As he had suspected, there was not a lot of daytime activity in the neighborhood. Mostly sprinklers. Automated. Some kids were around—he heard shouts from backyards—but hardly any grownups. He observed three young women pushing babies in strollers or leading toddlers to the park on Block Four, beyond the range of his area of study. He wasn’t sure if the women were mothers or nannies.
He made his second round at dusk. This time he wore a more relaxed outfit, jeans and a university T-shirt, but he still carried the clipboard. Again confirming his suspicions, life had entered the houses. In the twilight summer heat, many people had their doors propped open, their curtains wide. Some shared their
musical preferences with passersby and their neighbors. Milo heard the edges of conversations, saw phantom people on large-screen TVs through living room windows, smelled meat grilling. Other people strolled the street, some of them being dragged along by dogs. There were many cats out in the evening, perching on fences and watching him, darting across the street, rolling in the grass.
And there were possums.
Where he had grown up, out in the country, possums were night visitors, not active when the sky was still half full of light, and you never saw more than one at a time unless it was a mother carrying babies on her back.
When he saw the first possum crossing the street, he almost mistook it for a cat, but it carried its ratlike tail low to the ground, and with its short legs, its movement was more a trundle than a stroll or a lope. Once he recognized the first animal, he started noticing them everywhere.
Almost every house in Block Two and most of the houses on Block Three had a possum lurking near it. Some of the possums snuck up and ate from pet food dishes on people’s porches. Others crouched in shadowed parts of the yards, almost catlike in their silhouettes, but not quite.
“What is with this plethora of possums?” Milo muttered. He had photocopied his first map earlier in the afternoon so he’d have a copy for each round he made and could note populations on it, people and things and animals. He used M for man, W for woman, C for child, D for dog, and K for cat (since C was already taken). There were little red Ps for possum all over.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” said someone beside him.
He jumped so hard his teeth knocked when he landed. “What—who are you?” he asked.
“Bethany,” said the girl. She wore a pale sundress that showed her nice breasts and good legs. Her black hair was bunched into a curly ponytail. Her skin was tan or naturally dark; she looked like caramel given a sultry shape. She had dark eyes that looked wise beyond her years, whatever they were—he wasn’t sure if she was a teenager or a grownup. “I’ve been following you for two blocks.”
“What?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t your mother tell you not to talk to strangers?”
“You’re not a stranger. Aren’t you staying in Tad and Sherry’s house? You’re Milo, right?”
Milo’s shoulders sagged. His clipboard hand lowered to his side. “How’d you know?”
“Sherry, she’s not the type to trust people, you know?”
“I know.”
“Well, she asked everybody to keep an eye on you and make sure you didn’t do anything subversive, like, say, have fun while you’re here. I live next door, and I’ve been watching you. Not that I’d rat on you to Sherry. I’m not a squealer. I’m just bored.”
Milo looked at his clipboard, with its neat stack of maps, three for each day of the rest of his stay. He had planned to do one round in the morning (provided he woke up on time), one in the afternoon, one at twilight. He had even thought that he’d go up and knock on doors midway through the process, maybe pretend he was conducting a survey or something, and ask what people did with their days, how many of them were home and why. He wasn’t sure anybody would talk to him, but he thought it was worth a try.
Not if everybody knew who he was. That would contaminate his data. He sighed a sigh that started in his toes and worked its way up.
Maybe he could start over, pick some blocks farther from Tad and Sherry’s. He was getting into this data collection thing.
“So what
are
you doing?” Bethany asked.
Milo started walking again, and she walked beside him. “Just watching stuff,” he said, lifting his clipboard to mark two children playing basketball on a concrete driveway.
“Sounds lonely,” said Bethany. “Want some company?”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Sixteen.”
“Somebody’s going to accuse me of a crime if I hang out with you.”
“Oh? So how old are
you
? Eighteen?”
“Twenty,” said Milo.
“We’re just walking where anybody can see us. I can tell everybody I’m making sure you don’t have any fun.”
