Dread Locks (13 page)

“I told you,” she said. “You don’t need that anymore.”

“That’s crazy—of course I do.” I tried one more time to force the helmet on, then Tara grabbed it away from me and tossed it. But she didn’t just toss it, she hurled it. I watched it disappear like a baseball flying over a ballpark fence. No one had the strength to throw something that far.

“How did you—”

She climbed onto the bike. “Let’s get going.”

And so, with no helmet and no chance of tracking it down, I climbed on the dirt bike, started the engine, and took off. The wind pulled our long tendrils of hair, making them whip out behind us like streamers.

I never expected what Tara did next. It came as a sudden, horrific surprise, so unexpected that I didn’t react fast enough to stop it. We were up on Ridgeline Road—the path that led out from the valley into the exclusive neighborhood where we lived.

As we were about to make the turn on Darwin’s Curve, right above the deadly cliff, Tara leaned forward, grabbed my hands, and locked her elbows. I tried to turn the handlebars, but couldn’t—Tara’s grip was too strong.

“What are you doing?!”

“Making a point.”

We were heading straight for the gap in the railing!

“Tara, no! Are you nuts?!”

“You’re gonna love this, Baby Baer!”

“Nooooo!!”

We hit the edge of the road and were airborne. I screamed, not understanding why Tara had done this. There was nothing beneath us now but a hundred feet of air and the sharp jagged rocks below. The bike fell away first, then I felt Tara’s hands slip away from me; and I was alone, falling to a painful, sorry end.

That feeling came—the feeling of the first drop on a roller coaster. The nasty tingle of free fall. Two seconds ... three seconds ... then contact!

I hit a jagged rock on my side and bounced off it. My skull connected with another rock, and I went spinning in the other direction, tumbling against the jagged stones, my arms and legs flailing with each impact, bones breaking—shattering—with every boulder I hit. I could feel the force of every single impact, yet no pain accompanied it, and I thought,
Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to die before I have to feel the pain.

But the pain never came.

When I finally came to rest at the bottom of the cliff, my jeans and shirt were torn to shreds—even the soles of my sneakers had been ripped apart, but there wasn’t a single scratch on my body I stood up, flexed my arms, and touched my face. Nothing! No cuts, no bruises, no blood! It was impossible. I had felt my bones break and my flesh tear, yet I showed no signs of the injuries. It was as if I had healed in an instant.

“See, I told you!” Tara came strolling up behind me. “Wanna do it again?”

“No!”

And even if I had wanted to, we couldn’t, because a few yards away lay my dirt bike, a useless mass of twisted metal and rubber.

“But how ... how did ... how could ...”

“Shhh,” Tara said. “Never ask how.” And she winked at me, making me feel like we were in our own special club. A club of two. Secret and superior. You can’t imagine how intoxicating that felt.

Never ask how.
At that moment, it felt like the wisest advice I had ever gotten.

We walked all the way home and didn’t say a word to each other, but that was all right. I took her to her front door, said a simple good-bye, then went home. I didn’t even notice if anyone else was home. I think parts of my brain had shut down that afternoon. Maybe it was shock, I don’t know, but instead I went straight up to my room, changed out of my shredded clothes, and did my homework like nothing had happened. And when I was done, I went downstairs and sat at the dinner table, eating, not listening or hearing what everyone talked about, ignoring the fact that the food didn’t seem to fill me in the least. And when dinner was over, I shot some hoops alone on the court, sinking every single one. And then I went to bed.

Simple. Just like any other evening. Except for the fact that I should have been dead, and I wasn’t. Never
ask
how. But if I couldn’t die, then “never” seemed like a very long time.

13

NEW HUNGERS

I
did my best to put the trip off Darwin’s Curve out of my mind. Believe it or not, it wasn’t all that hard to do, because there were other things more pressing. Like the hunger. It grew with each passing day—it seemed worst when I was at school surrounded by others. It was not a hunger for food—I knew that much. It wasn’t a hunger for mud, either—I actually tested that possibility and gagged on it. Deep down I knew I had an appetite for something very different, but I could not figure out what it was.

It was four in the morning, at the end of that strange week. I had woken up famished, as usual, but I knew there was no food in the house that would satisfy my hunger.

When I came downstairs and into the kitchen, I found Garrett sitting there in the dark. I jumped when I turned on the light—I wasn’t expecting to see him sitting there, so silent, so still. He had no such reaction, though. He didn’t flinch from the light. Even in the dim fluorescents of the kitchen, I could see that the sickly pallor of his skin was getting worse. It had turned grainy, like a photo blown up too large. I wondered how Mom and Dad could see him every day and not notice. Then again, maybe they did but were afraid to say anything—as if speaking it aloud would somehow make it real.

Garrett sat there at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal in front of him, staring down into the bowl. Grape-Nuts, it looked like.

“Midnight snack?” I asked as I grabbed myself some juice from the fridge.

He didn’t move for the longest time. Then he turned his head slightly toward me. “I can’t cry, Parker.”

It was such a strange thing for him to say—so out of character.

“Wh-why would you want to cry?”

Again it took him a long time to answer, as if moving the thought from his mind to his mouth was like trying to start a freight train.

“The cereal,” he finally answered.

“What about it?”

