Spoiler! :
Who in the world freaking sings in a thin-walled apartment complex? Ritchie thought. It's worse than having a loud argument in a cul-de-sac.
Maybe the dumbass across the alley, in love with his own voice as he crooned along to a retarded latino tune by some guy who probably wore a white sequined cowboy outfit on the CD cover, was so annoying because he was singing in an apartment complex in a cul-de-sac. The entire bank of buildings would be listening to it now.
"Que te espero, que te espero!"
Was there a genre more universally hated than the latino wannabe crooner? This wasn't Ricky Martin, it wasn't a five-piece mariachi ensemble—it had no rhythm, style, or funk, and if the original recording was bad, the amateur karaoke of it was like ripping off your ears and throwing them into the dryer with rocks. Ritchie shook his head, pushing away from his keyboard, the wheels of his chair sliding back. He staggered past a bunk bed over to the bedroom door, trying to get away from it.
"Voy a mi senora, cocina sabrosa mamaaaa" shouted the guy across the alley, repeating it over and over as if it amounted to a chorus, without any melody or anything else that counted as music. Ritchie winced and opened the door, shutting it quickly behind him. The singer was muffled, a tiny bit.
"Ritchie?" called Mom from downstairs. "I'm going to meet Sally at the station."
"Who?" Ritchie scratched his head, not really listening.
"Sally. You know. She's coming to stay with us."
"COCINA SABROSO MAMAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" came the terrible voice. Was it just inside Ritchie's head, for the love of Christ?
"What?"
"I told you a week ago. It's your fault you didn't remember."
Ritchie heard the front door creak and snap open. He said, "Mom, can we call the police?"
Several steps of his mom's flats. Keys being jingled as they were nabbed off the hook by the counter.
"What for, Ritchie?"
"Because the guy across the alley is singing like a moron, right into my window, and it's late, so he's breaking the law."
The door creaked again as it was being shut. "Don't be ridiculous, Ritchie," Mom said as she shut the door.
The silence in the following moments seemed to amplify the crooner.
"COCINA SABROSOOOO--"
"SHUT UP!" Ritchie threw open his door and ran to the window. "Shut up shut up shut UP AND TAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE YOU IDIOT!"
It was quite possible that the crooner was deaf. He not only went on, happily, shouting his idiotic song to the night, not even in the shower, but he seemed to be growing increasingly pleased with it. Were people really this inconsiderate? Did they know what headphones were, and listening to your stupid songs on your ipod? Did he think the entire zip code would love to hear his attempts at emulating a soap-opera-opening-theme, thin-mustached dork?
Ritchie's mom sighed when she saw Sally come out of the huge, black bus. The bus had a blue tent emblazoned on its side with a flag that said "N" topping it. All the other passengers, it seemed, were adults, and Sally was almost enveloped in a too-big black leather jacket, her head pillowed by giant earphones around her neck that made her look like an air traffic controller. Or would have, if she was anything other than a skinny girl with purple and blue zigzag streaks dyed into her black hair.
Ritchie's mom was Sally's aunt, and Ritchie, although he probably had forgotten about it, was her cousin. Sally's home situation wasn't so good right now, which didn't surprise Ritchie's mom, who knew her parents too well to expect much of them.
"C'mere, Sally. Put on this nice coat. It was warmer back there, right?" Ritchie's mom said. Sally just shrugged, pulling the coat on.
"Thanks."
Sally sat in the passenger-side seat, not speaking, all the way home, staring at the lights across the river. Ritchie's mom glanced at her face's reflection in the window a couple of times, and sighed.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHH!!!" Ritchie was shouting, pounding the sides of his desk with both fists, making his keyboard jump into the air. "I WANT OFFSPRING OR AEROSMITH OR I DON'T KNOW, JIMI HENDRIX TO BREAK YOU! TO COME TO YOUR HOUSE AND BREAK YOU WITH MICROPHONES—THAT ARE SHAPED LIKE SCORPIONS!"
"Que te esperoooooo..."
