Night of the Mannequins Read online

  And had the assistant manager not clocked that frozen-in-place face, that empty expression, that Ken Doll drugged-out happiness?

  I shook my head no, no, this wasn’t right, this wasn’t even in the general arena of being close to right. If—if this prank wasn’t working, then . . . then nothing held, right? Nothing was real. Everything was cut loose and falling just wherever, it didn’t matter because rules didn’t count anymore.

  And then, in the middle of me forgetting how to breathe, how to process, how to not run shrieking away into permanent crazyland, the assistant manager got to me to check my ticket. Just because he was authority and I was banned, I kept my face down kind of on automatic, let him do his necessary thing and slide right past, but then Tim, a few seats down, he couldn’t find his stub anywhere. Which pretty much figured for him. In trying to explain that he’d really paid, the assistant manager finally figured out who he was, which instantly turned into a big thing, Shanna getting reeled into it all unawares, both of them getting marched down the carpeted stairs.

  I hardly looked up when they were led past, practically in cuffs. I just scooched my knees over to the side, kept my face down.

  For the rest of the movie, then, in the dead space after the failed and failing prank, in the impossible afterplace of everything having gone wrong, I wasn’t checked in to the whole superhero parade on-screen. What I was glued one hundred and fifty percent to was the man sitting up so straight in the center of the movie theater, his red-and-white cap on at the same rakish angle I’d put it on him, all my hopes and dreams packed into his twenty-five pounds of department store plastic, my heart beating so hard, my eyes so laser-focused, my mouth so dry, everything I thought I knew dripping out my ear, my nose, my fingertips.

  When the credits rolled, Manny didn’t wait for the tag-on scene we knew came later, he just stood up, didn’t look around, and filed out with the rest of the crowd, his legs stiff but moving, his arms swinging in a limited range, like action-figure arms.

  I leaned over, threw up into and through the bottom of my cupholder, and then smushed my cup down into it like to hide it.

  3

  ON THE LONG WALK home, up through the wide streets of the Richie Rich mansions, Danielle and JR were jittery with ideas for what could have happened. The reason Tim and Shanna weren’t there was that they were in movie jail, the kind you only get bailed out of under the withering glare of the mom or dad you have to use your one call for.

  Danielle was ninety percent sure Manny getting up and walking out had been a double prank, which I didn’t think was really a thing. Her idea was that some college kids had seen what we were smuggling in, and they’d crept over, laid Manny down into the aisle and pulled him down to the door little by little, smuggled him out that way, a piece at a time probably, then creeped his outfit back in on someone else during a big action scene. For who knows what reason. Is it just automatic to steal any mannequin you happen to encounter?

  “We would have,” Danielle countered.

  JR and me shrugged, couldn’t exactly deny that.

  JR’s idea was that the assistant manager had actually recognized either Danielle or me or JR or Tim, and somehow immediately figured out exactly what we were doing, there being nothing new under the sun, whatever that stupid song is. Anyway, when he’d shined his assistant manager light down for the ticket stub, he’d just been miming it. Or, he’d really done it, but we couldn’t see if he was shining his light onto a ticket stub or just his own open palm.

  Then, maybe because there’s a secret door for the projector in back or something, he’d sneaked Manny out, switched clothes, and sneaked back in, sat in that same place, only ducking into the hat at the last moment. Just to teach us a lesson, via freaking us out.

  “It worked,” Danielle said, mostly talking about me, I think, since my muscles kept twitching and jerking with nerves, like I was about to burst—it was my third day of forgetting my meds, I guess I should say. They usually tamp my nerves down so people can’t see them.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight my insides were on full display.

  “But what did he do with Manny, then?” my stupid nerves made me ask.

  JR studied me for maybe five seconds, like he was trying to make sense of my question, and then he didn’t have an answer.

  “What do you think then, Einstein?” he said.

