Kyle Dwyer back home. He was Charlie’s older brother, but that wasn’t obvious to the casual observer. Charlie’s face was chubby; Kyle’s was close to gaunt. Charlie shuffled; Kyle sauntered. While Charlie was at home playing video games, Kyle was out “playing the field.” They weren’t buddies, probably never had been. If you said a bad word about Charlie, Kyle would defend him, because that’s what an older brother does. Otherwise, they steered clear of each other.
Kyle was arrested once. It was a sunny autumn afternoon, the beginning of fifth grade for Alistair. He and Keri had just come home from school, and their father met them at the front door and presented them with a pair of rakes. Grumbling, they took to the front yard, where they clawed at the mess of leaves. A police cruiser carrying two officers glided past. Lights weren’t blaring. There was no emergency.
Ten minutes later, the cruiser was heading the other way and it stopped in front of Alistair’s house because a pair of plastic trash cans had rolled into the road. The officer on the passenger side got out to move the cans, and Kyle’s face was framed in the backseat window. Kyle smiled and held up his hands. Cuffs decorated his wrists.
“Can you say jailbird?” Keri whispered as she rested her rake against a tree.
The officer tossed the cans into the Colters’ yard next door, and Kyle blew on the window, fogging up the glass. Using a finger, he wrote out a message that Alistair read as:
TUO EM KAERB
“Is that, like, written in Russian or something?” Alistair asked as the officer climbed back into the cruiser and they pulled away.
Keri cracked up. “No. That’s, like, written in Moron. He wrote the letters backward, but not the words.”
Alistair furrowed his brow. With the car gone, he’d already forgotten the exact letters, so it would be tough to solve. Keri grabbed her rake and used the handle to lightly poke him in the ribs. “‘Break me out,’” she said.
“Oh…”
“So you gonna do it?”
“I assume … it’s a joke?”
“You think?” she said with a laugh.
“I wonder what he did.”
Keri attacked the leaves with the rake and looked up quizzically. “Sold black-market babies. Spied for the Commies. Squeezed the Charmin. Could be anything.”
* * *
“A butterfly knife,” Charlie told Alistair over the phone later that evening. “They found it in his locker after school.”
“How’d they know it was there?” Alistair asked.
“Anonymous tip.”
“Is he going to jail?”
Charlie huffed. “Probably not even juvie. He’s only sixteen, and this is his first offense. I think the police wanted to scare him. He’s suspended for two weeks, though.”
“Man,” Alistair said. “What are your parents doing?”
“Freaking,” Charlie said. “Dad mentioned something about kicking him out.”
“You think they would?”
“Naw. It’s a bluff. Mom wouldn’t let it happen.”
“So what are they gonna do to him?”
Charlie adopted a deep voice, an impression of his father. “Gonna teach him right from wrong. How to be a civil member of society.”
Alistair knew that Kyle wasn’t a perfect guy, but Kyle had always been nice to him. “Why do you think he had the knife?” he asked.
With a strangely joyful laugh, Charlie said, “For stabbing, of course.”