2

Jimmy was wrong.

Dave Boyle returned home four days after he'd disappeared. He rode back in the front seat of a police car. When the two cops brought him home, to his mother's house, reporters from the papers and TV were already there.

There was a whole crowd there that day – parents, kids, a mailman, two shop owners, and even Miss Powell, Dave and Jimmy's fifth-grade teacher. Jimmy stood with his mother and felt jealous as the cops and Dave were laughing like old friends, and pretty Miss Powell clapped her hands. I almost got in that car, too, Jimmy wanted to tell someone. He wanted to tell Miss Powell more than anyone. She was so beautiful and clean. Jimmy wanted to tell her he'd almost gotten in that car and see if she gave him the look she was giving Dave now. Miss Powell was uncomfortable there, Jimmy could tell. After she'd said a few words to Dave and touched his face and kissed his cheek, other people moved in. Jimmy was watching the crowd surround Dave, and he wished he'd gotten in that car, so he could see all those eyes looking at him like he was something special.

It all turned into a big party, everyone running from camera to camera, hoping they'd get on TV or see themselves in the morning papers – Yeah, I know Dave, he's my best friend, grew up with him, you know, great kid, thank God he's okay. Even later, when the reporters had all gone home, and the sun was starting to set, no one was going inside. Except for Dave. Dave was gone.

Dave's party was in full swing^[13], but Dave must have gone back into his house, his mother, too, and when Jimmy looked at their windows, the shades were drawn. Then suddenly, one of the shades rolled up and he saw Dave standing in the window, staring down at him. Jimmy held up his hand, but Dave didn't move, even when he tried a second time. Dave just stared. He stared at Jimmy, and even though Jimmy couldn't see his eyes, he could sense blankness in them. Blankness, and blame.

Jimmy's mother came up to him, and Dave stepped away from the window. She put her hand on Jimmy's shoulder and said, “How you doing, Jimmy? You didn't say anything to Dave.”

He shrugged. “I'll see him tomorrow in school.”

His mother lit a cigarette. “I don't think he'll be going in tomorrow.”

“Well, soon, then. Right?”

Jimmy's mother nodded and blew some smoke out of her mouth. She was looking at him now.

“What?” he asked, and smiled.

She smiled back at him. “Hey, Jim,” she said. “You got a great smile, boy. You're going to be a heartbreaker.”

“Uh, okay,” Jimmy said, and they both laughed. He loved it when she called him “Jim.” It made him feel like they were in on something^[14] together.

“I'm really glad you didn't get in that car, baby.” She kissed his forehead, and then she stood up and walked over to some of the other mothers.

Jimmy looked up and saw Dave in the window staring down at him again, a soft yellow light in the room behind him now.

Damaged goods. That's what Jimmy's father had said to his mother last night: “Even if they find him alive, the kid's damaged goods. Never be the same.”

Dave raised a hand. He held it up and didn't move it for a long time, and as Jimmy waved back, he felt sad. Jimmy was just eleven years old, but he didn't feel it anymore. He felt old. Old as his parents, old as this street.

Damaged goods, Jimmy thought. He watched Dave nod at him and then pull down the shade to go back inside his quiet apartment with its brown walls and ticking clocks.

Jimmy was glad, too, that he hadn't gotten in that car.

* * *

For a few days, Dave Boyle became a celebrity, and not just in the neighborhood, but also in the state. The headline the next morning read LITTLE BOY LOST/LITTLE BOY FOUND. The photograph showed Dave, his mother, and some smiling kids from the Flats, everyone looking just happy, except for Dave's mother, who looked like she'd just missed her bus on a cold day.

The same kids who'd been with him on the front page started calling him “freak boy” within a week at school. Dave would look in their faces and see anger he didn't understand. Dave's mother said they probably got it from their parents, and they'll soon get bored and forget all about it and be his friends next year.

Dave would nod and wonder if there was something about him – some mark on his face that he couldn't see – which made everyone want to hurt him. Like those guys in the car. Why had they picked him? How had they known he'd get in that car, and that Jimmy and Sean wouldn't? Looking back, that's how it seemed to Dave. Those men (and he knew their names, or at least the names they'd called each other, but he couldn't make himself use them) had known Sean and Jimmy wouldn't have gotten into that car without a fight. Sean would have run for his house, screaming, probably, and Jimmy – they'd have had to fight with Jimmy to get him inside. The Big Wolfhad even said later: “You saw that kid in the white T-shirt? The way he looked at me, with no real fear? Kid's going to kill someone someday, and not lose a night of sleep over it.”

It helped to give those men silly names: Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf. It helped Dave to see them as creatures, wolves, and Dave himself as a character in a story: the Boy Taken by Wolves. The Boy Who Escaped and found his way through the woods to a gas station. The Boy Who'd Stayed Calm, always looking for a way out.

