Chapter 12: Senior Year (Patreon)

I'd forgotten how to be seventeen.

The body remembered everything. It wanted to eat four times a day, sleep until noon, and look at every girl who walked past the Bradley Video window. Its ears went red whenever anybody said Kristen, and it laughed at fart jokes, hard, in a way I hadn't since I was eleven in a group home in Rancho Cordova. The body was a seventeen-year-old body and knew exactly what it was doing.

It was the rest of me that had forgotten—the part that had spent four years in the Army and a few more after, being an adult the way you learn it when nobody ever showed you how, badly, on purpose, with a lot of rules. That part didn't know how to go to the movies on a Friday night with two girls from school without doing something: scanning the exits, counting the people in the lobby, training.

Stay in the room, I kept telling myself. Stay in the room.

Tatum picked me up at six-thirty in her mom's Jeep Cherokee with Sid in the front seat and honked twice. When I came out the front door my mother was standing behind me in the doorway with her arms folded.

"Home by eleven," she said.

"I'm grounded."

"You're grounded until you're thirty," Mom agreed. "But you came in the living room four nights in a row, and you ate your eggs, and it's Tatum and Sidney." She looked past me at the Jeep. Tatum waved. Sid didn't, but she looked. "Go be a teenager. On purpose. Home by eleven, or I'll come get you myself, in my robe, in front of everybody."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Randy."

I turned around on the porch steps.

"Have fun," my mother said, very seriously, like it was an order.

The Rialto is the old movie palace on Main Street, built in 1928, with a marquee of a thousand bulbs and a ceiling painted like a night sky with little lights for stars. In the eighties it had been split down the middle into two screens, badly, so that during a quiet part on the left side of Screen 1 you could hear the explosions in Screen 2 through the wall. I walked in under the marquee and saw the ceiling, and for one second I was in another theater with stars on the ceiling and a red curtain and an audience of children with no faces, and my hand closed at my side on a spear that wasn't there.

"You okay?" Sid said.

"Yeah," I said. "It's just a nice ceiling."

She held my eyes a second longer than she needed to. Then she looked up at the ceiling and its little lights. "It is. I forgot about it. My mom used to bring me here."

It was the first thing either of us had said about her mother since September. I didn't know what to do with it, so I bought her a Coke.

Ransom was a Mel Gibson movie about a rich guy whose kid gets kidnapped and who goes on TV and turns the ransom into a bounty on the kidnappers' heads. It was a perfectly fine movie, Mel Gibson yelling a lot and Gary Sinise being creepy, and about forty minutes in I realized I wasn't watching it. I was watching the exits. There were four: two by the screen under the red EXIT signs, one at the back by the projection booth, and the lobby. I was watching the man three rows ahead in the Raiders jacket, who'd gotten up twice. I was watching the aisle. I was in a movie theater on a Friday night with two girls I liked a lot, and every muscle in my body was set for something to come down the aisle with a knife.

Tatum leaned over. She had the middle seat, between me and Sid, and the popcorn. "You're doing the thing," she whispered.

"What thing?"

"The thing. Where you look at the doors." She took a handful of popcorn. "Dewey does it now. At dinner. At the grocery store. It's so annoying." She held the popcorn out to me. "Watch the movie, Randy. Mel Gibson is yelling."

I took some popcorn and watched Mel Gibson yell.

About ten minutes later Tatum reached over without looking and squeezed my upper arm, the hey, it's okay kind of squeeze. Then she stopped, and squeezed again, and turned her head very slowly in the light from the screen and looked at me.

"What," Tatum whispered, "is that."

"What's what?"

"That." She squeezed again, hard, and her fingers didn't go in very far. "Randy. Since when do you have an arm?"

"I've always had an arm."

"You've always had a noodle. You had arms like pasta. In ninth grade you couldn't open a Snapple." She squeezed one more time, and her face did something complicated in the flickering light, somewhere between impressed and suspicious and a third thing I didn't have a word for. "Holy shit."

"Shhh," said the man in the Raiders jacket.

Sid leaned forward past Tatum and looked at me without a word—at my arm, and at my shoulders in the old flannel, which had hung on Randy in September the way all his shirts did, like clothes on a hanger. They weren't tight now, but they'd stopped hanging. Then she looked at my face, and sat back, and watched the rest of the movie without saying anything.

We went to Denny's after, because in a town like Woodsboro that's where you go at nine-thirty on a Friday night when you're seventeen and there's nowhere else. Tatum ordered a Grand Slam. Sid ordered coffee and didn't drink it. I ordered two Grand Slams and a side of bacon, because the body had opinions, and the waitress said, "Both for you, hon?" and I said yes, and Tatum laughed so hard she had to put her head on the table.

"Okay, I have to know," Tatum said when she could talk. "What is this. The arms. The two Grand Slams. Dewey says you run at five in the morning. Dewey says that, and Dewey doesn't get up before eight unless somebody's dead." She pointed a fork at me. "Brittany Hollis says you buy hamster food. Brittany Hollis says you bought every battery in the Thrifty. Sal at the butcher told my mom you bought a pound of raw liver. What is happening to you?"

"I'm getting in shape."

"For what?"

That question again. Everybody kept asking it. "Senior year," I said, with a laugh that didn't have much in it.

"Bullshit," said Tatum cheerfully.

Sid hadn't said a word since the movie. She was turning her coffee cup around and around on the saucer, the way Dad turned his mug. "Randy," she said. "Did you call me? Last week?"

I looked at her. "No. Tatum asked me the same thing. I didn't."

"Somebody did." She kept turning the cup. "Twice. Sunday night and Tuesday night. Both times around ten. The phone rings, and I pick up, and nobody says anything. I say hello, and hello, and nobody says anything." She stopped turning the cup. "And then they hang up."

The table went quiet. Tatum had stopped eating.

"I thought it was you," Sid said, looking at the coffee and not at me. "I thought you were trying to call, and you didn't know what to say. Because you've been... because we haven't really talked since the hospital. Not really. I thought maybe you picked up the phone and couldn't." She almost laughed. "That's what I'd do."

I'd picked up the phone twice and put it down twice. I hadn't dialed.

"It wasn't me," I said.

"I know," Sid said. "I know that now."

"Did you star-sixty-nine it?"

Star-sixty-nine was the newest, most exciting feature on the American telephone in 1996. You dialed it after a call and it told you the number that had just called and offered to call it back for seventy-five cents. Half of America used it to find out who'd been prank-calling them; the other half used it to find out who their husband had been talking to.

"Dad did," Sid said. "The second time." She looked at me. "It was a pay phone. The one outside the Greyhound station on Fourth Street."

Nobody said anything. The waitress came by and refilled Sid's untouched coffee.

"It's probably a reporter," Tatum said finally, too loudly. "Right? Some tabloid guy. They used to do that. Call and hang up, to see if you'd pick up. Dewey said. Gale said that's how the sleazy ones work."

"Probably," I said.

