Hellhole

  “Well, I’d get you some more, but I have to go to work today, even if it’s only for a couple of hours. Or I’ll get fired for real,” Max said. “You’ll have to make do without them for a night.”

  “MAKE! DO! WITHOUT?”

  Max’s hands were forming into claws again, but Lore stepped forward. “I’ll take care of it,” she told him. “I’ve got a bunch of stolen booze left over from when Verm was around. I don’t have to work today. I’ll just swing home—in the BMW of course—and come back here to drop them off.”

  Max frowned. “I don’t want you coming back here alone.”

  She reddened. “Well, as gallant of you as that is, Max, I can take care of myself. But thanks for your concern.”

  “Well . . . okay,” Max said, biting his lip. “Just come by my house after work so I can make sure nothing cataclysmic happened to you.”

  “Okay,” Lore said. “It’s a date.”

  Max and Burg watched her go, her ponytail swinging.

  “You two banging yet?” Burg asked.

  “Shut up.”

  Sort of Jerk

  MAX’S TIRES SKIDDED ACROSS THE PAVEMENT. He dropped his bike against the side of the Gas Bag and ran inside without bothering to lock it up.

  Stavroula was behind the counter, arms crossed, wearing an expression reminiscent of those in paintings of Vikings.

  “You’re late,” she growled. “Very late.”

  Max looked at his watch. He was supposed to have arrived two hours ago. “Sorry, Roula—”

  “No excuses!” she shouted, which was a relief to Max. Somehow he didn’t think I’d have been here sooner, but I had a little murder to tidy up was an acceptable explanation. She pointed a finger into his face. “I forgive you for cat burgle. I give you days off. And still, you late.” She shuffled back to her office, shaking her head. “You’re on last straw! Five strikes and you out!”

  Lack of baseball knowledge aside, Max took that cryptic last part to mean that he was very close to being unemployed. He put on his vest and took his place behind the counter, catching a glimpse of his old crossword puzzle stashed beneath the register. Something tugged inside him. What he’d give to have that be the most pressing issue of his day, how many puzzles he could solve in a shift.

  Okay, technically he was still solving puzzles. They’d just increased in difficulty and proximity to corpses.

  Max managed to duck into the Food Baron just before they closed. He made a big show of paying for each and every one of his items. He made a series of terrible jokes to the cashier so that she’d remember him. He even spoke to a manager about Paul in a last-ditch effort to get him his job back.

  When he got home from work, he presented dinner to his mother as if it were as fancy as lobster topped with caviar stuffed with filet mignon.

  “A supermarket rotisserie chicken complete with drippings!” she cried, clapping as he put the tray down.

  “I didn’t even bring utensils,” said Max. “So you can tear into it with your bare hands, just the way you like it.”

  She’d already ripped off a drumstick. “Thanks, hon.”

  “How was your day?”

  “Oh, fine.” She sounded a little disappointed. “Lloyd said he’d call, but . . . whatever. Guess it was just a fun little fling.”

  “Like I said: you’re too good for John Cusack.”

  She laughed and wiped a bit of gristle from her cheek. “What have you been up to today?”

  Oh, just a little theft. Fraud. Some light murder.

  “Same old, same old.”

  “You sure? You look tired.” She squinted at him. “Is it that bully again? Still giving you a hard time?”

  “A little.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But I think I may have finally gotten rid of him.”

  She put the drumstick down, still concerned. “Seems like you’re under so much stress lately, hon. School, work—and I’m certainly not helping matters.” She wrung a napkin through her hands. “You know, I’ve been thinking . . . maybe it’s time to get a little help. You’re getting older, you’ve started dating, you’ll be going off to college next year—”

  Max let out a soft laugh. “We can’t afford college, Mom.”

  “Well, you might get a scholarship. Either way, you’re young and free and shouldn’t have this huge responsibility bearing down on you all the time. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s not about what’s fair—”

  She took his hand and leaned in. “Max. This isn’t the life I want for you.”

