The cliffs, p.10
The Cliffs, page 10
Mesmerized now by the whites of Julius’s eyes bulging out from between long blond lashes, Reed couldn’t turn away from the malformed thing above him. But he still struggled. Grunting, he shoved upward with all his might.
It did no good. It was like the weight of a hundred cars pinned him down.
“Please, please,” Reed whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know this was going to happen to you. I just wanted you to be locked in overnight. I didn’t want this to happen.”
He knew there was no use in begging, but he couldn’t help himself. He opened his mouth to say something else, but that’s when the question of whether Julius had consciousness was answered. Julius shifted downward to press his heavy, seeping mass against Reed’s mouth. Reed could no longer speak.
But he could hear.
In the distance, downstairs, the other kids were returning from their soda run. Reed could hear Pickle suggesting to Shelly that he could construct a better torture device than anything medieval people had come up with.
“I’m not sure that would be an accomplishment, Pickle,” Shelly said.
Reed strained, grunting, desperate to get their attention.
Trying to yell, Reed could only make unintelligible groans.
Downstairs, Ory piped up. “Can I play with the remote again, Pickle?”
Julius shifted, and Reed allowed himself a moment of hope. Maybe he could get away.
Pouring every bit of life force he had into his muscles, he surged upward. He hoped to erupt like a volcano and get ejected away from Julius, toward freedom.
But he didn’t erupt. Or rather, he did, but before he could get ejected away from the Julius cage that imprisoned him, Julius’s mashed hands somehow grabbed hold of Reed’s outstretched hands. Julius’s formless legs somehow managed to wrap tightly around Reed’s ankles.
Reed was now as linked to Julius as Julius was to his exoskeleton. And Reed knew what was going to happen next.
With the pressure of Julius’s face wedged against Reed’s throat, Reed couldn’t make a sound that could be heard downstairs. He was facing his worst nightmare, and he couldn’t scream.
Downstairs, Pickle responded to his brother’s question. “Sure, Ory. Go nuts. We have all night!”
* * *
Ory grinned and knelt on the floor next to the miniature house. Usually interested only in cars and racing, Ory was surprised by how much fun this robot was. Maybe he could get his brother to build him other things. He’d never been able to get a robot to move this way before. It was super cool!
Pressing a button, Ory got the little robot to crawl out from behind the mini-miniature house. He carefully maneuvered the robot out of the miniature house, not wanting to get on his sister’s bad side. One time, he ran the little skeleton into a wall. When he did, he heard something bump on the floor above his head.
He looked up, but he didn’t hear anything else, so he continued carefully guiding the robot out of the house and onto the miniature porch. When he got it out, he did a little fist pump.
Happy with himself, Ory grinned wider and decided to see if he could get the robot to do even weirder things than it was doing before he got his soda. He began manipulating the remote so fast his fingers were just a big blur.
In response, the little robot shot off the toy house’s porch and began spinning and thrashing. While Ory shouted in triumph, the little robotic skeleton began popping and snapping its metal limbs in all kinds of unnaturally delightful ways.
I wish we were a nice family,” Chris said. He and his parents and sister sat around the secondhand dinner table, eating hot dogs and canned baked beans and macaroni and cheese that had come from a box.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Chris’s dad said. He was still wearing his uniform from the garage with his name, DAVE, stitched in cursive letters over the shirt’s breast pocket. “Do you think we’re all a bunch of jerks or something? I mean, look at your mom—is this the face of somebody who isn’t nice?”
Chris’s mom flashed an exaggerated angelic smile and fluttered her mascara-painted eyelashes.
“And what about your little sister here—she’s not nice?” Chris’s dad pointed a forkful of macaroni and cheese in Emma’s direction.
“I’m very nice,” Emma said, pushing her glasses up on her freckled nose. She was in fourth grade and was, Chris thought, bossy beyond her years. She gestured at her green uniform, complete with a sash full of badges. “I’m a Girl Scout and everything.”