But I was thinking about a pay phone outside a bus station at ten o'clock at night in a town nobody came to anymore, and somebody who'd stand at that pay phone twice, in the cold, listening to Sidney Prescott say hello, and hello, and say nothing back. About a woman in another movie, in another year, who'd spent two years planning, very patiently, for the people who killed her son. Not yet, I thought. That's next fall. That's Windsor. But I'd thought a lot of things were supposed to be years away. I'd thought the Ring was 2002.

"If it happens again," I said to Sid, "call me. Not Dewey. Me. Any time. I don't care if it's three in the morning."

She looked at me across the table. "Okay," Sidney said.

That night, on the page after WHAT WORKS ON WHAT in the unicorn notebook, I wrote: Sid. Hang-up calls. Sunday + Tuesday, ~10 p.m. Pay phone, Greyhound, 4th St. And then, after a long pause, a name, and then I scratched it out so hard you couldn't read it, because it was too early, and because writing it down felt like inviting it.

Saturday was orientation.

Tatum showed up at Channel 27 at 8:55 with a pink box of donuts from the place on Main, a notebook, a pen behind her ear, and an expression of fierce professional intent, like it was her first day at a law firm. Martha came with me, because she was the producer, because I'd promised, and because Mom had said take your sister in the voice that means there's no discussion.

Dale Pruitt taught the class himself, in his Grateful Dead shirt with his reading glasses on his head. There were nine of us: two retired guys from the Woodsboro Model Railroad Society who wanted to film their layout, a woman who wanted to do a cooking show in Tagalog, a Lutheran youth pastor, a sullen teenage boy whose mother had signed him up as punishment, and us.

It was four hours, and it was wonderful. I mean that—some of the best four hours I'd spent in Woodsboro. Dale explained the FCC rules (no ads, no swearing, no obscenity, really no swearing, Randy) and the cameras (two Ikegami studio cameras older than me, with tally lights that went red when you were live) and the board (a Grass Valley switcher with a T-bar you pushed to cut between cameras, which Martha took to like she'd been born in a television station). He explained three-point lighting with a desk lamp and a coffee cup. He explained why you never, ever, ever point a camera at the sun. He explained slate and roll tape and cue and stretch and wrap, and Tatum wrote every word in her notebook, underlined.

And when he let us loose on the cameras for the last hour, Tatum Riley turned out to be a natural. She got behind the big Ikegami on its rolling pedestal, put her eye to the viewfinder, and something happened to her: she stopped talking, and she never stopped talking. She stood perfectly still with her hand on the pan handle and moved the camera so smoothly that Dale stopped mid-sentence with the Model Railroad guys and came over to watch.

"Who taught you that?" he said.

"Nobody," said Tatum, without taking her eye off the viewfinder. "I'm just looking at stuff."

"You're framing," Dale said. "You're leading the subject. You're giving them headroom." He looked at me. "She's giving you headroom, man. People take a year to learn that."

Tatum looked up from the viewfinder, pink in the face. "I have an eye," she said with enormous dignity. "Executive producers have an eye."

Martha, in the booth, pushed the T-bar, cut to the other camera, and put a wide shot of Tatum's face on the monitor mid-sentence with her mouth open, and Dale laughed so hard he had to sit down.

We were signed off at 12:55. Dale gave each of us a laminated card reading WCTV 27 CERTIFIED PRODUCER with our names typed on it. Martha's said MARTHA MEEKS. She studied it, then slid it into the clear plastic window in her wallet where most girls her age kept a picture of Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

"Thursday," Dale said, shaking my hand at the door. "Ten o'clock. Be here at nine for setup. I'll run the board the first time, your sister can shadow me." He held on to my hand a second. "And Randy? Folks are going to call in. If you do a call-in. They always do. Some of them are going to be weird." He let go. "Public access is like leaving your front door open. Mostly what comes in is cats. But not always."

Sunday we went to the city.

It was Tatum's idea, sort of. At Denny's on Friday, when she wouldn't stop asking what the training was for, I'd mentioned the climbing gym from the flyer at the Y: Mission Cliffs, a warehouse in San Francisco's Mission District that somebody had filled with forty-foot plywood walls studded with colored plastic holds. Tatum said no way and Sid said nothing. Then on Saturday night Tatum called and said we're coming, Sid wants to, don't ask me why, pick you up at eight, and hung up.

It's an hour and a half from Woodsboro to the city, down the 101 and over the Golden Gate. Tatum drove, Sid sat in front, and I sat in the back with my knees around my ears, because the Cherokee wasn't built for six feet of anybody. I watched the hills go by, green from the first rains, and the bay come up blue and enormous on the left, and then the bridge. Theo had seen it a hundred times; the group home took us every year on a field trip. Randy had seen it maybe three times. I sat in the back seat holding both sets of memories at once, and the bridge came up out of the fog the way it does, red and impossible, and something in my chest that was both of us went oh.

Mission Cliffs smelled like chalk and sweat and old rubber, and it was the loudest place I'd been since the boiler room—rock music on a boom box, people shouting take! and falling! and nice!, carabiners clanking, climbers hanging off the walls everywhere forty feet up like spiders. A guy at the desk with dreadlocks and fingers like sausages rented us harnesses and shoes and gave us the belay class. It took forty-five minutes and made Tatum cry once, from laughing, when he explained the figure-eight knot and I tied it perfectly the first time.

"How'd you know that?" Tatum said.

"Boy Scouts," I said. A lie. It was Air Assault School at Fort Campbell, a summer I'd never told anybody about, rappelling out of helicopters into the Kentucky heat. But Randy had been a Boy Scout for exactly one year, and that was close enough.

I climbed first. I'd been waiting for this. Grip strength had topped PROGRAM v2 since the first morning—Randy has the grip strength of a wet napkin—and for two weeks I'd done everything Gloria allowed, dead hangs from the back-room doorframe at Bradley Video, farmer's carries with boxes of returns, squeezing a tennis ball under the counter until my forearms burned, and I didn't know if any of it had worked.

It had, some. I got about twenty-five feet up the easiest wall before my forearms turned to concrete and my fingers opened on their own—the pump, climbers call it—and I came off the wall and swung out on the rope, and Tatum caught me, braced against the floor, yelling "I GOT YOU, I GOT YOU" loud enough to turn heads all over the gym. Twenty-five feet. Two weeks earlier Randy couldn't have done a pull-up. My right shoulder was singing its little song about consequences, and Gloria was going to kill me, but I'd done twenty-five feet.

Tatum let me down, red-faced and grinning. "You weigh something now," she said accusingly as I touched down. "You used to weigh, like, nothing. I could feel you on the rope. You weigh something."

"Thank you?"

"It's not a compliment, my arms." She shook them out, still grinning.

Then Sid climbed.

I don't know what I expected. Sid ran track in the spring, strong the way runners are, all legs and lungs. I'd never seen her climb, and I don't think she'd ever climbed anything in her life. She tied in, checked my knot twice, put her hands on the wall, and went. She climbed like something was chasing her: fast and silent and furious, not looking down or anywhere but the next hold, jaw set, knuckles white. She didn't stop to rest or think. Twenty feet. Thirty. Thirty-five. People on the other walls stopped to watch.

