Hellhole

  “Wait!” Burg looked at Max imploringly and asked, “Can you put in a good word with her for me?”

  With that, Max shoved Burg over the threshold and down the flight of stairs, taking a distinct pleasure in each bump and squeal that came from the darkness. “Stay down there! Forever!”

  He slammed the door and, not caring whether this would get his throat slit in the middle of the night, locked it.

  Triple-checked the kitchen door: locked, locked, locked.

  Triple-checked the windows: locked, locked, locked.

  Ruckus: stationed at the top of the stairs, bribed with an extra-heaping bowl of cat food, with festive garnish. Might keep Burg from breaking down the door and coming upstairs. Last-ditch effort, but can’t hurt.

  Mom: unharmed. Still sleeping peacefully. Did her cheekbones always protrude that much, though? And were her fingers that bony yesterday?

  Audie: gone. Saw her get into Wall’s car and drive off.

  Officially safe to leave. Go.

  His mental checklist complete, Max ducked out the back door, hopped on his bike, and rocketed out of the driveway, oblivious to the police cruiser whose windshield he instantly found himself sprawled across.

  “Christ, Max, watch where you’re going!” Audie’s dad yelled, getting out of the car. “You okay?”

  Max nodded and brushed himself off, nearly cackling at the cruel irony of it all. “I’m fine. Totally fine. Sorry, Chief Gregory.”

  Chief Gregory let out a relieved sigh. “You need a ride? Audie said she tried to find you before she left with Wall, but I guess you were in the shower or something—”

  “No, that’s okay,” Max said. “I like to bike.”

  “All right.” Max could see that the chief had raised an eyebrow behind his sunglasses. “Sure you’re okay, Max? Audie said you were acting funny yesterday. And you’re acting funny right now.”

  “Funny?”

  Chief Gregory pointed to Max’s armpits. “It’s not even eight o’clock, and you’re sweating through your shirt.”

  “I ran out of deodorant!” Max said gaily. “And yesterday—I was just tired. That double shift on Saturday kinda zonked me out.”

  The chief nodded slowly. “All right. And your mom—”

  “She’s fine too. We’re all fine. Really, incredibly fine.”

  Max got the distinct impression, as he watched the cruiser disappear around the corner, that Chief Gregory did not believe him.

  Max had been staring at the inside of his locker for so long he was no longer aware that he was doing it. His mind was elsewhere, everywhere, a million places at once.

  Slowly he became aware of another presence, someone peering into the locker alongside him. “Anything good on in there?” Audie asked.

  Max snapped himself out of his stupor, slammed the locker door, and gave her a toothy smile—the only kind of fake smile he could manage. “Just finishing up a movie. Spoiler alert: Everyone dies.”

  “Do they.” Max had expected her to be in her secondary mood, but a smile was tugging at the corner of her lips, leading him to conclude that she was fairly jubilant. He suspected that this had something to do with Wall’s return from his weekend college visit; he’d seen them making out in front of the water fountain.

  Actually, he’d wanted a drink from said water fountain, as he could no longer count on his salivary glands to provide the amount of moisture his mouth required. His temples were pulsing, his nerves frayed. The effort he’d expended to convince the world that everything was fine in the Land of Max had paradoxically turned him into a paranoid speed freak. He felt as if he’d sprinted to the other side of the world and climbed up Mount Everest, then gotten the shit kicked out of him by an angry mountain goat.

  “Are you all right?” Audie said, scrutinizing his bloodshot eyes. “You don’t look so good. And what’s that on your hand?”

  He shoved his ash-stained hand into his pocket. “I’m fine. Just like I told your dad this morning. Why’s your family so nosy, huh? Why did you have to tell him I was acting weird?”

  “Because you are acting weird!”

  “I am not,” he said, backing away from her. “I’ll talk to you later, okay? I gotta get to calc.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “For your Satan presentation?”