“Look closer.”

And so I did. I looked close enough to see that it didn’t really look like cereal. Plus, there was no cereal box on the table, just the bowl, a spoon, and the container of milk. Still Garrett stared down into the bowl, not moving. Not crying. But in a moment I discovered he shouldn’t have been crying at all. He should have been screaming ... because the door to the pantry was open just enough to reveal an open ten-pound bag on the floor. A bag of Petfit Kitty Litter.

My stomach heaved, but I drank a huge gulp of orange juice to chase the feeling away.

“Why do I want to eat this, Parker? Why am I so hungry for it? Why? Why?” I could see him working his eyes, trying to make tears come out, but they wouldn’t come. “Why don’t I feel anymore? Why don’t I care?”

“You care enough to know something’s wrong,” I said to him gently. I put my hand on his, gripping it, hoping to give him comfort. His hand was cold. No, not cold ... it was ... room temperature. Like a snake.

“But soon I won’t care,” he said. “Very soon I won’t care at all. It’ll be like everything else. I don’t care about my grades. I don’t care about my friends. I don’t care about Mom and Dad. About Katrina. About you. I don’t care about myself.”

Tara did this to him,
I thought. But then something else occurred to me. She had done it
for
me. She had done it because I had been so angry at Garrett that day And suddenly I knew that Garrett’s condition was my fault and my fault alone.

...
Na...

I had cursed him, and somehow Tara had followed through on the curse.

“I’m scared,” he whispered.

“I know,” I told him. “Don’t be. It’ll be okay.”

“No ... I
want
to be scared. It’s
a feeling.
I want to hold on to that feeling. Please, Parker. Please let me be scared.
Help
me to be scared....”

It went against every fiber in my body, but I had to respect his wishes, and so I dug down as deep as I could to find something that would keep him scared. All I had to do was tell him the truth, based on what I had heard about Ernest.

“It’s going to get worse,” I told him. “Your bones are going to get thicker. Your joints are going to grow stiff, and no doctors will be able to figure out what’s wrong. The only good thing about it is that you won’t be able to feel how much you’re suffering.”

He blinked. His lids went slowly down, then slowly up. Not a bit of moisture slipped from his glazed, graying eyes.

“Are you scared, Garrett?” I asked.

Garrett breathed in. Garrett breathed out. “Not enough, bro. Not enough.”

We sat there in silence for a good ten minutes. Then finally he said, “Go back to bed, Parker.” And so I did. Just before I left, I turned to catch sight of him lifting his spoon to his mouth, eating the kitty litter. I went to my bed, put my head beneath my pillow, and I began to cry I cried for both of us.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. My head was full of thoughts as twisted as Tara’s twirling locks. As twisted as my own. Before dawn I decided to do something about it.

I went to the bathroom. I didn’t look in Garrett’s room, because I didn’t want to know if he was there or still downstairs having his fancy feast. I remembered that there was a pair of scissors in a drawer still childproofed from when Katrina was small. I reached in, undid the latch, and pulled out the scissors. As I raised them toward my head, my curls pulled back. It was more than a twitch. It was a squirm. I could see the eerie way they moved. With the scissors shaking in my hand, I caught one of the curls between the blades and began to snip.

Until that moment, I had never known the meaning of pain. I once broke my leg in two places while snowboarding. I once had a root canal. I once took a softball thrown at full force, in the most tender spot known to man. But none of those things came anywhere close to the pain I felt as the jaw of the scissors came down on that first thick tendril.

The pain shot through my scalp, zigged through my brain, and clasped my spine like barbed wire. I could no longer feel my arms, my legs, my body It was all the pain I should have felt when I fell from Darwin’s Curve. I was blinded. There was nothing left of me but the pain. Then the pain began to fade.

I found myself curled up in the fetal position, knees to chest, between the toilet and bathtub, the scissors lying on the floor beside me. But something was wrong with them. They didn’t look right, and as my vision came into focus, I could see that one of the blades had snapped.

I stood up slowly, balancing against the sink to keep my knees from buckling beneath me. The twisting, snaking curls were still there—all of them—and in the sink was the broken scissor blade.

After that, I slunk back to my room. The sun was rising now, but I didn’t feel like facing the day I crawled into bed and fell asleep, and although I knew I had vivid and bleak nightmares, I didn’t dare remember any of them.

Somewhere between 5:30 A.M. and noon, Tara claimed her next victim.

14

THE SCULPTOR

I
woke up at noon, still feeling profoundly void in my mind and in the pit of my stomach. It was Saturday; my parents were off at the country club, Dad playing golf, Mom organizing yet another social function. I slithered down the stairs. I couldn’t find Garrett, but Katrina was there, sitting in the living room, brushing Nasdaq. There was something off about the way she did it. Not so much rhythmically as mechanically. My heart missed a beat. I slowly approached her.

“Hey, Katrina,” I said. “What’s up?”

“You’re right,” Katrina said.

“Right about what.”

“She’s not a vampire. She’s something else.” Katrina continued to brush the cat, and the cat clearly didn’t like it.

“What did you do?”

“I went to her house and snuck in.” Katrina shivered.

“What happened?” I demanded. “Did something happen when you were there?”

“She caught me snooping. She ...”