She reached the top, forty feet, and slapped the top hold the way you're supposed to, and then she just hung there—not looking down, not calling take, forty feet up, her forehead against the plywood and her shoulders going up and down.

"Sid?" Tatum said beside me.

I had the rope. I held it firm and waited. You don't rush somebody at the top of a wall; you let them come down when they're ready. After about a minute, without turning around, she said softly, "Take," and I took, and let her down slowly. She came down the wall with her eyes closed, and when her feet touched the mat she stood a second with her hands on the rope above the knot.

"Good climb," I said.

She opened her eyes. They were wet, and she didn't wipe them. "Up there," she said, "there's nothing. You know? You're just... you're holding on. That's all you're doing. Holding on. You don't think about anything else." She looked at the wall. "I haven't not thought about anything else since September."

Tatum put a hand on her back.

Sid climbed four more times that day, each a little slower. On the last one she stopped halfway up, looked down at me holding the rope, and smiled. Just a little. It was the first time I'd seen her really smile since a night on a lawn with a garden spade and a Maglite and a lot of blood.

We drove out to Ocean Beach afterward, because it was right there at the end of the city, where the land just stops.

It was four-thirty and cold, the sun already low, the wind coming in off the Pacific with sand in it. The beach was almost empty: a guy with a metal detector, and a woman throwing a ball for a black Lab that ran into the waves and came back, over and over, like it had never seen anything so wonderful. The waves were big and gray and loud. The sky over the water was going orange and pink and a deep bruised purple, and a long line of fog sat on the horizon like a wall.

The three of us sat on the seawall with our legs hanging over, eating soft pretzels Tatum had bought from a cart, Tatum in the middle. My hands were raw from the holds. I had a flapper on my right ring finger, a little torn flap of skin that Tatum had taped up in the gym with athletic tape and a great deal of complaining.

"I'm thinking about Windsor," Sid said, to the ocean, out of nowhere.

Everything in me went still.

"It's in Ohio," she said. "It's a small school. They have a good theater program. The guidance counselor gave me a brochure in September, before—" She stopped. "Before. And I threw it away. And then I went and got another one, last week, from the library." She pulled her knees up. "It's far. That's the thing I like about it. It's far. Nobody there knows me. Nobody's going to look at me in the cafeteria like I'm the girl from Top Story. Nobody's going to put my face on a T-shirt." Her mouth twisted. "Somebody did. Did you know that? At the flea market in Santa Rosa. Gale told Dewey. A T-shirt with my school picture and a knife."

"Jesus," Tatum said.

Windsor College. Ohio. A film class. A news van in broad daylight. A guy in a mask who'd done his research, a voice on a cell phone asking movie trivia, and Randy Meeks in the back of a van with his throat cut, in the sequel, the way they always are—the guy who knows the rules, who dies anyway. Don't let her go to Windsor without you. I know what happens at Windsor. I've seen it in your head.

For about two seconds that was all there was. Then the other thing showed up, quieter and slower, and warm. Ohio.

I'd been to Ohio, two weeks ago. I'd flown into Columbus with a backpack and a collar that made people believe me, walked into a psychiatric hospital in Springwood, helped put a dream demon in the ground, and flown home. Windsor and Springwood were in the same state; I'd looked at a map once in October without telling myself why. An afternoon's drive.

And the Randy who died at Windsor wasn't me. Canon Randy had a mouth, a VHS collection, and a Bradley Video name tag. He walked onto that lawn in broad daylight, a skinny kid with a theory and nothing in his hands, and the sequel ate him in one bite. I had a spear that went through oak trees and that I could throw now without touching it. I had a wind that stopped things. I had fire in storage that went where I pointed, and something in Slot 2 I hadn't told anybody about, tested by the creek on Thursday night, that had scared me. I had two months of Gloria, three miles at five a.m., and a Red Cross card in my wallet. And the guy in the mask at Windsor was a guy with a knife and a cell phone. I'd done a guy with a knife. I'd done a dream demon.

In Ohio I wouldn't be alone. In Ohio there was Nancy Thompson, who'd beaten Freddy twice; Dr. Gordon, who'd buried his bones with a crucifix; Donald Thompson, who'd be off the cane by spring. There were seven kids who'd already gone into the dark with me once and come out laughing—Kincaid, who could lift a car if he believed hard enough and probably half of one even if he didn't; Taryn, who carried herself like a switchblade even awake; Will, Joey, Phillip, Jennifer. And Kristen, who'd pulled me across two thousand miles in my sleep the first night we ever talked. In California, I was the only one who knew the rules. In Ohio, I had a squad.

Sitting on the seawall with sand in my pretzel, I realized I was almost smiling.

"Randy?" Tatum said.

"Windsor," I said. "That's in Ohio."

"I just said that," Sid said.

"Yeah. Sorry." I looked at the ocean. The Lab was still running into the waves. "It sounds like a good school. It really does."

Sid turned her head and looked at me. She'd seen it, both halves. Sidney Prescott had been watching faces very closely since September; she'd learned the hard way that faces lie.

"What," she said.

"Nothing."

"Randy. What." Her voice went flat. "Your face did two things. First it did the thing you did in September. At the fountain. In my kitchen. When you knew something was going to happen, and you didn't say." Her eyes narrowed. "And then you smiled. Which is worse."

I didn't have an answer.

"Don't," Sidney said. "Don't do that to me again."

The wind came in off the water. Tatum looked at Sid, then me, then Sid again, and very slowly set her pretzel down on the seawall.

I thought about Truth Assertion in storage. About the ambulance in September, Sid's hand in mine, and some things you shouldn't make people believe. About the kid's rules—be nice to Sid; she doesn't know how to say sorry yet—and every lie I'd told her since September and every true thing I'd held back, and how tired I was of both.

"I don't know anything," I said. "Not for sure. Not about Windsor. It's a year away. Anything could happen." I made myself look at her. "But I know how sequels work, Sid. You know I do. And I know that the girl who survives the first one always goes somewhere far. Somewhere new. Somewhere nobody knows her. And it always finds her there."

Sid looked at me a long while. "So I shouldn't go."

"I didn't say that."

"Then what are you saying?"

"I'm saying," I said, "if you go, I'm going too."

The waves came in. The Lab ran out to meet them.

"What?" said Tatum.

"I'm saying if Sid goes to Windsor, I'm applying to Windsor." I shrugged. "And honestly? If something does follow her there, Ohio's not the worst place to be the guy who knows the rules. I know people in Ohio."

"You know a girl in Ohio," said Tatum.

"I know eight people in Ohio. Nine, with Dr. Gordon."

"And one of them is a girl."

"Four of them are girls, if we're counting Nancy, which I think we have to, even though she's a whole woman—"

"Oh my God," said Tatum to the sky.

Sid didn't laugh, but for the first time that afternoon, the corner of her mouth moved a little. "That's why you smiled."