  Dammit! Why did he keep bringing up the least believable class in his arsenal? “Yes. That is the one.” He turned around and attempted to scoot away, but Audie grabbed the loop of his backpack and yanked him back.

  “OH no you don’t,” she said. “Not until you tell me what that church interruption was all about. And why you lied to my face—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “—and why you’re currently lying to my face.”

  The annoyed mood was about to make an appearance; Max could see it happening in real time, like a cloud drifting in front of the sun. He tried to breathe evenly, buy himself time to come up with something that wasn’t quite a lie but was enough of one to throw her off the scent, even though . . .

  Even though he wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her everything. And he would have, if not for what Burg had told him with the visual aid of that crushed Mountain Dew can.

  “I think I, uh—I think I lapsed into a fugue state,” Max blurted. He’d seen a special on TV about this once, how people could fall into these special kinds of amnesia trances and forget large portions of their lives.

  Audie pursed her lips. “A fugue state? You mean the condition that shady characters on TV shows claim they have when they want to cover up something they don’t want other people to know about?”

  Max nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s the one! I don’t know where it came from—maybe I was overtired from work or something—”

  “Max. In case you can’t tell, which you can’t because you are spazzing out, I’m not buying a word of this.”

  “Really?” Max scratched his hair, which had started to itch. “Well, that’s one of the side effects, I’ve heard: that no one ever believes you.”

  She cocked her head. “Is this about a girl?”

  He scratched deeper, way into his scalp. “Huh?”

  “Because I saw one inside your house last night before you pulled the curtains shut. Do you secretly have a girlfriend and you’re not telling me?”

  “I do not have a girlfriend,” he said, breathless. “That was just Lore Nedry, who I invited over on your advice to help me with my project—”

  “You actually called Lore Nedry?”

  “You told me to!”

  “I was just trying to get you out of my church! Jesus, Max, you swindled that poor girl over to—what? Make fun of her Satan thing?”

  “No, that’s not what happened. She just came over to help me with my project, and in fact she was quite helpful, so there’s no reason to—can I help you?” he shouted at the hapless freshman who had just tapped him on the shoulder. She handed him a yellow slip of paper, then darted back into the rushing current of students like a terrified tadpole.

  “Sorry!” Max shouted after her.

  Audie shook her head in disapproval. “Fine,” she said, starting to leave. “You don’t want to talk to me—be that way. Good luck pulling the same shit with my mom, though.”

  Max looked down at the slip from the principal’s office as she left, then groaned.

  Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

  The clicky-ball contraption merrily clacked away on Principal Gregory’s desk while Max sneered at it with unbridled hatred. It went back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum, each click of the metallic spheres scraping against his spine like a rake across a chalkboard.

  If he wasn’t already on track to develop a nervous eye twitch by the end of the day, he would be after this.

  Left. Right. Left. Right. Oh. My. Friggin’. God.

  “Can you please stop that thing?” he asked.

  Principal Gregory raised an eyebrow and, cupping her hands around the apparatus, put a stop to the torture. “
Sorry. I find it helps me relax. You don’t feel the same?”

  “No. No, I don’t.” Relaxation was a foreign concept at this point. “Am, uh,” Max started, but his throat was so dry his sentence petered out. He started again. “Am I in trouble?”

  “Of course not.” She gave him a warm smile. “It’s just that Audie told me you’ve been acting strangely lately, and my husband said the same. So I thought I’d check in.”

  God! Max thought. Doesn’t this family have anything better to do than psychoanalyze my abundance of problems?

  “So talk to me, Max,” she went on. “Let’s get a dialogue going.”

  I’m going to puke all over your desk, he thought. Does that count as dialogue?

  “It’s nothing, really,” he managed to say. “Just a bunch of things went wrong this weekend—our phones went out, and I didn’t get much sleep—”

  Principal Gregory was nodding thoughtfully, ever so thoughtfully. “And your mom’s health?”

