“Doug.” She hated the whine in her voice. “Can’t you be late for once?”
“Love you, too,” Doug said from outside. “I’m going to steal some food, cool?”
Liv sat up and rubbed at the pillow grooves in her cheeks. Her tank top was soaked to her back. She grimaced, distraught like a child who’d wet the bed, and angry, too, for being unable to quit doing it. She peeled herself of damp clothes and kicked through the multicolored mess on her floor for sweatpants.
John, a mud-colored sheepdog mutt of advanced age, struggled to his feet and followed Liv through the house, his claws clicking across scratched hardwood, dull linoleum, and broken tile, and then through the front door. Across the skinny dirt road awaited a mundane panorama of nothing of note: undeveloped farmland stretched into the horizon, thin groves of overgrown trees, and just visible off to the east, a single hill topped with Major Dawkins’s former place.
The major had once uttered the only inspirational phrase Liv valued:
Be the tallest you can.
She spoke this charm to herself, attempting to draw her spine tall and straight, forcing the muscles of her torso to tighten and her eyes to open fully. Only after she’d built the best Liv she was going to get at this odious hour, she shifted her eyes left to the sight she knew would try its best to depress her.
Doug stood in the yard shoving an untoasted Pop-Tart into his face. The disheartening vision fit into the yard’s ambience: a cemetery of dead saplings her dad had planted that, since his disappearance, no one had bothered to nurse. The sunrise, by contrast, was a great one, an electric tangerine that coaxed feathered textures from silver clouds. Doug, however, stared at the dirt, as he always did, as if there was something with his neck that hindered looking upward at what the world had to offer.
“You could at least close the cabinets,” Liv said. “Every Sunday it looks like we were robbed.”
Doug shrugged. Crumbs clung to the greasy tendrils of his shoulder-length hair. John snuffled at the ground for bits.
“Aggie doesn’t mind,” he said. “If she was up, she’d say, Go hog wild, Doug.”
Doug called her mom Aggie and had called her father Lee, a familiarity no other friend of hers had achieved. Liv felt her annoyance soften. She looked where Doug looked, at the dirt, and kicked at an anthill.
“She’s never up, though, is she?” she asked.
Liv sighed, bothered by her early-morning urge to criticize Doug. She knew the kitchen cabinets at his house were empty. He didn’t eat meals, mostly surviving off trail mix he made from ingredients he bought in military bulk—almonds, peanuts, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, raisins, and dried cranberries. It was a trait he’d picked up from Liv’s dad in his final months. All day long, to the ridicule of classmates, Doug pulled feed from baggies he kept in the side pockets of the same army-green shorts he wore every day regardless of season. It didn’t help that he insisted on using the hikers’ term for trail mix, gorp, which was too close to dork for anyone to resist.
Doug didn’t react well to sympathy; he eyed it like a snake he hoped would slither away. In fact, he behaved in ways that invited scorn, as if more comfortable with that emotion. He got to school late, slept through obligations, forgot to shower for days on end. Yet he was never, ever late for their Sunday morning ritual. His fealty to it was a fist that squeezed her heart. She was afraid of what he’d do if she ended the ritual—which is what she wanted to do more than anything.
“You sure you want to do this?” It was as far as she dared. “We could go back inside. I can do better than Pop-Tarts.”
“Don’t be lazy,” he admonished. “You got the screwdriver?”
She held it up with the speed of an eye roll. He saluted the tool and indicated the clear plastic grocery bag tied to one of his belt loops. It was filled, as ever, with John’s poop, a week’s worth collected from the yard. Here it was, the day before her last year at Bloughton High, and this, ladies and gents, was her life: not blitzing through last-second school shopping with Monica and the gang, but perpetuating a fanaticism that, if anyone ever learned of it, would brand her as loony tunes as her dad. It meant everything to Doug, so she did it for him, in gratitude for the years when he’d been all she’d had.
She stowed the screwdriver in her pocket and set off for the backyard. She was tired and grumpy, but forced herself to smile; Monica said she’d read online that smiling actually forces your brain to be happier. Right then, something about the light reminded her of a walk she and Doug had taken when they were short enough to breeze beneath these same branches.
“Remember when we walked to the firehouse?” she asked.
“Those guys were jerks,” Doug said through his last bite of Pop-Tart.
The backyard was in shoddier shape than the front. The push mower had rotted where it had died, searing the grass with gasoline. The swing set’s collapse had contorted it into a briar of sharp steel. All over, there were piles. How else to say it? Piles of brick, piles of plank wood, piles of buckets. No one remembered why Lee had piled them. The grass had become shin-high bracken and knee-high sedge, a jungle gym from which ticks swung until they found John’s belly.
“They were perfectly nice firemen,” Liv said.
“They came at us with axes!”
“They were holding axes. They were firemen. Firemen hold axes. They just weren’t used to kids showing up with a list of demands.”
Doug chuckled. Now Liv’s forced smile became real. The firehouse visit was the kind of jaunt that had made knowing the younger Doug Monk such a thrill. Doug was the best kid to play with; he always arrived armed with multiple proposals of stuff to do, each so original they made their sleepy Iowa burg feel like a place where incredible things happened all the time.
All kids heard things—from their families, on the playground. Only Doug took rumors as dares. Liv, did you hear there was a barn on Sycamore where a guy built a “monster” from dead-animal parts? They say he lets people see it for a few bucks! Liv, did you hear about the guy who used to live above Fielder’s Auto? He robbed graves. You think we should sneak up there and see if we can find anything cool?
“There was a dude buying firecrackers from my dad once.” Doug spoke in the animated voice Liv alone in the world got to hear. “And he said he used to be a volunteer firefighter, and he swore the firehouse had a chunk of meteor.”
“I’m just saying,” Liv said, “who would even believe that? I didn’t think it could be real.”
“A meteor hitting Bluefeather Prison? Why wouldn’t that be real?”
Liv laughed, and the happy sound helped, now that they had waded halfway into the backyard. John held back. It was dangerous out there; his old master had taught him that. He whined, lay down by the door, and watched Liv, the closest thing he had now to a master, walk straight toward what he sensed was still a bad place.
What the homes at Bloughton’s outskirts lacked in stores, gas stations, and reliable cell coverage they made up for in real estate. The backyard was a third of a football field long, the back half of which was nearly vacant. In the far southeast corner of the backyard was Lee’s shed, a storage facility for gardening tools until the day he stumbled naked onto the town square. After that, he began to fill it with tools of a different kind.