"That's part of why I smiled."

"You don't even want to go to college," Tatum said. "You told me in tenth grade. You said you were going to work at Bradley Video forever and own it someday and turn it into a cult cinema."

I had said that. Randy had. I remembered saying it in Tatum's kitchen with Billy and Stu, the four of us eating her mom's pizza rolls, Billy laughing at me and Stu throwing a pizza roll at my head.

"Where are you going?" Sid said, low. "Randy. Seriously. If not Windsor. What do you want?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, because I didn't know.

Theo never went to college. He got out of a group home at eighteen with a backpack, a GED, and four hundred dollars, and the recruiter at the strip mall in Rancho Cordova was the only person in the world who ever looked at him and said we've got a place for you. After the Army there'd been the channel—videos about horror movies, two hundred and eighty thousand subscribers—and a one-bedroom in Sacramento, and a plan to maybe take some community college classes someday that he never followed through on. And Randy wanted to own a video store. In 1996 that's a fine dream; Blockbuster is the biggest thing in the world. But sitting on that seawall I knew that in about ten years every video store in America would be dead, killed by a little red envelope in the mail and then by a website, and Bradley Video would close, and Randy's whole dream was a dinosaur that hadn't seen the meteor yet.

I knew some other things too. I knew that a little online bookstore in Seattle called Amazon would go public next May at eighteen dollars a share. I knew Apple was about to buy Steve Jobs's company in about a month for four hundred million dollars, that Apple stock was sitting at the bottom of a hole, and that the hole was about to become a mountain. I knew two grad students at Stanford, an hour south of where I sat, were building a search engine. I knew about Netflix. I knew about the iPod and the iPhone and Bitcoin and every stupid thing that would make somebody very rich, in roughly the order it would happen. I had seven thousand five hundred dollars in a custodial savings account with my dad's signature on it, and a head full of the future. I didn't need college, not for money, not if I was careful and smart. In ten years I could have more money than anybody in Woodsboro had ever seen and own every video store in California, if I wanted, right up until they all died.

None of that answered what do you want.

"I don't know," I said out loud to Sidney Prescott on a seawall at sunset, and it was the most honest thing I'd said to her since September. "I honestly don't know, Sid. I've been so busy trying not to die that I never thought about what I'd do if I didn't."

Sid looked at me, then at the ocean. "Yeah," she said softly. "Me too."

Tatum didn't say anything. She picked her pretzel back up, broke it into three pieces, and handed one to each of us without a word, like communion, and we sat and ate it and watched the sun go down into the fog.

"You're training like you're waiting for it," Sid said after a while, still to the ocean. "Aren't you. The next one."

I thought about lying, and didn't. "Yeah. I am."

She nodded slowly, like she'd known since she felt my arm through a flannel shirt in a dark movie theater on Friday night.

"Then teach me," Sidney said.

"What?"

"Whatever you're doing. The running. The arms. The thing with the doors in the movie theater." She turned her head and looked at me, her eyes very dark and unwavering. "If there's a next one, and it's coming for me, in Ohio or anywhere, I'm not going to be the girl hiding in the closet again. I'm not going to be the girl running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door." Her jaw set the way it had at the top of the climbing wall. "Teach me."

"Me too," Tatum said immediately. "I mean. I'm in. Obviously. If Sid's in, I'm in. I've been in since September." She looked at both of us. "I'm the one Billy was going to kill in a garage. You told me that. I have standing."

The sun was almost gone. The Lab's owner had clipped on its leash, and it was walking up the beach soaking wet, looking back at the waves over its shoulder like it couldn't believe they were leaving.

"Five a.m.," I said finally. "Every day. Three miles to start."

"Five?" said Tatum.

"Gloria's going to want to meet you."

"Who the hell is Gloria?"

Sid laughed, a real one, short and surprised, like it had gotten out before she could stop it, and it was the second time that day. "Okay," she said. "Five a.m."

Woodsboro High reopened on Monday, November 18th, after seven weeks.

They'd done things to it. There were two gray, humming metal detectors at the front doors now, with a sheriff's deputy at each, and everybody had to put their backpack on a little table and walk through one at a time, like at an airport, in a line that ran all the way down the front steps onto the lawn. There was a new principal, Ms. Ruiz, a short, fierce woman from a school in Oakland, who stood on the front steps in a red blazer and shook every student's hand as they came through, looked each of us in the eye, and said our names. She knew all of them. She'd memorized the yearbook.

"Randall Meeks," she said, holding my hand a second longer than the others. "Welcome back."

There were grief counselors in the library. There was a new brass plaque by the trophy case with Principal Himbry's name on it, and Casey Becker's, and Steve Orth's, and Kenny's last name, which I hadn't known until I read it there, because Kenny hadn't gone to Woodsboro High; he'd just died in front of it. Somebody had been replacing the flowers under it every day.

My locker had been repainted. The PSYCHO from October was gone under a fresh coat of institutional beige, and somebody had already written something new on it in pencil, small, down by the vent slots. I bent to read it. thank you. That was all, in what might have been a girl's handwriting. I didn't know whose, and I didn't erase it.

That morning, brushing my teeth in the upstairs bathroom, I'd looked in the mirror and for a second didn't know who it was—the good kind of not knowing, nothing like the first morning in September, when I'd stared at Randy's face over the sink and thought who the fuck is that. Same face, same ears. But the hair had gotten long. I hadn't cut it since September; Theo had worn an Army high-and-tight for four years, and some part of me had decided, without asking the rest, that we were never doing that again. It fell in my eyes now, brown, going lighter at the ends from seven weeks of running in the sun at dawn, and the Stylist skill, which I'd been using on exactly nobody, had apparently been using itself on me: every morning I pushed the hair out of my face with wet fingers without thinking, and it fell right, in layers, like somebody had paid forty dollars for it. There was a shadow along my jaw I kept forgetting to shave—four years of shaving every morning because a drill sergeant would scream if I didn't, and the second nobody was screaming, I'd stopped. The face under it had changed shape too. The baby fat was gone. The PROGRAM had taken it along with everything else that wasn't useful.

I looked older. I looked like somebody who'd been somewhere.

"You need a haircut," Mom had said at breakfast, the way she had every morning for two weeks.

"I'm growing it out."

"Into what?"

I didn't have an answer for that either.

Then there were the two traits from the plane, which I'd forgotten and which had not forgotten me. Minty Breath: my breath had smelled like a fresh pack of spearmint gum every second since November fifth, through coffee, through Denny's, through a mouthful of garlic on Thursday night, and nobody had said anything yet, but Tatum had started looking at me funny when I talked close. And Scenic Wind, which I'd toggled back on as a joke—you never know when you'll need to look majestic—and which picked that morning, of all mornings, to find out.

I came through the metal detector. The deputy waved me on. And in the front hall of Woodsboro High School, indoors, every door closed and not a breath of air moving, my hair lifted gently off my forehead and blew back, and my open flannel flapped once, dramatically, behind me, like a cape in a music video. Three girls by the trophy case stopped talking. I kept walking. What else are you going to do?

