Baby Teeth

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  1

  I first saw him at Penny Anderson’s funeral, standing in the back of the chapel with his hat on. No one else seemed to notice him, they were too busy looking at the box Penny Anderson was in, or at Penny Anderson’s aunt who bawled so loudly that it was hard to hear Reverend Gary’s sermon, or at Penny Anderson’s mother and father who made no sounds at all. Penny Anderson would go into the ground the next day, and all of Loganville had turned out for the service; there were no seats left for the stranger.

  “Terrible thing,” said Ms. Perkins after, as we filed past the body.

  “Even in life…” said Ms. Farrow.

  “She’s with God now,” said Ms. Perkins.

  “So beautiful,” said Ms. Farrow.

  Though I could only comment with confidence on the last. Penny Anderson looked just the same as she had at homecoming, might even have been wearing the same dress (the Andersons were not wealthy people). She was paler, but that had always been part of her charm. Some of the others said goodbye to her, but I did not.

  When it was over the stranger was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  The Volvo was in the shop again and so we’d caught a ride to the funeral parlor with the Smiths, but they were going out to dinner on the way back and though my mom waited they did not invite us along. We took the bus and didn’t get home until after dark. My mother microwaved two meals and we sat down in front of the TV to eat.

  “I’m sorry, Graham,” said my mom.

  “Thanks.”

  “I know the two of you were special friends,” said my mom.

  Once upon a time when the neighborhood kids had existed as a sexless preadolescent mass, Penny Anderson and I had played tag and gone rambling and in winters sledded together down the big hill at the end of the development, but everyone used to do that and anyway it had stopped long ago. The last conversation I could remember having with Penny Anderson had been the previous spring, when she had seen me reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide during free period and called me a loser in front of Sally Lorne and Tim Abbot.

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  I still don’t know why I decided to bike back to the funeral parlor. It was a warm night and I liked taking my bike for long rides and I did not want to be in my house anymore, listening to the late-show monologue and my mother’s snoring. Penny had not been my special friend but she had sat by the window in English class, and sometimes when the sun broke on her she looked just like the girls in the books I read, or how I thought of those girls as looking.

  I supposed I planned to mope around in the parking lot and feel sad for a while, about Penny and a lot of other things too, probably, but then I saw a light was still on and I thought maybe Penny’s parents were still inside, and that I could say something to them, although what would that have been? In any event they weren’t inside, it was just Penny, or I mean Penny’s coffin, alone in the center of the room.

  I recognized the click from a thousand movies and TV shows and I responded accordingly, freezing wide-eyed and stiff.

  The stranger appeared from a corner, gun in hand. “You one of his?”

  “What?”

  I’d been hit before—sallow, bookish children often are—but not like that, one instant his hand at his side and the next I was on the ground, as if he had pulled some thread and unspooled me.

  “No!” I gasped. “No!”

  “You don’t look like it. What are you doing here, then?”

  I probably couldn’t have explained that even if I hadn’t been wiggling on the floor. I had an air rifle, and my uncle had once let me shoot some cans with his shotgun, but I had never seen a pistol before. It seemed very small in the man’s hands, like the barrel was growing straight out from his palm.

  “You aren’t thinking of doing anything to this girl, are you?”

  I spluttered some denunciation and he laughed at me. He had a laugh like the kids in gym class.

  “You’re going to have to stick around. He might come for a visit. Probably not, but … maybe.”

  I did not know who this other He was and was too afraid to ask. The stranger lifted me up to my feet, and I got my first good look at him. His hair was short and his skin was very dark and his eyes were darker. Beneath his T-shirt his chest seemed all muscle but he was only a little taller than I was, and this was before I had hit my spurt. I noticed that then and remember it now but moment to moment I often forgot.

  He turned the light off, then took me back to where he had been sitting, on the ground against the wall.

  “Who was she to you?” he asked.

  “Just a friend.” I had some of my breath back by then.

  “You went to school together?”

  “Tenth grade, yeah.”

  “She with anyone?’

  “Huh?’

  “Dating. She dating anyone?”

  “She was dating Carl Stanford—he’s back-up QB, he’ll probably start next year—but I heard they broke up.”

  “When?”

  “A month ago, maybe? After homecoming.”

  The funeral parlor was right off the highway, you could hear the cars and the occasional eighteen-wheeler rumble past.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I’m the undertaker.”

  “You don’t look like the undertaker,” I said. This reads braver than I intended it—I was often saying stupid things to people at that age (and other ages) but it was only because I didn’t (don’t) understand the way they sound until after I’ve said them.

