Disappearance at Devil's Rock (23 page)

Luis suggested that they go sit by some trees instead, or even chill inside the actual split. Josh protested that they'd too easily get caught drinking. He was in near a panic about being caught, more so than usual, because he had brought the beer. His father had an old fridge in the garage he kept stocked with water and beer. Mostly beer. There was a random collection of odd-duck bottles, each from a different brewer on the door shelves. The rest of the fridge was full with water and white cans of light beer. The light beer was marginally more drinkable than the darker stuff in bottles. And you couldn't hide how much you were or weren't drinking with a bottle, so he made sure to bring only the light beer cans. Luis made mock complaints like he was a beer snob already.

The boys sat in what little and fleeting patches of shade they could find on the rock. Arnold was restless. He paced and hopped over the split a bunch of times. He made Josh nervous.

Tommy burped loudly, then said, “I played Minecraft last night for like the first time since school got out.”

Luis: “Should've texted me.”

Tommy: “It was way late. Like 2
A.M
.”

Luis: “Hardo.”

Tommy: “I wasn't up to 2
A.M
. I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.”

Luis: “Your first wet dream?”

Josh: “About Luis's mom!”

Tommy said, “Chirps!” like it was the next line in their script. The banter ended there as Tommy went away, somewhere inside himself. It was so Tommy. He had this switch he could flip and he'd disappear into his own head right in front of you. He was there but he wasn't
there. You could almost feel that electric charge of Tommy's fully engaged personality shut off. It wasn't an affect, a woe-is-me posture, or a pose, or something he did for attention. This was a part of who he was, and Tommy had been doing it for as long as Josh had known him. Josh had spent more time than he'd ever care to admit wondering where it was Tommy went and what exactly he was thinking. Today, he figured Tommy was back in his room and thinking about why he couldn't go back to sleep. Maybe Tommy had dreamed about the devil standing outside of his window.

Forget the beer and the rock and Arnold and even Luis, Josh wanted to go home now and get online with Tommy, spend the whole day playing Minecraft like they had just over a month ago, back when they were so different than they were now.

Tommy: “I was on our server. And I don't know what happened but things looked way different.” Unsaid was the question of whether or not Josh or Luis had been playing and adding buildings and/or destroying what they'd built.

Josh: “What, like errors? Glitches?”

Arnold said, “You have any corrupted chunks?” Pools of sweat ink blotted his red T-shirt around his armpits and on his chest up by the collar. He still kept jumping across the split, alternating the foot upon which he landed.

Luis: “Corrupted Chunks. Band name.”

Arnold: “There are region fixers you can download to correct the errors, recover the parts of the world.”

Luis said, “That's so cool.”

Josh rolled his eyes. After Luis's initial reluctance and stand-offishness toward Arnold, he had since morphed into Arnold's chorus, a parrot. How could a kid who was normally such a relentlessly contrarian wiseass go so totally in the other direction and not see it? Who had replaced Luis with this lame imitation?

Tommy: “I don't think there're errors or anything like that. Just, like some of the rooms in our home base was different and some of the small bases were in different parts of the map than I remembered.”

Luis: “Don't look at me. I haven't played in months. Probably Josh changing and hiding shit on us again.”

Josh: “Easy, hardo. I did it one time, over a year ago.
One time
, and he still gives me shit.”

Tommy: “He's a giver.”

Josh: “I haven't been playing at all.”

Luis: “Yeah, right. You probably rebuilt—”

Josh interrupted with “Shhh. It'll be okay, Luis. You'll get over it someday.”

Luis threw an empty can at him, and the metallic clank of can off rock echoed through the surrounding forest.

Arnold ignored the skirmish, and he started talking about some of his own Minecraft discoveries and strategies. The boys listened and drank. Or at least Josh pretended to drink. He'd brought the beer hoping that the offering would help take off the pressure of having to drink the stuff himself. The last time they were here, Luis had been relentless with jokes and comments about Josh being a lightweight. Arnold had told Luis to chill, but it was halfhearted, and Tommy and Arnold had ended up talking to each other about the fungus that turned South American ants into zombies, which made things worse for Josh. Whenever Tommy had Arnold's full attention, Luis would turn on Josh, and then later, when it was just the three of them or just him and Luis, it was like none of the verbal sticks and stones had happened. Josh didn't get why Luis was acting like this now. At school Luis never made fun of Josh, and unlike Tommy, who retreated into his own world, Luis would run madly into the daily middle school skirmishes to defend Josh against any and all tormenters.