It was a strange day. People looked at me, but not the way they had at the memorial in October, like I'd crawled out from under a rock. It was something else. Kids I didn't know came up and shook my hand. A sophomore asked me to sign his copy of the Herald with my picture in it, and I did, because I couldn't think of a way to say no that wasn't mean. A big senior from the football team named Pete Hendrickson, who'd stuffed Randy into a trash can in eighth grade, came up to my locker and stood there a long while like he was trying to remember how to talk, then said, "Hey. Meeks. That was... uh. That was cool. What you did," and walked away very fast.

In fourth period, trigonometry, I discovered I'd forgotten everything I'd ever known about trigonometry in either life. Mr. Carlisle called me to the board to solve a problem, and I stood there with the chalk for about thirty seconds, and then turned around and said, "Mr. Carlisle, I'm going to be honest with you, I was in the hospital for nine days and I've been shot." The whole class laughed, and Mr. Carlisle laughed, and said, "Sit down, Meeks," and I did.

Sid, Tatum, and I ate lunch in the quad under the oak tree, just the three of us. The table where we used to sit with Billy and Stu was on the other side of the quad, and nobody sat at it. I don't think anybody ever sat at it again.

After school there was the guidance counselor.

Every senior had to see her that week. College applications were due in six weeks, the UC ones by November 30th, and Woodsboro's seniors had lost seven weeks of school to a pair of serial killers. The district had decided this was a crisis, which it was, just not the crisis anybody thought.

Her name was Mrs. Feldman. Her little office off the library had a poster of a cat hanging from a branch that said HANG IN THERE, a filing cabinet full of brochures, and a dish of butterscotch candies, and she'd been a guidance counselor at Woodsboro High since 1971 and looked like she'd been tired since about 1972.

"Randall," she said, opening a folder. "Let's see. GPA, three point one. Strong in English. Strong in, hm, film studies elective. Weak in math." She looked at me over her glasses. "You took the SAT in June. Twelve-forty. That's a good score. That's a very good score." She closed the folder. "Where are you thinking?"

I opened my mouth and closed it.

"Most of the kids who come in here," Mrs. Feldman said gently, "this year, I mean, they say anywhere but here." She took a butterscotch from the dish and unwrapped it. "Is that you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"That's all right." She put the candy in her mouth. "That's allowed. That's more honest than most of them." She opened the filing cabinet and set a thick stack of glossy brochures on the desk in front of me: UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State, NYU, Emerson in Boston, which had a film school, and USC, which had the best film school, she said, and cost about as much as a house. And Windsor College, Ohio, a brochure with red-brick buildings and fall leaves and kids in sweaters laughing on a lawn.

I looked at that one a while. It didn't scare me as much as it should have, and that scared me a little, in a different way.

"Ah," said Mrs. Feldman. "Windsor. That's a funny one. Sidney Prescott took that one too. Twice." She looked at me over her glasses again, and something in her tired face sharpened a little. "You two are friends."

"Yeah."

"Hm." She sucked on her butterscotch. "Well. I'll tell you what I tell everybody. Apply to the one you want, and apply to the one you can afford, and apply to the one that scares you a little." She pushed the whole stack toward me. "And then go wherever you'd be sorriest not to have gone."

I took them all, even USC, even Windsor. I carried them home, put them in my desk drawer under the unicorn notebook, and didn't look at them again that week.

At work that week, the eyebrows went up.

Everybody was used to the push-ups behind the counter by then. Mr. Bradley had taken to just walking around me when I planked on the floor behind the register, like walking around a dog asleep in the hall. What got them was the food. I'd started bringing a lot of it to work—Tupperware, hard-boiled eggs, chicken, three peanut butter sandwiches, and a gallon jug of milk, which I drank from directly between customers, like a man in a commercial.

"You eat like my son did," Mr. Bradley said on Tuesday, watching me finish my second sandwich at three-fifteen. "When he was playing football at Santa Rosa J.C." He looked at the jug of milk. "He was six-four, Randy."

"I'm in a growth phase."

"You're seventeen."

"It's a late growth phase."

A woman returning The Night He Came Home stood at the counter watching me drink milk from the jug. She looked at Mr. Bradley, who looked back with the face of a man who'd decided some time ago not to ask questions he didn't want answered, and she put down her tape and left without renting anything else.

On Wednesday, Brittany Hollis from the Thrifty came in to rent Clueless, stood at the counter, studied me, and said, "Did you get taller?"

"No."

"You look taller."

"I'm standing up straight," I said. "I used to hunch."

"Huh," said Brittany, and went red, and paid for Clueless in quarters.

On Thursday at 6:02 p.m., Kristen called.

"Elaine signed," she said.

I sat down on the bed.

"She signed. Dr. Gordon called her and talked to her for, like, an hour, and Max says he heard Dr. Gordon say the words liability and custody review in the same sentence, and then she signed." Kristen was talking very fast. "And then she said it was fine, actually, it was good, because now she and Rick could go to Dayton without worrying about me, and she sounded so happy about it that I wanted to scream, but I didn't, because I'm coming." She stopped to breathe. "Randy. I'm coming. To California. All of us are. Joey's mom said yes on Monday and Will's parents said yes yesterday and Kincaid's grandma said it's about time somebody took that boy someplace. Seven. All seven."

"All seven," I said.

"Dr. Gordon says it's the most paperwork he's ever done in his life. He says he signed his name eleven hundred times. He says if one of us so much as sneezes on the plane he's going to lose his license." Her voice wobbled. "Randy. I've never been on a plane."

"It's easy. You sit there. They give you peanuts."

"I've never seen the ocean."

"I know," I said. "I've got a good one picked out."

She laughed, and then went quiet a second. "You sound different."

"Different how?"

"I don't know." She thought about it. "Lighter? Like you've been... I don't know. Outside. A lot."

I thought about the seawall. Sid at the top of the climbing wall with her forehead against the plywood. Tatum breaking a pretzel into three pieces. Sitting on the floor in front of the couch watching Seinfeld reruns with my family every night that week, even Thursday, even with a show to tape.

"I've been doing stuff," I said. "With people."

"Good," said Kristen Parker firmly, like she'd been waiting a long time to say it. "Good. It's about time."

Rules of Engagement, Episode One, went out live on WCTV Channel 27 on Thursday, November 21st, 1996, at 10:00 p.m. Pacific, to a potential audience of eleven thousand cable households in Sonoma County, of whom, Dale estimated later, about three hundred were watching.

It was the best thing I've ever done, even though the show itself was rough. I stood in front of a rented whiteboard on an easel in a Bradley Video T-shirt with a lav mic clipped to the collar and a red tally light staring at me, and for the first ninety seconds I forgot every word I'd planned to say. Tatum, behind Camera One, had to hold up her notebook with SAY HI, DUMBASS written on it in big letters, and I said hi. Then it came back, all of it, the way it used to in a one-bedroom in Sacramento with a ring light, a cheap mic, and two hundred and eighty thousand people I'd never meet. It came back like riding a bike.

