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  for my brother Spot, who’s there

  1

  SO SHANNA GOT A new job at the movie theater, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.

  I’d like to say it wasn’t my idea, that we all thought of it spontaneously, just started saying parts of the prank out loud that jigsawed together in the air, one quarter my plan, a quarter Danielle’s, Tim and JR competing to finish out the rest.

  It was kind of only me, though.

  Let me explain.

  First, Shanna’s job at the movie theater, the big one down by the lake. Her mom was making her do it. Not work—Shanna’s had jobs since she was in junior high—but working there specifically, her checks going straight home to pay for what happened to their side lawn, which is a whole different thing and not my fault at all, not completely. The reason it was that movie theater and not the dollar show or the drive-in or the even bigger cineplex farther down 30 toward Dallas was, first, it was that that one’s the main one in Rockwall, and closest, but, second, and probably the real reason, Shanna’s mom had dated that theater’s main security guard in high school, and he could keep an eye on his long-ago ex-girlfriend’s daughter. He thought.

  Two weekends in, Shanna used her usher powers to sneak us in the emergency exit at the back of theater 14, the last one on that side, and the farthest from the manager’s offices, which is where security was. It was less because we wanted to see a movie than that we wanted the thrill of not paying for a movie. You know. Anyway, with assigned seating, we were having to move the four of us to a new place with about every third clump of people who came in. It was kind of a giveaway, ended up with the assistant manager coming in to count heads, and us claiming we’d thrown our ticket stubs away already, who keeps ticket stubs? The only problem was we couldn’t remember where our seats had been.

  It probably would have worked, or, it could have worked, but then the assistant manager asked us what movie this even was, surely we knew that, right?

  Not really.

  Worse, it turned out to be a senior citizen kind of movie—four old dudes escaping their nursing homes and doting children and county jail situations to have one last golf game—which was when we all kind of shrugged and gave up. Better to get busted than claim having wanted to see that.

  Because we were sophomores the same as Shanna, it didn’t take long before they were asking her questions about did she maybe know us. Of course we all temp-unfriended her while being perp-walked out, but that didn’t erase snapshots, and there were a lot of those. Even under the filters and markups, it was kind of obviously the five of us, from elementary on up until this very night, including one group selfie from our stolen seats, posted right on her timeline.

  So, the result of us sneaking in and not knowing to sit in the very front row until the show started was (A) Shanna would now work in tandem with a more trusted “experience provider,” and (B) there would be random head counts of all movies she was in charge of.

  It was bullshit, especially since she could be making more in tips at the car wash with Danielle—because of the Porta-Potty situation, girls didn’t work there so much, so they pulled tens and even twenties sometimes—but she still had six hundred to go in paying her mom’s landscaping tab, so she was stuck.

  Anyway, the prank.

  JR lives kind of out in the sticks, right? Way out on Rabbit Ridge, technically in Heath? Back behind his fence, there’s this big hill we used to always roll down in boxes. Stupid kid stuff, pretty much turned us into instant chigger-bait, so we were looking like we had pimples before we even really had them. Anyway, in sixth grade Tim was going for the record in his box, and it crashed him through the trees, into the dark stinky muck of the creek that had never been actual water, had always been just mud.

  None of us went in there anymore since Danielle had gotten poison oak or ivy or we didn’t know, so we were all standing there waiting when Tim came back limping, bleeding from the forehead, and carrying a pale white arm kind of bent in cheery fashion at the elbow.

  We braved the woods to see the rest of this.

  There in the black slime of the creek bed was a naked white mannequin, this giant Ken Doll reaching for the sky with the one arm he had left.

  You better believe he was our toy for that whole summer.

  We traded him between our houses, carrying him a piece at a time bungee-corded to skateboards and bikes, or stuffed halfway into a camping backpack. We stole our dads’ clothes to dress him up, leave him here and there. He had so many names, but he was finally just “Manny,” for, you know, mannequin. Real clever, I know.

  When we finally got bored with him, he ended up in my garage, straddling the Kawasaki 750 my dad had laid over, the motorcycle forbidden by my mom from ever being ridden again, but that didn’t mean Dad had to sell it, which is a whole thing with them, but never mind.

  So, Manny was a joke from when we’d been kids, before life had gotten all serious and SAT. Me having the idea to bring him back for this perfect prank was a way of honoring the kids we’d been, I figured. And it would be one last blast for Manny. Better, Shanna would get the joke right off. That was very important. It was kind of how we’d be telling her we were sorry for the hot water at her new job. Well, and for the landscaping she was paying off with that job too. For a lot of stuff, okay? I mean, she’d always been the toughest of us, the meanest when she needed to be, the least likely to cry or complain about cuts or scrapes, the best at earning WoodScouts badges, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like nice things too, we figured. Like being included in the prank to end all pranks, the one that could, someday, summarize our whole high school experience and, right now, blast us off into the future in the most fitting way.

