The People Next Door (7 page)

An empty belly hears nobody.

ENGLISH PROVERB

Amy was crossing town on the Foothills Parkway in her Passat wagon when she saw the white hood in her side mirror and realized
Jason Wells and Eric Pritchard were following her home from school. Half a mile ahead, the stoplight at Valmont turned red.
The Honda gained as she let off the gas. If she coasted a while, maybe the light would change and she could speed up again
without having to stop and look at them. What more did they want? Hadn’t they done enough? She tried to pretend it was a coincidence,
then flushed with shame, then felt like crying, but refused to give them the satisfaction. And how far were they going to
take this? Were they going to follow her all the way home? If so, then what?

The light turned green. She pushed the Passat up to sixty and zoomed through the intersection. The Honda fell off a bit, but
within half a mile had returned, racing up on her ass and swerving into the left lane. She tried to get a look at them as
the car looped around her, but the windows were not so much tinted as opaqued. She dropped the Passat down to fifty and the
Honda took the lead. This Civic had the same giant gray louver fin. It
was them, no question. She gripped the wheel and slowed to forty as the Honda left her far behind.

They aren’t really dangerous, she told herself. Get a hold of yourself. We’ve got too much to do to spend the rest of the
day in a funk. She listened to her voicemail – Lowry, the coordinator from This Takes the Cake, about the design Amy had submitted.
Deep Sea Wonderland in blue chocolate with white fudge frosting, preliminary bid: $320. It would be ready in time for the
party, but Lowry had a few questions about the creatures and logistics. Did she want sea lions or walruses? In plastic figurines
or sculpted frosting? I dunno, Lowry. I just don’t know.

She merged with the Diagonal Highway tiredly, the long summer afternoon as oppressive as her To-Do list. She had yet to decide
about the balloons, go to the party store for cups and napkins, follow up on the email chain of questions flowing back from
the e-card reminders she had blasted out, and hit Grand Rabbits for more plush take-homes. Plus the groceries, but it was
too early for that, the big day still ten days away.

Cancel the party, a voice inside her warned. It was getting out of control before Mick’s accident. Now you have to worry about
him too. It’s not too late.

But it
was
too late. Things had been set in motion. The RSVPs were trickling in and if they scaled down now, it would only worry Briela
about her father and the strength of the family in general.

She reached Jay Road, turned right, and half a mile later her mailbox came into view. She turned into the
long driveway and parked in front of the garage on the house’s east side. She sat motionless as the A/C bled out and the heat
baked in.

Go on, look again. Confront it, deal with it.

She looked in the rearview mirror and the vicious graffiti on the wagon’s rear window jangled back at her in reverse, horror-movie-style
red letters.

STIT GOHTRAW

She had left the high school annex today in the same mood as she had left the first three sessions: in a hurry, feeling dirty,
wishing she had taken a part-time job as a cashier at Best Buy, anything but this. She had not looked at any of the students
milling around in the parking lot-cum-smoking area. She could not understand why they lingered when they resented having to
be there for summer school in the first place, and she couldn’t bear another glimpse into their bitter, listless, pimply faces.
She had kept her eyes on the ground until the Passat’s Mojave metallic rear end entered her field of vision, looked up, and
it hit her like a thrown cup of urine.

WARTHOG TITS

She knew immediately that Eric Pritchard and Jason Wells were the culprits. The skinny, smoke-reeking boys had been acting
up the entire three hours of the morning session. When she finally snapped at them, after fifteen
or so polite reminders to
please pay attention
, they had scowled at her from the back of the classroom and whispered conspiratorially.

People’s evidence number two: when she twirled, scanning the parking lot to see if anyone had noticed it yet – her first instinct
was to avoid embarrassment, not ascertain the perpetrator – they were already laughing. Standing just six spaces away, leaning
against Eric’s hopped-up Honda (with its giant gray louver fin), smoldering Marlboros in hand, feasting on her reaction. Identified,
they covered their mouths and fell into each other, guffawing, ‘Aw, damn!’ and ‘Ouch!’ But they did not run away or deny what
they had done.

They hovered at a safe distance as she scrubbed the glass furiously, but the wad of purse Kleenex failed to do so much as
smudge the letters. They had used permanent markers, and there lay the smoking gun. She’d seen them in the halls last week,
tagging lockers with their artless signs and calling cards. By then it was unbearable. Going back inside to track down Dick
Humphries, the custodian, was out of the question. She’d be here another hour, and Dick’d probably enjoy the dirty insult
almost as much as Eric and Jason were enjoying it now.

As their laughter reached its crescendo and began to fade into a morbid curiosity about what she was going to do next, Amy
wanted to march over and remove the cigarettes from their mouths and plant the coals in their eyeballs. Instead she gasped
like the schoolmarm she was becoming, chirped the power locks, and sped away.