In school, though, he was just the Boy Who Got Stolen, and everyone wondered what had happened during those four lost days. In the bathroom one morning, a seventhgrader stopped beside Dave and said, “Did you do it?” and all his seventh-grader friends started laughing and making funny noises.

Dave turned to face the older boy, but he suddenly hit him in the face.

“You got something to say, freak? Huh? You want me to hit you again?”

“He's crying,” someone said, and Dave's tears fell harder. It wasn't the pain that bothered him. Pain had never bothered him much, and he'd never cried from it, not even when he'd fallen off his bike. It was the emotions he could feel coming from the boys in the bathroom: hatred, disgust, anger, contempt. All directed at him. He didn't understand why. He'd never bothered anyone his whole life. Yet they hated him. And the hate made him feel dirty and guilty and small, and he cried because he didn't want to feel that way.

They all laughed at his tears, and Dave dropped his head, but the older boy was walking away with his friends, all of them laughing as they left the bathroom.

Dave sat down on the bathroom floor and wished he had the will to kill someone in himself. He'd start with that older boy, he supposed, and move on to Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf, if he ever saw them again. But, truth was, he just didn't think he could. He didn't know why people were mean to other people. He didn't understand. He didn't understand.

Dave found that even the few classmates who'd been his friends after he'd first returned to school started to ignore him. If they ran into each other^[15] as they left their houses, Jimmy Marcus would sometimes walk silently together with him to school because it would have been strange not to, and he'd say, “Hey,” when he passed him in the hall on the way to class. Dave could see some mix of pity and embarrassment in Jimmy's face, as if Jimmy wanted to say something but couldn't put it into words. But it felt to Dave as if their friendship had died when Dave got in that car and Jimmy had stayed on the street.

Jimmy, as it happened, wouldn't be in school with Dave much longer, so even those walks together soon ended. At school, Jimmy had always hung out with Val Savage, a small, psycho boy. They finally stole a car – almost a year after their fight on Sean's street – and it got Jimmy and Val expelled from the school. They were allowed to finish sixth grade, since there were only a few days left in the year, and then their families were told they had to look elsewhere for the boys' schooling. They found a place for them in a mostly black school where the two of them, Dave heard, soon became the local terror – two white kids so crazy they didn't know how to be scared.

Dave hardly saw Jimmy after that, maybe once or twice a year. Dave's mother didn't let him leave the house anymore, except to go to school. She was sure those men were still out there, waiting, driving that car that smelled of apples, looking for Dave.

Dave knew they weren't. They were just wolves. But they visited his mind more often now – the Big Wolf and the Greasy Wolf, and what they'd done to him. They came, and Dave closed his eyes, trying not to remember that Big Wolf's name had been Henry and Greasy Wolf's name had been George.

And Dave would tell himself that he was the Boy Who'd Escaped from the Wolves. And sometimes he replayed his escape in his head: the crack by the hinge he'd noticed in the door, the sound of their car driving away, the screw he'd used to open the crack wider and wider until the old hinge fell off. He'd come out of the cellar, this Boy Who Was Smart, and he'd run straight into the woods and followed the late afternoon sun to the gas station a mile away. It was a shock to see it – that neon sign already lit for the night. It made Dave drop to his knees at the edge of the woods. That's how the owner of the station found him: on his knees and staring up at the sign.

* * *

In Sean's dream, he looked into the open door of the car that smelled like apples, and the street held his feet. Dave was already inside the car. All Sean could see in the dream was that open door and the backseat. He couldn't see the guy who'd looked like a cop. He couldn't see his partner who'd sat in the front passenger seat. He couldn't see Jimmy, though Jimmy had been right beside him the whole time. He could just see that seat and Dave and the door and the trash on the floor. That, he realized, had been the alarm – there had been trash on the floor. He hadn't remembered the trash until now. Even when the cops had been in his house and asked him to think – really think – about any detail he might have forgotten to tell them, it hadn't occurred to him that the back of the car had been dirty, because he hadn't remembered it. But in his dream, it had come back to him, and he'd realized, without realizing it, somehow, that something was wrong about the “cop,” his “partner,” and their car. Sean had never seen a cop car in real life, but a part of him knew that it wouldn't be filled with trash. Maybe under all that trash had lain half-eaten apples, and that's why the car smelled as it had.

A year after Dave's abduction Sean's father came into his bedroom to tell him two things. The first was that Sean had been accepted to Latin School, and would begin seventh grade there in September. His father said he and Sean's mother were really proud. Latin was where you went if you wanted to make something out of yourself.

The second thing he said to Sean was: “They caught one of them. One of the guys who took Dave. They caught him. He's dead. Suicide in his cell.”

“Yeah?”

His father looked at him. “Yeah. You can stop having nightmares now.”

But Sean said, “What about the other one?”

“The guy who got caught,” his father said, “told the police the other one was dead, too. Died in a car accident last year.”

Sean hoped he'd been driving the car that had smelled of apples, and that he'd driven it off a cliff, and took that car straight to hell with him.