“NO!”
I sat upright in bed. The closet light was still burning. Outside my bedroom window a bird skittered by, looking almost liquid in the silver-gray morning light.
My body felt clenched up, my legs ached where they’d been cut. The dream was fading, but pieces of it still clung to a cobwebby corner of my brain. I shook my head, as if I could fling the dream away like droplets of water after a shower. I was actually shivering with fear. But why? I didn’t know the people in the dream. Did I?
Marky.
Who was Marky?
Mark Rosenthal? As a kid? Impossible. For one thing, his grandmother is Jewish, not Greek.
Maybe the kid was me. I sure felt close to him, and I do call my grandmother Yiayia. But she’s in Greece, and nothing else in the dream happened in my life. It wasn’t even my house. Nothing looked right. The TV was kind of a strange, long shape, and the clothes were some ugly style I’d never seen.
Hmm, maybe Marky was an alien.
The dream fragments were breaking up now, like a radio station in a car speeding too far from the signal. Last night’s reality shoved itself back into my mind.
Or was Gumby a dream, too? I hoped so. Desperately.
“Are you okay in there?”
My mom was outside my door. Her voice was thick with early morning grogginess.
“Fine,” I replied.
She took that as an invitation to come in. In her robe, flannel nightgown, and bare feet, she seemed small and fragile. She hardly ever looks that way, and it was kind of refreshing. “Hi, sweetie. You had a nightmare, huh?”
“I guess.” I plopped my head back on my pillow, trying to look as if I needed to go back to sleep.
The truth? I was wide awake and flying.
“David …”
My mom has about seven hundred ways of saying my name. This was Number 359: the suspicious “David.”
“Your pants in the sink? They’re full of mud and grass.”
This threw me a little, because I thought she’d been upstairs sleeping the whole night. “Oh, sorry,” I said.
“You had a little outdoor proofreading?”
“Mom … I’m tired.… It’s Saturday.”
She let out a sigh and stood up. “Look, David, I know you’re not a boy anymore. But as long as you live in my house, you follow my rules. One: Come home when we agree, or call if you’re going to be late. Two: Don’t do anything … foolish you cannot take a man’s responsibility for.”
A man’s responsibility! Suddenly, in her mind, I’d turned into every mom’s nightmare. My Son the Stud. I wanted to burst out laughing and say, “Thanks for the compliment!” I didn’t know who was the worse wishful thinker, her or me.
“I didn’t, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“All right … if you say so.”
As she shuffled back out of my room, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “Mom!”
She turned around. “Uh-huh?”
No.
I couldn’t tell her. It was too gruesome. She’d get hysterical. She’d call the cops. The school. The FBI. And what if I had dreamed the whole thing?
“Nothing,” I said.
She gave mea weird glance and left. I caught a glimpse of my digital clock: 5:28.
I got dressed quietly. No way was I going to sleep. I also had no intention of sitting there thinking about Gumby. I had to get my mind off it … him.
No one had proofread the yearbook the night before, but Mr. Brophy had told Mr. DeWaart it could be done early this morning. I didn’t know what time Someday My Prints Will Come was open, but I’d find out.
And I would take the overland route to get there, as far from the Ramble as I could go.
“Aaagh! Someone hold me up! I’m seeing things!” Mr. Brophy said, clutching his heart and staggering backward on the print shop’s front steps. His gray, shoulder-length, aging-hippie hair fell across his pasty face.
He was joking, I assumed. But on this particular day, that particular kind of joke made me nervous. I smiled to humor him.
“It’s … it’s a high school senior awake before noon on a Saturday!” he gasped.
“Hey, some of us have to work hard,” I managed.
Mr. Brophy put his key in the front door. “Yeah, to make up for the other slobs, huh? Come on in. I have the mechanicals laid out for you. The photos aren’t pasted down yet, but you’ve got them marked on the back, right?”
“Right.”
“Matching pictures to names is something I can do pretty well,” he said. “It’s the names themselves that get me. My eyes cross after six letters.”
I followed him in, feeling queasy, thinking about what lay in the river a few hundred yards away. I vowed not to say a thing about it. If Gumby was a dream, I’d forget it eventually. If he was real, somebody would discover him. There would be an explanation, and I’d be able to forget the whole thing.
I went through the motions of proofreading. I vaguely remember correcting a few last names and skimming over some quotes, poems, and captions. But my concentration was shot. The letters on each page seemed to swarm like ants. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could do.
On my way out, I saw Mr. Brophy racing around the shop. Employees were straggling in, and machines were whirring. “Thursday okay?” he shouted.
“This Thursday?” I asked. “To print them and bind them?”
“What do you think I run here? A bunch of Benedictine monks with quills? I do everything in-house — and you guys ain’t the only school I’m doing. I’m like an accountant at tax time. I need to get you out of the way for the crunch, that’s all.”
“Thursday would be great,” I said.
He rummaged around a pile of papers and pulled out an envelope small enough to hold a yearbook photo. “This is the weird shot. You want one copy for each absentee, right?”
“Yep,” I said.
Mr. Brophy gave me a sly half-grin and shook his head. “You guys are sick, man. Worse than we were at your age.”
“They had photographs back then?”
“Out!” Mr. Brophy picked up an X-Acto knife and held it like a dagger. “Out, brazen child!”
I ran from the shop, surprised I had any sense of humor left.
Over the weekend, no one said a thing about a body. I listened to the local news each evening and kept my ears open in town.
On Monday morning, as I approached Wetherby High, I noticed three police cars parked in front.
Inside the lobby, students were gathered near the office doors of our principal, Mr. Dutton. I could see Ariana, Smut, and a friend of theirs named Monique Flores.
Monique is blond, wispy, smart, and very emotional. (When she found out she was class salutatorian, she burst into tears of disappointment.) Ariana and Smut were on either side of her, arm in arm, as if they had to support her.
“What happened?” I asked them.
“Rick Arnold’s … missing,” Monique said gravely, between sniffles. “The police are talking to Mr. Dutton about it.”
“His parents are in there,” Ariana added. “They’re hysterical.”
“Wow,” I replied. “When did they notice he was missing?”
“They’ve been looking since the weekend,” Smut said. “But they didn’t want to make a big deal about it. You know Rick. They figured he hitched down to Vanderbilt to camp out at his brother’s college dorm. He does that sometimes.”
“And he didn’t?” I asked.
Smut shook his head. “They’d have known by now. They think either he hitched with some wacko kidnapper, or he’s hiding out around here.”
“Did they mention anything about him, like what he was wearing?” I asked.
Ariana looked me in the eye. “Black shirt and black pants. Why?”
That confirmed it. I pictured the face in the Ramble and mentally filled it in with a skull and some cheekbones.
Gumby was Rick Arnold.
And I was the only one who knew where he was.
The door to the principal’s office swung open, and a stocky, youngish policeman stepped out.
“Uh, please disperse,” he shouted. “Come on, let’s decongest the egress.” (I never have understood why cops talk like that. This guy sounded like a taxidermist who took a wrong turn.)
I looked beyond him and caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold inside the office, their faces streaked with tears.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I stepped forward, staring at the policeman. He looked at me as if I were approaching the President of the United States with explosives strapped to my body.
“Move along, pal,” he said with a steely glare. “Ain’t you got homeroom?” His fingers instinctively perched near his billy club.
That I understood. I froze in my tracks as he disappeared back into the office.