The saddest part was that she knew she wouldn’t do anything about it. She could sit them for detention, but she wasn’t getting
paid enough to spend her summer afternoons making them read
Great Expectations
, and she doubted they could read. She had only the next four weeks to get through, eight more sessions, and then Eric Pritchard
and Jason Wells would be free to make their disgusting jack-off faces at their teachers at Boulder High or September School,
or at the guards at the Boulder County Jail – the eventual if not next stop on their descent.

But it would only get worse as the weeks wore on. She had no experience with average high-school students, let alone the kind
of metal shop ’n’ meth miscreants that were her charges this summer. She had taught grades three, four, and five, and taught
them well, for eleven years. But it had been a bad (couple of) year(s) for the restaurant.

To pick up some of the slack, Amy had used her background in human resources to wrangle her way into teaching Workplace Economics,
the vocational technical program created to reward high-school kids who were also holding down jobs of at least twenty hours
per week, and who were – due to their financial demands, sloppy grades, difficult home environment, or lack of discipline
– at risk of not graduating. Successful completion of WorkEcon earned the kids fifteen credits, the equivalent of three regular
semester classes; for Amy, an extra fifty-five hundred before taxes and health insurance. Her net take-home would be less
than one
mortgage payment. But it was something at a time when every little bit helped.

WorkEcon was supposed to be a snooze, for her and the kids. And for the first week, it was. But that was before Ronny Haskovitz
got expelled for smoking pot in the back row, before Lisa Klein punched Angela Valdez in the possibly pregnant belly, and
before Amy herself became

WARTHOG TITS

She was a coward, she knew. She would pass Eric and Jason right on out of WorkEcon with a C-, just so she didn’t have to face
the bureaucratic wrath of Jeff Wheatley, the program’s supervisor and most ardent champion, whose criteria for WE success
was summed up in the motto, ‘Twelve summer days earns a triple A.’ So long as the students attended and didn’t kill anybody,
she was expected to pass them. After all, some of these kids were supporting their families.

But breadwinners or not, Eric Pritchard and Jason Wells frightened her. They were tall. They stank. They looked at her with
rapist’s eyes. She feared that if she turned them in for this bit of graffiti, next week it would be her tires slashed, a
broken windshield, a blouse-ripping assault, her face pressed to the chalkboard.

She hated herself for allowing their juvenile insult to gain traction in the ruts of her self-esteem. But she couldn’t ignore
the fact that this was, in essence, what she was to them. The randy, jack-booted, ADD-afflicted teen boys –
men
, when you accepted the reality of their
facial hair – in her class did not see her as a milf or slut or hotbox or some other insulting but at least suggestively attractive
being. To them she was porcine. A tusked pig. A beast with eight hairy gray teats.

Whatever happened to the harmless nicknames of yore? It seemed like only yesterday her wily fifth-grader Tyler Sampson had
admiringly referred to her as Muggle Nips. She’d sent him to the principal’s office, of course (and vowed to start wearing
thicker bras), but she’d at least been able to laugh at that one over a glass of wine. No matter how you looked at it, there
was no silver lining in warthog tits.

Of course it wasn’t just the awful insult. Or the vandalism of her car. It was the decision to take on a class she was not
prepared for. It was her vivid nightmares of becoming an Obese American. It was the pressure of this job, how frighteningly
important the extra income had become. In short, Eric and Jason’s real crime was not defacing her window with the red tip
of their inhalants. It was that they had successfully boiled down everything that was wrong in her life to two words.

‘Warthog tits! Warthog tits!’ a voice squealed behind her, giggling with delight.

Amy looked up to find Briela standing behind the car with Ingrid, their family assistant, pointing at the obscenity.

‘Briela, noooo,’ Ingrid said, pushing B toward the house. They must have just gotten off the 205, at the bus stop across Jay
Road. ‘Don’t say that. Go inside while I talk to your mom, please.’

Briela ran by as Amy powered down the window, dabbing her eyes.

‘Amy? You okay?’ Ingrid said.

‘Fine, I’m fine.’

‘What happened to your car?’

The rags and turpentine would have to wait. ‘Just another fun day at Vo-Tech. How are you? You two have a good afternoon?’

‘We’re all right. Now. Do you have a minute?’

Amy cringed, preparing for more bad news.

Trouble follows this family around like Pigpen’s dirt cloud, Ingrid Gustafson thought. Thank effing God I’m outta here in
August.

Ingrid had graduated from Colorado State University two years ago, her red-and-black cowboy boots a proud remnant of her aggie
heritage. Her parents were good old-fashioned non-organic farmers, but the rest of their daughter, above the boots, was all
Boulder. She favored hippie skirts and her straight black hair fell to her waist, swishing around the armory of bracelets
and rings adorning her thin limbs.

