Bad Break: A Novel

PROLOGUE

In the shadow of jagged moonlight, crooked as the painted, broken windowpane that framed the glow, the three boys looked small and pathetic.

Had they realized the perception, they would have bristled at it. They were fourteen, fifteen, and fifteen-and-a-half, respectively. Who dare call them boys? They were old enough to father children, biologically! Old enough in generations past, before licensing requirements, to drive a car! Old enough in centuries past to fight in wars! Two of them bore enough upper lip fuzz to credibly claim mustaches.

Kevin Smalls, the eldest of the three, had read in a history book once that in some Middle Eastern cultures, boys are declared men as early as age twelve, and in some African cultures, boys undergo manhood rituals as soon as they're old enough to effectively wield a weapon and hunt. Catch and kill? You're a man!

As much as he loved to read - though he hated school, for a moment, just a moment, Kevin wished that he spent less time reading and more time taking seriously those silly horror movies his cousin Trey loved so much.

Trey was all about the classics - Friday the 13th, Halloween, you name it. And when they did sleepovers —at least twice a month— Kevin often found himself, slouched on the basement couch next to his sixteen-year-old cousin, wrist-deep in a tub of buttery movie theater-quality popcorn that his mom always made for them, rolling his eyes every time Trey gripped the arm of the couch and shouted at the television.

Trey was the worst kind of movie companion because he couldn't help but talk and offer "advice" and criticism to the characters on screen as if they could hear him. It was why they usually watched films in Kevin's basement and not in movie theaters. Trey would probably get them kicked out.

Look out!

Don't go in there!

C'mon! Why in the world would you go upstairs, with no obvious exit, to investigate that sound?

Are you crazy? You don't need to know where that noise came from! Get out of there!

Kevin ruefully wished that this was a scary movie scene and that Trey was shouting at him. He would surely have listened and taken Trey's frequent admonition that, "there's a lot we can learn from these movies about what not to do!"

He then tried to think of that York Peppermint Patty commercial. He hated the taste of peppermint and chocolate together but almost chuckled at the thought of a bite of a minty snack allowing him to imagine his way to another location.

The joke was that as much as school annoyed him, and church annoyed him, and going grocery shopping with his mother annoyed him, he would gladly bite a York and transport himself to any of those places if it would get him out of this place.

Instead, he found himself on his knees, hands behind his back, with the two younger boys —one on either side of him— trussed up just the same and whimpering like newborn kittens.

They were not men. They were definitely boys. Men might be able to talk their way out of this situation. Men might be brave in the face of uncertainty.

Kevin and his friends quivered.

"Why are you here," the man in the corner had asked.

"We..."

Kevin thought he was quick to answer, but the man cut him off after a word and asked again, "Why are you here?"

Again, "we heard..."

Again, the man cut him off — after two words, and asked the same question again.

Kevin seethed with rage but bit his tongue, literally. Maybe after another few tries, he could spit out a complete sentence.

He'd read in another book that rapidly repeating the same question was an interrogation technique common with spies and secret agents. He'd read that the technique was meant to emotionally exhaust a detainee without physical violence, to the point he would beg to answer the interrogator's question in full.

He wasn't quite ready to beg, but he really did wish the man would just allow them to answer. He thought he'd try another tact, instead.

"Um, we haven't seen you. I, I mean your face. We haven't seen your face. We don't know you!"

Silence.

"You could let us go - I mean come up behind us, cut us loose and we would head back out the door without looking back. We don't know you and would never come near this place again. No harm, no foul."

He uttered that last part as a question, hopeful the lack of interruption meant the man thought the offer was reasonable. It had worked on his parents once or twice when he needed to justify breaking curfew or some other rule.