"In the Army," I said to the red light, "before any operation, you do an estimate of the situation. There's an acronym for it, because the Army has an acronym for everything. METT-TC." I wrote it on the whiteboard. "Mission. Enemy. Terrain. Troops. Time available. Civil considerations. Tonight we're going to use it on the most dangerous situation an American teenager can find themselves in." I turned back to the camera. "A slasher movie."

I did forty minutes. Mission: survive until dawn, that's it; you don't win a slasher movie, you outlast it. Enemy: he's usually human, usually alone, usually somebody you know, and he's always, always slower than you, and he catches you anyway because you trip. Terrain: the house is his, the woods are his, the summer camp is his, so get to your terrain, which is anywhere with lights and people and a lot of witnesses. Troops: nobody goes anywhere alone, nobody splits up, and if somebody says I'll be right back, you tackle them. Time: the cops are always twenty minutes away, so plan for twenty minutes. Civil considerations: the adults won't believe you, the sheriff won't believe you, your parents won't believe you, so stop trying to convince them and start getting your friends out the door.

I drew diagrams. I drew a floor plan of a typical two-story suburban house and marked the choke points, the escape routes, and the place every horror movie ever made has somebody hide, which is the closet, which is why you never hide in the closet: it is a box with one door. I did a whole bit on why you never run upstairs, and Tatum laughed behind the camera, which you're not supposed to do, and the mic picked it up, and Dale told us later that was the best part.

At 10:40 Dale signaled me through the booth window. Martha, next to him in the booth in a headset much too big for her and an expression of enormous seriousness, pushed a button, and I said, "We've got a few minutes left. The number's on your screen. If you've got a question, call in."

The phones lit up—all four lines, instantly—and Dale's face through the booth window did something I'll never forget.

The first caller was a kid of nine or ten from Petaluma who wanted to know if Freddy Krueger was real. I said, "Not anymore," and Dale put his face in his hands. The second was a woman from Santa Rosa who wanted to say she thought the show was irresponsible and I should be ashamed. I said thank you for watching, ma'am, and she hung up. The third was a high school girl from Healdsburg who said her stepdad had been acting weird and she didn't know who to tell. I quit making jokes and talked to her for four minutes, very carefully, and gave her the number for the county's teen crisis line. She said thank you. I hoped she'd call it.

The fourth line had been blinking a while. Martha looked at Dale in the booth. Dale shrugged and nodded.

"Line four," I said. "You're on Rules of Engagement. Go ahead."

Nothing.

"Hello? Line four? You're on the air."

Nothing. I could tell the line was open—the faint hiss of a live phone line, like the inside of a seashell—and under it, very faint, the sound of somebody standing outside somewhere. Wind. A car going by a long way off. And breathing, slow and even, nothing like a prank caller breathing hard to be creepy. Just breathing, like somebody listening very carefully. Like somebody who'd called just to hear my voice.

Behind Camera One, Tatum had stopped moving.

I knew that breathing. I'd never heard it, but I knew it the way you know a song from the first two notes, because I'd been hearing it in my head since Friday night at Denny's, when Sid turned her coffee cup on its saucer and said nobody says anything. Ten o'clock at night. A pay phone. Somebody who'd stand in the cold and listen to you say hello and say nothing back. There's a name in the unicorn notebook on the page after WHAT WORKS ON WHAT, scratched out so hard the pen went through the paper, and I'd scratched it out because it was too early, because it was 1996, not 1998, because writing it down felt like inviting it. It's always too early, I thought. Until it isn't.

Then I thought, very clearly, in Theo's voice, the one that had sat through a lot of briefings: If you can't see the enemy, make him show you where he is.

I smiled at the camera, the yearbook smile, the electrocuted one.

"You know what, line four?" I said, easy and friendly, a host doing a bit. "If you're gonna breathe at people on live TV, at least commit to it. Come on. There's a guy in a white mask who did this way better than you, and he had a script." I leaned on the desk. "This is public access. Nobody's stopping you. Give the people what they want. Let's hear your best Ghostface."

In the booth, Dale's head came up. Martha's mouth fell open.

For a second, nothing. Then a small sound on the line, a click, too small and plastic for a hang-up, like a switch being thumbed on. And a voice came out of the studio monitors, deep and rasping and electronic, filling the room.

"Hello, Randy."

Behind Camera One, Tatum Riley made a sound. A quiet one—the small sound you make when you miss a step in the dark—but the camera moved with it. On the monitor the frame jerked an inch off my face, then crept back, not quite level. I didn't look at her. I couldn't. But I knew why.

She'd heard that voice before. In September, at the Riley house, the night Sid stayed over: the phone ringing late, Sid holding the receiver out between them with her hand shaking, and that same low, amused, synthesized purr coming out of it, taunting Sidney Prescott in her best friend's kitchen. Tatum had stood close enough to hear every word. And it was the same—the same rasp, the same pitch, the same little electronic flutter at the end of the consonants. The same model of voice changer. In 1996 you could buy them at RadioShack in the novelty aisle next to the walkie-talkies for thirty-nine ninety-nine. Billy had. Somebody else had too.

"Is this the impression you wanted?" the voice said.

"It's not bad," I said. My voice came out exactly the way it had for the last forty-five minutes. I don't know how. Practice, I guess. "You've been rehearsing."

"I've had time."

I listened—not to the voice, to everything around it. Wind. A car. And then, faint and far away, a woman on a public address speaker, flat and bored and echoing: ...now boarding at Gate Two, for Sacramento, Stockton, and Fresno... The Greyhound station on Fourth Street. Six blocks from where I stood.

"Three hundred people watching," the voice said. "Maybe four. Listening to you teach them how to survive. Mission. Enemy. Terrain." A pause. "You left something out, Randy."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"The kitchen floor."

Everything in me went cold.

"You didn't tell them about the kitchen floor," the voice said softly, almost gently, through all that electronic gravel. "About standing over a boy who was already down. And emptying the whole gun. Into his face." The breath came through the speakers, slow. "That's not one of your rules, is it? That's not mission or terrain. Tell your viewers what rule that was."

The studio was dead silent. In the booth, Dale had his hand on the board over a switch and wasn't moving. Martha was white. I could have hung up. I could have looked at Dale and drawn a finger across my throat, and he'd have killed the line. I didn't.

"He was getting up," I said. "They always get up."

"He was seventeen."

"So was I."

"Did they let his mother see him?" the voice said, and something in it changed, just for a second—even through the voice changer, I heard it crack. "After? With what you left of his face? Did anybody let her see him?"

That was the whole answer, right there on live television. She'd said mother—not family, not parents. The name in the notebook, under the scratches. Mrs. Loomis, Billy's mom, who'd left Woodsboro and Billy's father years ago, the way canon said, and who in about two years was supposed to come back under another name with a notebook, a press pass, and a college boy who wanted to be famous. Two years. 1998. A film class. A news van. Two years, my ass. Right now, on Fourth Street, at a pay phone, with a voice changer from RadioShack and a grief so big you could hear it through the electronics.

