The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek Read online

  “Now, hold on a sec,” GamGam said. “I just thought of somethin’, Neenie. You should get a ride with Donna over to Li’l Dino’s with your camera, get some footage for your movie.”

  “Oh,” Janine said as her insides screamed GOD, NO! “I don’t think that’s necessa—”

  “No, listen,” GamGam said, her voice rising and speeding up in that way it did when she got excited. “Big Gary—he’s the owner over there—he just passed a coupla kidney stones last week! And they ain’t his first. He’d be a perfect interview!”

  Janine didn’t have the heart to explain that in the last half hour, she’d more or less scrapped the entire project. Donna, meanwhile, was just standing there, her shoulders slightly hunched.

  “Okay GamGam,” said Janine. “Maybe I’ll stop by there tomorr—”

  “I haven’t even gotten to the best part,” GamGam interrupted. “He saves all his stones, Neenie! He’s got ’em in a jar right there in the restaurant. Isn’t that right, Donna?”

  Donna stared, then gave a slight nod.

  “Now that’s somethin’ you need in your movie!” GamGam concluded triumphantly.

  Janine sort of wanted to throw up, both at the idea of a bunch of kidney stones in a jar and at the predicament she’d found herself in. “Um…”

  “I’m sure Donna wouldn’t mind givin’ you a ride, right?”

  “Yeah,” Donna said, which made it sound like she did mind, but GamGam wasn’t having it.

  “Great! You girls go, have a fun time together.”

  Janine really didn’t want to, but she saw the earnest, hopeful look on GamGam’s face and knew she had no choice. “Um, okay, I guess that works,” she said, a hard knot forming in her chest as she followed Donna toward the door. This would be the last destination on her Failed Kidney Stone World Tour. Fifteen minutes at Li’l Dino’s and then she’d get out of this town as fast as she could.

  “Wait!” GamGam shouted. “Your camera!”

  “Oh, right,” Janine said. She grabbed her camcorder off the table and zipped it into its case. “Thanks, GamGam. This should be a blast.”

  “I’ll say!” GamGam raised her drumstick in the air and shook it like a maraca.

  By the time Janine stepped outside, Donna was already in the car.

  4

  REX AND LEIF sat across from one another in silence, each perched on his own rock on a tiny island in the middle of the Cape Fear River. They’d been coming to this place for a couple years now, ever since their parents had given them permission to visit the river without supervision.

  This miniature isle, with its natural privacy from the low roar of the nearby rapids, was the setting for many of the most significant moments in their friendship. It was here that Rex had shown Leif the calendar he’d found in his grandfather’s garage, entitled “Snow Bunnies,” featuring women wearing mittens, scarves, and nothing else. It was here that they’d discussed whether or not Matthew Jenkins was going to Hell because he believed in evolution. And it was here that they had first conceptualized their now-very-much-in-question masterwork, PolterDog.

  The idea they once could not shut up about was now the reason for their silence. They didn’t remember who had first suggested making the movie, which was both comforting and frustrating, as it left them to share the blame for Alicia’s current predicament.

  Leif had slept a total of forty-two minutes the night before. After he’d dropped Rex off and returned to his empty home just past two, he’d lain in bed, eyes open, as still as a corpse, his mind cycling through the events of the past day, Alicia’s voice the looping soundtrack: Rex! Leif! Helmmmphsseh! At one point, he’d found himself whispering aloud, “I’m racked with guilt!” This habit of vocalizing inner thoughts was something he’d developed the year before while memorizing vocabulary words for eighth grade English. He wondered if there was any other situation in which one could use the word “racked”? Could you say that you’re racked with happiness? Or donuts? It seemed like you should be able to, but Leif didn’t think he’d ever heard it used that way. He’d then realized he was casually questioning word usage while his best friend and secret crush was trapped in a creepy reform school, which made him feel even more guilty and ashamed. This pattern continued for hours. It was a long night.

