“Did Tonya tell you she didn’t do it?” Meika said.
“Yeah, she did,” Carlos said.
“That doesn’t mean we believe her,” Finn said.
The front door opened and Claire emerged.
“Speak of the devil,” Carlos said.
“What?” Claire said, and they all laughed.
Claire pretended to laugh, too, and they all filed past her and into the house. A minute later they emerged again. They probably wanted to chew tobacco, and Claire knew not to allow it in the house; their mom could always tell, hours or days later. As the boys, and Claire, began their disgusting coughing and spitting, Max knew the stage was set. He knew what he had to do. “Okay. Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”
He snaked out of the fort’s entrance, making sure he was undetected by the four targets across the street. Now standing across the street, he looked closely at Claire and her friends and confirmed that he had not been detected. He reached back into the fort for his ammunition. He gathered the snowballs carefully into all of his available pockets. When his pockets were full, he placed the rest kangaroo-style in the front of his coat. He left twenty snowballs in the fort, in case he needed to replenish his supply later.
Now he had to get closer. He needed to cross the street and position himself in the neighbor’s yard. There, he would have a fence to protect himself from the enemy fire. But it was a long way across the street, and surely they would see him running no more than forty feet away.
Then he had an idea.
He took one of his smaller snowballs and threw it as far as he could. He could throw far — he could throw a baseball forty-four miles an hour, according to the radar thing at the batting cages — so the snowball, a small one, sailed over the heads of Claire and her friends and into the far-neighbor’s yard. When it landed, it made a loud scratchy sound and the four teenagers all turned to see where the sound had come from. While they were distracted, Max darted across the street and dove behind the other neighbor’s fence.
The plan worked. He was smarter than he could stand. He advanced quickly.
He was now only about twenty feet away from the enemy, with the neighbor’s fence obscuring them. The four teenagers were doing their business with the chewing tobacco, the boys putting it in their mouths, the girls saying, “That stuff’s nasty,” and then saying other things that were stupid and were not worth saying. All the while, none of them had any idea that they were about to endure a devastating assault.
Max dropped all his snowballs onto the ground below him, and placed a line of ammunition on the lower beam of the fence. He kept seven snowballs in his various pockets, in case he needed to advance on the enemy and finish them off.
Finally he was ready. He took a long breath, heaving out something like dragon steam, and he began.
He unleashed a barrage of five snowballs, one after the other, throwing them faster than even he thought possible. His arm was some kind of machine, like a tennis-ball cannon.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
One hit the bed-headed kid in the chest. The sound was incredible, a hollow pop against his puffy jacket.
“What the hell?” he yelled.
Another smacked Meika in the thigh.
“Ah! What the!” she gasped.
One thumped onto the station wagon’s windshield; again the sound was great. Two missed their targets completely but it didn’t matter — Max was already unloading another barrage. Four more left his cannon-arm, and these hit Claire’s shoulder, the car’s roof and door, and Carlos, right in the groin. He doubled over. Fantastic.
“Who is that?” Claire yelled.
Max ducked behind the fence but not before the boys deduced that Max was the source of the assault. They had figured out his position. Max got another arsenal ready, but when he peeked over the fence again — “There’s the little bastard!” one said — he was met by an avalanche of snow, which fell upon his head and back with great force and speed. The boys had been fast, and deposited a boulder of snow over the fence and onto Max. The fight was moving beyond artillery and into hand-to-hand combat sooner than Max had expected.
“How’s that feel, wuss?”
“You hit me in the balls, idiot.”
If Max could run across the street, he would be safe. Even if they followed him across the street, they would never be able to find his well-hidden fort, much less penetrate his defenses. He took off.
“Run, little grasshopper! Run!” they said.
“Look at his little legs go!”
As he began running, he launched one last snowball, arcing it so high it disappeared into the sun before Max could see where it would land.
He ran, and was across the street before the boys had even decided to follow. He zig-zagged through the pines to throw them off the scent, and then heard the last snowball land with an icy smack.
“Max, you freak!” he could hear Claire saying. “You hit Meika in the face!”
That was a shame, Meika was the one he hadn’t wanted to hit at all. Maybe she would think him more muscular because he’d hit her in the face? Did it ever work that way? He thought maybe. Max grinned as he reached the entrance to the fort. Maybe Meika would kiss him and touch his neck because he hit her in the face with snow.
He looked out his peephole, and could see Claire helping Meika, who was crying, her face red and raw. Why would anyone cry about getting hit in the face with a ball of ice and snow falling from the sky after almost hitting the sun?
Max was disappointed in her. Girls were such girls. Pretty soon Meika would be crying all the time, about everything, which is what Max’s mom seemed to do. A few years ago Max had said “What’s wrong?” and “Don’t cry, Mom,” but now there didn’t seem to be a point.
“Where’d he go?” one of the boys said. Max could hear the voice, but couldn’t find its source through his peephole.
“Wait. Check out the flag,” said the other boy.
Max made a mental note: next time, no flag.