  Anyway, he didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t answer but he didn’t seem to mind. We sat in silence a bit longer and then he was up without any warning. “I’m going to go out for a smoke. Keep an eye on her.”

  He was not a smoker. I know writing this here spoils the story some but it’s more important that I keep a clean record about everything and about him in particular. It was not just that he was lying then about having a cigarette, it was that he never smoked, nor drank. Occasionally I noticed him breathing.

  A long time passed. I didn’t try to run; I thought he might be laying a trap, and also I was the sort of child who did the things that people told me to do. Mostly.

  “Graham?”

  “Penny?”

  She was suddenly upright, holding a hand against her forehead.

  “Jesus Christ, Penny!” I had read about this sort of thing; in Victorian times they’d put bells in the coffins in case they buried you too early. But what about the stranger? No, there was something more sinister at work here; a white slavery ring, with young, pretty girls rendered comatose, then whisked away to work in sex parlors in foreign countries.

  “Graham?” Penny spoke in a strange rasp, some side effect of whatever drugs the man must have given her. “Is that you?”

  Thank God I was here to save her. I hurried to help her out of the casket. “Penny, we have to go, there’s a man here who I think is going to—”

  “It’s freezing,” said Penny, though it was warm for October and seemed hot as hell to me. Penny had strawberry blonde hair, which is the prettiest color of hair in the world, so pretty that even the name itself is pretty: strawberry blonde. Her skin was pale and the veins in her neck throbbed. When she had called me a loser her eyes had sparkled bright with wickedness but now they looked dead as burnt filament and her mouth was a tangled mess of canines broken glass torn aluminum dirty needles half-sharpened razor blades and I was a step from kissing her when she screamed, louder and shriller than anything I had ever heard before, a stern bit of steel between her perfect breasts, the sound so loud and the sight so horrible and then both came to a thankful end.

  * * *

  I awoke in the passenger seat of a car. The stranger was driving. The radio was off. All the time I spent in that car I never heard the radio.

  “Your bike is in the trunk,” he said.

  I was waiting for the next part—what had happened, why it had happened, what would happen next—but I didn’t get it.

  “Where are we going?” I asked finally.

  He didn’t answer that either, though I figured it out by the next turn.

  “How do you know where I live?”

  By then we were almost home, and I felt the usual shame at our unweeded garden and peeling paint, my embarrassment an anchor of familiarity amid the night’s madness. He stopped the car without coming into the driveway. Then he pulled my wallet out of the hollow of his side door and han
ded it to me. “Your name is Graham Isolde. You live at 344 Fett Street. You go to Logan High School. You have a Blockbuster membership. I can find you anytime I want to.”

  “OK,” I said.

  I got out and closed the door and took my bike out of the trunk and closed the trunk and went back to his window and said, “She wasn’t dead.”

  “She was dead,” he said. Then he drove off.

  2

  No one noticed anything had happened. Probably that tells you everything you need to know about my life at the time. My mother cleaned offices and braided hair sometimes and was always very tired. My father was then in Indiana, I think, but he moved around a lot and I can’t remember for certain. I was not on any sports teams, the star of no musicals, lacked any role which might have drawn the attention of another adult. Perhaps I was quieter and more skittish than usual, but there was a general pall over Logan High that October; I would not care to guess how many late assignments the death of Penny Anderson excused.

  Anyway, Erica was the only one I can remember asking about me, and that wasn’t until Thursday at lunch, when we were setting up to play Dungeons & Dragons in the Algebra II room on the third floor. “You sleep all right, Graham?”

  In fact, the night before I had slept like the dead—like the honest dead—but only because I had not managed an hour in the three previous evenings. “Do I look tired?”

  “No, you look really well-rested. I was going to ask for tips.”

  Erica had moved from California before the start of the year. Her mother was originally from the area. She had braces and freckles. She had very brown eyes. She was Jewish. She liked Star Trek but not Star Wars. She had seen us playing earlier that fall and asked what we were doing and then asked if she could roll up a character. I was a little bit in love with her, as I would always be with any girl or woman who showed me even casual kindness.

  “I don’t think I really have any,” I said.

  “I’m just kidding, Graham, you look terrible. What’s up?”

  I would likely have yielded my secrets—it would not have required a truncheon—but Donald and Barry came in just then, and we only had forty-five minutes to play, “barely enough time to belt up your buckler,” as Donald would put it, and we had to get started. Donald and Barry were the other three members of our Dungeons & Dragons quartet. Quartet is the sort of word you would know if you played Dungeons & Dragons, along with kobold, cantrip, and cockatrice.