  It was what they’d been calling me since I’d started taking AP courses, which my mom said would calm me down, keep my brain clicking on other stuff instead of obsessing about all the wrong stuff and then having to recount it for whoever would listen. So, “Einstein,” yeah. You can’t do anything about a name that’s both an insult and a compliment. AP had kept my mind occupied somewhat, though. Until this.

  “We don’t know anything about him, do we?” I said to the two of them.

  “The assistant manager?” Danielle said. “My mom says he played basketball the year we went to regionals, but he didn’t start.”

  “Manny,” I told her.

  “What do you mean?” JR asked, his mouth Icee-blue.

  “Maybe somebody hadn’t just thrown him away in the mud, yeah?” I said, looking them both in the eyes to really set it, JR first, then Danielle. “Maybe he’d been there forever, and he finally just, like, got uncovered.”

  “He looks exactly like the ones in the window where my aunt works,” Danielle said.

  “He’s probably mad from not having a—you know,” JR said, miming a penis like he was holding a fire hose. Danielle averted her eyes, rolled them like girls do.

  “I’m serious,” I said, then waited a kind of campfire-tale amount of time before adding, “I didn’t put him on my dad’s motorcycle. And I know my mom didn’t. She says he’s creepy, all pasty white like that.”

  “That leaves just one obvious person,” Danielle said, tapping her chin in fake thought. “However shall we solve this impossible mystery?”

  “My dad loves that bike,” I said, all serious. “He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t make it a joke like that.”

  “So Manny was trying to ride away?” JR asked, a hint of nervousness to his voice.

  “My dad almost died on that bike,” I said right back, a hint of insult to my voice.

  When you’re talking about your dad being in the hospital for three weeks, nobody can say anything back for about ten seconds.

  “Why does he even keep it?” JR asked.

  “It’s this whole big stupid thing,” I told him, not wanting to go into it.

  “Maybe somebody kicked him out of a plane,” Danielle said. “Manny, I mean. That little airport’s right there, isn’t it?”

  “That dentist airport?” I asked, after the beat it took to place it in my head, all the way on the other side of the interstate.

  “Maybe they kicked a person out,” JR said, falling in, “and, on the way down, the only spell he could cast to save himself was to become a mannequin.”

  “Because that’s a spell all wizards memorize,” I said. “And also because wizards are real. I’m trying to be serious here. Y’all weren’t sitting at the same angle I was. I saw Manny stand, I saw Manny walk away.”

  “His legs are put together with little pieces of wood,” Danielle said, I guess trying to be the adult of us or something.

  “And he just has a bulge,” JR said, leading with his pelvis again, most definitely not being our grown-up.

  “He was our friend for that whole summer,” I said. “And then we just forgot him.”

  Neither of them could argue with that.

  We all three kind of shrugged, and we were bad enough people we didn’t even call Tim or Shanna that night, and then Shanna kind of quit calling us altogether that week—she’d done it before, to punish us—and Tim was so grounded he didn’t have access to any kind of phone.

  Maybe this is how it happens after high school, right? Or even on the ramp up to high school being over. You just drift away, and then it gets easier not to call, and then you forget the number,
and then you see your old friend in line for the movie or whatever and you let your eyes keep moving, because it’s going to be awkward now. Never mind that they know you better than any other human in the world. Never mind that they fake-spilled juice into your lap in fourth grade when you’d peed your pants. Never mind that you hugged them when they slept over and cried about their dad moving out. Never mind a thousand things.

  I don’t know, I really don’t.

  We’ll never get to that awkward stage anyway. Obviously.

  Unobviously? Neither me nor Danielle nor JR looked behind us that walk home that night, but if we would have, I bet we would have seen a tall male form standing behind us, watching us from under the brim of his Redskins cap, his pants and shirt and shoes not even close to matching, his blue eyes painted wide open and intense. His posture absolutely perfect.

  4

  SHANNA WAS THE FIRST TO GO. And by “go” I mean die. And by “die” I mean get killed.