“See? It doesn’t get nicer than that,” Chris’s dad said. “And everybody who knows me says I’m reasonably nice—the guys at the garage, my customers, my buddies I go bowling with. People tend to like me. Or at least, they generally don’t run away when they see me approaching them.” He reached for another hot dog—a mistake, given his growing waistline, Chris thought—and squirted it with an excessive amount of mustard. “So what do you mean when you say our family isn’t nice?”
Chris felt like his father had misunderstood him. This was a regular occurrence. “No, you’re all nice people,” Chris said. “That wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was”—Chris searched in vain for words that would express his thoughts without offending his family members—“I guess I don’t know what I meant.”
But really, Chris knew exactly what he had meant. His parents were decent people: good citizens who loved their kids and worked hard for their family and community. His little sister was annoying in the way younger siblings were, but he would never say she was a bad person. That being said, when he compared his family to the families of the smartest kids in school, they fell short.
Part of it was his parents’ education, or lack thereof. His mom had started working as soon as she graduated high school and still had the same job at the utility board she had gotten when she was eighteen. After Chris’s dad finished high school, he had gone to vocational school to learn how to work on cars. He had an excellent reputation as an auto mechanic, but that job didn’t strike Chris as prestigious enough. His dad came home every day dirty and smelling like axle grease. In Chris’s opinion, truly successful people didn’t need to take a shower as soon as they got home from work.
When Chris went out with his parents, to a restaurant or a store or a school function, he always felt embarrassed. His mom was loud and flashy. She wore the brightest colors she could find with the reddest lipstick and the biggest, shiniest costume jewelry.
His dad, despite his daily after-work showers, always had grease under his fingernails, so he never looked quite clean. And then there was the matter of his weight. Chris’s dad’s belly protruded over his belt, and sometimes his shirt rode up such that the great shelf of his distended gut escaped and hung out for all to see. When he sat and his pants slipped down and his shirt rode up in the back, what he exposed was even worse.
Chris knew his parents were nice. He just wished they could look nice and act appropriately in public. The smartest kids at school had parents who always knew how to look and act. The dads wore jackets and ties or khakis and polos. The moms wore tasteful blouses and dress slacks and subtle, expensive jewelry and makeup. These parents were professionals: lawyers or engineers or medical doctors. They had careers that required years of schooling beyond high school. This was the kind of career Chris wanted.
The kinds of jobs that Chris’s parents worked led to a deficiency in another area: money. They weren’t poor, no. They owned their house, but it was a plain, dumpy house, barely big enough for a family of four, and the furniture was mostly hand-me-downs from Chris’s grandparents. His mom and dad each had a car, but both of the vehicles were ancient and only kept running because of his dad’s mechanical know-how. They had a creaky old shared family computer, and Chris’s video game console was so tragically out of date he couldn’t buy new games for it anymore. They only got basic cable. Honestly, who just had basic cable these days?
When Chris rode around town on the school bus, he always noticed the subdivisions that were full of fancy, two-story brick houses. He liked to fantasize about the families who lived in them: the doctor dads and lawyer moms and their high-achieving kids, all dressed in designer clothes, eating grilled salmon and steamed vegetables and salad for dinner and then lounging in rooms that looked like they were ready to be photographed for one of the home-and-garden magazines he always saw in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. The parents probably played golf and tennis at the country club while their kids splashed around in the pool. There were never any worries about how to pay for the kids’ college once they were old enough.
That’s what Chris had meant by wishing they were a nice family. He wanted a nice life for them, with nice things, and a bright future for him and his sister. Surely it wasn’t so wrong to want more out of life than scraping by every month just to pay the bills, then having to buy the off-brand items at the grocery store just to save a few cents.
“Emma, it’s your turn to do the dishes tonight,” Chris’s mom said as they were finishing their meal.
“Okay, Mom,” Emma said. It annoyed Chris how cooperative she always was. Didn’t she ever get sick of doing the same chores over and over?