Arnold kept on talking Minecraft and the first time he made it to the End. He didn't really describe it, but he didn't have to because all the boys had been there.

Tommy chimed in. “Took us forever to beat the Ender Dragon for the first time, and it was kind of disappointing, right? We got that end poem message thingy at the portal, but I expected more of a big deal, yeah? But it was dark, like dark-dark, and nothing but endermen milling around, and I don't know, it felt lonely.”

Josh and Luis looked at each other and laughed at Tommy. Tommy shrugged his patented yeah-I-know-what-I-said-is-weird shrug and took a small sip of his beer, and let his bangs fall over his eyes.

Luis said, “You need a hug, bro?” He said
bro
in Tommy's way of saying it:
bruh
.

Arnold said, “You know what's weird?”

Luis: “Josh's right nut is three times smaller than his left nut.” He couldn't get it all out without breaking up at his own joke.

Josh laughed. It was funny. So much funnier than the constant drink-up harassments.

Arnold: “That is weird. But not what I was gonna say. I played Minecraft last night too, right around the same time Tommy was playing. And it's the first time I've played since—since before I met you guys, I think.”

Josh said, “Of course the seer knew you were playing, Thomas.” He said Tommy's name like “Tom-ass.”

When he first met Arnold, Josh had thought the whole seer shtick was exactly that, and Josh had pretended otherwise because it was fun and it was what their summer had become. Tommy had his big mystery to contemplate, and Luis had someone he looked up to and wanted to impress, and Josh was content to simply play along because, well, for good or bad, that was what his role had become. The others seemed so happy and they were willing to include him. It was enough.
Now he wasn't so sure that there wasn't something off or unsettling about Arnold. The repetition and sameness of their meeting place and discussions and beer drinking felt purposeful, like they were being worked on or worn down.

Luis said, “So it was you who messed up the place!” He pointed a mock-accusatory finger at Arnold.

Josh was horrified. Had Tommy invited Arnold to the server?
Their
world? His already hot and sweating face flushed, the color red pushed and pulsed beneath his skin.

Arnold spoke in a formal voice, “I assure you that I caused no trouble in your region and played with a sound mind and pure heart.”

Josh: “You were playing on our server?”

Tommy: “What's the big deal?”

Arnold: “No. No worries. I was on some public one. Not yours.”

Josh: “How'd you know Tommy was playing then?” His voice was whiney and he hated himself when he sounded like that, but he couldn't help it.

Arnold: “Huh? Nah, I didn't know.”

Josh: “You just said you did.”

Arnold: “I didn't say I
knew
he was playing. Me and him playing at the same time was random.”

Josh: “Random?”

Arnold: “Yeah.”

Josh: “So, a coincidence?”

Arnold laughed a little. “Random. Co-inky-dink. Yup.”

Josh: “The devil's in the coincidence, right? You said that.”

Luis: “Dude. What are you getting at? Why do you always have to be such a hardo?”

Josh didn't know what he was getting at, but even in his rising anxiety, he enjoyed that Luis was bothered by his questions. Josh said, “
Dude
. Relax, I'm just joking around. That's what he told us, remem
ber? Coincidence. In the story about the devil and the rock and everything else.”

Arnold wasn't annoyed, at least, not that Josh could tell. He still slowly and nonchalantly hopped over the split and back. “Are you saying I'm the devil?”

Josh's insides pooled into his toes, the same feeling he got in school if the vice principal threatened him with detention. “I'm not saying, I'm just saying. If the horns fit.” He giggled, not because it was funny, more like a pressure valve releasing steam. He giggled because he couldn't believe he had said it out loud.

