Spoonbenders

He opened his eyes. He’d been asleep, and now his heart thudded with dream excitement. But maybe he wasn’t dreaming. He jumped up and lurched to the window.

There was Mary Alice, walking quickly across the lawn, heading to the street. Dressed in red flannel and black jeans.

“Mary Alice,” he hissed. She didn’t hear him. Louder, he said, “Malice.”

She whirled as if shot.

“It’s me,” he said in a stage whisper.

She froze for a moment, then walked closer to the window and looked up at him. “I know it’s you,” she said, also whispering. “What do you want?”

He pushed up on the window, and managed to shove it a few inches higher. “Where are you going?”

“Go to bed, Matty.”

Matt, he thought. “Wait there. I’m coming out.”

“No! Just—”

But he’d already ducked away from the window. He yanked off his shorts and pulled on his jeans, a maneuver that required much hopping and teetering. Then he grabbed his gym shoes and eased open the bedroom door. A few feet away, Frankie and Loretta’s door was shut. The air conditioner groaned obliviously. Matty crept down the hallway, holding his shoes.

In the living room, the blanket fort had collapsed and the twins lay in the polyester wreckage, unconscious. He stepped over their bodies and unlocked the front door.

Malice was gone.

He crossed the lawn, the grass slicking his bare feet, and looked down the street in both directions. Nothing.

He couldn’t believe it. She’d ditched him.

Yet—he’d had an OBE! Without touching himself! Though once again he’d been thinking of Malice, so that was a problem.

Another problem? Getting back into the twins’ bedroom.

He moved quietly around the side of the house, carrying his shoes in each hand like weapons. He could hear nothing but the moan and rattle of the air conditioner jutting from Frankie and Loretta’s bedroom window. He reached the rear of the house, where the light from the garage window cast a yellow light across the backyard. The twins’ swing set crouched in the half shadows like a huge spider.

He sat at the top of the basement stairs and pulled on his shoes. Malice had closed the door behind her, of course, but if it wasn’t locked he could get back into the house that way. But now he didn’t want to go back inside. Why couldn’t Malice have waited for him? No doubt she was having fun, joyriding across the northern suburbs. He was wide awake with nowhere to go. He could take a walk, but Uncle Frankie’s neighborhood was sketchier than Grandpa Teddy’s. The cars were older and rustier, the beige-brick houses narrower and closer together. Chain-link fences were a recurring landscaping motif. This block was probably safer than the one he’d left in Pittsburgh, but back there he knew which people were the bad people, which ones looked like bad people but weren’t, and which people looked like nice people but were assholes.

Then he remembered what was in the garage. He went to the side door and pushed inside. It took him only a few seconds to find the white poster board, set out on the hood of Loretta’s Toyota Corolla. In black capital letters it said, SEIZE THE DAY.

That was hardly a random phrase. Frankie said “Carpe diem,” like, three times a day. But what about the night? What was a fourteen-year-old supposed to do with the night?

—

He woke to cartoons blaring from the living room. His bladder was full and he was desperate to get to the toilet. He looked both ways down the hallway and, seeing the coast was clear, scampered across to the tiny bathroom. It was like a closet-sized version of a dollar store, crammed with shampoo bottles and bath toys and scented candles. When he lifted the toilet lid, he rattled the row of UltraLife bath products balanced on the back of the commode. How did five people—six, counting himself—share one tiny bathroom?

When he got to the living room, the twins for once didn’t mob him; the television claimed their complete attention. In the kitchen Uncle Frankie sat at the table reading the Sun-Times, a plate smeared with dried egg yolk in front of him. In the center of the table was a mound of cigarette stubs in a plastic ashtray, but Aunt Loretta was nowhere in sight. Neither was Malice. He imagined that she’d slunk back to her underground lair before dawn.

“You look like a man who needs a cup of joe,” Uncle Frankie said. He was inordinately proud of Matty’s new addiction to coffee. It was an inevitable consequence of working with the crew, as it was practically the only thing they drank. Matty had started with a training-wheels concoction that could have been marketed as Sugared Milk—now with slight coffee flavor! and then gradually darkened the mix. In six or seven years he’d be able to take it black.

Uncle Frankie waited (impatiently, Matty thought) while he mixed his drink. “So?” Frankie asked. He raised a significant eyebrow. “Anything?”

“Yeah,” Matty said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”