The Fading Read online

  ‘No, Noel, he didn’t. I’m sorry. I know you asked him months ago, but he’s busy and he forgot. Your dad forgets a lot of things these days. I stopped by the store yesterday and I stole it, okay? Now, please, have a good day.’

  She thrust the ball into his limp arms and leaned over to kiss his cheek. She smelled like cherry cough drops. He secured the Nerf in his backpack.

  ‘Thanks, Mom.’

  ‘Noel?’

  ‘Huh?’

  She pinched his chin, steering his eyes to hers. ‘Don’t lose it.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  The day only got better. During math, he ran through fractions with what felt like magical ease. He scored nineteen out of twenty on his spelling pre-test. And then filing down the hall alphabetically toward the cafeteria he could smell his favorite hot lunch being served before he turned the corner. Baked cheese and tomato soup and probably green beans, which meant, all in all, life was pretty good for a Tuesday in April.

  Concealing the Nerf in his backpack, he sat with Ryan Argento and Trevor Malcolm during lunch. He wasn’t close with either boy, but Ryan had invited him over to play Intellivision on Christmas break, once, and Trevor sometimes rode his bike through Noel’s neighborhood, so it didn’t feel like a weird choice.

  Ryan pressed his steel-framed glasses against his nose and studied Noel. ‘What’s in the bag, Shaker?’

  ‘Hm? Nothin’.’

  ‘Then why you carrying your pack in the lunch room, dingus?’ Trevor said.

  Noel shrugged. They waited, staring at him. He unzipped his pack and aimed the mouth so they could see inside.

  ‘Issat a Nerf? Sweet!’ Ryan was already diving for it, but Noel swatted his hand.

  ‘Outside,’ he said.

  Trevor was staring at Noel like he was crazy. ‘Whatta we been sittin’ here for? Come on, man! Let’s chuck that thing.’

  They bolted from their chairs and Noel felt out of control as he trailed onto the playground. ‘Just us, okay? Seriously, guys.’

  They found a corner in the gravel soccer lot, away from the higher trafficked asphalt sections of the playground, and unwrapped the prize. They took turns squeezing it, massaging it, mashing it between their palms and slapping the belly of it, as if it needed to be brought to life before it could take flight. Noel found himself grinning at their excitement, their unusual envy of him. He waved Trevor back a few paces and graciously tossed the Nerf, a good portion of his trust departing with it.

  Trevor caught the ball, admired the packed feel of it, then dropped back a few steps and fired to Ryan. Ryan broke toward an imaginary end zone and snagged it on the run. Pivoting, he completed the circuit back to Noel, who stumbled but caught the ball low, fingers inches from the pea gravel. The triangle stretched as the ball yearned for more distance and their arms warmed with new blood. Soon their chatter subsided and it was just the soothing quiet of the deep red and black blur arcing through a forty-five-degree day under silver clouds, their breath free in their chests, legs alive, snouts happily panting between the punctuation of the deep smack landings. The spirals tightened. Their feet grew wings. Noel forgot about the rest of his life. He forgot about himself. He forgot he was even at school. A kind of love for these two almost-friends swelled inside him and sprang free in the form of laughter, hoots, applause when they made a good catch.

  Maybe things would be different from now on.

  They could have gone on this way for hours, each boy piecing together a highlight reel in his imagination, but within minutes a group of eight or nine other kids, led by Dean Boettcher, who was officially king shit of their rivals, Mrs Baird’s fourth grade class, began to circle like buzzards. You could only ignore them for so long. A request to share or just hand it over was imminent.

  Throwing the ball to Dean would probably result in Dean and his band of studs taking control of it until the bell rang. Refusing Dean outright, without a counteroffer, would most likely result in a brawl or total chaos in the form of an impromptu and mean-spirited session of smear the queer. The only sane choice was to beat Dean to the punch and suggest a fair game with some kind of rules. Maybe Noel would get to be a captain. It was, after all, his ball. Shouldn’t he be able to dictate the terms?