The homework on the computer in front of Ritchie was blurring, blending together, the equations scattering like ants. He clenched his fist, pissed that he couldn't fight back. He'd broken his CD player, every mp3 player the family had ever owned. He broke musical apparatuses the moment he touched them. The only intact ones, the speakers, sat at either side of his monitor, useless. His computer was a Windows 95, it didn't have sound drivers installed. His brother had the laptop, and it was with him right now as he traveled around the world on a "gap year experience project" documenting things and posting them on the internet for people to ooh and ahh over. He'd already won a Webby award, the hell that was.
"Ritchie!" came Mom's voice. It sounded mad, like she'd been repeating his name over and over. Ritchie ran out the door and onto the landing, then stamped down the stairs, pausing at the last step. His mother and cousin were standing near the front door.
A sullen girl was folding her arms, staring at the salt shaker on the dining table, while Ritchie's mom was staring at him, her hand on the girl's shoulder. She tutted. "Why didn't you hear me?"
"That idiot—that guy just screaming the Mexican anthem or whatever—soap opera opening theme—can't hear anything in my room but him--"
"Well, look. Sally's staying with us for a while. She'll be in your room, because while Andrew is away that bunk bed just takes up space anyway. I hope you made a comfortable bed for her in advance, like I told you to, since I warned you she was coming a week ago."
That wasn't fair. She hadn't mentioned this before leaving for the station. She hadn't reminded him on purpose, just to have an excuse to yell at him when he inevitably forgot.
"Yeah, sure," Ritchie said. "Sure. Another person in my room. Great."
"And finish your homework tonight. I'm tired, Sally, so have Ritchie fix you something from the fridge, and then go to bed and try to get some sleep and relax. I know it's been...rough...lately."
Ritchie, who was burrowing in the fridge for something to serve the sullen girl, looked up. Sally had sat down at the table, in Andrew's long-vacated seat. She was tracing a shape on the placemat with her finger.
"What did you want to eat?"
Sally muttered, "Not hungry."
Ritchie understood kid-speak just yet. Sally just wanted to eat a token something or other, something that wouldn't have his mother complain that she wasn't eating. He took out a couple of yogurts and put two slices of brown bread into the toaster.
Then he sat down across from Sally. She was playing with a device unfamiliar to him—an mp3 player, he realized. One of the cool, newer ones. "Hey, you got video on that thing? Like cartoons?"
Sally shook her head.
"So you got games on there?" Ritchie's fingers were itching to test it, but now that he thought about it, he couldn't ask to see it. He vaguely remembered his mom warning him about Sally. Now that he looked at her more, at how she looked stick-thin out of the bulky down jacket, with a pair of purple headphones and the cool mp3 player accessorizing her black shorts, he realized that the music apparatus must be one of the few things she had to take joy in. He tried to look unobtrusively over by the door. A tiny roller suitcase, beat-up, sat by the door, but Sally didn't seem in a hurry to unpack it. A black leather jacket was thrown over it.
With a jerking noise, the toast popped up. Ritchie slid off his chair and grabbed two plates from the dish rack on his way over.
"I'll just have half," Sally said, picking up her toast and breaking it in half, and depositing the larger half on his plate, without asking him. Ritchie shrugged, spreading peanut butter on it. She did seem to like the cup of yogurt.
"You can have another one if you want," he said. "The yogurt. We have a lot. You might as well eat more before they spoil, because mom doesn't eat much yogurt."
Sally shook her head, pulling the headphones over her ears. "So, where's your room?"
"You weren't here before?"
"No, maybe when I was really little. I dunno."
Ritchie tried to remember a tiny, laughing girl tumbling around the carpet, her dark hair all fuzzy on her head. He had the memory, but there didn't seem to be a place for it. It didn't seem to connect at all to the girl in front of him. She almost looked like a punk, except her face wasn't the pale, pinched, pierced face, that Green Day type. Her face was brown with a reddish flush, like a normal girl. Probably the punk morphing had just begun recently.
"Here's my brother's bunk. I'll put some sheets on it, wait a sec," Ritchie said, opening the closet and taking out some bedsheets. The crooner was still whining his stupid song. Ritchie looked up, and noticed his cousin had vanished.
She came back in a little while, eating a yogurt. "Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot to say the bath is down the hall," Ritchie said, awkwardly. At least he'd prepared the bed by now, spreading the quilt over it.