  So, we raided our dads’ closets again, and dug into the costume trunk in our old fort that nobody’d found yet, way back in the trees behind Holy Trinity. We were needing clothes for Manny, but for us as well.

  We were going nineties-baggy for that Friday night.

  Danielle shoved a whole mannequin arm down the leg of the pants she was wearing, which kind of made us all . . . look away but not look away? I mean, okay, Danielle was always just one of us, a girl, yeah, whatever, but she’d never been like a dating prospect, right? Mostly because none of us were dating, didn’t need boyfriends or girlfriends since we had each other. Or maybe we just didn’t have the nerve, were hiding in the safety of friendship, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. And Shanna was like my third cousin on my mom’s side anyway. But, Danielle, the thing with her, why she’d never been in the realm of possibility—it was probably that we’d all seen each other with snotty noses in elementary, we’d all ridden the acne highway of junior high together, and now we were telling each other horror stories about the swarm of college questions constantly spewing up from the mouths of grandparents and family friends. It’s like we were too close for anything romantic, if that makes sense? Any of us going out with any of the
rest of us had never been a real consideration, or even a distant maybe.

  Still, seeing that mannequin arm reach down the front of her pants? I had to kind of look far, far away, I don’t know about Tim and JR. Then she did the same with the other arm, and tied bandannas around her thighs to keep the arms in place, and part of me was wondering why we hadn’t been playing this particular game for a long time already.

  “That’s two limbs,” JR said, all helpfully.

  The legs were a thousand times trickier.

  We ended up in Tim’s uncle’s shop in the old part of Rockwall, his uncle using a band saw to slice the legs in half top to bottom and longways, then drilling holes for dowels so they could be pushed back together. Because we’d told him about the joke we were playing on Shanna, he comped us a roll of duct tape to hold the legs back together. When we were leaving he shook his head, said it must be great to be young and endlessly stupid.

  He’s a good guy, really. If I were ever going to be his age, I think I’d want to be just like him, mostly.

  Anyway, with the legs cut into pieces like that, Tim got both lower parts into his biggest backpack and slung one of his dad’s shirts over it. It looked fake as hell, but would anybody at concessions risk asking the hunchback kid if he was smuggling something in or not?

  JR used his old soccer bag for most of the other leg pieces, and we duct-taped it to his middle, for a stomach, because two hunchbacks in one screening might be pushing it. I picked up the last foot, hefted it under my arm, looked ahead to the uncertain future.

  “You just going to carry it, Sawyer?” Danielle said like the challenge it most definitely was.

  I nodded yeah, and it wasn’t a lie. What I did was wrap it in cardboard and brown packing tape. My story was going to be it was a lamp my mom had wanted me to pick up from the repair place, and the window on my car—I don’t have a car—it wouldn’t roll up, and I couldn’t leave it in the parking lot, could I?

  My bet was that, while the theater might have new rules about carrying backpacks and stuff in, it wouldn’t have a repaired lamp policy. And once anybody hefted it once or twice, it would obviously not be some crazy assault weapon. JR couldn’t get away with this, since his dad was a known gun nut and all, so people just assumed he had some of those bullet-shaped genes, but my dad was mostly concerned with figuring out what kind of mileage our new electric car was getting, and how much that was saving us per month, per year, and on into the hybrid future, so I wouldn’t get any second looks, could tap-dance right past the box office with whatever, I was pretty sure.

  To prove it, I just dropped the head into a plastic shopping bag, so it was completely seeable to anyone who gave it half a look. But if you saw a human head in the bag of someone in line for a fountain drink, would you say anything? I mean, if I were the one holding that bag, and my record was super spotless, all my emotional meltdowns far in the past?

  You wouldn’t give me a second look. Probably not even a first look. Nobody would.

  The torso we put in a trash bag we rubbed actual trash all over, then leaned up against the wall in the alley by the emergency exit. It was theater 4; Danielle had coasted by the box office, checked that out for us, her hair all in her face so she was just any girl on another Friday night.

  We got in without any hassle, paid this time, were even in the theater early enough to pop the emergency exit door without any problem—Tim did a big fake fall on the stairs on the opposite side up high, his drink going everywhere, JR acting offended and maybe ready to fight about it, nobody looking over to me holding the door open so Danielle could drag a suspicious trash bag in.

  We waited until the trailers to assemble Manny, but had to lie down in front of the very front row to do it. It was gross. Our hair and shirts kept sticking to the floor, and we knew the story about the senior football players sitting in the back row and peeing in secret, letting it run all the way down to the screen, where we were.

  When it was done, our throats raw from how much we had to cough to cover the duct tape tearing, each of us took an assigned article of extra clothing off, dressed Manny up, topping his outfit off with my dad’s Redskins cap he wore all ironically for working in the garage, that I was sure he’d never miss, and would probably be better without.

  On the count of three, then, when the screen seemed darkest, we stood with him, carry-walked him up to the seat we’d bought him, even going so far as to thumb his ticket stub into the front pocket of his shirt like a handkerchief square.