  Except, something had already been ruined. Noel didn’t want to share his ball with sixteen other kids, half of whom probably didn’t even know his name. He especially didn’t want Dean Boettcher mugging and throwing nasty blocks at the rest of them. Dean was loud and felt the need to touch everybody, always slapping and shoving and bear-hugging kids he barely even knew. And, despite owning four or five of those trendy corduroy ballcaps with the patches from the top ski resorts like Aspen and Vail and Steamboat, and a brand new Redline that Noel had seen in BMX Plus! for $350, Dean strutted around school as if he deserved a piece of every other kid’s business. He didn’t beat kids up, just made them miserable enough to give it up. Dean was not so much a bully as a barger. He barged in on whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. And no one could be bothered to stop him.

  The buzzards had stopped circling and now were standing hunched in a half-circle, wings folded at their sides, sniffing and hopping closer to Noel and his friends. For a moment Noel wished his mom hadn’t given him the Nerf at all. Or stolen it, if that’s what she had really done. Maybe the stupid thing was cursed.

  For the first time he could remember, Noel wished that the thing that sometimes happened to him would happen right now. He wanted to be beamed away, to anyplace but here. But of course that would be disastrous. If it happened in front of his friends or the playground monitor, there would be holy hell to explain and he would forever be marked as a freak. The discovery of his secret would set off a chain of torturous events. Teachers would get back to his mom. He would be forced to leave school. He would be taken away … somewhere, where they put deformed mental cases like him.

  Noel didn’t understand a lot about the thing that visited him once in a while, but he knew it wasn’t normal. He wasn’t normal. Kinda how Jesse Lubbens wasn’t normal. Last year in third grade, Noel’s class had been outside playing kickball for PE, and Jesse Lubbens was up at bat. When the fat red ball came bouncing to the plate, Jesse kicked it real good, over the second baseman’s head (because, as Tod Shrine said afterwards, retards have superhuman strength and Jesse Lubbens’s musta been confined to her leg) and into the outfield. She ran three-quarters of the way to first base and then froze, her whole body stiffening. She began dancing in a tight circle, skittering off the baseline until her eyes rolled back and spit dripped all over her Esprit sweatshirt and Coach Kanasaki had to stop the game to take her to the nurse’s office.

  Jesse came back to school about nine days later and at first she seemed fixed. But only three periods in, during US History, she smacked her hands on her desk and bucked out of her chair and pitched another fit on the carpet. Some of the other girls screamed. Two of the boys laughed. Jesse’s pink jeans took on a dark stain around the crotch as her heels beat against the carpet. Principal Lawrence Morgan, who let the kids call him Lare-Mo, came running in with a handful of wooden sticks.

  That had been the last of Jesse Lubbens any of them saw at Crest View Elementary. Rumor was, she had been sent away to a special farm in Florida where everybody sat outside in the grass, weaving straw hats and drinking grape juice.

  Noel wanted to get away, but not like Jesse Lubbens got away.

  ‘Hey, anus-face, I said whose ball is that?’ Dean Boettcher said to Trevor, his eyes gliding over to Noel as if he knew the answer and wanted to screw with them first.

  ‘Shaker’s,’ Trevor said, tossing a duck to the owner, eager to be rid of it.

  Trevor’s pass bounced off Noel’s knuckles and bobbled at his feet. He smirked, chased it a few steps and scooped it up. He glanced at Ryan and saw neither fear nor support in his eyes. Ryan had entered a zone of detached curiosity. What are you going to do, Noel? You got us into this, how are you going to get us out?

  Noel sighed
and turned to face Dean and the other boys, all ten or twelve of them. Dean clapped his hands loudly and put them up, smiling. Over here, he didn’t need to say. Throw that ball to me now.

  Noel did not throw the ball.

  Dean clapped his hands again, harder, and now he was no longer smiling.

  ‘Can’t,’ Noel said softly.

  Dean snorted in disbelief. ‘Why not?’

  Noel shrugged.

  ‘Throw me the damn ball, Shaker.’

  Noel shook his head once each way.

  One of Dean’s buddies, an apple-faced boy named Avery who had gained his bully status primarily through the consumption of donuts and who wore a Boy Scout shirt stretched so tight his shirt buttons could be heard pleading for their lives, whistled in an amused tone that forgot to bring sarcasm with it.