She had been the Nash family assistant – which let’s face it really meant glorified maid and abused babysitter – for two years
and had somehow given them the impression she would do just about anything for eleven bucks an hour: make lunch, fold laundry,
schlepp B to the zoo, and make that ridiculous salad every day to save Amy the headache that was chopping vegetables. Funny
how most of that salad was still sitting in the fridge the next morning. The Nash compost heap was a regular arugula and balsamic
Bugs Bunny all-you-can-eat buffet.

If she had one trump card up her sleeve at all times, it was that she was great with Briela. Amy would be lost without her
and both of them knew it. Briela’s teachers had been hinting at something serious near the end of the last term – space cadet
answers on her assignments, eye-bulging David Banner tantrums, shoelaces tied in compulsive knots – and summer break had not
diffused the situation. She’d had another blowout two weeks ago, when Amy refused to let her stay up till midnight to watch
the rest of the
Witches Lane
marathon on AMC. And then the movie theater incident last week, when B got ejected from the multiplex for licorice-whipping
tykes in the next row, the new Miley feature making their prodigal go Keds-stomping
cuh-ray-zay
. Ingrid had almost thrown in the towel then, but here she was.

Amy was rinsing her commuter mug in the kitchen sink. She stared out the window and a look of bemused charm erased the folds
of her forehead.

‘Oh, look, Ing! Did you see this? The new people are settling in.’

Ingrid looked over Amy’s shoulder and saw the two Range Rovers, one black, the other olive green, parked in the Eyesore’s
roundabout. ‘Those were delivered this morning. Like, seriously? People are still buying Range Rovers? It’s like take-out
destruction.’

Amy whirled on her. ‘Have you seen them? The people?’

‘Nope.’

‘We’re all dying of curiosity. That house must have cost three, four million dollars. And Melanie, you
remember my friend, the runner?’ Ingrid nodded. ‘She knows Brian over at Kingdom Realty and he said no one can dig up a thing
on them. No brokers, no titles, no deeds, no paperwork whatsoever. And the permits, in this town? They cut into open space,
which requires some kind of serious leverage with the city council, but no one’s talking. It’s like something out of East
Hampton.’

‘Right.’ Ingrid blew air up at her bangs. ‘Briela had a little problem at the ice-cream shop today.’

Amy turned from the window and mustered concern. ‘Right, yes, go ahead.’

‘And before I forget, do you think it would be okay if I got a paycheck?’

Amy mustered more concern, with a side order of alarm. ‘How long has it been?’

‘Five weeks.’

‘
Five
? I thought Mick was paying you.’

Ingrid shrugged. ‘He told me to ask you.’

Amy blushed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s no big deal.’

‘It is, though. And where is Mick, anyway? I didn’t see his truck.’

Ingrid braced herself. ‘I’m not supposed to say.’

Amy’s eyes widened. ‘He did not go to work.’

‘He sort of snuck out the back.’

Briela came running in as if a stagehand had shoved her through a door. ‘I didn’t do anything! It’s not my fault!’

‘You be
quiet
,’ Amy said, and Briela shut her mouth,
then ducked out of the kitchen. Amy looked back to Ingrid. ‘All right, so?’

‘We were getting ice cream at Glacier. She said there was a boy making faces at her through the window, and then she sort
of lost it. I don’t think anyone was hurt, but. To tell you the truth, the whole thing scared me. I think she’s very angry
about something. All that stuff last spring, it kind of feels like it’s starting up again.’

‘I was sleeping!’ Briela reappeared. ‘I fell asleep and he scared me!’

‘Enough! You take a time-out, now.’ Amy pointed. Briela ran down the hall.

‘That’s the other thing,’ Ingrid said. ‘She said the same thing that time in the movie theater, but it’s not sleep. It’s more
like she just spaces out, you know?’

‘It used to be called daydreaming. Now it’s ADDHD-LMNOP – who can even keep track of these acronyms? Are you okay? This must
be wearing you out.’

Gee, ya think? ‘I’m fine but, Amy, the thing is, there wasn’t any boy. I looked, and there weren’t any boys within a hundred
feet of that shop. I asked her to describe him. She didn’t sound like she was making it up, but the details didn’t really
make sense. She said he was pale, with fuzzy hair, and he had a long face, like a wolf-boy. With huge teeth.’

After a disquieting gap, Amy said, ‘A wolf-boy. That’s, uhm, disturbing. I guess I better make an appointment with her pediatrician.’

Ingrid accepted her check. ‘That might be a good idea.’

She’d suggested this very thing three or four times, but they never listened to her. It wasn’t her place to push, but at a
certain point neglect becomes a form of child abuse. They must be in worse financial trouble than she ever suspected.