Freeze Frame Read Free

Pretzer would have sent him to hell or something. Maybe I could get him a copy. I was about to ask Mark for my one phone call when I remembered. My stomach lurched and I almost threw up. I leaned my head against a cool brick wall.
    â€œKid, you okay?”
    I nodded.
    â€œIt’s late. You’d better get some sleep. We have a big day tomorrow. Any questions?”
    â€œUm, is my mom okay?” The lump returned to my throat when I thought about how Mom had looked in the hospital parking lot.
    â€œYour family is fine. You’ll see them tomorrow. Get some rest.” Mark clapped me on the back, closing the door to the tiny room.
    I hadn’t realized how tired I was until then. I couldn’t sleep, though. My mind replayed the day over and over again, always getting stuck at that one scene. A black screen faded to forms of gray, as if the shed had been dipped in murky fog. Jason’s body was blurred, lying in a black pool. Then the screen became red.
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    â€œKyle, are you ready?” Mr. Allison asked. “We need you to focus now.”
    â€œOh, yeah. Sure.” I nodded, looking around the small room.
    The skinny cop stared at me with buggy eyes. He reminded me of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings . Fatty, on the other hand, looked more like Igor. It was like Clash of the Movie Tools .
    â€œIgor, bring me the brain.”
    â€œYes, master.” Igor rubs his hands together and hobbles down the dark corridor to the deep freeze.
    â€œMy precious. My precious,” Gollum says, limping after him.
    â€œRubbish, Smeagol. Bloody fool,” Dr. Frankenstein mutters. “You’d think he could find something appropriate to wear over those putrid rags.” He pinches his nose and sneers down the hall after the receding shadows. He flips through a thick medical book, then looks over his spectacles at the body, prone on the metal slab.
    The sky flashes with streaks of lightning. For a split second light illuminates the corpse’s pasty face.
    I jerked my head sideways and gasped. Everybody in the room stared at me. Dad’s hand was on my shoulder.
    â€œDo you need me to repeat the question?” Gollum leaned back in his chair. “Can you take me through what happened yesterday, step by step?”
    Both of the officers pulled out their little notebooks at the same time. It looked like one of those choreographed moves in Bollywood. I wondered if one of them would get up on the table and sing. They looked at me in the way adults look at kids on those after-school specials before the kid admits to having tried beer at a party. Do directors tell them to make those faces?
    I looked at Dad.
    Dad nodded.
    I told them everything I knew, up until the blurry scene. Their pencils whirred. They flipped the pages and scratched more.
    â€œWe need to know what happened next. Do you remember pointing the gun? Squeezing the trigger? Anything like that?” Gollum leaned in.
    â€œI don’t know.” I shook my head. Scene Three was gone—a snippet of the film cut and thrown out. I’d seen a movie called The Final Cut where people had these implants in their brains that recorded their entire lives. After people died, cutters would edit their lives and present the recordings to the dead people’s friends and family inthe form of a movie. It was like my scenes had already been edited.
    Igor looked up over his glasses. “Hmm…,” he grunted.
    â€œOkay, let’s skip to what happened next. We’ll go back to that part later. What do you remember after that?”
    October 8, 9:18 A.M ., Scene Four, Take One, Continued
    Mel and I watched Mom and Jason.
    I heard Dad’s car drive up. “Dad’s back with the syrup, Mom.” Now we could have our pancakes and go back to our regular day. I remembered I hadn’t eaten yet. I wondered if we’d have time to eat before the game. I felt hungry—starved.
    â€œMel, get yourself together and