  Dean scowled at Avery. ‘Shut your face, tuba boy.’ He turned back to Noel. ‘What’s the freakin’ problem?’

  Noel pushed a hill of pea gravel with his sneaker, graded it flat. ‘Nah.’

  Dean took a few steps and some of his friends took their cue to close ranks. ‘What? You afraid I’m going to steal it?’

  ‘Not really,’ Noel said, and this was true. He wasn’t afraid of anything right now. He simply didn’t want to share, or even be here. He felt empty, hollow, lost.

  Dean moved a few steps closer. ‘It’s a football, you dumbshit. What’d you bring it out here for if you don’t want to play? Come on, let’s get a game going. Eight on eight. Five on five. Whatever, let’s just scrimmage.’

  Noel felt himself caving in. He looked up from the ball and his mouth opened to say fine, but no words came out. His breathing stopped. He was staring past Dean, between the impatient shoulders of the other boys, whose faces had become mere blurs as the thing far behind them came into sharp focus.

  Someone was standing on the other side of the fence on the west side of the playground, about a hundred feet away. It wasn’t a boy. It was a man, but not a grown man, and maybe not even a real man, just a strange short person in black pants and a black jacket that were like the suits Noel’s dad sometimes wore to funerals or the store Christmas party. But this suit was shabbier, the shoulders rumpled and loose, as if the jacket had been made to fit someone twice the size. On either side of the blurry face, its fingers were laced through the chain link.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Dean Boettcher’s voice was a distant jumble, of no concern to Noel. ‘Do you guys want to play ball or not?’

  ‘Up to him,’ Ryan or Trevor answered.

  Behind them, the figure shook the chain link separating them and while no one turned to see what all the fuss was about, Noel could hear the ring and rattle of it as if it were happening inside a pair of stereo headphones.

  Dimples. Or what Dimples has become this time.

  No, not here, please. Anywhere but here.

  The figure seemed to read his fear, and he seemed to like it. Dimples magnified by ten, telescoping back to Noel with flat white eyes the color of chalk set deep within their sockets, sunken as if there were no brain inside the head. The cheeks once painted white and rosy were now the dirty no-color of chewed gum. Noel could see teeth inside the thin but widening lips, and they were not fangs or made of metal like that scary guy in the James Bond movies – just the opposite. They were tiny and flat and there seemed to be about seventy of them. Noel’s legs felt like they were made of butter and soon he would melt, but that would be bad, because what he needed to do right now was run.

  The grinning thing in the suit raised his hands higher, too high on arms that seemed to stretch like desperate inch worms, and gripped the top of the fence. With one slight bend it bounced up, hovering high before tucking its knees to its chest and landing on the other side, inside with them. Arms coiled back to normal size, hands smoothing the jacket, it began to walk toward them.

  Less than a minute before, Noel was still willing to believe that maybe he was just overreacting, that maybe this was a stranger, a parent or some creep interested in the events that had been unfolding on the playground. But there could be no doubt now. He hadn’t come to Noel in over a year, and now he was changing again. This Dimples looked stronger than he had summer before last, when Noel had been riding his bike on the path by the 19th Street park.

  His feet had been hot and sweaty from pedaling across town on what was a ninety-some-degree day, so he stopped to soak his feet in Farmer’s Ditch. He had dumped his bike on the bank, rolled up his jean cuffs, and let the cold water rise to his calves. He’d been sitting there with his eyes closed for a few minutes, enjoying the smooth stones under his arches, and when he opened his eyes again his feet weren’t in the water. He could still feel the cold flowing around his skin, but his legs were gone. His pants were gone. He was gone.

  And Dimples was sitting on the opposite bank, about twenty feet to Noel’s right, soaking his feet too, his suit pants rolled up to his knees. Dimples’s legs were covered with dark fur, and through the water’s refracted light his feet looked cut short, more horse hooves than the human kind with ten toes. That was the first time Dimples appeared without any of his clown costume, and his plain white face softening in the heat like oven cheese. Noel felt sick, and as if ashamed Dimples looked away from him. He stood and began to walk away, his ankles hidden beneath coarse wet hair, his feet blending into the ground as he moved down the grassy bank of Farmer’s Ditch toward the big slope of 19th Street, where he turned onto the sidewalk and disappeared up the hill.