  He stared at her.

  “I so appreciate what you’ve done for me,” she said, squeezing his hand. “You have no idea how much I appreciate it—I thank God every day that I have you, and I’ll keep doing so all the way to my grave. You’re the best thing my life has produced. And I love you too much to see you cooped up here all the time, me selfishly keeping you all to myself.”

  “But—”

  “No ‘buts.’ Before I left the hospital yesterday, one of my colleagues offered to set me up with a visiting nurse. She’ll feed me and dress me and get a good look at my sad, bony ass, and it’ll be miserable and embarrassing, but I’ve been mulling it over, and I think it’s what I want. Really.”

  “But we can’t afford a nurse.”

  “She made a good offer. I think we can squeeze by.”

  Max shrank. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything. Do you have any idea how happy I am that you turned out the way you did? I didn’t know the first thing about how to raise a child, but I guess somewhere along the way I must have done something right.”

  O’Connell’s pale, blank face swam across Max’s vision, the blood on the floor, so much blood . . .

  Max shuddered, then stood to cover it up. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Maybe it’ll all be worth it, he thought as he watched her crinkling eyes. Maybe all these awful things I’ve done really will add up to something extraordinary.

  “And hey,” he said with an easy smile, “you never know. You might get better. Might bounce back completely. Maybe we won’t need that nurse after all.”

  She gave him a placating smile. “Maybe, hon. You never know.”

  Max heard a quiet, secret knock at the kitchen door. He kissed his mother good night and told his heart not to thump out of his chest when he opened it.

  It thumped anyway. “Oh, good,” he said with a melodramatic sigh of relief that was, in truth, not that exaggerated at all. “You’re alive.”

  “So it seems,” said Lore.

  He let her into the house. “Was he satisfied with the booze you brought?”

  “For now. We’ll see how long it lasts. Why are you grinning like that?”

  He led her into the dining room. On the table, beside the DVD of West Side Story that had arrived in the mailbox that afternoon, sat a flat, round item covered with a dishtowel. “I got you something from the Food Baron.”

  “Is it stolen?”

  “Nope. Paid in full.”

  He lifted the towel.

  “Whoa!” Lore said, her eyes growing as round as the platter. “A cookie cake!”

  “Yeah. As a thank-you.”

  She squinted at the frosting. “Why does it have footballs on it? Why does it say ‘Go Team Go’?”

  “Because it was the only one left that wasn’t covered in flowers. And because the cake decorator had already gone home for the night, so I couldn’t get anyone to write ‘For Lore, almighty Satan warrior.’”

  She smirked. “Can we eat it in the whale?”

  Max almost kissed her right then and there. “I—yes. Of course.”

  They went outside and lowered themselves, then the cake, inside. Light from the full moon streamed in through the open porthole.

  “Crap,” Max said. “I didn’t grab silverware. Should I go get some?”

  “No. I forbid you.”

  “Then how do we eat this thing?”

  “Like this.” Lore dug her hand i
nto the gooey, half-baked dough, rolled it into a disgusting-looking ball, and held it up in the air. Max did the same, making a mental note to encourage more Mom-Lore bonding, since they seemed to share a fondness for utensil-free eating.

  They clinked the blobs together as if they were champagne flutes. “Go team go,” Lore said.

  She shoved the abomination into her mouth, then proceeded to moan with delight as she chewed. Max took a more modest bite, but had the same reaction. “Oh, man. That is good.”

  “Glad you agree.”

  “Hey, does loving cookie cake count as a common interest?” Max asked.

  “I don’t think so. I think it just means we’re both pigs.”

  “Okay. Well, we should keep looking, then. I still think you should give model dinosaurs a try.”

  “You are aware of my feelings on model dinosaurs. Want another glob?”

  “Yes.”

  Lore scooped up another clawful and plopped it into his hand. “Now, here’s an important question: You’re committed to finishing this whole cake, right?”

