Shelby was getting ahead of Toby and he sped up.
“You could just keep the flag. We could get it out sometimes and look at it.”
Shelby stopped. It was too dark to know what was on her face.
“You don’t get it,” she said. “I’m embroiled in a contest of pranks that has gone on for thousands of years, between people long before me, and if there’s a God then he’s been watching the whole thing and laughing. Someone stole my sister. That was a hell of a prank, don’t you think? A lot bigger than hanging a flag.”
“I see,” Toby said. He didn’t. He didn’t see what the church and its music had to do with Kaley. He almost wished he could tell Shelby where her sister was, so she knew who was worth being afraid of, so she wouldn’t waste her energy on a false enemy. The only thing to be scared of in this county was Toby, and he wasn’t going to hurt Shelby anymore. He hoped he never hurt anyone anymore.
Toby started the two of them walking again. “A hammer and nails will be too noisy,” he told Shelby. “If you’re going to do this, you need a staple gun.”
The classroom kept dimming then flooding with light as masses of clouds passed in front of the sun. Mr. Hibma pointed at a kiss-ass and ordered her to close the blinds. It was the last day of the foreign nations presentations. Mr. Hibma asked for a volunteer and here came Toby, a box of visual aids in his arms. Toby’s eyes were puffy, pinkened. He competently pushed his way through a bunch of obscure facts. He played a South African pop song. He gave everyone a serving of some canned root in a sugary sauce.
Next Shelby got up. No props. Iceland: puffins, aurora borealis, the Sugarcubes, Irish monks. Shelby had an aunt there. She ran a website, which Shelby promised she had not looked at in researching her presentation, a website called whatwouldtheythink, on which the aunt reviewed things. This aunt, Aunt Dale, had been with the same man since Shelby had been alive, but refused to marry him. Shelby’s aunt didn’t care for the United States. She refused to put ads on her website, and was compensated instead by the government of Iceland.
“Hold up,” Mr. Hibma said. He knew Shelby’s aunt’s website. He went on it from time to time and read reviews of performance artists. He hated performance artists.
“So you had that Stubblefield lady as one aunt,” Mr. Hibma said. “The lady in Tennessee, in the barn. And then you have expatriate Aunt Dale as another aunt.”
“Right, but Janet Stubblefield wasn’t my real aunt.”
“And both of them are nuts in a pleasing way.”
Shelby looked skeptical.
“Oh, Aunt Dale’s nuts,” said Mr. Hibma. “She’s dedicated her life to conjecturing what impression Martians might have of Earthly customs.”
“Abnormal,” Shelby conceded.
“Do you know how many people are abnormal in a way that pleases me?”
“In the world?”
“Let’s estimate.”
“Four hundred?”
This seemed a perfect guess. “And you have two of them for aunts.”
Mr. Hibma wondered if Aunt Dale had ever visited Citrus County. The area seemed ripe for whatwouldtheythink. It was unimpressive in a noteworthy way. Mr. Hibma could see Aunt Dale at the Best Western lounge, chatting with the mermaids. He saw Aunt Dale down at Hudson Beach — a scatter of damp dirt and a burger bar with Calypso music. Mr. Hibma saw himself serving Aunt Dale dinner in his villa. “The drywall is all original,” he would tell her. He would serve calzones, baked by the Long Islanders down the street.
Mr. Hibma dismissed the class, allowing each kid to grab a poster on the way out, something they now did out of obligation. He’d broken into a long patch of straight-to-video action movies — beefy, confused-looking men and women with shiny cleavage.
When the last kid was gone, Mr. Hibma shut the door. He stared at a Bosch print. Grotesque birds. Women with bonnets. Demons hiding in big eggs — or were they being born? Bosch had captured the horror so deftly that it seemed to echo. Mr. Hibma felt he might find himself in the painting, walking around lost with chalk in his pockets.
He was very jealous of Aunt Dale. He was meant to do few things, and what Aunt Dale did, criticize, was one of them. She’d made better decisions than Mr. Hibma and had ended up in a better life. That’s what Mr. Hibma should’ve done with his inheritance: started whatwouldtheythink. He never should’ve ended up throwing a dart. He should’ve chosen his life.
He sat down at his desk and squared a sheet of paper in front of him, readied a pencil, then wrote the following letter:
D,
I plan to kill a fifty-something-year-old woman in early June, an English teacher, and I would like to invite you to review the murder, to evaluate it as a work of art. I will smother this woman with a couch pillow. I have told no one of this but you.
Mr. H
Mr. Hibma did not feel in possession of himself. He didn’t know why he’d written this letter. He felt again like a character in a novel. Not a passive character, though — not at the moment. His story was going somewhere.
Mr. Hibma wasn’t going to mention which county he lived in, certainly wasn’t going to mention Shelby. In fact, he would drive to the middle of the state, somewhere near Orlando or something, so the postmark wouldn’t give him away. Mr. Hibma was going to go home and dig up the address of whatwouldtheythink. He was going to get an envelope out and slip his letter inside and he was going to drive to Clermont or wherever and pay whatever you had to pay to mail something to Iceland. First he was going to get a PO Box in Clermont, and he was going to use that PO Box as his return address. And he was going to have his mail from that PO Box forwarded to his villa. He was doing something. He was taking part in his life.
Toby had received, on his locker, a card informing him that his pole-vaulting book was overdue. The fine was a quarter a day. There was no mention of a maximum fine the book could accrue, of a retail value the library put on the book. Toby didn’t know if he could simply re-borrow the book, or if the library would take it away from him and put it back on the shelf, in case another student wanted a turn with it. Toby wanted to keep the book till the end of track season. He was going to keep it and then pay the fine. He had an allowance now. He could afford it. Not that the book was helping a great deal. All Toby could claim to have mastered, so far, was his natural fear of hurtling through the air. His grip and his stride were coming along. Except for the moment when he was supposed to gain altitude, to shoot upward, he could approximate the look of a pole-vaulter. He was a member of the track team. He was on the team. That was the important thing.
The first meet was upon him. Toby rode the bus with his teammates out to a complex that bordered the rock quarries, near the grounds of Lecanto Middle School. There was no crowd, not even parents. Toby drank a soda then jogged a lap around the track. There was only one pole-vaulter on the opposing squad, a sturdy Asian kid who wore a visor. Toby went over like a stand-up sportsman and shook the kid’s hand, and the kid wished Toby luck in claiming one of the two all-county spots. There were six pole-vaulters total, the kid explained. He, himself, would have one of the spots, and the other one was up for grabs. He told Toby one of the most pivotal parts of pole vault, this season at least, would be the coin flips. It would be crucial to never go first, because if you went first you didn’t know what height you had to beat. Pole-vaulters were supposed to alternate turns, but last year two kids had kept bumping shoulders as they crossed paths and they ended up getting in a fight. One of the kids got his tooth knocked out, the Asian kid told Toby, so now one vaulter went three times, then the other went three times.