Nobody would believe this if I told them, but I felt sorry for her. For one second, standing in that red light, I felt sorrier for her than I've ever felt for anybody. Her son was a murderer and she'd loved him anyway, the way mothers do, and somebody had emptied a magazine into him on a kitchen floor, and the somebody was me. Then I thought about Sid at Denny's, turning her coffee cup around and around—nobody says anything—and I quit feeling sorry.

"You sound like you knew him," I said.

A long silence on the line. Wind. A bus pulling out.

"Everybody in this town knew him," the voice said.

"Sure," I said. "Okay." I turned to the camera—to the three hundred households, and to the woman at the pay phone, who was almost certainly watching on a TV somewhere, or had been before she walked to Fourth Street. "Here's a free one, folks. Bonus rule. Since we're talking about sequels." I held up a finger. "In a sequel, the new killer always has a reason that goes back to the first movie. Always. Somebody the hero hurt. Somebody the first killer loved. A girlfriend. A brother." I let it sit exactly one second. "A mother."

The line went completely silent—no breathing, no wind, like she'd put her hand over the mouthpiece.

"And the other rule," I said, still to the camera, still easy, "is that the people who survived the first one aren't stupid anymore. They're not running up the stairs. They know the voice. They know the pay phones. And they've got friends."

Silence. Five seconds. Six. In the booth, Dale's hand was white on the board. Then the voice came back, very quiet and calm, all the crack smoothed over the way a professional smooths it over.

"Take good care of Sidney for me, Randy," it said. "She's going to need it."

And I rolled my eyes. On camera, on live television: a big, slow, theatrical, seventeen-year-old eye-roll, all the way up to the lighting grid and back down, the kind Randy used to give Stu when he said Last Dance was better than The Night He Came Home. Behind Camera One, Tatum made another sound, a different one, like swallowing a laugh and a scream at the same time.

Because I'd stood in a boiler room in front of Freddy Krueger and watched his whole act—the monologue, the talk show, the theater full of dead children. That was intimidation. That was a professional. This was a woman at a bus station with a thirty-nine-dollar toy from RadioShack, reading lines her son had already used.

"Please, Miss Loomis," I said. "You're just doing the reverse of what Mother's Boy did. Or Camp Blood. You're just as corny as Billy was when it comes to horror movies."

The line went dead—no wind, no bus, no breathing, two full seconds of the whole world on the other end stopped. Then the voice changer clicked off, and a woman's voice came out of the studio monitors. Her real voice, higher and older, tight and raw and shaking with something that had come up out of her too fast to stop: a woman who'd been holding all the cards for a week, standing at a pay phone in the cold, who'd just heard her own name said on television by the boy who killed her son.

"How dare you," she said. "How dare you say his name to me. You don't know anything about my son. You don't know anything about what he—"

She stopped. I heard her hear herself, through a phone line six blocks away—the moment she realized her own voice had just gone out over the air to three hundred households in Sonoma County, right after my mouth had already said her name. A sharp breath. A scrape. The receiver hitting something hard, the aluminum hood of the pay phone, maybe. Then the dial tone.

I stood in the red light for one breath. Two. Then I looked straight into Camera One and smiled the yearbook smile.

"And that, Woodsboro," I said, "is rule number one of being a horror movie villain. Never, ever call the guy who knows the rules." I pointed at the camera. "Remember: be prepared. You're never ready. Goodnight."

"God, what a fucking dumbass," I added, not knowing we were still live. "Did she really think she could get that worked up about Billy and not get caught?"

Only then did Martha push the T-bar, and the tally light went dark.

Tatum came around Camera One before the light was all the way off, her face the color of the studio's back wall.

"That was the voice," she said. "Randy. That was the voice. That was his voice. I heard it in September. On Sid's phone. I was standing right there, I heard every word, and that was—"

"It wasn't him," I said.

"It was the same—"

"It was the same voice changer. It wasn't him." I took the lav mic off my collar. My hands didn't shake; they couldn't afford to, not with Tatum looking at me like that. "Billy's dead, Tatum. I made sure."

"Then who—"

"Somebody who loved him."

Tatum stared at me, and I watched her run it the way I had—did they let his mother see him—and get there.

"Oh my God," Tatum whispered. "Oh my God. His mom." Then her eyes went huge. "Randy. You said her name. On TV. You said Miss Loomis, out loud, on live television, and she—"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because now everybody knows it," I said. "Dale knows it. Dewey's going to know it in about five minutes. Burke. Three hundred households. Whoever was taping it." I wound the mic cord around my hand. "She can't be anybody else now, Tatum. She can't move back to town in a year with a new haircut and a new name and a notebook, and be some nice lady reporter who wants to interview Sid. Not anymore. Everybody heard her voice."

Tatum stared at me. "How do you know she'd do that?"

"Because it's what I'd do," I said. "If I were writing the sequel."

Dale came out of the booth with the station phone in his hand. His ponytail had come half out of its rubber band, and he wasn't grinning anymore. "I'm calling the sheriff," he said. "That's not a crank. I've had cranks for eleven years. Guys who play kazoos. Guys who read the phone book. That's not a crank, man." He looked at me. "She threatened somebody. On my air." He paused. "And you named her. On my air. Man, if you're wrong about that, that's a lawsuit."

"I'm not wrong," I said.

Dale looked at me, then at the monitor, where the tape of the show still sat in the deck with her voice on it. Her real one. "No," he said slowly. "No, I don't think you are."

"Ask for Deputy Riley," I said. "Tell him it came from the pay phone outside the Greyhound station on Fourth. Tell him the last bus out tonight is the eleven-ten to Sacramento."

Dale stared at me. "How do you know that?"

"The PA," I said. "In the background. Listen to the tape. And she's been calling my friend Sidney from the same pay phone."

He went and listened to the tape, and then he made the call.

Martha came out of the booth last, still in the too-big headset, which had slid down over one ear. Without a word she walked straight across the studio, put her arms around my middle, and held on hard with her face in my Bradley Video T-shirt, the way she had on the lawn in September.

"It's okay," I said into her hair.

"It's not," said my sister, muffled. "I'm thirteen. I'm not stupid."

"No," I said. "You're not." I held on to her. "Okay. It's not okay. But I'm going to make sure you're okay, whatever I have to do."

Tatum drove us home. Martha fell asleep in the back seat in the too-big headset, which she'd refused to give back, holding my hand between the seats.

Dewey had called Dale back while we packed up. A car was already on its way to Fourth Street, another to the bus station, and Burke was being woken up. By the time they got there, I knew, there'd be nobody at the pay phone, nobody on the eleven-ten to Sacramento who looked like anybody, and a receiver with no fingerprints, because she was careful. In canon she'd be careful for two more years. She'd be careful now.