“Chris, I told Mrs. Thomas you’d help take out her trash tonight,” Mom said, getting up from the table. “After that, you can take Porkchop for his after-dinner walk.”
Chris didn’t want to do either of these tasks. Why were parents always exploiting kids for free labor? “Mom,” he said, trying to keep his voice from rising to a whine, “I’m busy. Tomorrow’s the first day of school, and I’ve got to get ready.”
“Taking out Mrs. Thomas’s trash and walking Porkchop will take thirty minutes, tops. That gives you plenty of time to get your stuff ready for school tomorrow.”
He could tell from the tone of his mom’s voice that she wasn’t going to put up with any argument. “Okay, but I won’t like it.”
“I know you won’t like it,” his mom said. “It’s part of my evil plan to oppress you.” She did a fake laugh like a villain in a cartoon. “Come on, I’m trying to make you laugh here.”
Emma, who was already clearing the table, laughed, but Chris wouldn’t give his mother the satisfaction. With a theatrical sigh, he got up from the table and left by the back door to go to Mrs. Thomas’s house.
Mrs. Thomas was old, so old that Chris’s parents were always amazed that she still managed to live alone and take care of herself. She had been a high school English teacher for over forty years, teaching Chris’s parents along with many generations of the town’s high school students. Now, though, she had been retired and widowed for many years and lived in a small, boxy, book-cluttered house with just her cats for company. She cooked and did light housekeeping herself, but Chris’s parents helped her out with anything that required heavy lifting.
Or, at least in the case of the garbage, they forced Chris to help her. The arrangement was that on the night before garbage day, Chris would come to Mrs. Thomas’s house, empty all the trash cans in the house, and take the bags to the big garbage pail in her driveway, which he would then take to the side of the road so it would be ready for pickup the next morning.
Chris had once asked his dad if he could at least be paid for this weekly responsibility, but his dad had said, “Sometimes you don’t do a job for money. You do it because it’s the decent thing to do.”
Chris had taken that as a no.
Chris knocked on Mrs. Thomas’s door and prepared to wait. She moved slowly, and it always took her a long time to answer. When she finally came to the door, she was wearing the same yellow cardigan she wore year-round, even now when it was hot outside. She was a tiny, delicate, birdlike woman. Her glasses were thick, and her hair was thin and gray. “Hello, Christopher. It’s so nice of you to come over and help me.”
She was the only person who ever called him Christopher.
“Sure,” Chris said. But really, it wasn’t a matter of being nice. It was more that he was still a kid and so when his parents made him do something, his only choice was to do it or suffer the consequences.
“Please come in,” she said, holding the door open. “There’s just one bag of trash that needs to go out. It’s in the kitchen.”
The house was dark and smelled musty. The walls were lined with full bookshelves, and every piece of furniture in the living room had at least one cat sleeping on it. He followed her into the kitchen.
“Could I interest you in some cookies before I put you to work?” Mrs. Thomas asked, gesturing to the cat-shaped cookie jar on the kitchen counter.
“No thank you. I just had dinner.” Mrs. Thomas’s cookies were the cheap kind they sold at the ninety-nine-cents store, and they were always stale. After taking her up on the cookie offer twice, he had learned to say no.
“Well, that’s never stopped me from having a cookie or two,” Mrs. Thomas said, smiling. “Your mother tells me you’re starting high school tomorrow. That must be exciting for you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Chris said, anxious for this conversation to end so he could get back to doing stuff that really mattered.
“She was bragging about what a good student you were and about how much you love to learn. You know, I taught at your high school for many years. English literature. If you ever need any help with anything academic, just let me know. And if you ever want to borrow any of my books, you’re always more than welcome to.”
“Thanks, but I’m more of a science guy than a literature guy.”
“Don’t put yourself in a pigeonhole yet. You’re too young,” Mrs. Thomas said. “And there’s absolutely no reason you can’t be both a science guy and a literature guy. There are so many wonderful things in the world to learn.”
