We Mistakenly Think It Keeps Growing

#

Freddie goes missing overnight on a Sunday. That week is a blur of search parties and candlelight vigils, porch lights on in such abundance that the nights are as bright as day. We rake the cornfields in regiments of two dozen, flattening the farmland. Deputies Mullen and Mullen ask us questions about the people in Freddie’s life. Did he spend time around adults with hungry smiles? Did he have many friends?

“Just us,” we tell him. Freddie stolen in Comfort’s easy night, casual as a peach from a produce corral. “There’s only us.”

#

We’re the boys of Comfort County. We love tire swings and ten-speed Huffies. We stay out past eight o’clock on long summer evenings, hoarding the dusk, knowing exactly how the light loves us. The six of us represented one-third of Miss Kriebell’s fifth-grade class the year she grouped us together for a landscaping contest, and we won with a rock garden and twelve fringes of bleeding hearts. Fairvale Elementary’s frontage still boasts our efforts, which teems fuchsia with poison every spring. The flowers grew in red this year, though.

We’re older, now. Stronger. We’re mostly out of our braces, and when we walk together in town, folks pause to watch us. We are romantic in a way that Comfort aches for—something of the city, we think, like boys who look stylish in big sunglasses or Prom Kings strolling in step. We are a way out in some small, derivative way.

We watch movies at the twins’ house, sitting too close together. Humid Thursday. Our shins stick together when we shift. Mrs. Kingsley listens to the radio in the kitchen as Knox yells, “Run!” at the television. “Fuck’s sake. She’s dead now. They never run!”

“They’re scared,” Hassan signs. “Their legs are jelly.”

“Their brains are jelly,” says Knox.

“I couldn’t do it,” says Sam Kingsley. “Run, I mean.”

Sam has a way of winding Knox down. Knox sighs, sucking on the end of an unlit cigarette. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t die there, too.”

Mrs. Kinsgley is a vivid, attractive, look-at-me woman. When she steps in front of the TV, we mute it. On the kitchen counter, the radio is frizzing on words like missing and murder that we only hear now that Marion Crane has stopped screaming.

“They found something,” Mrs. Kingsley whispers. “They think it’s him.”

#

We bike to Palos Lake in time to see the police fish the body upright. Porcelain Someone, hair trimmed down to the tenth inch, but still a whisper of blond. Sam cries out when he sees, and the sound splits the summer because the rest of us are silent. “Boys, get back,” John Mullen says, waist-deep in his waders, and we retreat because there’s nothing of Freddie left for us here. Someone stole the dormant man in him, his love of ladybugs, 16.6 percent of us. The sixteen, we’ll never be together.

Freddie was the best of us. We have to reevaluate who we are without him. Michael catches Knox before he faints, but just barely, and for a long time, we are too tired to carry him back home.

#

“They’re wicked,” whispers Deputy Rick Mullen, when he thinks we can’t hear him. “Kids, but wicked.”

It makes Noah smirk from the front desk, where Clara, the dispatcher, is sneaking him sips from her hip flask while she profiles him. Kingsley, she writes, Noah Thomas. Age: 14. Hair: Black. She puzzles over the color of his eyes before penning Gray on the line, a rarity that gives us an edge, which we use like a scalpel. Noah flickers his eyes like new nickels whenever we want something. Today is the Friday after the funeral, and we are raging for answers, so we ask Clara if she will take our mugshots.

“I’ll find some film,” she says, disappearing into the back room. The door taps shut behind her.

We slip off our chairs and spread out through the station. “Obituaries, photos, police reports,” says Noah, fanning a stack of files across the desk. “Quick. Anything you can find.”

A boy in Pocket went missing two days ago. No one will talk to us about it, but the Pocket PD has been in and out of Comfort ever since, taking notes over diner breakfasts of coffee and cherry pie.

Hassan raps the desk twice to get our attention. Underneath our profiles—Name: McMannus, Hassan; Height: Room to grow—he has found a newspaper clipping from the Pocket Pioneer.

The missing boy’s name is Maxwell Munn. He is luminously blond, like Freddie and Knox, has grinning eyes, a gap between his front teeth. Pocket-charming, we decide. A certain crude charisma about him, small-town but substantiating. If he lived in Comfort, we’d let him be our friend.

“It’s light hair, then,” says Noah.

Knox’s pale bangs quiver as he laughs. “You don’t know shit. You’re no safer than I am.”

“Least I’m not next.”

Hassan sees shadows under the door and flicks two fingers outward on each hand: hurry. We rush the folders back into stacks. Noah folds the article three times and slips it up one sleeve. We’re in our seats again by the time John and Rick open the door.

“Sorry, boys,” says John. “No new news. Run along.”

Clara backs out of the supply room, opening a box of film. “Wait,” she says, words slurred. “Let me do this.”

She photographs us one at a time with the station’s black-and-white instant camera. There’s an accidental brilliance in her lighting, the shakiness of her inebriated grip. We are overexposed. More than ourselves. Clara pins our Polaroids to the town map, and we laugh at this dangerous new geography: take a left at Michael’s eyelashes, then straight on until you reach the end of Sam’s smile. We are your landmarks now. We’ll find you when you’re lost.

#

Freddie, we promise you this much: retribution. Home. Rest. Memories. Blood. Bereavement. Hair.