Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night Read Free Page A

impression, because CJ gritted his teeth in anger and then caught himself. “You
gonna tell Mom?”
    I took my time answering,
letting him squirm a little. “I might…but I could maybe be persuaded not to…”
    “What do you want?”
    “A dog.” It was true; I’d been
bugging Mom for months now for a dog. She always said that dogs were a lot of
trouble and she didn’t think I was responsible enough to help take care of it
and so on. I knew that if I could get CJ to promise to help with it, though,
she might reconsider.
    CJ rolled that around in his
head for a minute. “A dog, huh? Would I have to help take care of it?”
    “Maybe a little at first. Just
long enough to convince Mom to let us keep it.”
    “And you won’t say anything
about…?” He jerked his head towards his room.
    I ran a finger twice across my
chest. “Cross my heart. Of course Mom might figure it out on her own when Vicki
shows up with a baby that looks like you.”
    “Not gonna happen, twerp.” He
reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a little square foil packet. It
looked like candy to me. Was there a candy that could keep a girl from getting
pregnant?
    CJ turned then and went back to
his room. I heard his door close behind him and some low giggling. But I wasn’t
really listening anymore—I was already trying to think about what kind of dog I
wanted.
    It turned out to be a good thing
we never did get that dog. There’s no way it would have survived that summer.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
     
     
     
    A day later, Debbie told me that Matt
Visser had been asking her if it was true that I’d seen the dead girl.
    Every neighborhood has an
obligatory weird kid, and Matthew Visser was ours. Nobody knew what had
happened to his mother; we only knew that Matt lived with his father, and spent
a lot of time alone because his dad was always working. 
    Matt was a smart kid—he’d
tested insanely high on his IQ test—but he had a mean streak. I wondered
sometime if his dad beat on him, and Matt carried it on down the line and
abused other kids. He had this toy that heated up and could cook little rubber
monsters, and he loved to try to lure the unwary into touching the burning-hot
surface. He’d fry ants with a magnifying glass on summer days or put dead
cockroaches on a girl’s chair at school. He’d spent more time in the
principal’s office than anyone else in school. You’d think Debbie and I would
have avoided him like the plague.
    But we didn’t. Maybe it was
because he lived two houses down from me, and we’d all grown up together, or
maybe Debbie and I secretly felt sorry for him, because he didn’t have a mother
or siblings, and we seemed to be his only friends.
    Debbie thought it would be fun
to go tell Matt about my encounter with a corpse, so we went to see him.
    We knocked on his front door,
and after a few seconds he answered. “Oh, hi, you guys,” he said, regardless of
our gender. “Hey, you gotta come see this – I’ve got something really great to
show you.”
    Matt had dried blood on his
white T-shirt.
    “Are you okay?” I asked him.
    “Yeah…why?”
    “Is that blood on your shirt?”
    He stopped in the kitchen
doorway and glanced down. “Oh, yeah, I guess it is. S’okay, though—it’s not
mine. Now c’mere.”
    We followed him into the
kitchen. I noticed the smell—foul and musky—before I saw what was on the
kitchen table.
    Matt had laid out some kind of
animal there. It was dead (from the smell I was guessing it’d been dead for a
while), but it was so badly mangled it was at first hard to make out what it’d
been. Then I saw the big, fluffy tail, and I guessed we were looking at a
squirrel that’d been hit by a car.
    “God, Matt, that’s gross ,”
Debbie said, grimacing.
    Debbie was putting it mildly: this
was weird even for Matt. “Where’d you get it?” I asked.
    “Found it this morning in the
gutter over on Camino Real.” He stuck a finger in the thing’s split side,