He heard the footsteps of the two boys very close to his fort. Man, they were fast. Now they were behind him. He turned around and could see their feet just beyond the entrance to the cave.
“He’s in there,” one said. “I can see his stupid boots.”
“Hey kid, you in there?” the other asked.
“He’s in there,” the first said again. “The boots, dude.”
“Come out, or we’ll get you out.”
Max was starting to worry. It really did seem like they knew where Max’s fort was, and that he was inside it. He was stuck if he stayed in the fort, and would probably be slaughtered if he left it. His options seemed few.
Now a hand was inside the fort. One of the boys had shoved his arm through the roof. How’d he do that? Max kicked it, hard, and it retreated.
“Ow! Now you’re dead, kid,” a voice said.
Then it was very quiet for a moment.
And Max could no longer see their feet.
He heard some giggling, then some shushing.
Then it was quiet for a very long moment.
Now footsteps on the roof. A bit of snow-dust fell from the ceiling. Max felt safe, though, knowing that there were many layers of well-packed snow between the roof and his chamber. They stepped and stepped. So what, Max thought. Step all you want.
Then they jumped.
The sound was like a low, loud cough.
They jumped again.
More snowdust fell from the ceiling. The roof drew closer to Max’s head. He shrunk down, now laying flat. But still the ceiling seemed to be falling.
The crunch of earth swallowing earth.
They jumped once more.
Then white. All was white.
And the cold, the cold! It was in his jacket, in his eyes, his nose, his pants. He couldn’t breathe. He could hear almost nothing. He was drowning.
Then he heard the laughing. The boys were laughing.
“Nice fort,”
one said.
“Come out,” the other said.
Max couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he was alive.
“Get up, little grasshopper,” a voice said.
Max couldn’t move. Was he alive?
“Oh crap,” said a voice.
The sounds of digging. Furious scratching above.
The weight on Max’s back lightened and he found himself being lifted out of the white. The boys were pulling him up, and soon he was in the air again, breathing the light air. But he had no strength. He couldn’t stand. He fell to the ground like a puppet.
Laying on the snow, he coughed and coughed. His eyes were soaked, his skin scorched. His eyes didn’t work, his mouth would not open. His lungs heaved, his throat burned.
“You okay?” one of them asked.
Max rose to his knees, but couldn’t speak. He choked on snow and phlegm. His heart seemed to have split itself, migrated northward, and was now beating in each of his ears.
Where was Claire? She should have been with him by now. Holding his shoulder. Rubbing his neck. Cupping her hands around his ears, blowing hotly to warm him as she did just a year ago, when he had fallen through the ice in the creek after the blizzard.
But Claire was not near. Max stood up and the snow in his jacket drained down his back. He shuddered and shook. He looked to his sister, but she was attending to Meika, and seemed ready to let Max, her brother, die in the middle of this colorless afternoon in December.
“You hurt, kid?” one of the boys said. The other one had already walked back to the car.
The horn honked. Now the second boy shrugged, left Max, and ran to it. Claire lingered on the driveway for a second, glancing Max’s way. For that brief moment Max held out hope that she would come to him, that she would take him inside, draw him a bath, stay with him and curse the boys and never see them again. That she would be his sister again.
“Your brother’s kind of sensitive, huh?” a face said from the car’s open window. It was Finn, the wild-haired kid.
“You have no idea,” Claire said. She turned away from Max, ducked into the back seat, and closed the door. The car backed out and drove off.
CHAPTER III
Max no longer had a sister.
He walked back to the house, and before he knew exactly what he was doing, he found himself in the kitchen, where he looked under the sink and retrieved a large pail. He turned the pail over, emptying it of its cleaners and sprays and brushes. He brought the pail upstairs, to the bathroom he shared with Claire.
He turned on the bathtub’s faucet and placed the bucket below. As it filled with water, he caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. He was soaked, every part of his body was wet, and his face was red, feral. He liked how he looked.
The bucket was full and he reached down to lift it. Too heavy, so he emptied the top third. He took the bucket, sloshing to and fro, and brought it to Claire’s room.
It was a room in transition. She had always had a frilly bed of pink and powder blue, a canopy above, but now over the bed was an ugly crocheted blanket, something she had bought in the parking lot of some concert in the city.
Before he thought one way or the other about it, he dumped his bucket on her bed, where the water made a loud splash and instantly spread over the surface of the mattress.
He went back to the bathroom, where the faucet was still running. He filled the bucket again and returned to Claire’s room, this time dumping the contents on the floor, where the carpet soaked up the water immediately. It was satisfying, but only whetted his appetite. He filled the bucket again and again and dumped its contents again and again, drenching her dresser, her closet — every part of her room. He emptied seven buckets this way, pouring water on the chair where she threw her clothes, on her closeted collection of dolls and animals and field hockey equipment, on the bulletin board where she had collaged pictures of herself and her worthless friends.