  ‘Noel? Noel? Hey, are you okay, man?’ Trevor was saying.

  Noel came back to them, remembered where he was and what was about to happen. It was seconds away, he was sure.

  Think of something, his mind cried. Get out of here now! It’s going to ruin everything! They can’t see you, they can’t see it happen!

  The thing that used to be Dimples was less than fifty feet away now. Walking faster, pulling at the folds of his jacket, yanking the cloth straight as his eyes got larger and larger. Its stumpy black dress shoes were shiny against the gravel but made no sound and left no divots in the gravel.

  Don’t lose it.

  That’s what his mom had said when she handed him the ball this morning. And that was his answer now. He knew what to do.

  The thing that used to be Dimples was perhaps twenty feet away.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he barked at all of them. ‘We’ll play a game of five hundred. But we’re going to play it one time and one throw only. I’m gonna chuck it, and the one who catches this ball gets to keep it. Now line up!’

  At least half of them did not believe him and just stood there, scowling. But when Noel trotted back a few paces, the other half of them guessed he was serious enough and took off running right at Dimples, who stopped, shifted right, then left, confused in the flurry of running boys. But by then Noel wasn’t watching them, he was running, looping out of the pocket.

  He ran backwards, almost daring the sad face to come after him. When he could wait no more, he came to a gravel-plowing halt, found the puffy laces, cocked his arm, and with every fiber of muscle he could summon launched the ball into the sky. Every single boy, the ones who were playing and the ones who were just bored, the ones who wanted so badly to be the new owner of this new Nerf football and the ones who just wanted to stand back and watch as the fight broke out, turned their faces to watch the Nerf fly at a forty-five-degree angle. It was a prize now, not just a game, and Noel was no longer a part of it.

  He was free.

  The Nerf sailed high and true, shrinking to a pill as it traced a fine arc some fifty yards downfield. If Coach K had been there to see it, he would have placed a phone call to his friend Bud Jarvis over at Centennial Middle and told him he had a prodigy quarterback coming his way in two years.

  The ball was still spiraling tightly when Noel turned his back on them and ran in the opposite direction, toward the bike racks near the front of the school. He ran as hard and as fast as he could. His lungs throbbed and his
thighs burned. He dared not look back, because whatever happened next he did not want to know. He ran and ran, the only sounds his chuffing breath and the intermittent crunch of his feet in the gravel. He counted five and then five more huge strides before chancing a look down. Below his scissoring vanished legs the gravel continued to crunch and spread in clean little pots, but the boy who reshaped the ground as he ran was no longer here.

  Far behind him came the shouts and cries of boys clamoring for a ball. And somewhere between where they played and where Noel Shaker was headed, from something much older than all of them, something ageless and corrupt, came the howl of a jackal with an empty belly.

  7

  He slowed in the teachers’ parking lot as a cramp (probably from the extra baked cheese sandwich) turned vicious under his ribs. Looking back to make sure no one was following him (and, really, how could they? but he had to look anyway), he slipped between a blue Mustang and a battered white Jeep with a black cloth top. He crouched, peering through car windows to make sure the oddly changing version of Dimples hadn’t tracked him. So far the coast was clear, but he couldn’t stay here for ever. He needed a plan, but it was hard to plan anything when you didn’t know when and where you would blink back into existence.

  Most of the other episodes had ranged from thirty seconds to ten minutes. But it was hard to be sure, because the time he spent missing was so distorted by fear and confusion that each minute felt like an hour. Noel wished he had kept notes. There was no schedule he could follow, but on the whole they seemed to be lasting longer. Maybe the older he got, the longer they would last.

  If that were true, this one might last anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. He thought again of the multiplication tables he had learned this year, the way small numbers bounced off each other and grew fright-eningly fast into big numbers. What if his problem was like that? Twenty seconds tripling into a minute, three minutes, nine, nine times nine was eighty-one minutes, and some day maybe eighty-one minutes times eighty-one minutes … but he didn’t want to carry the math that far right now. He didn’t want to think about how one of these times it might never let him go.