The Monster Variations Read Online Free Page B

to be a curfew. No kids on the street after eight p.m., effective immediately. “For how long?” Reggie asked James, who had begged the same question of his dad: “For how long?” James’s dad only shrugged, took a pen from where several sat leaking into his shirt pocket, and busied himself with the columns of numbers that made up his work. “As long as it takes,” he said.
    The boys agreed it was terrible news. The summer wasn’t totally ruined, but close. After all, eight o’clock on a summer night wasn’t even
night
, it was the same as daytime only better—dimmer, cooler, and veiled. Now they’d have to withstand the stuffy interior of three separate houses several blocks apart from one another, and all because some guy was zooming around town looking for twelve-year-old boys to run over?
    It’s not fair
, James thought as he pressed his forehead against the van window. The world beyond was stone gray and moved too fast to understand. Anything could mean anything. There was an old man scolding a dog-maybe he did sick things to children. There was a tallman brushing himself off in front of a barber pole-maybe he was a drunk, maybe he beat his wife with a wooden spoon. There was a little troll-like woman hobbling her way down the sidewalk—who knew, maybe she liked to run over kids in her silver truck.
    It was a bad day to go anywhere, and James was headed for a funeral. There had been a wake the night before—this, he had learned, was when everyone filed by the casket to get a peek at the dead person. He was not allowed to go and was too scared anyway. Willie’s parents did not allow him to go either; ever since the second hit-and-run, the Van Allens had become even more protective of their son. Reggie, of course, went to the wake, and because his mother worked nights he did it alone. James didn’t know how Reggie got so brave, but Reggie was determined to see a dead kid, and if the funeral home had sold tickets, he would’ve arrived early to get a good seat. Reggie owned no dress clothes, but borrowed one of his mother’s white button-down blouses and tucked so much fabric into his pants it looked like he was wearing diapers. He owned only white sweat socks, but soon enough found a black marker and went to work.
    After the wake, Reggie had come knocking at James’s bedroom window. It was easy to do: if the family van was parked in the driveway alongside the house, Reggie had only to scale it, leap onto the lower roof of the three-story split-level home, dart across the shingles, then tap on James’s windowpane. Before the accident Willie also used to do it, but these days he had to use the door.
    According to Reggie, Greg Johnson was definitely dead. Three people took the podium to speak. There were twenty huge bouquets of flowers, and more Styrofoam cups of coffee than Reggie had ever seen. Four people left during Mr. Johnson’s emotional plea to find the killer. Eleven people cried. Twelve people hugged Reggie, despite the fact that he didn’t recognize any of them, aside from Mrs. Van Allen. By the time it was all over, his socks were almost white again, and Reggie guessed it was all those damn teardrops that did it.
    “What did he look like?” James asked.
    “He looked pretty good” was the response, but looking was not enough, not for an opportunist like Reggie. He hung back to the very end of the viewing line—at least, that was what he told James—and then leaned his elbows on Greg’s casket, settling his chin against the cold, new metal.
    “There was something weird with his eyes,” Reggie reported. “I’m not kidding. There was something all wrong with them.” When asked to explain, Reggie would only hint that the protuberance of Greg’s eyelids was somehow unnatural, either too big or too small, perhaps hiding objects that were not Greg Johnson’s eyeballs at all, but artificial glass that the mortician inserted after scooping out the originals—or, maybe, after the original