“Which would be the truth,” he muttered. He marked another P on his map. This time the possum was under a hedge. Its eyes glowed red in the dusk. Milo glanced behind him to see if there were any lights shining that might have bounced off the back walls of the possum’s eyeballs, but no.
Bethany tagged along as he finished his round of his three chosen blocks. He continued to make notes, including adding in another six possums, four with red eyes turned in his direction, spooky in the fading light.
Milo decided he would pick new blocks tomorrow, but in the meantime, he put his first two maps on the front step of Tad and Sherry’s house and studied them
side by side by porch light, with Bethany peering over his shoulder.
“That’s the Nasser house,” Bethany said, touching a house on the daytime map, which had more blank space for writing. “And that’s where the Dylans live. This is where Rachel and David Saleh live with their kids, Jen nifer and Alison.”
Milo stared at her, then wrote down what she said. She filled in names on all the houses on his diagram. It was useless, he thought, to make these notes, since he was going to pick another route tomorrow, but what the heck, he might as well know more about the people he’d be living among for the next three weeks. Maybe he could shift the focus of his study, or maybe, if he kept the data dry enough, he could use what he had. Refocus the study somehow.
“Did you really see all these possums?” Bethany asked, touching red Ps on his second diagram.
“What do you think, I’m going to mark something down that’s not true? It’s not even relevant data. I don’t care about possums. I’m interested in people.”
“I knew I’d been seeing more possums than I used to, but I didn’t realize there were this many,” she said. She lifted the map and studied it, then looked across the front lawn. “Gimme your red pen.” She held out a hand.
He gave her his red pen, and she wrote a P on the square in front of Tad and Sherry’s house. He lifted his gaze and saw the red-eyed stare from a hunched shadow under the hydrangeas.
“They’re freaking me out,” Milo said. He stood, watching the possum, and went to the hose coiled against the side of the house. He shook loose a few coils, stuck his thumb over the end of the hose, turned it on, and then sprayed a stream of water toward the possum.
It gave a grunting snarl and turned tail, leaving behind
a puff of smoke and a smell of burned wires. Milo shut off the hose.
“What?” Bethany said.
Paladin woofed from the back yard where Milo had left him. “Dumb dog,” Milo said. “Can’t even bark at an animal when it would matter. He waits till it’s over before he adds his two cents.”
“How come that thing smelled like electricity?” Bethany asked. “Sometimes they’re rank, but that isn’t right.” She headed for the bush.
“Wait a sec,” Milo said. He followed her. “Anybody ever tell you you’re an idiot? If something’s strange, that doesn’t mean you rush toward it.”
“You are
so
much more boring than Sherry said you’d be!” Bethany said. She stooped and peered under the bush. “It’s gone anyway. Except for—ouch!” She snatched her hand back and stared at reddening fingers.
“What happened?” Milo grabbed her hand and saw the red was a rash, not blood. He peered at the dirt under the bush and saw a twisted piece of what looked like white metal.
“Ow ow ow,” Bethany said.
“Let’s wash that off.” Michael kept a grip on her arm and dragged her into the house, where he thrust her hand under the kitchen faucet. She did some shrieking. He gently washed her hand with antibacterial liquid soap and warm water. The red stopped spreading, but it didn’t fade. He held her hand under the light. The skin of her fingers was peppered with tiny blisters. He got out a kitchen towel and wrapped her hand in it, wondering if he should make her an ice pack. By this point she was sitting on a chair, crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Maybe he should have listened to her when she told him to let go all those times.
“No,” she said, and hiccupped, “it’s all right. I feel better.” Tears ran down her cheeks.
“I should probably take you to a hospital,” he said.
“Get that piece of metal first.”
“Okay.” He opened the tool drawer and got out a pair of pliers, then fished a glass canning jar from Sherry’s neatly arranged supplies. He headed toward the front yard, only to be stopped by a Hawaiian-shirted semi- man-shaped mountain.
“What did you do to my little girl?” roared the mountain, shoving Milo back into the kitchen. Seeing Bethany’s tears, the mountain took a swing at Milo, who ducked the fist but lost his feet.
