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So it seemed to make sense that Darren had dragged the crew down to the church on Saturday night, like he’d said, because that was a high-risk job, and kids were sure to talk it up once they’d heard about it. It made even more sense, now that I thought about it, that Darren had
told me
they’d done it, because if the people at the church had painted over the tag and hushed it up early Sunday morning, then other kids might not know that the crew had even hit it. And if other kids didn’t know about it, then they definitely wouldn’t talk about it, and that defeated the purpose of doing it in the first place.

I made a left turn behind the strip mall, sped up, gave the Italian salute to the brown Datsun hatchback that honked at me, grabbed the handlebars again, and jumped the curb as a tailwind hit my back. I caught some sweet air, and as I floated gently back to earth, my mood began to change. I finally felt like I was getting somewhere, partly because I’d just realized something that I hadn’t thought of
before. Although the clues I had weren’t leading me to anyone in particular, I still might be able to crack the case by working in the
opposite
direction. In other words, if I could eliminate people from the list of possible suspects, then I’d have fewer to choose from, which meant I’d stand a better chance of apprehending the culprits. And since two perpetrators and a rubber bracelet pointed to almost every possible pairing of teens and preteens in the whole damn town, I could do a hell of a lot worse than to narrow the field a little.

So I set my mind to the cheerful task of eliminating Darren—at least as a suspect. The biggest problem was easy to see, and I saw it right off: it didn’t seem like Darren had a motive to hit the sign. But while he might not’ve had any motive I could easily discern, the fact that
both
he and Neecey had lied to me in connection with the sign, independently of each other, made me think there had to be something rotten as all hell in
DINKMARK
. She’d lied to me by saying she hadn’t heard about it, and Darren had lied to me when he’d said he didn’t know who did it.

Neecey could be lying to cover for Darren again, like she’d done with my bike, but that still didn’t necessarily mean he’d done it, because there was always the chance that Darren had lied to
both
of us to cover for somebody else. But if that’s what he was doing, then the question was, for whom? Well, that was pretty simple: he’d be covering for someone in the crew. Maybe
that
was why he wouldn’t say whether he knew who did it or not, but tried to warn me off the case anyway.

Fair enough. If I were Darren, I’d be afraid for their sake, too. But that instantly shrank the field of suspects down to less than the number of starters on a Little League team, because beyond Darren there were only six other members of the crew, and I knew the names and addresses of every single one of them. There was Sticky, who was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and a quarter wearing a full suit of armor. He’d be a senior this year, so that made him the oldest. Then there were the juniors: Squat, who had light hair, a medium build,
the height to go with it, and was named for what he knew; Burger, a goofy, almost likable guy who got his nickname because he was kind of round and because his favorite food was hot dogs; Roni, pronounced with a long
o
, as in
maca-roni
and cheese, but meaning cheese, because everything he said was really fucking corny; and Lyle, who was another pipe cleaner like Sticky, but didn’t have a nickname, because Lyle was his real one, and I guessed they figured that was bad enough. Finally, there was Johnny Scatto, who was going to be a sophomore this year, like Neecey and Cynthia, and whose nickname was Chakha, not after the singer, but because he was short and square-shaped and had thick hair
all
over his body, so he reminded you of the prehistoric ape-boy in that old TV show
The Land of the Lost
. He was the youngest, and once he’d started high school last year, the crew had closed their ranks and hadn’t admitted any new members since. Not like that was a surprise. They’d all been friends since the beginning of elementary school and they’d only been waiting for Chakha to start his freshman year to go exclusive anyway. And now they were.

I cut behind the convenience store, stuck out my right leg, and kicked one of the plastic milk cartons by the Dumpster a good four or five feet. When I got to the driveway at the far end of the lot, I dismounted the Cruiser. I was getting close to home, but that also meant I was close to the Circle again. There was so much traffic on it during the morning and evening rush hours that it backed cars all the way up to the Garden State Parkway, and people tried to outrun the bottlenecks by drag racing from light to light on the highway so goddamn fast that just thinking about crossing on your bike could get you killed. So I waited for an opening, sprinted the Cruiser across all four lanes, and hopped on again without breaking stride. For some reason it struck me that the Circle and the mall worked in tandem: the traffic jams of the one detoured people toward the other, which simply lay in wait to pick their pockets. I’d never realized it before, but it was a perfect setup, and it was goddamn obvious.

I was around the corner from my house, but the word had stuck with me—
obvious
. If I added a “the” to it, that’s what I’d been overlooking. Nobody in the crew ever did
anything
without Darren’s say-so—he was the leader, it was
his
crew—and that meant if a pair of them had done it, then at the very least he’d known in advance or had even ordered it. And to me, that was the same damn thing as doing it himself, maybe worse. But that’s what being a crime kingpin was all about: you got your minions to do the dirty work for you. I started to think I’d been on the right track from the start. I should’ve pushed Darren harder yesterday when I’d questioned him, and after I got home, had a quick bite to eat, and changed my torn shirt, I’d see if I couldn’t track him down and push him some on his motives in the hour and a half or so that remained until dark.

I leaned forward and cranked it, eager to get back to work. But as I rode up to our place, I saw a light blue Chevy Nova parked by the curb and knew that my day was done. It was Pauline’s car, the babysitter—an interstate pileup of a woman with a wispy Fu Manchu beard and a hairy mole on the side of her neck so grotesque that you couldn’t look away from it. Neecey and mom were out for the night, while I’d be locked in.
Goddamn it
. All I had to look forward to was a plate of grub, a shower, writing in my journal, and maybe some reading later on in my room. Everything else would have to wait for the morning.