  “She’s okay,” Max said, arranging his face into what he approximated to be an expression of human happiness. “Still waiting on the transplant, but she’s stable. Feeling good.” To stop himself from saying more, he held his tongue between his teeth.

  “That’s wonderful news, Max. And Audie also tells me you had a girl over last night?”

  “No. No no no.” He let out a nervous laugh. “I mean, yes, but we were just doing a project together.” He swallowed. “For calculus.”

  “Oh. I see.” She gave one of those insidious wink-wink condescending smiles that adults think make them look cool and in the know. “Calculus.”

  Max sucked on his bleeding tongue. “Can I go now?”

  “Well . . . okay.” She looked unconvinced. “But Max, please, let me know if you need to talk. About anything.”

  “Right. Will do. Thanks, Principal Gregory.”

  He sprang up from his chair and was almost out of the office when she called after him. “Max, is something the matter with your eye?”

  “My eye?”

  “It’s twitching a lot. Is it bothering you?”

  “Uh, no. I didn’t even notice.”

  She frowned. “Well, if it gets worse, stop by the nurse to get it checked out. Maybe it’s one of those nervous tics that are caused by stress.”

  Max held a finger to his spastic eye, all the while praying that he could just keep it together for a few more hours, that his mom was safe at home, that Burg wasn’t at that very moment setting fire to an orphanage—

  He swallowed. “I think stress is a distinct possibility.”

  Staring at nothing was officially Max’s new hobby. At lunch, he unwrapped his peanut butter sandwich and proceeded to gape at it for a full ten minutes. He would probably have continued this foray into insanity until the end of the period if a cobalt-blue lunch box hadn’t slid across the table, blocking his view.

  “Sorry!” The lunch box was retrieved and placed at the seat across from him. A tuft of orange hair followed.

  “Oh. Hey, Paul.”

  “Hey yourself. Aw, crap!”

  Paul jumped up and bobbled back to the counter to grab a straw. Max winced as he watched him go. The other thing about Paul was that his head had grown to adultlike proportions, but the rest of his body hadn’t caught up yet, giving him the appearance of a walking, talking lollipop. Add to that the way he walked on the balls of his feet—bounced, really—and it made for a somewhat unsettling encounter.

  Even more disturbing was the way he was currently huffing and puffing, small flecks of spittle gathering on his strained-to-the-max braces. “Er,” said Max, eyeing him as he returned to the table, “something wrong, Paul?”

  “I got fired from the Food Baron!” Paul said with righteous indignation, slamming his thermos on the table. “They thought I was stealing!”

  Max’s heart took a flying leap. His hands went clammy, and an anxious ringing filled his ears. “Really?” he said, taking care not to let his voice rise.

  “Yeah.” Paul pulled out a wad of aluminum foil and proceeded to unwrap it. Inside, Max knew, were exactly twenty-one boiled cocktail wieners. Paul didn’t care for sandwiches.

  “Why would they think that?” Max asked, choosing his words carefully.

  “Because they’re imbeciles!” Paul blared, waving a stubby little hot dog. “Like there’s any way I could fit a Twinkie box in my apron, stuffing Twinkies into that tiny little pouch in front. And it’s not like I could stash Twinkies anywhere else—pants pockets aren’t big enough to fit Twinkies! Right?”

  “Right.” Max was starting to feel itchy again. He scratched at his neck, then his chest. “Maybe the Booze Hound came out of retirement.”

  “That’s what I said! But they wouldn’t believe me!”

  Max scratched harder. Paul came from a big family. His dad drove a truck, and his mom stayed home with the four kids. Unlike Max’s mom, none of them had hearts that disintegrated if you looked at them wrong, but Max knew that money was tight. Paul needed a job just as badly as he did.

  “Hey, you think your boss is hiring?” Paul asked, eyebrows lifting.

  Max was finding it difficult to get words out around all the guilt building up in his throat. “I don’t know. I’ll ask her.”

  “Thanks!”

