Scary Out There (36 page)

A few minutes later the little guy was sound asleep. Not a care in the world. I checked the kitchen clock. Ten till eight. I crept out the kitchen door.

It was a windy night. The trees were shivering and shaking, making whispery sounds like in one of those cornball horror movies. The swirling gusts made the lawn tilt one way, then the other.

I was halfway across the backyard when I realized the lights were on in the guesthouse.

I froze. I could feel my heart leap to my throat.

Nate and Mike are already there. Waiting for me. They didn't wait till eight o'clock.

The wind blew a string of scratchy dry leaves around my ankles. The trees suddenly stopped whispering. I squinted into the front window. A shadow moved inside the workshop.

“Waiting for me,” I murmured.

I turned back to the house. Should I make a run for it? What about Nicky? I couldn't leave him alone. And . . . I couldn't call the police.
I'd already blown my chances with them.

Nate and Mike tracked me down. They know I heard them. They know I heard the whole thing. And now they're here waiting for me.

I stood frozen, my brain spinning, unable to think straight, unable to move. Then, without realizing it, I took a trembling step toward the guesthouse. My eyes gazing into the yellow light of the front window, I took another step.

The door swung open.

And I screamed.

“Connor? What's your problem?” Ziggy shouted.

He stood in the light from the workshop, his big body nearly filling the doorway.

“Ziggy? You're here?” My voice came out tiny and shrill, like a baby's cry.

“I got home from Ivy's house and came right over,” he said. “Been waiting for you. Didn't you get my text?”

“Uh . . . no.”

My heart refused to stop pounding. My legs felt rubbery and weak, but I managed to cross the lawn to the doorway. Of course, I was relieved to see Ziggy. But I knew my problems weren't over. “Is it eight o'clock yet?” I asked. “Is it?”

Ziggy nodded. “Almost.” He pulled out his phone and glanced at it. “Yes. Almost eight.”

“The radio—” I murmured. I could barely form words. “Eight o'clock. The radio.”

I pushed past him into the workshop. He followed close behind me. “I thought I'd get a head start,” he said. He motioned to the worktable.

It took my eyes a few seconds to focus in the bright light. And then I started to choke. “You—you—you
didn't
!”

“I took the old radio apart,” Ziggy said. “So now we can put it back together. Do you
believe
all these glass tubes and weird wires?”

I stared at the radio parts scattered over the table. My legs started to fold. I sank onto the stool next to him. I could feel the blood throbbing at my temples. The whole room spun in front of me.

“Hey—what's wrong with you, Connor?” Ziggy asked. “Why do you look so weird?”

I didn't have a chance to answer.

I heard the soft scrape of footsteps outside. And then a pounding
knock knock knock
on the guesthouse door.

“Who's
that
?” Ziggy asked.

R. L. Stine
is one of the bestselling children's authors in history. His Goosebumps and Fear Street series have sold more than 400 million copies around the world. He has had several TV series based on his work, and the
Goosebumps
movie stars Jack Black as R. L. Stine himself. Bob lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, an editor and publisher.

Website:
rlstine.com

Twitter:
@RL_Stine

Facebook:
facebook.com/rlstine

JADE SHAMES

Sparrow

“Yesterday,” said Kelsey, “I saw a sparrow fly around the living room.”

I was fourteen, but even then I knew

there was no sparrow.

At a sleepover in the dark,

I listened to the way her body hushed,

and she told me a secret—

that she could see the colors in music.

She put on “Hey Jupiter.”

It was this song

that really hit her hard.

The twisting, unpredictable piano,

a witchy female voice sang in delirium.

I should have known these were the warning signs

of some form of psychosis.

But I was just a boy,

and she was my friend,

a little older,

telling me about things to expect,

and introducing me to new music.

After losing touch with her for many years,

I bumped into a friend who told me she had died

of a drug overdose after a long battle with insanity.

My immediate instinct was to act,

but I probably won't.

I won't petition

or picket for anything,

or build a foundation,

raise awareness,

start a war.

But what's weird is this daydream I keep having

where I fly into her living room,

and even though this is in the past,

I'm not a boy anymore,

and there is Kelsey, picking apart her furniture,

and I place my hand on her head,

and lean in and whisper something I can't quite hear

but I know it's absolutely the most perfect thing—

my whispering acting like water on the fire pit of her mind

she breaks apart into a flock of wild birds,

and the rustling of feathers is like applause,

and each bird flutters out the open windows,

and falls upward

all the way to Jupiter.

Thinking of Kelsey, and how she went to high school one year before I did and said that it was horrible, and how many years later she overdosed on Benadryl in a bathroom because she believed werewolves were waiting for her outside, but really it was a schizophrenic relapse.

Somehow

this
is what I can't

wrap my head around:

She was older

than me. And now,

I am the one

who is older.

Trench Coats

It was the five of us loitering in my friend's backyard, which was less a yard

and more of a concrete pit and a compost heap.

There was a view of a bank and a used car lot

and smoke.

This was northeast Philadelphia, where I got an accent

that I slip into when I go back there, but I rarely do.

We all knew

about the Jardel gang—named after the nearby community recreation center where they played basketball.

I still remember being at the neighborhood carnival when there were gunshots

and young men chanting its name.

But Jardel was where the courts were.

This was back when I was fourteen

and still walked around in a black trench coat despite Columbine.

