.

“Come on, you guys,” Stacy said. Then she did a little yowl. “Let's go, Cougars!”

Will laughed and she shot him a dark look.

“Sorry,” he said, still smiling. “It's just . . . this isn't the sort of thing you ever cared about back in the day.”

Her eyes rolled and she gave him a sheepish look. “I know. I still don't, really. But it's our reunion, and Homecoming and all. If we lose it'd be a bad omen. So, go Cougars! Right?”

A cheer went up from the crowd and they both spun just in time to see the ref in the end zone throw up both hands to signal that the field goal attempt had been successful. They had missed actually seeing the play, but the important thing was the scoreboard, which now read:
Home 3, Visitors 0.
Stacy let out that funny little yowl again and resumed walking.

“Where are your friends supposed to be sitting?” she asked, half turning to him.

Before he could reply he spotted them, halfway up the bleachers. There were other familiar faces, but in a cluster along three benches adjacent to the aisle, he saw Ashleigh and Eric, Danny and Keisha, Lolly, Pix, and Nick Acosta.

“Stacy,” Will said.

She paused and glanced back at him. He nodded toward the upper rows of the bleachers, where Danny and Ashleigh had now noticed them and were beckoning with frantic waves and gestures, as though they were trying to coax in an airliner.

“Up there. The freaks who look like they're having seizures. Should we run?”

Stacy laughed, skin crinkling at the corners of her soft brown eyes. “I don't run. Although if they don't stop that, we might have to slip casually away.”

“They'll just think we went to grope each other under the bleachers.”

That eyebrow arched up again. “And maybe they'll be right.”

Will opened his mouth to respond but she had already started up the steps toward the others. And he wouldn't have known what to say anyway. It amazed him how easily she could take him off guard like that. But he liked it.

Just as he started up after her, plastic tray full of nachos clutched carefully in his hands, a finger tapped his arm.

“Hey. Is your name Will James?”

Will turned around, brow knitted in curiosity, and found a tall, wiry, redheaded teenager standing there looking decidedly uncomfortable. The kid had a sullen look that he recognized almost immediately.

“Wait a second,” Will said, pointing at him. “You're . . . I met you yesterday. You—”

The kid nodded. “Yeah. I live in your old house. And it's Kyle. Kyle Brody.”

What the hell is this kid doing here? And—

“How do you know my name?”

The kid sighed and glanced around as though he were afraid of being seen speaking to
Will. “It's . . . shit, this is stupid. I can't even believe I'm here. Look, this is crazy, but I have a message for you.”

“What?” Will asked, staring at the kid. “What are you talking about?”

But even as he asked, Kyle Brody was passing him a yellowed scrap of paper. On it, scrawled in an eerily familiar hand, were two words:

Don't forget.

Cries of outrage rolled like thunder through the stands. In the midst of that cacophony someone shouted the word “Fuck” loud and long, stretching it out so that it became almost a moan. “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”

Will blinked. His throat was dry. His gaze ticked from the yellowed scrap of paper in his hand up to the impatient expression on the pale features of Kyle Brody. He wondered, apropos of nothing, if Kyle's parents had assigned him the same bedroom that Will had lived in when growing up. Once again he gazed at the scrawl on the page.
Don't forget.
What was that supposed to mean?

“Don't forget what?” he asked, barely aware of having spoken the words out loud.

“How'm I supposed to know?” Kyle demanded. Then he shrugged and backed off a step. “Look, I delivered it. Don't even know why I did it, but here I am. And here I go.”

The kid turned and started off toward the stairs that led out of the bleachers. For a second Will could only shake his head and stare mutely after him. He spun around and glanced up into the stands. Stacy had made it halfway up to the place where Ashleigh and the others all sat and now stood on the steps watching him curiously. Everyone else was watching the game. For just a moment he surveyed the faces of his friends, familiar and comforting, and he felt himself drawn to them. There was room on the bench just in front of Ashleigh and Eric for him and Stacy to sit down and he felt pulled toward that place. Yet all of that seemed hazy to him, as though in a dream, the world cloaked in a mist of confusion and the faintest hint of menace in the air.

His fingers rubbed the yellowed paper. The note had been folded in two. It was solid, rough to the touch, and it crinkled as he refolded it. There was nothing around him just then that was more real than that note.

Will raised his eyes and searched above the heads of the people moving through the stands, trying to find their row. Seconds had passed. He saw the bright orange of Kyle's hair ahead, perhaps halfway to the steps that led down from the bleachers. Then, without really even being aware that he was going to go after the kid, he was moving, slipping past people in pursuit.

He caught up to him on the far end of the bleachers.

“Kyle!”