  Max tried to respond, but no noise came out. Only a dry wheeze.

  He scratched himself again—the itch had traveled around to his back, where he couldn’t reach it. He peeked down his shirt to find big pink splotches haphazardly splashed across his stomach. Were those hives? Hives were what you broke into when you were stressed, right?

  It’s not your fault Paul got fired, he thought to himself, as if that would make the splotches go away. But they remained, stubborn, growing even hotter and pinker as he stared at them.

  There’s nothing you could have done, he reworded, switching up his thinking. You needed those snacks for you. To keep yourself and your mother alive. Survival of the fittest.

  Because two high school boys jockeying over grocery store jobs are on equal footing with the process of evolution now? the hives retorted.

  Yes! Natural selection! his brain yelled. And so forth!

  Impassioned pleading did nothing. The splotches got splotchier.

  Just then, a crumpled-up piece of paper skittered across the table. Neither Max nor Paul batted an eye, as they had grown fairly accustomed to trash and other debris sailing across the cafeteria and landing in their vicinity. But after a glance at the brown ponytail bobbing out the door, Max reached for the paper and unfolded it.

  Blow off the rest of your classes. Meet me at the small patch of woods behind the soccer field. Be stealthy.

  The house hunt is on.

  Devised a Plan

  “WHAT,” LORE SAID AS MAX TRUDGED through the bushes toward her, “is on your head?”

  Max tugged at the black ski mask covering his face. “We’re robbers, right? Isn’t this what they wear?”

  “You look like the Hamburglar.”

  Max took the mask off. “Sorry. You said to be stealthy.”

  “I meant behaviorally.”

  “Well, I was an upright citizen before all of this started. I don’t know the dress code for thievery.”

  “There is none.” Case in point: Lore was wearing the same Catholic school uniform skirt and the same sort of bedazzled white polo shirt, though this one featured rhinestone flowers instead of teapots. “And besides, we’re not stealing anything.”

  “We’re stealing a house!”

  “Keep it down.” She turned and began to hike deeper into the woods. “This is where some kids come to smoke, so try not to be so overtly delinquent.”

  “Me? You’re holding a crowbar!”

  “I sure am.” She gave it a tender pat. “This is Russell. Russell Crowebar.”

  “You named your crowbar?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Max could not think of a good reason why not. “The googly eyes are a nice touch.”


  Lore wiggled the crowbar so that its plastic eyes went all spastic. “Thanks. I once had a spare five minutes and a preheated glue gun. Couldn’t help myself.”

  Max followed her into the woods, brambles snagging on his jeans. The weather was just as sickly warm as it had been over the weekend, with baffled meteorologists saying that the unusual September heat wave was showing no signs of letting up. He was drenched within minutes; blood pounded in his temples with each step, and an odd, tinny ringing filled his ears. “So where are we going?”

  “There’s a trailer park just on the other side of this hill,” Lore called back to him. “Their overgrown lawns would suggest that some of them have been abandoned.”

  “Trailers?”

  She whirled around to face him. “Is there a problem with trailers?”

  Max felt bad about getting whiny; at least Lore was coming up with ideas, while all he was coming up with were new cadences in which to whine. “Well, no. I just don’t think Burg will go for something as dumpy as a trailer. He wants, like, a mansion.”

  She crossed her arms. “You want that guy out of your basement, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then has it occurred to you that a trailer might be the perfect place for him to crash, removing him from the vicinity of your mother and your girlfriend—”

  “Audie’s not my girlfriend.”

  “—while we sort through all the nearby abandoned mansions and pick out just the absolute perfect one for His Highness?”

  Max blinked at her. It sounded like a really flimsy idea. But what he said was, “That’s a really good idea.”

  She turned and kept walking. “Of course it is,” she muttered.

  He ran to catch up to her. “You think he’ll go for it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe if you get him drunk.”

  “Oh, sure. Like stealing Twinkies isn’t bad enough, now you expect me to steal alcohol?”