So he sketched a devil’s head, its mouth open as though to devour; it was a version of one of the monsters from Seth’s numbers booth. Seth had littered the booths with repeating motifs—“People are idiots, they never see anything,” he’d explained—and the impulse to overdo it seemed like a good one. Sometimes you have to hit people over the head with your visions to get them to notice anything.
But when the shape was complete, he wanted something more: to leave his mark, to really put the fear of God into whatever dumb fish Evelyn Gates had wriggling on her hook. So he dragged the chalk in a straight line down from the devil head’s chin, angling it deftly so that no eye could miss it. A head on a stake. Alligators in the moat. A torch that burns not in welcome but in warning.
He then wrote the following:
SICK SATAN SENTRAL FAITHFUL 4EVER! BY THIS
SIGHN CONQUER BY THESE LIGHTS COME TO
SEE
and painted, underneath, sidelong-gazing googly eyes that mirrored the ones overhead on the store’s sign. The echo of the unseen, the exacting feel for detail: he kept it all in there, even working at speed. A risky choice for a simple embellishment, which is how you know Derrick was the one who made it. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. You hear it all your life. When the hour comes to remember old sayings, you learn a little about how they’ve managed to grow old without dying out.
INSTEAD THERE WAS THIS TUFTED ROCK
The strip of developed land in the shadow of the freeway wasn’t a total eyesore—it had served a purpose, once—but it stood out, and Anthony Hawley’s porn store had made that worse. People noticed. Of course, there were a few who, privately, were glad to find a place like it that didn’t require them to drive all the way into San Jose. But most people quietly hoped it would go away. On its best days, it looked ratty.
The police fielded several calls that day about the broken glass and the animal bones. These were recorded as “reports of vandalism,” but none of them were from the owner of the property, and no vehicle was dispatched to investigate. Secondhand reports of vandalism are data points, not priorities.
The store itself, the old building that had been many things over the years, waited uncertainly for the people who would come, that evening, to help it cross into the next phase of its long existence.
7.
GLOSS MYSTERY
Angela and Seth spotted each other in the halls at school the next day; they nodded and exchanged greetings, but quickly moved along on their own errands. Secrets require care and nurturing; they die when they hit the air.
Seth was accustomed to adrenaline letdowns. Staying up all night, held firmly in the pincers of some momentary obsession, was almost routine for him: in his bedroom, alone, he often watched the sunrise creep in under the shades, wondering how long he’d already been awake. His sleeping medication’s window of effectiveness was about an hour. If he toughed it out past that hour all bets were off.
Angela, on the other hand, was sorting through the events of last night carefully in her mind, working overtime to compartmentalize them: everybody does crazy things in senior year. Her friends talked about it all the time; it was something they’d all noticed together during their first few weeks back after summer break. There was something in the chemistry among the incoming senior class that felt unmistakably new. Anything seniors did together felt like some ratings-grab cliffhanger from the season finale of a TV show—not just the big moments, but the small things: going out for ice cream; standing in the lunch line together; showing up at a pep rally. Everything took on some pathos. Even the most practically minded seniors—Angela counted herself one—had started letting their hair down in case they never got the chance to do it again.
Had she been Alex, rationalizing her part in the rededication of Monster Adult X might have proved a more difficult task. Alex was attuned to the frequencies of life-changing moments. He’d heard that high tone droning all night, and felt the current traveling between himself and the others, an unmistakable circuit. He recognized its vibration. Angela felt it, too—the first twelve bottles of amyl nitrite she’d arranged into a cairn on the counter hadn’t felt like much, but after stacking six more brightly colored pyramids atop the glass display case, all separated by brand and tiered into a color spectrum from dark to light, she began to feel personal investment in the work; the shape she and her friends had begun imposing on the interior of the store felt like a personal expression, something privately satisfying, a confidential matter. In front of the seven pyramids, she’d placed a jumbled arrangement of letters cut from VHS sleeves to spell out MYSTERY? She especially liked the question mark. It made you stop a little longer, but even then, after you’d given it a whole extra minute, it didn’t give anything extra back. Before leaving, she made a point to regard the counter carefully: a mental snapshot of something for which no evidence was expected to survive.