Authors: James van Pelt
Pandora's Gun (6 page)
Peter had never gone on a date. He didn’t count the two middle school dances he attended as dates, even though, technically, he asked a girl to both of them. It’s not really a date, he thought, if your dad drives you and the girl both ways, and the whole thing takes place before the sun goes down. He wasn’t sure what a date would be like, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t been on one yet. If there wasn’t the possibility of kissing, it wasn’t a date.
Both non-dates were in 8
th
grade. The first was The Turkey Fox Trot and Fall Fling dance. The Student Leadership class decorated the gym with pumpkins, piles of leaves (which continued to litter the halls for weeks after), and scarecrows. Peter asked Loreana Thigpen, who was the tallest student in the 8
th
grade, easily six inches taller than Peter, and Peter was tall, even then. She didn’t dance, and Peter didn’t have much motivation to ask her since the girls gathered on one side of the gym, and the boys on the other. The only people who danced were the teachers who sponsored the activity. Also, the whole thing seemed ridiculous since the dance started right after school and was done by 5:00. Sun streaming through the gymnasium windows didn’t exactly send a “dance” vibe.
The Mermaids on Parade dance was in the spring. He took Connie Shale who, the first chance she got after Peter’s dad dropped them off at the school, showed him a baggie filled with dried leaves that smelled suspiciously like oregano, and asked him if he wanted to “toke up.”
Peter went into the gym and didn’t see Connie for the rest of the evening. At least for the spring dance, some kids got out on the floor so the teachers weren’t the only ones dancing.
He wasn’t sure why he was thinking about dates anyway. Going over to Christy’s to write a paper about a John Steinbeck novel didn’t constitute a date. But there you are.
When Peter got home, Dante was sitting on the steps leading up to his front porch.
“Tell me that you moved the bag?” he said. “Otherwise I’m not the only one who knows about the Fairlane’s trunk.”
“I moved the bag.” Peter didn’t add where he’d moved it to. He told Dante about what Christy had said about someone in the records room.
“I heard about that. The guy was wearing a blue suit.”
“So? Lots of guys wear blue suits.”
“It was robin egg blue, like a pastel. Pretty weird if you ask me.”
Somebody breaking into the school shouldn’t be that big of a deal, thought Peter. It might not have anything to do with them at all. Still, Peter felt the paranoia. “They’re closing in, Dante. We need to get rid of it.”
Dante looked thoughtful. “What we need to do is sell it. I can post anonymously at one of those Internet markets. We ought to be able to do the whole thing from advertising, to negotiating, to making the delivery and collecting the money without giving away our identities. Maybe whoever it belongs to would be willing to pay for it to be returned.”
Peter frowned. “What makes you think that anything you do on the Internet is anonymous? Maybe we should do the same thing, except
not
sell. We should announce where whoever owned it could pick it up.”
Dante sighed with disgust. “Goddamn it, Peter. I’ve got to pay for college in a couple of years, and so do you. If you’re going to give away the best go-to-college-for–free opportunities I’ve ever seen, than you’re way more of a fool than I thought.”
Peter controlled his voice. He knew he’d been under stress the last two days, and his dad had always told him to talk softly when he was mad. “You think I’m a fool? Who thought that peanut butter on leaves from your backyard would be a healthy food idea? Who picked poison ivy for his little ‘eat natural’ experiment? Don’t call me a fool until you show good sense yourself. This gun, or whatever it is, has disaster written all over it. No joke.”
Dante snarled. Peter had never actually heard a snarl from a person before. Dante said, “If you don’t want it, then give to me. I’ll sell it, take all the risk, and split the profits with you right down the middle.”
“I don’t think it’s salable. You can’t just put in on the Internet with a big FOR SALE sign on it like you would an old bike.”
Dante slapped his hand on the porch. “And you think the best plan for it is to give it away for free. We
own
it, Peter. We’re like those scavengers who search for sunken ships at sea. When they find a ship, they salvage it. They own it if they find it, even if it used to belong to someone else. They get salvage rights. Instead of searching an ocean, we searched a trash heap. Trash doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s been thrown away. We get salvage rights.”
Peter tried to think of a good answer for that argument, but he couldn’t come up with one. Dante could be persuasive, and he sounded logical. Nobody throws something away and then gets mad because someone else finds a use for it.
Except, Peter didn’t think the bag had been thrown away.
A car turned the corner at the end of the block and headed their way. Peter watched it glumly. He didn’t want to argue with Dante, but there was no way they were going to try to sell the gun. Worse than that, though, is he realized that he didn’t trust Dante with it. He didn’t even want Dante to take it home with him. Peter imagined Dante punching icons at random in his house. The wrong button, and the neighborhood could melt down or blow up or levitate. Peter wondered if there was anything the gun
couldn’t
do. Maybe T-Man’s buddy at Peter’s locker had been right. The gun was no different than a wizard’s staff. Maybe it did make them gods. Was there an app that could call down lightning? Was there an app that could turn a person into a toad? Could he raise the dead? Would apps that did any of those things be any more unlikely than what they’d already seen?