While looking at mine,

Jay remembered that he had just gotten a long black coat for his birthday,

and his cousin also had one inside,

and Nicky dug his father's out of storage, and Lance, well, he
just looked the part despite his dark windbreaker.

All five of us walking at one in the morning, like a mafia,

with this attitude

of absolute certainty, that to this day,

I don't know

if I was the only one who was terrified.

There was one light still lit

over the half-court,

and part of a chain-link net dangling off the hoop,

and we played

like we were dancing

on hot coals.

War Paint

I want to remember this,

my dad and I together in war paint,

in the desert outside of San Diego.

A photographer dressed us.

He had his glasses off and I had not yet gotten them.

We looked serious for the camera,

I had more red around my eyes

and he had green,

but we both had dark blue battle lines on our cheeks.

The powdered paint covered our faces and bare chests,

my dad said something about me being an Indian

The warrior

like him.

I want to remember this,

I want to quit my job

and run over to my dad's house—

down into the basement

and pull him off the couch,

away from the TV

and tell him that I remember that power again

and we would track down that photographer back in San Diego

We would take our glasses off

We would demand that she get her powdered paints

We would tell her to dress us again

In the warrior colors.

But this time

there would be no camera.

Jade Shames
is a screenwriter, fiction writer, and poet living in Brooklyn. He is the grand prize winner of the 2013–2014 Fresh Voices screenplay competition and the recipient of a creative writing scholarship from The New School's MFA program for poetry. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Best American Poetry blog,
H.O.W. An Art and Literary Journal
, and
LA Weekly.

Website:
jadeshames.com

Twitter:
@JadeShames

RACHEL CAINE

T
here were probably lots of things worse than a road trip with Mom through a no-cell-signal West Texas desert in the middle of the night, but honestly, Zen couldn't think of any. It was too dark to read the book she'd brought; she tried to use the flashlight, and her mother snapped at her to turn it off—it was messing with her night vision.

“You have headlights,” Zenobia said without looking up. “Why does it bother you?”

“Headlights are out there, you're in here—
turn it off.
” Her mom sounded really tense, which wasn't a surprise. They were both exhausted and cranky, and that fifth cup of coffee for her mother had obviously been a super bad choice. “Check the map. How much farther to Pecos is it, anyway?”

“A billion miles.”

“Zenobia,
por el amor de Dios
, just tell me!”

“Do you have to pee? Because I'm pretty sure the last gas station was back in Monahell.”

“Monahans.”

“Did you see it? God. My name is so much better.” She hated this. Hated leaving El Paso and her school and her best friends. Hated leaving the boy that
might
have been the love of her life, if he'd ever asked her out, and she knew he'd been about to do that, she
knew it
.

This was ruining her life. It wasn't her mother's fault, but she couldn't help but blame her too.
Blame Dad, because he's the one who made this happen.
That was true too, and she knew he was the bad guy, the one who'd screwed around, the one who had leaped at the chance for a divorce, who'd left them with nothing.

And her mom was brave for starting over.
She knew.
She just hated it, all of it, and she wanted to get lost in a dark, dystopian world where at least you could fix the things that were screwing up your life.

She'd only gotten a paragraph in when her mom sighed and said, “I'm not going to tell you again. Turn the light off!”

Zenobia sighed and clicked the flashlight off. Obviously, her third reading of the battered copy of
The Forest of Hands and Teeth
was going to have to wait until when her mother wasn't on too much caffeine. “It's another hour to Pecos, okay? Happy now?” She didn't wait for her mom to tell her how much she wasn't. She grabbed the side handle on the seat and pulled up, and her seat leaned backward, faster and harder than she'd imagined it would. Her mother let out a little yelp of fright and frustration and sent her a glare that, by the light of the old
dashboard's red glow, looked more than a little demonic.

Her seat slammed into a box about eight inches back, and she heard something shift inside. She hoped that wasn't one of Mom's precious ceramic angels. If something broke, she'd catch hell for sure.

Life sucks enough already.
She was stuck in the desert with her entire life stuffed into the back of an ancient old station wagon with the fake wood paneling peeling off the sides, and there was no cell reception. Which meant no social media. No texts. No music.
Nothing.
And nothing to see, because out here in the desert was like being in outer space, all hard black sky and bright cold stars, and the road only an illusion vanishing just past the headlights. Like floating in a big bowl of darkness.
Maybe we're not really going anywhere. Maybe we're trapped going around in a circle. With no GPS, how can we tell?

She already knew what her mom would say to that, in that aggravated, superior way old people had.
In my day we could use maps. It wasn't that hard.
And phones had dials, games had boards, blah blah blah. She could recite all of the anti-new-stuff rants from memory.

Three more years until she could move out on her own, and she could not
wait.
She'd get her own apartment. Something tiny and cute, with a big chair. And a dog. She wanted a dog. They hadn't had one since Alfonse, the greyhound rescue that her dad had brought home one day. Alfonse had been shy and skittish, and limped a lot, but she'd loved that dog. She'd cried
for days when he'd died. In fact she felt her throat clench up just at the thought of his sad eyes, that velvety gray coat, the fast, scared beat of his heart when she'd held him for the last time.

She shut her eyes. Her mom punched buttons on the ancient stereo, trying to find some station out here in space.
Never happen. Give it up.
And even if they'd thought to bring the old CDs (which her mom still had), the wagon didn't even have a CD player.

Dark Ages
.
No wonder her uncle had sold it to them for five hundred bucks.