  It’s like—she was still part of us, I guess, of the group that had abandoned Manny one perfect summer so long ago. So, Manny, he was starting on the outside or something, starting with her because she was furthest from the actual prank, and he was going to work his way in.

  Leaving guess who right in the gooey middle, surprise.

  Anyway, yeah, news flash, Shanna died when that Mack truck veered off the service road, jammed through her bedroom wall, kept right on going through the rest of her house. Big disastrophe, horrible tragedy, made The Dallas Morning News, her mom and little brother both dead too, whole community in tears, candlelight vigils, memorials, half days at school, the whole deal. “Why them?” everyone was asking. “What did they ever do to deserve this?” “Isn’t it so random how that can happen to just anyone?” “It could have been any one of us, couldn’t it have?”

  There were no answers, of course, but it wasn’t because there weren’t answers. It was because nobody was asking me what I might know.

  Would I have even told them, though?

  Honestly, at that point in things, I’m not sure.

  Whatever I would have said, though, it’s a sure thing they wouldn’t have believed me. There’s not one half of one tenth of a sliver of a chance that they wouldn’t have called me crazy from grief, suffering from survivor’s guilt, acting out via conspiracy theories, engaging in magical thinking, maybe even showing the front edge of a psychotic break with reality, a break due to, I don’t know, to our failed prank, and how it had fundamentally upset the nature of what I’d been foolishly calling reality, the one, you know, where mannequins don’t get up, walk around.

  It’s probably good I kept quiet, I’m saying.

  But I could have told them all a thing or two, if they’d wanted to listen. Or, I’d have asked them certain leading questions. What if that truck wasn’t random? What if Shanna’s mom and brother were just collateral damage? Most important, especially as it still applied to me and Danielle and Tim and JR, what if Shanna sort of maybe had been asking for it?

  As far as I knew—as far as they said, and we believed them, why would Shanna and Danielle lie—Manny had been their first kiss, one truth-or-dare afternoon. And that whole summer was a . . . I don’t know what the best joke had been. There were just so many, each more fabulous and inventive than the last. Setting Manny up in old people’s yards holding their spraying garden hose with one hand, the other lifted to wave in a 1950s “we just won the war, everything’s hunky-dory” way should any cars drive by. Using two of us to lift his eyes up level with the bottom of Danielle’s second-story bedroom window, making her scream loud enough her dad nearly caught us. Giving Manny Sharpie tattoos and then Windexing them off, making them bigger, louder, worse and better at the same time. Carrying his head into Kroger and hiding him open-eyed in the cantaloupes, running off with him like a football before any clerks or bag boys could catch us. Leaving him on benches in the park and then hiding in the bushes, blowing dog whistles as hard as we could so the dogs would try to attack him, the owners desperately apologizing, trying hard to drag their crazy dogs back to the normal world.

  Manny was good for it all, was always game.

  Until we kind of just left him behind like a baseball glove we didn’t need anymore. Like a tricycle we’d outgrown. Like a friend we’d decided we didn’t need to talk to anymore.

  I can still see his hand lifted in pre-wave, though. Just waiting for someone to drive by, notice him.

  We deserved him coming for us, yeah.

  I’m just sorry it had to start with Shanna, who wasn’t even in on the prank.

  But if Manny’d started with me, then a whole lot more people would have ended up dead, so, yeah, sorry, Shanna. Guess it sort of had to be like this. The greatest good, all that, which is also just a way of saying the least bad, which, I know, a truck running off the service road and through your window at sixty miles per hour, that’s pretty bad, right?

  But yeah, I could have maybe called to warn you, sure. Probably I even should have. And okay, I didn’t have it all figured out so much yet then, but, I mean, I could have told you about that rattling I was hearing in my backyard anyway. Particularly around the shed. The rakes and shovels, the tomato planters my mom always pins so many of her hopes on.

