MATTY AND MICHAEL WERE TALKING to Bryce when I walked in. He was standing between them, staring straight ahead into the middle distance with eyes that were angry white holes in the red expanse of his face.
Matty was crouched in front of him, and as I walked up Michael saw me and tried to smile. Matty looked up and tried the same.
“I’ll handle it, guys,” I said. “Gotta get Bryce here a new pumpkin, that’s all.” Bryce still hadn’t said anything. “You guys want to go see how Faisal’s doing? See if he needs any backup?”
Michael didn’t think about it. He just nodded and said, “Yeah, all right. Thanks.”
“Let me know if you need any help in here,” Matty said, locking her eyes on mine.
“I will,” I said, smiling until the door closed behind them. I waited to make sure they didn’t come back through. “All right, gotta get you a new pumpkin, huh?”
Bryce didn’t say anything back. His jaw was clenched at an angle and his eyes were still focused on whatever he was seeing a million miles between us.
“Look. I’m sorry I called you an asshole. I shouldn’t have done that. Just been a long day. Let’s just get you a pumpkin and we’ll carve it up, yeah?” If I’d said it any friendlier, he might have figured that something was up.
“I don’t want to.”
This time, when I smiled, it was real. Because he was dropping his horseshit act and talking to me.
“Come on. It’s okay. We’ll carve whatever you want into it.”
He looked at me.
“Whatever I want?”
“Mostly whatever you want.”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Fine, let’s carve the stupid pumpkins.”
“My man. All right, go get one.”
“What?”
“Just through there,” I said, pointing at the staff-only room Lump and I had found.
“What about the ones in there?” he said, pointing back to the room filled with kids.
“What ones in there? Those are all taken. Yours got busted so you need to get another from the staff pile. Means I won’t get to carve one, but that’s the job, right?”
The dramatic color had gone out of his face, but he was still looking at me like I was lying to him.20
“It’s staff only.”
“So?”
“So you’re probably going to tell on me.”
I breathed out heavily, only half-faking being frustrated. “Why would I tell on you? I just told you to do it. Pumpkins are down there next to the confiscation box at the end of the tunnel. Just be quick.” I opened the door that nobody had bothered re-locking and hit the light switch.
The only two bulbs that worked buzzed on as I let the keywords work their way into his head, slowly but steadily convincing him that A) it was a good idea to do what I said because B) it was an independent act of free will that would put him somewhere he wasn’t allowed to be and C) in the direct vicinity of a whole box of contraband while also D) depriving me of a pumpkin. He edged up to the doorway and looked down the stairs.
“It’s dark in there,” he said.
I answered him even though he was more than likely just thinking out loud. “So?”
There was enough sarcasm in that one word to shift his tone one hundred and eighty degrees.
“So nothing. I’ll be right back.”
And the little fucker steeled himself and stepped into the darkness, jolting and grabbing the railing when the first stair creaked under his weight. He paused for a tenth of a second at the first light’s horizon, not looking back at me or dramatically shuddering, but pausing all the same.
He forded the darkness, one arm clutched close and the other reached out, his feet moving six inches at a time.
I waited until he broke into the light to step down. Under the second lightbulb, he was far enough away that he didn’t hear the stair creak under my feet.
Beneath the lights, he was the Bryce we all knew: obnoxious, loud, and shitty. I reached up for the light nearest the stairs, the bulb that completed and ended the bridge of darkness in the long tunnel, and twisted.
He didn’t notice; bent over with his face buried in the boxes, he didn’t see the light nearest the stairs go out. But he would. He would turn around and he would realize that there was nothing for him in that tunnel except one small island-puddle of light in a cold, soundless, and otherwise pitch-black void.
He would hear me walk back up the stairs, one creaking step at a time.
He would hear the door close.
He wouldn’t leave the dim light. Not when it was the only light he could see.
And eventually someone would notice he was missing and they’d eventually hear him screaming and crying and they’d open the door and find him, the pale-faced and whimpering little bastard who finally got what he deserved.
Charlie taught me a lot of things, not the least of which was the price and payoff of being a bastard. That there could be a reason to play the villain.
The bulb in my hand hadn’t had a chance to get hot, to reach its full temperature, but it wasn’t cold. Not yet. It had started to heat up even though it had only been on for thirty seconds.
Bryce stood up, scratched at his back, and said, “I don’t see it.” He went to turn around—to see all there wasn’t to see—when he leaned back over to rummage through another box he had no business rummaging through.
The lightbulb was going cold in my hand.
I pictured staring up at Test through all of the thin ice I’d let myself fall through.
Bryce stood up.
And he started to turn around.
He turned and faced the apparently endless darkness.
I thought of that moment when little broken Charlie Baltimore brought me his Nintendo DS because he just wanted to mitigate the damage.
I thought about the dead things in Faisal’s story that really maybe did contain life, and I thought about Lump still needing help, and how much I needed everything that had led to this moment to mean something. And I twisted the goddamn light back on.
“There’s nothing down here,” he said, not having a chance to register how close he’d come to being left in his own worst-case scenario.
With the bulbs working and me standing there, he walked through the tunnel toward the rickety stairs as shittily as ever.
“Everything okay?” Matty said from the top of the steps.
I flinched hard enough to almost rip the light out of the socket. She turned her head a little and said, “You okay? What’re you guys doing down there?” For just a second in the dim yellow light, it was like looking into a crystal ball: she looked ten years older and ten times more badass. Like a noir detective, one hand resting out of sight on the butt of a six-shooter; calm, cool, and anything but oblivious.
Bryce walked past me and up the stairs, past Matty. “He told me to go down there to get another pumpkin.”
“Oh. All right,” she said, looking at me, her eyes scanning for subtext. “Well, I think I saw some extras in the other room. With the other pumpkins. Where all the other pumpkins are.”
“I don’t want a stupid pumpkin anyway,” Bryce said, breaking off toward his friends.
Matty and I sat down around the small table where Faisal was hanging out with Trevor and Michael. Goblin Joe was hovering around the table looking at all the pumpkin designs we hadn’t gotten around to carving yet.
“Everything okay?” Faisal said.
“Yeah, everything’s fine.” I looked at Trevor and said, “Couldn’t find him another pumpkin. I guess he doesn’t get to have one.”
And instead of smiling or telling me just how much Bryce should go fuck himself, Trevor said, “I think he’s scared.”
“Who?” I asked, even though I was sure I knew.
“Bryce,” Trevor said. “He spends so much of his time being a blow job but I think it’s because he doesn’t know how to be sad and scared like everyone else.” Like all the other machine boys in the world who don’t hurt like they’re supposed to.
“Why would he be sad or scared?” I asked, running through a mental list of reasons why someone like Bryce would feel anything like shame or guilt.
Trevor gave me a look that was, for Trevor, very sarcastic. “Because Lump is in the infirmary because of him. She told him that she’s seen how mean he is to Joe and it makes her so sad it hurts. She’s sad enough to be sick and he knows he helped make her feel that way.”
“What?” I said, forcing myself to keep a straight face. I hadn’t known her for very long, but Lump seemed like the kind of person who would emotionally gut-punch the Bryces of the world in defense of the Trevors and Goblin Joes.
“I’d be extra sad too,” Trevor said, and Goblin Joe nodded his goblin-head in agreement. “Anyway, thanks for the pumpkin.” Trevor looked us both in the eyes before nodding at Goblin Joe and heading over to Bryce’s table. He handed Bryce his pumpkin.