Tatum didn't say anything for six blocks. Then, at the stoplight at Main and Fourth, she looked left down Fourth Street toward the Greyhound station two blocks away. A sheriff's cruiser was parked in front of it, lights going, red and blue against the bus station windows, a deputy on the sidewalk with a flashlight. And at the pay phone, under its little aluminum hood beneath the streetlight, the receiver was hanging off the hook, swinging slowly back and forth on its silver cord the way they do when somebody's just let go and walked away.

"Randy," Tatum said.

"I know."

"You said teach me. Sid said. On Sunday. And I said I was in."

"I know."

"I'm still in," said Tatum Riley, staring at the swinging receiver with her hands white on the steering wheel. "I want you to know that. I'm more in."

"I know," I said.

The light turned green. She drove us home very carefully, under the speed limit the whole way, checking her mirrors every few seconds the way Dewey did now—the way I did.

She pulled into our driveway at 11:40 and didn't turn off the engine.

I carried Martha in, dead asleep, all elbows and headset. My mother met me at the top of the stairs in her robe, took one look at my face, didn't ask anything, and opened Martha's door and pulled back the covers. When I went back out the front door to say goodnight, I expected the Cherokee to be gone. It wasn't. It sat in the driveway with the engine running, headlights off, dome light off, Tatum still behind the wheel with both hands on it, looking straight ahead at our garage door.

I went around and got in the passenger side. Neither of us said anything. The heater ticked. The radio was on very low, some San Francisco station playing slow songs for people driving home late, and somewhere in the dark a sprinkler came on.

"Everything's changing," Tatum said finally, to the garage door.

"Yeah."

"Like, everything." She still had both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like in driver's ed. "Sid's going to Ohio. She says thinking about, but she's going. I know her. And Dewey's got Gale. Gale Weathers, Randy. She's at our house every night. She uses my conditioner." Her voice wobbled, and she caught it. "And my mom works doubles now, since September, because she can't sleep, and the school's got metal detectors, and Billy's dead, and Stu's dead, and apparently Billy's mom is calling Sid from a pay phone doing the voice—"

She stopped and took a breath. "And then there's you."

"Me?"

"You." She finally turned and looked at me in the dark. "You used to be the dumbest boy I knew. You know that? You were the guy who threw up on Billy's shoes at the eighth-grade dance. You were the guy who couldn't open a Snapple. You talked about horror movies for six hours straight and nobody listened and you didn't care. You were the most—" She hunted for the word. "Normal. You were the most normal thing in my whole life. You were just Randy. You were always just there."

"I'm still here."

"I know you are." A short, shaky laugh. "That's the thing. Everything else is going somewhere. And you're still here. You're weirder, you've got muscles, you run at five in the morning and you eat raw liver and you talk to psycho moms on live TV like they're a bad movie, but you're..." She stopped again. "When I'm with you and Sid, it's like September didn't win. You know? Like there's still one normal thing left. Two. Sid, and you." She looked at the steering wheel. "I keep grabbing on. I know I do. Squeezing your arm in the movie. Showing up with donuts. I know I've been weird about it. I just—" Her voice went small. "I don't want to let go of the last normal thing."

I didn't trust anything I had to say.

She let go of the steering wheel and sat back. After a second, very carefully, like she was testing whether ice would hold her, she leaned across the gearshift and put her head on my shoulder. The good one. Her hair smelled like the studio, hot lights and dust, and under that the strawberry shampoo Randy's memory told me she'd used since sixth grade. I could feel her breathing, and her heart going fast against my arm.

I didn't move. I didn't know what to do with my hands. I was very aware, in a way I hadn't been at the Rialto or Denny's or on the seawall at Ocean Beach, that Tatum Riley was a girl, leaning on me in the dark in a car with the engine running, and that my ears had gone hot, and that I had no idea—none—what any part of me thought about it. The parts weren't separate anymore. They didn't take turns. They all just sat there together in Randy's body with Tatum's head on our shoulder, completely lost.

"You're blushing," she said into my jacket. "I can feel it. Your ear is hot."

"It's the heater."

"My heater's been broken for a week."

She lifted her head and looked at me, closer than she ever had in either set of memories. Her eyes were wet and red at the edges, from the studio lights and from crying at the light on Fourth Street, which she'd done silently and I'd pretended not to see, and her face was doing something I'd never seen it do—very quiet, nothing teasing in it, like somebody standing at the edge of a pool deciding how cold the water was.

Neither of us moved. Then the porch light came on, bright and yellow and sudden, flooding the front yard and the driveway and the inside of the Cherokee like a searchlight in a prison movie, and we both jerked back so fast Tatum hit her head on the driver's side window.

"Ow," Tatum said. "Ow. Oh my God."

In the front window of the house the curtain moved, just a little, like somebody who'd just flipped a light switch was standing behind it in a robe, not watching, definitely not watching.

Tatum stared at the window, then at me. Then she put both hands over her face and started to laugh, helpless and silent, her whole body shaking in the yellow porch light, her forehead on the steering wheel.

"Your mom," she wheezed. "Your mom is the porch light."

"My mom," I agreed, "is the porch light."

It took her a long time to stop. When she did, she sat back, wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, and looked at me sideways, and something had settled in her face. She looked lighter, like she'd put something down.

"This didn't happen," she said.

"Nothing happened."

"Exactly." She pointed at me. "Nothing happened. And you're not going to tell Sid. And you're definitely not going to tell Ohio. If anybody tells Ohio, it's going to be me."

"Tatum—"

"I'm serious." She reached over and squeezed my upper arm once, hard, the way she had in the movie theater. "Five a.m. Don't be late. Executive producer's orders." She looked at me one more second in the porch light. "Goodnight, Randy."

"Goodnight, Tate."

Randy had called her that when they were ten, and nobody had called her Tate in years. Her face did something small when she heard it. She didn't say anything. She put the Cherokee in reverse, and I stood in the driveway in the yellow light and watched her taillights go down the street, slow, under the speed limit, mirrors checked, until they turned the corner and were gone.

Inside, the living room was empty. My mother's bedroom door at the top of the stairs was closed with a line of light under it, and from behind it, very faintly, I could hear her laughing.

I sat in the dark kitchen, opened the unicorn notebook to the page after WHAT WORKS ON WHAT, and looked at the scratched-out name. Then I wrote it again underneath, clearly, in block capitals, MRS. LOOMIS, and didn't scratch it out this time.

Then, because the kid had made me promise, and because it was eleven-thirty on a Thursday and she was the only person in the world I could say it to, I called Ohio and woke Kristen up. She said "Mmf, Randy?" in a voice thick with ordinary sleep, and I said, "Sorry. Go back to sleep. I just wanted to hear somebody say my name." She said "Randy," very softly, and then "there," and hung up on me and went back to sleep, which, honestly, fair.

Five days. Then they'd all be here.

I went upstairs, checked the window locks, checked them again, and lay down under the pumpkin poster with the hamsters rustling on the dresser. Cham-P had pressed himself against the bars on the side nearest my bed, as close as the cage would let him get. Maga-Z was out of the cage again, somewhere in the dark of my room, and I decided to find that comforting.