Joan laughed, then worried for a moment that Richard was being serious. But he laughed too. “I have a really good sense of smell,” she said, “and when I was a kid I thought I could smell ghosts.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah. I can tell that Uncle Murray is definitely a ghost in this room.”
“What does he smell like?”
“He smells like creepy old man. Like crusty underwear and soup.”
“Ugh,” Richard said.
Joan crouched to look at the spines of some books that looked familiar. She realized she was standing in front of the young adult shelves, which included about a hundred Nancy Drew novels. It felt weird telling Richard, a boy she would never talk to at high school in a million years, how she thought she could smell ghosts. It wasn’t anything she’d told anybody else, not even her parents. Suddenly, she had a panic that when she started sophomore year Richard would always be by her side, trying to talk to her, or something.
“So this is what you’re going to do for your summer? Sit in a smelly room and read books?” she said.
“Sure,” Richard said, unfazed by what she thought was a pretty condescending tone.
“Okay, well,” she said, about to tell him she was going to go back to her room to watch television, but she spotted a cluster of books written by Joan Aiken. “Look, Joan,” she said.
He looked where she was crouched, and said, “Joan Aiken. Did you read Wolves of Willoughby Chase?”
“It’s right here,” Joan said. “No, I haven’t. Any good?”
“Not bad.”
Joan stood up, leaving the book on the shelf. She really did think she needed to go, even though the thought of going back to her room, where her sister would probably be reading or journaling or something, was not that appealing.
“So you’d help me get revenge on your cousin, right, if I wanted to?” she said.
Richard pushed his lips together, as though considering it. “Sure,” he finally said. “If I had the guts, I’d murder him, then he wouldn’t be anyone’s problem.”
Joan laughed, and said, “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Are you serious?”
“No, but I’ve thought a lot about it. I only wouldn’t do it because I’d probably get caught and have to spend my life in prison.”
“So how would you do it?”
“How would I murder him? I’ve given this a lot of thought, actually. He’s from New Jersey, so if I had to murder him there, I’d probably just hire some Mafia people to bump him off.”
“You’d need a lot of money for that, probably.”
“Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. I guess I could murder him here. He’s actually a really terrible swimmer. I mean, he can swim and all, but he always looks like he’s struggling to just stay afloat.”
“Drowning him. I like it.”
“He’s always looking for alcohol, so I’d give him a bottle of whiskey or something, and then push him in the pool when he was too drunk to swim.”
“That could work,” Joan said, moving to look at a separate shelf of books. There was a large Stephen King selection at eye level and she spotted the empty spot where the book Richard was reading had probably been.
“Nah,” Richard said. “There’s too many things that could go wrong. He’d have to be pretty drunk to not be able to climb out from the deep end. There’s a ladder there.”
“You could keep pushing him back into the pool with that long . . . whatever it’s called, the net they use to skim the pool.”
“It might leave evidence,” Richard said. “It would cut open his head or something and then they would know that it wasn’t an accidental drowning. When you kill someone it has to look like an accident, or it has to look like someone else killed them, otherwise it’s no good.”
Joan touched the spine of a book called It. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“About killing my cousin? Yeah, I have.”
She laughed. “Would you really kill him if you could get away with it?”
“Sure,” he said.
Joan looked at him. He was wearing the cargo shorts he always wore and a striped polo shirt that was a little too tight on him. Probably a shirt his mom had bought for him in middle school. His book was still open on his lap, and he was holding a finger at the place where he’d stopped reading. He looked back at her, his expression unchanging. She thought his face was like a blade, with his thin, bony nose. He had some hair on his upper lip, and she wondered if he was hoping to grow a mustache or if he just hadn’t bothered to learn how to shave yet.
“You really would kill him?” Joan said, again. For whatever reason, probably because the expression on his face never changed, she didn’t really know if he was being serious.
“I’d kill a lot of people if I could get away with it. My cousin Duane, for sure. I’d kill Garrett Blake, and my stepfather. I’d kill lots of people if I could go back in time. Hitler. Richard Nixon.”
“What did Garrett Blake ever do to you?”
“What, you like Garrett?”
“No,” Joan said. “Not really. As much as you, probably. I just think of Garrett as someone you don’t even think about, not someone that you want to kill.”
“Garrett was probably my best friend from second grade to fifth grade, and then he stopped hanging around with me when they started calling me Old Spice.”
“Oh,” Joan said. “Just so you know I never called you that.”
“I don’t care,” Richard said. “All the kids called me that, I guess. It’s just that Garrett was pretty spineless about it. He didn’t even want to be seen with me.”
“So what about Tommy Fusco? You wouldn’t want to kill him?” Tommy had been the biggest bully, by far, at Middleham, the type of kid who made the Richards of the world miserable.
“I might kill Tommy if I had the perfect opportunity, like if it just fell in my lap or something. I mean, he’s a pretty repulsive person, but I just don’t give him that much thought. He’s a bully, but he’s actually not that good at it. I mean, he’s not smart enough to know how to really hurt people.”
Joan thought about that. “Yeah, you’re probably right. So who’s a smart bully, then?”
“Your friend Madison.”
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you just said that. She’s my best friend, you know.”
“You asked me who a smart bully was, and I thought of her. Remember what she did to Wendy Cook in eighth grade.”
“Wendy tried to steal Madison’s boyfriend,” Joan said.
“Oh, maybe. I don’t know all the details. I just remember that Madison pretty much destroyed her.”
That was how Joan remembered it too. Madison had decided to ruin Wendy Cook’s life, and then she’d done it by spreading rumors and by convincing other eighth graders to not speak to her. It had been a full-fledged campaign. Joan had done her part, mostly because Madison asked her to, and when Wendy had been pulled from school （the rumor was she tried to kill herself） Joan remembered her parents sitting her down, asking her all about it. She’d lied and told them she felt terrible for Wendy.