  The week before, our party had managed to convince the Wood Elves to show us a secret path through the Forest Dolorous which led to a back entrance in the Black Fort, where the Demilich Seran was closeted, poisoning the land with his baneful influence.

  “Lord Evelywn slams shut the door just ahead of the furious zombie horde,” Donald said.

  “I bar it,” said Erica.

  “Dahlia bars the door. The wood is heavy and the iron strong, but you can hear the undead mass rage fierce against it.”

  “Hit me with a cure heavy wounds,” I told Barry.

  “I’ve only got two left,” said Barry. “Take a potion.”

  “I’m our front-rank fighter! If I go down, what do you think will happen to the rest of you?”

  “I’ve got your back,” said Erica.

  Barry snickered. Erica played with us Mondays and Thursdays at lunch but her father wouldn’t let her come over for our weekend games so she lagged a few levels behind the rest of the party, waving about her Long Sword +2 while the rest of earned relics and minor artifacts. Also, Donald never gave her anything good; she was always opening trapped chests and falling prey to various withering curses.

  “You have come to an ancient library, thousands upon thousands of moth-ridden tomes stacking up to a stained-glass ceiling high above. There are no obvious means of exit.”

  “Do I sense any secret doors?” asked Erica. Erica was playing an elf, and elves can sense secret doors.

  “No. And you do not need to ask, I automatically check.”

  “I cast detect magic,” said Barry. Barry was multi-classing as a wizard/priest/thief, which was very Barry. Barry had to be better at everything than everyone.

  “This deep inside the lich’s territory, there is such a plethora of sorcerous activity that your spell is of no effect.” Donald rattled off a d20. “The door is holding, but it will not for much longer.”

  “Too many Pennys banging against the door?” Barry asked.

  I snapped my head up.

  “That’s disgusting,” said Erica.

  “It’s just a joke.”

  “It’s a disgusting joke,” said Erica. “She’s dead.”

  “So what?” asked Donald. “Death is nothing of which to be afraid.” If Donald was not afraid of death, he was afraid of many other things: of having a ball thrown at him, of showering after gym, of Barry’s dog, which used to chase him all around Barry’s house. “Your conscious brain is eliminated, leaving nothing behind to feel pain.”

  “Who knows?” Erica asked. “My grandmother used to say that after you die your soul can manifest any way it wants. She said when the wind blew through the maple trees, she could hear my aunt’s voice.”

  “That’s facile,” said Donald, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

  Donald was as certain of this as he was the Konami code, or that Two Towers preceded Return of the King.

  * * *

  When I saw the stranger waiting in the parking lot I thought I might be sick or run back into the school. I didn’t do either of those things, however. I just went over to where he sat in his car. He looked the same as he had when he’d dropped me off the previous Sunday, same coat, same hat, even the same shirt, I think, or a twin.

  “Get in,” he said.

  It was then I realized that part of what had kept me awake that week, mixed with the constant anxiety and the memory of Penny’s eyes, was the fear that something special had happened to me and never would again. I felt a strange sense of relief. I got in the car and he pulled out of the parking lot.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You’re going to do something for me.”

  I admit it was a little disappointing to end up in front of the library, which as it happens was where I was going anyway, to drop off my copy of The Crystal Shard and pick up the next book in the series.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the library.”

  “I know what the fucking library is,” I said, but I squeaked a little on the curse. “Why are we here?”

  “I need you to look something up for me.”

  “Look something up for you?”

  “They’ve got a registry in there? Of births and deaths in the town?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I want you to get it for me. You’ve got a library card.”

  “You can’t get a library card?”

  “Why would I need a library card? Why would I come to a shit town in the middle of nowhere and look at the local history section? You think that’s the kind of thing a person might remember?” “Why did you come here? Who are you?” Then, lower; “What was she?”

  “You should have figured out the last.”

  I had. I guess you probably have to. But I didn’t want to say it out loud—either he would laugh at me, which was bad, or he wouldn’t, which was somehow worse.

  “You scared?”

  “No,” I lied.

  He grunted and shifted the car back into drive.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Coming to the funeral parlor alone like that, I thought maybe you had some balls—but I should have known by the way you took that punch that you were just a little bitch.”

  I had been called this and much worse by people driving past me in trucks, by varsity and JV athletes, by my father once before he left, but something about how the stranger said it made me want to prove him wrong. “How is checking a book out of the library going to show I’m not a bitch?”

  “You think I came for that girl the other night? She wasn’t a target, she was a victim. Wasn’t the first, but if it’s up to me she’ll be the last. You want to help, or not?”