8

I didn’t do much on Wednesday night. Welcome to my world. It was almost six by the time the late bus dumped me out on the side of the road. The bus just crawls sometimes. I swear, it goes like two miles an hour on the hills. And this area is all hills. On the plus side, Mom’d finally been food shopping. I could smell the Shake ‘n Bake as soon as I opened the door. The first dinner after she went shopping was almost always something good: Shake ‘n Bake chicken, Hamburger Helper, something like that. It would take a few days until we got to the frozen stuff, but hey, that’s why it’s frozen, right?

After dinner, I took a bag of potato chips and went into the front room to start reading the book. Mom was probably confused not to hear the television click on right away. That took an hour or so to happen. I put the book down once I figured out who was going to get killed first. I figured maybe I’d pick it up again later.

And I know that an hour of reading might not sound like much, especially with what I was saying before, how I had half a mind to take it out right at school and start reading it there. But there’s something you’ve got to understand: That book is seriously frickin’ dense. Thing’s like a brick.

There are probably other versions, with bigger type and more pages, but the one we had just crammed the words in there, with tiny type and words out to the edges. The pages were just like all ink. And the writing was the same way: really complicated and hard to figure out. Some of the paragraphs went on for two pages!

Anyway, add it together and you could be reading for a while and not be halfway down the page. And I’m not exaggerating, either. This is one paragraph from the first page, talking about this dude Raskolnikov:

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past, he had been in an overstrained, irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had been so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payments, threats and complaints, and to rack his brain for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

So there you go, and that was just one paragraph. First of all, was there a sale on commas? Second, that’s a long way to go to say that the dude was broke and decided to duck his landlady. After an hour of that I needed a break and maybe an aspirin. Anyway, I watched Without a Trace on cable, and it sort of felt like part of the same assignment.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that show, but it’s all about missing persons. It’s not something I watched a lot, but I’d seen it a few times before, and this one went pretty much like the others. It starts off, someone disappears, like walks out the front door and just fades out on the screen. Then this group of FBI agents, who all seem like they’ve had way too much coffee and way too little sleep, go to work trying to find them. They start by putting a picture of the missing person up on a board.

I tried to remember if I had a picture of Tommy anywhere, like a school photo or something. I didn’t think so, but what the hell would I need one for? It’s not like I was going to forget what he looked like.

Anyway, the thing I liked about the show was that it seemed sort of realistic to me. I mean, what did I know, except that it was a little less cute and clever than a lot of other mystery-type shows, and I was pretty sure at this point that real life wasn’t cute and clever very often. It’s like on other shows, some old lady or flighty dude will string together all of these random clues, like a church bell going off early, some spilled flour, and a cracked picture frame. They’ll take all this in, mull it over, and then with two minutes left in the show, they’ll be like, Reggie did it! For the inheritance!

And sometimes it was fun to follow along with that stuff, if there was nothing else on, but it just sort of seemed like bull to me. You know how they got things done on Without a Trace? They shouted, and if they were really at a loss, they shouted louder. You might think I’m joking, but it’d happened in every show I’d seen so far. Their big thing wasn’t collecting weird clues, it was getting people in this little room and questioning them as loudly as possible.

The clues that mattered to them were the ones that mattered in the real world: Who knows who? Who knew the victim, who did the suspect know, who had a grudge or a crush or whatever. They drove all over the place in these sleek black cars, flashed their badges, busted down doors, and hauled anyone like that back to the little room.

Jack was the main guy, Jack Malone, and he was kind of a big, burly guy, and he always seemed about one nervous twitch away from totally losing it. I think sometimes it was an act, you know, to scare the person, but it was hard to tell. I mean, the whole thing was acting, but you know what I mean. Anyway, he’d get angry and red in the face. He was supposed to be Irish, so that part was believable. He’d yell at the guy, pick up a chair and slam it down, slam his hands on the table, say he was going to arrest him or worse. Or he’d go the other way and lean in real close, still just as angry, like he was barely in control, and whisper in the guy’s ear. He’d get totally in his space and go like, Did you kill her?

Sooner or later, the poor dude would crack and tell him something. It wasn’t even necessarily something about the missing person. It could just be something that’d lead the agents to someone else who might know a little more. Then they’d haul that person in and repeat the whole process. And Jack would be even angrier the second time, so what chance would that person have?

They’d just work their way through everyone who might’ve had anything to do with the person going missing. And by the end of the show, they’d find them. And yeah, they’d break through the door and rescue the lady or kid or whoever with two minutes to go, just like the other shows, so it was still sort of a fairy tale. It was still TV, when you came right down to it. It just seemed a little more like how things were, that’s all.

I mean, cute and clever or angry and loud, how do you think the world works? I think you could pretty much turn on the news right now—or hell, just go through grade school again—and that would give you your answer. And sure enough, I picked up the book again and, right away, this dude killed an old lady with an ax.