"It's cold, you'll need this. If you're too cold with it, you can borrow some of my warm pajamas. I think we're the same size."
"Whatever," Sally said. She plopped down on her bed on the lower bunk. Maybe he was being too patronizing.
"I hate that guy," Ritchie said, getting back into his computer chair. He nudged his head out the window, at the black, cloud-strewn sky speared by some low buildings and the closest one, of course, having all its top floor's windows illuminated, with the terrible singer's voice floating out of all of them. "What's his problem? I mean is he a human being? I'm waiting for other people to complain about him, or the cops to come. I'm sick of it."
"What song is this?" asked Sally.
"It's not a song. It's something horrible. And the worst thing is he thinks it's okay. He loves this, he's having fun."
Sally said, "Maybe he actually is a singer, but can't afford studio space. Maybe he's recording himself."
"No one would willingly listen to that voice. All whiny and—SHUT UP! And his lyrics--"
Sally stood up and walked over to him. He looked over his shoulder questioningly, and saw that she was reaching for the speakers' wires. She followed them under the desk, and he pushed his chair away to help her. She plugged the wire ending into her mp3 player's headphone jack.
A feedback crackle shocked Ritchie a little. Then, there were weird amplified tapping noises as Sally scrolled through songs. She pressed what looked to be the play button, and Ritchie felt an expectant, hope-this-works feeling rush through him.
It did.
"One and two and three and four and oneandtwoandthreeandfour..."
"Offspring!" shouted Ritchie. "All right! Let's turn it up!"
He spun the volume dial on the speakers till the fast opening bars of "Walla Walla" would definitely flow out the window. Then he jumped back,
"GOODBYE MY FRIEND YOU MESSED UP AGAIN..."
The energy of the fast, poppy, rocky song went through Ritchie like a knife. He hadn't heard music he liked in his own room for so long. "WELL I'LL SEE YA!" he shouted. He couldn't even hear Mr. "Cocina Sabroso" anymore.
"THAT CAR LOOKS SO TEMPTING, SO EA-SY TO DRIVE, JUST LIKE THAT APAAAARTMENT YOU BURGLARIZED," screamed the speakers.
Ritchie sang along. "YOU STARTED TO RUN, BUT DIDN'T GET FAR, 'CAUSE UNDER YOUR ARM WAS A--"
"V-C-R!!!" Sally shrieked.
"HEY, A WALLA, I'LL SEE YA IN A WALLA WALLA!" They both shouted. "SLAP ON THE WRIST—WELL NOT THIS TIME!!!" They were jumping up and down, in their own private rock concert, bugging out. "HEY, A WALLA, I'LL SEE YA IN A WALLA WALLA!"
"IN THIS GAME OF LIFE WE'RE ALL JUST BROTHERRRS," rocked the speakers.
"REHABILITATE WITH ALL THE OTH-ERS!!!" shouted Ritchie and Sally. "WELL I'LL SEE YA!"
And then came Ritchie's favorite part of the song. "I'm innocent!" whined the speakers, almost mockingly. "I didn't do nothing man...this is BULLSHIT...he just gave it to me it was a present..." he imagined the idiot latino karaoke artist as the person making the plea.
"Ooooho not this time my friend, you'll be in LOCKDOWN BY TEN!" he screeched along with the audio. "I'm afraid you can't talk your way outta this one, son—them four walls are your TWENTY FOUR HOUR A DAY CONSTANT COMPANIONS!"
"HEY A WALLA, I'LL SEE YOU IN A WALLA WALLA..."
As the fast ska rhythm of the song continued, Sally and Ritchie started dancing in a circle around the room, rocking out, swinging their arms, tapping their feet to the beat, hopping 360s. When the song ended, they heard a noise. To Ritchie's disbelief, it was the guy from across the alley, sticking his head out the window, yelling at them. Sally and Ritchie barely peeked out of their window with the top halves of their faces showing, and wished they hadn't. He was shirtless, longhaired, stringy-looking, and yelling so loud the spit was definitely leaving his mouth in buckets.
"HEY TURN IT DOWN! TOO LOUD! TOO LOUD!"
Ritchie laughed, cupped his hands over his mouth, and shouted, "SCREW YOU!"