The car stopped in front of Christy’s house. Christy jumped out of the passenger side, grabbed a book bag from the backseat, and then walked up her sidewalk. She waved. He hesitated before waving back.
“You’re the luckiest guy in the school, Peter. What I wouldn’t do to have my bedroom window facing her bedroom window.”
Peter got up, repulsed. “Give me a break. She’s a person, not a peep show.”
“A very pretty person,” Dante said reasonably. “So, have you tried that x-ray vision app on her yet?”
For the second time in as many days, Peter found himself blushing.
“Not quite holier than thou, are we?” said Dante. “I’ve got to go to dinner with mom and the stepdad tonight. Let’s meet tomorrow to see what else the gun can do.”
Dad sat in the kitchen, eating a sandwich. He read from his laptop, which was open on the counter, while holding the sandwich in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. People told Peter all that time that he looked like his dad. Dad’s narrow face and angular nose made him younger looking than he was. Only the gray hair gave his age away. Like Peter, he was tall and slender, but other than that, Peter couldn’t see the resemblance.
“Do you know anything about this e-mail?” Dad asked. “It says it came from the school.”
Peter walked around the counter to read the message. It had the school’s group mail header. Every parent and student would have received it. WE KNOW YOU HAVE OUR PROPERTY. WE WILL TAKE YOU APART IF IT IS NOT RETURNED. REWARD OFFERED.
Dad said, “All caps is a bit of overkill. Odd wording too, don’t you think? Threat and bribe in one. Normally I get notices about upcoming PTA meetings from the school.” Dad put the sandwich down. “There’s an attachment.”
“Don’t, Dad,” said Peter, shielding the keyboard with his hand. He envisioned his own picture popping onto the monitor. He said, lamely, “It might be a virus.”
“From the school?” Dad laughed. “Not likely.”
“It’s a hack, Dad. The school didn’t send this.”
The attachment was a picture of a burnt tree. Peter recognized the branch that had exploded, sending the top third of the branches to the ground. It was the tree he’d torched right after he found the gun.
While he was eating his own sandwich, Peter’s phone buzzed with a text message from Dante. “Did you see the school’s e-mail? You might be right.”
Over the lasagna, Christy’s parents mentioned the e-mail too. Christy’s dad owned three hardware stores, but they were hundreds of miles apart, so he spent a lot of time on the road. From his shape, Peter figured he spent much of that time eating doughnuts. The mom, though, was a slender whippet of a woman who ran marathons regularly and helped coach the middle school track team. Peter’s dad had said to him once, “If you want a glimpse into a woman’s future, look at her mother.” From the mom’s appearance, Christy would not have to fight off the pounds as an adult.
Peter wondered why he shouldn’t also look at the dad to see Christy’s genetic inheritance. After all, she could just as easily favor her dad. Peter filled his plate with a second helping. Evidently, worrying about the gun hidden in Christy’s backyard didn’t affect his appetite. It could be nervous eating, Peter thought. Christy had changed out of her Poms uniform into a button-up flannel shirt and a pair of fuzzy, red pajama bottoms with yellow ducks. It looked more to him like she thought he was coming over for a sleepover instead of a study session. She’d done her hair in a ponytail and scrubbed off her makeup.
The dinner felt surreal. He hadn’t been in Christy’s house for years, and he’d never sat at their dinner table. What a weird coincidence that that morning he’d gone into Christy’s backyard to hide the duffle bag, and now he was in her house for dinner. It felt like fate taking a hand, like one of those stories from mythology where the gods arranged everything.
“Do you think it’s a prank?” said Christy’s dad. “Some of these kids are too darned smart for their own good about technology. I heard that it doesn’t take but an hour or two after they change the password for a student hacker to break the code.”
Peter refocused on the dinner. They’d been talking about the e-mail threat. He imagined that Christy’s dad pictured a brilliant but bent teenager hunched over a keyboard, wending his way through the heart of the school district’s security system. The kid, fueled with Red Bull and Twizzlers, was surely destined for a career in the dark side of information technology. However, Peter knew for a fact that the principal’s secretary taped the passwords to the top of a pullout leaf in her desk, and that the student aids copied them to share with their friends as soon as she left the office, which meant that the whole school had them on the same day they were changed. This was low-tech hacking. The system might be well-designed, but the security sucked. The kings of hacking, the kids in the Computer Geek Club, specialized in hitting the keystrokes that made people’s screens display upside down, or they changed the auto-correct so that every time someone typed “the,” the computer changed it to “boobs.” This would alter the opening sentence of Peter’s
Of Mice and Men
essay to “Boobs tragedy of
Of Mice and Men
is that boobs men, Lennie and George, never had a real chance to achieve boobs American dream of ‘living off boobs fat of boobs land,’” which would strike the Computer Geek Club as the pinnacle of wit since as far as they were concerned, nothing could be more interesting than “boobs land.” The surprise was that even with the password being well known there wasn’t more obvious computer mischief. The most nefarious plot Peter had heard was to use the password to send e-mails home announcing a snow cancellation the first time the weather changed enough to make the message believable.