“Daddy!” Bethany shrieked. “He didn’t do anything! I hurt myself, and he was just trying to take care of it!” She waved her towel-wrapped hand.
By the time Milo and Daddy and Bethany had straightened things out, the piece of mystery metal was gone.
Milo slept in the next morning. The previous night, while he and Bethany and Dad were sitting in the waiting room of the hospital emergency room, Bethany had told Milo which kids were headed to summer camp, what jobs the dads and moms were going off to, who stayed home (only two grownups in his three sample blocks), which houses had nannies and/or maids, and who the neighborhood housekeepers and gardeners were. He had written it all down, numbering each house on his map and then organizing a page of data for each house. Bethany’s dad hadn’t said anything to confirm or deny Bethany’s intel; mainly he flipped through car magazines from the hospital’s battered collection of reading material.
Collecting all his data from one informant whose veracity he had not yet had a chance to check wasn’t an ideal situation, Milo thought, although he hadn’t really
talked to his professor about field studies and how they were conducted. Still, he’d lost his taste for making his rounds. If, while he was wearing his little brown pseudo-UPS outfit yesterday, everybody already knew who he was—he cringed, then overslept.
Paladin woofed him awake, finally, around eleven AM. The dog slept at the foot of the bed, all the manners Milo could get out of him, considering Milo was living in Tad’s oldest kid’s room, and that apparently was the kid the dog liked best. The first couple of nights the dog had actually tried to sleep on top of Milo. Since Paladin weighed more than a hundred pounds, Milo had protested, wondering how his nephew survived the crush of the dog at night. Locking the dog out of the room didn’t serve; the dog whined at the crack under the door all night. Leaving him in the back yard was marginally better, until one of the neighbors woke Milo up at three AM. to complain about the howling. Finally they compromised. Paladin slept across Milo’s feet, and Milo was happy the rest of him remained uncrushed.
Paladin woofed again. Milo struggled to his feet and pulled on a pair of boxers, then wandered out to the kitchen to get Paladin some kibble. It was only after he’d dished out two scoops that he realized someone was pounding on the front door.
He went to the door and peeped out. Bethany and her father stood on the welcome mat. He opened the door.
“Nice,” said Bethany, looking at his boxers. He looked down, too, and realized these were the Valentine ones, covered in hearts with little arrows through them. Bethany’s dad grunted something Milo couldn’t understand, though he caught the gist of it. He closed the door, dressed, and returned.
“So I was telling Dad about the possums on your map,” Bethany said when they were all in the kitchen. Milo fired up the yuppie coffeemaker, fetched his clipboard, and joined the other two at the breakfast nook table. He flipped to the map of last night’s walk and showed it to Bethany’s dad. Who, surprise, grunted.
“I know,” Bethany said. “It’s a lot. Hard to believe, except I was there when he was doing this part—” She traced her finger along half the route—“and I saw them, too.”
Bethany’s dad grunted.
“Yep,” Bethany said. She turned to Milo. “We’re both going with you tonight.” She glanced at the top of his map, saw that he’d written start and end times for his evening observation. “Seven PM. We’ll be here.”
Milo transferred basic data to one of his empty maps (names and numbers of residents in each house, with the residents’ ages, where known), went to Kinko’s to make new copies, and then stopped off at Toys R Us to gear up. He dressed as himself for his afternoon route and stopped pretending he wasn’t interested in everything he passed. Most of the houses were empty again. He had to get up early one of these days and see the houses before all the kids took off for their summer prisons of day camp, summer school, or planned activities. He hadn’t repurposed his study yet. Maybe he should collect the data and then design his paper around what he actually found out.
Maybe he should just spend his summer the way he had when he was a kid, doing nothing but fun things, and come up with some other project a week before school started again.
He should at least give it two days before he gave up. He didn’t anticipate showing Sherry any of his data, but he could imagine her sneering at him for again not finishing
something he had started. Not that he cared what Sherry thought.