Sally yelled. "THIS IS CALLED MUSIC!"
They slammed the window shut, laughing, as he prattled threats to talk to their parents.
It was only later that night, after the kids had finally gone to bed. Ritchie's mom sat up in bed smoking, her bedside light making her window the only bright one on their floor. In fact, it was the only lit one in the building, and on the street. Even the idiot singer had gone to bed. On the cold street of the cul-de-sac, a stray cat clambered up the low wall that made up the central garden area, and jumped onto a black metal bench on the other side of the garden to sleep.
It was only later that night, the chilly breeze blowing through the quiet of the town, broken only by the occasional passing cars. The bus station where Sally had arrived was silent, and empty, but lit up and cavernous, as big bus stations are at night. The areas for forming lines were ironically empty, the interconnected fabric chains that would keep people in line, useless now. Most of the kiosks were closed but only a few people here and there, some asleep, waited for a bus that would take them somewhere more like home.
The blue tent bus was still there. It would depart in the morning; meanwhile, there was a piece of luggage left inside its bottom cargo. Nobody was really around to hear the odd bumps coming from the cargo as something whacked against its sliding door.
If someone had been around, maybe they would have unlocked and slid open the cargo and pointed a flashlight into an area that had been checked and reported empty before. They would have found something extremely peculiar. Its glowing, bluish-green eyes shone in the dark inside the compartment, straining to see through the thin crack of the locked door. Its slim, long body was crowned with a great fin that was banging against the top of the container.
The creature was, not surprisingly, uncomfortable. It opened its mouth in the dark, and nobody saw its rows of golden, zigzaggy triangular teeth. But then it let out a scream from deep within its stomach.
It was a primal, giant monster scream. It was a scream out of an old and badly-special-effected movie. A college kid sleeping with his backpack on his lap on the floor thirty feet away jumped, glancing around at the bright and unfamiliar hangar. He couldn't guess exactly where the noise had come from, and decided it had come from his dream.
It was only later that he realized this was not true.
Back at Ritchie's house, someone else was having trouble sleeping. Ritchie kept hearing Sally toss and turn in her sleep. It kept him awake. He looked over the edge of his top bunk at the mp3 player, its cable snaking to the floor where the headphones rested. Now, if ever, was a good time to check it out.
Only it was on such a low table that he couldn't reach it from the top bunk, and if he climbed down, he was sure Sally would wake up and see him.
Just as Ritchie was looking at it, at how its turned-off screen reflected the wintry half-light from outside, it glowed teal and started to vibrate. His jaw dropped, and he sat all the way up in his blankets, blinking, as its actual case seemed to melt, morphing into an entirely different shape.
"S-Sally," he said. The glow started to fade, and the device stopped moving, lying on the table. Ritchie bent downward to stick his head over the edge of the bunk and into the lower bunk, holding onto the railing. "Psst! Sally!" he whispered.
Sally sat up, shaking her head. "What? What?"
"Your thing. It changed, man."
"What do you mean 'changed'? What thing?"
Ritchie climbed down from the bunk and pointed at the ex-mp3 player. He saw Sally, rubbing her eyes, gasp and stare at it. Then she jumped up, hitting her head on the top bunk.
"OW! Shit! What happened?! Is this a joke?!" she scrambled out of her twisted sheets, stumbling out of bed and dropping to her knees in front of the table with the device, staring at it. Ritchie scratched his head behind her.
"It's not a joke. I didn't do anything, it just sort of...started glowing, and it looked like a cell phone, like someone was calling it..."
"Calling it?!"
"Yeah, and vibrating, but then it changed into this thing, and...I don't know...does it still work?"
Sally picked it up. Ritchie couldn't see so well in the dark, but it looked like a blue-green, round, flat object with silver and orange buttons and a rectangular screen in the center. But they didn't have the play, rewind, pause, or in fact, any of the normal signs on them. Part of the device had odd symbols on it...they looked like hieroglyphs, but not Egyptian ones, more like, they were derived from the weird symbols you saw when you had an error on your computer, or tried to open an image in Microsoft Word.
"Work?" she muttered. "How do I even turn it on?"
