Crazy Dangerous (17 page)

“Well.” Dad took off his round glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked really tired. He had been up late the night before, sitting with his sick friend, Mr. Boling. He hadn’t even bothered to come down on me for sneaking out of the house. “She obviously has some kind of mental illness,” he said. “Some variation of schizophrenia, I guess. I’ve seen it before.”

I had heard of schizophrenia, but when I thought about it, I realized I didn’t really know exactly what it was. “What’s that, like, split personality or something?”

“No.” My dad sighed and put the glasses back on. “It’s this really tragic disease. Genetic partly—it tends to run in families. It’s not very common, but when it does show up, it frequently shows up in young adults. They hear voices, get strange ideas. Sometimes they even see things. They get confused about what’s real and what isn’t.”

“Jennifer saw demons in her hallway,” I told him. “And a coffin with something inside that came to life and reached for her.”

“Poor girl,” he said.

“Her poor mother,” said my mom. “Raising those two children all by herself—and now this. God help her.”

I sat staring down at the rug. I still felt pretty miserable. I kept hearing Jennifer’s voice in my head. I kept hearing her scream.

“Help me, Sam! Don’t let them take me! Help me!”

“I couldn’t make her understand that the police were trying to help,” I said out loud.

“Yeah,” said my dad. “I know it feels bad, like you let her down. But you didn’t. You did the only thing you could to help her. Doing the right thing—you know, it isn’t about
feeling
like a good person. It’s about doing what’s best for someone else—which sometimes doesn’t feel very good at all. That’s a hard thing to learn, Sam. A lot of people never learn it.”

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I understood it myself.

“Will the doctors be able to cure her?” I asked.

Dad shook his head wearily. “There’s no cure for schizophrenia yet. But they have some medicines that can help. Sometimes they help a lot. If she’s lucky, she’ll be one of those cases.”

I nodded. That made me feel a little better, though not much. There was still the memory of Jennifer’s voice:

“Something terrible is going to happen, Sam. Tomorrow. I know that now. It’s going to happen tomorrow.”

“Jennifer came here to tell me that something terrible was going to happen,” I said. “She said it was going to happen tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?” my father said. “Something terrible like what?”

“I don’t know. She said she heard . . . demons planning it.” It sounded pretty crazy when I said it out loud. I added lamely: “She was pretty sure of it.”

“Well . . .” My dad stood up. He stretched his back, his hands on his hips. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Schizophrenics often think they have secret information about conspiracies and so on. It’s part of the disease. The important thing is that she goes to a doctor before she really hurts herself or someone else.”

I nodded. “I guess,” I said.

But I still felt pretty bad.

I went to bed early that night. It had been a long day. The track meet, Burger Joint, Zoe, and Jennifer. My body hurt, I was exhausted, and I was down in the dumps.

But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the dark a long time with my eyes open because every time I closed my eyes, I saw Jennifer again. I saw her face, terrified, chalk-white in the darkness. I saw her struggling with the policemen as they carried her away. Even with my eyes open, I could hear her screaming.

“Help me, Sam! Don’t let them take me!”

“Sam Hopkins! It’s the magic word!”

I thought about what my dad said, about how sometimes doing the right thing feels bad. I thought about how bad I had felt when I was hanging around with Jeff Winger up at the barn. Then I felt bad because I was doing something wrong. Now I felt bad because I’d done something right. What kind of a rotten deal was that?

Finally, my eyes started to get really heavy. They drifted shut and I finally managed to fall asleep . . .

But when I did, I had a horrible dream. Here’s how it went:

I was riding in the backseat of a car. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I couldn’t escape. A guy was sitting up in front driving. I thought it must be Jeff Winger, but I was afraid to see his face. I looked out the window, hoping to find some way out. All I saw outside was scenery passing: rolling hills, trees, a lake.

“Where are we?” I said.

The driver looked up at me in the rearview mirror. I saw there was something wrong with his eyes. My heart began to beat faster. I knew something really, really scary was about to happen.

Then it did. The driver spun around quickly to look at me. And I saw it wasn’t Jeff Winger at all. It was a demon. His face was gray with a long snout like a rat’s. He had dripping fangs and laughing, fire-red eyes. He was about to speak.

“See . . . ?”

But before he could finish, I came awake with a start. I was breathing hard, as if I’d been running. My heart was thundering.

I looked around my bedroom. It was morning. The sun was pouring in through the window, glinting on the shiny surface of the Super Mario poster on my wall. What a relief to see daylight! What a relief to see Mario!

Then my relief vanished. I sat up, putting my feet over the side of the bed onto the floor. I remembered my dream. The demon. Its terrifying face. It had been about to speak to me, about to tell me something. I had this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that I knew what that something was.