  What I didn’t tell you was that my dad sent me out there to chase whatever raccoon or dog away, but instead of a raccoon or dog, I saw a flash of Band-Aid-pale skin in the bushes for a moment. My heart nearly stopped. I froze, looked harder, finally cued in to a painted-on eye watching from a break between the bushes.

  Manny.

  When we’d been posing him here and there and everywhere, he’d always been stiff, hard to make do what we needed him to.

  The level his eye was at now, though, I had to imagine the rest of him crouched down like at the starting blocks for a race. Meaning his fingertips, which had always been more like the front edge of a paddle, had to be holding him up, had to be able to spread wide enough to do that. And his feet would have to be a body length behind him almost, ready to blast him up and away from getting caught doing whatever he was doing.

  Was he trembling from the effort of holding this awkward position? Was that trembling making the front half of one of his thighs start to calve off, the dowel in there at just the right angle to slip? Was he still wearing our dads’ cast-off clothes or was he naked now, which doesn’t really matter for him?

  Was he happy to see me?

  I was still thinking that, then.

  So, yeah, after walking out of the theater like a normal human person, he’d—he hadn’t had anywhere to go, anywhere to be, so he’d gone feral, right? Maybe he’d lived on the golf course for a few nights, then remembered where our old fort was back in the trees and gone there, hoping to find us still being kids, still ready to play, still ready for more and more hilarity. But he had to be just operating on dim memories, I figured. And those memories had brought him here, to my backyard, so he could sneak into the garage, maybe. So he could ride away on my dad’s Kawasaki, save us the trouble of having to deal with the guilt of him always standing out there at the edge of things. That’s the kind of guy Manny would have been, I mean, if he could have been human.

  I couldn’t leave the garage open for him, though. Even if he could get my dad’s motorcycle started, he wouldn’t know how to ride it, not really. He’d lay it over the same as my dad had, and his limbs and head and body would go spilling every which way, and I’d get busted for it, of course, because he couldn’t have done this himself, he’s just a thing, Sawyer, try telling the truth for once, why don’t you?

  All the same, I couldn’t let him starve, could I?

  I whispered to him to wait, then went inside, scavenged for what I imagined a mannequin might eat. It turned out to be bubble wrap and packing peanuts and mayonnaise.

  I walked two steps past the light in the backyard, my heart pounding, dropped it all and ran, then came back thirty minutes later to tear the corners off the mayonnaise packets.

&nbs
p; The next morning it was all still there, but it was scattered and smeared around, like Manny had looked in this junk for the food part, not found it. But the shed door was swinging back and forth in the breeze, and it had definitely been shut the night before. For absolute sure, because if it wasn’t, the raccoons were always out there in their black masks, waiting.

  I tiptoed in, saying Manny’s name not really hopefully, but like a shield, I guess. Like reminding him I’d known him, once upon a time.

  He wasn’t there, but my mom’s jumbo bag of generic Miracle-Gro had its side ripped open in the most obscene way, most of its pellets not spilling out, just plain gone. As many of them that slick plastic fingers would have been able to get out, anyway.

  “You eat that?” I said out loud to him.

  “Eat what?” my dad said back, standing in the open doorway right behind me, then, before I could answer, he asked if I’d seen his Redskins cap, and my traitor of a brain kicked up the rakish angle he usually wore it at, and then suddenly knew why I’d put it at that angle on Manny.

  “Maybe Mom put it in the dishwasher again,” I told him without looking, and that was enough, he faded like dads do, leaving me with this plundered bag.

  “You’re growing, aren’t you?” I said to the idea of Manny.

  The idea of him nodded back.

  He was hungry, he was growing, and he sort of remembered us.

  That combination left me feeling a certain kind of uneasy. A suspicious, dready sort of uneasy.

  And then that Mack truck veered off the road into Shanna’s room. Unrelated, right?

  Wrong.

  Because her login was still on my old laptop, I spidered over to her account to see what she’d been pirating the night those headlights came through her window. My idea, I guess, was that if the download had been interrupted, I could finish it for her, at least give her that much closure.