  “Absolutely. We deserve every single calorie.”

  She snorted. “Like you have to worry about calories.”

  “And you do?”

  “Uh, yeah. Duh.”

  Max’s heart thumped double time. Dead Noah or not, he knew what he was going to say. He was powerless to stop it. “Well,” he said carefully, “I think you’re perfect.”

  Lore was quiet for a moment. The cicadas swelled and faded, swelled and faded.

  “You know the moon?” she said out of nowhere.

  “The . . . one in the sky?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ve heard of it, yeah.”

  “So . . . like . . .” She waved her hands around, casting about for the right words. “You think you know the moon pretty well, right? It’s big and white and circular, or sometimes half or crescent. You know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, there was this one time—” She paused to grab more cookie off the plate. “I went with Noah’s family on vacation to Cape Cod a couple of years ago. And the town we were staying in had fireworks on the beach every Friday night. So we went down to the beach and sat on our blanket, and even though it was summer, it was cold at night, you know? So we were huddled all together on the blanket, and I was digging my feet into the sand, and we were waiting for the fireworks to start.”

  She took a big bite of cookie, so her mouth was full as she spoke. “But instead of looking at the spot on the beach where the fireworks were set up, everyone started to look out at the water. Because the ocean was starting to . . . glow. A weird red color, just on the horizon. There were some clouds, so it was hazy. But then it got stronger and brighter. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off and we were witnessing a genuine mushroom cloud, and then, just when it looked like it couldn’t get any brighter, a light pierced through the clouds. It was the moon. A full moon, rising right up over the ocean.”

  Her bit of cookie was gone, but this time she didn’t reach for more. “And like I said—I thought I knew the moon. But turns out, I didn’t know the moon at all. I’d never met this version of the moon. Because this one was red, then orange, then gold—this furious, unstoppable gold that was pissed it never got to be seen. And it was huge. You know how sometimes you see the sun at sunset and it seems really big? The moon was even bigger than that. It was enormous. It lit up the beach. And everyone just sat there in awe. The kids stopped waving their sparklers. The adults stopped drinking their wine. Everyone stopped to watch the moon.”

  Max’s chest got tight. He loved her so much right then, he couldn’t trust himself to speak.

  “Max?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I like you.”

  “I like you too.”

  “No, I mean—well, in the words of your average seven-year-old, I like you like you.”

  Max’s heart thumped triple time. “Oh.”

  “And you like me like me too, right?”

  Max swallowed. His throat was dry.

  “Yes,” he said. “How could you tell?”

  “It’s kinda obvious.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “So I like you and you like me.”

  “Correct.”

  “But I still really miss Noah.”

  “I know.”

  “So we’ll have to take this very slow.”

  Max felt lightheaded. “Okay,” he said.

  Hold her hand, Burg had said.

  So he did, slipping his gooey fingers into her gooey fingers.

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  A pause.

  “Perfect.”

  Cut Short

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A WEEK Max got a full night’s sleep. He woke up feeling as fresh as a daisy (the friendliest flower, according to You’ve Got Mail). Everything seemed to exude a rosy glow; his teeth seemed whiter, his nose seemed smaller, even his hair seemed to resemble a hat that didn’t have a brim.

  He buoyantly skipped into his mother’s room to wish her a good day, though he had a strong inkling that she’d be having one regardless. “How do you feel?” he asked, way too earnestly.

  She gave him an odd look. “Uh, fine. What’s with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said, grinning like a hyena. “Just checking in.” His fingers sprang out to her wrist. “How’s that pulse? Feeling any stronger?”

  “Doubt it. Same old pitter-patter of a three-legged kitten it’s always been.”

  “Well,” he said, winking, “who knows? Miracles can happen.”

  She frowned. “Max, did you eat some expired meat?”

  After assuring her that he was perfectly sane, he biked to school. And so began the Great Apology Tour of First Semester, wherein Max proceeded to beg amnesty from every teacher who had scolded him, berated him, or flunked him over the past week.