Something terrible is going to happen. Today. Today. Today
.

I made a noise and shivered.
It was just a dream
, I told myself.
It wasn’t real. It didn’t mean anything. I was just upset about what had happened the night before and so my mind turned it into a bad dream, that’s all
.

That’s what I told myself.

I washed up and got dressed and headed downstairs. As I did, I noticed something strange. It was quiet in the house. Nobody was moving around. There were no voices anywhere. There was no noise at all. That just doesn’t happen in my house early on a Sunday morning. My dad has to get up super early to get ready for the eight o’clock service. And even though there’s no choir until the ten o’clock, my mom usually wakes up with him to make breakfast and get ready to sing in her service and host the women’s discussion group later and so on. Most Sundays, when I wake up I can hear my parents talking and the breakfast pots and dishes clattering. Or if I wake up a little later, I hear my brother taking a shower and my mom singing to get her voice ready.

But this morning: nothing. No voices at all. Silence through the whole house.

I went on downstairs. Into the kitchen. There was my brother, John. He was sitting by himself at the kitchen table, eating a piece of toast with one hand and holding his iPhone in the other so he could read the latest news on his sports app.

He glanced up at me, chewing his toast. “Hey. How you doing? How’s the bod?”

“A little better, actually. Not as sore.”

“You still look like garbage.”

“Thanks.”

“You recover from last night?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“That was pretty gnarly stuff, that girl screaming like that.”

“Yeah, it was. Where is everyone?”

“Mom and Dad had to go out. Their friend Mr. Boling died last night.”

“Oh man, that’s too bad. He was, like, Dad’s best friend.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s sad. But the guy was really old and really sick. Dad said he was totally peaceful about it at the end. Just said he was ready to go home—and went. It’s the way it is, bro.”

“Sure. I know that.”

And I did know. People die. And it’s not like I was grief-stricken about it or anything. I mean, I didn’t know Mr. Boling all that well and, like John said, he was a really old guy and it was his time to go. Still, I remembered the weary look on my dad’s face last night, and I felt bad he had to lose his old friend. I knew he’d be sad about it.

For a while the news about Mr. Boling pushed Jennifer out of my mind. I forgot about my dream completely—like I said, it was just a dream after all. I made myself some toast and then got over to church for the ten o’clock service.

Mary—Dad’s assistant minister—had taken over the service for him so he could go be with the Boling family. Mary was a small, squat woman with short salt-and-pepper hair. She had a loud, high, happy-sounding voice. She was kind and cheerful and everyone liked her. I found her sort of comical sometimes—everything she said sounded like she was singing opera—but I liked her too.

The church was crowded this morning. My brother and I squeezed into a pew near the front. I was a lector and had to get up and read one of the Scripture passages for the day.

The service went on and I waited for my turn to read. As I did, I sort of got lost in my own thoughts—about Jennifer and Mr. Boling and Jeff Winger and all the stuff that had been happening this last couple of weeks. Then John stuck his elbow in my side and I realized it was my time. I jumped out of my pew and hurried up the aisle to the podium.

I used to get nervous reading in front of everyone, but I didn’t much anymore. Most of the people in the church had known me my whole life, and it wasn’t like they were going to laugh at me if I made a mistake or anything. I was a little embarrassed about my bruised face, but I figured the whole town must have heard about what had happened by then. I had the Old Testament portion today and I started reading, “When the L
ORD
restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream . . . ,” and so on.

When I was done, I got down and went back to my pew and sat next to John and the service continued.

And as it did, my mind started to drift again.

“We were like those who dream . . .”

I started thinking about that. I started thinking about dreams in the Bible. The dream that told Abram about God’s plan for Israel. The dream that told Joseph there was going to be a famine in Egypt. The dream that told the wise men to go home by another way . . .

My dreams were never like that. They never predicted the future or anything. Most of the time they didn’t even make any sense. All the same, I began thinking about the Bible dreams, and then I began thinking about the dream I had last night. How I was driving in the car where I wasn’t supposed to be. Looking for an escape route but seeing nothing outside except the scenery. Then that driver suddenly turning to look at me with his rat-demon face . . . about to say something . . .

The congregation around me started to stand up to sing the next hymn. I stood up too—and as I did, something occurred to me. I stood there holding the hymnbook but staring into space. My lips parted, but I didn’t sing.

I remembered the demon driver in the dream. He hadn’t been
about
to say something. He
had
said something.

He had said: “See . . . ?”

See what?
I thought. What was there to see?

I had been looking through the window for a way to escape—just as I had done when Jeff Winger and his thugs threw me into their Camaro and drove me up to the barn in real life. I had been looking out the window and there was nothing to see outside but scenery. Hills. Trees. A lake.

“It’s a demon tree. A low-spreading oak over the tarn.”