“You can’t do this,” she said, her voice cracked and bloody. “People saw us together, I’m sure of it. Saw us talking outside the diner.”
“Kid, if they did, they decided to mind their own business. That’s what most people do, if they’re smart.” He laughed, quick and humorless, then picked up the pots. He moved them to the corner behind the door, directly over where she’d already peed. “One has clean water. The other’s for used.”
He hooked his thumbs into his pant loops. Shadows played across his long, snakelike fingers. She watched as he undid his belt, felt a cold paste filling her veins.
She moved her hands slowly behind her, not wanting him to notice, searching for a rock, a sliver of something sharp, anything to put between her and him.
“Remember,” he said. “You scream, and I take the light away.”
CHAPTER 6
If you balanced parents and doors, Claude had the best tunnel access of our group. Mom and Dad had kept our underground entrance original, a heavy oak door as fancy as our main one, the signaturePfor Pandolfo inlaid in its upper frame, same as Claude’s. Unfortunately, Mom’s situation made our place a hit or miss. Brenda’s parents were technically the mellowest of the bunch, but one of her brothers—Jerry, I think—got caught sneaking out after he was grounded a couple years back, and Mr.Taft sealed off their basement access. Now their basement door looked like that page fromThe Monster at the End of This Bookwhere Grover was trying to keep some terrible creature out, all crisscross, knotted boards and heavy nails. Maureen’s basement was so full of storage that it made it a pain to reach her door.
So Claude’s it was.
The four of us had explored most of the tunnel system and knew our section forward, backward, square, and round. We’d even scouted all the way up to the original factory, but those enormous metal doors had long since been soldered shut. We’d never worried we couldn’t find our way home, no matter how far away we traveled, because on the tunnel side, some stops still had the house number carved into the masonry above the door. That was smart, whoever thought of that, so you didn’t accidentally enter the wrong home after a long workday.Some people had chipped theirs off, but enough remained that we never got lost for long.
What we hadn’t told any of the parents was that the same key worked on the tunnel side of more than one of the doors. We’d discovered it by accident when Claude’s mom had locked their basement entrance after we’d gone through it one afternoon. It was before Brenda’s parents had sealed theirs, so Brenda had her keys with. We tried her basement key on Claude’s door, and sure enough, it slid in like butter. Same with every other basement door we tried. It was a glitch in the Pantown design, one we were happy to exploit.
Claude was so excited when I called to tell him about TV tag that he was waiting on his front porch when Junie and I showed up. He bounced down, showing off a new haircut that his mom must have given him. It made him look more like Robby Benson than ever. It was crazy how tall he’d gotten, shot right up like a weed in the sun. He was a cutie, no denying it. I planned to make him run any potential girlfriends by me first.
“Did you remember to invite Maureen?” Claude asked. He’d been trying for a nickname since kindergarten, anything besides Claude-rhymes-with-howdy, which people constantly mispronounced as “clod.” His last name was Ziegler, so his latest request to be called Ziggy was one of his more reasonable ones. The problem was we’d known him his whole life, so we couldn’t help but think of him by his given name.
“Brenda did,” I said, glancing across the street at Maureen’s. Her house was dark, matching the heavy sky. I hoped rain was coming to break up the wall of heat we’d been living in. The air felt like warm soup. “We’re the first ones here?”
“Yep,” Claude said. “I expect the other two’ll be here any minute.”
On the muggy hop-skip over to Claude’s, Junie’d begged to play word hunt instead of TV tag. Word hunt was our cleverest game. We’d suction our heads against people’s doors trying to overhear whatever phrase we’d chosen, like the Oscar Mayer wiener song or McDonald’s“two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun.” When we caught the first word, we’d run, giggling, on to the next door, waiting until we overheard the second word, and so on. We rarely collected the whole phrase. We did hear a lot of silence, some mumbled conversations, people arguing, or worse, people loving on each other. Whenever we accidentally heard that, I was grateful that not everyone had their house numbers visible on the tunnel side. I didn’t want to see their faces at church and know what they’d done at night.
That’s how we’d overheard Ant’s dad screaming at him. It happened last January, during a break in the neighborhoodRoots-watching party the Pitts were holding. After filling our cakeholes, a bunch of us kids rumbled into the tunnels to let off steam. That’s when I first realized Ant hadn’t been at the party. We headed straight to his door to listen.
Boy did we get an earful of Mr.Dehnke bellering. The way he did it, you could tell it was a regular event. But the funny thing was, even though he was yelling at Ant, he was yellingaboutAnt’s mom.
Your ma doesn’t want me to be happy, does she, boy? Naw, she wants to nag me all day long. She wants to tell your old man what to do, doesn’t she, Anton?
Claude had jerked away from the door the second he realized what was going on. I could tell by his face he thought we shouldn’t be spying on a friend. I stayed, though, feeling something new, something cold-hot, like shame and pleasure swirled together in a gummy ball. I tried to picture what Ant was doing while his dad was talking to him butnottalking to him. Was his mom there, too?
I guess I’m just terrible, Ant. I guess I can’t do anything right. Your ma hates for us to have a good time, that must be it. She thinks I’m not looking hard enough for a job, but she doesn’t know that I’m out there all day, pounding the pavement.
I heard Ant grunt in reply, that’s how close he stood to the basement door. It was enough to push my ear away. Claude and I made ourway back to the party together, quiet, not looking at each other, not saying a word until we reached the Pitts’.
The next time I saw Ant, it was like he knew what we’d overheard. He acted all embarrassed and aggressive, shoving Claude on the icy playground, yelling at me when I told him to back off. It was about the same time last winter that he sleep-moaned during the symposium. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to feel bad, that we all had weird stuff going on in our heads and behind our doors, but I didn’t.
Anyhow, Ant sort of faded away from the rest of us shortly after the night Claude and I (me more than Claude) spied outside his door. The few times he traveled in our pack, he acted so flustered, blurting outI don’t knowin a small voice anytime we asked him a question, that it was almost a relief when he started hanging with Ricky.
Claude swatted a mosquito that had landed on his neck as we waited for Brenda and Maureen. That was another good thing about the tunnels—no bugs. He punched me lightly on the arm. “What’s the skinny?”
“Mom didn’t come out of her room,” Junie said, answering for me, her voice gloomy.
That surprised me. I’d thought she didn’t notice anymore. I suppose that was unrealistic. Our whole house was attuned to Mom and her moods.
“She’s fine,” I told Claude. “Extra tired is all.”
He nodded. He wasn’t only big for his age, he was smart, too. Heart smart, my mom called it, back when she paid attention to such things. That made me think of the last day of school this year. We’d been doing busywork algebra exercises, thosex’s andy’s a pretty code tumbling into place, when the substitute teacher called me out in front of the whole class.
Heather Cash, pull your hair back from your face.
Her words had stapled my chin to my chest as surely as if she’d pushed a button. The motion turned my shoulder-length bob into aprotective shield, the opposite of what she’d demanded. It was instinct, not disrespect, but she viewed the top of my head as a direct attack.