  Rex had fared better, his sleep logging in at three hours and fifty-one minutes. Though a part of him may also have been guilt-racked, most of him was angry. Angry at the Boykinses, angry at Mr. Whitewood and his stupid school, angry at himself. After Leif had dropped him off at home, he’d peeked into his parents’ bedroom and found them both snoring loudly. Good. They hadn’t noticed he was gone. Rex had then gotten into bed, not even bothering to remove the human-sized punching bag that had been his sleeping substitute. In fact, he’d begun to punch it. And kick it. And scream under his breath at it. When he’d abruptly realized how idiotic it was to pummel a punching bag while lying in bed next to it, he’d jumped up and walked out the front door, figuring his parents would be out cold for at least another five hours.

  Rex had walked the streets of Bleak Creek, reliving Alicia’s abduction and their failed attempt to save her. He’d stopped when he’d reached his destination: the bush he had left his scooter beneath. It wasn’t the right bush. The one next to it hadn’t been right, either. “Come on!” Rex had shouted angrily to no one.

  After nearly an hour of fumbling blindly beneath bushes, he’d finally found his scooter, by which point the fury of searching for it so long had commingled with the Alicia fury to create a sort of superfury.

  Rex had channeled that into his scooting. He’d powered down street after street, this time with no clear destination, thinking only one thing: Work that scooter leg. If it had been up to snuff earlier, maybe they would have caught up to the van. Maybe Alicia would be with them right now. Rex wasn’t sure how long he’d rage-scooted, but by the time the sky started to turn purple, the first sunlight peering past the horizon, he knew he was exhausted. He’d gone home and fallen asleep seconds after his head hit the pillow.

  “Do you think she’s gonna be okay?” Leif asked now, not looking up at Rex, who was sitting on the larger of the two rocks on the river island. Last year, they had established a conversational system in which the person sitting on the smaller rock could only ask questions, while the person on the larger rock could offer answers or original thoughts. It seemed cool at the time, but had since become a bit of an unnecessary hindrance to communication.

  “Yeah, definitely,” Rex said, staring out across the river. “She’s Alicia. She’s unbreakable.”

  “But what about the kids who…died?” Leif hadn’t wanted to think about, much less talk about, the three kids who had passed away at the school since it opened in the late seventies.

  “Those were accidents,” Rex said. “Kids being where they shouldn’t. Freak mishaps. Alicia is the least accident-prone person I know. That’s the last thing we should worry about.”

  Leif nodded, trying his best to let Rex’s certitude comfort him. It only half worked. “Okay, but even if she’s safe, how do we know she won’t…change?”

  The Whitewood School was known to be very intense and very effective in its reform mission, but there were conflicting reports about what actually happened inside. What Leif and Rex both knew well, though, was that pretty much every single kid who had gone there had come back…altered. Tommy Dowd had been sent to Whitewood in fifth grade when, during career day at Bleak Creek Elementary, he’d snuck into Anna Coleman’s dad’s police cruiser—which Officer Coleman had been proudly showing off to the kids—and blasted a cassette of N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” on the car speakers. When Tommy came back four months later, he was no longer listening to N.W.A., but he also never really did anything else interesting. Two years ago, Katie McQueen had been taken to Whitewood after calling her mother a bitch in front of several customers at Loretta�
��s Beauty Salon. It didn’t matter that her mother was widely known to fit that description perfectly; Katie went away for an eight-month stint at Whitewood. After getting out, she always respected her mother, but the once-gutsy girl was now just compliant.

  “I mean,” Rex said, ignoring the shiver running down his spine, “at the end of the day, it’s still just, like, a school. Maybe the teachers are stricter, but…she’ll still be, like, learning stuff. Just in a different location.” He knew his words reeked of denial.

  Leif thought of Alicia losing her Alicia-ness and his eyes filled with tears. He quickly turned his head away, pretending to inspect the water rushing past them. Even in his fake watching, he couldn’t help but observe a decomposing leaf float by, following it with his eyes until it disappeared into the mild rapids below them.