The redhead snapped around as if he'd been yanked, glanced once at Will, and rolled his eyes. By then Will was in close, blocking out Kyle's view of the stands, trying to keep their exchange at least semiprivate, there in the midst of the Cougars' fans.

Will held the note in front of him like a priest brandishing a communion wafer. “Tell me.”

The kid scowled, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Tell you
what
?”

A rush of anger and frustration went through Will. Much as he had tried to block it out, his mind had been slipping gears since last night. When he had awoken this morning he had been profoundly unnerved by the tricks his memory was playing on him. But the note in his hand, rough under his touch, was not the product of his imagination. It was tangible.

Will shook his head, and for the first time since the kid had handed him the note he looked into Kyle's eyes, really
looked
at him.

“Listen, kid . . . Kyle. A lot of weird shit has been happening to me the last couple of days.” He shook the note. “This is just the latest. Not a lot of it makes sense to me. You're here. You came all the way down here to hand me this—”

A frown creased Kyle's forehead. “I go to Eastborough, man. It's Homecoming.”

“Yeah.” Will nodded. “Of course it is. But, look, you brought this with you. Aren't you at all curious what the hell it means?”

Sullenly, the kid tipped his head to one side, gaze downcast. He shrugged lightly. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

Kyle glanced around as if afraid he was being watched. Then he nodded. “All right, yeah. I'm curious. Killed the cat, didn't it? So tell me, then. What is it?”

Aware now of the way his heart was racing, Will nodded toward the bleachers. A few rows up there was room on the end of the bench. With obvious reluctance Kyle went up the stairs and sat down, sliding in so that Will could take the seat beside him.

“Where did it come from?” Will asked.

Kyle watched the game, eyes focused and yet also somehow distant. After a few seconds he gave a soft laugh. “Weird,” he said, and shook his head, attention still on the action on the football field. “It really used to be your house? You lived there?”

“Until I went to college, yeah.” Will wanted to urge him on but he could tell now that he had to let this kid tell it in his own way or he wasn't going to tell it at all. Around them people shouted and cheered. Popcorn flew, and along the very same row in which they sat, Will saw a kid about Kyle's age tipping a bottle of Jack Daniel's into a half-empty two-liter bottle of Coke as his buddies looked eagerly on.

“Which room was yours?” the kid asked.

“The one at the far end of the hall with the windows in the front. The one with the ash tree just . . . never mind.” The ash tree wasn't there anymore.

Kyle nodded as though that made all the sense in the world to him. “That's my room, too.”

“So you found it in your room?”

The kid shook his head. At last he turned to regard Will carefully, meeting his eyes, and there was an unease there that Kyle was doing everything to hide.

“The storage area? Under the house?” the kid began.

“Yeah. We kept all kinds of stuff in there. Wheelbarrow. Storm windows and things. Half the time I think my parents forgot it was there. I hung out in there with my friends sometimes.”

Will didn't have to elaborate, didn't have to explain that he and his friends would go there to drink beer and maybe smoke a joint now and again. There was an instant communication between them. Kyle understood those things implicitly because it was his house now and he was of that age and had done the same things.

The edges of Kyle's mouth twitched in a blink of a smile. “My dad put a lock on it last summer. But I copied the key.” Then all trace of amusement disappeared and once more the kid could not look at Will. “That's where the problem comes in. I've been down in that hole a thousand times. There's some loose insulation in the ceiling, by a beam—”

Images flashed through Will's mind. He could picture the storage area under the split-level's enclosed porch as if he had just been there yesterday. The door wasn't much, just a few planks of heavy wood and a latch. Inside, the floor was the same concrete as the patio. To get through the door you had to crouch low and duck your head, and even inside you still had to stay down low. Will could not count the number of times he had bumped his head. There was a single bare lightbulb with a chain to turn it off and on, and a couple of thick support beams for the porch ran up through the little room.

And in the insulation that kept the winter cold from seeping into the porch above, there were lots of rips and tears that were perfect for hiding things. Like a dime bag of marijuana, which Will had never really liked but would smoke with his friends if they had some. Or like the Polaroid nudes he had taken of Caitlyn sophomore year and later burned at her insistence.

Will nodded. “You hide things in there,” he said, though his voice sounded far away even to him and the roar of the crowd seemed to diminish. He felt as though he were slipping into the same mist that seemed to envelop everything at the moment. But then his fingers rasped on the yellowed paper of that note in his hand and he blinked and turned to look at Kyle again.

The kid was studying him with renewed interest, as though he had never seen Will before at all. Or as though he had just discovered that Will was a brand-new type of creature, something entirely unexpected.

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Sometimes I do.” A moment of guilt made him drop his gaze, but then he brought his eyes up again and looked at Will more firmly. “I was in there yesterday, right after I saw you. I was going to get something I had hidden in there, but then I found the note.”