Chris lifted the garbage bag, filled mostly with empty cat food tins, out of the trash can. “I’ll take this out and then roll the big can out to the road, okay?”
Mrs. Thomas nodded. “Thank you, Christopher. You’re such a great help to me.”
Chris walked back toward his yard. He knew Mrs. Thomas was trying to be nice, but it was kind of sad that she thought she could help him with school stuff. She had gone to the little local college a bazillion years ago, then taught high school English until she retired. It wasn’t like she was some great intellectual. Plus, she was so old she had probably forgotten what little she had known. He was sure she could teach him nothing.
Chris opened the gate to the fenced-in backyard, where Porkchop was wagging and waiting. As soon as Chris was inside, Porkchop jumped up on him and craned his neck so he could lick Chris’s face.
“Get down, Porkchop! You’re getting me all muddy!” Chris backed away from the dog’s dirty paws and tried to dust off his pants.
Chris had wanted a dog, but Porkchop was not the dog he had wanted. Chris had wanted one of the smart, beautiful purebred dogs he had seen on dog shows on TV: a border collie or a Shetland sheepdog. But his dad had said they couldn’t afford a purebred dog and that anyway, it was immoral to buy an expensive dog from a breeder when there were so many dogs in shelters that needed good homes.
And so one evening when Chris was in sixth grade, his dad had come home with Porkchop, a brown-and-tan, overgrown, snaggle-toothed shelter mutt who bore no resemblance to the elegant herding breeds Chris admired. It was immediately clear that Porkchop also lacked the intelligence to learn the tricks or agility skills Chris had dreamed of teaching a dog. Instead, Porkchop was a happy idiot whose favorite activities focused on his belly, either filling it or getting it rubbed.
“Ready for your walk?” Chris asked, without much enthusiasm.
Porkchop made up for Chris’s lack of enthusiasm by wagging, barking, and running in small circles.
“If you won’t sit, I can’t put your leash on,” Chris said. He couldn’t believe how much time he was wasting carrying out his parents’ orders.
He attached the leash to Porkchop’s collar. “Once around the block, and that’s all you get,” he said.
Walking through the neighborhood was depressing. The houses were small and identical little boxes, which had originally been built for the workers in a steel mill that had shut down many years before Chris was born. The yards on which the houses sat were postage-stamp small. He was sure he was the only kid in the Science Club who lived in such a lousy neighborhood. He hoped he could keep where he lived a secret from the other kids, who, he was sure, all lived in the fancy neighborhoods on the west side of town that had names like Wellington Manor and Kensington Estates.
As promised, he took Porkchop around the block once, then brought him in the house and emptied out a can of dog food into his bowl. Porkchop happily gobbled it up.
Finally, with his chores all done, Chris could go to his room and start getting ready for the first day of high school. Not only did he need to get his backpack filled and organized, but he also had to decide what he was going to wear. His mom had taken him shopping the week before and bought him five shirts, three pairs of jeans, and some new sneakers. But they had gone to this awful big-box store because the prices there were affordable. What Chris had picked out looked okay, but he wished he could have real, name-brand clothes from one of the good stores in the mall. His mom said nobody could tell the difference, but he knew this was a lie she told to try to make him feel better.
Still, Chris was feeling hopeful. The first day of high school was a fresh start, a chance for him to prove himself. A whole new ball game, as his dad would say; the man never met a cliché he didn’t like.
The thing that Chris was most excited about was joining Science Club. At West Valley High, Mr. Little’s science classes and the club he supervised were legendary. Mr. Little’s classroom was lit by plasma balls and lava lamps and strings of glowing bubble lights. He was famous for demonstrating spectacular experiments that involved fire or carefully controlled explosions, though he said he made sure his students didn’t work on anything that would put them in actual danger. He was also famous for jump-starting student projects that produced extraordinary results and almost always won science fairs when West Valley competed with other schools.
