I decided to aim for normal. “Who do you think he knows at this conference? Older people? Or does he have a special group of friends like you when you go to camp?” I didn’t have anyone outside of Toshi and Jay.
“They’re probably older people, with jobs and all. If they’re important. Hey, how much trouble did you get in for the piss bombs?”
I said, “My dad didn’t think it was any big deal. Why? What did your dad do?”
Toshi rubbed absently at his wrist. It was a weird habit he’d picked up, as if he’d tricked himself into believing in the ache of a bone that really had snapped and healed. “He yelled at me a bunch. He was pretty mad, saying that I ruined my future. I’m still grounded right now, but tonight is the night he spends with his girlfriend, so he’ll never know that I didn’t lock myself in my room right after school. Hey, did you hear what Jay’s dad did to him?”
I shook my head.
“Disowned him. Right as soon as he walked in the door, dropped him just like that.”
“Yikes,” I said. “He told you?” I didn’t say, Jay forgot to tell that to me. Jay was supposed to tell me everything, and whenever Toshi let out a tidbit I didn’t know, I prickled with jealousy.
“It only lasted two days, though. Jay did a bunch of groveling or made promises or something so that his dad would let him back in. He wasn’t going to be allowed on this Kentucky trip, but he convinced his dad that he needed the discipline of the conference, or something like that, and then his dad must have realized it would be better to take him along than leave him home alone for the weekend.” Toshi nodded. “So he got to go.”
Jay must have been miserable for those days he was disowned, but I hadn’t even noticed, preoccupied as I’d been with my own concerns. It was funny because I might not even notice if my father disowned me, a punishment he’d probably never think up in the first place. You couldn’t disown something that barely seemed like yours.
A car drove past us; the kids inside yelled, “Dickwads!” and threw a half-empty milkshake that splattered across my shins. Our big reveal as the piss bombers hadn’t made us popular at school; instead, everyone seemed to hate us more. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Toshi stared up at the sky. “My dad locked away my stereo and all my magazines and books and horn because of the whole piss bomb thing. My room is like a jail cell, now. I think maybe I’ll stay in New Veronia tonight, even though I might catch a cold.”
Ever since I’d learned about moving to Florida, my house had seemed emptier and emptier, too. When I biked back home, the windows would be black as rats’ eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, “same here.” New Veronia always looked so cozy, sort of like a cabin in a fairy tale, and really, there was no reason for us to go home.
The howling reached me about a hundred paces out from the encampment. Toshi heard it, too: he stopped and sort of hid behind me.
“What is that?” he whispered.
“Must be the Zimzee,” I said, trying for jokey to cover up the fact that I was scared.
Another howl, more pitiful sounding than the first, wafted among the trees. I picked up a branch and held it like a baseball bat as we made our cautious way into New Veronia. Maybe Mark had discovered our fort and he was trying to scare us as revenge for that night at the party.
But what we found in New Veronia was a dog: her back left paw had been caught by our bear trap. She snarled when she saw us, but I could tell that she only hated us because she was terrified. She’d chewed up her leg—bits of red flesh dangled from it—and her foot angled unnaturally on the other side of the trap.
“I thought those things didn’t work,” I said.
Toshi shrugged. “Jay lubed them up after that time they didn’t go off.”
After that time they didn’t snap closed on my father, he meant.
The dog was so skinny that her heavy panting racked her whole body—all her bones were shaking. “Do you think there was just a little scrap more of meat over there, and she sniffed it out?”
“Maybe,” Toshi said. “Or Jay might have baited it again. We have to put her out of her misery.”
I wanted to tell Toshi that no, we could let her go, maybe she’d heal up, but of course I knew that she never would. Besides, if we tried to get close enough to free her, she’d bite us, for sure. “Don’t you wish Jay was here? He could use his gun.”
“We’ll have to do it.” Toshi walked around behind New Veronia—a bunch of old tools were rusting against the north side of the triplex, things we had borrowed from our fathers and never returned, not that they had noticed—and came back with a shovel.
I stared at him, shocked. “Isn’t there anything quicker?” I couldn’t believe that hypochondriac, pee-shy Toshi was prepared to bludgeon a dog to death, but I was also grateful that he wasn’t asking me to do it.
“It’s better this way. Even if she wants to keep on living, she shouldn’t.”
I distracted her for the first blow so that Toshi could sneak up behind and get her good, but then I had to look away; it took a long time. I helped Toshi dig the grave, though.
After we’d finished, we scuffed around the grounds of New Veronia and talked lethargically about making improvements. We’d dragged an old toilet behind some bushes, but it didn’t have a pipe to convey away the waste, and we mostly just peed against trees. We’d extended the flagpole with the help of a sapling, and now from the ground, the penises Jay had drawn on the flag all those months ago just made it look kind of dirty.
By the time the sky had blackened, I’d regained my appetite. “Let’s look in Jay’s side to see if there’s anything to eat,” I said.
“He wouldn’t want us going in there with him gone. But there’s got to be food in his house. I’m sure there’s a window we can climb through or something.”
Before we left, Toshi watched silently as I sprung the rest of the bear traps—each one snapped off a few inches of my branch—then covered them up with leaves and sticks so that Jay wouldn’t notice the change.
The moon shone brightly enough that we could halfway see where we were stepping in the woods. Without any lights on inside, Jay’s house looked abandoned, and the mess of debris around its yard magnified this impression. The window above the kitchen sink hadn’t been locked, and we easily slid it open and slithered through, the only mishap being that I placed my foot in a teetering stack of dirty dishes. They toppled with a clash, which set my heart on fire, but of course, no one was home to be disturbed.
Toshi found a grocery bag, and he filled it with beer nuts and those packaged Danishes that had expiration dates months and months into the future. I checked in the fridge, but when I saw a greenish-looking jar of mayonnaise, I shut it quickly.
“Maybe we should go in his parents’ room,” I said. Jay had never let us in there; since he’d been little, his parents had instilled in him a strong off-limits rule for their part of the house.
“Oh, yes,” Toshi said. “Totally. I bet they have a sex swing. Or maybe the place is booby trapped and we’ll get our legs lasered off.”
My real motive for moving us upstairs was Stella’s bedroom and all the wonderful things her body did inside of it, like sleep and get dressed and paint her toenails and dance around to No Doubt—her favorite band. This was my chance: Stella’s heavenly room hovered just above my head. As soon as I could ditch Tosh, I’d go there.