  “I’ve been having trouble at home,” he said, which technically wasn’t untrue.

  In most cases his plaintive tone—plus the masterful way he was able to blink back watering eyes—earned him a “Well, just do better next time” or a “I’ll let it go just this once” or, the most painful, “I’m disappointed in you, Max. Don’t let it happen again.” He’d thank them profusely and sit upright at his desk, taking copious notes and asking thoughtful questions. He attended every one of his classes on time, with the utmost studious aptitude. He raised his hand so much some teachers politely asked him to stop.

  He even poked his head into Principal Gregory’s office to personally apologize for blowing her off. By the end of the day, he was convinced he’d undone most of the damage Burg’s presence had wrought.

  The only snag was Mrs. Rizzo. Once the room had cleared after class, he approached her podium and formed his face into the expression he’d come to think of as the Heartbreaker.

  “Mrs. Rizzo, can I talk to you for a sec?” he asked, biting the inside of his lip until a tear sprang to his eye. “It’s about the past week. I’ve been having some trouble at home, and—”

  “Spare me.”

  “W-what?”

  She crossed her arms, unmoved. “I’ve been a teacher for thirty-three years, Mr. Kilgore. I know your kind. The innocent, meek students who think that a solid track record is enough to fall back on once senioritis hits. Or who think that they can make up sob stories, spinning tales of woe and sorrow and five or six dead grandmothers. Or maybe you’re one of the ones who think that teachers are just plain idiots.”

  She vaulted herself forward and towered over him. Max had never realized how tall she was.

  “I’m not an idiot, Mr. Kilgore. I will not be changing your grades. You made some unfortunate choices. No matter the circumstances, you made them. And now you will have to live with the consequences of your actions.”

  Max’s hands started to shake. She was only talking about grades, of course. But her words resounded much d
eeper within him. The unease that had so lightly flitted away began to creep back in, more insidious this time, seeking out newer and smaller capillaries in which to hide.

  “There will be a final test on Hamlet next Monday,” she said, going back to her desk. “I suggest you study.”

  “I will,” Max said. “I’ll be better now, I promise.”

  But his words felt hollow.

  He delivered the same song and dance to Stavroula when he got to work after school, but she’d just chased off another gas-and-dasher and wasn’t in the mood.

  “I’m not in the mood,” she huffed. “Probably same hooligans who steal snacks, throw off inventory. Headaches and scoundrels! Why I even bother?”

  Max felt bad. Bad enough to slip some of the change from Flossie’s administrative fees into the cash register when she wasn’t looking.

  “Well, I think you look ravishing today,” he told her, gesturing at her hair, which seemed poofier than normal.

  “Is fake,” she said, but Max could tell she was pleased. “Something called weave. They say the kids wear it, but I no spring chicken! Bah.” She waved her hand and disappeared into the office.

  That afternoon was one of the busiest shifts Max had ever worked at the Gas Bag, with an endless stream of customers coming in to stock up on supplies for the homecoming game and the tailgating parties that would precede it. By the time the sun went down, they’d already sold out of hot dog buns, frozen hamburger patties, and red plastic cups.

  It was so crowded Max almost missed Paul’s braces as they poked their way up to the counter. “Paulie boy!” he cried. “How’s it going?”

  “Good.” Paul gave him an odd wink. “The turkey’s in the bag.”

  “Huh?”

  “The eagle is in the nest.”

  “Paul. In English. Without bird metaphors.”

  Paul stared at him. “Uh, the hole. I filled it all up.”

  Max could have kissed him. “You have no idea what this means to me, Paul. Seriously. Here—” He dug through his pockets and pulled out more of Lore’s money. “Here’s a hundred bucks. That seem fair to you?”

  Paul gawked at the bills on the counter, but as his mouth was in a constant state of gawking, it was difficult to tell the difference. “Um, yeah.”