ELEVEN

The sound of mom’s voice woke me up. She was sitting
on the edge of the bed in the white blouse and black skirt of her waitress uniform, with her hair pulled back, her lips pressed into a smile, stroking the side of my face, humming the same song she’d been waking me up with for years. She seemed tired around the eyes and could’ve used a day or two in the sun but was otherwise holding up well in the looks department. Yeah, mom had always been easy on the eyes, and it was weird to think that one day her head would shrink, her skin would wrinkle, her eyebrows would fall out, her mouth would pucker, and she’d turn into grandma, the way Neecey was turning into mom, like a series of before, after, and way-the-hell-after photos. You couldn’t really see it yet, because mom looked more like twenty-eight than thirty-eight, but it was bound to happen. Just like if I hung around long enough, I’d turn into I didn’t know what, because the only thing left to compare me to was a cardboard box of old junk and photos that we’d tossed on the curb years ago.

I yawned and said good morning, but she didn’t answer because she’d decided that today was one of those days when it was better to
sing the song’s chorus than hum it. I would’ve preferred that she hadn’t, because it made me think her life had to be pretty goddamn dreary if I was supposed to be the sunshine in it.

“Good morning, yourself,” she finished, planting a wet one on my forehead. “You boys awake?”

As if anyone could sleep with her carrying on like that.

“How are you feeling this morning? Any nightmares?”

“Not that I can remember,” I said. “What time is it?”

“That’s good.” She smiled, brushing my cheek. “It’s a little after seven.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting up in bed, rubbing the crud out of my eyes. Something had to be wrong if she was getting me up this early on my vacation.

“Nothing’s wrong. Lana has an appointment at the orthodontist this morning, so I’m covering her shift.”

If anybody needed some quality time with an orthodontist, Lana did. Shit, I’d seen barracudas with better grillwork. Come to think of it, she could’ve used some time with a dermatologist and a dietician, too, but I didn’t like the idea of mom having to wake up at the crack of dawn so Lana the teenage duckling could work at becoming a swan, and I told her so.

“It’s no big deal, Genie. She’s a sweet girl and she’s covered for me lots of times when I’ve had to leave early for the bar, so I owe her a few. Besides, we could always use the extra money. Speaking of, did you take the envelope I left to the home yesterday?”

“Yeah, I took it,” I said, thinking that we might just as well have flushed it down the goddamn toilet with Bryan there calling the shots. “But I told you, you should let me do grandma’s checks from now on so we don’t have to go through this shit every two weeks.”

“That’s not such a bad idea, but it’s a little early for that gutter mouth, don’t you think?”

“That way we can be sure they’re not double-dipping into grandma’s pocket,” I added for good measure.

“C’mon, Genie, they’re a little tight-fisted, sure, but they’re not crooks.”

“No? Then how can Bryan afford that cherry IROC of his, did you ever ponder that?”

“Ponder?” She laughed. “Bryan’s no embezzler, he’s a jittery little mouse. Besides, I hear they practically give those cars away on lease now.”

“You can’t go believing everything you hear,” I said.

“And
you
can’t go believing everything you read.” She smiled, tousling my hair. “Those crime novels are making you cynical.”

If knowing how to smell a rat was being cynical, then I was goddamn glad to be it. But I didn’t push the point.

“Maybe you’re right, though,” she went on. “It’d be a lot less hectic on our budget if I didn’t get surprise requests for fifty dollars every two-odd weeks.” She shifted her weary brown eyes over to Thrash and tugged softly on his leg. I could tell it tickled him by the way he was smiling. Mom moved her hand back to her lap and said, “And, you know, you’re almost a teenager now, so maybe you’re ready for more responsibility.”

My heart stopped. I’d been hoping for the you’re-a-teenager-now speech for so long that it didn’t seem real. Mom had been dancing around it all summer, dropping hints, cutting me more slack, like letting me take the Cruiser to the Shore on my own and not making me call her every two hours at work to check in, and I’d been toeing a strict line since the end of school to help her around to my way of thinking. It seemed like she’d finally arrived. But there had to be a catch. For a second I expected her to reach up to her face and tear the skin away, leaving in its place the dead, mechanical stare of one of those Fembots from
The Six Million Dollar Man
. But she didn’t. She said, “Only if you continue to behave yourself.”

There it was, the catch, the price tag stitched in the collar. But freedom always came at a price. “Piece of cake,” I assured her. “I’m a model citizen.”

“Well, there’s no denying you’ve been great all summer and I’m really proud of you. So I’ll think about letting you be in charge of grandma’s bills. You’re better at math than I am anyway. I’ll let you know. For now, though, I’m going to give you a reward—”

“What?” Suddenly, I was wide awake.

“A trial run, I guess you might call it.”

“What?” She was killing me with all the preamble.

“Well, Neecey’s staying at Cynthia’s tonight, but…” She paused, letting the suspense burrow into my stomach. “I’m not gonna call Pauline to come and watch you. I’m gonna let you watch yourself. How does that sound?”

I could’ve hugged her. A night home alone, the house to myself—it was like a dream come true. No Neecey and handing her towels, no having to listen to her squealing on the phone with her friends or them running in and out, slamming the back door, blasting MTV or Led Zeppelin while I was trying to read, no Gary renting a video and her not letting me watch, bossing me around, making me get this or that, sending me up to my room; and no lonely Pauline camping out on the sofa so there was no room to sit, with about nine bags of potato chips and sour-cream-and-onion dip, cramming them in her mouth, guzzling Tab by the bucketful to wash it all down, stinking the house up with junk food but not sharing, watching
The Cosby Show
or
Cheers
or some other sitcom, slapping her jiggly thigh, her booming laugh scarifying the walls, calling to me,
Genie, you missed it, Norm just told Cliff whatever
, but ruining all the jokes in a way that made you wish the world would end. No, not tonight. Tonight I’d be on my own, left to my own devices—
-free
. It was enough to make you want to weep for joy.