Arnold pawed around his head with one hand, fake-looking for horns. “Nah. Nothing there. I had them removed. Grinded down with a power sander.”

Tommy: “That sounds ouchy.”

Josh laughed and felt tears filling his lids, and he didn't know why he was getting so upset or what he was going do if he started crying in front of them all.

Arnold said, “I know that my devil story is like the greatest.” He held out his hands and rolled his eyes at himself, allowing both Luis and Tommy to grumble playful insults at him. “And I know you all know it's just a folktale, but let me tell you all something. For reals. Everything that happens is a coincidence, and at the same time there's no such thing as coincidence.”

Luis pointed at Arnold and said, “He speak funny.”

“Watch.” Arnold kept on leaping over the split. “If I slipped and fell into the split right now—” he jumped across and back “—would that be a coincidence or karma or whatever you want to call it? No, because I'm taking a chance that I might fall with each jump, yeah? I mean, if I fell in, would you be surprised?”

Tommy: “Yeah, actually I would.”

Arnold: “Right! Yes!
You
would, but at the same time, when the park ranger guy shows up after I fell in and bashed my head open, and you'd have to tell him that I had a few beers and I was jumping over the split a bunch of times and then missed once, the ranger'd be all like, oh, okay, Darwin award winner takes a rock dive and bites it. Right? It would be an accident but not an accident at the same time. Get it? It's hard to explain, but everything that happens is connected to something that happened before it.”

Tommy said: “So you mean everything that happens to us, is like, all mapped out already?”

Arnold: “No, no, it's not all mapped out. Shit can happen and change, there's still chance, and infinite possibilities, and everything, but there's this—what—a connection. More of a connection than people think. When one thing happens, it turns into the next thing, and then the next thing. Yeah?”

Luis: “Go home, Arnold. You're drunk.”

Arnold: “Wiseass.”

Luis beamed at him. “You sound like the math guy from
Jurassic Park
.”

Arnold laughed and kicked a twig at Luis. He walked away from the split and sat down on the rock, closer to Josh than the other two. “I'm not saying this right—okay, it's like this. You ever think about something and then it happens?”

Josh: “I don't know. Maybe. I guess.” Maybe it was like when before he went to bed and he thought about Arnold and the devil story then he had nightmares about a man standing outside his window. Josh had constructed detailed images of the scene on the rock with Oakes Eastman, and how the devil was trapped in the split, scurrying and scrabbling back and forth, so quickly, like a blur, and that blurring would loop in his head if he let it. So his thinking about the story
would lead to him having a man-standing-outside-his-window dream, and the dream would make him think more about the story and then he'd dream again.

Luis: “Nah, I call bullshit.”

Arnold: “Like, haven't you ever been thinking about someone randomly and then boom, they call you or text you?”

Josh wasn't sure if he had, but he nodded. So did Tommy.

Arnold: “Or you get a song in your head, you're singing it and you don't know why, and then you hear it on the radio or someone talks about the song without you bringing it up? Or how's this: You're hanging out at a 7-Eleven talking Minecraft, and this total boss comes up to you and starts dropping mad knowledge?”

The boys all laugh at the same time and in rhythm.

Luis: “Or if you're thirsty, someone gives you a beer.”

Josh tosses him a can.

Luis: “That's so weird!”

Arnold downed the rest of his beer. “Nice on keeping these cold, by the way, Josh.”

And with that Josh climbed down from the peak of his Arnold mistrust. He relaxed. That thanks-for-the-cold-beer comment from Arnold was really all Josh wanted out of the day, to feel like he wasn't a fourth wheel.

Josh tossed Arnold another beer. This would be his third. There were only two left in Josh's backpack.

Arnold: “People talk about right-place-right-time as a way to explain coincidence, and letting themselves admit that maybe there's a connection there, to something. Something bigger.”

Tommy: “What is it?”

Arnold: “I don't know. It's like sometimes I can sense it and almost put it into words, but can't. What I'm really describing is seeing.
My
seeing, yeah? That's what it is. Sometimes, it's like I know what I'm
looking for, and I can see the connections happening before they happen. From a mile away. Not all the time.”