"Wait," Ritchie paced closer, looking over his cousin's shoulder. "Look, maybe you don't have to!"
The screen had started to glow, not bright like the last time, but like a black computer screen when you had just pushed the power button: backlit. On the black screen, a red arrow appeared, pointing at the top, and then it rotated on an axis, like a compass. A green, dotted-line circle appeared on the axis, and numbers, too, one after another. Although the arrow moved around the dial wildly, the numbers stayed the same.
1,293m.
"What's that mean?! What's going on?" whispered Ritchie urgently, dropping down beside his cousin.
Sally was just as confused as he was. Suddenly, she looked back up at him.
"I'm hungry."
"What? Mom will hear us if we go to the kitchen! Besides, that thing--"
Sally looked back at it, clutching it tightly. "I dunno. I think I'll think easier about it when I'm full."
Sally led the way through the dark hallway, tiptoeing, and Ritchie, following her in every step, realized that he made a lot less noise than he'd expected. Sally put her hand on the staircase's banister, and slowly stepped down each stair, keeping her feet on the edges of the steps. Her night vision must be excellent. It occurred to him that earlier, when he'd not found her in his room, she probably had explored the hallway in more detail, even in the dark.
Ritchie opened the fridge, and the light blinded him for a second. He blinked. The microwave said 3.34 AM. He didn't feel like yogurt. "I want bread with cheese," said Sally from the dinner table. Apparently this was her way of saying "grilled cheese sandwich".
"We can't have that. It'll make too much noise. Eat something quiet," said Ritchie, crouching down to check out the crisper. "We have Asian pears."
"What's an Asian pear?"
"What? It's this sort of thing," he took the golden, hard fruit out of its Styrofoam wrap and showed it to her. "It's like this watery, crunchy, sweet apple."
"Okay. I'll have it. Are there a lot?"
"If there aren't, we'll just buy more. Mom has a job," Ritchie tossed it over his shoulder. He heard Sally catch it.
"My mom didn't. Or her boyfriend. Or my dad."
"Well, you're living with us now. I'm going to get a job when I turn fifteen. My mom's going to make me work at the convenience store. She knows the owner."
Sally said, "Ritchie, the number changed."
Ritchie shut the fridge. "It did?"
"Yeah. Now it says '1,300m'," she stuck out the device to show him. The arrow still rotated wildly.
Ritchie froze. It reminded him of something. A compass, that was it.
"Lay it flat on the table!" he said a little too excitedly, then blushed, embarrassed. Mom would hear if they talked that loud. "Sorry. Lay it down on the table."
"Why are you saying sorry?"
"Because I might wake Mom up."
She blinked, staring at him over the faintly glowing device. "There's no way she'll hear us talking. Her room is at the end of the hallway upstairs."
"The number changed again, but the arrow's not moving now," said Ritchie. "Wait. It's pointing over there."
"Back toward your bedroom.."
Ritchie stuck the back of his thumb into his mouth and bit it. It was a habit he'd picked up from Andrew. "What does the 'm' mean?"
"It must mean meters. Because the distance changed from when we were in your room," said Sally, slowly.
"But then...it means we're farther away from something in the kitchen than we were in my room. It means that arrow is pointing to that thing. Right?"
"Like in video games?"
Ritchie nodded. "I think so."
There were a few moments of silence as Sally bit into her Asian pear. She was surprised by the taste, but probably so much more surprised by the device that she ignored it. "I want to go see what it is."
Ritchie said, "It's dangerous, this time of night. Come on."
"I want to go, though," she looked down at the device in her hand. "I wasn't sleeping well anyway. C'mon, nobody will know."
"And? If my mom finds our beds empty?"
"When does she go to work?"
"Nine-thirty."
"So we have like, five hours."
"You're nuts. A thousand and whatever meters is really far away..." but now that he thought of it, he wanted to do it. Ritchie hadn't been out at night before. He had always wanted to go to some places he saw a lot during the day, like the playground at the primary school on the hill, and Terry Park, and the river's esplanade, at night, just to see if there were ghosts or something. And sometimes with friends at school he'd talk about, when they were teens, going into the woods for fun because it was scary. Maybe the thing that was more than a thousand meters away was something scary that he'd be able to tell his friends about.
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