His words hastened; his tone became more anxious. “Other than my father, I have the only key. I figured he'd found my . . . the thing I'd hidden. I pulled the envelope down. I was losing it, thinking I was totally busted. But then I saw what it said—”

“What envelope?”

Kyle broke off and gave him a quizzical look. Then understanding dawned and he gave another little shrug. “You don't think it came like that, do you? How do you think I knew your name and where to find you and shit?”

“Do you still have it? The envelope?” Will asked.

An odd sort of slow motion seemed to capture them both. The handful of seconds it took for Kyle to nod and then reach into his back pocket to withdraw the envelope dragged on interminably. As Kyle brought it up and Will snatched it from his grasp, he saw the scrawl on the face of the yellowed envelope. It matched that on the note and was even more familiar, yet he couldn't place it.

Kyle,
said the scribble on the face of the envelope.
A guy named Will James used to live in this house. You've met him. He'll be at the Homecoming game. Find him and give this to him. Everything depends on it.

Will read the words a second time and then a third. A tingle had begun at the base of his neck, and he frowned as he folded the envelope over. With a sidelong glance he regarded Kyle carefully.

A strange prickling sensation raced across his skin, as though his entire body had been asleep and only now was the blood rushing into him again. What were the chances, really, that this kid's story would hold water? This wasn't at all like his confusion of the night before and the way his whole head had felt stuffed with cotton this morning. This was a tangible thing. Someone had done this, had put the note there in the storage space beneath his childhood home.

Someone's fucking with me,
he thought.

Immediately he frowned.

Kyle caught the look and flinched. “What?”

“You sure you're telling me the whole story?” Will prodded, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Seriously, Kyle. I'm not the guy to fuck with today. It's been a long weekend and it's not half over yet. Did somebody put you up to this?”

But before he had gotten the whole question out, Will already knew the answer. He saw the flicker in Kyle's eyes, the surprise and anger, the way the kid got his back up at having his story questioned. If someone was screwing with Will, Kyle's role in that was innocent. The kid was a pawn. But the question was already out.

“I don't need this shit,” the kid said. “I don't even need to be here. I
was just . . . I was curious, that's all. But this is too bizarre.”

As he spoke, Kyle began to slide off the bench, rising to his feet. Will grabbed his shoulder, spoke his name, and Kyle gave him a hard look.

“You want to not do that,” the kid said, and it wasn't a suggestion.

Will let his hand drop to his lap, but at least he had Kyle's attention again. “Sorry,” he said. “It's just that, well, hell, obviously someone's messing with me. I wanted to make sure you weren't a part of it.”

Kyle started down the steps but hesitated. After a moment he glanced around to be certain they weren't drawing too much attention, and he sat back down in the bleachers next to Will.

“All right. What's it all about, then?” the kid asked.

There was a moment in which Will was tempted to tell it all, to spill the bizarre events of the previous twenty-four hours. But he thought better of it. What was a high school senior going to say, except that Will was losing his head? Instead of an explanation, he opted for the truest answer he could summon.

“I don't have the first clue.”

“But you said—”

“I'd tell you,” Will interrupted. He shook his head, an ache growing at the base of his skull now, the kind of pain that told him it was only the beginning. He could feel Kyle staring at him, but for a long moment Will only watched the action on the football field. The ball sailed high above the grass, arcing as it soared toward the wide receiver's outstretched hands.

The receiver caught the ball. The clack of helmets colliding resounded through the stadium as a defenseman made the tackle and then others crashed into them, half a dozen teenagers going down in a crush of flesh and plastic, and it occurred to Will that he wasn't even quite sure which team was which. He had to blink and clear his head to realize that Natick High had the ball, that it had been their quarterback to throw that beauty of a pass, and their receiver to catch it.

Abruptly, Will turned to Kyle. “When I figure it out, I'll come find you. I said I'd tell you what it means, and I will. If you still want to know.”

Kyle nodded slowly. “I do.”

“Fine.” Though it had been the kid who seemed so eager to depart, it was Will who stood up now and started down the steps. “I know where you live.” He shot Kyle a conspiratorial smile that felt obscenely false, and then he turned away, not wanting to look at the kid anymore, not wanting to think about any of this stuff.

K
YLE SAT AND WATCHED
Will James go down to the front of the bleachers. He wanted to laugh. The whole thing was just so idiotic. His buds were probably down on the field, watching the game from the barren patch of ground beside the stands. That's where they always hung out, mainly because it made it easy to slip away if they wanted to take off with a girl, or sneak a beer. And here he was with this Matt Damon-looking guy, with . . .