It was a very workmanlike process, getting the water and pouring it all over Claire’s room, but Max felt that it had to be done. It was his job, at that moment, to pay Claire back for allowing him to be crushed under a hundred pounds of snow, and for ignoring him, for allowing her friends to nearly kill him. He was sure that this step, soaking her room, was the first of many on the way to the two of them no longer being siblings. She would probably want to move out so she could live with Meika or get married to one of the stoners and live on a farm in Vermont, which is what she was always talking about doing some day. She wanted her own farm, she said, where she could make ice cream and sell handmade dolls and the kind of bookmarks she’d recently learned to crochet.
That would be fine, Max thought. As long as she left, Max didn’t care where she went. He just wanted her out of the house so he wouldn’t have to have someone betray him like this ever again. He would live happily with his mom, especially after he got rid of her boyfriend Gary, who Max didn’t want to think about at that particular moment.
He stood for a moment on the soggy carpet, now dotted with small lakes. Calming down and surveying the damage, he began to have conflicting thoughts about what he had done.
CHAPTER IV
The coming night had colored his room an airless, cottony blue. From his lower bunk, he switched on both of his globes — antiques his father had bought him, from another time, each aglow from a light within. The bulbs resided deep inside, where the earth’s liquid core would be, and gave the globes’ oceans and continents a buttery tint.
Max lay in his bed and thought awhile.
His thoughts, he knew, sometimes behaved like the scattering birds of his neighborhood. Everywhere on Max’s block were quail — strange, flop-topped birds reluctant to fly. One moment the quail would be assembled, in a straight row, a family, eating the seed from the ground, with one standing guard atop a low fencepost, watching for intruders. Then, with the slightest sound, they all would scatter in a dozen directions, swerving and disappearing into the thicket.
Every so often Max felt his thoughts could be straightened out, that they could be put in a row and counted; they could be made to behave. There were days when he could read and write for hours on end, when he understood everything said to him in every class, when he could eat dinner calmly and help clean up, and then play quietly alone in the living room.
But there were other times, other days, most days really, when the thoughts did not line up. Days when he chased the various memories and impulses as they veered and scattered away from him, hiding in the thicket of his mind.
And it seemed that when this happened, when he couldn’t make sense of something, when the thoughts did not flow from one to the other, that on the heels of the scattering quail he did things and said things that he wished he had not said or done.
Max wondered why he was the way he was. He didn’t want to hate Claire and he didn’t want to have destroyed her room. He didn’t want to have broken the window over the kitchen sink when he thought he was locked out of the house — which he’d done a few months ago. He didn’t want to have screamed and pounded the walls of his room last year, when in the middle of the night he couldn’t find the door. There were so many things he’d done, so many things he’d broken or torn or said, and always he knew he’d done them, but could only half-understand why.
And it occurred to him that he might be in real trouble. Until then it had seemed simple enough. He had almost died in the fort, so he soaked his sister’s room and tore up any evidence of any affection he had ever had for her.
But now that simple plan, inevitable and logical, seemed less wise than it had only moments ago. His mom might not appreciate Max having thrown seven buckets of water into Claire’s room. It was so strange to think about: how was it that just minutes ago, doing all that had seemed like the only thing to do? He hadn’t even questioned it. It was the only idea in his head, and he carried it out with great speed and determination. Now he was listening to his mother’s footsteps on the stairs, coming up to see him, and he fel
t like erasing the past, everything he had ever done. He wanted to say, I know I’ve always been bad, and now I will be good. Just let me live.
“Anyone home?” Max’s mother asked. “Max?”
He could escape. He could slip downstairs and run out the front door. Could he? He could live in another town, he could hop trains, become a hobo. He could leave, try to explain himself in a note, wait it out while everyone calmed down. He was sure that there would be anger, and yelling and stomping, maybe that violent sort of silence his mother had perfected. He didn’t want to be around for all that.
So he got ready to leave home for good.
He retrieved his backpack, the one his father had bought him before they hiked through Maine. But just as he was getting up to put on dry clothes and pack the bag, his mom was there, door open, already in his room, standing over him.
“What’s happening in here? Anything good?” she asked.
She was wearing her work clothes, a wool skirt and white cotton blouse. She smelled of cold air and sweat and something else. God, he loved her so much. She sat down on his bed and kissed his head. He briefly fell apart, disintegrated by her gentle touch. But then he placed the smell: it was Gary’s deodorant, which she had begun sharing. It was a wet, chemical smell.
He sat back in his bed and his eyes welled. How could so many tears come so quickly? Stupid crying. So stupid. He threw the covers over his face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Max didn’t answer. He couldn’t look at her.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
Max was surprised by this question, though it wasn’t a new one. For a second, it gave him strength. It reminded him there were other problems, other people to blame.
“No,” he said.
She pulled the covers down from his face.
“What is it then?” she asked. “Were you crying?”
“Claire’s stupid friends smashed my igloo,” he said. It came out far sooner than he’d planned.
“Oh,” his mom said, running her hand through his matted hair. She didn’t seem very impressed with the crime. He knew he had to make his mom furious at what Claire had done. If he made her angry enough, she might understand what Max had done in response. She might want to pour water on Claire’s room, too, or worse.