  As his eyes returned to his towering best friend on the Big Rock, lost in his own river gazing, it occurred to Leif that it might feel good to tell Rex about his profound crush on Alicia. Sure, it wasn’t the same as telling her, but it was a way to get it off his chest, and he knew Rex would probably have wise insights. “You know what you need to do?” Rex might say. “Write her an epic love poem.” And Leif would say, “Good idea, thanks.” And Rex would say, “No problem, that’s why I’m here.” And Leif would smile and feel okay for a moment.

  Of course, this was all impossible because Leif was sitting on the Small Rock. They needed to switch places.

  “Hey, man,” Leif said, beginning to stand, “I—”

  “I’ve got something funny to tell you,” Rex interrupted.

  Leif sat back down.

  “You’ll probably think this is weird,” Rex continued.

  Leif decided he could momentarily deal with the interruption. Rex’s stories that started this way never disappointed.

  “So…” Rex said. “When we were shooting at the fundraiser…No, actually, before we started shooting at the fundraiser…Like, while we were preparing to start shooting, you guys on one side and me on the other, I was, um…I was looking through the camera to frame Alicia, and I just, like…really noticed her lips. Like really noticed them.”

  Leif stared at Rex, expressionless.

  “I know, I know,” Rex said, feeling completely insecure. “I told you it might be weird. But…I mean, I don’t know. If she wasn’t just, you know, taken away or whatever, I probably would have ignored that moment or forgot all about it. But now that she’s gone, I just feel like…I think I have a crush on Alicia. As of yesterday. I know it’s weird. But, I mean…is it weird?” Rex caught himself violating the Big Rock rule of no questions. “I mean, I’d like to know if you think it’s weird.”

  Leif felt frozen, unable to fully process what he’d just heard. From the word “lips” onward, he’d plunged into some kind of out-of-body experience, as if he were suddenly underwater, staring up at Rex from a great distance. And desperate for oxygen.

  “Yeah, I knew you’d think it was weird,” Rex said, shaking his head.

  The words brought reality crashing back to Leif, whooshing him up into himself again. He blinked and adjusted his glasses as he tried to think.

  Rex also had a crush on Alicia.

  As of a day ago.

  This was a painfully unfair turn of events.

  Leif started to speak but was barely able to form a word. “I—”

  “Let’s go to the Tree,” Rex said, standing up, then stepping off the island and steadying himself in the knee-deep water. He was feeling embarrassed and wanted a change of scenery.

  Leif remained paralyzed. Why did Rex get to confess his crush first? He hadn’t even let him sit on the Big Rock at all! And Leif was the one who’d been grappling with his crush for at least a month. His feelings had actual substance—it wasn’t just about one time when he liked looking at Alicia’s lips. Geez!

  Rex turned his head. “You comin’?”

  Leif slowly stood up, almost involuntarily beginning to follow Rex to the giant tree they’d found two summers ago, a hardwood so enormous that Rex, Leif, and Alicia couldn’t hold hands around it. They checked every time the three of them visited to see how close they were getting. Just a week ago they were still one foot short.

  Leif carefully worked his way through the river, which was never more than waist-deep at this spot during late summer. He caught up to Rex as they reached the silty bank, even in his stupor still keeping an eye out for the moccasins that loved to bask along the water’s edge.

  As they began to walk into the woods lining the river, Rex noticed that Leif wasn’t okay.

  “Look,” Rex said. “I know there are things about Alicia you find super annoying, so you probably could never imagine her this way, but—”

  “No, I could,” Leif said, sensing an opening. “I really could.”

  “Oh, you could?” Rex asked, surprised.

  Leif’s heartbeat quickened. Here it was. For better or worse, they were both going to lay it all out there. “Yeah,” he said. “I could.” His whole body tensed as he waited for Rex’s response.

  “Thanks, man,” Rex finally said, putting a hand on Leif’s shoulder. “Thanks for supporting me like that and not thinking it’s weird. Even if Alicia does really irritate you sometimes.”