There were no geniuses in the Computer Geek Club.
Christy took him to her bedroom to work on the essay. Her mom refused to let him help with the dishes. “Homework trumps dishes,” she said. The last time Peter had been in Christy’s room, when she was nine, the walls were pink and covered with My Pretty Pony posters. Now, she’d switched to blues and greens, and the posters were of Lady Gaga, Lita Ford, the Ronettes, Joan Jett, Blondie and Heart. She’d hung a beat up electrical guitar over her door. Peter felt like he’d stepped into a Hard Rock Café.
The room itself was large, almost living-room size. Her bed (where he’d seen her before with the gun set to “x-ray”) dominated one side of the room, while a desk, dresser and guitar stand, with a much better looking guitar than the one above the door, filled the other. Her desk held a laptop, a copy of
Of Mice and Men
, and a couple books of literary criticism.
“I didn’t know you played,” said Peter, and it occurred to him that they hadn’t really talked for the last three years. They were the definition of “We went different directions.” He wondered what she would think of the gun hidden in her backyard.
“Not well,” she said, “for all my effort. You’ve got to hear this, though.” She hit a button on her stereo, starting a long guitar solo. After a couple minutes, Peter started to speak.
“Not yet. Just listen.” She turned up the volume.
When it finished, and the singer launched into the lyric, she said, “That’s Lou Reed’s intro to ‘Sweet Jane.’ Good stuff, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know very much about music.” He tried to think of anything related to rock and roll that might impress her, but he came up empty. Mostly, if he wanted music, he played movie soundtracks. He particularly liked
Pirates of the Caribbean
or anything by Vangelis.
“Welcome to Christy Sander’s school of rock.” She put her hand on the guitar without picking it up. “I can teach you what I like about music, if you teach me how to make sense of this stupid book.”
“Let me see what you’ve got so far.”
As she’d said, her essay only had two-hundred words. They sat on the edge of the bed as Peter studied her paper. She said, “See, I’ve written all that I thought. What more is left once you’ve said what you think?”
Peter breathed easier now that they weren’t talking about music. She’d turned the stereo just loud enough so she could identify the songs, which she did as each one started, but not so loud as to distract him.
“When a paper’s short, it’s either because you didn’t support with much evidence, or you didn’t explain how your evidence relates to your main idea. See, here . . .” she leaned in so that their shoulders pressed together, “ . . . you quoted Crooks, but then you start a new paragraph. You didn’t say why you quoted him or how it relates to your argument. You can get another couple hundred words easy. And while you’re doing it, I’ll bet you can think of other quotes from the novel that are related to what you are saying.”
“His quote proves my thesis, doesn’t it? It’s obvious.”
“If it’s obvious, why bother writing a paper about it?”
“Hmmm. Good point. So what would I say after the quote?”
Peter thought about how he wrote papers. He hadn’t considered his own process too closely. Writing came easily for him. It really was his super power. “Uh, try this. Pretend I’m like twelve. I’ve read the book. I’m bright, but I’m not sophisticated like you are. You’re this cool, smart sophomore, and I’m just a lowly sixth-grader.”
“Why, thank you, sir.”
“So explain how that quote proves your thesis. I’ll show you. I’ll type; you say what you would say. Writing’s just talking on paper anyways.” He moved to her desk, back to the essay on the screen that she’d printed off to show him.
“Okay.” She started talking. Peter typed what she said, word for word. She peeked over his shoulder, her hand resting on his arm.
When she ran dry, she said. “That’s a lot of typing. How long did we go?”
“Let me read it back to you,” which he did. “So, do you sound smart to yourself? I mean, do you sound like you know the book and you’ve thought about it?”
She smiled. “Sort of. Yeah. I guess I do.”
“All your ideas and language. Nothing from me.”
“How long is it? How many words do I have left?”
Peter checked the word count, then laughed. “You’re at one-thousand three-hundred.”
“No way,” she gasped.
“Total way.”
“That’s amazing. I had no idea I knew so much.”
“And that’s how you turn two-hundred words into a complete essay.”
“You’re a mastermind.” She hugged him, much to his surprise. “On the next essay, I’m going to ask you for help much earlier.”
“Do you think you’ll need it?”
“Just because I went a few feet without training wheels doesn’t mean I’m ready for an entire bike hike. That’s a metaphor, by the way.”
Peter looked up at her, standing beside him at the computer, and he knew the evening was nearly over. Once they started on the essay, he’d quit thinking about the gun or the ominous e-mail, or what Dante was going to do, or what plans T-Man had. For the last hour he’d been in Christy Sanders’ room, talking about homework. Things could hardly get better. Then he had an idea.
“Could you play that first guitar bit again and tell me what I should hear in it? I need to be smarter about music.”
She did.
As he walked back to his house in the dark, his hands deep in his pockets against the cold, he thought the evening was way better than a date.