Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

September 1991:

Junior kicked a pebble and watched it skip through the chalk-drawn squares of a hopscotch game. His supper lolled about in his stomach, his intestines throwing gas around, and he moved his palm along the thermos of tea in his hand, lifted it up to his mouth.

He took a seat on the bleachers, the elementary school behind him, the soccer field growing weeds, and the yellow heads of dandelions, buttercups, before him. He took another sip of his tea, and waited for Graham to show up, let his mind drift along the sandwiches with Kevin Rose earlier.

He swore under his breath, and images of himself fist-fighting Rose pirouetted around his imagination.

Something stirred behind him, and he turned to see Graham hoist one leg up and over the seat of his bike, stand one-legged on a pedal as he steered the rolling bike toward him

Junior shivered. "No officer, I am not dealing drugs," he said, and heard Graham's laugh from behind the bleachers.

The wooden seats shook then as Graham climbed them like steps, and sat beside Junior on the top seat. The night was already moving in around them, the days choosing to run from it faster and faster, as x's filled the numbered squares on Junior's calendar.

"I'm sorry about my dad, man," Graham said.

Junior let his thoughts go for a second, and realized that his dad was supposed to be on the news again tonight. Some kind of press conference to do with a new deal the mill had struck up with a log-cutting company, and he imagined Kevin Rose sat back in the torn fabric of his armchair, one leg propped over the other as the bullshit wafted through his skull, the contradictions to his thought going undetected somehow within the safe space of his own skull, as he watched Junior's dad speak.

"Just surprised he still lets you hangout with me," Junior said.

"I wanted to talk to you about that," Graham said, and laughed. Junior saw the way his brown eyes brightened as he did.

"That paper my dad showed you. He's been putting it together with a bunch of people he meets with every night at the pub. They're nuts though. Like totally on something –"

"He did seem like he took a few extra whiffs of the old glue stick there today," Junior said.

"Yeah. Look – I didn't want to tell you this in front of the house earlier because I knew he was inside, but he wasn't just laid off from The Tide – he was fired. Fired because he kept insisting to his editor that the mill had been infiltrated by a bunch of scientists paid by the government to do some kind of research."

"But what kind of research?" Junior said. He stared out towards the edge of the soccer field, where the forest rose up and swallowed the horizon. He could see the place where the trail had been cut through, and leveled off with rocks for the kids' adventures at lunchtime.

"This is why he was fired," Graham said. "His answer to that question was always so ludicrous: he thought it was something to do with aliens. Alien abductions, or alien technology being used to experiment on people at night when all the mill workers went home."

Junior barked out a laugh, and bent over, his tea dripping out of his mug onto the wooden seat in front of him. "Dude. How does a grown-ass man like your dad come to believe that the paper mill in town turns into some kind of secret laboratory at night, where alien technology come down to visit?"