  Wait! No! For weeks, Leif had been imagining the joyful moment when Rex would give his blessing to the Leif and Alicia coupling, and now somehow it was Leif giving a blessing to him? Everything was spinning out of control. He had to undo this.

  “Not that it even matters,” Rex said. “Since Alicia is off at Whitewood. Man, it sucks so much. We can stop talking about this, but thanks, dude. Telling you that felt, I don’t know…freeing or something.”

  “Um,” Leif said. “Wait, we can…Uh, let’s talk about it a little more.”

  “Really?” Rex said. “I didn’t thi—” He stopped midsentence, his head pivoting sharply to the right. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I thought I heard a twig snap.” Rex scanned the area with laser focus.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Leif said, his sleepless body already exhausted from the waterlogged walk to the Tree, which was now only thirty or so feet away. He wondered if Rex’s sudden concern with a snapping twig was just another case of him employing his sophisticated subject-changing tactics. “Might have been a raccoon or something.”

  “Raccoons are nocturnal,” Rex said.

  As they emerged into the small clearing that surrounded the ancient hardwood, they immediately noticed something different since last visiting the Tree. There were branches leaning against the oversized trunk, covered in mud and leaves, making a crude shelter. In front of the lean-to, a ring of rocks surrounded a fire that had only recently died, red-hot coals still glinting. Beside the fire, on a flat rock, lay a freshly peeled squirrel skin.

  Rex and Leif knew that deer hunters used these woods alongside the river, but this didn’t look like any deer blind they’d seen, and they were pretty sure hunting season was still at least a month away. This was someone’s…home.

  They looked at each other, instinctively knowing not to speak.

  Rex slowly walked toward the shelter, Leif wildly but silently expressing his disapproval of his friend’s decision to investigate. There appeared to be a collection of belongings under the leafy roof, and Rex figured they held clues as to the identity of this mysterious forest-dweller.

  He knelt down at the mouth of the shelter.

  “Halt!” a squeaky voice shouted from behind them. They turned their heads to see a boy, probably close to their age. His face was covered in dirt, and he was barefoot, though you may have first thought he was wearing brown shoes given the mud that caked his toes. The only thing unsoiled was his lightning-blond hair, giving him an almost angel-like appearance. He had some sort of animal pelt—maybe rabbit, maybe possum—over his shoulders. I
n one hand he held a homemade spear, and in the other, a stick skewering a half-eaten squirrel carcass. He took a step forward, his wooden spear not exactly pointed at them, but not exactly not pointed at them either.

  “Step away from my stuff,” the wild boy commanded.

  “Okay, no problem,” Rex said, trying to hide the fear in his voice with a forced smile.

  Leif took in for the first time the dull brown jumpsuit the boy was wearing. Or maybe it was once white. He also noticed a ragged, bloody bandage on the boy’s hand, the one holding the squirrel kebab.

  Rex didn’t recognize the boy, which was odd, as everybody in Bleak Creek knew everybody in Bleak Creek. Especially everybody their own age.

  “Uh, what are you doing out here? Hunting?” Rex convinced himself to ask.

  “Well, this squirrel didn’t impale itself on my spear. So yeah, hunting is one thing I’m doing,” the boy answered, his eyes slowly moving between them. “Better question: What are you doing out here?”

  “Uh, we were just leaving, actually,” Leif said, convinced they’d crossed paths with a psychopath capable of killing more than just squirrels. “Sorry to bother you.” He began to walk around the boy, who sidestepped to block his escape.

  “I asked you a question,” the boy said, his spear definitely pointing at Leif now.

  “We come to this tree a lot,” Rex said, trying to ease the tension.

  “I can see why. This is an impressive specimen,” the boy said. “White ash.”

  “Yep,” Rex said after a pause.

  Leif backed up, joining Rex at his side, then took an additional step in order to put his larger friend in between him and the spear wielder.

  “You didn’t know it was a white ash, did you?” the boy asked.

  “We came here about a week ago,” Rex said, ignoring the boy’s question. “You weren’t here.”

  “I was somewhere else.”

  “Are you, like, living out here?”