  We didn’t know if this was Shanna’s theater or not—she never found her assignments out until she came in, and then it could change for no real reason—so the way we picked it was by what movie we actually wanted to see.

  It was part three of a juggernaut of a superhero series, and we’d seen the first two about ten times already, tracking it from this theater to the dollar show to the drive-in to rentals and bootlegs—not necessarily in that order.

  It was Manny’s first experience at the theater, of course.

  He never blinked.

  2

  WE SHOULD HAVE GUESSED what was going to happen next. What had to happen.

  We were all hopeful and stupid, though. And, yeah, probably feeling kind of bulletproof. One of our friends worked here, didn’t she? What could go wrong? And it wasn’t like we hadn’t paid this time. Sure, we were sort of banned, but did the assistant manager really expect that to hold? Would he rather we pirate everything on his marquee? Wouldn’t that ruin the movie industry and contribute to juvenile delinquency, sir?

  Anyway, about halfway through the movie, JR went down to concessions, filled his small fountain drink cup up with blue Icee and volunteered to the junior taking his money that someone had just sneaked into theater 4, was disturbing the peace, saying the lines out loud with the heroes and heroines, I don’t know how he phrased it. It worked, that’s what’s important. A few minutes later the assistant manager and the manager rolled in with Shanna’s mom’s security-guard ex, their grim faces on, flashlights in hand, two or three experience providers ranged out behind them to get some more experience. But then, after some whispering, the ex ducked out, the rest of them waiting there along the curtain-wall so patiently, the assistant manager’s loafer tap-tap-tapping to get this started already. About thirty seconds later the quiet little lights under the stair steps dialed up bright-bright, some people in the audience gasping, and then the footlights sucked back the complete other way, to blackness, and took all the little hidden lights along the walls down with them, stranding the theater in about five seconds of inky black, except for the exit sign, which I guess never goes off. It was weird, kind of made me feel like my whole seat was floating away with me, that all the seats had let go, and we were drifting up wherever now, were going to probably slam down when the lights came on.

  Or maybe it was just me and my heart, I don’t know.

  My coke wasn’t coming up through its own straw anyway, and popcorn wasn’t drifting around at eye level. It was probably just the weirdness of being in a public place with so many people, and then suddenly being all alone too, if that makes any sense.

  Except for that green flickering exit sign.

  I used it for my anchor, told myself it wasn’t getting smaller, that it wasn’t sinking away from me, and held on to it as best I could until the security-guy ex at the light switches found the balance, brought the stair lights up a smidge, like he’d probably been told to.

  And, in this new glow—yes. Just like we’d each been praying, one of the experience providers who’d been roped into this was Shanna. She was wearing the black slacks she’d borrowed from Danielle, that Danielle said she never wanted back, they were all cinemucked up, and she had the green transparent visor on that everybody from the theater was wearing to promote that new bank teller movie or whatever. It’s not important. And while she didn’t see me—I’ve thought and thought about this—I’m pretty sure she maybe did see Danielle, and kind of tried to look away like uh-oh.
>
  As it turned out, “uh-oh” was right.

  The manager and the assistant manager were ducking up and down the rows now, and we were all in our far - from - each - other/we’re - not - a - group strategically distant unguilty seats just trying to enjoy the movie we paid for, and each ticket stub that showed up under a dim flashlight was one ticket stub closer to us fizzing over with so much held-back laughter.

  We’d put Manny in the best seat in the house, of course. That translates to about the hardest one to get to. And, since the manager was working from the top, the assistant manager from the bottom, it was also just about the last. I guess maybe the idea was that, in a house half full like that one was, it being the fifth or sixth week of the movie already, the best seats would have been taken already, meaning the sneakers-in would have to take what’s left.

  I was already planning how I wasn’t going to say directly to Shanna that this was my idea, but she’d be able to connect the dots. We all knew which of us still had Manny, right?

  It was going to be perfect, wonderful, legendary.

  Until the assistant manager actually got to that middle seat.

  I couldn’t see Danielle’s or Tim’s or JR’s eyes, Shanna’s either, but I could feel them looking at me, and each other.

  What we expected was for the assistant manager to startle and fall over the back of the seat in front of him, hopefully into someone’s popcorn, which he’d then have to replace, or we expected him to immediately start trying to administer the CPR Shanna said she’d had to get certified in, in case of Milk Dud failure or whatever.

  Instead, the assistant manager lowered his flashlight down below knee level like he’d been doing to see stubs and not blind everyone in the place, and then he nodded, kept crouching along that row.

  What the hell, right? What the fuckity fuck.

  I stood up from my seat to, I don’t know, to call foul, to explain the joke and how wonderful it had been about to be, but as soon as I did the dude behind me grumbled for me to sit, so I sank back down. But it was like my chair was still floating away, right? This. Did. Not. Track. Not even a little. Yes, Manny had a ticket, that was going to be the next part of the joke, one of us peeling it up from his shirt pocket, but Manny couldn’t flash his own ticket. All Manny could do was sit there.